After five bone-jarring hours on the road, Bristol almost felt grateful when the cart turned into Prison Lane and rattled toward a wooden enclosure rising out of early darkness. The night was warm and moonlight shimmered across the waves in Boston harbor. Standing in the cart, Bristol yearned toward the distant water. Somewhere out there, across that gigantic sea, her Jean Pierre lived and breathed. Knowing it, thinking of him, gave her a tiny sliver of courage to cling to. She had known love, and if her life ended tomorrow, no one could take that from her. Jean Pierre had been the reality of her life; not this. As she watched the dark prison draw nearer, she prayed he would never learn her fate.
The jail perched on a grassy hill outside of Boston Town. A cluster of log sheds formed the core, and around it lay a yard fenced by high wooden slats. Originally built to house no more than forty, now the prison swelled with nearly two hundred accused witches awaiting trial. Prison personnel could not cope with the sudden influx.
Harried officials directed a daily building program, adding pens to the main enclosure as quickly as they could be thrown together. The makeshift pens were unsatisfactory, unwieldy, unsanitary, and difficult to police. Additional guards had been posted to oversee the pens, but they resisted patrolling the poorly lit enclosures. The men weren’t easy at guarding witches. God only knew what this conglomeration of evil might do to a man. They avoided contact with the hags and warlocks whenever possible.
Consequently, the prisoners suffered an appalling lack of everyday necessities. They ate swill. None were healthy. All were filthy. Lice and dysentery were facts of everyday life. Fresh water had to be hauled from Boston and was considered a luxury. Sewer facilities were nonexistent.
Bristol had heard the prison described as “a grave for the living,” and as the cart stopped and she stared around her in the dim light, she decided the description had been kind. A fetid stench assailed her nostrils, and a deep rancid layer of muck crusted the ground. Dark shapes lay wedged together in a ring around the inner enclosure; even witches had to sleep, but nothing said they needed better than dirt for a mattress, or had to have shelter. Moans sounded everywhere, and pleas for assistance, but the guards remained in the log sheds, refusing to respond.
A weary man with hard eyes and a grim mouth met the cart and stared at Bristol by the light of a stained lantern. “Another one,” he stated sullenly.
The cart driver stretched his neck and rubbed cramped muscles. “Count your blessings, Kingston, you coulda had three. The others went to Andover.”
“Son of a bitch!” Kingston spit in the dirt. “This means some sorry sod has to stay up all night!” He glared at the driver as if this inconvenience was his fault.
The driver shrugged. “Get her outta the cart, will you? I want to go home.”
“So who doesn’t?” Kingston gripped Bristol’s arm and dragged her from the cart. He shoved her ahead of him toward one of the log sheds. “You got the papers on her?” he asked the driver. The driver tossed over a thick packet and rattled out the gate.
Inside the log hut, a group of men sat in a circle drinking from battered mugs. They glanced up without interest as Kingston led Bristol past them and into a dark empty room. He placed a candle on the room’s earthen floor. “You’re to remain here for twenty-four hours,” he said, pushing her down into the dirt.
Bristol licked dust from her lips. Her stomach growled. “Mr. Kingston?” she asked timidly.
“What?” He frowned at her, about to close the door. Bristol noticed a peephole cut in the upper half.
“May I please have a drink of water and could you untie my hands?”
“No.” The door started to close.
“Mr. Kingston!” He glared back into the room, angry now. “Please,” she begged. “Why am I in here?”
“You all ask that, and you all know the answer. You do it to harass us!” He slammed the door.
After a moment a wary eye appeared at the peephole, watching her. Bristol stared at it a moment, then looked away. Her mind raced, turning the question, trying to think of anything but thirst and hunger. Of course. Familiars. A familiar had to feed from the witch’s body once in each twenty-four-hour period. Part of jail processing was obviously to collect evidence for the trial. Bristol squirmed near the wall and leaned her spine against the logs. A twenty-four-hour rest would be wonderful; her eyes closed.
Instantly the watching eye blinked out and a violent pounding erupted against the door. The eye reappeared. Each time Bristol’s head nodded toward her breast, the door shuddered beneath a shattering pounding noise. Sleeping was not allowed.
