Jeremy grabbed hold of her and held her until she calmed. “You read my mind,” Jeremy said in her ear.
“One day, Serena will know your mind entirely,” said Francis, his eyes glazing over. “And you hers.”
“I could not wish for more.”
“There’s news that a mine up at Will’s Hill had yet another cave in. Killed two men, maimed another for life, and Thomas Putnam, part owner in the venture escaped with a twisted ankle this time ’round.”
More small talk, Jeremy wondered, or did Francis mean to keep him informed?
Then Francis added, “I’d noticed Putnam’s limp when he and the others took my Rebecca, and I’d silently asked God why he’d not taken Thomas Putnam instead of those boys in that useless mine?”
“God would not have so vile a man!” Serena shouted. “And Parris will learn it one day, too.” Serena paced the porch. “What’s taking Ben and the others so long to get here?”
“We’d hoped you two would not come back,” said Francis, finding a seat. “Hoped you’d remain in Boston at safe distance, Serena.”
“It became untenable,” Jeremy replied, holding Serena’s hands in his, “despite our wishes.”
“So, getting to it, Jeremiah, what success had you in Boston?”
“Little, I fear . . . very little.”
“Little?” Serena gave him an angry scowl.
“I mean aside from our marrying, of course.”
Francis nodded, impatient. “Of course, but did you speak to the magistrates there? The ministers? Mather?”
“They all left Boston before I had an audience.”
“I have heard rumor they are in Salem, the magistrates, but what of Mather?”
“Reverned Cotton Mather,” said Serena through clenched teeth, “may or may not be in Salem; no one seems to know, but rumor has it he’s come to investigate matters personally—or so it’s rumored.”
“Rumored?” asked Francis. “Jeremy, did he tell you this or not?”
Jeremy exchanged a glance with Serena. “A news pamphlet I worked for said it was so.”
“Yes, but did he relate the same to you personally?”
“Tell Father, Jeremy. Tell him!”
“Mather refused to see me.” Jeremy deflated with the confession, finding a seat.
“What? But I thought you two were—”
“One day too busy with colonial affairs,” put in Serena.
“The next he ill and abed, and seeing no one.”
“Hiding, he is,” she grimly said, “like our Governor Phipps.”
The old man considered this news for some time. Once it’d sunk in, he said, “Likely Mather, and perhaps Phipps himself, will follow the others here.”
“The Boston authorities paraded into the village two days ago.”
“Paraded, sir?” asked Jeremy.
“Sir William Stoughton, Sewell, Saltonstall, and Addington.”
“All here, now?”
“Yes, now.”
“Then perhaps they did get my appeals. I’d tried to see them all in turn while in Boston, but was told one after the other was gone. I’d assumed they were simply shunning me like Mather. Well, this is wonderful news! These are men of learning. They’ll put a stop to this nonsense.”
“They’ve done nothing so far.”
“It may take time, but these are intelligent men—Harvard graduates all.”
Francis remained skeptical. “Intelligence is no guarantee of integrity, Jeremy.”
“What’re you saying?”
“Saying that my wife’s arrest warrant came a day after their arrival.”
“Their names on the warrant?” Jeremy stared into the old man’s eyes. “Tell me, were their names on—”
“Like you said, they are smart fellows, so no, they do not attach their names to the warrants.”
“They leave it to Corwin and Hathorne, eh?”
“They do. They’re clever men.”
Jeremy tried to absorb this veiled accusation coming from Francis Nurse. “But Francis, surely the Boston judges did not come here to see Mother Nurse placed in shackles.” Jeremy did not believe them capable of this.”
“They have their own motives. Say they are here to establish order, but they’ve only made things worse.”
“How are you so sure?”
“They’re suing for our property as well.”
“What?” Serena shouted. “They’re not even concealing their motives?”
“They’re saying the original deed was in Rebecca’s hands, which is true. It’d been a land grant given her father, Towne, divided among his three daughters, Rebecca the eldest. When we married, Rebecca’s third share of the deed was changed over in my name.”
