by Megan Chance
She hesitated. I felt her gaze hard upon my face, and then she said, “Father. Father, is it…you?”
’Twas a question, but she did not seem to require an answer. I saw the distress come into her eyes before she said wonderingly, “I did not kill you. I did not kill you.…” She began to sob.
I rolled off her, and gingerly I gathered her into my arms, expecting that she would bolt at my touch. She collapsed against me, and I held her there until she crawled into my lap like the little child she had once been, putting her arms around my neck to hold me close. I felt the warm wetness of her tears on my skin and cried myself for all the years I’d lost, for the child who had slipped away from me to journey alone into madness…and the man who had let her go.
Chapter 39
SAM GAVE US THE USE OF HIS CART AND THE MULE, THOUGH I HAD no money to give him, and no certainty about when they would be returned. He provisioned us for several days’ journey, and gave me a flintlock and powder, and some coin. When I protested, he said bleakly, “I would that I could help the others so falsely accused,” and I knew he was thinking of his mother. I accepted his generosity with humility.
“I will send word when I arrive.”
“’Tis best if you do not, Lucas. Who knows if they will choose to pursue you—’twould be better if I know nothing. But then, when this is all over”—he smiled weakly—“then I may apply to you for a new cupboard.”
I clapped him on the back and said my most heartfelt good-byes to the man who had been such a good friend to me.
I left as soon as we could, afraid that my lingering would bring trouble to his family. ’Twas near twilight—the roads were emptiest now, though night was the most dangerous time to travel. I had no other choice, not given my travel companions: an infant, a six-year-old, and a girl so haunted and frail she seemed transparent beyond the sharpness of her bones.
The way was difficult, the girls sleepless and irritable; Charity constantly watched the road beyond us, the trees, the fields, as if she saw demons in every shadow. Perhaps she did. She barely ate, and twice she broke into fits where she called out to her mother, and I was only able to still her by holding her so tightly in my arms she could not move.
I had planned to go to New York, where I suspected there would be no pursuit, but in the end, I could not abandon Susannah so completely, in spite of how dangerous it was to be close. I told myself I would go there someday, with her beside me. We would find a haven there, where the influence of the rationalist Dutch was strong. They did not put so much credence into the fact of witchcraft—only a short time ago, such disbelief would have been abhorrent to me; now ’twas my salvation.
Yet if I could not go to New York, neither could I stay in Massachusetts. I must stay hidden—if not for myself, then for Charity, who still suffered her afflictions, who would have been obvious and suspicious to anyone. So I went deep into Connecticut, where the three of us found lodging in a boardinghouse in a town at the end of a narrow bay, where I thought to stay until I found work enough to take a small house of our own.
Our room was mean and dirty, with a single small window. The furniture consisted of a rickety table and a bench, and two straw pallets covered with blankets that I rented from the landlord. I put Charity and Jude on one, while Faith and I shared the other; she whimpered and fussed while we all tried to find exhausted sleep. Faith had turned colicky with travel and the change to goat’s milk and cow’s milk—whatever I could afford to buy on the route. If she was not thriving, she was not languishing, either. Jude did well; she accepted things so easily, and this new place was a delight to her.
I grew more and more worried about Charity. I took a job at a nearby sawmill, but I had never made friends easily, and now I did not know who to turn to—anyone here I might tell would be immediately suspicious. The talk of Salem was the greatest bit of gossip in the town, enough so that I called myself by my stepfather’s name to disguise myself. I could not go to a preacher and confess that my daughter was afflicted; they would assume the witchcraft plague had come to Connecticut. I did my best; as the days passed into a warm June, I prayed with them every night, and not the way I had done—I took care not to speak of the Devil at all, or of sin.
