Crane Pond

by Richard Francis

  He sighs with satisfaction at having brought his argument to a close, then goes on to explain what happened next. Mr. God told Tituba he would return the following Friday. When he came he had a book with him. He wanted Tituba to sign it by way of agreeing to serve him for a period of six years. The man offered her a pin fastened to a stick to write in his book with, a blood quill, telling her to scratch her arm and then put an X. There were other names in the book, nine in all. Tituba couldn’t read, of course, but Mr. God said that Goody Good was one of the signatories to this satanic contract, and also Goody Osborne. Somehow Tituba herself avoided signing after all—‘So she claims, at least,’ Noyes says. ‘Though you mustn’t believe all that a slave like her tells you.’

  ‘I must keep my mind impartial,’ says Sewall, ‘since I may be trying these cases in due course.’

  ‘You will keep a clear head on the matter,’ says Mr. Noyes, ‘particularly since yours isn’t obscured by a periwig. I am writing an essay on that topic. In it I explain that anyone with any skill at physiognomy will know that that hair—’ he points across the table at Sewall’s declining hair—‘cannot grow on this head—’ he points upwards towards his own absence of hair—‘any more than saltmarsh hay can grow on the top of a hill.’

  Sewall almost protests at the unkindness of this comparison, but instead looks across at the clock. ‘Almost time for the ferry,’ he says. ‘I must hurry. Thank you so much for an excellent meal, and please congratulate Anne for me also.’

  As he heads towards the door, Mr. Noyes grasps him by the elbow, puts his face up close, and solemnly says, ‘Malleus maleficarum. Hammer of heretics. That is what you must be, Mr. Sewall, when the cases come to trial. The witchcraft is spreading apace. It has already infected some who are close to us, or who seemed to be.’

  Sewall recalls that Malleus Maleficarum is the title of a book published two centuries ago, to do with hunting down witches. ‘That is what we all must be, in this time of threat,’ Nicholas Noyes concludes. ‘Hammers.’

  It’s six o’clock when Sewall arrives home. Hannah opens the door to him. ‘Ah, my dear,’ he says, ‘I’ve something to tell you.’

  ‘I have something to tell you, too,’ she replies. She looks a little tired and strained, as she often does after a headache, but is wearing her good gown of sprigged muslin (he imported the material from London especially for her as part of a consignment he was shipping over) and a starched lace cap. ‘Mr. Stoughton is here.’

  Sewall is too startled to speak. For Mr. Stoughton to turn up at his house in person, without a prior arrangement, and wait for his return until becoming benighted, suggests some emergency has taken place. ‘I insisted he must sleep here,’ Hannah continues. ‘He can’t ride all the way back to Dorchester at this time of night. Sarah is busy preparing a late dinner or early supper for the two of you, whichever you wish to call it. I expect you’re hungry after your day on the ocean waves.’

  ‘I must go in directly and see what he’s come about.’

  She smiles a little wanly. ‘I’m glad to have you back safely.’

  ‘Laus Deo.’

  ‘What was it you wanted to tell me?’

  ‘Oh.’ He’s been so busy speculating about Mr. Stoughton’s motive in coming here that he almost forgot. ‘A family matter. I’ll speak to you about it when Mr. Stoughton’s gone.’

  ‘I know he’s an eminent man,’ Hannah says, ‘but . . . ’

  ‘But what?’

  Hannah lowers her voice to a whisper. ‘He frightens the children. They’ve scampered off to their holes like mice being chased by a cat.’

  ‘I’ll go and beard the lion in his den,’ Sewall tells her. ‘Or rather in my den.’ He places his hands on her hips and squeezes gently, then walks past her to his study.

  Before Sewall and Mr. Stoughton can settle down to talk, Sarah comes in and summons them to dine. ‘You’d better have it at once,’ she says, ‘before it gets cold.’

  Hannah and the children had their dinner before his arrival and stay tactfully (or fearfully) out of the way. Sarah has baked a dish of pigeons with parsnips, and Sewall has Bastian bring up some of his Passado from the cellar. Sewall pours them each a glass of wine, and then serves Mr. Stoughton a couple of the birds. He hesitates over whether he can get away with only taking one himself, but Stoughton is watching the platter intently as if to make sure of the symmetry of the meal. Sewall has to encourage yet another lie to blossom into truth: in this case the lie of appetite must justify itself by consumption. The mendacities have come thick and fast today, some deliberate, others accidental, wave upon wave of them, yet never, as far as Sewall (inspecting his own intentions) can see, intended with malice. He sighs at the swarming complexity of it all, and takes a second pigeon.

