The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (30 page)

Deliverance felt the candle loiter between her spread thighs, its flame hideously hot next to the tender skin of her most secret folds, and she heard the women whispering in discussion.
Preternatural excrescence of flesh
she heard one of them mutter, jotting notes, and murmurs of assent sounded at the end of the table as rough fingers poked and spread her apart. Hot, miserable tears filled Deliverance’s eyes, overflowing the corners of her lids and trickling down into her ears. Then the candle was removed. When she opened her eyes she looked up to see the ring of faces staring down at her, all of them closed off in damning judgment.

“You have the witches’ teat, Livvy Dane, and at the very cusp of your accursed womanhood, too,” one of them pronounced as another chimed in, “I trow you ha’ given suck to diabolical imps or familiars! Confess it!”

Deliverance propped herself on her elbows, face contorted in anxious fury.
Salacious myth, that, is all
, she thought,
for familiars be not diabolical at all
. But of course she could not say that to the women.

“I ha’ done nowt of the sort!” she spat, and the women pulled away from her, intimidated by her forcefulness. Deliverance clambered off the table, throwing on her shift in white anger. “You are a foolish wretch, Mary Josephs!” she exclaimed. “How many babes ha’ you caught, yet you know not the God-made body of your women! I am made in God’s image, and so are you! Hand me a candle and I shall find this witches teat on the
lot of you!”

The women crowded angrily around her, mouths open in scolds and recriminations, but Deliverance had closed her ears to them. As she threw her garments on with haste and was borne back to the prison amongst the chattering, finger-waving women, she turned her mind to the trial that was to come tomorrow, but more than anything, she thought about her daughter.

Marblehead, Massachusetts
Early September
1991

T
HE SURFACE OF THE DINING TABLE WAS SPREAD OUT WITH NOTES
and papers, and in the middle sat Constance Goodwin, her head bent over a thick, open manuscript that was bound in dark oiled leather sewn with heavy twine, its pages brown-yellow with age and bearing the dry silverfish smell of the Radcliffe special collections library. The book was about the size of an antique bible, with a few pressed, shriveled herbs jutting out from between its leaves. She was reading, and had been reading for several days now. At her elbow sat another book, the title of which seemed to be Guide to Herbs and Indigenous Plants of New England. It, too, was open, to a page with an ink drawing of a feverfew plant. Three small note cards were arrayed across the table above the manuscript: one, with a title that alluded to tomatoes, written all in Latin, and two others.
Sure cure for Fever and the Chills
was written across the second; the third had no title, but instead bore some sort of word puzzle. A pen tapped in a regular rhythm against her
temple, but the notepad sitting at her other elbow was still empty, forgotten as she grew more absorbed in the text. As she read, her lips moved without making a sound.

Her other hand supported a heavy brass-handled magnifying glass, located some days previously in a drawer in Granna’s desk, and under it the scratchy words swelled and stretched, gliding across the glass surface as Connie tried to sound them out. The book seemed to have no real progression or order, and certainly no table of contents. She had already counted six or eight different handwritings, and not a few different styles of print, with many of the entries jumbled together, interleaved indiscriminately. Some of the entries appeared to be in Latin; from her longtime friendship with Liz, Connie was able to sift snatches of meaning from these passages, but only snatches. But most were in forms of English of various archaism, complicated further by their nonstandard spellings and dated terminology for plants, substances, and processes. She had already read through a section enumerating recipes for poultices to cure festering wounds, infections, black lung, apoplexy, and “the ague.”

Several pages were devoted to what looked like prayers, but which were more likely charms—all of them invoking assistance from the Almighty. Connie was surprised at the explicit religiosity of the text so far, of a type that alluded to Christian practices from well before the Reformation. The text reflected a world in which Christianity was utterly bound to the conception of reality. No wonder Puritan theologians had found witchcraft—if that is what this was—so threatening. In a system of thought in which salvation, and therefore all goodness, could come by grace alone, in which one’s actions were believed to have no effect on the state of the soul, and in which illness or misfortune were often read as signs of God’s disfavor, a method that counteracted illness and misfortune by direct personal appeal to God, together with arcane proto-scientific practice, would have gone against everything that the Puritan power structure wanted to maintain. Puritan theologians would have seen such work as sacrilegious.

