The Last Witchfinder

by James Morrow

  “I mourn him, I truly do,” Abby said as she greased the great iron skillet. “I did not love my uncle, but I mourn him.”

  Dunstan winced. How might he speak to her of his apprehension? What words would make sense? After testing a dozen preambles in his mind and judging none adequate to the task, he finally blurted out his succinct but anguished opinion. “Goodwife Stearne, methinks you bring too much ardor to your designs against Mr. Belcher.”

  “You perplex me.”

  “You name Belcher a wizard, and yet we’ve not submitted him to a single proof.” He laid the drowned fish on the dining table, brought a lanthorn close, and made ready to remove its head.

  “Lucifer hath beguiled the Governor,” she said. “’Tis as blatant as blood on snow.”

  He set the tip of her dagger an inch behind the fish’s unblinking eye, then pushed. The blade failed to pierce the scales but instead retreated into the shaft. “We’ve neither swum him, nor pricked him, nor—i’Christ, Abby, your bodkin doth break!” He lifted the dagger free of the fish. The blade shot forward. What sorcery was this? Again he pressed the knifepoint against the scales, and again the blade retreated, leaping outward when he jerked it away. “There be some imp within!”

  “Can it be you’ve ne’er held a pricker’s bodkin before?” Abby said.

  “Pricker’s bodkin?”

  “To secure the blade, you need but throw the lever in the shaft.”

  “Pricker’s bodkin?!” His heart crashed against his ribs like a pent and raging beast. Lurching toward Abby, he held the dagger before her gaze. “Speak truthfully. Is this sham blade the same as pierced you Friday?”

  “’Twas clever of you to wheedle Hathorne to our side”—she lifted the skillet to her breast as a Christian knight might raise his shield against a Turk—“and no less clever of me to seal our victory with my gift for legerdemain.”

  “Legerdemain? So Trenchard spoke the truth? Legerdemain? Is this why your flesh bears no wound?”

  “’Tis time you cleaned our fish.”

  “Raven feathers, our Savior’s nails—illusions all?”

  “When you married Abigail Williams, you espoused a most artful cleanser.”

  “My sister goes to the gallows in consequence of tricks?”

  “Nay, Goodman Stearne, she goes in consequence of signing Satan’s ledger. Now let us curtail this dreary discussion of bodkins and prepare our supper.”

  It seemed that all his earthly possessions had surrendered their solidity. The hearthstones, door hinges, windowpanes, wall-planks, floorboards, roof-beams—these things were fluid now, molten, pouring into one another like metals roiling in a crucible. When he attempted to speak, he could find no words save the pronouncements of St. John Chrysostom, most renowned of the Desert Fathers and prime amongst the objects of his own father’s secret admiration for the Roman Church.

  “‘What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an inescapable punishment, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, painted in fair colors?’”

  “Husband, thou art exceeding spleenful tonight.”

  The manner of her departure, he decided, must be biblical yet abrupt, dramatic yet merciful. With an anguished howl he tore the skillet from her grip and, raising its iron mass high, smote her on the brow. Samson battering the Philistines. Jael spiking down Sisera’s head. Her skull broke open like an egg, and she fell insensible to the floor.

  “‘No wickedness approaches the wickedness of a woman’!” he cried, quoting the Book of Ecclesiasticus. “‘Sin began with a woman, and thanks to her we all must die’!”

  Later, after he’d set down the skillet and prayed for her soul and mopped up the matter of her intellect, he took the Commission’s tool-kit in hand and walked through the damp woods until he reached the dock. Crickets and cicadas sang all about him. The pond soughed against the shore. Opening the calfskin satchel, he retrieved the short pricking needle and hurled it toward the dark pond. Next he rid himself of the long needle, next the magnification lens. He tied the mask-o’-truth to the shaving razor and threw them both into the water.

  As the night thickened there descended upon the former witchfinder a tranquility such as he normally experienced only when drawing landscapes or reading Scripture. Each second followed upon the next like the divine and perfect strokes of an angel’s wing. He wished that he might just then take hold of Heaven’s pendulum and bring it to a halt, stopping time forever, locking the moment in place, no incipient sunrise or insistent noon or ineluctable dusk.

  What was a deposed cleanser to do with his life? How could he best put his wisdom to use? Who might his next sponsor be?

