“What did you say?”
Bel laughed at me. “You don’t have one little idea, do you? He is a pretty man,” she added.
“Yes,” I said, “and I hope a good deal more.”
“What do you think set off Lizzie?”
I had begun to have an inkling of an idea but was not sure. The last of those gathered near the entry passed inside the meetinghouse. I drew close to the door and pointed to a sign. “This afternoon, evidently we will be contracted to marry, and Mr. Dane will preach the bride sermon for me and Jotham Herrick. I did not expect the betrothal notice to be on the door until the next meeting.”
But the announcement was there, and the town clerk would be calling the banns for weeks to come. Any who did not know me would know of me then. Mr. Dane was mindful that I had not dwelled long in Andover and did not have many friends to support me in my new life. Neither of us had family to prepare the wedding meal, and I did not even have a family house to be married from. I certainly had no wish to marry in Goody Holt’s sewing room; in his kindness, Mr. Dane had invited us to wed in his own house. It would be a simple-enough ceremony to execute, only a question to each of us from a magistrate, and there would be the recording of names in the town register—the clerk would bring it—and a dinner with bridal cakes and sack posset prepared by the Dane women. Jotham Herrick and I would be well tied and could go together to the rooms over the shop.
“Ah,” Bel said. “I begin to understand.”
“And so do I. Unfortunately.”
“My sister has claimed three or four young men as possible husbands. But only in her fancy.”
“And I hope she will move swiftly to a different one,” I said, “as I am a little afraid to return to the house. Your mother will no doubt be seething hot. I fear that I shall have to be mouse quiet and mouse small until she grows tired of being wroth with me. Though I am somewhat cheered that Mr. Dane is there to smooth over upsets.”
“We must go in,” Bel said, moving toward the women’s door. “But do not worry. I will help. And perhaps,” she added with enthusiasm, “Mother will be so busy stewing in choler about you that I will be able to persuade her that I should be married as soon as possible. And shall get Mr. Francis Dane to come to my aid.”
“Overjoyed to be so very useful and handy, Bel,” I said, eyeing her, but she paid not the least attention to the satiric note in my words.
“Yes, that is good. I shall have to put the fear into Mother that her daughters are in danger of being unplowed fields—thornbacks, dried and ornery and husbandless.”
“A promising scheme,” I said, and laughed. Opening the door, I slipped inside.
People were yet milling around in disorder, many of them gossiping about what had taken place outside, while Mr. Barnard called for them to sit.
The morning services were frigid, and several men railed at their near neighbors and called for beer before the minister was half-done. The teaching elders read prodigious passages of Scripture. The expositions and prayers droned on. The pastor kept turning over the hourglass, and his sermon must have been divided into a hundred heads and subheads. It was all long, long, long, the words beating on the sounding-board. Though fond of singing, on this morning I seemed to look on my kind as if on visitors from a land where song was forbidden. The people bawled the psalms, some for tune hewing to Windsor, some to York, some to Cambridge, all whining or screaking or tolling the notes as their separate humors and fancies seized them. Never had a cold meeting seemed to move so slowly!
But at last the nooning break came.
Bel and I were invited to a supper of pease, cold venison, pumpkin stew, and beer between the morning and afternoon preaching. Goodwife Deliverance Dane had seen Lizzie Holt’s fit and conceived that we might be better content away from the Holt house. We were glad to be elsewhere, glad to dine in company.
Before day was over, I was contracted to marry, and seated before the people with Jotham Herrick. Mr. Dane preached a fine bride’s sermon on the text I had picked from the Song of Solomon: For behold, winter is past: the rain is changed, and is gone away. The flowers appear in the earth: the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land. And though he spoke on the Church as the Bride of Christ, yet he also dwelled on our past losses and trials, and how we would join together and make winter into our spring. We sat attentively, knowing that all around us, people were looking, and yet conscious that the other was close beside. I wanted to weep, thinking of my mother and how she would never prepare my bride cakes or greet my husband on our wedding day. To distract myself from making such a public sign of weakness, I thought of Lizzie shrieking from the ground, and how she had wanted to take from me the few tokens of family I had left. That cheered me right up! Or, rather, the thought that my remnants would belong in the rooms over the smith’s shop, and that I would belong to someone again—not as a servant but as an essential part of a whole—comforted me.
