“Not at all. I was thinking of the power of suggestion. I’ll bring you Mather’s book sometime. We descendants of the Britons are still susceptible to such things—druidism and pagan beliefs are ingrained in us. What do you do when you say everything is going fine, your car runs, your family is healthy—”
“I knock on wood, of course. And if I get a sty in my eye, I spit on a gold ring and rub my lid and the sty goes away.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, I’m not. It really works. My mother taught me.”
“There—you’re superstitious, too.”
I leaned back against my tree. “It’s not superstition if it works and I know it does, although I don’t know why.”
“You’re proving my point. All its invasions made England a melting pot of religions. When Christianity arrived, it spread its mantle over the old beliefs, but they’re still there and when the mantle slips they show through. To hate witchcraft is to believe in it, and if you believe in it, you naturally resort to countermagic and violence to eradicate it. And that’s what’s dangerous. Hysteria breaks out and then nobody is safe. For instance, among those hanged in Salem were two women whose younger brother was my direct ancestor…”
I groaned inwardly—another genealogy buff like my mother!
“…so I have a natural interest in them. Even the judges hesitated to find such staunch church members guilty, but they didn’t dare go against the panic they themselves had fostered. The older sister, Rebecca Nurse, is perhaps the most cited case of wronged innocence, but the younger—Mary Esty—was, of all the victims, the most intelligent and literate. Her famous petition, written in her own hand to the appellate judges, pleaded, not for her own life, but for more caution in future trials, and for a reexamination of confessing witches, lest they belie themselves to save their lives and thus be damned. Imagine a condemned woman having the compassion to worry about the weak!” His brown eyes glowed. “Mary Esty haunts me, Mitti. She was a restless spirit. According to the record, her ghost stopped the whole miserable affair.”
“You don’t really believe that, do you?”
“The recorders did. So did my ancestor, Bered Towne. He was sixteen years younger than Mary, who was fifty-eight at the time of her death. His mother had died bearing him, so Mary was more like a mother to him than a sister.”
Mary—Towne—Esty! Those were names right out of my dream—where the worn little woman with a swollen belly sat by the fire, stroking her cat!
“He became a stonecutter by trade—” he went on, “gravestones mostly, I imagine, as Death was always with them in those days. During the first part of his life he was probably content to make the crude little slabs you see so often in New England, with incised skulls and other symbols, but after Mary’s death, he spent nearly eight years in England perfecting his craft. When one of the Salem judges, Lieutenant Governor William Stoughton, died in 1701, Towne was commissioned to carve the marble for his tombstone in Dorchester. He produced a masterpiece, for he had become a sculptor—and an avenging angel as well. He carved with a double-edged blade.”
“How do you mean?”
“At one end of the tomb he reproduced the Stoughton family arms. At the other, he carved a pair of skulls with stylized ribs which, gruesome as they are, are the work of a master. In addition, hovering above the two skeletons, is a winged figure with an hourglass in the center, which probably means ‘Tempus fugit.’ Yet, if you look at the wings and hourglass in a certain light, they take on the appearance of a vampire. The story handed down in our family is that old Towne deliberately avenged his sisters. There is no reference to that in the fragments of his diary that have survived, but he did mention his hatred of Stoughton.”
I absently picked at the green part of a leaf, denuding its skeletal structure. “Why Stoughton and not the other judges?”
“Because he was chief justice at the trials, I imagine, and he never recanted as his associate, Samuel Sewall, did after his favorite daughter died. Sewall thought his Sarah’s death was God’s punishment and he made public penance—but not Stoughton, who was furious when Governor Phips called off the trials.”
Greg pursed up his lips in an imitation of an austere despot and thundered, “‘We were in a way to have cleared the land of witches…Who it is that obstructs the course of justice I know not.’”
I applauded. “You should play Stoughton in the pageant!” To my surprise, he said he’d enjoy portraying the old curmudgeon. “Be careful,” I warned. “To make him believable, you must try to understand his viewpoint and—portray the humanity in the man.”
