The Fifth Petal

by Brunonia Barry

  Now the group made less sympathetic sounds.

  “Specifically, she claimed the Whiting woman killed her cow by putting a spell on it that caused its milk to sour and then compelled the creature to run into the ocean and drown itself.”

  Some of the group scoffed.

  “Perhaps an early version of mad cow disease attributed to witchcraft,” the docent offered. “But then Goodwife Whiting countered the accusation with one of her own. She claimed that Goodwife Hathorne had bewitched her husband, using herbs from the Hathornes’ garden.”

  “That happened in our neighborhood just the other day,” a woman deadpanned and got a laugh.

  “Both women sat in Salem Jail for a long time, but neither was executed. Eventually, they stopped the executions, and the Court of Oyer and Terminer was disbanded.”

  “Hanging judges and spectral evidence, that’s what Oyer and Terminer should be remembered for,” said another member of the tour.

  The docent nodded. “After the governor’s wife was accused of being in league with the devil, a newly appointed court put an end to the trials, and those in jail were released. But being released was not the same as being free. You had to pay for your jail time, both room and board. Goodwife Hathorne was forced to sell her land to the Whiting family, everything but the house you’re standing in.”

  Marta entered the room at just this moment. “Emily loves that part of the story,” she said, rolling her eyes and hustling Callie away from the group. She led her to a small bedroom, saying, “This is not part of the tour.”

  Marta looked a little thinner than Callie remembered. Probably from the flu. But she didn’t look tired, as Callie might have expected. The energy field that Callie sometimes sensed around people seemed stronger than ever around Marta, though her vibration had changed tone. It had always been slightly dissonant; now the dissonance seemed a bit stronger. Illness had a way of doing that to a person. If it had been anyone but Marta, she might have offered to help, but somehow she knew that, like meditation, sound healing would not be a modality Marta would ever embrace.

  “Your house is beautiful,” Callie said.

  “It’s sweet and simple,” Marta said. “With a no-nonsense New England attitude. Just like its resident.”

  Callie couldn’t imagine describing Marta as either sweet or simple.

  “Every piece in here is historically accurate, down to the single ‘sleep tight’ rope bed in the corner,” Marta said. “But I don’t sleep in that.” She led Callie to an even smaller room, which held two straight-backed chairs and a four-poster queen-size bed with a lace coverlet. “The only anachronism in the entire house,” Marta said, indicating the bed, “that you can see, anyway. The regular conveniences of daily living are carefully hidden behind closed doors.” She shut the bedroom door behind them, pointing Callie toward one of the chairs. “Watch your head.”

  The chairs were under a slanted ceiling that housed the structure’s only gable, and Callie had to duck to get to them. Marta took a seat on the other chair, pouring a glass of wassail punch for each of them from a carafe on a nearby table. “Everyone thinks the ceilings are so low because the people from the sixteen hundreds were shorter.”

  “Weren’t they?”

  “They may have been, but I don’t think so. The ceilings were built low to conserve heat.”

  There was a fire in the bedroom fireplace. Next to it were the regular implements: an iron shovel, a hook and lance to move the logs, and a broom to sweep the embers away. Hanging on a hook was a braided rope that looked as if it were made from the witch hazel branches Callie had noticed on her way in. One of the Goddesses, she couldn’t remember which, had told her that witch hazel symbolizes eternal life. “What’s that?” Callie asked when Marta spotted her looking at the braided rope.

  “That’s the switch,” Marta said, bitterness creeping into her voice. “My mother said every good New England family has one.”

  “Was it ever used?”

  “Of course. My mother was a big believer in corporal punishment,” Marta said, her light tone betraying her disapproval. “ ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child’ was one of her favorite sayings.”

  Callie grimaced. “I had a nun like that at the children’s home. But she used a ruler.”

  “My mother forced me to braid it myself. Good and tight,” Marta added grimly.

  Callie didn’t hide her surprise. “Why on earth do you keep it?”

