The Heretic's Daughter

by Kathleen Kent

  When I had the strength to ask questions, Tom revealed to me what I had only imagined in my sickness and what had truly taken place. Some of the women in the cell had indeed taken turns caring for me, although most of them had given me up after a few days of raging fever. The only one who continued to watch vigil while Tom and Margaret slept was Lydia Dustin, the old woman with the sharp tongue. Two dogs had been hanged, one in Salem and one in Andover, for being familiars to the Devil. One of the prisoners, a young woman seven months into the family way, gave birth in silent agony to her first child. With a sudden understanding I knew that the meowing of the cat I had heard must have been the cries of the infant. The babe had quickly died and there would be no more for the girl, who all but poured her own life’s blood into the straw.

  In dismay I reminded Tom of the message I was to give Father from Dr. Ames but had lost again in my ravings. But Tom assured me he had passed it along word for word as it was given to me. When I asked Tom what it meant he said Father had told him that Dr. Ames and his fellows were New Levellers. When Tom asked Father what it meant, he responded only that they were men who believed that all men were to be protected equally under the common law. And that each man was to be free to follow his own conscience in practices of religion. I remembered the Quaker man in Uncle’s barn, the man Margaret had called a heretic for believing such, and wondered if Dr. Ames was secretly a Quaker.

  My fever rose again even as the cold of autumn dug in, and we all pressed together tighter for warmth. In a few weeks the groundwater would start to freeze and the first snows would drift through the high westward portals, dusting white our hair and lacing and stiffening our thin shawls to parchment. Margaret would lie next to me by the hour, rambling in her speech about the trial or her home in Billerica. At times she defended herself to invisible judges, which left her melancholy and spiritless, as though she had caught my fever and was jaded because of it. But she was always tender to me. Washing my face or urging me to drink broth when it could be had, or using the sordid light to pick from my scalp the lice that tormented me so.

  It is often at sunset that the vital protective channels of the body are at their lowest. A fever will rise, a woman with child will ready herself for labor, the spirit will darken with the shadows and weaken. It was at such a time that I felt overcome by my guilt and I poured out my confession to Margaret.

  “I have killed my own mother,” I cried miserably into my hands. She held my head and rocked me, smoothing my hair back from my face. She smiled and bent to whisper something in my ear.

  She said, “Shall I tell you a secret?” I nodded, for I remembered well the secrets we shared together when I lived with her family, and I expected her to tell me something pleasantly distracting.

  “Hush, now. Don’t cry. I have seen her only yesterday and she is well.” She nodded and looked off to a far corner of the cell.

  The well of my mouth dried to dust and I whispered, “Who?”

  She seemed not to hear me and continued on as she deftly plaited strands of my hair. “If I gather your hair so, it will not pull and we will not have to fever-cut it to the scalp. But you have knots that will never come out. That’s the thing about knots. They are easier tied than untied.”

  I grabbed her hand and asked again, “Margaret, who did you see yesterday?”

  “Why, I saw Aunt Martha. She came into the cell while you were sleeping. She was quite sorry you have been ill and will be all the more sad if you do not mend. I asked her to stay but she would not. D’ye know what she told me to tell you?”

  I shook my head, my eyes huge and staring, my bowels turning to water. She cocked her head and her gaze became suddenly clear and reflective.

  “She said, ‘Hold fast the stone. . .’ ”

  I shut my eyes and remembered the touch of my mother’s hand as she closed my fingers around the stone I had carried from Preston’s farm. How Margaret could have known about it I cannot say. I could have, in the tossing of my fevered brain, spoken of it to her. Or perhaps the thread of knowingness had been passed to her as well and her tangled mind had caught some bit of message from the shaded world like a moth caught in a net. Margaret had resumed plaiting my hair and she sang a little song I had heard Aunt sing as she moved about the hearth. It was one that my own mother had hummed when she was unguarded and thought herself to be alone, and I wept again, not from the press of my guilt but from the easing of it. And from that moment on I began to get better.

  ON A DAY close to the end of September, the door was opened by the sheriff and a tall, stately man in a flowing cape and large-brimmed hat walked into the cells and stood looking over us. He entered with a prim disdain, bringing the edge of his cloak up to cover his mouth and nose from the stench. He resisted the movement of his legs backwards and planted his feet as though enduring gale winds. The play of emotions upon his face, though, was remarkable and would stay with me through all my life. It was as though he held up to us the mirrored image of our slide from decent modesty, grace, and dignity to the degeneracy of fear and self-recrimination and sickness. His features, which were large, quivered and melted like wax held too close to the heat. His eyes, at first narrowed in righteous condemnation to view so many accused witches, widened and brimmed over with tears, which he dashed away as though they scalded his skin. His lips, pressed tightly together, a cage against speaking idly of profane things, opened to a sharp intake of breath. He put his fist up and covered the quivering mouth that muttered over and over again “My God, my God, my God. . .” There were no entreaties or pleas of mercy from the women. There were no moans of distress or even tears. They sat or lay mute, letting their bodies be the book of revelation.