“If he had any,” he growled. “If Sewall could admit his error, why couldn’t Stoughton?”
“But Sewall had lost a child.”
“Stoughton didn’t have any to lose. He never married.”
“So he couldn’t feel God’s retribution like Sewall did.”
Greg frowned. “I hardly expected you to defend an arrogant bigot—”
“And upper class witch, if your theory is correct,” I reminded him. “American history is more fascinating than I realized. Maybe that’s how we’re being governed now—by bell, book and tape recorder.”
Now he laughed. “We are a witchy country at that,” he conceded. “Thirteen colonies—a coven, if you will—represented by thirteen pentacles in a magic circle on our original flag.”
“And don’t forget the thirteen stripes!” I supplied.
“What’s worse, we keep adding pentacles,” he continued the game. “Two more states and we’ll have four covens.”
“Or a deck of cards.”
He reached in his pocket and pulled out a dollar. “Ever notice this pyramid with the shining eye at the top?”
I shook my head. “Just goes to show you can look at a thing all your life and never see it.”
“That’s straight out of the Cabala.”
“Or Masonry.”
“That’s about the same thing. Ever read the history of the Templars?”
I confessed I hadn’t. “The Occult Background of Red-Blooded, God-fearing America! What a great title for a book!” I exclaimed. “Do you suppose we still have covens in the government?”
“In Washington, anything can happen.” He drew himself up to a sitting position, his face level with mine—so close his features blurred. I struggled against a desire to brush my lips against his—yet the impulse seemed not to belong to Mitti Llewellyn, but to another woman totally removed from me.
Leaves rustled and we drew apart as a shadow fell across us. She was little changed—the same translucent eyes and pale skin, her lips curved in their salamander smile.
Greg was the first to recover. “Taking the day off, Iris?”
“I closed the shop in deference to the Osburns.” What are you doing? her eyes asked me. “And I brought your daughter home.”
I sprang to my feet. “Rowan? She was at the Carriers’!”
She shrugged. “No, she was at my house. She knew Charity and Muriel were going to La Crosse today.” She turned eloquent eyes to Greg. “It’s so important to give children a chance to communicate.”
The bitch! Trying to make me look like a delinquent mother! My anger fused into pain. Had Rowan lied to me? What had she told Iris?
“It’s been a long time, Mitti,” she continued.
Not long enough! “Excuse me,” I said aloud. “I must get back to Rowan. I don’t think she should be left alone.”
The counter rebuke failed to penetrate. “Of course,” she replied in a soothing tone, laying a proprietary hand on Greg’s arm. “Walk me home, darling.” He shifted uncomfortably. “Greg and I love to go for long walks,” she added.
“I thought swimming was your sport!” I blurted out before I could stop myself.
Her pupils were almost nonex
istent in the yellow-green irises. “We enjoy that, too, don’t we, Greg?” She tugged at his arm. “Come on, darling, Rowan needs her mother. Let’s go.”
“By all means—don’t let me keep you.” I turned away. If Greg was going to let her tow him around, I wanted no more of him.
“Wait a minute, Mitti!” he checked me. “Sorry, Iris, Mitti and I are working on the pageant. Some other time.”
Greg stayed only long enough to explain some notations in his script, but the length of his stay wasn’t important. She had forced a confrontation and it had backfired. As for Rowan, that was another matter. After Greg dropped me off at the Phoenix I knocked at her door.
Our eyes met in the mirror where she sat combing her curls, and she looked away. “You said you were going to your aunt’s, Rowan.”
“I was, but she wasn’t home.”
“You knew she’d gone to La Crosse. Iris told me. We may have our differences, Rowan, but I never thought you’d lie to me.”
“I didn’t. I never said I called Aunt Charity.”
“But you went to Iris’ house knowing I thought you were at your aunt’s.”