  “I—” Marta paused. “I really don’t know.” She walked to the fireplace, took down the switch, and examined it. “I should have buried it with her.” With a quick twist of her wrist, she threw it into the fire. “Take that, you old hag.”

  They both watched as it caught, then slowly started to burn.

  “I take it you and your mother weren’t close.”

  Marta burst out laughing. She took her seat. “So, Callie,” she said, her mood much lighter. “What’s new in the world of Whiting?”

  Seeing an opportunity, Callie jumped in. “I hope I’m not overstepping. I want to talk to you about Christmas. Finn said you may not come to dinner if Rose is invited. Is that right?”

  “I won’t,” Marta said. “I’m sorry. But that shouldn’t stop you from inviting her.”

  “I don’t want you to stay away. The Hawthorne Hotel has a Christmas dinner. I’ll take Rose to that.”

  Marta laughed again. “Please don’t think me rude. I’m simply a person who doesn’t want to be associated with any talk of witches and injustice. I had enough of that at Thanksgiving. For a number of reasons, some of which go back generations, as you’ve heard today. I just don’t feel comfortable being in the same room with her, knowing what her beliefs are and how some might construe them.”

  “Rose is trying to find closure. She wants the bodies of those hanged found so that everyone can move on. When she talks about the oak—”

  “I’m not interested in keeping that dark history alive. In any way.”

  It was rich that Marta—who lived in a museum to the past—claimed she didn’t want to keep history alive. Callie wanted to argue the point, to remind Marta of all that Rose had been through. But Marta already knew the story. “I don’t want you to miss Christmas dinner because of an invitation I extended,” Callie said, an edge in her voice.

  “Between you and me, you have no idea how happy I am to use Rose as an excuse not to attend this year.”

  The remark took Callie by surprise, but Marta quickly softened and changed the subject. “Did you know that Christmas was outlawed in Massachusetts in the sixteen hundreds?”

  “Because it was based on the Pagan holiday?”

  “Partly that, and partly because the Church of England was pro-Christmas, which automatically made the Puritans vehemently anti-Christmas. My, I am pedantic today. It’s one of my greatest flaws.”

  “I don’t think you’re pedantic. I do think you’re extremely well versed in the past.” Maybe too well versed.

  “Well, thank you for that.”

  They were interrupted by the docent’s knock and entry. “Can you come out here a minute, Miss Hathorne? We need you to answer a question about the spinning wheel.”

  “Oh, I know quite a lot about spinning and weaving, too,” Marta said. She pointed to a plate of Christmas cookies on the side table. “Help yourself. I’ll be back as soon as their eyes begin to glaze over.”

  Callie had more of the wassail punch, took a cookie, and scanned the room. There was an uncomfortable-looking cradle in the corner, hand carved and, in all likelihood, passed down through the generations. She imagined Marta had once slept in the thing. She looked past the cradle to the leaded-glass window above it, and had a clear and disturbing thought: Marta and her family had chosen to live in the dark history of the past for more than three hundred years. They were keeping it alive. With the exception of Marta destroying the switch just now, it seemed as if nothing had ever changed in this house. And, until now at least, no one had wanted to let the darkness
out. Maybe now that she’d burned the switch, Marta would consent to opening a window.

  Callie looked at the bed, with its lovely lace coverlet, the only thing in the entire house that looked out of place. And then she spotted another thing that didn’t belong.

  Sitting on the bedside table were Finn’s eyeglasses.

  To the Puritans, anything beyond the western boundary of Salem Village could invoke terror, for that was where the savages dwelled. But one could encounter the devil in those you met in Salem Town as well: In the Quaker heretics and blasphemers, and in the Catholics.

  —ROSE WHELAN, The Witches of Salem

  “Does Paul know?”

