I went back to the door and knelt down to listen. I could tell the cries were a woman’s. She had begun to cough. She had stopped crying but continued to cough badly while I waited for the key. I did not know what I would find on the other side of the door, but the girl, Eliza, was clearly afraid and ran back down the stairs the minute I put the key in the lock.
* * * *
She was so thin I barely recognized her. She had on a torn robe and her hair was straight and stringy and fell to her shoulders. She was perspiring badly, for the small attic room was hot and the air was fetid and so oppressive that it was difficult to move about. My head was stooped for I could not stand upright. I loosened my shirt immediately and stared at the huddled creature in the corner. She did not even lift her eyes as I entered. “Maebelle?” I said sadly. “Good God, Maebelle. Is it you?”
She swayed gently from side to side. I went to her, reaching out to touch her arm. Suddenly, she leaped out at me as the catamount had done when I walked as Ann Putnam.
“Bastard!” she screamed as she kicked my legs and ripped her nails down my face. “Bastard!” she wept and flung her arms at me furiously. Her eyes were wild as she struck me. I fought for her hands so that I could hold them down at her side. I jumped back as best as I could to avoid her rapid kicks as she attempted to hit me with the flat part of her foot.
I was able to hold her arms down and push my leg behind hers. I forced her to the floor. I sat over her and held her hands above her head. We were both breathing rapidly and I could feel poor Malcolm’s heart about to explode. Maebelle wiggled beneath me as though trying to escape my grasp but she was clearly weak. After a moment, she desisted all movement and lay there staring up at me. I wasn’t sure if it would be wise of me to let her go. I could feel the burn on my skin where she had scratched me and I felt the blood on my lips.
“Listen to me, Maebelle. I mean you no harm,” I whispered.
“Give me some!” she yelled at me. “Give it to me, now!” She ran her tongue over her mouth and her eyes seemed to disappear in the top of her head.
“Give you what?” I questioned. “What?” I leaned in close to her face and searched it.
“My medicine!” she screamed. “Let me drink it,” she said more softly. She began to writhe under me, screaming out again from the top of her voice.
I looked behind me to see if Catherine had followed me up the stairs but the door behind me had closed. “Catherine!” I yelled. I called her name several times before she finally appeared in the doorway. “Good God, help me!” I told her.
Catherine walked slowly to where I sat straddled over Maebelle’s body. She held a small pouch in her hand and what appeared to be a glass of brandy in her other. She knelt before me and held the pouch up and brushed my nose with it. Maebelle began to breathe heavily.
“Do something,” I said to Catherine.
Catherine opened the pouch and poured the tincture into the brandy. She turned the brandy glass around three times until the laudanum was made, and lifted Maebelle’s head to sip it.
“I know you prefer it in the pipe,” she said to me.
Maebelle finished everything in the glass and returned her head to the floor. I felt her body go limp, and I knew she would no longer fight me. I released my hands and got off her. I was breathing so deeply I thought I would faint. I sat Malcolm’s large body on the other side of the room and stared at Maebelle. She was smiling at me and had begun to hum softly. Catherine looked on as though she were thoroughly amused.
“How long has she been like this?” I asked her.
“For years, Father. Please. Don’t pretend you do not know that it was you who started her. It drove her quite mad. She will probably die because of it. Does that make you a murderer?”
I ignored her remark and turned my attention back to Maebelle. She appeared almost normal, now. She stood up and walked to a small table. She reached for a brush and began to move it through her hair until it became full and flowed from her face. We watched as she put it up in a chignon with small pins. When she was through she smiled at herself in the mirror. I looked on sadly. I remembered how she had once loved my son. She was the mother of my granddaughter. She was of my blood. She did not deserve to end here in an attic, locked away like an animal, loved by no one, living only for a drug that would eventually kill her.
I slowly came and stood behind her. I put my hands on her shoulders and looked at her image in the glass. “Very pretty,” I said quietly. “You look like a queen.”
