The Last Witchfinder

by James Morrow

  Attraction, acceleration, radiation, resistance: earth, air, fire, water—could any reasonable person doubt that Newtonian motion was every bit as primal, every jot as fundamental, as Aristotelian matter? It would seem that the bracing biblical revelation, And God saw that it was good, now enjoyed a logical corollary, And God saw that it moved virtuously. Ah, but if such were the case, then surely Jehovah had in the beginning systematically barred Satan’s invisible minions from both domains—stuff and flux—so systematically, in fact, that a philosopher would be justified in declaring these minions nonexistent!

  “Ergo, to recover Newton’s lost disproof,” she muttered to herself, “one need only establish the essential benevolence of the myriad motion-spirits that serve and facilitate the four kinetic entities.”

  “Mrs. Crompton, prithee, be quiet,” Tobias whispered.

  The Reverend Dowd sent a scowl her way, even as he prattled about the Wedding at Cana.

  “For all Satan tries to corrupt these spirits,” she mumbled, “he must always fail, as God hath made them invulnerable to temptation.”

  “Stay your tongue,” Tobias said.

  “Such was Aunt Isobel’s insight on the pyre!”

  “Silence!”

  j

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING Jennet bid Nellie Adams gather up their materials—lodestone, pendulum, prism, pair of wooden ramps—and accompany her to the home of Lydia Trimble, a nursing mother whose husband owned a tavern in Ship Street. At first the Hammer of Witchfinders had no luck elucidating for Mrs. Trimble why she wished to conduct natural philosophy experiments on the premises, and how the woman’s lactations fit into the design, but then Jennet opened her purse, and the glister of its guineas proved explanation enough. Whilst Mrs. Trimble suckled her baby beside the hearth, Jennet and Nellie performed an earth demonstration, using the lodestone’s invisible fingers to pull a hobnail across the floor, thereby releasing those motion-spirits, whether sinister or saintly, that served the kinetic element called attraction—saintly, evidently, for they declined to impede Mrs. Trimble’s milk. Jennet next did a water experiment, making the pendulum oscillate through beer, honey, whale oil, and other fluids of varying densities. The unleashed spirits of resistance forbore to disrupt the nursing process. She then performed a fire experiment, instructing Nellie to hold the prism to the window; the morning sun flashed through the glass pentahedron, and radiation’s agents got busy, transmuting the beam into a rainbow. Mrs. Trimble’s breast remained productive. That afternoon Jennet and Nellie did several experiments keyed to Aristotelian air, observing how acceleration’s spirits imposed a uniform velocity on spheres of different weights rolled down wooden ramps. The baby continued to feast.

  Two days later Jennet’s purse persuaded a poultry farmer named Hugh Berridge to admit the kinetic experiments into the vicinity of his chicken coops. The hens never stopped laying. At noon Mr. Berridge’s wife leased her churning skills to the cause. The butter came in full. That evening Jennet persuaded a confused but accommodating Tobias to swive her as she manipulated her philosophy tools. The demonstrations surely conjured many motion-spirits, but they worked no mischief on his manhood.

  “The kinetic elements are moral to the core, with nary a malefactor in the lot!” Jennet declared. “Lucifer could ne’er warp such sterling spirits!”

  “That surely sounds correct to me, darling,” Tobias said, stroking her naked thigh.

  Of course, Jennet reasoned, these results did not mean the motion-spirits were omnipotent. Only the Creator Himself enjoyed that attribute. Try though they might, the agents in question were powerless to shield humankind from blizzards, thunder-gusts, blights, or contagions—all those natural shocks wrongly attributed to demons. But God had no more ceded the universe of action to fallen angels and malevolent imps than He’d assembled the world from fungus and dung.

  It took Jennet six days and as many rough drafts before she had an argumentum grande that fell felicitously on her ear. “All flowings and fallings,” she wrote by way of an inaugural sentence, “all flappings and snappings, all swingings and springings, all splittings and flittings know naught of goblins but only of goodness.”

