The Truth of All Things (23 page)

“May I have the honor of this dance?” Grey said.

Helen let him take her hand. “You may.”

The band launched into Sousa’s most popular dance song, “The Washington Post March,” and Grey led the two-step, slowly maneuvering Helen into the middle of the floor. She smiled at him. “I think
the last time I danced like this, I was still in school. But you’re rather clever on your feet, Mr. Grey.”

“I don’t have much call to practice these days either, but when I was a young man, my education was certainly varied and thorough.” Grey continued to guide Helen toward the far side of the tent, to within twenty feet of the colonel.

Helen studied the men standing alongside Blanchard and shook her head. They two-stepped along until Helen was positioned to see the faces of the men who stood opposite the colonel. Her eyes darted over all the surrounding faces, locking onto a strongly built man with short-cropped blond hair. He wore a black patch over his left eye. She felt the surprise spread across her face as she blurted out, “It’s him!”

All of Blanchard’s group, and several dancing couples, looked in Helen’s direction. Grey spun her around quickly so that she faced away from their scrutiny.

“The blond hair and the eye patch,” she whispered. Helen watched Grey’s face as he stared at the colonel and his men for a few seconds before casually leading her back across the floor to where they had entered the tent. They stepped out under the night sky as the music faded behind them. Grey kept hold of Helen’s hand.

“Let’s move along. We’ll have a better view for the festivities.”

It wasn’t exactly the sort of comment Helen was expecting after having just identified the colonel’s associate, but she let Grey lead her away from Fort Allen Park, weaving among the crowds of spectators standing on the hillside or else spread out on picnic blankets, all awaiting the aerial display.

“I shouldn’t have cried out like that,” she said. “Do you think he suspects us?”

“I don’t believe he saw your face.”

They continued on along the grassy slope, Grey leading at a casual pace, shooting glances behind them. Helen looked back toward the tent as well, but it was too dark to make out anyone in particular.

“Are we being followed?”

“There’s nothing to worry about.”

Helen only half believed him, noting the way that Grey hunched his shoulders, making himself shorter and less noticeable among the crowds. A sharp whistling sound rose from the waterfront at the base of the hill, where the fireworks were being staged. The crowd offered up a collective cheer. Grey and Helen paused to watch the flare rise into the sky and burst into a shower of blue and white directly over the crowd. Several more bursts followed. As soon as there was a lull and the sky grew dim again, Grey guided Helen farther uphill toward the street. Each time a new flare sounded, they would pause and await the explosions. Helen was so amazed at how close the bursts were, nearly filling her entire field of vision, that she forgot all her thoughts of Colonel Blanchard and the blond man. After several rockets combined for a particularly dazzling burst, she said, “Isn’t this spectacular?”

“Yes.” Grey’s disinterested tone caused her to look sideways at him, and she realized that he was paying no heed to the fireworks. He was instead using their illuminating effect to scan the faces in the crowd.

“What’s wrong?”

“We should be going.” The sky began to darken again, and Grey reached out to guide Helen up the last stretch of hillside. As they stepped onto the pavement of the Eastern Promenade, Helen turned and saw a soldier following after them. He motioned to some unseen comrade, then pointed in their direction. Grey urged her forward to one of the carriages that sat in a row, awaiting fares at the end of the fireworks show. He helped her up into the enclosed four-wheeler.

As Grey climbed in, the driver called out, “It’ll be a bit of a wait, sir. Packed in here tight until them in front of us move out.”

“Yes, thank you,” Grey said. Inside, he did not take a seat but moved directly across to exit the opposite door, then assisted Helen down on the street side of the carriage. Her choice of shoes, bowed Dieppe ties with Louis XV heels, was not conducive to flight, so Grey held on to her as they hurried over the Promenade’s uneven paving
stones. Once across the wide avenue, they turned in to the corner of Moody Street to escape from view.

Helen glanced back and didn’t see anyone following them, but Grey pressed her along the sidewalk, moving up Munjoy Hill to where Rasmus waited with Dr. Steig’s carriage. Between the excitement and the slope they were facing, Helen’s breathing became quick.

“Are you all right, Mrs. Prescott?”

“Perfectly fine, thank you. An evening of dancing, fireworks, fleeing from angry soldiers—what more could a lady ask for?”

“I do apologize. This was needlessly risky on my part.”

“Oh, I’m just having you on a bit. I’m fine. Truly.”

“Shh!” Grey held a finger to his lips as he pulled Helen toward a recessed doorway. She glanced about as she stepped in but didn’t see or hear anything that would cause alarm.

“What is it?” she whispered.

Grey waited, then leaned forward several inches and peered down toward the boulevard. Helen risked a peek. Two men, silhouetted against a streetlamp and wearing army hats, were standing in the middle of the street, one block away. They looked all around, then moved on toward the next side street.

“That was him with the blond hair,” Helen said.

“His name is Simon Gould. He’s one of the men who chased you in the alley?”

“Not the alley—the library. He was the man in the lobby.”

“But is he the man who actually pursued you in the library later that night?” Grey asked.

“Maybe. He might have been.”

“Could you swear it to the police? Or a judge?”

Helen sighed. The rush of excitement drained out of her. She couldn’t honestly swear that Simon Gould was anything other than an unnerving man who had asked about books on witchcraft. If she accused him now, the authorities would dismiss her as quickly as Archie Lean had the morning after that incident. No one would arrest one of Colonel Blanchard’s close associates on the uncertain word of a nervous woman, frightened out of her wits in the dark, rushing through
the library at night in fear for her life, after spending the evening listening to a lecture on witchcraft.

“I’d like to get home to Delia now.”

Grey nodded and took Helen’s hand as they hurried along the rough sidewalk toward the waiting carriage.

