When I awoke I was on the floor, my hands tied behind my back and my feet bound with thick rope. Mistress Reeves was kneeling next to me, pushing me toward the fireplace. Flames leapt in the corner of my vision and my skin burned from proximity to the fire.
I screamed and Mistress slapped me across the face. I stopped screaming simply out of surprise, my face stinging, but then I began anew, using every bit of strength I could muster to scream and wrestle myself out of her grasp. She tried slapping me again, but I twisted my head just in time and she missed, striking the floor instead. She shook her hand as if to toss away the pain.
A cry of rage escaped her throat and a look of pure wildness lit her eyes. I squeezed my eyes shut and rolled toward her, knocking her off balance. She fell to one side, her knees coming out from underneath her skirts. She was very thin—her strength wasn’t coming from her muscles, but from within, from a place of sick depravity.
She used her legs then to push me toward the fireplace once more. With my hands and feet bound, there was little I could do to escape her, save for writhing on the floor to get away from her. The wooden floor planks ripped my skin as I tried to slither away from her, but she rose to her feet and used her body to push me toward the fireplace.
I was exhausted. In a tiny corner of my mind I began to wonder if it would be easier to let Mistress Reeves push me into the flames, to give myself up to the fate that had met my mother. Surely if I allowed death to overcome me I would meet my mother and father again. That tiny thought began to grow and I could feel my muscles losing the battle, my breath coming in shallow rasps. Mistress obviously felt it, too, because she began pushing harder. My body was only protesting from reflex now, from the natural tendency to avoid a painful death. I closed my eyes again, wondering how long it would take, how terrible the pain.
But in another tiny part of my mind, I could suddenly hear Richard’s voice struggling to make itself heard. He was promising to return to me after his voyage at sea. I saw his face in that part of my mind, his bright eyes, his gentle smile. And before I knew what was happening, that part of my mind began to overtake my thoughts of death, of joining my mother and father in eternity. I wasn’t ready to die, and certainly not at the hands of a madwoman.
The scream that erupted from my mouth was so piercing and so shrill that it surprised even me. Mistress Reeves was clearly taken aback, since she stopped pushing me and stared into my eyes for the briefest of seconds.
And in that moment, she knew something inside my mind had changed. I saw the fear rising in her eyes, the momentary uncertainty and the renewed determination to kill me rather than accept the fate that surely awaited her if I survived.
But her determination wasn’t as strong as mine, and it wasn’t enough to dislodge the thought of Richard from my mind.
Rolling onto my side, I kicked her legs, sending her tripping and sprawling backward onto the wooden floor. As she scrambled to rise again, I used my feet to drag a chair between us. When she was standing and moving toward me again, I kicked the chair toward her, knocking her down again and hurting her this time. She grabbed her ankle and howled in pain; I could see a huge lump forming over the bone almost immediately. She stood and advanced toward me again, limping and using the chair to help support herself, I wriggled under the table and lay on the floor on the other side of it, panting from exertion and fear. She was moving more slowly now, the pain making her wince with every step, and as she came around the table, I rolled underneath it to the other side, out of her reach.
Her eyes burned with fury when she wasn’t able to reach me. She looked around and a monstrous smile spread across her face as her gaze alit on the fireplace poker. Using a wall for support, she limped over to where the poker stood up against the side of the fireplace. She gripped it in both hands and turned around to where I lay on the floor. I looked around wildly for a place to escape where she couldn’t reach me with the poker, but it was a small room. I rolled farther under the table again as she took her first swing toward me.
The whizzing sound the poker made as it narrowly missed my head was the only sound I heard for a moment, but it was quickly followed by a loud thump as Mistress Reeves lost her balance and fell forward into the edge of the table. She whimpered as she hit the ground, probably due to the pain in her ankle but possibly because she had hit her head, and I took the only chance I had.
I rolled toward her with a speed that I wouldn’t have thought possible, gathering slivers of wood from the floor in my skin as I moved. She was searching for the poker with her eyes and making grasping motions toward it with her hands. I was wearing shoes, so it didn’t hurt me when I found the poker with my feet and kicked it out of her reach. Then I aimed my feet at her and wriggled forward, pushing her toward the fire in the grate with every ounce of strength I had. She was still crying out in pain from having fallen into the table, and I hardly think she knew what was going on, such was her surprise when I kicked her hard in the back.
She slumped toward the fireplace and I caught a quick glimpse of abject terror on her face. She screamed and I think the shrill, horrifying sound of it spurred me to further action. I kicked her again, and this time her hand flung into the fire as I pushed her body closer to the hearth.
Her shriek was bone chilling.
“Stop, please stop!” she cried. She looked at her hand as if it were something she didn’t recognize and screamed again, and this time the front door flung open and Arthur and his father rushed in.
