The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

by Katherine Howe

  “Really?” asked Thomas.

  “Yeah.” Sam laughed. “I’ve been getting regular checkups and scans, but they tell me everything looks fine. You should have heard my father. ‘This wouldn’t have happened if you’d gone to law school,’ he kept saying.” Everyone at the table groaned.

  “See—it’s not too late, Thomas,” Connie said, nudging her student under the table.

  “But now you’re back to restoration work? What do you call it?” Janine asked.

  “Steeplejacking,” Sam said, smiling crookedly. “Yeah. I’m just a lot more careful now with the safety harness.” He turned to Liz. “You’ve got to come up and see what I’ve done with the house. It looks incredible.”

  “Does it have electricity yet?” Liz asked, dubious.

  “Not quite,” he said. “Grace insists she likes it better this way. Brings her closer to the changing rhythms of the earth, or whatever.” He rolled his eyes.

  “When do I get to meet your mom, Connie?” asked Janine. “You mentioned that she’d moved back, but do you ever get to see her?”

  Connie smiled, twisting the coaster under her cocktail glass. “Grace kind of keeps to her own schedule,” she said.

  The truth was that even though Grace announced at the end of September that she had reconsidered selling the Milk Street house, preferring instead to return from Santa Fe to her “root soil,” she found reasons not to go to Cambridge. Too much to do in the garden, or too many aura clearings to attend to. Connie suspected that she just preferred to have Connie come to her. She had taken to spending weekends puttering with her mother in the house, which had been freed of its tax abatement by the considerable profit from selling Grace’s place in New Mexico. Together they cleared room for the herbs in the garden, trimmed the overgrowth of ivy on the windows. They did not talk about it, preferring instead to work in silence. But one afternoon, while she was poring over some scribbled notes at Granna’s paw-footed desk, Connie looked up to see a rag drag an empty dust-free stripe through the window above the desk, and through the empty stripe appeared her mother standing outside in the garden, rag in hand, smiling, long hair swinging. And Connie smiled back.

  LATER THAT NIGHT, CONNIE AND SAM WALKED ALONG THE BRICK-cobbled streets of Cambridge, supporting Liz’s sagging weight between them as they headed home to Saltonstall Court.

  “I still can’t believe you burned it,” Liz moaned, head lolling. “All that gorgeous Latin! Stuff that no one has seen in hundreds of years! Oh!” She leaned more heavily on Connie, resting her head on her friend’s shoulder with mock drama. “So selfish! There was a whole classics dissertation to be had in there, you know.”

  Connie renewed her grip on Liz’s waist, hoisting her friend up a curb.

  “I hated to do it,” Connie said. “But Chilton was right there. It was the only thing I could think of. He thought the missing element of the philosopher’s stone was in the book. Said something about it being the conduit for God’s power on earth.” She shuddered. “I was terrified!”

  “Peter,” Liz slurred. “Thass the philosopher’s stone.”

  “What?” asked Connie and Sam together, eyes meeting over Liz’s drooping head.

  “I thay to you that thou art Peter, and on this rock I shall build my church! Or whatever.” Liz waved her hand like a Roman orator and then giggled. “Peter is Greek for rock. Issa tautology. Bible’s full of riddles like that.” She hiccuped. “You’d think he woulda known that. Should of done classics, is what.”

  Connie whistled through her teeth. “Incredible. So it’s not a substance. Peter is the rock—on Peter shall I build my church.” She paused. “So Chilton was sort of half-right. The philosopher’s stone was real. But it wasn’t a rock, and it wasn’t something that could be made from elements and experiments. It was a person—an idea. Someone who could spread God’s healing power on earth.”

  “Wow,” said Sam.

  Connie cast her gaze up to the night sky overhead. The orange lights of the city washed away some of the stars that could be seen in Marblehead, but that night she thought she could just see them, glittering through the haze. For a moment she closed her eyes, enjoying her secret knowledge.

  Finally, she could not resist. “I’ll just say this, and you had better not say a word. Promise?” She looked into Liz’s eyes, which already were shining through their mist of alcohol.

