by Megan Chance
“No, thank you, ma’am,” Mary said. Her voice was polite but frosty. She pulled the bodice from the folds of her cloak and laid it on the table. It was bundled and wrapped far more neatly than when I’d brought it to her crumpled into a ball. “I’ve come to return this.”
“Ah, yes, the bodice,” Susannah said, as if she’d forgotten all about it. She lifted it and unfolded it onto the table, and I was startled at how lifeless and ordinary it looked in her hands—as plain as the sad-colored one I wore now. There was no light dancing across the silky fabric, no shine to its nap. In the candlelight, the red looked dull and dark—there was nothing special about it at all.
I glanced at Mary and wondered if she was thinking what I was: It had cost us far more than it was worth. Her expression was sullen; I saw the way she watched Susannah spread out the sleeves and finger the cloth, looking for damage or soil.
“I didn’t hurt it. I was as careful as if it were mine,” Mary said.
“But it was not yours, was it?” Susannah folded the bodice again and left it there.
“No, ma’am. ’Twas wrong to take it.”
“And wrong to involve Charity as well.”
Mary glanced at me. I said, “I took it of my own free will. ’Twas my choice.”
Susannah ignored me. She kept her gaze on Mary. “I’ve decided there’s no harm done this time. The bodice seems in good condition; ’twas gone less than a day. But I trust this will not happen again.”
“No, ma’am,” Mary said, but insolently this time. Susannah stared at my friend with that thoughtful gaze.
“You’re a pretty girl, Mary,” she said. “What makes you think you need a bodice such as this to catch a boy’s attention?” She smiled after she said it, and her tone was close and friendly, the kind that made one want to share secrets.
But Mary was not me. Mary was not so easily tricked. I saw her jaw clench. “I was foolish, ’twas all.”
Susannah nodded. “Aye. Well, a word of advice, Mary, from one who knows. The next time, try your wiles on the village boys, not grown men. You might be more successful.”
“I was successful enough until you happened by. You could have any man in the village. Why must you choose the one I want?”
“The one you want?” Susannah laughed. “Child, you mistake me.”
Mary’s eyes narrowed. “Do I? Do I really?”
“Where’s your mother, that she’s not helping you choose a proper suitor?”
“She’s dead.”
“Well, if she were here, she would tell you as I do: Tend your business close to your home, and you won’t be disappointed.”
Mary snapped her mouth shut. I felt sorry for the next person she met on her way home. She fairly glowered at Susannah. “May I go now?”
My aunt hesitated; then she sighed and waved Mary away. “Aye. Go on. Show your friend to the door, Charity, won’t you? You’ve something to say to her anyway, I think.”
I knew what she meant; she wanted me to tell Mary I could not see her anymore. I had no intention of doing any such thing, but I hurried after Mary, who stalked to the door without waiting. When she slipped outside, I followed after, shutting the door carefully behind me.
It was freezing. I had on nothing but my dress, and the wind cut through to my skin and blew the wet snow into my face. Quickly I backed again into the mean shelter of the doorway and rubbed my hands up and down my arms to keep warm.
Mary turned so quickly to face me that her cloak flew out around her legs like wings, scattering snowflakes. Her eyes were like sparks.
“I see what you mean about her, Charity,” she said. “She’s a demon.”
“I told you.”
“Did you hear what she said to me? As if I were a child! ‘Tend your business close to your home,’” she mocked. “Who does she think she is to say such things to me? What makes her so righteous?”
“’Tis what I’ve been saying.”
“Did you see the way Robert looked at her yesterday? His eyes nearly popped from his head! Once she left, he hadn’t a single glance to spare for me. Not one! Before she came, he’d been looking at me as if I were a tankard of beer and he was like to die of thirst.”
“I saw it,” I said, freezing, rubbing my arms harder.
“You cannot tell me she doesn’t want him too. He’s the most eligible man in the village.” Mary paced, stamping down the thin layer of snow to the frozen dirt beneath. “She plans to steal him from me!”
