“You're such a bad liar, Quill,” she said. “The judge never needs to have a witness at the arraignment. I'll be there because I'm to be arraigned as well.”
Quill was face-to-face with her again at once. “Satan whispered that lie to you, didn't he.”
“Why would you say that?”
“I saw it,” he said. “I saw him whisper to you.”
“You're insane.”
“I saw you looking at me, and in a sudden moment you were told something that you hadn't known before. Satan whispered.”
Had he seen it? Was it his knack to see other knacks working?
No. It was his knack to find the useful lie hidden inside every useless truth. He had simply seen the transformation in her facial expression when she understood the truth about his intentions.
“Satan has never told me anything,” she said.
“But you already told me about your knack,” he answered with a smile. “Don't recant– it will go hard with you.”
“Maybe I have a talent for seeing other people's intentions,” she said defiantly. “That doesn't mean it comes from Satan!”
“Yes,” he said. “Use that line in court. Confess your sin and then deny that it's a sin. See what happens to you under the law.” He reached out and touched her hand, gently, caressingly. “God loves you, child. Don't reject him. Turn away from Satan. Admit all the evil you have done so you can prove you have left it behind you. Live to let your womb bear children, as God intended. It's Satan, not God, who wants you twitching at the end of a rope.”
“Yes,” she said. “That much is true. Satan your master wants me dead.”
He winked at her, got up, and went to the door. “That's good. Keep that up. That'll get you hanged.” And he was gone, the door locked behind him.
She shook with cold as if it weren't summer with the heat already oppressive this early in the morning. Everything was clear to her now. Quill came here ready to do exactly what he had done– take a simple accusation of the use of a knack, and turn it into a story about Satan and gross perversions. He knew he had to do this because honest people never told stories about Satan. He knew that she would not name others she saw at witches' sabbaths because there were never any such conclaves, and all such denunciations had to be extracted through whatever torture the law would allow. Witchers did what Quill did because if they did not do it, no one would ever be convicted of trafficking with Satan.
This was how her parents died. Not because they really did have knacks that came from Satan, but because they would not play along with the witchers and join them in persecuting others. They would not confess to falsehood. They died because the City of God tried so hard to be pure that it created its own impurity. The evil the witchers did was worse than any evil they might prevent. And yet the people of New England were so afraid that they might not live up to the ideals of Puritanism that they dared not speak against a law that purported to protect them from Satan.
I believed them. They killed my parents, raised me as an orphan, tainted with the rumor of evil, and instead of denouncing them for what they had done to me, I believed them and tried to do the same thing to someone else. To Alvin Smith, who did me no harm.
Purity threw herself to her knees and prayed. 0 Father in heaven, what have I done, what have I done.
* * *
Alvin finished the piss-poor breakfast they served to prisoners in the jail, then lay back on his cot to survey the people that he cared about. Far away in Camelot, his wife and their unborn daughter thrived. In Vigor Church, his mother and father, his brothers and sisters, all were doing well, none sick, none injured. Nearby, Verily was being let out of his cell. Alvin tracked him for a while, to be sure that he was being released. Yes, at the door of the courthouse they turned him loose to go find his own breakfast.
Out on the riverbank, Arthur Stuart and Mike Fink were fishing while Audubon was painting a kingfisher in the early-morning light. All was well.
It was only by chance that Alvin noticed the other heartfires converging on the river. He might not even have noticed them, in his reverie about eating fish just caught from the river, roasted over a smoky fire, except that something was wrong, some indefinable change in the world his doodlebug passed through. A sort of shimmering in the air, a feeling of something that loomed just out of sight, trembling on the verge of visibility.
Alvin knew what he was seeing. The Unmaker was abroad in the world.
Why was the Unmaker coming out in the open with the tithingmen? There had been no sign of the Unmaker lingering around Quill, who was clearly a lover of destruction.
Of course the very question contained its own answer. The Unmaker didn't have to emerge where people served its cause willingly, knowingly. Eagerly. Quill wasn't like Reverend Thrower. He didn't have to be lied to. He loved being the serpent in the garden. He would have been disappointed if he couldn't get the part. But the tithingmen were decent human beings and the Unmaker had to herd them.
Which was, quite literally, what it was doing. Quill had asked them to go searching for a witches' sabbath. They set out with no particular destination, except a vague idea that since Purity had spoken of encountering Alvin's party on the riverbank, that might be a good area to explore. Now, whenever they turned away from Arthur and Mike and Jean-Jacques, they stepped into the Unmaker's influence and they became uneasy, vaguely frightened. It made them turn around and walk quite briskly the other way. Closer to Alvin's friends.
Well, thought Alvin, this looks like a much better game if played by two.
His first thought was to bring up a fog from the river, to make it impossible for them to find their way. But he rejected this at once. The Unmaker could herd them whether they could see their way or not. The fog would only make it look more suspicious-sounding, more like witchery, when they recounted their story later. Besides, fog was made of water, and water was the element the Unmaker used the most. Alvin wasn't altogether certain that his control was so strong, especially at a distance, that he could count on keeping the Unmaker from subverting the fog. Someone might slip and die, and it would be blamed on witchery.
