The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (33 page)

At the bottom of the western hill, where the crowd thinned, a tallish girl in an overlarge, badly pinned coif stood, one hand holding the bridle of a skinny, antsy little horse weighted down with several bundles tied together with rope. At her feet sat a small dog, who seemed the exact same color as the cloud of dust; several onlookers who passed en route to the front of the crowd looked once and then again, unsure if the animal were really there. The girl’s pallid face was devoid of expression, betraying none of the pleasure and excitement, or subdued smugness, that animated the faces around her.

As the day wore onward toward noon, the energy thrumming through the crowd grew in almost palpable layers. Thick masses of dread and anticipation built up in the chest of each onlooker; it was the same heavy, expect
ant mood that falls over a tavern just before a fistfight breaks out, a heady blend of fear and dismay, touched with excitement. The chattering became more lively, and when someone finally spotted the prison cart lumbering toward them in the distance, screams and bellows began to thread through the throng, punctuated by scraps of audible prayer and remonstration.

Mercy placed her hands on the Bartletts’ bay mare’s flank, balancing on her toes and peering over the horse’s knobby back. The cart drew closer, led by a warden, with six women of varying heights and ages standing, their hands gripping the bars of the cart for balance, swaying and knocking over the ruts in the road.

As the cart reached the outer edges of the crowd, the first head of rotten cabbage went flying, striking old Susannah Martin squarely on the chest with a wet splat so loud that even Mercy, from her distant vantage point, could hear it. The stricken woman in the cart turned her face away, mouth pulled into a miserable frown as the rancid leaves clung to her already filthy dress. Rebecca Nurse, eyes still wizened and kind, incredibly, after her months of imprisonment, reached a bony finger up to pluck one of the leaves off of Susannah’s collar, whispering a few words in her ear as she did so. Susannah nodded, mouth still frowning, and closed her eyes, seeming to pull deep within herself as the next cabbage exploded across the wooden side of the cart.

Mercy observed the condemned women huddling together, Sarah Good’s mouth open, screeching at the mob now roiling around the wheels of the cart, arms reaching up to claw at the hems of the women’s dresses, spoiled vegetables soaring ineffectually overhead or, sometimes, glancing off a cowering shoulder. Sarah Wildes held her arms up over her face, hands clutching her soiled coif, shoulders trembling, and Elizabeth Howe was seen to spit square upon the face of a bellowing matron in the crowd. In the middle of the group, half a head taller than the rest, Deliverance Dane stood, brow soft, gazing off into the far distance. Mercy squinted and saw that her mother’s mouth was moving imperceptibly, but she could not tell what charm or prayer she might be saying. A maize cob sailed by, just miss
ing Deliverance’s cheek, but she did not flinch. Mercy straightened her shoulders, willing herself to feel the strength that she saw in her mother’s face.

The cart slowed, weighed down by the throng lapping up against its sides but drawing ever nearer to the scaffold on the hilltop. The sound rising and bubbling from the crowd was so intense that Mercy thought she could almost see it, hovering, yellowish black, pouring forth from the gaping mouths and angry eyes of the villagers. The cart drew to a rickety halt a few feet from the base of the scaffold, and as the six women were led down from their perch, the mob surged to overtake them, held back only by the linked arms and entreaties of a small band of ministers from the surrounding towns. Chained together at the wrists, they were escorted up the steps to the wooden platform, and Mercy’s grip tightened unconsciously around the thick leather bridle, causing the bay mare to jerk her chin and nicker.

Each woman was led by her wrists to stand directly behind the six hanging ropes, their loops lying in wait like six fat snakes. A magistrate mounted the scaffold steps, hooking his thumbs importantly into his overcoat and surveying the wild crowd. A rotten squash tumbled onto the platform at his feet, and he glowered, clapping his hands together sharply to indicate that the crowd must collect itself. Silencing began in the shadows of the scaffold, gradually working its way in fits and spurts across the surface of the crowd, and Mercy perceived the boiling noise lower to simmering.

