The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

by Katherine Howe

  “Ooof!” he cried. “She got me!”

  The hat poked up from behind the ivy, shading a pair of anxious eyes.

  “Get up!” Connie whispered to him. “You’ll scare her!”

  “You have to say the magic words!” moaned Sam, rolling his head back and forth in false pain and anguish.

  “‘Please’?” guessed Connie.

  “No, the other magic words!” He clutched at his imaginary wounds. “Quick!”

  “‘Get up, doofus’?” Connie suggested.

  Sam raised his head. “You’re not very good at this, are you?” he asked.

  Connie sighed. “Abracadabra?” she said.

  Sam sprang to his feet in triumph. “Oh, thank goodness! I am saved,” he whooped, and the hat shook with giggles. The woman smiled at them. Connie cast her eyes heavenward.

  “That was a close one,” said Sam as they moved into the shade of a nearby tree. “I thought she had me.”

  “It’s based on a wimple, you know,” Connie said, offhand. “Or a hennin.”

  “What is?” he asked.

  “The witch hat that the little girl was wearing. The tall pointy part derives from a fifteenth-century headdress called a hennin, and the wide brim is a simplified form of an English wimple. Common middle-class women’s headgear in the late Middle Ages, basically. Nothing inherently witchy about it.”

  Sam laughed, throwing his head back and wrapping his arms around his middle. “Hoo,” he said, wiping his eyes. “You still haven’t come back from orals-land, have you?”

  The open-air passage where they were walking wound through the old city center of Salem, from the empty wharves, past the old hotel, around a small museum full of Chinese porcelain and model ships, all the way to the graffitied commuter train station, moving as it did so through each successive stage of Salem’s community life. Knots of tourists strolled at a holiday pace among the vendor carts that dotted the walkway, perusing tie-dyed WITCH CITY T-shirts, “lucky crystals,” iced lemonade, bonsai trees.

  “And what about all the other stuff?” he asked.

  “What other stuff?” she said, picking up a Witch City snow globe, examining it with a shake, and setting it back down on a nearby cart.

  “Brooms? Black cats?” he teased. “You know. Witch stuff.”

  Connie snorted. “Well, the cat is just a stand-in for a familiar. But they weren’t always only cats.”

  “Familiar?” he said, toying with a crystal on a long leather thong on the cart.

  “A devil or spirit in the guise of an animal, that did the witch’s bidding. In one of the Salem trial transcripts I’ve read they accuse some poor woman of having an invisible yellow bird perched on her shoulder. A little girl who was accused told the court her mother gave her a snake for a familiar, which she suckled from a wart between her fingers.” Connie frowned. “I don’t know why popular culture pairs witches exclusively with cats at this point. Maybe cats have their own folklore that just got mixed up with witches. And the broom I only know about because Liz showed me a woodcut in a book that she had to read for her orals.”

  “So tell me,” he said “The broom stuff is crazy,” she said. “So a medieval witch on her way to a sabbath would strip off all her clothes.” She laughed as Sam blanched. “Then smear her naked body with flying ointment, straddle her broom with the straw end up, which is important, because that’s where the candle goes so that you can see when you’re flying in the dark, then say a spell and be swept up the chimney. Isn’t that nuts?”

  “Mmmm. Flying ointment,” Sam said, one eyebrow arched.

  “Shut up,” she teased, smacking him gently on the chest.

  A group of middle-aged women with cameras shuffled by, clad in shorts and feathered witch hats. They clutched bulging plastic shopping bags advertising a witch trials–themed trolley tour. A teenage girl in heavy black eyeliner posed, lip curled, before a shop front wax museum that advertised DUNGEON AND BURNING-WITCH DIORAMAS.

  “They really play up all this witch stuff, don’t they?” Connie reflected.

  “Summer solstice today,” said Sam. “If you think this is bad, you should see it at Halloween.”

  “Yeah, but it speaks to how alienated we all are from history,” Connie grumbled, blue eyes darkening. “For generations the witch trials were such an embarrassment that no one would discuss them. A proper history of them wasn’t even written until the end of the nineteenth century. Now look at it—it’s a carnival.”

