Charis in the World of Wonders

by Marly Youmans

  “Tread with caution, Mistress Herrick, and I will do my best to save your name and your neck,” he said. “For your name is, to my thinking, still fair, and your neck is far too young to be stretched by the rope.”

  I thanked him for his good opinion of me and said that I should always remember him, at which he gave my arm a little shake and said that he hoped to see me many times more and in my proper place. And after, he prayed with me by the hearthstone and gave me his blessing. Before he departed, he reminded me that the disciples were often in prison unjustly, and I was so bold as to say that sometimes they were let out again, as when “the Angel of the Lord came upon them, and a light shined in the house.”

  “Indeed, I wish the disciples might come and treat me as they did Saul, letting him over the city walls in a basket,” I told him.

  “They must have had mighty giant baskets in those days,” Mr. Dane said, and this was the first time that he smiled while we were together in that room. “I, too, wish you might have such help and such a basket.”

  Again I thanked him and said that help and baskets come in many shapes, and that I was glad of all who believed that I was no witch and had no part in any demonic ministry.

  “My young brother pastor has set the people on edge. I wish he knew that altar fires should not be lit with coals from hell! Yet I will speak to him and others of your merits and work for your freedom,” he said.

  “Would you pardon me and speak well of me, sir, if Providence gave me a path out of this trouble?”

  He drew away and gazed at me. “A basket over the wall? If that should be, I would not regret your loss to us, indeed, Mistress Herrick. For I believe you are as innocent of crime as was Saul when he preached at Damascus. You came to us nearly solitary in the world, and such wanderers are vulnerable. As I told you before, once I had to defend a fellow from accusation who was alone in the land. He was a malcontent, but he was not guilty of erecting Satan’s kingdom in Massachusetts. Nor are you the cause of a mark on a babe’s face. Nor are you a signer in blood of the Archfiend’s book.”

  “I thank you, sir.”

  “Mr. Increase Mather tells us that there is a dark and amazing intricacy in the ways of Providence,” he said. “Who knows what may happen, or how God may have already revealed possible paths to your future?”

  “Perhaps so,” I said.

  Here the minister made ready to depart in answer to a shout from Goodman Peeters.

  “Good madam, I would wish you a fair evening and angels with a basket, but I fear they may have difficulty finding us in such a wilderness. And there is an officious, provoking fellow to bar the way.”

  At this, I managed a small smile. I followed him to the door, not wishing to see the last of someone who had been kind to me.

  “Your obedient servant and unfeigned friend,” he said, his outline barely visible in the gloom of the doorway. “God bye to you, Mistress Herrick.”

  “The like to you,” I said, my voice trembling. “Pray remember me. Fare you well.”

  A bustle at the door, some words exchanged with my jailers. . . and from then on I was anxious about three things. One was that Jotham Herrick might yet think better of his words to me and not be ready. Another was that Goodwife Bel Dane would hear where I was being kept and send word to Mr. Barnard that the house was not secure. And the last was that Hortus would not be in his stall, even in such poor weather for traveling, or that the gear and tackle he had earned with his own journeys through Essex and Middlesex would be missing. In recent months, Hortus had carried men to Billerica and Haverhill and Salem Village. Once he had been to Salem Town harbor and again, I suppose, glimpsed the sea and snuffed the salt airs. He was acquainted with the ferries over the Merrimack, and the cartways and roads and Indian trails. But perhaps we would need no ferry if what I had heard was true, that the rivers were frozen nigh solid already.

  Because a mortal being can never have enough of worrying, despite how little it changes events, I took to wrestling over whether it was right for me to make use of the tunnel, or whether I should go meekly and with hope to questioning, jail, and trial. Constables would escort me; the jailor would shackle my legs and arms, burying me in the small, stinking dungeon below Salem prison, and there my little Samuel might die of the cold or the drying-up of my milk. Perhaps I would have to give him to some stranger to suckle. But that I could not bear. Or perhaps I would at last see Boston again, to be immured in stone walls, the water to my ankles when it rained, the dung freezing and unfreezing in a corner, and my bed a heap of rotted tow. How could we survive the frost-bound stones, the bad airs, the hunger?

