The Last Witchfinder

by James Morrow

  Six months earlier, Belcher explained, Governor Gordon had led a military action that culminated in the apprehension of the infamous West-Indies buccaneer Hezekiah Creech. According to Belcher’s agents, Gordon had gifted himself with a portion of Creech’s treasure ere delivering the remainder to the Crown.

  “A troubling accusation,” Dunstan said.

  “Troubling, but also fortunate,” Belcher said. “These days a man need but utter the words ‘Tucker affidavit’ within earshot of Mr. Gordon, and he will grant that person almost any boon.”

  “‘Tucker affidavit’?”

  “A particularly damning deposition came from a Redcoat corporal named Noah Tucker. The Governor is all frantic to keep this fact in the shadows.”

  “‘Almost any boon’? Such as, for example…replacing Cresswell with a jurist less sympathetic to Lucifer?”

  “You have a nimble mind, Mr. Stearne. Now it so happens Judge John Hathorne of Salem-Town is recently gone to Philadelphia, that he might convince his nautically inclined nephew to abandon the sea and enter the ministry.”

  “Dost perchance speak of the same Judge Hathorne who presided at Salem alongside our dear departed Mr. Corwin?”

  “The very man.”

  “Is it possible Hathorne still practices the law?”

  Belcher nodded, smiling gamely. “He hath eighty-nine years, yet his wits remain as sharp as Gideon’s sword. When I apprised him of the situation, he insisted he was hale enough to wrestle the Dark One to the ground.”

  “I feel a great exhilaration at these developments.” Dunstan reached forward and set the baize bag on the Governor’s maplewood desk.

  “You will find the good judge at Mrs. Crippin’s Rooming-House in Callowhill Street.” Belcher, rising, approached Dunstan and slapped his back with the virtuous vehemence of a physician eliciting a newborn’s first breath. “In my next dispatch to Kensington Palace, may I assure His Majesty that the Philadelphia Court will find against Mrs. Webster?”

  “Thou mayest.”

  “Your efforts will not go unrewarded. The Privy Council hath directed me to pay your Commission two hundred pounds sterling should the case end happily.”

  “We do not cleanse for money, sir, though I would ne’er deny that money’s a useful appendage to the hunt.”

  Belcher frowned and gestured suspiciously toward the baize bag. “What’s this?”

  “Thumbs, my Lord Governor.”

  “Come again?”

  “Witches’ thumbs. Four of ’em.”

  “What are they doing on my desk?”

  “’Tis not obvious?”

  “No.”

  “They’re the basis on which you compute the Commission’s salary.”

  “Get ’em out of here.”

  “As you wish.”

  “Get ’em out right now.”

  “Of course,” Dunstan said, whisking the sack away.

  “I’m a worldly man, Mr. Stearne. Don’t e’er put thumbs on my desk again.”

  j

  ON THE AFTERNOON of May the twentieth, Dunstan and his fellow demonologists donned their darkest Puritan cloaks, secured the door of their Framingham salt-box, and betook themselves to Boston. The following morning they boarded a southbound sloop, the Ignis Fatuus, captained by one Angus Morley, a garrulous Calvinist and devoted Bible Commonwealth reader who gave the New-England cleansers the same caliber of regard he might have awarded traveling royalty or an itinerant troupe of Shakespearean players. Captain Morley’s largesse knew no bounds. He arranged for the demonologists to receive the best berths, fed them fresh scrod for breakfast and boiled beef for lunch, and gifted them with two pounds of Barbados sugar.

  After four days at sea, following a stopover on Manhattan-Isle and a harrowing storm of possibly demonic origin, the Ignis Fatuus sailed up the Delaware and put to port. Dunstan was the first cleanser to disembark, guiding Abby and Mr. Parris into the malodorous burbling stew pot known as Chestnut Street Wharf. Studying the people’s clothes and overhearing their polyglot conversations, he concluded that Philadelphia swarmed not only with the expected Quakers but also with the dregs and dross of a dozen European cities. Unsavory Scots abounded here, as well as sordid Germans, shady Welsh, seamy Dutch, and renegade French. Were it not for his duty to the Witchcraft Act, he would have quit this undeclared penal colony posthaste and led his band back to Boston.

