The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (16 page)

The woman arched one penciled eyebrow and smiled wider. “Sure. They’re right in the back, on the left.”

“Thanks,” said Sam, pulling Connie along in his wake.

“Blessed be,” said the woman, nodding.

They made their way to the shelves in the back, which held racks of paperback books on Aleister Crowley, tarot reading, astrology, and something called “astral projection.”

“Where are the magic eight balls?” asked Connie dryly, and Sam sighed.

“Don’t you think it’s interesting?” he said, prodding her. “I’m always intrigued by the different ways people decide what to believe. I mean, look at this—they’re taken from all over the place. Celtic knots, Eastern philosophy,
the New Age. Past and present collapsed into a buffet of equivalent options, all in pursuit of the divine. It’s fascinating. This funky pagan element is one of the reasons that living in Salem is so interesting, even to a hardened old agnostic like me.”

Connie perceived the real, guileless curiosity shining in Sam’s eyes and immediately regretted her own curmudgeonliness.

“An agnostic steeplejack? There’s a contradiction for you,” she said, arms folded. Then she relented. “You’re right, Sam. It
is
interesting. I’m sorry. I guess it just reminds me of some of the loopier aspects of my upbringing.” Connie fingered a knitted prayer shawl hanging from a wire display rack and looked down at her feet.

Sam took her by the shoulders. “Hey,” he said, stooping to look into her face. She glanced up at him, half-smiling. “Don’t worry about it.” His green eyes twinkling, he smiled down at her, holding her gaze. She swallowed.

“What do you think Deliverance Dane or Mercy Lamson would have to say about all this?” she joked, breaking the fleeting quiet that had gripped them. He laughed.

“God knows. I bet,” he said, picking up a paperback collection of alien abduction narratives, “that
this
would have been Deliverance’s favorite.”

Connie laughed, turning away from the bookshelves. She stopped mid-chortle, stepping back in surprise. Opposite where she stood, stretching from the floor to near the ceiling, towered rack upon rack of powdered herbs and potions in little plastic envelopes with calligraphy labels.

“Wow,” she said, moving in for a closer look. The selection ranged from common kitchen herbs, like oregano and savory, to inorganic substances, like ground yellow sulfur and vials of liquid mercury. She recognized most of the plant names, noting with some surprise that many of them seemed to grow wild in Granna’s garden. She touched the little plastic packets, forehead crinkled in thought. The racks reminded her of something.

Of the jars and bottles in Granna’s kitchen actually. The faded labels in the kitchen looked just like these, though largely illegible after so much elapsed time. “How odd,” she whispered, pulling an envelope of henbane from one of the shelves and examining the label.
GATHERED IN JUNE
1989 was typed in tiny script on the lower right-hand corner. Connie sniffed. Anyone with the most rudimentary knowledge of horticulture knew that herbs started to lose their efficacy almost the instant that they were gathered. Even cookbooks were explicit about this; the difference in flavor between dried herbs and fresh was an elementary fact of cooking.

“What a racket,” she muttered, placing the packet back on its shelf. She caught up with Sam, who was perusing a selection of nose rings under the glass at the front of the shop.

“Do you think I should stick with the septum ring, or expand the options a little?” he asked as she approached, toying with the ring under his nose. “They’ve got little opal studs, cubic zirconia….”

“Their herbs are all expired,” Connie groused to him. “They’re best if they’re fresh, but you really have to use them within like two months of drying them. Otherwise they’re no good. The ones they’ve got in the back are all, like, two years old. It’s a total rip-off.”

“Did you find everything you were looking for?” the pigtailed woman interrupted. She was affixing price tags to lavender Witch City coffee mugs. Her penciled brows were thrust together in a glower. Connie wondered if she had overheard their conversation.

“We’re all set, thanks,” said Connie, employing the universal New England expression that signals the end of a transaction. To be “all set” can mean that you are finished eating, that you do not need a fitting room, that you have the directions already, that the car has plenty of gas. It often means that you are not going to buy anything. A thundercloud gathered in the pigtailed woman’s eyes, and she turned her shoulder toward them, half-moon earring swinging, and slapped a few more price tags on a few more mugs in chilly silence.

