The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

by Katherine Howe

  A vision of her life as it was soon to come unfolded before Mercy: a long stark corridor, empty and void. Everything that she knew was in Salem Town: her friends, her mother’s friends, her meetinghouse. Her father was buried there. Soon enough, her mother would be, too. At this thought her lip started to tremble, and the beginning tremors of panic began in her belly and sent malevolent shoots up behind her ribs, down her legs, into the hands that were clutching and unclutching at her apron.

  “Daughter,” said her mother, once again gripping Mercy’s chin and forcing her to meet her gaze. “We’ve a plan. Our house I sold to Goodman Bartlett these many months ago, after Mary Sibley come to us, remember? I saw some of this in the egg-in-water, but knew not precisely when ’twas coming. The proceeds I used to order a little house built up Marblehead way, that’s nearly done. ’Tis on Milk Street, the end of a long lane alone, well hidden in the woods.”

  While Deliverance spoke, confusion, surprise, and fear warred across Mercy’s face as she struggled to keep up with what her mother was telling her. The house? It was sold? Sold these six-odd months ago? But she knew no one in Marblehead!

  “I’ll have you take the receipt book, and the Bible, and be gone,” Deliverance continued. “You can take Goody Bartlett her bay mare. Goodman Bartlett, he being informed of our plans, can help to remove the furniture when Providence allows.”

  Mercy stared into her mother’s face and in it read the absolute immobility of her will. She wished, not for the first time, that she could be as forthright as her mother was. So she was to be on her own—after tomorrow, she would be well and truly alone. Mercy wrapped her arms around herself, trying to force her fear and panic into submission.

  “Mercy,” Deliverance said softly, reaching out to trace her fingertips over her daughter’s dampening, trembling face, “it is written in the New Testament, in Matthew, that God came down and spoke to Peter, saying that upon this rock shall his church be built.” She smoothed Mercy’s eyebrow with her thumb, and smiled.

  “It is you who are Peter, my daughter. You who are the stone on which the church is built. For through you may His power in all its infinite goodness be felt upon the earth. And so you must not pass your days in fear and recrimination. You must endeavor to secure your safety, and then you must not forbear to resume your craft, for it is God’s work that you do.”

  “But, Mama,” Mercy said, voice breaking, overcome with how small, weak, and powerless she was in the face of all that was to come.

  Deliverance shushed her, placing a finger on Mercy’s lips with a firm shake of her head. “Enough. I’ll have you go tonight. I’ll not have you come to the western hill tomorrow.”

  At this Mercy buried her head in her mother’s lap and began, silently, to keen. They sat that way for several hours, as the tiny window overhead grew dim, and then dark, and then a thin, watery gray.

  THE CROWD ON THE WESTERN HILL OF SALEM TOWN HAD BEGUN TO ASSEMBLE hours earlier. Somberly clad men and women milled about with a false seriousness arranged on their faces to mask their overweening excitement. Voices mixed together, each speaking in a register slightly higher than usual, blending into a grating, screeching miasma of self-righteousness and anticipation. Clusters of women dug into pockets tied at their waists, swapping tough bread and cheese. A band of children scampered around the legs of the adults, chasing one another, emitting happy screams. Under the heat of the afternoon the mud that had been churned up by boots and horse hoofs since well before dawn hardened into deep, riveted crusts, crumbling under ever more feet until beaten into a powdery dust that rose through the crowd, staining dresses, streaking faces, and casting a gray pall over the sun. In the distance, rising from within the haze of dust and the buzzing populace, stood a narrow wooden structure, consisting of a slender platform topped with a high wooden plank, from which hung six snaking lines of heavy rope.

  At the bottom of the western hill, where the crowd thinned, a tallish girl in an overlarge, badly pinned coif stood, one hand holding the bridle of a skinny, antsy little horse weighted down with several bundles tied together with rope. At her feet sat a small dog, who seemed the exact same color as the cloud of dust; several onlookers who passed en route to the front of the crowd looked once and then again, unsure if the animal were really there. The girl’s pallid face was devoid of expression, betraying none of the pleasure and excitement, or subdued smugness, that animated the faces around her.