“Yes,” she flung at me defiantly. Again the warning bell in my mind—don’t make too much of this. Don’t turn Iris into forbidden fruit. “And she was nice enough to walk home with you.” I tried to sound convincing and perhaps succeeded, for she shot me a startled look.
“I—uh—I didn’t talk about us,” she volunteered.
“I didn’t think you would.”
I hurried out. The phone was ringing in my room.
“Sub—mi—t!” A male voice this time. “We warned you—we hate you—witch! Move away—move away!”
I dropped the phone, stared at it through several more rings, then jerked it off the hook.
“Listen you! Oh, it’s you, Charity, I’m sorry! I thought it was—someone else. When did you get back? Then you haven’t heard—oh, you have? Yes, it was a terrible thing. I’m so sorry for Elspeth and Melvin. Rowan? Yes, she’s here. I’ll get her—”
I stumbled over something as I went to call Rowan. After she’d taken the phone I bent to pick it up. It was a tiny model racing car, battered and crushed. Inside was a lump of charcoal.
Chapter Eight
The sanctuary of the Community Church throbbed with Gounod’s “Sanctus” as Alison and I took our places in one of the pews. I glanced up toward the organ in surprise. Surely Gladys Pudeator couldn’t have improved to this extent! My memory hadn’t played me false. A slender, dark woman was at the console.
“Is that Quentin’s mother? I didn’t know she was an organist,” I whispered to Alison.
“Yes—and a very good one. Gladys is on vacation.” Ambers and yellows predominated in the stained glass windows, casting a saffron light over the sanctuary. Names of Peacehaven families filled the “In Memoriams” beneath the windows—Nurses, Cloyces, Carriers, Toothakers and others, dividing them from those who had joined since the collapse of the Congregational Church. Charity and Damon came down the aisle and slid into a pew farther forward. We half-rose as a powerfully built man of medium height, followed by a diminutive woman and a great, shuffling hulk of a boy, bulldozed over us to get to the other end of our pew.
“Irving and Mavis Good,” Alison whispered. “He’s the sheriff—and that’s their son Jonah,” she added as the young man slouched down next to his mother.
I sensed the apology in Alison’s tone. Jonah was watching us with a vacant stare. His child’s face was set in a small head on top of his massive man’s body. I tried not to notice him, looking beyond him to his father. Irv Good, once the town bully, now the sheriff! Deep lines creased his features and his huge fists were covered with scars, some still raw. His wife sat with shoulders bowed, nervously fidgeting with loose strands of graying hair.
“Her father owned Scott’s bakery.”
Not Mavis Scott! Surely this bent, shriveled woman with knob-knuckled hands couldn’t be the beautiful Mavis I remembered!
Alison answered my look. “You’d look like that, too, if you were married to Captain Bligh. Oh, and here comes another arm of the law—Peacehaven’s police chief, sheriff’s deputy and patrolman.”
All these titles belonged to one man, whom I recognized as Gareth’s friend, Jim Willard. Preceding him were his wife, a girl about Rowan’s age, and a small boy. The mother and daughter were both petite and dark, but the boy, small as he was, was already rawboned and lanky like his father.
A door creaked open and the choir filed into the chancel. I was relieved to see the Osburns weren’t there. Then a worse possibility set my skin to prickling. They might be somewhere behind me, watching. Come on now, you’re being paranoid, I scolded myself.
Lucian, clad in a black robe with scarlet stole, mounted the pulpit. Rhoda Jackson’s back tensed as she modulated into the firm, resounding strains of the doxology. Latecomers hurried to take their places—Muriel and Caleb Toothaker just ahead of the Goods, while to our right a woman bulging with child tried to wedge herself into our pew. Her ruddy-faced, sturdily-built husband waited behind her, making no effort to assist or to conceal his boredom. Two girls stood quietly behind their father.
“The Redds,” Alison breathed.