  Connie looked around at the relaxed people milling about the esplanade, gazing into the windows of costume shops and card readers. She tried to imagine other violent, oppressive periods of history that had similarly been transformed into a source of amusement and tourism but could not think of any. Did Spain have Inquisition wax museums, showing effigies of people broken on the rack?

  “There’s something fascinating about violent death,” Sam remarked, sensing her disaffection. “Especially if it happened to someone very distant from you. Look at the Tower of London. The tours there are all beheading, all the time. Generations of kings and queens in chains, getting their heads lopped off. And while you’re there, be sure to admire the Crown Jewels! Their wealth and privilege is what makes them distant from us, in addition to their place in the past. And so we don’t feel guilty reveling in their suffering.”

  “It’s horrible,” Connie said. “The people accused in Salem were just regular, everyday people.”

  “It’s not all bad,” said Sam, leading her away from the stoop of the wax museum. “One weird offshoot of all the witch stuff is that Salem has become a huge magnet for modern-day pagans. They come from all over the place.” He gestured to a verdant shop front in a narrow alley off the main walk. Its hanging sign read Lilith’s Garden: Herbs and Magickal Treasures in looping, hand-painted letters.

  Connie sniffed with disapproval. “That’s almost worse. Real pagans coming here to make a buck off of tourists with a morbid curiosity about people who were persecuted three hundred years ago. And the dead people weren’t even pagans! They were Christians who just didn’t fit in.”

  “Feeling cynical today, are we?” asked Sam. “You should have a little more faith in people, Cornell. C’mon.” He took her by the elbow and pulled her, protesting, into the little shop.

  As the door opened, a soothing gong sounded in place of the bell that usually rang over souvenir shop doors, and Connie was met with a waft of unplaceable scent—incense, but she could not tell what kind. Dark and spicy. Soft pan flute music played from a tape deck on the counter, its sound made slightly tinny by a dribble of hardened purple candle wax melted into the speaker mesh. Under the glass counter ranged crystals and jewelry of various kinds attached to black leather strings, and pewter figurines of wizards and fairies holding opalescent marbles aloft on their thin metal arms. A rack of wind chimes adorned one wall, and they released a torrent of clanking and tinkling as Sam’s shoulder brushed against them.

  “Merry meet!” piped a smiling woman, leaning on her elbows over an almanac open next to the cash register. “A joyous summer solstice to you both.” Her hair was gathered in two lush pigtails over both of her shoulders, and half-moon earrings dangled from her ears. On her chest, peeking out between the ruffles of her blouse, lay a tattoo of a pentacle entwined with roses and lilies. Connie muffled a snicker between her lips, and Sam pinched her to keep her quiet.

  “Hello,” he replied to the smiling woman.

  “Can I help you find anything?” she asked. “We have some special events today, just so you know. Tarot readings start in half an hour, and at five we’ll have someone doing aura photography.”

  “We’re just browsing,” said Connie at the same moment that Sam said, “Can you tell us where the books are, please?”

  The woman arched one penciled eyebrow and smiled wider. “Sure. They’re right in the back, on the left.”

  “Thanks,” said Sam, pulling Connie along in his wake.

  “Blessed be,” said the wo
man, nodding.

  They made their way to the shelves in the back, which held racks of paperback books on Aleister Crowley, tarot reading, astrology, and something called “astral projection.”

  “Where are the magic eight balls?” asked Connie dryly, and Sam sighed.

  “Don’t you think it’s interesting?” he said, prodding her. “I’m always intrigued by the different ways people decide what to believe. I mean, look at this—they’re taken from all over the place. Celtic knots, Eastern philosophy, the New Age. Past and present collapsed into a buffet of equivalent options, all in pursuit of the divine. It’s fascinating. This funky pagan element is one of the reasons that living in Salem is so interesting, even to a hardened old agnostic like me.”

  Connie perceived the real, guileless curiosity shining in Sam’s eyes and immediately regretted her own curmudgeonliness.

  “An agnostic steeplejack? There’s a contradiction for you,” she said, arms folded. Then she relented. “You’re right, Sam. It is interesting. I’m sorry. I guess it just reminds me of some of the loopier aspects of my upbringing.” Connie fingered a knitted prayer shawl hanging from a wire display rack and looked down at her feet.