  Slowly a strategy congealed in Dunstan’s brain. On the morrow he would slip into the forest, deeper, ever deeper, beyond Framingham, beyond all the English settlements, and from that day forward he would live as had Chrysostom and the other Desert Fathers, sustaining himself on fried locusts and raw honey.

  All five implements remained submerged—testament to their holiness, proof of their kinship with martyrs’ bones and saints’ fingers.

  Dunstan of the wilderness. But that would not be the end of him, for on certain rare occasions he would quit the forest and appear before his fellow Calvinists, heralding the Great Antisatan, Suedomsa—Asmodeus inverted—the angel whose shoes he was unworthy to loosen and whose hem he was unfit to kiss: Suedomsa, supreme pricker, divine cleanser, descending upon Massachusetts Bay in a chariot of fire and driving Lucifer from the New World forever.

  He reached into the tool-kit one last time, drew out the Paracelsus trident, and flung it into the night. The device followed a lovely flowing arc, a curve more perfect than any a geometer might inscribe, and as it reached its apex the moonlight glinted off the tines, so that the trident became a skyborne lanthorn, a celestial beacon, an Oriental comet, pointing the way toward Bethlehem.

  j

  ON WEDNESDAY AT SIX O’CLOCK, as two raw-faced, ill-scrubbed lobsterbacks brought her out of the dungeon and into the dawn, Jennet saw that the Baltimore Globe-Boy had received her petition favorably. She would not die ere seeing a stellar object. Directly ahead lay the morning star, Venus, coruscating above Martsolf’s Mill. Though her flesh was numb with dread, her mind now embarked on speculation. Had the Prime Mover brought forth living forms on Venus? What manner of creatures were the Venusians? Did they suppose that demons made their world go round?

  Crimson coats muted by scrims of fog, a full company of soldiers encircled the tumbrel, each man keeping an uneasy watch on the two factions in the prison-yard. She recognized the commanding officer, the same gaunt and ashen Captain Wilcox who’d led the attack on the West-Indies pirates. The crowd had apparently changed its disposition since Montesquieu’s report, for whilst her admirers indeed outnumbered the sixteen prosecution witnesses by a factor of two, the latter group was much the noisier. On seeing their nemesis, Jennet’s putative victims showered her with imprecations and rotten vegetables. Michael Bailey, the harness-maker who blamed her for his wife’s ague, hurled a turnip. The root’s decayed matter spattered against her forehead. Daniel Morris, the glassblower who imagined she’d bewitched his bottles, attacked her with a squash. The sloshy spheroid struck her shoulder and disintegrated. From Wilbur Bennet, the dairyman who believed she’d soured his milk, came a cabbage, its putridity exploding across her chest.

  A solitary horse, gray and stippled as the moon, stood ready to bear Jennet to the gallows. Hunched in the driver’s box, Matthew Knox offered her a flaccid smile. As the rising sun glinted amongst the trees, washing Venus from the sky and igniting the dew on the lilac bushes, Herbert Bledsoe stepped from his office. He grasped her chain, guided Jennet into the tumbrel, and seated her directly behind Mr. Knox. After easing himself onto the opposite bench, he applied his handkerchief to her brow and cheeks, wiping away the vegetable residue. From his coat he procured a glittering object that at first she thought a pocket-watch.

  “Every drop’s for you.” Mr.
Bledsoe passed her the small copper flask. “Brandy nauseates me.”

  “Merci.” Accepting the flask, she made a mental effort to forgive the young magistrate his part in making her last days of imprisonment so gratuitously miserable, but her labors came to naught—under present circumstances, evidently, such magnanimity was beyond her. “Merci beaucoup, Monsieur Bledsoe.”

  She pulled out the stopper, tossed back her shaven head, and pressed the flask to her lips. Her wrist-shackle clanked against the copper. The fiery stream trickled down her gullet and spread across her stomach. In a matter of seconds the brandy entered her brain, but instead of producing the desired insensibility it merely made the people swirling around her seem as swollen and grotesque as anything Barnaby Cavendish had ever put in a jar.

  Captain Wilcox shouted incoherently, and the Redcoats fell in on both sides of the tumbrel, twenty men per file. The drummer pulled two mahogany sticks from his belt, set them against the sheepskin head, and rattled out three tight rolls followed by two single beats. He repeated the cadence. A second shout from Wilcox, and the soldiers began to march, even as the horse, feeling the bite of Knox’s whip, released a tremulous whinny and started off toward Walnut Street Prison.

