She gave him a stern look of disapproval.
“I’ve told you how serious my work is.”
“Is it your plan to be Mather’s lackey for the rest of your life?”
“That’s not fair, Serena. When this is over, I’m promised a judgeship in the colonial province of my choosing, perhaps even Boston.”
“The scars of your past are still dictating your life, Jere.”
“That’s not—”
She snatched at her reins, and her horse reared on its hindquarters in response to her expert signals, and she shouted, “Find me then when you’re finished playing games, Jeremy! When you are once again your own man!”
“A man fulfills the contract he signs!” he shouted after her.
But Serena had galloped off toward home, leaving Jeremy alone with the final weak, winking stars before twilight. He feared losing Serena, feared their love could disappear like the night sky if it were not nurtured with care. He’d felt that way even as they were locked in embrace.
God, he thought, Mather must make good on his promises when all is said and done. He must. He must, and I will.
Then a looming fear filled Jeremiah. Suppose he lost his quiet war against Parris? Suppose he lost everything. Mather’s trust, his appointment, and most of all his fair-haired Serena? Losing her a second time, he’d never again have this gift in hand, and he knew it.
Chapter Sixteen
Salem Village, the night of the storm
Reverend Samuel Parris carefully outlined his argument. Unfolding it point by point to the mesmerized senses of one Thomas Putnam who listened in rapt attention. Putnam, although related to Parris, had great admiration for the other man’s obvious learning and worldliness, and Thomas felt proud that Parris had singled him out for this talk of impending doom about to befall their parish. Thomas straightened his stiff, splintered leg toward Parris’s hearth fire, and he accepted yet another cup of the Canary wine the minister plied him with. “Go on, Samuel, go on,” he muttered.
“There is a coven, Thomas, a witch coven operating under our noses.”
“You don’t say?”
“An entire nest of devil-worshipping monsters in our midst.”
“Who? Who are they?”
“I can’t supply you with all their names.”
“No names?”
“I know two for certain.”
“Aha! and they are?”
“Goode and—”
“No surprise there.”
“And my Indian woman, Tituba.”
“A vanguard for worse yet?” Thomas poked.
“Vanguard, yes.”
“These Satanists’re all about us, you say?” Putnam searched every corner of the dark house that’d been so difficult on every minister who’d ever inhabited the parish home. “I see the wisdom of your point.”
Parris paced. “They dare attack me, Thomas, through Betty!”
“My God, no!”
“And you! Are you blind?”
“Whatever do you mean?”
“Blind to the suffering of your little Anne, and the torments that your wife endures?”
“Of course, not! I see the suffering. Damn it, man, I hear it nightly.”
“But have you given thought to the root cause?”
“Root cause?”
“Think on it, Thom!”
“Do you mean to say . . . ”
“Yes! Nine Putnam children—your progeny—stricken down before they might take hold of life! What else but witchcraft? Murder of the innocent by chicanery.”
“My children . . . murdered by witches?”
“How else do you lose nine innocents, and Little Anne bravely holding on?”
“M-My wife and one living child b-b-bewitched?”
“Bedeviled, your wife and daughter are constantly being attacked in the same manner as my own Betty by-by those who’ve taken your children.”
“No witch can think she can work her magic on you, cousin,” Thomas mused, snatching at his beard. “Yet Goode has made threats against Betty. I heard it.”
“Unable to work her magic on we who are strong, Thom, they attack our women.”
Thomas Putnam’s eyes widened. Every illness, each hardship he’d ever faced had this moment a new light flooding over it. “I see.”
“You need but open your eyes, man.”
“What do we do, Samuel?”
“Women and children they attack, you see, because they’re more easily deceived.”
“Stands to reason.”
“Weaker of mind and body, you see.”
“More easily attacked, yes.”
“And they’re more easily tempted away from the light.”
“So true.”
“Because we are strong in our faith,” continued Parris. “Too strong to be shaken.”
“Agreed but what now? What can we do?”
“There is a great deal we can do? And we will, Thom, we will.”
“May God preserve us.” Thomas crossed himself in the manner of a Papist. Parris frowned at the gesture.
“So far as I’ve been able to ascertain, Thomas, the bewitching began with your children during the time when George Burroughs was minister here.”
“Began with my children? But the curse on the parish came before Burroughs. Dates back to when James Bailey ministered here.”
“Yes, but you miss my meaning. Bailey is Burroughs.”
“What?”
“Burroughs is Bailey.”
“You mean they worked in tandem?”
“I meant they are the same evil in different guises.”
“Before my Anne and I were wed, that Bailey enchanted her . . . made her do foolish and shameful things.”
“And he may well have made her barren.”
“Barren?”
“Do you really think it a coincidence that after he was run off and Burroughs took over that your every child conceived by your wife before and after Burroghs’ time here never came to fruition? Withering on the vine?”
Thomas looked both stricken and like a man who has finally stepped from darkness into light. “By my word, you’re right. All the time Bailey was here, she was sullen, Anne was, and with Burroughs here, my wife lost two sets of twins—four children in all, and another she could not bring to full term.”