What did the tithingmen care about? They were good men who served their community, to keep it safe from harm and to keep the peace among neighbors and within family. When a couple quarreled, it was a tithingman who went to them to help them iron it out, or to separate them for a time if that was needed. When someone was breaking the sumptuary laws, or using coarse language, or otherwise offending against the standards that helped them all stay pure, it was a tithingman who tried, peacefully, to persuade them to mend their ways without the need of dire remedies. It was the tithingmen who kept the work of the courts to a minimum.
And a man didn't last long as a tithingman in a New England town if he fancied himself to be possessed of some sort of personal authority. He had none. Rather he was the voice and hands of the community as a whole, and a soft voice and gentle hands were preferred by all. Anyone who seemed to like to boss others about would simply be overlooked when the next round of tithingmen were chosen. Sometimes they realized that they hadn't been called on for many years, and wondered why; some even humbly asked, and tried to mend their ways. If they never asked, they were never told. What mattered was that the work be done, and done kindly.
So these were not cudgel-wielding thugs who were being herded toward the riverbank. Not like the Finders who came after Arthur Stuart back in Hatrack River, and were perfectly happy to kill anyone who stood violently against them. Not even like Reverend Thrower, who was somewhat deceived by the Unmaker but nevertheless had a zeal to pursue “evil” and root it out.
How could Alvin turn good men away from an evil path? How could he get them to ignore the Unmaker and take away its power to herd them?
Alvin sent his doodlebug into the village of Cambridge. Into the houses of families, listening for voices, voices of children. He needed the sound of a child in distress, but quickly realized that in a good Puritan town, children
were kindly treated and well watched-out-for. He would have to do a little mischief to get the sound.
A kitchen. A three-year-old girl, watching her mother slice onions. The mother leaned forward on her chair. It was a simple matter for Alvin to weaken the leg and break the chair under her. With a shriek she fell. Alvin took care to make sure no harm befell her. What he wanted was from the child, not from her. And there it was. The girl cried out : “Mama!”
Alvin captured the sound, the pattern of it in the air. He carried it, strengthened it, the quivering waves; he layered them, echoed them, brought some slowly, some quickly in a complicated interweave of sound. It was very hard work, and took all his concentration, but finally he brought the first copy of the girl's cry to the tithingmen.
“Mama!”
They turned at once, hearing it as if in the near distance, and behind them, away from the river.
Again, fainter: “Mama!”
At once the tithingmen turned, knowing their duty. Searching for witches was their duty, but the distress of a child calling for her mother clearly was more important.
They plunged right into the Unmaker, and of course it chilled their hearts with fear, but at that moment Alvin brought them the girl's cry for yet a third and last time, so when fear struck them, instead of making them recoil it made them run even faster toward the sound. The fear turned from a sense of personal danger into an urgent need to get to the child because something very bad was happening to her– their fear became, not a barrier, but a spur to greater effort.
For a while the Unmaker tried to stay with them, trying out other emotions– anger, horror– but all its efforts worked against its own purpose. It couldn't understand what Alvin was relying on: the power of decent men to act against their own interest in order to help those who trusted them. The Unmaker understood how to make men kill in war. What it could not comprehend was why they were willing to die.
So the tithingmen hunted fruitlessly in the woods and meadows, trying to find the girl whose voice they had heard, until finally they gave up and headed into town to try to find out which child was missing and organize a search. But all the children were in their places, and, despite some misgivings– they had all heard the voice, after all– they went about their ordinary business, figuring that if there needed to be a witch hunt, tomorrow would do as well as today.
On the riverbank, Arthur and Mike and Jean-Jacques had no idea that the Unmaker had been stalking them.
In his cell, Alvin wanted only to lie back and sleep. That was when the sheriff came for him, to bring him into the court for his arraignment.
* * *
Verily had only a few minutes to confer with Alvin before the arraignment began, and always with the sheriff present, so there couldn't be much candor– but such was the rule with witch trials, so no potions or powders could be passed between them, or secret curses spoken. “No matter how it seems, Alvin, you must trust me.”
“Why? How is it going to seem?”
“The judge is John Adams. I've been reading his writings and his court cases, both as lawyer and as judge, since I first began the study of law. The man is decent to the core. I had no knowledge of his ever doing a witch trial, though, and so I had no idea of his position on them. But when I came out of jail this morning, I was met by a fellow who lives here–”
“No need for names,” said Alvin.
Verily smiled. “A fellow, I say, who's made some study of witch law– in fact that's his name, Study– and he tells me that Adams has never actually rendered a verdict in a witchery case.”
“What does that mean?”
“There's always been some defect in the witchers' presentation and he's thrown the whole thing out.”
“Then that's good,” said Alvin.
“No,” said Verily. “That's bad.”
“I'd go free, wouldn't l?”
“But the law would still stand.”