Even diabolical.

As far as Connie could tell, the recipes outlined in the shadow book relied on a combination of prayer, attentive mixing of herbs and other natural substances, and something else—something ineffable. Will? It was not that, quite, but almost. Intention. In the book it was called variously “technick,” “crafte,” and “authoritie.” But Connie still had trouble articulating, in modern terms, what such a concept might be. Thinking back to the spider plants when she first found Granna’s recipe cards, she recalled that Sam had tried the same spell—she allowed herself to use the term, though she felt self-conscious doing so—yet he had been unable to render any change in the dead plants. She frowned, concentrating, and turned another page.

Sam. He was growing worse. She planned to visit him again that afternoon, to relieve his parents from what had started as regular visits but had evolved into a kind of vigil. His exhaustion was extreme, and though his leg was healing, it was only because he passed most of the day in tight restraints so that the convulsions ripping through his body every few hours would not jostle his shattered bones. The periodic violent vomiting made it difficult for him to stay hydrated, and so his skin was starting to appear sallow and tired. Even his humor was starting to ebb. The doctors still expressed confidence that a solution would be found, but Connie read in their faces the draining away of their certainty. When she peered into Sam’s eyes, she saw that he, too, could read their confusion; his faith in their ability to help him was starting to flicker and fade. And behind that vanishing faith, Connie saw in Sam the first inklings of real fear.

She turned another page of the manuscript, refocusing her gaze through the magnifying glass as the words bled together. Her head was starting to ache, and she laid aside the glass and squeezed her eyes closed for a moment, rubbing her fingertips over her eyelids. Then she forced herself to take up the brass handle again.

The word
Fitts
swam into view across the convex plane of the magnifying glass, and Connie bent lower to the page, bringing the glass nearer to the difficult text.

“Method for the Redress of Fitts” read the heading, and Connie caught
her breath. Historians had never been fully able to describe precisely what colonial chroniclers meant by “fits,” whether they more closely resembled fainting spells, or perhaps episodes of religious ecstasy, with shaking and speaking in tongues. Arguments had been made for both. Connie thought about Sam’s shaking, trembling body when it was gripped by muscle convulsions during one of his seizures. His eyes rolled into the back of his head, revealing their whites, and his tongue extended.

If that was not a “fit,” then what was?

“To determine if a Man’s mortall Suffering be caused by bewitchment,” the instructions began, “catch his Water in a witch-bottel and throw in some pins or nayles and boil it upon a very hott fire.”

Connie raised her head, thinking. What was a “witch-bottel”? Bottel. A phonetic spelling of “bottle.” A witch bottle. She pushed aside the manuscript and riffled through her notebooks, bringing up her transcription of Deliverance’s probate record, running her finger down the page. There it was: 30 shillings’ worth of “glass bottels.” Connie recalled wondering at the time why the probate would have made special mention of the bottles, and had never come up with an answer.

She lifted her head, scanning the crowded shelves of the dining room. Connie had spent considerable time scrubbing the earthenware dishes and glassware stacked in the alcove next to the large hearth fireplace, and had peeked into the dark cabinet under the alcove but been repulsed by the dense layers of grime that awaited her inside. The cabinet contained a number of antique bottles, among other things, though they seemed uninteresting at the time. Just junk, ready for a curio shop. And the kitchen was full of sealed jars, of course, but those were all of recent vintage—the remnants of Granna’s work, however she might have conceived of it.

Now Connie turned, looking over her shoulder and gazing at the wooden alcove with its small cabinet underneath. She narrowed her eyes, focusing her attention on the corner of the dining room, picturing the flowered back of her grandmother, a thin cotton apron tied behind her waist, getting to her knees with a tired grunt and swinging open the door. The
imaginary Granna brushed aside a loose strand of hair before seeming to reach inside the cabinet, and Connie thought that she heard a rummaging and tinkling from behind the wood.

