Devil's Mistress (30 page)

“Well,” she demanded tartly, “what did you learn in the ordinary?”

Robert ignored her and went to Michael, who was sitting on the floor playing with pewter tins. “Want to come for a walk with Papa, Michael? A thaw seems to be truly setting in, and we’ll start plowing up the fields soon. Perhaps your Mama has a carrot or two we might spare for the mules.”

Michael happily lifted his arms to Robert. Brianna glanced up and bit her lip, then quickly looked back to her work. Michael was getting too heavy for Robert to hold. And Robert did not look well. She believed that the things going on were disturbing him perhaps even more than her.

Robert walked by Brianna. “You will see; things will return to normal. Seems we have found our scapegoats,” he said bitterly. “After Tituba’s story the other two would do best to admit their guilt—so that our good people can start saving their souls—and let them live out their mortal lives!”

“A confession will save them?” Brianna demanded.

“Aye—from the rumor that I hear.”

She smacked the bread soundly. Maybe there would be justice here—if it was true. She knew these people, and the truly pious would rather die than “belie” themselves, for they believed that God would eternally damn them for a lie. Yet she did not want to trust Robert’s words, because it was quite customary anywhere to execute a confessed witch.

He touched her hair then, and bent to kiss her forehead. “I do not think that we have anything to fear.” He smiled wanly. “Ingersoll’s was most interesting. John Proctor was there, quite disgusted. ‘Come to fetch his jade,’ he said. Mary Warren is his servant, you know. Her fits did cease, he said, when he thrashed her. He is a man of good standing in the community and he is sick of the nonsense. ‘Spectral evidence!’ he snorted to me. And old George Jacobs calls the girls ‘bitch witches.’ It will end, Brianna.” He turned away from her, cradling Michael’s little face close to his shoulder. “Brianna, do not run from me again. I cannot help but be afraid. None know of you but Eleanor, and she would never harm you. But if someone did hear something, they could so easily accuse you!”

Brianna swallowed miserably. “I’m sorry, Robert.”

“I know how you feel,” he murmured. “Well, young Michael, we shall go for our walk. Where has Mama put your coat?”

“I’ll get it!” Michael cried happily, shinnying from Robert’s arms. He took his coat from the deacon’s pew, and Robert helped him into it. Then Robert rose and his dark-brown gaze caught hers again, opaque and troubled.

“There was other talk at the ordinary,” he told her, pausing a second. “Lord Treveryan was there right before I came.”

“Oh?” The single word caught in her throat. She tried to keep her eyes level with Robert’s; they refused to stay so.

“He sailed in a week ago.”

“I had heard.”

“Had you?” Robert seemed surprised. “Why do you suppose that he has come?”

She shrugged, feeling half blinded as she started to pound into the dough again, trying to reply blithely. “He is a sailor. He captains his own ship. Such men must sail the seas, or so I suppose.”

She waited for Robert’s answer. It was slow in coming.

“We will talk later, when Michael sleeps.”

Brianna nodded and Robert and Michael went out.

The rabbit she cooked that night was tough and stringy, and improperly seasoned. Her bread burned. When she attempted to set the table, she dropped the forks and knives.

Each time she felt her husband’s eyes upon her, she wanted so badly to be able to pretend with assurance and bravado that Sloan’s being near meant nothing to her at all.

And yet when Michael was at last in bed asleep, Robert’s stand regarding the situation was not what she had expected at all.

“One of us must bring Michael to see him,” Robert told her. Again he stood at the mantel gravely surveying her.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Brianna,” he said very softly, “the child is his, and he will know it when he sees Michael, if he does not suspect so now.”

“How can you say that?” Brianna cried, rising from her chair. “Who is to say that he knows we are here or even that there is a child at all?”

“He knows,” Robert said. Then he sighed. “His presence here does not make me happy, yet it cannot be denied. He is no fool, we both know that.”

“No, Robert! I do not want him to see him! Michael is our son. There is no reason—”

“There is every reason. By the law Michael is mine. But by blood he is Treveryan’s. We must trust him—”

“Trust Sloan Treveryan!”

Robert paused, shocked by her outburst. Each word he uttered cost him dearly, and yet he knew that he was right.

“He does not deserve that. He saved your life not once but twice, and for that I am eternally grateful. When he came for you in England, he could have taken you. You told him that you wanted to be with us—and he respected your desires, rather than his own. There is no reason to believe he would harm you now in any way. But for all that he did for you, he deserves to be shown his son.”

Brianna stood, shaking her head, her mouth going dry. “Robert,” she said at last, and the sound took great effort, “he cannot care. Our lives have gone separate ways.”

“If you choose not to see him, then I will do so.”

“No! If we leave it alone, he will sail away again!”

He smiled at her. “Are you afraid to see him?”

“No! I—I don’t know. Please, Robert, our life is set. We have done well here. I—”

“Let’s go to bed, shall we? It has been a very long day, full of tumult, and I am very tired.”

She lowered her eyes and swallowed fiercely at the lump that rose from her heart to her throat. She nodded.

Hours later she still lay awake. She did not want to see Sloan. She was afraid of him. Not that he would harm her but he might destroy all the resolutions, all the contentment she had at last learned. While awake, she became aware of the sounds around her. The wind tore around the whitewashed frame of their home, howling and moaning, rising and falling.

She frowned, and twisted in the bed. Robert was sleeping, but was tossing about. She lowered her head to his chest but quickly withdrew with dismay, for it was not just the wind that she heard. His wheeze was terrible and he was gasping with each breath he drew.

She was worried, and wondered whether to wake him or let him sleep. She gnawed upon her lip with concern, then pulled her own pillow from beneath her and carefully lifted his head to set it higher. He mumbled something, and turned again. His forehead felt feverish, and so she climbed out of bed and hurried to the water basin, squeezing out a cloth to set upon his forehead. She did not go back to bed that night, and did not sleep.

