Children of Salem

bevy of ugly-soul’d, devil-worshipping scum!”

Jeremy saw the smooth-faced, young Noyes shiver as he listened to this news.

Hale’s expression, beyond a widening of the eyes, remained unreadable.

Corwin lifted his glass to lips and continued drinking; his reputation had him doing this a great deal of the time.

Hathorne nodded vigorously and went to Parris, standing beside him in a show of solidarity.

Higginson shook his head in what, if put into words, might mean damn fools are at it again.

Jeremy gnashed his teeth, a growing sense that practical and reasonable argument had all but flown up the chimney.

Judge Hathorne stepped to Tituba’s tied and chained form, standing at her shoulder. “Is this how you repay your master, girl? Harming his child with your ugly friend Goode and her coven?”

“I don’t do voodoo ‘gainst Betty! Not me! Goode! Goode do it.”

“Goode and who else?” interrogated Hathorne, his thinning dark hair streaked with gray, his steely eyes coming round to match her stare, to read her.

“I don’t know none of dem. I don’t go wid dem.”

“Ignorant, eh? Ignorant and innocent?”

“Yes, massa. Innocent.”

The small black woman wore a simple gray cotton dress and sat on the edge of her chair, pulling at her bonds. Anyone could see she was in pain from the scars on her back, scars inflicted by Parris’ whip. Jeremy wondered where the beating had taken place. He imagined it had gone on at the jail, a black dungeon built into the side of a hill away from polite society. Jeremiah had seen jail cells in every community he’d ever been to and nothing compared in depravity to the Salem jails; they were little more than rat holes. The jailkeeper was a rat- faced, filthy man named Weed Gatter and if ever a man looked the devil, this one did.

Hathorne circled Tituba now as he continued to interrogate her, looking down his nose at her as if looking on trash. Jeremy wondered if the judge kept his distance due to her being trash, or the possibility she was a witch.

Tituba tried at first to follow Hathorne with her eyes, but this proved impossible as he circled. Jeremy wondered at the complete loss of her former pride and fire. All gone. Beaten from her. She’d gone from lioness to cowed house cat.

Hathorne came in close behind this submissive Tituba, and he shouted into her ear, making her jump. “We will brook no more lies, girl!”

“I already say hundred time, I don’t do it!”

“Lies! More lies!”

“Goode and her witches do it!”

Higginson slammed his cane across one of Corwin’s tables, the sound like a gunshot. “I was given to understand, Mr. Parris, that this Bermuda Indian woman of yours is a witness, yet you are treating her as a threat? Locked in chains? Educate me, please.”

“That was the original report, sir,” replied Parris, “but the crisis has deepened and changed.”

“Evidence against the woman has increased,” added Hathorne.

It was the first moment that Jeremy was privy to the fact that all these men had met on this matter before tonight. That this night’s meeting was a continuation of suspicion of witchcraft running rampant in the village. Was this the information that old Higginson had wanted to convey to him before he entered the village that first night? The information that had never come?

“What evidence do you have that condemns this woman before us now?” asked Jeremiah, emboldened by Higginson’s example.

“Goode tells a different story,” replied Parris, staring out at the rain-soaked village. “According to the old bat, Tituba here created the conditions necessary to the efficacy of the coven’s curse on my house.”

Jeremy thought of the doll stuck with pins, the sword, the blood at the hearth, and the blood in the barn.

“—And what Mr. Parris calls a deepening of the crisis,” added Hathorne, a hand on his buttons, “refers to a terrifying increase in the number of children in the village suddenly and inexplicably afflicted in the same manner as his daughter.”

“I’ve heard rumors, but who?” asked Hale, going stiff at the fireplace. “Whose children?”

Parris turned from the window and his thoughts. “My niece, Mary Wolcott under my roof, exhibiting signs, and my other niece, Mercy Lewis, in the Putnam household, along with the Putnam girl.”

“Oh, poor woman, that Mrs. Putnam,” moaned Corwin, “to have this put upon her after enduring so much.” Corwin swallowed more Brandy.”

“Thomas Putnam’s child is it?” asked Hale, who has his own flock to worry about in Waverly. “Thank God we’ve had no such troubles in our village.”

“Convulsions and fits she endures, the little one,” continued Parris.

Higginson held a hand up. “Hold, that child’s been afflicted in one manner or another all her life.”

“Not my Mercy and not my Mary but they’re falling prey to the same fits and discontent and disobedience!”

“Mary Wolcott, Mercy Lewis, Anne Putnam, Betty Parris,” Noyes quietly enumerated. “I heard too that Bray Wilkins’ maidservant, the Sheldon girl, that she’s of a sudden down with an awful sickness, too. Perhaps she’s also under attack by invisible forces?”

Parris nodded solemnly. “It is spreading like a disease, I tell you. It is a disease, one spawned of Hades.”

“Attack the children,” mumbled a frightened Noyes.

“It’s what the Fallen Angel does,” declared Parris. “Attack the weakest among us.”

Shaking his head, Noyes added, “Exactly as the books tell us how He will come with his invisible minions.”

Jeremy didn’t like the way this was going.

“How many children must suffer and die before we take action?” cried out Parris.

“By what stretch do you prove death and murder, Mr. Parris?” asked Higginson.

“I point to Thomas Putnam’s nine dead children, and it can’t be long before my own is dead of her contortions and afflictions. Thomas Putnam’s also informs me same as Noyes here of a young girl named Susana Sheldon, also showing signs of it. He has seen her up at Will’s Hill, Wilkins’ place. I am told, she had been seen in the company of Sarah Goode.”

“In all the years no one has ever suspected foul play in the deaths of the Putnam children, so why now?” pressed Higginson, fire in his ancient eyes.

“It has taken an outsider to see it clearly,” countered Parris, going to the old minister and standing over him where he sat. “It took me, sir.”

“I see. So now you can see into the Invisible World of Satan?”

“I have it on authority of those arrested, Goode and Tituba here, that those Putnam infants were murdered by those who midwifed at what should’ve been their birthing.”

“Confessions beaten from an addled hag and a frightened servant?” asked Jeremy, going to Hathorne t plead for logic. “You can’t trust a confession tortured from a man or woman.”

“You stay out of this, Mr. Wakely,” Parris said, rushing at him, their noses nearly touching. “You are not one of us, and you have no stake here.”

“You said yourself it might take an outsider’s eye here, Mr. Parris.” No one challenged this, not even Higginson. Jeremy dared continue. “Your evidence of murder of the Putnam unborn appears as flimsy as blank parchment, sir.”

“I have more evidence. Much more.”

“Then reveal it.” Higginson tapped his cane hard on the floor.

“Very well.” Parris went to a door, opened it and called to someone in an anteroom to come in. “I’d hoped to spare the children this, but you press my hand, Mr. Higginson, you and Wakely. Though I know not why.”