  Sam took her by the shoulders. “Hey,” he said, stooping to look into her face. She glanced up at him, half-smiling. “Don’t worry about it.” His green eyes twinkling, he smiled down at her, holding her gaze. She swallowed.

  “What do you think Deliverance Dane or Mercy Lamson would have to say about all this?” she joked, breaking the fleeting quiet that had gripped them. He laughed.

  “God knows. I bet,” he said, picking up a paperback collection of alien abduction narratives, “that this would have been Deliverance’s favorite.”

  Connie laughed, turning away from the bookshelves. She stopped mid-chortle, stepping back in surprise. Opposite where she stood, stretching from the floor to near the ceiling, towered rack upon rack of powdered herbs and potions in little plastic envelopes with calligraphy labels.

  “Wow,” she said, moving in for a closer look. The selection ranged from common kitchen herbs, like oregano and savory, to inorganic substances, like ground yellow sulfur and vials of liquid mercury. She recognized most of the plant names, noting with some surprise that many of them seemed to grow wild in Granna’s garden. She touched the little plastic packets, forehead crinkled in thought. The racks reminded her of something.

  Of the jars and bottles in Granna’s kitchen actually. The faded labels in the kitchen looked just like these, though largely illegible after so much elapsed time. “How odd,” she whispered, pulling an envelope of henbane from one of the shelves and examining the label. GATHERED IN JUNE 1989 was typed in tiny script on the lower right-hand corner. Connie sniffed. Anyone with the most rudimentary knowledge of horticulture knew that herbs started to lose their efficacy almost the instant that they were gathered. Even cookbooks were explicit about this; the difference in flavor between dried herbs and fresh was an elementary fact of cooking.

  “What a racket,” she muttered, placing the packet back on its shelf. She caught up with Sam, who was perusing a selection of nose rings under the glass at the front of the shop.

  “Do you think I should stick with the septum ring, or expand the options a little?” he asked as she approached, toying with the ring under his nose. “They’ve got little opal studs, cubic zirconia….”

  “Their herbs are all expired,” Connie groused to him. “They’re best if they’re fresh, but you really have to use them within like two months of drying them. Otherwise they’re no good. The ones they’ve got in the back are all, like, two years old. It’s a total rip-off.”

  “Did you find everything you were looking for?” the pigtailed woman interrupted. She was affixing price tags to lavender Witch City coffee mugs. Her penciled brows were thrust together in a glower. Connie wondered if she had overheard their conversation.

  “We’re all set, thanks,” said Connie, employing the universal New England expression that signals the end of a transaction. To be “all set” can mean that you are finished eating, that you do not need a fitting room, that you have the directions already, that the car has plenty of gas. It often means that you are not going to buy anything. A thundercloud gathered in the pigtailed woman’s eyes, and she turned her shoulder toward them, half-moon earring swinging, and slapped a few more price tags on a few more mugs in chilly silence.

  “Let’s go,” Connie whispered, taking Sam by the arm. An uneasy feeling suffused her, but as they passed under the gentle gong attached to the door, the feeling started to fall away.

  THE SKY OVER SALEM HAD COOLED, AND A PALE PINK STAIN WAS SEEPING through the field of blue-gray stretching overhead. Connie inhaled, savoring the saline bite of the evening air, and let out a long, contented sigh.

  “Are you going to finish this?” asked Sam, peering into her carryout box of pad thai. His chopsticks were poised expectantly. Connie laughed.

  “What is it about boys?” she teased him. “Every boy I know can eat his own weight in food. You should see my thesis student. He looks like he weighs ninety pounds, but every time we have a lunch meeting he’s always getting seconds and thirds.”

  Sam laughed through a mouthful of her noodles. “Just lucky, I guess,” he said. “Mmmmmm. Yours is better than mine.”

  Connie dangled her bare feet over the end of the dock and surveyed the harbor stretching away below her. Several yachts were moored together, growing darker under the pinkening sky, and the soothing sound of halyards clanking against masts traveled across the surface of the water. She tried to picture what the wharves would have looked like when Salem was a bustling seaport, one of the great city centers of the colonies. Even for her practiced mind the distant picture was difficult to conjure. She tried to place a great wooden triple-masted sailing ship alongside the wharf where they sat, tried to see the piles of sea chests and the boxes of live chickens, sacks of grain and hardtack, oiled barrels of rum heaped together on the wharf. She filled in rickety warehouses and sail lofts lined up in tight rows along the edge of the long wharf, wooden signs swinging in the breeze. She strained to hear the sounds of the sailing master barking orders at the sailors working in the rigging overhead, but all she heard was the cry of a seagull seated atop a rotting piling twenty feet out in the water. Maybe Grace was right. Maybe she did spend too much of her time in the past and not enough noticing the present moment.

