Early in the seventh year of her life Jennet developed an intense yearning to possess some true and valuable memory of the mother she’d never known, and by her eleventh birthday she’d managed to summon the desired tableau. The veil of forgetfulness lifted, and there was Margaret Noakes Stearne, bloated with Dunstan, sitting alongside Jennet on the parlor floor in Colchester and fashioning one of her famous æolian machines, a wondrous kite of white birch and red silk. “In the spring you and I shall fly it,” Jennet’s mother told her, holding up the finished contraption. “’Twill glide above every steeple in England. I’faith, ’twill soar clear to Heaven!”
Had Jennet’s fourteen-month-old brain in fact recorded this complex scene, or was the recollection but a phantasm? She didn’t know—though she could say with certainty that the flying of the red kite had never occurred, for by the spring of 1680 Margaret Noakes Stearne lay dead atop the birthing-bed, the newborn Dunstan squirming betwixt her thighs. And yet Jennet’s memory of the comely woman extolling the kite felt real, and whenever, as now, she found herself hedged by uncertainty and peril, she would conjure up this benevolent ghost and avail herself of its comforts.
Before fleeing Haverhill, the Nimacooks separated the six white daughters from one another, forcing each into a different canoe, doubtless to prevent them from planning and executing a coordinated escape. All during the dark and frigid journey down the Merrimack, Jennet knelt in the lead canoe and fixed her thoughts on her mother and the kite. In the spring you and I shall fly it. Aided by the river’s current and the braves’ furious paddling, the flotilla made a rapid retreat from the burning town. ’Twill glide above every steeple in England. The passing water reflected the Indians’ torches, now deployed as beacons in the bows, so that the Merrimack seemed home to some fantastic breed of luminous fish. I’faith, ’twill soar clear to Heaven.
The night was at its deepest when the savages put to shore. It took them but a few minutes to conceal their canoes beneath mounds of branches and boughs, which they’d evidently harvested that morning in anticipation of a victory. Having thus confounded whatever rescue parties the Haverhill survivors might launch upon the river, the savages snuffed their torches, shouldered their dead, and gathered up their spoils—including, Jennet noticed with a surge of nausea, several sacks of scalps. After aligning themselves with the waxing moon, the Nimacooks led the white daughters through a stand of cattails and thence into the woods, setting out along a path speckled with fireflies and limned by the glow of Earth’s lone satellite. The Stygian forest stretched in all directions, coils of fog entwining the branches, tree frogs chirping within the hollow trunks, heathen spirits roving the dark æther. With each step Jennet’s misery compounded. Her terror took on a life of its own, a thousand animalcules of dread cruising her veins like the blood-borne imps Aunt Isobel had expected the experimentum magnus to yield. She hugged herself, and ground her teeth, and put one foot before the other.
An hour’s march brought the war party to a wide granite shelf rising from the earth to form an immense cavern. Stores of provisions lay everywhere within—barrels of salted fish, casks of water, ceramic jars filled with dried berries and cured venison, piles of moose-hide bedding. Apparently this vast chamber was the Nimacooks’ equivalent of an inn, a bountiful and capacious road-house marking the way into their territory.
The Indians relighted their torches, revealing near the grotto’s entrance a large pit, freshly dug, waiting to receive the six skin-wrapped corpses. A burial ensued, brief and spare—no prayers, no eulogies, no moment of silence—though Jennet supposed that under peacetime conditions the savages accorded their dead a greater regard. The only whiff of ceremony occurred when a pensive brave with a yellow starburst on his stomach leaned over the grave and set atop each body a soapstone pipe and a small clay pot filled with tobacco.
In obeisance to a series of gestures from their captors, the women removed their shoes and dropped them into the pit. Whilst three young warriors shoveled back the dirt, a third distributed new footwear to the prisoners, deerskin moccasins secured with thongs. At first this ritual perplexed Jennet, but then she grasped its logic: a moccasin, she realized, left no mark upon the world, no track the men of Haverhill might pursue in search of their stolen daughters.
By now it was obvious that each captive had her own private keeper. Jennet’s guardian was a stolid young man with a horizontal crescent moon painted across his chest, the horns pricking his nipples. He’d used the same pigment to give himself a feline countenance, a lynx’s perhaps, or a panther’s. His hair, like that of his brother savages, was greased with rendered bear fat. The cavern gathered and compacted the collective scent, which seemed to penetrate not only Jennet’s nasal passages but every bone in her head. It was a protean odor, always shifting, now revolting, now beguiling, now benumbing, now bracing, as if refracted through some olfactory equivalent of a prism.
The lynx-faced man filled a wooden bowl with venison and berries. As he proffered this spartan dinner, its savory smell somehow overpowered the bear grease to fill Jennet’s nostrils, and she realized that despite the day’s many disasters she would consume the entire portion.
“Thank you,” she said, and he responded with a short declaration in his own tongue.
Later, after captors and captives had finished eating, Lynx Man dipped a gourd ladle into a water cask and, presenting Jennet with the measure, spoke again in Nimacook. When she gave him an uncomprehending look, he attempted a sentence in halting French: “Ce soir nous coucherons ici.” We shall sleep here this evening.
She drank eagerly, sucking every drop from the ladle. “Merci.”
“Je veux vous montrer quelque chose.” I want to show you something.
“Qu’est-ce que c’est?”
“Suivez-moi.”
Lynx Man borrowed a torch from the surgeon, then bade her follow him deep into the grotto. She reasoned that he did not intend to murder her—not after all the trouble his tribe had taken in abducting the white daughters—but it was conceivable he meant to make her the object of his lust. The sheathed knife protruding from his belt suddenly seemed as threatening as a puff adder, and images of ravishment filled her mind as he guided her into an alcove the size of a livery stall. Her heart hurled itself against her backbone, and her stomach spasmed as if preparing to eject the venison and berries.
“Voilà,” Lynx Man said.
Pictures emerged from the blackness, some executed in charcoal, others in paint. As her keeper raised the torch aloft, she beheld a band of savages hurling spears at an elk…a lone hunter setting a deadfall for an approaching bear…another hunter laying a snare for a rabbit…an archer bringing down a partridge with an arrow…a squaw trapping fish in a weir.
“My brother was an artist,” she said, slipping a hand into her dress pocket. Her fingers brushed Dunstan’s sketch of the horse-head promontory. “Mon frère était un artiste.”
Lynx Man said nothing.
The flickering of the torch imparted to the images an illusion of movement, so that the elk seemed to leap, the bear to lumber, the rabbit to scamper, the partridge to plummet, the fish to swim. Each illustrated Indian shivered with the thrill of the hunt, and now Jennet shivered as well, and then her tears began to flow, and they did not stop flowing until, three hours later, lying on a moose-hide mattress in the savages’ road-house, the bear grease drilling through her brain, the torches decorating the walls with black lapping shadows, she drifted off to sleep.
AT FIRST LIGHT LYNX MAN and the others scrubbed the paint from their bodies, whereupon the forced march began, the savages pressing their prisoners ever westward. The Indians did not pause to break their fast, nor did they halt for a midday meal, but instead moved deeper and deeper into the conifer forest, eating and drinking as they went—venison from bulrush baskets, water from leather bottles—occasionally sharing these provisions with the white daughters. As the sun dipped toward the horizon, the war party at last crossed into the bounteous and sprawling estates of the Algonquin Nimacook.
According to Jennet’s comprehension of her keeper’s French, each Haverhill prisoner was destined for a different village. Evidently her translation was accurate, for upon reaching a sun-dappled glade the company fractured like a dropped mirror, with no two daughters assigned to the same band. Suddenly aware that they might never see one another again, the young women squirmed free of their guardians and came together in a communal embrace—all save Jennet, whose attitude toward these wilting Puritans fell far short of affection. For a full minute the Indians permitted the prisoners to say their farewells, and then the great scattering began.
Led by Lynx Man, Jennet’s band walked silently through the forest, bearing their sacks of spoils and scalps across mounds of brown needles shed by the firs and hemlocks. Within an hour the trees yielded to brush and thickets, which in time melted away to reveal a river: the Shawsheen, her keeper called it, as roiling and jaunty as the Merrimack was tame and somber. Here the band turned north, proceeding along a shore of such floral fecundity—violets, honeysuckle, clematis, buttercups—that it seemed to Jennet a kind of Paradise reserved for the souls of deceased honeybees and the shades of departed hummingbirds. By degrees her dread declined into simple foreboding, and the reeling shock of losing her father and brother became, regarding Walter, indifference, and, concerning Dunstan, the manageable ache of grief.
“I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,” she muttered, gesturing toward the blossoms, “where oxlips and the nodding violet grows.”
“Quoi?” Lynx Man asked.
“Shakespeare,” Jennet replied.
“Votre nom est Shakespeare?” Your name is Shakespeare?
“Non, je m’appelle Jennet,” she said.
“Et je m’appelle Pussough.” I call myself Pussough.
At length the band drew within view of a broad, undulating field, its gentle slopes dotted with small earth-mounds from which emerged tangled arrays of corn, beans, and squash. A score of Indian women moved amidst the crops, prising up weeds with quahog-shell hoes and using these same implements to frighten away rabbits.
Upon realizing that the warriors were back from Haverhill, the women abandoned their plantation and headed for the riverbank. They ranged in age from pubescent girls to crones, but their clothing was nearly identical: grass mantles and deerskin skirts, with nary a cap or bonnet amongst them. Apparently no one from Pussough’s village had died in the attack, for every wife, sister, daughter, aunt, mother, and grandmother retained her smile throughout the various overlapping accounts of the great battle, and when the warriors finished reciting their tales a raucous celebration followed, the plantation ringing with bright laughter and a high wavering chant that sounded to Jennet like an Anglican hymn sung under water.
Reunion accomplished, the plantation maids turned their attention to the white captive, examining her from every angle as might a company of Cambridge Platonists confronted with a unicorn or a griffin. They fingered Jennet’s dress, toyed with her unbraided hair, sniffed the sweaty juncture of her neck and shoulder. As far as she could tell, none of the women was paired with Pussough, and it occurred to her that she might be marked to become his bride. Certainly there was an intimation of courtship in the way he now led her up the nearest slope, so gloriously a-bloom it made her late father’s garden seem barren as a pauper’s grave.
“Les trois soeurs,” Pussough said. The three sisters.
To her eye each triad of crops indeed enjoyed an intimate and sisterly relationship. Green vines laden with beans coiled about the maize stalks, using them for support, even as the nascent squash huddled in the salubrious shade cast by the other vegetables.
“Ces soeurs sont heureuses,” she said. These sisters are happy.
Pussough laughed and squeezed her shoulder in a manner that seemed to occupy an Aristotelian middle-ground betwixt domination and affection. “Voici votre vie nouvelle.” Here is your new life.
Evidently she too would become a plantation maid. “Ma vie nouvelle?”
“Oui.” His hand strayed from her shoulder to her hip. “Nous ne vous ferrons pas de mal.” We shall not harm you. “Vous aurez un bébé, et nous ne vous ferrons pas de mal.” You will have a baby, and we shall not harm you.
A pint of bile flooded her stomach. “Un bébé?”
“Oui, un bébé.”
Un bébé. The horrid idea seized her imagination, wrenching her from the company of the gentle trois soeurs, and suddenly her brain could conjure no object save human blood, in all its varieties. She saw pools of blood, creeks of blood, biblical rivers of blood. The absence of a child in your womb brought each month a rational and reassuring measure of blood, but the presence of such a monster could cause a very cataract. Un bébé was the vilest of phenomena. Un bébé was hemorrhage and darkness and death.
“Quand est-ce que j’aurai le bébé?” she asked. When will I have the baby?
“Quand vous serez prête,” Pussough said.
Could this be true? A Nimacook wife might defer the gravid state until she was prête—ready?
She ran a finger across the helical course of a bean vine, vowing silently that, whether her future husband was the man standing before her or another of these enigmatic tawnies, she would somehow, some way, hold him to the laudable custom of deferred procreation. The Nimacooks might make her their slave—they might force her to carry their water, sew their mantles, mend their moccasins, clean their hovels, tend their corn, run their gauntlet: all these indignities she could abide. But to spare herself the doom of Margaret Stearne, she would move Heaven and Earth and all the bodies in between.
AT FIRST SHE TALLIED only the days, noting each planetary rotation by dropping a pebble into the hollow of an oak tree growing just inside the village gateway. Then she started marking the months, recording every new moon by concealing a crow feather in the darkest corner of her wigwam. Eventually it became clear that her captivity must be reckoned in years, and so whenever the planting season came to the Shawsheen Valley, she fashioned and fired a commemorative pot, setting it beneath her sleeping platform.
Her immediate community, forty-eight in number, occupied four stockaded acres on the eastern shore. They called themselves the Kokokehom, the Owl Clan, willing followers of a one-eyed sagamore named Miacoomes. Having determined that, true to Pussough’s assertion, these people meant her no harm—that, indeed, they were attempting to provide her with their notion of a happy life—she resolved to find in her circumstances some measure of redemption. Had Aunt Isobel ever landed amongst the naked tawnies, she would surely have endeavored to study them, bringing to the task the same fascinated detachment she accorded animalcules on a Van Leeuwenhoek stage. Thus did Jennet come to view the Kokokehom less as her captors than as the subjects of a philosophic project—though she could not deny that these same subjects were in turn scrutinizing her, casting many a curious and condescending eye on this woman so woefully ignorant of maize planting and mat weaving and everything else that mattered.
Although the prospect of running the Nimacook gauntlet, the wopwawnonckquat, had always instilled in Jennet an unmitigated alarm, she had survived the initiation with nary a bruise or welt. It was a nasty business to be sure, requiring her to dress in naught but a linen shift, then dash betwixt two parallel columns of Indians, all of whom proceeded to set upon her with battle clubs, quahog-shell hoes, and rawhide lashes, their stated intention being to thresh the very whiteness from her soul. And yet at the midpoint of her sprint through this human chute, she realized that her captors were checking their blows, restraining their strokes, and staying their whip hands. Amongst certain Nimacook clans, no doubt, the gauntlet was still a bloody custom, but within the Kokokehom it had evidently transmuted, violence to vestige, savagery to sacrament, ordeal to echo.