Taking in the macabre scene in a single second, they pulled Mistress Reeves out of the fire; the pastor tended to her while Arthur ran to where I was weeping on the floor, panting and spent.
“What happened?” he cried. He looked over his shoulder at his mother. “Mother, are you all right?”
She could only shake her head and sob into her skirts. The pastor looked stricken with confusion and shock.
“Father, put her hand in water,” he ordered. The pastor stared at his son for a moment and then stood up and reached for a bucket that was on the floor. He ran outside and was back in an instant, snow filling the bucket to the brim. He gently picked up his wife’s hand and placed it in the snow as she screamed in protest, and as her hand touched the frozen water she fell back in a stone faint.
I lay on the floor watching the scene with relief and gratitude for their arrival. Arthur finally noticed that my hands and feet were bound and he grabbed a knife that hung around his waist. He quickly cut through the rope and threw it aside.
“Why are you bound?” he asked. He looked at me with a complete lack of comprehension.
“I fainted and your mother tied me up!” I yelled. It wasn’t Arthur’s fault; my shock was fading, being rapidly replaced by furious wrath.
“Why did you faint?” Arthur still didn’t seem to grasp the gravity of what had happened while he, his younger brother, and his father were away from the house.
“She killed my mother!” I shrieked. The pastor’s head jerked up from where he was trying to revive Mistress Reeves. Both men looked at me and then glanced at each other, clearly appalled at my words.
“That’s nonsense,” the pastor said. His voice was quieter than I would have expected.
I took a deep breath. I was safe, Mistress Reeves couldn’t hurt me anymore. I needed to calm down and speak so I could be heard and understood. I lowered my voice. The pastor tapped his wife’s face again, trying to get her to wake up, but he was watching me as I spoke.
“Mistress Reeves admitted to killing my mother,” I said in as calm a voice as I could muster. “She said my mother was teaching heathen practices to the girls and women of Town Bank. She killed her.” I slumped, finally allowing the realization of Mistress Reeves’s actions to permeate my mind. I bent forward and began to cry into my skirts, much as Arthur’s mother had done just a few minutes before. I let the tears flow in a torrent of sadness, grief, and shock, not caring what either Arthur or his father thought or said. When I looked up at them they were both staring at me. The looks on their faces told me everything I needed to know: they knew I was telling the truth.
When Mistress Reeves awoke, she immediately started screaming again from the pain in her hand. Arthur and his father looked at each other again, clearly at a loss over what to do to give her some relief.
I staggered from the stool where I was sitting and made my way over to her on the floor. She cowered when she saw me moving toward her. She called for her husband and he stood up with a start, but I motioned for him to be seated, explaining that I was going to help her.
I examined her hand without touching it. The silent screams inside my head begged me to let her suffer and die where she lay on the floor, quite possibly in the same spot where she killed my mother, but something else inside me couldn’t let her perish when it was within my ability to help her.
I grasped the fireplace poker and she let out a scream. I held it away from her as I explained that using a hot object to draw more heat out of the burning wound would help her heal. When I had explained that to her, I turned to her husband and asked him to fetch wine. His eyes narrowed in suspicion, but I explained that wine was necessary for healing. When he still looked skeptical, I explained that no one would be drinking the wine—I was going to pour it on his wife’s skin.
That seemed to appease him and he left in search of wine while I turned to Mistress Reeves.
“Arthur, I want you to hold her arms so she doesn’t inadvertently touch the poker,” I instructed. He looked at me with something akin to horror.
“Arthur, you must. If she moves, she might very well touch the poker with her burned skin and she’ll be burned all over again.”
Mistress whimpered. Arthur let out a long, labored breath and knelt on the floor next to his mother. She cried out loudly when he grasped her upper arms, but she held still while I held the poker over her hand. Before long she was begging me to stop, saying the heat from the poker was making her burn worse. Just then her husband arrived with the wine, so I put the poker aside and grasped the bottle. I poured it in a slow stream over Mistress’s hand as she howled in pain. To my utter relief, she fainted again.
That made my job easier, so I continued pouring wine over her hand as Arthur collected the runoff on a cloth he held under her arm, casting anxious glances at her face as he waited for her to wake up again.
When I had used all the wine in the bottle to soak her burns, it was time for me to leave. I had stayed for as long as I could, looking at her loathsome face and treating wounds that I secretly hoped wouldn’t heal. Without another word to Arthur or his father, I fled from the Reeves house and back to my own. I was still weak from my ordeal at the hands of Mistress Reeves, but my urgent need to get to safety in my own house was too great to be impeded by physical pain and exhaustion.
Once in my house, the trembling began. How I wished my parents or Richard were with me. The shock of Mistress Reeves’s words hadn’t abated. I still flinched in horror every time I thought of her telling me she had killed Mamma.
Mamma, who had been the kindest, gentlest, most generous woman I had ever known. Dead at the hands of a pastor’s wife.
