Hour of the Witch(14)

“No,” she said. “Those women chose to be naked. At least one of them did. She insisted upon it.”

“Now why would she have done something like that?”

    Mary was about to explain that the woman had been protesting what she felt was the injustice of her prosecution—persecution, the Quaker had in fact said, initiating a war of semantics that only made the penalty more severe—and the hanging of that missionary woman named Dyer. Mary didn’t, however, because she saw that among the small parade of gawkers behind the poor man was a group of half a dozen children, including two of Peter and Beth Howland’s brood. She saw Sara, their little girl, and Edward, the younger of their two boys, and they were throwing gravel from the street a pebble or two at a time at the Quaker.

Mary put down the clothing in her arms and ran to the procession. She pushed past a woman she didn’t know and grabbed the pair of young Howlands around their wrists, catching them both by surprise, and pulled them to the side of the road, where she stood with them before the house of Squire Willard.

“There is no call for that,” she said to the children. “There is no call for that at all. I doubt the magistrates wanted thee to be stoning the poor man while he was being whipped.”

Edward, a boy nearing ten, wrestled his arm from her and met her gaze. “But he’s a Quaker,” he said, “and he’s probably a witch, too!”

“If he’s a witch, then I wouldn’t be vexing him further,” she said.

Little Sara turned her face squarely upon her brother and started to chant softly, “Edward will be hexed. Edward will be hexed. Edward will be—”

The boy punched the girl on her arm and she yelped, and so Mary, in turn, slapped the boy on his rump. “Thou art too old to hit her,” she scolded him.

“Sara said—”

“I don’t care what Sara said. Thou art old enough to know better than to be hitting thy sister, and thou art old enough to know better than to be throwing rocks at that man.”

“They were pebbles,” he insisted, as if that made it all right. Then he shook his head, desperately trying to hold back the tears, but it was a lost cause. Abruptly he was crying and his sister was sobbing with him, and the onlookers who’d come outside or glanced up from their dying, dwindling gardens now turned their attention from the Quaker—who was considerably farther down the block now, anyway, the blood and ripped flesh on his back making it look like a harlequin’s doublet—to the weeping children.

    “I think it’s time to go home,” Mary said to them. “I’ll walk with thee.”

Before she could turn them in the direction of their house and start with them on their way, she saw the door behind her open and Squire Willard emerge on the short path to the street. Isaac Willard was elderly but fit, a widower, and was known for walking with his cane back and forth from the carding mill he owned in the North End and along the Neck to Roxbury and the mainland.

“I’m going that way, Mary,” he said, and he sounded cross. “I can return them home.”

“I thank thee,” she said, wondering at the suggestion of anger in his voice. She didn’t believe he was the sort who would be annoyed by the sight of a Quaker being disciplined. Quite the opposite. Most likely, the punishment had his hearty approval.

“It’s nothing,” he said. “Come along, children.”

And then, though they had gone no more than three or four steps, he stopped and turned back toward her.

“Mary, thou should not encourage babes such as these to disrespect the wisdom of the magistrates.”

“I did nothing of the sort.”

“I was at my window. I heard what thou said, and I saw that wallop thou bestowed upon young Edward. Now—”

“It was hardly a wallop.”

“I agree it is better to be whipped than damned, but it is better still to be reasoned with.”

She wanted to argue with him and defend her action, but she knew it would get back to Thomas if she did. And so she lowered her gaze and apologized. When she looked up, the boy was smirking at her, and he resembled more than a little the grotesque-looking face that had been carved onto the Rhenish pipkin from which she sometimes served stew.



* * *





There were still pansies with flowers at the edge of the street and beside the steps to their house, and Mary stooped to deadhead them. She was agitated by the way Isaac Willard had disciplined her a moment ago, and she couldn’t bring herself to return to her mending.

“Shall I start supper?” Catherine asked. The servant was still in the doorway.

“Yes, that would be fine. I’ll be but a moment.”

The girl went to the back of the house to retrieve some eggs, and Mary had just resumed her work on the flowers when she saw something metallic sparkle in the jumbled knot of green tendrils. She reached for it and came up with a fork, one of the small ones that, according to her mother, people were starting to use back in England. And though this looked to be one of the very forks that her mother had shown her last week, clearly it hadn’t been dropped here by mistake: it had been driven tines first into the ground, so that less than an inch remained above the dirt. On a hunch she reached amidst the pansies on the opposite side of the stone step and rooted around with her fingers. Sure enough, there was a second fork there, too, pressed vertically into the ground like a post, on a line with the first. Once again, barely a thumbnail was aboveground.