Other Nimacook traditions, by contrast, seemed invulnerable to emendation by time. Each autumn, once the seeds were in the ground, the six clans always left their respective villages and came together as one tribe, congregating in a vast settlement to the south under the leadership of the Nimacook grand-sachem, Chabaquong. For two weeks the Indians would feast, dance, feast some more, seek out marriage mates, indulge in further feasting, smoke their tobacco, then throw another feast, all the while discussing public business, most especially the vexatious issue of the English settlers’ appetite for Algonquin land. Although these gatherings enabled Jennet to mingle with the other white daughters, she entered their vicinity but rarely, for the conversation of all five girls turned almost exclusively on the past—an understandable obsession, but also quite useless. The daughters grieved for their murdered parents and slaughtered friends, their burned homes and broken baubles, their razed dreams and ravaged aspirations. And yet, even as they indulged in these ritual remembrances, they were obviously learning to inhabit the present, and ere the first year had passed, the five seemed Nimacook to Jennet in all but blood, and two were already with child by their wasicks—their mandatory husbands.
Jennet did not exactly love her own mandatory husband, who turned out to be not Pussough but rather his cousin Okommaka, the brave who’d officiated at the burial rite the night of the raid, setting pipes and tobacco atop the corpses. She nevertheless felt toward Okommaka an undeniable tenderness and devotion—a remarkable circumstance, given that she’d enjoyed no liberty whatsoever to reject his marriage proposal. The courtship consisted entirely in her wasick presenting her with a pictographic charcoal-on-deerskin catalogue of the assets he would bring to their union: a steel knife, a French musket, a birch-bark canoe, a snappish guard dog named Casco, and a set of reed mats sufficient for constructing a private wigwam. Beyond this strange fixation on his dowry, Okommaka seemed in his own way a reflective and philosophic young man, and this attribute, combined with his high-cheeked, black-haired beauty, aroused in Jennet an emotion that would serve for the poetic passion until it unequivocally entered her life.
Whilst not normally given to bluster, Okommaka never tired of relating how, shortly after the Haverhill raid, he’d bested seven other braves, Pussough amongst them, in a quartet of games—wrestling match, canoe race, archery contest, spear toss—and thereby acquired the right to woo and wed the sky-eyed, fire-haired English maid. Jennet wasn’t sure how she felt about this prologue to her matrimony. There was much in the narrative to gratify her vanity (not since Homer’s Penelope had a woman occasioned such fierce competition amongst suitors), but even more to make her feel like a piece of booty, a spoil of war. Whether its genesis was chivalric, barbaric, or something betwixt the two, however, her bond with Okommaka clearly entailed guarantees of safety and sustenance, and so she resolved that for the immediate future she would give no thought to escape. Her body and mind could readily tolerate the r
le of Nimacook bride, whereas frigid winds and an empty stomach surely awaited any white woman foolish enough to flee into the inhospitable reaches of the Shawsheen.
The marriage ceremony was spare but elegant, a simple matter of Jennet and Okommaka sharing a bowl of corn soup in his family’s presence, clasping each other’s hands above the muchickehea stone, and, finally, exchanging gifts. He gave her three eelskin hair ribbons and a clam-shell necklace. She presented him with Dunstan’s drawing of the horse-head promontory, along with a pouch she’d made from cedar bark, suggesting that he use it to store his tobacco. When dusk came he led her to the back of his family’s longhouse and removed her deerskin mantle, immediately finding himself in a state of hydraulic fervor. He shed his garments and bade her lie with him. She did not embrace her husband with enthusiasm, but neither did she know fear, for Chapter Two of her Woman’s Garden promised that the discomfort would be brief, and she’d calculated that her fertile period was at least ten days away. Forcing a smile, she permitted Okommaka to deflower her in the quick and awkward manner that Isobel had called “the universal buffoonery of young men on their wedding nights,” and then came the soothing sensation, unique in her experience, of falling asleep in another person’s arms.
“Cowammaunsh,” he told her in the morning. Later she learned his meaning. I love you.
What most astonished Jennet about her adoptive family—which included Okommaka’s mother, Magunga, his father, Quappala, and an assortment of siblings and cousins—was their willingness to grant her the same privileges she would have enjoyed if born into the Owl Clan. To transmute an outsider into a full-blooded Nimacook, you needed merely to change her name. On Welcoming Day, one month after her wedding, she became Waewowesheckmishquashim, Woman with Hair like a Fox, an epithet whose sense delighted her and whose abridged form, Waequashim, fell pleasingly on her ear.
Indifferent as the Nimacooks were to a wife’s ancestry, the same could not be said of her fertility, and none of Waequashim’s new relations pretended she’d been abducted for any reason beyond her presumably hale womb. Extinction was a possibility these people could not discount. Famine, wild beasts, intertribal warfare, and Puritan violence regularly reduced the population of childbearers amongst them—amongst all the Algonquin peoples. But it was the terrible small-pox epidemics, raging through the Indian settlements at unpredictable intervals, that wrought the greatest devastation. Skishauonck, they called it, the “flogging sickness,” and to Jennet that sounded like the perfect word, skishauonck, the rasp of Satan clearing his barbed and pustuled throat.
Although Latin had always been for her a laborious pursuit, it was child’s play compared to Algonquin, whose rhythms and idioms seemed better suited to the inhabitants of Callisto than to any race on Earth. To say “I am glad you are well” meant teaching your lips to form “Taubot paumpmauntaman.” “It will rain today” pressed your tongue into the service of “Anamekeesuck sokenum.” “How fare your children?” required the questioner to articulate “Aspaumpmauntamwock cummuckiaug?” For Okommaka, logically enough, English proved equally perverse. He had difficulty grasping that eight words, “A man shot by accident during the hunt,” were needed to translate “Uppetetoua.” He resisted the fact that “I am not inclined to pursue the matter” was the simplest possible rendering of “Nissekinean.” It bewildered him that “When the wind blows northwest” was the most efficient way to say “Chekesitch.” And so it happened that, during the first several weeks following their nuptials, Waequashim and her husband managed to conduct quotidian transactions solely through their mutual though defective French, Okommaka and his fellow Owl Clan braves having absorbed bits and pieces of this language from a Jesuit missionary who’d lived in the village for a year, during which interval he’d succeeded in winning only two Indian souls to the Roman faith. But gradually, steadily—and with considerable delight—Jennet and Okommaka learned each other’s native tongue, even as their natural tongues found novel ways to fill their private hours with connubial amusement.
Despite their fears of oblivion, the Nimacooks behaved exactly as Pussough had foretold, permitting Jennet to set the terms of her fertility. Okommaka did not complain when she forswore the marital act on those nights when conception was most likely, especially since Chapter Six, “Labia North and South,” detailed several compensatory procedures. As a further precaution, before lying with Okommaka she always suffused her privy shaft with a seed-stilling unguent of pennyroyal and marjoram. The physic came from Hassane, the clan’s lithe and puckish medicine-woman, their taupowau: a kind of wood nymph, Jennet decided, forever flitting about the village as if borne on invisible fairy-wings, merrily dispensing bits of cryptic wisdom—“The dog hath found its brother in the wolf, but humans still await their kindred kind”—along with her songs and simples.
Having reduced the menace of pregnancy to a minimum, Jennet felt free to experiment with the activities outlined in both Chapter Four, “The Lust of the Goat,” and Chapter Five, “The Algebra of Desire.” To the degree that Isobel’s knowledge was firsthand, it would seem that as a sensualist Edward Mowbray had suffered few equals. But Okommaka, too, possessed an aptitude for the priapic, and as their private encounters grew ever more heated, Waequashim gradually apprehended the strange and satisfying truth that swiving had become as central to her sustenance as eating.
It was this newfound carnal appetite that made Jennet resolve to forestall indefinitely the day when she would cease to be attractive in her husband’s eyes. Despite the many virtues of a crop-woman’s life—the agreeable companions, frequent diversions (she took a special delight in pisinneganash, a kind of card game played with bulrushes), heady tobacco (its pleasures being permitted to both genders), and nightly exchanges of tales both factual and fabulous—she had come to regard the plantation as the great enemy of her youthfulness. Her time beneath the burning New World sun was causing her brow to peel like birch bark and her hands to become as coarse as a toad’s skin. Eventually she brought the matter before Hassane, who gave her a musky ointment with which to butter her exposed flesh ere venturing upon the maize field to battle the weeds and shoo the crows. Owing to this balm, plus the unsightly but effective bonnet she’d woven from corn husks, Waequashim eventually grew confident that she and Okommaka would wither at the same rate.
As her fifth year amongst the Nimacooks began, Jennet found herself in possession of a compelling hypothesis, perhaps even a truth, concerning the two very different worlds in which Dame Fortune had thus far deposited her. The European universe, she speculated, was in essence a road, a meandering thoroughfare bearing its pilgrims from one impressive way-station to the next, from Greek civilization with its beautiful geometry, to the Christian nations with their brilliant theology, to the star-gazing trinity of Galileo, Kepler, and Newton. But the Indian universe was a wheel, always turning, its rotations marked by the movements of game, the ripening of crops, the shoaling of fish, the fruiting of trees, and the running of sap. Beyond their fondness for French muskets and English fowling-pieces, technical innovation meant little to these people; no Nimacook had ever sought to fashion an astrolabe or a microscope. At first this deficit bewildered Jennet, but in time she came to see certain limitations in her aunt’s allegiances. Although natural philosophy was the noblest of enterprises, it had never tracked a deer, maintained a maize crop, trapped salmon in a weir, woven a reed mat, or wrought syrup from the ichor of a maple tree.
Europeans and Indians did not see the same moon, the same nanepaushat. For the Cambridge Platonists as well as the Continental Cartesians, Earth’s satellite was a mass of dead matter pulled around the planet by an arcane entity (gravitation for the Platonists, vortices for the Cartesians) that could cause “action at a distance.” But the Nimacook moon was an immense wampumpeag bead fashioned by an ancient coastal people, the Quanquogt, their intention having been to offer it to Kautantouwit, the Great Southwest God, source of all salutary winds, in exchange for the ocean that nurtured them.
“I assume that Kautantouwit did not smile on the proposition,” Jennet said to Okommaka as they planted a row of merry yellow trilliums along the walkway leading to their wigwam.
He grunted in assent. “Kautantouwit was much offended. He banished the Quanquogt to a barren desert, then hurled the great wampumpeag bead into the sky.”
“A harsh but fitting sentence.”
Casco the dog ambled onto the scene, approached the stew pot in which they’d cooked their midday meal, and inserted his snout in quest of venison scraps.
“Ah, but even a god can be tempted.” Okommaka pressed a wad of tobacco into the bowl of his soapstone pipe. “Even Kautantouwit will have his greed. And so it happens that once each month he reaches toward the nanepaushat-sawhoog, the moon-bead, obscuring it bit by bit with the shadow of his hand—but in the end he always decides to leave the bead in place.”
“A sign, aye?” Jennet said. “A symbol of his displeasure with the Quanquogt.”
“Nux. Yes. No part of the Earth may be bought or sold, Waequashim, no piece of Mittauke. No sea, forest, lake, or mountain.”
“If the moon is a bead, then what is the sun?”
“In England they have no knowledge of the sun?” He frowned emphatically. “The sun, cherished wife, is the council fire around which our ancestors gather. When a Nimacook dies, his soul travels to the southwest mountain, and if Kautantouwit judges it worthy he will deliver that same soul to Keesuckquand, Guardian of Heaven’s Torch.”
“Now that I am Nimacook, do my ancestors gather around the fire?”
“Look at the sun,” he said, pointing skyward. “Not long, lest it blind you. Look, and you will see all those who came before you.”
She locked her gaze on the sun. The burning rays flooded her skull with light, and she turned away, blinking, eyes smarting. Casco licked the stew pot. Okommaka lit his pipe.
She lifted her head and again stared at the council fire. A golden frieze appeared. Her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother sat huddled in the sun’s corona like jewels decorating a diadem.
Some desire of her mind, quite likely. Some phantom of her brain. And yet the glimmering chimera produced in Jennet a joy such as she’d not known since that long-gone March evening at Mirringate, a night of hot sugared coffee and dancing oak-wood flames, when Aunt Isobel had taught her to comprehend the grand cosmic drama, more than twenty-five thousand years in duration, known to natural philosophers as the precession of the equinoxes.
NEAR THE END OF JENNET’S SEVENTH YEAR in the Owl Clan, it became obvious that Okommaka, Magunga, Quappala, and the rest of her immediate family could no longer abide her vacant womb. Assenting to the inevitable, she set aside Hassane’s unguent, and she and Okommaka started clustering their connections toward the middle of her cycle. Within three months she was pregnant. Despite the cessation of her lunar bleeding, she found the condition supremely uncomfortable, but she did not experience the terror she’d so long anticipated. Her qualified equanimity traced to the tradition whereby Nimacook squaws dropped their babies whilst standing erect—the very attitude that Aunt Isobel (having researched the matter in four languages) regarded as the safest and least painful, “the upright pagan posture, ninety degrees from the horizontal lying-in to which a European woman subjects herself.” Whatever hardships the birthing process might involve, Jennet imagined that through heathen tradition and Hassane’s talent she would elude the fate her mother had suffered in delivering Dunstan. If the infant was a girl, she would name her Bella, a variation on Isobel. If a boy, he would be Anton, in homage to the inventor of the microscope.
As Jennet entered her final month, the infant kicking against her womb at least once an hour, protesting its imprisonment, a distressing report reached the village. The flogging sickness had struck the Moaskug, the Black Snake Clan, a Nimacook community a half-day’s walk to the north. Later that week the rumor received vivid confirmation as the pied corpses of two Moaskug women came floating down the Shawsheen. Jennet’s fellow Indians knew from experience what would happen now. First, more skishauonck victims would appear on the river. Then, for miles around the village, the forest would tremble with the shrieks of the dying and the keening of the bereaved. And finally a new sound would arise, the marching feet of the machemoqussu, the wandering doomed, those still-living sufferers whom the disease had transformed into madmen.
Theirs was an understandable insanity. In the initial stage of skishauonck, Hassane explained, the patient endured a burning fever and violent vomiting, even as tiny red spots appeared all over his body. In the second stage the spots became blisters filled with lustrous pus. If the victim was going to survive, this happy fact soon became manifest: his fever broke, and the blisters turned to scabs and fell off. But many did not survive. For these unfortunates, the blisters began erupting, thereby causing the outermost tiers of the flesh, both internally and externally, to split away from the underlayers, so that the victim was literally flayed alive, without and also within, blood oozing from his mouth, nose, genitals, and anus.
With every brave except Miacoomes and his councilors away on the summer hunt, it fell to the women to take up firearms and prevent the machemoqussu from spreading the contagion amongst the Owl Clan. Despite Jennet’s gravid state, Miacoomes required her to spend two hours each morning doing sentry duty in collaboration with a crone named Winoshi, the two women pacing back and forth outside the stockade wall, muskets in hand, all senses at peak. Although the machemoqussu were nowhere to be seen, Jennet did not for an instant doubt their actuality. She could hear them wailing and moaning amidst the shadows as they crashed blister-blind from tree to tree and boulder to boulder—the world’s true demons, the goblins with dissolving skin.
