Tarbell and the others followed. Ben finally rushed to catch up.

“This way!” Jeremy pointed. “Safest retreat! Follow my lead.” He’d taken Serena by the hand, guiding her off into the night.

Serena looked back at her mother, a sense of guilt and confusion threatening to overwhelm her. “Don’t look back, Serena.” Jeremy tugged her onward thinking of the biblical story of Lot and his wife.

They were followed by Ben and Tarbell, and soon searching again for Joseph who’d been elected to stay with the horse and wagon to keep close watch there and to keep the animal calm. They had emptied out the jail, but they’d failed in their objective—to free Mother Nurse.

No one made another sound save their footfalls as they made their way back to the hidden wagon and Joseph.

By now the men who’d arrived with the new prisoners were reviving Weed Gatter, and his deputy, Fiske, and Gatter could be heard moaning and cursing and assessing the damage and losses at the jail. The words ‘bloody hell’ wafted up to their ears, and Jeremy thought he heard Fiske cursing something about being set upon by a covenant of powerful witches.

When they relocated Joseph, and he saw that they’d returned without his mother, he went a little crazy until Tarbell and Ben sat on him and calmed him to a chorus of his shouting, “I knew I should’ve gone!”

Jeremy shushed them as men were beating the bushes now in search of the escapees, and they were getting near.

The Nurse clan and Jeremy climbed onto the wagon and quietly, sadly the group made its way back toward Francis’s home. “How’re we going to tell the old man?” Ben wanted to know.

Serena didn’t miss a beat. “We tell him the truth.”

“What, that you botched the whole of it?” asked Joseph.

“Look here, Joseph!” shouted Serena. “You weren’t there, so ya dunno what you’re talking about.”

“Yeah, you’re off the hook,” added Ben. “Ya know nothing of it!”

“Joseph,” began Jeremy, his heart filled with sympathy for them all. “Somehow your mother sees this ordeal as giving meaning to her death.” This made the others look at Jeremy. He shrugged and gave them a look that loudly said—well it’s true. “Mother Nurse knows she’s dying—has since the beginning of this sordid affair.”

“What’re you saying. Wakely?” asked Tarbell as the wagon rolled on, striking a rock but not slowing.

“I’m saying, she thought she might die last winter. She believes—”

“That God saved her for this trial before sending the Reaper.” Serena squeezed Jeremy’s arm where they sat in the rear of the wagon. “I suppose in some way that . . . she has no choice.”

The wagon moved on. Not long after, they heard horses coming in their wake, night riders eating their dust as if after them here on the road. Men with torches and guns suddenly raised up all around them in the darkness, and their leader, Sheriff Herrick, shouted, “You aboard! Pull to and stop!”

Joseph, driving the team, had no choice. Ben’s fingers were on the hidden weapons. Serena held tight to Jeremy’s arm, and Tarbell stood up in the wagon and shouted, “That you, Sheriff? What’s the trouble?”

“Tarbell?”

“Aye, ’tis me and some of my family.”

“And have you come from the jailhouse in the village now?”

Some of the others on horseback grumbled and made remarks, wondering why Herrick wasn’t simply throwing them in irons. But Herrick quelled them with a single blast of his rifle skyward, startling men and beasts. Joseph had to quell the jittery team, getting down from his seat to do so.

Herrick asked of the people in the wagon, “Why’re you out past the court’s curfew, all of you?”

“Curfew?” asked Tarbell.

“Aye, curefew, man!”

“But I don’t think it applies beyond the boundaries of the village, Mr. Herrick,” Jeremy countered.

“Who is that, speaking?” It was Thomas Putnam in his uniform still.

“Why it’s Jeremiah Wakely,” said Bray Wilkins beside Putnam. “That imposter priest. He’s behind this matter at the jailhouse!”

“What matter at the jailhouse?” asked Tarbell. “We know of no such matter?”

“Where’re ya coming from, then?” demanded Putnam, holding a gun on them.

“We’ve just come from the family plot to pay respects to the dead. Went there a bit late but it was on the spur, ya see.”

“Family plot?” asked Herrick.

“Take them under suspicion!” shouted Putnam at Herrick.

“Hold on, all of you! This is a civil matter, and I am in charge, not the militia. So you’ll not be taking orders from Mr. Putnam, not tonight, not here and not now.”

This only calmed the men somewhat. Jeremy could literally feel their enmity and venom as if in waves passing over everyone in the wagon, and he worried terribly for Serena, and he was angry with himself for allowing her out with them. So far, she was being taken for a man and being smart enough to keep silent.

“Okay, I want you men to sound off, and Nigel here will take your names, and if we need speak to you by light of the sun, we’ll come find you then. Now sound off!”

“John Tarbell!”

“Ben Nurse!”

“Joseph Nurse!”

“You know me,” said Jeremy.

Serena cleared her throat and sent up a coughing jag, to which Jeremy said, “Young Killean Wakely, my half brother visiting from Woburn.”

“Put him down, too,” ordered Herrick.

“We only stopped at the cemetery plot,” said Ben. “We’re returning from John’s home to my father’s place.”

“Coming from a birthing party!” added Joseph, returning to the reins and his seat beside John. “Tarbell’s done fathered another one again—or haven’t ye heard?” He slapped Tarbell on the back and the two laughed good-naturedly. “Makes four, right, John?”

Tarbell spoke with a drunken slur. “Plenty of Canary wine!”

“So you mean fellows had naught to do with breaking out prisoners down at the jail?”

“A jailbreak? Tonight?” Ben sounded amazed at the notion.