“And who were the midwives that Reverend George Burroughs sent to your wife in a show of Christian spirit?”
“Why ’twas always the same ladies of the church.”
“Exactly. I’ve seen the records. Exactly . . . ”
Putnam swallowed hard, picturing each of the midwives who’d ever attended his wife during those dark days, among them Rebecca Nurse and her sister Sara Cloyse. “I-I-I need to tell Anne this.”
“Are you sure she can withstand such news?”
“Yes, she must know all of it.”
“I daresay she does know deep within,” suggested Parris, “but do share my suspicion. Anne has a fighter’s heart, and she’s earned the right to know.”
“Damned witches at her the entire time.”
“Pretending goodness in the guise of midwives.”
“And somehow they slipped up with little Anne Junior, eh?”
“By God,” repeated Parris. “Right again!” A long silence settled in over the minister and deacon. “Don’t you see our path is clear, Thom?”
Putnam’s blank expression proved confusion could be cavernous, yawning, bottomless, and profound.
God the man is thick, thought Parris, but said, “Your daughter’s fits . . . those convulsions she’s given to?”
“Yes?”
“Not unlike those my Betty is enduring now!”
“Fits, yes. Anne’s always had the fits. But now your child? The same?”
“Betty has never had fits of any sort until now.”
“I’m sorry to hear it. My heart drops whenever Anne goes into her fits.”
Another long silence during which Thomas could hear the distur
bed sleep of the child in a room overhead. “Tell me, Thomas. Does your daughter speak of a dark, stout man dressed in black broadcloth who comes holding a mockery of our Bible? A black book. A man who bids she sign in his unholy book, and for this he promises an end to her suffering?”
“She’s not said such to me, but perhaps she’s confided in her mother.”
“Betty calls out in her feverish kicking and screaming the words King of Witches—that George is King of Witches.”
“King George?”
“No, fool! Sorry. Forgive me, Thom. George is George Burroughs.”
“A minister for Satan, him?”
“Yes, yes, I say. He is their leader! A real coven requires a male leader, a cunning man, a Pan. Tituba and Goode have both confessed to dealing with this man, and that he is the one who lured them into temptation and into the work of the Devil.”
“But Burroughs is no longer among us.”
“He comes on the night wind! Comes flying from afar to be with his coven.”
“I last heard he had a ministry in Maine.”
“No doubt another one with rot and evil at its core. You still fail to see my main thrust, Thomas.”
“And that being?”
“Burroughs was an appointment according to record.”
“And?”
“Pushed on the village parish by the Town Councilmen!”
“Who at the time were . . . ”
“The parishioners who block me at every turn, beginning with—”
“Francis Nurse.”
“Whose wife and sisters by marriage oversaw the births—or rather deaths—of your children, man.”
The connective tissue began to find glue inside Putnam’s mind. “Hold on! Burroughs’ own family, wife and children, like Bailey’s before him, died of a fever when he was minister here as well, so—”
“So? So what? Don’t you see it? The man did away with his own.”
“Are you so sure of it?
“Am I sure? We are sure of it.”
“We?”
“The doctor, Corwin and Hathorne, and me, yes.”
“The Dr. Porter and the magistrates are in agreement?”
“And so are you, my friend, once you’ve gotten it in your head.”
“You believe the man did away with his own?”
“They could not be converted to his black religion, so pure of heart were they, so he arranged for their deaths.”
“Like my own dead children?”
“Precisely.”
“Have you evidence of it?”
“I have two witches in lock up who will testify to it.”
“You’ve spoken to the judges, have you?”
“I have, yes.”
“And you mean to bring charges against Burroughs?”
“Among others, yes, but I need your and Anne’s help.”
“Help? Which of my Annes?”
“Both, I’m sure.”
“But why?”
“It will not do for me alone to bring charges.” When Parris got a blank stare from Thomas, he stomped the floor, angry. “I want you and your wife to swear out charges so that Sheriff Williard then serves the warrants of arrest.”
“Serve warrants of arrest? To carry out . . . the charges.”
“It is our duty, Thom.”
“But you want me and Anne to swear out the complaints?”
“Yes, it’s crucial that it doesn’t appear all from one party, especially not from me.”
They’d begun their secret meeting in Parris’ kitchen as everyone in the house slept, and since had moved to the hearth. A storm had come up outside, and now Parris heard a noise on the stairwell, and a quick glance caught a nightshirt. Mary, eavesdropping. How much had Mary Wolcott heard? Mary had been tending to Betty, whose fits and screams had kept everyone up late into the night, and then she fell ill with fever. Seeing that Parris had found her out, she scampered back upstairs to the sick room.
“Go home to your wife, Thomas, and not tonight but soon . . . soon break this news to her. Determine if she agrees or disagrees with my conclusions, and when and if you swear out your warrants against those who’ve maimed your family for eternity, keep my name out of it. Understood?”
“Understood.”
At the door, after saying their good nights, the rain slamming into them, Parris added, “All your children who’d be men today like Nurse’s children, all working to a good end for all the Putnams, Thom, bearing you grandchildren, all murdered with needles stabbed into their innocent bodies right here and here.” Parris indicated each of his armpits. “Where no one might think to look. Puncturing the lungs and the heart from this point downward.”
