Susannah Morrow (45 page)

“I have seen enough,” Danforth said, coming forward. He grabbed Lucas’s arm. “Release her.”

“I will not!” Lucas wrenched from the deputy governor’s grasp. “Charity, listen to me. If you would listen to me, you would
see the truth.”

Danforth gave a nod. Tom Putnam and John Hathorne rushed forward to grab Lucas’s arms. He tried to shake them off, to cling
to his daughter. Desperately he said, “Charity, ’tis your father. My God. My God, I love you. Do not do this—”

She leaned over and vomited. ’Twas bile only, but shining within it were two pins.

Tom Putnam released his hold on Lucas. “Oh, dear God, look at this!”

Lucas escaped them. He grasped Charity hard, pulling her to his chest. She was stiff and unwilling, but he held her tight,
caressing her hair. “Believe me, Charity. Believe me. Susannah is no witch. How could I love a witch?”

Love.
The echo of it cracked in the room. Charity twisted from Lucas’s arms with forcible strength at the same moment that Tom
Putnam and John Hathorne finally pulled him loose. Lucas went stumbling back, held tightly by those men. Charity screamed.
The pins in that little pool of yellow bile glinted.

I saw the way Danforth looked at Charity, that horrible, repulsed pity. Then he glanced up at Lucas, and I saw something else,
something calculated. Suspicion and fear were dark in this room. I thought suddenly of John Proctor, who’d come to his wife’s
examination an innocent man and left a prisoner.

“Let me touch her,” I said to Danforth. “Let me touch her.”

The deputy governor paused. He glanced at Hathorne, who nodded, before Danforth assented. I rose in a clattering of chains
and went to my niece. I laid hands upon her the way I had been made to do at my examination.

She calmed, as I had known she would, as she had done before. When she settled, I pulled her to me as best I could with these
wretched chains about my wrists. Like a baby, without will or protest, she came, and I knew what it looked like: as if I had
bewitched her. I held her as I had dreamed of doing during the long sea voyage to Salem. I held her as if I were the mother
she had lost, the mother I would never be. She went limp and fell asleep in my arms, staying there until I felt George Locker
pulling me away, while Samuel Parris lifted Charity and took her from the room.

I looked up then, into Lucas’s face, and I saw a quiet faith there, a faith in me. I knew what he felt; I knew the power of
it, how he’d fought it, and so this victory was the most precious gift I’d ever been given. He loved me enough to trust me
against all reason, to make this sacrifice, to put his own life in peril to choose me.

I could yet do the same.

I turned to Thomas Danforth. “The things she’s said are true,” I told him quietly. “I have bewitched him.”

“No,” Lucas said forcefully. “Dear God, Susannah, do not do this.”

I ignored him. “I would like to confess. Who will hear it?”

“No! No!”

“Quiet him,” Danforth said, and I felt a moment of terror as he motioned to George Locker. The constable went immediately
to help Tom Putnam and John Hathorne take Lucas from the room.

He struggled; they had to drag him to the door. Even then, he grabbed the door frame and looked back at me, and there was
fury and dismay in his eyes. “I will not let you do this, Susannah.” Then they yanked him away, and the door shut behind them.

I
WAS ALONE WITH
T
HOMAS
D
ANFORTH AND
J
ONATHAN
C
ORWIN
, and I was terrified. I had wanted only to save Lucas; I had not thought beyond that.

“You are confessing to being a witch?” Danforth asked.

I nodded. “Aye.”

Corwin said, “We must bring her before the bar. We should examine her as we have examined the others.”

Danforth nodded. “Get the afflicted girls, the Fowler girl as well.” He turned to me as Corwin left. “You understand what
you are confessing to? You understand witchcraft is a capital offense?”

I tried to suppress my fear. “I understand.”