“Susannah Martin,” the magistrate began, voice shaking in the timbres of self-imagined gravitas, “Sarah Wildes, Rebecca Nurse, Sarah Good, Elizabeth Howe, and Deliverance Dane! You have been tried by the esteemed Court of Oyer and Terminer gathered together at Salem Town and found guilty of the heinous and diabolical crime of witchcraft, which being a crime against the very nature of God Himself, is punishable by death. Do any of you wish to confess, and name those agents of your very undoing? Will you do your duty to purge your community, struggling and alone in a wilderness fraught with sin, of the evils that lie in our midst?”

The six women stood, saying nothing, some with their heads bowed and
others with their eyes closed, cheeks twitching. One of the ministers, a nervous man just down from Beverly Farms, stepped forward from where he had been hovering behind the magistrate, a small Bible clutched between his hands. Mercy’s eyes narrowed, and she strained to hear what the minister was saying.

His voice did not carry with the weight of the magistrate’s, but he seemed to be entreating each woman in turn to confess her witchcraft, and that if each would confess and submit herself to Jesus then she should be spared, if only she would name those others in the town who were her confederates in diabolism. Mercy’s conclusions were confirmed when the man reached Sarah Good, her eyes manic, her distraction made more pronounced by her palpable fury.

“I, a witch!” she screamed, and the crowd gasped. She cast a black look at Deliverance, then thrust her chin at the crowd and bellowed, “
I
am no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink!”

Upon this outburst the crowd exploded in a rage, more spoiled vegetables raining down upon the women on the scaffold, hurling oaths and condemnations upon them. Mercy’s hands were clutched underneath her chin, her lips drawn back in a grimace, and two hot tears squeezed out of the corners of her eyes. She tried to collect herself, knowing that she must concentrate in order to accomplish the duty she had set for herself. She fastened her eyes on her mother, whose mouth was still moving silently, and whose eyes were traveling across the faces of the women standing at her side.

“Very well!” cried the magistrate. “If you women shall not give yourselves into the hands of your willing Savior and confess your sins here before God and your fellow man, then you are to be hanged by your necks until dead. Have you anything further to say for yourselves?”

Rebecca Nurse, straightening her thin and withered frame, folded her hands into a manner of prayer. The mob hushed, waiting to hear what this widely respected woman, this full church member no less, would say in the instant of her death. “May the most gracious Almighty God forgive them,”
she said, and the crowd was silent enough that Mercy had no trouble hearing her, though Goody Nurse’s voice was reedy and weak. “For they know not what they do.”

Murmurs burbled in the mouths of the watching populace as a man clad in black fitted a noose around Susannah Martin’s neck. Susannah’s face was a mottled shade of purple and red, weeping, mucus bubbling at her nose. The noose tightened down at the base of her skull, and Susannah started to emit a high gasping whimper, her breath coming faster in her chest as she gulped for air. The man moved to kick Susannah off the platform, and as his heavy boot made contact with her cowering back, a frisson of excitement ran through the crowd. At that moment, time seemed to slow imperceptibly, and Mercy saw Susannah’s feet rise from the wooden platform, her eyes cast upward, her face contorted with fear and anguish, the rope trailing loose behind her as she traveled through the air. Then in an instant a great crack sounded over the heads of the crowd, and Susannah Martin’s body swayed at the end of the taut rope, lifeless, left foot twitching. The crowd erupted, and Mercy heard an unseen woman cry out, “God be praised!”

The man in black moved to Sarah Wildes, who fell to bawling, begging, and pleading to be spared, that she was no witch, that she could never confess to a lie for that be a mortal sin, that she loved Jesus and craved His grace and forgiveness. The crowd hooted as the weeping woman clutched at her face, and the thin, nervous minister approached her to hold her by her hands and pray with her as the man fitted the noose around her neck. Her screams rose in pitch as the minister stepped aside, the man kicked her, then stopped suddenly as a great cracking sound tore across the empty hillside.

