“You seem downcast, young man,” the magistrate said. “Are you troubled by something?”
“Yes, sir, I am,” Matthew had to admit. He thought of Ausley at the window, the carriage wheels turning to take him far away from the almshouse, the boys who were left behind, the terrible punishments that Ausley could bring down upon them. For now, Ausley held the power. I plan on staying here for many years to come, the headmaster had said. In that case, Matthew knew where to find him.
“Is this a matter you wish to talk about?” Woodward asked.
“No sir. It’s my problem, and mine alone. I will find a way to solve it. I will.”
“What?”
Matthew looked into the magistrate’s face. Woodward no longer wore his wig and tricorn, his appearance much aged since that day he’d driven Matthew away from the almshouse. A light rain was falling through the thick-branched trees, steam hanging above the muddy track they were following. Ahead of them was the wagon Paine drove.
“Did you say something, Matthew?” the magistrate asked. I will, he thought it had been.
It took Matthew a few seconds to adjust to the present from his recollections of the past. “I must have been thinking aloud,” he said, and then he was quiet.
In time, the fortress walls of Fount Royal emerged from the mist ahead. The watchman on his tower began to ring the bell, the gate was unlocked and opened, and they had returned to the witch’s town.
seven
THE DAY HAD COME, with the announcement of a cock’s crow.
It was dark-clouded and cool, the sun a mere specter on the eastern horizon. From the window of his room, which faced away from Fount Royal, Matthew could see Bidwell’s stable, the slaves’ clapboard houses beside it, the guard tower, and the thick pine forest that stretched toward the swamp beyond. It was a dismal view. His bones ached from the continual damp, and because of a single mosquito that had gotten past the barrier of his bed-netting, his sleep had been less than restful. But the day had come, and his anticipation had risen to a keen edge.
He lit a candle, as the morning was so caliginous, and shaved using the straight razor, soap, and bowl of water that had been left in the hallway outside. Then he dressed in black trousers, white stockings, and a cream-colored shirt from the limited wardrobe Bidwell had provided him. He was blowing out the candle when a knock sounded at his door. “Breakfast is a’table, sir,” said Mrs. Nettles.
“I’m ready.” He opened the door and faced the formidable, square-chinned woman in black. She carried a lantern, the yellow light and shadows of which made her stern visage almost fearsome. “Is the magistrate up?”
“Already downstairs,” she said. Her oiled brown hair was combed back from her forehead so severely that Matthew thought it looked painful. “They’re waitin’ for you before grace is said.”
“Very well.” He closed the door and followed her along the hallway. Her weight made the boards squeal. Before they reached the staircase, the woman suddenly stopped so fast Matthew almost collided into her. She turned toward him, and lifted the lantern up to view his face.
“What is it?” he asked.
“May I speak freely, sir?” Her voice was hushed. “And trust you na’ to repeat what I might say?”
Matthew tried to gauge her expression, but the light was too much in his eyes. He nodded.
“This is a dangerous day,” she said, all but whispering. “You and the magistrate are in grave danger.”
“Of what nature?”
“Danger of bein’ consumed by lies and blasphemies. You seem an able-minded young man, but you nae understand this town and what’s transpirin’ here. In time you might, if your mind is na’ poisoned.”
“Poisoned by whom? The witch, do you mean?”
“The witch.” It was said with more than a hint of bitterness. “Nay, I’m na’ speakin’ of Rachel Howarth. Whatever you hear of her—however you perceive her—she is na’ your enemy. She’s a victim, young man. If anythin’, she needs your he’p.”
“How so?”
“They’re ready to hang her,” Mrs. Nettles whispered. “They’d hang her this morn, if they could. But she does na’ deserve the rope. What she needs is a champion of truth. Somebody to prove her innocent, when ever’body else is again’ her.”
“Madam, I’m just a clerk. I have no power to—”
“You’re the only one with the power,” she interrupted. “The magistrate is the kind of man who plows a straight furrow, ay? Well, this field’s damn crooked!”
“So you contend that Madam Howarth is not a witch? Even though her husband was brutally murdered, poppets were found in her house, she can’t speak the Lord’s Prayer, and she bears the Devil’s marks?”
