The Last Witchfinder

by James Morrow

  “Yesterday in this hall we all beheld a frightening wonder,” the judge began. “We saw Mrs. Webster’s demons attack Abigail Stearne with crucifixion nails, a spectral raven, and, deadliest of all, a steel bodkin. Mr. Stearne informs me that, thanks be to God, his wife will not die, though her wounds are sufficiently grievous to keep her abed.”

  “Excellency, the defense knows a second way to interpret this so-called attack on Mrs. Stearne,” said Montesquieu, rising.

  “Sit down, Monsieur le Baron,” Hathorne said. He faced the jury-box, slamming his mallet repeatedly against his palm like a cook tenderizing a mutton chop. “We cannot doubt that the Court of Oyer and Terminer is now under siege from Lucifer himself. I must perforce instruct you worthy landholders to begin your deliberations anon, that this trial might cease ere all Hell’s agents come against us.”

  “The defense calls Barnaby Cavendish to testify,” Montesquieu declared.

  Barnaby jumped to his feet.

  “Your memory fails you, Monsieur le Baron,” said Hathorne, “for you examined your last witness yesterday.” He slid his clay pipe from his robe and pointed the stem toward Mr. Hocking. “Good Foreman, you will take your eleven to the antechamber.”

  Hocking abandoned his chair, removed his felt hat, and gestured the jury to a standing position.

  “Your Honor, you must permit me to address the Court!” Barnaby cried, storming the judge’s bench. “I am the very Dr. Cavendish whom the Baron wishes to interview!”

  “Then you are the very Dr. Cavendish who will not be heard today,” Hathorne said.

  “Give me but a moment’s preparation, Excellency, and I too shall make hobnails fly from my mouth!”

  “Be seated, sir.”

  Barnaby flourished his blood-pouch. “I can show the Court how Abigail Stearne seemed to stab herself! ’Twas all legerdemain!”

  Hocking led his colleagues out of the jury-box in a solemn parade.

  “Dr. Cavendish, the Court can no longer abide your noxious interruptions!” Hathorne set the unlit pipe betwixt his lips and blew into the stem as if playing a fife. A staccato, birdish tweet emerged from the bowl. “Marshals, you will escort this demented spectator into the yard.”

  “Abigail Stearne hath deluded you!” Barnaby cried.

  The four marshals lurched out of their niches and, rudely taking hold of the curator, bore him down the central aisle by main strength.

  “Tell your minions to unhand that man!” Jennet screamed toward the bench. “He’s but a frail and harmless philosopher who will not survive a mauling!”

  “Mrs. Stearne vomited no nails!” Barnaby shouted as the marshals dragged him toward the foyer. “No nails! No nails!” And suddenly he was gone.

  “Excellency, you must at least suffer the Crown’s advocate and myself to make our closing arguments!” Montesquieu protested.

  The jury foreman halted his eleven before the antechamber door.

  “Mr. Stearne,” said Hathorne to Dunstan, “what think you of the procedural issue the Baron hath raised?”

  “In the interests of delivering this Court from the Dark One, the Crown relinquishes its privilege of a summarizing speech,” Dunstan replied.

  “Then it seems only fair for the defense to relinquish that privilege as well,” Hathorne said, “and I so rule.”

  Montesquieu dashed across the hall and, planting himself before Hocking, made a heroically hopeless attempt to distill his nine-page address into a handful of compacted clauses. “Good landholders, this day you can bring low the odious Witchcraft Act of James the First! In framing your verdict, you must remember that God allows no demon to confound His design!”

  Mr. Hocking shepherded his eleven out of the hall, the last juror slamming the door in Montesquieu’s face. The bailiff inserted his key and activated the lock.

  “Call those jurymen back!” Nicholas Scull demanded.

  “Call ’em back!” Ben cried.

  “This Court is adjourned!” Hathorne shouted, punctuating the pronouncement with his mallet. “When the jury hath reached its verdict, the tower bell will ring seven times!”

  Jennet’s mind became a fractured scrying-glass, a shattered gazing-crystal, each shard reflecting a facet of the commotion. John Tux stomping his feet and screaming, “Call ’em back!” Montesquieu shouting his abridged address at the antechamber door. Hathorne crying “Seven bells!” whilst hammering madly on the bench like a man shingling a roof in a hurricane. Ben brandishing the Sufficiency and challenging all within his hearing to read it. The spectators rising in clusters and stumbling toward the foyer, doubtless headed for the food stalls.