Throughout the preparations under way about her neck, Rebecca Nurse had held her hands folded under her chin, her eyes closed and her face serene. Her lips moved as she repeated the Lord’s Prayer, and she did not interrupt her communion with God for even an instant as the noose was tightened and the foot went flying, sending her frail body cartwheeling into space. When the rope stayed her fall with a brutal snap the crowd gasped, as
if they had not fully understood until that moment that this gentle, well-regarded woman would really be put to death.

An unbroken stream of curses and oaths had been pouring from the mouths of Sarah Good and Elizabeth Howe, each spitting and kicking out at the grasping hands below them amid the rising cheers of the mob. “Damn you all! God damn you all!” Sarah Good was screaming when the man’s rough foot connected with her side, and she fell twisting and flailing over the side of the scaffold, her body stopped with a bounce by the choking grip of the rope.

Mercy tore her gaze away from the horror on the scaffold, pulling a handful of herbs from the pocket beneath her apron. She glanced down at the familiar animal seated at her feet, who looked up at her sadly. Steeling herself against the coming pain, Mercy began shredding the herbs in her hands, scattering them in a precise circle at her feet and muttering a long string of Latin words quietly enough to be unobserved.

Five women now dangled at the end of the long ropes, the kicking having drained from their feet, all their faces unaccountably smooth and white, loosened hair hanging around their faces, a vengeful smile even lingering around Sarah Good’s lips, though her head now flopped at an impossible angle. The man in black clothes approached Deliverance Dane, and she held her head stiffly, folding her hands in prayer. Mercy fastened her gaze upon her mother, channeling all the love and fear and terror in her heart into a torrent of pure will, which coalesced into a barely visible glowing blue-white ball held in her outstretched hands. The man tightened the rope around the base of Deliverance’s neck, and she gripped her hands together more tightly, bracing for the impact of the man’s foot but still jerking in surprise when it came.

For a split second time halted, the crowd frozen immobile, Deliverance hovering suspended in the air before falling as the blue-white intention ripped forth from between Mercy’s trembling fingers, cracking like a lightning bolt over the heads of the slavering populace, landing on Deliverance’s
forehead and bursting outward with a glittering of invisible sparks. In that instant Mercy felt the connection of her will with her mother’s own, watched the unfolding flashes of her mother’s life rush across her own eyes, glimpsing now the great ship pulling away from the coast of East Anglia, the smallness of her mother’s feet running through a garden forty years ago, the bursting in the chest at the face of a young Nathaniel, the overwhelming love mixed with terror at the great squalling mouth of the infant Mercy, the sadness that it all must end, and the unshaken faith of something, something ineffable but beautiful, yet to come. All this passed into the palms of Mercy’s hands as she filled her mother’s body with the will and possibility to be released from pain, her brows knitted in effort. Then all at once she perceived the release as it happened, sensed her mother’s soul freed from the constraints of her mortal envelope, feeling time resume and her mother’s body grow limp, her face bright and serene, and Mercy’s hands dropped to her sides, faint whiffs of smoke trailing up from her fingertips. Mercy’s nerves and muscles quivered with the blinding pain that she had siphoned away, and she stumbled, nearly faint. She climbed with the last of her strength onto the sagging back of the bay mare, and by the time the sound of Deliverance’s neck breaking echoed over the heads of the howling crowd, Mercy was gone.

Marblehead, Massachusetts Autumnal Equinox 1991

T
HE LONG DINING TABLE STOOD CLEARED OF ITS USUAL FLOTSAM
, and its surface evinced a deep golden polish, as if someone had finally taken the time to get after it with lemon oil soap and a clean rag. The interior shutters had all been pinned back, welcoming what little late afternoon sunlight could penetrate the overgrown garden outside. As summer had broken down into the brittleness of autumn, the dense ivy on the windows of the Milk Street house had faded from a rich dark green to angry, vibrant red. Then, one day, a meddlesome wind dashed through the garden, lifting away the top scrim of leaves, sloughing them off like dead skin. Connie fastened back the last shutter and surveyed the orange and yellow garden with pleasure; as the garden layers fell away ahead of the advancing winter, she felt the house shaking off its vegetal shadows, filling with life as the world around it changed. As she watched, a fresh gust blew by, rolling along another
armful of leaves. She inhaled, enjoying the crisp smell of the earth as it underwent its preparations.