Her face had altered so completely that I meant every word. I touched her hair softly and felt the tears fall to my cheeks. I reached up to brush the tears away and it was then I noticed that Maebelle had almost ceased to breathe and was staring back at me through the glass, as if I were a ghost.
“What is it, poor dear?” I asked her softly.
She bent her finger at me and beckoned my ear to her lips. As I bent down, I could feel Catherine stiffen behind me.
“Yes?” I asked.
“Who are you?” she whispered.
“It is Malcolm, your husband,” I said softly.
Maebelle laughed as she stood and took my hands. “Husband? Husband?” she said as she giggled and turned me around in a circle. “Why you’re a woman, and a very beautiful one, I might add.”
Maebelle had never had the sight. Whatever it was about the drug that had given it to her, I did not know, or care, but I knew she could see the real Annabel Horton as clearly as Emie and Meredith Mae.
“Leave us,” I said sharply to Catherine.
“Gladly,” said Catherine. “If you wish to spend your time with a madwoman, it is your affair. I shall finish my coffee in the parlor. You may join me when you’ve had enough of her ridiculous hallucinations.”
Once I heard Catherine’s steps on the stairs, I turned back to Maebelle. She had moved herself to a corner of the attic room and stared at me as though I were an apparition.
“I will not hurt you,” I said softly and reached for her hand. Slowly she let me lead her back to the vanity table. She stood on the tip of her toes and looked at my face.
“Were you always a woman?” she whispered and gently stroked my cheek.
“I am not really…Malcolm,” I told her.
She took a small pencil sketch that was encased in a leather frame from the table and showed it to me. “My son, Jed,” she said proudly. “He’s a priest.”
I looked at Jed and saw the same sweet face he had had as a boy. “Where is he a priest?”
She returned the picture to the table as she answered me. “France. Loudon, France,” she said.
“Loudon?” I whispered. I realized my suspicions might have some validity. “Has he friends there?”
“Just another young priest,” she said.
“Who? What priest?” I asked her quickly. I realized I had frightened her for she retreated a bit toward the wall. I walked to her slowly and smiled. “Do not be afraid. I will not harm you.”
“Who are you?” she asked me again.
“Annabel Horton,” I said. “Lost witch of Salem.”
She smiled then, and told me she could trace her family back to Salem.
“What priest did Jed know in France?” I asked her. “Was it Father Jacques?”
“Who is that?”
“Do you know Meredith Mae?” I asked her.
“Of course. My daughter. She died abroad.”
I wondered just how much Maebelle could really help me, for I assumed she had been locked away in this attic for years. I also feared the drug had deteriorated her mind to the point where reality was a fine line. Still, I needed answers. I walked to her and sat her near me on the small cot. I took her hand and held it in my own.
“I’m going to tell you a story, Maebelle. Would you like to hear it?”
She nodded like a small girl and nestled her head against my shoulder.
* * * *
I told her everything, because I thought she was insane enough to hea
r it—my childhood in Salem where I played by the open sea and ran in the fields between the farms to tease my brothers while they tilled the land—the accusations against me, trials by men made mad by their own deceptive virtues—and my death on Gallows Hill—I told her that I became a lost spirit and wandered for years claiming the flesh of those the devil favors. But it was not until I mentioned Matthew that she began to tell me her tale. She began in a whisper, but soon, she spoke clearly and with full voice. She wept as she relayed how Matthew had drowned in the Hudson River. She told me how much she had loved him and how desperately she had fought to win his heart. The memories she relayed were as clear to me as the face that I now beheld, though my vision was still murky and opaque, I could see her eyes and watch as her expressions changed.
* * * *
“Our baby…” she began.
“You never loved her,” I said softly, but without accusation.
“Yes,” she contradicted me, “I did. I saved Meredith Mae,” she whispered.
I remembered how easily she had given the child up to Patience, but I said nothing. She sat straight up and leaned her back against the wall. I could not see her face as she spoke, yet I heard her pain and did not let go of her hand.
Chapter Twenty-One
“I was foolish, but not so stupid or shallow that I did not know grief.” Maebelle turned sharply to me and stared at me so intently that I did not know whom she saw.
