The Last Witchfinder

by James Morrow

  “Intuition says the heavier object wins the race,” she told the jurors, “but behold what happens when I perform the experiment.” She released both spheres, rolling them along the grooves. “Your eyes did not deceive you, gentlemen. Lead and straw reached the finish line at the same instant.” Twice more she demonstrated Galileo’s law of uniform acceleration, first pitting a ball of wire against a ball of yarn, then a sphere filled with cider against one containing grass. Victory eluded each and every sphere. “As you have seen, good jurymen, Nature cleaves to her own rules, heedless of our petty expectations.”

  No sooner had Montesquieu flourished his lodestone than a cry of uncertain origin and uncanny timbre shot through the courtroom, a piercing “Aaaaiiiieeee!” A second such scream sent scores of faces turning toward the prosecution table, where Abigail Stearne was rocking to and fro like a victim of the ergot.

  “The witch sends forth her demons!” Abigail released a third shriek, lurched to her feet, and vaulted into the aisle. “’Tis Hell’s worst minions make those spheres move so contrarily!”

  The spectators began chattering amongst themselves, a cacophony admixing confusion with fright.

  “I send forth no demons,” Jennet insisted, managing an outward tranquility even as she seethed within.

  “Silence, spectators!” Hathorne commanded.

  “I’Christ, her goblins are loose within me!” Abigail cried, limping toward the judge’s bench. “They gnaw upon my stomach and bowels! Call ’em back, witch! Call thy demons back!”

  “Oh, my dearest wife!” Dunstan wailed.

  “Darling niece!” Mr. Parris yelped.

  From Abigail’s throat came a sound suggesting the death rattle of a rabid lynx. “Her demons choke me! They rob the breath from my lungs!”

  It was the same old Abigail, Jennet realized. The decades since Salem had not weakened by one whit her powers of prevarication.

  Arms outstretched in a pose of crucifixion, Abigail halted before the judge. “Excellency, there be but one way I may lift this curse.” Like a Roman conspirator preparing to assassinate Julius Caesar, she slid a glittering silver bodkin from her dress. “I must release a drop of the witch’s blood.”

  “This woman plays you false,” Jennet calmly informed John Hathorne. “She played you false at Salem, and now she plays you false again.”

  Twirling around like a weathercock in a gale, Abigail sprang upon Jennet and embraced her as she might a lover. The bodkin flashed in the afternoon sun. Abigail snarled, and suddenly the blade was glancing along the edge of Jennet’s jaw, leaving in its wake a stinging wound.

  “Lying slush-bucket!” Jennet cried. “Filthy vixen!”

  The spectators’ jabber grew louder yet.

  “Be quiet, all of you!” Hathorne ordered.

  “The spell is broken!” Abigail shouted with manufactured exuberance. She restored the bodkin to her dress and made her way to the prosecution table, slowly, uncertainly, like a lost traveler staggering through a blizzard. “Broken,” she gasped, collapsing into her chair. She folded her elbows, rested her head on the fleshy pillow, and appeared to fall asleep. “Broken…broken…”

  “Good Philadelphians, you must not believe Mrs. Stearne’s playacting,” Montesquieu said, placing his handkerchief in Jennet’s grasp.

  “Merci.” She raised her manacled wrists and pressed the white silk against her bleeding jaw.

  The Baron turned his palms outward and beseechingly approached the jury-box. “She has merely mimicked a woman possessed.”

  “Monsieur le Baron, ’tis not your place to tell these dozen worthies what they may and mayn’t believe,” Hathorne said. “Prithee, finish your dumb-show, that the jury might begin its deliberations on the morrow.”

  “Mrs. Webster, do you feel prepared to continue, despite this outrageous attack upon your person?” Montesquieu asked.

  “Aye,” Jennet said, passing the Baron his blood-soaked handkerchief.

  She proceeded to illustrate the law of magnetism, making first a watch-fob, next a key, and then a musket-ball fly across the table and adhere to Montesquieu’s lodestone. Abigail slept soundly through all three collisions, but she stirred slightly during the fourth: the noisy meeting of the magnetite and a steel stirrup.

  “The Gilbertian force is woven into the very tapestry of Creation,” Jennet told the jurymen. “Magnetism follows its own God-given principle, unimpressed by human will or demonic desire.”