“Lies upon lies. I think you’re a man of some education: do you believe in witchcraft?”
“The books on demonology are well founded,” Matthew said.
“Hang the books! I asked if you believe.” Matthew hesitated; the question had never been posed to him. Of course he knew the Salem incident, which had occurred only seven years ago. He’d read Cotton Mather’s Memorable Providences and Richard Baxter’s Certainty of the Worlds of Spirits, both of which secured witchcraft and demon possession as fact. But he’d also read John Webster’s The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft and John Wagstaffe’s The Question of Witchcraft Debated, and both of those volumes held that “witchcraft” was either deliberate fraud or that “witches” were insane and should be bound for an asylum rather than the gallows. Between those two poles, Matthew hung suspended.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Mark this,” Mrs. Nettles told him. “Satan does walk in Fount Royal, but Rachel Howarth’s na’ the one beside him. Things that nae want to be seen are plentiful here. And that’s God’s truth.”
“If you believe so, why don’t you speak to Mr. Bidwell?”
“What? And then he’ll be thinkin’ I’m bewitched too? Because any woman or man who speaks up for Rachel Howarth would have a noose ready for—”
“Mrs. Nettles!” came a shout from the bottom of the stairs. “Where’s Mr. Corbett?” It was Bidwell and he sounded quite irritated. “We’re awaiting our breakfast, woman!”
“I’m at your mercy!” she whispered urgently to Matthew. “Na’ a word about this, please!”
“All right,” he agreed.
“We’re here, sir!” Mrs. Nettles called to the master of the house, as she started toward the staircase again. “Beg pardon, the young man was late a’risin’!”
Their breakfast was slices of ham and cornmeal porridge, biscuits and locally gathered honey, all washed down with mugs of strong amber tea. Matthew was still full from last night’s dinner of turtle soup, turtle steaks, and cornbread, so he ate only sparingly. Woodward, who’d awakened with a raw throat and clogged nostrils after a restless night, drank as much tea as he could and then sucked on a lemon. In ravenous appetite, however, was Bidwell; the master of the house consumed slice after slice of ham and a whole serving bowl full of porridge, as well as a platter of biscuits.
At last Bidwell leaned back in his chair, expelled air, and patted his bulging stomach. “Ahhhh, what a breakfast!” His gaze fell upon an unclaimed soul amid the carnage. “Magistrate, are you going to finish that biscuit?”
“No, sir, I’m not.”
“May I, then?” Bidwell reached for it and pushed it into his mouth before an assent could be made. Woodward swallowed thickly, his throat very painful, and afforded himself another drink of the tart tea.
“Magistrate, are you not feeling well?” Matthew asked; it would have been difficult not to notice the man’s pallor and the dark circles beneath his eyes.
“I didn’t sleep very soundly last night. The mosquitoes here seem to favor me.”
“Tar soap,” Bidwell said. “That’s what you should bathe in this evening. Tar soap keeps them away. Well…most of them, that is.”
“I thought the insects were particularly greedy in Charles Town.” Woodward
scratched at a reddened welt on the back of his right hand, one of a dozen bites he’d suffered already this morning. “But your mosquitoes, sir, have no compare.”
“You have to get used to them, that’s all. And the tar soap does help.”
“I look forward, then, to being tarred.” He knew he appeared rather peaked, as the shaving mirror had told him. He was miserable in these borrowed clothes, which might have been a plowman’s pride but were ill-suited for his elegant tastes. Also, he felt near naked without his wig, and terribly conscious of his age-spots. Never in his life had he felt so old, and such a prisoner of fate. Without the wig, it seemed to him that his entire face drooped near off the skull bones, his teeth appeared chipped and crooked, and he feared he looked more of a country bumpkin than an urban sophisticate. His sore throat and swollen air passages further tortured him; on any other morning, he might have returned to bed with a cup of hot rum and a medicinal poultice but on this morning he had major work ahead. He realized Matthew was still staring at him, the young man’s sense of order disturbed. “I’ll be fine directly,” Woodward told him.
