The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (6 page)

“What’s this, little man?” she asked, reaching gingerly between his teeth. “Did you find a wild carrot?” The animal obediently dropped the root into her hand, then looked up at her, waiting for praise.

When Connie saw what she was holding she let out a scream, recoiling in horror and dropping the root on the floor. Without thinking, she immediately wiped her hand across the seat of her jeans, rubbing away any residue that it might have left on her skin.

“What’s the matter?” asked Liz. “Does it have bugs?”

“Oh, my God,” Connie panted. The pulse at her throat beat heavy and fast, and she forced herself to inhale slowly to calm her breathing. “No, it’s not that. Don’t touch it!” She knelt on the kitchen floor, peering at the inert vegetable where it lay in a spatter of mud.

“Why?” asked Liz, looking over Connie’s shoulder. She wrinkled her nose at its malformed hideousness. “Ew. What
is
that?”

Connie shoved away the dog, who was starting to realize that the burst
of praise that he had expected was not forthcoming. She swallowed, eyes searching the kitchen for a tool that she could use to pick up the root.

“I am reasonably certain that our friend here has brought us a mandrake,” she said. Using two fingers and a dense wad of paper towel, she picked up the plant by one leaf and held it at arm’s length for Liz to see. “I’ve only ever seen drawings of them in gardening books, but their roots are supposed to be shaped kind of like a person. See?” She indicated the leglike shape of the bifurcated root, with two fat protuberances where arms might go.

“So?” asked Liz.

“So, they’re among the most poisonous plants known to man,” said Connie. “So poisonous, in fact, that legend had it that anyone who tried to dig one up himself would die on the spot. As a result, anyone who wanted one needed a dog to dig it up for him.” She glanced down at Arlo. Surely, she told herself, that legend spoke more to the fact that dogs will dig up anything, poisonous or not, than that men could not collect mandrakes safely. The creature wagged at her. “Also,” she added, “some early modern horticulture books claimed that when the mandrake is uprooted, it screams.”

“Freaky,” whispered Liz, peering at the plant. “What would your grandmother be doing with something so dangerous growing in her yard?”

“Beats me. She has some other crazy stuff outside, too,” Connie said. “Did you see the belladonna vine?” She shook her head, still holding up the homunculus root. “Maybe it’s a volunteer plant that just showed up on its own. Like a weed. I can’t imagine that anyone in her right mind would want something like this hanging around the house.”

“What are you going to do with it?” Liz asked, voice worried.

Connie sighed, suddenly overwhelmed by the prospect of the tasks that lay ahead of her. She did not want to have to worry about poisonous plants in the kitchen, garden snakes in the living room, tax liens on the house. All she really wanted to do was eat some dinner and pretend as if the summer were not about to happen.

“We’ll just put this up here for now, where no dogs can eat it,” she said, tucking the root onto a shelf between two blackened jars.

C
ONNIE JERKED AWAKE, HER HEART LURCHING IN HER CHEST
. F
OR A
long minute she could not identify where she was, and she was not sure if she was awake or still asleep. Gradually the shapes in the room swam into focus: the needlepoint armchair across from her, the Chippendale desk lurking in the shadows behind it. She wiped a hand over her face, crisscrossed by pale red marks where it had been pressed against the back of the chair. The details of the dream receded, leaving their emotional content but not their substance. Vague, terrifying shapes bending over her, long ropes reaching down, chasing after her…or perhaps they had been snakes? She peered around the small sitting room, its benign forms seeming like skins draped over something else, something menacing. As her mind struggled for focus, the borderland between dream and reality felt slippery and imprecise. She must have dozed off in the chair in the sitting room.

Before retiring to one of the four-poster beds discovered upstairs, Liz had managed to crank open one of the windows in the sitting room, so the room’s overpowering mustiness was now tempered somewhat by the soft breath of summer. Outside Connie heard only the occasional sawing of crickets. After her years in Harvard Square, she found the quiet strangely foreboding. It roared in her ears, demanding her attention, where sirens would have passed by unheeded. She was accustomed to being kept awake by the whispering of her anxieties, but here the whispers sounded even louder in the pervasive, disquieting silence.