Shortly after sunrise on her twentieth morning of guarding the village, Jennet’s sac abruptly split, sending a stream of warm clear water spilling down her thighs. The fluid rolled across the ground, irrigating the grass and quenching the wildflowers. A half-hour later the first spasm arrived, seizing her body with all the force of a plowshare breaking hard earth.
She took her leave of Winoshi, ran to her wigwam, and grabbed the poppet she’d made two nights earlier—deerskin body, eyes of white beads—that she might gift her child with a toy upon its disembarkation. As she made her way to the taupowau’s dwelling, the immured and impatient baby bobbing before her, a second spasm came, stronger even than the first. Hassane gathered together the steel knife, leather flask, linen rags, figwort leaves, deerskin blanket, and other necessities, then guided Jennet to the wooded northwest quadrant of the village. The birthing lodge was a typical Nimacook longhouse, though equipped with a nesseanaskunck: two shorn hemlock branches suspended five feet above the floor, positioned in parallel like railings on a bridge, and supported by leather thongs affixed to the ceiling.
“Step betwixt the poles,” Hassane commanded.
Jennet did so.
“Set your arms around the centers,” Hassane said.
Even as Jennet obeyed, a third spasm took hold of her.
“Breathe quickly and deliberately,” Hassane said, “as if you are swimming across the Shawsheen.”
Jennet opened her mouth and sucked in a great sphere of air. She released it with a sharp calculated puff.
Owing to Hassane’s midwifing skills and the virtues of vertical birthing, the delivery fell short of an ordeal. It was exhausting to be sure, punctuated by ferocious explosions of pain, but never once did Jennet feel herself in thrall to those profane forces that had carried her mother to the hallowed ground of a Mistley churchyard.
“You have a daughter, Waequashim.” The taupowau eased the expelled infant into the good air and soft light of the birthing lodge, then took up the knife and with a single stroke severed the umbilical cord.
Healthy and unharmed, or so Hassane asserted, Bella fascinated Jennet from the moment the taupowau placed the infant in her arms. Whilst Hassane buried the bright blue placenta by the riverbank, Jennet sat outside the lodge and contemplated the creature’s tiny eyelashes and subtle nose, her articulated knuckles and wrinkled brown knees, her wispy black hair and stubby but differentiated toes. Who could have guessed that the great bulky stone in Waequashim’s womb would emerge into daylight boasting such glorious detail?
“Many are the lessons I would teach thee,” Jennet said, setting the deerskin doll in her baby’s reflexive grasp.
She told Bella that the season for planting began when the leaves of the white oak were as large as a mouse’s ears. She explained how each time the sun refracted the lingering damp of a summer shower, a rainbow appeared in the sky, and if you could somehow gather up that spectrum and strain it through another such prism, its rays would fuse into a beam of purest whiteness. When guarding the plantation, a squaw must never slay a raven, neither with arrow nor spear nor musket-ball, for it was that bird and no other who had brought to the Algonquin the very first maize seed. She informed her daughter that they would one day scour the Shawsheen’s bottom until they discovered a stone so clear and pure it could serve as a microscope lens, and then they would find another such stone, and next they would fit the two lenses to a tube of soapstone, and by this means they would explore the world that lay hidden within the world.
“Six sides there be to each and every snow crystal,” Jennet said, alternately stroking the deerskin doll and the infant’s brow. “Mr. Hooke hath proved as much. That is the planet to which you have come, my beautiful, darling Bella.”
NOW THAT OKOMMAKA’S DAUGHTER had arrived, launched upon the trajectory of her joys and the vector of her sorrows, Miacoomes forbade Waequashim to do sentry duty, lest the toxic breath of the machemoqussu bring sickness to the infant. Instead Jennet became a plantation maid again. Each morning she would package Bella’s bum in an absorbent mixture of cattail fluff and sphagnum, roll a deerskin around her body until the child resembled an unhusked ear of corn, strap her to a cradleboard, and equip her with the rattle Magunga had made from bits of bone and a scooped-out gourd, whereupon the two of them would set off for the field des trois soeurs, the baby riding on her mother’s spine like a turtle basking on a log. As she attacked the weeds with her hoe and unburdened the bean crop of dead vines, Jennet kept an eye peeled for the machemoqussu, and she did not relax her vigilance until, five weeks after Bella’s birth, the Moaskug sagamore sent word to Miacoomes that the skishauonck epidemic had finally lifted. In her mind Jennet saw this event as the abating of a furious storm, its gusts and rains and sleet burned into oblivion by the sun.
Bella’s fortieth night on Earth was lit by a moon as pale and yellow as a firefly’s lanthorn. Jennet was sitting in the village plaza, the baby’s lips clamped around her left nipple, when she noticed the aberrant blotch. It was dark, solitary, no larger than a freckle, fixed like a wood tick to Bella’s cheek.
Jennet brushed the blotch with her thumb. It remained rooted, a hundred times more ominous than any Devil’s mark. She brushed it again. The dot persisted.
“Dear God in Heaven…”
Without breaking the seal betwixt mouth and breast, she rose and proceeded directly to her mother-in-law’s longhouse. Upon seeing the excrescence, Magunga let out a howl as loud and anguished as a machemoqussu’s cry, and then came three more howls interspersed with wheezing gasps, until finally Magunga grew rational enough to assert that only the blaze of the sun could reveal the mark’s true nature. For the immediate moment Jennet could do nothing but nurse the baby to sleep: if there was any hope for Bella, it lay in the dream world—once set roaming across those ethereal hills, the infant’s spirit might meet a mauchatea, a “ghost guide” who would lead her far beyond the demon-infested land of the flogging sickness and bring her to the healing waters of the River Woaloke.
Staggering home along the moon-lit path, Jennet felt as if she had herself become a wanderer in the dream world, but no mauchatea appeared to point the way. She entered the wigwam and, after suckling Bella until the infant’s lips stopped moving and her jaw went slack, eased her sleeping body into the cradle as she would shelve the only existing copy of a wise and exquisite book. She sat down, sprawled across the mat, and closed her eyes, all the while imploring Kautantouwit and Jehovah to collaborate in delivering her child from the small-pox. Bella’s breathing filled the air, the gentle inhalations and soft exhalations, delicate as breezes meant to launch a fledgling finch on its first flight. Sleep came to Jennet but fitfully that night, her wakeful moments a concatenation of unbidden twitchings and involuntary doggish yelps, her dreams aboil with machemoqussu infantries on the march.
At first light she unfurled her clenched fingers and set her palm on Bella’s brow. The baby’s skin was hot, deathly hot, skishauonck hot. Seconds later Bella awoke, and from her little chest a jagged screech shot forth.
Jennet picked up the baby, her infinitely detailed Bella whose spirit had failed to find a mauchatea, and carried her into the remorseless light of day. Pustules speckled Bella’s torso like Satanic wampumpeag beads.
“Blessed Kautantouwit, I beg thee…”
Thirty pustules, fifty, a hundred.
“Hear me, Kautantouwit…”
Again Bella screeched.
She bore her daughter to Hassane’s wigwam, hoping the medicine-woman would judge Bella afflicted with a rare but curable disease whose symptoms uncannily mimicked those of the flogging sickness. But instead of offering any such lore, Hassane merely directed Jennet to swab the child head to toe with river-soaked wads of sphagnum, again and again and again.
To what unspeakable precinct of their pantheon did the Nimacooks consign skishauonck? From whence sprang this Satanic contagion? Jennet never found out. The Indians were not given to raging indignantly against the plague, but neither did they regard it as a fitting punishment for their sins. Apparently they viewed skishauonck as a mystery. The disease confounded Jennet as well. Bathing Bella as Hassane had prescribed for five unbroken hours, all the while watching her daughter transmute from a baby into a machemoqussu, and thence to a corpse, she could not decide whether skishauonck represented the iniquity of Lucifer, the wrath of God, the perversity of Nature, or yet another force, beyond all human comprehension.
She grieved as would any other Nimacook, staining her teeth with juniper berries, loading her moccasins with pebbles, and cutting her hair with a sacred elk-bone knife, so that ragged auburn tufts now sprouted from her scalp. She prepared a cake of charred oak and rubbed it across her face, darkening her cheeks and brow with an itching patina of soot.
Taking the corpse in her arms, she hobbled down to the riverbank, where Hassane and Magunga awaited, their faces likewise blackened.
“Kutchimmoke,” Hassane told her. Be of good cheer.
“Kutchimmoke,” Magunga echoed.
After searching the shore for an hour, the women found a soft and secluded spot beneath a willow tree, and there they dug a grave with clam-shell spades, lining the bottom with a cushion of sticks. Jennet placed Bella in extreme flexion, hands covering face, then slipped the deerskin doll under her arms and wrapped her in a reed mat. In tandem the women fitted Bella into the grave, slowly, deliberately, seed into furrow, string into nock, feather into braid, and then Jennet said good-bye to the child with the wondrous knuckles and the rich black hair. The women filled the hole with sand. Hassane erected atop the mound a tower of twigs and stones no higher than a maize stalk, gently tilting it toward the southwest—for this was a cowwenock-wunnauchicomock, she explained, a “soul-chimney” meant to draw the child’s immaterial essence from her dead flesh and point it toward Kautantouwit’s sacred mountain, that it might join with the God of Gods.
“And now, Waequashim, you must take the river-cure,” Hassane said.
“Today and every day for a month,” Magunga elaborated, “you will give yourself to the Shawsheen.”
Did the Nimacook river-cure represent a foolish heathen superstition, or was it rather a paragon of pagan wisdom? In her numb and pliant condition Jennet could form no opinion, and so it was with a divided heart that she removed her mantle and skirt, pulled off her moccasins, bid Hassane and Magunga farewell, and stepped into the cool racing fluid. She walked along the muddy bed until the water reached her waist, and then she lifted her heels and tipped her body forward. She swam north, face down, countering the current by moving her legs in a frog kick and raising her head to breathe. Waterborne twigs stroked her thighs. Clusters of leaves caressed her sides. The Shawsheen washed the soot from her cheeks and brow.
At twilight she reached Hawk-Isle, then rolled on her back like an otter and let the river return her to the mound where Bella lay. Clambering onto the shore, she locked her gaze on the little wooden tower, still pointed toward Heaven. Such a fragile talisman, this soul-chimney, this cowwenock-wunnauchicomock. It would not survive the briefest rain-shower, much less a blizzard or a thunder-gust.
“In the spring you and I shall fly it.” Her knees failed, and she collapsed naked and shivering atop her daughter’s grave. “We shall fly it for fair, my dearest, sweetest Bella.”
For an indeterminate interval she sobbed and keened, pummeling the mound with her fists, soaking the sand with her tears as her birth waters had saturated the earth outside the village gateway, until at last her grief grew so thick and hard—a kind of second pregnancy, malign this time, tumoral—that she could no longer work her wailing limbs or move her weeping joints. She curled her body into a tight sphere, a human moon-bead, and she did not bestir herself until dawn.
FOUR DAYS LATER Hassane brought Jennet a male infant whose mother had succumbed to the contagion, so that the white woman’s engorged breasts might nourish him. Kapaog’s sucking proved far more vigorous than Bella’s, so that, true to a phenomenon documented in Chapter Seven, Jennet found herself in a state of concupiscent arousal. When Hassane required her to hand Kapaog over to another lactating woman, a potter named Cumunchon, likewise mourning her infant machemoqussu, a deep carnal longing settled into Jennet’s bones, lingering until at last Okommaka returned from the hunt.
“I gave our daughter an English name,” she told him. “Bella, after my Aunt Isobel, the natural philosopher. All the world held great fascination for her, from the meanest worm to the brightest star.”
“The brightest star,” Okommaka echoed. “Then our child was Pashpishia.”
“Pashpishia…”
“She Who Loves the Night.”
With every visit she paid to Pashpishia’s grave that month, Jennet grew more determined to evoke nupakenaqun—the right of a bereaved mother to exempt herself from further procreation. Okommaka in turn claimed a collateral privilege, so that his nubile cousin Maansu became his second wife. In a development so ironic it might have given even Sophocles pause, Jennet found that, far from arousing her jealousy, this bigamous arrangement increased tenfold her sense of unity with the Owl Clan. She would never be a Nimacook mother, but now she knew herself for an absolute Nimacook squaw, the first and favorite of Okommaka.
This pagan marriage was real. The Kokokehom were the case. Her clam-shell necklace, eelskin hair ribbons, bead bracelet, fur robe, deerskin leggings, and moose-hide moccasins were factual as grass. As for Salem and Boston, Colchester and London, the Aristotelian Earth and the Newtonian moon, these were just labels on dreams, mere names for places as mythic as Atlantis or El Dorado.
Out there, it was 1703: so said her calendar of fired pots. Out there, some bright young natural philosopher was likely on the point of discovering Newton’s lost demon disproof. Even as her twenty-fifth birthday arrived—an event she celebrated by fashioning for herself a head-dress of hawk and pheasant feathers—an argumentum grande was doubtless appearing on the stage of European history, poised to topple all witch-courts and shred all conjuring statutes. But for Waequashim of the Nimacook, there was no more work to do.
ALTHOUGH JENNET REMAINED HORRIFIED by the brutality and the bloody scalps, the Indians’ war against the Merrimack Valley settlers had evidently accomplished its aim. By the turn of the century a crop-woman could spend a productive morning tilling her clan’s acres without fear that some eager Puritan would try to steal them come afternoon. To all appearances an undeclared truce had emerged betwixt Chabaquong’s people and the English towns, including a reconstructed and repopulated Haverhill, and in time the Nimacooks permitted the Puritans to inscribe a toll road along the extreme eastern edge of their territory—a mail route from Boston to Amesbury—with the Indians receiving a fee of one wampumpeag bead per mounted wayfarer and two per horse-drawn coach.
Because the far boundary of the Owl Clan’s plantation abutted the Amesbury Post Road, Jennet now became witness to a daily stream of white men—galloping mail-carriers, marching soldiers, sweating drovers, panting peddlers—a circumstance that prompted Quappala and Magunga to imagine their elder daughter-in-law imploring some traveler to bear her away. Eventually her family’s suspicions grew so acute that, whenever their farming chores brought the crop-women near the new thoroughfare, Magunga outfitted Waequashim with the exact sort of leather halter by which she’d been abducted.
And so it happened that Jennet once again came to regard the Nimacooks not as her kin but as her keepers. Nothing moved them, neither her protestations of loyalty—the louder she asserted her allegiance to the tribe, the more convinced they became that she intended to bolt—nor her protests against the yoke: “I shan’t be harnessed! I am not an ox! I am not an ass! I am not a plow horse!” All such metaphors proved equally impotent, partly because draught animals played no rle in the Indian way of life, largely because the subject was not up for discussion.
