The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (7 page)

“How came you to ask Goodwife Dane to call upon your ailing daughter?” asked Saltonstall, addressing his question boldly to the assembled populace. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, voice booming into every corner of the meetinghouse.

“I ha’ heard tell that she were able with physick for those ill,” muttered Petford.

“Who spoke thusly?” demanded the lawyer.

“Them as took notice of it,” said Petford, unsure. “Goody Dane be known in the town.”

“And Martha your daughter was some poorly.”

“Of a Monday she were at her labors in the gahden, only to take to her bed Tuesday eve. One week hence she were dead.”

“Dead how?” asked Saltonstall.

“I know not,” whispered Petford. “She cried out in toahments and said she was pricked. Her clothes seemed to trouble her, as though she were boilt up.” His voice caught for an instant, and he paused to clear his throat. “She was in her fits,” he finished.

“Did Goodwife Dane come direct you called her?” prodded Saltonstall.

“She did, and expressed no surprise that I would ask her,” Petford nodded.

“She came to your house to see the child,” Saltonstall confirmed.

“She did.”

“How did the aforesaid Dane minister to the child?”

Petford scowled, thinking. “It seemed she held her head and whispered to her, then fed her something from within her pocket.”

“What sort of physick did she give the child?” asked Saltonstall.

“A tincture of some kind, I dasn’t know what.”

Saltsonstall paced thoughtfully across the room, nodding. “And how smelt it?” he asked, cocking one eyebrow at the defendant.

“Most foul,” said Petford.

“And the child did drink the physick?” Saltonstall continued, this time looking directly at the men of the jury. They sat in a body, frowning, Palfrey nodding his head.

“She did,” said Petford, “and on a sudden she war sorely molested by invisible hands, as if she were beaten about the head and shouldeahs.” At this revelation the crowd gasped, and many eyes turned in their corners toward where Deliverance Dane was sitting.

“Did you see her beaten?” asked Saltonstall.

“I sar not the hands, but I sar her body twitch, and heard her cries.”

“Then what did you?”

Petford paused a moment, looking down at his hands. He pressed his lips together and lifted his face for the first time to the waiting meetinghouse. The townsfolk watched, waiting. Knitting needles stopped. “I war so affrighted that I couldnae move, and begged Goody Dane to make her torments stop. But she looked steadfast upon me, and held her arms above her heid, and saith some mumblings that had no sense, and her eyes glowed like burning coals. My limbs were frozen to the spot, as though unseen bands had tied me. Marther’s cries grew quiet and she fell back amongst the bedding,
and she did not move again. Then I knew this must be witchcraft that ha’ killed my Marther, that this Deliverance Dane must be a wicked sorcerah!”

A commotion broke out as the young woman leapt to her feet and cried, “You dare thus to lie in all this assembly! I am wronged! She was bewitched, but
not by me
!”

The audience exploded in a flurry of shouts and scraping chair legs, women wailing and clutching their hands together. Appleton stood from his armchair and commanded, “You shall sit quiet, Goodwife Dane!” He saw Goody Dane’s husband grab her by the hand and pull her back into her seat. Her cheeks burned scarlet, and her white-blue eyes grew paler.

Saltonstall waved his hands in a gesture of calm, meeting the eyes of the meetinghouse with a knowing gaze. The shouts died gradually into a low rumble, and Saltonstall nodded with authority.

“If,” he resumed, “the child were bewitched, how came Goodwife Dane to know it?”

“I know nowt,” said Petford, “but that she bewitched her.”

Saltonstall strode to the center of the room, standing arms folded with his back to the witness. “Have you heard tell of others so troubled?” he boomed to the back of the room.

“These several months since Marther died I ha’ heard tell sundry other tales of Deliverance’s wickedness. There are them as feel afeart when she cast her eye on them,” claimed Petford, his voice growing stronger.

Saltonstall moved to stand directly in front of the jury, hands clasped behind his back. “Are you a liar, Goodman Petford?” he asked, eyes locked on Lieutenant Davenport, the jury foreman.

“I am not,” affirmed Petford.

“Do you swear so to this jury and these standers-by?” Saltonstall asked, still standing before the jury.

“I do,” said Petford.

“Very well,” said Saltonstall. “You may step down.”