“How can you be sure of that, Mary?”
“She does!” she spat at me. “And even if she didn’t, she humiliated me in front of him! She’ll pay for that, I promise it.”
“She’s clever, Mary. You won’t be able to take your revenge by setting loose a cow in a garden.”
Mary had been moving in circles like a crazed thing, but now she stopped, and there was a bitter smile on her face. It froze me colder than the snow or the wind. It seemed to cut right through me.
I stopped my rubbing. “What? What is it?”
“The spells,” she said.
“What spells?”
“The ones we’ve been doing at the parsonage.”
“What about them?”
“Tituba calls them our English tricks. ‘English tricks,’ she says. ‘You won’t get no spirits with them.’“
Such talk made me nervous. “So?”
“So Betsey told us the other day that Tituba could see the future. That sometimes, when she stared into a bowl of water, the things she saw came true.”
“You mean she’s a cunning woman?”
“More than a cunning woman, I should think.” Mary came close to me, close enough that I could see the golden flecks in her hazel eyes. “Abigail says she knows things. Real spells.”
“Tricks.”
“No. Spells, Charity. Like how to bring animals ailing, or to curse—”
“No.” I recoiled. “’Tis asking the Devil for help against himself.”
“Don’t be absurd. ’Tis nothing of the kind.”
The snow was swirling beyond her, flakes falling onto her shoulders, into my face. I said, “There has to be another way.”
Mary shook her head. “It took her less than an hour to read my heart and wrench it from me. How long do you think it will be before she reads yours, hmm? Do you think she will hesitate to tell your father about you and Sammy?”
Mary’s words hit hard. This morning unfolded before me again, Susannah’s questions, that knowledge in her eyes. What do you know about this, Charity? Who is Samuel Trask? My own desperation rose with the fury in Mary’s eyes. The shadows in my head crowded ever closer.
“What do we do?” I whispered.
Mary smiled. In the pale whiteness of the snow, she was a black shadow. “We ask Tituba.”
Chapter 12
MY FATHER HAD BEEN WRONG ABOUT THE SNOW. IT DID NOT LET UP that day, or the next, and the heavy white flakes grew lighter and drier, the weather colder, so there was a thick film of ice on the windows, both inside and out. The heat from the fireplace escaped out the chimney and barely touched the room beyond the first few feet. The only warm place was just before the hearth, but to stand in front of it meant a burning face and a freezing backside, so there was no truly comfortable place to be but in a thick feather bed.
The snow kept us prisoners in our own house; we could not go outside. So I began the spinning. My mother had taught me well; I could spin a thread as fine as most of the matrons in the village. Until this winter, I had never minded the chore. There was something peaceful about spinning, about watching the spindle and the wheel turning round. Last year, my mind had been full of daydreams as I’d worked. The wind howling past the house had been the whisper of Sammy’s voice, my steps those of a courting dance. I had no memory of cold air or numb hands—I had been warmed by thoughts of love.
But now I knew those thoughts for what they were: sinful temptations borne by the Devil, and the big wool wheel only reminded me of all the things I
’d done. Still, ’twas a task that allowed me to stand in the same room as Susannah, to study her with Jude while pretending to concentrate on the spinning. I set myself to work, and beside me, the window glimmered with the light of winter snow. At first, I did watch Susannah, but ’twas so quiet and so uneventful, that soon I found myself staring blankly at the wheel again, at the spindle and the thin, taut stretch of wool as it quivered into yarn.
When I heard the laughing, I thought at first ’twas only the hum of the wheel. Then it grew louder and louder, and I looked up, startled to see Susannah before me, wearing the red bodice and laughing. She reached out for me, and I tried to back away and could not move; ’twas as if I were frozen there. In desperation, I glanced toward the window, and there I saw my mother, her face pressed against the pane, her eyes wide, and I saw the black man beside her, holding her tight.