  Their initial order of business, he decided—more important even than securing lodgings, locating Judge Hathorne, or blackmailing Governor Gordon—was to visit Rebecca Webster and corroborate the signs of Satanic covenant reported by the New-Jersey magistrate. How lamentable if the Widow Webster had been falsely accused! Not only would such a development dash Dunstan’s hopes of widening his campaign into Pennsylvania, it would mean that the three cleansers had sailed to this unseemly city for naught.

  They passed an open-air vegetable market, traversed a similar emporium selling fish, and entered a tavern called the Friar’s Lanthorn. A stifling vapor hung in the air, a cloud compounded of beer fumes and sot-weed smoke mingled with human gas. Rapidly the demonologists consumed their lunches—fried halibut and boiled turnips washed down with cider—then climbed into a day-coach heading north. By three o’clock they were in Manayunk Gaol-House, presenting themselves to the magistrate.

  At first the youthful Herbert Bledsoe did not believe that these sweaty and exhausted travelers constituted the famous Massachusetts Bay Purification Commission, and his skepticism remained intact even after Abby opened the calfskin tool-kit and withdrew the Paracelsus trident and the mask-o’-truth. His suspicions dissipated only when Dunstan produced the newest edition of the organization’s charter, which bore the Privy Council’s seal as well as Governor Belcher’s signature.

  At Dunstan’s urging, Bledsoe summoned his gaoler, a corpulent drunkard named Knox, and ordered him to fetch Mrs. Webster. Knox descended to the dungeon, appearing betimes with the prisoner, a tall, shorn, handsome woman of middle years, wearing a tattered burlap smock cinched about her waist with a plow-rope.

  “Good afternoon, dear brother,” she said.

  “I’faith!” Reverend Parris exclaimed.

  “’Steeth!” Abby cried.

  A barbed and bitter chill washed across Dunstan’s skin, as if a thousand apprentice prickers were probing his every pore. He shuddered and winced. A tracery of wrinkles had appeared upon her skin since that distant day when she’d denounced him on the Shawsheen River Bridge, and she’d lost most of her hair to Abraham Pollock’s shaving razor, but Dunstan did not for an instant doubt the prisoner’s identity. Thundering Christ! By what plan of inscrutable Jehovah or scheme of iniquitous Mephisto did he now find himself face-to-face with Jennet?

  “God is not mocked!” he screamed. Snatching the trident from Abby, he waved it around as a cleric might deploy a crucifix against a goblin. “God is not mocked!”

  “This woman who calls herself Rebecca Webster is in sooth my husband’s sister,” Abby explained to Bledsoe.

  “His sister?” gasped the magistrate. “What say ye to this accusation?” he asked the prisoner.

  “I say that, being ashamed to bear the name of Stearne, I have cheerfully altered it to Webster,” Jennet replied.

  “Then this demonologist is truly your brother?” Bledsoe asked.

  “We issued from the same mortal womb,” the prisoner said, “much as I wish ’twere otherwise.”

  Abby flashed Jennet the sort of slanted smile she assumed whenever the angel Justine vouchsafed her the name of a witch-infested village. “You may spin your spiderweb from now till Doomsday, heathen wench, but the Purification Commission shan’t become entangled. Husband, I suggest we go apprise Governor Gordon of this farce and then return to Boston.”

  Back to Boston? No, Dunstan thought. The Lord might work in mysterious ways, but the Devil trafficked only in plain ones. By selecting Jennet Stearne and not some other freethinking heretic as his principal agent in Pennsylvania, Lucifer had obvious
ly sought to constrain the famous and formidable demonologist Dunstan Stearne from attending whatever courtroom proceeding Jennet’s maleficium might ultimately inspire—for surely this pricker, like any pricker, would refuse to prosecute his own blood-sister.

  “Foolish Lucifer!” Dunstan cried.

  “Foolish Lucifer!” echoed Mr. Parris.

  Foolish Lucifer. How poorly the Devil understood his enemy’s mind—how feeble his comprehension of the Witchfinder-Royal’s heart!

  “Goodwife Stearne, this be no farce,” Dunstan said, “for by Abraham Pollock’s testimony my sister hath truly signed the Dark One’s register.” He paused, waiting for the prisoner to contradict him, but she simply rolled her eyes toward the ceiling beams. Tightening his grip on the trident, he stepped to within inches of the witch. “Mr. Pollock notes a diabolical excrescence on your neck. I would now confirm his finding.”

  Jennet replied with a low, noxious grunt, but she obligingly tilted her head to one side, exposing the mark to Dunstan’s gaze. He pressed the trident’s middle tine against the blotch. Within five ticks of the clock his hand started shaking.

