Children of Salem Read online

  “Midnight? Where?”

  “At Watch Hill—” he coughed roughly—“before you enter the village for the parish house. When we meet in public, no one can know that we’ve had any contact.”

  “Understood but Watch Hill at the witching hour?”

  “This fiend, Parris, believes himself the owner of the entire parish and its buildings.” More coughing interrupted the old man. “I will have additional papers, affidavits you should see and read before you go much further.”

  “I hope your confidence in me is not misplaced, Reverend Higginson.”

  Mather laughed and poured more ale for them all. “Come, come. This is a challenge for a man of your talents, and if you rise to it, Wakely, your star will rise as well. You will’ve finalized your indenture to our family and take up your final education in the law. My father will see to it that you are well rewarded.”

  Jeremiah kept his eyes pinned on the elder statesman of the church. Higginson did not flinch or blink. “Increase spoke of a magistrate’s seat opening up…an appointment in a district along the Connecticut, I believe. Once this is over.”

  Jeremiah turned to Mather. “I’d like that in writing, sir.”

  Again Mather laughed. “That’s why my father likes you, Jeremy! Preparation and reparation. You’re wise enough to cover your backside.”

  The powerful Mathers had obviously discussed this matter at length with the patriarch Higginson some time before Reverend Increase Mather had sailed for England in a bid to negotiate a new Charter for the colonies with the new King of England. The Mathers and Higginson believed that an insider was needed, one the powerful ministers, in the end, could control.

  Mather now lifted his ale cup and toasted: “Get word back to us, Jeremy.”

  Jeremy stayed his hand for any final toast. He feared his coming off as ridiculous in Serena’s eyes—no matter her current situation—when he should show up in that cursed village as a Prodigal Son who’d turned to the clergy. There as an apprentice working toward being ordained a Puritan minister. Far from the promises made to Serena in the letter he’d penned and left behind, that he’d return when he made his way in the world as a man worthy of her. As a result of these careening thoughts, Jeremiah’s ale cup was the last to go up in toast to seal this backroom deal.

  The sloshing cup in Higginson’s hand shook like a windblown sheaf of paper. The old man’s other hand, planted firmly on his cane, shook as well, so hard that it sent the cane from side to side. Still, the three men drank to success while Jeremiah thought, but dared not say: Higginson’s one foot is in the grave, the other slipping, while Cotton Mather is the definiton of an opportunist. What private conversations have they had? What do they figure to collect from their schemes? Have I struck a bargain with the devil?

  All three men now emptied their cups, but this caused even more ghastly coughing coming from deep within Higginson’s gut. Regardless of Higginson’s difficulty, they all shook hands after Mather, at the last moment, snatched on a white glove.

  Then Jeremiah Wakely put aside his cup and said, “I’d best be off…prepare for my trip back to Salem.”

  As Jeremiah rushed off, he gave a fleeting thought to Serena Nurse. She represented the only true penitence that’d come of his having left Salem a decade ago. She’d likely be well married by now, perhaps with a toddler if not two, and she’d scarcely give him a glance. As for his giving her a glance, it’d likely be from afar if at all.

  She’d be untouchable of course, and she’d surely have forgotten all about him by now. Serena hadn’t been the only reason he’d not wanted this duty, but she remained the only reason he’d not spoken of. To speak of the depth of his pain and longing to such men as Mather and Higginson might well have gotten him a cheery pat on the back and a bit of a chuckle but hardly understanding. At least he imagined as much now as he made his way along the closed-in, dark streets of Boston’s North End, going for his lodgings.

  The few lamps that lit his way only made the darker corners and hideaways blacker still: places that cloaked piratical Portuguese sailors waiting for a berth alongside the usual scoundrels and human jetsam. His path took him within speaking and hearing distance of such men lolling about a tavern or locked away in the North End jail. All signs said that a cutthroat might leap out at him at the next footfall. Someone who might as casually kill him for what loose coin jingled in his pouch as say “G’evenin’ gov’ner.”

  As he passed ships in the harbor, the rigging beating an ominous sound in a building wind, he thought of how Reverend Mather had meant to keep Reverend Higginson’s presence in Boston their little secret until the old man came storming from behind that door.

