Hour of the Witch(4)

    She continued to hope that someday she would have children who would sleep in that second chamber—the way Thomas’s daughter from his first marriage had had her own room in the first house the man had built here—but she had understood for some time now this wasn’t likely. After all, they’d been married over five years.

“It was a late night for him,” Catherine said, referring to Thomas, and she was careful to allow no hint of disapproval to color her tone. But she never did. The girl rather fancied Thomas. Mary could see it in the way her cheeks sometimes grew flushed around him or the way she would hang on his words as if he were a pastor. She hovered over him and sometimes seemed to follow him like a well-trained dog.

“It was,” Mary agreed, glancing at the pot over the fire, and pausing to savor the plaintive trilling of the mourning doves that had nested in the oak just outside the kitchen window. They were continuing to coo when she heard Thomas waking, but Mary stopped listening to the birds so she could focus on the noises above her. Sometimes she could tell her husband’s mood by the first sounds he would make in the morning. If his day began with a great contented stretch and yawn, he would remain in good spirits, at least through their midday dinner. If, on the other hand, his lungs were packed and he began either by coughing or spitting, then he would be ornery and she would find herself hoping that he would remain at the gristmill until the end of the afternoon when he returned home for supper.

She heard the thump of his feet hitting the hardwood floor, followed by a sound that could be likened to a great male cat purring: the low rumble that Thomas Deerfield would make when he would stand, drowsy and well pleased with his world, on a good morning.

    She wanted to look at Catherine for the reassurance that the girl had heard it that way, too, but Thomas was a gentle patriarch around Catherine. The girl may have known that her master had a temper, but it couldn’t have seemed extreme to her, and any discipline he exerted upon his wife in front of her was well within reason. Besides, Mary refused to acknowledge that her home’s tranquility was really so fragile, and so she focused instead on taking the Psalter down from the shelf and finding one of the psalms with which Thomas liked to open their day.

She settled on a prayer and bookmarked the page, and left the volume beside the trencher she would share with her husband.



* * *





Thomas was dressed when he came downstairs, save for his moccasins and his cloak. She was about to speak—ask him how he had slept, whether he was feeling well, anything to ensure that he knew she had no plans to show him anything but deference while Catherine was present—when he came to her, placed one hand on her waist and his index finger upon her lips, and said, “Prithee, say nothing. I was in a foul temper last night and I took it out on thee. I am very, very sorry and I will ask my Lord to forgive me. Wilt thou as well?”

Then he kissed her forehead, and even through his mustache and beard she was surprised by how dry his lips had become in the night. She started to speak, but he shook his head and said to the girl by the fire, “Ah, Catherine, good Sabbath. How wise thou were last night to be visiting thy brother. I was a monster to this fine woman. A ghoul.”

“I doubt that is possible, Master Deerfield.”

“Oh, trust me: it is. It is and I was. I worked hard and then I drank much, and before I knew it, I was filled with demons. So, tell me about thy brother. How is he?”

“A little better, perhaps. He ate some.”

    Mary felt him loosening his grip on her waist, and she looked up and saw him smiling at her. He winked. He was still so handsome when he smiled. Then he turned his full attention on Catherine. “When was the last time that Dr. Pickering tended to him?”

“Friday, I believe.”

“Was he purged?”

“Yes, sir. Purged and cupped.”

“Maybe tomorrow he can be bled again. William is a strong lad.”

“May it be so.”

He glanced at the Psalter and said, “Oh, Mary, this is a fine choice. Lovely! Let us gather.”

Catherine placed the pot with the mush directly on the table and joined them while Thomas read the psalm and prayed aloud. When he was through, he took a long swallow of beer and started to eat.



* * *





In Plymouth, to the south, there had been a time when the Separatists had been called to their church by a drum. The congregation would assemble before the captain’s home and march to the meetinghouse three abreast behind the drummer. They hadn’t done it that way in close to twenty-five years—not since the 1630s—but Mary never understood why anyone would approach church as if it were a military skirmish.

Here it was considerably more civilized. They had a bell in the steeple of the First Church, and the congregation didn’t gather as if preparing for battle. They arrived, each with their families, as if they were still back in England, with the only real difference being that she and Thomas would separate at the door so he could sit with the men and she could sit with the women and the young children. This morning she sat beside her mother in the third pew on the left, along with Catherine and her mother’s servant girls, Abigail Gathers and Hannah Dow.

She realized soon after the Reverend John Norton had begun his first prayer that today was not going to be a Sunday rich with either grateful ebullitions or penitential whimpering from the congregation. It was a more intellectual sermon, and people were responding accordingly. She herself was going to have a difficult time concentrating, and so she sat with her spine straight to try and remain focused. Still, her mind wandered, and she found herself glancing at the boys and girls. She would look at the families—separated by an aisle, yes, but still she would link the men with their wives and their children, because certainly God looked at the congregation that way. She would turn and glimpse the children in the pews behind her as they fidgeted, their mothers disciplining them with a whispered word or a small pinch, and she gazed at the downy curls that escaped from one young girl’s bonnet.