Epilogue
Governor Phips of Massachusetts, who had never known where the truth lay, took swift and decisive action.
By the time a special court of oyer and terminer met again, spectral evidence was no longer to be accepted.
Three were condemned—three who insisted that they were witches—but Phips refused to sign death warrants.
The man had determined to wash his hands of innocent blood. In May of ninety-three he issued a general pardon. The jails were to be cleared.
Brianna, in moving into her beloved home in New York, really had no great passion to return to Salem at that time.
But Eleanor, who had married her Philip that long ago day when they reached New York, came to see Brianna, and informed her that many of the accused—though pardoned—were still in prison because they could not pay their jailor’s fees.
Fields had lain dormant in Salem during the year of havoc and the relatives of many had fled Salem, so they simply had no way to pay.
Brianna mulled over the information for a while, then implored Sloan to take her to see what they could do. They couldn’t free everyone, but they did what they could.
And it was while they were there that Brianna also felt a gnawing penchant to return to the farm that had once been hers. For some reason the place had not been seized. Sloan found her later, seated on the deacon’s bench, staring about her with a little smile.
She looked at him sheepishly and a bit ruefully, and he thought then that no matter how long he lived, he would never cease to think her eyes the most beautiful he had ever seen, the most expressive—and bewitching.
She stood, greeting him with a kiss. When his arms came comfortably around her, she said, “Sloan, I know you’ll think me mad, but I’d like to keep this place too.
Since Powells came here and died here … well, I am family.
I couldn’t live here again, but it’s beautiful property, Sloan!
Eleanor and Philip have been talking about returning, and I thought we could let it to them until they bought a place of their own. ”
She spun about then, looking up at him eagerly. He smiled, kissed the tip of her nose, and then her lips.
He realized then that she had never asked him for anything worldly. Not plate, not gowns, nothing. “If you wish it, my love, then we shall keep it. But we shall have a rather large number of homes, don’t you think?”
She laughed. “It’s quite possible, too, that we shall have a rather large number of heirs. Michael shall have the title and Loghaire—but what of the child we’re expecting in the spring?”
He was stunned by the news—awed and completely overjoyed. He hadn’t been there to see Michael born; he’d never held a tiny babe and known the wonder of anxiously awaiting a child.
He came to his knees and kissed her hand, and swore roughly that they should have a dozen homes if she wished.
She touched his dark hair and marveled aloud, “Sloan, that you should love me so is surely the greatest wonder of life. Once I thought that I was cursed, but no woman has ever been so blessed!”
It wasn’t their second son, however, but their third, Robert, who loved the farm—enlarged and improved with the years—with all-encompassing passion.
Like his father and his brothers—and even his two younger sisters—Robert loved the sea.
The Treveryans owned a fleet of ships by then; ships that serviced the Colonies, and ships that sailed the ocean.
But Robert Treveryan always returned to the farm, just as his eldest brother always returned to the castle in Wales, and his middle brother, Sloan, always returned to the grand house in New York.
And it was Robert who learned of his mother’s wishes one day. They were walking along the Salem wharf; Sloan and Brianna had just returned from a voyage to Loghaire, and while Sloan supervised the unloading of the cargo, Brianna had greeted her third son with maternal glee and spirited him away.
Robert, at thirty, had his father’s adventurous spirit and the rugged appeal of a very good-looking devil, but his looks were his mother’s.
His eyes were as blue as a summer’s day and his hair was as dark as the night.
While Brianna observed her son with the greatest pride, she had no idea that he was returning the assessment.
In her early fifties, she was still as slim as a nymph. There was but one streak of white to her hair, and it added mystery and sophistication to her beauty. Perhaps to other eyes she had aged, but never to him, Robert thought—and certainly, never to his father.
She wasn’t usually a “nagging” parent, but on this particular day she had been after him about settling down with a wife so that she might see an abundance of grandchildren. He was wondering how to hush her politely when she ceased the discourse of her own accord.
His eyes were leveled at the Burying Point, and she smiled suddenly, as if she had thought of some secret joke.
“Do you know, Robert, I’d like to be buried there.
Oh, don’t look at me so strangely! I’m not intending to die for a long, long time, not until you’ve given me some grandchildren!
But I’d like to be there, right in front of that old magistrate Hathorne!
For all those questions he put before me!
” She fell silent for a minute. “I think I forgive him. And Corwin. And even Matthews.…” She paused, grinning at him wryly, and he thought he must be seeing her just as she had been as a very young girl.
Young and so lovely that an envious person might readily have called her “witch.”
“I forgive him, but I’d still enjoy a chance to make him squirm for eternity!” She laughed and pulled him along. Sloan would be waiting at the wharf, and Robert knew that she had never been able to bear leaving his father for long.
Years later, when he did kiss her good-bye for eternity, he remembered her words. And he laid her to rest where she had pointed that day, beneath the spidery limbs of a sapling tree.
As the years passed, the roots of the tree encroached upon her marker, enwrapping it. Just as the New England fog swirled in and out throughout the centuries, enwrapping her memory in legend.