Children of Salem

much in the throes of love.

“We can’t go on like this, Jeremy,” she whispered—or rather gasped—into his ear before plunging her tongue into his mouth.

“I know . . . must make an honest woman of you.”

“And soon.”

“Absolutely . . . ah! Yes.”

They fell away into one another’s arms, trying desperately to not let their giddiness and joy so overtake them as to send up a howling, which is what each very much wanted to do by this point.

After a long respite and with no more sounds coming in under the door from the hallway, Jeremy again stood and quickly dressed and slipped from the room, blowing her a kiss as he disappeared, and down the hall he went to muss up his own bed to keep the charade alive for Mrs. Fahey, while outside the windows of the boarding house, he heard the rhythmic noise of street hawkers and produce salesmen shouting out their wares and bartering over weights and measures.

# # # # #

Boston bristled with activity. The busiest area in the city proved the North End with the towering clock and bell tower of the North Church looking down over the ships in harbor at the seaport. In essence, Boston appeared a larger scaled Salem Town. While Salem was the port-of-call in the New World for Great Britain and many foreign countries, Boston had begun to rival Salem for the title and to outstrip Salem in permanent growth and population. In fact, there seemed a giddy explosion of activity and expansion and building here. Merchants, bakers, candlestick makers—all in all any business imaginable and some areas of ill repute as grimy and as reprehensible as to rival London some said—but not quite, Jeremy suspected.

As with most second generation New Englanders, Jeremiah Wakely hadn’t ever had the opportunity to see England or London—or any other place off the continent, and would not unless he became a seaman. A highly unlikely prospect, and while like many, he would like to one day see the “old sod” as England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland had come to be known among the colonists, he doubted mightily if he ever would. As a result of such certainty, many a colonist had long ago decided that being a born New Englander was plenty enough to worry a man in the here and now, and that England and London had naught that a man needed that he could not find and attend to on these shores.

Of course, it was a lie men told themselves to help in accepting the rough and primitive world into which their parents and grandparents had deposited them.

Jeremy and Serena married in a quiet ceremony at the North Church, a Reverend Stiles having been pressed into service to do the honors on a weekday. The best man was a deacon of the church, called last minute, along with a lady of the church to act as witness, and Serena still talked about the kindness of these strangers and how they had all cheered and clapped for the young couple.

Jeremy had purchased a pair of gold bands with what amounted to nearly the end of his meager funds, so while in Boston, he’d done some work at the local newspaper office, where he wrote a column under an assumed name, denouncing the witch hunt at Salem as “a fabrication with underlying motives too despicable for polite society to imagine.” Quite soon after the publication of his first “dispatches” from Salem as he called the pieces written under the pseudonym Alastair Cantwell, he was fired and the column running in the pamphlet-sized paper shut down as seditious and libelous.

Jeremy had been enraged by this, and he had fought with his editor, Horatio Sperlunkle, but the pressure from somewhere in a powerful seat proved too great, and so he’d been without sufficient funds now for a few days. But worse than the loss of money was the suppression of truth. Still, funds were a worry as soon, he and Serena would have nothing for the rent.

They continued to board at a Mrs. Fahey’s who charged a reasonable and fair rate. In fact, she stopped them in the hallway and insisted Jeremy take back half the rent she’d charged him before they’d become man and wife. Jeremy put up resistance, thinking it odd until Mrs. Fahey conspiratorially said, “I can’t charge a man for an unused bed. Now you two just take back the half.”

Mrs. Fahey, a stubbornly curious and naturally observant Boston lady had determined a great deal about Jeremy, Serena, and their situation. If Jeremy weren’t sure of her good nature and open heart, he might have believed the woman a spy if not a witch! Conniving busybody she was, yes, but as it turned out in a good way, he’d determined, so he long before now had settled on the term meddler to cover her interest in the newlyweds.

She did not appear to be reporting back to anyone save her small dog, Harry, she called him, after her late husband, who’d died at sea some years before. At breakfast this morning, Mrs. Fahey insisted that the two of them—newly minted husband and wife—go down to the piers and do her marketing for her, claiming that she must make beds and that she felt nauseous and unlike herself, ending with, “Certainly can’t ’spect me to suck in all them fishy odors at the pier? I’d likely vomit in public, a thing a lady must never do, correct, Serena? They take you for a witch, a lady losing her godly graced food.”

The notion was that if the food was graced, then a true witch’s stomach couldn’t abide it and must hurl it back.

“Daft fools that they are!” Mrs. Fahey said of the belief. “Now a man, he might throw up in public all he wants, anytime he wants—and who’s to blame? A witch-man’s entrails? No, indeed! Must be other spirits—Rum!” She cackled with an infectious laugh, Serena and Jeremy joining in while a gruff fellow with the stern look of a good Puritan, a banker by trade, also boarding at Fahey’s, sat stiff and not in the least amused.

Mrs. Fahey lit into the Mr. Stone-gruff-Puritan, saying, “You don’t find that strange or peculiar in the least, Mr. Davenport, eh? Not so much as a snicker or a frown outta ye? Come now, why should a vomitin’ woman not’ve gotten into the rum! Haaa!”

The banker pushed back his chair, stood, said not a word, but disappeared with hat and cane in hand, going on his rounds.

“He goes about saying he’s a banker, but what he truly is? He’s a collector for a banker.”

“He’s got the nature for it,” suggested Serena.

Mrs. Fahey burst into laughter at this. Jeremy didn’t think it so funny, but Mrs. Fahey’s laughter was, and so he joined in again.

“I didn’t mean to disparage the man,” added Serena.

This only made the house owner laugh more.

“Whatever did I say?” Serena looked to Jeremy for help.

“You’ve precisely summed the man up, dear Goodwife.” Jeremy reached across the table and took her hand in his.

“So will the two of you collect up the produce and catch I require for the day?” Mrs. Fahey laid several silver coins on the table—this to make the purchases, and anything left over . . . “ she pulled forth a Boston bill, money minted for city use only.

“We can most certainly do your shopping for you, Mrs. Fahey,” began Serena.

“But we’ll not take your charity,” added Jeremy.

“Charity? Charity is it? To pay an honest wage for honest work?”

“Picking out vegetables, fruits, and fish is hardly work,” countered Jeremy.

“You men!” Mrs. Fahey folded the bill around the coins and pushed it all into Serena’s hand and closed her fist around it. “Show Goodman Wakely here what is work, Serena, and you hold the coin.”

“How shall I determine how much you need from the market?” she asked.

Mrs. Fahey rushed out and returned in an instant with two wicker baskets. “Fill these with enough for dinner and breakfast tomorrow.”

“Consider it done.”

Jeremy and Serena made their way out into a brilliant, lovely morning. Carts, both horse drawn and pulled by men, rattled over cobblestone—many on their way to the seaport marketplace. Life here appeared so much more on kilter than in Salem Village. The sound of horse hooves on stone was joined by the shouting of butchers and fishermen a block away at the piers that extended like giant fingers along the shallows—just as in Salem Town. Here ships from England, Portugal, the Orient, the West Indies, Spain, and France stood creaking about the docks