The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

by Katherine Howe

  Sam shrugged, shaking out the second match. “I don’t know what the symbolism means, but as far as I can tell, it’s meant to be a charm. To ward off evil.”

  “Evil, huh,” Connie said.

  “I’m just saying. It’s totally possible that someone was practicing magic then. If the idea of witchcraft existed, someone was bound to give it a try. People are people, after all, even Puritans. This carving clearly meant something, to someone. There was something in this town to be afraid of.” He looked closely at her. “This was not just academic to them; it was real life. And real life had real terrors.”

  Connie brushed her fingertips against the shallow nicks on the granite marker, entranced by what Sam was saying. Of course his argument made sense. But everything that she had read insisted that witchcraft was just a stand-in for other things: the irrational social tool of a pre-Enlightenment world, used to displace fear of the unknown onto vulnerable members of society. A thrill rushed through her as her hand lingered on the face of the stone. Magic was not just a stand-in, not just some psychoanalytic category to explain away a world without apparent cause and effect. To some of the colonists, magic was real. The idea made her catch her breath. Here was tangible, touchable proof, buried in a compost heap for over two hundred years.

  She was about to reply, when a distant voice called out “Is someone there?” from the back door of the house. Connie and Sam looked at each other, mouths open in surprise. “I told you!” she whispered, smacking him on the chest. He spread his hands out in a gesture of innocence, shrugging, as if to say What can I say? Then he caught her by the hand, and gasping and laughing, they started to run.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Salem, Massachusetts

  Mid-June

  1991

  CONNIE STOOD, ARMS FOLDED, BEFORE THE IMPOSING GREEK REVIVAL edifice of the Salem city courthouse, wondering what she was doing. The blazing heat of the previous week had continued unabated, and the entire town was shuttered against the summer world outside. Boutiques stood vacant. A lone school bus spilled day campers out into the street, the image of them running hand in hand down a cobbled alleyway obscured by the heat waves shimmering up from the asphalt. Connie stepped through the iron-grilled doors of the courthouse, which were propped open with a metal folding chair to capture any passing breeze.

  The marble entrance hall felt dim and cool after the glare of the street, and Connie paused to let her eyes adjust. The security desk sat empty, and Connie slid her Harvard identification card back into her cutoff pocket, reflecting that summer breeds a special kind of indifference in the normally overly ordered New England consciousness. She passed through a second set of oak doors, also propped open, and turned down a musty hallway, following the printed placard that read WILL AND PROBATE DEPARTMENT, indicated with an arrow.

  A week had passed since she and Sam had been chased out of a stranger’s backyard, and in that time the pleasurable confusion that she felt in Sam’s presence had lingered even in his absence. Chatting with Liz that morning on the pay phone downtown, she had blamed the heat, which always seemed to smear her thinking, like a wet fingertip wiping an ink stain.

  “I don’t think it’s the heat,” Liz said.

  “Oh, you have no idea,” Connie moaned. “Granna’s house is stifling. And I can’t even plug in a fan. Last night I just filled the tub with cold water and sat in it for half an hour. It’s turned Arlo into a glob instead of a dog.”

  “Whatever. You’ve been hot before,” Liz said, dismissive. “I think that meeting this guy has thrown you off your game. But in a good way.”

  She was taken aback; Liz, as always, had a way of clearing aside her obfuscations to articulate what Connie herself was not able to say.

  It was true that she responded differently to Sam. The boys she had dated in college had all been pleasant enough—indifferent, genial guys who were happy to stand next to her at a fraternity party and supply her with beer, but nothing more. Connie had been unable to make many personal inroads with the men at Harvard; she claimed that they were too absorbed in the rigors of grad school to spend time socializing, but Liz insisted that they found Connie intimidating. Sam, on the other hand, was neither indifferent nor intimidated. Her lips twisted into a crooked smile as she thought about him. She felt paradoxically at ease with Sam and disordered; when she was with Sam, she was able to surprise herself.

  At the end of their day together, Sam had extracted from her a begrudging promise to keep him apprised if she learned anything more about her mysterious witch, and she nodded, avoiding looking at him. The late-night service bus arrived to carry him back to Salem, and she watched him climb on board, his departure slowed as he walked to the back of the bus, the vehicle advancing around him while his movement seemed, momentarily, to hold him in place. He waved at her, and then the bus pulled him away, and Connie had felt solitude descend again around her like a curtain.

  If she discovered something about Deliverance Dane that afternoon, she would have an excuse to stop back by the meetinghouse where Sam was working, to tell him what she had found. The thought of finding something to show him caused a rill of excitement to rush through her arms and legs. She had studied the Salem witch trials as part of her qualifying exam, but she did not remember seeing anything about someone named Deliverance Dane in the secondary source literature. If Deliverance had been one of the accused witches, she must have been almost completely purged from the historical record. Connie had not yet formed a hypothesis about why that would have happened. An undiscovered Salem witch! She quickened her pace down the hall, eager to begin.

  A TALL DESK DOMINATED THE WILL AND PROBATE DEPARTMENT, STAFFED only by an oscillating fan and a small metal bell. Connie dinged the bell and leaned over the desk, about to call out when a curt voice behind her hissed, “Yesss?”

