Sixteen
As they arrived home that night, Mary and her parents were stopped short when they ran into Peregrine Cooke leaving the Burdens’ dooryard.
“Peregrine, I am sorry we missed thee,” Mary said, “but thou must have known we were at the Town House.”
“Yes. I heard it will take a second day to resolve.”
“Has something happened?”
The woman had dark bags under her eyes. “No. I was feeling bad about how we parted when I visited thee last.”
With her right hand, Mary touched Peregrine’s arm and said, “Shhhhhhh. Say nothing more. I was too curt, as well.” She turned to her mother and father and said, “I will join thee inside presently.”
Her parents looked at the two young women, so close in age despite the fact that one was married to the other’s father, and then Priscilla Burden smiled warily and said, “Very well. Peregrine, it is lovely to see thee. Have a good night.”
“I brought some boiled apples and raisins,” said Peregrine, as the older couple went inside. “Rebeckah Cooper and I made batches. I just dropped some off with Hannah. A peace offering. I am sure thy parents smelled it the moment they opened the door.”
“Oh, I love boiled apples!”
“I know. Rebeckah told me.”
“How art thou feeling?”
Peregrine tilted her head and shrugged. She patted her stomach. “I am sorely tried by this one. But the Lord will give me nothing I cannot bear.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
“No, there isn’t. I just want thee to know…”
“Know what? Thou canst speak plainly to me.”
“I will not try again to change thy mind. My father might. But I understand the path thou hast chosen. I respect it.”
Mary was so moved that she wanted to embrace the other woman and felt her eyes welling up. “I’m sorry,” she said simply.
“May I ask thee one thing, Mary?”
“Yes, ask me anything.”
“I fear little in this world.”
“I have always suspected that.”
Peregrine wasn’t wearing gloves and blew on her fingers, and Mary could see the other woman’s breath in the night air.
“I know thou art formidable. I know the things people say about thee and that thou hast consorted with Constance Winston.”
“What art thou implying?”
“Be more scared, Mary.”
“I hope thou dost not believe that nonsense that I am in league with the Dark One.”
“Prithee,” Peregrine said. “I have seen the way that my husband looks at thee. I know thy body has been unchanged by childbirth. Do what thou must in regard to my father. But be wary of my husband. He, too, has frailties.”
“I have no designs on thy husband! Why wouldst thou think such a thing?”
“He speaks most highly of thee.”
“Bury that fear. It is ridiculous,” Mary said. She recalled what Benjamin Hull had said about the fellow at the Town House.
“The world is awash in sin.”
“But, Peregrine—”
“Fine, I will speak no more of this. We were friends once, as well as family. And so what I am about to say, I say with reverence for the person I once knew well.”
“Thou knowest me still. I have not changed.”
Her voice was keen and low, the agitation clear. “Be careful. The worst is yet to come. Thou knowest those men; but so do I. I may know them better than thee. There are dangers I doubt thou hast ever contemplated.”
Was Peregrine about to say more? Mary thought so. But they heard Hannah outside now, and it sounded as if she were by the coop with the chickens.
“I just…I just hope thou dost enjoy the apples.” She shook her head, smiled sadly, and turned to go. Mary considered calling after her, but knew in her heart that Peregrine had already said more than she had planned. A part of her was grateful.
But another part? She wasn’t sure whether she should be more offended by the idea that the woman considered her an adulteress or frightened by the possibility she might be hanged as a witch.
They ate supper that night later than usual because Hannah had been alone at the house. She had worked with characteristic efficiency, but she was accustomed to having Abigail and Mary’s mother—and lately Mary herself—to share the labor. But Mary and Priscilla had been upstairs at the Town House all afternoon, and Abigail had been pacing nervously there on the first floor, waiting to be summoned. The five of them—Mary and her parents and their two servants—ate their beans in molasses and pork largely in silence after James’s prayer, dining off their most casual trenchers. They spoke not at all while eating the dessert that Peregrine had brought. Mary thought the boiled apples, though a well-intended gift, were more tart than she liked and ate but one bite. Only Hannah seemed to enjoy them and finished her serving. There wasn’t a fork to be seen among the utensils, but there hadn’t been since Mary had returned home to her parents.
Her left hand was aching tonight more than it had the day before, and so she had a second and then a third mug of beer. She was confident it was healing and attributed the pain entirely to the cold that was settling in for the gray season: the days when the leaves are gone but the snow has not yet arrived, and the skies are endless and ashen and flat.