  Increase Mather, famed clergyman, friend to the King and the Governor alike, would work from that moment to cast doubt upon the accusers, and though he would never find fault outright with the judges or his son, Cotton Mather, this doubt would be a mighty blow to the Court of Oyer and Terminer. He would return again to the prison on October 19th to take statements from women who said they had been pressed into giving false witness against themselves, but I would not be in Salem to see him.

  On Saturday, the first day of October, Dr. Ames came into our cell and told us that our bail had been collected and that within a very short time many of the youngest prisoners would be released. Coins had been raised from the towns of Andover and Boston and even faraway Gloucester. It gave proof, he said, that people’s minds were changing in their belief in the Salem Court. Early on the morning of the 6th of October, the sheriff opened the door to let in the blacksmith. He stood in the corridor while our chains were removed to give us time to say our farewells and to walk from our cell as best we could. I was released with my three brothers, along with fourteen other children. Abigail Dane Faulkner’s two daughters were freed, along with Moses Tyler’s nieces. Mary Lacey, Mercy Williams’ friend, who had been one of the first to cry out against my mother, was so weak from her confinement that she had to be carried from her place in the straw. Mercy Wardwell, whose father, Samuel, had been hanged on September 22nd, had turned nineteen just three days before and so was no longer a child. She hid her face in her hands and would not say good-bye to us as we left her under the cold autumn drafts from the high western wall. Behind us we left sisters and mothers and grandmothers who had no promise or even hope of release.

  Lydia Dustin pressed my face in her hands and blessed me, saying, “This be but a dark dream. Now you can waken and stay with the living.” Both she and her granddaughter would spend the whole of the winter in chains. The court would find them not guilty on the 1st day of February, but because they could not pay the prison fees, they would be returned to prison. On March 2nd Elizabeth Colson would be released and returned to Reading. On March 10th, 1693, Lydia Dustin would die, one of the few remaining women left in the “good” cell of Salem prison.

  I rejoiced at our freedom until it was made known to me that only the children of Andover were to be released. The children of
Salem and Beverly and Billerica were to remain. Margaret was returned to her mother’s side, and as Richard carried me from the cell, she stretched her arm out to me, her fingers grasping the little piece of pottery I had given her. She held it out to me like a talisman against loss or as a promise that there would always be a connection between us that would hold tight beyond the crossing of dark and dangerous days. And as I was carried up the stairs I heard her voice calling to me, distant and metaled, as though calling from the bottom of a covered well, “Sarah, Sarah, Sarah. . .” I could hear her calling to me even after the door to the stairwell had been bolted fast again.

  THE LEAVES OF autumn that October of 1692 were gold and red like the blood of martyrs and so suffused with color that it assaulted our prison-blind eyes like a fiery rod. We stood blinking and cringing at the outer door, not knowing whether to go forward or turn back, too weak at first to descend the few steps into the prison yard on our own. My brothers and I were the last to stand at the door and slowly, slowly, we could see, appearing through the sharp light, figures standing motionless in the prison yard.

  A silent crowd had gathered around the steps, silent save for the few desperate greetings from families calling out to their children standing in front of us. One by one the children were reclaimed and dragged or carried away until we were the last four to stand wavering in the lifting wind. I was held upright between Richard and Tom and it was Andrew who walked first down the steps, still holding his injured arm close to his chest. The crowd had pressed in closer around us and I could see more clearly now what was in their faces. Pity and perhaps some portion of compassion, but withal, under every play of emotion was fear. Fear that perhaps the children of a woman hanged for a witch might yet still carry the seeds of devilry within them. It was Andrew, simple, tortured Andrew, who with the back of his knuckled fist gently pushed back the crowds, saying, “Go to home, then. Go to home.”

  When he had pushed them back far enough, we saw Father moving his way to us, his head rising above the tallest of them, his face shadowed from the brim of his hat. He placed himself in front of the townspeople and waited for us to come down the steps. He did not come to our aid or rise to greet us but waited for us to make our way down by ourselves. And when we at last descended the final step, he turned, and the rustling crowd parted raggedly, like crested waves before the prow of a ship, making a space for us to walk. I understood at that moment fully and suddenly why he would not carry me, and why he had not come to my defense in times past when I was battling for my place in the world. It was not because he failed to love me, but because he loved me so well. He had brought us food and clothing and kind words when we were imprisoned; he did not abandon us. But he would never seek to weaken me so that I could not withstand the burdens and cruelties or harsh judgments of the world. An infant must learn to walk only by cutting his lip on the harsh ground. Only by tasting blood is the toddler discouraged from falling.

  I took a step. And then another. And so it went as we followed Father, who had come to take us forever away from Salem. And with every step I thought of my mother’s courage as she faced her judges. With every step I thought of her cleaving to the truth even as she fell the short distance of the rope. With every step I thought of her pride, her strength, her love.

  And with every step I thought, I am my mother’s daughter, I am my mother’s daughter . . .