  “Nature does not submit herself to Satan!” Montesquieu cried.

  “The day is at hand when Occam’s razor will cut the noose from the neck of every convicted witch!” Ben insisted.

  “Mr. Hathorne, thou art no friend to justice!” Herbert Bledsoe declared.

  Montesquieu projected a final sentence toward the antechamber—“Insult not the world with fables of wizardry!”—then returned to the defense table and explained to Jennet that any further unsolicited oratory would do their case more harm than good.

  “You made a noble effort, Charles,” she said.

  “Against an ignoble judge,” he muttered.

  Adjusting his opulent wig, Hathorne gained his feet and lit his pipe. He puffed twice, stepped into the alcove behind the bench, and vanished through the door, a twist of smoke coiling behind him like a boar-pig’s tail.

  j

  THE GREAT WAITING stretched from ten o’clock till eleven, and then from eleven till noon, Montesquieu, Ben, and Jennet huddled together at the defense table like wayfarers gathered before a tavern hearth. Jennet’s lawyer attempted to alleviate his anxiety by contriving chapter titles for his projected magnum opus, which he planned to call either L’Essence du Gouvernement Civil or L’Esprit des Lois. Ben passed the time by drafting potential headlines for the next morning’s Gazette. Evidently his choices failed to please him, for he’d crossed them all out, including JUSTICE CRUSHED AT WEBSTER TRIAL and JUDGE HATHORNE’S SHAME and PILATE IN PENNSYLVANIA.

  Jennet decided that she could best endure the immediate future by contemplating the ruins of her philosophic apparatus. Before the jury-box sat the Galilean ramp, now split down the middle. Nearby lay the lodestone, broken in two. Wrapped in shadows, the Newtonian prisms rested forlornly beneath the prosecution table; the little glass wedges seemed peculiarly alive—a species of marine creature, she imagined, spawned in a luminous sea but now tossed upon a nocturnal beach, where they lay suffocating for lack of light. Fissured but still whole, the sulphur-ball cast its shadow on the floor. The black oval evoked for Jennet one of Aunt Isobel’s favorite stories from the history of natural philosophy.

  “Some eighty generations ago the great Eratosthenes, director of the Library of Alexandria, joined two facts that had ne’er been yoked before. What were they, dear child?”

  “At noon each year on June the twenty-first,” Jennet told her tutor, “a stick set upright in the ground casts no shadow at Syene, whereas in Alexandria on the same date, at the same time, such a post throws a substantial shadow.”

  “Eratosthenes made an inference from this seeming impossibility…”

  “He concluded that the Earth could not be flat. He decided ’twas in fact a sphere.”

  “And then?”

  “And then he measured the length of Alexandria’s noontime shadow. One of Euclid’s finest theorems, the equality of alternate interior angles, told Eratosthenes that the distance from Alexandria to Syene must be seven-point-two degrees of the Earth’s circumference: the fiftieth part of a circle. Because Eratosthenes knew that four hundred eighty miles lay betwixt Syene and Alexandria, the simplest arithmetic revealed that a bird encircling our planet would make a trip of some twenty-four thousand miles.”

  “Darling Jenny, you have learned your lesson well!”

  Shortly after striking one o’clock, the tower bell tol
led again—seven times. Judge Hathorne reassumed the bench. Foreman Hocking led his fellow landholders to the jury-box. The spectators pushed and shoved their way back into the courtroom, packing it from wall to wall.

  “Oyez! Oyez!” the bailiff cried, bringing his pike against the floor with the pounding regularity of a Newcomen steam pump.

  A hush settled over the hall.

  “Mr. Hocking, hath the jury reached a verdict?”

  “Aye, Excellency.”

  “How goes’t with the defendant? Be she guilty or nay?”

  Jennet recalled Aunt Isobel’s old experimentum magnus, the teacher and her pupils searching for microscopic diabolism in the tissues of supposed familiars. To minimize its suffering, Isobel had ordered each animal strangled prior to dissection. But in a witch-court no such compassion obtained. Mr. Hocking slid—“By way of preventing further maleficia”—his knife into Jennet’s side—“such as were visited upon Abigail Stearne”—firmed his grip on the shaft—“we are decided that the defendant”—and twisted the blade—“is guilty”—ninety degrees.