  Did everyone in the church have a secret passion or something to hide? What did it gain Mather the Younger to align himself with the most powerful churchman in Salem Town, a seaport doing twice the business with England and foreign ports as Boston these days? A seaport destined to become the center of all commerce in the Massachusetts Bay Colony?

  Sleep on it, he told himself.

  It’d been a long journey to Boston from Casco Bay, Maine, where his last assignment had taken him to another troubled parish. Then the Puritan leadership kept close watch on a former minister of Salem Village, Reverend George Burroughs.

  The minister had left Salem in disgrace and under a dark cloud; in fact, he’d left from a jail cell. Nonpayment of debts that’d accrued from two funerals—one for his wife and the other his children, all dead of a plague. Reverend Burroughs had resettled in Maine as a possible heretic. However, Jeremiah’s reports, he believed, vindicated the man, and so he imagined that was one fire he’d doused—and that perhaps his work served a noble purpose after all. But thus far, only Reverend Cotton Mather had read his reports on the matter and no action one way or the other had been taken in the Burroughs affair.

  To be sure, George Burroughs proved a colorful character indeed for a man who earned his living from behind a pulpit. Jeremy thought him a minister who might fit in with that colony of misfits—Rhode Island.

  By the time Jeremiah found his bed and undressed for sleep, as sleeping naked was his preference, it’d grown quite late. He lay on his rough mattress and pillow in the crowded Red Lion Inn, wakeful yet.

  Again he was thinking far more of Serena Nurse than he was of riding off to Salem out of some sense of duty. He worried far more about his first confrontation with her than any eccentric minister or possible heretic, or of Mather’s cow-towing to Higginson, for that matter.

  In fact, the image of Serena, ten years younger than today, swept out all other thought. He remembered her golden hair, often flowing loose, always luxurious and framing a heart-shaped, smiling face. He recalled how she smelled as fresh and wonderful as the new morning’s dew that once they rolled about in as foolish and young hearts. He recalled how creamy and smooth her skin was against his, and how sweet her lips to his taste. Her hands so tender and warm, her arms welcoming. All romantic memories that wanted so much to push away the awful reality of the situation.

  Bittersweet memories of Serena afforded some comfort, despite his losing her, despite the ache in his heart. It was an image to lull and to anchor a man. Even a man without a home; to lull him into a desire for slumber over drink or gambling or worse vices still. Serena, he asked himself as he dozed off, do you remember or care to remember what we once had?

  Chapter One

  Swampscott, Essex County, Massachusetts, March 6, 1692 at the midnight hour

  At two-score-ten and four, the woman in tattered clothes chewed tobacco, lit a candle, shakily stood alone in the abandoned McTeagh cabin, then waddled straight for her hidden magic needles and the doll.

  The doll she’d paid dearly for was fashioned by Sam Wardwell, both blacksmith and cunning man, some openly called the Wizard of Andover. Sarah had made several trips to make payments, and each time Wardwell would display the doll in its progress from wood to realism. Sarah Goode believed the man a magician.

  F
urther, Wardwell asked no questions beyond her specifications. He kept mum, too, and never knew that his creation was in the image of Betty Parris; that it was a doll that’d do harm to Reverend Samuel Parris’ eleven-year-old, little Elizabeth Junior, named for her mother.

  The doll, once stuck full with pins—as Parris’s Barbados servant, Tituba Indian, had instructed—would thereby inflict pain on the minister’s daughter; thereby inflicting suffering on the minister himself. But only if Sarah used a lock of the child’s real hair, pinned to a swath of cloth belonging to the child made into a pouch harboring the child’s nail clippings. All items Sarah had bartered from the hands of Tituba, the Barbados witch and servant to the Reverend Samuel Parris. Aside from a few pretty shells and a green bottle, all that Tituba had wanted from the bargain was that Sarah Goode eventually destroy Reverend Parris.

  The old woman was unsure if she believed everything that Tituba had told her about Reverend Parris—like the business of his having either stolen or killed Tituba’s infant at birth—and that it was his child—but Goode understood why the black servant hated her master. “Tit’shuba hates ’im ’cause what Parris done to her. Same as me—took her child same as my Dorcas.”

