The Last Witchfinder

by James Morrow

  “May I trust you to keep Trenchard’s location a secret?” Ben asked.

  “Je serai très discret.”

  “To find the journalist in question, you need look but a yard beyond your nose, for Ebenezer Trenchard is my nom de plume.”

  “Formidable!” Montesquieu offered a bow of admiration, nearly losing his peruke in the process. “Ah, Monsieur Trenchard, I am so honored to make your acquaintance.” His gaze alighted on a dozen copies of The Sufficiency of the World stacked atop the scrubbing counter. “And here we have the divine Monsieur Crompton!” He removed the topmost volume and brought it to his bosom. “Nature’s laws truly refute the demon hypothesis.”

  “I must insist that you ne’er reveal certain facts concerning J. S. Crompton.”

  “Naturellement.”

  “Is this your sacred promise?”

  “Oui.”

  “Then I shall tell you that Crompton is a woman.”

  “Sapristi!”

  “She is also my dearest friend.”

  The Baron’s eyebrows ascended to an altitude such that they nearly touched his wig.

  “Moreover, she is sister to Dunstan Stearne, the likely prosecutor at the Webster trial.”

  “Mon Dieu!”

  “Most provocative of all,” said Ben, retrieving the broom from its customary corner, “J. S. Crompton and Rebecca Webster are the same person.”

  “Incroyable!”

  Fixing his attention on the clusters of debris beneath the press, Ben systematically whisked them into the coal scuttle whilst simultaneously describing Jennet’s foolhardly plan. He did not forbear to offer his opinion that she was “toying with her own life,” a circumstance that was causing him “more anguish than I can calculate.”

  “Une femme courageuse.” Montesquieu returned the demon disproof to the pile. “I sincerely hope her trial will deal the tyrannical prickers a fatal blow. You see, Monsieur Franklin, I am a great lover of the concept called freedom, la liberté—as are you yourself, oui?”

  “Oui,” said Ben, wielding his broom against the cobwebs beneath the scrubbing counter.

  “Though I also believe—and here I suspect we are likewise in accord—I believe that every man’s freedom must be constrained by the statutes his nation deploys against despotism.”

  Ben stopped sweeping and bobbed his head. “I would usually trust a congress o’er a king. And yet, even as we shape our statutes, do not these same statutes shape us? Are we not the creatures of our laws?”

  “Des créatures de nos lois! Exactement! Good laws make good men. Bad laws harm everyone—not only those who break them, but those who obey them as well.” Tightening his embrace of the demon disproof, Montesquieu explained that he’d reached these conclusions during his years as Président à Mortier in the High Court of Justice at Bordeaux.

  “So you’re a jurist as well as a satirist?” Ben said.

  “A jurist, oui,” Montesquieu replied. “I am adept at writing statutes—though even more adept at writing about them, si vous comprenez. What I so admire about your English form of government is how it honors the reign of law. Three separate parts, each holding the other in check. A parliament to fashion the canons, an executive to administer them, and a judiciary to interpret them.”

  In point of fact, the English system was far messier and murkier than that, but Ben had no wish to lecture his visitor on the defects of the British Constitution. Another idea now occupied his brain, quite possibly his greatest since realizing that lightning must be electricity’s celestial twin.

  “Monsieur le Baron, I have a proposition for you. Let me make bold to suggest that the perfect lawyer for the remarkable Mrs. Crompton is at this moment standing before me.”

  “You wish me to defend your friend?”

  “Oui.”

  “Ce n’est point possible. In two days I sail for La Brède, there to be at last reunited with my family.”

  “You say you’re skilled at making laws, but I’m offering you something more momentous—an opportunity to make history!”

  “Or an opportunity to appear ridiculous,” Montesquieu said. “Your Madame Crompton is intelligent, but juries are not. She could easily lose.”

  Humming his favorite ballad, “The Knight of Liddesdale,” Ben made an ellipse about the room, the blacking table at one focus, the scrubbing counter at the other. “Baron, you have many enemies in France…”

  “How did you learn this?”

  “No man writes a book so barbed as Lettres Persanes without other men accusing him of treachery against Church and State. I ask you, sir, what better way to prove yourself a loyal Frenchman than to run a wicked English law to earth?”