  She purchased a stack of parchment at Darby’s, printed a title across the topmost sheet, Contra Dæmonologie, and copied out the final version, eight pages long, using her best hand. Obviously the momentous document required a signature, and after some deliberation she settled on “J. S. Crompton, Curator, Cavendish Museum of Wondrous Prodigies, Colonial Branch.” All that remained was for her to dispatch the treatise to Kensington Palace, accompanied by an explanatory note.

  AN APPEAL

  To Her Most Esteemed Majesty,

  Queen Anne,

  Defender of the Faith,

  Ruler of All England,

  Scotland, Ireland, and France:

  By enacting various Newtonian Demonstrations in a Manner design’d to goad Motion-Spirits to Maleficium, the Cavendish Museum hath in recent Days prov’d that the four Kinetic Entities are benign in Character, forever immur’d against the Devil’s Wiles. If Her Most Sovereign Majesty agrees with the Conclusions express’d in the enclos’d Treatise, we would humbly ask that she set this Matter before both Houses of Parliament, that they might repeal the 1604 Witchcraft Statute of King James I.

  Your humble Subject,

  J. S. Crompton, Esq.

  19 September 1710

  An expert in postal systems and their vicissitudes, Tobias confidently forecast the fate of Contra Dæmonologie. If the Columbine, as sturdy a mail-ship as had ever crossed the Atlantic Sea, did not fall prey to storms or pirates, the treatise would be in the Queen’s hands by the tenth of November.

  “Proud I am to call myself your husband,” he told Jennet as they stood together on Long Wharf watching the Columbine glide across the harbor. “Great was my satisfaction in making my seminal donation to demonology’s demise.”

  “Thou art a good man, Mr. Crompton.”

  “I’m a dull man, Mrs. Crompton.”

  “That too, but in the months to come I shall strive to be a better wife to thee.”

  In the months to come…the phrase brought a chill to her bones. What, exactly, might she do with the rest of her life? Cleave to this inert marriage? Having swum in the wild rivers of Nimacook paganism and sailed the uncharted seas of Newtonian experimentalism, she had but little desire to paddle about the shallow pond of Boston respectability. Perhaps she would become the first woman ever to teach Euclidian geometry at Harvard College. Perhaps she would start a school for governesses, impressing her students with the necessity of going beyond antiquity’s tongues and Aristotle’s insights to instruct their charges in the new mechanical philosophy. But no matter how intently she gazed into the prism of her aspirations, studying the glass for some clue to her future, she did not see Tobias Crompton looking back.

  j

  WHEN JENNET DISCOVERED that, despite Aunt Isobel’s charts and Hassane’s unguent, a child was growing inside her, she instinctively attributed this catastrophe to her Creator’s will, though her husband’s virility had clearly played a part as well. Evidently Jehovah had decided that He would spare her the inconvenience of progeny only until she’d birthed the argumentum grande, and now she was constrained to present the world with a miraculum minitum as well.

  Having lost her first child to the small-pox, she could not help fearing that some equally diabolical phenomenon would destroy her second baby too. She combated these premonitions with every weapon at her disposal. During the early weeks of her pregnancy she consumed the blend of wild mushrooms that Hassane believed prevented miscarriage. As her fifth month commenced, she availed herself daily of juniper tea, the Nimacook prescription against premature delivery. The quickening phase found her ingesting great quantities of red-fern and yarrow, which in the experience of her Lyn Street neighbor, a midwife named Sarah Dinwidie, protected an infant from illness not only in the womb but throughout the first postnatal year. The instant the spasms beg
an, she sought out Mrs. Dinwidie, and together the women went to Chadwick’s Livery and appropriated a vacant stall abounding in fresh straw. Whilst the midwife whispered words of encouragement, Jennet pressed her back against the wall, grabbed the partition, bent her knees, and prayed.

  The spasms intensified. Her screams frightened the horses and put two cats to flight. The pangs grew stronger yet, as did her cries. She felt as if she were about to birth the Maw of Folkestone, or perhaps Perdition’s Pride.

  “I don’t even want this blasted babe!” she shrieked.