I knew what had to happen.
When I got to the lawyer’s house in Town Bank, he received me immediately. As he listened to the details of my encounter with Mistress Reeves, the expression on his face grew from grave interest to shock to horror.
“My dear Miss Hanover!” he cried. “We must go to the authorities with this information straight away!”
There was a problem, though, since one of the main enforcers of the law was Pastor Reeves himself. The lawyer made the decision to go to the town officers immediately. They, like him, were astounded by the account of my torment at the hands of Mistress Reeves and promised to send an officer of the law to the Reeves household at once.
It was much later that night when there was a knock at my door. I was seized with an icy fear that wouldn’t let go of my throat.
“Miss Sarah?” a voice called. “It’s me again, Mister Browne.”
I trudged to the door in my stocking feet, unsure of what awaited me when Mister Browne came into the house.
I opened the door slowly and faced the man standing outside in the cold, clear air of midnight.
“What can I do for you, sir?” I asked. “Forgive me for not inviting you inside, but you can see I am ready for bed.”
“That’s all right, Miss Sarah,” he said. “Several men from the village took a vote and elected me to come tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
He hesitated. “Mistress Reeves is dead.”
I should have been surprised, but I wasn’t.
“How did it happen?” I asked.
“She threw herself into the fire when the men from town went to arrest her, and she died shortly afterward.”
So she had died in the same way my mother did. It was strangely comforting.
“Thanks for letting me know, Mister Browne. If you don’t mind, I’m going to bed now.”
“Wait, Sarah. There’s more.”
“There’s more?”
He nodded. “A woman from one of the farms hereabout came to my office yesterday. She told me a gruesome tale of being attacked recently by Captain Eli in Widow Beall’s barn.”
I let out a gasp. “Is she all right?”
Mister Browne nodded. “Her husband found out about it and beat Captain Eli, causing serious injury.”
So that’s the story behind the captain’s leg injury, I thought grimly.
“It seems, upon further investigation, that Captain Eli had a spot set up in the barn where he would receive certain female visitors,” Mister Browne continued.
“Did Widow Beall know about it?”
Mister Browne sighed. “It appears that she did. He paid her to keep that part of the barn cleared for him. It also appears, however, that she was unaware of his attack upon the woman recently.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I now understood how Widow Beall could afford the ingredients for sugar pie, despite having no discernable income. And I also understood why she had declined to let me clean up the area outside her barn. She was protecting her income. Then I was struck with a more horrible thought.
“Mister Browne, do you think my father knew about this ... this arrangement?”
“I doubt it, Sarah. He would sooner have given Widow Beall money than let her earn money in such a disgraceful way.” I knew in my heart that he was right—my father would never have let her stoop to such depths for money if he had known her predicament.
“Is Widow going to be brought up on charges?” I asked.
Mister Browne shook his head. “We understand it was her way of surviving to provide for her children. She’ll suffer from the things people will say about her once word gets around, but we won’t make her suffer any more than that. Captain Eli, on the other hand, will be leaving Town at daybreak. I’ll make sure of that. I’ve spoken to him, and for once he wasn’t taken with drink. He told me that he did try to get your sweet, gentle mother to go away with him, but she refused. He didn’t bother her again after that, though his obsession never diminished. I’m embarrassed to say he was no more than a lustful and contemptible wretch who lied about his dealings with her.”
I could do nothing but nod, overwhelmed with all I had just learned from the magistrate.
“You take care of yourself, Miss Sarah.” He gave me a sympathetic look and turned away. I closed the door and sat in front of the fire for a long time, missing my parents, concerned for Widow Beall’s future welfare, and wishing Mistress Reeves had never been born. I thought back to the letter I had found in Pappa’s trunk. I wondered if Mamma had been afraid of Mistress Reeves, or whether it had been Captain Eli to whom she had referred in her letters to her mother. I supposed it didn’t matter anymore, now that both Mamma and Mistress Reeves were gone. I shuddered at the thought of Captain Eli, relieved that he would be leaving the cape, never to return.
The village was abuzz for days with the death of Mistress Reeves, and I received another round of visitors who came to tell me how very sorry they were to hear about the gruesome way my mother had died.
I should have been grateful for their good intentions and their expressions of sorrow, but I wanted it all to end. I wanted Richard to return. I wanted to be left in peace to attend to the people who needed me in the apothecary. I wanted to tend to the animals on my small farm. I wanted my parents back.
And one day the visitors stopped coming. Almost every resident of Town Bank and the surrounding farms had come to the house over the past two weeks and I knew it was time for me to move on.
I gathered up the books my parents and I had brought from England and set off for Patience’s house, where her mother awaited her first reading lesson. Following the death of Mistress Reeves, I could think of but one way to continue honoring my mother’s memory, and that was by teaching the women and girls of the cape to read. All of them, if possible.