Book Read Free

The Minister's Daughter

Page 1

by Julie Hearn




  the Minister’s Daughter

  Atheneum Books for Young Readers

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  the Minister’s Daughter

  JULIE HEARN

  Atheneum Books for Young Readers

  New York London Toronto Sydney

  Copyright © 2005 by Julie Hearn

  First published in Great Britain in 2005 by Oxford University Press

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Book design by Kristin Smith

  The text for this book is set in Adobe Garamond.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First U.S. edition 2005

  4 6 8 10 9 7 5

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hearn, Julie, 1958-

  The minister’s daughter / by Julie Hearn.—1st American ed.

  p. cm.

  Published in Great Britain under the title “The Merrybegot.”

  Summary: In 1645 in England, the daughters of the town minister successfully accuse a local healer and her granddaughter of witchcraft to conceal an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, but years later during the 1692 Salem trials their lie has unexpected repercussions.

  ISBN 0-689-87690-4

  ISBN 13: 978-1-416-90235-5

  eISBN 13: 978-1-439-10875-8

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  [1. Witchcraft—Fiction. 2. Trials (Witchcraft)—Fiction. 3. Fairies—Fiction. 4. Supernatural—Fiction. 5. Pregnancy—Fiction. 6. Sisters—Fiction. 7. Hopkins, Matthew, d. 1647—Fiction. 8. Great Britain—History—Civil War, 1642-1649—Fiction. 9. Somerset (England)—History—Civil War, 1642-1649—Fiction. 10. Salem (Mass.)—History—Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.H34625Mi 2005

  [Fic]—dc22 2004018324

  In memory of Shoe Taylor

  Something still dances Just out of your sight Its the voice from the well The trick of the light It’s something like water you hold in your hand While it s business as usual In Merrie Olde Englande.

  —Robb Johnson

  “That as there have been, so ther are & wil be, witches unto the worlds end.”

  —John Gaule, preacher, 1646

  The Confession of Patience Madden

  THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1692

  Good day, brothers. I am ready to talk to you now. Ready to tell you the truth. Pray forgive the croak in my voice. It has been … it has been …

  Water? Yes. Thank you.

  Are you listening? I can barely see you. It is so dark in here….

  Are you ready?

  Then I will begin.

  I never meant it to end the way it did. Grace might have done, but not me. Grace was fifteen, as artful as a snake, and already on the slippery slope to Hell. But I, Patience Madden, could have stopped at any time—uncrossed my eyes, made my arms and legs be still, and called a halt to the filthy words jumping out of my mouth like toads. I could have spat the pins from under my tongue and admitted they came not from the Devil, but from the cherry wood box our mother kept tiny things in.

  I could have sat up in bed, looked around at the villagers come to whisper and gawp, and said, No. Stop praying for me. Stop bringing me bay leaves and splashes of holy water. For I don’t deserve your lucky charms, nor any help from the Lord. Neither does my sister. She deserves them even less. It was her fault. She started it. And now she’s hurting me. Yes, she is. Pinching me black and blue, beneath the coverlet, lest I weaken and tell you the truth.

  “Grace,” I whispered on the third evening, after our neighbors had drifted away, to feed their hogs, their children, or their own nosy faces. “Grace, I’m scared. I want to get up. Grace, I’m hungry.”

  “Be silent,” she hissed. “Or, if you can’t be silent, call out some more about imps at the window and a crow in the corner. That was good. They liked that. We’ll do more with the imps and the crow.”

  She promised me I would not have to behave like this for much longer. In a day or so, she said, we would stage our recovery. Wake up all smiles, ready to put on our itchy bonnets and do our tiresome chores, like good, obedient girls.

  A few days more, she said, and our lives would go back to normal. As dull as scum, but blameless.

  It did not happen like that. It went too far.

  We went too far.

  APRIL 1645

  The cunning woman’s granddaughter is chasing a pig when she learns there is to be no frolicking in the village on May Morning. Minister’s orders.