  Whilst the prosecution witnesses rushed to the head of the parade, Jennet’s admirers clustered around the tumbrel, their ranks as ragged as the Redcoat formation was orderly. She gulped down a second dose of brandy, then a third. Her brain seemed to rotate on its axis. To spare herself the noose, she realized, she would gladly burn all existing copies of The Sufficiency of the World—burn them then and there, burn them into oblivion, burn them as resolutely as John Flamsteed had immolated his pathetic Historia Cœlestis Britannica.

  The procession advanced down Ridge Road. An expansive farm rolled by, its hills a-swarm with bulbous and oblivious sheep. Apple trees raised skeletal branches toward a sky the gray of the Globe-Boy’s pickled flesh.

  After perhaps a half-hour the tumbrel reached the edge of Manayunk and drew within view of the Wissahickon Creek Bridge, a graceful arc of sandstone. Reaching into her smock, shuddering as the wrist-shackle touched her breast, she retrieved the wooden tiger. She passed the carving to Mr. Bledsoe and secured his promise to return it to her son on the morrow, whereupon a wholly unexpected event occurred.

  With the suddenness of a thunderclap the woods flanking Ridge Road erupted with a noise she’d not heard since the burning of Haverhill: Nimacook battle cries—if not Nimacook, then some equally contentious tribe. Scores of Indians plummeted from the trees and landed on the backs of the Redcoats, two braves for each soldier, dragging them down with the predictably lopsided success of wolves falling on lambs. The drum cadence stopped. Knox halted his team. Bledsoe yelped in fear. Jennet steeled herself and drained the brandy, soon finding within the depths of her bewilderment a lucid thought: a quick death at the hands of a tawnie was far preferable to a slow strangulation on the gallows.

  In the mêlée now unfolding, the Indians did not scruple to press their advantage. The instant Captain Wilcox freed his sword from its scabbard, his collateral savages knocked him senseless with their tomahawks. Every time a soldier attempted to fire his musket, his appended Indians thwarted him by wrapping thongs around his wrists and ankles. Soon the entire Redcoat company lay rolling about on the ground, trussed and disarmed, so that a wayfarer coming upon the scene might have surmised that a committee of witchfinders was about to swim forty accused Satanists en masse.

  A second commotion drew Jennet’s attention to the Wissahickon Creek Bridge, where the Rebecca Webster faction and the maleficium sufferers were assaulting each other with improvised armaments—rocks and clods, sticks and fists, feet and teeth. The impetus clearly lay with her apostles, and ere long the prosecution witnesses retreated bleeding and moaning into the forest.

  She surveyed the victorious Indians. There was something most peculiar about them. With their silly feather head-dresses and ridiculous war-paint, they would have looked more at home in the King’s Theatre than here in a Pennsylvania woodland.

  A barrel-chested savage clambered into the tumbrel and offered Bledsoe an amicable nod. “Prithee, hand over your prisoner to my stalwart Junto clan,” the Indian said, repositioning his cockeyed feathers, “that we might bear her to a less hostile clime.”

  “Mr. Franklin?” the astonished magistrate groaned. “’Tis really you?”

  “My name’s Chief Ephemeron,” Ben said.

  “Dearest Ben,” Jennet gasped.

  “Chief Ephemeron,” he corrected her.

  Bledsoe pulled an iron key from his coat and, sliding the blade into the lock above her left wrist, popped open the shackle as efficiently as a serving-wench turning the tap on a keg, then with equal dexterity un-cuffed her right wrist. The bracelets thudded against the tumbrel floor, quite the most agreeable sound she’d heard since William first took suck at her breast.

  Now Nicholas Scull, the youngblood through whose initiatives the citizens of Manayunk had been moved to demand Mrs. Webster’s arrest, appeared from out of nowhere, sporting an Indian disguise only slightly less outlandish than Ben’s. He scrambled into the driver’s box and snatched the reins from Knox. Addressing the turnkey in a morbidly jocular tone, Scull informed him that if he wished to avoid “the piquant un-pleasantry of a scalping” he must forthwith surrender his seat. With the frightened agility of an adulterer responding to the cuckold’s unexpected return, Knox leapt from the tumbrel and sprinted north along Ridge Road.