By 1708 a new element had entered the Nimacook economy. Those braves with a talent for trapping learned that if they brought their beaver pelts, their toumockquashuncks, down the Shawsheen to the English village of Bedford, they could exchange them for a panoply of European goods. The Nimacooks’ grand-sachem disdained this so-called “fur trade,” for it seemed to embody the very mercantilism that the Moon-Bead Legend condemned. Chabaquong’s councilors, however, argued that the Great God Kautantouwit would not feel offended by such commerce if the trappers limited their acquisitions to flintlock muskets, forged knives, iron kettles, and other products unknown to Algonquin industry. Eventually Chabaquong permitted the enterprise to go forward, though without his blessing.
The grand-sachem was not the only Nimacook to lament the tribe’s entry into the fur trade. Jennet did so too, for once the toumockquashuncks were in hand, the tedious job of treating them fell to the women. She detested each step in the process: scraping the backs of the skins, rubbing them with marrow, trimming them into rectangles, sewing six or eight such pieces together into a robe, wearing the garment from dawn to dusk until the pelts grew supple enough to command a top price. But then one day Okommaka mentioned that books were amongst the items available at the Bedford Trading Center, and Jennet’s opinion of the fur trade improved considerably.
“What sorts of books?” she asked.
“The English God-Book,” Okommaka replied. “The Bible of Grand-Sachem James.”
“What else?”
“French verses. English plays. Histories written in Latin.”
English plays! Oh, to scan that linguistic music again, to experience once more Juliet’s longings and Cleopatra’s passions and Lady Macbeth’s depravity. If she came upon a Principia Mathematica in Bedford she would immediately toss it aside—she was no longer a Hammer of Witchfinders, after all, no longer obligated to cultivate an acquaintance with Lucasian Professors—but a quarto Macbeth would be as welcome as a reincarnation of Aunt Isobel’s treatise.
Okommaka, predictably, recoiled at Jennet’s desire to accompany him on his next Bedford adventure. Fur trading, he insisted, was a masculine enterprise, and any brave who brought a wife along risked ridicule by whites and Algonquins alike. But she continued to press the matter, and eventually, owing either to the righteousness of her case, the pathos in her voice, or the chapter called “Labia North and South,” Okommaka relented, solemnly declaring that a great Nimacook trapper did not prostrate himself before the opinions of lesser men.
The expedition comprised three canoes bearing Okommaka, Pussough, six other braves, Casco the dog, and—now—Okommaka’s headstrong elder wife. All during their passage down the Shawsheen, a glorious anticipation filled every pipe and parlor of Jennet’s heart. Okommaka had agreed that she could acquire four volumes, assuming they collectively cost no more than half a beaver-robe, and with each paddle stroke she imagined herself savoring yet another line of Shakespeare or Marlowe or Jonson.
The celestial council fire had passed its zenith by the time they reached the trading center—an impressive installation, three well-made cabins supplemented by a livery and a forge, plus a tavern called Paradise Misplaced. A flagpole rose in the front yard, flying both the Union Jack and the device of the Shawsheen Fur Exchange Authority, a beaver surrounded by the company’s motto, Profit, Prosperity, Plenitude. Okommaka steered his canoe to the wharf, where three white traders fidgeted about, thickset men in plain muslin shirts, idly smoking pipes and skimming stones across the water. As Jennet climbed onto the dock, the traders greeted her with dark scowls and hostile mutterings. Perhaps they regarded her as pitiable, so pitiable in fact that—were they made of sterner stuff and not outnumbered by the Kokokehom—they might have tried liberating her with the aim of collecting a reward. But more likely they simply found Jennet repulsive, this corrupted woman whose braids smelled of bear grease and whose soul stank of idolatry, and the less they had to do with her, the better.
Much to her frustration, Okommaka and Pussough insisted on patronizing the first two stores, one featuring muskets and shot, the other offering tools and cooking implements, before venturing into the third, an emporium specializing in felt hats, leather boots, wool blankets, and steel gorgets. Okommaka guided her to a battered shipping crate. She lifted the lid. Books filled the compartment top to bottom—one hundred volumes at least: five score jolts for a dozing intellect, a banquet for a hungry brain. She took a breath, praised Kautantouwit, and got to work, unloading the crate and organizing the jumble as her husband and his cousin looked on in amusement. She did not really expect to find Macbeth or Romeo and Juliet or Antony and Cleopatra in the mess, but there was indeed a Shakespeare quarto, The Tempest, as well as Marlowe’s Tragical History of Dr. Faustus, both of which she set aside. Her third decision, Thomas Shelton’s translation of Don Quixote de la Mancha, was similarly easy. Now came an impossible choice. How much did she desire Cæsar’s Commentaries as opposed to Spenser’s The Færie Queene? Plutarch’s Parallel Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans versus Xenophon’s Recollections of Socrates? One thing was certain. She would eschew the ratty copy of Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft, one of the skeptical works Aunt Isobel had told her to consult in devising the argumentum grande. A Hammer of Witchfinders might find that tome of use, but she wouldn’t trade a beaver’s cheek for it.
Eventually she reduced the conundrum to three possibilities: Montaigne’s Essays, Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, and an old friend from her Mirringate youth, Virgil’s Æneid. She set the volumes on the floor, each at the point of an imaginary equilateral triangle, and, rising to full height, made ready to surrender the matter to Dame Fortune. Whilst Okommaka and Pussough snickered conspicuously, she stepped inside the triangle, shut her eyes, spun around thrice, stretched out her arm, and directed a pointing finger downward.
She opened her eyes. The Æneid. A splendid resolution. Arma virumque cano.
“What does that book talk about?” Okommaka asked.
“Virgil recounts the adventures of Aeneas, destined to bring forth the Roman nation,” she said.
“The missionary who lived amongst us spoke often of ancient Rome,” Pussough said. “Its founders were Romulus and Remus, suckled as babes by a she-wolf.”
“Virgil tells a rather different story,” Jennet said.
“No Romulus and Remus?” said Pussough. “No she-wolf?”
“No she-wolf.”
“My uncle knows a Moattoqus brave who was raised by wolves,” Okommaka said. “Such a thing can happen, Waequashim. Virgil should not have doubted it.”
AT DUSK THE INDIANS RETURNED to the Shawsheen, laden with the fruits of their bartering. Okommaka spread out his prizes on the wharf—Italian dueling pistol, keg of gunpowder, iron skillet, c mirror, striped blanket—then wrapped them in a deerskin and wedged the bundle into the bow. Jennet slid her books into a hempen sack and secured it beside her husband’s cache.
A pastoral scene unfolded in her mind: the trading party camped that night beside the river, Jennet reading Virgil aloud by the fire, translating as she went. Storm-tossed Æneas and his men landing on the Libyan shore. The hero telling the Carthaginians the tale of the Trojan horse. The romance of Æneas and Dido. Her suicide following his decision to leave for Italy. The shade of Anchises showing Æneas the future history of Rome. The great war betwixt Æneas’s forces and the Latin armies of King Turnus. Æneas slaying Turnus in personal combat. Okommaka, Pussough, and the other enthralled Nimacooks attended every word.
Excited shouts disturbed the gloaming. Jennet lifted her head.
A mob of Indians and whites had collected by the riverbank, their attention fixed on a high footbridge arcing across the Shawsheen like a wooden rainbow. Huddled together in the center of the bridge, four figures in Puritan garb used a plow-rope to lower a woman toward the water, her legs and trunk concealed by a flimsy shift, her moans muffled by a leather napkin. Thongs drew the prisoner’s wrists and ankles together, forcing her body into the shape of a horseshoe.
“Husband, I see a gang of Calvinist witchfinders, inflicting their tests on an innocent woman,” Jennet said. “By your leave, I shall go to ’em and protest this injustice.”
“When English settlers choose to harry one another, a Nimacook finds this cause for joy, not bewilderment,” Okommaka said.
“My conscience will torment me if I do not denounce these prickers to their faces.”
Okommaka issued a series of low, discrete grunts. His taut tongue roamed around the inside of his mouth, bulging his cheeks, and then at last he spoke.
“Tell the Englishmen that if they harm you, Waequashim, your husband and his fellow braves will not forbear to separate them from their scalps.”
She leapt over the canoe, sprinted along the shore, and, reaching the bridge, mounted the stairway to the horizontal span. The quartet still held the swimming-rope, their gray capes rippling in the wind.
She could not decide which shock was the greater: seeing Dunstan in the flesh, or apprehending the form in which that flesh had survived the burning of Haverhill. Although Nature had wrought a handsome adult from the raw materials of youth, the achievement was gravely compromised by the cataract of scar tissue spilling down from his high-crowned hat all the way to his jaw.
“Dunstan!” she gasped. “Praise God! I was certain the fire had consumed thee!”
Not unexpectedly, Abigail Williams had ripened into a comely specimen of womanhood. As for her uncle, the Reverend Samuel Parris, the fourteen intervening years had turned his face into a burlesque of itself, all beaky nose and receding chin. Time had been equally severe with Magistrate Jonathan Corwin, robbing him of so many teeth that his cheeks had collapsed, causing his head to resemble a skull dipped in tallow.
“O sweet Jesus, can this be my own long-lost sister?” Dunstan lifted his hands from the swimming-rope. His confederates froze, leaving their prisoner to dangle above the Shawsheen like a fox caught in a snare. “’Tis truly Jennet Stearne beneath those feathers and skins?”
“Aye, Dunstan. You must set that woman free.”
He lurched away from the bridge rail, flung his arms around Jennet, and drew her to his chest like a laundry-maid pulling bedsheets from a clothesline. She answered his embrace by stroking his brow and kissing the frightful scar.
“I feared you’d been scalped”—Dunstan touched the brim of his hat—“but ’tis I who lost his hair, every lock burned to the bone: a small price to pay, for with Jehovah’s help I retrieved our father’s license. Prithee, give us the space of a quarter-hour to switch off yon Satanist, and we shall bear you to the safety of our Framingham salt-box.”
“Nay, Dunstan,” Jennet said. “I’m Waequashim of the Kokokehom now.” Defiantly she adjusted her head-dress. “Have you not yet learned that witchery’s an impossible thing? Unbind this woman, I implore thee.”
“Unbind her?” Abigail sneered. She abandoned the swimming-rope, so that the task of counterweighting the prisoner fell entirely to Parris and Corwin. “Hah!” Her contemptuous eye ranged across Jennet’s wardrobe, moccasins to leggings to mantle to hair ribbons. “How the Algonquin fashion doth become you, Miss Stearne. Those stinking braids will bring many a savage suitor to your door.”
“In point of fact I’m married to a Nimacook trapper,” Jennet said.
“Do you hear that, Dunstan? Your sister swives a tawny pagan!”
“I would rather be a pagan wife than a Protestant wench,” Jennet said.
“You will not call me a wench, sister,” Abigail said, “for Dunstan and I are wed five years now.”
Jennet raised a hand to her collarbone and anxiously fingered her necklace. Given the unspeakable pain and the demonic scar that were the price of Dunstan’s deliverance from the fire, she could hardly blame him for rushing to his demented friend and taking refuge in her affection. But it was one thing to understand their union and quite another to bless it. The thought of these two fanatics spawning a new generation of witchfinders nauseated her as surely as any emetic.
Again she touched Dunstan, resting her hand on his sleeve. “To this day your drawing of the horse-head promontory hangs in my dwelling. I gave it to my husband as a wedding gift.”
A flicker of remembrance lit Dunstan’s face. “’Twas an excellent sketch—I shan’t dispute you.” He pivoted toward Parris and Corwin. “Lower the hag!” he called, and the two cleansers offered their prisoner to the Shawsheen.
“No!” Jennet cried.
“I am my father’s son,” Dunstan said, turning toward her. “He did not rear me to coddle goblins or sup with Beelzebub.”
“She floats!” Parris announced. “The river brands Susan Diggens a witch!”
“I can prove that wicked spirits are but desires of the mind,” Jennet said.
“My dear queen of the heathens,” Abigail said, “if you durst interfere with us, we shall bring you before the Bedford magistrate.”
“We’re all of us now the Crown’s official prickers: the Massachusetts Bay Purification Commission,” Dunstan explained, “twin to the Kirkcaldy Cleansing League and chartered by Her Majesty’s Privy Council.”
Parris and Corwin hauled Mrs. Diggens over the rail, spilling her onto the span as offhandedly as two Puritan farmers dumping a cartload of hay. The minister drew out a pair of draper’s shears and sliced her thongs apart. Mrs. Diggens stretched but did not attempt to rise. She was short and sturdy of build, and for one breathless moment Jennet imagined that here was Aunt Isobel, come back from the grave.
When at last Corwin untied the mask-o’-truth, Mrs. Diggens exhaled sharply and scrambled to her feet. Her frightened stare shot past her tormentors and fixed on Jennet. “Help me, friend Indian,” she whispered. “In my life I’ve stolen much and shagged many, but i’Christ I’m blameless to sorcery.”
“The river hath revealed her nature,” Parris said. “Next comes her execution.”
“Friend Indian, I beg ye,” Mrs. Diggens pleaded.
A vortex of movement possessed the Purification Commission, and after the chaos had subsided Jennet stood pinioned against the rail, her right arm paralyzed by Parris’s grip, her left wrist trapped in Corwin’s skeletal fingers. Mrs. Diggens lay hunched and trembling on the span. The rope that had recently encircled her waist was now a noose about her neck.
“’Tis not lawful to hang a person merely on the evidence of a swimming!” Jennet shouted. “She must go before a duly appointed committee and thence to a courtroom!”
“Were you a subscriber to The Bible Commonwealth,” Abigail said, “you would know that by Queen Anne’s decree neither we nor our Scottish brethren need apply mundane standards to the invisible crime of sorcery.”
Dunstan said, “However, if ’twill give you satisfaction, Jenny…” He pivoted toward Abigail. “Goodwife Stearne, as the Examination Committee on this bridge, you may now offer your findings.”
“The Examination Committee returns a billa vera,” Abigail replied, looping the rope around the rail and securing it with three quick knots.
“Oh, dear God!” Mrs. Diggens shrieked.
“Stop this!” Jennet wailed.
“Mr. Parris, what verdict doth the jury render?” Dunstan asked.
“The jury finds Susan Diggens guilty,” the minister said.
“Mr. Corwin, we shall hear your sentence,” Dunstan said.