She had preparations under way herself, she recalled, turning away from the window. On the table she had laid the thick Dane manuscript, open to the page marked
Method for the Redress of Fitts
, together with her own scribbled notes, diverse dried herbs collected from the garden and kitchen jars, including the mandrake root, and the bottle that she had smuggled out of the hospital. Next to these implements stood the antique oil lamp, lit and at the ready in the event that the daylight drained away too soon. She moved back to the hearth, where after some effort—the chimney was hesitant to draw, full with decades of undisturbed soot—she had kindled a low, steady fire. Stooping, Connie prodded the embers with a long poker, sending a glittering of sparks up along the brick sides of the fireplace. An iron cauldron hung, ridiculously, suspended on a hook to the side of the fire. She leaned the poker against the wall and looked down to where Arlo was sitting, primly, his paws together, under the table.

“All I need is a pointy hat,” she remarked. He blinked.

The plan was simple. She had placed the charm under Sam’s pillow already. Now the recipe prescribed a short ritual that would draw the “malefactor”—she took that to mean whatever agent was making him sick, but the manuscript was ambiguous on that score—out of a person suffering from fits. She would conduct the ritual, and it should pull the illness out of Sam; the charm under his pillow would keep it from coming back in. She was prepared for the practice to hurt somewhat; with each successive experiment that she had conducted, either with the plants or the divination tools, she had felt a higher degree of pain the harder she worked. Connie placed her fingertips on the table and closed her eyes. Did Grace feel pain when she cleared the auras of her Santa Fe friends? Connie would have to ask her. A tiny smile pulled at her lips. The rational voice that dwelt in Connie’s most private core still balked at what she was about to do, but that voice had grown smaller in the past few weeks. Instead she focused her
thoughts on Grace’s warm face, beaming her unshaken confidence in what Connie could do. And she thought about Sam.

She opened her eyes. “Okay then,” Connie announced to the empty room, and she pushed the sleeves of her turtleneck sweater up over her elbows. Running a finger down the manuscript page, she found her place in the text and began.

“To determine if a man’s mortal suffering be caused by bewitchment,” she read aloud, “catch his water in a witch-bottle and throw in some pins or nails and boil it upon a very hot fire.”

For the past few days Connie had been ruminating on the nature of this word
bewitchment
. The language of this strange work seemed slippery across the ages, with meanings shifting over time in the same way that the description of the book had changed according to who was doing the describing. Modernity took “bewitchment” to mean something caused by magical intervention. But early modern people lived in a world that largely predated science, operating without sophisticated understanding of the difference between correlation and causation. Connie had a suspicion that “bewitchment” might imply not magical causes per se, but only nonorganic ones. Poisoning, say, rather than common illness. Something attributable to an outside source, rather than to the mysterious workings of Providence. Just because a situation had a magical solution might not necessarily mean that it had a magical cause.

She took hold of the antique bottle, half full with Sam’s stolen urine, and released the stopper. Two or three pitted old pins were still inside, rusted in place, but she dropped in three brand-new silver eight-penny nails that she had purchased that week at the Marblehead hardware store. She added an open safety pin, a plastic-pearl-topped sewing pin that pricked her foot one morning in the bathroom, the still-threaded needle from within the grinning little corn husk doll on the mantel, a few new staples retrieved from the stapler in the Widener Library reference room, and an upholstery tack pried from the underside of a pew in the church where Sam was working on the day that he fell from the scaffold. Each addition tinked against the glass
bottleneck, falling into the water with a hiss and releasing a faint but perceptible curl of smoke. Connie replaced the stopper, pausing to watch the water inside begin to simmer and boil, though the bottle was still standing on the table, away from any source of heat.