Not junk.

Connie unfolded herself from the chair and knelt by the cabinet door. Awkward storage spaces were built into all sorts of areas of the house; the tiny attic bedrooms each had a built-in window seat, in which Connie had discovered extra quilts, a game of Scrabble with most of the vowels missing, and the unpleasant evidence of several generations of mice. She unhooked the tiny latch and swung open the door.

Inside, clad in thick layers of dust and festooned with a few tender spiderwebs, lay an untidy heap of crockery of all shapes: small iron cauldrons and skillets, what looked like a rusted waffle iron, a long-handled grill for roasting fish over an open fire, a few copper bed warmers, green with age, designed to be filled with glowing coals. And thick glass bottles. Dozens of them, perhaps a hundred, of a wavery blue-green hue that spoke of molten sand and age. The lips at the tops of their necks were uneven, their bases as dense as slabs of rock. They were of varying size, but all appeared to hail from before the dawn of the industrial age, when glass was blown by mouth and not by machine.

The bottles were unstoppered and empty for the most part, and Connie reached in to free one from the crust of grime in which it was resting. She held the bottle aloft, catching the dim light of the dining room in the bottle’s thick, bubbled walls, and saw that inside it were two or three deeply rusted nails. She carried the bottle back to the dining table, turning her attention again to the thick manuscript.

“Throw the bottel into the fyre whilst reciting the Lord’s Prayer follow’d by this most effective Incantation: Agla Pater Dominus Tetragrammaton Adonai Heavenly Father I beseech thee bring the Evildoer unto Me.”

Connie straightened in her chair, perturbed. She pressed her hands to either side of her head, willing the spreading throb in her brain to recede.

Agla
, like on the burn mark on her door. A long list of names of God. And
Tetragrammaton
—where had she seen that before? She moved the heels of her hands until they rested over her closed eyes, exhaling in the darkness behind her eyelids. Connie sorted through the different drawers in her mind, rooting through the file labeled
MISCELLANEOUS
. For some reason the word made her think of Sam.

Then her eyes opened wide, and she remembered: “Tetragrammaton” was carved on the charmed boundary marker that Sam had shown her, on the first night that they met. She sorted through her notes again, finding the definition that she had jotted down from the book on the material culture of vernacular magic. It was a word describing the four Hebrew letters that signify “Yahweh,” yet another name for God.

Connie looked at her watch. It was getting late. She would finish reading this passage, and then she would go.

“When his Water is well Boilt so shall the Sorcerer be drawn unto the fyre,” the manuscript continued. “And so with the pins and crafte may he be entreated to free his Victim from Diabolicall machinations. Refer to receipts for Death-philtres to ascertain other means.” The remainder of the page contained a long list of Latinate names for plants and herbs, headed up by the words “Fuel for sure Withdrawal.”

Leaning back in her chair, Connie paused for a few quiet minutes, tapping the pen against her teeth. Then she took up the small bottle with its contents of rusted nails, slipped it into her shoulder bag, and hurried out of the house.

Salem Town, Massachusetts
June 29
1692

T
he sound roiling inside the meetinghouse had already reached deafening proportions by the time Mercy Dane arrived. She paused outside the entrance to the building, knocking her boots against its stone steps to loosen the hunks of mud picked up on her long trek across town. Mercy had tarried too long at the house, she knew; pacing to and fro across the hall and promising herself that she would leave, yes, she would be ready to go in only another minute or so. She did not fully grasp the reason behind her delay. Certainly she missed her mother and yearned to see her again. Perhaps she was afraid.

