Witch Child (12 page)

‘Not him. You.’

‘Why me?’

‘That’s for him to tell you.’

‘When?’

‘Not today. It grows late. You will know when. I will find you.’

With that he left, melting into the forest. I know I cannot follow. I cannot even tell which direction he takes. His feet make no sound, no scuffing of leaves or cracking of twigs and I catch no sight of him in the dappled shadows.

Entry 55

I never know if Jaybird will be there. He just appears. I never see him. He could be an arm’s length away and I would not guess it. He is teaching me how to be quiet in the woods. Quiet enough for the animals to come out and show no fear. And he teaches me bird calls. I can do the jay bird almost as well as he does. That’s how I know he’s there. I call, and he calls back.

Sometimes, he leaves gifts by our door. Little woven baskets of rush or willow, containing nuts and fruit, plums and blueberries. He knows that these are Martha’s favourites; they are like bilberries, but sweeter and bigger.

He never comes to the town. Neither do any other native people. He is the only one I have seen since we came here.

Entry 56 (October? 1659)

‘You want to know why the woods are empty of my people?’

We are eating strawberries in the forest. Jaybird knows a place where the fruits grow until the first snow, which will not be long now. We sit opposite each other. Dressing like a boy makes me easier with him. He treats me like a brother.

‘Very well. I will tell you. When the first settlers came, my people welcomed them and without us they would have perished. We taught them how to live, what to grow, when to sow, when to harvest. We thought the land was big enough for all to live together. But that was not to be. More came, and more came, wanting more land, and more land. They took the land, land that we had cleared, for it was easier for them to settle there. But that was not what killed the people.’

‘You were attacked? Wiped out?’

He shook his head. ‘Not in the way you mean, with guns and weapons. The white man brought sickness, disease. This began many years ago, before even the first Pilgrims came to Plymouth. Fishermen began to come from Europe, to fish the seas in the north. Every winter they went back, but did not have to stay to leave their fevers. Then traders came, wanting fur, and they, too, brought illness. When the English came they brought the spotted sickness. Our medicine men were powerless against sickness they had never seen, that came from across the sea.

‘Many, many of our people died. Those that were left were too weak to hunt, to fish, to plant crops or bring in the harvest. We belonged to the Pentucket band of the Pennacook nation. Our main village was to the north, on the Merrimac river. So few were left there that their land was sold to the English. My father was a Sachem, leader of a small band remote from the main centre on a tributary river. He hoped that his band could escape the sickness which raged along the Merrimac, but that was not to be. People came to us for help and brought the sickness with them. He died, and my mother, and my sister and brothers and many, many others. A white man, a good man, took pity on our plight. He did what he could for the sick, which was little, and he took me and some others. Cared for us, schooled us, treated us as his own.’

‘But you left him?’

‘The choice was not a hard one to make. I grew old enough to know that there is more to being a white man than learning his language and wearing his clothes. I wanted to go home to my people. Except I found that I had no home, I had no people. My village was a white man’s town. Beulah.’

‘What had happened? Where had they gone?’

‘We do not live just in one place as the white man does. The place you call Beulah was our place in summer. In winter we go deeper into the forest to hunt and take shelter from the worst of the winter and come back in the spring to plant and fish. It has always been that way. One spring, the people, what was left of them, returned to find the village had been taken. Their holy places overturned. The graves of their ancestors desecrated and built upon. Their food stores had been broken open, the contents stolen. They had no choice but to move on.’

‘So there was no-one?’

‘Just my grandfather. He stayed. He watches the holy places. The stones are still there ... ’

‘What stones?’

‘Great stones stood on the top of the hill. They had been there since time began, marking the place as sacred to our people, and now ... ’

‘They lie under our Meeting House.’

I remember remarking how oddly-shaped they were, not fresh cut and squared, but ancient, weathered by time, worn by wind and rain.

‘We have stones like that at home.’ I told him of the ones my grandmother visited, and the great ones I had seen on Salisbury Plain.

‘Then your people should respect them.’

It was my turn to shake my head. ‘They would think them heathen.’

‘Even their own?’

‘Even their own. You have been in the town?’

‘Enough times.’

He did not explain, but I could tell from the way he said it that he would not go again.

Entry 57

‘There’s been talk. I told you there would be.’ Martha fixed her eye upon me.

Our house is finished. After we have eaten we settle round the fire as darkness descends outside. Martha has had a visit from her sister, which always unsettles her.

‘Talk?’ I looked up from my stitching. ‘Of what?’

‘Of you. Wandering in the forest. And more besides.’

‘What talk is this, Martha?’ Jonah asked, alerted by the worry in Martha’s voice.

‘Jethro Vane complains his hogs sicken. He says that someone has given them the Evil Eye. Mary was seen to come and go from the place where they roam. And she was seen staring at them, and shouting, like to cursing ... ’

‘I was not cursing! You told me to drive them off if they came in our garden! I was shouting because they are bold creatures, half wild from living in the woods. They take some shifting.’

‘Who told you this?’

‘My sister, Anne Francis. She wanted to warn me, what folks were saying ... ’

‘Worry you more like.’ Jonah’s face darkened. ‘She strikes me as a meddler and a keen bearer of ill tidings. Take no notice.’

‘Not much gets past our Annie. She has an ear for gossip, that I’ll give you, and a finger into every pie.’ Martha shook her head. ‘But that only serves to strengthen her warning. You do not know these people as I do.’

‘That’s as maybe, but there’s always some proper explanation.’ Jonah sighed. ‘“Evil Eye”? What stuff!’ He is a man of science and has little truck with superstition. ‘Like as not Jethro Vane’s swine caught the sickness from the ones his brother brought here.’ He went back to his book. ‘They looked to me like a sickly lot.’