  No, it will not serve.

  Was the tunnel my Angel of the Lord, my basket over the city walls, my dark and amazing rescue? I fell to wondering whether the curious providences of God had given me a way out of my troubles—and those, truly, would lead to more difficulties as we journeyed—or whether it was simply my own desires that guided me. I contemplated how I had been led through the wilderness with no fatal harm to my body, and pondered whether at the end of those challenges I was meant to have a brief passage of joy and content and then die. I remembered the story of a woman accused of witchcraft, who upon release found her house burned by Indians, and who sheltered in what remained until she was murdered by passing warriors. Just as when I journeyed and questioned whether the Almighty lay behind the attack on our house and the rotting mountain of flesh at Falmouth, I now wondered whether the tunnel had been planned for me long ago—known, yes, but perhaps also ordained and made for my use?

  “For Christ is my sovereign,” I whispered. And I am far from earthly kings and queens. Is not this new wild world of Massachusetts a realm where I may choose to be free—terribly and wonderfully free to obey God and live fully, in accordance with truth?

  All these wilderings of mind kept me wakeful. My fingers kept busy, rubbing the butt of the tallow candle into the stiff leather of my shoes. Afterward, I knelt on the hearthstone and prayed that Christ would have mercy on me.

  “Always with me,” I said aloud, startling myself in the quiet that was not quiet but full of the snap of fire, the settling of the house, and the noise of mice tunneling through the corn husks.

  For a long time I listened, and at last heard the noise of sleepers. I inched down the hall and peeped into the main room. The two men who had accompanied me were lying curled by the fire. One was snoring with a hearty fervor, and the other was emitting little whiffling noises as if running to keep up with his companion. Goodman Peeters also appeared to be asleep, upright on his stool and breathing deeply. He was the least comfortable, propped in the cold away from the fire, and he was the one I feared most to wake.

  The house was so small! I would have to be quieter than the little mice in their tunnels through the husks, and more clever.

  Back in the bedchamber, I forced my shoes back onto my feet and collected the pattens Mr. Herrick had made for me against the snows of winter. They were finer than most such articles, with sharp spikes embedded in the whittled wood under toes and heel. I lit the tallow candle from the fire. Fat dropped hissing into the flames before the wick was well caught. I set it near the door on a flat baking stone from the hearth. That made me remember Phoebe Wardwell again; I wondered if she had brought the stone into that room to cook ashcakes and so let the room smell sweetly of bread. The tallow would not burn long but, left behind, perhaps its spit and glimmer would let any who wakened assume that I was up in the night with my stub of candle.

  I impaled the beeswax candle Goodman Abbot had given me on the crown of spikes inside the lantern.

  My fingers were damp as I searched along the floorboards until I found the groove. The trapdoor was harder to raise than I had imagined and made a grinding noise as I pulled it upward.

  I stood, lifting the panel waist-high, my heart like a meetinghouse bell ringing with the alarm for fire or attack. Leaning against the wall, I listened hard, though the pulse of blood in my head made me hear nothing e
lse for a time. At last I counted—one, two, three, the braided sound of three sets of sleepers—and set down the door. I fetched my pattens and dropped them through the opening, first leaning down as far as I could reach.

  The wick fizzed and flared up when I lit the beeswax candle from the flame of the tallow. It burned with a lovely, clear flame that shed beams throughout the room. The pierced tin let the light out in shafts and patterns, but I had no time to sit and admire the patient candle-making of Phoebe Wardwell’s mother. As it was, I blessed her name and kept moving.

  And so I wrapped up in my cloak and shielded the flame as well as I could, knowing that the light would either betray or save me. I slipped into the hole, my feet kicking and feeling for the crude rungs. Though I held the candle lantern by its strap, I moved that arm carefully, fearing to set my cloak or gown on fire. The slats cut into my fingers, but I moved downward more swiftly than I thought possible and jumped to the earth.