Now completely awake, she shifted her weight in the chair, toying with the oil lamp that glowed on the table at her elbow. Connie could not fathom why her grandmother had never had the house wired for electricity. It seemed impossible that there could be a house in America at the end of the twentieth century that did not have electric light, but a concerted search had revealed no switches, no lamps, no power cords of any kind. And no
telephone! God knew how her mother expected to sell it this way.
I’ll be going to bed pretty early this summer, looks like
, Connie reflected, sullen. At least someone had thought to add running water somewhere along the line. The makeshift kitchen was echoed on the second floor by a simple lavatory, accessible through another modified closet in one of the two attic bedrooms. It contained a deep claw-footed bathtub with no shower, a pull-chain toilet with a wooden seat, and a tiny sink. Liz, as was her wont, had remarked as they brushed their teeth that the tub held out the possibility of long, romantic baths by lamplight. When Liz had said this, Connie had blushed, embarrassed. Connie was uneasy around men; she disliked this aspect of herself, for it seemed materially different from Liz’s sweet, self-conscious silliness. So yes, the tub would be great, if there were anyone to share it with. Which, of course, there was not.

She frowned, feeling the possibility of sleep grow increasingly remote. Liz had collapsed over an hour ago. Connie told herself that she was probably anxious about tomorrow, when Liz would take the train back to Cambridge. Liz was scheduled to start teaching in Harvard’s summer school on Monday—Latin declensions for overachieving teenagers. Soon the house would have her all to itself. Connie felt like she was being abandoned on a high plank, extended out over a dark lake that she could not see. Liz was right. She should never have agreed to this.

Connie rose from her seat by the empty fireplace, carrying the little brass lamp with her toward the bookshelf, craving distraction. Maybe an old temperance novel, or a book of bridge strategy. She smiled at herself. Just thinking about reading those things would send her to sleep.

Her fingers ran gently over the cracked spines of the books, fine brown powder lifting off the untreated leather and staining her fingertips. None of the spines were legible in the dim, flickering light. She pulled a slim volume from the shelf, dirt and bits of binding raining onto the floor in its wake. She flipped to the frontispiece:
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
. Typical. Every old New England house was guaranteed to have a copy of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
. It was like a calling card, announcing that
this
family was on the right side of the Civil
War. She sighed and slid the book back into place on the shelf. Sometimes New Englanders could be so self-righteous.

She drew the light along the spines of the books, its yellow orb illuminating three spines at a time together with her chin and knuckles, leaving the rest of the room swathed in black. Connie moved the lamp to the bottom shelf, where the thickest, heaviest books were kept. These would be Bibles, or possibly Psalters. Puritan doctrine held that literacy was necessary—even vital—to receiving divine grace. As such, every proper New England home must have its own copy of the revealed word of God. Placing the lamp on the floor, she wrestled the largest volume out of the shelf, supporting it with one slender arm while she thumbed it open. Yes, a Bible—an old one, judging from the idiosyncratic spelling and the fragility of the paper. Seventeenth century, she thought, pleased with her training. For a fleeting moment she caught herself weighing what a Bible like this might be worth. But no; Bibles were the most common printed texts, so not all that rare, even when they were this old. And this one was rotted with mildew and water damage. The pages felt pulpy and begrimed under her hands.

As she thumbed a page midway through Exodus, Connie wondered to herself what she might hope to find as she sifted through this house. Liz had said that Connie and Sophia sounded as if they would have gotten along, but she had never really known Sophia. Who was this odd, stubborn woman? Whose story was hidden here?

At the moment that these idle thoughts wandered through her mind, the hand that was holding the Bible vibrated with a hot, crawling, pricking sensation—something between a limb falling asleep and the painful shock that comes from unplugging a frayed lamp wire. Connie screamed in pain and surprise, dropping the heavy book with a thud.

She rubbed her hand, the strange sensation so fleeting that after a moment she doubted she had ever really felt it. Connie knelt to see if she had damaged the antique book.

The Bible lay open on the floor, raked by the glowing light from the oil lamp, surrounded by a rising cloud of dust stirred by its fall to the carpet.
Kneeling on the floor, Connie reached forward to gather up the Bible when she noticed something small and bright protruding from between its leaves. Nudging the lamp nearer, Connie traced her fingertip down the edge of the pages until she found the little glimmering object, then slowly withdrew it from its hiding place.

It was a key. Antique, about three inches long, with an ornate handle and hollow shaft, probably designed for a door or a substantial chest. She turned the key over in the soft light from the lamp, wondering why it had been hidden in the Bible. It seemed too bulky for a bookmark. As she warmed the small metal object in her hands, puzzling about what it could mean, she noticed the tiniest shred of paper protruding from the end of the hollow shaft. She knitted her brows together in concentration.

