“Ingersoll talks a lot of gossip; I spent a good deal of time around his inn and apothecary for just such information. He told me a queer old tale one day when I asked after the mental state of Mrs. Putnam, Anne’s mother.”

“She’s an addled woman; has been all the years I’ve known her,” replied Francis. “Go on.”

“Ingersoll said she was haunted by the ghost of her brother Henry, whose body had never known hallowed ground as he’d committed suicide by hanging.”

“It is a familiar story in the village.”

“We heard little of the details,” added Serena.

“Anne Carr, Mrs. Putnam was known then, was much older than Henry and she wielded some influence, as she’d been mother to him—their mother having died in a fire. At any rate, Anne refused to allow Henry the hand of a young woman in marriage, which led to the young man’s hanging himself in the home.”

“That’s about how I recall events.” Francis sighed heavily. “To the point, man.”

“The young woman who’d stolen Henry’s heart, his sister refused—was none other than one who stands accused today, whose name is—”

“I recall, Anne’s having said the woman had bewitched her brother,” interrupted Francis. “She put up a big fuss over his not being buried in church ground at the village. Said it wasn’t fair, that a man who’s committed suicide due to bewitching wasn’t the same as suicide, as he wasn’t entirely doing his will but that of the witch’s.”

“Interesting argument,” Ben granted.

“Susannah Martin of Amesbury?” asked Francis. “Yes, am I correct?”

“One and the same.”

“How then does it help us to know this?” asked Ben.

“Don’t you see?” asked Jeremy. “This court’s chosen to rely on spectral evidence, clues and facts handed it by spirits like that of Henry Carr. It is insane of the judges and ministers to accept such evidence as untainted, but they have—and have convicted people to die upon it. But this—this is tainted spectral evidence, don’t you see?”

“Ah . . . frankly, no,” replied Ben, shaking his head.

“This is what I want to present to the judges of the high court.”

“What? Present what?”

“Even the mere hint that an old grudge of Anne Carr’s is being played out here—someone she has singled out not just now but years ago—she believed then as now killed her brother utilizing witchcraft, it’s tainted as hell itself.”

“Do you think it strong enough to make a difference?” asked a hopeful Francis.

“It can’t hold, not even with these judges. It’s a vengeance motive, and it will lead to unearthing the rest of her venom and how it has, over the years, poisoned her child and others around her—and it discredits Mrs. Putnam, who is behind all the early warrants.”

“Her name is affixed to Rebecca’s warrant,” added Francis.

“So when do you propose to spring this revelation on Mather, Parris, and their puppets?” Ben stood and paced.

“I have already. They know of the each fact that if taken together must throw cold water and doubt on every case they’ve tried in Salem—that if Anne Putnam Senior can use the court and circumstances to exact a twenty year old vengeance, then how many other warrants sworn against the accused are also thus tainted?”

“It’s sheer brilliance, Father.” Serena hugged Francis. “It will mean Mother’s freedom. They must listen to this petition.”

“I gave an impassioned argument to the men of court. They appeared shaken by the facts. I have every reason to believe they must make changes now to cast out any and all spectral evidence and bar the door to the seer children and the notion they have powers to see into the Invisible World of Angels and Demons.”

A palpable sense of relief filled the Nurse home when Jeremy revealed this.

# # # # #

Rebecca Nurse dreams now and every day of a future when she will rise up in all her former youth, strength, and beauty to the gates of heaven she knows are awaiting her. This is how her nights and days are spent in the cruel cell she’s been kept in, but she also has nightmares. Her repeating nightmare is filled with humiliation and shackles.

She sees herself taken from the cell in shackles. Taken to the meetinghouse where she is forced to walk the center aisle to stand before the congregation to the sound of those shackles and the heckling of men, women, and children—many of whom she’d helped bring into this world. She blinks and sees herself—Mother Nurse, as she’d come to be called by everyone in and around Salem. Mother Nurse under her own will, climbs down the stairs of her own home, her Bible in hand, telling her family, “God will provide,” adding, “I knew some calamity . . . some ordeal was coming. God’s test for me and me alone. Let it be. Do not interfere. Do not act my hero. Allow it to unfold as His wishes dictated for his only begotten son.”

Rebecca blinks again and finds herself back in the meetinghouse, listening to Samuel Parris telling the congregation that she is to be shunned, that she is declared excommunicated from her church as she has been pointed out a deceiver, a liar, a woman in covenant with the Devil, a woman who’d given her body to the Snake of Snakes, a witch and a murderer of children. She repeatedly uses the phrase, “It is God’s will . . . God’s will, what you do to me. I knew it was coming. God tests me, yes, but he tests all of us together en masse.”

Rebecca has not left the jail cell for over a month. Her arrest and excommunication remains in her mind as if yesterday. She sometimes visits the courtroom where Corwin and Hathorne have been joined by three strangers from Boston, calling themselves magistrates—all in black with powdered wigs. She is again humiliated and here again the crowd scorns her, and the tightly knit, highly organized cadre of children spit pins from their mouths, fall and grovel and swear that Rebecca’s invisible shape, though she herself is in the room! These sad children claim that she has placed the pins in their mouths and into their armpits. Some are stabbed with knitting needles, blood discoloring their petticoats. Again Rebecca’s other self—which they claim to see but is invisible—does the stabbing.