So often when some sweet hour comes, we have to render payment for it afterward. To touch Jotham Herrick’s hand when services ended, to feel proud of his words and sentiments, to admire the lines of his face: all this vanished into the past like a scrape of sugar into hot water when Bel and I set off for the house. I felt only dread when I contemplated Lizzie’s froth and fury, sure that I was trapped in its presence unless I returned to the Saltonstalls—and in that case I would be far from Jotham Herrick.
I do not know whether I felt more of perturbation or relief when I saw Francis Dane, Thomas Barnard, and Dudley Bradstreet entering the house ahead of us, but both mingled strongly in me. I hoped two ministers and a magistrate might be a bulwark between me and Goody Holt and Lizzie.
When we stepped inside, I at once saw Lizzie Holt reclining on a bench by the fire, the ministers and magistrate talking to her mother and Dr. Abbott. John was there, feeding the flames with fresh-split wood. He stared at me and gave a jerk of the head, as if to signal that I should pass quickly upstairs.
But Lizzie started up and shrieked, “There she is, there she is! Catch her, catch her!” Her voice was strained and hoarse, but there was no doubt she meant me.
“Come forward,” Mr. Dane called to us.
We approached the others slowly, Bel taking my arm.
“There! The witch,” Lizzie croaked, pointing a long finger at me. “Witch! She bewitched our speckled pig and Mr. Herrick. I would have said so when the bride sermon was preached. Yes, I would have stood in the assembly and named her a witch.”
My hand rose to my breastbone. I could not speak.
“Dear child, you have been unwell—afflicted by a profusion of humors—and now the bleeding has made you feeble in body and mind,” Dr. Abbot said. “Crawly mawly, as your mother says.”
Mr. Dane turned to us. “Perhaps daughter Mehitabel Holt would take her mother for a short walk so that Goodwife Holt could have respite from the day’s sufferings.”
“That is not an ill thought,” Mr. Barnard said in a loud voice, seemingly determined not to be outdone by his elder.
“Surely a parent should be present,” Goody Holt said.
“There is no need,” Mr. Dane said, “and you have been through much.”
“I commend the fresh air,” the doctor added.
But Goody Holt was not going to be deprived of her say. Though Bel put an arm around her mother as if to turn her toward the doorway, she was not to be diverted from her course. She glared at me. “We have had nothing but trouble with this one. A poor, draggled thing who felt herself too fine for us!”
“Indeed, she did not, Mother,” Bel said, drawing her mother’s arm through her own. “She was always helpful and courteous.”
Goody Holt ignored this response and pushed on. “Why, my Lizzie thought her coverlet far too precious for someone in her situation. And truly it was—a finespun wool beautifully dyed and woven in subtle patterns. Not at all the thing for a low girl.”
“Flaunting herself in a violet gown whe
n she went to the Danes’ that evening, Mother,” Lizzie Holt said huskily. “You know her garb was not suitable to her rank. And under her bonnet, that coif with the white embroidered leaves!”
Bel dropped her mother’s arm. “Forgive me, but the coverlet—the blanket, more properly—was almost all that she had from her mother, who spun the wool and dyed it. Would you take that from her? And the coif and gown, too, were stitched by her dead mother. Would you have a daughter scorn her elders?”
Goody Holt looked at her in indignation, crimping her lips together as if she had just bitten down on a peppercorn. “Hush, child,” she said.
“I will not be hushed. And am no child. I tell you in the presence of these men that I will no longer be silent when you have prevented my own marriage and threatened me!”
“What? What are you saying? Surely you are one bewitched,” Goody Holt said loudly. “See? Another one magicked!”
“Goodman Richard Dane would marry me, and I would marry him. You have no right to keep me from him. I protest to the magistrate and the ministers that you have wronged me in this matter!”
I had never seen Bel so wroth, and I nearly smiled in surprise to see it.