Carefully, delicately, she caught the end of the paper with her thumbnail and withdrew it slowly from the shaft. It looked like a miniature parchment, tightly rolled into a tube. She laid the key in her lap and held the parchment up to the lamp, unrolling the crisp, brittle slip one millimeter at a time. It was brown and stained, barely as long as her thumb.

On it, in a watery ink barely legible in the flickering light, were written the words
Deliverance Dane
.

Salem Town, Massachusetts
Mid-June
1682

M
ajor Samuell Appleton, Esquire, flexed his toes inside his boot and frowned. His big toe had carried a dull ache for weeks now, and he could not stop himself from worrying it. He could feel it, swollen and hot, chafing egregiously inside the stiff leather of his shoe. His thick woolen stockings only made the boiling in his toe worse. He sighed. Perhaps his wife could fix another poultice for it, when the day’s work was done. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat and dabbed at his moist forehead with a handkerchief. The afternoon yawned before him, and he sent a private request to God to make it pass quickly.

The day outside was dusty and warm, and yellow sunbeams spilled through the meetinghouse windows, casting bright puddles of light on the wood-planked floor. Appleton sat in a majestic tapestried armchair behind the broad library table at the front of the room, elbows propped on the table, arms folded. The room in front of him hummed with low conversation as
the men and women crowded onto benches and side chairs awaited the beginning of the court session. White coifs bent over knitting and needlework; men leaned sunburned heads together, nodding. Those being brought to the bar for their offenses sat sullen-faced near the front, some of them wringing their hands. Appleton grunted to himself. Court days always made for good spectacle. For a godly people, he reflected, his neighbors surely took their interest in one another’s sins.
Whores and blackguards all of them
, he thought.

Appleton glanced off to his left at the smug knot of jury men seated in a row of straight-backed chairs, waiting to pass judgment on their peers. He knew most of them by sight: Lieutenant Davenport, the jury foreman, was a decent man with a frightening countenance. He bore a deep pink scar across his face from the Indian wars at the Eastward that made him look ferocious and angry, but it masked a forthright soul. Next to him sat William Thorne, a genial fellow who ran a tavern out on Ipswich road, and Goodman Palfrey, a cordwainer who was forever volunteering for town committees. Appleton snorted with distaste. Palfrey had sat on almost every jury this year, on top of being elected town fence viewer. There were rumors he was putting himself forward for full church membership as well. Appleton detested a man who did not know his place. The other three men were unknown to him—local artisans most likely, propertied enough to serve, but still of a largely middling sort.

Appleton waved over the clerk, a slight, nervous young man named Elias Alder. The little clerk leapt to his feet in a tangle of limbs, slid a heavy sheet of paper across the library table toward the judge, and withdrew off to the side, holding the tip of his quill anxiously to his mouth. By the end of the session his lower lip would be black with ink, Appleton reflected. Appleton held the paper at arm’s length, squinting to make out Elias’s unfortunate penmanship. Four suits scheduled this afternoon. He sighed again, returned the paper to the clerk, and nodded. The throb in his toe was no better.

The clerk cleared his throat, Adam’s apple bobbing visibly in his neck, and the murmuring meetinghouse grew quiet.

“Deliverance Dane versus Peter Petford for slander!” he announced, and the assembled populace burst into a rising twitter of commentary that continued for a full five minutes.

“Enough!” bellowed Appleton, and the roar quieted down without fully disappearing. The judge surveyed the meetinghouse with a withering eye, casting his magisterial gaze over each watching face. When he felt the attention of the room settling on him once again, he continued. “Goodwife Dane, you shall render your deposition.”

A young woman rose from the front row of deponents, smoothing her skirts as she did so. Her dress was of a neat dove gray, and her collar and modest head covering were improbably fresh and white for a woman of her station. A heavy knot of tree-bark hair rested on the nape of her neck, just visible beneath her coif, and her soft cheeks shone with warmth and health. Appleton knew that this woman was spoken of in the village, but he had never seen her before. She wore a placid expression like a veil overlying the unmistakable confidence that radiated forth from her face. Appleton reflected that in some women such confidence might be mistaken for pride.

