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Never did they ask the question Why me? In truth, they never even asked the more reasonable question Why anyone?
The issue, of course, would not merely be his violence, nor would it boil down to a debate over what she said versus what he said. The wrack of their marriage was not solely his cruelty, and the divorce petition would be grounded by snares beyond her ken. Here, she realized, there were times when she would have been better off if she could have been alone but for the angels or her God, and—conversely—there were times when she would have given a very great deal for a witness that was human. Because even for a mind as sharp as Mary Deerfield’s, it was the recognition of her own mean desires and
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How is it I am humiliated when I am alone? Does not humiliation demand an audience?
Signs, after all, were everywhere; it was just a question of knowing how to read them.
It saddened her to know that she would never miss Thomas if he ever had to travel. It grieved her that despite the fact he was right beside her in their bed, asleep atop the feathers that were such a luxury in this strange, needy world, he wasn’t even among the men whose images would fill her mind when she would reach between her legs and sate the mesmeric frenzy that some nights filled her soul.
It wasn’t that he hit her or, recently, had thrown her into the hearth. It was deeper. She really didn’t like Thomas Deerfield. She didn’t like anything about him. Some days, in fact, she loathed him.
Cruelty may be defined as violence without provocation and discipline that is excessive.
She did not pray for a child because she feared that, without one, in her dotage she’d become a crone in a cottage: a woman such as Constance Winston. She did not pray for a child for Thomas: he was old and she wasn’t even sure that he desired another baby. No, she prayed for a newborn because she wanted now to love a child the way that Thomas’s first wife, Anne Drury, had loved Peregrine, and the way that child, now a woman, in turn loved her offspring.
…which is why I know a fork can be a weapon most terrible.
He had the juice of a crayfish rubbed on his tongue. The physician, Dr. Roger Pickering, administered a drink made of eggs and fennel and rum, and gave him nutmeg and cardamom to try and ease the pain. Then he bled and cupped William. And when William began to bleed from inside his nose, the physician tied up spiders and toads in a rag and insisted the ailing patient inhale the fumes. After the toads had been boiled and dried and ground into dust, the healer took the fine powder and with a length of straw thrust it up William’s nostrils.
“And always better a scrivener than an attorney. I know more and more people are resorting to those appalling advocates who twist and trick, but many of the magistrates still view them with justifiable disdain.”
“Mary, I do not know and I do not need to know whether thou pulled me from thy life like a bad tooth because my simples failed thee or because there are those who view my interests as peculiar—because, to be blunt, thou feared an association with someone of my sensibilities.” “I told thee,” Mary said quickly, “I have simply had much to tend to.” “I don’t care. 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
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“I have heard it argued that prayer does not change God’s mind; rather, it changes us.”
“There it is again: that particularly deadly sin of pride. I succumb to it often. It will be the death of me yet.” “Ah, but who among us will be the agent?” “It won’t be thee,” he said, and he went to her. He stood so close that she could feel his breath on her face. “And why is that?” He looked at her intently. “Because, I think, we are much alike.” “In what fashion? We know each other but little.” “A falcon knows its kin at a very great distance.” “And its prey.” He smiled. “Exactly. I am in thy talons.” Then he leaned in closer still, and she felt him taking her right hand in his. “And,
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Her voice was keen and low, the agitation clear. “Be careful. The worst is yet to come. Thou knowest those men; but so do I. I may know them better than thee. There are dangers I doubt thou hast ever contemplated.”
A thought crossed her mind, and it frightened her: Did he know on some level that she had never loved him and that was why he mistreated her so cruelly? Was this all her fault? She shook her head and banished the idea. She had done nothing to be hurled into a hearth or beaten about the face or have her hand speared by a silver fork. Still, the reality gave her pause. The truth that she did not love the man did not justify his cruelty, but it could possibly explain it.
Yes, she thought, revenge belongs to God. But justice? That will be mine.
“She was sent to the scaffold because she had a sharper tongue and a shrewder mind than her accusers. It is always the case when men hang women. Look at Magistrate Caleb Adams: there is nothing that frightens that man more than a woman who does not live happily under a man’s thumb.”
