The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

by Katherine Howe

  “’Tis,” Goody Josephs nodded.

  “The girls are still in their fits, then,” Deliverance remarked. The women said nothing.

  They arrived on the stoop of a simple frame house, like Deliverance’s own in Salem Town but more tightly arrayed between its neighbors. The women led her into the front hall, where a girl, about Mercy’s age, was tending to the fire in the hearth. When the little band appeared she tossed another two split logs onto the fire and mounted the ladder into the loft overhead without so much as a word. She’s been warned away, Deliverance thought. Or she is afraid of me. She surveyed the room and felt a rising tide of sadness creep throughout her body. It had been months since she laid eyes on her daughter. She wondered how the girl was able to pay the prison for her keep.

  “Goody Hubbard, we will have a candle, if you please,” said Goody Josephs, rolling her blouse sleeves up her sturdy forearms. She turned to Deliverance. “I’ll have you unlace your dress, Livvy. And quick now. Soon enough the night will be upon us.”

  Deliverance’s gaze roved among the women’s impassive faces. Goody Josephs was the only one she recognized, though she knew the others must be midwives as well. She imagined they had placed themselves at the disposal of the court in part to ensure no inquiring eyes would be laid upon themselves. ’Tis forever women leaping to condemn each other, she reflected. She wondered why that was. Women posed dangers to one another that they somehow did not pose to men. She reached for the laces at her breast and worked to unknot them, loosening the bindings that held her dress together. It was odd to disrobe as a roomful of people watched, arms folded, one holding a smoking candle behind her cupped hand. Presently she stood in her coif, shift, and stockings, aware that the cuffs, collar, and hem of the shift were blackened where they had been exposed from beneath the dress. She rubbed the top of one foot with her stockinged toes.

  “Shift and coif, too,” Goody Josephs prodded, and Deliverance’s eyes widened in momentary panic. She could not remember the last time she had appeared before another without a shift. Even in the most trying hours of her confinement with Mercy, she had kept her shift on, stained with blood and sweat though it was. In their youth, Nathaniel had once entreated her to shed it, and she had demurred for weeks into their marriage. Now as she struggled out of the stained cotton underclothes the image of that night rose before her, the night when she had given in to his pleadings. She had stood, in stockings only, hair unbraided and running over her shoulders, arms wrapped around her nakedness as the warmth from the fire lapped at her bare haunches. Oh, Livvy, how beautiful you are, he had said.

  Deliverance cast the crumpled cotton garment to the floor, and looked down at her naked body with a kind of wonder. Deep shadows ran through her ribs, under her tired breasts, and her hip bones jutted at an eerie angle where the poor prison victuals had sloughed away her heft. She reached up to unpin the head covering that she always wore, dropping it atop the pile of clothes at her feet, and then bent to roll her knitted stockings down, stepping out of them one foot at a time. Merciful Jesus, Nathaniel, how I yearn to see you again, she thought as she stood, head bowed, graying hair draping across her face to hide the flushed trembling that had seized her.

  One of the women whom she did not recognize gestured for her to climb atop the long hall table, and on shaking legs Deliverance did so, spreading her limbs out under the grasping hands of the midwives. She squinted her eyes closed, body gripped with shame, as the women’s knowing fingers hunted over her skin for the telltale mark. She felt them poking through the tufts of hair in her armpits, running down her flanks, moving the little puddle of candle warmth so that it shone first behind her knees, then into the secret depths between her legs. Another set of hands combed through the hair on her scalp, moving methodically from her brow to the crevices behind her ears.

  Deliverance felt the candle loiter between her spread thighs, its flame hideously hot next to the tender skin of her most secret folds, and she heard the women whispering in discussion. Preternatural excrescence of flesh she heard one of them mutter, jotting notes, and murmurs of assent sounded at the end of the table as rough fingers poked and spread her apart. Hot, miserable tears filled Deliverance’s eyes, overflowing the corners of her lids and trickling down into her ears. Then the candle was removed. When she opened her eyes she looked up to see the ring of faces staring down at her, all of them closed off in damning judgment.

