The Last Witchfinder

by James Morrow

  A full moon rose over Philadelphia, the great Quanquogt wampumpeag bead. In nine hours the Delaware would be at flood, and the high-masted ships would leave for Port Royal, Havana, Bridgetown, Bristol, Gravesend, Lisbon, and a dozen other cities. She spun around, surrendering to the current. Her gaze roamed from Venus to the other planets to the fixed stars beyond and…was it possible? Had a nomad entered the summer sky? She couldn’t be certain, of course, not until she’d caught the object in Ben’s telescope, but it seemed that a soft glimmering comet lay just below Orion, due east of the Great Dog. Perhaps Giordano Bruno was right. Perhaps the cosmos throbbed with an infinity of worlds, which meant there were surely other thinking creatures in the heavens, pursuing their lives, charting their dreams, devising their sciences. And if you believed in the laws of probability, as

  Jennet did, then one of these creatures had recently dived into

  a soothing river, and she was at that moment

  happily contemplating distant

  constellations whilst

  swimming

  j

  Naked

  came I from

  my author’s brain, I,

  Principia, a quivering precipitate of

  heretofore unthought ideas, a plasma compounded

  of geometry and inspiration, celestial mechanics and lucky guesses.

  The midwives of my advent, those skilled printers and diligent binders, incarnated me with their ink, fixed me with their paper, secured me with their adhesives, and clothed me in their leather. And somewhere along the line I acquired passions commensurate with your own.

  You will not be surprised to hear that my Jennet spent her remaining years endeavoring to establish a connection between magnetism and electricity. Early in these investigations she concluded, quite correctly, that to magnetize a horseshoe she must subject it to a steady electric stream, not simply jolt it with lightning sparks. Her attempts to wring a continuous flow from static Von Guericke discharges proved bootless, however, and after six months she had nothing to show for her labors except the largest collection of sulphur balls in the New World.

  Eventually it came to her that she was going about the problem backwards. Rather than trying to generate first electricity and then magnetism from a rotating Van Guericke sphere, she must instead start with a lodestone, spinning it via a Newcomen steam engine. A coil of copper wire placed near such an apparatus would soon, logically enough, become home to an electric current. Alas, my goddess never realized that she should have put the coiled wire inside the spinning lodestone, thereby exploiting its magnetic field—or else she could leave the surrounding stone alone and spin the wire instead. And so it was that the principle of electromagnetic induction had to wait another seventy years for its definitive demonstration, which occurred courtesy of Joseph Henry in 1830 and Michael Faraday in 1831.

  Throughout this period of futile experimentation, Jennet wrote long letters to Rachel, and her child reciprocated, but the exchange failed to have the effect the women desired. Rachel never managed to comprehend her mother’s obsession with lodestones and copper wires. Jennet was equally confounded by her daughter’s liaisons with a series of French writers both famous and obscure. At one point Rachel even attempted to fill the void that was visited upon Jean François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire by the premature death of his dear friend, the talented young actress Adrienne Lecouvreur, but she soon tired of vying with a ghost, and Rachel and Voltaire went their separate ways.

  Although electromagnetic induction and maternal satisfaction both eluded Jennet, her final years were far from empty. One bright and brittle October morning Pussough appeared at the farm, accompanied by a large wolfish dog whose sienna coat suggested a patchwork quilt made of periwigs. A woman living alone might do without a birch canoe, her Lynx Man explained, or a stew pot or even a sleeping platform, but a guard dog—never. She gladly accepted the gift. The dog’s name was Ahanu. He Who Laughs.

  Before old age carried him off, the ebullient Ahanu watched over Jennet for seven years. Pussough stayed for roughly the same interval, learning about steam-powered magnets to a degree that far exceeded his curiosity, until a winter chill turned to pneumonia and took him to the mountain of Kautantouwit.

