Mercy surveyed the room where she had passed the last several hours, her pale eyes traveling over every square inch of wainscoting in a meager effort to keep her mind occupied. Many years had lapsed since she made her home in Salem, and her confusion had been great when told the case would be heard in the new town hall rather than at the meetinghouse or in the magistrate’s parlor. Right on the common it sat, like a proper English courthouse, or so she had heard. Two stories, good new brick, and not far from the wharves. But in England the courthouse wood never smelled so polished and new, she supposed. Mercy had never given much thought to England. Not until she married Jedediah.
The room where she sat, surrounded by fellow petitioners squirming on benches, bore a magisterial splendor that had been unknown in Mercy’s youth. At the front of the room rested a raised bench, festooned with scrollwork, flanked on both sides by heavy wooden boxes for the jurymen. Below the bench stood two fine carved tables, for the lawyers and the clerk, and then, between the tables, in full sight of the jury, bench, and onlooking townsfolk, an empty space before the bar. Already this morning she had watched four piteous souls led to stand alone in this space, the keen focus of the entire room rendering them as if under heavy magnifying glass. A wave of nausea washed through Mercy’s stomach, and she felt her forehead grow cold and moist. Her turn would come soon enough.
Behind the judge’s bench hung a life-size portrait of a regal man in fine robes trimmed in fur, with long, curling hair and heavy rings. She returned her attention to this apparition; she had been contemplating it the better part of the morning. Never had she seen such a lavish likeness of a person. Even from her distant vantage point in the gallery, his eyes seemed warm and kind, and his skin flushed a healthy pink and white. Once she had caught herself wondering how that fine, curling hair would feel pulled through her fingers like a comb—soft, smooth, scented with lavender, she imagined. Embarrassed, she stirred in her seat. The likeness were startling, sure, she thought. Should this man ever walk down the streets of Marblehead she would know him, right enough.
Jedediah would be to sea a further two months yet. Mercy’s eyes darkened to think of his feeling, should he hear some of what she must say. Though he knew well what she was about, so much the better that he be gone.
Movement stirred at the front of the courtroom, and Mercy worked her feet together, shifting her weight on the uncushioned bench. The current petitioner was led away, head hanging, wrists clamped together in irons, by two solemn constables. A frisson of activity around the bench and jury boxes signaled the beginning of the next case, and Mercy watched the clerk leaning in inaudible conference with the judge, who nodded and then cast his eyes upon her. Mercy’s stomach rolled over and she swallowed, her tongue suddenly drained of moisture.
“Mehcy Dane Lamson versus the Town of Salem in the County of Essex!” called out the clerk, and a score of heads swiveled to look in her direction. The skin around Mercy’s eyes tightened in momentary surprise, for she had been long gone from Salem Town and knew none of the faces now watching her as she rose from her seat. How could this changed town have such a long memory? she wondered, making her way to the bar. The judge, a great hillock of a man wrapped in black robes, with cheeks the sickly yellow of tallow wax, glared at her as she arrived in the empty rectangle at the center of the room. Idly, on the murmuring level below her conscious mind, Mercy assembled the list of herbs that he would need to tone his dying liver. He’d be a man who liked his drink.
“Have you no lawyer, then?” barked the judge.
Mercy opened her mouth to speak, but her dry tongue clung to the roof of her mouth, and a cough came out instead.
“Well?” the judge bellowed. Mercy straightened herself, smoothing her skirts with both hands, and then settling them on the polished bar before her.
“Indeed, sir, I have not,” she said.
The judge harrumphed, and titters reached Mercy’s ears from the corner of the room that held the jury box. She held her gaze steady on the warm eyes looking down from the portrait of the regal young man. The room settled into quiet. Mercy noticed a cloud pull away from the tall windows on the right side of the room, releasing a yellow square of sunlight onto the lawyers’ tables. The windowpanes were just beginning to frost over with ice.