A
week had passed since the return from Scituate and the subsequent revelation by Helen Prescott that the killer was using aliases drawn from Salem’s male witch-trial victims. July’s arrival had broken a long pattern of rainy weather. More important, the Independence Day weekend had brought Lean some welcome time with his family and a respite from the mayor’s requests for updates. When he saw Grey waiting by the steps to the public library and historical society, all such pleasant thoughts faded.

As they made their way to the top floor to meet Helen, Grey relayed her identification of Simon Gould as the man in the library, further solidifying the theory of a connection between the Portland Company murder and the temperance union. When they reached the third floor, Helen was sitting at the reference desk. Only one other person occupied the room—a thin, scholarly man who looked as if he were intentionally ignoring the newcomers.

“Is there somewhere we could talk in private?” Lean asked.

Helen glanced at the wall clock. “We close in another fifteen minutes. Though, I suppose once the last visitor leaves, I could shut the doors early.”

Grey sauntered over to where the visitor, a mousy-faced man with a twitchy mustache, was perusing a book. He studied the man as if he were an amateurish painting hanging in a gallery that ought to show better. Eventually the man acknowledged his discomfort by asking if there was some way he could help Grey.

“No. But aren’t you running late for your birching?” Grey flicked his arm, mimicking a whipping motion.

“I beg your pardon.” The man drew himself up to his full, but still unimpressive, height.

“Keeping that burly woman in high leather boots waiting isn’t going to improve her mood any. Or is that the whole point?”

Helen’s face turned a violent shade of red reserved for occasions of deep personal embarrassment. Lean bit his lip to keep from laughing as Grey followed the nervous man to the exit and shut the doors behind him.

After Grey rejoined them, no one spoke for several moments until a stunned Helen uttered, “Was that really called for?”

“I certainly hope so,” Grey said. “It depends on how rewarding your research has been.”

“Yes, well …” was all that Helen managed as she led them into the back room of the historical society. The space, used for storage and organization of archived documents and material, was an eruption of books and stacks of papers. Small wooden crates dotted the floor, some with lids off, revealing their cargoes of texts like recently unearthed treasure chests left by long-dead, and strangely erudite, pirates. Stuffed bookshelves lined the walls, and a few pitiful tables sagged under their loads.

Lean surveyed the random stacks of bound and loose pages. “Looks like the devil’s been holding a rummage sale. This isn’t all for us, I trust.”

“No, we’re just a bit behind in our cataloging. I’ve set aside a work area for materials from the two hundred years since the witch trials.”

Helen stepped toward a small desk that held her notes. “I assume you know the basic facts from 1692. Salem was rife with factions and long-running disputes over land, religious matters, and anything else they could think of. Not exactly the type of great city on a hill envisioned by the Puritans. In the winter some of the village girls had gathered together and done a bit of fortune-telling. Shortly afterward some of them started having spasms and writhing in agony, contorting into unnatural postures, uttering all sorts of nonsense. The village physician examined them and concluded they were ‘under an evil hand.’ Salem’s minister, the Reverend Parris, called the neighboring ministers
to his house, and they all agreed the devil was conducting an unholy assault upon their community.

“You must bear in mind,” Helen said, “it was an established doctrine that the devil could not interfere directly against humans, except through other human beings acting in confederacy with him—that is, witches. The question on everyone’s mind was, who were the agents of the devil that were afflicting the girls? I call them girls, though some adult women soon joined their ranks. Anyway, the constant pressure to identify their tormentors finally became too great. One after another, the girls cried out the names of the Reverend Parris’s Caribbean servant, Tituba, along with Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne.”

“What about the accused men?” Lean asked.

“It was popularly known that women were much more likely than men to be witches. But it was also thought that people closely related to witches were themselves in danger of becoming witches. So, soon after the next group of women was accused, two of their husbands, John Proctor and the very elderly Giles Corey, were also named. The afflicted girls would normally be at the bottom of the legal and social hierarchy. Some of them were servants in others’ households. The fact that they became such important and powerful figures in the witchcraft crisis was a remarkable event. It turned the social order on its head. Despite the afflicted girls’ newfound influence, they were not always able to formally bring charges against accused witches. Often that task would fall upon the male head of the household.

“Some men, such as John Proctor, were openly skeptical of the accusing girls’ fits and their claims of being tormented by witches’ specters. His servant was among the afflicted girls, but he refused to support charges made by her, instead threatening to beat the fits out of her. Not surprisingly, John Proctor’s defense of his own wife’s innocence and his hostile attitude toward the accusers soon earned him a place among the accused witches.

“As for Giles Corey, he was called up for trial, pleaded not guilty, then refused to answer the required question of whether he would be tried by God and country. The traditional punishment for failure to agree to trial was to lay the prisoner down with a wooden board atop
his chest. He would be pressed with stones until he either agreed to a trial or died. Despite the mounting weight, the eighty-year-old only uttered, ‘More weight,’ when his compliance was demanded. It was a slow death, with one witness recalling that Corey’s tongue was forced out of his mouth from the pressure, only to have the sheriff push it back in with his cane.”

“Just so you know,” Lean said with mock sincerity, “I’d do you the same favor. If it ever came to that.”

Grey nodded. “Thank you. It had been preying on my mind.”

Helen cleared her throat. “The old and infirm George Jacobs was accused by a servant as well as by his own granddaughter. His body was searched and revealed several apparent witch’s tits. The servant had accused Jacobs of wickedness and failing to pray. Jacobs responded that this was because he could not read. When instructed to recite the Lord’s Prayer, he made several errors and could not repeat it correctly despite numerous attempts. This inability to recite the Lord’s Prayer perfectly was considered a sure sign of guilt.”