  Stoughton has come on Salem Village business, as Sewall guessed. ‘At present we have no proper powers to engage with this outbreak, despite the urgent need to act,’ Stoughton tells him. ‘New England is in danger of being lost.’

  ‘I suppose that is what our rulers feared when they drew up a new charter for us.’

  ‘I am not talking about the Court of St James. New England is in danger of being lost even here, in New England. There is a dark time coming on our colony—on our province, as we must learn to call it when the new charter takes effect.’

  A dark time. Sewall recalls little Joseph’s prophecy, two years ago: the bad people are coming.

  ‘The number of accused witches is growing very fast,’ Stoughton says, ‘upwards of twenty already.’ Twenty? Mr. Noyes told Sewall only this afternoon that Tituba had counted nine signatories in the Devil’s book. Fast indeed. ‘Worse still, the outbreak isn’t confined to the Goody Goods of this world who never bother to attend divine service.’

  Stoughton pauses, as if visualising the Goody Goods of this world (a sorry company indeed) in his mind’s eye. ‘The flotsam and jetsam.’ He cuts himself a morsel of pigeon breast with a deft manoeuvre of his knife that would have done credit to a surgeon, impales a slice of parsnip to accompany it, slips the portion into his mouth, and immediately begins chewing with tiny but very rapid movements, like a squirrel consuming a nut. ‘Yesterday a woman called Nurse came up before the examiners. She’s a widow of some means and one of the congregation of the saints, a covenanted member of Mr. Noyes’s church in Salem Town since the days when the Salem Village congregation couldn’t participate in the full covenant itself. But because it’s not always possible for her to travel to divine service there, she also goes regularly to Mr. Parris’s meetings in the village. At the end of her hearing she was remanded in custody to await trial.’

  Unlike Mr. Stoughton, Sewall has been chewing slowly to allow his digestion as much time as possible to reconcile itself to each instalment, but now hurriedly swallows his mouthful. ‘How can that be, if she’s one of the saints?’ he asks. He’s assumed all along that the witch congregation (if that’s the correct word for it) will be drawn from those outside the Christian community, from those who have not taken the covenant or who have lapsed from it and no longer go to church.

  Mr. Parris, Stoughton continues, knowing Mrs. Nurse’s examination was just about to take place (he is acting as clerk to the court), preached a remarkable sermon on this difficult issue last Sunday. Mr. Stoughton has received a full report. The text was John, chapter 6, verse 70, when Jesus says to the disciples: ‘Have I not chosen you twelve, and one of you is a Devil?’ The church is a garden, Mr. Parris had concluded, and contains weeds as well as flowers. ‘He admirably prepared the way for what was to follow,’ Stoughton affirms. ‘The indictment of a member of the congregation. Of two congregations.’

  ‘But should he have done so?’ Sewall asks. ‘Isn’t that a kind of interference in the course of justice?’

  ‘All Mr. Parris has done is define the possibility of a certain kind of wickedness. You might as well say that the Ten Commandments, by tellin
g us that murder is a sin, are being unfair to murderers. Rebecca Nurse is simply awaiting trial. The course of justice will be our responsibility, at a later date.’

  There’s a pause. Mr. Stoughton takes another mouthful of his dinner, disposes of it as before, then resumes. ‘However, there was some ill-feeling about this case in the village. Voices have been raised. People who don’t know any better are crying foul play. Mrs. Nurse has her friends and allies. She is not a Tituba Indian or a Goody Osborne. Or, as I said before, a Goody Good. And in three days’ time there is to be another examination, this time of two accused witches. One of them is a woman called Sarah Cloyse. She is Rebecca Nurse’s sister.’

  ‘Ah,’ says Sewall. Here they are, two men of affairs, dealing with the possibility of social unrest. ‘And who is the other one?’