“Get on with it, woman!” roared the judge, and she felt the force of his impatience hit her like a hot wind.
“Youah to give yah deposition now,” whispered the clerk, who had appeared at her elbow. He gave her an encouraging nod.
“Oh! Indeed,” said Mercy, unsure. She unfolded a thick sheaf of papers that she had written out at home, periodically, over the past several weeks. They rattled in her hands, and she willed them to be still. She cleared her throat, and the room leaned forward, ears open, waiting for her to speak.
“I, Mercy Dane Lamson, late of Marblehead, do hereby petition the town of Salem in the County of Essex for the rightful restoration of the good name of my mother, Deliverance Dane, that all baseless charges heretofore held against her be cleared by the court, thus relieving us her family of shame and disgrace. Which infamy ha’ resulted in difficulty in transacting business and affairs such that I ha’ little means of sustaining myself and my family, leaving us well nigh in want and indigence, denied the favor and friendship of our fellow men.”
How she hated saying these things. How wretched Jedediah should feel, as though she thought he did not do well enough by her. Mercy’s cheeks flushed deep scarlet as the witnessing townsfolk murmured in response to her plea.
“Mr. Saltonstall for the town, if you please,” said the judge, indicating a plush, elderly man seated at the lawyers’ table to Mercy’s left. With a grunt the gentleman rose, adjusting the flowing gray wig that sat, slightly askew, atop his head. His posture stooped somewhat, but he was lean, and his eyes glinted with the fervor of a much younger man. Mercy tried to read the intent in his face, finding as she did so a loose familiarity to his countenance, the context for which had years ago slipped away.
“Mrs. Lamson,” he began, standing with both hands planted on the table before him. “Problems of reputation being famously difficult to quantify, you perhaps could provide the court with some further detail?”
“Sir?” she asked.
“You have a husband, then?” asked Mr. Saltonstall.
“I do,” she answered, perplexed.
“With you today, is he?” asked the lawyer, making a show of craning his neck to look over the crowd.
“He is at sea,” she replied, brows knitted.
“Ah!” said the lawyer, folding his hands behind his back and strolling into the space before the bar where Mercy stood. “A seaman. Difficult work, that. But it can provide.” The gallery met this sarcastic pronouncement with mirth, and Mercy bristled.
“After my mother’s imprisonment I was for some years neglected by young men of good fame who used to court me for marriage, ’til I was well and truly thought an old maid. Jedediah Lamson endeavored to gain my affection upon his arrival from England, in the thirty-fifth year of my age.”
The women in the gallery whispered among themselves; Mercy felt stirring behind her an undercurrent of feminine anxiousness, as she stood before them embodying one of their many unspoken fears. She started to finger the hole in her cloak but then gripped the bar a little tighter instead.
“Indeed!” proclaimed the lawyer, pacing across the space before her again. “A most fortunate event. And before this inveigling of Mr. Lamson’s, how did you gain a reputable living?”
“After my mother’s trial my neighbors and friends had forsaken my company,” Mercy said, her voice quiet. “I were made so odious in the eyes of all good subjects that they would refuse to employ me in my stated trade, nor entertain me in their houses, nor suffer to repast with me, nor barter with me, neither even to converse with me. I did forbear the practice of my trade, being the very offscouring of my society, and so made to make my home in a new town whereupon I resumed my healing work to a
much diminished degree.”
Still the whispers circulated in the mouths of the people seated behind her, occasionally spilling out whole words and fragments that Mercy could just overhear. Disappeared, she thought she heard, and little child and neigh distracted. Also one word, more often than all the others, the word she dreaded: witch.
“What is this healing work whereof you speak?” asked the lawyer, folding his arms and glaring at Mercy. She looked around her, worried, and then up again at the soft eyes in the portrait.
“I am able with plants and herbs, to assemble tinctures for the sick, or for women in the childbed, and to perceive what ails them to a true extent, to give counsel and to soothe their sufferings as well as can be done. For this work I receive goods in trade, or sometimes currency.”
