The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

by Katherine Howe

  “Up for air, you dirty bawd!” cried a passing shoreman, his breeches neatly splattered. A putrid smell began to suffuse the narrow thoroughfare, and Prudence wrinkled her nose in distaste.

  She pulled open the tavern door and surveyed the scene inside, looking for the man whom she was appointed to meet. The room hung thick with smoke from tobacco pipes and the great stone hearth at the far end, veiling the clusters of men who lounged on low benches around rough wooden tables. It smelled not unpleasantly of woodsmoke and ale, boiling fish stew and wool coats crusted with seawater. Prudence shifted the heavy bundle she was carrying to her hip and passed a hand thoughtlessly over the stomacher that bound her waist. The pungent smell of the stew caused her mouth to flush with saliva, and she wondered if the man—this Robert Hooper—might be persuaded to treat her.

  “Prue,” greeted the graveled voice of the tavern keeper, who nodded at her from across the room.

  “Joe,” she said, nodding back. She waded toward him through the merry room, batting away the errant hands of a few drunken men with grubby fishermen’s clothes. “Seen a Robert Hooper about today?” she asked, arriving finally at the keeper’s table. He sat with a flagon at his elbow, flanked by a young laughing woman with lace spilling out of the bodice on her tight jacket and cheeks rather more rouged than nature had intended.

  Joseph Hubbard reached up to scratch his whiskers, planting his other hand on his extended knee. His great belly lopped over the sagging waist of his breeches, and his coat was open. Under shaggy gray eyebrows his dark eyes gleamed. “That be that Robeht Hoopah of up the trainin’ field hill? Great fine house he has. New built.”

  “The same,” she said, scanning the room for a man who seemed to match such a description. The Goat and Anchor was hardly known to have been frequented by the gentlefolk of up the hill. Joe let out a robust laugh.

  “Has some business with you, does he?” asked the man, taking a draught from his mug.

  “Aye,” said Prudence. “I’ll just be waiting then.” She located an empty bench by the wall and placed her parcel on the table. Settling in her seat, she reached up to adjust her mobcap, tucking loose strands of hair back into place, and tugged on the emerging sleeves of her shift to smooth out their wrinkles. Robert Hooper would be a man of fashion, after all.

  “Not needin’ you for his wife, I trow, poor wretch!” Joe bellowed as he waved over a serving girl. The woman seated with him laughed a high, irritating screech, covering her face with a fan. She weren’t as young as all that, then, Prudence thought. “You’ll fix her up, right enow.” Joe chortled. “Set his gahl to rights, I hope.”

  Prudence scowled, resenting his implication. “How fares Mrs. Hubbard with little Mary?” she asked pointedly. The serving girl placed a flagon of ale before her and then waited, eyeing Joe Hubbard.

  “Well enough, that one. Neahly two. Runs us ragged.” He caught the serving girl’s eye and shook his head once, and the girl withdrew without payment. Joe chuckled. “Yoah health, Prue,” he said, raising his ale in Prudence’s direction.

  “And yours,” she replied, raising hers in turn. Brought out twelve of his, she glowered, and not all with Mrs. Hubbard neither.

  Prudence pulled a little ceramic pipe from within her pocket, together with the crumpled flyer that she had carried with her for the last several days. She smoothed it across the tabletop and contemplated it as she packed the pipe bowl with a pinch of tobacco, then lit it at the lamp on the table. OLD BOOKS WANTED, the printed flyer said. CURRENCY OFFER’D FOR THE RARE AND UNIQUE. INQUIRE WITH MR. HOOPER AT THE FOLLOWING ADDRESS. She inhaled, sallow cheeks growing hollow around the pipe, the harsh smoke filling her lungs and gradually seeping calm through her twitching nerves.

  She supposed that she could still change her mind. He wasn’t here, after all. Perhaps he didn’t even want it.

  Prudence hazarded a glance at the parcel and rested her hand on it for a moment, rubbing her thumb across the rough fabric wrapping. As she did so, she thought of the sum that he had mentioned in the note that had arrived in response to her inquiry. More than she would get in almost two years of midwifing. But the sum alone was not her main reason for selling the book. She had her reasons for wanting to be rid of it.