  A strange wind blew through the courtroom, a howling amalgam of outrage and incredulity, and now the separate No’s burst forth, a “No!” from Ben, a “No!” from Montesquieu, a “No!” from Mr. Scull, a “No!” from Mr. Bledsoe, a “No!” from John Tux. A score of Manayunk spectators likewise expressed their dismay, unleashing sounds such as Jennet had not heard since the whooping tawnies had descended on Haverhill.

  The marshals hauled her quivering body before the bench. She struggled to stand up straight, commanding each relevant part of herself to make a proper contribution to the effort, neck and shoulders, spine and hips, knees and ankles, and by the time Hathorne spoke again she had achieved a dignified posture.

  “Prisoner at the bar, have you anything to say ere sentence is passed?” the bailiff asked.

  “May God strike down the Witchcraft Act of James the First,” she cried, “and all its abominable brethren!”

  “Let the record show that in her final statement the prisoner added sedition to her list of offenses,” Hathorne said. He paused briefly whilst the bailiff outfitted him with the black silk cap. “Rebecca Webster, the jury hath found that you did sign a pact with the Devil, a crime for which no punishment may be considered too severe. Come Wednesday morning a company of His Majesty’s soldiers will bear you to Walnut Street Prison, where at the noon hour you will be brought into public view, stood upon the horse-cart, and hanged by your neck until you are dead.”

  “Eppur si muove,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Still, it moves.”

  The judge glowered and took up his mallet one last time. “The Court of Oyer and Terminer is hereby dissolved.”

  C H A P T E R

  The

  Twelfth

  abababababababab

  In Which Truth Acquires the Clothes of Science, Justice Assumes the Shape of Lightning, and the Narrator Finally Runs Short of Words

  j

  As she lay atop her pallet, inhaling the stench of the straw and shivering whilst the dungeon’s chill invaded her flesh, it came to Jennet that above all else she wanted to see the stars once more. She’d been without them for two months, her trial having occurred entirely by day and her incarceration beneath Manayunk Gaol-House being in essence an entombment. A glimpse of Orion would satisfy her, or Cassiopeia, Lyra, Gemini—or even a bright planet: scintillating Venus, crimson Mars, banded Jupiter, locked in their Keplerian ellipses.

  It had not been Herbert Bledsoe’s idea to make her final three days on Earth a Draconian ordeal of cold, hunger, encumbrance, and solitude. He had enjoyed no choice in the matter—or so he claimed. Shortly after the jury delivered its verdict, Governor Gordon had informed Mr. Bledsoe that any coddling of the Satanist would probably cost him his appointment. Thus it was that the magistrate appropriated Jennet’s feather mattress along with her woolen blanket. He removed her writing-desk, impounded her books, reduced her suppers to stale bread and gray beer, and forced her once again to wear the burlap smock. To Jennet each such privation seemed as harsh as the sting of a scourge, but one cruelty in particular she found intolerable: Bledsoe’s decision to allow her just one visitor per day, one hour per visit.

  On Sunday afternoon she expended her allotted interval with Montesquieu. Standing outside her cell, the mournful aristocrat leaned against the dormant brazier and poured out his heart whilst her fellow prisoners pretended not to eavesdrop. He pledged that upon his return to La Brède he would commend her treatise to every Continental court and legislature, so profound was his respect for her, so deep his adoration.

  “Vraiment, Madame Crompton, the British Conjuring Statute has found a new adversary,” Montesquieu said, “a weasel-faced male satirist this time rather than a beautiful female philosophe, but a person no less dedicated to the fight.”

  For all the Baron’s passion, his oath sounded hollow to her, artificial as Hezekiah Creech’s jaw. She hoped that her analogous promise of forty-two years earlier had not chimed so untruly in Aunt Isobel’s ear.

  “The Sufficiency of the World will outlive you,” he continued. “It will outlive us all. Your masterwork is destined to join Dante and Chrétien amongst the world’s imperishable things.”

  “If only my soul could make the selfsame boast,” she said.

  He ran a gloved finger along the brazier’s clay chimney. “Do you not believe in the promise of eternal bliss?”

  “I would not wager Pascal’s last thruppence on that possibility, and neither—let us speak candidly, Charles—and neither would you. Like Shakespeare, we hold death an undiscovered country, if ’tis even a country at all.”