  SOON AFTER FATHER had brought us home, he took us to the place where he had buried Mother. It was south of Ladle Meadow on Gibbet Plain, where she used to go as a girl with her sister. The meadow she had taken me to last spring, close to the lone elm, where the red book was buried. He could not have known about the book. It was the only place where she felt alone from her cares. We set late sprigs of rosemary around the cairn of rocks he had used to mark her grave. The morning was quiet with little wind, the leaves gently falling, their use spent except to blanket the ground for the coming cold. There were no birds calling, no streamers of pigeons or wild geese overhead, for they had already flown away south. I knelt down and placed my ear over the cairn, listening to the settling of the stones.

  I remembered wondering long ago what song my mother’s bones would make. I had once imagined their singing would be as the crashing of waves, for I knew that even the fragile ocean shell carries within it the sound of hounding surf. But what I heard was a gentle rustling, an odd whistling. The sound the birdfoot violet makes as it grows through the early frosts of winter.

  CHAPTER TEN

  October 1692–May 1735

  WE STAYED IN Andover for some time. We worked the farm, and always Father was there. His reserve never softened and yet he was gentle with us, attending every wound, every searing distemper, every horrific dream, until we were part whole again. We were left unmolested by our neighbors, and indeed the suspicion and fear people still held for us worked to our advantage. We were always given the best at barter, and in the early days of our release, there were even gifts of food or odd bits of clothing left at our doorstep. We would never know for certain who it was that brought us these gifts, as they were left in the dead of night and, as the lurcher had died, we had no warning of these visitations.

  Dr. Ames traveled from Haverhill once to call on us, and though Father thanked him warmly, I believe the good doctor was disappointed in the brief discourse. There were no illuminating ideas exchanged between them, no passionate debate of the righting of wrongs, only simple expressions offered on the unsteady courses of seasons and the increase or diminishment of our livestock. And after a long pause, Father saluted his visitor and left the doctor with us in the yard to attend to his fields. After the death of his father, Dr. Nathaniel Ames moved with his wife and children to his family home in Boston and spent the rest of his life petitioning the Crown and the courts of Massachusetts for the reform of the royal prisons in the colonies.

  My aunt and cousin were not set free from prison until February of 1693. A trial by jury had found them not guilty in January, but Allen could pay their prison release only by first selling his father’s horse, Bucephalus. Margaret and Aunt were carried home to Billerica in a cart but, as they took the more northerly Ipswich Road, did not pass by our door. Allen would inherit his father’s farm and would by all accounts manage his family’s homestead with a tight fist and a shrewd eye. And although Father petitioned him to allow me to be re-united with Margaret, he was unrelenting in his stony and embittered refusals.

  By May all of the fifty-six remaining prisoners of the witch trials were found not guilty and freed. After months and years had passed, the wounds of our captivity were to be scabbed over by the weak-headed nods of civility from the townspeople. But these wounds were too wide and too deep to heal without a thorough scouring. Within five years of the witch trials, one Salem judge and twelve jurors made formal apologies for their part in the killing of innocents. In 1706, Ann Putnam Jr., the only one of the Salem accusers to do so, stood in front of the village meetinghouse and made a full and public renouncement of what she had done. She said, however, that her actions were not of her own doing, but rather from delusions brought on by the Devil himself. She would die at five-and-thirty years, unmarried and alone, haunted by dreams of the Salem dead.

  In the same year as Ann Putnam’s confession, Mercy Williams, the girl who had been indentured to us and who had given false testimony against me, died. On a cold December day, she had fallen or, some whispered, been pushed from the Haverhill ferry as it crossed the Merrimack River. She was found at dusk, floating among the clots of ice, her red underskirt ballooning up from the gray water acting as a beacon to the searchers on the riverbank. The news brought no satisfaction, only a bitter, lingering sadness over such a wasted and tawdry life.

  Visitors to our farm were few, and even the Dane family, who kept Hannah as their own, paid us very little mind. Hannah remained a fearful and timid soul even to her womanhood, and though she would marry and have her own children, her eyes would forever hold the look of the lost. She had stran
ge fits of melancholy and was plagued her whole life with night terrors. The Danes thought it best we not upset her with visits, and so she had turned nearly twelve before I saw her again. When I was finally admitted to the Dane house, I was taken to the common room, where my sister sat, head bowed, at her spinning. Gone were the soft and dimpled curves of infancy and in their place sat the angled and rigid form of austerity. She shook my hand wanly and raised her eyes for a moment, but I knew she had mostly forgotten me. We spoke of village things and hearth things, but she never asked after Father or our brothers and I left the past alone. When I said good-bye, she nodded once and began again to work the treadle of the spinner. I cried for her on the long walk home, hiding my tears from Father, telling him she sent home with me her fidelity and her love.

  As we did not return to the meetinghouse, we did not witness the resurrection of Reverend Dane back to his place at the pulpit. It seems his adversary, the Reverend Barnard, had kenned the changing and lofty tides of opinion from stern judgment and harsh consignment to solemn and doubtful consideration of spectral evidence. He had jumped with Reverend Dane into the petitions for the prisoners’ acquittal like a man caught fire.

  Robert Russell stayed our friend and, with his wife, often came at times of harvest or sowing or sickness. Robert was to have his wish for sons and had five of them in startling succession with the former Widow Frye. Not two years after our release from prison, Richard married Robert’s pale, shy niece, Elizabeth Sessions.