In fact, every whaler and cargo ship arriving at the Crown Colonies stopped here before going on to Boston. Salem was the port-of-call in the Bay Colonies. Salem Harbor thrived. Commerce served in the seaport town inlet well, while God served the distant and dark, tree-ringed Salem Village, which looked surreal to Jeremy now as he entered this historically troubled place.

He walked Dancer now with the horses’ characteristic high step past a bevy of modest cabins and saltbox homes of clapboard siding, past Ingersoll’s Inn and Apothecary, and past the village common to halt before the meetinghouse and nearby parsonage home and outbuildings. What he stared at from horseback represented a plot of land hotly contested. A plot most recently carved out by Samuel Parris as his—a contested parish house and meeting hall, which had split the parish down the middle over what was right and what was wrong. A contest that had for too long tied up the courts and troubled the ecclesiastical authorities in Boston.

With the snow creating see-through ghostly dervishes before him, Jeremy searched for Samuel Parris’ doorstep.

Chapter Three

At the parsonage door in Salem Village, 1:20AM, March 7, 1692

A stocky, short man, nonetheless Reverend Samuel Parris felt the walls of the small parish home—his property by way of contractual agreement with his flock—closing in on him. The stairwell proved so tight that Parris could hardly make it up the narrow passage to his daughter’s room, where he looked in on little Betty, who’d been battling a fever—symptoms of an ague so often seen in little ones. Betty slept fitfully, as if assailed by nightmares, but at least she slept. Her cousin, the Reverend’s niece, slept too but in a separate bed in the corner.

Every inch of space was accounted for and filled.

Parris slammed a balled fist into his palm and muttered, “Damn my bloody dissenting brethren.” He referred to a faction within his flock. People who resented him and begrudged him this ordinary place with its modest yard and orchard, hardly large enough for his family, hardly more than a common Barbados army barracks. Yet many– too many–begrudged him. Nearly half the village parishioners in fact, and they’d taken to withholding tithes and fees and his rate. As a result, he’d had to find other means of support.

If his rage were given full vent it’d keep him pacing all night, so he attempted to calm himself. At least and at last, he’d found a place to finally settle his family—wife, child, niece, and his once exotic black servant, a Barbados acquisition, named Tituba, whose last name was unpronounceable in English, so he’d had her Christianized and given the last name of Indian. After all, she was Indian native to Barbados.

Parris gave some thought to how little he’d accumulated in life; how little he’d accomplished, and how often he’d failed. One venture after another gone bad. Now it was threatening to happen again. At my age, I simply can’t allow it!

His appointment three years earlier as minister in Salem, Massachusetts was to be his last adventure, and the parsonage his last home. He wanted it to work. Wanted it badly . . . worst than any desire he’d ever held. He’d struggled to become a community leader here, an influential voice, and the spiritual guide in Salem Village.

The Select Village Committee had given him the parsonage house and lands in perpetuity. And yet it was being questioned. Suits were being drawn up against him. The courts might soon be arbiter over his life, thanks in large part to a handful of litigious and arrogant landholders—men who had theirs who wished to deny him his! This scrubby little plot—a mere clump of relatively worthless earth.

Tonight he’d wandered the house from top to bottom and from cubicle to crevice, worried. He’d looked in on everyone, especially checking on Tituba who’d been sneaking out of late. But thankfully, everyone was abed, mother, daughter, niece, servant and his usually squawking bird. He felt a pang of relief at having gotten Mercy—his delinquent niece—out of his home, but she’d been replaced with yet another niece, Mary Wolcott, and he feared Mary might be just as useless as Mercy’d been. Still, he’d had no choice. This rotating of young women and boys among the parishioners was part of his duties, and as such, he collected a tithe on each child for his trouble.

Samuel wound up back in his small room, as he no longer slept in the same bed as his wife Elizabeth. He gritted his teeth at the thought of her snoring and sleeplessness. He gritted even harder at the thought of those in his parish who’d decided to do everything in their power to break what he judged a binding legal contract. True none of the other nearby municipalities—Andover, Ipswich, Wenham, Topsfield, Rowley, or Beverly—had ever relinquished their common parish lands to a minister.

True that ministers were viewed as itinerants who didn’t customarily hold title to their parish homes and lands, but this was after all part and parcel of a package of promises made to him. He meant to hold the people who had sent their emissaries to Barbados to recruit him for their troubled parish accountable. Promises were made. A list of them in fact, one he meant to make them adhere to at any cost.

“Those deacons and elders gave their word—Thomas Putnam, Revelation Porter, Bray Wilkins,” he muttered under his breath. “How was I to know they hadn’t the backing of that nuisance Francis Nurse or John Proctor, from whom they’d broken ranks?”

He suspected too that crotchety old Nehemiah Higginson at the First Church of Salem Town was behind the resurgence of interest in his holdings. The old miscreant was a mischief-maker to be sure. Higginson had, early on, fired up a number of his parishioners against the infamous contract, and now he wanted it settled in his favor before he should pass from this life.

He sat on the edge of his bed, muttering, “Perhaps he’ll die before the court acts. Damn him. A contract is a contract.” He stood and wandered the rooms again. Tight doorways and even the small hardwood furnishings made him feel awkward and obese.