I was suffocating, and the trees crowded in my head, blocking out sound and light. I dropped the wool, grabbing at my throat—
Something clattered, loud and hard, and suddenly the Susannah before me melted away like heat vapors on a summer day. My vision cleared; I could breathe again. I realized in a single moment that Susannah had dropped the wooden peel, and that she was standing at the hearth wearing a mossy green bodice and a brown skirt the color of dead leaves. Not red, not that wicked red bodice. She had not moved from that place.
I glanced slowly at the window, afraid of what I might see. If Mama’s specter had been there, it was gone now, and there was no sign it had been present. There was no man so black that light could not touch him. Nothing but the white of snow beyond the glass, cut by the diamond panes into wavering patterns.
I stumbled out of the room and hurried upstairs, desperate to be away.
Once I was in the room that we used for storage, I sat on a powdering tub with my back against the corner and stared out at the room, at bushels of oats and rye and peas and a bundle of dried codfish hanging from the wall. I longed to restore the ordinariness of my life. I longed to be just a village girl with a mother and father who loved her.
Instead, I saw again the vision of Susannah, of my mother’s torment, and I began to shake. Tears moved into my throat and settled there, and soon they formed into a lump I could not swallow. I put my head in my hands and prayed to God for a way out of this, a way to save myself from the Devil, a way to cast him from my family.
What came to me then were Mary’s words. We ask Tituba.
I could not go to the parsonage that day nor the next. The snow piled over the pathway and inched up the foundation of the house. The winter world was barren, set in black and white, but I had always found it less frightening than summer, with its leaves filling out the woods in thick lushness, creating darkness and shadows, the mugginess that gave the air solidity and presence. In the summer, it was easy to believe in demons—they, too, liked the warmer air.
Winter was not like that. True, the darkness came early and stayed long, and the nights were bleaker. But there was no temptation to open the windows to let in the cooling vapors—or the night humors that came with them—it was too cold for that. Already chilblains had started to develop on my toes and fingers. I could bear the cold if it meant that there would be snow to take away the shadows and open the world.
But it did not feel so open in the close press of the house, and with all the snow, there was no place to escape. I had offered to help my father in the barn, and he said ’twas no job for a well-bred girl and that Susannah needed my help in the house. So I did as he wished, and with each chore she assigned me, I grew to hate my aunt more; with each moment in her company, I grew more afraid. By the time a week had passed, I found myself longing for the snow to stop. In every shadow, I saw again the vision of her laughing. At every window, I imagined the press of my mother’s face, her desperate eyes.
The morning I woke up to find the sky clear and blue, and the white glittering on the ground like starlight, I could barely contain my relief. I did not know if Mary or the others would be at the parsonage—Mary and Mercy would have to walk nearly two miles in the snow to get there—but I did not care. Abigail would be there to take me to Tituba. I prayed the parson would not be home. Surely, on the first clear day after a snow, he would have some good works to see to?
It was no easy matter for me to get out. The snow was piled against the door, tramped down only in a thin path from the house to the barn so that Father could work in the bitter cold and I could milk Buttercup. That morning, my father decided ’twould be best to clear it away completely and spent two hours widening the pathway. It was impossible to get away while he was at the door, and the morning was too busy for me to attempt it anyway, because Susannah had decided to clean the house while she could get in and out.
It wasn’t until after dinner, when we were clearing away the trenchers, and I was growing desperate trying to find a way to escape, that there was a knock on the door. It was Goody Penney, bearing Faith, come for a visit—the delight on my aunt’s face when she looked at my little sister made me heartsick. So I lied. Father was in the barn; I told Susannah that he’d asked me to take something into the village for him, and she was too distracted by Goody Penney and the baby to question it. I had my cloak on and was out the door before she had time to remember to ask me anything, and I ran the first half mile in the stinging cold, slipping and sliding over the icy road, because I was afraid she would run after me.