Jeremy’s eyes had widened at this, his grimace made of anger and confusion.
“Trying to take our land, just as Jeremy predicted,” said Serena.
“They want the entire place, all three shares,” said Jeremy, “which means they will also be coming for your aunts, Serena.”
“Everything we’ve built.” She dropped her gaze and fought back more tears.
“Tell me, Mr. Nurse, sir, were the Boston justices’ names on the suit?”
“No, no! As I’ve said, they’re not fools.”
“Then how do you know they’re behind this?” pressed Jeremy, hoping against hope that Francis was wrong about the justices of the highest court in the land.
“I’ve talked to Higginson and Hale, who both assure me that the judges—all of them—have sided with Parris.”
“All this effected in a matter of days.”
“In our absence,” lamented Serena.
“I can hardly believe it.”
“And why not, Jeremy?” Serena scolded him.
Francis put up a hand to the young ones. “Jeremy, they’re out to supplant the issue of Andros with the frightful issue of—”
“Witchcraft, of course.”
“There is an election coming on, and they are political animals, whatever else they might be called.”
Jeremy swallowed hard as if it hurt to do so. “I should’ve seen this coming.”
“Why? No one else did. Williard passed me the suit papers on the heels of the warrant for Rebecca’s arrest. Their names aren’t on it, no, but their stamp of approval certainly is. They mean to call it Towne land by her being a Towne, and that it’s a disgrace that a government granted land parcel has fallen into the hands of a so-called witch and an old seaman.”
“A scheme that gets Parris and Putnam what they want,” sputtered Serena, her anger rising.
“Access to our acres, the rivers, the timber.” Francis sighed heavily. “I’d give it all for Rebecca, all of it.”
“Have we any other choice, Father? No!”
Jeremy nodded. “They also mean to give the villagers the blood of witches.’
“The land,” muttered Francis. “What they’ve squabbled about since the day I married Rebecca.”
Jeremiah shook his head in disbelief, even as he asked himself, What’s not to believe? “What plans have you? Any?”
“John Proctor’s wife’s been arrested too, and John’s ranted and publicly attacked the ministers and magistrates for their—how’d he say it? Idiocy. I’ve had to calm John as there’s a good chance he could be arrested next, and I need him beside me.”
“Proctor runs a lumber mill, right?”
“He does, and it’s as attractive as Corey’s grain mill, and like I said, Mrs. Corey’s been jailed as a witch, made to implicate her husband, and he is on the run.”
“I begin to see the pattern.”
“Good! But you and I are in the minority. Others see it as God’s will be done at last. Those who’ve long been our enemies in that cursed village yonder!” His hand flew up, a flourish in the general direction of the village.
Jeremy fingered his empty cup. “So what are you doing next, sir?”
“Every legal means I have, I am taking. I’ve a petition got up, an
d many have willingly signed, giving witness to Rebecca’s goodness, her life, and devotion to God.”
“Has it had any effect?”
“None, but I keep trying to get it into Stoughton’s hands.”
“I see. But lately that has become a near impossible task. I still have that copy of Parris sermon on me.”
“Can’t get it past Hathorne. He and Corwin’ve become the front men here for people like myself who might be an annoyance.”
“So, you’ve joined me as an annoyance?”
“We’re in the minority, Jeremy,” he repeated. “And it is an extreme minority, growing smaller each day.”
“Fear will do that to people,” said Serena. “Where do we go to get Mother back? What do we need to sign?”
“Wish it were that easy, my girl.”
“We must regain Mother at any cost!”
“Don’t you hear me, child? Your mother will not hear of being traded for a single acre!”
“You are the head of the household, the man here, Father, and you have a duty to override her wishes!” The argument had grown heated.
“So, what would you have me do? Break my promises to her? It’s a mistake, your coming back here, you two! You make me more vulnerable than ever. Jeremy, you must please take Serena as far from Salem as you possibly can.”
