The Dreadful Tale of Prosper Redding (The Dreadful Tale of Prosper Redding #1)(20)

He got desperate. He didn’t want to fail. If anything, it made him feel like an actual human, not just the grimacing, nearly colorless portrait hanging in the entryway of the Cottage.

Suddenly I had a very clear picture of where this story was headed. “What…what happened to the Bellegraves?”

“Half were killed in the fever that swept through the colony that first winter,” Uncle Barnabas said, with a sharp tone. “The other half starved to death when their crops turned to ash one night.”

“Jeez.” It wasn’t like I didn’t know my family wasn’t going to win a gold medal for kindness, but that was seriously rotten. “But I still don’t get why I’m here or what happened last night.”

“I already told you—” Nell began, but Uncle Barnabas silenced her with a wave.

“Almost there.” He took a long sip of his tea. “You know what happened here in Salem, of course?”

“Of course! Birthplace of the National Guard!”

Uncle Barnabas cocked his head to the side, giving me an unamused look. Man. Tough crowd.

“Well, it’s true,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest. “Yes, okay, I know about the Witch Trials. I also know they were also held in Danvers, Ipswich, and Andover, and not just Salem Town,” I added, when it looked like Nell was about to correct me.

“For many years,” Uncle Barnabas continued, still looking unhappy, “the Reddings benefited from their partnership with the malefactor, and there were no problems. Suspicions, though…those ran rampant. When those young girls in Salem began pointing fingers and accusing everyone around them of consorting with the Devil, you can imagine how uncomfortable it made those using witchcraft. And then the witch-hunt fever began to spread through all of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and things took a turn for the worse.”

I stared at the WITCH’S BREW logo on his mug, and the grinning witch there. Probably wouldn’t have been so happy in the 1690s, swinging from a tree with a noose around her neck.

“The Reddings, who had never lost a crop, never seen their numbers reduced to nothing by fever, or even suffered bloody conflict with the Native Americans…they, more than any other family, felt the suspicions rise around them like unwanted shadows.” Uncle Barnabas shook his head. “They did what they thought they had to do to avoid being caught, accused, and killed. They broke the contract.”


It turns out that breaking a contract with a malefactor isn’t as simple as tearing up a sheet of paper or snapping your fingers. You couldn’t even bribe the fiend-demon-whatever into leaving either. You had to engage the services of an actual witch.

“Dangerous business, hiring a real witch during those times,” Uncle Barnabas said, leaning back against the couch. It sounded like he was half-impressed by Honor Redding’s cunning. “But they found the real deal in Goodwife Prufrock. She gave them the casting they needed to trap the malefactor in a human body.”

“Why would they have to do that?” I asked.

“Malefactors exist in our world as spirits, which means they can’t be harmed physically. To trap a malefactor in a human body is to render it mortal, and the only way to break a contract with a fiend is to kill it.”

“So they got Alejandro—”

“Alastor,” Nell corrected.

Well, excuse me for not knowing whatever fancy-pants name the imaginary creature had.

“So poor Al got trapped in someone’s body? Whose?” I would be the first one to admit that most of this was sailing clear on over my head, but I got the feeling that if you were going to kill a fiend—hypothetically, since, you know, not real—you probably had to kill whoever he was trapped inside of.

Uncle Barnabas shrugged. “Some expendable servant girl.”

Oh no.

“Ugh, are you serious?” I asked, instantly taking an eraser to every nice thought I’d ever had about Honor. Another small, awful thought slithered up to me and sank its fangs in. “But the girl…she survived, right?”

Uncle Barnabas shook his head.

“How did she die?” I whispered.

“How did they normally kill witches in that day?” Nell asked darkly.

Oh no.

“I mean…hanging…drowning…stoning…?”

Don’t say fire, don’t say fire, don’t say fire—

“They burned her at the stake,” Uncle Barnabas said.

I put my hands to my face again, moaning, “Oh nooooo.”

Here’s the other thing you need to know about Founder’s Day and the bonfire: they don’t really mark the day when Redhood was settled, but when the family’s luck turned around and the settlement was renamed. The legend that gets lost in the shuffle of pretty ideas about renewal is that Honor started the bonfire with some sort of object they believed was cursed. And once it was gone…

“Oh noooooo.” Even the bonfire was awful. There was officially nothing good about Redhood except the Silence Cakes. And knowing the truth about my family, they were probably originally made from the hearts of babies, not pumpkin leaves.

“Don’t pretend like you’re actually upset,” Nell said icily. “Aren’t servants invisible to you people? Only good for how well they polish the silver?”

Anger flooded me. “You don’t know anything about my family. And yeah, I’m upset! She was an innocent person, and she shouldn’t have had to die because some guy got scared and made a terrible mistake—”