The hours passed, and eventually she wished with all her heart for a familiar to appear. She ached all over and felt bone-weary. She wanted nothing more than to stretch out in the dirt and sleep. Forget everything and sleep. No sooner had the wish crossed her mind than the door crashed open and a man bolted into the room. He raced to a far corner and stared in triumph at a small brown spider. “Here it is!” he sang out.
“So?” an indifferent voice called from the next room. “Kill it and go to bed. We’re sick of your complaints!”
The man lifted his boot and ground the spicier into the dirt, with a shiver of fear. He snatched up his foot and rapidly examined himself to see if he’d acted before the familiar witched some part of his body into a hairy monstrosity. Weak with relief, he turned to Bristol and prodded her to her feet. He muttered to himself, “Off to the examination room, then the damned report, and then to bed.”
This time she knew better than to risk anger by asking what the examination room was. The man shoved Bristol into a small room with a cot along one wall. He lifted his leg over the cot and kicked an old woman out of a whimpering slumber. “Here’s another one,” he said. “I’ll be just outside if you need help with her.”
The old woman rubbed her eyes and nudged a bundle of rags sleeping beside her. Both women pulled to their feet, grumbling and carping at each other and Bristol. “Take your clothes off.”
Mutely, heart thudding, Bristol turned to show her bound hands. One of them cut the ropes. Slowly she undressed, her face red and her eyes blunted.
They examined her inch by inch. “Bend over.” Bristol did as they demanded, wishing God would strike her dead. The indignity, the humiliation of it, was more than she could bear. She wasn’t surprised when they found what they sought.
“Look here,” one of them cackled, pointing to the faint ridges on Bristol’s back. “A familiar’s feeding tit if I ever saw one!”
“Please, once I was whipped, that’s—”
“Shut up.”
Next they took a knife, sharpened to a fine thin point, and began pricking her all over. They started at her toes and worked up, raising fiery needles of pain. Bristol flinched and cried out and tried to twist away, but the strongest held her while the other dotted the knife point across her skin.
Unable to resist, incapable of fighting them, she went limp. Her body sagged. Every sense felt deadened by exhaustion. Her mind seemed wrapped in cotton.
“Here it is!” the old woman crowed. “See?” She touched Bristol’s hipbone with the knife point. Bristol didn’t react. Had she not been watching, Bristol wouldn’t have known the old woman pricked her. She decided they could have broken both legs at this point and she would have felt nothing.
“That’s it, all right, the devil’s mark. Dead flesh.”
Mercifully they put away the knife and threw her clothes at her. The younger of the two returned to the cot and rolled near the wall. The older one waited until Bristol dressed; then she kicked open the door. “She’s got it, all right,” she shouted at the man. “On the back and on the hip, just here.” She drew a circle on her own hip to show him.
He nodded. “Write it up and I’ll be back.”
The old woman shook her head. “Write it up yourself, you lazy slug. You know I can’t do letters.” She slammed the door.
Muttering beneath his breath, the man jerked a lantern from a peg and gave Bristol a vicious kick out the door. She sprawled in the muck, curling into a ball and covering her head.
“Get up,” he screamed. She scrambled to her feet, her eyes wide and frightened, and he shoved her through the darkness, down a lane of packed bodies, and out the gate. They marched through meadow grass and finally halted before one of the wooden pens. He unlocked the gate and hurled her through, locking it behind her. When his grumbling mutter faded, Bristol looked around.
Beneath a starry, moon-bright sky, she saw row upon row of jammed sleeping bodies. The seeping ooze of a dung hill glittered at the end of the pen. The stink was unbelievable.
“Bristol Adams?” a soft voice called nearby. “Bristol Adams Wainwright? Is it you?”
“Aye,” Bristol answered in a loud whisper. A shape rose from the sleeping bodies. “Rebecca!” Bristol ran forward and dropped to her knees beside the old woman. Rebecca Nurse squeezed to one side and made room; then she pressed Bristol’s fingers.