  “Monsieur Franklin, you are quite the logician,” Montesquieu said. “Perhaps you should argue Madame Crompton’s case yourself.”

  “Sir, there is but one jurist on these premises.”

  A prodigious sigh escaped the Baron’s lips. He removed his peruke and rubbed the ball of his thumb across his brow. “Do you know what my uncle once said to me? ‘We live in unprecedented times, Charles, and our sacred obligation is to occupy them fully.’ Very well, Monsieur Franklin. I am persuaded to take up your friend’s cause.”

  “Vous ne regretterez pas cette decision.”

  “It occurs to me that in moving against the English Witchcraft Act, we might en passant destroy other such laws throughout Europe,” Montesquieu said, “for never before has the world been so prepared to cast off disastrous ideas.” If good men everywhere rose to this occasion, he

  elaborated, their posterity would consider itself well served. These

  grateful descendants would call the present

  century an era of courage, an

  epoch of innovation,

  and an age

  of

  j

  Reason,

  I don’t doubt,

  will always hold an

  honored place in my affections.

  And yet I must admit that the more I think

  about it, the less certain I become what Reason is. Everyone

  agrees that Montesquieu’s Persian Letters and Voltaire’s Candide epitomize something called the Age of Reason (even though these novels can’t stand each other, and neither could their authors), but this doesn’t stop Reason from being among the most bedeviling ideas yet visited upon Western civilization.

  Is the Malleus Maleficarum an unreasonable book? Many conscious entities would say yes. But if by reason we mean an orderly presentation that cleaves to a kind of perverse Aristotelian logic, then the Malleus Maleficarum is an imperially reasonable tome. Was the Third Reich an unreasonable enterprise? When you consider its grounding in neopaganism, occultist malarkey, blood-and-soil folderol, and crackpot eugenics, yes, indubitably. And yet the Nazis went about their agenda in a manner I can only call rational.

  You know what I’m about to say. Whatever the stains on Reason’s résumé, Revelation has much to answer for as well. Even were I to agree that Reason has been tried and found wanting (and I’m not convinced that such is the case), I would still applaud the Enlightenment for noticing that Revelation had rather too much blood on its hands, and it was time to contrive a different metaphysic.

  And yet I concede that the apotheosis of Reason is a wretched idea. The Principia Mathematica will never file a brief on behalf of Reason per se—Reason unchecked, Reason unchained, Reason for Reason’s sake. I am the first to insist that rationality disconnected from decency, deliberation, and doubt—a triad that, were I human, I would call humanism—leads not to Utopia but to the guillotine.

  In the summer of 1794, some sixty years after the climactic events of this narrative, I decided that, being an honest sort of masterwork, I would observe firsthand the fruits of unfettered Reason. Willing myself to Revolutionary France, I climbed into the consciousness of Benoit Clément, a Catholic priest whom the Comité de Salut Public had recently found guilty of being a Catholic priest. Over two centuries have passed since that
horrid day, but I can still recall the details: the suffocating heat of the dungeon, the frightened faces of my fellow prisoners (many of them children), the press of the shackles on my ankles and wrists.

  It’s the twenty-fifth of June. La Terreur is at its height. In recent weeks the Comité has abandoned all pretense of due process. The mere circumstance of appearing before Robespierre’s tribunal proves that you harbor Royalist sympathies and have plotted against la Révolution.

  I have just finished saying the Mass, using stale water for the blood, a rotten pear for the flesh, but no one has drawn much comfort from it. Six guards appear, armed with pistols and pikes. They have a list. My name is on it, along with nine others.

  The guards herd us outside and shove us into a tumbrel, then scramble aboard themselves, their pistols trained on our chests. With a crack of his whip the driver urges the horses forward. As we approach the Place de la Révolution, our nostrils burn with the stench of human blood. Soon we hear the peasants singing drinking roundelays as they urge the executioners to their murderous work. Now another sound reaches our ears, the rushing roar of the guillotine blade.

  My Principia Mathematica self is appalled. Is this what the love of Reason comes to in the end? Was my Jennet wrong to embrace the Enlightenment dream of eternal rational discourse? Is there any nontrivial difference between a witch-court and the Comité de Salut Public?

