The Last Witchfinder

by James Morrow

  Though normally an early riser, Ben experienced difficulty quitting his bed the next morning, as this meant trading a pleasant reverie about Amakye-Isle—he was catching eels in Copernicus Cove—for the waking nightmare of Jennet’s trial. The more alert he became, the lower his spirits fell. He wished he owned some sort of time-traveling carriage, the crowning product of his philosophic pursuits, that he might vault across the remainder of the week and land unscathed in Sunday.

  Through a sudden surge of will he abandoned the sheets and, leaning over the warm cavity from which he’d emerged, kissed his drowsy Deborah on her cheek. He shuffled to the dresser, surprised his face with a splash of cold water, and climbed into his breeches. Almost as useful as a time-traveling carriage, he mused, would be a machine that performed your morning ablutions for you.

  He stepped into the nursery, expecting to find William asleep, but the boy was sitting on the floor playing with his birthday present from Barnaby Cavendish, a mahogany Noah’s Ark cradling a cargo of ten animals whittled from fir blocks. In theory William knew only what he’d been told—his mother was standing trial on a false accusation of witchery, the best lawyer in the world was defending her—and yet he seemed aware of more than these raw facts. It would be pointless to mislead William, painting Jennet’s future in rosy hues, for the prism of his mind was aligned to pierce all such adult deceptions.

  “Be thee well, son,” Ben said, embracing the boy. “I’m off to Manayunk.”

  From his little ark William removed a wooden tiger and placed it in Ben’s hand. “For Mother.”

  “’Tis a bonny gift.”

  “Tigers are brave,” William said.

  “Indeed,” Ben said.

  “Tigers are strong.”

  “Quite so.”

  As if she’d fallen victim to a melancholia of the very sort that afflicted Ben, the mare transported him at a torpid pace, and he arrived in Manayunk later than he’d intended, entering the courthouse just as the marshals were seating Jennet. He noted with satisfaction that two jurymen and at least thirty spectators were reading that morning’s Gazette. Pulling the tiger from his pocket, he approached the defense table, mysteriously overspread with a microscope, a horseshoe, a Von Guericke sphere, a dish of phlox petals, a phial of milk, a bowl of grain, and, most peculiar of all, a wire cage containing a distressed rooster.

  “William presents you with his bravest beast”—Ben pressed the tiger into Jennet’s palm as respectfully as he would Isaac Newton’s epochal apple—“that you might draw courage from it.”

  “Tell our son I’ve ne’er received a better token.”

  “Prithee, call your first witness,” Hathorne instructed the Purification Commissioners.

  Abigail Stearne rose from the prosecution table and, black cape billowing like a window-drape in a thunder-gust, glided toward the judge’s bench. “The Crown summons Michael Bailey,” she said.

  After settling behind the journalists’ desk, Ben opened his valise and retrieved his writing supplies. He trimmed his quill, transmuted into Ebenezer Trenchard, and made ready to report on the day’s events.

  Mr. Bailey, a gorbellied harness-maker who seemed to be storing turnips in his cheeks, heaved his bulk into the stand. Questioned by Mrs. Stearne, he lamented his decision to slam the door in Rebecca Webster’s face one evening when she’d come begging for a jug of cider. His regret traced not to his uncharitable behavior, however, but to the fact that Mrs. Webster had evidently retaliated by afflicting his wife with dropsy.

  Spurious Connection ’twixt Webster and Wife’s Illness, Ben wrote.

  As the morning progressed, sufferer after sufferer stood before the Court, each attesting to how he’d spurned the defendant—apparently she’d habitually sought to share her neighbors’ victuals and borrow their tools—and consequently endured some hardship or other. The jurors heard of butter that declined to come, dough that neglected to rise, hens who failed to lay, a baby who rebuffed the breast, a wound that wouldn’t heal, and flax turned rotten in the field.

  Feeble Attempt to cast Misfortunes as Maleficium, Ben wrote.

  The first seven witnesses occasioned no reaction from the defense, but then Mrs. Stearne interviewed Bethany Fallon, a comely but morose goose girl who told how, two days after she’d refused to let Mrs. Webster roam through her henhouse collecting eggs at will, twenty of her flock had died of an enchantment. When Miss Fallon added that the birds’ death throes included running in circles and pecking at rocks until their beaks shattered, Jennet and Montesquieu sat up straight and exchanged urgent whispers. The instant the Crown finished with the witness, Montesquieu proposed to cross-examine her.