  “You have the witches’ teat, Livvy Dane, and at the very cusp of your accursed womanhood, too,” one of them pronounced as another chimed in, “I trow you ha’ given suck to diabolical imps or familiars! Confess it!”

  Deliverance propped herself on her elbows, face contorted in anxious fury. Salacious myth, that, is all, she thought, for familiars be not diabolical at all. But of course she could not say that to the women.

  “I ha’ done nowt of the sort!” she spat, and the women pulled away from her, intimidated by her forcefulness. Deliverance clambered off the table, throwing on her shift in white anger. “You are a foolish wretch, Mary Josephs!” she exclaimed. “How many babes ha’ you caught, yet you know not the God-made body of your women! I am made in God’s image, and so are you! Hand me a candle and I shall find this witches teat on the lot of you!”

  The women crowded angrily around her, mouths open in scolds and recriminations, but Deliverance had closed her ears to them. As she threw her garments on with haste and was borne back to the prison amongst the chattering, finger-waving women, she turned her mind to the trial that was to come tomorrow, but more than anything, she thought about her daughter.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Marblehead, Massachusetts

  Early September

  1991

  THE SURFACE OF THE DINING TABLE WAS SPREAD OUT WITH NOTES and papers, and in the middle sat Constance Goodwin, her head bent over a thick, open manuscript that was bound in dark oiled leather sewn with heavy twine, its pages brown-yellow with age and bearing the dry silverfish smell of the Radcliffe special collections library. The book was about the size of an antique bible, with a few pressed, shriveled herbs jutting out from between its leaves. She was reading, and had been reading for several days now. At her elbow sat another book, the title of which seemed to be Guide to Herbs and Indigenous Plants of New England. It, too, was open, to a page with an ink drawing of a feverfew plant. Three small note cards were arrayed across the table above the manuscript: one, with a title that alluded to tomatoes, written all in Latin, and two others. Sure cure for Fever and the Chills was written across the second; the third had no title, but instead bore some sort of word puzzle. A pen tapped in a regular rhythm against her temple, but the notepad sitting at her other elbow was still empty, forgotten as she grew more absorbed in the text. As she read, her lips moved without making a sound.

  Her other hand supported a heavy brass-handled magnifying glass, located some days previously in a drawer in Granna’s desk, and under it the scratchy words swelled and stretched, gliding across the glass surface as Connie tried to sound them out. The book seemed to have no real progression or order, and certainly no table of contents. She had already counted six or eight different handwritings, and not a few different styles of print, with many of the entries jumbled together, interleaved indiscriminately. Some of the entries appeared to be in Latin; from her longtime friendship with Liz, Connie was able to sift snatches of meaning from these passages, but only snatches. But most were in forms of English of various archaism, complicated further by their nonstandard spellings and dated terminology for plants, substances, and processes. She had already read through a section enumerating recipes for poultices to cure festering wounds, infections, black lung, apoplexy, and “the ague.”

  Several pages were devoted to what looked like prayers, but which were more likely charms—all of them invoking assistance from the Almighty. Connie was surprised at the explicit religiosity of the text so far, of a type that alluded to Christian practices from well before the Reformation. The text ref
lected a world in which Christianity was utterly bound to the conception of reality. No wonder Puritan theologians had found witchcraft—if that is what this was—so threatening. In a system of thought in which salvation, and therefore all goodness, could come by grace alone, in which one’s actions were believed to have no effect on the state of the soul, and in which illness or misfortune were often read as signs of God’s disfavor, a method that counteracted illness and misfortune by direct personal appeal to God, together with arcane proto-scientific practice, would have gone against everything that the Puritan power structure wanted to maintain. Puritan theologians would have seen such work as sacrilegious.

  Even diabolical.

  As far as Connie could tell, the recipes outlined in the shadow book relied on a combination of prayer, attentive mixing of herbs and other natural substances, and something else—something ineffable. Will? It was not that, quite, but almost. Intention. In the book it was called variously “technick,” “crafte,” and “authoritie.” But Connie still had trouble articulating, in modern terms, what such a concept might be. Thinking back to the spider plants when she first found Granna’s recipe cards, she recalled that Sam had tried the same spell—she allowed herself to use the term, though she felt self-conscious doing so—yet he had been unable to render any change in the dead plants. She frowned, concentrating, and turned another page.