Petford made his way shakily to the bench where he had been seated while the assembly resumed its debate over the merits of the case. Goody
Dane sat immobile, back straight, her hands clasped in her husband’s, pretending to ignore the vast tide of ill feeling that was lapping at her feet.

Appleton turned to instruct the jury in their deliberations but paused, taken aback. The hatred toward Goody Dane that Appleton saw twisting Goodman Palfrey’s face told him already what the verdict would be.

Cambridge, Massachusetts Mid-June 1991

“T
HERE IS THE DISTINCT POSSIBILITY THAT IT COULD BE A NAME,”
remarked Manning Chilton, turning the little slip of parchment over in his hands.

“You think?” Connie asked. She shifted in the stiff wooden chair opposite her advisor’s desk, peeling the backs of her knees one after the other off of the seat. This was the first real summer day of the season, and a trickle of sweat was working its way from under her armpit down her rib cage. Connie always faintly worried that her disheveled appearance would reveal the disordered state within herself. She marveled that Professor Chilton seemed impervious to the elements—she had never seen his shoes caked with winter salt or his palms touched with sweat. He sat today behind his broad leather-topped desk, crisp Oxford cloth shirt matched with a tidy bow tie. He laid the parchment on his desk and settled back in his armchair, looking at her.

“

“But of course. The Puritans, as you know, were rather partial to names drawn from the cardinal virtues.”

“Well, sure,” Connie agreed. “But I thought they generally favored biblical names. Sarah, Rebecca, Mary…”

The dryness and warmth in the room drained her concentration.
You’d think with all their money Harvard could install some central air
, she thought. A fan perched atop Chilton’s bookcase oscillated in the afternoon sun, stirring the heavy air near the ceiling of the office without managing to cool it.

“That they did,” said Chilton. “But they had a distinct fondness for the virtues as well. Quite common, really. Chastity, Mercy, what have you.”

“But Deliverance?” she pressed. “I hadn’t encountered that one before.”

“Not as common as Mercy, perhaps, but not unheard of,” he replied, bringing his fingertips into a little temple shape before him, elbows on the armrests of his chair. “You found this where, again?”

“My grandmother’s house. Marblehead,” said Connie, pulling the slip back across Chilton’s desk.

“A puzzle,” said Chilton. Behind his fingertips his eyes glimmered with interest, as if a delicious shape had crossed before him that Connie could not see. “Perhaps you could stop by their historical society to ask. Or check in the local church records to see if there is a birth or marriage entry. Just to satisfy your curiosity, of course.”

Connie nodded. “I think I might,” she said, cradling the slip in her palm. She had not told Chilton about the key, largely because she could not explain its being where she found it. Why would anyone have hidden a key inside a Bible? The discovery had puzzled her since she’d found the key with its curious parchment. She carried it in her pocket, fingering it every so often, as if meaning could be leached out of the metal.

“But, Connie,” said Chilton, gazing at her over his folded hands, “where do we stand with the dissertation proposal? I had expected to see something by now.”

“I know, Professor Chilton,” said Connie, shrinking inwardly. She had hesitated at first to take her find to him, for fear that the full weight of his expectations would descend upon her. Now she saw them massing over his head like a great cloud, or a tarpaulin filling with rainwater, about to spill over. “I’m sorry. I’ve been so absorbed by having to sort everything out with this house.” Even as she said the words, the excuse sounded feeble.

“Your responsibility is to your research,” he began, pushing back his chair. The ringing of the telephone on his desk interrupted him midword. Irritated, he looked down at the telephone, over at Connie, and then back at the telephone. “Blast,” he said, “would you excuse me a moment?” and picked up the receiver.

Connie accepted the momentary reprieve gratefully and turned toward the books lining Chilton’s office, letting her gaze roam over the spines. Connie and Liz had often joked that grad students make terrible dinner party guests, because they cannot be gotten away from reading the spines of the books.

The shelves within closest reach of the desk all held essential texts of American colonial history—narratives of the settlement of English colonists, of the early Indian wars, of the collapse of the Puritan theocracy. She owned most of them herself. The higher shelves held books that she had never heard of:
Alchemical Symbolism in Jungian Psychoanalysis. Alchemy and the Formation of the Collective Unconscious. History of Medieval Chemistry.

