The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

by Katherine Howe

  “I can’t talk long,” her mother said without preamble as the receiver clattered to life. “I’ve got Bill Hopkins here, and he needs an aura cleansing.

  You should see it—jagged lines every which way. He’s been terribly depressed—”

  “Mom,” Connie interrupted, gasping. “I have it.”

  “Have what, my darling?” her mother said, followed with a whispered I’ll be just a minute, Bill—it’s my daughter spoken over the bottom of the receiver.

  “Deliverance Dane’s shadow book!” Connie burst, heart thrumming.

  “But of course you do, my darling. Though I still say you don’t need it.” Grace sighed softly. “Well, I suppose it can’t hurt. You’ve been so worried about him. It can be nice to have some concrete guidelines when you’re just starting out.” Tea, Connie heard Grace mouth to the waiting Bill, whoever he was, waving a hand in the direction of the kitchen in her low desert house.

  Connie frowned, confused. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Why, helping Sam, of course,” Grace replied, and Connie envisioned her mother’s fragile eyebrows rise into two sincere arcs over her eyes. “Frankly, I’m a little surprised he’s come to harm so early. There must be a terribly strong bond between the two of you.”

  “What?” Connie said, incredulous.

  “Usually they go quite a while before the accident happens. But it always does,” Grace said, her voice quiet. “Never have had a good explanation for why. The Lord giveth, and He taketh away, was how Mother always put it, like it was a price exacted in exchange for seeing clearly into others. We have the gift, but it brings pain to us at first—headaches, usually—and finally sorrow on the ones we hold most dear. And like all things, it goes in cycles; the intensity varies, tied to the state of the earth. As we near the end of this century, the rhythms have only gotten more acute. I had just eighteen months with poor Leo, while Mother and Dad had twenty-odd years. And now here’s your Sam, after only eight weeks.” She sighed, sorrowful. “My poor darling.”

  “How do you know about Sam? How do you even know his name?” Connie demanded. She was willing to admit a certain degree of intuition between herself and Grace, but she had been circumspect with her mother about her relationship with Sam. Was this why Grace had been asking about him so assiduously?

  Grace blew an impatient sigh through her nose, mouthing I’m sorry, Bill, while waving him into a seat on the sofa in her raftered living room. “Listen, Connie, whatever you decide to do, make sure that it all happens inside the house,” she said, voice firm. “You can’t be safer than at home, on your own turf, as it were, can you?”

  “But, Mom, I…” Connie started to speak, then trailed off. “Wait. Are you saying that you knew something was going to happen to Sam?”

  Grace sniffed with impatience, her customary signal when she thought that Connie was willfully overlooking some point that to her was clear and unambiguous. “Really, Constance. Sometimes it’s like you simply refuse to see what is right in front of you.”

  Connie froze, the telephone receiver gripped in a hand that now seemed somehow detached from the rest of her body, floating next to her face like a moth. What had Grace said?

  Constance.

  Her full name.

  Like a lot of people who are known only by nicknames, Connie tended to forget that she had any connection with that word. She and Liz had talked about it once. How had Liz put it? Whenever someone calls her “Elizabeth,” she always thinks that they are talking to someone standing behind her.

  Constance. A prissy, patent-leather-shoes-and-ruffled-socks sort of name. She loathed her name as a little girl, and her mother’s loose counter-culture friends drifting in and out of the Concord commune were never ones for full names, anyway. Those who had babies when Connie was growing up gave them all overwrought hippie names—Branch Water Alpert, who was now an undergraduate at Brandeis, and Samadhi Marcus, a priggish, right-leaning young man who was now living in Asheville and going by “John.” As if anyone could blame him.

  So Connie had let the name drift away from her, putting it away with the same finality that she put away her shoes as they were outgrown year after year. It was so thoroughly discarded that she now rediscovered, with a dawning sense of wonder, that the word had a meaning beyond its function as a name. Constance. Abidingness. Fealty. The act of remaining steadfast. A state of being, or a condition to which one might aspire. Like grace.