  A circle of quiet rippled out in the vicinity of the door, and Prudence looked up to see the cause: a young man, dressed in a rich crimson jacket with shining buttons and long, elegant cuffs, stood sweeping his hair back with one hand where it had been ruffled by the removal of a new felted tricorne hat. He stamped his feet to loosen the mud from his butter-soft calfskin boots and surveyed the interior of the tavern, evidently looking for someone. She caught his eye and lifted her chin. He smiled and made his way toward her, hat under one arm, trailing silence in his wake.

  “Mrs. Bartlett, I presume?” he said, half bowing.

  “Just Prue’ll do,” she said as the man seated himself with a flourish. The room watched him join the midwife in the corner nearest the hearth, digested this incongruous piece of information, and then turned back to the business of merrymaking.

  “Is this the volume?” the man asked eagerly, indicating the package between Prudence’s elbows.

  He started to reach for it but was stopped when she commented, as if for his own edification, “The Goat ’n’ Anchor’s known for its stew.” She puffed on her pipe, blowing the smoke off to one side, and gazed at him evenly.

  “Ah,” said Robert Hooper, turning to the serving girl who had appeared by their table. “Of course. Two bowls of stew, if you please. And whatever punch is best.”

  The girl sniffed in reply, and Hooper turned back to the parcel. Prudence slid it across the table, and as he unknotted its dimity wrapping her eyes traveled over his countenance, gathering her impressions of him. The clothes were new, to be sure, but he wore them with the self-consciousness of a man not accustomed to them. He fussed with his lace sleeves, and kept shifting the hat about on the bench next to him, unsure how best to supervise it. His face was young and earnest, as yet unseamed by the wear of drink, or women, or soft living. It still carried the nut-brown hue of a man who had reason to be out of doors, or on the water. When the stew was brought to the table he gripped his pewter spoon in his fist, leaning over to bring his mouth nearer the bowl. Prudence half-smiled, and resituated the pipe between her lips. He pushed aside the bowl and reached for the book.

  “Remarkable,” he said, turning over the book’s leaves one at a time. “Surely not all writ in one hand?” He glanced up at her.

  “No, indeed,” she said.

  “What is this, Latin?” He turned another page, peering at the text.

  “Most Latin, yes. Some English, too, near the end. And some in cipher. More ’n’ that I couldn’t say.”

  “And your note said this came from England?”

  “So I’m told,” she said. “A family almanac, like.”

  “How very curious,” the man said, running his hands over the leather binding with a tenderness that surprised her. His fingers, she saw, were still thorny, rough, and callused. Perhaps his reverence for old books came from not having encountered any of his own. “And you’ve no idea the age? Which is the oldest entry?”

  Prudence arched one eyebrow at him, and then delicately sipped at her stew, saying nothing. They sat for a moment in silence, Hooper squinting at a page covered over in symbols and hatch marks, Prudence wondering when the time would come to talk about money.

  “I cannot read Latin,” Hooper confessed, not looking at her. She gazed at him in an attentive attitude, hands clasped under her chin, but inwardly she heaved a little sigh. Everyone has wounds as want healing, she reflected.

  Seems like they all find me. She looked at this prosperous young man seated before her and perceived the areas within him where the damage lay. The whole idea made her tired. “But I mean that my son should learn,” he added, glancing up.

  She let her pale eyes linger on his face for a while, not speaking. “Why do you look for old books t
o buy, Mr. Hooper?” she asked finally, toying with the handle of her pewter spoon.

  He chuckled, embarrassed. “My business interests have grown of late,” he began, “much aided by a flourishing connection with some merchant houses in Salem.” He took a long swallow of his punch and made to wipe his lips on his sleeve before checking himself. A fragile handkerchief appeared from within his sleeve, and he dabbed at the corners of his mouth before secreting it away again.

  “I got…that is, I was invited by some gentlemen to join their Monday Evening Club. And now the Club, being comprised of sundry well-read gentlemen of sophistication and taste, decides to establish a private social library, that we may all benefit from our collective literary and scientific interests.” He paused, turning his punch cup where it sat on the table. “We are all asked to donate volumes of our own collection, you see.” He looked up at her.