“Please go on,” I said as gently as I could.
“Matthew was my Orpheus. Matthew was my heart.”
She spoke more softly now.
“But it was not I he sought from Hades. It was never I he sought. Our marriage was arranged. He would not love me, except for one brief shining moment when he clutched me in the dark. He came to me in all his sweetness, with gentle strokes and such murmurs of affection.”
She turned her face to the wall and began to recite a poem. I knew it well. Matthew had loved it.
The dew of the morning sunk chill on my brow.
It felt like a warning of what I feel now.
“Lord Byron. Do you know it?” she asked me. “Matthew bored me incessantly with Lord Byron.”
I smiled and squeezed her hand. Matthew had recited the poem often, with his head back and his long legs stretched before the fire as he whispered the verse, his hands over his heart, tears welling up in his eyes, as if love were some destructive weapon and not our only glory. “Ghosts are too far distant,” I had told him. “Lost to perpetuity, Matthew.”
* * * *
I knew Maebelle was also remembering how he ached in his melancholy for nothing he could name.
“But he came to love me,” she said. “And in one of those sweet, ecstatic evenings he gave me my daughter, my Meredith Mae. He lost his sadness to this joy, the birth that we awaited. Matthew and I had created a life! I was no longer the dull and ignorant girl who worshipped him. I was a woman worthy of his heart. He loved me then. He honored me. Matthew Joshua Guyon loved and honored me.”
I knew the tears fell to her cheeks as they did to mine. I knew she brought her hand up and wiped the tears away. I let mine fall. She deserved to see them.
“Go on,” I said.
“But he must have found his muse buried in the river’s deep because he did not return to hold this gift of life to his heart.”
I sighed, as she said that, and brought her fingers to my lips.
“Is there a place in heaven where one can see the earth, I wonder? See the earth and share the sorrows of vulnerable love and the simple joys of mindless frivolity? Is it one and the same to the dead, or have they no tolerance for our defenseless hearts?”
She paused, as if she wanted me to answer her. When I didn’t speak up fast enough, she continued, though I would have told her that we are always defenseless, always vulnerable to love, which in the end is always more a thing of joy than of grief.
“My baby was born without a father. I gave her to the grandmother, Patience Guyon, Matthew’s mother. I ached to hold her and to love her. I was a coward. I couldn’t bear the grief. I couldn’t stand the pain. ‘Here,’ I said to that horrid Patience. ‘Take her.’ The woman hated me and was so pleased to receive the child. She loved her. She loved her as I loved her.”
My flesh burned as I remembered my distaste for Maebelle, my elitist opinions, the coldness of my own heart to accept so readily that she had not embraced Meredith Mae as I did, with my entire soul. I carefully squeezed her hand.
“I married quickly,” she said. “I married to escape what I could not control. Unquenchable sadness. A delirium of depression so deep I sought distraction. Malcolm came to me like a magnet, one so drawn to my need, so drawn to my despair. ‘Take this,’ he crooned in my ear and fed me the laudanum as if it were honey on my lips.”
She laughed so strangely then that it frightened me and I turned to look at her. She had closed her eyes and a strange smile appeared on her face. I touched her, as if to draw her back. I could not lose her now that she yearned to tell me so much.
“Maebelle,” I whispered. “Then what?”
“Who are you?” she screamed at me and released her hand.
“Annabel Horton. Lost witch, as lost as you. I am not Malcolm. Please, go on. Go on,” I pleaded passionately as I reached back for her hand.
I watched as her eyes glazed over but she began to speak again. I noticed that she now spoke much more rapidly and her voice had taken on a raspy quality.
“Oh, how soothed I became in my delirium, in my obsession, and how Malcolm fed upon my grief until I could face the morning sun and smile on my neighbors, as if my heart were unimpaired. I would have taken the child back then, though Patience had lost so much as well, two husbands, a son. And I was unsure of my own strength. I married Malcolm, not out of love. It was for need. I sought his presence at my side so that I might hold my head up in society and feel approved. Married and approved. And, of course, there was the laudanum, my embrace with heaven. How else could I maintain such total delirium if not for the laudanum that Malcolm fed me as if I were a child on medication? I welcomed it.”