“I can’t say I’m glad to see you; not here.” The woman’s cheerful little face split into a thousand wrinkles around a smile. “Are you hungry?”
Bristol nodded.
“I’m afraid the water’s gone until tomorrow.” Rebecca lifted a filthy apron and rummaged in the pocket. She produced a crust of bread and a chunk of moldy cheese. “My granddaughter bribed the guards to get this in. I save it for newcomers. It isn’t much, and this is the last of it. But everyone’s so hungry after the familiar room. Were you in the full twenty-four hours?”
“Shouldn’t you be sleeping?” Bristol whispered loudly near Rebecca’s ear. She had to repeat it.
Rebecca chuckled and patted Bristol’s hand. “At my age, a person doesn’t need much sleep. Besides, I’ll be sleeping plenty before too long.” She watched Bristol wolf down the food. Between bites, Bristol told of the empty room and the spider. Rebecca smiled. “That’s nothing. You are looking at the worst witch of all time. Oh, aye.” Her button eyes twinkled in the starry light. “When I went in, it started to rain—the last good rain we had before this dry spell. And every stray cat and dog and mouse and frog in Suffolk County wiggled into that room. All of them wringing wet and looking for a dry spot. Near scared the life out of that young man.” She shook her gray head and chuckled.
That Rebecca could retain any good humor at all in this foul place astonished Bristol. Soon, however, the smile faded from those wrinkled old lips, and Rebecca spoke of sadder events. Old Goody Osburn had died in the prison. Others they both knew were very ill. Elizabeth Proctor feared for her unborn child, as the food was poor and maggoty and the water often went bad before fresh was hauled to the prison. Rebecca feared little Dorcas Good’s mind had gone; the child suffered greatly. She’d heard rumors that torture was practiced in the men’s pens, and both men and women were kept chained. Rebecca lifted her skirt and showed Bristol her own shackles.
In the morning two guards arrived and locked iron cuffs around Bristol’s ankles, the cuffs attached to a length of chain soldered to eight-pound iron balls. Bristol could walk only by bending and carrying the balls. Using this method, she could hobble about, bent at the waist. She soon discovered that trying to drag the balls only flayed the ankles.
By daylight, the pen was hideous. A square of fenced misery and offal. That humans could survive such conditions was a staggering idea. But they did, and Bristol gritted her teeth and vowed she would too.
On Rebecca’s advice, Bristol claimed an area of fence. When guards dragged away a woman there, Bristol slid immediately into the narrow spot, marking it as her own by tearing a scrap of skirt and nailing it to the fence with a sliver of wood. The benefits of a fence position were instantly obvious. It was difficult for the sightseers standing on benches behind the fence to hurl refuse at anyone directly beneath the fence. Also, the wooden slats provided a backrest and offered shelter from a boiling afternoon sun. Those without a fence place sat in the middle of the compound and served as target for the sun and curious onlookers. These women glared at Bristol, angry and resentful that a newcomer had beat them to the fence spot. Bristol returned their stares and thanked God for Rebecca.
Rebecca proved invaluable by helping Bristol and other newcomers adjust to the hardships of prison life. If the food wouldn’t stay on their stomachs, Rebecca teased them about being too fat. When the water didn’t arrive on schedule, Rebecca suggested a rain dance and coaxed a smile. As layer upon layer of dirt and mud accumulated on Bristol’s skin and clothing, Rebecca congratulated her on looking like a fresh arrival no longer.
In July, Rebecca Nurse was hanged. Along with Sarah Good and three others.
Bristol spent the day in quiet prayer and hopelessness. She leaned against the fence and stared at the iron cuffs banding her ankles. Rebecca Nurse dead. How did rational minds accept such an atrocity? Her eyes strayed to Rebecca’s fence spot, already claimed by a new haggard face. But Bristol saw Rebecca there, and her throat ached.
By the first week in September, Bristol came to understand none of them would leave the prison alive. Those who did not die here, died at the end of a rope.
Five more had been hanged in August, including John Proctor. Elizabeth Proctor escaped hanging only by reason of pregnancy; she’d been tried, and when the baby was born, she would hang.