“Let’s go,” Connie whispered, taking Sam by the arm. An uneasy feeling suffused her, but as they passed under the gentle gong attached to the door, the feeling started to fall away.

T
HE SKY OVER
S
ALEM HAD COOLED, AND A PALE PINK STAIN WAS SEEPING
through the field of blue-gray stretching overhead. Connie inhaled, savoring the saline bite of the evening air, and let out a long, contented sigh.

“Are you going to finish this?” asked Sam, peering into her carryout box of pad thai. His chopsticks were poised expectantly. Connie laughed.

“What is it about boys?” she teased him. “Every boy I know can eat his own weight in food. You should see my thesis student. He looks like he weighs ninety pounds, but every time we have a lunch meeting he’s always getting seconds and thirds.”

Sam laughed through a mouthful of her noodles. “Just lucky, I guess,” he said. “Mmmmmm. Yours is better than mine.”

Connie dangled her bare feet over the end of the dock and surveyed the harbor stretching away below her. Several yachts were moored together, growing darker under the pinkening sky, and the soothing sound of halyards clanking against masts traveled across the surface of the water. She tried to picture what the wharves would have looked like when Salem was a bustling seaport, one of the great city centers of the colonies. Even for her practiced mind the distant picture was difficult to conjure. She tried to place a great wooden triple-masted sailing ship alongside the wharf where they sat, tried to see the piles of sea chests and the boxes of live chickens, sacks of grain and hardtack, oiled barrels of rum heaped together on the wharf. She filled in rickety warehouses and sail lofts lined up in tight rows along the edge of the long wharf, wooden signs swinging in the breeze. She strained to hear the sounds of the sailing master barking orders at the sailors working in the rigging overhead, but all she heard was the cry of a seagull seated atop a
rotting piling twenty feet out in the water. Maybe Grace was right. Maybe she did spend too much of her time in the past and not enough noticing the present moment.

“We don’t have much time,” said Sam, edging nearer to her on the dock.

“Oh, we don’t have to be anywhere.” Connie smiled at him.

“Ah, but we do,” said Sam, rising to his feet and offering her his hand.

She followed him down a darkening alleyway that ran through the neighborhood behind the old mercantile exchange building, and was surprised when they came to a stop outside of the First Church, where she had first met him. They had approached it from the opposite direction, and Connie experienced the odd vertigo that she always felt when coming upon a familiar place from an unfamiliar standpoint. He unlocked the meetinghouse door and held it open for her.

“Now that I’ve led you astray for a day,” Sam said as he steered her to the staircase that she had noticed on their day in the church archives, “what’s your next step? You’ve already seen Mercy Lamson’s probate record, right?”

“Yes,” said Connie, watching her footing as they climbed in the close confines of the circular stairwell. “Mercy left a book called ‘receipts for physick’ to her daughter Prudence.”

“
Prudence,
” Sam repeated. “Whoa.”

“Yeah,” Connie acceded. “These names are pretty intense.”

“So are you going back to the Will and Probate office after dear Prudence?” He paused to hum a bar or two and his voice echoed as it fell down the empty center of the stairwell. The stairs grew steeper and bore a musty smell, of rare use and dead wasps. Sam had not turned on any lights.

“Maybe,” she said finally. “I mean, yes, definitely. But Mercy was involved in some kind of lawsuit in 1715, and I’d like to find out what it was about. So I guess that’s what I’ll be doing tomorrow. Going to the courthouse. Then I’ll go back to Prudence’s probate record after that.” She was starting to grow short of breath from the climb. Presently Sam came to a halt in front of her, and she heard him fumbling at his key ring.

“Here we are,” he said, fitting a key into the locked door ahead of him. With one shoulder he eased the heavy wooden door free from its frame, and turned to grasp Connie’s hand. She hesitated for a moment, then fitted her hand into his palm. “Watch the doorjamb,” he said before pulling her out into the evening sky. Connie caught her breath.