He looked at me thoughtfully, and then he took me into the courtroom, to the bar of justice, where I was made to stand and
wait. It did not take long before the girls were brought from an ordinary nearby, along with a crowd of people anxious to
see. I recognized Charity’s friends as they were brought in: Annie Putnam, Mary Walcott, and Elizabeth Hubbard were among
them, along with two I did not recognize. And then, brought in last, though she had suffered the morning worse than any, was
Charity.

She and the girls performed on cue—how cynical I was, that I expected such. Charity screamed louder than the others, though
just a half hour before, she’d lain quietly in my arms. I wondered if she even remembered it. I wondered if she’d felt the
peace we’d shared for just a few moments together.

Hathorne returned, along with Thomas Putnam and George Locker, who came quickly to stand beside me. I craned my neck for a
view of Lucas, but I saw him nowhere.

“Susannah Morrow,” Danforth began, “you have today confessed to being a witch, have you not?”

The girls went eerily silent. The courtroom talk died immediately. I had the strangest thought—’twas as if I were on a stage,
and the people gathered in the benches were not witnesses in the courtroom but a paying audience looking for a good entertainment.
Geoffrey’s words came to me:
You give them what they want, is all. They like exaggeration, my love. They want to be horrified; they want to laugh.…’Tis
easy enough. Throw in a trick dog, and they’ll be in the palm of your hand.

I understood him then, as I had never quite before. ’Twas the first time since I’d come to Salem that I felt in control of
anything. They were ready to hang on my every word, captivated already, bewitched. And suddenly I knew what I must do.

“How long have you been a witch?” Danforth asked me.

“A century,” I said.

Danforth looked surprised. “A century? How can that be, when you are barely above thirty years?”

“My spirit is very old.”

“You would have us believe that your spirit has lingered for seventy years beyond your age?”

“Evil is timeless, is it not?”

There was a gasp from the audience. Charity stared at me with unblinking eyes.

“What demon are you, that you can exist for so long?”

“No demon. Only a servant of the Devil, as you have all called me.”

Danforth looked smugly satisfied. “How often do you visit with the Devil? How does he come to you?”

“Nightly,” I said. “He comes as a man.”

There was furor in the front row. Mary Walcott had been knitting. Now she looked up and shouted out, “She is the mistress
of the Devil!”

“Quiet, quiet!” Danforth held up his hand. He turned back to me. “And what of Goodman Fowler? Did the Devil command you to
bewitch him?”

“Aye.”

“How have you bewitched him? What spells have you used?”

I paused and looked out at those faces, those people who were enraptured by my words, by their worst fears made flesh, their
most rampant curiosities. I understood then what they needed from me. Their horror went deeper than a simple obsession with
the Devil. ’Twas a fear of God, of fate. They wanted explanations of why things happened, reasons they could understand and
believe: If Indians attack your village and kill your mothers and fathers, ’tis the Devil who has led them here, because you
have done something wrong. If little John dies of a strange fever, ’tis because I have looked at him as I passed, and not
because of a curative failure. What blame there was in this blameless world they wanted mounted. They wanted assurances:
Prayers work; I am one of God’s chosen; my destiny is not Hell, but Heaven.…

Yet I had spent these last eighteen years in London, and I knew…nothing was assured, and prayers were only prayers, and I
knew in that moment that I would be hanged for my inability to give them relief, to provide them with solace.

Danforth said again, “What spells did you use to bewitch your sister’s husband?”

I stared at him, and then I laughed. “With my hands,” I said, and when he turned red, I laughed again. I saw Mary Walcott
sitting there, knitting away, and said, “With a red bodice and a will to have him, with my hands and my mouth—aye, I bewitched
him. I took him against his will as often as I could.”

Mary stopped her knitting and looked up. “The black man is whispering in her ear even now. Look at him there!”

Charity hugged herself hard. She was shaking uncontrollably.

“Have you seen this woman with a black man before today?” Danforth asked Mary Walcott.

“At her examination,” she said. “He whispered often in her ear.”

“He stood beside a white man,” Charity offered.

