THE FIRST WITCH OF CAMBRIDGE #3
The next morning I waited for the Reverend to leave his desk at the inn for his daily walk.
I followed him past a neglected garden of low bushes filled with thorns; one snagged me, but I did not bleed.
I never did. From here, we could spy the sea, so bright it was almost green on this day.
My master’s walks were his time to think, and now I would give him something to think about that would provide him the chance to end what the witch-hunters had begun.
“Did you want something?” he said, irritated when I began to follow him. He’d never paid me the least bit of attention. I was nothing but an annoyance, a fly against a windowpane, a stone in his shoe.
“I did,” I said softly. I frightened myself with the depth of my intentions and the darkness inside me. To fight what is foul, one has to see through the dark and not shy away from what is evil in the world.
The cook was fixing breakfast, and she looked out the window to where we stood in an abandoned garden where roses had grown before the witchcraft mania had begun.
She pulled the curtain back, all the better to see.
She was waiting for something mysterious and unusual to happen, something that might mark me, since I was a stranger and therefore suspect.
The slightest thing could be used against you; even something wondrous—a smile, a kiss, a bird fallen from its nest that you saved on a summer’s day—could be seen as evil.
My mother’s crime was that she wore red boots.
Witches were said to do that, but so did duchesses and queens.
I had no power then, but my master had the ability to change things now.
“Shall we walk on?” I dared to say. We would then have privacy so that I could tell him the one thing that might change his tactics.
“If you insist,” he said.
He walked quickly so I might fall behind, but I kept pace with him. I wasn’t about to have him be rid of me. As we continued along the lane, I told him that the staff at the inn were saying that his wife was a witch. One had said she’d been seen rising off the ground.
The Reverend did not speak as I talked to him, but I could see the fear growing inside him. Fear is blue, like ice, but it burns, it burns until it turns white, until it becomes invisible, and even then, it’s still there.
“There is evidence against her,” I said.
“Impossible.” The Reverend’s face appeared chalky.
I saw that he loved his wife, as she loved him in return, and that love did not necessarily bend to logic.
It struck you like an arrow and then what choice did you have?
He’d fallen in love with a woman who would have been jailed had she been anyone else.
His wife never practiced her craft. She didn’t even have a witch’s garden; she had given it up for him.
“They have no proof that she’s done anything wrong,” the Reverend told me.
“It is impossible,” I said. “And yet impossible things can happen. Isn’t that what your son says every day?”
When we returned to Boston, the Reverend locked himself in his study.
When Cotton came to visit, my master said he was too engaged in his writing and could not be disturbed, and he turned his son away.
That was the first step. I had faith in my plan, and in myself.
I watched Cotton standing at the closed door, and I saw something inside him that was black as night.
I was amazed to see that he was in possession of what people in the countryside in England call left-handed magic, or the Crooked Path.
It was blood magic, the magic of tragedies and envy, self-importance and greed.
I hadn’t known he had it in him, but there it was.
His mother’s bloodline ran through him, but like the flower that had bloomed in my hand, it had turned from white to blood-red.
I saw it because Cotton Mather dropped his defenses; he was in a fury, and I was glad to be hidden behind a velvet curtain on the day he realized what his father meant to do. He would go against his own son.
This I Declare and Testify, that to take away the life of anyone, meerly because of a Spectre or a Devil, in a Bewitched or Possessed person does accuse them, will bring the Guilt of Innocent Blood on the Land, where such a thing shall be done.
Mercy forbid that it should (and I trust that as it had not, it never will be so) in New-England.
Increase Mather denounced spectral evidence and the witch trials, and there were those who said he made clear declarations that without sufficient grounds of conviction to be condemned, he would rather judge a witch as an honest woman than judge an honest woman as a witch.
This attitude was meant to save his wife, but in the process, he saved countless others.
They were still taking people in Salem into custody, and by the end of the witch trials, nineteen victims would be killed, but in the Reverend’s next sermon, he declared that it was better for a dozen witches to go free than for one innocent person to die.
It was the beginning of the end of the witch hunt when Increase Mather delivered his speech at Simon Willard’s Third Church in Boston, advising his congregation to look inward rather than judge their neighbors.
O what makes the difference between the devils in hell and the angels of heaven? he asked those in attendance.
By now, the governor’s wife had also been accused of witchery, and rumors were flying so that no one was safe; many women were too afraid to leave their own houses.
Mather and Governor Phips met and discussed the mania in Massachusetts, and they proclaimed that spectral evidence should not be enough to decide a person’s fate.
All the same, Phips was done with the province of Massachusetts.
I heard him say that the day he left London was the cause of his continuing misfortune, and I suppose he was right, at least for him.
Cotton came one night soon after his father’s sermon, and I could hear the men quarreling.
They were father and son, and Increase Mather would not go against Cotton publicly, but they no longer agreed, and without his father’s backing, Cotton Mather would not have the power he had previously wielded.
I could feel the darkness within him even when I wasn’t in the same room; a door and a lock and key couldn’t protect you from someone like that.
He had the worst traits of mortals stitched to the blackest magic.
His soul was divided, and that division left him encased in rage.
He hid it well until you saw it, and then it didn’t matter how handsome he was, or how educated. You could see he was a monster.
“Do they have nothing better to do than argue?” Miss May asked me, worried about her husband and son.
I knew the answer, though I didn’t say it aloud.
What men don’t understand they will seek to destroy.
I worked for my mistress for two years, all the while devising my plan to run away and start life anew.
When I went to her to tell her of my intentions, she wasn’t the least bit surprised.
Mistress Mather handed me a purse filled with silver coins and told me she would miss me as if I had been her own daughter.
She and her husband had ten children together, none of whom had any idea what she’d given up to marry the Reverend.
She had confided that she’d relinquished her magic by the use of an ancient charm, and that although she had regrets, she had made her decision because she knew her husband would never accept that part of her.