  I had forgotten the moistness and odd fragrance of the tunnel. . .

  The candle I set on the ground. Removing my cloak, I climbed up the ladder and peered into the dark hall. Nothing. I had half expected the men to be chasing after me and plunging into the hole.

  God bye to you, my wardens.

  My fingers found the edge of the trapdoor, and I shifted the weight slowly, sliding it into place with one hand while I clung to the ladder with the other. The panel did not settle completely into its bed, and I felt sure some movement would be noticed when one of the men walked down the hall. Feeling it from corner to corner, I discovered a wooden knob and, pressing close to the rungs and wall of earth, tugged the door into place. Before climbing down, I held on for a moment longer, letting the thump of my heart slow to its ordinary time.

  My right hand smarted from cuts, but that was no matter to me—I had entered the tunnel and, even if my absence was discovered instantly, had a fair chance to flee away. I put on my cloak and picked up the pattens. Retrieving the lantern, I held it up. The tunnel looked different from before in the clear light. Bands of varying color striped the earth, as if the soil had been laid down in layers like a stack cake. Bits of crystal and isinglass glimmered in several levels, and I could see the marks of a pick where the delver had left a ragged surface. Above my head were some odd, long-l egged spiders, and though I knew that animals made burrows and nests under the ground, I had not thought to see such creatures here.

  I smelled a faint scent of lavender.

  “Fear not,” I whispered.

  If a ghost of Goody Wardwell or of her babe had left the scent, it did not show itself further. I would have thanked her shade for the candle, given unknowingly, a glow out of the dark of death. I trudged on, the lantern swinging and making crumbs of metal in the earthen walls flash out as if in greeting, as if the tunnel could know me on my third walk there.

  I would not have believed that the underground passage could be beautiful, but it was so: the beauteous beeswax light swinging and shifting in patterns, the crystals and metals like a message of welcome inscribed in the soil itself, and the fragrance of the earth—surely a sign that it was alive, its pores sending out sweet and rank odors mixed. My eyes filled and blurred the light, and my very spirit streamed forth in gratitude and joy at the world of wonders. And while I knew what our ministers sometimes meant by that phrase, world of wonders, the strangenesses, the witcheries, the slashing work of magics, the ghosts, the marvels seen in clouds, and the fabulous creatures hidden in the forest, a new thought came to me: this is a world of wonders because good and true and beautiful, and only sin and wrong make it fall away from a natural glory. Were the animals not happy in Eden, where there was no hunting down of the innocent and no death? As I walked down the tunnel, looking about me at its walls for the last time, I forgot what I was about, forgot everything but loveliness.

  I felt that the tunnel had been meant for me, as surely as if those glittering bits had formed the letters of my name and called to me with a mystical song. For though I no longer believed that God played with human dolls, yet I trusted that all things spired up from divine power, and that our ways and names and the very shape of us, from ankle bone to the wing of an eyebrow, were known to the divine energies that lived and rejoiced before the worlds were made.

  But when the path rose and met the door, I must lose all that surprising elevation of spirit. For I had a hard work before me. The ice and snow was weighty, and the stems and vines that had earlier been a mass over the opening now latched it down, so I must thrust and thrust again, and slide my injured hand along the edge to tear at tendrils and dormant roots. Even when it seemed free, I could not raise the door.

  Panic rose in me. I sat on the ramp of earth and closed my eyes and rocked to and fro in anguish.

  Calm, calm, be at peace.

  I thought on how greatly I desired to be safe with Jotham Herrick and my babe Samuel. And with three mighty shoves I broke open the door and crawled out, ripping away the tangles.

  I nested among the moss and dried leaves and snow, panting and sending out little splinters of prayer. Flopping onto my back, I lay with my arms flung out and the cloak unfurled like wings on either side.