“But why was little Anne spared? How?”
“I believe God saved Anne.”
“T-To bear witness?”
“You say she and her mother are visited by the dead children. What are the dead saying to your women?”
“Anne says they call out that they’ve been murdered, yes, but I never did believe it anything but rantings.”
“Get thee home to your two Annes, Thom, and sleep well this night if you can.”
Thomas wheeled and rushed off in the storm for his house, his mind filled with the images posited there by the minister. As he sloshed home, using a crutch, even in the darkness, he could see smoke curling and rising from a chimney miles away, an old, supposed-abandoned Nurse house, and he wondered whose fire it might be. Could it be a meeting of the coven that Parris had spoken of?
“How do these Nurse and Towne people fair so well?” he asked the night sky as a streak of lighting showered down with the rain and thunder. In his head, he could hear Parris’ considered answer: Through manipulation and cunning.
“Cunning begun with early land grants,” muttered Thomas to himself. How else had they so tricked his aged father into signing over that perfect tract of land to them and theirs? Signed over to Towne, and from Towne to the Nurses, all a put up job from the beginning thanks to that swift-talking Reverend Burroughs as well, but at that time Burroughs was in another guise as Reverend Jedidiah Allen of Boston. It’d all been the work of a warlock, a witch man.
Nearing home, Thomas shouted, “They mock our Sabbath with their black rites.”
He visibly shook with the cold rain and his anger. “Blaspheming and cursing our Lord Jesus with their sacrileges and taking innocent lives!”
Deacon Ingersoll saw and heard Putnam ranting in the storm, which had awakened him at the back of his inn. Ingersoll rushed out to Putnam, asking if he were all right. Putnam snatched his arm away from Ingersoll and shouted, “We must form up the militia company, Nathaniel!”
“Now?”
“Yes. Drill-drill. Prepare for war.”
The overhead storm had grown in intensity. Ingersoll tried to persuade Putnam that he was drunk, adding, “Besides, no one will come if you call ’em in this weather at such an hour unless we’re under attack!”
“We are under attack, sir, and the militia company must be told!”
“Told bloody what?”
“We must take up arms!”
“Indians? You’ve word of an uprising?”
“Witches, man! I’m talking about Satan’s invisible army.”
“Where? Where, man, where?”
Putnam turned in a 380-degree circle, pointing to the darkness. “Everywhere you see dark, there is one called Legion.”
Chapter Seventeen
Later the same night
Mrs. Thomas Putnam tried to sleep amid the uproar of thunder and lightning strikes all round the village. The sound of it tortured her soul as it had the distinct sound of God’s anger toward her, and why not? She’d failed so miserably at all she’d ever touched, beginning with her failed love for the lost James Bailey, a married man and a minister at the time she’d thrown herself at him. A married man whose wife lay dying in the next room. A man who’d just buried his three children, three lovelies who’d succumbed to the disease plaguing the pa
rsonage so many years ago
She’d been pregnant with James’ son, and when James Bailey left Salem immediately after his wife had left this earth, Anne Carr had been left alone with her secret, that she carried Bailey’s child within her. James had not believed her; had not wanted to believe it, and part of his disbelief had been fueled, perhaps, as she looked back on it now, by the sheer obsessive nature of her passion. She’d terrified him with it. She’d run him from the village with her lust for him. A lust so strong it knew no mores, no custom, no rule, no limit, and no decorum. She’d prostrated herself before Bailey, told him she’d do anything for him…just to have him as hers, and for the child’s sake, she’d argued, but she’d lied. It’d all been for her unbridled lust after the Reverend James Bailey.
So strong was her obsession that she’d plotted it even as his family withered and died around him, almost as if she’d willed their sickness and willed their eventual death, so she might have him entirely and without bonds to anyone or any principle or custom.
She dreamed of James for years after, but she’d need a father for the child, and so she had settled for Thomas Putnam at the time. She cast her future in a servile role to this man she could never truly love. Then Bailey’s child died without ever taking a breath outside her womb. At least no one had ever guessed that it’d been James’—not even Thomas.
Putnam was and remained a man who wanted most in life to be important in the village, so he’d immediately set out to right the wrong of his child’s stillbirth by impregnating Anne again. And when the second child died within weeks of birth, again Thomas determined to set it right. And after this one lived but a handful of days, again they tried, and again they failed—she failed, her womb failed until there had been nine failures, and then came Anne Junior. All of it, she reckoned, was by way of God’s curse on her for pride, arrogance, and disobedience.
Cursed, she was. She’d accepted this fact long before Thomas had. Cursed was her womb—bringing forth only the sickly, puny Anne Junior, who lied, cheated, stole, and generally hated her mother, and who was now suspected of engaging in sordid acts beneath the sheets with Mercy Lewis.
“Reverend Parris must come and take that child back or correct her ways,” she’d told Thomas, who needed it explained in detail. “Pluck the devil from his Mercy, as I might every hair on Mercy’s head if something’s not done and done soon.”
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