  Startled, Connie turned to find a tiny, withered woman in a tight bun and spectacles, dressed in an A-line skirt and Keds. Her arms were folded, and her mouth was pressed into a narrow, bitter line.

  “Good afternoon,” said Connie, collecting herself. “I am here to research a probate record.”

  “Do you have an appointment?” the woman snapped, casting her eye over Connie’s cutoffs and flip-flops with disapproval.

  Connie surveyed the silent archive, devoid of either staff or researchers, and planted her hands on her hips. “No, I’m afraid I don’t,” she said firmly. “But it will only take a minute. I can see that you are busy.”

  The woman scowled at her. “Indeed,” she spat. “We usually only take folks who make an appointment.”

  “In that case I very much appreciate your making an exception for me,” said Connie, congratulating herself on her diplomacy. “I am looking for a will that would have been probated in the 1690s.”

  “They’re by name, not by date!” the woman barked.

  “I see,” said Connie, the muscles in her jaw tightening, like a rope wrapping around a cleat. “And the files have not been cross-referenced by date?”

  “No call for it,” said the woman. No call for it. The New England character as a matter of course privileged sameness above all else, including efficiency. Because it’s always been that way was an explanation that Connie had encountered before in her research; it stood like a breastworks, keeping the non–New England world at bay. She felt a passing wave of sympathy for Grace’s teenage will to rebel. Granna’s household must have been ordered according to a similar system of consistency at the expense of progress and change.

  “In that case, would you kindly point me to the section of names that begin with D?” Connie said with a tight smile.

  “Card catalogue theah,” said the woman, pointing in a direction that indicated the overall left half of the archive. Then without further comment she turned on her Keds and disappeared through a little door marked STAFF ONLY.

  “Thanks,” Connie said to the empty room, dropping her shoulder bag on a long reading table and turning to the card catalogue.

  C
onnie knew that if Deliverance had died before her husband (assuming she had a husband), all her property would have been turned over to him automatically. If she had outlived him, then at least one-third of his property would have been given to her by law, with the remainder being given over to any children. Things grew trickier if she had never married, but that was highly unusual in the colonial period. Connie reflected that she had no evidence for how old Deliverance would have been during the witch trials. Statistically, most accused witches were middle-aged, from their forties through their sixties—the age when colonial women were at the height of their social power. Accused witches usually were anomalous in some conspicuous way: they had fewer than average children, or they were economically marginal. If Deliverance was a statistical witch, there was a good chance that she was an older woman, possibly a widow, and possibly with no children.

  Because the will and probate records were active legal documents, despite their age they were kept in the same filing system as more current records, with no special archival steps taken to preserve them. Connie roamed the rows of metal filing cabinets, finally alighting upon a numbered drawer marked PROBATE: DAM–DANFORTH. She heaved the drawer open and was met with a billow of dust followed by hundreds of file folders. Each file represented an entire life. Within each folder lay clues to personalities long dead and family dynamics long forgotten. Farms carved into smaller and smaller parcels. Marriage prospects made or ruined. Connie always found herself moved by the narrative drama that sometimes lay hidden in such dry-seeming archives. But it was Sam’s enthusiasm that had reawakened this taste for investigation in her. I wonder if Marcy Lamson is in here somewhere, she thought as she began to root through the files. The memory of the smiling older woman’s face lingered in the back of Connie’s awareness as she walked her fingers through the grimy folders.

  Finally, squashed between DANEFIELD, HARVEY, DECEMBER 12, 1934 DANEFIELD, JANICE, FEBRUARY 23, 1888 appeared a thin, dirty file folder of crumbling cardboard marked only D. DANE. Connie pulled the file out from its hiding place, excitement at the discovery displacing her initial irritation at its incorrect location, and settled at the table to read.

  The twentieth-century probate files consisted of an official-looking typed cover sheet bearing the date on which the will was probated and the signatures of the executors and the state clerk, followed by many fat pages of legalese and bequests. A cursory look proved that these cover sheets were fairly standard—they appeared, written in longhand, in the nineteenth-century files as well.

  When Connie opened the Dane file, however, the cover sheet was missing. Without the cover sheet, Connie would have no way of confirming the date of Deliverance’s death. She presumed that Deliverance would have been put to death after her excommunication in 1692, but without the dated probate sheet she could not be absolutely certain. The file folder, which appeared to have been created some time in the nineteenth century, contained only one lone sheet of paper. Connie rose and strode over to the door behind which the archivist was hiding, opened it, and thrust her head into the staff office. The archivist, seated at a desk with a romance novel open in her lap, was raising a coffee mug to her lips when the sound of Connie’s voice caused her to start in her seat.

  “Excuse me,” said Connie from the doorway. “The file I am researching seems to be missing its cover sheet. Can you tell me if it might be filed elsewhere? Or if there is a ledger that records the dates of probated wills?”

  The small woman glowered at her. “No,” she said, her voice clipped. “All sorts of nonsense happens in three hundred years.” She replaced her coffee mug to signal to Connie that that was all she had to say on the subject.