  The longer she lived, the more the sufficiency hypothesis became for Jennet not simply an abstract principle but a personal creed, and in time her neighbors realized that a wise-woman dwelt amongst them. They appeared on her doorstep at odd hours, and unless they’d awakened her from a particularly diverting dream, she always received them courteously. While her clients had never heard of either Hassane or Isobel Mowbray, in truth she’d become at once a rationalist edition of the Kokokehom medicine-woman and a philanthropic version of Mirringate’s mistress. My goddess set broken bones, lanced boils, delivered babies, dispensed herbs for preventing pregnancy, prescribed simples against quinsy and the gout, bent young minds toward contrariness and doubt, and convened philosophy salons in her front parlor. Jennet Stearne, the Witch of Manayunk.

  I must decline to provide the details of her death. How could I bear to set them down? Let me merely state that she lived to the impressive age of eighty-three, whereupon her heart’s Cartesian mechanism ceased to function properly. Lying abed in her farmhouse, she slipped into the undiscovered country on July 4, 1761, watched over by Ben, William, John Tux, Nicholas Scull, Bethany Markley, and Zebulon Plum, exactly fifteen years before Ben would sign the Declaration of Independence. Among her Philadelphia friends, only Barnaby Cavendish did not help Jennet out of the world, for two decades earlier he’d collapsed and died while lecturing on his newest acquisition, the Argus of Providence.

  She had never joined a church, and so Ben buried her behind Manayunk Courthouse, scene of her astonishing presentation of the sufficiency hypothesis, not far from the tomb of the ergot-ridden rooster. Six months later, Ben, William, and the Junto conducted a memorial service in Nicholas Scull’s drawing room, temporary home of the Free Library of Philadelphia. Rachel sailed all the way from France. Montesquieu did not attend, having died in 1755, his deathbed utterance baffling everyone who heard it: “La vermin se reproduit”—the wrigglers generate themselves. At the climax of Jennet’s funeral Ben recited the whole of Milton’s Lycidas. “‘Yet once more, O ye Laurels,’” he read, “‘and once more, ye Myrtles brown, with Ivy never-sere, I come to pluck your Berries harsh and crude, and with forc’d Fingers rude shatter your Leaves before the mellowing Year…’”

  I think about her every day. I think about her intelligence, her energy, her impatience with consecrated nonsense. Naturally I retain fond memories of her struggles to comprehend me, and also of our lovemaking, which I accomplished by inhabiting Pussough during her exile among the Kokokehom. My soul bleeds for Jennet Stearne. I grieve for her now, and I shall grieve for her when my Four Hundredth Anniversary edition rolls off the presses in 2087.

  Ben ultimately attained Jennet’s age, then added one more year, succumbing in 1790 to yet another attack of pleurisy. He lived to see the birth and ratification of the American Constitution, surely one of our planet’s worthier documents. (Vibrating with mutual if qualified respect, We the People and I play contract bridge in cyberspace every Saturday night, partnered respectively with Poor Richard’s Almanack and L’Esprit des Lois.) Throughout his entire adulthood, Ben never stopped being rational. One month before his death, he wrote to the Reverend Ezra Stiles, “As to Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and His Religion, as He left them to us, the best the World ever saw…but I apprehend it has receiv’d various corrupting Changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some Doubts as to His Divinity.”

  Concerning William Franklin, the less said about that creepy little Tory bastard the better. Most historians would concur that he inherited neither his mother’s breadth of vision nor his father’s generosity of spirit but received instead his maternal grandfather’s mediocrity. On September 4, 1762, William m
arried Elizabeth Downes in London, and five days later he accepted a commission as Royal Governor of New Jersey. Throughout the pre-Revolutionary period, William strove mightily to thwart the dissidents’ cause, alternately breaking his father’s heart and rousing his wrath. At the risk of sounding vain, I would say that, while disagreeing with my illustrious progenitor on many points, ethical and theological, I have been a better son to Isaac Newton than William Franklin ever was to Ben.

  I cannot take leave of you without mentioning another actor in Jennet’s life, her great legacy, the Witchcraft Statute of George II. To be sure, that particular law cannot be called the beginning of the end for European witchfinding. The Zeitgeist was radiant with skepticism long before the British Parliament weighed in against the demon hypothesis. It was more like the end of the end. And yet I count its passage a triumph. As late as 1768, the English evangelist John Wesley, founder of the Methodist Church, wrote in his journal, “The giving up of witchcraft is in effect giving up the Bible,” and two years later he publicly complained, “The infidels have hooted witchcraft out of the world.” Were it not for the Act of George II and the argumentum grande that inspired it, Wesley might very well have found an audience for his lament.