If she could have pressed her hands to her ears and willed the world to disappear, she would have. She would linger in the house, clutching Dog in her arms, sitting perfectly still in a bargain with God that if she refused to move, not even an
inch
, then time itself would cease to progress, and at least that way nothing could get any worse. In her pausing she recognized her
childish obstinacy, as if without her presence, the Court of Oyer and Terminer would not proceed. After a few more turns around the hall, Mercy overcame her silly illusions, finally running most of the way through the damp streets of Salem all the way to the meetinghouse steps. The day was thick and gray, and Mercy felt her clothes plastering themselves to her sides, and her cheeks flushed an uncomfortable red.

To her chagrin, the trial seemed well under way by the time she slipped through the door. At the front of the room, behind a long library table, sat a row of distinguished gentlemen in sparse black coats and curled hair, each more dour than the last. The one in the middle, a sallow man with a wide lace collar, long nose, and wobbly double chin, must be William Stoughton, the lieutenant governor. Mercy had never seen him before, but he presented a very fine personage. He and the other judges seemed to be talking amongst themselves, but she was too far back in the room to hear what was being said. She rose on tiptoe, craning her neck to see if there was any space nearer the front.

Over the shoulders and heads of the townsfolk she could just see the row of accused women, their hands clasped together in chains, heads bowed, standing immobile before the raised platform of judges, with the railed box of jurymen off to one side. Deliverance was the second from the left; Mercy recognized the dress that her mother had been wearing when Jonas Oliver took her away, though it was now browned, splotched with filth, and torn in places. Mercy edged around the back corner of the room, keeping her eyes locked on her mother’s back. As she climbed over the legs crowding the aisle, she saw Deliverance glance quickly over her shoulder, meeting Mercy’s gaze with a tired face showing blurred relief and dismay.

“Watch yahself, gahl!” growled a grizzled man, his clothes reeking of fish. He rubbed his shin and stared at her accusingly. She murmured an apology and continued to creep through the crowded pews, wishing to reach the far front corner of the room, where she might see her mother’s face. All around her swirled snippets of gossip and conversation, none seemingly tied to a particular person, but all arising as a whole from the observ
ing crowd.

“…ne’er ha’ thought Rebecca
Nurse
would do…”

“…came to hah in the night, the very image o’ her, ridden on a broomstick, with a candle in the straws…”

“…an’ her eight children gone, born then withered in her arms…”

“…for suckling devils and imps, they said…”

“…vengeful scold, and I seen it too…”

Mercy’s eyes darted from face to face in the crowd, and all of them—wrinkled, toothless men, fresh young matrons, lace-collared gentlefolk, ruddy-cheeked children—all were contorted with biliousness, mouths opening and shutting like angry fish snapping at shreds of flesh in the water.

Mercy reached the far corner of the meetinghouse, pressing her shoulder against the wall and balling her fists together in her apron. Behind the row of the accused, in the front pew, at the very center of the whole room’s breathless attention, sat a passel of girls about her own age, some a little older, quite a few even younger, wringing their hands and writhing about, squealing and carrying on. Mercy scowled. She knew one or two of them. That Ann Putnam, she knew her, and Lord forgive her, but how she loathed that girl. Proud and flighty, never first with a new thought, but always embraced others’ notions with the loudest voice. Mercy’s nostrils flared. Ann was a mite older than the other girls; oughtn’t she to be in better straits?

Of the accused women, apart from her mother Mercy recognized only two: Sarah Good, a common enough sight in both Salem Town and Salem Village, roaming the streets with her little girl, raving and distracted. Even now she stood, eyes rolling, mouth slack, one hand twitching. Mercy had always been a little afraid of Sarah Good, and her wild infant was known to squall and bite. She wondered where little Dorcas was. A scan of the assembly did not reveal her. Then, on her mother’s other side, Mercy recognized with some surprise the wizened stoop of Rebecca Nurse—and she a full church member! A godly woman, known to all, and not for a witch neither.

She being accused, why, the judges must forbear to carry forth this madness
,
Mercy thought in her father’s voice. How she wished that her father were here. His word had carried weight in the Village. He would know what must be done. He would never loiter in the house ’til past time for the trial to begin.