  “Bogger … that,” she pants. “And bogger … this … pig. There’s no … catching … him….”

  Clutching her sides, she gives up the chase and collapses, laughing, against the gnarled trunk of a tree. Above her head pink blossoms shake like fairy fists. Spring has arrived. A beautiful time. A time when it feels absolutely right to think of dancing barefoot in the dew, and absolutely wrong to dwell on the new minister, with his miserable ways and face like a trodden parsnip.

  “That’s what they be saying,” the blacksmith’s son tells her. “No pole. No goin’ off into the woods. No nothing. It ain’t godly, Nell, to frolic so. That’s what the minister reckons.”

  Nell picks a blade of new grass and begins to chew it. Her stomach rumbles beneath her apron, but she is used to that. Out of the corner of her eye she can see the pig rooting around. It is a bad pig. A bothersome pig. Her granny will sort it out. This is how:

  A SPELL TO SOOTHE A TRUCULENT PIG

  First, catch your pig. Do it on a Monday, on a waning moon, when the time he right for healing. Point him to the north, and hang on tight. Rap his snout three times with a wand of oak, and call: “Powers of earth, tame and soothe this creature that he may become docile and no longer a bogging nuisance.” Wait seven beats of the heart, then let him go. So mote it be.

  A light breeze frisks the orchard. There are things Nell ought to be doing, but she stays where she is, squinting up at the blacksmith’s son and thinking about May Morning.

  “And who be you wishing to frolic with, anyway, Sam Towser?” She chuckles. “As if I couldn’t guess …”

  The lad reddens. He is a month short of sixteen and all swept through with the kind of longings that can tie up a boy’s tongue and have him tripping over everything, from clods of earth to his own great feet, twenty times a day. He has a mop of corn-colored hair and a cleft in his chin so deep, it might have been pressed there by his guardian angel. He is too ungainly; too unfledged, as yet, to be truly handsome. But he will be. The promise of it is all about him, like the guarantee of a glorious day once some mist has cleared.

  “No one,” he mumbles. “I got horses to see to. No time for fumblin’ around with some daft maid on May Mornin’, nor any other time.”

  “Pah! That’s a fib!” Nell flings both arms wide and twists her face to look like a parsnip. “Beware, sinner! Beware what you say! Repent! Repent! For Satan loves a fibber and will carry you off to burn in Hell. In Hell, I tell you, where fibbers go. And frolickers. And women who wear scarlet ribbons or sweep their hearths on Sundays—”

  “Hush … Hush up, you daft wench.”

  “Repent! Repent! For I am your minister. God’s representative in this heathen place. Repent! For though my nose drips, and I do not know a hoe from my—”

 
“Nell, hush!”

  ”—elbow, I know a sinner when I see one. And a fibber. And a frolicker. All rolled into one vile, wretched—”

  “Right!”

  ”—body and a … yieeek!”

  He has pounced and is tickling her—tickling her to what feels like a giggly death—while the sun pours down like honey and the truculent pig looks on in mild surprise.

  “You two! Have a care! Mind that tree, and stop your messing.”

  A woman has entered the orchard. She stands some distance away, almost in the nettles. Her face, beneath a bonnet the color of porridge, is grave.

  “What?” Nell scrambles to her feet. “What is it, Mistress Denby? What’s happened?”

  The blacksmith’s son gets up. There are twigs and fallen petals in his hair. He looks like Puck. He looks drop-dead frolicsome.

  “Gotter go,” he mutters. “I got horses to see to.”

  The woman and the girl pay him no mind. They have already jumped the stile and are hurrying away, along the crooked path leading down to the village. Women’s stuff, he supposes. Someone getting born. Or dying. Or doing both in the space of a few breaths.

  He doesn’t want to be seen trotting at the heels of women-folk, toward whatever, or whoever, needs their attention in some fusty room. The sun is high now, and he has his own ritual to perform.