  We enter the fœtid plaza. Because I am the only priest scheduled to die that afternoon, the mob demands that I go first. “Touez le curé!” they cry. “Touez-le maintenant!” A guard pulls me from the tumbrel. As I mount the scaffold, the executioner turns the crank as dispassionately as a sailor hoisting an anchor, thus sending aloft the steel blade and its collateral lead weight. My captors set me chest-down on the trestle and insert my head in the yoke. The lunette is slick with blood. I stare into the woven basket, likewise blood-soaked. Lifting my gaze, I see a horse-drawn cart crammed with headless bodies and bodiless heads. A fat man in a brown leather apron stands beside the horse, waiting to receive my remains.

  “The Directors of the Lottery of St. Guillotine are pleased to announce the latest winner—Father Benoit Clément!” the executioner tells the crowd. They’ve heard the joke a thousand times before, but they still laugh.

  I make my confession to myself, then vomit into the basket. The executioner presses the release button. The scaffold trembles as the blade thunders down the groove. I feel a sudden coldness against my neck, as if someone has dropped a snowball on the nape, and for one astonishing instant, at once impossibly brief and supernaturally protracted, I know the horrors of quadriplegia. Strangely enough, I’m aware of my head’s tumble into the basket, an indescribable

  feeling—a falling sensation?—no, this is not an Isaac Newton

  moment, because to experience gravity you need

  a body as well as a brain: you need

  bones and limbs and

  muscles

  and

  j

  “Flesh

  is as grass,”

  the Apostle Peter

  had noted in his stirring First

  Letter, “and all glory of Man as the flower

  of grass.” The truth of Peter’s words became especially

  clear to Dunstan Stearne every time the Purification Commission switched off a Satanist through fire rather than the noose. How little effort it took to vaporize a witch’s grassy flesh. You chained her to a stake, lit the pyre, and within an hour there was nothing left but bones. “The grass withereth, the flower thereof falleth away, but the word of the Lord endureth forever.”

  He gave the signal, and the Commission went to work, foiling the Devil with clockwork precision. As Samuel Parris checked the thongs securing the Wampanoag woman’s wrists, Abby lifted a steel ax and dealt her a blow to the skull. The instant the witch lost consciousness, Abby and the minister carried her carcass to the mound of hay and deposited it on the summit.

  Whenever Dunstan perused a newspaper these days, he realized he was living in an era of unprecedented ingenuity: Fahrenheit’s mercury thermometer, Lombe’s thrown-silk machine, Réaumur’s steel-making formula, Harrison’s grid-iron pendulum, Hadley’s quadrant. This cataract of cleverness depressed him. Man did not live by Baconianism alone. When the Massachusetts Assembly wrote to the Witchfinder-Royal urging that in the name of decency he should strangle his prisoners ere burning them, he had instinctively resisted the idea, averring that the blind embrace of innovation was a pernicious impulse. Only after Jonathan Corwin had bid Dunstan recall that such chokings boasted a tradition stretching back centuries—that, indeed, Dunstan’s own aunt had nearly received this courtesy at her famous Colchester execution—did he relent and adopt the suggested policy.

  Poor old Jonathan, dead over two months now, another victim of pleurisy and diabolism. The funeral was still fresh in Dunstan’s memory. Reverend Parris had read the judge’s favorite piece of Scripture, the Song of Songs, that pious love-ballad through which Christ had catalogued the manifold virtues of His Church. “Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which came up from the washing.” For the Church had marvelous jaws indeed. “Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, and thy speech is comely.” And a splendid mouth. “Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed amongst the lilies.” And an excellent bosom.

  Pulling on his cowhide gloves, Dunstan marched toward the hay mound and closed his fingers around the throat of the dazed Wampanoag. For a count of two hundred he deprived her heathen lungs of air. The witch grew still. He released his grip, received the burning torch from his wife, and jammed it into the mound as if inserting a ramrod into a cannon’s muzzle. The hay took but a moment to transmute into a bonfire, spewing smoke and spitting sparks.

