Rebecca placed a hand on Serena’s forearm and looked her in the eye. “You know full well that if I ask it of my brood, they will come.” Calm assurance from both voice and eyes came through. In fact, Serena saw none of the watery, bleariness of her mother’s illness. Instead it’d been replaced by a certainty and a clarity Serena had missed for too long in her mother’s pale blue eyes.

“Have you really sent word round the compound?” asked Francis in the tone of a slap. He’d ventured out to help Rebecca negotiate the stairs.

“Yes. I have.”

“By Benjamin, I suppose.”

“By Bennie, yes.”

“Mother,” interrupted Serena, “you said Joseph too, earlier.”

“Both, yes—I’ve sent both riding off!”

Benjamin remained her baby, youngest of her children; he too lived in the main house, the old Towne home that had belonged to Rebecca’s father. Serena thought Ben conspicuously absent this morning, and now she knew the reason why. Mother had dispatched him to all the surrounding homes filled with little Nurses, little Eastys, little little Cloyses, and little Tarbells—Rebecca’s twenty-seven grandchildren. She meant to have an outdoor gathering with food, drink, children and grandchildren all in one place. A feast, a spring festival.

“We could as well do this indoors, Mother.”

“No, no,” she absently replied. “He told me specifically that it be outside and today. Beneath the new sun.”

“But today is Sunday. Hold . . . wait. Who told you?”

“A voice . . . a voice inside.”

“A voice?”

“All right, my Maker . . . your Maker.”

“Ah-ah . . . I see. But Mother, everyone will be off to church.”

“They’ve been told to forgo Parris’ vile sermons for this one day.”

“How long’ve I told ’em all to do just that?” asked Serena, her features tightening at the mention of Parris’ name. “I heard a rumor that he’s gotten himself an apprentice, oddly, someone named Wakely.”

“Wakely? Be it our lost Jeremiah?”

“No . . . most unlikely.” Serena gave thought again to the possibility—one she had dreamed on since hearing the nasty little rumor. “But if it is Jere Wakely—” Serena gave her broom a strong forward push to punctuate her point—“I’ll, I’ll give him a piece of my mind, I assure you.”

“Whoever the poor man is, he’ll be filled with Parris’ venom soon enough if he’s apprenticed to that man.” Rebecca negotiated the steps with husband on one side and daughter on the other.

Francis replied, “Just galls me to hear that country parson speak.”

“Galls me,” added Serena, “his likening himself and his situation to Christ’s condemnation.”

Rebecca grimaced and shivered with a sudden chill. She clutched her shawl, one that she had knitted during her convalescence, tighter to her. “My sisters tell me he’s now likening his own flock to the money changers and Pilate and swine.”

“I told those sisters of yours to mind what they say and to not to pester your mind with such nonsense as goes on in the village meetinghouse!” Francis erupted.

“No, instead you want to bring me all the nonsensical news sweetened and strained like porridge!” Rebecca laughed as she found her favorite porch rocker. “And if you won’t convey the truth no more, Deacon Nurse—”

He’d plopped into a rocker beside her and instantly defended himself. “Now that’s not true and you know—”

“True enough! Keeping me poor dear old feminine ears from harm…keeping me in the dark!”

“Mother,” interceded Serena.

“So then it will be my faithful sisters—and Serena here! She never sugar-coated a thing in her life.”

“You needn’t be upset by that place,” he promised. “I have it on good authority that our Mr. Parris is not long for Salem.”

“Indeed?” asked Serena, who’d remained standing and towering over her elderly parents.

“I imagine June or July and we’ll have seen the last of the Mr. Parris.”

“So you’ve been to see Mr. Higginson again, have you?” asked Rebecca.”

“I don’t understand the depth of Mr. Parris’ venom toward members of his own congregation,” confessed Serena, pacing the porch, lifting the broom anew and sweeping to quell her restless pacing.

“Why it’s mainly due our withholding his payment.” He searched for a pipe and tobacco in his vest pockets.

“Ne’er thought it a good plan, Francis. And don’t smoke so near me.”

“Just till this matter of the parsonage deed is cleared up, you see. But you know, Mother,” continued Francis, “even some of our brothers and sisters disagree with us on the matter of the parsonage grounds.”

“So?”

“So? So who’s to say if they’ll come to my table?”

“Our table! And they’ll come no matter. Disagreements will be put aside,” Rebecca assured her husband and daughter, and then she cheered on seeing a red-brested robin land atop one of the cleaned tables and step about like a sea captain inspecting the deck. “It’s a wonderful sign that!” she erupted.

Mother Nurse then turned her attention on their large holdings, smoke curling from distant chimneys at other homes on the compound. “They owe me that much,” she spoke of the people in the homes on the compound. “They know I’ll give ’em a righteous sermon, sure, and enough gumption to see us through another harvest.”

Serena snickered. “A righteous sermon.”

“What of it?” asked her mother. “Out with it.”

“Just that it’s become something…well, rare in these parts—a righteous instead of a self-righteous sermon.”

“You mea self-serving,” corrected Francis, who’d clamored to his feet and found the other end of the porch where he puffed on his pipe.

Rebecca had for years preached in the absence of an ordained minister in the area. Many people still came to pray with her at the house, including Serena’s aunts.

Their morning’s conversation had Serena convinced that Mother was as sharp-witted as ever; perhaps it’d been her wit that’d kept her going throughout the long winter’s illness. Certainly, Mother had the measure of Mr. Samuel Parris.