  Like deliverance.

  “Oh, my God,” she whispered, eyes widening with sudden certainty.

  But of course. And Sophia—Greek for wisdom, Liz had said. Mercy. Prudence. Patience. Temperance, whose placid mid-nineteenth-century face watched her from the portrait in Granna’s dining room, a silent link connecting the line of women in her present life with the line of women she was chasing in the past. Their last names morphed over marriages and time, but the first names traced a genealogy that was undeniable.

  Connie stared with wonder down into her palm, into the little fleshy hollow where her will had somehow manifested itself in painful, prickling blue-white light as she consulted the sieve and scissors, or placed her fingertip on Sam’s forehead to soothe his suffering body. She reviewed the details of her mother’s life, clearing away the opaque clutter of New Age terminology, watching the truth change its contours under the shifting parameters of language. Just as all these women—each locked in her own moment in history, and yet somehow also a variation on Connie herself—described the craft in terms specific to their time. She swallowed, bringing the telephone nearer to her mouth and dropping her voice to a whisper.

  “Mother,” she said, “do you know who put that burned symbol on my door?”

  Connie heard her mother chuckling softly, in a tone that stopped just short of being smug. “I’ll tell you this much,” Grace said. “No one—and I mean no one—wants to keep you safe more than I do.”

  Silence fell between them as Connie suddenly understood.

  “But how—” Connie started to say, only to have Grace cut her off.

  “I am so sorry, my darling, but I really must be going. Can’t keep Bill waiting. His aura’s just a disaster.”

  “Mom!” Connie exclaimed, protesting, but Grace shushed her.

  “Now listen—it’s all going to be just fine. Remember what I told you about these natural cycles in the earth? Other people feel it just as changes in the weather? I’m not worried in the slightest. Trust your instincts and you’ll know just what to do. It’s like”—she paused, rolling her eyes heavenward, groping for words—“it’s like making music. There is the instrument. There is the ear. And there is the practice. Bring all those disparate elements together, and you can play. There is also the sheet music, of course. It can guide you, give you hints. But by itself? By itself, it’s just marks on paper.”

  Uncertainty and fear descended over Connie, as if she were standing in a shallow stream, hunting through murky water for something bright and precious that has been dropped. “But there is so much that I don’t understand,” she whispered, pressing the telephone receiver so hard against her ear that it began to flush an angry red.

  “You see a mystery,” Grace said, voice confident, “but I see a gift.” Before Connie had a chance to respond, her mother called out Be right there, Bill! and then turned back to the telephone, saying, “I love you, darling. Be careful.”

  The receiver clicked and Grace was gone.

  “But it hurts,” Connie said into the dead receiver, flexing her free hand and feeling a faint electrical tingle coalescing, just under her skin.

  Interlude

  Boston, Massachusetts

  June 28

  1692

  The rat had spent the better part of the last quarter hour washing his face, scrubbing with his fists behind his ears and over his bristly cheeks. He was a fat and leisurely beast, and now that his ears were sleeked down and sparkling, he turned his attention to the pink-brown tail coiled around his haunches, clever fingers wor
king their way from base to tip, combing away any fleas or muck, bringing the end of the tail up under quivering whiskers to meet his tongue. The narrow square of sunlight in which he crouched, leaking from the barred opening overhead where feet and hooves could be seen passing by, drew an intelligent glitter out of his hard button eyes. As he worked away at the tail a soft moan rose from within the darkest corner of the cell, and the filthy straw on which the rat was sitting stirred under a stretching foot. Startled, he loped out of the square of sun to complete his toilet elsewhere.

  His place in the sunlit patch was now occupied by the quivering foot, two dirty toes extending forth from the unraveling snarl in a dingy, stained woolen stocking. Clamped around the outside of the stocking was a heavy iron cuff, attached with a short length of nautical-grade chain. The foot and its ankle were so small that the cuff had about half an inch of space remaining inside it, though it was on its smallest setting; the stocking underneath the cuff was blackened with rust stains.

