Chapter 58
Back in the library, Harper set the records back on the desktop. Before she opened anything she texted Akiel back:
Sent the report to Murphy at the dock, talked to Lady Bell, she’s putting the village on alert. All Bell vessels are docked. I’ll keep checking GeoRata—crazy awesome news from the lab
Honourable Sirs,
I accepted Taine’s commission in Glasgow Port under false pretense.
He stated that he wished to travel to the new world with seven others, lasses ranging in ages from girlhood to young women.
We did not know the nature of the travel or his relation to these goodly women.
And I will admit that I did not query further on Taine’s relationship to the lasses.
We were not privy to the records of court from Glasgow proper and knew not that we were, unknowingly, complicit in his flight from prosecution.
It is in this matter that I ask the clemency of the Boston court, if not for myself, then the goodly men who sail and work aboard The Mary Clarence.
They did not but follow my orders and in that they are innocent of fault.
The treatment and persecution of the young lass by the name of Meg MacGruer began on 14 August with the trouble following the death of her young lad.
The boy was given a proper burial at sea and as is the way with a godly mother, especially one so very young, the lass was bereft and sought to cause herself harm in her grief.
It was the actions of a young seaman by the name of Liam Kelly that saved her mortal life and thus began the trials she endured during those most dark days at sea.
I am guilty of inaction. I am guilty of complicit thought and behavior in my refusal to intervene in the days that follow.
It is in this way I ask again for the courts to bestow godly mercy on the men of The Mary Clarence as they followed my counsel in not intervening in the most horrid events that occurred.
Young Master Kelly defied my orders and often attempted to plea with the most foul Ewin Taine for mercy for the lass.
In this he should be held as godly among men, and more courageous than myself.
We witnessed the imprisonment of young Meg MacGruer in a belowdeck storage hold.
We witnessed the withholding of such comforts as food, water, blankets, or companionship.
We witnessed her lashing and her flesh burned in a most horrid act.
We witnessed the lass’s fingernail being pulled from her body by force.
Still I commanded my men to stand idle and not intervene.
As we had lain complicit through these horrors, we witnessed the most ungodly acts that occurred on 7 September 1690.
Meg MacGruer was of a virtuous nature and if accounts of her life in Loch Lomond are to be believed, she was victim to a false prophet, a Devil in the disguise as a man of our Lord.
Her innocent and youthful nature hath been tricked and havoc wreaked upon her goodly family and faith.
I wish it to be known to the good magistrates of the court that young Meg was indefatigable in her resolve to resist the horrors that the most foul Ewin Taine inflicted on her person.
In regard to the other women who attended these horrors and were often in active party, I can only beg the courts for their clemency. Their hearts and minds were not their own in these dark times. It was clear that Taine held them in sway with his teachings that were more of the D—than of the Lord.
Please consider my most humble words as I ask the courts and our Lord God for forgiveness for the actions on and leading to 7 September 1690.
Your Most Dedicated Servant Captain Cedric Caseling
Harper stared at the letter. The words swimming.
If she understood what she was reading, Ewin Taine and at least some of Meg’s sister wives had made it to Boston, but a sort of calamity had befallen Meg on the 7th of September.
Harper closed her eyes and felt the water like knives as she fell through the air, all feeling and time disappearing in the descent.
Her terror frozen like the night wind that whipped around the ship, the pain in her body and spirit focused and alive, its own monster spawned from her grief and suffering.
She heard a boy’s laughter below her and knew her Rory waited.
Her eyes closed as the water like a thousand knives cut into her skin.
The overwhelming cold was so penetrating that all feeling was lost. Harper felt her panic as she inhaled the salt water and her corporeal form began to die.
She felt herself falling slowly, drifting down to the depths, where Rory waited in a kingdom of his own making.
A peace overcame the panic, and her arms went loose, angel wings that guided her to a death different from any imagining, and luckier.