  “Many are the times I’ve heard a customer speak those very words,” Mrs. Dinwidie assured her. “’Tis the very litany of your predicament.”

  After an interval of two hours, through the operations of God Almighty and universal gravitation, a pink and slippery female infant descended into Mrs. Dinwidie’s waiting hands.

  This time, Jennet resolved, her daughter’s name would be free of all sentimental connection. She certainly wasn’t going to use “Bella” again, neither would she christen the infant “Margaret” after her mother nor “Catherine” after her mother’s mother. “Rachel” had always struck Jennet as a robust and resonant vocable, and when she presented the idea to Tobias he acquiesced without quarrel, though he insisted on augmenting the choice with his late mother’s name. And so it was that on the fifth of May, 1711, the Reverend Dowd drew a watery cross on the forehead of Rachel Veronica Crompton, thus alerting Heaven to the presence of another salvation-worthy Protestant in the world.

  Rachel’s life began auspiciously. She was a ruddy infant with bright hazel eyes, a strong cry, a precocious smile, and no tendency toward the colic, this last asset doubtless attributable to Mrs. Dinwidie’s pharmaceutical wisdom. Tobias, not surprisingly, idolized his daughter from the outset, but Jennet refused to relax her vigilance, for it still seemed probable the child would perish ere reaching her first birthday. And yet one succulent spring morning, five weeks after the baptism, Jennet realized that she adored Rachel past all telling, a circumstance that felt rather like the pregnancy itself: precautions had been taken, those precautions had failed, and now the ambiguous consequences were upon her.

  Although Tobias urged Jennet to employ a wet-nurse, such a service being comfortably within their budget, she decided to suckle the baby herself. Especially gratifying were the events that followed each feeding. She would set Rachel betwixt her breasts and revel in the pressure of the warm, compacted, breathing bundle, as if the nexus of her circulatory system had been mysteriously transported outside her body. Good people of Boston, come see this marvelous monstrosity. Step into the Cavendish Museum of Wondrous Prodigies, Colonial Branch, and behold Nature’s most beautiful aberration yet, the Externalized Heart of Hannover Street.

  For all the pleasurable feelings it entailed, all the agreeable obligations, motherhood failed to distract Jennet from the fact that the Queen had not responded to Contra Dæmonologie. When Rachel learned to walk, traveling across Boston Common through a combination of tentative steps and comical tumbles, Jennet’s joy could not cancel the melancholy caused by Her Majesty’s conspicuous disinterest in the demon disproof. When the child progressed from random babbling to coherent words to complete sentences, Jennet’s delight was betimes diluted by the Crown’s failure to acknowledge either the treatise itself or her subsequent inquiries into its disposition. Shortly after her fourth birthday, Rachel employed her poppets in an improvised theatre-piece about a woman philosopher who rides a cannonball to the moon, and Jennet’s soul swelled with pride, but this pleasure was severely circumscribed by the silence from Kensington Palace.

  On the first day in October of 1715, a brown-skinned courier appeared at Jennet’s door bearing a packet displaying the provenance label of a certain Lord Wentworth in Essex County, England. She paid the manumitted Negro a guinea and, with the enthusiasm of Juliet opening a letter from her Montague swain, ripped apart the envelope and drew out the vellum sheet.

  25 July 1715

  Dear J. S. Crompton:

  Her Majesty hath instruct’d the Privy Council to respond to your Contra Dæmonologie, which reach’d Kensington Palace in November of 1711. After some Months of Deliberation, we decid’d to place the Document with an eminent Natural Philosopher to whom the Council oft-times turns in such Cases. Dr. Edmund Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, eventually wrote to us as follows:

  “Mr. Crompton’s Intentions are doubtless honorable, and his chosen Methodology boasts a novel and astute Design. The present Treatise is so lacking in Detail, however, so bereft of Thoroughness and Rigor, that it inclines a rational Man toward a Conclusion quite opposite to the Author’s.”