‘Like as not they caught it from Jeremiah himself,’ I said.

Tobias laughed. Jeremiah Vane shares his daughter Deborah’s colouring. He is russet-bearded, small-eyed, narrow-jawed, and long-snouted, and thus much resembles a Tamworth hog.

‘This is no matter for laughing!’ Martha’s eyes flared green in warning. ‘Such talk is dangerous. We all know where such whispers lead. We don’t want folk turning against us.’ She turned to Tobias. ‘You, sir, can mend the fencing. I do not want his hogs anywhere near our property. And you,’ it was my turn now, ‘you can mend your ways! No more going into the forest. No more wandering. Lest tongues wag even more.’

Entry 58

‘They live in the forest in nakedness, in sin and degradation. They make nothing of the land. They live worse than beggars.’

Goodwife Anne is paying another visit, this time in the evening, so she can speak to all of us. She is giving us newcomers the benefit of her wisdom and superior experience. Her subject is the native people.

Martha sits, face closed. If it was not for the native people her sister so despises, Jonah would be in his grave by now. Her eyes flick up, warning us to say nothing. Jonah draws the sprig on the table in front of him. Tobias sits in the corner whittling a doll for Rebekah’s sister. I want to shout, cry out about how little she understands. The Indians go lightly in the world, that is all. They make their homes from living trees, only taking what they need before moving on to let the land replenish itself. But I hold my tongue. Goody Francis is a stupid, narrow-minded, ignorant busybody of a woman, poking her long nose into everything, puffing out her saggy cheeks to make judgements, then pulling her mouth in, like a tightly drawn purse string.

‘What is it that you write, child? May I see?’

My fingers jerked, splaying the nib cut into the quill, turning the ‘g’ I was forming into a crooked blot.

‘Mary helps me.’ Jonah handed me a knife to cut a new nib, which I did, though my hand was trembling. ‘With my
Herbal
.’

‘May I see?’

Goody Francis stretched out her hand.

Jonah made a show of sorting through the papers in front of him, spreading them out to cover my writing. She clearly meant for me to give her what I was writing, but Jonah gave her his book instead. She took it from him. She opened the pasteboard covers. The pages crackled and buckled as she turned them. She studied what she found there carefully, brows knit, as if she understood what she looked at, but her mouth worked to form the words, and her finger ran under the writing, marking her as almost unlettered.

‘What is this?’

She had stopped at mandrake, mandragora. The drawing of the root looks like a small man, a little homunculus. At the base of the trunk, the root forked, split into three parts. She fairly shrieked at it, shrilling her disgust.

‘It looks like a poppet, a waxen image.’ She shuddered. ‘Unclean!’

Jonah’s eyes twinkled. ‘No more so than carrot or parsnip.’

Her thin lips pursed and puffed, slowly spelling over the letters describing the plant’s purpose and her putty face paled even more.

‘I have heard stories about this root. It grows only under the gallows tree and screams like a human thing when pulled from the ground.’

‘All false and untrue. Old wives’ tales. Doltish dreams put about by runnigate surgeons and physick mongers. The root has many virtues. It provokes sleep, eases pain. Have a care what you believe, Mistress.’

‘Have a care what you write in your book.’ She snapped the covers shut. ‘Such are kept by magicians and folk of that sort, up to the Devil’s work.’

‘I am an apothecary.’ He took the book back from her. ‘It is necessary for me to keep a record of the virtues of plants and different simples and cures.’

Goody Francis folded her arms across her black bodice and set her mouth in a stubborn line.

‘Such stuff smacks of magic.’

Jonah sighed. ‘Not so, Goody Francis, not so. You did not complain when I dressed your husband’s leg when he cut it on the scythe. This is where I found the herbs to heal the wound and ease the pain. I am the closest thing to a doctor here. I have kept this book all my life. I need it for my practice and will not stop now.’

Goody Francis did not looked convinced, but she would not better Jonah. She turned on me instead.

‘You may say what you please, Master Morse, but inky fingers on a girl are very far from natural. You’ve been making far too free.’ She looked from me over to where her sister sat sewing. ‘You would be better set staying close and helping Martha. Take it from me.’

She paused and sat up straighter, sucking in her breath and then puffing out her cheeks and chest, so obviously readying herself for some pronouncement that even Tobias looked up.

‘I have to tell you, sister,’ she turned to address Martha, ‘that this, this arrangement,’ she waved one hand around to indicate the room, our home, ‘this arrangement has been called into question.’

‘Called into question?’ Jonah looked up. ‘How so?’

‘Some think that it is not fitting that a young girl should share a house with men who are not related to her.’

She glanced at Jonah, at the pages in front of him. If he had been suspect before, this made him more so.

‘Who says this?’ Martha’s voice trembled. ‘We live as a family here.’

‘Just so.’ Goody Francis gave her little pursed smile. ‘And you live in error. It would be much more suitable if this girl,’ she waved her hand towards me, ‘lived with the Rivers. They are a proper family. It has been brought to the attention of the Reverend Johnson.’

‘By whom, may I ask?’ Martha’s hands were trembling as she put aside her sewing. I could see her temper rising.

‘The Reverend will talk with the Selectmen. You will be told what they decide.’

At that, she rose to go.

‘Wait, Mistress,’ Jonah’s face was creased with concern. ‘Do we not have a say in this?’

‘Newcomers have no say as yet.’

‘What about the Rivers, do
they
have no say? It’s his household she’ll be joining.’

‘They will abide by the decision. John Rivers is a God-fearing man. How can it be otherwise?’ She spoke with slow drawn-out patience, as if addressing a pack of ignorant children. ‘With the Reverend Johnson’s strength and under his guidance, the meeting
always
comes to the right decision. God speaks through them, how else could we know of his intention? The will of the meeting is the will of all.’