It was far colder than I’d thought. The air seared my lungs, and my breath came in fast, frosty clouds. My cloak was not thick enough to protect me, and my boots too thin, and I was shivering and so cold I could not feel my fingers or my toes by the time I reached the village and the parsonage. I knocked on the door hard. There was no sound, no movement, and I crumpled in tears on the doorstep when I thought that perhaps no one was home. But then I heard footsteps, and the door creaked open to reveal the dark face of a man—John Indian, Tituba’s husband, and another slave to the Parrises. When he saw me, he smiled, big and broad, flashing white teeth, and said in his heavy Island accent, “Ah, you girls, you watch each other? Be that how you know?”
I stared at him in confusion, and he smiled again and stepped back to let me in.
“They all be here too,” he explained. “The first day after a snow, and bam! you cannot wait to try out the demon spells.”
I looked beyond his big form and saw the others in the hall—Mary and Mercy Lewis, Mary Warren, Betty, Abigail, and little Betsey. And there was someone else there too, a thin blond girl who was too tall for her age. Annie Putnam.
I ignored John Indian and went inside, taking off my cloak as I went. The room was warm because of all the bodies, and the fire was built up high so that flames were shooting up the chimney. The crane, with its hanging pots, had been swung out onto the hearth. In front of it stood Tituba, rubbing her hands over her arms as if she were cold, while the little Parris boy played with a jar of buttons beside her.
Mary looked up as I came inside and gave me a smile that warmed me. “Come over, Charity,” she said, motioning to me, and then she gave me a knowing look, and glanced toward Tituba as if to tell me we were together in this. ’Twas a relief to know I was not in this alone, that I was not Susannah’s only enemy.
Annie Putnam was sitting beside Mary. She looked slyly up at me. With her pale blond hair, she had always been a pretty child, but there was a delicacy about her now that was faintly unhealthy. Her skin was too pale; there were dark circles beneath her eyes.
“Mercy brought Annie,” Mary told me. “She’s threatened to tell her father if we didn’t. Isn’t that right, you little angel?” She smiled thinly at Annie and pinched her arm so the girl jumped and squealed.
“She’s been having bad dreams,” Mercy explained. “She thinks she can see the dead.”
Mary snorted. “It’s her mama who believes that.”
“Mama worries about my aunt and her three babies,” Annie said to me with the greatest solemnity. “They torment her at night.�
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The whole village knew the story. Annie’s aunt had died soon after moving to Salem Village, with each of her three children dying quickly after. My mother used to say that the elder Ann Putnam had never truly recovered from those deaths, and that they tormented her to illness, even though she had six children of her own to help ease her grief.
Mercy went on explaining. “She wants to talk to the dead.”
Little Betsey Parris started at this, and her big blue eyes grew wide and frightened. “Talk to the dead? But ’tis a sin! We aren’t going to talk to the dead, are we?”
“We don’t know how, you silly goose,” Abigail said. “We need Tituba for that. You’ve said she can do it, haven’t you, John Indian?”
I had not seen John slinking into the hall, but suddenly there he was, standing beside me, his big bulk smelling of hay and livestock and sweat. “Aye, you little sly one, she can do it.”
“You shut your mouth, Mr. John,” Tituba called from the fire. “I told these children there won’t be no talking to the Devil today.”
“But ’tis why I’ve come!” Annie protested.
“You don’t mean it, do you, Titibee?” Betsey asked. She was near tears, she was so frightened. “You can’t really talk to the dead?”
Tituba turned from the fire and smiled reassuringly. “Don’t you worry, little one. You got nothing to fear.”
I noticed that she did not deny it, and I shivered at the thought, but then I caught Mary’s gaze and saw the smile on her face. I knew what she was thinking: If Tituba could talk to the dead, she could surely curse the living. I felt suddenly light-headed.
“Please, shall we continue?” Betty asked. She was at the end of the table, kneeling on the bench so she could see better into the bowl of water set there. “I’ve bought an hour, but then I shall have to be getting back.”
Abigail nodded. “Ask the question first.”
John Indian laughed and walked away, shaking his head. Tituba said, “You go on, laughing man, there be plenty enough for you to do.” He eased by her on his way out the door, setting his big hand against her hip for a moment until she swatted him away.