Children of Salem

Serena’s arms, but she had come down and stood on the step above him, blanket in one hand, the sheet wrapped about her. “Is she gone?”

“Aye, the foul thing is gone, yes.”

“Thank God. That woman unnerves me—has all my life.”

“She has that affect, yes.”

“Are you sure she’s not disturbed the horses?”

“She doesn’t get on with Dancer, I can tell you. Not to worry, she’s gone now. Addled and gone.” He withheld telling her about the old woman’s torturing a likeness of Betty Parris. Instead, he leaned in to her kiss, after which he asked, “Back to bed?”

“No.”

“Moment lost? That damned hag.”

“No, not lost.” She rushed past him, laughing and snatching the blanket from him as she went. While he stood nude and confused, she sent the blanket billowing up and out. Jeremy watched it cascade before the hearth. She’d created a pallet before the flames. “Come back to me here, Jere.” She peeled away the sheet again, revealing firm round breasts and a curvaceous body. She laid down, her arms outstretched to him, inviting him like some Siren of yore, he helplessly thought. But his love was no cruel Siren. He instinctively knew this was right, despite all custom, despite all commandments. This was love.

Jeremy’s hands tightened about hers as he again lowered himself over Serena. In the firelight, which bathed them, she glowed with an aura as if surrounded by some ethereal corona. Serena’s energies were personified in the flames, a kind of metaphor for her desires, his own reflected as well. The red and blue flames entwined one another from the source, comingling with one another in their rise and fall and spiral and eddy as did the limbs of the lovers.

Serena’s body melded with Jeremy’s, and together they felt as if levitating about one another, as if their joy in touch of one another would leave them on the ceiling. “I am enchanted,” he whispered in her ear and kissed her neck, finding her breasts, and moving down along the ravine of her torso, gasping and kissing her everywhere he could in a frenzy now.

“More, more,” she moaned in ecstasy.

Firm now, he forcibly entered her with reckless abandon, rushing his lovemaking, as if fearful she might disappear beneath him, as if this were all just a dream so that if he did not hurry, it would dispel in an instant.

“Slowly, Jeremy. I am not going anywhere,” she promised as if reading his mind.

He slowed his lovemaking, panting as she held him, her nails clawing.

“Yes, yes, Jere, like that, yes.”

“I love you,” he chanted.

“Don’t say it, Jere, unless it be true.”

“It is . . . it is.”

“And in time,” she answered, “I may perhaps . . . again learn to love you.”

# # # # #

As they rode back to Serena’s home, Serena began making plans for their future together. “You know why I took you to my brother Francis Junior’s old place?” she asked at one point, talking nonstop and skipping from subject to subject. “Do you?”

“To get in out of the storm, of course.”

“Of course,” she repeated in a mocking tone. “How thick is your skull?”

“What?”

“Typical man.”

“What?” He shrugged beside her where they rode atop horses that bumped one another as they sauntered along.

“We didn’t avoid a storm, silly! More like we leapt into one.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m not following you, Serena.”

“Jesus take you! Look here, the old place is lovely but abandoned, sad and-and useless it is, you see, but —”

“I dunno? We made good use of it.” His smile spread wide.

“I mean with Francis gone, it’s been no good to anyone.” She’d earlier explained that the eldest son had gone off to farm in Connecticut. “Sitting up there on that knoll all to its lonesome.”

“The house? You mean the house?”

“Yes, the house! Aren’t you paying attention?”

“It did feel an unhappy house until we entered.”

“Exactly what I am driving at, Jeremy.”

He wondered exactly what she meant.

Serena went on as they cantered. “It ought be a useful place, useful to the Nurse compound, I mean, and what with you back and our feelings for one another unchanged, and-and—”

“Serena, are you proposing we . . . that you and I make a home of the house?”

“Think of the memories we’ll always have there, and besides, it needs a family.”

“Whoa . . . just slow down a moment.”

“Slow down what?”

He grabbed her reins and halted both horses. “Serena, I do love you, but I’m not likely to become a farmer or a father anytime soon.”

“I didn’t propose you become a farmer or a father—anytime soon!”

“If I were to accept the gift of a house on the Nurse property, then I’d be expected to work the land just as the Tarbells and the Cloyse men, and—”

“Well now, is that such a bad thing? I mean, you’re not going into the ministry, and you’re done chasing shadows down in the village, I should hope.”

“Chasing shadows?”

“Shadowing Mr. Parris then.”

“Serena, I have no intention of settling here in Salem, however—”

“However much I want it?” she asked, glaring at him. “As for me, I haven’t any intention of leaving home with the likes of you.”

“And why not come away from this cursed place with me?”

“It’s home, Jeremy. Has been all my life, and there’s mother and father to think of, and such a thing as family. But I suppose your never having had any real family, that family doesn’t mean anything to Jeremiah Wakely, now does it?”

“That’s hardly fair!”

“Your father brought it on himself, Jeremy; his own grief brought him down, not the village.”

Jeremy wasn’t prepared to hear this coming from her. “You really believe that?”

“I do.”

“And my mother?”

“Two things marked her more than her French blood, Jeremy.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“Illness marked her and her being an unrepentant Catholic; she would not disavow her Papist past. That’s what my mother told me.”

“What’re you saying? That my father put himself in the grave and pulled over the lid because he loved her?”

“Food was brought to the jail. Mr. Ingersoll, my mother, Reverend Deodat Lawson, and others tried to help him, but your father starved himself to death.”

“In debtors prison, left with a broken heart, and me a boy unable to affect a thing.”

“The food Mother took to him, Jeremy, it rotted beside him.”

“His fast was a protest, Serena!”

“To protest his wife’s treatment, I know.”

“He protested their withholding halowed ground for her burial.”