Where had I heard that name? Oh yes, Damon had been on his way to their house the morning Freya was killed. Why did everything have to remind me of that? I turned around to see if I could locate my daughter. Lucian and his daughter Lucy had come by early to pick up Rowan for Sunday school. The girls were several pews behind us on the other side of the sanctuary. Lucy, a frail child with cascading ash-blonde hair that framed her pale, thin face, sat rigid and quiet, staring up at her father. Rowan leaned away from her, whispering to—I bit my lip—Iris Faulkner, who turned and looked at me triumphantly.
The collection plate floated past. Just in time I checked myself from dropping in a crumpled Kleenex instead of the bill I’d taken from my purse. Alison glanced at me in amusement.
“Here come Mr. and Mrs. Big,” she mouthed under cover of the next hymn. “Tyler and Rosalind Bishop. Too late for the collection, as usual. He’s the bank president. Stuffed shirts,” she added, “but you’d like their daughter. She’s with the Peace Corps in Africa.”
She hushed as Lucian rose and laid his hand on the large pulpit Bible. He put on his glasses, then removed them again—for dramatic effect, I thought at first, but then I saw he was distracted by something at the rear. Greg was making his way slowly down the aisle, his eyes scanning the congregation in search of someone. I saw Iris motion to the girls to slide over, but he ignored them and continued on until he reached our pew. With an apologetic nod he squeezed past the Redds and sat down next to me. Only then did he seem to become aware of an awkward pause in the service and a deep flush spread over his face.
Lucian cleared his throat. “Brothers and Sisters,” he began in that peculiarly compelling voice. “Instead of my usual text, I’d like to read a speech that was delivered to an undercover group by a man wanted by the authorities…” His eyebrows formed two circumflexes as he ran his finger along the page. “This man told his agents the following: ‘Do not think that I have come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.’ Harsh words, you say? Then listen to this: ‘If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.’
“Who was this wild-eyed subversive and where was he? In Berkeley? Belfast? Beirut? What would you have done had you been there? Called in the FBI or the CIA? Well, my friends, you were born too late. By nearly two thousand years. This rabble rouser, this instigator of familial disobedience, was Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. He was talking about priorities. Not
even our family obligations can supersede our loyalty to Him.”
What was he doing? Setting the children up in judgment over their elders? My father would have decried such an interpretation.
“This may seem severe indeed,” he went on in a gentler tone, “yet He said the same thing in a different way—‘I am the Way, the Truth and the Life: no man cometh unto the Father but by me.’ Jew and Gentile were asked to depart from the beliefs of their parents to follow Him, and He asks it of us today. Beware, all ye who are not born again in Christ lest your children learn to hate you. Jesus demands loyalty and there can be no backsliding.
“My friends”—his robe fell bat-like from his upraised arms—“everywhere true Christians are ringed around with the synagogue of Satan described by the Apostle John in Revelations—those who claim to be Christians but are not because they have never truly given their hearts to Jesus. They know not the baptism of the Spirit. Let me tell you about this ‘synagogue’…”
It was a vivid picture he painted—a wilderness of unsaved Christians, atheists, pagans, blasphemers, and backsliders. There was no denying the power of Lucian’s delivery. But then he switched to the other side of the picture, a “synagogue of Christ.” Why do preachers generally make the good side sound so dull? Feet began to shuffle, noses were blown and coughs became endemic. The sheriff, who had been cooling himself with a fan labeled, “Jesus Saves! Courtesy of the Osburn Funeral Home,” checked his watch and began to kick the pew ahead. Muriel Toothaker turned around and gave him a dirty look. Homer Redd and Tyler Bishop were unabashedly asleep.
“And can we be saved by our works alone?” Lucian’s fist came down on the pulpit. Heads snapped back, only to droop again as the minister settled into calmer tones. I tried futilely to concentrate, but the distant hum of a motorboat pulled me out the window. How long before the river would begin to wash at the foundations of this building? Another five years—or three or two—and this part of Peacehaven would be submerged with canoers gliding overhead, unaware of the buildings slumbering in the mud below…
The Witch and Warlock MEGAPACK ®: 25 Tales of Magic-Users Page 16