Every day of her incarceration, Rebecca replays these ugly moments in her mind in an attempt to read the hidden meaning, to understand what Christ and God want from her. Each time she hears the same words in her ear—Be my instrument; act as Christ himself when he was attacked and condemned.

“No easy thing to do,” she says aloud to the consternation of other prisoners tired of the old woman’s ongoing conversation with God.

She blinks back the pain and anguish, ignores the sweat and horrid odors of her cell and the blank stares of cellmates. At times, she sees her beloved children and their children gathered around her but not here. No, all are at the gathering place around the tables at the great oak. She sees her beloved Francis, his face and eyes pleading with her to come home—to confess and come home. Others have confessed their sins before the court and have been released, she hears him clearly say in her ear.

“Remain out of it, Francis; stay above and apart from the madness descending on Salem. Be patient, and let nothing wrest your faith from me or God.” Others in the cell think she is hearing voices because she has quietly gone mad.

In her daydream, Francis understands and does as she asks. In her nightmare, Francis comes after her with Ben and her other sons, all armed to the teeth with guns, and they are all killed, and their land is forfeit, and their grandchildren leave their home in a sad parade with only what they carry on their backs.

She pleads daily with Francis, but sometimes her words are not argumentative but loving words. “Francis, you are all that I love, you and our family. But now, at this time, I must do this alone and be left to it. Have faith we will be reunited one day.”

But the croup, a cough that racks her body so terribly that it leaves her in pain, interrupts her dreams and nightmares; the keys rattle and the door creaks open and in come the dogs of the court to again shackle her, to take her to yet another humiliation.

Gatter makes his falsetto apologies that are as meaningless as those from Herrick and his men, all of whom treat her with deference. Some think her deserving of respect, while most think her out of her mind.

Herrick reads from a list. The names of each prisoner to be shackled, hand and foot.

“Oh, it’s a vacation,” jokes Wardwell, one of today’s chosen. “Stay close by my side, Mother Nurse.”

Each is led out into the blinding light and led into the prisoner cart, a horrid little rolling cell that tells anyone looking on that those inside are guilty.

Meanwhile more arrests are made daily as the madness in the village grows like a cancer, spreading out, seeking more victims like some sort of satanic root that touches them all. Each person arrested as a witch or wizard is made to implicate others, the disease metastasizes.

# # # # #

June 11th 1692

Francis Nurse cornered Jeremy in the barn. Alone, the old man spoke his mind. “I fear I can no longer control the men, especially Ben and Tarbell, Jeremy. Not since this execution yesterday of that innkeeper, Bridget Bishop.”

“Bishop was executed?”

“Aye, yesterday, the 10th day of June. Some say to test the taste of the public for blood. Otherwise, why hang only one of the recalcitrant guilty as they call those who refuse to indict others and to confess the sin of witchcraft and murder?”

“I’d heard they meant to hang her but—”

“Bishop never broke.”

“—but I didn’t think they’d go through with it. May God have mercy on her soul, and God forgive me for saying so, Francis—it could work in Mother Nurse’s favor.”

“Work in our favor? How?”

“I’ve seen this sort of hysteria to hang witches break out in other parishes, in particular during my time in Connecticut, where the fear from pagan Indians runs even higher than here.”

“What’re you saying, son?”

The old man had taken to calling him son since his and Serena’s return with a wedding band on his daughter’s hand. He’d also expressed sadness that there’d been no proper wedding and party. “Rebecca would have loved to see it, sure,” he’d finished on the day of their return from Boston.

“Often with a witch hung, the bloodlust of the mob is quenched.”

“We can only hope.”

“But as to Ben and Tarbell, I doubt they’d listen to me any more than they’re hearing you, these days, sir.” Jeremy groomed Dancer as they spoke.

“I want you to take Mather up on that land in Connecticut, Jeremy, and to take Serena away from here—out of harm’s way. And do so quickly before . . . before either of you are called out by those awful children.”

“Parris’ puppets, yes. I couldn’t agree with you more, sir.”

“Then will you do it? She’s sure to be the next accused, if not Ben.”

“I want desperately to find a new life for Serena and myself.”

“Then we’re in agreement?”

“We are, up to a point.”

“Up to a point?”

“Serena must come to the same conclusion. If I try to force her, she’ll fight me on it. Sir, not to change the subject, but something nags at me to return to Boston for a talk with—”

“Boston? Talk with whom? Who is left to take our petition to?”

“No one, I’m afraid, but I saw Parris’ Barbados woman in the jail there, and I believe she has a story in her that may bring Samuel Parris down so far that no one here will ever be influenced by him again.”

“Whatever are you talking about? Tituba? What can she possibly—”

“I have no solid proof, but I believe she had a child by Parris.”

“A child? A bastard child?”

“In Barbados, yes—and to protect his good name and reputation, and that of his wife, this child was disposed of.”

“Disposed of how?”

“I suspect in the worst way.”

“You can’t mean killed?”

“Shortly after birth the baby expires or was given away. As for the mother, Tituba, she never once saw the child—alive or dead.”

Serena had been listening at the barn door, and now she said, “That snake of a man! He concocted the entire scenario for how the Putnams’ children died based on a murder he’d himself committed in Barbados before coming here?”

“It’s a theory I have. Not sure he jammed a needle into the child’s brain or heart, but who knows?” Jeremy went to her and wrapped an arm about her.