  “The Court hath heard quite enough of this girl’s benighted geese,” Hathorne replied. A sound emerged from the gallery, a shrill moan suggesting the synchronous whimperings of a hundred ill-treated dogs. “Howbeit, let it not be said I failed to accord the defense every leeway.”

  Like a priest bearing a communion cup to a celebrant, Montesquieu approached the witness-stand carrying his bowl of grain. “Mademoiselle Fallon, may I offer a conjecture concerning your geese? I believe they succumbed not to bewitchment but to a natural illness.”

  “Aye, a natural illness contrived by the Widow Webster,” Bethany Fallon said, gesturing vaguely toward Jennet.

  “More likely your geese grew sick from eating rye seeds such as these.” Montesquieu thrust the grain before the witness. “You will note that some are brown and normal, though others appear black as tar, a sign of fungal infection. This corrupted food sickened your geese with the disease called ergot, also known as St. Anthony’s fire and infernalis. Its cause was established fifty years ago by my countryman Monsieur Dodart, a Paris doctor with a special knowledge of molds and mushrooms. Speak truly—did you feed your flock on rye seeds?”

  “I have always given ’em such.”

  Ergot caus’d by Fungus not Fiends, Ben wrote.

  Montesquieu revisited the defense table, seized the wire cage, and bore the unlucky rooster toward Miss Fallon. Never before had Ben beheld so sorely afflicted a creature; his thoughts turned to Jennet’s accounts of skishauonck, the small-pox, murderer of her first child. When not throwing itself against the walls of its pen, the rooster bobbed its head in all directions and tore out its own feathers. Unless it died first, the wretched fowl would by day’s end be as naked as if plucked for roasting.

  “Last evening I fed this rooster contaminated rye seeds, and now it displays a manifest case of the ergot,” Montesquieu said. “Tell me, s’il vous plaît, whether my bird perchance reminds you of your own stricken flock.”

  “Aye, ’tis so,” the girl said. “But did not Mrs. Webster mayhap bid Lucifer taint my grain with the mold of which you speak?”

  “Any experienced farmer will tell you that a fungi may thrive without benefit of occult powers. Écoutez-moi, Mademoiselle. To save your geese from future plagues, you must purify their food. Use a sieve to filter out the larger black bodies, then drop the remaining seeds in a tub of saltwater. The lesser black bodies will rise to the surface, where you may easily skim them off.”

  “Thus sparing my birds this madness?” she asked, pointing a milk-white finger toward the dying rooster. “Then verily I shall do’t.”

  “Vous êtes très intelligente. I have no more questions.”

  Montesquieu returned to the defense table, whereupon Hathorne decreed a recess for the midday meal. As the interval began, Jennet prevailed upon Ben to put the rooster out of its misery. He carried the cage behind the courthouse, took out the bird, and grasped its tattered body by the neck. Closing his eyes, he twisted the head round and round as if removing the cork from a wine bottle.

  A brief trip to the Wissahickon Creek yielded two bucketfuls of stones, which he piled one by one atop the feathered witness, and soon the cairn completely obscured the rooster’s earthly remains. He set the final stone in place, then offered up a succinct but sincere eulogy, for such commemoration was surely due any
creature sacrificed in counter to the demon hypothesis.

  Later that day, cued by Abigail Stearne, a fresh parade of maleficium sufferers told their stories. After disregarding the initial four victims, Montesquieu elected to cross-examine a wizened flax-planter named Zebulon Plum, whose crop had sustained a blast of Heaven’s fire and subsequently burned to the ground. The Baron began by cluttering the stand with the horseshoe, the Von Guericke sphere, the dish of phlox petals, and a copy of The Sufficiency of the World. He turned the crank, set his palm against the equator, and thereby made a squall of petals fly to the sphere and stick to its surface like ants mired in a trickle of sap.

  “Mr. Plum, I show you the force called electricity, supreme amongst those energies with which God has suffused the world.” Montesquieu halted the sphere, causing it to shed the petals. “Now observe what happens when I cause an electric charge first to accumulate within my body and then to find release in iron.” He gave the ball a vigorous crank, placed his left hand against the sulphur, and extended his right index finger, bringing the pad to within an inch of the horseshoe. A tiny crackling thread shot forth. The Baron flinched. “Tell the jury what you saw, Monsieur.”