As Abigail was rinsing the cutlery and the bowls in a water bucket and Hannah was bringing the remnants from the trenchers to the animals, Mary heard a horse’s hooves and feared it was Thomas. She had been about to go upstairs to her bedchamber, and when she heard the sound she looked anxiously at her mother and father. Clearly, they suspected the same thing. Her father went to the door and opened it, and there indeed, tying his horse to the post, was her husband. When the animal was hitched, he came to the doorway.
“Hello, Thomas,” her father said, his tone flat.
Thomas saw Priscilla and Mary standing behind him and took off his cap. “James,” he began. “Ladies.”
“Why hast thou come?” her father asked.
Mary noted the way that Thomas had planted his boots hard in the dooryard and locked his knees. She knew that posture. He was trying to hide how much he had drunk. It was, perhaps, a greater miracle that he hadn’t ever fallen off Sugar in this state and broken his neck than that he had managed to avoid the stocks all these years.
“Nothing has happened, other, of course, than the continued diminishment of my reputation this afternoon at the Town House,” he said, his voice gravelly, speaking slowly and with the precision he used when he was in this condition. “And so, given what looms tomorrow, I have come to discuss thy daughter’s petition.”
Her father started to speak, and Mary rested her hand on his arm, cutting him off, and said, “ ’Tis my petition, Father.” Then to Thomas she continued, “Peregrine suggested thou might visit.”
“Did she? She knows her father, that one does,” he said, and he sounded rather proud. “She brought me some boiled apples and raisins tonight. Delicious, they were.”
Mary waited for him to continue, saying nothing.
“I was just at the tavern,” he went on, “and I learned that thy scrivener took up much time with Ward Hollingsworth.”
“Good,” Mary said. Hollingsworth owned an ordinary that her husband patronized often.
“I can assure thee, it was a waste of effort. Ward told me that he said nothing of consequence to the flea thou retained to assail my character.”
“We shall see tomorrow,” said Mary. She had read the testimony that Hollingsworth had provided Benjamin Hull. And while it wasn’t damning, the man had acknowledged that there had been nights when he had ceased refilling Thomas’s tankard.
“And there is this,” he went on, his voice grave. “I heard also that Rebecca Greensmith of Hartford told the magistrates there that the Devil has had much carnal knowledge of her body. She’s in prison.”
“That has nothing to do with me,” she said. “Besides, that is but tavern talk.”
“They’re going to hang her, Mary.”
“I repeat: that has no relevance to my petition.”
“I disagree. It will weigh heavy on the minds of the magistrates tomorrow. They know of the outbreak in Hartford and how the Devil has encroached upon their sanctuary. Even some good woman named Cole—Ann Cole—a woman of real piety they say, has taken to fits.”
“I lose no sleep over gossip,” she said, though she felt another of those sickening pangs of fear and doubt.
“Mary Sanford has already been hanged,” he reminded her, almost as if he could sense her dismay. “That is not gossip.”
“Catherine Stileman has done her worst. She made her accusations, and the magistrates took none of it seriously. Do I seem possessed to thee?”
“Oh, I know thou art not possessed. But I know also that the Devil likes to see the innocent chastened and the godly hanged. Likewise, it seems not to vex the Lord in the slightest to see the prideful dangle from the end of a rope or burn like so much cut brush. And Mary? Thou might be godly. But I know, too, the presumption that lurks within thy soul.”
“And thou knowest all this how? What special insights into the mind of the Devil and our Lord dost thou have?”
“Mary, that is enough,” her father rebuked her, and she turned to him in surprise. Her mother, beside him, looked frightened and ill.
“Tomorrow,” Priscilla said, “the magistrates will hear from Goody Howland and Abigail. There are others. They will hear from thee, Thomas.”
Abigail looked up from the bucket at the sound of her name, but said nothing.
“They will,” he agreed.
“Dost thy lawyer know thou hast come to see us?” her father asked.
“No.”
James nodded, and once more Mary had the sense that although her husband was drunk and her father was irritated, they were yet in league. They were adversaries, this was clear; but she felt again the prickle she had experienced periodically over the past two weeks that there was plotting beyond her ken.
“Thomas, Father?” she began, looking back and forth between them. “Is there something I need to know? If there is, thou must tell me. ’Tis my life we are discussing, and it will be my life that the magistrates will be weighing.”
“Not thy life, little dove,” said her mother. “This is only a petition for divorce.”
“Only a petition for divorce?” Thomas barked, emphasizing that first word sarcastically. “Thou makest it sound but a dispute over the price of a bag of cornmeal! It is thy daughter’s life—and mine! It is our reputations. And, yes, Priscilla, thou knowest well it could be about thy daughter’s very survival if she doesn’t tread carefully through the swamp of the Town House and the vipers in their black robes.”
“Thomas,” her father said, but her husband cut him off.