# # # # #

The home of Bray Wilkins at Will’s Hill, Essex County, the following morning

Anne Putnam’s father, Thomas Putnam, had spent the night at the home of a business partner, cousin, and friend—Bray Wilkins. Bray as he brayed like a mule whenever he laughed. So far as Thom Putnam felt, a man could never be counted poor if he should stop to count his friends, though he did not fully believe it himself and would rather be wealthy than befriended by such as Bray.

Bray was a lanky, bull-shouldered man, a gray-bearded grandfather many times over, something Thomas believed he’d never be. He held a strong suspicion that his eleven-year-old daughter, Anne, would not live a long life, and another certainty—that he’d never have a son to carry on his name, nor a grandson for that matter.

Thomas could not imagine any man desperate enough to take Anne Junior for a wife, as everyone in Salem Village knew the Putnam girl was frail of heart and weak-limbed, and rather useless, and nothing much to look at; worst of all, she’d lived a life of sickness and fits from birth, a birth defect, perhaps the same as took the lives of her brothers and sisters before her.

Putnam had slept poorly here on Wilkins’ maidservant’s bed. The sixteen-year-old servant girl, Susana Sheldon, had been ordered to give up her bed to Thomas, that she could as well sleep on the floor at the hearth.

Now with everyone in the cramped house gone to sleep, Thomas inched closer and closer to the servant, and in a moment he aroused the comely young thing. “Why don’t you come back to-yer-bed, honey?”

“No sir, if it please you, I am fine here where ‘tis warm.”

“Would please me to be warm . . . warmed by you, Susana.” He ran his hands over her, but she fought off his advances, nearly catching her nightshirt aflame in the effort. In order not to wake Bray or his family, Thomas let it pass, shushing the girl, who certainly could carry his seed as he guessed her age at seventeen or eighteen.

He’d been drinking heavily with Bray all evening, and this morning, he was paying the piper sure. “Head feels split open by the blunt end of an ax,” he said to Susana, trying to elicit a smile from her, but it was no good. “But the look you’re givin’ your dear uncle now . . . now that’s e’en worse than an ax to the head!”

Still no good. Still no easing of the fear in the girl’s eyes. That look as if she might scream at any moment. The same look that had held him off Mercy Lewis up ’till now.

Neither Mercy then nor Susana now had given him any sign of their having any normal, healthy leanings in that direction. Neither seemed to like being touched even on the most innocent of places, a pat on the head, a hand on the shoulder, nor a kiss on the hand or cheek. At the moment, Susana showed no sign of changing or of suddenly acquiescing to his desire. Instead at this moment, she was crouched like an animal, back against the fire, ready to run yet clutching her covers to her bosom at the same time.

A voice in his head told him it was not worth losing friends and respect over. A voice in his head suggested he give it up, and so he decided he must.

As Thomas fought to his feet, knocking things over, the servant girl now stifled her laughter at his discomfort, doing so by pushing thick strands of her own hair into her mouth—which looked to Thomas a sensuous gesture indeed. His back ached from center to shoulder blades, a stinging, radiating pain like a drumbeat. The straw ticking from the rents in the girl’s mattress clung to his back.

He recalled snatches of what he’d said already to the servant girl, not wishing to repeat himself. But the drink had hold of his memory. He gazed again on the pretty young thing. Scruffy and dirty to be sure, this Susana Sheldon.

He suddenly reached out and pulled her into him, and she twisted away like a large snake. Her features displayed a pure disgust and she pleaded, “Please, sir, if’n you wake Mr. Bray, he’ll tear me up for it.”

“I’ll protect you,” he lied. “Just be quiet, and do’s I say, girl. I mean woman. You are a woman, now aren’t ya?”

But she wouldn’t listen or lay down or obey as he pulled her back to the bed he wished to share with her, and the layers of fear and disdain came out in nails ripping into Putnam’s grip on her. He slapped her hard across the face and under his breath said in her ear, “A word from me, wench, and Bray will flay yer backside in a way only that old brute can. Now me…me, I am gentle with you, love.”

“You’ll wake him and there’ll be hell to pay!”

“Then by all means, we’ll be quiet,” he countered.

“No, sir,” she’d replied and tore away from him, her nightshirt revealing a breast.

“No? Don’t say no to me, Susana. It’s time you were made a woman.” He tried a step toward her, reached out again, but she ducked away.

“Touch me again, sir, and I’ll scream out me lungs . . . sir!”

She was sneering at him now, all fear replaced by hatred. Thomas backed off as again the voices in his head warned him against this foolish action. “I’m…I’m sorry, child. It’s the drink, you see. The devil takes me when I drink too much.”

“Get thee behind me then!” she shouted.

“Shhh…quiet,” he now pleaded and rushed back to her bed and threw the covers over himself.

# # # # #

The following morning, Thomas Putnam’s eyes proved bleary and his head felt like an anvil, but propped on an elbow, he watched Susana going about her morning chores. Putnam had to admire the verve with which she’d delivered that line so memorable even to a man without much memory left: Get thee behind me! He felt there was hope yet, as she had not said Satan in her epitaph.

He roused himself, stood, stretched, intentionally being noisy and hoping she might turn and acknowledge him, say something like “Are you hungry? Can I get you water to wash your hands and face? How are you this morning.” Nothing of the kind came from her, of course. Nothing but a flinch when she felt him step toward her, and now standing near, he muttered I her ear, “You know, child, I’d fight that old bastard—” he pointed to Bray Wilkins’ closed door—“to the death, I would, to keep any harm coming to you. One single hair on your pretty head is harmed, and I—”

“She turned and placed a skillet of hot oil between them. “I’m not afraid of Goodman Wilkins,” she let it be known, her eyes like fire.”