  As far as Jennet could tell, the sham Indians’ raised tomahawks and flashing knives were keeping the Redcoats in check, and it gradually came to her that she probably wasn’t going to Walnut Street Prison this morning, or the next morning, or any morning in the immediate future. Dame Fortune and the Junto had plucked her from the gallows.

  “Mrs. Crompton, I wish thee Godspeed.” Bledsoe placed the wooden tiger in her palm, then jumped to the ground and rushed to join Knox.

  Scull urged the speckled horse forward. The wagon rattled across the bridge and continued down Ridge Road, Jennet’s partisans all the while celebrating her deliverance by applauding like satisfied playgoers and crowing like ecstatic roosters.

  “Oh, Ben,” she said, “I’ve ne’er seen such a marvelous display of derring-do—but I cannot imagine the next step in this audacious caper.”

  “You will be spirited to safety,” he responded.

  “Over two hundred miles as the crow flies, three hundred as the carriage rolls, till you reach the Hoosic River,” Scull elaborated.

  “To wit, you are escaping to the bosom of your Kokokehom kin,” Ben said. “’Tis high time you fulfilled your pittuckish.”

  At the Hunting-Park Road intersection, Scull set the horse on a northeast path, in eternal divergence from Walnut Street Prison with its expectant crowd of public-execution enthusiasts.

  “Three hundred miles,” Jennet sighed. “You may call it an escape, but it sounds more like an exile.”

  Ben scratched both cheeks simultaneously, his war-paint having evidently begun to itch. “As a woman convicted of witchery and suspected of sedition, you shan’t this day elude the noose without antagonizing many an agent of the Crown, from Governor Gordon taking bribes in Locust Street to the Lord Chancellor shooting quail in Marylebone Park.”

  “To put it crudely,” Scull added, “instead of a rope around your neck, you will soon acquire a price upon your head.”

  “Believe us, darling Jenny, the Nimacook village is your one true haven,” Ben said.

  “Your reasoning’s persuasive, but you must suffer little William to come with me,” she said.

  “I think not,” Ben said, “for such a gambit would surely place him in deadly peril.”

  Betimes the tumbrel reached the Henry Road intersection, where the Baron de Montesquieu’s coach loomed out of the morning mist, the driver’s box occupied by another Junto youngblood, the brawny Philip Synge, dressed in tawnie trappings. The Baron’s team of matched black geldin
gs anxiously stomped the ground, tossing their heads, steam gushing from their nostrils. As Scull pulled back on the reins, halting the tumbrel, Montesquieu and his footman stepped out of the coach. Jennet half expected to see them disguised as Indians, but instead they wore their usual powdered perukes, silk waistcoats, and perfumed neckcloths.

  “Madame Crompton, vous êtes sauvée!” an exultant Montesquieu cried.

  At Ben’s urging, Jennet vaulted free of the tumbrel, regaining her balance as a second coach came clattering out of the fog. Juxtaposed with Montesquieu’s lordly equipage, this newly arrived conveyance was a shabby affair, lamps broken, curtains torn, paint as mottled as the Turtle of Tewkesbury’s skin, and yet it seemed roadworthy enough, pulled by as sturdy a team as Jennet had ever beheld. Commanding the horses was Montesquieu’s customary driver, the phlegmatic Herr Strossen, and no sooner had he decelerated the coach than the passenger door flew open to reveal the first real Indian of the day, John Tux, who promptly hopped to the ground.

  Now Ben abandoned the tumbrel. “Herr Strossen hath agreed to transport you and Mr. Tux safely to the Hoosic,” he explained to Jennet, “a task for which he will receive two hundred guineas plus this venerable coach, both incentives supplied by Monsieur le Baron.”

  With a snap of his whip, Nicholas Scull got the tumbrel moving again. He continued down Hunting-Park Road, vanishing anon into the spectral embrace of the fog.

  “We shall travel the entire western shore of the Delaware,” John Tux said, “and thence to New York, and finally to Massachusetts—a five-day journey by my calculation.” He pointed to his bulging purse. “Thanks to your French patron, we are supplied with funds sufficient to sleep in whatever inns suit our fancy, trade up our horses should an injury befall them, and seal the lips of any magistrate who looks upon our party askance.”