She lifted her eyes to his, and for a moment he was bathed in their coolness. As the young woman held his gaze he felt the bustling room recede around him, and an unfamiliar tingling sensation, like a beam of sunlight entering his forehead. Appleton felt his putrefying toe submerge as though into a cold, babbling stream, and the numbness of it carried away the dull, burning ache. Unaware that he was doing so, Appleton let out a soft sigh of relief. All at once the moment passed, and the judge shook himself, blinking, the sound of the meetinghouse pressing in around him once more. He flexed his foot inside his shoe, and the toe did not protest. He looked sharply at her. The Dane woman wore a small, knowing smile.

She reached into the pocket that was tied to her belt to withdraw a folded sheet of paper. She spread the paper out in her hands and began to read aloud in a softly modulated tone.

“I testify and saith that on the eve of the new year the said Petford bade
me come see to his child that was sick and that he had a good mind it was afflicted by some mischief. I hastened to the said Petford’s house whereupon I found Martha, Petford’s daughter, aged about five years, suffering a pain in her head and near dead with fever. I brewed a tincture of physick for the said Martha who drank it down and grew quieter and slept. As she slept the said Petford did rail and moan that surely some evil sorcery had been worked upon the child, for she had thrived yet one week previous.

“I made to sleep upon the floor nearby the child’s bed. Some hours hence I awoke to Martha’s awful cries as she clutched herself and saith, O, I am pinched, and now, O, I am burnt, and she tore at her clothes. I took her into my arms and held her as she pitched to and fro in her fits, and then loosed one final breath and died.

“The said Petford, being much aggrieved for the death of his only child, cried what witch hath murdered Martha, and looked upon me strangely. I saith that none ha’ killed his child but it was God’s will, and then I hastened back to Salem.

“Some weeks hence Susanna Cory saith to Nathaniel, my husband, that she had heard the said Petford tell Goody Oliver that I must surely have written my name in the Devil’s book. He ha’ spake sundry unfair cruelties by me though I only crafted physick for his daughter, thereby murdering my good name, and since then I ha’ felt angry carriages in the town.”

As she read her account the townsfolk gathered in the meetinghouse listened rapt, gasping aloud at the drama of her recitation. When she finished, the room vibrated with controversy as the onlookers weighed her statement, dying down to a subdued hush when the clerk stood up from his desk.

Goodwife Dane passed her deposition to the clerk, lowered her gaze to the floor, and resumed her seat on the bench. Whispers eddied around her, but she gave no sign of hearing them.

“If Goodwife Cory be here she shall render her deposition,” demanded Appleton, reasserting his control over the room. How he hated these old gossips with their wagging fingers.

A frank-looking woman of about fifty years stood from her place next to Goody Dane. She held her head stiffly, her hands planted on her hips, unashamed of the darning and patches that spotted her dress. She pulled a paper from her own pocket, held it up close to her good eye, and read aloud in a rasping monotone.

“I testify and saith that as I passed the said Petfahd’s house one faw-noon I huhd the said Petfahd tell Goody Olivah that that Deliverance Dane of Salem is a common rogue and witch that she ha’ murdered his darter as part of her pledge to do the Devil’s work. I tarried and saith to that Petfahd that she seemed none a witch to me but only a wise woman. I saith also that I ha’ known the said Deliverance’s mother and that she were cunning also. The Olivah then countehed that Deliverance once bought several bottles of her and that when she asked Goody Dane whehfoah she wanted bottles she said to read the watah with. Goody Olivah and Goodman Petfahd then told diverse other tales of felonious sawceries which I could scarce believe. I ventured to the afawsaid Dane’s house to tell them what were being said.”

After surrendering her testimony to the clerk, Goody Cory cast a glower toward the man whom Appleton assumed to be Petford, a roguish-looking sort sitting on the opposite bench with his head cupped in his hands. She sat and folded her arms, sniffing her disapproval of the proceedings.

“Very well,” said Appleton. “If Nathaniel Dane be present, he shall deliver his deposition.”

A tall young man seated on Goody Dane’s other side rose. He was simply and neatly dressed, and looked like he might smell pleasantly of burning leaves. There was an out-of-doors quality to his countenance that made Appleton muse that this Goodman Dane would be a top fowler.

The man uncrumpled a little slip of paper, glanced down at his wife, and then paused a moment to draw breath. Appleton noted that the young man’s eyes had dark circles under them, and that his face was whitish yellow under his sunburn. The room waited.

“I testify and saith,” he read, pronouncing each word with deliberation,
“that my wife be no kind of witch, but that the said Petah Petfahd ha’ hardened his heaht for sadness at the loss of his child Mahther, and only sought to blame where naught could be helped.”