  “What?” Liz whispered.

  Connie leaned in, bringing her mouth close to Liz’s waiting ear. “Radcliffe had made more progress microfilming their special collections than Harvard had.”

  There was a moment of silence as Connie’s statement penetrated Liz’s brain.

  “Oh, my God,” Liz said, looking into the middle distance. She blinked, and then stopped walking, turning to Connie. “Oh, my God. Radcliffe? I thought you said that Mr. Whatsisname Industrialist gave all the Salem Athenaeum books to Harvard,” she said, voice a fraction louder.

  “Yeah,” Connie replied, mouth cracking open into a grin. “Remember how I could never get a handle on how the book should be described? How here it was an almanac, there it was a shadow book, there it was a recipe book….”

  “Holy mackerel,” Liz said, understanding sparkling in her eyes.

  “Exactly,” said Connie.

  “You can’t be serious,” Liz exclaimed, bringing one hand to her forehead.

  “Radcliffe,” Connie continued, resuming her stroll toward their dormitory, “as we all know, has one of the most renowned collections of cookbooks in the world.”

  “Incredible,” Liz breathed. “No wonder Chilton never found it.”

  “Yeah,” Connie said, flushing a little. Sam reached a hand back behind Liz to stroke Connie’s arm.

  “So it’s still in there somewhere?” Liz asked, regaining her pace toward home.

  “Yes. I changed up some of the details on the catalogue card,” Connie confessed. “I probably shouldn’t have. But at least that way I’ll know the text survives, hidden in their archives. Though”—she paused, looking up at Sam—“I think Grace was right.”

  “How’s that?” Sam asked, smoothing a strand of hair back from Connie’s forehead. As he did so, a group of costumed undergraduates tripped across the street, hollering jovial insults at one another. One of the girls swanned by in a long, billowy black dress, a tall, wide-brimmed pointed hat on her head, trailing a broom in her wake. In her arms she carried a stuffed toy cat.

  “I don’t think we need it,” Connie said, her pale eyes gleaming in the night.

  ABOUT THAT TIME, TWENTY-ODD MILES AWAY FROM CAMBRIDGE, ALONG the roadway by the sea, dusk was creeping across Marblehead. In the distance a cannon fired, followed shortly by another, and then another, their blasts echoing off of the craggy granite face of the cliffs as the yacht clubs ringing the harbor announced the sunset. On the northern side of Old Town, past Milk Street, past a boatyard full of empty wooden hulls overturned like elephant ribs in the darkness, an older couple strolled in silhouette along the highest ridge of Old Burial Hill. They were moving toward a bench that stood on the site of the first meetinghouse in town, long since gone; it was the spot that afforded the best view of the harbor as the surface of the water turned a lavender orange-gray in the setting sun. The couple eased themselves onto the bench, settling their backs with relief. For a while they sat, enjoying the salt air as it washed up the sides of the hill, carrying with it the faint sound of rigging clanking against the masts of sailboats moored on the water, and a few distant cries and thumping feet of children at play.

  “Hey,” said the man, shaken out of his reverie. “Thah’s no dogs allowed up heah! Shoo!” He clapped his hands at a smallish dog, barely visible in the grass on the hill, who had been napping, curled up, against one of the headstones. The animal raised his head leisurely, looking at the man.

  “Go on, now!” the man said. “You go on home! Get!”

  The woman clucked with disapproval. “It’s all them new people,” she murmured to the man, reach
ing a hand up to pat his sleeve. “None of ’em can be bothered.”

  “They should have a little respect,” the man groused, wrapping his arm protectively around his wife.

  “They should,” she agreed, settling herself nearer to him. The orange tinge on the rippling harbor surface had started to recede before an advancing inky blue, seeping up from the hollows of the waves and spreading over the surface of the water.

  The dog, meanwhile, had taken his time getting to his feet. He reached his front paws forward in a luxurious stretch, yawning. Then he moved away from the headstone where he had been sleeping, and when the man glanced back to scold him again, the creature seemed to have disappeared.