  “An idea of some merit occurred to me this morning,” Abby informed Dunstan. “I found myself envisioning an exchange of witchfinders ’twixt ourselves and the Kirkcaldy Cleansing League. They would send us their ablest demonologist, and we would export my uncle to Scotland.”

  “’Tis a worthy scheme, Goodwife Stearne. I shall commend it to our Caledonian brethren anon.”

  Evidently Dunstan had not applied sufficient force during the strangulation. Such, at least, was the conclusion he drew when the witch hurled herself off the hay, her clothing a-flame, her hair a blazing bonnet, and ran screaming through the woods toward her village. Her fellow pagans would have experienced some difficulty recognizing her at that moment, for she’d lost all particularity and become instead an ambulatory conflagration of vaguely human form.

  “I’Christ, we’ve got a runner!” Abby yelled.

  “Oh, how I wish Jonathan could be here!” Mr. Parris cried. “The sight of a runner ne’er failed to stir his blood!”

  An absorbing spectacle, but Dunstan did not enjoy it. He could think only of the packet he’d received that morning from Boston, twenty-eight depositions collected by a Philadelphia grand jury whilst interrogating an alleged witch named Rebecca Webster (chief amongst them the report of Abraham Pollock, a New-Jersey magistrate), plus a letter from Governor Belcher exhorting the Commissioners to take the Crown’s part in Mrs. Webster’s forthcoming trial. In principle Dunstan was willing to lease his genius to Pennsylvania, but he had many questions about the case, and he was glad for the Governor’s suggestion that the two of them meet in Boston come Monday.

  With characteristic compassion, the Almighty now arranged for an armed Wampanoag deer-slayer to appear from behind a tree, assess the situation, and end the burning Satanist’s misery. The brave unshouldered his musket and, drawing a bead on the witch, sent a bullet into her brain. Tumbling over the bank of a creek, the dying Indian crashed into the water and extinguished herself in a hissing cloud of smoke.

  Dunstan had met Jonathan Belcher on only one previous occasion. The Witchfinder-Royal was delivering a sack of severed thumbs to Belcher’s private secretary, the priggish Mr. Peach, when the Governor himself had entered the foyer, an
unlit churchwarden pipe clenched betwixt his teeth. He asked Mr. Peach for a tinder-box and, receiving the desired artifact, returned to his duties without giving Dunstan so much as a nod. From that brief encounter Dunstan had judged the Governor a cold and self-absorbed man. He was greatly pleased therefore when Mr. Belcher began their Monday meeting by grasping his hand amicably and speaking in an almost deferential tone.

  “His Majesty’s Privy Council hath requested that I commend you for your long and loyal service to the Crown,” the Governor said, leading Dunstan into his Treamount Street office, an airy space featuring mullioned windows and a parquet floor. With his wide face and bulky frame, Belcher looked rather like the manatee Dunstan had spotted two weeks earlier whilst a-cleansing on Martha’s Vineyard. “The Boston clergy is similarly grateful. More than once I’ve heard a Puritan minister aver that our province’s prosperity traces in the main to your work amongst the savage Indians. I must confess to a certain ambivalence toward your profession, but that needn’t concern us this morning.”

  Heeding the Governor’s gesture, Dunstan assumed an ornate chair cushioned in red velvet. He opened his valise and removed the newest proof of his industry, a baize bag containing four charred Wampanoag thumbs. “The Puritan divines value my services, and yet they would have me spend a month in Pennsylvania?”

  “I gave ’em no choice in the matter, for the Webster case hath grown complex of late,” Belcher said. “There be factions in America who would exploit it to raise a cry against the Conjuring Statute. King George will not have a great Parliamentary tradition assailed in this fashion. Is that understood?”

  “Aye, my Lord Governor.”

  “Even as we speak, a cabal of atheists and freethinkers conspires to bring down the law in question. I allude to an upstart newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette, that each week prints letters attacking witch-courts everywhere. What is more, Governor Gordon hath appointed Judge Malcolm Cresswell to the case, a man notorious for ceding to defendants the benefit of far too many doubts.”

  “An appalling situation.”

  “Appalling’s the word”—Belcher settled onto a plush divan—“which is why I now offer you a trump card. I hope you’ll see fit to play it.”