  The foot’s owner, one Dorcas Good, lay on her side in a trembling ball in the dim far corner of the cell, knees and arms pulled up to her chest, face overlaid with a webbing of matted hair. Her eyes were open wide, but vacant, and her mouth suckled on one of her tiny thumbs. In the last few weeks, her language had forsaken her; though she was four years old, and by all accounts had been a lively and engaging child, she now appeared thin and wasted, and her only utterances were the moans and wailings of a babe.

  A hand reached over to smooth away the hair, which a layer of sweat had glued to the girl’s forehead. The air inside the cell was heavy with the heat of beginning summer, and thick with the stench of molding straw and overfull ordure buckets with which the occupants were supplied. Deliverance Dane held her hand, a prickling warmth radiating from her palm, over the little girl’s staring eyes, and whispered an incantation under her breath, the one that seemed to work best as the days had worn on. Dorcas’s eyelids lowered, raised, and lowered again, shuttering away what remained of her mind from the horror in which her body lay. The girl’s breathing deepened, and she fell into a dreamless sleep.

  “She sleeps ag’n, eh?” croaked a broken voice from another corner of the cell.

  “She does,” Deliverance assented, withdrawing her hand back into her lap. She shifted her shoulder blades against the rough stone wall. She had grown thinner in the past few months, and her bones could no longer find a way to settle. Flesh had fallen away, it seemed, a few pounds at a time, and gaps now appeared between the fingers of her hand; she held it up to the tiny square of sunlight and could see the opposite side of the cell through the spaces between her fingers.

  “I’ve nevah saw one as could sleep thus,” the voice continued, knowing. “’Taint natural.”

  Deliverance sighed, closing her eyes. She had had this conversation with Goody Osborne enough times already. “God shields the souls of the innocent as best He can from the Devil’s torments,” she murmured.

  The voice laughed, a derisive cackle that dissolved into a fit of hacking coughs. When the hacks subsided Sarah Osborne’s indistinct shape heaved in the shadows at the opposite corner of the cell, crawling forward until a pockmarked face, topped by a coif the color of dishwater, appeared a few feet from where Deliverance was sitting. The parched lips pulled back from gums dotted with teeth, and Deliverance closed her throat against the foul odor coming from the woman’s mouth. “I know you, Livvy Dane,” the woman hissed. “And Dahcas’s mother do, too, though she be in some othah hellish hole. I’ve a mind to tell ’em what you done. We all knowed it.”

  Deliverance’s eyes traveled slowly to the side, where they paused to take in Goody Osborne’s face. The skin between the older woman’s eyes was creased and rubbery; the crone had always had a distemper about her. Her mind jumped from one path to another, with scolds and rails in between, and because of this distraction she had lived only by the beneficence of the Village. She would appear scratching at a door, demanding coin or a heel of bread, or a night in the cowshed out of the elements, and the Villagers would comply, outwardly avowing the Christian virtues of charity and goodwill, while silently willing her to be gone. Sarah Good, Dorcas’s mother, who was held several cells away, though younger than Goody Osborne, was just as wretched and labored under similar constraints. Goody Good’s eyes were forever vacant and unfocused, yellowed with misery and drink. It was whispered in the Village that Dorcas’s father was unknown, and that Goody Good had passed her confinement in prison because of it, convicted and fined for fornication.

  Deliverance pressed her lips together, looking upon Goody Osborne’s ravaged face with an uncharitable mixture of pity and disgust. Pity for the life that she had been entreated to live, and disgust for the certainty that Goody Osborne would embellish her meager ministrations to the cringing, suffering Dorcas until the suspicions building against her in the town would harden into acknowledged fact. Over the months that they had sat imprisoned, ankles chained to the wall in clamps, waiting for Governor Phips to arrive in the colonies bearing a new charter, and with it a legal mandate for a trial, Goody Osborne had passed her few moments of lucidity keeping a weather eye on Deliverance, lying in wait like a spider.