  Connie sighed and shut the door again. She returned to the table, fingering the probate list on the table before her. She cast her eyes over the list: the sum total of Deliverance Dane’s life and fortune. She pulled her notebook out of her shoulder bag and copied the handwritten list verbatim, knowing that the archivist was unlikely to grant her permission to photocopy such a fragile document.

  Deliveranse Dane

  farmhouse and 2 acres arable land M’hd £63. [water stain]

  divers linnens and cloathing £13. 12 s

  furnishings: bedstead, table, 6 chairs, cupboard £12.25 s

  sundry pieces iron cookware 90 shillings

  earthen crockerie 67 shill.

  sundrie household wares

  54 s.

  glass bottels

  30 shil.

  wooden chest

  22 sh.

  Bible, receipt booke

  15 sh

  other bookes

  12 sh.

  1 hog

  £1.5

  1 milk cow

  £2.5

  7 chickins

  34 shillings

  taxes ow’d

  £12.10 s

  to only issue Mercy

  Connie stared at the document for a few minutes, thoughts simmering. She closed her eyes and began to construct a picture of the stark rooms that would have been the scene of Deliverance’s life. She began with an imprecise, standard pattern of the interior of a late-seventeenth-century house, wooden-floored, large hearth, empty. Slowly, the paper revealed clues that Connie painted into her mind’s picture, building layers of detail, as an artist shades in blocks of color.

  Deliverance must have been a widow, as the probate list did not mention a husband. Connie mentally placed a woman of indeterminate age standing by the imaginary hearth, alone. She was of low to middling economic position; she owned some land, but not a whole farm, and basic household fixtures, though nothing of particular value. No silverware, for example, and no pewter. The furniture was valued almost as much as the linens, which indicated that the furniture must have been decent, but not remarkable. No details about the chairs, so they were probably not upholstered or armchairs. No rug was listed for the tabletop, and no turkey work. From these conclusions Connie sketched in furniture around the imaginary woman, adding a plain wooden table with turned legs, topped with simple dishes, an iron cauldron simmering over the hearth fire, stiff wooden chairs drawn up to the table, but only one or two places set. No rug on the table. Across the room, or perhaps one room over, in the keeping room, a bedstead heaped with linens and feather mattresses, the most valuable items in her house. For fun, Connie added some herbs and flowers drying overhead. The imaginary woman folded her arms.

  Connie’s mind’s eye pulled out from the interior scene, filling in a vegetable garden around the house—greens and peas, probably, together with roots that could be stored in winter, and possibly a fruit tree or two. Next to the house sprouted a heap of firewood that Deliverance either chopped herself or traded for with another family. Connie drew in a rough wooden enclosure for the hog—she gave the hog black and white patches, and floppy ears—and added a simple shed at the rear of the yard for the cow. Connie completed the picture by scattering some chickens pecking in the dirt by the front door of the imaginary house. She pulled still farther away and surveyed her mental construction of Deliverance’s life.

  From this vantage point, Deliverance appeared solitary but capable. She could provide much of her own food, and could trade simple things—eggs and cheese, maybe even laundry or mending—with her neighbors. But a few details were difficult to explain. Without any specific birth or death dates, for example, Deliverance’s age was a mystery. The probate listed a single child, a daughter named Mercy. Deliverance could have been a young widow, Connie reflected—perhaps she had not had time to have any more children or remarry before she was put to death. But if that were the case, the estate would likely have been turned over to her father or other surviving male relative, rather than a young child. That Mercy Dane inherited from her mother suggested that Mercy had reached adulthood but had not yet married. In that instance, Deliverance’s house would have been unusually empty of people for her time period. It held no passel of young children, no indentured servants, no elderly relatives. Connie frowned, unsu
re what to do with the suggestion of two adult women, a mother and daughter, living alone.

  The glass bottles also posed a problem. To be mentioned specifically rather than obscured under “sundrie household wares” implied that there were rather a lot of them, or that they were worth mentioning for another reason. Connie tried to superimpose a vast assortment of glass bottles of varying shapes and sizes into her image of Deliverance’s living space, but they did not fit in a way that made sense. Connie mentally scattered some bottles across the table and arranged more in the cupboard. Why would Deliverance have had so many? Connie leaned her weight into the table, elbows planted on either side of the probate list, chin in hands. The imaginary woman in her mind smiled at her.

  “Misssss?” slithered a voice by her ear.

  “Yes?” she said, irritated. The dessicated archivist stood over Connie, arms crossed, attempting to loom but failing in her slightness.

  “We close in half an hour.” She gestured with her sharp nose to a schoolhouse-style clock hanging over the card catalogue.

  “Thank you. I won’t be much longer.” Connie watched as the archivist withdrew behind the filing cabinets, then turned back to stare again at the sheet of paper.

  Something else was bothering her about this probate list. Something was off, and Connie drew her lower lip gently under her teeth as she tried to puzzle out what it was. The tax rate seemed about right—the estate was not over-or undervalued. The assortment of animals was about what she would have expected. Books? But most Puritan households would have had some books—no novels yet, but published sermons sold in Boston, tracts disseminated for moral uplift, certainly a Bible.