The Last Witchfinder

by James Morrow

  The pleasures of gestating the demon disproof were all but ruined for Jennet by the disintegration of her correspondence with Rachel. Although she’d attempted to make each letter to Madraspatam a confection of consummate wit and endearing frivolity, by Rachel’s ninth birthday it was obvious that the child had lost interest in the exchange, and Jennet begrudgingly admitted to herself that no jocose note from her daughter would accompany the latest quarterly stipend from Tobias.

  “I pray that the Day will come when you might understand why I seem’d to favor Mechanics over Motherhood,” she wrote in a letter she suspected Rachel would never read. “But until the Dawning of that bless’d Morn, I shan’t blame you for judging my Aristotelian Pursuits contemptible.”

  Deprived of Rachel’s written words, she was forced to settle instead for her phantom form. At least once a day she spied the child’s face in her pendulum’s shining disk. Sometimes she imagined Rachel’s ghost peering out from behind the magnet-driven windmill, and once she beheld the revenant fleeing across Walnut Street Common. Thus it was that spectral evidence, a species of delusion that even her father could not abide, became Jennet’s only bond with the issue of her flesh. She had never endured a darker irony, though she feared that Dame Fortune was not yet weary of the game.

  j

  IN ALL IT TOOK HER four years to lay the foundations of her new treatise, brick by brick, lodestone by lodestone, prism by prism, but at last the task was complete, and she once again admitted herself to the outside world. The summerof 1720 found her strolling each morning amidst the stalls and emporiums of Market Street, delighting all the while in the songbirds’ concertos, the perfumes wafting from the flower-carts, the chatter pouring from the taverns, and the warmth of God’s favorite star pulsing against her face. Within her bosom a vast and sinless pride now swelled: she had carried out Aunt Isobel’s command—she had mastered Mr. Newton from sprit to spanker and grafted the Principia onto her soul. If these forty philosophic demonstrations failed to fulfill Dr. Halley’s requirement of thoroughness and rigor, then the Sahara would barely meet his expectation of a desert.

  Restoring Nellie Adams to her employ proved not only the simplest of procedures but also indubitably beneficent. As Nellie’s bad luck would have it, the paterfamilias of the Eckhardt family had stormed the fortress of her chastity, subsequently allowing himself further such liberties on the grounds that the governess was manifestly a slattern. She took great pleasure in serving notice to Herr Eckhardt, whose predations had—praise Jehovah—fallen short of impregnation, quite likely because poor Nellie had availed herself of the same pennyroyal-and-marjoram unguent in whose application Jennet had tutored her.

  In the months that followed their reunion, the Hammer of Witchfinders and her assistant set about assembling their new and better case against demonology, together evoking countless motion-spirits and offering them abundant opportunities to inflict maleficia. By promising the mortal participants a generous fee—her savings from the quarterly stipends now stood at one hundred pounds—Jennet and Nellie easily recruited scores of wet-nurses, milkmaids, midwives, poultry farmers, and brewers to the cause. Throughout the experiments the women carefully recorded their observations, noting down each dry breast, barren udder, difficult birth, unproductive hen, and sour cask of beer. Their conclusions were unequivocal. Even under highly enticing circumstances, the world’s kinetic agents did not stoop to diabolism.

  At first Jennet wondered how their project might encompass virile members, but then one day Nellie mentioned that her only respites from Herr Eckhardt’s unwelcome attentions occurred when he visited Philadelphia’s most respected house of ill repute, the Grinning Sphinx on the water-front. Jennet immediately entered into negotiations with the proprietress, Mrs. Postlethwaite, who agreed that for a fifty-fifty split—eight shillings perhour to the madam, eight to the harlot—she would allow her girls to ply their trade in proximity to philosophy. And so it was that, night after night, Jennet and Nellie manipulated prisms and pendulums whilst stationed outside the perfumed chambers of dainty Nora Geddis, sly Moll Frost, pouty Gina Little, sanguine Sophie Epsom, and languid Charlotte Ketch. Interviewed ex post facto, the harlots invariably revealed that the episodes of flaccidity lay well within the norm.