“Whatever do you mean?” Goody Holt cocked her head to one side, peering at her daughter as if she had not seen her clearly heretofore, which, upon reflection, I considered quite likely.
“I ask the ministers and Captain Bradstreet to support me in this cause, and I will take my plea so far as the General Court if you do not let us have our way,” Bel said with firmness.
Goody Holt opened and closed her mouth a few times in an admirable imitation of a fish. At this, John, still kneeling by the fire, let out a noise suspiciously like a laugh, choked, and waved a hand in front of his face as though afflicted by a fume of smoke.
“What of this?” Mr. Barnard said, turning to his elder minister.
“They have, it seems, promised that they will marry no one else but each other,” Mr. Dane said. “At least, that is the report I have heard from our young Richard.”
“Witch! Witch!” Lizzie was now so hoarse that it was difficult to understand what she was saying, and no one heeded her outcry.
“Exactly right! We are each promised to the other, and no one otherwise will ever do,” Bel said.
“Mehitabel Holt,” her mother said, and sank onto a plank-bottom chair.
“Mehitabel Holt will be Mehitabel Dane or nothing else,” her daughter said. She appeared bigger than before, her feet set wide apart, hands planted on hips.
“Your daughter’s demand is lawful,” Mr. Barnard told Goody Holt.
“This is about me,” Lizzie cried, “me and that witch.”
“Indeed she is within her rights,” said Captain Bradstreet.
“And I will sue for those rights in court if she does not yield them to me,” Bel added.
“Mehitabel has no excuse to threaten marriage when mine is spoiled,” Lizzie said in a fretful tone, but the men did not hear.
Pastors and magistrate stepped closer to Goody Holt, who put up her hands as if to keep them off.
“I told her my maternal wishes. She is a bad, stubborn naughty-pack of a daughter,” Goody Holt said, and her eyes wandered around the room as if in search of support.
“That is an untruth. I have been a proper daughter even when given strong reason to be angered by peevishness and spite,” Bel said.
“Oh! Have it your way, you monstrous, monstrous child!” Goody Holt slapped her knees in lieu of slapping her daughter. “Offspring of Babel-tower! Scion of Belial!”
Everyone in the room stared at her in silence.
Lizzie was the one to break that startled hush.
“What about the witch?” Strained by screaming, her voice was as plaintive as a gravelly voice could be.
“What witch?” Mr. Barnard was confused by the change in the direction of events, but not so confused that he could not maintain a keen interest in all things diabolical.
She waved a hand at me.
“Pah!” exclaimed Bel. “What arrant nonsense!”
We all looked at her, for by the magic of determination and desire, she had puffed up like an enraged cat and become the most powerful person in the room. The rest of us seemed mere harvest mice in comparison.
“She is no witch, Lizzie Holt, but only a person with many misfortunes,” Bel said, “one of them being the misfortune of tumbling into the clutches of a pair of tetchy, jealous, and cobble-hearted women. All she has done is make you gowns and petticoats and collars and such. Yes, the work does look so lovely that it seems like witchcraft but only because she is adept and quick with her needle, above the common ruck. She did no harm to anyone, nor to the speckled pig, who ate cockleburs like a fool and died. And you were not even kind to one who had just lost her mother and father and everyone she loved!”
At the end of this speech, the men shifted as one to stare at Lizzie Holt.
She had begun to shed tears, and I was surprised to find that I felt pity for her. The doctor’s lance and bowl of blood were lying beside the hearth, and I wondered if she cried out of weakness.
“He was to be mine. The sieve did not promise,” she sobbed, “but the key-and-book did. They said so!” She looked at us imploringly.
“My dear daughter in Christ,” Mr. Barnard said, these words striking what was hard in him like a flintstone against adamant. “Surely you have not been playing at scissors-and-sieve! And to take the holy writ in vain in such a way, meaning to usurp the foreknowledge of God, determined to have revelation via the vile practice of key-and-book! What do you mean by such pranks of wickedness? Why, to pervert the Scripture is far worse than the reading of the unlawful ribaldries, merriments, and vulgar romances that so infect the work of our Boston publishers. It is abominable!”
Lizzie sobbed the louder.