“Were this a case of thievery and bawdiness alone, I might be moved to spare her,” said the judge, forcing the prisoner to stand erect, “but Susan Diggens hath manifestly written in the Devil’s ledger, and so—”
“Friend Indian!” Urine and liquid feces leaked from beneath Mrs. Diggen’s shift.
With an efficiency doubtless born of experience, Dunstan and Abigail pulled a burlap sack over the prisoner’s head, lifted her onto the rail, and gave her a rude shove. Mrs. Diggens screamed as she fell, and then came a short, sharp report, like a dry twig snapping underfoot.
The instant Corwin and Parris relaxed their hold, Jennet rushed toward the stairway, seriously pondering the possibility, at once tempting and terrible, of summoning the seven Kokokehom trappers and suggesting that they massacre this so-called Purification Commission. Instead she stopped and turned, her eyes now two gazing-crystals, each fixed on Abigail’s breast as if to scorch the vixen’s heart.
“Hear me now, ye damned witchfinders! Your fellowship will not prosper! For all ye enjoy the blessings of the Crown, I shall one day destroy your enterprise as surely as Æneas slew King Turnus!”
“Go back to your naked Redman,” Abigail hissed, “and trouble us no more!”
Step by languid step, Jennet descended to the riverbank. Okommaka and the other Nimacooks collected around her, knives unsheathed, muskets cocked, tomahawks at the ready. Casco barked ferociously. She faced the bridge. Susan Diggens’s corpse swung from the rail like a Huygens pendulum. As Okommaka hovered by her side, Jennet walked back to the canoes, dislodged her new found Virgil, and carried it to the relevant cabin. The exchange took but a minute, and when it was over she no longer owned the Æneid, having acquired in its stead Reginald Scot’s treatise. True, it was unlikely that more than a paragraph from Discoverie of Witchcraft would end up in the argumentum grande. By themselves
Scot’s words could never kill the Conjuring Statue or prompt
the Privy Council to cancel her brother’s
charter. But a Hammer of
Witchfinders had to
start
Somewhere
amidst the private
papers of the brilliant American
sculptor Gutzon Borglum is a drawing that
I regard as his crowning conception, greater even than
his quartet of Mount Rushmore presidents. Borglum titled his idea “The Reader,” and he never got around to rendering it in stone; as far as I know, he never even took it to the maquette stage. Perhaps he lost enthusiasm. More likely he failed to find a patron. If realized, “The Reader” and its pedestal would have towered over twenty feet above some American park, common, or square. It shows a young woman sitting in a Windsor chair, lost in a book, a spaniel asleep at her feet.
I needn’t remind you that readers have always constituted a minority within your species. Merely by opening this chronicle of mine, you have placed yourself in rare company. The odor of bowel wind is known to every human, but the fragrance of book glue has crossed only a fraction of mortal nostrils. And yet it behooves us not to judge the unlettered too harshly. We must stay the impulse to write CHUCKLEHEAD above their doors and carve DOLT upon their tombstones. For in days gone by, at least, a certain chariness toward typography made sense. Borglum’s woman in the Windsor chair is performing a traditionally problematic act.
The first recorded instance of a troubled relationship between a reader and a book occurred in 590 B.C., when Yahweh ordered Ezekiel to eat a scroll, thereby absorbing its contents. Although the scroll displayed the words “lamentations, and mourning, and woe” front and back, Ezekiel acquiesced to the command. He reported that the book tasted “as honey for sweetness,” which strikes me as a mighty peculiar flavor for lamentations and mourning and woe. In my opinion Ezekiel was afraid to speak his mind: a prophet who knows what’s good for him does not go around criticizing God’s cuisine.
One hundred and seventy years later, readers had to contend with Socrates’s pronouncement that books are useless artifacts. Literary works cannot explain what they say, the great philosopher argued—they can only repeat the same words over and over. To me this sounds less like the definition of a book than of a Heideggerian, but in any event Socrates clearly missed the point. Books don’t repeat the same words over and over. The Gulliver’s Travels whose whimsy amused you at twelve is not the Gulliver’s Travels whose acid engaged you at thirty.
Some of you belong to my dear Jennet’s gender. I needn’t remind you that throughout Western history an argument has raged over whether women possess sufficient intellect to profit from the print medium. In A.D. 1333, the Renaissance artist Simone Martini provoked an ecclesiastical crisis when he painted the future Mother of God receiving the Annunciation while holding a book. Wasn’t Mary almost certainly illiterate? fretted the keepers of the faith. Wasn’t it sacrilegious to suggest that a woman might love knowledge when the Bible clearly stated, “Thy desire shall be to thy husband”? Would the painting’s audience even be able to recognize the Blessed Virgin in this strange scholastic stance?
In 1740 the South Carolina legislature, haunted by images of their Negro chattel learning Jesus’ views on love and, worse, the abolitionists’ views on slavery, made it illegal to teach an African to read. According to this law, any black person caught with a book must be flogged. After the third such offense, the first joint of his forefinger was severed. Other Southern states rushed to enact identical measures, many of which remained in effect even after Emancipation.
And so we see how throughout history the community of readers has been prey to sinister forces—to pedants and priests, legislators and lunatics, deities and demagogues. You have paid for your passion in humiliation, mutilation, and sometimes even—as when Henry VIII burned Bible translator William Tyndale as a heretic—immolation. I salute you all, as do my fellow books. Were you to call yourselves heroes, we would not smirk. Show
me an accomplished reader, and I shall show you a person
of many virtues, thoughtful and articulate,
contemplative though rarely passive, temperate and yet
benignly
Ambitious
beyond his intellect,
though timid in congruence with
his clumsiness, Tobias Arnold Crompton
had never fallen in love at first sight before, but now
he’d done so, and the situation was causing him far more puzzlement than pleasure. The woman of his dreams was inaccessible. Insuperable circumstances, wide as any moat, high as any rampart, precluded the possibility of a chance meeting, let alone a tryst. Not knowing her name, Tobias had taken to calling her Bathsheba, for his plight indeed evoked King David peering down from the palace roof and beholding Uriah’s comely wife performing her ablutions.
Two times a week, whilst carrying packets along the Amesbury Post Road for the Provincial Mail Commission, Tobias was privileged to observe Bathsheba laboring on the Nimacook plantation. Beyond her ridiculous bonnet of husks, she was a woman of transcendent desirability, one who made the cultivation of a maize crop—digging the furrow, inserting the seeds, adding a dead fish for fertilizer, extracting the weeds, harvesting the ears, uprooting the barren stalks, bundling them into sheaves for tinder—seem an arcane sport reserved to Vestal virgins or Greek goddesses. If by some blessed turn of fortune Bathsheba became Tobias’s wife, his joy would surely propel him through the ranks of his profession until he reached the pinnacle, Postmaster General of the British Crown Colonies in America.
She was manifestly the Indians’ unwilling prisoner, not an adopted bride now reconciled to her fate or a sentimentalist playing at savagery, for they kept her on a halter, the cruel strap running from her neck to the wrist of a Nimacook hag, probably her mother-in-law. Beyond this evidence was the fact of Bathsheba’s visage, with its endless sadness and chronic grief—the face of one who longed for an Englishman’s kiss.
A plan formed in Tobias’s throbbing brain. He saw himself galloping onto the plantation like a knight seeking to save a maiden from a dragon, then swooping up Bathsheba in a gesture so heroic that she could not help but requite his adoration. It was the sort of derring-do he might have rendered in a poem, were he a poet, or in a painting, were he an artist, or in reality, were he a man of action.
But, alas, there beat within the mail-carrier’s breast the heart of a procrastinator, if not an outright poltroon. I am a sorry Lancelot, he told himself. I make a puny Percival. But as the harvest ended and the autumn air stiffened with intimations of winter, he realized that Bathsheba would soon depart the maize field, and so he picked an imminent date for the great rescue, the twentieth of October, the very day that, four years earlier, Harriet Easty of Amesbury had told him, “Given a choice in marriage partners ’twixt yourself and a boar-pig, I should vastly prefer the latter.”
He rose before dawn, dressed hurriedly, and secured beneath his belt the two essential tools: his pistol, loaded and ready, and his knife—the one he used for opening undeliverable epistles (“dead letters” in the parlance of his trade) in hopes of learning the whereabouts of the sender or intended recipient. As the sun’s first rays touched the shingled peaks and whitewashed steeples of Boston, he saddled Jeremiah, slung the mail valises over the gelding’s rump, and rode out along the cobblestoned streets. Reaching the post road, he urged his mount to a trot. Bathsheba rarely stayed on the job past noon, but if his horse kept up the pace, he would reach the plantation no later than eleven o’clock.
He broke his fast in Stoneham, fed and watered Jeremiah, then continued north. Three hours later, Tobias cast an eye on his beloved.
Tethered as always, she stood farther from the road than usual, braiding together maize ears by their husks with an élan worthy of Ceres herself, then hanging them to dry on a gallows-like lintel. A full five yards separated Bathsheba and the hag, a gap sufficient for his escapade. He unsheathed his knife and, jabbing his boot heel into Jeremiah’s ribs, charged across the field. Reaching Bathsheba, he leaned down and with a grand flourish simultaneously severed the halter, freed his beloved, lost his balance, and tumbled off his horse.
A bundle of sheaves cushioned his fall, and after a brief episode of flailing about in the dirt he gained his feet and glanced all around him. Much to his delight, he saw that the day was not lost, for during his interval on the ground Bathsheba had seized the reins and hauled herself onto the horse’s back. Tobias had but to join her in the saddle anon, and the two of them would ride off together.
But Bathsheba had a different idea. She guided the horse along a rank of standing stalks and reigned up before her mother-in-law.
“Tell Okommaka I shall remember him with affection!” Bathsheba shouted, after which she exclaimed a brief sentence—presumably the identical message—in the incomprehensible Nimacook language. The hag replied loudly and angrily using the same confounding tongue, whereupon Bathsheba wheeled the horse around, galloped across the field, and disappeared down the road, taking the mail valises with her.
No sooner had this distressing development occurred than Tobias noticed the hag running toward him, her bony hand clamped around a fowling-piece. She paused and fired. The ball whistled past his cheek. He drew forth his pistol and cocked it, but before he could take aim the old woman vanished amidst the drying-racks. He jammed his pistol into his belt and sprinted madly away, as fixed in his purpose as any mother determined to retrieve her stolen baby from a band of Gypsies.
Throughout the subsequent hour, as he puffed and groaned his way down the Amesbury Post Road, Tobias’s mental disposition oscillated betwixt stupefying humiliation and near dementia. With each passing farm he devised yet another narrative by which he might convince his employers that the loss of the valises had been unavoidable—brigands, Indians, a lightning-bolt, a tornado, a bear with an appetite for paper—but none enjoyed the ring of plausibility. He did not know which situation chastened him more: his imminent dismissal, or his woeful misassessment of Bathsheba’s nature.
Shortly after three o’clock—so said Tobias’s pocket-watch—he encountered an itinerant peddler, his wagon a rattling concatenation of pots, pans, knives, and scissors, and the next thing he knew the gnarled old man was offering him a ride to Boston. Tobias blessed his luck and climbed aboard. At three o’clock the peddler dropped him off in Treamount Square. A serrated wind arose, cutting through Tobias’s benumbed and humbled flesh. He walked down Sudbury Street to Hannover, followed the flagstones to his door, and entered the townhouse, at which juncture his despair evaporated with the suddenness of a sneeze.
Still dressed in her Nimacook leathers, though missing her grotesque bonnet, Bathsheba sat in the drawing-room, holding a glass of his best Rhenish and paging through his Æneid. Her moccasined feet rested on the Oriental stool, beside which lay both mail valises.
“If this be the taste of civilization, I’m entirely in favor of’t,” she said, taking a sip of wine. A sensual, smoky voice, each syllable bathed in molasses. “Fear not for your amiable horse—I stabled him round the corner at Chadwick’s Livery.”
“Thou art a skilled equestrienne,” he said admiringly.
“I apologize for stealing your mount, Mr. Crompton, but I thought you a highwayman with designs upon my virtue. Only after noticing these valises did I realized that you’d contrived a rescue, and so I made such inquiries as brought me to your house.”
“Your deliverance was in sooth my aim,” he said, his voice quavering with awe. The goddess was right here—in his own parlor—barely six feet away! “May I speak bluntly? From the moment I saw you laboring in the heathen field, my heart became yours to do with as you will. Indeed, but for one stark fact I would now make bold to ask for your hand in marriage.”
“What stark fact? That I might spurn you?”
“That I know not your name.”
“Waequashim,” she said.
“Your given name, I mean.”
“Waewowesheckmishquashim.”
“Your real name.”
“Jennet…Stearne,” she said slowly, as if speaking the words for the first time in her life. She snapped his Virgil shut. “Now ’tis my turn to indulge in the crudest candor. Your antics today bespeak a chivalrous heart, and this house is undeniably convivial. I seek a kind of patron, someone who might feed and clothe me whilst I undertake a philosophic project.”
He stood up straight as a pike, throwing back his shoulders. “At present I am a lowly mail-carrier, but ere the year is out I shall command the entire Boston Post Office.”
“Most ambitious. Do you perchance enjoy access to the library at Harvard College?”
“My younger brother attends that very institution, in training for the ministry!”
“Then I assent to your proposition,” she said.
“Oh, my dear lady, do my ears deceive me? You would become my bride?”
“On the understanding that my loyalties will also extend to my Baconian investigations.”
“I should love my wife even if she were an alchemist!”
“And on the supplementary understanding that I shall ne’er count myself a Puritan.”
“There be but six-score baptized Anglicans in Boston, and yet your Tobias is amongst ’em!”
“And on the further understanding that ’tis no apple-cheeked virgin you’ll be taking to your bed.”
“I have long supposed you the victim of many brutal ravishings by your heathen husband.”
“No ravishings to speak of, merely a mutual enthusiasm concerning the carnal domain. But if you’ll forgive me my past, I believe that Providence will smile upon our future.”
“’Tis axiomatic I should absolve the woman I love.”
Possessed by a wild and unaccountable impulse, he reached into both valises simultaneously and, gathering up a great mass of mail, threw the lot into the air. As the myriad packets settled to the floor, he pictured himself a-float on a magic sea, bits of foam descending all around him. He glanced toward his bride. Once again the Æneid had entranced her. How marvelous, he thought. Before her abduction, she’d evidently been a kind of sage. Their marriage, it seemed, would never lack for stimulating conversation, and might soon bid fair to become the loftiest in Boston.