As these thoughts traveled through Mercy’s mind the conference among the judges drew to a close, and one of them—“John Hathorne, him who was a magistrate afore,” according to a whisper a few rows behind where Mercy stood—spoke to someone seated in the pew just opposite the wailing girls with a few curt words, too quietly spoken to reach the farthest gallery.

Mercy squinted—her eyes did not always focus on the same point all at once—and saw a bony, aged man, his bald head speckled with liver spots, get to his feet. Judge Hathorne spread his hands in a gesture of calm and quietude, and a wave of shushing traveled from the front rows of the meetinghouse, washing over the assembled populace and then breaking in a coil up against the farthest walls. As quiet overlaid the assembly, the man started to speak. Mercy strained to hear what he said.

“…long suspected Goody Dane of sorcery,” he was saying when the whispers finally died enough for Mercy to hear him. “My fears were most horribly confirmed on a night these ten years ago, in which my poor daughter Martha died at the hands of some diabolical mischief whilst Goody Dane was ministering to her.”

At this the pewful of girls broke out squealing and wailing, and Ann Putnam rose to her feet with a scream, pointing at Deliverance and crying, “I ha’ seen it! Her very image is come to me in the night, and she saith ‘I killed Martha Petford, and if you call out on me I shall kill you, too!’”

The crowd gasped, and a few of the other girls burst forth with their own revelation of Deliverance’s threats and recriminations. “She came in at my window, brandishing her fiery broom!” one screamed, as another cried, “And at mine! She bade me come to her wicked sabbaths and sign my name in the Devil’s book!”

Lieutenant Governor Stoughton, his wattles quivering in rage, pounded
on the library table with a gavel as one of the girls fell over fainting, and Ann Putnam, her voice rising, added, “Aye! And she bade me take off my clothes, and showed me a specter of my father all dressed in winding sheets, and saith I must go with her, lest my father be kilt as well!”

Hands reached forth to restrain the flailing Ann, who seemed to be tearing at the collar of her dress, as someone lifted up the fainting girl and smacked her gently on the cheeks until her eyelids started to flutter. Governor Stoughton rose from his seat, smashing down the gavel and bellowing, “Abominable! Abominable! I shall hear what the accused has to say for herself!”

And at this the crowd quieted, loath to miss what Deliverance might say. As a body they leaned forward, holding their breath. Mercy knotted her fists more tightly together under her apron, lest her rage and indignation result in an unwanted and uncontrollable effect. “She lies,” Mercy hissed under her breath. “She never had nowt to do with us! She lies!”

Down in the space before the bench, Deliverance seemed to be surveying the faces of the judges and of the crowd at either side of her. Next to her Mercy saw Rebecca Nurse reach a gentle, wrinkled hand up to stroke Deliverance along her arm. Deliverance drew herself up marginally taller, lifting her chin, and even from as far away as she stood, Mercy could see how her mother had grown thin over the past months, and older looking, too. Beneath her eyes were deep purplish circles, and her hair looked more watery and gray. The color drained a little from Deliverance’s eyes, leaving them a cold pale blue, and she began to speak.

“Lo these ten years ago I were called to the side of Goodman Petford’s daughter, Martha, who was in her fits and much aggrieved,” Deliverance began. The crowd grew silent, listening. “I made to attend to her, thinking she were ill, and so I gave her some physick which I had brought with me, and I prayed o’er her into the night.”

“But ’tis readily acknowledged that a witch cannot complete her prayers!” cried an unseen person in the gallery.

“I pray every day,” Deliverance said quietly, and Mercy observed a flut
ter of doubt passing through the belly of the crowd. She brought her hands out from beneath her apron and clasped them together under her chin, eyes wide, waiting.

Deliverance paused, looking down at her chained hands, and up again at the waiting bench of judges. Mercy wondered what she was thinking and tried to focus her attention squarely on her mother’s face, listening. She could not perceive it. Her mother swallowed, licked her lips, and then said, “Goodman Petford, he ha’ lost his wife barely some months afore his daughter’s fits, and I ha’ long believed that”—she cast a sidelong glance at Peter Petford, who was seated, staring at her with unconcealed malice—“that his grief like to ha’ colored his thinking of the facts.”