Harper snapped awake. This wasn’t the end; she knew that in her core. Whatever became of Meg MacGruer, the end of the story was not on the eve of September 7, 1690.
7 September 1690 is well marked in Meg MacGruer’s history by the deposition written by Captain Caseling to the Boston courts, as well as ship logs of the day.
Much of Meg’s notation of this day is journaled, but the damaged state of, and frantic nature of, the writing make for an erratic account of the events following Ewin Taine’s confinement on The Mary Clarence.
What is known for certain is that as the night fell, The Mary Clarence was approximately twenty nautical miles from the coast of Bell Island.
Taine was thought to be unconscious by the deckhands who had kept watch over him throughout the day.
As such, he was left unattended on deck.
He used this to his advantage and broke his bonds.
The Boston court records recount the story that one of his wives, Huldah Taine, cut the ropes that bound him and freed him from confinement.
It is at this time that Taine, with the assistance of his wives, set out to perform what they called the “prayer test,” wherein the accused would be challenged with saying the “Lord’s Prayer.
” This hails from King James’s Daemonologie and was used as empirical evidence in both the old world and new until the 1720s.
This is similar in tone to the story that Ewin Taine, Huldah Taine, and Elizabeth Taine would go on to recount to the Boston courts in the ensuing trial following the arrest of Taine and his surviving wives as The Mary Clarence docked in Boston Harbour on 9 September 1690.
She was said by all to have recited the “Lord’s Prayer” in “perfect syntax and cadence,” but instead of proving her innocence, this was used as further proof of the Devil’s hold.
Apart from the prayer test, it is difficult but necessary to report that Meg MacGruer would have been forced to kneel for many hours straight without reprieve or consideration for her discomfort and pain.
Still, she persisted, and as midnight on 7 September 1690 approached, she was alive, if not well, on the fore of The Mary Clarence.
Harper pushed the historian’s account back and stared at the stained-glass window across from her.
The dim light outside did not emphasize the colors as vividly as the artist intended.
Instead of bright golds, reds, lemon yellow, and blues, the window shone with a dull darkness, the design blending into a blur.
That must be a bit of how Meg felt that last night on the deck of The Mary Clarence as she repeated the prayer that she’d been taught as a balm.
Harper closed her eyes and allowed Meg’s memories to rise in her mind.
The details of each day blurring into each other, the ins and outs, the words spoken, the miserable meals, the cold, the pain, all of it blurring into a muted shade, no differentiation, no bright sparks to keep her focus.
Suddenly, Harper was jolted back into the waking world with a vivid flash of a scene behind her mind’s eye.
She was angry to the point of tears, the feeling of injustice not remembered overwhelming her.
Her mother stood before her, her face pinched in equal anger.
Her words were sharp, and careful. Harper couldn’t make out the edges, but she was made more agitated by every tone spoken.
She was young, not quite a teenager. Her mother pointed and Harper slammed a door so hard the wood cracked.
She was filled with an immediate fear and regret, her words, the split in the wood.
She left her hand on the knob as though she could undo all the things she’d said, what she had done.
Instead, her mother’s presence on the other side lingered and then disappeared.
The crack in the door remained. Harper’s memory fixed on that crack.
It would later be the last thing she saw from the flat, her bags packed, her memories already fading.
Everyone who shared her blood dead and gone, and all she remembered was the crack in the door, made in anger.
Harper rubbed her temples, trying to rid her mind of the image, the memory.
She blinked. The memory of that day was back in her head, slowly and blurred, but it was there, a file reuploaded.
Harper had been twelve. She’d fought with her mother over an invite to a party.
She wasn’t allowed to go, and she’d slammed the door in her mother’s face, broken it, and they’d never had the money to replace it.
Later her mother had looked at the broken door and shook her head.
“You’ll have to remember this for a lot of days now, elskan min.
” Harper remembered how heavy the shame was.
Her mother was right, she did remember, and now she understood.