  After 1740 there is almost nothing for a witch reporter to report. Yes, in May of 1749 the Inquisition determines that Sister Maria Renata Sänger von Mossau, a Würzburg nun, has signed the Devil’s book and bewitched the other members of her convent, but it’s a throwback case, and everybody knows it. Sister Maria is nevertheless beheaded the following month and her corpse tossed onto a bonfire of tar barrels. Four years later a vigilante mob in Hertfordshire swims a suspected witch named Ruth Osborne, performing the test so crudely that she chokes to death. But times have changed, and at the next assizes the ringleader, Thomas Colley, is convicted of willful murder and condemned to the gallows. And then at long last, on April 11, 1775, the final legal execution for witchcraft occurs in the Western world, when a deranged serving woman named Anna Maria Schwägel is decapitated in Kempten, Bavaria, having confessed to copulation with Satan. And suddenly it’s over. Finis. The infidels have hooted witchcraft out of the world. In 1821 even the pious country of Ireland succumbs to the Enlightenment, and its lawmakers repeal the Conjuring Statute of 1587.

  The optimists among you will argue that the witch universe is gone forever. You’re probably right. Still, let me take this opportunity to detail the diaspora of The Sufficiency of the World, quite possibly the rarest published treatise on our planet. Forget about the Internet. The rare-book websites won’t know what you’re talking about. At present two copies reside in the British Museum, one in the Bibliothèque Nationale, one in the New York Public Library, and two in the Library of Congress, while a seventh graces the Franklin collection of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. True, it’s unlikely that Western Civilization will ever again have need of Jennet’s remarkable work, but I thought you ought to know where to find one, just in case.

  Before we part company, I invite you to journey with me to the convivial community of Maplewood, New Jersey, for I have just now discovered an opportunity to connect—obliquely but meaningfully—with my goddess. Join me as I climb inside the mind of Inez Maldonado, an idealistic educator, sauntering toward fifty, who teaches eighth-grade arithmetic from an historical perspective. The postulates of geometry were not handed down from Olympus, Inez tells her students. They were devised by human beings. When Euclid’s nose itched, he scratched it. When Pythagoras heard cicadas thrum their abdomens, he reveled in the music.

  On Tuesday afternoons Inez meets with the eleven members of the Rocket Club in Room 332 of Maplewood Middle School. She would prefer coaching the chess team, but Fred Maltby, an aging geography teacher, has captained that activity since time immemorial. Nevertheless, in recent years Inez has developed a fondness for the Rocket Club, which so obviously nourishes the socially inept youngsters it tends to attract.

  It’s Saturday morning—launch day. The spacious grounds of the soccer field swarm with the rocketeers, many of their parents, and several students too cool to have signed up but too curious to have stayed home. The April sun is warm and mellow. Bluejays, robins, and bumblebees are on the wing.

  At the moment the main object of Inez’s concern is twelve-year-old Juliet Sorkin, who has designed and built a sleek, magnificent rocket named the Golden Comet. A prodigy of sorts, Juliet has a bad habit of lecturing to her classmates using big words, and in consequence they pick on her. Our teacher’s pet is sweet-tempered, distractible, and like many bright people mildly dyslexic, her cherubic face sprinkled with freckles and three ripe pimples. Although Juliet has recently won second prize in the Maplewood Science Fair—for an exhibit about human cloning centered around her cousin’s discarded collection of Barbie dolls—she remains an outsider.

  From the viewpoint of my Principia self, one fact about Juliet Sorkin eclipses all others. She is a direct descendant of Jennet Stearne, Hammer of Witchfinders. Were Juliet to become curious about her ancestry, she might succeed in tracing her line back ten generations to Stéphane Crompton, born November 11, 1746, the bastard son of Rachel Crompton and René Duvic, a professional cad specializing in Voltaire’s former lovers. But Juliet doesn’t strike me as harboring a genealogical bent. She’s a forward-looking sort of misfit.