They stood behind a fragile brass railing that wrapped around the bell tower of the meetinghouse, and spread out below them Connie saw the city lights of Salem beginning to wink on in the advancing night. From this height they could see over the clustered brick houses and treetops and shop fronts down to the wharf where they had been sitting, to the harbor and beyond that to the little peninsula of Marblehead lying against the blackening sea. Overhead the sky turned from a frail pink into a deep blushing red-orange, spreading its color onto the rippling surface of the water.

“Oh,” she breathed, eyes widening at the view of the city stretching away beneath her feet. He placed one hand over hers on the railing, and his skin felt warm and dry against her knuckles. His other hand traced her jaw, coming to a rest alongside her neck and ear, and as she turned to ask him a question, his lips met hers in a deep kiss that lasted until the orange curtain of the setting sun had been pulled completely away to reveal the stars glimmering overhead.

Salem Town, Massachusetts
Late October
1715

T
he thinning patch had been there for at least two winters, but of course it would be on this day that the cloak would rip. And she with no darning materials even to pass the time. Mercy Lamson scowled as she poked her thumb through the offending hole, feeling the harsh wool scraping against her skin. She was tempted to tear the hole wider and wider, to wreak on her tattered cloak the anger that she felt. But she thought better of it.
New cloak would be too dear
, she told herself, frowning. She scanned the townsfolk ranged on the benches around her, half-expecting them to have seen into her passing distemper. If they had, they gave no sign. Scattered women pulled crewel work needles through little scraps of cloth. Men murmured. Behind her, a man she did not recognize slept, head propped on the hard bench back, mouth stretched open in a soundless snore. She sighed and settled herself again in her seat, smoothing the frayed ends of the hole into some semblance of order.
Time enough for patching later
, she thought.

Mercy surveyed the room where she had passed the last several hours, her pale eyes traveling over every square inch of wainscoting in a meager effort to keep her mind occupied. Many years had lapsed since she made her home in Salem, and her confusion had been great when told the case would be heard in the new town hall rather than at the meetinghouse or in the magistrate’s parlor. Right on the common it sat, like a proper English courthouse, or so she had heard. Two stories, good new brick, and not far from the wharves.
But in England the courthouse wood never smelled so polished and new
, she supposed. Mercy had never given much thought to England. Not until she married Jedediah.

The room where she sat, surrounded by fellow petitioners squirming on benches, bore a magisterial splendor that had been unknown in Mercy’s youth. At the front of the room rested a raised bench, festooned with scrollwork, flanked on both sides by heavy wooden boxes for the jurymen. Below the bench stood two fine carved tables, for the lawyers and the clerk, and then, between the tables, in full sight of the jury, bench, and onlooking townsfolk, an empty space before the bar. Already this morning she had watched four piteous souls led to stand alone in this space, the keen focus of the entire room rendering them as if under heavy magnifying glass. A wave of nausea washed through Mercy’s stomach, and she felt her forehead grow cold and moist. Her turn would come soon enough.

Behind the judge’s bench hung a life-size portrait of a regal man in fine robes trimmed in fur, with long, curling hair and heavy rings. She returned her attention to this apparition; she had been contemplating it the better part of the morning. Never had she seen such a lavish likeness of a person. Even from her distant vantage point in the gallery, his eyes seemed warm and kind, and his skin flushed a healthy pink and white. Once she had caught herself wondering how that fine, curling hair would feel pulled through her fingers like a comb—soft, smooth, scented with lavender, she imagined. Embarrassed, she stirred in her seat.
The likeness were startling, sure
, she thought. Should this man ever walk down the streets of Marblehead she would know him, right enough.

Jedediah would be to sea a further two months yet. Mercy’s eyes darkened to think of his feeling, should he hear some of what she must say. Though he knew well what she was about, so much the better that he be gone.

Movement stirred at the front of the courtroom, and Mercy worked her feet together, shifting her weight on the uncushioned bench. The current petitioner was led away, head hanging, wrists clamped together in irons, by two solemn constables. A frisson of activity around the bench and jury boxes signaled the beginning of the next case, and Mercy watched the clerk leaning in inaudible conference with the judge, who nodded and then cast his eyes upon her. Mercy’s stomach rolled over and she swallowed, her tongue suddenly drained of moisture.