  It occurred to her that she’d managed to invent a novel sort of martyrdom. Jesus Christ, St. Stephen, Giordano Bruno, and Jeanne d’Arc had all sacrificed themselves because in their various white-hot opinions the world was not sufficient. By Christ’s calculation, the given required a supplementary phenomenon called the Kingdom. For Stephen, it needed an organized Christian Church. For Giordano, the world must have endless mystic duplicates of itself. For Jeanne d’Arc, the world became complete only upon intersecting the plane of Heaven, the better to bring the voices of departed saints within earshot. But until the Passion of Rebecca Webster, no one had ever martyred herself to the idea that God had gotten it right the first time. Until the Webster hanging, nobody had used her own execution to argue against populating the universe with angels and spirits and other immaterial entities, so miraculous was the accessible, so wondrous the mundane.

  “How I wish you could behold the commotion outside the gaol-house,” Montesquieu said. “All sixteen prosecution witnesses are collected on the lawn, screaming for vengeance against Rebecca Webster as an opium-eater might cry for his next phial.”

  “Why would I want to see such a spectacle?” she asked.

  “Because your sympathizers are gathered on those same grounds, and their number is twice as great, their voices thrice as loud. Believe me, Madame, when the executioner shows himself on the scaffold this week, the hisses and howls will deafen him.”

  “And will your own hisses and howls be amongst ’em?”

  He bobbed his head, saying, “Forty pounds sterling has persuaded the captain of the Fleur de Lys to keep his ship in port another week.”

  “Then I shall ask a boon of thee. In my life I’ve witnessed two public executions. My aunt died screaming at the stake. Giles Corey kept crying, ‘More weight!’ I do not fear the undiscovered country, but I dread the painful portal by which I shall enter it. When the noose closes round my neck, you and Ben must come forward and ally yourselves with universal gravitation, pulling me earthward that my end might come more quickly.”

  “Mon Dieu! I cannot imagine committing such violence against you.”

  “You must.”

  “Ce n’est point possible.”

  “Prithee, Charles. Tell me you’ll do’t.”

  The dungeon reverberated with
Matthew Knox’s boots clomping down the spiral staircase.

  “Monsieur,” the turnkey said, “I fear your hour hath elapsed.”

  Montesquieu abandoned the brazier and, reaching through the bars, squeezed Jennet’s hands betwixt his own. “I promise to intervene as you desire. But know this. Should the rope break, I shall forthwith carry you to safety.”

  “Spoken like a true cavalier!” Mrs. Sharkey called from her cell.

  “Baron, thou hast the soul of a knight!” Mr. Turpin shouted.

  “Give no thought to heroism, Charles,” Jennet said, “for’t can only end in a storm of musket-balls.”

  “Monsieur,” said Mr. Knox again.

  “Au revoir, my brilliant advocate,” Jennet said.

  “Au revoir, my mad and glorious friend,” Montesquieu said.

  He turned his back and, one measured step at a time, mounted the stairs, wheezing and moaning as would an accused wizard chafing against the mask-o’-truth.

  Jennet’s hour with Ben occurred on Monday morning. He arrived bearing sorrowful but entirely expected news. The previous afternoon Major Patrick Gordon had summoned him to his office in Broad Street and explained that his administration was obligated to reject The Pennsylvania Gazette’s latest attempt to influence Rebecca Webster’s fate—a formal petition, signed by over two hundred citizens of the colony, requesting that she be pardoned.

  “He said to me, ‘Mr. Franklin, you must realize that His Majesty’s statutes apply as forcefully in the Provinces as in Piccadilly.’”

  “How are we to explain such callousness from a man whose star your journal did so much to brighten?” Jennet asked.

  “I cannot prove my suspicion,” Ben said, “but I believe your brother hath fallen upon a means of blackmailing Mr. Gordon. And hence we are forced to pursue some other path to your reprieve.”

  “There is no other path.”

  “Then we shall hack one out.”

  “Do not entertain false optimism, dear Ben.”

  “Do not embrace specious despair, sweet Jenny.”

  They passed the remainder of the visit discussing their son, until at last they reached a wrenching decision: there must be no final reunion betwixt Jennet and William. Seeing his mother in a dungeon cell, shackled like a West African slave, jaw scarred, scalp shorn, whilst outside the gaol-house a mob of her supposed victims wailed for her blood, William would immediately understand that she was destined for the gallows, and this knowledge might plunge him into an incurable melancholy.