She seemed to fade away from me again and I spoke up quickly. “And after? What happened after you married, Maebelle?”
She opened her eyes and looked at me inquisitively. “Annabel?” she whispered.
“Yes, yes.” I cried. “A friend, finally now, a friend.”
She put her head back on my shoulders as she continued.
“It was a few years later that Malcolm began to insist we take back Meredith Mae. All of a sudden. Just like that. Ah ha! I couldn’t imagine why Malcolm Northrup would want this child of my prior marriage when it was only at the age of three or four years that he showed any interest in her at all. However, I refused to take her from Patience at this point, and we argued often. I told him that if we left the child with Patience, Meredith Mae would inherit her fortune. Then he said, ‘Fine, then let’s take her weekends.’ He didn’t love the child. I had given him three of his own. His interest confused and unsettled me.”
I took my other hand and brought it over my chest so that it rested upon her arm. “Did you ever discover why he wanted Meredith Mae to return to your home?”
“Oh yes,” she sighed. “Yes, I did. I sensed it from the beginning, though I dared not think it.”
I let out a long breath. I loved her so completely for protecting my Meredith Mae from Malcolm that I began to weep openly.
I felt the small pressure of her fingers on mine as if offering me the comfort I owed her.
“There were sacrifices,” she told me then. “You see, I had no more love to give after I gave my child to Patience. Three children I had with Malcolm. I sacrificed each of them.”
“What do you mean?”
“My son to God, Catherine to the devil, and Beth Ann to sin, to sin and contrition.”
“Contrition?” I asked with a smile.
She began to cry. She freed herself from me and stood from the bed. “Yes
, contrition!” She screamed at me. “Contrition!”
I held out my hand to her. “Please. Sit by my side. Let me comfort you.”
She was weeping uncontrollably and fell to her knees. I slid from the bed to the floor beside her. I put my arms around her until the crying ceased. Gently, I led her back to the cot, but we sat on the edge this time and she put her head on my arm.
“Beth Ann was only a child. A child. He never wanted Catherine, of course. ‘She is ugly,’ he would laugh. ‘She will need a fat dowry to win a husband,’ he would tell me over dinner. Only Beth Ann was worthy. Not beautiful, like Meredith Mae, but worthy enough. Beth Ann, who adored him.”
She spoke so quickly, as if she wanted to tell me everything and in the telling erase the tale. Her voice retained that scratchy quality, as if it pained her to talk. I listened, though my heart was sick to hear it.
“The old man, Ebenezer, would come and they would follow each other while I sat at the table. ‘Say Malcolm is a good man one hundred times,’ he would tell me. And I would sit there and say it while the child bathed. The child bathed, and the old man Ebenezer went upstairs, into the bath, while Malcolm fed me my laudanum. The old man would stay in there for a long time, a very long time. Then, out he would come, back into the kitchen with his mouth set tight and tell Malcolm to dry Beth Ann, and Malcolm would go upstairs and dry the child while I sat in my delirium. The old man slept in the chair after smoking his pipe. I knew what they did to my daughter, and I could not fight against this monstrosity. Take my soul, Annabel, witch that you are. Lay it at Satan’s door. Take my soul, for God will never have me.”
With this admission, she wailed out so deeply that Catherine heard the cries. I could hear her footsteps coming quickly up the stairs. But Maebelle would not be stilled.
“And the child would come from the bath with such haunting in her eyes. I took more of the laudanum. I turned my face away from my daughter’s eyes. Good God. They put her on her knees in the corner and told her to pray. To pray as if it were she that had sinned, to ask God to forgive her. For what? For being innocent? Oh, how I hated him. How I hated him. He saw the hate, saw it on my face and he would lean in close. ‘Malcolm is a good man. Say it one hundred times while the little whore prays, one hundred times. Malcolm is a good man. Malcolm is a good man.’”
Annabel Horton, Lost Witch of Salem Page 15