  “’Tis hard to describe. A kind o’ thin, cold spark.”

  “Exactement. Just as the great Sir Isaac Newton discerned a general gravitation stretching to the very edge of Creation, so has Philadelphia’s own Benjamin Franklin postulated a universal electricity.”

  Ben blushed to hear his name mentioned in the same breath with Newton’s, though he allowed that the parallel was not without merit. Montesquieu advocates for Universal Electricity over Unseen Elementals, he wrote.

  Flourishing Jennet’s book, the Baron faced the jury-box and locked his eyes on Mr. Hocking. “To the curious amongst you I recommend the account of Mr. Franklin’s work found in J. S. Crompton’s admirable treatise, The Sufficiency of the World,” Montesquieu said. “If the Franklin hypothesis is correct, the spark I just now made leap betwixt flesh and metal differs only in degree”—he turned and fixed his gaze on Mr. Plum—“from the celestial torch that destroyed your flax.”

  “A spark is not a lightning-bolt,” Mr. Plum protested. “A whelk is not a whale.”

  Montesquieu answered the witness’s complaint with an insouciant flip of his hand, then strode toward the twelve landholders, staring at each in turn. “Perhaps these fiery blasts come forth as our planet rubs against its envelope of æther. Perhaps they form in the arcane depths of maelstroms and then ascend to the clouds, returning to Earth during thunder-gusts. But I swear to you, good jurymen, there is no more deviltry in a lightning-stroke than in the blooming of a daffodil or the hatching of a swan’s egg.”

  To Ben’s great satisfaction, Montesquieu now employed the very tactic the situation demanded. He approached the witness-stand, cranked the sphere, and instructed Plum to unfloor his feet, explaining that otherwise the planter might receive a nasty jolt. He set Plum’s palm against the spinning sulphur. The remaining petals hurled themselves against the ball.

  “Behold!” Montesquieu cried. “Zebulon Plum is a Christian man who has never once met Lucifer, and yet he fashions the electric force with his very hands!”

  “No deviltry in lightning!” Barnaby Cavendish yelled.

  “No deviltry in lightning!” Nicholas Scull echoed.

  “No deviltry in lightning!” insisted the thoughtful young magistrate Herbert Bledsoe.

  “Silence!” Hathorne screamed, pounding the bench with his mallet.

  Von Guericke electrifies the Court, Ben wrote.

  The next two witnesses—a glassblower who held Rebecca Webster responsible for his last eighty bottles turning brittle, a cordwainer convinced that she’d ensorcelled his glad-adder—inspired no cross-examinations from Montesquieu. But then Stearne put Wilbur Bennet on the stand, a swart dairyman who’d declined to lend the Widow Webster his plow horse, that she might clear a tree stump from her property. Two days later, he’d lost forty gallons of milk to curdling.

  Upon receiving Hathorne’s permission to question Mr. Bennet, Montesquieu marched to the stand bearing the microscope and the milk phial. “Can you tell me the purpose of this instrument?”

  “Methinks ’tis a kind o’ magnifier,” Bennet said.

  “Vraiment.” Montesquieu placed a white droplet on the stage, directed Bennet to peer through the eyepiece, and bid him describe what he saw.

  “It looks to me a herd o’ worms,” the witness said, scrutinizing the specimen, “itchin’ and twitchin’ like they’ve contracted the chorea.”

  Montesquieu told the Court that the microscope’s optical components were the handiwork of Anton Van Leeuwenhoek, the legendary linen-draper who could grind lenses so powerful they revealed “the very stitchery God employed in sewing the fabric of the world.” In his letters to the Royal Society, the Baron continued, Van Leeuwenhoek had described, amongst other wonders, the tiny creatures he’d seen swimming about in pond water, tooth scum, and fecal matter. By the lens-grinder’s report, sweet milk was free of these animalcules, whilst sour milk contained them in abundance.

  “Would you not agree that Van Leeuwenhoek’s beasties account for your ruined milk far better than does the demon hypothesis?” Montesquieu asked the witness.

  “I would not,” Bennet said, giving the specimen a second glance. “Your microscope tells me only that Mrs. Webster implored some demon to spoil my milk with foul-tastin’ wrigglers.”

  “But if they’re like other creatures—the ant, the moth, the field mouse—then these wrigglers generate themselves, and we need not posit wicked spirits to explain their propagation.”