  Sam. He was growing worse. She planned to visit him again that afternoon, to relieve his parents from what had started as regular visits but had evolved into a kind of vigil. His exhaustion was extreme, and though his leg was healing, it was only because he passed most of the day in tight restraints so that the convulsions ripping through his body every few hours would not jostle his shattered bones. The periodic violent vomiting made it difficult for him to stay hydrated, and so his skin was starting to appear sallow and tired. Even his humor was starting to ebb. The doctors still expressed confidence that a solution would be found, but Connie read in their faces the draining away of their certainty. When she peered into Sam’s eyes, she saw that he, too, could read their confusion; his faith in their ability to help him was starting to flicker and fade. And behind that vanishing faith, Connie saw in Sam the first inklings of real fear.

  She turned another page of the manuscript, refocusing her gaze through the magnifying glass as the words bled together. Her head was starting to ache, and she laid aside the glass and squeezed her eyes closed for a moment, rubbing her fingertips over her eyelids. Then she forced herself to take up the brass handle again.

  The word Fitts swam into view across the convex plane of the magnifying glass, and Connie bent lower to the page, bringing the glass nearer to the difficult text.

  “Method for the Redress of Fitts” read the heading, and Connie caught her breath. Historians had never been fully able to describe precisely what colonial chroniclers meant by “fits,” whether they more closely resembled fainting spells, or perhaps episodes of religious ecstasy, with shaking and speaking in tongues. Arguments had been made for both. Connie thought about Sam’s shaking, trembling body when it was gripped by muscle convulsions during one of his seizures. His eyes rolled into the back of his head, revealing their whites, and his tongue extended.

  If that was not a “fit,” then what was?

  “To determine if a Man’s mortall Suffering be caused by bewitchment,” the instructions began, “catch his Water in a witch-bottel and throw in some pins or nayles and boil it upon a very hott fire.”

  Connie raised her head, thinking. What was a “witch-bottel”? Bottel. A phonetic spelling of “bottle.” A witch bottle. She pushed aside the manuscript and riffled through her notebooks, bringing up her transcription of Deliverance’s probate record, running her finger down the page. There it was: 30 shillings’ worth of “glass bottels.” Connie recalled wondering at the time why the probate would have made special mention of the bottles, and had never come up with an answer.

  She lifted her head, scanning the crowded shelves of the dining room. Connie had spent considerable time scrubbing the earthenware dishes and glassware stacked in the alcove next to the large hearth fireplace, and had peeked into the dark cabinet under the alcove but been repulsed by the dense layers of grime that awaited her inside. The cabinet contained a number of antique bottles, among other things, though they seemed uninteresting at the time. Just junk, ready for a curio shop. And the kitchen was full of sealed jars, of course, but those were all of recent vintage—the remnants of Granna’s work, however she might have conceived of it.

  Now Connie turned, looking over her shoulder and gazing at the wooden alcove with its small cabinet underneath. She narrowed her eyes, focusing her attention on the corner of the dining room, picturing the flowered back of her grandmother, a thin cotton apron tied behind her waist, getting to her knees with a tired grunt and swinging open the door. The imaginary Granna brushed aside a loose strand of hair before seeming to reach inside the cabinet, and Connie thought that she heard a rummaging and tinkling from behind the wood.

  Not junk.

  Connie unfolded herself from the chair and knelt by the cabinet door. Awkward storage spaces were built into all sorts of areas of the house; the tiny attic bedrooms each had a built-in window seat, in which Connie had discovered extra quilts, a game of Scrabble with most of the vowels missing, and the unpleasant evidence of several generations of mice. She unhooked the tiny latch and swung open the door.