“Mehcy Dane Lamson versus the Town of Salem in the County of Essex!” called out the clerk, and a score of heads swiveled to look in her direction. The skin around Mercy’s eyes tightened in momentary surprise, for she had been long gone from Salem Town and knew none of the faces now watching her as she rose from her seat.
How could this changed town have such a long memory?
she wondered, making her way to the bar. The judge, a great hillock of a man wrapped in black robes, with cheeks the sickly yellow of tallow wax, glared at her as she arrived in the empty rectangle at the center of the room. Idly, on the murmuring level below her conscious mind, Mercy assembled the list of herbs that he would need to tone his dying liver. He’d be a man who liked his drink.

“Have you no lawyer, then?” barked the judge.

Mercy opened her mouth to speak, but her dry tongue clung to the roof of her mouth, and a cough came out instead.

“Well?”
the judge bellowed. Mercy straightened herself, smoothing her skirts with both hands, and then settling them on the polished bar before her.

“Indeed, sir, I have not,” she said.

The judge harrumphed, and titters reached Mercy’s ears from the corner of the room that held the jury box. She held her gaze steady on the warm eyes looking down from the portrait of the regal young man. The room settled into quiet. Mercy noticed a cloud pull away from the tall windows on the
right side of the room, releasing a yellow square of sunlight onto the lawyers’ tables. The windowpanes were just beginning to frost over with ice.

“Get on with it, woman!” roared the judge, and she felt the force of his impatience hit her like a hot wind.

“Youah to give yah deposition now,” whispered the clerk, who had appeared at her elbow. He gave her an encouraging nod.

“Oh! Indeed,” said Mercy, unsure. She unfolded a thick sheaf of papers that she had written out at home, periodically, over the past several weeks. They rattled in her hands, and she willed them to be still. She cleared her throat, and the room leaned forward, ears open, waiting for her to speak.

“I, Mercy Dane Lamson, late of Marblehead, do hereby petition the town of Salem in the County of Essex for the rightful restoration of the good name of my mother, Deliverance Dane, that all baseless charges heretofore held against her be cleared by the court, thus relieving us her family of shame and disgrace. Which infamy ha’ resulted in difficulty in transacting business and affairs such that I ha’ little means of sustaining myself and my family, leaving us well nigh in want and indigence, denied the favor and friendship of our fellow men.”

How she hated saying these things. How wretched Jedediah should feel, as though she thought he did not do well enough by her. Mercy’s cheeks flushed deep scarlet as the witnessing townsfolk murmured in response to her plea.

“Mr. Saltonstall for the town, if you please,” said the judge, indicating a plush, elderly man seated at the lawyers’ table to Mercy’s left. With a grunt the gentleman rose, adjusting the flowing gray wig that sat, slightly askew, atop his head. His posture stooped somewhat, but he was lean, and his eyes glinted with the fervor of a much younger man. Mercy tried to read the intent in his face, finding as she did so a loose familiarity to his countenance, the context for which had years ago slipped away.

“Mrs. Lamson,” he began, standing with both hands planted on the table before him. “Problems of reputation being famously difficult to quantify, you perhaps could provide the court with some further detail?”

“Sir?” she asked.

“You have a husband, then?” asked Mr. Saltonstall.

“I do,” she answered, perplexed.

“With you today, is he?” asked the lawyer, making a show of craning his neck to look over the crowd.

“He is at sea,” she replied, brows knitted.

“Ah!” said the lawyer, folding his hands behind his back and strolling into the space before the bar where Mercy stood. “A seaman. Difficult work, that. But it can provide.” The gallery met this sarcastic pronouncement with mirth, and Mercy bristled.

“After my mother’s imprisonment I was for some years neglected by young men of good fame who used to court me for marriage, ’til I was well and truly thought an old maid. Jedediah Lamson endeavored to gain my affection upon his arrival from England, in the thirty-fifth year of my age.”

The women in the gallery whispered among themselves; Mercy felt stirring behind her an undercurrent of feminine anxiousness, as she stood before them embodying one of their many unspoken fears. She started to finger the hole in her cloak but then gripped the bar a little tighter instead.