  For the next presentation she charged the Von Guericke sphere and drew a range of substances—eider-down, sot-weed granules, wig powder—to its surface.

  “Though natural philosophers still have many questions concerning universal electricity,” she said, “they know better than to give their ignorance the name of demon.”

  Her climactic presentation had her placing a pentahedral glass prism on the defense table. She allowed the setting sun to strike the prism and send a full spectrum, red to orange to yellow to blue to indigo to violet, cascading across the jury-box, then employed a second prism in restoring the rainbow to a stream of purest whiteness.

  “The phenomenon of refraction belongs to Nature alone. ’Tis not the plaything of hypothetical spirits. And God said, ‘Let there be—’”

  “Aaaaiiiieeee!” screamed Abigail, leaping up like a boulder launched from a catapult. “I’Christ, her devils find me! Her refraction demons pound a prism into my heart! Aaaaiiiieeee!”

  The spectators abandoned their benches, their collective mutters reverberating off the walls and rattling amongst the rafters.

  “Sit down, every one of you!” Hathorne cried.

  To a man, to a woman, the spectators remained standing.

  “Her electric imps set my bile aboil! Her magnet-spirits fill me with Golgotha’s nails!” Abigail ran toward the defense table, gathered up the philosophic tools—ramp, lodestone, sulphur ball, prisms—and hurled them in all directions. “Sayeth the witch, ‘Let mine enemy eat of the iron that locked Christ to His cross!’ The nails! The nails! I must purge myself of the unholy nails!”

  “Darling Abby, methinks this bride of Lucifer means to murder thee!” Dunstan shouted.

  Bending in two, Abigail clutched her stomach, slapped her cheek, and opened her mouth. Against the grain of common expectation, four iron nails spewed from her gullet, clanking and clattering as they rolled across the table.

  “Heaven protect us!” Foreman Hocking shrieked.

  “I cannot believe it!” Hathorne gasped.

  “Deliver me, Lord!” Abigail spat up two more nails. “God have mercy!” Another nail came forth. “Aaaaiiiieeee!”

  It seemed to Jennet that a tremor of unease now passed through Montesquieu. For one small second, the sliver of an instant, he apparently thought he might actually be defending a witch.

  “Spectators, find your seats, or I shall have the marshals drag you from the hall!” Hathorne shouted.

  Regaining his wits, Montesquieu bounded toward the jury. “Honorable landholders, heed not this woman’s mendacity!”

  “Oh, my Savior!” Abigail strode away from the spiky vomitus and, lurching upright, spat an eighth nail into her open palm. She rushed to the jury-box and held the nail before Mr. Hocking. “Good sirs, you must refuse to set yon witch upon the world!” She pivoted toward an open window and hurled the nail through the aperture. “In Christ’s name, you mustn’t loose her!”

  Now Barnaby joined the tumult, quitting the gallery and dashing toward the judge’s bench. “Excellency, these seeming wonders are but an illusionist’s tricks!”

  “The raven!” Abigail cried. “The raven! She torments me with Beelzebub’s spectral bird!”

  Ducking and cringing, she gestured as if to catch and crush a pesky midge, when suddenly a large black raven feather materialized in her grasp. She swatted the air a second time, thus plucking another feather from the invisible bird.

  “More tricks!” Barnaby shouted.

  “She shan’t defeat me!” Abigail snatched
a third feather from the æther. “I love Christ even more than the witch adoreth Satan!”

  “Abby, save yourself!” Dunstan insisted.

  “Scratch the witch!” Mr. Parris advised.

  “Save myself, aye!” Abigail dropped all three feathers and pulled the bodkin from her pocket. She stepped toward Jennet and froze abruptly, whereupon her bodkin arm jerked outward, twisting and twitching like the tail of a storm-tossed kite. “Oh, sweet guardians of grace, she turns my dagger against me!” Her bodkin arm reversed direction, pushing the blade deep into her side, directly below her rib cage. “The thrusting lance! Our Savior’s precious hurt!”

  “Damn thee, Jennet, thou shalt cease this assault upon my wife!” Dunstan, rising, pounded his fist on the prosecution table. “Desist! Desist!”

  Abigail yanked the bodkin free. A thread of blood jetted from the lesion, staining the floor with a sinuous red line. Her eyes crossed, her tongue snaked forward, and she drove the blade into her left breast.

