THE FIRST WITCH OF CAMBRIDGE #2
We had rooms at an inn not far from the docks.
People didn’t look at you in Salem or they looked at you too closely, and either greeting was frightening.
I was reminded of the prison in London, where we didn’t dare to lift our eyes to the guards.
That was another place where women knew enough to disappear, always gauging how best to behave.
I was a fast learner when it came to such things.
Don’t talk, merely listen, watch them when they’re not looking at you.
Salem had been named after the word Shalom, peace.
I stayed in a room near the kitchen, but I spent most of my time upstairs with Mistress May.
She had the shaking disease and she was taking medicine that made her drowsy, and sometimes it made her see things that weren’t there.
She wore her onyx necklace even when she was ill and in bed.
It had been a gift from her husband, and she had told me she never removed it, no matter the circumstances.
The physicians had no idea how to cure her, and I had bishopwort to strengthen her, and bittersweet, which cured dizziness and vertigo.
I knew that the old cures were the best, even if men didn’t believe in them.
When I sat with Miss May, she told me things about her family that she had likely never told anyone else, how she had left behind all that she was for the love of the Reverend.
“I was someone else,” she told me. “You couldn’t understand.”
But I understood all too well. I took a flower from a bouquet on her bedside table, and it wilted in my hands. The bud turned from white to red when I breathed on it. My mistress laughed out loud. I swear I had never seen her so delighted.
“No wonder I took you from that prison,” she said.
For the first time she truly understood who and what I was.
We were the same, but my mistress had closed the door to magic, she’d taken a vow to renounce her true nature.
Our secret was in our blood, which turned black when we were cut, but she had done her best to be an ordinary woman to please the Reverend.
When the maid came in to make up the bed, she overheard May Mather tell me that when she was a girl a bat had followed her, and it sometimes still appeared.
It was tapping at the windowpane as we spoke.
The maid looked at us the way people did in Salem, from the corner of her eye. Trouble to come, I told myself.
I knew I must be ready for whatever happened next.
At the minister’s trial there were hundreds of onlookers who shouted and demanded his punishment.
All at once, gathering clouds crossed over the sun and darkness fell; the onlookers became silent.
The darkness was proof of something, but they weren’t sure what.
These people believed that the devil walked beside them, that he placed his hand on their shoulders and left his mark and called women to him at midnight.
Not even ministers were safe from his terrible demands to commit acts of sin and depravity.
The devil lost his power when faced with judges, or at least that was what Cotton Mather said when he came to my door at night.
I heard him breathing. I heard his desire.
I had moved a bureau in front of the door and placed five black stones upon it to repel evil.
“I will keep the devil from you,” he promised me, but he was a liar. Evil wasn’t a mystery to me; it was there on the other side of the door. I knew his plan. He’d have me, then have no remorse when he accused me of witchery.
“Go to hell,” I said. “Go before I send you there.”
After that he came to despise me. “Can you not find a better servant?” I heard him say to his mother. When she didn’t answer, I knew what she was thinking. Can I not find a better son?
At the trial a deep quiet cloaked the madness in the room.
It was as if we were poised on the edge of the earth and could easily fall into a pit of darkness.
There was a fire burning somewhere beneath us, and smoke was in the air.
I felt I might be asphyxiated, not by smoke, but by pure evil.
There was no devil, I knew that for a fact, only the hatred of men, which was real enough.
“He’s come to this,” I heard Increase Mather say of the minister. “It won’t go well for him.”
George Burroughs, a tall, serious man, appeared to have no fear as he climbed up the ladder to his fate.
It was the ladder of doom, and I had seen it before.
It led upward, as if to heaven, when its true destination was hell.
If I had done something to save him, it would have been the end of me, but I will always regret not trying to save him.
I stood motionless beneath the vast lake-blue sky when I wished I could run to him and cut the rope with a knife.
I would have liked to burn the fields down all around us.
We were on Gallows Hill, and from here it was possible to spy the sea.
I wondered what the land had looked like before the Puritans had come to settle, before they turned forests into fields, and men and women into ashes.
They seemed convinced they were doing God’s bidding, but who could truly believe it was the Almighty’s wish to have a rope strung around the neck of one of his ministers?
They say that witches cannot recite the Lord’s Prayer, but Burroughs did so easily, and when he did, people in the crowd began to whisper.
There was a flicker of doubt all around, and I saw Increase Mather grow pale.
“Let him walk away,” my mistress said to her husband. “He is a minister in God’s service. Stop this now.”
Reverend Mather would not grant his wife’s request. “It’s been decided,” he said, as if the trial were a river whose course he could not change. Some men who appear to be strong are weak deep inside, and he was one of those. “I’d do no different if I were the judge.”
The case had been determined upon spectral evidence—nothing more than the claims of neighbors, stories of cows that could talk and girls who saw imps in the hedges and signs from the devil in their morning porridge.
This was the sort of proof the Reverend had approved, at least for now.
I spied acres of rye below the hills, and I knew what could result from such damp weather; the rye would rot and be covered with purple-black growths.
Once eaten, the rot would make people see things that weren’t there, an invisible world created in their own minds, a fantasy used to send people to their deaths.
I kept my eyes downcast when they hanged George Burroughs.
Daisies were growing up through the grass, and I saw there was still beauty in this world despite the evil that men did, and I put my hands over my ears when the crowd began to cheer.
They say that witches are foul, that we steal children and enchant men, but we do not murder the innocent, and we do not applaud what is wicked in the world.
Later that night, I heard the servants gossiping in the kitchen. They said there were witches everywhere, and if a hundred hangings were to follow it still would not be enough. They looked at me when I entered the room, so I was quick to agree with them, even though I believed them to be fools.
“Amen,” I said with great modesty. “The world is filled with incredible things.”
I had gone to the kitchen for an elixir for my mistress; I would make a tea of thorn apple and henbane and willow to treat her inflammation.
The servants asked about my mistress. They had seen her shuddering and wondered if she was possessed.
That was when I understood that I could do something to change the course of what was happening to the women of this town, something that might bring peace.
I needed to give Increase Mather something worth fighting for.
Most Puritan couples slept with wooden boards between them on the bed, but I told the servants not to go into the Mathers’ room, for if they did they would see something God didn’t intend them to see.
My mistress and her husband were people who had sexual relations nearly every night.
It was quite a scandal, I said. The servants looked at me, ready for more gossip, and more than willing to believe the worst. I’d been to hell, and I remembered how it had begun.
It was gossip and nothing more that had caused my mother’s death.
I had stood in the crowd, just as I had when George Burroughs was hanged, unable to put a stop to the deeds of cowards who believed in lies.
That was why I felt a responsibility to those who were already lost and those whose lives might soon be taken.
Perhaps there was something that would cause Increase Mather to fight the battle for us. Let him have just cause.
I lingered in the corridor after leaving the kitchen so that I might overhear the servants’ chatter. “The Reverend’s wife,” the cook said with a tone of fear. “She ate an egg with the shell still on.”
The cook’s serving girl added, “When she took the stairs, she lifted off the ground.”
I had often dreamed of a dark angel who came to the service of those in need, carrying a burning torch that would illuminate the truth.
Now I saw that it was my own fate I’d dreamed of.
To save the many you sometimes had to sacrifice the few.
If my master had something to fight for, he might see to ending the trials.
Let them think my mistress was a witch and let my master come to realize how easy it was to indict the innocent.