“Take Serena away from here?” She snapped at her father. “I am not some bundle of hay to be carted off at the first sign of trouble. No, we’re here to help, not to run!”
Serena marched noisily about the porch, collecting their empty ale cups, and she put one foot indoors, going to refills when she stopped in the doorway, “What kind of daughter do you think you raised?”
“It’s what your mother wants—her final wish of us, she calls it; it’s why she sent you to Boston in the first place.”
“I’m here to fight for her,” said Jeremy.
“And so am I,” added Serena. “To get her out of that hole they’ve thrown her into, Father!”
“The two of you will be sucked into this and arrested, and where will that leave any of us!”
“Not if we work cautiously,” countered Jeremy.
“Caution does no good against the kind of insanity in the village.”
Jeremy thought of the scene in the apothecary where Mary Wolcott had ‘danced’ with the devil. “I suspect you’re right, but we can’t just walk away from this, not now, not with Mother Nurse’s life in the balance.”
“Sign the petition and go. It’s all you can accomplish.”
“I intend to talk to the justices from Boston,” countered Jeremy, and to locate Cotton Mather if he is indeed in Salem.
“Questioning them and their methods can only bring down this hell on you and Serena, Jeremy.”
“We’re going nowhere, Father.” Serena’s tone put an end to it. “I’ll make us all some breakfast. It’s far too early for all this drinkin’ you two are doing.” She disappeared inside, the ale cups in her hands clanking.
“Sounds just like her mother,” Francis said with a slight mirth.
“Where’s that petition?”
“Circulating. Ben’s been hell-bent to go down to the village with guns to take Mother by force. He’ll get himself killed, that boy.”
“But you managed to get his attention and put him to work on the petition?”
“Precisely.”
Jeremy stood over the old man now and placed his hands on the stooped shoulders. “I am terribly sorry that this horrible business has come to your doorstep, sir, in this time of your lives, you and Mother Nurse.” In the winter of your lives.
Francis, a tear coming to his eye, patted Jeremy’s left hand with his right where it rested. “If I thought you were capable of it, I’d press you to get my daughter from here, Jeremy.”
“She has a mind of her own.”
“When those madmen fail to get a confession of witchcraft and murder from my Rebecca, and I know they will not, what befalls this family next? They will arrest her sisters, and when that fails.” He glanced over his shoulder to determine if Serena was still nearby. “When that fails, they will come for my children in their effort to get me to agree to their demands.”
“I think you have the lay of their scheme, sir.”
“Then you must get Serena away. You must convince her. You two must stay above the fray at all cost.”
“I will do all in my power to protect your daughter, sir. I love her as you love her, as you love Rebecca.
Chapter Eight
Across the land stretching to the village, at the Thomas Putnam home, Mrs. Putnam, Anne Carr, was trying desperately to find sleep—alone again—and again listening to the voice of her dead brother, Henry.
“I killed myself for her, because of you, Anne,” Henry’s voice held no emotion despite the terrible words he’d left her with on his deathbed that night twenty years ago. Why now? Why return to me now, all these years later? She could not fathom it—unless he meant to warn her of impending doom. Why does he put images of us as children in our father’s house in Salisbury into my head?
“The girl was a witch, Henry!” she shouted at his ghost now again as she had so many years before. “She’d’ve used you up! A witch! And she never loved you, Henry, not like I did.”
She saw snatches of their incestuous affair, images he pressed upon her mind with his renewed vigor and presence here today. Now little Anne up in the loft had been caught doing much the same with the servant girl. Perhaps it ran in the blood, this awful sin of sins. She’d finally convinced Thomas to remove the offending Mercy Lewis from their home despite her daughters rantings and pleadings that she keep Mercy, that Mercy was more ‘mother’ to her than she!