  The headstone itself, now receding behind the coming night, was slate, chipped at the edges and leaning, and all of the carving on it had melted away, carried by rain and the passage of time. Though if one looked closely, the first letter of the name on the headstone might have been a D.

  POSTSCRIPT

  Real Witches, Real Life

  The Salem witch trials of 1692 are hardly new territory, either for a historian or for a novelist. However, when the trials appear in literature or in history, it is generally assumed that they are acting as a proxy for something else. Either the trials exploded out of social rivalries in Salem and present-day Danvers (the former Salem Village), or else they articulated tensions around the changing role of women in colonial culture, or else the afflicted little girls had all eaten moldy bread, which caused them to hallucinate. What is usually overlooked in these accounts is that, to the people who experienced the Salem panic, the trials were really about witchcraft. Everyone involved—judges, jury, clergymen, accusers, and defendants—lived in a religious system that held no doubt whatsoever that witches existed, and that the Devil could make mischief on earth through human interlocutors. When I started thinking about the story in The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, I decided to take the Salem villagers at their word for once: what if witchcraft was real?

  And to some extent, witchcraft was real, though not in the ways that we think of it today. Medieval and early modern England held a long tradition of so-called cunning folk, local wise people who sold occult services ranging from basic divination, to the location of lost property, to the healing of assorted illnesses. Specifically, the cunning person specialized in un-bewitchment; if you suspected that a witch had cast a spell on you, the cunning person was your best hope for redress. They were usually canny business-people, and their reputations were always rather suspect; after all, anyone with the power to remove spells could be assumed to have the ability to cast them, too.

  Most cunning folk came from the artisan, rather than the laboring, class, in part because tradespeople had more flexible time for seeing clients, but also because they were more likely to be literate. The charms on offer derived both from published grimoires, or spell books translated from Latin into English, and from practices dating from pre-Reformation Christianity. It is thought that the cunning folk tradition did not travel to New England with the colonists, both because of the extreme form of Protestantism that they practiced, in which even Christmas was considered too pagan, and because of the newness of the physical space of the New World. The tangible qualities of magic, derived from special objects, special prayers, and special places, were rooted inextricably in the haunted realms of the Old World.

  Or were they? When the Salem panic first broke out, villager Mary Sibley suggested that the culprit might be revealed through a witch cake, a biscuit made of rye meal and urine from the afflicted girls that was baked and then fed to a dog. Though her personality in the story is the product of my imagination, her actions are not. The real Mary Sibley was chastised for resorting to diabolical means to ascertain diabolical actions, but she nevertheless was confident that this popular magic technique held real power to address Salem’s witchcraft problem. Similarly, the mysterious charmed boundary marker in the story is based on a real charmed boundary stone, located in Newbury, Massachusetts. Magic still lurked in the daily lives of colonial New Englanders, though its face was hidden.

  I have endeavored to be as accurate as possible in my rendition of the historical world of Deliverance and her family, paying special attention to details of dress and room interior. In addition, numerous real people pepper the narrative, though I hasten to add that they are used fictitiously and that some details of their lives have been embellished or changed. The judge and jurymen during Deliverance’s 1682 slander trial are all real, as is Robert “King” Hooper, the wealthy Marblehead merchant. My description of Lieutenant Governor William Stoughton, who presided over the Salem witch trial, derives from an extant portrait of him.

  The nature of the evidence entered against the accused witches is also accurate, including the so-called witches teat for suckling imps and familiars. This phenomenon provided the only reliable form of physical evidence against an accused witch; almost all other evidence was “spectral,” or claims by witnesses that they had seen the accused’s specter doing malefic work. Historians differ on what the witches teat might have really been, arguing variously for anomalous third nipples, for skin tags, for moles, and most notoriously, for the clitoris. In a world lacking in artificial light, hand mirrors, private bedrooms, or bathrooms, the suggestion that women might have been somewhat alienated from their own bodies seems less incredible.

