Twenty
Catherine prepared a dinner for the three of them of well-seasoned squash and mussels that Thomas had instructed her to buy that morning at the market. There was also cornbread and cheese.
At one point, Thomas rested his fist on the table beside Catherine’s trencher and said to the girl, “Dost thou still believe thy mistress is possessed?” Mary tried to decipher the tone: on the surface it was paternal, but there was something about the way he stressed the inherent sibilance of the last word that gave it a more threatening cast.
Catherine shook her head grimly, and then brought one of the mussels to her mouth, sucking the cooked animal from the shell. The girl was cornered. What could she say? They agreed that she would retrieve her clothes that afternoon from Goody Howland’s and then resume her life with the Deerfields. That night she would sleep once again in the kitchen, as she had every night she had lived in Boston, with the exception of her time at the Howlands’. Mary had a feeling that the servant would not sleep deeply but felt no sorrow at her plight. If she lusted after Thomas, it seemed he did not return her ardor; if she truly believed that Mary was a witch, now she was trapped with her inside this house. Yes, Mary had lost; but so, it seemed, had Catherine.
“Good,” Thomas said. “Thou wilt be happy here again.” He took a swallow of beer and smiled benignly. He reported that he had asked the physician to visit that afternoon and examine Mary’s hand to see how it was healing.
“That’s not necessary,” she told him.
“Certainly, it is,” he said, and then parodied what she’d said at the Town House. “After all, Mary, a teakettle can be a weapon most terrible.”
Mary did not reply. She turned to Catherine and told her, “I still miss thy brother. I am sorry that he passed so young.”
“He is with the Lord. He is well now,” she murmured.
“Yes,” Mary agreed. “He is.”
When they had finished dinner, Thomas returned to his mill. She and Catherine cleaned up the remnants of the meal. Then Catherine left for the Howlands’, and Mary sat alone at the kitchen table. The room was utterly silent. She thought back on their meal. Thomas’s prayer had been short, but he had thanked the Lord for returning to him his wife. It was altogether nonjudgmental and suggested no atonement was necessary on his part: it was as if she had been thought lost at sea and suddenly, much to everyone’s surprise, been found. His conversation had vacillated between ominous and ordinary. At one point, he had tried to be pleasant and told a story of the farmer from Salem he had dealt with that morning. Another time, he had glowered at the squash and ruminated aloud, “What do the two of thee think? Do I need a cupbearer? Shall I search out and retain my own personal Nehemiah to be sure that my food has not been poisoned?” Mary recalled the man’s daughter’s apples, but neither she nor Catherine had responded.
Now, Mary realized as she sat in solitude, she was stunned. Once, early that summer when she had been walking at the edge of the city, she had seen a hawk plunge into a farmer’s field and then arise with a chipmunk in its talons. The chipmunk was alive, but it wasn’t struggling. It was dazed. Stupefied. Mary understood that her situation was not that dire: her death was not imminent. She wasn’t about to be eaten. But she found it almost unfathomable that but two hours ago she was standing in the Town House hoping to hear that her petition had been granted and she’d been set free. Instead she was a—and the word came to her and she thought it not melodramatic—prisoner.
She was a prisoner of a man who had within him a monster. It lived among his four humours, and he was pliant to its whims. When he was drink-drunk he was especially susceptible to its brutality and fancies, but it would be a mistake to attribute his violence to his penchant for too much cider or beer. She knew what he was capable of even when he was sober. Moreover, there was a deliberation to his evil: he attacked her only (and always) when there were no witnesses present.
Finally, she stirred. She went to the bucket where Catherine was soaking their knives and spoons, and pulled from the water a knife. She held it in her right hand and thought again of that chipmunk in the hawk’s claws. She felt gutted, the emotions spontaneous and almost overwhelming, the sorrow deep inside her, and she started to cry. She collapsed onto the floor, her back against the wall, and stared through her tears at the blade. She pressed it against her left wrist, curious if she could or should slice through the skin and watch her blood puddle onto the wooden boards.
She turned her left hand over and looked at the mark where he had stabbed her and recalled the pain. She thought of Corinthians:
O death, where is thy sting?
