Hour of the Witch

by Chris Bohjalian

She really didn’t like Thomas Deerfield. She didn’t like anything about him. Some days, in fact, she loathed him.

Ah

“I only meant that on occasion thou hast spoken with the surety of a man. When my master chastised thee, I believe it was in the hope that thou might rein in thy mannish presumption. His guidance was always administered with concern for thy soul.”

!

All I want thee to know is this: thou art a woman facing men who would be comfortable to see thee dangling there,” she said, and she pointed up at the scaffold with the hanging platform. “I harbor no ill will and no grudge. I believe we are more alike than thou art willing to admit. If I can ever assist thee, do not hesitate to renew our acquaintance.”

Foreshadow

Since my childhood I have prayed for the living and the dead, and—” “And thou hast seen no prayers answered.” “It is not that,” she corrected him. “It is my acceptance, finally, that our Lord has His plan for us and it is not for me to try and influence His vision. We cannot—and so it has come to me of late that there is no reason to appeal.” “I have heard it argued that prayer does not change God’s mind; rather, it changes us.” “The act.”

Hmm

“And thou wilt be an agent of thine own destiny by divorcing Thomas Deerfield.” “Just as I was my own agent when I married him. We are flawed; we make mistakes. We try our best to correct them.”

Yes

He was as misguided as he was violent. She regretted snapping back at him because one could never win an argument with a person so fundamentally unreasonable.

Yes!

Mary understood Abigail’s predicament: the girl’s testimony could enrage her employers, but lying came with far greater consequences, because they were eternal.

If only people kept this in mind today!

The risk of losing one-third of his estate?

That’s all?

Her left hand was aching tonight more than it had the day before, and so she had a second and then a third mug of beer. She was confident it was healing and attributed the pain entirely to the cold that was settling in for the gray season: the days when the leaves are gone but the snow has not yet arrived, and the skies are endless and ashen and flat.

Thus why I flee to Florida.

Her left hand, cosseted by her glove, began to throb, and she massaged it with two of the fingers on her right hand. She told herself it was just the cold, but in her heart she feared it was something more: it was a sign. Because, if one looked around carefully, wasn’t everything?

In her era, yes.

Whenever we ponder a petition of this magnitude, I am obliged to ask myself this question. If now I were dying, how would I wish I had behaved during my life? For what would I crave remembrance, and for what will I have to answer to our Lord God and Savior?

Wow!

She knew what he was capable of even when he was sober. Moreover, there was a deliberation to his evil: he attacked her only (and always) when there were no witnesses present.

If I were her, I'd always have my servant present.

Her husband was still asleep in the bedstead, his breathing more a wheeze than a snore. She looked at him and sighed. There was no part of him that she did not detest. Even his beard, scruffy from a night against the pillowbeer, repulsed her. His left hand sat beside his face, the fingers splayed and reminiscent of a spider, and she wondered what it would be like for him to be awakened by a fork being plunged into the back of it. Or by having a pot of boiled salad dumped upon him.

AMEN

If anyone could assist her—carefully and with great stealth—with her emancipation, it was likely to be an independent woman with a subversive streak in her soul.

Yup

She found it ironic that a widow received the same portion of a husband’s estate as a woman who divorced him: one-third.

Me too. Who gets the rest?

It surprised her how relieved she felt. She had expected only regret, and wasn’t sure whether this was because her Lord and Savior had walked her away from the precipice to Hell, or whether it was because He had given her a much better idea.

Ooh

There were people in the world who were good and people who were evil, but most of them were some mixture of both and did what they did simply because they were mortal. And her Lord? Peregrine’s Lord? He knew it all and had known it all and always would know it all. But the deliberations of His creations? Meaningless. Absolutely meaningless. Still, there was one thing of which she was certain. “Oh, I think we do know,” Mary said finally. “Yes, this may be the hour of the witch. But the Devil? He most definitely wears breeches. The Devil can only be a man.”

From her viewpoint, yes.