  The governor had arrived from England in May, at once decreeing that a grand Court of Oyer and Terminer, or a court “to listen and determine,” be established in Salem Town for the prosecution and containment of the spreading diabolical menace. For months the possessed little girls, Reverend Parris’s daughter Betty among them, had cast pointing fingers at every imaginable personage. And some unimaginable: a rumor reached the prison that they had even cried out against one of their former ministers. The Village grew jumpier and anxious, inflammable, and the band of frightened little girls, gripped in the clutches of violent fits, spread their accusations to farther reaching towns, even up to Andover and Topsfield, seeking in vain to push the Village’s accusing eyes away from themselves. The court had met for the first time at the very beginning of June, condemning Bridget Bishop to be hanged by the neck; and so she was, barely a week later, strung up and dangling before a great, cheering assembly on the desolate hilltop on the western side of town. There were those who held that justice done to Bridget Bishop might draw the matter to a close. Yet still the accused women sat in prison, waiting.

  In spite of the heat in the cell, Deliverance wrapped her arms around herself, shivering. She folded her bony fingers together. “Come, Goody Osborne,” she said, her fatigue seeping through her voice. “Let us pray together.”

  The beggar woman snorted, a great rattling “Pah!”, and retreated back into the shadows of the cell. She fell to muttering and incoherence, but then out of the patter of her meaningless utterings, Deliverance discerned her whisper, “Shah no prayah can help us now.”

  For some hours Deliverance sat, her hands folded under her chin, mouth moving in silent prayer. Little Dorcas slept on, limbs shuddering in her sleep, the chain on her ankle sometimes scraping on the floor, and Goody Osborne lurked in her corner, rearranging the straw over her lap. Deliverance had not lost her wonder about how time in the prison could move so slowly. The tiny square of sunlight crept across the moldering floor, folded itself up the far wall, and presently stretched into a long, distended rectangle. Deliverance watched its progress, waiting.

  Down the narrow hall on the other side of the heavy cell door she heard what she thought might be the sound of keys jangling together, punctuated with murmuring women’s voices. The sounds grew nearer, and her suspicions were confirmed when a creak and clank in the darkness announced the unlocking of the cell door, which swung open to reveal the warden holding a tallow candle aloft over a grouping of three or four modestly attired women of middling years.

  One of the women stepped forward, and Deliverance recognized her as a respected midwife from down by Rumney Marsh, though she could not produce the woman’s name. Was it Mary? Deliverance looked up at her, moving her head a fraction. It could have been. ’Twas hard to tell in such dimness. The wo
man approached her, keeping her face a careful mask of neutrality, though her quivering nostrils betrayed an unhappy awareness of the smell permeating the cell.

  “Come now, Livvy Dane,” she said evenly, holding out her hand. “Mister Stoughton would have us examine you afore the morrow.”

  While the woman spoke, the warden was stooping to unlock the iron cuff around Deliverance’s ankle, and she stiffened as his fingers brushed familiarly over the stocking covering her lower leg. She withdrew her foot under her skirts as soon as the ankle was free, and the man’s grimy face leered up at her where he knelt with the keys. One of his eyebrows raised perceptibly. I kin help yehs, he had said some weeks ago. Look ’pon me softly like, ’n’ we kin see, eh? She focused her eyes on his and sent a pristine image into the center of his brain. The image said spiders, and immediately the man dropped his key ring with a strangled cry and started scratching at his arms and hair.

  Deliverance took the woman’s hand—Mary Josephs, it was, she remembered now—and rose to her feet. She swayed, unsteady, as her stagnant blood moved down into her legs. Goody Josephs wrapped an arm around Deliverance’s waist and led her to the group of women waiting at the door. “We’ll away to Goody Hubbard’s house,” the midwife said, and the group ushered her down the prison hallway, leaving the scratching warden to re-lock the cell door, his oaths echoing after them in the hallway.

  Though the streets of Boston were well into the evening, the gloaming light hit Deliverance’s face with the brilliance of full noon, and she realized how long she had been locked away. “So the trial’s for tomorrow, is it?” she asked Goody Josephs, as if they were two women pausing over their labors to review the gossip of the day.