JENNET WOULD BE THE FIRST to admit that marriages of convenience were not the noblest arrangements on Earth, but no one could deny that the institution boasted an impressive history. What was the affair of Cleopatra and Julius Cæsar if not a marriage of convenience binding Egypt to Rome? What was the Catholic Church if not a marriage of convenience fusing an emergent Christianity to a venerable paganism? What had Magna Carta consecrated if not a pragmatic conciliation betwixt King John and his barons? Should a loveless union be the price of her demon disproof, she was willing to pay it, though she hoped she would not break her husband’s heart in the bargain.
True to his prediction, with the coming of summer Tobias ascended to the position of Boston Postmaster, which meant he no longer spent protracted and depleting days on horseback. For Jennet this promotion proved a mixed blessing. On the asset side of the ledger, his increased salary enabled him to hire a maid-servant from amongst the Long Wharf rabble newly arrived on the brigantine Flying Fish: Nellie Adams, a stout young Chelmsford widow whose competence at marketing, cooking, mending, and laundering secured for Jennet sufficient time each day to pursue what Tobias called “this admirable campaign against your brother’s unholy band.” Alas, her husband’s less strenuous regimen had him coming home each evening abrim with residual vigor. Jennet’s despair lay not so much in the failure of his ungainly frame, equine face, and weather-vane ears to arouse her, but rather in his refusal to allow that the carnal arts had progressed considerably since Adam had first lain with Eve. Her rhapsodic accounts of the secrets revealed in “Labia North and South” and “The Lust of the Goat” brought to his cheeks not the flush of concupiscence but the blush of embarrassment, until at last she decided to terminate his connubial education and scandalize him no more. Whilst she would hesitate to call Tobias a man for whom ignorance was bliss, it seemed likely that in matters of bliss this man would always be ignorant.
When he learned that her marriage to the Nimacook trapper had resulted in a female infant, a fit of jealousy seized Tobias—evidently he’d managed to convince himself that Jennet and Okommaka had swived but rarely—though he immediately became the soul of condolence upon hearing that the child had died of the small-pox. Unfortunately, his reaction to Bella’s passing went beyond mere sympathy. He wanted to efface the tragedy itself. Jennet’s grief, he insisted, would truly subside only after she’d produced a second child—and of course nothing would bring him greater satisfaction than to father a strapping baby boy or entrancing little girl.
Although pregnancy was the last circumstance Jennet wished to endure at this point in her life, she resolved to maintain Tobias’s goodwill by feigning enthusiasm for the prospect, even as she arranged to keep her body unencumbered. Each time she entered the house bearing pennyroyal or marjoram from Pratt’s Apothecary, she would allude to her philosophic pursuits, when in truth these ingredients were the key to Hassane’s unguent against conception. She rarely experienced any difficulty, prior to the copulative moment, finding a pretext for slipping briefly away, subsequently applying the paste to her womanly canal, and by pleading a contrary stomach or a troublesome tooth she generally succeeded in avoiding Tobias on her days of peak fertility.
Thanks to her brother-in-law, Wilmot Crompton, whose privileges as a divinity student included a borrower’s license from the Harvard College library, she came into temporary possession of the major works by “the three John W’s,” as Aunt Isobel had termed witch-hunting’s most conspicuous opponents: John Webster, John Wagstaffe, Johann Weyer. But it was the labyrinthine Beacon Street bookshop called Darby’s that proved for Jennet a true cornucopia, equipping her with not only a fresh copy of the Principia Mathematica but also the particular treatises Newton had recommended as stepping-stones to his opus. Inevitably she happened upon volumes by Royal Society fellows other than Newton—Henry More’s An Antidote against Atheism, Joseph Glanvill’s Saducismus Triumphatus, Robert Boyle’s The Sceptical Chymist—but she decided not to squander her husband’s money, for Isobel had labeled these men witch believers all.
Darby’s also carried newspapers, including The London Journal, The New-England Courant, The American Weekly Mercury, and, most energizing for Jennet, the Calvinists’ own periodical, The Bible Commonwealth, which routinely reported on the Massachusetts Bay Purification Commission and its Scottish counterpart, the Kirkcaldy Cleansing League, in a style that oscillated unpredictably betwixt sober detachment (“We must not forget that our best Defense against Demons lies in Praying, not Pricking”) and giddy enthusiasm (“These brave Cleansers have hasten’d the Day when Satan will quit Christendom forever”). A project soon suggested itself, and Jennet subsequently secured from Darby’s an unruled leather folio, decorating the first page with fat blockish characters: The Devil and All His Works, she wrote. In the months that followed, upon the appearance of a new Bible Commonwealth, she would scissor out each article concerning Dunstan’s band and paste it into the folio. Whenever the quest exhausted her, whenever it seemed that she would never align the Greek immutables with Newton’s principles and thereby recover his demon disproof, she would peruse The Devil and All His Works, forthwith finding her anger renewed and her ambition replenished.
Although she’d intended to spend the winter studying the three John W’s, she was barely ten pages into Webster’s Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft ere noticing that the author did not doubt the existence of wicked spirits, and it happened that an analogous credulity infected Wagstaffe’s The Question of Witchcraft Debated and Weyer’s De Præstigiis Dæmonum. True, these men held views that would enrage a Cotton Mather or a Walter Stearne. The John W’s variously argued for the impossibility of developing unambiguous cases against accused sorcerers, for the possibility that Satan’s vanity prevented him from granting magical powers to hags, and for the probability that human misery traced to forces other than maleficium. But none dared mount a frontal assault on demonology itself.
She set the John W’s aside and delved into Newton’s intellectual ancestors. It took her two months to negotiate the whole of Euclid, but she absorbed all the postulates and ingested all the proofs without mishap (though she deliberately skipped Book X and its impenetrable discussion of incommensurable magnitudes), and she had an equally gratifying experience with De Witt’s Elementa Curvarum. When she turned to Bartholin’s Commentaries on Descartes’s Geometry, however, she managed to solve only seven problems out of the thirty Newton had prescribed, and she endured even more humiliation at the hands of Huygens’s Horologium Oscillatorium, a work of maddening obscurity, preternatural opacity, and intractable trigonometry.
She was on the verge of despair when late one evening, acting on an impulse whose origins she could not divine, she began turning back the pages of the Principia Mathematica itself. For a full hour she meandered through Newton’s rarefied realm, whereupon a strange unbidden radiance suffused her being, the sort of benign seizure a Philadelphia Quaker might have called the Inner Light. She understood this book! Not in its particulars, certainly, not in the details of its lemmas and proofs, but the author’s overarching design seemed suddenly, utterly, wonderfully clear.
For all its grandeur, the universe posited by Euclid had been from its inception a frozen domain. Five centuries of such stasis had elapsed, ten centuries, fifteen—and then, mirabile dictu, enter Isaac Newton, bestowing time and motion on geometry. Under Newton’s persuasion the Euclidian shapes had grown wings and gone soaring across the sky. The Lucasian Professor had made butterflies of parabolas, wrought eagles from hyperbolas, and set spheres dancing like seraphs.
Whilst her qualified comprehension of the Principia made Jennet buoyant of heart and joyful of mind, these feelings did not endure, for the impossible task still lay before her, looming like the mile-high minaret of the Tall-Tower Problem. Somehow she must synthesize all this Newtonian kineticism with the Aristotelian immutables from which God had built the world.
Her epiphany occurred in, of all places, St. Mark’s Anglican Church. She was sitting in the front pew, Tobias’s thigh pressed against her own, the hare-lipped Reverend Dowd presenting his idiosyncratic interpretation of the Wedding at Cana—he averred that the wine Christ had wrought from water that day was not wholly consumed, the surplus reemerging months later at the Last Supper, where it underwent a further transfiguration—when she fell upon a train of reasoning that she sensed might lead, God willing, Kautantouwit assenting, to her philosophic Grail.
As any educated person knew, Aristotle and Newton had each reduced the cosmos to underlying components, Aristotle anatomizing its matter, Newton its motion. Newton’s system was by far the more complex, and yet Jennet believed that she detected, in both the Principia Mathematica and “A New Theory About Light and Colors,” an assumption that the kinetic universe, like its Aristotelian counterpart, consisted of four basic elements, namely acceleration, attraction, resistance, and—when you considered the great prism paper of 1668—radiation. Ah, but look how simple it was to map one universe onto the other! For radiation, the Aristotelian connection was obvious: Newton’s experiments with light depended upon the sun, source of the Greek immutable called fire. Concerning attraction, she was quick to associate this entity with the Greek element earth, magnetite being amongst the most essential components of the planet’s crust, with other such minerals doubtless awaiting discovery. When it came to acceleration, a match with the element air seemed warranted: even if you rejected Cartesian vortices, you were obliged to recognize that Earth’s atmosphere and the æther beyond held immaterial substances that gave gravity its gravitas. In the case of the remaining entities—Newtonian resistance and Aristotelian water—she did not hesitate to link them, for Book Two of the Principia had much to say about the behavior of pendulums slicing through inhibiting fluids.
Attraction, acceleration, radiation, resistance: earth, air, fire, water—could any reasonable person doubt that Newtonian motion was every bit as primal, every jot as fundamental, as Aristotelian matter? It would seem that the bracing biblical revelation, And God saw that it was good, now enjoyed a logical corollary, And God saw that it moved virtuously. Ah, but if such were the case, then surely Jehovah had in the beginning systematically barred Satan’s invisible minions from both domains—stuff and flux—so systematically, in fact, that a philosopher would be justified in declaring these minions nonexistent!
“Ergo, to recover Newton’s lost disproof,” she muttered to herself, “one need only establish the essential benevolence of the myriad motion-spirits that serve and facilitate the four kinetic entities.”
“Mrs. Crompton, prithee, be quiet,” Tobias whispered.
The Reverend Dowd sent a scowl her way, even as he prattled about the Wedding at Cana.
“For all Satan tries to corrupt these spirits,” she mumbled, “he must always fail, as God hath made them invulnerable to temptation.”
“Stay your tongue,” Tobias said.
“Such was Aunt Isobel’s insight on the pyre!”
“Silence!”
THE FOLLOWING MORNING Jennet bid Nellie Adams gather up their materials—lodestone, pendulum, prism, pair of wooden ramps—and accompany her to the home of Lydia Trimble, a nursing mother whose husband owned a tavern in Ship Street. At first the Hammer of Witchfinders had no luck elucidating for Mrs. Trimble why she wished to conduct natural philosophy experiments on the premises, and how the woman’s lactations fit into the design, but then Jennet opened her purse, and the glister of its guineas proved explanation enough. Whilst Mrs. Trimble suckled her baby beside the hearth, Jennet and Nellie performed an earth demonstration, using the lodestone’s invisible fingers to pull a hobnail across the floor, thereby releasing those motion-spirits, whether sinister or saintly, that served the kinetic element called attraction—saintly, evidently, for they declined to impede Mrs. Trimble’s milk. Jennet next did a water experiment, making the pendulum oscillate through beer, honey, whale oil, and other fluids of varying densities. The unleashed spirits of resistance forbore to disrupt the nursing process. She then performed a fire experiment, instructing Nellie to hold the prism to the window; the morning sun flashed through the glass pentahedron, and radiation’s agents got busy, transmuting the beam into a rainbow. Mrs. Trimble’s breast remained productive. That afternoon Jennet and Nellie did several experiments keyed to Aristotelian air, observing how acceleration’s spirits imposed a uniform velocity on spheres of different weights rolled down wooden ramps. The baby continued to feast.
Two days later Jennet’s purse persuaded a poultry farmer named Hugh Berridge to admit the kinetic experiments into the vicinity of his chicken coops. The hens never stopped laying. At noon Mr. Berridge’s wife leased her churning skills to the cause. The butter came in full. That evening Jennet persuaded a confused but accommodating Tobias to swive her as she manipulated her philosophy tools. The demonstrations surely conjured many motion-spirits, but they worked no mischief on his manhood.
“The kinetic elements are moral to the core, with nary a malefactor in the lot!” Jennet declared. “Lucifer could ne’er warp such sterling spirits!”
“That surely sounds correct to me, darling,” Tobias said, stroking her naked thigh.
Of course, Jennet reasoned, these results did not mean the motion-spirits were omnipotent. Only the Creator Himself enjoyed that attribute. Try though they might, the agents in question were powerless to shield humankind from blizzards, thunder-gusts, blights, or contagions—all those natural shocks wrongly attributed to demons. But God had no more ceded the universe of action to fallen angels and malevolent imps than He’d assembled the world from fungus and dung.
It took Jennet six days and as many rough drafts before she had an argumentum grande that fell felicitously on her ear. “All flowings and fallings,” she wrote by way of an inaugural sentence, “all flappings and snappings, all swingings and springings, all splittings and flittings know naught of goblins but only of goodness.”
She purchased a stack of parchment at Darby’s, printed a title across the topmost sheet, Contra Dæmonologie, and copied out the final version, eight pages long, using her best hand. Obviously the momentous document required a signature, and after some deliberation she settled on “J. S. Crompton, Curator, Cavendish Museum of Wondrous Prodigies, Colonial Branch.” All that remained was for her to dispatch the treatise to Kensington Palace, accompanied by an explanatory note.
AN APPEAL
To Her Most Esteemed Majesty,
Queen Anne,
Defender of the Faith,
Ruler of All England,
Scotland, Ireland, and France:
By enacting various Newtonian Demonstrations in a Manner design’d to goad Motion-Spirits to Maleficium, the Cavendish Museum hath in recent Days prov’d that the four Kinetic Entities are benign in Character, forever immur’d against the Devil’s Wiles. If Her Most Sovereign Majesty agrees with the Conclusions express’d in the enclos’d Treatise, we would humbly ask that she set this Matter before both Houses of Parliament, that they might repeal the 1604 Witchcraft Statute of King James I.
Your humble Subject,
J. S. Crompton, Esq.
19 September 1710
issitudes, Tobias confidently forecast the fate of Contra Dæmonologie. If the Columbine, as sturdy a mail-ship as had ever crossed the Atlantic Sea, did not fall prey to storms or pirates, the treatise would be in the Queen’s hands by the tenth of November.
“Proud I am to call myself your husband,” he told Jennet as they stood together on Long Wharf watching the Columbine glide across the harbor. “Great was my satisfaction in making my seminal donation to demonology’s demise.”
“Thou art a good man, Mr. Crompton.”
“I’m a dull man, Mrs. Crompton.”
“That too, but in the months to come I shall strive to be a better wife to thee.”
In the months to come…the phrase brought a chill to her bones. What, exactly, might she do with the rest of her life? Cleave to this inert marriage? Having swum in the wild rivers of Nimacook paganism and sailed the uncharted seas of Newtonian experimentalism, she had but little desire to paddle about the shallow pond of Boston respectability. Perhaps she would become the first woman ever to teach Euclidian geometry at Harvard College. Perhaps she would start a school for governesses, impressing her students with the necessity of going beyond antiquity’s tongues and Aristotle’s insights to instruct their charges in the new mechanical philosophy. But no matter how intently she gazed into the prism of her aspirations, studying the glass for some clue to her future, she did not see Tobias Crompton looking back.
