“It is our duty, Thom.”
“But you want me and Anne to swear out the complaints?”
“Yes, it’s crucial that it doesn’t appear all from one party, especially not from me.”
They’d begun their secret meeting in Parris’ kitchen as everyone in the house slept, and since had moved to the hearth. A storm had come up outside, and now Parris heard a noise on the stairwell, and a quick glance caught a nightshirt. Mary, eavesdropping. How much had Mary Wolcott heard? Mary had been tending to Betty, whose fits and screams had kept everyone up late into the night, and then she fell ill with fever. Seeing that Parris had found her out, she scampered back upstairs to the sick room.
“Go home to your wife, Thomas, and not tonight but soon . . . soon break this news to her. Determine if she agrees or disagrees with my conclusions, and when and if you swear out your warrants against those who’ve maimed your family for eternity, keep my name out of it. Understood?”
“Understood.”
At the door, after saying their good nights, the rain slamming into them, Parris added, “All your children who’d be men today like Nurse’s children, all working to a good end for all the Putnams, Thom, bearing you grandchildren, all murdered with needles stabbed into their innocent bodies right here and here.” Parris indicated each of his armpits. “Where no one might think to look. Puncturing the lungs and the heart from this point downward.”
“But why was little Anne spared? How?”
“I believe God saved Anne.”
“T-To bear witness?”
“You say she and her mother are visited by the dead children. What are the dead saying to your women?”
“Anne says they call out that they’ve been murdered, yes, but I never did believe it anything but rantings.”
“Get thee home to your two Annes, Thom, and sleep well this night if you can.”
Thomas wheeled and rushed off in the storm for his house, his mind filled with the images posited there by the minister. As he sloshed home, using a crutch, even in the darkness, he could see smoke curling and rising from a chimney miles away, an old, supposed-abandoned Nurse house, and he wondered whose fire it might be. Could it be a meeting of the coven that Parris had spoken of?
“How do these Nurse and Towne people fair so well?” he asked the night sky as a streak of lighting showered down with the rain and thunder. In his head, he could hear Parris’ considered answer:
“Cunning begun with early land grants,” muttered Thomas to himself. How else had they so tricked his aged father into signing over that perfect tract of land to them and theirs? Signed over to Towne, and from Towne to the Nurses, all a put up job from the beginning thanks to that swift-talking Reverend Burroughs as well, but at that time Burroughs was in another guise as Reverend Jedidiah Allen of Boston. It’d all been the work of a warlock, a witch man.
Nearing home, Thomas shouted, “They mock our Sabbath with their black rites.”
He visibly shook with the cold rain and his anger. “Blaspheming and cursing our Lord Jesus with their sacrileges and taking innocent lives!”
Deacon Ingersoll saw and heard Putnam ranting in the storm, which had awakened him at the back of his inn. Ingersoll rushed out to Putnam, asking if he were all right. Putnam snatched his arm away from Ingersoll and shouted, “We must form up the militia company, Nathaniel!”
“Now?”
“Yes. Drill-drill. Prepare for war.”
The overhead storm had grown in intensity. Ingersoll tried to persuade Putnam that he was drunk, adding, “Besides, no one will come if you call ’em in this weather at such an hour unless we’re under attack!”
“We are under attack, sir, and the militia company must be told!”
“Told bloody what?”
“We must take up arms!”
“Indians? You’ve word of an uprising?”
“Witches, man! I’m talking about Satan’s invisible army.”
“Where? Where, man, where?”
Putnam turned in a 380-degree circle, pointing to the darkness. “Everywhere you see dark, there is one called Legion.”
Chapter Seventeen
Mrs. Thomas Putnam tried to sleep amid the uproar of thunder and lightning strikes all round the village. The sound of it tortured her soul as it had the distinct sound of God’s anger toward her, and why not? She’d failed so miserably at all she’d ever touched, beginning with her failed love for the lost James Bailey, a married man and a minister at the time she’d thrown herself at him. A married man whose wife lay dying in the next room. A man who’d just buried his three children, three lovelies who’d succumbed to the disease plaguing the parsonage so many years ago
She’d been pregnant with James’ son, and when James Bailey left Salem immediately after his wife had left this earth, Anne Carr had been left alone with her secret, that she carried Bailey’s child within her. James had not believed her; had not wanted to believe it, and part of his disbelief had been fueled, perhaps, as she looked back on it now, by the sheer obsessive nature of her passion. She’d terrified him with it. She’d run him from the village with her lust for him. A lust so strong it knew no mores, no custom, no rule, no limit, and no decorum. She’d prostrated herself before Bailey, told him she’d do anything for him…just to have him as hers, and for the child’s sake, she’d argued, but she’d lied. It’d all been for her unbridled lust after the Reverend James Bailey.
So strong was her obsession that she’d plotted it even as his family withered and died around him, almost as if she’d willed their sickness and willed their eventual death, so she might have him entirely and without bonds to anyone or any principle or custom.
She dreamed of James for years after, but she’d need a father for the child, and so she had settled for Thomas Putnam at the time. She cast her future in a servile role to this man she could never truly love. Then Bailey’s child died without ever taking a breath outside her womb. At least no one had ever guessed that it’d been James’—not even Thomas.
Putnam was and remained a man who wanted most in life to be important in the village, so he’d immediately set out to right the wrong of his child’s stillbirth by impregnating Anne again. And when the second child died within weeks of birth, again Thomas determined to set it right. And after this one lived but a handful of days, again they tried, and again they failed—she failed, her womb failed until there had been nine failures, and then came Anne Junior. All of it, she reckoned, was by way of God’s curse on her for pride, arrogance, and disobedience.
Cursed, she was. She’d accepted this fact long before Thomas had. Cursed was her womb—bringing forth only the sickly, puny Anne Junior, who lied, cheated, stole, and generally hated her mother, and who was now suspected of engaging in sordid acts beneath the sheets with Mercy Lewis.
“Reverend Parris must come and take that child back or correct her ways,” she’d told Thomas, who needed it explained in detail. “Pluck the devil from his Mercy, as I might every hair on Mercy’s head if something’s not done and done soon.”
The storm roiled and tumbled overhead and all around the dark little village homes.
Thomas grunted and muttered, “