  On a scorching afternoon in August of 1721, the air so hot it seemed as if a candle might melt without influence of flame, Jennet escorted Nellie to the wharf and installed her aboard the brigantine Artemis—the maid-servant was sailing home to Chelmsford at the behest of her ailing father—then returned forthwith to the Chestnut Street townhouse, picked up a quill, and set to work. By Christmas Day she’d emptied eight ink pots to produce 151 pages of manuscript. By Easter of the following year the count stood at sixteen pots and 302 pages. At noon on All Saint’s Day she set down her quill, drank a glass of Rhenish, and placed three impassioned kisses on a complete first draft of 434 pages. Should Dr. Halley complain of superficiality again, his accusation would ring as hollow as a sucked egg.

  One task remained, nettlesome but essential. Assuming King George’s Privy Council was as chary of irreverence as its predecessor, she needed somehow to insulate her argument from accusations of Arianism, atheism, and impiety. By whatever means, she must overlay the treatise with a thick coating of Anglican exegesis and Trinitarian theology.

  She was navigating the Schuylkill, a-float on her back, when the answer came, a seraph of inspiration winging through her brain. The Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The kinetic elements: attraction, acceleration, resistance, and radiation—intrinsically allied to earth, air, water, and fire. Christ…incarnation…ah, hah! The Redeemer was manifestly connected to Earth, having graced the planet with his flesh and blood. And the Holy Ghost? The Aristotelian link was obvious: at Pentecost, this phenomenon had descended upon the Apostles in the guise of fire. Concerning the Father, an association with air seemed natural and inevitable, for God was the breath of life.

  That left the fourth Greek element, water.

  The current carried her south. A dead tree arced out of the Schuylkill; two yellow-spotted turtles sunned themselves on the half submerged trunk. She drifted. Waters of the Delaware Bay. Waters of the Atlantic Sea. Waters of the Pishon, the Gihon, the Euphrates.

  Birth waters, leaking unstoppably, heralding doomed Pashpishia and dear Rachel—heralding every child of woman born. And the Holy Virgin, blessed Mother of God, she too must have known that inexorable leakage, that wonderfully auspicious spill. There! She had it! Hurrah! God, Christ, Ghost, Virgin: air, earth, fire, water. A year might pass ere she finished the treatise, perhaps even two, but at last a complete and irrefutable demon disproof was in hand, and if King George and his Parliament didn’t find it a work of the most astonishing piety, they could all go fishing in Hell.

  j

  BENJAMIN FRANKLIN KNEW that his ambition to absorb the whole of human knowledge before his thirtieth birthday was immodest, but did that mean it was impossible? He thought not. The key, he decided, was self-discipline. Whereas the other journeymen at Keimer’s Printing-House spent their luncheon intervals in the gloomy Crooked Billet, swallowing beef and swilling ale, Ben always passed this same hour in the sunlit compositing-room, improving his mind. Beyond the obvious advantages of his vegetarian diet, amongst them a thinner girth and fatter purse, lay the fact that he could consume his bread, raw cabbage, and pint of distilled water in a fraction of the hiatus required by meat, which gave him additional time for philosophic inquiry.

  At the beginning of the week Ben had known almost nothing about the cryptic phenomenon called electricity, but he’d spent the previous four evenings reading Otto von Guericke’s Experimenta Nova, which discussed the substance, revealed how to make it, and even explained the word itself: electricity, from the Greek elektron, “amber”—for it was the ancient Ionians who’d first noticed that, when rubbed vigorously, a chunk of amber exhibited a peculiar attractive property. After studying the drawings in Experimenta Nova, Ben had stayed awake u
ntil midnight constructing a Von Guericke sphere, a turnip-size ball of sulphur mounted on a steel axle turned by a gear and crank, and now he was ready to test it. He finished his cabbage, pulled his stool to the slopping table, and arranged the four mounds around the sphere, all equidistant from the core. With his left hand he cranked the sulphur to spinning, then arced his dominant hand above its surface and pressed down.

  First the wheat chaff flew up, leaping through the air and sticking to the charged ball, just as Von Guericke had reported. He cranked faster, rubbed harder. The sot-weed granules took flight. Faster. The wren feathers soared. Harder. Now the primrose petals. The sphere was alive! It surged with power!

  A gray mouse scurried across the floor. Keeping his right hand in contact with the sulphur, Ben lifted his feet to let the creature pass, whereupon, apropos of nothing, an errant primrose petal ascended and affixed itself to his free hand. He returned his feet to terra firma. The petal abandoned his palm and drifted to the table. He cranked the ball, charged the sulphur, held his left hand over the wayward petal, and again lifted his feet. The petal flew to his palm. He flicked it free.