Matthew said nothing, unwilling to embarrass the magistrate by appearing overly concerned. He poured some tea for himself, thinking that Woodward’s bare-headed exposure to the raw swamp humours was certainly not beneficial to his health. Not very far from the forefront of his mind, however, was the encounter he’d had with Mrs. Nettles. Her passion on the subject had been undeniable, but was her purpose to cloud his mind instead of clear it? Indeed, if she were bewitched she would be in the employ of Rachel Howarth’s master as well. Was that master trying to use him, to taint the magistrate’s judgment? He couldn’t help but ponder the vastly different opinions on the subject of witchcraft by the authors of the tomes he’d read. He’d spoken the truth to Mrs. Nettles; he honestly didn’t know what he believed.
But Matthew didn’t have time for much reflection, because suddenly Mrs. Nettles appeared in the dining room’s doorway. “Sir?” she said, addressing Bidwell. “The carriage is ready.” Her visage was stern again, and she gave not even a glance in Matthew’s direction.
“Excellent!” Bidwell stood up. “Gentlemen, shall we go?”
Outside, the carriage’s team was reined by the elderly black servant, Goode, who had played the violin at the first dinner and caught the turtle for the second. Bidwell, Woodward, and then Matthew climbed into the carriage and under tumultuous clouds were taken away from the mansion and past the spring along Peace Street. A few citizens were out, but not many; the quality of light—or lack of such—made for a gloomy morning, and Matthew saw clearly that life was fast ebbing from this forsaken village.
At the useless sundial, Goode turned the carriage’s team eastward onto Truth Street. A fit of nerves seemed to affect Bidwell as they neared the gaol, and he eased his mounting tension with a doubleshot of snuff up the nostrils. Goode steered them around the pigs that wallowed in Truth’s mud, and in a moment he reined the horses to a halt before the grim and windowless wooden walls of the gaol. Two men were awaiting their arrival; one was Nicholas Paine, the other a stocky, barrel-chested giant who must have stood six feet tall. The giant wore a tricorn, but the hair that could be seen was flaming red, as was his long and rather unkempt beard.
Upon departing from the carriage, Bidwell made introductions between the magistrate, Matthew, and the red-bearded giant. “This is Mr. Hannibal Green, our gaol-keeper,” he said. When Woodward shook the man’s red-furred hand, he had the feeling that his fingers might be snapped like dry sticks. Green’s eyes, an indeterminate dark hue, were deeply sunken into his head and held no expression other than—in Matthew’s opinion—a promise to do bodily harm to anyone who displeased him.
Bidwell drew a long breath and released it. “Shall we enter?”
Green, a man of no words, produced two keys on a leather cord from a pocket of his buckskin waistcoat and inserted a key into the padlock that secured the gaol’s entry. With one sharp twist, the lock opened and Green removed a chain that the lock had held fastened across the door. He pulled the door open to reveal a dark interior. “Wait,” he rumbled, and then he walked inside, his boots pounding the rough planked floor.
Staring into the gaol’s darkened recesses, both the magistrate and his clerk felt the gnaw of anxiety. The bittersweet smells of damp hay, sweat, and bodily functions came drifting out into their faces, along with the sense of what it must be like to be caged in that stifling and humid environment. Green soon returned, carrying a lantern that shed only paltry light through its filmed glass. “Come in,” he told them. Bidwell took another quick snort of snuff and led the way.
It was not a large place. Past the entrance room there were four iron-barred cells, two on each side of a central corridor. The floor was covered with hay. Matthew presumed it had been a small stable before its conversion. “Thank Christ you’re here!” called a man’s voice, off to the right. “I was startin’ to believe you’d forsaked me!”
Green paid him no mind. The gaol-keeper reached up to the utter height of his outstretched hand and caught hold of a chain that dangled from the ceiling. He gave it a good firm pull and with the sound of ratchets turning a hatch opened up there, allowing in more fresh air and much-needed illumination.