“And did the child die that night?” asked another of the judges, identified by the whisperer behind Mercy as “Jonathan Corwin, him who ha’ taken the place of Nathaniel Saltonstall, that war so distraught with the hanging of the Bishop woman.”

“Alas, so she did,” Deliverance said. “Whilst I held her in my arms.”

Peter Petford’s jaw was quivering, color creeping up his face.

The same judge, Corwin, leaned forward on his elbows and leveled his gaze at Deliverance. “And was the gahl ill? Or war she bewitched withal?”

Deliverance’s eyes shifted left and right, her nostrils quivering, and Mercy felt a sinking dread grip her entrails. “She were bewitched, of a sort,” Deliverance allowed. “I have testified so in court, when I sued to clear my sullied name, and I will not go against it now.”

“And how came you to know that she war bewitched? Who might the culprit be, if it is not you?” the judge pressed, one wiry eyebrow rising wickedly.

“That I cannot say, sir,” Deliverance whispered. “I know not the machinations of it. But God in His wisdom and goodness sometimes reveals things to me, if I beseech Him thus, that I may better serve Him.”

“God?” said Judge Corwin. “You speak to God, Goody Dane?”

“I believe that all God’s children may speak to Him,” Deliverance said, shifting her eyes to the cluster of ministers who sat observing the proceedings. One or two of them were nodding, but a few sat with their arms folded,
glowering.

“Now, Goodwife Dane,” broke in another of the judges, but the whispering voice did not tell its companion the name of this one, at least not loudly enough for Mercy to overhear. “How can you be sure it is the Almighty God who reveals these things to you?”

“Sir?” Deliverance asked, voice confused.

“Him whose machinations you yourself claim not to know. How came you to believe that this is the work of our Savior?” he asked, drawing his hand along his chin, as if stroking an imaginary beard, and gazing at her with the smug face of a man who thinks he is about to win an argument against a child. “Could you not in fact be serving the Devil, who deludes you with promises of wealth or fame, and tells you to
pretend
that you do the work of God?” The crowd responded with impressed murmurs, heads grouping together, nodding.

Deliverance appeared to think for a moment, and then raising her voice so that all could hear her clearly, said, “For He created all the Heavens and the Earth. I believe that there is nothing in this world or the next that is not the work of God.”

The crowd hissed and muttered, casting dubious glances at her, and Mercy heard a bitter whisper behind her say
Sacrilege
!

Governor Stoughton, eyebrows raised in surprise, said, “Why, Goodwife Dane, surely you believe in the Devil? And that he has been working his vile sorceries on the innocents in Salem Village, through his loyal servants here on earth?”

The room paused, waiting. She said nothing. Governor Stoughton continued. “You would not say that this court is
deluded
in its object, would you, Goodwife Dane?”

“I am afraid that I would, sir, or else that the Devil achieves his object through the condemnation of the innocent, and not the railings of these wicked, distracted girls,” said Deliverance, closing her eyes as the crowd bellowed and the girls screamed out in rage, surging toward the chained women before the bench, held back only by the crush of several men and ministers
who had been seated near the front of the room.

“I see him!” screamed Ann Putnam, pointing, her face empurpled and bursting with fury. “There! A black demon whispers in Goody Dane’s ear! Cannot you see him? There! He stands just there!”

The hubbub in the meetinghouse rose to a furious level, and for a time Mercy, huddled against the support of the church wall, could not hear what was being said. She saw her mother standing quiet and still, with Rebecca Nurse whispering something into her ear, as the other accused women crowded up against them, cringing away from the rushing, screaming, grasping bodies all around them. The judges had bent their heads together, hands gesticulating, fingers jabbing into one another’s chests. There seemed to be some sort of disagreement amongst them, but within a few moments the discord had passed, and they regained their seats. Governor Stoughton banged his gavel to signal that the crowd must get ahold of itself long enough for him to pronounce judgment.