  The apple tree he chooses is truly ancient; its timber as knotted as a crone’s shins, its blossom strangely pale. No one knows how long it has stood here or why it was planted alone. Much older than the rest, it continues to bear fruit so sweet that to press cider from it, and drink the stuff, is said to send the mind dribbling out of the nostrils and the legs in several directions at once.

  It is to this tree the Apple Howlers come, on Twelfth Night, to scare away evil spirits. It is here that they form their circle—raggle-taggle villagers, young and old, banging pails and pots and howling “Hats full! Caps full! Bushels, bushels, sacks full!” loud enough to wake the dead.

  It is on these branches, and around this trunk, that the Howlers hang their amulets and leave cider-soaked toast for the piskies. The orchard swarms with piskies. Everyone knows that. Little folk in rags, their skin as rough as bark, their heads sprouting lichen and moss. A few are downright malicious; the rest, merely troublesome and high-spirited. All are uglier than dead hedgehogs and as greedy as swine. Over the hills, in a neighboring county, lies fairy territory—a prettier species, by far, the fairies, but just as pesky, so rumor has it … just as demanding of treats, and remembrance.

  Be good to the piskies, the old folk say hereabouts, and they will be good to you. Treat them with respect, on Twelfth Night, and they will stay by the trees, watching over the fruit until picking time comes.

  The cider-soaked toast has been eaten long ago by robins and other things. But the amulets are still here, swaying gently at the end of their strings, like small, hanged felons.

  “May I?” says the blacksmiths son before pressing the point of a horseshoe nail into the old tree’s trunk.

  Yep, something replies, the sound of it such a faint rasp that the blacksmith’s son assumes the pig has farted.

  Slowly, carefully, he begins to cut. Not his full name—Samuel—for he isn’t sure of all the letters. A single “S” is the mark he makes, the downstroke wobbly as a caterpillar against the wood. He can’t spell the other name, either. The one that is on his mind day and night. The one he only has to hear, in passing, for a fluttering to start in his belly, as if larks are nesting there.

  He knows his alphabet, though. Just. And he knows, from the way the girl’s name is said, which letter he needs to entwine with his own. It is one of the tricky ones that sound different, depending on the word. As the metal point of the nail forms the letter’s curve, he finds himself wishing it made a soft sound like the beginning of “gentle.” He would have liked that. It would have seemed significant.

  The girl’s name, though, begins with a hard “G,” like “gallows” or “god.”

  When he has finished, he steps back to inspect what he has done. And then he sees one. At least, he thinks he does. There and gone it is, between knots of blossom, its face as coarse and gray as the tree, its small, bright eyes fixed intently on the “S” and the “G.”

  Oh …

  He looks quickly, all around, and then back again. Nothing. There is nothing there. A trick of the light, perhaps? But, no … His sight is good, and he isn’t given to fancies.

  He stays a minute more, half dreading, half hoping to see the thing again. What did it mean? Was it lucky, to see a piskie when you were a month short of sixteen and so desperate to get your hands on a certain someone that you would probably die of frustration if it didn’t happen soon?

  Did it mean that he would?

  Did it?

  It takes just seconds for the blacksmiths son to convince himself that he has been sent an auspicious sign. That, come May Morning, he will be frolicking away to his heart’s content with the girl whose name begins with a hard-sounding “G.”

  She will be all over him like a vine—yes, she will—for all she is the minister’s daughter and seems as distant, and cool, as a star. He will have her. No doubt about it. For they are joined, already, in his mind, and on the tree. And their union has been blessed. He has the piskie’s promise.

  The blacksmith’s son feels light on his feet as he swings himself over the stile, and he is whistling as he strides away.

  Silly young bogger … goes the sighing and the rasping among the topmost branches of the trees. Silly little whelp. And the letters “S” and “G” begin slowly turning brown, the way a cut apple will do or naked flesh beneath hot sun.