  Nowhere in Experimenta Nova did Von Guericke mention that the human body became a conduit for electricity when isolated from the ground. Could it be that Mr. Franklin himself had stumbled upon a heretofore unknown law of Nature? The matter merited further investigation. He set his feet on the floor, cranked the ball, and caressed the sulphur—but before he bothered to unground himself, his uncommitted hand strayed toward a box of broken type. A tingling splinter of electricity materialized betwixt the tip of his index finger and a 20-point leaden W—an unpleasant jolt that made him yelp as if he’d stubbed his toe.

  He contrived for the same event to occur again, but now he braced himself for the jolt, and so the shock was less. Once more he charged the sulphur. This time, however, he deliberately unfloored his feet ere touching the W. No spark. No jolt. What was going on here? What secret principle had he activated?

  The tinkling of a brass bell, rigged by Ben to chime whenever the front door opened, announced the arrival of a customer. He damned his luck. John O’Leary and the others were still at the Billet, and Mr. Keimer had left at ten o’clock, laid low by an attack of the gout. Ben had no choice but to abandon his experiments and attend the patron.

  Striding into the press-room, he happened upon the handsomest woman in Philadelphia, or such was his initial assessment of her face and form. She was about thirty-five, perhaps even forty, and all the more exquisite for it. Clad in a green damask dress, her flesh had aged not into decrepitude but toward rarity, the same phenomenon as occurred with wine, brandy, cheese, and marble. Her tresses were a glorious auburn, her features noble, her proportions generous. Her lips boasted the moist sensuality of an inking-ball dipped in tallow.

  The lady removed her bonnet and gloves, then inquired whether the master of the shop was about. He replied that the gout had sent Mr. Keimer home but that he, Benjamin Franklin, though a mere journeyman, would assist her. His visitor raised her eyebrows to a skeptical elevation. She smiled. From her satchel she produced a thick manuscript, setting it on the scrubbing counter and petting it as she might the cowlick of a favorite nephew.

  “I fancy the fragrance of this place,” she said. “Ink, glue, leather, and something I can’t identify.”

  “Mouse droppings,” he said.

  She laughed. None of the whores he bedded at the Grinning Sphinx, not even Nora Geddis, had ever inspired in him such deliciously sinful fancies.

  “I am Jennet Stearne Crompton, devotee of Baconian experimentalism and former wife to the Madraspatam Postmaster-General. Since my deliverance from Indian captivity, a narrative on which I shan’t waste your time, I have devoted myself to writing a book. I would see it printed without delay.”

  Ben lifted the cover-page from the stack and studied it, instantly surmising that Mrs. Crompton’s appetite for speculation quite possibly rivaled his own.

  A Treatise of

  How the Four

  ARISTOTELIAN ELEMENTS

  May Serve to Convince There Are

  NO ELEMENTALS,

  Neither Are There

  Demons, Devils, Goblins,

  nor

  Wicked Spirits,

  Excepting

  Lucifer Himself,

  and Why

  Witchcraft & Maleficium

  Are in Consequence

  Impossible Things,

  This Being the Personal Investigation of the Author,

  J. S. Crompton,

  Curator of the Cavendish Museum

  of Wondrous Prodigies

  (Colonial Branch)

  “I must confess, I’ve ne’er heard of the Cavendish Museum,” Ben said. “Is the Colonial Branch in Philadelphia?”

  “At the moment ’tis largely in my head,” Mrs. Crompton replied. “I intend to found such an institution, but until now my battle against demonology hath consumed me.”

  “I, too, pursue the philosophic life.” Ben returned the cover-page to the pile. “This morning I installed a Von Guericke sphere in our compositing-room. As the month progresses I shall employ my leisure hours in learning more of the electric force.”

  Again she flashed him a smile, though whether of admiration or condescension he couldn’t tell. “I can spare from my private fortune the sum of six hundred and fifty pounds. Will that be sufficient to print and bind three hundred copies? I mean to gift each Parliamentarian with one, likewise King George and his councilors, that they might join together in overturning the Witchcraft Act of James the First.”