  “’Tis Lucifer’s kiss—I can feel it!”

  “You feel naught but the natural twitchings of your aged fingers,” Jennet insisted.

  Abby brushed her palm across the reddish stubble on the suspect’s head. “Whate’er became of your tawnie husband? Did he expel you from his harem?”

  “Mr. Pollock also reports that the cold-water ordeal indicted Mrs. Webster,” Dunstan said, still maintaining the seal betwixt trident and blemish. “Mr. Parris, will you assist me in repeating the experiment?”

  “The Schuylkill should serve our purpose,” the minister said, nodding.

  But before they could lead Jennet away, an unexpected and utterly profane intervention occurred. Herbert Bledsoe reached out and, like a goshawk catching a pigeon on the wing, plucked the trident from Dunstan’s grasp.

  “I fear the blood-tie ’twixt prisoner and prosecutor will make for a muddy sort of justice,” Bledsoe said, locking his tiny pale eyes on Dunstan. “Mr. Stearne, ye will forbear to further test Mrs. Webster. ’Tis apparent the Court must replace ye with another.”

  “Dost imagine I would decline to cleanse a witch merely because she’s kin to me? Hah! My father once brought evidence of Satanic compaction against his own sister-in-law!” Dunstan grabbed the trident and jerked it from Bledsoe’s hands. “You needn’t fret, young jurist. When I meet with Governor Gordon on the morrow, I shall happily reveal the blood-tie of which you speak.”

  “At which juncture the Governor will instruct ye to resign from the case,” Bledsoe said.

  Not if I inaugurate our interview with the words “Tucker affidavit,” Dunstan thought. “This meeting goes on too long,” he told Bledsoe, then swerved toward his sister, fixing her as fiercely as he would any other bride of Lucifer. “Mark me well, Mrs. Webster. You will not avoid the gallows even if pagan Socrates himself ascends from Limbo to prepare your defense.”

  “I need no sage for my solicitor, as I have Reason on my side,” Jennet said.

  Dunstan turned to his companions and guided them toward the door, tapping each cleanser gently with the trident. “What is Reason?” he said in a tone of measured ridicule.

  “Scripture doth not speak of’t,” Reverend Parris replied.

  “Reason’s a habit of mind that enjoyed great favor with the Papist Scholastics of old,” Abby said evenly. “But today no person remembers their names.”

  j

  THE NEW-ENGLAND CLEANSERS’ clamorous and eventful visit to Manayunk Gaol-House aroused in Jennet an optimism quite opposite to the intimidation that had been their aim. All three demonologists had obviously offended Herbert Bledsoe, and it seemed logical to suppose they would likewise offend the jurymen appointed to determine her fate.

  “I must confess, Mrs. Webster,” the magistrate said, “ere your brother descended upon us, I thought it possible ye’d consorted with the Dark One. But I sense scant holiness in the Purification Commission. From this day forward, I intend to make your cell a hospitable place.”

  “Do you mean I might have a true bed?” she asked.

  “With a feather mattress,” Mr. Bledsoe said.

  “A linen shift instead of this rag?”

  “If ye like.”

  “Ink, quill, paper, and a writing-desk?”

  “Verily.”

  “Whene’er a person comes to visit me, I would have Mr. Knox let him inside my cell.”

  Mr. Bledsoe nodded and said, “I shall accord your callers every comfort within my authority.”

  Over the next four days the magistrate made good on his promises, civilizing her circumstances as much as he could without provoking public speculation that she’d bewitched him. A pair of Derbyshire chairs arrived in time for her first meeting with her advocate.

  The encounter was not long underway when Jennet decided that Charles de Montesquieu had managed to rise above his aristocratic birth to embrace the world in all its earthy particulars. Despite his plumed hat, silk vest, perfumed neckcloth, and landed lineage, he seemed at ease in these squalid surroundings, and she believed he would have adapted equally well to the previous, unappointed version of her cell.

  “You have written a brilliant book, Mrs. Webster, and I am persuaded to make it the centerpiece of our case,” he said, removing The Sufficiency of the World from his portmanteau. “When interviewing you before the Court, I shall prompt you to speak of acceleration, oscillation, refrangibility, and other such principles. Thus will the jurymen learn that the universe obeys Nature’s laws, not Satan’s wraiths.”