  Concerning our own Reaction, we find your approach so Impious as to be but one Degree of Remove from Atheism. When a Person presumes to reduce the World’s Workings to self-sustaining Principles, whether he calls them “Forces” following Mr. Newton (who subscribes, we must note, to the deplorable Arian Religion) or “Kinetic Entities” per your Treatise, he must take great Care lest he give unwitting Comfort to those Deists and Freethinkers who would dislodge the Christian God from Creation’s Center.

  To wit, we shan’t be troubling the English Parliament, and certainly not Her Most Sovereign Majesty, with your misguided Investigations.

  Philip Tyrrell,

  EARL OF WENTWORTH

  LORD PRIVY SEAL

  Owing to the Indian attack on Haverhill, Jennet had never enacted her wonderful plan to rip her father’s cleansing license from his door and mutilate it beyond recognition. But now, suddenly, she had in hand an equally noxious document. She tore Lord Wentworth’s letter into pieces, then tore the pieces into bits, then fed the bits to the fire in the kitchen hearth, where Nellie Adams was at that moment baking a half-dozen loaves of wheaten bread.

  “How durst they reject my treatise!” Jennet shrieked.

  “’Tis an insult to our good labors,” Nellie said.

  “Those morons! Those dunces! Numskulls, I call ’em! Buffoons! Mooncalves! Puddingheads! Nincompoops!”

  “That’s exactly what they are, ma’am.”

  Perhaps if he’d seen Giles Corey lying beside Salem-Town Courthouse, pinned under the granite blocks—or stood on the Shawsheen River Bridge and heard Susan Diggens cry “Help me, friend Indian!”—Tobias might have apprehended the magnitude of her desolation. Instead he could only offer observations of a sort she found more irritating than soothing.

  “If the great Dr. Halley sees no use in trying to disprove demons,” he told her, “then mayhap ’tis a less worthy enterprise than you believe.”

  “Dr. Halley doth not gainsay the purpose of my project,” she snapped, “and he calls its design novel and astute.”

  “But if the demonologists are so misguided as you aver, would not England’s philosophers have argued ’em out of business by now?”

  “Dear Tobias, methinks you play the dolt without half trying. If the Royal Society hath attempted no argumentum grande, ’tis only for want of motivation. Should the day come when Dr. Halley finds himself accused of sorcery, a dozen demon disproofs will pour from his pen, for terror’s a most inspiring sponsor.”

  As happened so often in Jennet’s life, salvation arrived in the person of a book. On the Monday following her receipt of Lord Wentworth’s vile letter, the second edition of Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica appeared in Darby’s front window bearing a publication date of 1713, and as she turned back the thick fragrant leaves, she noticed that Book Three concluded with a new Scholium. Its matter was God. Whether acquiescing to external Anglican pressure or responding to some private revelation, Mr. Newton now insisted (if she could trust her Latin) that “this most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets” depended upon “the counsel of an intelligent and powerful Being,” which idea he proceeded to elaborate over the next five pages.

  Joy flooded her heart. The Privy Council feared that those who methodized Nature’s workings trafficked in atheism, and yet here was
Newton, spicing his postulates with Providence as effortlessly as a cook might add rum to a cake batter. Of course, she would never quote the geometer directly—not so long as he cleaved to “the deplorable Arian Religion”—but it was obvious that if you chose your words thoughtfully, Baconian experimentalism could be made to seem as pious as the Beatitudes.

  Then there were Dr. Halley’s requirements of detail, thoroughness, and rigor. She vowed to make her revised Contra Dæmonologie detailed to a fault, with a thoroughness to tax an angel’s patience and a rigor sufficient to snap iron. This time around, she would not merely wade into the Principia’s shallows—she would dive into its rollers and plumb its deepest trenches.

  “I am Lazarus, come back from the abyss,” she announced to Tobias shortly after Nellie finished laying out their crab-cake dinner. “I shall give the Privy Council a treatise so sodden with God ’twill make Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses seem but a grocery list! I’ll shower Dr. Halley with pages enough to wipe his bum from Epiphany to Michaelmas!”

  “How delighted I am that your melancholia hath passed,” Tobias muttered.