“I am aware of that,” Chilton said quietly into the receiver. “But I can assure you, the paper will be ready. Yes.” Connie kept her gaze steady on the bookshelves. Behind her, she heard Chilton clear his throat. Glancing over her shoulder, Connie’s eyes met Chilton’s and saw that he was waiting, his hand over the telephone receiver.

“Oh!” Connie exclaimed, sensing his meaning. “I’m sorry.” She stood, excusing herself from the room.

Connie idled in the vestibule before Chilton’s office, looking with disinterest at the ceiling. For a few minutes she heard murmurs from behind the
door, broken suddenly by the sound of Chilton raising his voice, muffled but clearly audible.

“My God, how many times must I say it! September, at the Colonial Association conference!” he bellowed. Connie frowned. Chilton never raised his voice. She edged farther away from his office door, staring hard at a painting hanging on the far wall of the vestibule. It was a sickly green landscape, with a blasted half tree trunk in the foreground. The sky was blackened with storm clouds, obscuring a heavy yellow moon on the left side of the canvas and a bloody sun on the right. Eerie. Who would want to have to look at that every day?

“You have my word,” Chilton said behind the office door. “Yes. Before you make the decision, I would ask you to wait until you have seen what I have to offer.” His voice dropped again, and though she told herself that she was focusing only on the painting, her curious ears strained to hear what else Chilton said. The words were too muffled to make out.
Substance
, she thought he said,
rather than stone
. Then she could not hear any more. Several minutes passed in silence, Connie’s gaze traveling along the winding river in the landscape painting until it curved, vanishing into a forbidding wilderness. The painting was so detailed that she could almost recognize the many different species of herb and vine, grouped incongruously together, as if night plants and day plants could all simultaneously exist, flowering all at once.

“I do not want you to be sidetracked by trifles,” Chilton snapped, causing Connie to jump where she stood. The painting had so absorbed her attention that she had not heard the door open between his office and the vestibule. Stepping back into the office after him, Connie blinked, trying to shake the disquieting image of the landscape from her mind. She settled into the seat across from Chilton’s desk, baffled by what she had overheard.

“Well?” Chilton said, leaning forward. Connie wrestled her attention away from the image with its half-formed associations and forced herself to attend to what he had asked her. What had it been? Something about wasting her time with trifles. What was he talking about?

“I’m sorry, Professor Chilton. I…it’s just so warm today. What did you just say?” Connie asked, loathing the words as they came out. She always felt her tokenism in the department keenly and took pains to appear focused whenever she met with Chilton. Her ears burned as Chilton’s mouth drew into a withering smile.

“Trifles. We don’t want you to be distracted from your work,” he reiterated.

“No, of course not,” she stammered.

“It’s all well and good to have these other interests, spending the summer cleaning and whatnot,” he continued. “But we cannot regard the summer as if we were mindless little undergraduates, can we?” Chilton lapsed into the royal “we” only in the deepest throes of aggravation. She found the degree of his displeasure unnerving. “My girl, you simply have to focus. In the academy, the summer is when we are fortunate enough to be free to give uninterrupted attention to our work. I would hate to see you fritter away the opportunities that lie before you.”

Connie paused, unsure if she was reading his tone correctly.
My girl
, she thought. Janine Silva would lose her mind if she found out that Chilton referred to Connie in these demeaning ways. If challenged, she knew that Chilton would think he was being encouraging, even affectionate. That he did not apply such nicknames to his male graduate students Chilton would explain as a sign of his special regard for her. His smile broadened, condescension glinting in its corners. Without thinking, she rubbed the key inside her pocket for reassurance.

“I have no intention of wasting my time this summer, Professor Chilton,” Connie said coldly.

“Of course you don’t, my dear. I just have no wish to see distractions get the better of you. All we need is a remarkable, unusual primary source. When you follow up on your little mystery, don’t lose sight of your real goal. In fact…” He paused, leaning back in his chair and reaching his long fingers toward the pipe that rested in a brass ashtray on his desk. As a match flamed behind Chilton’s cupped hand, Connie felt the meeting drawing to a
close. He shook the match out, finishing his thought. “This find of yours could be serendipitous. Your source awaits you. All you need to do is look.”