“What!” cried the lawyer, moving his face near to hers so that she cringed away from him slightly, “Are you a cunning woman?” The accusation washed over her face, and she began to see the folly of explaining herself to this man, him with his silver buttons and—she sniffed his breath—his snuff addiction.
“I prefer not to attach a name to my craft,” Mercy said, steeling herself against the nausea that still circulated in her belly. Under all her many layers of wool and linen she felt a clammy sheen of sweat collect in her armpits. The air in her lungs grew more shallow.
“Ought not an ailing man be better served to consult with a physician? One properly trained in the movements of the humors and the machinations of the body?” asked the lawyer, aiming his question at the box of jurymen. One of them wore a satisfied smirk and was sitting with his boot propped against the polished box railing. A doctor, surely, Mercy thought. Educated down Cambridge way, at the college. As if all he need know could come from a book!
“There are those as prefer that,” she conceded.
“Prefer!” the lawyer bellowed, and the judge smiled. “You are a charlatan, woman!” The gallery exploded in cries and commentary as Saltonstall pointed at her with one long finger, the lace of his cuff waving in its wake, and Mercy felt her patience slice in two.
“Whether I am a charlatan or no ought not concern us here!” asserted Mercy, her voice growing stronger. “I charge the court to clear the name of Deliverance Dane, for her memory’s own sake as well as my own, and for the sake of my infant daughter, as it did the names of all the other unfortunate souls condemned to death by the Court of Oyer and Terminer called by this town in 1692, which scurrilous evidence and vicious lies ha’ been well established by Judge Sewall himself!”
As she spoke she brought her fist down on the bar before her, the strength of her will massing in her belly and crackling down her flying arm, her eyes faded to ice, and the force of the blow shot a crack through the wood, nearly severing the railing in half. The watching crowd gasped, silenced.
Richard Saltonstall, unfazed, strolled back over to where Mercy Lamson stood, her knuckles white with rage, her nostrils quivering.
“So true that the Court of Oyer and Terminer, in their haste to free our covenanted community from diabolical influence, did perhaps too hastily credit the evidence of specters and distracted little girls,” he said, shaking his head sadly.
“And so true, too, that those unfortunate souls, now given over to the care of our almighty and merciful God, have since had their names restored by this court to the status duly accorded them for the benefit and improvement of their living progeny.” He strolled back to stand before the jury box, where the twelve pairs of watching men’s eyes sat fixated upon Mercy’s quivering form.
“And so true that your circumstances have been rendered mean and insupportable following the condemnation of your mother, and yet…” Saltonstall paused, turning to survey the gallery. The gallery waited, holding its breath.
“And yet, Mrs. Lamson,” he said again, and Mercy looked upward at the portrait with its warm, pink cheeks, and its luscious curls, all flat and made only of indifferent paint.
“And yet,” he said a third time, now turning to meet her cool eyes.
“Those unfortunates were innocent.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Boston, Massachusetts
July 3
1991
THE UPSTAIRS SPECIAL COLLECTIONS READING ROOM OF THE BOSTON Athenaeum was entirely empty, and Connie checked her watch for the fifth time in an hour, wondering if she should take the delay as a none-too-subtle hint. The research librarian had made no attempt to conceal his irritation when she asked for the book to be paged.
“All right, fine,” he whispered. “But we close early today. Wait over there.” He pointed at the chair positioned squarely in the patch of sun under the window, farthest away from the fan, and now Connie felt a blanket of warmth pressing into her back. A trickle of sweat snaked down from her eyebrow into the hollow on the side of her nose, and she wiped it away with irritation. Fifteen more minutes, she promised herself. I can wait for fifteen more minutes. Her pencil shaded in the leaves on the drawing of a dandelion that she had traced in the margins of her notebook. Presently her mind softened, pulling a transparent scrim of daydream up in front of the table where she sat, on which she saw projected a perfect film of Sam, brushing back his wet hair under the moonlight. She allowed herself to move further into the dream, her lips curving.