WHEN JENNET DISCOVERED that, despite Aunt Isobel’s charts and Hassane’s unguent, a child was growing inside her, she instinctively attributed this catastrophe to her Creator’s will, though her husband’s virility had clearly played a part as well. Evidently Jehovah had decided that He would spare her the inconvenience of progeny only until she’d birthed the argumentum grande, and now she was constrained to present the world with a miraculum minitum as well.
Having lost her first child to the small-pox, she could not help fearing that some equally diabolical phenomenon would destroy her second baby too. She combated these premonitions with every weapon at her disposal. During the early weeks of her pregnancy she consumed the blend of wild mushrooms that Hassane believed prevented miscarriage. As her fifth month commenced, she availed herself daily of juniper tea, the Nimacook prescription against premature delivery. The quickening phase found her ingesting great quantities of red-fern and yarrow, which in the experience of her Lyn Street neighbor, a midwife named Sarah Dinwidie, protected an infant from illness not only in the womb but throughout the first postnatal year. The instant the spasms began, she sought out Mrs. Dinwidie, and together the women went to Chadwick’s Livery and appropriated a vacant stall abounding in fresh straw. Whilst the midwife whispered words of encouragement, Jennet pressed her back against the wall, grabbed the partition, bent her knees, and prayed.
The spasms intensified. Her screams frightened the horses and put two cats to flight. The pangs grew stronger yet, as did her cries. She felt as if she were about to birth the Maw of Folkestone, or perhaps Perdition’s Pride.
“I don’t even want this blasted babe!” she shrieked.
“Many are the times I’ve heard a customer speak those very words,” Mrs. Dinwidie assured her. “’Tis the very litany of your predicament.”
After an interval of two hours, through the operations of God Almighty and universal gravitation, a pink and slippery female infant descended into Mrs. Dinwidie’s waiting hands.
This time, Jennet resolved, her daughter’s name would be free of all sentimental connection. She certainly wasn’t going to use “Bella” again, neither would she christen the infant “Margaret” after her mother nor “Catherine” after her mother’s mother. “Rachel” had always struck Jennet as a robust and resonant vocable, and when she presented the idea to Tobias he acquiesced without quarrel, though he insisted on augmenting the choice with his late mother’s name. And so it was that on the fifth of May, 1711, the Reverend Dowd drew a watery cross on the forehead of Rachel Veronica Crompton, thus alerting Heaven to the presence of another salvation-worthy Protestant in the world.
Rachel’s life began auspiciously. She was a ruddy infant with bright hazel eyes, a strong cry, a precocious smile, and no tendency toward the colic, this last asset doubtless attributable to Mrs. Dinwidie’s pharmaceutical wisdom. Tobias, not surprisingly, idolized his daughter from the outset, but Jennet refused to relax her vigilance, for it still seemed probable the child would perish ere reaching her first birthday. And yet one succulent spring morning, five weeks after the baptism, Jennet realized that she adored Rachel past all telling, a circumstance that felt rather like the pregnancy itself: precautions had been taken, those precautions had failed, and now the ambiguous consequences were upon her.
Although Tobias urged Jennet to employ a wet-nurse, such a service being comfortably within their budget, she decided to suckle the baby herself. Especially gratifying were the events that followed each feeding. She would set Rachel betwixt her breasts and revel in the pressure of the warm, compacted, breathing bundle, as if the nexus of her circulatory system had been mysteriously transported outside her body. Good people of Boston, come see this marvelous monstrosity. Step into the Cavendish Museum of Wondrous Prodigies, Colonial Branch, and behold Nature’s most beautiful aberration yet, the Externalized Heart of Hannover Street.
For all the pleasurable feelings it entailed, all the agreeable obligations, motherhood failed to distract Jennet from the fact that the Queen had not responded to Contra Dæmonologie. When Rachel learned to walk, traveling across Boston Common through a combination of tentative steps and comical tumbles, Jennet’s joy could not cancel the melancholy caused by Her Majesty’s conspicuous disinterest in the demon disproof. When the child progressed from random babbling to coherent words to complete sentences, Jennet’s delight was betimes diluted by the Crown’s failure to acknowledge either the treatise itself or her subsequent inquiries into its disposition. Shortly after her fourth birthday, Rachel employed her poppets in an improvised theatre-piece about a woman philosopher who rides a cannonball to the moon, and Jennet’s soul swelled with pride, but this pleasure was severely circumscribed by the silence from Kensington Palace.
On the first day in October of 1715, a brown-skinned courier appeared at Jennet’s door bearing a packet displaying the provenance label of a certain Lord Wentworth in Essex County, England. She paid the manumitted Negro a guinea and, with the enthusiasm of Juliet opening a letter from her Montague swain, ripped apart the envelope and drew out the vellum sheet.
25 July 1715
Dear J. S. Crompton:
Her Majesty hath instruct’d the Privy Council to respond to your Contra Dæmonologie, which reach’d Kensington Palace in November of 1711. After some Months of Deliberation, we decid’d to place the Document with an eminent Natural Philosopher to whom the Council oft-times turns in such Cases. Dr. Edmund Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, eventually wrote to us as follows:
“Mr. Crompton’s Intentions are doubtless honorable, and his chosen Methodology boasts a novel and astute Design. The present Treatise is so lacking in Detail, however, so bereft of Thoroughness and Rigor, that it inclines a rational Man toward a Conclusion quite opposite to the Author’s.”
Concerning our own Reaction, we find your approach so Impious as to be but one Degree of Remove from Atheism. When a Person presumes to reduce the World’s Workings to self-sustaining Principles, whether he calls them “Forces” following Mr. Newton (who subscribes, we must note, to the deplorable Arian Religion) or “Kinetic Entities” per your Treatise, he must take great Care lest he give unwitting Comfort to those Deists and Freethinkers who would dislodge the Christian God from Creation’s Center.
To wit, we shan’t be troubling the English Parliament, and certainly not Her Most Sovereign Majesty, with your misguided Investigations.
Philip Tyrrell,
EARL OF WENTWORTH LORD PRIVY SEAL
Owing to the Indian attack on Haverhill, Jennet had never enacted her wonderful plan to rip her father’s cleansing license from his door and mutilate it beyond recognition. But now, suddenly, she had in hand an equally noxious document. She tore Lord Wentworth’s letter into pieces, then tore the pieces into bits, then fed the bits to the fire in the kitchen hearth, where Nellie Adams was at that moment baking a half-dozen loaves of wheaten bread.
“How durst they reject my treatise!” Jennet shrieked.
“’Tis an insult to our good labors,” Nellie said.
“Those morons! Those dunces! Numskulls, I call ’em! Buffoons! Mooncalves! Puddingheads! Nincompoops!”
“That’s exactly what they are, ma’am.”
Perhaps if he’d seen Giles Corey lying beside Salem-Town Courthouse, pinned under the granite blocks—or stood on the Shawsheen River Bridge and heard Susan Diggens cry “Help me, friend Indian!”—Tobias might have apprehended the magnitude of her desolation. Instead he could only offer observations of a sort she found more irritating than soothing.
“If the great Dr. Halley sees no use in trying to disprove demons,” he told her, “then mayhap ’tis a less worthy enterprise than you believe.”
“Dr. Halley doth not gainsay the purpose of my project,” she snapped, “and he calls its design novel and astute.”
“But if the demonologists are so misguided as you aver, would not England’s philosophers have argued ’em out of business by now?”
“Dear Tobias, methinks you play the dolt without half trying. If the Royal Society hath attempted no argumentum grande, ’tis only for want of motivation. Should the day come when Dr. Halley finds himself accused of sorcery, a dozen demon disproofs will pour from his pen, for terror’s a most inspiring sponsor.”
As happened so often in Jennet’s life, salvation arrived in the person of a book. On the Monday following her receipt of Lord Wentworth’s vile letter, the second edition of Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica appeared in Darby’s front window bearing a publication date of 1713, and as she turned back the thick fragrant leaves, she noticed that Book Three concluded with a new Scholium. Its matter was God. Whether acquiescing to external Anglican pressure or responding to some private revelation, Mr. Newton now insisted (if she could trust her Latin) that “this most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets” depended upon “the counsel of an intelligent and powerful Being,” which idea he proceeded to elaborate over the next five pages.
Joy flooded her heart. The Privy Council feared that those who methodized Nature’s workings trafficked in atheism, and yet here was Newton, spicing his postulates with Providence as effortlessly as a cook might add rum to a cake batter. Of course, she would never quote the geometer directly—not so long as he cleaved to “the deplorable Arian Religion”—but it was obvious that if you chose your words thoughtfully, Baconian experimentalism could be made to seem as pious as the Beatitudes.
Then there were Dr. Halley’s requirements of detail, thoroughness, and rigor. She vowed to make her revised Contra Dæmonologie detailed to a fault, with a thoroughness to tax an angel’s patience and a rigor sufficient to snap iron. This time around, she would not merely wade into the Principia’s shallows—she would dive into its rollers and plumb its deepest trenches.
“I am Lazarus, come back from the abyss,” she announced to Tobias shortly after Nellie finished laying out their crab-cake dinner. “I shall give the Privy Council a treatise so sodden with God ’twill make Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses seem but a grocery list! I’ll shower Dr. Halley with pages enough to wipe his bum from Epiphany to Michaelmas!”
“How delighted I am that your melancholia hath passed,” Tobias muttered.
“An affectionate sentiment, but spoken without feeling,” she said. “What ails thee, Mr. Crompton?”
“I’Christ, woman, can you not see that in constructing this second and more elaborate treatise, you will grievously neglect our daughter?”
Taking up knife and fork, she carefully hexed her crab-cake. “Such fatalism ill becomes you, sir.”
“Methinks you confuse fatalism with foresight,” Tobias said, tearing apart a fragrant loaf of bread. “Tell me you’ll abandon this scheme.”
She placed a crab-cake wedge in her mouth and chewed. “I would ne’er renounce my life’s very purpose.”
“You cannot be a fit mother to Rachel, nor yet a proper wife to me, and still wear the clothes of a natural philosopher.”
“Might I give you my opinion?” She consumed a second morsel. “By my lights the clothes of a natural philosopher are considerably more dignified than the livery of the Boston Postmaster.”
“Then you will be pleased to know I am on the point of changing that very garment.”
Tobias buttered his bread, sipped his claret, and explained himself. The previous evening a missive had arrived from the Royal Mail Authority offering him employment as Postmaster-General for the British Crown Colonies in America. He had already drafted his letter of acceptance. By the end of the month they would all be Philadelphians, living in William Penn’s famous province to the south. Their new situation, he insisted, had everything to recommend it—a higher income, a lower latitude, a larger house.
“Congratulations,” she said, a barbed sneer in her voice. “Thou hast toiled most diligently for this appointment.”
“Prithee, Mrs. Crompton, judge not these fruits ere you’ve tasted them.”
An unhappy presentiment suffused her, for she knew nothing of Philadelphia save its reputation as a hotbed of Quaker fanaticism. But Tobias was not about to solicit her views on the matter. The instant he spoke the words “Postmaster-General” in the same hushed and reverent voice her father had employed when pronouncing “Witchfinder-Royal,” she understood that their relocation was a fait accompli.
Aunt Isobel had always averred that the universe abounded in forking paths, and yet it seemed to Jennet that just one course lay open to her. By Hassane’s account the world was opulent in options, but Jennet could see before her only duties. She was obliged to pack up her prisms and her pendulums, tell Rachel that circumstances were taking them to a warmer clime, and pray to Jehovah and Kautantouwit that the City of Brotherly Love might one day acquire a second epithet, the Cradle of Demon Disproofs.
DESPITE JENNET’S MISGIVINGS, her new environs and the revised argumentum grande proved uncannily compatible with each other. The thoroughfares of Philadelphia constituted a tidy grid, and whenever she left their Chestnut Street townhouse to stroll amidst this rectilinear arrangement, a concomitant orderliness descended upon her thinking. Equally vital were the energy and inspiration she drew from the omnipresent Society of Friends. Although her Quaker neighbors indeed practiced several varieties of irrationality, including the eponymous paroxysms on display in their meeting-houses, they had nevertheless bestowed on Pennsylvania an ethos whereby hunting, hanging, or even talking about witches seemed quite the silliest of activities.
By the time Rachel had celebrated her fifth birthday, the undercurrent of disgruntlement that Tobias brought to most of his dealings with Jennet had transmuted into an overt hostility. His bitterness traced not just to the demon disproof, which he viewed as progressing only at Rachel’s expense, but also to his wife’s failure to conceive a second child. Whilst Jennet privately ascribed this situation to Hassane’s unguent, she offered her husband a much less plausible though far more palatable explanation: God had elected to seal her womb until she’d defeated the Witchcraft Act.
“How durst you presume to know the designs of Providence!” Tobias roared. “Such arrogance appalls me!”
“I warned you of my philosophic passions from the first,” she reminded him.
“Shall I tell you my darkest suspicion, Mrs. Crompton? I believe you deprive me of a son through the sheer force of your womanly will.”
“If womanly will could accomplish such a feat,” she snarled, “there’d be far fewer squalling babes in the world at this moment—of that I assure thee!”
Her favorite place for perusing the second edition of the Principia Mathematica was the sprawling meadow on the eastern shore of the Schuylkill River, a tract on which the city’s day-laborers had recently staked out a bowling-green. Whenever the weather allowed it, she and Rachel and Nellie would arrive before noon, luncheon-basket in hand. During the subsequent hour they would consume their wheaten bread and cold meat at a leisurely pace, whilst Jennet held her companions spellbound with the Moon-Bead Legend or some other nugget of the Nimacook imagination—the Fable of the Wily Raven, the Parable of the Greedy Porcupine, the Adventure of the Tortoise Who Had No Shell. After the meal Jennet would begin the day’s struggle with Newton, leaving Rachel and Nellie to wander about in search of amusement. Sometimes they enacted Nimacook stories using Rachel’s poppets. Sometimes they watched the men rolling their bowls across the green. But Rachel’s preferred activity was to sit by the river’s edge and catch fish, for she was now an expert in the bobber-and-hook method her mother had mastered many years earlier on the banks of the Merrimack.