“Men call bright women dim whenever they are threatened. So, take no relief in the names that any man calls thee. There is no safe harbor there.”
“But if not fork, then what?” she asked, but even as she was forming the question, the answer came to her. Before Constance could respond, she continued, “Serpent.
“There comes a time when resistance is not zealotry, but sanity.” “Even if it leads to a noose?”
Mary understood that anguish: the pain of knowing the grievous sin that was in one’s heart and the way that it disappointed the Lord, and what it meant when one contemplated the fires of Hell that awaited. To be among the damned and not the chosen? There was and there could be nothing worse. And yet people daily made pacts with the Dark One. His seductions were smooth, a vortex from which, once enticed, there was no escape.
“Thomas,” he began, but he didn’t get another word out, because with a speed and an agility that shocked Mary—even though she knew that her husband’s temper could crack with the suddenness of lightning—he released her, turned, and smacked Henry hard on his spine. Mary watched as the younger man flinched and started to rear up, but Thomas hit him again, this time joining his hands and using his arms as a club to pound one of the spots on Henry’s back where undoubtedly the flesh was raw from the whip. Even through his doublet and cloak, the pain had to have been excruciating, and Henry
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Thou art an exquisite thing, a sun that warms my soul. Thy tenderness is so ardent that even while I was being lashed in the cold, when thou appeared from nowhere—Diana draped in a winter frock—I felt ensconced by a fireside inglenook. I was no longer chilled or in pain.
This city is not built upon the precious stones of Revelation: we are not so pure. The scar on thy wounded hand is but one small testament to the evil of which we are capable. And so whether I am blessed to see thee tomorrow or tomorrow’s tomorrow, whether it is here or that other, blessed City to which we all aspire, I will not risk thy reputation or thy soul again while thou art wed to Thomas Deerfield. Thou meanest too much to me—far too much.
Did a woman who was possessed not know it until it was too late—until the Devil had His claws so deeply inside her that extraction could only come via the noose? She imagined crouching inside her, rather like an infant in her womb, a monstrous imp—a shrunken gargoyle at the beck and call of the Devil—its talons ready to gouge out her flesh. This would be the beast she would birth, and the only one ever.
“Aqua tofana.”
“Cruelty by definition is needless.”
“Thou needest trade me nothing for medicine,” said Esther. “I was not censured because I was cruel. We were censured because we called out the crooks among the elders and the fiends who hanged Ann Hibbens.”
He swallowed. “I do not know what thou art planning,” he said. “I do not know what thou hast in mind. But thou art contemplating something sinister. I know not what, but—” “Either I have white meat for a brain or I am plotting evil,” she snapped at him. “Cheese is not known for its perniciousness. Which is it: am I a dullard or a witch?”
What she could not decide as she neared the warehouses, however, was whether she felt a distance from her Lord because of what she was planning—whether this was the Devil working His way inside her—or because the speed of Boston’s growth was blinding them all to His vision. Her doubts about what they were striving to build in this new world felt woeful and lurid, but what, in fact, had they accomplished if she looked rather specifically at her own home? She had a husband who was vile, a servant girl who was either evil or deluded, and parents who had relegated her to the dungeon of Thomas
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“I only want to make sure thou knowest that wolfsbane is a river and, once crossed, there is no returning.”
Esther pointed at the book in Mary’s hands. “All of thee dost speak much of lambs and love, but thy actions…” She stopped and shook her head, the repugnance unmistakable. “Prithee, continue.” She sighed. “Thy actions? Thou art wolves, Mary. All of thee who shunned us: thou art wolves.” Mary didn’t defend herself. She didn’t defend her people. If Esther was mistaken, it was only in that she was comparing them to wolves instead of snakes.