  “And you have none,” she finished.

  “I have acquired some fine specimens, and have hopes to secure still more. Though none so fine and rare as your own.” He reached into his pocket and placed a small drawstring leather bag between them on the table. It looked heavy and fat. “I wonder how you can bear to part with it,” said Hooper, watching her.

  A sickening lurch gripped Prudence’s stomach as she looked at the fat little bag sitting on the table next to her almanac—her mother’s almanac, she should say, for her mother, though frail, yet still lived in her house. A vision of her mother’s aged but beautiful face rose before her, framed by the whispers that had dogged her through her entire life. Mercy had more strength than she, carrying her head high every day as she did. She knew what great stock her mother placed in this tome, but Prudence herself felt only resentment for it. Her mother had passed her whole life on the fringes of her society. All the bitterness that Prudence might have held for the neighbors who shunned her mother, who sometimes whispered still when Prudence took Patty to the meetinghouse, she heaped upon the tattered leather binding of this wretched book.

  She thought then of Josiah, and the shooting pains he complained of in his back, worsened by each day spent off-loading boats down the landing. Prudence imagined the frayed snap of a rope giving way, the rumbling of heavy wooden casks slipping their binds, bouncing down the gangplank toward the frightened form of her husband. She could not fathom a life with Josiah taken from her. She closed her eyes against the image. Her father had gone in an instant, washed away to sea, and her mother’s father, too, felled with all the men who married into her line. If she could be rid of the book perhaps she could keep Josiah safe, preserve him from Providence’s vengeful hand. He giveth, and He taketh away. Prudence wanted nothing more than to have the book out of her house, away from her, where it could sully her family no more.

  Admittedly Prudence quavered to contemplate what Mercy would say if this betrayal were discovered. But Mercy was languid in her old age; she spent her afternoons puttering in the garden, needling Patty in the kitchen, napping under a tree with the dog. It was years since she had looked for the book, years more since anyone had sought her counsel. Mercy Lamson wended her way through her days, each one roughly like the next, until one day, soon enough, they would come to an end.

  Prudence thought then of Patty, who had sprouted near three inches since Christmas. Her loping, warmhearted daughter, so deft with the garden and the chickens the family kept—every morning they presented her with eggs as ripe and round as little melons. What would Patty want with old shames and superstitions? The money in the fat little bag could be laid aside for a dowry, or could improve the Milk Street house. Patty, with her speckled cheeks from days in the sun, her blue eyes bright and warm, not cold and careworn like Prudence’s own. Why, when Patty reached the age that Prudence was now, the nineteenth century would be upon them. She sometimes tried to imagine the world into which her daughter, all awkward limbs and knocked-over teacups, would vault, and as she did so she saw time flowing forward from the still point of the table in the kitchen of their house, unfathomably long and distant. Sometimes the magnitude of it overwhelmed and frightened her.

  Prudence set her jaw and laid the spent pipe aside. She reached for the bag.

  “I’ve no more use for it,” she said simply.

  Without another word Prudence rose, pocketed the little bag, and with a nod at the surprised Robert Hooper, strode across the riotous main room of the Goat and Anchor, through the weighty tavern door, and out into her future.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Cambridge, Massachusetts

  Early July

  1991

  CONNIE TOOK A LONG SWALLOW OF HER COCKTAIL, AND WHEN SHE lowered the glass back to the bar, she noticed with irritation that her hand was trembling. Abner’s had lately acquired an acoustic version of Led Zeppelin’s greatest hits, which was playing for the entire hour that Connie had been leaning at the bar. Janine was running late, as was her wont. Connie reflected that if Janine did not walk through the front door within the next five minutes, the odds were better than even that she would stand up and break her barstool over the jukebox. In her mind she lifted the heavy stool and brought it down over the glass dome of the jukebox, feeling the crunch of the dome collapsing under the stool’s weight, hearing the music drawl to a blessed stop. She smiled with satisfaction at the fantasy.