One sweltering Sunday afternoon in August, Jennet took up the luncheon-basket, shouldered Rachel’s fishing-pole, and set off with her daughter for the Schuylkill, her intention being to loll in the meadow and thoroughly digest Newton’s theology, the better to avoid tainting the new argumentum grande with some subtle Arian heresy. Nellie was absent from their company, for Tobias had given her the day off, that she might visit her brother’s family in Cohasset. Arriving at the river, mother and daughter devoured their midday repast, Jennet the whole time offering Rachel her usual lecture on the safe and proper way to fish: keep one foot planted against a rock, never yank abruptly on the line, take care lest you lean too far over the bank whilst throwing back your catch. Rachel as always assented to these conditions, and so her mother sent her off in quest of salmon and perch.
For a reading space Jennet selected a tranquil patch of shade hedged by a half-dozen maples. She entered the grove, spread her blanket on the grass, and set about pondering Newton’s relationship with God.
According to her translation of the 1713 Scholium, the Supreme Being existed everywhere at once, His essence never varying from place to place, “all eye, all ear, all brain, all arm, all power to perceive, to understand, and to act.”
She looked up. Rachel sat on the riverbank, fishing-pole in hand.
Fixing her thoughts again on Newton, Jennet learned that the Almighty operated “in a manner not at all human, in a manner not at all corporeal, in a manner utterly unknown to us.”
She placed her finger betwixt “utterly” and “unknown,” omnio and ignotus, then glanced toward the river in time to see Rachel snag a perch, its sleek form twisting and twitching like a bodkin in thrall to a lodestone. The child unhooked the creature and returned it to the water.
Jennet went back to the Principia. The Almighty, Newton averred, was best conceived as a kind of supernatural steward or spiritual landlord. “For a being, however perfect, without dominion, cannot be called Lord God.”
A child’s scream shot across the meadow.
Jennet glanced up. A monstrous void crouched beside the Schuylkill. A vacancy, a vacuum, a demon made of empty space.
Tossing Newton aside, she gained her feet and sprinted toward the river. A liquid cacophony reached her ears, an amalgam of thrashing limbs and gurgling screams. She halted at the bank. At first she saw only a frothy white turbulence; next Rachel’s fishing-pole jerked into focus, riding the chaos—and then a human form appeared, submerged, one hand gripping the pole, the opposite arm flailing madly. Jennet leaned forward, making ready to pitch herself over the edge, when suddenly a hirsute man with the prodigious proportions of a blacksmith brushed past her, threw down his woolen cap, kicked off his shoes, and leapt into the water. A maelstrom took shape before her eyes, a mad Charybdis at whose circling center Rachel’s would-be rescuer struggled to subdue her panic.
As a dozen more bowlers rushed onto the scene, Jennet brought her hands together in a prayerful posture. Surely the All-Eye-All-Ear-All-Brain-All-Arm who’d hurled the planets into orbit could raise a single in-substantial child from a river. Surely the Almighty could suspend His principia long enough to save one small virtuous life.
“Prithee, Lord God Jehovah!”
No sooner had Jennet voiced her entreaty than a sobbing, shivering, wheezing Rachel climbed onto the shore, followed by the blacksmith, if such was indeed his trade, coughing and panting. Rivulets rushed down the limbs of child and man alike. Scum stippled their clothing. The smith spat out a mouthfulof water. The bowlers continued to collect on the bank, the commotion drawing them as inevitably as a lodestone beguiling iron.
“Oh, my sweet darling!” Jennet cried.
Despite her ordeal, Rachel had managed to retain the fishing-pole, which she now held before her like an infantryman brandishing a pike. “I h-hooked an eel!”
“My eye’s own apple!” Jennet lifted Rachel into the air, hugging her so tightly that the child’s teeth stopped chattering, even as her sobs became titters of relief.
“Methinks ’twas the mightiest eel in Creation!”
Squeezing Rachel more tightly yet, Jennet planted a hundred kisses on her cheeks, freckling her with affection. “My heart’s own harbor!”
“He sought to steal my fishing-pole, but all he got was my hook!”
Jennet returned Rachel to the grassy earth, then grasped her shoulders and rotated her toward their benefactor, who now wore an expression so stern it might have humbled a troll. “You must tell this good gentleman that your gratitude runneth over,” she instructed her daughter.
“My gratitude runneth over,” Rachel muttered tonelessly, setting the fishing-pole on her shoulder.
“Prithee, give me your name,” Jennet asked the dripping smith, “that I might one day write a ballad in your honor.”
Much to her surprise, the man replied reprovingly, “Truth to tell, I am niggardly with my name, declining to share it with vain and careless persons.”
“Well spoken, brave sir!” declared a soot-smeared chimney sweep, stepping from the crowd and facing the smith. “Ye’re right to scorn this sister of Narcissus, who reads a book whilst her daughter nearly drowns!”
A surge of chagrin passed through Jennet, reddening her cheeks, felling her crest. Seeking to redeem herself, she faced Rachel and addressed her in a voice directed more to the mob than to the child. “Ere the week is out, your mother will undertake to tutor you in the art of swimming.”
“Ye must not besmirch the word ‘mother’ by applying it to so unfeeling a creature as yourself!” insisted a plump and ruddy bystander wearing the blue-bibbed apron of a butcher.
“No weasel accords its young such disregard!” a linen-frocked wag-goner asserted.
“No snake would deign to claim ye as a parent!” a lantern-seller averred.
“A slug would blush to find ye up its family tree!” cried a hatchet-faced man whose sheepskin skirt marked him as a tanner.
Uncertain how to answer this menagerie of accusations, Jennet instead grabbed Rachel by the wrist and escorted her away from the bank. The child’s dress exuded a sharp, oddly pleasing fragrance, the aroma of damp silk mingled with the river’s pungent mud. Upon reaching the maple grove, Jennet retrieved the blanket, the basket, and her Principia Mathematica. She repressed an impulse to spit on Newton’s masterwork. The canniest treatise yet penned had now become the most corrupt, for the reading of it had nearly cost Rachel her life.
“Tell me, darling, do you hope we might soon enjoy another sojourn by the Schuylkill?” Jennet asked.
“Aye, Mother.”
“Then you will hold silent concerning this afternoon’s misadventure. Is that clear? You must not speak of’t to Nellie, nor to Mrs. Dinwidie, nor even to your own father.”
“Not even to Father?”
Jennet nodded solemnly. “Were the postmaster to learn of your plunge, he would bar us both forever from these shores.” She laid a hand on Rachel’s soggy shoulder. “Now hear my most sacred vow. May my hair fall out and my skin turn green if I e’er again let you stray from my sight.”
“No hair?” Rachel said, giggling.
“Quite so.”
“Green skin?” the child added, snickering more exuberantly yet.
“Indeed.”
If you were five years old, it seemed, no event could be more entertaining than your mother’s transmutation into an acorn squash.
THREE MORNINGS AFTER her daughter’s descent into the Schuylkill, Jennet awoke to find that Tobias had vacated their mattress—a surprising circumstance, for they both normally remained beneath the covers until Nellie announced that their veal and eggs were ready. A queasiness spread through her. The planet’s axis seemed suddenly askew. She abandoned the mattress, pulled on her dressing gown, and dashed, pulse throbbing, into her daughter’s bed-chamber.
Rachel was gone. Her wardrobe had been plundered, each compartment as empty as a skull’s eye-socket.
Jennet proceeded to the kitchen. Nellie sat at the mahogany table. Tears stained the maid-servant’s cheeks. Red veins striated her eyes.
“I am instructed to give ye this,” Nellie moaned, presenting her mistress with a folded sheet of vellum secured by a blob of tallow. “I’Christ, Mrs. Crompton, he hath stolen her away!”
Jennet cracked the seal. Tobias’s spidery hand covered the vellum top to bottom.
19 August 1716
My Dear Jennet:
Three weeks ago the Royal Mail Authority propos’d to make me Postmaster-General of a far-flung Colony whose Identity I shall reveal to you at some future Date. None but a Fool would forgo this Opportunity to build a Postal System from Scratch, using everything I know about the Safety of Carriers, the Arrangement of Drops, and the optimal Deployment of Horses.
Mayhap you believe a Husband ought not to keep such a Secret from his Wife, but if Secrets are to constitute the Matter of our Conversation, I must tell you that my best Rider, the worthy Harry Bainbridge, was playing at Bowls this Sunday hard by the Scene of Rachel’s near-Drowning. He hath judg’d the whole Affair an appalling Instance of maternal Disregard, the very Sort of Threat I always knew you would one Day visit upon our Child.
By the Time you read these Words, Rachel and I shall have sail’d free of America, away on the morning Tide. Assuming favorable Winds, our Carrack will reach London by October, whereupon we shall head for my new Place of Employment. Fret not, Mrs. Crompton, as I mean to provide for your Welfare. The Townhouse is yours to keep, likewise the Horse Jeremiah, and you shall eventually receive from me a Stipend of thirty Pounds per Quarter, more than adequate for your material Needs as well as Nellie’s Wages.
In short, I have decid’d that our Union, ne’er a Prize to begin with, hath play’d through all its Possibilities. You bear no Love for me, and your Devotion to Rachel waxes and wanes like the Moon. Indeed, I say you are bound to Naught on God’s green Earth save that damnable Thesis of yours.
Be thee well, my distract’d Wife. Ere long I shall make such Arrangements as will permit you to wed another Englishman. As for myself, I doubt that I shall ever marry again, for Jennet Stearne Crompton is still my most precious Balm, even as she aspires to be my perpetual Bane.
Sincerely,
Your Tobias
“Oh, Mistress Crompton, last night Rachel told me of her fall into the river, and how the news of’t hath made her father wroth,” Nellie wailed. “Methinks this disaster is largely of my making. I should ne’er have gone visiting on Sunday.”
“Nay, Nellie, you aren’t to blame,” Jennet said. “The fault lies in the incongruity ’twixt Mr. Crompton’s ambitions and mine own.”
As she read the letter a second time, all the while clenching her teeth like a surgical patient biting a musket-ball, she felt herself undergo a sea-change. Her fury transformed her. Body and brain she became a freak, the most ferocious prodigy yet acquired by the Cavendish Museum—the Harridan of Chestnut Street. She grabbed her purse from behind the pendulum-clock, slung the leather thong about her neck, and rushed off to Sharpe’s Livery, where she outfitted Jeremiah with saddle and bridle.
It took her but fifteen minutes to reach the docks. Two towering carracks, their names obscured by mist and distance, followed the Delaware’s southerly course, riding high upon the moon-drawn waters.
Locking her gaze on both vessels, she galloped to the end of Market Street Wharf and dismounted. She hitched the gelding to a mooring post, then set about importuning every passing soul. She detained sweaty sailors newly arrived in port, hawkers selling Malay teas and French laces, pale painted ladies who seemed unaccustomed to daylight, suspicious constables who believed she must be a whore herself, and leering Redcoat soldiers of the same opinion. Though no one could remember whether a child of five had recently taken ship with a rangy man of middle age, a consensus eventually emerged concerning the two carracks cruising down the river. The lead vessel was the Antares, bound for the Sugar Isles, that her captain might convert his cargo of lumber and flour into a cache of Barbados rum, a treasure he would subsequently redeem for two hundred West African slaves. Behind the Antares flew the mail-ship Bristol Maid, carrying tobacco, beaver hats, rattlesnake belts, private parcels—and twenty paying passengers—to England.
An image arose in Jennet’s mind, a rowboat, sufficiently swift to facilitate Rachel’s recapture, and soon she found one, the Manatee, tied to a stone pier adjoining Arch Street Wharf. The tub’s owner, a sallow Quaker crabber with a beard resembling a wasp’s nest, accorded her a sympathetic ear as he transferred the morning’s catch from vessel to quay. Spiky claws and spiny legs probed betwixt the slats that formed the dozen crab-cages. She thought of the Colchester Castle prison-cells, those scores of beseeching arms sinuating through the iron bars.
“Thy mission hath all the marks of madness,” the Quaker said after she’d finished describing her plight.
“Doubtless you are correct.” She climbed into the rowboat, seized the penultimate crab-cage, and lifted it onto the quay. “Prithee, rent me your Manatee for the excellent price of three pounds sterling”—she drew the tethered purse from her bodice—“that I might fetch my Rachel.”
The crabber took the final cage in hand and scrambled free of the rowboat. “Thy daughter sails into Delaware Bay e’en as we speak. Thou hast not a prayer of o’ertaking her.”
“Four pounds,” Jennet said.
“Wilt thou make it five?”
She shook the requisite coins into the crabber’s eager palm, unfastened the Manatee’s line, and sat down facing the stern. Sliding both oars into the water, she brought the boat about, then pulled with all the vigor of Archimedes levering the world.
“I wish thee good fortune!” the Quaker called after her.
Stroke upon stroke, yard after yard, she chased the retreating carracks—down the river, into the bay, toward the ascending sun.
“Hallo, Bristol Maid! Hallo! Hallo!”
She gave the oars an emphatic yank and, pivoting on her hips, glanced toward the horizon. Already the Antares had dropped from sight, but the Bristol Maid still nicked the sky.
Turning, she resumed her labors, stroke upon stroke. Mauminikish, she told herself—row harder. Her back spasmed. Mauminikish. Her muscles sang with pain. Mauminikish. The blisters on her palms grew big as grapes—and yet she cleaved to the task, working the oars as furiously as a Nimacook brave driving his war canoe into battle.
“Hallo! Hallo!”
Her vision went muzzy with her tears, and she apprehended that she was close to blacking out. Again she turned. The Bristol Maid was gone, claimed by the planet’s imperceptible curve. She shipped the left oar, then the right, and slumped forward, gasping and groaning like some half-drowned hag who’d just endured the cold-water test.
“I’m here, Rachel!”
The sun pounded on the bay, scorching her brow and neck. Her throat felt as raw if she’d eaten sand. She set her shredded hands in her lap, staining her dress with blood.
“Your mother’s right behind you!”
Gradually but inexorably an ember of logic caught fire within her brain. If she continued to pursue the carrack, the likely outcome would not be a reunion of mother and daughter but rather, for Jennet, death by exposure, and, for Rachel, a meaningless bereavement.
“Damn thee, Tobias Crompton!”
Whereas if she quit the chase—if she tipped her king, sheathed her sword, hoisted the white flag—she would be abandoning Rachel to a man of liberal means and generous intentions. A child could do far worse in this world.
“Damn thee to Hell!”
A gust of wind caught her tears and flung them overboard, adding their number to the Atlantic’s brackish infinitude. For an indeterminate interval she stared at the bottom of the boat. Seawater sloshed amongst the oaken ribs. A solitary blue crab scuttled along the keelson. Under other and better circumstances she might have submitted the crab to philosophic scrutiny, but instead she picked up the creature and, after gazing briefly into the black seeds that were its eyes, hurled it into the bay.