Despite the hangings, the likelihood of dying in prison was far greater than dangling at the end of a noose. The trials progressed slowly. At the present rate of trial sittings, Bristol calculated it would be years before the pens cleared of witches.
Looking over the crowded desperate women, Bristol swallowed hard and wondered if she could survive these conditions for years. In her heart, she doubted it. Summer had been appalling; winter would be deadly. That they had managed to endure the blistering summer was credit to the hardiness of humanity.
The pens were open sewers, an invitation to rats and maggots and giant mosquitoes that raised welts the size of shillings. Breathing the foul stench burned nostrils and lungs. All thought of modesty disappeared within hours; no privacy existed of any kind. Two buckets of sour water were allowed every other day and vanished instantly. No one bothered to give the women provisions for monthly needs; they caught the curse and had no way to blot the flow or clean themselves. Lice foraged in hair and clothing. They fought like animals for moldy bread and scraps a dog would not have touched.
When rain fell, everyone rejoiced—for a short time. They stood in the compound and scrubbed weeks of crust and filth from their bodies and tried to wash the clothes they wore. Then they lay down in the mud to sleep, and it began again, the cycle of dirt and bugs and dysentery and hopelessness.
Quickly they became the animals most of the populace believed them to be. When they spoke of it, and they did endlessly, they felt anger and bewilderment at their treatment, at the terror in eyes which slid away from direct contact. Yet, sometimes they stared at each other and saw what others saw—and fear leaped in their own eyes as well. They’d entered these gates as clean, responsible human beings and had become ragged hollow-eyed creatures of hell, willing to claw a neighbor for a scrap of food or a bit of space. Any could have served as model for a sketch of the worst features associated with witches.
“Care for company?”
Bristol looked over her shoulder as Divinity Cooper lowered her iron shackles with a sigh. Hurriedly Bristol buried a bone she’d stolen from the community pot. “Aye, sit down.” She patted flat the earth next to the fence where she hid her treasures and settled her back against the wooden slats. “Is there anything new?” It was the standard greeting.
“No.” The standard answer. Divinity crossed her legs and settled carefully within the perimeters of Bristol’s rectangle of space. A skirt hem on a neighboring patch was enough to instigate a scratching, howling fight. Divinity closed her eyes and let the autumn sun warm a muddy face.
Guiltily Bristol fought with herself. Should she offer to share the bone or not? Three weeks ago Divinity had nursed Bristol through an attack of dysentery... but Bristol’s stomach felt as if it gnawed itself. She’d keep the bone. She sighed. “Divinity, I have a bone; come back tonight.”
Divinity smiled and nodded, knowing the battle Bristol had lost; they all waged such wars. “Thank you,” she said formally. “Hester Ellison told me they tortured two more men yesterday. Tied their necks to their heels until blood ran out of their noses and mouths.”
Bristol looked up, interested. “I didn’t hear that. Was it anyone we know?”
Divinity shook her head, her stiff matted hair not moving.
“I don’t think so. At least no one I know.”
They sat quietly, looking at each other and wondering for the hundredth time what the other would look like cleaned, rested, and well-fed. Divinity’s round eyes peered from a face crusted with grime and dried mud. Bristol knew her own face looked the same. She glanced at their fouled skirts and tried to decide what the original colors might have been. She couldn’t remember. Each scratched her head and body while they visited; it was as natural an action as breathing.
“Did you hear Phillip English escaped again?” Bristol asked.
“No!” Divinity’s eyes sparkled; escape stories were the essence of life. “How?”
“Same as before. Bribed a guard. He got his wife out, too; she was in the North pen.” Here, as everywhere, money made all the difference. With money, extra food could be had, a second cup of water. And with enough money, escapes could sometimes be arranged.
Divinity’s eyes took on a dreamy cast. “Someday a tall, handsome man will look over the fence, see me, and bribe the guards to let me out.” Like Bristol, Divinity had no family, no one to care that she was in prison.
Bristol laughed. “Divinity, this man of yours needs to be a witch himself to see anything worth saving! He’ll have to use magic to see past all that.” She waved at the tatters Divinity wore over months of dirt. It occurred to Bristol that she hadn’t the remotest idea of Divinity’s hair color.