  “Witch, thou canst not conquer me!” she screamed, lactating blood. “Christ’s mercy is my armor and shield!”

  “Sit down, spectators!” Hathorne shouted. “Sit down!”

  Barnaby dropped to his knees, pressing his right hand against Abigail’s shed blood as if sealing a seed within a furrow. He lifted his palm and licked it clean.

  “Excellency, this gore be sweet, not salt like true blood!” he informed Hathorne. “I swear ’tis naught but cherry pulp!”

  Abigail tore the bodkin from her breast and, dashing toward the defense table, cut an invisible slit in the air and then a palpable gash in Jennet’s scalp.

  “She seeks to fool us with cherry pulp!” Barnaby shouted.

  Again Jennet availed herself of Montesquieu’s handkerchief. Even as the wound stopped flowing, Abigail pocketed the bodkin and strutted down the crowded aisle, the perplexed mob parting around her. With a final ghastly shriek Abigail entered the foyer, kicked open the front door, and leapt into the gloomy dusk.

  “The Court is adjourned!” Hathorne cried.

  “Cherry pulp!” Barnaby screamed.

  “Are you deaf, sir? Adjourned!” Hathorne pounded the bench so violently that his tool snapped in half. The disembodied mallet-head spun like a child’s top. “Adjourned! Adjourned!”

  j

  MATTHEW KNOX SUPPLIED JENNET, Montesquieu, and Barnaby with a splendid meal that night, a succulent fellowship of roasted pork, boiled cabbage, and Syracuse salt, then capped the feast by rolling a cask of ale into the gaol-cell and pouring full tankards all around. As he started to leave, the turnkey mentioned, diffidently but earnestly, that he’d heard rumors of a bewitchment in the courtroom, whereupon Jennet invited him to join their colloquy. If Barnaby could convince this simple gaoler that Abigail’s antics did not portend Satanic intervention, it followed that he might convince the jury as well.

  She downed her portion of ale in one colossal gulp, thereby achieving considerable relief from the lacerations in her jaw and scalp. “Good curator, do enlighten us,” she instructed Barnaby.

  “My knowledge of the magician’s art goes back some twenty years, when I joined forces with a crystal-gazer and an illusionist to create Le Cirque de la Lune,” Barnaby told his audience. “The latter wight, one Feizunda, taught me the rudiments of legerdemain—the same rudiments as were employed against our Jenny this afternoon.” He turned to Mr. Knox. “Friend, did you know your brain is home to a member of the insect race?” No sooner had a frown gathered on Mr. Knox’s face than Barnaby reached forward and retrieved a large black cricket from inside the gaoler’s left ear. “Behold the source of the music you hear each night as you fall asleep.”

  “Monsieur Cavendish, vous êtes d’une adresse stupefiante,” Montesquieu said.

  “’Tis a magnificent trick,” Mr. Knox agreed.

  “The same trick by which Abigail Stearne seemed to pluck feathers from a spectral raven today,” Barnaby said. He presented the cricket to Jennet, who set it on the floor that it might hop to freedom. “As you may have heard, Mr. Knox, the Stearne woman also vomited forth eight iron spikes. Speaking of which, I am reminded that my noonday meal was an uncommon tart, filled with…” He pressed one hand against his stomach. “I’Christ, those acorns confound my digestion! ’Twould seem a purgation’s in the offing!”

  Clamping his free hand across his mouth, Barnaby staggered groaning and retching toward Jennet’s writing-desk, then abruptly disgorged five greenish-brown acorns. They bounced off the brass ink pot with short, sharp reports.

  “’Steeth!” Knox exclaimed.

  “I would imagine such sleight-of-hand demands many hours of practice,” Montesquieu said.

  “Aye,” Barnaby said, “but once he’s mastered the illusion, a person can appear to purge himself of everything from hickory nuts to Christ’s own nails.”

  “Hélas, Madame Webster, I must confess that when I beheld Abigail Stearne spew that iron, a wave of faithlessness washed over me,” Montesquieu said.

  “I saw it in your countenance, Charles,” she said. “But know that I absolve you, as I have ne’er seen so persuasive a deception.”

  “For her third trick the insidious Abigail stabbed herself with a bodkin,” Barnaby informed the turnkey, “just as I now stab myself with my own digit.”