  “The wrigglers generate themselves!” Barnaby Cavendish shouted, and instantly his cry was taken up and chorused, first by Nicholas Scull, then by the rest of the Junto, then by scores of spectators.

  “You will be silent!” Hathorne demanded.

  Bennet stole a third peek at the animalcules. “Baron Montesquieu, ye do not study the evidence closely enough. This puddle swarms with the squirmin’ progeny o’ the very serpent who deprived us all o’ Paradise.”

  “You have a vivid imagination,” Montesquieu said, packing up the milk phial and the microscope.

  “These be the Devil’s descendants, I swear’t.”

  “I should be astonished to find in Europe even one natural philosopher who might corroborate that conclusion. You are excused, Mr. Bennet.”

  Lens-grinder sees through Witchfinders, Ben wrote.

  “The dinner hour is upon us, and so we shall adjourn,” Hathorne said. “Prithee, Monsieur le Baron, I would examine that milk myself.”

  Montesquieu glowered but obediently bore the microscope and the phial to the bench, setting them before Hathorne. The judge closed one eye and with the other peered into the milk’s darkest reaches. He turned the focus knob, clucked his tongue, and let loose the least spontaneous laugh Ben had ever heard.

  “’Tis just as Mr. Bennet claims!” Hathorne told the Court. “A hundred tiny demons cruise these white currents! All praise Anton Van Leeuwenhoek, whom history will remember as the man who brought Satan’s invisible empire to light!”

  j

  THE AUTUMN SUN BURNED that morning with an unseasonable intensity, warming the air and inspiring the larks to praise in song the world’s sufficiency, but to Jennet that same world seemed bleak, sterile, and unworthy of such music. Making her fettered way to the defense table, she endured a queasiness in her stomach, as if she’d just consumed a quart of Ben’s revolting nostrum for mal de mer.

  By the Baron de Montesquieu’s reckoning, the Commissioners would attack her from two sides today, indicting not only the odd behaviors she’d exhibited whilst living on the Sumac Lane farm, but also the presumed blasphemies entailed in her denial of demons. The odd behaviors were easy to explain. As for the blasphemies, she hoped to answer them by drawing upon the previous evening’s tutorial with Montesquieu, during which he had offered up his illuminating translations of those Old Te
stament verses in which that most horrible of heresies, the willing substitution of Lucifer for Christ, was supposedly anticipated and then denounced by the Hebrew prophets.

  Invited by Hathorne to continue the Crown’s presentation, the Reverend Samuel Parris bestirred his creaking bones, stretched himself into wakefulness, and contemptuously discarded that day’s edition of The Pennsylvania Gazette. Ebenezer Trenchard’s column had begun with an observation Jennet thought especially pithy. “Just as Rye Seeds infect’d by Fungus must be cast aside lest they afflict Geese with Infernalis, so must Statutes infest’d with Superstition be struck down ere they send more Innocents to the Hangman.”

  “The Crown calls Rebecca Webster,” Mr. Parris said.

  A chorus of sympathetic murmurs filled the hall as, wrist chains clanking in a discordant carillon, Jennet assumed the witness-stand. She reached into her pocket as far as the manacle permitted and closed her hand around William’s wooden tiger.

  “Mrs. Webster, this Monday past the Court heard from Abraham Pollock, Magistrate of Mount-Holly,” Mr. Parris said, hobbling toward the stand bearing the same fat Bible that Dunstan had employed during his opening address. “He attested to the presence of six cats in your barn.”

  “’Tis as natural for a widow to solicit a community of innocuous cats,” she asserted, “as for a marooned sailor to befriend a troop of wild monkeys.”

  “I did not ask you to opine upon the character of your cats. That is the jury’s prerogative.” Mr. Parris offered the landholders a labored wink and a sly grin, then faced Jennet again. “As Foreman Hocking’s worthies go about their job, I know they will recall the scriptural passage Mr. Stearne read to us on Monday. ‘A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death.’”

  “When next you return to the original Hebrew,” she said, employing what she hoped was a scholarly tone, “you will notice that the phrase ‘a woman that hath a familiar spirit’ is best translated as ‘pythoness’—a seer, that is, such as the Oracle at Delphi. The word ‘wizard,’ meanwhile, should be rendered as ‘diviner’ or ‘knowing one.’ ’Tis baldly obvious the author of Leviticus speaks not of Satanism.”