  The Golden Comet is ready for its maiden flight: parachute secure, igniter snugged against the propellant, alligator clips in place. At a signal from my Inez self, the students draw back from the launch pad—fifteen feet, that’s our rule. Juliet takes the controller and inserts the safety key, arming the system. The warning bulb lights up.

  “What engine?” asks Danny Ginsburg, who is forever sneaking his chameleon into school.

  “A D12-9,” Juliet replies proudly. Most of the kids still use pathetic B’s and C’s.

  “That means twelve Newtons of thrust, huh?” says Danny’s best friend, Raoul Pindar, who has a crush on Juliet but doesn’t quite know it.

  “Eleven point eight, actually,” says Juliet with a touch of pedantry, then counts down from ten to zero.

  She presses the controller button. At the speed of electricity the current rips along the wires, charges the alligator clips, and heats the igniter. Now comes that delicious microinstant between the igniter combusting—you can tell by the smoke, the sizzle, the little flame—and…liftoff! A circumscribed explosion spews sparks and cinders onto the steel disk, and Juliet’s ship rides up the launch rod, leaves the pad, and zooms skyward with a thick emphatic hiss. The spectators clap and cheer. Twenty Newton-seconds elapse as the Estes engine and my father’s Third Law carry the vessel five hundred—eight hundred—twelve hundred—fifteen hundred feet into the heavens! In the entire history of the Maplewood Middle School Rocket Club no ship has ever risen fifteen hundred feet.

  Propellant spent, the Golden Comet glides for nine seconds, a tiny apostrophe in the sky, and then the ejection charge detonates. The nose cone pops off, the shock cord pays out, and the parachute opens like a blossoming orchid.

  But now disaster befalls the flight. The ship is soaring so high that the wind gets under the chute and bears the whole assemblage far beyond the soccer field. With sinking heart and foundering spirits, we all watch as the Golden Comet floats toward the pine groves of Memorial Park and passes from view. I glance at Jennet Stearne’s descendant. She is wincing. Her lower lip trembles. When gravity reasserts itself and the ship plummets, the chute lines will catch in the treetops, and Juliet will lose her masterpiece.

  “I’m going to get it back!” she informs her teacher.

  “Good luck,” my Inez self replies.

  But it is my Principia self who empathizes most fully with poor Juliet. For a protracted moment we stare into each other’s eyes, and, romantic that I am, I allow myself to imagine that my goddess has been restored to me.

  Oh, yes, it’s she all right. We are back in Colonial Salem. Crouching by the banks of the Merrimack, she removes the iron hoo
k from the trout’s mouth, then glances across the river. A beautiful young Indian brave gathers marsh marigolds on the far shore, oblivious to my presence in his mind and body.

  This time Jennet and I enjoy a brief conversation. In halting English, I tell her that she will come of age not in Salem but in a Nimacook village. This heritage, I insist, will figure crucially in her demon disproof.

  “How can you possibly foresee such a thing?” Jennet asks.

  “I know not.” I set the marigolds on the shore, a gift for my goddess, then slip into the New England woods. “It’s just one of those secrets of the universe.”

  As my reverie evaporates, Juliet, Raoul, and Danny go sprinting across the field and disappear into the pine groves. Inez Maldonado admires their ambition, their optimism. She wishes she could be like them. This is not a good time in her life. Her cholesterol count is too high. Her husband has mentioned a divorce.

  We are helping Hejong Kim and Peter Gorka prepare their ships for launch when the recovery team bursts out of Memorial Park, and we’ve never seen a more entrancing tableau. All three youngsters are jumping up and down, and there—there in the lead—there strides Juliet Sorkin, cradling the Golden Comet, nose cone and parachute included. Her smile is as big as a boomerang. Reaching the launch site, she tells her teacher that Raoul spotted the rocket at the base of a pine tree. This makes little sense to either Inez or me. Why didn’t the branches snag the chute lines? For a full minute we ponder the question, and then we resolve to worry about it no longer. We give Juliet a hug. It’s simply a mystery, we tell ourselves. It’s just one of those secrets of the universe.