  ‘Elizabeth Proctor, also a woman of some standing. She and her husband have an inn—‘

  ‘I think I know it!’ Sewall exclaims. It’s outside Salem Village on the main highway to Salem Town. When going overland to visit his brother, Sewall has stopped there to have refreshment and bait his horse. The landlord, John Proctor, is a stocky irascible man, very sure of himself. Sewall can remember him haranguing his young maidservant, the jade as he called her, that her servings were too large. As Sewall recalls it, his own plateful was barely adequate. Proctor threatened to whip the girl should she offend again.

  ‘They have a farm, too,’ Stoughton says. ‘These Proctors are people of property. They have weight in the community. That’s why it’s important that the examiners have weight of their own, to counterbalance theirs.’ He has decided to beef up the proceedings when the court next meets. On this occasion, the examining justices already on duty, Jonathan Corwin and John Hathorne, are to be joined by five more, and Sewall is to be one of them. The examinations will be held in Nicholas Noyes’s capacious and smart meeting house in Salem Town rather than in Samuel Parris’s decrepit and cramped building in Salem Village. Mr. Noyes himself suggested this.

  ‘Mr. Noyes?’ asks Sewall in surprise. ‘Is he an officer of the court? I di—I was with him this very afternoon.’

  ‘He was merely acting as a friend to the court, as any citizen might.’

  Sewall remembers Noyes’s comments about the need to be a malleus maleficarum, instructions almost. Perhaps he already knew that Sewall would be coming back to Salem in a day or two. Perhaps he already knew the names of those to be examined, and was keeping the news to himself at dinner today. Sewall feels slightly resentful, jealous even, of the possibility that Mr. Noyes has gained privileged access.

  And yesterday Mr. Mather took it upon himself to puff his way round to impart the latest news. And last Sunday Mr. Parris aimed a sermon at the possibility that a covenanted church-member like Rebecca Nurse might be an interloper in the house of God. It’s natural the clergy should take an active interest in the witchcraft since it attacks Christianity itself, but for a moment Sewall feels a judge’s resentment at clerical interference in legal matters.

  The other judges have all already agreed but since Sewall was not at home, Stoughton has had to wait for him. He gives Sewall a somewhat acidic look as he tells him this. ‘There are other justices in Boston you could have sought out,’ Sewall replies a little indignantly. ‘You could have agreed to attend the examination yourself.’

  Stoughton shakes his head. ‘I think I will be more useful at a later stage. In any case we particularly wanted you to be on the bench. You have a reputation for fairness and impartiality which will be helpful in this instance.’ He says the words as if they are hardly a compliment at all, as he might say, we needed a small man to fit on the bench, owing to its narrowness. ‘Time is short. I have brought you a copy of the court papers. You need to study them tomorrow.’

  One thing Samuel Sewall is not is a small man, particularly at present. When the meal is over he feels he can hardly rise from the table.

  CHAPTER 10

  Sewall spends the following morning in his study, perusing the papers of the examinations so far. Each case dovetails into the next so it’s necessary to have some knowledge of all of them. By the same token the two women, Sarah Cloyse and Elizabeth Putnam, are going to be examined jointly when the court convenes the day after tomorrow. The witchcraft is a collective enterprise.

  After some hours he goes to the window. He needs to give his eyes a rest, or perhaps his soul. It’s a lovely day, and Hannah is pushing baby Mary up and down the path, taking the air. He decides to go down to join them for a few minutes.

  ‘What is it you had to tell me?’ Hannah asks when he catches her up. Little Mary, now six months old, gives him a welcoming smile from the cushion on which she is reclining in her little cart. His family news has slipped his mind in the agitation brought on by Mr. Stoughton’s visit.

  ‘Ah yes. I was talking with Stephen—’ It occurs to him that this introduction sounds a little like a cabal between brothers, so adds—‘and with Margaret, of course, about our Hannah.’

  Silence is of two sorts. There is the empty kind, like a room into which you can walk, and the solid variety, like a wall with which you collide. His wife’s current silence is of the latter type. After enduring it for a few seconds he continues, ‘We agreed it would do her good to stay with them for—’

  ‘You agreed!’

  ‘Yes, we thought—’

  Little Mary, sensing the difficulty of the situation, gives out a couple of tentative sobs, looking worriedly from face to face as if to check whether this is an appropriate reaction. ‘Shush,’ Hannah tells her, then turns back towards Sewall. ‘So,’ she says, ‘this we, this we that came to an agreement about our daughter—’

  ‘It was simply a conversation.’