  As the day wore onward toward noon, the energy thrumming through the crowd grew in almost palpable layers. Thick masses of dread and anticipation built up in the chest of each onlooker; it was the same heavy, expectant mood that falls over a tavern just before a fistfight breaks out, a heady blend of fear and dismay, touched with excitement. The chattering became more lively, and when someone finally spotted the prison cart lumbering toward them in the distance, screams and bellows began to thread through the throng, punctuated by scraps of audible prayer and remonstration.

  Mercy placed her hands on the Bartletts’ bay mare’s flank, balancing on her toes and peering over the horse’s knobby back. The cart drew closer, led by a warden, with six women of varying heights and ages standing, their hands gripping the bars of the cart for balance, swaying and knocking over the ruts in the road.

  As the cart reached the outer edges of the crowd, the first head of rotten cabbage went flying, striking old Susannah Martin squarely on the chest with a wet splat so loud that even Mercy, from her distant vantage point, could hear it. The stricken woman in the cart turned her face away, mouth pulled into a miserable frown as the rancid leaves clung to her already filthy dress. Rebecca Nurse, eyes still wizened and kind, incredibly, after her months of imprisonment, reached a bony finger up to pluck one of the leaves off of Susannah’s collar, whispering a few words in her ear as she did so. Susannah nodded, mouth still frowning, and closed her eyes, seeming to pull deep within herself as the next cabbage exploded across the wooden side of the cart.

  Mercy observed the condemned women huddling together, Sarah Good’s mouth open, screeching at the mob now roiling around the wheels of the cart, arms reaching up to claw at the hems of the women’s dresses, spoiled vegetables soaring ineffectually overhead or, sometimes, glancing off a cowering shoulder. Sarah Wildes held her arms up over her face, hands clutching her soiled coif, shoulders trembling, and Elizabeth Howe was seen to spit square upon the face of a bellowing matron in the crowd. In the middle of the group, half a head taller than the rest, Deliverance Dane stood, brow soft, gazing off into the far distance. Mercy squinted and saw that her mother’s mouth was moving imperceptibly, but she could not tell what charm or prayer she might be saying. A maize cob sailed by, just missing Deliverance’s cheek, but she did not flinch. Mercy straightened her shoulders, willing herself to feel the strength that she saw in her mother’s face.

  The cart slowed, weighed down by the throng lapping up against its sides but drawing ever nearer to the scaffold on the hilltop. The sound rising and bubbling from the crowd was so intense that Mercy thought she could almost see it, hovering, yellowish black, pouring forth from the gaping mouths and angry eyes of the villagers. The cart drew to a rickety halt a few feet from the base of the scaffold, and as the six women were led down from their perch, the mob surged to overtake them, held back only by the linked arms and entreaties of a small band of ministers from the surrounding towns. Chained together at the wrists, they were escorted up the steps to the wooden platform, and Mercy’s grip tightened unconsciously around the thick leather bridle, causing the bay mare to jerk her chin and nicker.

  Each woman was led by her wrists to stand directly behind the six hanging ropes, their loops lying in wait like six fat snakes. A magistrate mounted the scaffold steps, hooking his thumbs importantly into his overcoat and surveying the wild crowd. A rotten squash tumbled onto the platform at his feet, and he glowered, clapping his hands together sharply to indicate that the crowd must collect itself. Silencing began in the shadows of the scaffold, gradually w
orking its way in fits and spurts across the surface of the crowd, and Mercy perceived the boiling noise lower to simmering.

  “Susannah Martin,” the magistrate began, voice shaking in the timbres of self-imagined gravitas, “Sarah Wildes, Rebecca Nurse, Sarah Good, Elizabeth Howe, and Deliverance Dane! You have been tried by the esteemed Court of Oyer and Terminer gathered together at Salem Town and found guilty of the heinous and diabolical crime of witchcraft, which being a crime against the very nature of God Himself, is punishable by death. Do any of you wish to confess, and name those agents of your very undoing? Will you do your duty to purge your community, struggling and alone in a wilderness fraught with sin, of the evils that lie in our midst?”

  The six women stood, saying nothing, some with their heads bowed and others with their eyes closed, cheeks twitching. One of the ministers, a nervous man just down from Beverly Farms, stepped forward from where he had been hovering behind the magistrate, a small Bible clutched between his hands. Mercy’s eyes narrowed, and she strained to hear what the minister was saying.