Fine, she thought. Fine. It would have been too easy to have found proof of the girl’s duplicity—of her collaboration with Goody Howland and Satan—in the bag. That didn’t mean that Mary was not surrounded by a swamp of snakes. She still believed that Catherine was behind the forks in the dooryard and that Catherine had carved the Devil’s mark into the wood in this very house. She still thought it likely that the girl wished her ill, either because she saw in her mistress the cause of her brother’s death or she saw in Thomas something that Mary herself did not—if only as a way up from her
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Imagine throwing a pebble into a pond and watching the ripples fan out in ever-widening circles. There was Rhode Island. There was New Amsterdam. But the world was vast, and Mary knew that she needed distance from Boston if she wanted to begin again. She craved separation from this city that so nearly had led her into the embrace of the Devil and the deaths of two people, only one of whom she knew for certain was a monster. But she also wanted to start again far from that bench full of small-minded and petty magistrates, and from the ogre to whom she was married.
She had told him nothing of her plan to murder Thomas and see that Catherine was blamed for the crime. She had simply determined his support was unwavering and warned him not to worry about her when the likes of Goody Howland started their crow-like cawing.
“I think it would be fitting if I took one-third of the money Thomas keeps at the house.” “I think it would be wrong. And it won’t be necessary.” “No?” “No. I need not a dowry from thee.” For a long moment they stood in silence, staring out at the ocean. Then, almost as if dancing, they turned toward each other at the same moment and formalized their pact.
And, alas, Mary knew things she would never tell anyone, secrets that Constance and Esther Hawke knew, but nobody else. She had planned to murder her husband. She had planned that Catherine be tried for the crime. The fact that she had come to her senses and changed her mind in no way diminished the possibility that the Devil had His claws inside her and she was possessed—that she deserved to be hanged and hope, for reasons that were inscrutable, that God would spare her the flames that most likely loomed.
“We do not know that Constance Winston has been a bad influence on Mary Deerfield—or on anyone else, Caleb,” said Wilder. “Nor is Constance on trial.” “No,” he agreed. “Not yet.” Then he pointed at her and continued, “We know what sort of person thou art.” “A person with hair that is white and a face well lined,” she said. “In other words, the sort of person unlikely to be noticed, unless one is looking for those who are easily demonized and bullied.”
She could give no reason for Catherine. But certainly Thomas had behaved so abysmally around her that it was possible he had behaved equally badly around others. In the end, she had been unable to murder him. But might not someone else have been willing to try? A farmer he had wronged? A fellow he had met in a tavern? Someone else he had beaten? And that was when she knew. She knew. It was the word beaten.
“No,” Mary continued. “There was no room for Christ when He first came into our world and there was no room for Him when He died. He was scorned by authority and He was crucified because He demanded that the poor and the sinful and the children and the women be”—and she took a breath as she sought and found the correct word—“respected. Respected. The lowly for whom, just like Him, there was neither esteem nor hope. We separated and came here to this wilderness, and so far we have shown only that we are as flawed and mortal here as we were across the ocean. There is no act of horror or violence
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“Governor, thou hanged thy predecessor’s own sister-in-law. Thou art going to hang me, too. Fine. I cannot open the minds of men whose brains have doors locked shut. But, prithee, know that thou art hanging an innocent woman. My husband taunts me by insisting that my mind is but white meat. Perhaps. But it still sees the truth of thy rot and the truth of thy fears and—”
Mary gazed at her stepdaughter. “How badly did he hurt thee, Peregrine? How badly did he hurt thy mother?” “It was no horse that broke her neck.” “She—” “He knew she was plotting. Thou were not the first woman in his circle to visit the likes of Constance Winston.” “And thee?” “He never beat me. Only her. He did things to me that were worse. Far worse. Unnatural things that I told no one until this Sabbath, when I told Rebeckah.”
“Ah, the Devil Herself,” said Peregrine. “We really don’t know whether the Devil wears breeches or a skirt, now do we?”
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.”
Mary had named her daughter Desiree but called her Desire, after the child who had come to her in a dream—a vision—back in Boston.
Henry had spread a blanket on the grass, and when she looked over at him she saw that he was handing her a piece of bread. She thanked him and broke it into an even smaller piece—tiny, really—and placed it on her baby’s tongue. Communion, she thought. Communion. She wasn’t barren. She just wasn’t meant to bear a child with Thomas.
Anne Bradstreet.