  All the way down the path, Mistress Denby had gone rambling on about a pot lid: “That pot lid’s about to fall. Things be boiling up quick—a bit too quick, if you asks me. There’ll be trouble with this one, you mark my words.”

  Nell had simply nodded and hurried on. She understood. The Bramlow baby is coming, and coming faster than a snowball down a hill. But you never, ever, spoke of these matters outdoors, lest piskies should overhear and come to steal the newborn away. No piskie would be interested in something as boring as a pot lid—although Nell often wonders what they make of a village in which pots boil over with alarming frequency, and their lids, when that happens, seem so fragile and important.

  Now, beneath the eaves of a squat little cottage, the Bramlows’ pot lid is giving everyone the worries. The Watchers—all mothers themselves—shake their heads and grunt, sympathetically, as the person lying prone on a straw pallet arches her spine and hollers. Her belly, rippled across by contractions, is so huge that she can barely lift herself.

  Somewhere in the room a fly buzzes. It has been trying to escape, but the bedroom door is closed tight, and a rough piece of wood, wedged into the window space, is keeping light, air, and piskies out and heat, flies, and anxiety in.

  Nell takes a damp rag from her grandmother and begins to wipe Mistress Bramlow’s face. She does it reluctantly but with care, as if the sweaty forehead and cheeks were made of red glass. This is her first time in a birthing room, and she has to get everything right. It is important.

  The Watchers’ eyes, flint-sharp above the glow of their candles, follow every dab and stroke of that rag. Nell takes a deep breath, dips the wad of material three times in a bowl of water, whispers five words, then wrings it out.

  “Good girl. That’s the way,” murmurs the cunning woman. But whether she means her granddaughter or the heaving, panting soul beneath her hands, Nell cannot tell.

  The Watchers shift. It isn’t regular to have an unwed maid in on a birth. It goes against the grain, and who knows what trouble that might lead to? The Watchers know best—or, at least, they think they do. There are gaggles of women like these in villages all over England. Women who gather, as a matter of course, at every birth and death within walking distance. Women who are always first to throw something pulpy and rotten at whoever is slumped in the st
ocks. Women who like nothing better than a good hanging.

  Elsewhere, they are known by other names. Here, though, everyone calls them the Watchers. No one can remember why, but it is probably because whole generations of them have been particularly dour and scarily attentive.

  Right now they are directing black looks at Nell, as if they don’t even trust her to wipe a birthing woman’s chin without mishap.

  The cunning woman, sensing an ill mood, looks up, frowning.

  “My granddaughter is here to learn,” she says. “Or would you rather those yet to be born were left to the mercy of nature and your own cack-handed tuggings once I am dead and in my grave?”

  The Watchers lower their eyes. They will keep their own counsel—for now.

  “Right.” The cunning woman bends back to her task. “Good girls.”

  The trapped fly is crawling up the pallet. It can smell birth fluid and will soon be landing where it shouldn’t. Once, the cunning woman would have known it was there and willed it away. Not anymore. She has aged much over the last few moons. Her touch has a tremble to it, and she has difficulty, sometimes, recalling a surefire cure for warts or the correct spell to mend a broken heart. This vagueness has come upon her suddenly, and no one—not even the Watchers, who don’t usually miss a thing—knows quite how splutter-minded she has become.

  Time is running out for the cunning woman, and there are certain skills she needs to pass on. Nell is young and wild, but the gift of healing is in her. She will learn fast and make a fine midwife.

  The laboring woman howls like a thing in a trap as a fresh wave of pain grips her innards. “Get away from me!” she yells, hitting out at Nell’s hands. “Go play hide-and-peep out-o’-doors with all the other brats. Go on, you little streak of cat’s piss. I want no unweds here.”

  Knowing looks pass among the Watchers.

  Nell flushes to the roots of her raggedy hair. “Bogger it,” she says, setting aside the sweaty rag. “I’m off.”

 

‹ Prev