The answer? The sting of death is sin.
But she knew the sting of the Devil’s tines.
No, she knew the sting of a fork.
It was cutlery, no more devilish than this knife in her hand or the ones soaking with the spoons in the bucket, and henceforth she would call it that and only that. It was a…fork. And would the sting of the knife be an agony any worse than what Thomas had accomplished with a fork? Someday she would know God’s eternal plan for her, whether she was among the damned or the elect. Did it really matter if she discovered that in ten years or ten minutes? It did not. God was inscrutable. She could die here and be but sweat and tears and the macerating remains of her fiery humours when Catherine or Thomas returned, her soul already gone to Heaven or Hell.
She turned the knife so the tip was against the back of her wrist and pricked the skin until it bled. It was a small cut, but deep enough that she watched the blood pool. She imagined slicing through her flesh as if butchering a hog. She had that sort of strength in her right arm. She could end this lying down and then meet her Savior or Satan. She could. She stared up at the heavy table and the window beyond it, at the afternoon light. She loved the light this time of the year. She loved it in the trees when the leaves turned their kaleidoscopic reds and yellows, she loved it when the leaves were gone and the slim black branches of the oak but black lines against a sapphire sky. At the right time of day, it was like seeing the world through gauze, and the sun gave the world a calming, tawny cast.
Two words came to her now, each syllable distinct and clear: get up. Was it her Lord? It most definitely was a command. Get up. Get up now. She looked into the hearth, which almost was out, and saw there, too, a beauty in the fire. The voice, if that’s what it was, was neither Maker nor Devil. It was…her. It was her soul reminding her that her hap in the end was in God’s hands and had been in God’s hands since the beginning of time, but her moment on this earth was hers. It. Was. Hers. The self-pity had been accreting inside her like January snow on the sill—blinding her—since the moment she had stepped back inside this house. She began to fear that if she didn’t move, she would take the knife and sculpt a cup of flesh from her wrist and never get up again. And that wasn’t really what she wanted. Not at all. She wanted more, she wanted life. Where was the woman who had stood in the Town House and vowed that she would have justice when the unjust verdict had been rendered? Where had that woman gone? She recalled her resolve there and leaned over, dropping the knife back into the bucket and using both hands—her left, too, despite the pain that shot from the back of the mending bone up her arm and caused her to wince—to push herself to her feet. She would not wallow here on the floor. She would fight. What was the naval term? Line of battle. She would turn her broadside cannons upon her husband, while standing tall against the Catherine Stilemans and the Goody Howlands and the Peregrine Cookes and perhaps even the Rebeckah Coopers of Boston. She would learn who had buried the forks and the pestle in the yard—and why. And most of all? She would be free. She could not and would not live like this: a creature contemplating its own demise at its own hands. A mistress haunted by her own servant girl and scared of her husband.
She went to the window to gaze out at the world and the light that God had made, a gift to be relished—and for a moment she did. But she was not meant to enjoy it long. She saw the physician Roger Pickering, astride his majestic gray-and-white horse, coming to a stop at the end of the dooryard. As he climbed off it, their eyes met. He tipped his cap and then hitched his horse to the post. She took the hem of her sleeve and pressed it against the back of her wrist where she had pricked the skin with the tip of the knife, wiping away the blood that was hardening there. She wondered if the doctor would even notice it.
Thomas took her over the bedstead that night, violently, and her fingers clenched at the comforter against the pain. He grabbed a rope of her hair, yanking back her head toward him, and hissed into her ear that she was a sinner and a whore and she was disobedient. Her feet were bare against the floorboards, and she tried to focus only on the patch of rough wood beneath her right heel, but her mind kept returning to the pain between her legs and the pain along her scalp where it felt like he would pull out whole clumps of her hair. He had wrenched her head back so far that when she opened her eyes, she was looking upon the peak of the house and the beams that ran like bridges between the two slants of the roof. She wondered: Was there only hatred for him in the act now? Was he even attempting to curb the loneliness or the animal lust within him or was this just another way of punishing her? He wasn’t drink-drunk, this she knew. After all the allegations and suggestions at the trial, he had been careful to take smaller sips of his beer tonight at supper.