  His voice did not carry with the weight of the magistrate’s, but he seemed to be entreating each woman in turn to confess her witchcraft, and that if each would confess and submit herself to Jesus then she should be spared, if only she would name those others in the town who were her confederates in diabolism. Mercy’s conclusions were confirmed when the man reached Sarah Good, her eyes manic, her distraction made more pronounced by her palpable fury.

  “I, a witch!” she screamed, and the crowd gasped. She cast a black look at Deliverance, then thrust her chin at the crowd and bellowed, “I am no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink!”

  Upon this outburst the crowd exploded in a rage, more spoiled vegetables raining down upon the women on the scaffold, hurling oaths and condemnations upon them. Mercy’s hands were clutched underneath her chin, her lips drawn back in a grimace, and two hot tears squeezed out of the corners of her eyes. She tried to collect herself, knowing that she must concentrate in order to accomplish the duty she had set for herself. She fastened her eyes on her mother, whose mouth was still moving silently, and whose eyes were traveling across the faces of the women standing at her side.

  “Very well!” cried the magistrate. “If you women shall not give yourselves into the hands of your willing Savior and confess your sins here before God and your fellow man, then you are to be hanged by your necks until dead. Have you anything further to say for yourselves?”

  Rebecca Nurse, straightening her thin and withered frame, folded her hands into a manner of prayer. The mob hushed, waiting to hear what this widely respected woman, this full church member no less, would say in the instant of her death. “May the most gracious Almighty God forgive them,” she said, and the crowd was silent enough that Mercy had no trouble hearing her, though Goody Nurse’s voice was reedy and weak. “For they know not what they do.”

  Murmurs burbled in the mouths of the watching populace as a man clad in black fitted a noose around Susannah Martin’s neck. Susannah’s face was a mottled shade of purple and red, weeping, mucus bubbling at her nose. The noose tightened down at the base of her skull, and Susannah started to emit a high gasping whimper, her breath coming faster in her chest as she gulped for air. The man moved to kick Susannah off the platform, and as his heavy boot made contact with her cowering back, a frisson of excitement ran through the crowd. At that moment, time seemed to slow imperceptibly, and Mercy saw Susannah’s feet rise from the wooden platform, her eyes cast upward, her face contorted with fear and anguish, the rope trailing loose behind her as she traveled through the air. Then in an instant a great crack sounded over the heads of the crowd, and Susannah Martin’s body swayed at the end of the taut rope, lifeless, left foot twitching. The crowd erupted, and Mercy heard an unseen woman cry out, “God be praised!”

  The man in black moved to Sarah Wildes, who fell to bawling, begging, and pleading to be spared, that she was no witch, that she could never confess to a lie for that be a mortal sin, that she loved Jesus and craved His grace and forgiveness. The crowd hooted as the weeping woman clutched at her face, and the thin, nervous minister approached her to hold her by her hands and pray with her as the man fitted the noose around her neck. Her screams rose in pitch as the minister stepped aside, the man kicked her, then stopped suddenly as a great cracking sound tore across the empty hillside.

  Throughout the preparations under way about her neck, Rebecca Nurse had held her hands folded under her chin, her eyes closed and her face serene. Her lips moved as she repeated the Lord’s Prayer, and she did not interrupt her communion with God for even an instant as the noose was tightened and the foot went flying, sending her frail body cartwheeling into space. When the rope stayed her fall with a brutal snap the crowd gasped, as if they had not fully understood until that moment that this gentle, well-regarded woman would really be put to death.

  An unbroken stream of curses and oaths had been pouring from the mouths of Sarah Good and Elizabeth Howe, each spitting and kicking out at the grasping hands below them amid the rising cheers of the mob. “Damn you all! God damn you all!” Sarah Good was screaming when the man’s rough foot connected with her side, and she fell twisting and flailing over the side of the scaffold, her body stopped with a bounce by the choking grip of the rope.