  “Monsieur, ’twould seem you have grasped my argument in full,” she said, pacing the length of her stone-and-iron cube: twelve feet wide, only twelve—a fact that Mr. Bledsoe’s good intentions could never redeem.

  “Acceleration, osculation, refrangularity,” Mrs. Sharkey chanted from her cell. “When my case comes to trial, I’ll tell the judge I could ne’er have bludgeoned my husband with a plowshare, for Nature’s laws do not permit it.”

  “I’m inclinin’ toward the same strategy,” Mr. Turpin said. “‘Ye think I stole Mr. Pertuis’s cattle, Excellency? ’Tis obvious ye know naught o’ refrangularity.’”

  “Eavesdroppers, I shall thank you to keep silent,” Jennet said.

  “If ’twould be no inconvenience”—Montesquieu pressed his Sufficiency of the World into her hands—“I hope you might inscribe this copy to me.”

  She approached her writing-desk, dipped quill into ink pot, and, opening the treatise, decorated the cover-page with the bold looping hand she’d learned from Aunt Isobel. À Charles Louis de Secondat…avec toute ma considération et ma sympathie…Jennet Stearne Crompton. “I’Christ, ’tis the first time I e’er wrote my name in a book.”

  “Except, of course, when you signed the Devil’s register.” Montesquieu issued a succinct but merry laugh, then immediately turned somber. “I bring good tidings and bad.”

  “Tell me the bad straight away.”

  “Three days ago, for reasons that remain mysterious, the jurist Malcolm Cresswell recused himself from the case.”

  “Faugh!” Jennet said. “Who hath replaced him?”

  “None other than John Hathorne.”

  “Hathorne of the Salem trials?”

  “The same knave.”

  The quill in her hand seemed suddenly as grotesque and sinister as a Paracelsus trident. “Our enterprise hath sustained a deep wound.”

  “Deep, oui, but not deadly.”

  “I would now receive the good tidings.”

  “By the report of Mr. Franklin’s band of youngbloods, the whole of Philadelphia stands behind you,” Montesquieu said. “Should Hathorne attempt to abridge your defense, the cries from the gallery will set the courthouse to trembling as when Joshua’s trumpets shook down Jericho.”

  “A most opportune development.” She laid the quill aside, blew the ink dry, and returned the book to
Montesquieu.

  From the shadows atop the staircase a man called out, “Nor hath Dame Fortune yet run short of smiles, darling Jenny”—a familiar voice, coarsened by age yet still ringing and resolute—“for’t seems an old friend is lately come to Philadelphia!”

  In the center of the descending parade marched Mr. Bledsoe, brandishing an uncocked pistol. Behind him tromped Mr. Knox, grasping a ring of iron keys as a fallen angel might hold his shorn halo. And first in line, dressed in a torn and dusty surtout, stepped—Jennet blinked once, twice, then swallowed audibly—Barnaby Cavendish!

  “This beggar insisted on seeing ye,” the magistrate said.

  Astonishment and joy rushed through her like a surge from a Von Guericke sphere. “He’s no beggar, sir, but the treasured companion of my youth! Oh, Barnaby, dear friend, thou hast once again returned from the dead!”

  “’Tis a habit I intend to cultivate for the rest of my life,” he said.

  Receiving the magistrate’s nod, Knox unlocked the cell door and ushered Barnaby into Jennet’s presence. For a full minute she and the mountebank embraced. He exuded a bracing scent, a pungent and oddly pleasant mixture of sweat, hay, and mildew.

  “When last I saw this man,” she told the befuddled Montesquieu, “he was about to go down with the wreck of the Berkshire.”

  “’Twas a truly fearsome gale.” Barnaby adjusted his spectacles, which had somehow survived the nautical catastrophe. “But by freeing the Lyme Bay Fish-Boy and the Bicephalic Girl from their sea-chest and wrapping an arm round each, I stayed a-float amidst the froth and tumult. Twenty thirsty hours upon Neptune’s bosom, and then a Portuguese brigantine delivered us from certain doom.”

  “Dr. Cavendish curates a prodigy museum,” Jennet explained to Montesquieu.

  “My life was saved by two of the most amazing freaks e’er to drop from a woman’s womb,” Barnaby elaborated.

  “They reside in bottles,” Jennet noted.

  “Then you were rescued by Mr. Boyle’s law of buoyancy,” Montesquieu told Barnaby, waving the Sufficiency in his face.