“I will take my leave, James, fear not. And I will testify tomorrow and—I swear to thee—do what I can to end this madness.” He turned and started back down the walkway, stumbling once on a stone but catching his balance. He looked back to see if they had noticed, and then with extreme care climbed atop his horse.
When the three of them joined Abigail inside the house, Hannah was returning from the back with the animals. Suddenly the girl closed her eyes and pressed her palms flat on the tabletop, and allowed her chin to collapse against the base of her neck.
“Hannah,” Mary asked, “art thou in pain?”
The girl nodded and then turned toward the hearth. “I felt a most awful cramping, but ’tis not my time,” she whispered, grimacing. “I…”
“Go on,” said Abigail.
But Hannah fell to her knees and said, her voice doleful, “I’m going to be sick.” Mary and Abigail knelt beside her, Abigail rubbing her back, and Hannah brought her hand to her mouth. But then she gave in to the nausea and vomited into the hearth, amidst the hot coals but feet from the flames.
“I have been feeling a little seasick, too,” Abigail said to her, rubbing her back. “Not so bad as thee, but poorly.”
Mary brought Hannah a tankard of beer, but the girl shook her head. She sat back against the warm bricks and said, “I just need to rest a bit.”
Mary looked up at her parents, who seemed more alarmed than she might have expected.
“I wonder if it is the pork that doesn’t agree with thee,” her mother said.
“I felt a twinge of something, too,” added James Burden. “Little dove, how dost thou feel?”
“I feel fine,” she told her father. “And I ate the meat.”
Priscilla looked at her servant girls and her daughter on the floor, and she focused on Hannah. An idea had come to her. “Thou ate much of the boiled apples,” she observed.
“Yes,” Hannah said, as she brought her knees up to her chest and squeezed her eyes shut against another cramp.
“Abigail?” Priscilla asked.
“I ate just a bite. I didn’t enjoy one of the spices.”
“And what spice was that? Thou art most knowledgeable in the kitchen.”
“I did not know it,” Abigail answered. “I just thought something tasted off.”
“I felt the same way,” Mary agreed. “Usually I love boiled apples.”
Her mother nodded. “Hannah was the only one of us who ate her share. The rest of us nibbled and gnawed—”
“Even me,” agreed James. “Barely a mouthful.”
“Mother, art thou suggesting that Peregrine was trying to poison us?” Mary asked.
“I think that’s unlikely, Mary,” her father said. “But perhaps the apples were rotten. Or one of her ingredients was rotten.”
“James, thou art being kind. This was no accident. I can see well why she would want to poison us,” said Priscilla.
“So we are too sick to return to the Town House tomorrow,” Mary chimed in. “Or at least that I am too sick. If I were not there to defend myself—to speak on my behalf when it is necessary—it would be more likely that my petition would be denied.”
“Yes,” her mother agreed.
“But…”
“Go on,” said Priscilla.
“Peregrine made them with my friend Rebeckah. And she also brought some to Thomas.”
“Well, if Peregrine was hoping to make us ill, she most likely was not in consultation with Thomas,” her father said, and Mary realized that he was reminding her mother of…of something.
“Why do I feel that thou both have secrets?” Mary asked her parents.
“We have none,” James said, and his tone was categorical.
“None?”
“None,” he said again, but still she didn’t believe him.
With her sister’s help, Hannah stood. “May I lie down?”
“Of course,” Priscilla said. Then she took the pot with the boiled apples and started out back. “James?” she said, pausing at the door.
“Yes?”
“The ground is not yet a brick, correct?”
“The surface is hard, yes. But I doubt it is frozen much beneath the skin.”
“Come with me, prithee. I am going to bury this, and I may need thy help digging. I don’t want even the pigs to eat whatever venom Peregrine spooned into this abomination.”
Her father nodded and joined his wife, while Mary helped Abigail settle Hannah into bed.
Hours later, unable to sleep, Mary stood at the small window in her bedchamber and gazed out into the moonlit night. The rest of the house was silent, the homes along the street dark.
She tried to follow the bats that were darting playfully like swallows, and on the walkway below her she noticed a honey-and-white cat in search of prey. The animal was pressed flat into the dirt, half hidden by the rosebush that had grown quiescent for the winter. Was it a rat it was stalking? A chipmunk?
She knew what some people said of cats, but she saw nothing demonic in the animal. It was a mouser. That was its purpose. But what really did she know? She rapped on the pane of glass with the knuckles of her right hand, and the cat looked up at the sound. At her. She felt their eyes meet. But still: it was just a cat. Of this she was sure. It was no one’s familiar. It had not been sent by a witch to spy on her.