  He gasped and said, “Madam, for six hundred and fifty pounds we’ll supply every copy with Moroccan bindings, a golden bookmark, and a clockwork canary who turns the pages on command.” Noticing that David Harry had once again failed to sweep under the blacking table, he seized the broom and set to work. “Tell me, Mrs. Crompton, might I perchance borrow your intriguing treatise”—he sculpted the debris into a lopsided cone—“and read it this evening?”

  “Mr. Franklin, I should be delighted to have a bright young man negotiate my opus and offer me his opinions—though the task will take you more than one evening.”

  “I read quickly,” he said eagerly.

  “I write slowly,” she replied pointedly.

  “I grasp your meaning, Madam, and I shall give each sentence its due.” He used the coal-scuttle to transfer the debris from the floor to the dustbin. “The subject touches a nerve deep within me, for the celebrated Samuel Sewall, once employed by the notorious Salem witch-court, hath of late sought to ruin my benighted brother.”

  A full year had passed since Samuel Sewall’s campaign against The New-England Courant, and still Ben could not think on the affair without seething. No one disputed that the Boston newspaper had criticized both the provincial government and the Puritan clergy: neither the paper’s editor, James Franklin, nor his younger brother and indentured apprentice, Ben, was a friend to the status quo. But the fact remained that no unequivocal irreverence or blatant blasphemy had ever stained the Courant’s pages, and so when Judge Sewall moved to have James gaoled and his journal extinguished for allegedly perverting Scripture, it occurred to Ben that his imagination might be more cordially received in Pennsylvania. Whilst James dropped from sight, leaving his assistants to compose and print the Courant as best they could, Ben set out for Philadelphia, whose Quaker majority, despite its many eccentricities, had reportedly embraced the grand English ideal called freedom of thought.

  “My late father was amongst those who conspired with your Mr. Sewall to doom the Salem defendants,” Mrs. Crompton said. “And now my brother Dunstan hath likewise caught the cleansing fever.”

  “If you speak of Dunstan Stearne, I have read of his deplorable activities in The Bible Commonwealth. ’Steeth, ’twould appear we are to publish an imperially important treatise, of passing interest to theologians, philosophers, and general readers alike. I propose we charge at least two crowns per copy.”<
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  “What matters, young Franklin, is not what price we place upon my book, but what value Parliament extracts from it.”

  “Of course, Madam—though I fear that for Mr. Keimer there be no such thing as honor without a profit.” He offered her a sly grin, upgrading it anon to an admiring glance. “Ah, Mrs. Crompton, I imagine ’tis exhilarating to have in life so worthy a purpose as you enjoy.”

  “Exhilarating?” His visitor presented him with a dumbfounded expression, as if his nose had suddenly become a turnip. “Nay, sir, ’tis a skein more tangled than that. I cherish my quest, and yet I despise it. I treasure my mission, and still I detest it. As did Harry’s thrust to Hotspur, it hath robbed me of my youth.” In apparent prelude to her departure she pulled on her gloves, then gave her manuscript a quick caress. “Be warned, sir. I’ve planted herein a prodigious thicket of Keplerian mechanics and Newtonian proofs. You might get lost.”

  “I once tried to read Mr. Newton’s Principia, but I couldn’t manage the Latin. His Opticks, being in English, was more to my taste.” Again Ben approached the blacking table and, seizing a pair of inking-balls by their shafts, brayed them together to equalize their loads. He beat the two great sopping udders against the framed and locked type-form containing the first canto of Joseph Stukeley’s The Aphrodisiad, buttering the leaden letters with a film of ink—“Arise, my Soul,” the epic began, “thou burning Coal, my Heart’s own Foal,” an opening from which it never recovered. “But even if I comprehend but part of your argument,” Ben said, “’twill be like a healing rain, washing away the swill we brew on these premises—verses by witlings, pamphlets by scoundrels, sermons by hypocrites.” After securing the inked type-form in Mr. Keimer’s massive handpress, he laid a virgin sheet on the tympan, positioned the frisket (essential for preventing smears), and folded both parts over the stone bed. “The instant my luncheon interval’s done, I’m obliged to spawn a hundred copies of this doggerel.” He slid the whole arrangement beneath the platen. “I’faith, an African monkey playing with a case of type might easily surpass it.” He pulled the spindle lever, thus squeezing the sheet tight against the form and indelibly transferring ink to paper. “Behold Mr. Stukeley’s poem”—he rolled back the bed—“certain to lift him from the vale of anonymity and deposit him in the depths of obscurity.”