I cared for Charity as if she were a babe. I talked to my daughters at the table as if they were my neighbors, and interested in the goings-on in town, though they knew few of the people. Faith was eight months old now, and could sit up by herself. I would sit her on a burlap bag beside me on the floor and lean down to tease her or chuck her chin, and say to her things like, “Do you think this weather will hold, Faith?” The child gurgled back to me as if she understood my words. Jude would laugh, but Charity would not even smile. Her thoughts were her own, her eyes steadfastly silent.
Until a hot day in mid-June.
I spent that morning close to the saw, blocking out the sound the best I could with rags tied around my ears, concentrating on feeding the wood into the blade, watching my hands—dangerous work, work that required focus. Yet as I always did, I thought of Susannah. I wondered about her; I dreamed about her as I’d seen her last: too thin, the hollows beneath her collarbones deep, the ridges of her ribs a map beneath my hands.
I told myself I would know if she died, and I prayed it was so, though I did not truly believe it. God had proven fickle to me these last years, and I was bitter enough that I believed he might punish me by taking what I’d loved too much. My children. Judith. Charity. And now…Susannah. I listened greedily whenever the talk in town turned to Salem and the trials, and I knew that Governor Phips had been more concerned with the French and Indian War than with witches, and had left Salem to William Stoughton, his lieutenant governor. While the government had set up a court of Oyer and Terminer to try the accused, the girls still called out, filling the prisons with witches, though no one here seemed to know their names. I could not reveal the reason for my interest. All I could do was pray that my friends would escape this scourge, that Susannah would survive it. I prayed that those sitting judgment would prove more farsighted than the villagers.
That hot summer day, I was thinking of those things when I walked from the mill into the barely cooler evening air. I was covered with sawdust and sweat; my hair was plastered to my head. The rasping of the saw, the sluice of water, still rang painfully loud in my ears, so I did not at first hear the cries of the man who ran after me. ’Twas only because I paused to take off my gloves and shake the dust from them, that I even saw him there at all. It was Edmund Ames, who worked with me at the mill.
“Have you heard? Have you heard?” he bellowed. “They’ve hanged one of ’em!”
I should not have known what he spoke of. He had provided no context for it. Yet I understood immediately. Ames frowned and looked at me more closely. “You should take yourself home, man.”
“Which of them?” I asked him. “Which one of them did they hang?”
“Some woman.” He shrugged. “I didn’t catch her name. Does it matter? One witch gone, a hundred more to follow.”
He went past me, leaving me there on the street. The urge to ride back to Salem as fast as I could rushed over me; I began to run. I was halfway to the room I shared with my daughters when I realized in dull desperation that I could not return to Salem; even if they had hanged her, I could not attend to her body. I would be thrown back into prison the moment I set foot where I was recognized; I was in danger even here.
I stood there blindly in the street, the curses of a man whose cart and horse had to careen to miss me sounding only as a faraway echo. Gradually I became aware of the world around me again—the women pausing to gossip with their neighbors, gathering before a nearby shop, their voices alive with the story of the hanging in Salem. What Edmund Ames did not know, these women would, I realized. ’Twas their business to know.
An old woman moved from the others, hobbling with her full basket to her door. I hurried over, slowing as I reached her, pretending to be only a passing neighbor with a healt
hy interest in local gossip, nothing more.
“Who was it?” I asked her. “Who did they hang?”
She eyed me and gave a crooked grin. “Some woman who owned a tavern. I think the name was Beckett. Or…Blister. Somethin’ like that.”
I felt a rush of relief that made me put a hand to the wall for support. A tavern owner with the name of Beckett or Blister. Bridget Bishop. It did not surprise me that she’d been the first to be tried. She had been suspected of witchcraft once before, many years ago. There would have been more evidence against her than the others.
I listened with half an ear while the woman told me the rest of the story, obviously delighting in having an audience to herself. As I left her and made my way home, the tale gathered full-blown in my head, as if I had witnessed it.