  ‘A cosy conversation between you and beautiful Margaret Sewall of Salem Town.’

  ‘It wasn’t cosy. We were all at dinner—’

  ‘You never told me you had dinner there. I thought you came home hungry. I had Sarah bake you all those pigeons.’ It’s as if Sewall’s mendacity has given the birds wings again, despite having been cooked, and they’re flying home to roost.

  As if to deflect her adults from this unhappy conversation, Mary tries another smile, which at once turns into a tiny belch. Hannah bends down, lifts her up and pats her on the back. ‘Hannah is my child,’ she says when this has been done. ‘I went to all the trouble of giving birth to her, just as I did to this one. I gave birth to all of them, those who still live and those who have already died. Let Margaret have conversations and agreements about her own children. She already has one extra one who by rights belongs to someone else. She doesn’t need any more.’

  ‘You don’t mind Sam being at Mr. Hobart’s,’ Sewall says.

  ‘That was our decision. It was necessary for him. He needs to grow up. And it’s the usual thing for children of his age. They all need to grow up.’

  Sewall is aware of her taking comfort from this truism, which allows Sam’s deficiencies to be swallowed up in the general immaturity of his peers. ‘Well, Hannah is now the age Sam was when he first went off. Perhaps she needs to grow up too.’

  ‘Hannah is different. She’s such a gentle child. You can’t say Sam is gentle. Not like Hannah. He’s a boy. He’s—’

  ‘Not gentle, no. But he is vulnerable. Nevertheless I think placing him with Mr. Hobart has been a success, on the whole. I tried him again with a multiplication sum during my last visit and he got the answer nearly correct. Only a few apples adrift.’ He sighs at the memory. ‘He told me he’s grown tired of apples and wishes to calculate some other fruit.’

  ‘Hannah is quite good at arithmetic already.’

  ‘I was thinking more—’ He waves his arm vaguely in the direction of that ‘more’, which encompasses society at large, and sighs again. ‘Intercourse with the world. I was thinking more of her intercourse with the world.’

  ‘It’s because she’s
short-sighted. She can’t always make out who is approaching her. That’s why she flees.’ Young Hannah has the habit of rushing abruptly to the chamber she shares with Betty, like a startled animal. ‘You wouldn’t like it if instead of it being Mr. This or Madam That, there was just a vague shape coming towards you, like one of those witches the girls complain of in Salem Village.’

  ‘Those witches come in their habitual form. Apparently the girls see them clearly.’

  ‘Well, they must have better eyes for the supernatural than Hannah has for the natural.’ She puts the baby back into her cart. ‘I won’t have her going to Salem.’ She straightens up and looks Sewall in the eye. ‘I won’t have her being frightened.’ She’s tearful at the very thought.

  Sewall is about to remind her of the difference between Salem Town and Salem Village, but then pauses. The fact that the examination is going to take place the day after tomorrow in Salem Town seems to threaten the distinction between the two places. ‘Perhaps we need to send her somewhere else,’ he finally agrees. ‘Where she is in no danger.’

  They finish on that note, not exactly in harmony but at least not in open conflict. He tries to tickle little Mary under the chin but she immediately grimaces in an exaggerated childlike way as if being choked. This little failure to please his youngest daughter makes him feel suddenly tired.

  As he makes his way back to his study it occurs to him that he has conducted the argument with his wife just as if he’s always had it in mind to send Hannah off for the sake of her development, rather than Betty for the sake of her soul. He can’t decide whether this means that his lie has now become entrenched or that it has mutated into truth.

  Mr. Noyes stands at the doorway of the meeting house to greet the examining justices as they file in. With his black cloak flapping in the sea-breeze he looks like an enormous crow with ruffled feathers. The judges are topped and tailed by clergy, since Mr. Parris brings up the rear in his capacity of clerk to the court. He’s been fulfilling that role during the examinations in his own meeting house in Salem Village, and it was decided that for continuity’s sake he should do so today in Salem Town. He seems a nervous and watchful man (the jumpiest of the lot, Stephen called him), as well he might be, given that the Devil visited his manse while he was oblivious and deep in prayer.