  Inside, clad in thick layers of dust and festooned with a few tender spiderwebs, lay an untidy heap of crockery of all shapes: small iron cauldrons and skillets, what looked like a rusted waffle iron, a long-handled grill for roasting fish over an open fire, a few copper bed warmers, green with age, designed to be filled with glowing coals. And thick glass bottles. Dozens of them, perhaps a hundred, of a wavery blue-green hue that spoke of molten sand and age. The lips at the tops of their necks were uneven, their bases as dense as slabs of rock. They were of varying size, but all appeared to hail from before the dawn of the industrial age, when glass was blown by mouth and not by machine.

  The bottles were unstoppered and empty for the most part, and Connie reached in to free one from the crust of grime in which it was resting. She held the bottle aloft, catching the dim light of the dining room in the bottle’s thick, bubbled walls, and saw that inside it were two or three deeply rusted nails. She carried the bottle back to the dining table, turning her attention again to the thick manuscript.

  “Throw the bottel into the fyre whilst reciting the Lord’s Prayer follow’d by this most effective Incantation: Agla Pater Dominus Tetragrammaton Adonai Heavenly Father I beseech thee bring the Evildoer unto Me.”

  Connie straightened in her chair, perturbed. She pressed her hands to either side of her head, willing the spreading throb in her brain to recede.

  Agla, like on the burn mark on her door. A long list of names of God. And Tetragrammaton—where had she seen that before? She moved the heels of her hands until they rested over her closed eyes, exhaling in the darkness behind her eyelids. Connie sorted through the different drawers in her mind, rooting through the file labeled MISCELLANEOUS. For some reason the word made her think of Sam.

  Then her eyes opened wide, and she remembered: “Tetragrammaton” was carved on the charmed boundary marker that Sam had shown her, on the first night that they met. She sorted through her notes again, finding the definition that she had jotted down from the book on the material culture of vernacular magic. It was a word describing the four Hebrew letters that signify “Yahweh,” yet another name for God.

  Connie looked at her watch. It was getting late. She would finish reading this passage, and then she would go.

  “When his Water is well Boilt so shall the Sorcerer be drawn unto the fyre,” the manuscript continued. “And so with the pins and crafte may he be entreated to free his Victim from Diabolicall machinations. Refer to receipts for Death-philtres to ascertain other means.” The remainder of the page contained a long list of Latinate n
ames for plants and herbs, headed up by the words “Fuel for sure Withdrawal.”

  Leaning back in her chair, Connie paused for a few quiet minutes, tapping the pen against her teeth. Then she took up the small bottle with its contents of rusted nails, slipped it into her shoulder bag, and hurried out of the house.

  Interlude

  Salem Town, Massachusetts

  June 29

  1692

  The sound roiling inside the meetinghouse had already reached deafening proportions by the time Mercy Dane arrived. She paused outside the entrance to the building, knocking her boots against its stone steps to loosen the hunks of mud picked up on her long trek across town. Mercy had tarried too long at the house, she knew; pacing to and fro across the hall and promising herself that she would leave, yes, she would be ready to go in only another minute or so. She did not fully grasp the reason behind her delay. Certainly she missed her mother and yearned to see her again. Perhaps she was afraid.

  If she could have pressed her hands to her ears and willed the world to disappear, she would have. She would linger in the house, clutching Dog in her arms, sitting perfectly still in a bargain with God that if she refused to move, not even an inch, then time itself would cease to progress, and at least that way nothing could get any worse. In her pausing she recognized her childish obstinacy, as if without her presence, the Court of Oyer and Terminer would not proceed. After a few more turns around the hall, Mercy overcame her silly illusions, finally running most of the way through the damp streets of Salem all the way to the meetinghouse steps. The day was thick and gray, and Mercy felt her clothes plastering themselves to her sides, and her cheeks flushed an uncomfortable red.

  To her chagrin, the trial seemed well under way by the time she slipped through the door. At the front of the room, behind a long library table, sat a row of distinguished gentlemen in sparse black coats and curled hair, each more dour than the last. The one in the middle, a sallow man with a wide lace collar, long nose, and wobbly double chin, must be William Stoughton, the lieutenant governor. Mercy had never seen him before, but he presented a very fine personage. He and the other judges seemed to be talking amongst themselves, but she was too far back in the room to hear what was being said. She rose on tiptoe, craning her neck to see if there was any space nearer the front.