  “Everybody knows. It’s been going on for the last few years,” Towner said. “Emily used to look the other way, but these days…Finn and Marta have known each other since they were kids. Everyone thought he’d marry her and end the family feud, but his father wouldn’t allow it because she wasn’t Catholic.”

  They sat across from each other in the tearoom, sharing a pot of Difficult-Tea. “That seems odd,” Callie said. “In this day and age.”

  “It was odd, and it wasn’t really the reason.”

  “No?”

  “The real reason was money. Marta’s father was the reason the Whitings lost their business. It rekindled the old family feud. Finn’s father had to refill the family coffers. Marta was not only family non grata, she was as poor as a church mouse. Emily’s not Catholic, either, but they were happy to look the other way for her money. Of course there was the not small matter of Emily also being…‘in a family way.’ ”

  “You told me as much when I first met her,” Callie said.

  “I did? How indiscreet of me!” Towner smiled.

  “So his relationship with Marta never really ended?”

  “Oh, it ended. For quite a while. She didn’t live here for a long time. She was down in New York City. I don’t think they saw each other again for years. But then, when her mother got sick, Marta came back. From what I’ve heard, they pretty much picked up where they left off…and none too subtly, either.”

  “That must be really difficult for Emily.”

  “To say the least.”

  “Why does she put up with his infidelity?”

  A shadow crossed Towner’s face. “I think you’ll find when you love someone that much, you put up with all sorts of things you never thought you could tolerate, real or imagined.”

  Callie looked at her friend. “We’re not talking about Emily anymore, are we?”

  Towner didn’t break Callie’s gaze, and she didn’t answer the question. Instead, she sighed and stood to clear the table.

  “There was a time my mother was talking about divorce,” Paul said. “But that was before she got sick.”

  Callie had agonized before bringing up the subject with Paul. But Towner had assured her that he knew about Marta and his father, and, thinking back, some of his less than welcoming treatment of Marta now began to make sense.

  “My mother has told me to stay out of it. But it’s not always easy,” Paul admitted.

  Before they’d started talking about Marta, they’d been discussing solfeggio frequencies. Paul had been researching a symbol his team had found in the cave, something the scholars at the Vatican believed corresponded to the ancient solfeggio frequencies, at least from a mathematical perspective.

  Callie sometimes used the frequencies in sound healing: solfeggio was an ancient scale of six notes, all of which were pure sound that vibrated at different frequencies: ut, re, mi, fa, so, la. This scale eventually morphed into the seven-note musical scale that is used today.

  “The scale was used in the early Latin church hymns, for healing and spiritual awakening. Then many of them were mysteriously lost. Only a few remain, but we’re interested in finding anything that refers to them. This symbol might.”

  That the Catholic Church was interested in anything that she was using in sound healing surprised Callie. But she took it as an encouraging sign of the practice’s growing acceptance.

  They sat and watched the fire until it faded to embers. Paul stoked it once more and brought a blanket from the bedroom.

  Lately, they’d taken to making out like high school kids. “Does this mean we’re at least going steady?” he kidded her.

  She’d never gone steady in high school, never engaged in the “heavy petting” the nuns had warned was a mortal sin. Instead, she’d skipped over that phase entirely. Here, with Paul, she felt as if she were living her life in reverse.

  She’d been here almost every evening since their kiss in the car, and, each night, she tore herself away from his hands and lips and rushed back to Pride’s Heart before midnight, which Paul had taken to calling “curfew.”

  “I’ve got to get back,” she said just before twelve, pulling herself away from his embrace.

  “Sleep here,” he said when she stood to leave.

  “I sleep with my eyes open, remember? And I have nightmares.”

  “I’ll make them go away,” he said seriously, trailing his thumb across her neck.

  She laughed. “Are you going to walk me back?”

  “I don’t think I am, no.”

  “Okay.” She headed for the door.

  He sighed, getting up to follow. “You’re killing me, Callie,” he said, only half kidding. “I hope you know that.”

  Hearing his tone change, she turned back. “It’s not that I don’t want to sleep with you.”