She then turned her attention to the fire, bending to stoke it again with the long poker. Connie added a few pinecones, which snapped and hissed, bursting immediately into flame and jostling the fire to burn hotter. The manuscript listed a long array of herbs and plants to be burned for “sure withdrawal.” In the past few days Connie had gathered as great a variety as she could from the garden and woods immediately surrounding the house, hanging them in the kitchen to dry. First she tossed in a dried bunch of thyme, rosemary, feverfew, sage, and mint, the aromatic herbs disintegrating in a fragrant blue puff of smoke, most of which tumbled upward to the chimney, but some of which spilled over the top lip of the hearth, drifting to the ceiling of the dining room. Her nose twitched, enjoying the sharp sensation of the oils in the herbs popping in the fire. Next Connie threw in a fragile bunch of flowering angelica, its lacy flowers desiccated and crumbling. The fire leapt to consume the dried flowers, and Connie’s shadow ducked and shimmied across the floor behind her as she worked, her face shining orange in the firelight.

Last, she reached for the Plymouth gentian, a tender pink blossom that was almost impossible to find, which she had discovered struggling for life along the slurried bank of the little water hole called Joe Brown’s pond, a few minutes’ walk from Milk Street. The flowers had wilted without really drying, and as she took them up they drooped in her hands. She pitched them into the fire, and to her surprise the fire spat forth a bright white orb that seemed to explode with an audible poof. Connie swallowed, nerves clawing at her belly, and forced herself to turn back to the manuscript.

“Throw the bottle into the fire whilst reciting the Lord’s Prayer followed by this most effective incantation,” she read, hands planted on her hips. “Okay,” she said, wondering if saying so aloud would push her fear away.

It didn’t.

“Okay,” she said again, grasping the bottle with a shaking hand and holding it up into the fading sunlight. The fluid inside was churning and bubbling, the sharp pins and nails swirling in a great angry froth. “Our Father,” she began, “Who art in Heaven. Hallowed be thy name.”

As she spoke, Connie turned, bringing the bottle nearer the fire. “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.” The flames in the fire jumped, lapping higher against the hearth bricks, and Connie could feel the hot miasma rising out of the embers and pressing into the room. “Give us this day our daily bread,” she continued, squinting her eyes against the heat. “And forgive us our debts”—she chose the old, straightforward, Congregational wording—“as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation!” Her voice rose; she had never really listened to the words closely, but now the fire was growing fierce, its flames whitening, and she felt bizarrely as if she must be heard over the noise of its crackling. She held the bottle suspended over it with two singeing fingers, and blisters began to bubble forth. “But deliver us from evil! For Thine is the Kingdom! And the power!” At this a tongue of flame licked hungrily up toward the glass, meeting the bottom of the bottle. “And the glory! For ever and ever! Amen!”

She dropped the bottle. It spiraled, slowly, from her fingers down, down, down until it landed with an explosion of sparks, and the fire closed over it with a ferocious roar. Now she had the incantation to recite. Unsure what to do with her hands, Connie folded them at her chest in a prayerful attitude and bowed her head. The new blisters on the hand that had been holding the bottle felt tender and soft under the pressure of her fingers.

“Agla!” she said, and the fire spat in response, a thick column of white smoke beginning to billow out from the center of the burning logs. “Pater! Dominus!” With each word, the white smoke grew thicker until the chimney could not swallow it all and it began to spill forth from the hearth to the ceiling, crawling in waves across the rafters overhead before pouring through the open windows. “Tetragrammaton! Adonai! Heavenly Father I beseech thee, bring the evildoer unto me!”

As the last words escaped her lips, the white smoke seemed to condense into a tangible substance, or long-tailed creature, hurrying up out of the fire and skittering across the ceiling to escape through the windows. In that instant, with a rushing, gulping sound the fire tamped itself down. Connie opened her eyes to find the room suddenly calm, the smoke entirely vanished, the fire crackling and friendly.