He now pulled a chair to the hearth where embers threatened to leap out at him as they began falling all around, as if filled with a life of their own. A noise from the kitchen area where beneath the steps Tituba Indian slept made him snap to his feet. Going toward the steps, he reached and snatched back the mildewed curtain to expose the thin black woman, Parris half expected to catch her with that black servant of Porter’s, the one who’d been hanging about the house. But no, the male named Moses—also of Barbados—dared not come into this house. No, the noises emanated from a fitful sleep. Tituba rolling over and grumbling unintelligible chanting in her pagan language, but he caught a single English word, a name: Betty, his daughter.

The bony black woman looked to be made of hickory limbs. Nowadays their relationship was merely that of master and servant, and if honest with himself, his shame surrounding this woman had him hating her for what she had taken from him. As for any lingering feelings, he had more concern tonight for the bird and the goats in the barn. He’d atoned so far as he was concerned, and he certainly no longer felt tempted by Tituba. The only thing left between them was a mutual residual anger for what’d occurred years before in Barbados.

Little witch had put him into an untenable position, not simply with his wife but with God.

He returned to the hearth and pulled a book from the bookcase. He owned several books, an Old Testament, a New Testament, and a treatise written by Increase Mather on how the godly life must be led. Parris was, in effect, a man of one book, the Holy Bible. All else paled in his eyes. He strove to live by a strict interpretation of Jehovah’s Ten Commandments and the Pentateuch now as never before.

Parris now took a deep breath and opened his bible to Leviticus, about to read himself into weariness, when he heard a sudden rapping at the parsonage door.

What damned oaf comes at such an hour? Parris mentally shouted. He approached the door, shouted aloud, “Who needs what of me now?” They come to me for all their ills and every petty problem, but do they make my salary?

Each villager’s tithe to him had come slower and slower, until some had stopped altogether, while others paid in pumpkins, squash, oysters, and the occasional lobster. Worse than ordinary thieves, he thought, one hand on the doorknob, his ear against the wood.

Who could it be at such an ungodly hour? Another death in the parish? A sick child who’d wandered from the faith? These Salem people want courtesy and hard work from me, yet they fail me in miserable fashion.

Again three quick, strong raps on the door. From the sound of it, a strong man stood on the other side of the stout door.

“Who is it?” Parris shouted.

“Wakely, sir! My name is Jeremiah…”

“What?” The door still separating them.

“My name is Jermiah Wakely—”

“I know no Wakely!” came the muffled response.

Jeremiah wondered if the minister meant to come through the door with a blazing firearm or hot poker.

“I’ve come from Maine, sir.”

“Maine?”

“By way of Boston, sir!”

“Boston?”

“Have a letter of introduction, Mr. Parris, sir!”

“Letter? A post this time of night? Bah!”

“Can you hear me, sir? Through the door?”

“What letter?”

“From Mather, sir, Reverend Increase Mather.”

This brought on a chill silence. Finally, Parris replied, “Mather? Did you say Increase Mather?”

“I did, sir!” Jeremiah cursed the impenetrable door. He wondered if Parris meant for him to sleep on the porch tonight. “I’d like to settle my horse, sir, in your barn.”

But Parris’ breath had caught in his lungs. Can it be true, he wondered, that the greatest theological mind in the colonies has sent me a letter by midnight courier? Has Mather finally answered my repeated requests for intervention on my behalf? Ha, the delinquent parish members will be well fined now.

“Will you open the door, Reverend?” shouted Jeremiah. “Or shall Mr. Mather’s protégé sleep in your barn?”

What if it’s the Devil at my doorstep? Parris asked himself. This man calling himself Wakely could as well be some evil scratching to get in. The Devil would know that a letter from Mather would tempt him to make an invitation to cross his threshold. “Or has God sent this—what’d he call himself? Protégé?” he muttered aloud.

The pounding continued. So loud in the silent night that it sounded demonic.

Parris braced himself, lit a lantern, and pulled the door open just a crack, staring out at Jeremiah Wakely, who managed a smile. Jeremy then extended a letter with a heavy red wax seal reading IM—for Increase Mather.

The lantern glow divided Wakely’s face down the middle; one side lit bright, the other side in total darkness. The image had a strange, hypnotic hold on his reluctant host. “You look like a highwayman, Mr. Wakely.”

“I am sure, sir, but I am after all in my riding cloak and boots.”

“Give me a moment with the letter.” Parris grabbed the sealed note, pulled it inside, slammed the door closed, locked it from within, and left Jeremy in the drizzle.

Jeremy stepped off the porch and rubbed down his horse’s face. “A careful man,” Jeremy said to Dancer, the horse now shivering in the sleet. Dancer snorted, her entire body quaking when a chill ran the length of her.

The door was then pulled wide. Parris stepped onto the porch, and holding the lantern higher, looked Jeremy and Dancer over with more care. “Lovely animal.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“If you are truly from Mather . . . why do you come in at such an hour? Under darkness? It’ve been best to come in daylight.”

“A bridge was out,” lied Jeremy.

“I would’ve liked my parishioners to see your coming, to know you are here from Mather, and that Mather backs me against my enaaa . . . those who stand against me here.”

“I don’t know anything about that, sir. I’m just an apprentice . . . to be apprenticed to you, Mr. Parris, until which time—”

“Apprentice? I thought you simply a courier?” He waved the sealed note in his hand.

“You haven’t read it, sir?”

“I assumed…I mean, seeing the seal and Mather’s signature…well…” Parris gritted his teeth and read by the lantern now held by Jeremy, his riding boots squeaking and wet on the porch boards.