  “Connie, hello, hello,” breathed Janine Silva, settling her weight on the stool next to Connie and dropping her bag at her feet. “I’m so sorry I’m late. What are you drinking? Old-fashioned?” She held up two fingers to Abner behind the bar, who gave her a nod and turned away. Janine leaned on one elbow and applied a pair of bright purple reading glasses to the end of her nose.

  “So,” she said, and Connie, still sitting in profile, took another long swallow of her cocktail. Connie reached into her cutoff pocket, pulled out the key that she had found in Granna’s house, and clapped it down on the table before turning to look at her professor.

  “The very day I moved into my grandmother’s house, I found a key that fits nothing,” she said. Janine’s face grew perplexed. “And inside the key I found a name. Deliverance Dane.” She raised a fresh fingernail to her mouth and gnawed at it as Abner dropped two heavy tumblers of liquor, beaded with moisture, before the women and Janine wordlessly slid a few dollar bills across the bar.

  “It turns out,” Connie continued, pushing her empty tumbler away and reaching for the fresh one, “that Deliverance Dane is an undocumented Salem witch. Unlike all the other victims, she was a healer or cunning woman. And she left a record book of her work.”

  “But, Connie! That’s wonderful!” Janine exclaimed, eyes widening. “What a coup for you. People can spend their whole lives and never find a source that unique! And what a rich area of inquiry for the history of women…” She trailed off as she saw Connie frown.

  “I know!” Connie cried, her voice catching. “But now Chilton’s threatening to get my funding yanked if I can’t find it! And then these vandals came to my house.” She took a deep hiccuping breath, suppressing the tears that were welling up in her eyes. “I don’t know what to do.”

  Janine pressed her lips together in concern and placed a soft hand over Connie’s with a reassuring pat. “Okay, okay, one thing at a time. First of all,” she said, “I’ll only say this to you because we are friends, and I’ll expect this never to leave our confidence.”

  Connie nodded, wiping at her eyes. Her junior mentor leaned in closer and lowered her voice. “Manning Chilton…,” she began, then hesitated, taking a sip of her cocktail and gathering her thoughts. “Of course Manning is an eminent scholar, and of course his standing in the department is impeccable.”

  Connie’s brows swept down over her pale eyes. If Professor Chilton’s reputation had been blemished somehow, Connie’s entire professional future could be compromised. Janine cleared her throat again, glancing around the dim bar interior before inching her barstool closer to Connie’s knees. “It’s just that his recent research…well, it’s taken a turn for the idio
syncratic.”

  “What do you mean?” Connie asked, confused. She knew that he was planning something significant for his keynote address at the Colonial Association meeting in the fall, but she did not know the substance of it.

  “For a long while he was working on the use of alchemical symbolism in Jungian psychoanalysis,” Janine said, voice barely audible over the music and the murmur of summer school students in the booths at the rear of the room. “He was interested in alchemy as a way of understanding a world that reasoned by similarity, rather than by the scientific method. He thought that the language of alchemy could provide a psychoanalytic interpretation of premodern magical thinking and ritual. But the last paper that he delivered at the Association of Historians of the American Colonies was a little more…” She seemed to rummage in her mind for just the word that she wanted. “Literal,” she finished. “It was more literal.”

  “Literal? In what way?” Connie asked, leaning forward. Janine’s soft breath brushed across her face, smelling faintly of peppermints.

  “Have you ever heard of an alchemical concept called the philosopher’s stone?” Janine asked.

  “Sure,” said Connie, her confusion deepening. “It was one of the major goals of medieval alchemy, wasn’t it? Some mythical substance that could turn base metal to gold, but it was also the universal medicine, able to cure any illness. Right? But no one ever knew what it was exactly, or its true color, or what elements it consisted of. All descriptions of it and recipes for it were couched in riddles. It could only be revealed by God.”

  “Exactly,” said Janine. “One of the riddles said that the philosopher’s stone is a stone that is not a stone, a precious thing but without value, unknown but known to all. Well, the usual contemporary attitude toward alchemy is that it’s just the historical ancestor of modern-day chemistry. And in a sense that’s true, since alchemy was really the first time that scholars started to experiment with natural materials to see if they could be changed from one form to another. But many academics, Chilton among them, have emphasized the religious elements of medieval alchemy.”