The light—gray and murky yet still much better than the dirty lamp—afforded a view of the man who stood in the nearest cage on the right, his hands gripping the bars, his beard-grizzled face pressed against them as if he might somehow squeeze himself to freedom. He was young, only five or six years elder than Matthew, but already thick around the middle. He had husky forearms and a stout bull’s neck, his unruly black hair falling over his forehead, and a pair of gray eyes glittering on either side of a bulbous nose that was—as were his cheeks—covered with pock-marks. “I’m ready to go home!” he announced.
“She’s in the cell back here,” Bidwell said to the magistrate, ignoring the young man.
“Hey! Bidwell!” the man hollered. “Damn you, I said I’m ready to go—”
Wham! went Green’s fist into one of the man’s hands gripping the bars. The prisoner howled with pain and staggered back holding his injured fingers against his chest.
“You speak with respect,” Green said, “or you don’t speak at all. Hear me?”
“Ahhhh, my hand’s near broke!”
“Noles, you have one more day and night on your sentence,” Bidwell told the prisoner. “You’ll be released tomorrow morning, and not one minute sooner.”
“Listen! Please!” Noles, now apologetic, came to the bars again. “I can’t bear another night in here, sir! I swear before God, 1 can’t! The rats are terrible! They et up most all my food, and I near had to fight ’em off my throat! Ain’t I paid my penance yet, sir?”
“Your sentence was three days and three nights. Therefore: no, you have not yet paid your penance.”
“Wait, wait!” Noles said, before Bidwell and the others could move along. “It ain’t just the rats I’m feared of! It’s her.” He’d whispered the last sentence, and motioned with a tilt of his head toward the last cage on the left of the corridor. His eyes were wide and wild. “I’m feared she’s gonna kill me, sir!”
“Has she threatened you?”
“No sir, but…well…I’ve heard things.”
“Such as?” Bidwell’s interest had been fully secured now, and he gave Noles a long ear.
“Last night…in the dark…she was talkin’ to somethin’,” Noles whispered, his face once more pressed against the bars. “I couldn’t hear much of it…but I heard her speak the word ‘master.’ Yessir, I did. ‘Master’, she said, three or four times. Then she started a’laughin’, and by Christ I hope to never hear such a laugh as that again, because it was nothin’ but wickedness.”
“And what happened after that?”
“Well…she talked some more, to whatever it was. Just jabberin’, like to scare the moon.” He ran his tongue across his lips; his eyes flickered across Woodward and Matthew a
nd then returned to Bidwell. “Then…I saw a light back there. Like fire, but it was cold blue. Yessir. Cold blue, and it was burnin’ in her cage. Well, I drew myself back and laid down, ’cause I didn’t want to see what it was.”
“Go on,” Bidwell urged, when Noles paused again.
“Well sir…there came a hummin’ and a buzzin’. And I seen what I took to be a fly, leavin’ the witch’s cage. Only it was burnin’ blue, makin’ the air spark. Then it flew into here and started flittin’ ’round my head, and I swatted at it but to tell the truth I didn’t really care to touch it. It flew ’round and ’round, and I crawled over there in that corner and threw some hay at it to keep it away from me. After a while it flew on out of here and went away.”
“Went away? To where?”
“I don’t know, sir. It just vanished.”
Bidwell looked gravely at the magistrate. “You see what we’re up against? The witch’s master can transform himself—itself—into shapes that have no equal on this earth.”
“Yessir, that’s right!” Noles said. “I’m feared for my life, bein’ in here with her! I seen what I seen, and she’s like to kill me for it!”
“Might I ask a question?” Matthew proposed, and Bidwell nodded. “What offense has this man committed?”
“He whipped his wife bloody with a carpet-beater,” Bidwell said. “Dr. Shields had to attend to her. As it was Noles’s second offense, I ordered him here.”
“And what was his first offense?”
“The same,” Bidwell said.
“She’s a liar and a nag!” Noles spoke up adamantly. “That woman don’t know when to shut her mouth! I swear, even a saint would pick up an ax and cleave her head when she starts that damn prattlin’!” The man’s attention fixed on Bidwell once more. “Will you let me out then, to save my life?”
“Well—” He looked to Woodward for aid in this question. “Richard Noles is a good Christian fellow. I shouldn’t want to leave him to the mercy of the witch. What do you propose I do, sir?”