Witch Child (15 page)

Martha treats the Reverend Johnson’s children with a linctus of coltsfoot and liquorice boiled in honey with a touch of vinegar. She rubs their chests with goose grease, binds them with flannel, and makes them breathe in steam from a kettle in which she infuses leaves from the forest: pipsissewa, bergamot and native mints.

The children are recovering. The congestion is easing. They will soon be better. It is Goody Johnson herself who worries Martha. Apart from where the great bulge of the baby shows, she is very thin. Martha is concerned that carrying a child may be sapping her beyond her endurance.

Entry 70

Winter bites hard into the lives of all of us. The cold is unrelenting, it is colder if anything, and food is getting scarcer, fresh food scarcest of all. Jonah fears scurvy may break out as it did on the ship. His stock of lemon juice is all but exhausted.

The men go out to hunt when they can, but the game has fled the woods hereabouts and what they do manage to catch is hide and bone.

What we can spare, we share. I have been summoned by Goody Johnson. Martha offers to go herself, but Goody Johnson says that I must go, that Martha will not do. She has a favour to ask of me.

Entry 71

Goody Johnson welcomes me in. Her eyes are huge in her head, and as she smiles, her skin stretches back to show the skull beneath her skin. I have brought tonic for her, from Martha, but fear it will do little good. It is though the child inside is feeding off her, consuming her to the very bones.

She is a good woman and knows our stores are low. The children have recovered well and she wants to show her gratitude. She loads me down with gifts of food which we share between all of us. Corn, peas, beans, oatmeal, loaves she has baked, and even a few precious apples, their skins wizened, but their flavour the sweeter for it.

‘Now, the favour.’ She takes my hand; hers are cold and so thin, the skin stretched to transparency. ‘The Reverend Johnson’s nephew, Elias, is busy compiling his
Book of Wonders
but the cold causes painful swelling of the joints in his hands, making it difficult for him to write. I have been scribing for him, but my strength often fails me. He tells me that you can read and write and have a fair hand, and will make a tolerable substitute. Are you willing? If you come, of course you can eat here, and I’ll make sure you have something to take home with you.’

How could I refuse? She has given me enough to feed us for a week.

Entry 72

I do not see the Reverend Johnson often when I visit, and I am glad of it. I did not like the way he questioned me. His strange catechism made me nervous. He never eats with his family and keeps to a separate part of the house, as far from the noise of the children as possible. When I do see him, he ignores me as if I am beneath his notice.

Elias Cornwell has his own study, a little room tucked at the top of a set of winding stairs. It is small and dark with wood panelling. A fire glows in the grate and good candles stand on a table strewn with papers. It is here that he works on his pamphlet. It began as the journal he kept aboard ship but is now to be called:

g

A Book of Miracles, Providential Wonders and Many Remarkable Things (which may probably come to pass)

By

Elias Cornwell

g

I think the title too long, but do not see it as my place to remark upon it.

He hopes to travel to Boston, in the spring when the roads are clear, and deliver it to a printer there, but he is a long way off from that. He has amassed a very great, and very odd, collection of stories. Some are his own experiences; our remarkable sea deliverances, our journey here under providential guidance. He also has an account of the miraculous founding of the town itself, as told by Reverend Johnson and the original settlers. The rest is a ragtag collection of signs and portents, dreams and miracles collected from goodness knows where. Strange lights, comets burning across the skies, houses riven with strange hauntings and noise from invisible drummer boys, women and beasts who bear monstrous progeny, conjurors’ books which refuse to burn and I do not know what else. I do not know who is gulling him, but he has more old wives’ tales here than any village crone keeps in her noddle.

As I write, Elias paces the room, cracking his long fingers to ease the red knotted joints. As he walks, he talks, and as he talks his pale eyes gleam with a cold fanatical fire, every bit as wintry as the sun striking the ice outside.

‘Winter grips harder. Ships freeze in Boston harbour. The wolves grow ever bolder. Children sicken. Cattle die.’

‘But that happens every year.’

‘This year is worse, next will be worse still, and so on, until it snows year round. This year is 1660. We enter the Last Days, Mary. We have scant years left until 1666, the Year of the Beast. Can’t you understand? Satan’s reign is all about us. We must be ever vigilant, lest we be corrupted along with the rest. Only the pure, the untainted, will be fit to welcome back the coming Christ.’

Sometimes he comes close, leaning to see what I write. I smell his fishy breath, feel it on my cheek and neck, and struggle not to choke and gag.

He truly believes in Christ’s Coming, and that his Kingdom will have Beulah at its centre. His only worry is that this will happen before he can get his pamphlet to the printers. I think him more than a little mad.

Entry 73

Hunger stalks the town and the wolves do grow bolder, he is right about that. There was fresh snow last night and this morning Tobias showed me a set of tracks going straight down the main street. Broad forefoot, narrow hind.

‘Perhaps it is a dog.’

‘That’s no dog.’

His friend, Ned, spat. It is so cold his spittle froze before it hit the snow. The tracks went as far as the Meeting House. They stopped beneath the line of heads, as though it scented its own kind nailed up there, then went on. By the door the snow was melted, frozen yellow where she had squatted.

‘Shows what her thinks of yon.’ Ned grinned, his already discoloured teeth streaked and rimmed red with blood from his bleeding gums.

Entry 74

Goody Johnson’s eldest girls have fallen sick now, so I often spend the day with her, helping her with the smaller children, just as Rebekah helps Sarah. I do not feel like a servant. Goody Johnson is nearing her time and is great with child, so she needs all the help that I can offer. Besides, she has been kind to us. If it were not for her, we would be like to starve or use our seed corn for eating. If we share what she gives between us, we might just get by. When the work is done, and the children quiet in their corner, we sit in the kitchen and she gives me warm spiced ale with some cake to dip in it. She asks me of my past. I have told her what I can, but she knows I am keeping something back.