When her parents had been speculating on why Peregrine might want to sicken them (to sicken her; the others were mere ancillary damage), she had suspected another motive: to warn her away from Jonathan by demonstrating that she, too, was a formidable opponent and was prepared to do whatever was necessary to protect her marriage. She had considered sharing this possibility with her parents but decided this must be one more secret she needed to keep to herself. What good could possibly come from her parents knowing that Peregrine believed their daughter had designs on Jonathan Cooke—her husband’s son-in-law? It was squalid. It was reprehensible. And, most certainly, it was sinful. Wasn’t Mary’s reputation sufficiently tarnished already? Her parents were well aware of what Abigail had seen. Imagine if Abigail or Hannah were present for a discussion of the possibility that Mary wanted to steal Jonathan Cooke from Peregrine? It could destroy any hope she had of her petition being granted and her reputation surviving this nightmare intact.
But, then, how could she be sure that Peregrine had wanted to poison her? Thomas had eaten the boiled apples, too, no doubt a helping that would have dwarfed even what Hannah had consumed. And then there was this: Peregrine had not made the boiled apples alone. Rebeckah Cooper had been with her, the two of them cooking in concert. That further suggested her daughter-in-law’s innocence.
Or…
The idea was too depressing to contemplate, but consider it she did.
Perhaps her friend Rebeckah had poisoned the dessert. She chastised herself for suspecting for even a moment the other woman of evil, and could conceive of no reason why Rebeckah might wish ill upon her or her family. But the possibility had lodged there, one more pebble in her boot.
More than anything tonight, she was disappointed that the trial had oozed into a second day. She wanted it done. In every way she could imagine, this was a more humiliating spectacle than the stocks or the pillory—and perhaps more painful than a lashing. She gazed down at her left hand. Could the whip hurt more than what Thomas had done to her with the fork? It seemed unlikely. How was it that so much of the testimony that afternoon had been about her and not about him? How had it centered so much on her behavior and so little on his?
Tomorrow, she knew, he was going to speak at the Town House and he was going to lie. He was going to tell the magistrates that he had not plunged a fork into her hand. He had not hurled her into the hearth. He had not beaten her about the face. She was just a clumsy wench with white meat for a brain—though, of course, he would not say that precisely—who walked into clothes pegs and fell upon teakettles. He would add that he feared for her soul and did his best as her husband to school her. The worst he had done? He had accidentally banged her with the cooking spider while Catherine was gone and he was trying to assist with their supper.
He was despicable.
Yes, she, too, was a sinner. Perhaps she was not among the elect. But neither did she believe that she was capable of that kind of cruelty. Lust was a terrible and terrifying affliction, and it might lead to her damnation; but her worst crime was kissing Henry Simmons. And while she may have defiled her own body, she had neither debased anyone else’s nor degraded in any way the magic of the Lord’s myriad works.
She sighed. She wondered what Henry Simmons was doing tonight. She thought of him often, her mind taking comfort in fantasies of him when she was alone in this room. Surely tales of what had occurred today at the courthouse had reached him. No doubt, he had heard what people had said about her. The discussions of her barrenness. The debate about the forks. How could he possibly be attracted to her? Good Lord, for that matter, how could Jonathan? She should have said that to Peregrine: no one could ever want her who wanted children.
And yet Henry Simmons had desired her, hadn’t he? He had. He had pulled her into him to kiss her. That was a fact, as undeniable as the way the leaves turned crimson in this new world before dying or the marvels of those magnificent lobsters. Their size and their sea-monster-like claws. He had been drawn to her as she had been drawn to him, a magnetism as real as that which spun compass points to the north and as indisputable as the presence of Satan. Even here. A person could traverse an ocean so wide it took six or seven weeks to navigate, invariably storm-tossed and sickened, and here the Devil would be waiting. Yes, He had taken a knee before the Lord, but He hadn’t bowed.
Henry Simmons wanted her, just as she wanted him. She could speculate her entire life on whether this was a temptation from the Devil—a lure to coax her to Him. She would never know until her life was done and her soul gone to Heaven or Hell.
Now she allowed herself a daydream: her petition for divorce was granted, and with one-third of Thomas’s estate, she and Henry married and set off for Hadley to the west or Providence to the south. Somehow, she proved not to be barren and they had children, and the boys and girls lived.
They lived.
It was then that she saw the cat spring, pouncing upon a massive rat. The feline rolled onto its back, holding the animal with its forepaws and using its back legs to tear out the rodent’s intestines. Then it sat up and gazed down at the corpse almost curiously. Another bat raced past her window. The cat looked up toward the bat and saw her still behind the glass. The animal bobbed its head between her and the dead rat as if to say, I have thee in my sights, too, Mary Deerfield. I do.