When he was through, he let go of her hair and pushed her down onto the comforter by her shoulders. She thought he was done and started to reach for her shift. But he grabbed her right arm and whirled her around, pulling her toward him. Then, as she felt his seed dripping down her thighs, he took her left hand in his and whispered menacingly, “The physician says thy hand is healing. Thou must be more careful, Mary. I know thou believest I hurt thee for no reason, but that is not true. Thou needest breaking like a horse. Humbling like a fallen angel. Art thou merely dull or something worse? Something prideful? Something that will get thee damned?”
She wanted to remind him that whether she was damned or saved was long foreordained. But she knew it would be a mistake to utter a word.
“I know for sure only this,” he continued. “Thou canst not afford another accident like that incident with”—and here he paused briefly—“the teakettle. I feel thine agony, Mary. I do.”
Then he held her left fingers in his for a long moment, surveying in the dim light from the room’s lone candle the part of her hand that he had broken.
“Yes, it is healing,” he added, his tone pensive now, as if he honestly could tell. But she could see also that an idea was curdling inside him, and it was a dark one. “And these don’t look like the claws of a witch.”
She waited, silent and wary.
“Tell me something,” he commanded.
“Yes,” she said carefully, alert for whatever physical or verbal brutality was looming.
“Dost thou know why I lied in the Town House?”
She was taken aback by his candor. She knew there were a dozen answers she could offer, ranging from the vacuous and false to the most damning and true. She could say that he loved her or she could say that he was prideful and hoped to salvage a semblance of his reputation. She could suggest that he couldn’t bear to lose one-third of his estate. She could even say that he had risked his immortal soul with lies because he wasn’t in fact gambling at all: he knew already that he was most assuredly not among the elect, so what did one more falsehood, even one this brazen, matter?
Perhaps if she had begun to understand how she would have the last word—the absolute last word, justice, not merely the last word tonight—she would have known what to say. But unsure, she replied simply, “I do not know. But…”
“But what?”
“I am pleased that—at least with me, here beside our bedstead—thou dost acknowledge the truth.”
He released her hand. He raised an eyebrow and told her, “I had to lie. Oh, it was in my best interests, too. That is obvious to angels and demons alike. It was the only way to get thee back under my roof where, as my wife, thou dost belong. But listen carefully to what I am about to say because it is true: I did it for thee, too.”
“For me?”
He nodded. “We did it for thee,” he said, emphasizing that first pronoun. “Thy father and his friend at the Town House. The magistrate.”
She was surprised, but more by the idea he was telling her this than by the notion that there were conspiratorial tides washing about her. She had been feeling them since that day when she and her parents had first met with Richard Wilder.
He continued: “It was—and, yes, thy father and that magistrate and I discussed this two times—the only sure way to protect thee from the charges of witchcraft. Recall the accusations of our girl downstairs. Recall the innuendo lodged as fact by Goody Howland. Think hard on the death of William Stileman. I am an imperfect husband and an imperfect man. This, too, is fact. But I care for thee enough to school thee, even if sometimes that knowledge is administered in a fashion that causes us both pain. And Mary? Think hard on this, too: I am a far better alternative than the noose.”
She started to stay something but he put a finger on her lips. “All along, from the very beginning, thy petition had but the chance of a small bark in a hurricane. No, not even that. Of a butterfly through a blizzard. Thy scrivener did his work, but thou art but a woman—and a woman whose behavior has been more suspect than her husband’s has been unkind. Yes, thou hast a powerful father. But, as we have seen here and in Hartford, even the most powerful man is powerless against a mob—especially a mob of magistrates—that sees a witch in its midst.”
He put his hand on her neck, but he didn’t squeeze. The grip was as gentle as it was threatening. “I know my hands, in thine opinion, have been unkind to thee. But they are not a rope. And I know this, too: We can move forward as man and wife. We can. I can be better. But thou must meet me halfway if thy father and I are going to be able to protect thee.”
She swallowed hard, aware that he could feel the muscles moving in her neck. Her mouth had gone dry. “Meet thee halfway? What dost that mean precisely?” she asked, her voice unexpectedly hoarse.