  “Don’t say you just want to be friends.”

  “No. I can’t say that anymore.”

  “Then what the hell are we waiting for?”

  She decided to tell him the truth. Not the whole truth—the horrible suspicion that something awful might happen if she slept with him. Equating sex with death was too Freudian to mention. Instead, she told him, “I don’t want to be like my mother.”

  It was equally true.

  “Not much chance of that, I’d say.”

  “I was a lot like her before we met.”

  He seemed surprised. “Wish I’d known you then,” he tried to joke.

  “No, you really don’t.”

  When she finally fell asleep, she dreamed of sex with Paul: wild versions and perversions that left her body flushed and tingling, the blankets damp and clenched in her fingers. The dream ended the way it ended each time, with Paul on the cold stone floor, open eyed and openmouthed, the blood surrounding him growing less red and more purple every night.

  The Catholic Church embraced December as Christ’s birthday in order to appease the heathens, thereby building the number of converts to Christianity. For their part, the Puritans disdained the celebration, which reminded them not only of the Pagan devil worshipers but of the Catholics who had once persecuted them in England.

  —ROSE WHELAN, The Witches of Salem

  “Lovely day,” Rose said as they rode across the bridge to Pride’s Crossing on Christmas morning. She looked out at the ocean, which seemed to surround them. At least it was warmer than it had been on Thanksgiving. Today it was forty-six degrees.

  Emily had offered them her driver, and Callie and Paul had accepted. They’d gone together to pick Rose up from the shelter. Paul had waited downstairs in the family room while Callie braided Rose’s wild mane into a single tail, recalling how Rose had once done the same for her. Then it was time to introduce the two most important people in her life. Callie had been worried, but the minute they met, Rose said, “Look at these lovely boots Callie just gave me,” and seemed quite at ease. Paul complimented her footwear while ushering her into the car and then climbed in and sat beside her.

  “It is a beautiful day,” Callie agreed. “Strangely warm for late December.”

  Paul and Callie filled the rest of the ride with small talk, and Rose was content to listen and gaze out the window, but as they turned into the driveway and she sighted Pride’s Heart, Rose grew agitated. When the car made its way around the curve of the driveway, beneath the ancient
elm branches, she said, “It’s here.”

  “What’s here?”

  “The tree.”

  “Those are elms,” Callie said. “Not oaks.”

  “Not those trees,” Rose said, leaning forward in her seat. “It’s here. I don’t see it yet, but I can feel it. The hanging tree.”

  Callie and Paul exchanged a glance.

  As they pulled up to the front entrance, and the driver went around to open the car door, Rose jumped out and dashed toward the lawn and the ocean beyond.

  Paul and Callie scrambled to catch up. By the time they reached her, she was standing near the orangerie at the edge of the cliff in front of the lone oak on the Whitings’ property.

  “This is it,” Rose said, putting her ear to its massive trunk. “It has to be.”

  “What’s going on?” Paul whispered.

  “She thinks that’s the hanging tree,” Callie said.

  “I know it is. I saw it floating down the North River in my dream,” Rose said, growing more excited. “The North River flows right into Beverly Harbor, and it comes out here.”

  “This tree was planted by my great-great-grandfather in the late eighteen hundreds,” Paul said gently, “before the big house was built, back when he lived at what is now the boathouse. It was never in the North River, Rose.”

  Rose shook her head. “It’s telling me I’ve come to the right place.”

  “You have come to the right place,” Callie said, talking slowly as if to a child. “The Whitings have invited us for Christmas dinner.” She looked at the tree, an old and beautiful oak. “Let’s go into the house now. We can come back to see this after dinner.”

  Rose planted herself under the tree. “Thank you, but I’ll stay right here.”

  Callie was speechless for a moment. Until now, she hadn’t been overly troubled by the extent of Rose’s obsession. “It might be warm for December, but it’s still chilly. Come inside.”