“You the one waiting for the Bartlett journal?” asked the young librarian, his face dour. Connie blinked, pulled back to her table, her notebook, the sun on her back, and the man standing bent over a cart bearing several stacked archival boxes.
“Yes,” she said, pushing back in her chair to reach for the first box.
“Just a minute,” said the young man, brushing her aside. “You’re familiar with the rules, I hope. No pens. Use the foam blocks to prop the covers open so that the spines don’t crack. No photocopying. Open only one box at a time. Handle the manuscripts as little as possible, wearing these.” He deposited a pair of new white cotton gloves on the table next to her. “And frankly, you really shouldn’t be sitting in the sun,” he finished, casting a baleful look at Connie.
“I’m happy to move,” she said, too tired even to argue.
Soon ensconced in the blessed shade at the end of a long table, Connie slid the first box toward her, gloved hands gripping the edges lightly. She opened the acid-free box, untied the fragile string that was looped around the book inside, and settled the first volume of the journal atop two green foam wedges. She eased the cover open and read the title page.
Diary of Prudence Bartlett, it read in faint, watery script. January 1, 1741–December 31, 1746.
Connie caught her breath, heady with anticipation. Prudence had not been mentioned by name in the fragmentary record of Mercy Lamson’s 1715 lawsuit, but she had appeared as the sole heir on Mercy’s probate record. Though New Englanders were a famously literate people, very few colonists had left anything so explicit as a diary—even fewer women. Connie was astonished when a cursory call to the Boston Athenaeum revealed that Prudence Lamson Bartlett kept a journal, which had found its way into their special collections. So far Connie knew that the recipe book had passed into Prudence’s hands at Mercy’s death, or possibly before, but she had not been able to find Prudence’s own will or probate. Records that old, Connie knew, were often incomplete or damaged, but the disappearance of Prudence’s probate list had left her feeling crushed. There had been a dark afternoon last week when Connie telephoned Liz in a self-pitying panic, convinced that she would not be able to find Deliverance’s book after all.
Now she sat at the reading table, poised to devour an unimaginably rare variety of primary source. Prudence’s diary stretched over several volumes from 1741, the year after her marriage, when she was around twenty-six years old, to shortly before her death in 1798–over one hundred years after the Salem witch trials. Connie opened the book, her pale eyes shining in excitement, and began to read, pencil poised over her notebook.
Jan. 1, 1741. Very cold indeed. I have staid at home.
Jan. 2, 1741. Cold
continues. I have stayd at home.
Jan. 3, 1741. Shawl nearlie done. Snow.
Jan. 4, 1741. Snow continues.
Jan. 5, 1741. Cold abates some. Dog stays in the bede.
Connie sank her head into her hands with a groan. Of course it was unrealistic to expect long, reflective passages about the nature of womanhood in the eighteenth century, but really. The tedium of an afternoon slog through the minutiae of Prudence’s daily life stretched ahead of her, and Connie felt her excitement seep away, melting through her feet into the floor. She turned over a few thick leaves of the book, skipping ahead.
Mar. 25, 1747. Visit Hannah Glover. She is deliverd of a girl. Rec’d 3 lbs. Coffee.
Connie leaned closer, concentrating.
Mar. 30, 1747. Worked in the gardin.
Mar. 31, 1747. Gatherd herbs. Hung them to drye by the fire.
Apr. 1, 1747. Feel unwell. I have staid at home.
Apr. 2, 1747. Rain. Josiah to town. I have staid at home.
Apr. 3, 1747. Rain continues. Call’d to Lizabet Coffin inher labors.
Apr. 4, 1747. At Coffins. Lizabeth deliverd of a boy, born dead.
The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane Page 16