Alvin rolled his eyes. “Verily, I didn't come back here to try to reform New England, I came in order to–”
“We came to help Purity,” said Verily. “And all the others. Do you know what it would mean, if the law itself were found defective? Adams is a man of weighty reputation. Even from the circuit bench of Boston, his decisions would be looked at carefully and carry much precedence in England as well as in America. The right decision might mean the end of witch trials, here as well as there.”
Alvin smiled thinly. “You got too high an opinion of human nature.”
“Do I?”
“The law didn't make witch trials happen. It was the hunger for witch trials that got them to make up the law.”
“But if we do away with the legal basis–”
“Listen, Verily, do you think men like Quill will flat-out disappear just cause witchery ain't there to give them what they want? No, they'll just find another way to do the same job.”
“You don't know that.”
“If it ain't witchcraft, they'll find new crimes that work just the way witchcraft does, so you can take ordinary folks making ordinary mistakes or not even mistakes, just going about their business, but suddenly the witcher, he finds some wickedness in it, and turns everything they say into proof that they're guilty of causing every bad thing that's been going wrong.”
“There's no other law that works that way.”
“That's because we got witch laws, Very. Get rid of them, and people will find a way take all the sins of the world and put them onto the heads of some fellow who's attracted their attention and then destroy him and all his friends.”
“Purity isn't evil, Alvin.”
“Quill is,” said Alvin.
The sheriff leaned down. “I'm trying not to listen, boys, but you know it's a crime to speak ill of a witcher. This Quill, he takes it as evidence that Satan's got you by the short hairs, begging your pardon.”
“Thank you for the reminder, sir,” said Verily. “My client didn't mean it quite the way it sounded.”
The sheriff rolled his eyes. “From what I've seen, it doesn't matter much how it sounds when you say it. What matters is how it sounds when Quill repeats it.”
Verily grinned at the sheriff and then at Alvin.
“What are you smiling at?” asked Alvin.
“I just got all the proof I need that you're wrong. People don't like the way the witch trials work. People don't like injustice. Strike down these laws and no one will miss them.”
Alvin shook his head. “Good people won't miss them. But it wasn't good people as set them up in the first place. It was scared people. The world ain't steady. Bad things happen even when you been careful and done no wrong. Good people, strong people, they take that in stride, but them as is scared and weak, they want somebody to blame. The good people will think they've stamped out witch trials, but the next generation they'll turn around and there they'll be again, wearing a different hat, going by a different name, but witch trials all the same, where they care more about getting somebody punished than whether they're actually guilty of anything.”
“Then we'll stamp them out again,” said Verily.
Alvin shrugged. “Of course we will, once we figure out what's what and who's who. Maybe next time the witchers will go after folks with opinions they don't like, or folks who pray the wrong way or in the wrong place, or folks who look ugly or talk funny, or folks who aren't polite enough, or folks who wear the wrong clothes. Someday they may hold witch trials to condemn people for being Puritans.”
Verily leaned over and whispered into Alvin's ear. “Meaning no disrespect, Al, it's your wife who can see into the future, not you.”
“No whispering,” said the sheriff. “You might be giving me the pox.” He chuckled, but there was just a little bit of genuine worry in his voice.
Alvin answered Verily out loud. “Meaning no disrespect, Very, it don't take a knack to know that human nature ain't going to change anytime soon.”
Verily stood up. “It's time for the arraignment, Alvin. There's no point i
n our talking philosophy before a trial. I never knew till now that you were so cynical about human nature.”
“I know the power of the Unmaker,” said Alvin. “It never lets up. It never gives in. It just moves on to other ground.”
Shaking his head, Verily led the way out of the room. The sheriff, tightly holding the end of Alvin's chain, escorted him right after. “I got to say, I never seen a prisoner who cared so little about whether he got convicted or not.”
Alvin reached up his hand and scratched the side of his nose. “I'm not all that worried, I got to admit.” Then he put his hand back down.
It wasn't till they were almost in the courtroom that the sheriff realized that there was no way the prisoner could have got his hand up to his face with those manacles on, chained to his ankle braces the way they were. But by then he couldn't be sure he'd actually seen the young fellow scratch his nose. He just thought he remembered that. Just his mind playing tricks on him. After all, if this Alvin Smith could take his hands out of iron manacles, just like that, why didn't he walk out of jail last night?
Chapter 12 – Slaves
“You must take care of him,” said Balzac.
“In a boardinghouse for ladies?” asked Margaret.
Calvin stood there, his unblinking gaze focused on nothing.
“They have servants, no? He is your brother-in-law, he is sick, they will not refuse you.”
Margaret did not have to ask him what had precipitated his decision. At the French embassy today Balzac received a letter from a Paris publisher. One of his essays on his American travels had already appeared in a weekly, and was so popular that the publisher was going to serialize the rest of them and then bring them out as a book. A letter of credit was included. It was enough for a passage home.
“Just when you start earning money from your writing about America, you're going to leave?”
“Writing about America will pay for leaving America,” said Balzac. “I am a novelist. It is about the human soul that I write, not the odd customs of this barbaric country.” He grinned. “Besides, when they read what I have written about the practice of slavery in Camelot, this will be a very good place for me to be far away.”
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