Danforth went still. “A white man?”

“Aye,” she said quietly. “He made the black man tremble. He has made all the witches tremble in fear.”

“What of your aunt?” Danforth asked. “Did he make her tremble?”

“She trembles at nothing. Even God does not frighten her.”

Danforth turned to me. “Is this true? Are you so evil that God cannot frighten you?”

I met his gaze. “The Devil has promised me solace and eternal life. I have no fear of God.”

“Which others have you consorted with? Who else here is a witch?”

“I am new to this place. I don’t know their names.”

“Abigail Hobbs has said there are witches’ Sabbats, whereupon you gather to drink red wine and eat red bread. She says there
is a wizard there who performs the sacrament in a terrible parody of Christ. She has seen you there. She says you sing so
they can dance. That you sing the Devil’s songs.”

“Aye, she does!” Charity called out. “She does sing the Devil’s songs!”

“Tell us,” Danforth urged, coming closer. “Do you sing the Devil’s songs?”

“Aye. I…have sung.”

“At these Sabbats?”

“I have sung at places you would not approve of.”

“What else happens at these meetings?”

I hesitated. Every eye was turned toward me. “There are huge fires built, bodies swung over them to burn, and then there is
music and dancing; there is feasting while the flames rise and flicker. We eat meat that looks red in the firelight, and there
is much laughing and singing.”

“And this…This is the witches’ Sabbat?” Danforth asked.

“This is Guy Fawkes Day,” I said.

The courtroom erupted in chaos, but for Mary Walcott, who kept knitting. I caught her gaze, and I saw how it burned with hatred,
and all I could feel for her was pity. Horrible pity, that she should be so trapped here, that she should be so desperate—

“Enough!” Danforth shouted. “You toy with us, madam, as the Devil bids you.”

I was allowed to say nothing more. Danforth gestured to the constable, who dragged me back hard from the bar of justice; the
crowd was rising and shouting. In this chaos I was taken away.

They pulled me out into the street, where the people shouted at me and pushed. Someone threw an apple, which hit me on my
cheek so hard tears came to my eyes. Another threw a half-rotten cabbage that exploded where it hit my hip in slimy leaves
and the smell of corruption. Locker did not handle me gently. I tripped and stumbled, and my hair fell into my face—’twas
tangled and dull, with a foul smell, but I could not move it from my
eyes
; he would not let me stop, and he held the end of the chains so I could not lift my arms.

But in spite of this, I felt victorious. I had saved Lucas from arrest. I had managed to manipulate them well enough to save
my lover’s life.

Jem took my chains from Locker and led me down into the dungeon again. When he twisted the key in the lock, he began to chuckle,
and I stared at him in confusion as he pushed open the door and shoved me inside.

And then I saw what had caused his amusement.

Lucas waited for me with the others.

He was in chains.

Jem closed the door behind me, and I heard the lock. I fell to my knees. “Lucas,” I whispered. “My God. Oh, my God.”

I felt his hands on my shoulders as he knelt before me, and then he lifted his arms over my head so he could hold me close.

“Why are you here?” I asked desperately. “I cannot believe…Why are you here?”

“They’ve accused me of being a witch,” he whispered.

“But ’tis not possible. I told them I’d bewitched you. I told them—”

“’Twas over from the moment I withdrew my testimony. Before you even confessed. ’Twas nothing you could say to change it.”

“It cannot be. I will not let them do this.”

He gave me a bitter smile. “You knew it too, Susannah. You saw the way they looked at me. I had thought…I had hoped my reputation
would save me, but I should have realized.…If even Rebecca Nurse could be arrested, what chance did I have?”

I wanted to cry. “I cannot believe this. Surely this will end. Surely someone will see. There must be clearer heads—”

“What clearer heads, Susannah?” he asked fiercely. “Where shall they be found? The preachers believe. Magistrates believe.
Did they tell you they arrested nine others? Including Mary Easty, Rebecca’s other sister?”