  He unbuttoned his day-shirt and, pulling back the placket, drove his thumb deep into the flesh beyond. A dollop of blood rolled down his naked chest.

  “Marry!” wailed Knox.

  “Be not alarmed,” Barnaby said. “This blood’s mere cherry pulp, burst from a leather pouch concealed within my hand.”

  “’Twould appear you’ve poked your thumb into your heart!” Knox gasped.

  “A simple matter of folding it into the palm of the same hand.” Barnaby yanked the digit free of his chest, then wiped away the mock blood with his handkerchief. “Were we to examine Abigail’s bodkin, we would discover that on encountering resistance the blade slides into the shaft. No doubt the flick of a lever converts it to a normal dagger.”

  “A question, Mr. Knox!” Cyril Turpin cried from the adjoining cell. “When this conjurer finishes entertaining you, might he bring his tricks to my abode? I would be a most appreciative audience.”

  “’Tis not my job to arrange amusements for chicken thieves!” shouted Knox.

  “I’m a horse thief, sir, and I shall thank ye to address me as such!”

  The turnkey gathered up the residue of their meal—platters, utensils, tankards—and let himself out of the cell, locking the door behind him. By way of a parting remark, he proclaimed that Barnaby’s magic would surely dazzle the judge, flabbergast the jury, and set Mrs. Webster free. Montesquieu and Barnaby were less confident, however, and for the next two hours they rehearsed their presentation.

  At ten o’clock, yawning and bleary-eyed, Barnaby shuffled off to his lodgings in Mount-Airy Lane. Montesquieu lingered, writing out his final remarks to the jurymen, a moving and cogent paean to Nature’s laws, nine pages long. He performed it aloud for Jennet. Her body felt wholly depleted, but her brain remained alert as, sprawled on her mattress, she savored the Baron’s eloquence and drank in his sagacity.

  It was not enough, of course. How could it be enough? What breed of eloquence could nullify Abigail Stearne’s numinous crucifixion nails, what species of sagacity could prevail against her preternatural feathers?

  “Compared to Abby’s phantom raven,” she told the Baron, “Reason’s a feeble fowl indeed, its wings clipped, tail shorn, flesh rotten with ergot.”

  “And yet come morning we shall make it fly,” Montesquieu declared, rolling his address into the semblance of a telescope. “We shall send it kiting clear to Heaven.”

  j

  ALTHOUGH HER MATTRESS WAS SOFT and her fellow prisoners quiet, sleep eluded Jennet that night, and the next morning she entered the courtroom in a benumbed and bedraggled state. Someone had restored the defense table to its former location, but the aftermath of Abigail’s r
ampage, the bits and pieces of the previous day’s philosophic demonstrations, still lay scattered about the hall like corpses on a battlefield. Montesquieu sat hunched over the nine pages of his speech, shielding them with the fervor of a biblical scholar protecting a newly unearthed Gospel. He seemed no less dazed than she, peruke askew, eyes bloodshot, waistcoat only half buttoned, but he managed an energetic smile, and in receiving her from the four marshals he briefly lifted her, chains and all, off the floor.

  Settling into her chair, she apprehended that an atmosphere of dread now permeated the courtroom, not unlike the palpable terror that had suffused Haverhill prior to the Nimacook attack. Each time she looked toward the gallery, most of the spectators glanced away, as if they feared bewitchment. Only the Franklin faction—the journalists and the Junto members—willingly returned her gaze. At the prosecution table Dunstan studied his notes whilst Mr. Parris read his Bible. Abigail was evidently still at the prickers’ inn, nursing her illusory lesions.

  “Voilà!” Montesquieu said, unfurling that morning’s Gazette before Jennet. “Ebenezer Trenchard at his finest.”

  Her eyes alighted on the last paragraph. “Watching Abigail Stearne pretend to expel iron Nails from her Stomach this Friday, I thought of Exodus 7:11, wherein Pharaoh commands his Masters of Legerdemain to make Serpents of their Scepters in mocking Imitation of the divine Miracle the Courtiers have just witnessed: the one true God transforming Aaron’s Rod into a slithering Reptile. But Jehovah has the last Laugh, for the holy Snake immediately devours those of the Egyptian Magicians.”

  Hathorne seized his mallet, now repaired with spirals of copper wire, and smacked it against the bench. In a striking deviation from their customary contrariness, the spectators grew instantly silent.