She rose, nodding, and slid her bag over her shoulder. With one hand resting on the knob of his office door, Connie turned back to him. “Out of curiosity, Professor Chilton,” she ventured, treading lightly, “will you be speaking at the Colonial Association conference this year? I was trying to decide if I should go.” She eyed him, wondering if he could tell that she was prodding at the substance of his telephone call.

For a long minute he watched her under his lids, as though balancing a mental equation. At length he puffed on his pipe with two thin lips, releasing a haze of smoke through his nose, and chuckled. “Ah,” he said. “So you heard me.” He puffed again. “I have been working on a particular project for some time. I suspect it will be ready for the Colonial Association, yes.”

“What sort of project?” she asked, eyes sliding a degree down his face. Chilton’s skin looked sallow. The folds around his eyes and mouth seemed deeper than she remembered.

“Ach—plenty of time for all that later,” Chilton said, his voice glossed with a casualness that failed to conceal its evasion. “I know that you are anxious to get under way with your own research.”

“I am,” Connie said, watching him. He smiled at her, but it was a smile drained of warmth or mirth. Connie struggled to find a word to describe his smile to herself, but the closest that she could come was
hungry
.

T
HE FOLLOWING DAY, THE SUMMER AIR GREW DENSE WITH MOISTURE,
and a heavy layer of damp descended onto Connie’s skin. The atmosphere in Granna’s house grew leaden and thick with the heat, and so Connie fled to the main street in what passed for Marblehead’s downtown. She stood in the lone telephone booth, one sandal propping the door open, receiver wedged between her shoulder and her ear.

“Thank you, I’ll wait,” she said to the sleepy-sounding person on the other end of the telephone. The receiver clicked and went blank as she was
placed on hold. Across the street, teenagers in bathing suits clustered in an ice cream shop, flipping through months-old copies of
People
and elbowing one another. She wiped her forearm across her upper lip and caught herself staring at the chattering kids with a feeling akin to envy. Or perhaps nostalgia. Connie had nearly forgotten that there had been a time in her life when summer was for loafing, for filling long, bored hours.

The receiver clicked again. “Nothing?” Connie replied to the crackling voice. “Are you sure?” The telephone chirped and squawked.

“What about alternative spellings? Like
D-e-i-g-n
?” The phone squabbled again. She scribbled notes on the pad that she held open over the phone bookshelf.

“Okay,” she said, sighing in frustration. “Thank you.” She replaced the telephone in its cradle, resting with her hand on the hot plastic receiver. Connie contemplated calling Grace. She had not spoken with her mother at length since arriving at Granna’s house, and now she idly wondered what Grace would have to say about the peculiar, vivid daydreams that had been intruding into her consciousness over the past couple of weeks. Connie pressed her lips together, scowling. Either Grace would worry that Connie was not sleeping enough, and so launch into a long discourse on what herbal teas would help; or, she would believe that Connie was “tapping into her second sight” and would want to talk about aura healing. Only Grace, of all the people Connie knew, would consider hallucinating to be a good thing. On an impulse Connie dialed the number for the Santa Fe house, allowed it to ring four or five times, and hung up just as Grace’s machine started to say
Blessed be this day, dear caller!

Connie blew an exasperated breath through her nose and stepped with relief out of the booth. The scorching afternoon felt almost cool after the greenhouselike glass box. She felt the top layer of sweat lift off of her skin. That took care of the historical society, then. No records of any kind that mentioned a Deliverance Dane. Or a Deliverance Deign. Or any other kind of Deliverance, for that matter. She pulled the key out of the pocket of her cutoffs and turned it over in the white afternoon. It glinted.

Chilton had also suggested that she try local church records. That morning she stopped by the Marblehead meetinghouse, and a friendly matron in bright Lilly Pulitzer Bermuda shorts informed her that First Church by the Sea, Congregational was affiliated with First Church in Salem until around 1720, and that their early membership records were stored in Salem. The afternoon felt so dense and slow that Connie almost welcomed the excuse to travel to the neighboring town. When that search turned up empty, as she expected it probably would, she would adjourn to the beach in defeat. A striped umbrella and towel waited in the trunk of her Volvo, along with a bathing suit and a horror novel bought at the church thrift shop. Chilton’s disapproving face hovered before her momentarily, and Connie glowered.