  “We don’t have much time,” said Sam, edging nearer to her on the dock.

  “Oh, we don’t have to be anywhere.” Connie smiled at him.

  “Ah, but we do,” said Sam, rising to his feet and offering her his hand.

  She followed him down a darkening alleyway that ran through the neighborhood behind the old mercantile exchange building, and was surprised when they came to a stop outside of the First Church, where she had first met him. They had approached it from the opposite direction, and Connie experienced the odd vertigo that she always felt when coming upon a familiar place from an unfamiliar standpoint. He unlocked the meetinghouse door and held it open for her.

  “Now that I’ve led you astray for a day,” Sam said as he steered her to the staircase that she had noticed on their day in the church archives, “what’s your next step? You’ve already seen Mercy Lamson’s probate record, right?”

  “Yes,” said Connie, watching her footing as they climbed in the close confines of the circular stairwell. “Mercy left a book called ‘receipts for physick’ to her daughter Prudence.”

  “Prudence,” Sam repeated. “Whoa.”

  “Yeah,” Connie acceded. “These names are pretty intense.”

  “So are you going back to the Will and Probate office after dear Prudence?” He paused to hum a bar or two and his voice echoed as it fell down the empty center of the stairwell. The stairs grew steeper and bore a musty smell, of rare use and dead wasps. Sam had not turned on any lights.

  “Maybe,” she said finally. “I mean, yes, definitely. But Mercy was involv
ed in some kind of lawsuit in 1715, and I’d like to find out what it was about. So I guess that’s what I’ll be doing tomorrow. Going to the courthouse. Then I’ll go back to Prudence’s probate record after that.” She was starting to grow short of breath from the climb. Presently Sam came to a halt in front of her, and she heard him fumbling at his key ring.

  “Here we are,” he said, fitting a key into the locked door ahead of him. With one shoulder he eased the heavy wooden door free from its frame, and turned to grasp Connie’s hand. She hesitated for a moment, then fitted her hand into his palm. “Watch the doorjamb,” he said before pulling her out into the evening sky. Connie caught her breath.

  They stood behind a fragile brass railing that wrapped around the bell tower of the meetinghouse, and spread out below them Connie saw the city lights of Salem beginning to wink on in the advancing night. From this height they could see over the clustered brick houses and treetops and shop fronts down to the wharf where they had been sitting, to the harbor and beyond that to the little peninsula of Marblehead lying against the blackening sea. Overhead the sky turned from a frail pink into a deep blushing red-orange, spreading its color onto the rippling surface of the water.

  “Oh,” she breathed, eyes widening at the view of the city stretching away beneath her feet. He placed one hand over hers on the railing, and his skin felt warm and dry against her knuckles. His other hand traced her jaw, coming to a rest alongside her neck and ear, and as she turned to ask him a question, his lips met hers in a deep kiss that lasted until the orange curtain of the setting sun had been pulled completely away to reveal the stars glimmering overhead.

  Interlude

  Salem Town, Massachusetts

  Late October

  1715

  The thinning patch had been there for at least two winters, but of course it would be on this day that the cloak would rip. And she with no darning materials even to pass the time. Mercy Lamson scowled as she poked her thumb through the offending hole, feeling the harsh wool scraping against her skin. She was tempted to tear the hole wider and wider, to wreak on her tattered cloak the anger that she felt. But she thought better of it. New cloak would be too dear, she told herself, frowning. She scanned the townsfolk ranged on the benches around her, half-expecting them to have seen into her passing distemper. If they had, they gave no sign. Scattered women pulled crewel work needles through little scraps of cloth. Men murmured. Behind her, a man she did not recognize slept, head propped on the hard bench back, mouth stretched open in a soundless snore. She sighed and settled herself again in her seat, smoothing the frayed ends of the hole into some semblance of order. Time enough for patching later, she thought.