  The starlight spilled on me, setting my lantern at naught. A thousand thousand bees had been set alight and were floating in the deep blue-black tunnel of night. Whiter than a candle of sun-bleached beeswax, the moon gleamed at me, and the most delicate silk scarf of cloud moved infinitely slowly across the sky. I remembered my family, and how my mother’s father had believed that Providence working through the stars and moon brought change and the twists of fortune to all that was sublunary. The constellations shone down like beacons. How easy it seemed to believe that the planets and stars busied themselves with us, just as the plants gave themselves to us and to animals for food.

  Again I felt greeted. I had never seen anything so clearly and vividly as when I feared that I might die and leave behind the realm of bees and bee-stars, clouds and silks, moon and hive. It almost seemed that I could drift up and into the sky, burning with a white light, and walk among stars and farther, until I reached the empyrean realms.

  “World of wonders.”

  To whom did I say those words, lying in the weeds by the tunnel? Perhaps I spoke them to the bees of the stars and the daily swelling or daily dwindling white hive of the moon and the veil of drifting cloud. Perhaps I murmured them in sheerest gratitude to the maker of them all. Perhaps to each of those. Perhaps I did not know the difference between one thing and another, for all flowed together as one.

  Settling into myself, I rolled onto my hands and knees and pushed up. I shook the ice crystals and flakes of snow from my cloak. After collecting the lantern and pattens, I forced the door to the tunnel shut, stomping hard until it was wedged in place and sweeping snow over the spot with my feet.

  Would it ever be used again? Would the walls simply collapse over time, never needed, disappearing into the earth?

  When I checked my hand by the candlelight, I found the palm and fingers stained with blood, but the flow had already stopped. I debated whether to douse the candle. With a flame, I hazarded being seen, yet if I had no candle, I risked losing the route to town and wandering in the great whiteness, leaving erring prints of pattens until I collapsed and was frozen.

  Keep the lantern lit.

  With good light, my way to town was clear enough—no other path disturbed the snow—and I set off, rounding the house and moving slantwise toward my destination. The moon not being full, the ground was often shadowy and dark despite the dazzling starlight. I concluded to keep to the main cartway, and to slip and dodge about as needed once I passed the smooth expanse of Blanchard’s Pond and Pond Meadow. If I met a watchman, I would douse the candle. I would have to chance being challenged, shot at, or simply feared as a will-o’-the-wisp. But it was unlikely a watchman would go so far as to discharge his musket, for that would leave him with no means of firing again until he reloaded.

  Thoughts and decisions
flitted through my mind, and all the while I was washed by waves of sorrow because I had been scorned, unjustly accused, and must flee.

  “Bel,” I said, right out loud, though I had meant to be more quiet than the mice creeping in the mattress. My anger against her flashed like burning powder and died away. To hate her felt too simple.

  “Mehitabel Dane, you are a mystery,” I whispered to the stars and the hummocks of grass under the snow. “And perhaps more of a Holt than a Dane.”

  Would I ever understand why she had turned against me? I could think and think for years and maybe never understand. But I wished to know. Because I wanted to know everything about what it meant to be a woman—to be a human being wandering the face of the earth. And perhaps it was not a waste of time and spirit to try and fathom another and look as God looks, to see the alloy of dross and gold. What a fool’s paradise our friendship had proven to be!

  I stumbled on ice and thrust away the thought of Bel Dane and told myself that truth and sorrow were better companions than happy lies. My footing was unsure in the dark, even with the candle, with now and then a wrench to an ankle. So many dense or flittering shadows on snow, so many dips and rocks in the road! Never before was I glad to be well acquainted with the dark, unlike most of my kind, who are fearful of the least noise once the sun drops over the world’s brink. For I was forced to know that night is not as terrible as men and women fear, and that Satan is not its denizen—or at least makes no more of an appearance than by day. Less of one, I suppose, for his followers must sleep. Ill acts can occur in secrecy of gloom or by frank daylight.