  Goode’s candle flickered against a pinched, prune-dried face. The bowlegged Sarah must push and pull her weight on legs reluctant to take her the final step. It was, after all, a grave undertaking she had planned: to strike hard at a minister. A plan that would take her into the dark arts far deeper than ever she had practiced before—to commit witchcraft on a child.

  This last reluctance held her; perhaps she ought not to do what her anger dictated. Perhaps she should show a measure of Christian forgiveness, mercy. But when she looked for such things as pardon and clemency, all she found were the vilest of Christian curses to hurl at the Reverend Mr. Parris.

  In fact, none of the simple curses would do. Nothing as mundane as ‘may your dog ne’er hunt, may your pig ne’er grunt, may your cow ne’er milk, nor your worms e’er silk; may your lock ne’er latch, the wind take your thatch. Things had gone far beyond such humdrum incantation, and Goode had tried all the more tedious hexes on Parris, but the man’s protection proved strong against the commonplace. Besides, murderous thoughts had come of an old woman’s rage. So murderous and heinous that for days now, her incantations had continued nonstop. She’d gone without sleep.

  She stopped in her machinations long enough to mutter another curse—this one the strongest yet directed at the minister’s heart: “May the hot coals of your hearth, Mr. Parris, fall ‘pon your home and burn your heart! May your legs go lame, and your ugly soul perish in flame! May your wife shrivel and die as winter grass, and may your children’s catechism turn to the Devil’s class.”

  She ended with an aged tear escaping her left eye.

  “No damming curse is ’nough,” the crone muttered. “A curse alone’ll not do. Not for the likes of you. Damn you for stealing wee Dorcas from me.”

  She recalled how the minister had handed Dorcas over to a parish family to become a maidservant—used as a wee slave by strangers! “To learn a trade,” the minister had said.

  Sarah knew better; it was outright theft of a child from her mother, and the minister had taken coin for placing Dorcas—as addled and sick a child as her. “Old Porter’ll use her badly, sure. But he’ll be cursed next!” She spat the names of villagers she hated. “Parris, Porter, Putnam—all three . . . the Devil take all of thee.”

  She placed the candle on the floor at the northeast corner. There she had safely hidden the instruments of her witchcraft. She worked to loosen the board, and from below it, she snatched up the long knitting needles all wrapped in linen. Below these, she located her book of spells, and below the book, the doll exactly where she’d hidden it on her last trek to Swampscott. She stared now at the well-crafted doll, so lifelike…its blue eyes and corn silk hair reflecting in the weak candle glow. One strand the girl’s true hair.

  Cackling in delight, Goode came away from her kneeling position with all of her necessities balanced in her arms. Duck-toeing to the center of the room, she placed each item onto a low-standing oaken table. Here the shining, winking needles acknowledged her like an old friend, and why not? She had used them many times before to make an enemy suffer.

  But this was the first time she’d set out to harm a child, and a minister’s child at that. It gave her pause. Then Goode lifted her longest needle to her eyes, and it spoke to her, whispering the words: use me.

  The gleaming long needle wanted using. The feel of it against her palm said so.

  With leathery jowls roiling, Goode’s jaw worked in a habitual circle, her tongue rolling tobacco around her gums. A brown drool escaped from time to time, soup spatter about her chin. Tobacco held healing powers. This her sore gums attested to daily. She would trade her last table scrap for a wedge of ’bacca.

  She now opened the tattered little book of spells, leafing through to find just the thing to harm Reverend Mr. Parris, the lying-thieving-bastard. She spied the right page and flattened the yellowed edges, creasing the pamphlet with aged thumbs. She scanned the ancient Latin words she’d memorized as a child from her mother before her, because Sarah could only read a handful of words.

  The doll’s ruffled dress moved. A breeze . . . cracks in the old cabin walls accounts for it, Goode decided when the frilly dress stilled. Another strange wind threatened her candle and lifted the book page, flapping it ever so gently as if by an invisible hand or fairy. Now a stronger gust blew into the cracks, threatening to extinguish the candle.