It only sealed the need, her saying that to her own mother. So Mercy was gone, sent off now to the home of Bridget Bishop, and there Mercy had, if rumor were true, fallen into another of her newfound fits and had in a vision seen where that Bishop woman kept her voodoo dolls—dolls stuck full with pins.
The authorities had ransacked Bishop’s Inn and had found the witchcraft makings jammed behind some loose bricks at the hearth in the basement. Exactly where Mercy had sworn they’d be. Thomas had confided the story the night before, and he added how proud he was of Mercy, and that Mercy was heroic to do as he and Reverend Parris had asked—to go into that witch’s lair to unmask her. Bishop was now back in a cell where she belonged. Imagine a woman running a road house like that.
“You were a weak boy, Henry,” she said to the specter standing at the foot of her bed now—not really standing but floating there. In morning light, a shaft of it bathing him in brilliant jeweled life like nothing she’d seen before—as his visits had always been in dead of night before, but now he was being damned insistent, saying, “Anne . . . a-and you were cruel.”
“And you a feeble excuse for a man, like Thomas now! Damn you, I had no hand in your dying. I-I—”
“Death by broken heart, Anne.” She heard his voice inside her head, as if behind her, whispering in her ear. Yet his shape remained in the shaft of light at the foot of the bed.
“Nonsense. You fell sick of the fever.”
“Broken spirit.”
“Nonsense.”
She felt his weight on the bed now, as if a cat had leapt onto it, and the feel of it crept up alongside her, and she shivered. She denied any guilt in her brother’s end. “That Martin girl is still a witch, an old one now, and she give you not one thought! Not like I do!”
“You’re the real witch,” came Henry Carr’s ghostly reply like a whisper of smoke. Coils of his breath wended their way into her ear, just how she’d taught him to lick there. His breath and odor filled the corridors of her mind in search of a home.
“Get out of my head and my bed!” she screamed but somehow her scream came out dull and trapped in her throat.
“I starved myself near to death for her love, not for yours.” She felt him spooned against her body now. “Hung myself for our sins, sister.”
“You mean for you.”
“I loved you.”
Then he was gone. It was all she ever needed to say to Henry’s spectral form to have him leave, to say three simple words—I love you.
Had Thomas been in bed beside her, Henry wouldn’t’ve come, and she’d’ve been safe from yet another visit, but her husband had that fool venture with Bray Wilkins going on again. So he’d taken his cane and bad ankle up that way tonight, despite her pleas. She’d long ago confessed her nightmares were more than mere dream, that her brother Henry paid her regular visits saying the same thing over and over.
Half awake and relieved with Henry’s departure, Mrs. Putnam tried to sleep on a bit more. However, she continued with some difficulty as her breath would catch, and her body would go stiff. So stiff that breathing came hard, and this would simulate death, and she’d find her mind and body inside a coffin, and from within she’d be screaming, “But I’m alive! I’m not dead! You can’t bury me!” She’d scream this at the top of her lungs with no result. No one could hear, and no one came to dig her out.
Then the odors would fill her lungs. Choking, pressing odors of earth and earth worms, spiders, centipedes, vermin, all coming into the coffin with her, sniffing her, and crawling all over, until she screamed even louder.
It was Henry’s doing. Whatever he posited in her ear with his breath brought on the night horrors, until her shakes and screams would finally awaken Thomas, who’d shake her into consciousness and raise her from the coffin and the abyss—but Thomas was tired of the night work, and he was not here now!
She sat bolt upright this time, stiff and sweating from her struggle to regain reality without Thomas’ help or Anne’s help or Mercy’s help. At one time or another all three had shoved, pulled, pushed, hit and screamed at her to awaken her from the night terrors.
Something always crawled into the coffin bed with her, something sitting on her chest, a succubae or incubi, some demon from Hades sure . . . sitting there and stealing her breath, and hoping it could take all of the breath of life she possessed. The creature of night had stayed over in the light. Damn fearless of Henry. Much more courageous as a spirit than he had been in this world. And now he was haunting her daughter as well.
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