’Twas a frenzy, the old woman told me, as if she’d seen it herself, though I doubted she had set foot in Salem in her life. Even as Bridget Bishop choked and struggled in death, the afflicted girls kept up their mocking; they were not silent until the condemned was pronounced dead. Goody Bishop was cut down without ceremony, her body dumped in a crevice in the rocks. They began to cover her with dirt, but the digging was too hard, and so they left her there for the crows and wolves to find, her leg and arm sticking out like some bizarre plant. They walked away without even a prayer.
That image stayed with me. I found myself remembering Bridget as she had been in life—pretty and energetic, ornamented always with bits of lace, with a voice so low and raucous it marked her forever as a tavernkeep.
I was saddened and troubled as I walked slowly to the boardinghouse, barely greeting our landlord before I went up the rickety, dark, and narrow steps to the room where my daughters waited. As I approached the door, I heard sounds—the same ones I heard daily: Faith’s fitful crying and Jude’s tuneless singing as she tried to comfort her. I paused, wondering what I would tell them about the hanging, what would be Charity’s reaction. I opened the door and stepped inside.
The room was hot and close—though the tiny window was open to let in whatever breeze would come, the room was under the roof, where the sun beat all day. Charity stood there, motionless, still listless, staring out unseeingly. She did not turn when I came inside, though Jude stood from where she bent on the floor next to Faith. She smiled at me, and Faith’s whimpering burst into a fullblown cry when she saw me; she lifted her arms as if I were her savior, as if she could not bear another moment without me. I crossed the room and took her up, overwhelmed and humbled once more at how great was this child’s affection for me. She calmed, clinging to me with her little legs, as happy now as she had been miserable a moment before. So changeable, so easily mended—a lack of complexity I envied.
“May we go out, Father?” Jude asked me eagerly.
I shook my head, watching her face fall in quick disappointment. “Not tonight. ’Tis too much gossip about today. ’Twill be better to stay in.”
Charity turned slowly from the window. “Gossip,” she said, her voice devoid of emotion or inflection. “I have watched them running about all day, chased by demons—”
“There are no demons here,” I told her sharply.
“Aye, there are demons everywhere. Have you not told me—”
“I have not always been as wise as I should be.”
She looked surprised, and then she frowned. “’Tis not your fault, Father. Have you not always said that the Devil could lead even the best of us astray?”
They were the wrong words for today, the wrong words given that I’d just come from hearing of Bridget Bishop’s death. I was tired of fearing evil; I had had my fill of Satan and his minions, of grasping superstition that walked the streets like a young man searching for love, promiscuous and needy.
Suddenly I could no longer stand the thought of Charity staring out that window, seeing demons in every shadow. I could not bear the weight of terror that sat daily on her shoulders.
“’Tis enough,” I said, and then, without meaning it, my voice rose. “’Tis enough!”
Charity’s eyes went wide.
I handed Faith to Jude and said tersely, “Go downstairs. See if Goody Rich has a cake for her.” Then when Jude paused, looking hesitantly at Charity, I said, “Go. I’ve things to discuss with your sister.”
She went quickly, and I waited until the door closed behind her. I heard her steps down the stairs, and then I turned to Charity, who was watching me in pale fear, gripping the windowsill.
“I want the truth from you,” I said to her.
“The—truth?”
“Aye. I’m surprised I never thought to ask it before now.”
“I-I don’t understand you, Father. I-I have ever told the…truth.”
“Have you?” I took a step toward her, and she flattened herself against the window. “Is it the truth that sent Goody Bishop to the hangman two days ago, accused of witchcraft?”
Charity’s face went white. “Goody Bishop?”
“Aye. They hanged her on Friday, leaving her husband a widower and her sons without a mother.”
“She was a witch.”
“Was she? I wonder.”
“Aye, she was, Father; she was.” Charity started toward me, her hands outstretched, a plea in her voice. “We saw her specter—”
“You have never met Bridget Bishop. For if you had, I would have punished you for going to her tavern.”
She stopped midpace.
“Did you know her, Charity?”
“I-I knew of her.”
“Had you ever seen her?”