In the morning she dressed with the first coming of light, bundled Michael into warm clothing, and went out to find the doctor.

Dr. Griggs came back with her and shut her out of the room while he examined Robert. He came out to the kitchen looking grim.

“A fever it is, not uncommon with this winter we’ve endured.”

“But what can we do? He cannot go on wheezing like that!”

Dr. Griggs sighed—and Brianna remembered that this was the same man who had diagnosed “witchcraft” as the cause of the girls’ illnesses.

“For a stronger man it would not be so serious. For Robert you must take great care. I’ve a physic to prescribe for him, and keep him still and in bed and never flat—he must be raised upward as he is now. He needs complete rest.”

“Yes, yes. I will see that he gets it,” she said.

Griggs wrote out his prescription and left her—anxious to return to the meetinghouse where the magistrates planned to continue their examination of Tituba. That morning Brianna could not be worried about the proceedings. She was too concerned about Robert.

The days passed slowly and torturously for her. There was Michael to tend to, and now Robert. With Robert in bed all the tasks on their small farm fell to her. The land needed to be readied for the spring planting, and fretting about that made Robert wheeze worse. Brianna had to be a cheerful whirl of energy, convincing him that she wasn’t burdened at all.

Eleanor came by on the seventh of March to tell her that the examinations seemed to be over, the “witches” had been sent to jail in Boston to await their trials, and with any luck it would all end.

Brianna breathed a sigh of relief and went back to the task of single-handedly coping with things. She wasn’t sleeping well, for she heard the labored sound of Robert’s breathing all through the night. And when she dozed, she was horrified to discover that she had dreamed of Sloan, and she was almost gladder to live with exhaustion than to endure such dreams.

The witchcraft tumult had died down; Sloan would sail away, and all would be well.

Toward the end of March, Robert began to show improvement. When Sunday morning dawned on the twentieth of March, he smiled at her, then gravely suggested that she take Michael and attend church services.

“I don’t feel right about leaving you alone,” she told him, so glad that he was smiling. But he had lost even more weight, and his cheeks were terribly hollow. His eyes seemed enormous.

“I want you to go. You haven’t been out at all—and for the both of us, I want you to be there.”

She promised that she would go to the afternoon meeting.

Brianna arrived a little late and rushed into a full meetinghouse to find her place upon the bench. Deodat Lawson, from Boston, was at the pulpit. Brianna noticed that the people seemed uneasy, and she wondered what might have occurred during the morning to cause such a thing. But she didn’t think about it long, for she was glad to be at the meeting; never had she felt the need for prayer so deeply in her life.

She needed to pray that she stop dreaming of Sloan, imagining herself in his arms again.

Suddenly a shout rang out—high over the drone of the minister’s preaching.

“Look! There sits Goody Cory on the beam—suckling a yellow bird betwixt her fingers!”

Brianna’s eyes, like those of all others in the congregation, turned to Goodwife Martha Cory. She was a sound churchgoer and upright pillar of the community, and Brianna was astounded at the words cried out by Abigail Williams. Someone would discount them, surely! Martha Cory was a stout and hale elderly matron, a solid farm woman to the bone. She sat stiff and straight on her bench, looking neither right nor left at the accusation.

Then Ann Putnam, Sr., was on her feet, shouting that she, too, could see the specter of Martha Cory on the beam.

No one else spoke. Ann sat again, and the service went on.

Brianna was trembling when she gripped Michael’s hand, and hurried out when it was over. Eleanor was behind her, calling out her name and asking if they might ride home together.

As they headed for home, Eleanor began to tell Brianna what she and Robert had missed in their seclusion.

“It was a week or so ago when the girls first cried out against her,” Eleanor said of Martha Cory, very distraught. “No one wanted to believe it at first—she is so staunch, you know! But Edward Putnam and Ezekial Cheever rode out to warn her about the accusations and first they asked Ann what Martha would be wearing—and Ann said that Martha knew they would ask her, and had blinded her spectral visions. Oh, Brianna! Do you know what happened then? Martha was at her spinning wheel when they arrived and she welcomed them as if she knew they were coming. She actually asked them if they had spoken to Ann about her clothing! She said that there was no such thing as witches and she was sick of the scandal going on!”

“Good for her!” Brianna proclaimed heatedly, pulling Michael closer to her on the saddle.

“No, no—don’t you see, Brianna? To deny witches is to deny the devil, and that is to deny God! It is atheism!”

“I do not believe in witches!”

“But you must never, never say it! Brianna, since Tituba’s confession, the magistrates and ministers are convinced that they’ve barely scratched the surface of some heinous conspiracy. They believe that there is a ‘black man’ in Boston with a whole host of servants. They will be hunting and probing, seeking out crime!”

“What is being done is the crime,” Brianna said stubbornly.

“Please, Brianna, keep quiet. When Martha comes to trial, she must prove her innocence.”

Brianna didn’t agree, but neither did she argue the point. She had to worry about Robert before anything else—including the fact that Sloan might well still be near.

They reached home, and Eleanor came in for a minute. They did not mention Martha Cory to Robert, and he seemed very glad of the company, so Brianna was happy.

As happy as she could be at that time of her life.

But by the beginning of April she was feeling the birth of a new panic. Eleanor came to see her with another friend, Sarah Ingersoll, the spinster daughter of the people who owned the ordinary.

Robert was still in bed; Eleanor put her fingers to her lips and urged Brianna to close the door.

“Oh, Brianna, Sarah has come to warn you—she hears everything in the taproom, you know.”

Sarah bit her lip and nodded unhappily. “Brianna, Rebecca Nurse was arrested and brought to investigation.”