  Most important, Deliverance’s codefendants in the witchcraft trial—Sarah Wildes, Rebecca Nurse, Susannah Martin, Sarah Good, and Elizabeth Howe—together with the dates on which they were tried and executed, are all correct. I have attempted to be true to these women’s personalities insofar as they are known, though I took some liberties with Sarah Good. Other real accused witches make passing appearances: Wilmott Redd of Marblehead; Sarah Osborne, who died in prison; and deposed minister George Burroughs. Sarah Good really did threaten from the gallows that “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.” Interestingly, local tradition holds that the man on the receiving end of this threat, Nicholas Noyes, died years later of a hemorrhage, so in a sense Sarah’s prediction came true.

  Sarah Good’s daughter Dorcas, meanwhile, inspired my illustration of how the effects of the trial echoed years later for the families involved. The real Dorcas, at about four or five years old, spent eight months imprisoned in Boston, and her mother was hanged. As a result of these twin horrors, little Dorcas lost her mind. In 1710, her father, William Good, sued the town for help with her support and maintenance, claiming that Dorcas “being chain’d in the dungeon was so hardly used and terrifyed that she hath ever since been very chargeable having little or no reason to govern herself.” Association with the trials, even for those who were ultimately acquitted, caused entire families to suffer economic and social aftershocks until well into the eighteenth century, a harsh reality that informed the reduced circumstances of Mercy and Prudence in the story.

  The representation of Prudence Bartlett as an eighteenth-century Marblehead midwife who keeps a daily log I owe directly to the scholarship of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich on Martha Ballard, an eighteenth-century Maine midwife (though not a witch, it must be said) who kept a diary of her quotidian activities.

  The assorted magical elements woven throughout the story are based on research into grimoires held at the British Museum, in particular a text of disputed age and authorship called the Key of Solomon. (No North American colonial-era grimoires have been found—at least, not yet.) The magical circle conjured on the door of the Milk Street house is based on a circle drawn in a manuscript in the Bibliothèque de L’Arsenal in Paris, reproduced in a contemporary book of occult history. Similarly, the “Abracadabra” healing charm derives from a Roman talisman, the triangular shape of which was thought to draw illness out of the body, and discussed in a different modern source on vernacular magic. Urine and witch bottles were a common tool of cunning folk, following the widespread logic that a small part of the body can be made to
stand in for the whole. And finally, the “key and Bible” and “sieve and scissors” were both widespread, mainstream divination techniques in use as late as the nineteenth century. Anyone who has flipped a coin or shaken a magic eight ball in the course of making a decision has touched the modern descendants of these techniques.

  And what of Deliverance Dane herself? The real Deliverance Dane was accused near the end of the Salem panic, when the accusations were spreading deeper into the Essex County countryside. She lived with her husband, Nathaniel, in Andover, Massachusetts, and she was imprisoned on suspicion of witchcraft for thirteen weeks in 1692. Little is known about her, apart from the fact that she survived the trials, and unlike some of her contemporaries, there is no evidence that she was actually a cunning woman. The only record that I have been able to find is an account listing how much Nathaniel owed for her maintenance while she was in jail. This document, along with transcripts and digital images of the actual court documents, can be viewed in the Salem witchcraft papers digital archive maintained by the University of Virginia.

  And then there is me. Family genealogical research by successive generations of Howe women indicates our connection both to condemned witch Elizabeth Howe, who appears briefly here, and to accused witch Elizabeth Proctor. The latter connection is thought to be more direct, as she survived the trials, while Elizabeth Howe, as you know, did not.

  For a long while this knowledge was just one of those weird, amusing details about me that not many people knew. Then after a few years working and living in Cambridge, I arrived in Essex County, Massachusetts. As we settled into life on the North Shore, I was moved both by how fully the past in New England still haunts the present, especially in its small, long-memoried towns, and also by how the idiosyncratic personhood of the early colonists seems to have been lost in nationalist myth. In the bedroom of our little antique rental house my husband and I even found a tiny horseshoe, caked in paint, nailed over the rear door for luck, or to ward off evil, we were not sure which.