Captain Bradstreet whistled, and Mr. Dane sat down heavily on a stool that John brought to him. I could see Bess peeping at us from the back room.
“It was just a game,” Lizzie said. “I was not the only one.”
“This,” Mr. Barnard intoned, “this, this, this is how the Devil catches hold and snares the reprobate in his devices, how he catches the fluttering souls in his bird-lime. He boils the holly bark until the green part is ripe, and he pounds it into submission until the consistency is sauce, with no flecks of bark remaining. And then he ferments the whole and cooks it over the fire with oil. And when the mess is ripe, he spreads it on the invisible branches of this world and catches himself a silly young songbird.”
Mr. Dane drew out a large indigo cloth and mopped at his face.
Lizzie looked from one minister to the other.
Parson Dane crammed the linen back into his sleeve. “Mr. Barnard means that you should not have meddled with sieve-and-scissors or key-and-book,” he said mildly. “It is not right to attempt to tell the future, for that is a bid to take away the prerogatives of God. Occult powers are not horses for you to bridle, saddle, and control for your own use. Although not the worst form of witchcraft, witchcraft is what fortune-telling is. You did not know. And I am sure you will not play such tricks again.”
Here Lizzie burst into fresh sobs, rocking back and forth on the bench. Perhaps she was crying as much for the close observation of Captain Bradstreet as for reproof and jealousy. “But she bewitched Selectman Herrick. She’s the witch, not me!”
Bel went over and patted her on the shoulder. “Lizzie Holt, it was plain from the start that Mr. Herrick had a liking for only one person. That one.” She pointed at me. “He liked her when he saw her, and he still does. Sad for you, but that is how it is.”
“She bewitched him,” Lizzie said in a whisper.
“In a manner, if you call brightness and fair looks a witchcraft. Leave over, Lizzie Holt. I am sorry for you, but there the enchantment lies—in her merits. And she tried to stop the sieve-and-scissors. That is not the act of a witch.”
Lizzie pushed away her sister’s hand and sat
staring at the floor.
She loathes me. And Goody Holt scorns me. What should I do? Only Bel cares about me, and John and Bess, who cannot help. I gazed at the vials and packets tumbled at my feet, spilled from Dr. Abbot’s bag. White Snail Powder. Oil of Foxes. Cobwebs. Beetle-blood. Dried Heart-of-Dolphin. Willow bark. Old-sows. Honey. Rolled into balls, the old-sows made medicines for scrofula. Cobwebs helped cuts and bleeding. Honey was also good for wounds, and willow bark for fever and pain. The rest stayed a mystery to me.
“I do not believe that the young woman should stay longer under this roof,” Captain Bradstreet said, gesturing at me.
“She is not done with her hired labors!” Goody Holt stood up, her arms akimbo.
“No doubt she could manage just as well at another house for a few weeks,” Mr. Barnard said. “She may complete the work as handily in one place as another, or else you may release her.”
“My family would be glad to take her in,” Mr. Dane said. “She has spent time with the women of my household, and I expect they would be glad to have another lesson or two from her needle.”
The younger minister frowned. “I am more vexed over the matter of this wretched daughter Lizzie Holt,” he said. “As it is written in Romans 9, ‘Therefore he hath mercy on whom he will and whom he will he hardeneth.’ Please Lord she is not of the latter.”
“Pray excuse me for leaving that matter to you, Mr. Barnard. And I for one am satisfied with the proposed removal,” Captain Bradstreet declared. “Unless the maligned young woman wishes to bring suit in turn.”
At this, the magistrate turned his glance toward me. I curtseyed to him. “No, sir, indeed. I thank you for considering me.”
Captain Bradstreet had a kindly look, as best befitted a man who was a judge and a son of Mistress Anne Bradstreet. He nodded, appearing to be satisfied.
Bel, who had been crouching by her sister, rose. “By your leave, shall I help my friend pack?”
“Very well,” Mr. Barnard said. “Go you on. I expect Goody Holt will allow you to help carry goods and gowns to the Dane house. Perhaps my brother minister will be so good as to discuss your marriage once you arrive there.”
Charis in the World of Wonders Page 17