Slowly she shook her head.
“Then how did you know this specter who afflicted you was her?”
“They—they told me it was.” Her voice broke when she said it. She began to shake.
“Who told you?” I demanded.
“Annie,” she said. “Annie Putnam. She said her…She said her father knew Goody Bishop.”
“Did Annie see Goody Nurse as well? Who recognized her specter?”
Charity’s shaking grew worse. She grabbed her skirt.
“Who recognized her specter?” I asked again.
“Did they…hang her?” she asked, in a voice so quiet I could barely hear her.
I did not answer. Once more, I said, “Who recognized Goody Nurse?”
“Annie did. Annie…did.”
“And what of Susannah?”
Charity’s eyes filled quickly with tears; her shaking grew so she could not hold herself still—this affliction I recognized. I knew its stages the way I knew each corner of this room, and so I expected it when she backed away from me, holding up her hands. She gasped, “Do not touch me. Leave me!”
I advanced on her. “Who do you see, Charity?”
“’Tis her! ’Tis Susannah!”
“It cannot be Susannah. She is in prison. In chains. Her specter cannot get to you here.”
She looked at me wildly, and then her gaze leaped to the fireplace. “Mama!”
“Your mother is with God,” I said. “She is no servant of the Devil. She is with God.”
Charity fell to her knees. Her eyes were wide and black; her mouth was a silent hollow of a scream.
I felt the familiar helplessness, the pull of compassion that made me want to go to her, to hold her. Yet I knew how she would push me away; I knew the strength of that unseen force. I could not fight it. And so I did the only other thing I could do, the one thing I had not yet tried. I went to the bench and sat down, and I said, “There is no Devil holding you, Charity. Your mother is dead, gone to God. There is no evil in this room but what you make.”
She shuddered. “Leave me! Oh, do not hurt me so!”
“I have not left you,” I said quietly, evenly. “Your mother’s spirit is only a blessed one. There is no black man beside you, Charity. There is only me.”
I did not know if I imagined that whatever force held her prisoner loosened its hold. I could not say for sure if the tension I read in her body eased even a little. But I felt
I saw some answer in her eyes, and I said, “I have not left you, Charity, and I will not, no matter what has happened. You are my daughter. I have loved you since you were born. That will never change.”
Then I rose and went to the window, leaving her to her labors on the floor while I stared out at the darkness growing below, the soft summer twilight. I listened to the sound of children, laughter, the creak of a well’s rope, and the silence behind me. Then I realized—’twas no longer silent in the room, but there was the hushed sound of crying instead. I turned to see my daughter curled on the floor, her shoulders shaking in sobs, her face in her hands—just a young woman crying out her heart, all demons gone, the air quiet and soft.
Carefully I went to her and put my hand on her shoulder, and her sobbing became greater. “I am such a sinner,” she hiccuped. “How can God love me now?”
“What happened, Charity? Tell me what happened.”
She looked up slowly from her hands, staring at me through watery, red-rimmed eyes. Then, as if her words had been lodged in her throat and I had set them free, she said, “I did not mean for you to be accused. I did not mean it, I swear to you! When I thought you would die, I was ready to die myself.…I would have died, had they hanged you. ’Twas not what I intended. Not what any of us intended.”
“What did you intend?”
“I meant only to save you. I was…I was so afraid. I have been so afraid.…”
I sat there, listening while she told me how my apprentice had seduced her and she had fallen in love with him. How Judith had been horrified at her sin and sent the boy away with five pounds and did not tell me what had happened between my daughter and Sam. Judith had strictly bade Charity to keep it silent as well. Charity had lived in terror that I would find out, and when Judith died, she lived in fear her mother’s protection would cost Judith her rightful place with God. She feared that her sin, and the lie about it, kept her mother’s spirit here on earth, in league with Satan. Charity believed Susannah had come at the black man’s urging, and Susannah, with her London ways and bold honesty, had only made plain that fear.