“You may search our wagon, but you’ll find naught but a few jugs of whiskey,” Joseph added.

“Gotta keep Tarbell happy the way you do a bear!” Ben joked.

When the night riders didn’t laugh with Ben, he shouted, “All right then, do you see any prisoners here? Go ahead, search the wagon! We’ll get down and you can have at it.” Ben leapt off and onto the dirt path.

“If we were to break anyone from jail, it’d be our dear, sainted Mother,” Joseph added. “Do you see Mother Nurse here?”

“Fact is,” replied Herrick, giving the wagon and its occupants a cursory look, “your mother was one of a few who didn’t escape the jail.”

Jeremy had noticed a number of prisoners too sick or too depleted to stand much less run from the jail. He spoke up. “If we’d had any notion there’d been a jailbreak ahhh . . . do you need men to help you, sir?”

The men with Herrick grumbled at this, and there was a brief discussion before Herrick returned with, “We’ve enough men, but thanks for the offer, Mr. Wakely.”

Jeremy and the others instinctively knew the others did not trust them. “Well then if you’re satisfied, Sheriff,” said Joseph, “we’ll be on our way.”

Ben, seeing his bluff had worked, leapt back onto the wagon.

“Yes, be off,” said Herrick.. “But when these escapees are caught, if they should point a finger at you Nurse men, you will be arrested for aiding and abetting fugitives, some of whom have been condemned as witches.”

“And good luck to you.” Jeremy waved Herrick and his men off.

The moment Herrick and his men rode out of earshot, Serena whispered, “You’re the consummate liars Ben, Joe! And you, my husband. So I am now your brother?”

“Half brother!”

She lightly thumped him and laughed.

“I’m sorry about your mother, dear heart. Really I am. I’d hoped that faced with our all of us well intentioned children of hers, putting our lives on the chopping block that . . . well she’d change her mind and come with us.”

“My prayer too. Unanswered.”

“You have to admire her determination and faith.”

“I do. Still it saddens me.”

“She’s dying for her faith,” muttered Ben, who’d gone solemn.

“There’re worse things to die for,” Jeremy assured the others.

Serena dropped her head and her weight against him. Jeremy held her close.

“She’s already dead.” It was Ben, still full of self-recriminations at having failed this night.

The rest of the trip home was uneventful and silent. Each of them had gone to their thoughts, and their thoughts were cast in fear.

Chapter Three

July 19th came like a fast wind. Rebecca and the four others to be executed with her stepped from the jail and clambered up the boards laid over the muck by Gatter, boards leading up and into the jail cart. It’d had a former life as an ox cart, but with modifications, the huge, creaking wooden wheels now carried an entire metal cage forged of wrought iron. Flat bars as thick as a man’s arms. Now the Witch Cart as it was called was filled with the five to be sent to heaven or hell depending on what an onlooker believed. The cart seemed to rattle, but this noise came of the shackles around the ankles and wrists of the accused. A new order since the jailbreak was that prisoners be kept in chains at all times.

And so the noisy, rattling of chains filled the air with each turn of the wheels on the cart pulled by two oxen provided by Judge Corwin. The cart bounced over rough terrain and trundled off toward Watch Hill and the gallows—at times looking as if it might tilt completely over. When the cart would teeter on the verge of tilting, Anne Putnam, Mercy Lewis, Mary Wolcott and other girls who’d joined them in accusing so many people of witchcraft would shout and scream that they saw a crowd of other witches—invisible to the general public—trying desperately to knock over the cart to impede its progress and stop the hangings.

To be sure, the villagers had turned out in droves to witness what might happen next; everyone was curious for one reason or the other. Most curious to see if the accused might not at the last break and shout out their guilt and beg for the milk of human kindness and the olive branch offered by the judges and the ministers: that if the guilty but state their crimes and name names of others equally guilty of bewitchments and murder, that they would be spared. That their stone hearts could be melted, and that they could be rehabilitated to the love of Christ and God, and the hatred of the Antichrist.

Many another in the holding cells across the colony had repented, so why not these facing the rope—minutes now away?

Other villagers came in the hope of seeing the witches hung no matter what they confessed. Still others came to see the result of their handiwork—among them Reverend Samuel Parris, while others came to bid loved ones a final adieu even if from a distance, like the proud and upright Nurse family.

The sky, a brilliant, blinding mix of sunshine, blue, and scattered pure white cloud looked down on the falling-apart ox drawn cart. Children chased alongside the jail cart, some throwing clumps of dirt and rocks at the accused within, and a crowd the likes of which Salem had never seen awaited the cart at its destination below Mr. Fiske’s finely wrought gallows with its equally spaced six platforms of which only five would be put to use today.

Suddenly, Sarah Goode raised a fist to them, cursing the children who dared throw rotten eggs and apples and tomatoes at the bars, splattering ugly juices onto the condemned. The celebrated children capable of seeing into the Invisible World of Satan only shouted back, ridiculing Goode and the others in the cart.

Rebecca Nurse knew of the Invisible World only from her reading about it in books—one of them penned by Increase Mather. She believed the notion had a place in every Puritan text. But at no time in the history of Essex County or the Massachusetts Bay Colony had anyone seen into this world—certainly not to the degree and accuracy of determining that an invisible witch held a knitting needle dripping with blood, one that she plunged into children who then fell into a dead faint.

But for now, Rebecca must concentrate on God’s glorious other world—also invisible to men, also taken on faith alone, that place where she was staring at the entire time where she stood in the cart—skyward. She took in the azure expanse of it, and the inviting clouds that seemed to be opening up and beckoning her within. The crowd around her had faded into nothingness.