Divinity sniffed. “My dear, I shall simply cast my best hex, and he’ll instantly see what a treasure I am.” She grinned.
“Cast a spell to call up a rescuer for me too.” Bristol laughed as Divinity picked up her iron balls and hobbled across the compound to her own piece of fence.
Bristol had met Divinity Cooper at one of the prayer meetings Reverend Cotton Mather regularly held for the witches. Neither attended much anymore. Prayer wasn’t likely to alter their predestined paths, and too long an absence could cost their fence spots. They’d seen many a woman return from a lengthy prayer meeting, a glow of peace on her muddy face, only to discover she had to claw someone out of her place. Peace and screaming didn’t mesh well. The Boston preacher didn’t miss either Bristol or Divinity—his prayer meetings were well attended despite the cost.
“Anything new?” Bristol asked automatically when next Divinity visited Bristol’s rectangle.
“Aye.”
Bristol’s head jerked up at the unexpected answer.
“They pressed a man to death!” Divinity’s round eyes stared. She rocked back on her heels and awaited Bristol’s reaction.
Bristol’s mouth opened and closed. “Pressed a man to... to death?” Would the horror never end? She scratched her ribs and stared into Divinity’s mud-dark face.
“Aye. Name of Giles Cory. I never met him, but I knew his wife, Martha Cory.” In the past they might have complained of Martha’s sharp tongue, but Martha Cory had been hanged last week. They said nothing. “Goodman Cory wouldn’t plead guilty or not guilty, so they put a heavy rock on his chest to make him plead. But he wouldn’t. They kept adding big stones until he... until he died.”
The two girls stared at each other, trying to imagine what it must be like to feel life slowly crushed from the body, stone by stone. Bristol shivered. Man’s inhumanity to man could never be understood.
“It took three days for him to die,” Divinity added hoarsely.
Bristol closed her eyes. “It’s time to stand up,” she said, changing the conversation. If they didn’t stand often, rise out of the hobbled position, eventually they wouldn’t be able to straighten at all. They’d seen it happen to others. Both girls rose, holding their popping spines and groaning. Upright, they could see Boston harbor, sparkling in fall sunshine and dotted with rocking ship masts.
“Did you ever sail on one of those?” Divinity asked, her eyes yearning toward the tall ships. Always the romantic, Divinity envisioned a trip on a sailing ship as a glorious experience.
Bristol smiled sadly. “Aye,” she murmured in a soft voice. “Once... a long time ago in a better life.” All the ships resembled the Challenger. Indulging a moment of foolishness, she let herself think one of them might be Jean Pierre’s ship. Bristol’s smile turned wry, and she shook her head. She was becoming as wishful as Divinity.
A rotten egg sailed over the fence and smashed against Bristol’s shoulder, emitting a foul, noxious odor. Both girls instantly dropped to their knees and crawled nearer the fence, out of the sightseers’ range.
“It gets worse every day,” Divinity complained.
Bristol scooped a handful of dirt and scrubbed it into the ooze dripping down her arm. It helped some. “Sometimes,” she muttered in a low voice, “I worry that the good citizens will storm the prison and murder us all.”
“I know,” Divinity answered, watching a rain of eggs pelt the center of the enclosure. “They’ve only managed to hang nineteen so far.” Her voice was bitter. “The law isn’t killing us fast enough; there are still hundreds alive.”
Bristol’s hollow green eyes watched two women cover their heads and duck behind a dung pile. “How long do you suppose New England will be patient? How long before they decide to forget the law and hurry things along themselves?”
Guards chased away the angry, frightened people hurling garbage at the witches. Then they unlocked the gate and stood just inside the pen. One of them glanced down at a piece of paper. “Bristol Wainwright! Bristol Wainwright!”
Bristol and Divinity stared at each other. Divinity’s dirty fingers covered her mouth, and her eyes grew to saucer size. Both knew the procedure. The women were called out, cleaned some, and the next day were taken away to trial.
And no one yet had survived a trial. All had been hanged.