  She attempted to save the candle from going out, but the page tore from the book, lifted and wafted off and below the table.

  Is Reverend Parris at the window? Is he before his fire, sending forth his familiars to bedevil me even as I mean to bedevil him? Is the man in black a blackhearted wizard himself? Could he be causing me to lose my page and my calm?

  “A pox on ye!” she shouted the habitual chant before bending, reaching unsteadily, and finally crawling below the table for the page. The page regained, she groaned with her rising. Upright, a hand on her backside, her eye went from window to door, half-expecting to see it broken in, followed by men and lanterns and dogs come to drag her to the nearest tree. All with Parris overseeing her hanging. She imagined herself squealing, kicking, fighting to no avail until choked to death, her neck broken.

  But all remained silent. Just the wind kicking up.

  Her hazel eyes went directly to the blue eyes of the doll again. Warm blue pools so like the minister’s daughter, wee but plump Betty Parris.

  “Gawd but that clever Andover blacksmith put so much of you into the likeness,” she said to the empty cabin. “He did fashion you well, my Betty. Even got your dimples down. Gaw’d blind me, if you ain’t-a-spittin’ image.”

  Trembling in anticipation of her full-blown magic and the results of her witchery, Sarah smiled her toothless grin. The witch held the doll against her breast, sobbing over it, asking its forgiveness, calling it by the child’s name as she did so. “Forgive me, Betty, dear.”

  She held it against the table with one hand while her other lifted overhead and sent the longest needle into the doll. The needle deeply and evenly penetrated the soft, balsa wood belly. She brought the likeness, needle and all, up close to her mouth and kissed its lifelike lips, noting how extraordinary the little nostrils appeared, so real in the candle glow. As if breathing on its own…a pained breathing… and those eyes . . . vacant and innocent, had they been painted brown, the doll might be a likeness of her own Dorcas.

  Sarah felt the pang of onrushing emotion. She freely cried for the child, Betty, and she cried for her missing Dorcas. “I didn’t ask for this trouble between your father and me, child,” she told the doll. “Twas all his doing! First excommunicating me from that damned church, and then stealing my Dorcas! And cloakin’ it in the goodness of his parish duties! Lying swine. Sold my Dorcas into slavery is what he’s done! Money changed hands!”r />
  She jammed another long needle into Betty’s likeness. Tearfully, Goode cried out, “The sins of the father are visited ’pon the child! Not my rule! Not my sins.”

  She heard the doll whisper, I understand, Goodwife Goode.

  Goode rammed another needle into the doll.

  The doll winked at her under the candle glow as if to add, Father’s left you no choice.

  Chapter Two

  Watch Hill, outside Salem Village, same time

  Jeremiah Wakely in black riding cape reined in his pale horse and brought the gray-speckled mare to a soft trot. He and Dancer rounded the base of the gravelly hill that Jeremy recognized as Watch Hill. Must be careful . . . discreet. He urged the horse now up the gentle slope beneath the moonlight. Must arrive in Salem Village without notice. “Perhaps an impossibility?” he asked the horse, leaning in to pat the animal.

  As Jeremiah and his horse Dancer scaled the ancient hill, he wondered if it had not been a mistake to make this pact with Mather. Wondered if he shouldn’t ‘ve told both ministers the previous night—and in no uncertain terms that he was…what? Uncertain? “Hardly strong enough language for what ails ye tonight, eh, Wakely?” he spoke aloud to himself in the cold night air. Any moment now, he expected to see Higginson coming up the other side of this wretched hill, but so far no sign of the man.

  In a pace that stirred so much emotion in Jeremy, he wondered if the Mathers, and now Higginson, had not placed their confidence in his ability to remain neutral and above the fray possible. An attitude necessary to accomplish what amounted to a conspiracy against Reverend Parris. Am I the right man for this affair? Suppose the others are wrong? Suppose I’m the worst possible choice for this grim and complicated undertaking? Am I up to it?

  Then there was the fear that had welled up and engorged his heart with every hoof beat bringing him closer to Salem and Serena. His mind played over this fear…played over the moment that he’d most assuredly again lay eyes on her.