She surveyed the room, hands still folded under her chin. There was the fire, burning politely. There was the bottle, blackened with smoke, nestled in the embers. There was the dining table, still holding the manuscript and an unused assortment of herbs and plants. Her eyes traveled over every surface in the room, wondering if she had just imagined it all—the smoke, the noise, the leaping flames.

“Is that it?” she asked the empty room. Arlo was nowhere to be seen. She looked under the table and found him there, huddled in a little ball the color of night, watching her with worried eyes. “I think you can come out,” she whispered, beckoning to him. “It’s over.” He refused to move. Connie stood back up, frowning. Something was not right. The house felt suspended, alert. She waited, unsure what to do next.

As she stood by the table, fingertips resting on the tabletop, eyes wide, she heard a rumbling in the distance, like a heavy truck rolling over a wooden bridge, only the sound seemed to be drawing nearer. In the time it took for her to begin to move around the table and make her way to the nearest window, the sound built and grew, sending tremors through the ground under her feet, bending and rocking the wide pine floorboards. Connie fell to her knees, the shaking moving into the walls of the house, clattering the crockery in the dining room alcove and swaying the hanging spider plants in wide, jerky arcs. She crawled under the table, floor thumping and vibrating under her hands and knees. From the kitchen she heard the sound of a jar exploding across the linoleum floor. She reached Arlo, wrapping her arms around his small body just as the rumbling stopped with a single great
whump
, the sound of the front door flying open. Connie extended her head out from under the table, mouth flopping open in surprise.

There, adjusting his club tie, stood Manning Chilton. She backed away on her knees under the table, getting to her feet as she heard him start to chortle.

“Gracious, my girl,” he boomed from the front door, stepping into the house. “And I thought you were exaggerating. This is a wretched hovel, indeed.”

Her stomach contracted in fear, but a little voice in the back of her mind reminded her about the burned symbol on the door.
Better to be on your own turf
, she heard Grace say, voice knowing.
Nobody wants to keep you safe more than I do.
Connie straightened, face contorted in confusion.

“What,” she stammered, confused. “What are you doing here?” She cast one eye back down to the recipe, double-checking the words. “Bring the evildoer unto me” the incantation said. And then she saw that she had overlooked a last line.
When his Water is well Boilt so shall the Sorcerer be drawn unto the fyre
, the manuscript promised.
And so with pins and crafte may he be entreated to free his Victim from his Diabolicall machinations. Refer to receipts for Death-philtres to ascertain other means
. Then the page supplied the long list of herbs for sure withdrawal. At the very bottom of the page, in faded script such that she had not noticed it before, was written
Cont’d
.

Connie glanced quickly up at her advisor, who was approaching with a thin smile attached to his face. “I’ve been meaning to drop by for some time,” he remarked, voice jovial. “I believe that you have something for me, do you not?” He looked bemused, as if a theory he had long held had just been proven correct.

“How,” she began, swallowing when she found her throat sticky and dry. “How did you get here?”

He chuckled, drawing nearer. “Why, in a car, of course.”

Connie had read several historical accounts of the witch-bottle technique, all of which were ambiguous in their depictions of what would happen. She had thought that it would draw the illness—the malefactor—out of Sam, perhaps into the bottle in the fire. But now she saw that the instructions could be read another way. It could be seen to draw the
agent responsible
for the illness
to the fire. Chilton might have thought he was stopping by of his own volition, but the realization began to dawn on Connie that, in fact, his appearance was the result of the work she had just done. Her mouth fell open, horrified.

He bent to inspect one of the shield-back chairs that Connie had pushed to the side of the room. “Eighteenth-century. Marvelous,” he said to no one in particular. Reaching a long finger forward, he brushed a fingernail against the patterned splat. “Inlaid,” he confirmed to himself. He straightened, looking again at her. “Yes. Well, in truth I was spending the afternoon working away on some compounds in my office. And then, rather abruptly, it occurred to me that I might come see you.” He smiled again, his mouth devoid of humor. “I hope that the quicksilver doesn’t boil over. Imagine how I shall explain an office chemical fire at the next history department meeting.”