He started to recrumple the paper before Elias plucked it out of his hands and then settled himself again next to his wife. Appleton just glimpsed Goodman Dane brush his fingertips over his wife’s knee, and in that tender gesture the true depth of Dane’s fear unfurled before him. To have one’s wife talked about as a sorcerer was a worrisome thing indeed. If she did not prevail in this slander case, the rumors would only grow worse; a reputation for demoniac doings might never be undone.
Heaven help them if Petford not be found guilty,
he reflected. To think that a weak man’s grief could undo a young family such as this. Appleton, embarrassed by this limpid feeling of pity and sorrow for the couple seated before him, looked for help back at the clerk. Elias prompted him by mouthing the name of the next witness.

“If Goodwife Mary Oliver be here she shall present her deposition,” Appleton barked.

A woman of indistinct middle years arose on the other side of the meetinghouse aisle, her puckered face bristling with a tobacco-stained mustache. Just looking at her made Appleton think of tart pickled plums, and he pursed his lips with displeasure. She unfolded her own sheet of paper, raised her nose an inch or so, and spoke.

“I testify and saith that the said Deliverance Dane was a known healah and like a witch also, sost say so could be no defamement. One John Godfrey did tell me at this instant month that he hud a calf which were wasted and afflicted and asked the said Goody Dane whehfoah the animal was sick. She took watah of the calf into a bottle and boilt it in a kittle upon the fyah, whereupon she told the said Godfrey that his calf would be well though it was bewitched. And thus the calf was wal.”

At this the assembly gasped aloud, and a fresh swell of murmurs swept through the meetinghouse.

“Silence!” bellowed Appleton. “You shall continue, woman.”

Goody Oliver seemed to enjoy the effect of her testimony, surveying her audience with a proud smirk. “Anothah time,” she began again, “I ha’ sought physick from heh for a pained foot. She bade me entah heh house and did apply some liniment to my foot which she made by mashing hairbs and readin’ in some book. I asked her what book war this and she said nowt but placed the book on a high shelf and asked me if my foot weh feeling bettah, which it was.”

The townsfolk gathered in the meetinghouse burst forth in a fresh torrent of commentary as Goody Oliver pressed her lips together in satisfaction. She surrendered her deposition to Elias with great ceremony, remained standing a moment longer than was strictly necessary, and then resumed her seat. Appleton gazed on her with distaste. He could already imagine her recounting this minor testimony to her neighbor over a fence post with all the authority attendant on a capital trial.
Telt ’em, I did
, he imagined her saying.
That Dane shan’t think to chahge so much of me next time my foot be pained!
Scurrilous hag.

“Mr. Saltonstall,” Appleton intoned, casting an impatient eye on the muttering audience, “you shall examine the defendant.”

In the far rear corner of the meetinghouse a pair of boots adorned with overlarge, well-buffed buckles dropped down from where they had been resting, crossed, on the seat of an empty chair. Their owner, dressed in overcoat and breeches of fitted richness, fashionably snug about the elbows, topped by an ostentatious lace collar stretching almost to his shoulders, pulled himself up to his full six feet and ambled to the front of the room.
Someone ought to have a word with young Richard Saltonstall
, Appleton reflected.
I’d slice those curls off myself given half a chance.
Richard’s father had never carried himself so. No sooner does God grant favor on your ships than you forget to pay obeisance to God.

“Thank you, sir,” said the lawyer, his voice polished and confident. “’T’would be my pleasure.” He turned to face the crowded benches and announced “Goodman Peter Petford, defendant, shall submit to examination!”

The roguish man whom Appleton had noticed rocking and holding his head during the depositions looked around himself and rose, uncertain. Saltonstall gestured him toward a chair at the side of the library table, and Petford seated himself uneasily. In the corner Elias hovered, quill poised to jot down his every utterance. Saltonstall looked to Appleton for approval, and Appleton nodded.

“Goodman Petford, yeoman,” Saltonstall began, “you stand accused of sundry acts of slander for telling lies most grievous and spreading ill will of Goodwife Dane in the town. You are now before authority. I expect the truth of you.”

“I am a gospel man,” said Petford, his voice wavering. He hung his head down near his shoulders, gaze averted. Appleton noticed that Petford’s cheeks appeared hollow and dark, the skin of his head clinging to his skull. He looked dreadful, broken.