“I’ve no idea what designs thou hast and what thou were thinking with the Devil’s tines; I’ve no idea how far thy dalliance with Henry Simmons progressed. I don’t even know if thou hast continued to visit that strange woman out on the Neck. Constance Winston.” He dropped his hand from her throat. “But understand that thou must be careful. Do not court the Devil. He is a far crueler master than I.”
He pulled on his sleep shift. Then he turned from her and lifted the chamber pot from the floor and went to the corner of the room. She sat at the edge of the bed and wrapped the quilt around her, unmoored by what he had said, but not wholly surprised. It was only what she had suspected. She thought back on her days at the Town House.
But she recognized this also: she had done nothing wrong and—somehow, some way—she would yet be free of this man. Moreover, her liberation would not come because the magistrates who had sentenced her to a life with him had added to their iniquity and turpitude by sending her from this world to the next via the hanging platform.
“Mary?”
He was back now and sitting beside her on the bedstead.
“Yes?”
“Thou needest rest after what thou hast endured. Close thine eyes and calm thy mind.”
She nodded, outwardly obedient. But it would be hours before her mind would be calm enough to sleep.
And in the night she dreamt, and the dream was so real that when she awoke she stared at the wall from the bedstead and pondered in her heart whether it was a sign—and if it was a sign, what it meant. She wrote it down in her ledger because she wanted to preserve forever what she had seen.
The dream (if that’s what it was) was of a little girl who was no more than six years old and was dressed in a sky-colored shift and eating raspberries from a sky-colored bowl. The child’s hair was yellow and fell down her back in a ponytail held tight with a pink silk ribbon, and her eyes were so green that Mary thought of a cat. She was wearing the sort of elegant slippers that Mary herself had worn as a little girl, the pair that one of her father’s friends had imported from Bombay. The child did not speak like a child, however, she spoke like an adult who was sensible and wise, and who had lived a long and sensible life.
In the dream, Thomas was asleep beside Mary and didn’t stir when she saw the child with the raspberries. The room was lit well by the moon, and the girl was radiant. Mary was not afraid of her. Nor was she worried about why this young thing was out in the night and wearing clothing so helpless against the New England cold. She was merely surprised. She sat up and swung her legs over the bedstead and asked her who she was and whether Catherine had seen her enter the house and come up the stairs.
“Catherine doesn’t know I’ve come,” the girl replied.
“And the berries? We haven’t had fresh raspberries in months.”
The child took one of the berries and extended it to Mary as if this were part of Communion, and Mary ate the berry as if it were bread. She held it on her tongue a long moment before biting into it. It was delicious, the perfect combination of sour and sweet.
“But who art thou?” Mary asked again. “What art thou? An angel? Tell me, prithee, that thou art an angel.”
“I was given the name Desiree, but all who know me will call me Desire.”
“All?”
The child smiled as if the single-word question was absurd—as if it had been asked by a child herself. “All who know me,” she repeated.
“Art thou mine?”
The girl was quiet and her calmness unreadable. And so Mary persisted: “By thy silence, am I to suppose that I am not barren and will yet have a baby?”
And now Desiree held up her index finger, and the tip was stained red from the berry. She took the pad and pressed it against Mary’s forehead and then took a step back to survey her work. The finger had been warm, and the touch had been firm.
“There,” the child said. “I have marked thee.”
“Tell me, prithee,” Mary begged. “Art thou my child? Art thou the daughter I would pray for until…”
“Until what? Until thou gave up hope? Until thou lost faith?”
She sat up straight in her defense. “Until I understood that rearing a child was not God’s plan for me.”
But this time the girl did not respond, because she was gone. Vanished.
In the morning when Mary wrote down all that she could remember, she wished she could recall how the girl had disappeared. Had she walked from the room and back down the stairs? Or had she ascended into the sky to sit before—not beside, no, not that—their heavenly Father? It was only when she had finished writing and Thomas was beginning to stir on his side of the bedstead that it crossed her mind to go to the looking glass and see if there was a mark on her forehead.
There was not, and it was only then that her eyes welled up and, despite Thomas’s confusion, she began to weep.