A silence broods between us, rendering some moments stilted and awkward, until one day she asked me.

‘You have not told me all, have you, Mary?’

I cannot lie to her. She is so good, so gentle, to lie would be sinful.

‘Don’t ask me.’

I cannot speak of it, not in this house.

I hear his words again: ‘I am His representative.’

‘
Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live
.’ I have heard him thunder it from the pulpit.

‘I think I guess at it. I was not always as I am now.’ Her faded eyes looked deep into mine and seemed to take on darker blue and violet. ‘When I was your age I ran wild. I, too, lived with my grandmother. I never knew my father; he was a soldier. My mother left to follow him and no-one ever saw her again. I reached womanhood in a country plunging into war. Many parts became beyond the law, and into this breach stepped men bent on malice, intent on fishing in waters already troubled and muddy. I think you know the kind of whom I speak. They came to our town, to root out witchcraft, so they said, but their real interest was in their fee, twenty shillings to free the town from witches. My grandmother was dead by then, thank the Lord she was spared, but their attention turned to me instead.’

As she spoke, my own memories flooded me, causing my blood to heat and freeze me, running alternately hot with hatred, cold with fear.

‘They hunted me down like an animal, bound me and threw me into the millpond to see if I would float. I sank. I was bound hand and foot, I could not reach the surface and even if I did, I would be hanged for a witch. I was drowning. I was on the bottom looking up at them. I can still see their faces through the rippling water, circled above me, waiting for it to happen.

‘Then suddenly the surface of the water broke with a great splash. Someone was swimming down to me. Strong arms went round me, pulling me to the surface. He was a young preacher, on his way to his first parish. He had followed the hue and cry and when he saw what they did, he dived in to bring me back for God. He denounced the Witchfinder and his men as charlatans, interested in money, not saving souls. He cast the demons from me, right there and then. Along with a deal of water from my insides.’ She smiled at the memory and then her lips gave a bitter little twist, as if life had failed to give her the joy and hope that moment had promised. ‘He baptised me that day, there in the millpond, and a good few others besides. And when he left, I went with him.’

‘He saved you?’

‘That’s right. I owe him my life. I vowed to make him a good wife and lead a pious life. And I have. I have bowed my head in prayer and obedience, I have borne his children.’ She clutched my hands. ‘I changed. You can do the same!’

‘What if I can’t?’ The words came out in a whisper.

She looked away from me and her hands withdrew.

‘Then the Lord have mercy upon you.’

‘I will try, Goody Johnson. I truly will.’

I said what she wanted to hear, because she had been kind and I wanted to please her. I could not say what I really felt: if I had to choose between the life she’d had and death by drowning, I would choose the latter.

Entry 75

I have seen the wolf. I was on the edge of the wood, looking for nuts that the squirrels might have missed. Some have lost their virtue and do not have much taste, but they can be ground with acorns to be made into flour, and the butternuts are as good as ever they were. I was clearing snow and scratching about, when I felt my skin begin to prick. I looked up, expecting to see Jaybird and wondering what he was doing here, when there she was, not ten yards off. Very like a dog, but bigger, with greyish, dun-coloured fur, pale tipped at the neck, where it thickened in a shaggy ruff, and a black stripe running down the back. She stood on broad forelegs, big about the shoulders and chest. Her flanks were thinner, moving in and out with her breathing, her body tapering back to slender hind legs and narrow hindquarters. She was panting, her breath puffing white into the cold air, her red tongue lolling through her long white teeth. Her eyes were golden. She watched me and I watched her.

I was not afraid. I just willed her to go away. Hunger caved her belly and I know they bait traps for her at the edge of the forest.

We both stood quite still, caught in a gap of time, then she wheeled away, as though she heard my message, bounding off, her dark shape lost in the crowded blackness of trees.

Entry 76 (February, 1660)

Goody Johnson is dead. She died last week. The second week in February. She died in childbirth.

‘She should never be having another. This ’un could kill her.’

Martha had said all along, and said so again, as she hurried to the birthing room, then looked over her shoulder, lest she had been overheard. Her words could be taken as ill wishing and a midwife must be careful.

Martha and I went together for the birthing. Goody Johnson laboured long, to the brink of exhaustion and beyond. It took through one day and into the next. Goody Johnson was narrow, despite having had so many, and had no strength to push any more. The baby was big, and when he came, the cord was twisted about his neck. I had to fairly pull him from her. I cut the cord and gave him to Martha, who took one look and covered him with a cloth.

She stared at the mother, who lay as though dead, and turned away, her own face grey and drawn.

‘I fear that they will be buried together.’

Martha tried everything she knew, but she could not save her. She had given the last of her strength and was just drifting away from us. She woke once and asked to see the babe. Martha replied with a little shake of her head. She turned her face to the wall, eyes closed, lids deep violet against her sallow skin.

She never opened them again.

Martha called for Reverend Johnson. He was reluctant to enter the chamber, smelling as it did of blood and birthing. He held to the Bible teaching that a woman is unclean after giving birth.

‘If you want to see her in this life, you better come now,’ Martha said to him. ‘And bring your children that they may say farewell to their mother and their brother.’

Goody Johnson lay still, as though she had already begun her last and most perilous journey, but the sound of her children’s voices and their tears seemed to bring her back. Her eyelids flickered and her thin hand stirred on the counterpane. The Reverend Johnson’s voice rose in sonorous praise to the Lord. Martha and I withdrew leaving the family to spend their last time together.

Outside it was snowing again. We began our trudge back.