  Mercy tore her gaze away from the horror on the scaffold, pulling a handful of herbs from the pocket beneath her apron. She glanced down at the familiar animal seated at her feet, who looked up at her sadly. Steeling herself against the coming pain, Mercy began shredding the herbs in her hands, scattering them in a precise circle at her feet and muttering a long string of Latin words quietly enough to be unobserved.

  Five women now dangled at the end of the long ropes, the kicking having drained from their feet, all their faces unaccountably smooth and white, loosened hair hanging around their faces, a vengeful smile even lingering around Sarah Good’s lips, though her head now flopped at an impossible angle. The man in black clothes approached Deliverance Dane, and she held her head stiffly, folding her hands in prayer. Mercy fastened her gaze upon her mother, channeling all the love and fear and terror in her heart into a torrent of pure will, which coalesced into a barely visible glowing blue-white ball held in her outstretched hands. The man tightened the rope around the base of Deliverance’s neck, and she gripped her hands together more tightly, bracing for the impact of the man’s foot but still jerking in surprise when it came.

  For a split second time halted, the crowd frozen immobile, Deliverance hovering suspended in the air before falling as the blue-white intention ripped forth from between Mercy’s trembling fingers, cracking like a lightning bolt over the heads of the slavering populace, landing on Deliverance’s forehead and bursting outward with a glittering of invisible sparks. In that instant Mercy felt the connection of her will with her mother’s own, watched the unfolding flashes of her mother’s life rush across her own eyes, glimpsing now the great ship pulling away from the coast of East Anglia, the smallness of her mother’s feet running through a garden forty years ago, the bursting in the chest at the face of a young Nathaniel, the overwhelming love mixed with terror at the great squalling mouth of the infant Mercy, the sadness that it all must end, and the unshaken faith of something, something ineffable but beautiful, yet to come. All this passed into the palms of Mercy’s hands as she filled her mother’s body with the will and possibility to be released from pain, her brows knitted in effort. Then all at once she perceived the release as it happened, sensed her mother’s soul freed from the constraints of her mortal envelope, feeling time resume and her mother’s body grow limp, her face bright and serene, and Mercy’s hands dropped to her sides, faint whiffs of smoke trailing up from her fingertips. Mercy’s nerves and muscles quivered with the blinding pain that she had siphoned away, and she stumbled, nearly faint. She climbed with the last of her strength onto the sagging back of the bay mare, and by the time t
he sound of Deliverance’s neck breaking echoed over the heads of the howling crowd, Mercy was gone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Marblehead, Massachusetts Autumnal Equinox 1991

  THE LONG DINING TABLE STOOD CLEARED OF ITS USUAL FLOTSAM, and its surface evinced a deep golden polish, as if someone had finally taken the time to get after it with lemon oil soap and a clean rag. The interior shutters had all been pinned back, welcoming what little late afternoon sunlight could penetrate the overgrown garden outside. As summer had broken down into the brittleness of autumn, the dense ivy on the windows of the Milk Street house had faded from a rich dark green to angry, vibrant red. Then, one day, a meddlesome wind dashed through the garden, lifting away the top scrim of leaves, sloughing them off like dead skin. Connie fastened back the last shutter and surveyed the orange and yellow garden with pleasure; as the garden layers fell away ahead of the advancing winter, she felt the house shaking off its vegetal shadows, filling with life as the world around it changed. As she watched, a fresh gust blew by, rolling along another armful of leaves. She inhaled, enjoying the crisp smell of the earth as it underwent its preparations.

  She had preparations under way herself, she recalled, turning away from the window. On the table she had laid the thick Dane manuscript, open to the page marked Method for the Redress of Fitts, together with her own scribbled notes, diverse dried herbs collected from the garden and kitchen jars, including the mandrake root, and the bottle that she had smuggled out of the hospital. Next to these implements stood the antique oil lamp, lit and at the ready in the event that the daylight drained away too soon. She moved back to the hearth, where after some effort—the chimney was hesitant to draw, full with decades of undisturbed soot—she had kindled a low, steady fire. Stooping, Connie prodded the embers with a long poker, sending a glittering of sparks up along the brick sides of the fireplace. An iron cauldron hung, ridiculously, suspended on a hook to the side of the fire. She leaned the poker against the wall and looked down to where Arlo was sitting, primly, his paws together, under the table.