“Indeed!” proclaimed the lawyer, pacing across the space before her again. “A most fortunate event. And before this inveigling of Mr. Lamson’s, how did you gain a reputable living?”

“After my mother’s trial my neighbors and friends had forsaken my company,” Mercy said, her voice quiet. “I were made so odious in the eyes of all good subjects that they would refuse to employ me in my stated trade, nor entertain me in their houses, nor suffer to repast with me, nor barter with me, neither even to converse with me. I did forbear the practice of my trade, being the very offscouring of my society, and so made to make my home in a new town whereupon I resumed my healing work to a much diminished degree.”

Still the whispers circulated in the mouths of the people seated behind her, occasionally spilling out whole words and fragments that Mercy could just overhear.
Disappeared
, she thought she heard, and
little child
and
neigh
distracted
. Also one word, more often than all the others, the word she dreaded:
witch
.

“What is this healing work whereof you speak?” asked the lawyer, folding his arms and glaring at Mercy. She looked around her, worried, and then up again at the soft eyes in the portrait.

“I am able with plants and herbs, to assemble tinctures for the sick, or for women in the childbed, and to perceive what ails them to a true extent, to give counsel and to soothe their sufferings as well as can be done. For this work I receive goods in trade, or sometimes currency.”

“What!” cried the lawyer, moving his face near to hers so that she cringed away from him slightly, “Are you a
cunning woman
?” The accusation washed over her face, and she began to see the folly of explaining herself to this man, him with his silver buttons and—she sniffed his breath—his snuff addiction.

“I prefer not to attach a name to my craft,” Mercy said, steeling herself against the nausea that still circulated in her belly. Under all her many layers of wool and linen she felt a clammy sheen of sweat collect in her armpits. The air in her lungs grew more shallow.

“Ought not an ailing man be better served to consult with a
physician
? One properly trained in the movements of the humors and the machinations of the body?” asked the lawyer, aiming his question at the box of jurymen. One of them wore a satisfied smirk and was sitting with his boot propped against the polished box railing.
A doctor, surely
, Mercy thought. Educated down Cambridge way, at the college. As if all he need know could come from a book!

“There are those as prefer that,” she conceded.

“Prefer!” the lawyer bellowed, and the judge smiled. “You are a charlatan, woman!” The gallery exploded in cries and commentary as Saltonstall pointed at her with one long finger, the lace of his cuff waving in its wake, and Mercy felt her patience slice in two.

“Whether I am a charlatan or no ought not concern us here!” asserted Mercy, her voice growing stronger. “I charge the court to clear the name of
Deliverance Dane, for her memory’s own sake as well as my own, and for the sake of my infant daughter, as it did the names of all the other unfortunate souls condemned to death by the Court of Oyer and Terminer called by this town in 1692, which scurrilous evidence and vicious lies ha’ been well established by Judge Sewall himself!”

As she spoke she brought her fist down on the bar before her, the strength of her will massing in her belly and crackling down her flying arm, her eyes faded to ice, and the force of the blow shot a crack through the wood, nearly severing the railing in half. The watching crowd gasped, silenced.

Richard Saltonstall, unfazed, strolled back over to where Mercy Lamson stood, her knuckles white with rage, her nostrils quivering.

“So true that the Court of Oyer and Terminer, in their haste to free our covenanted community from diabolical influence, did perhaps too hastily credit the evidence of specters and distracted little girls,” he said, shaking his head sadly.

“And so true, too, that those unfortunate souls, now given over to the care of our almighty and merciful God, have since had their names restored by this court to the status duly accorded them for the benefit and improvement of their living progeny.” He strolled back to stand before the jury box, where the twelve pairs of watching men’s eyes sat fixated upon Mercy’s quivering form.

“And so true that your circumstances have been rendered mean and insupportable following the condemnation of your mother, and yet…” Saltonstall paused, turning to survey the gallery. The gallery waited, holding its breath.

“And yet, Mrs. Lamson,” he said again, and Mercy looked upward at the portrait with its warm, pink cheeks, and its luscious curls, all flat and made only of indifferent paint.

“And yet,” he said a third time, now turning to meet her cool eyes.

“
Those
unfortunates were innocent.”