“Why did they start the fire, Mama?” Jane had asked.
“It was me they were trying to kill.”
“But why?” she asked. “Why would they want to burn you up?”
“Fear is a funny thing,” her mother said.
“Why are they afraid of you?”
“People fear anything different, anything they don’t understand.”
Jane knew this to be true, even at a young age.
Her mama had a gift, but not everyone saw it that way. It was funny, though—even the people who spoke ill of her, called her a witch and the devil’s bride, they’d come sneaking out to the bog, asking Mama for love charms, healing spells, asking her to tell them their future or looking for a message from a spirit who had passed. People were afraid of her mother, but they also depended on her, sought her out in times of need (though they would never admit this out loud).
Jane herself had been ridiculed, called the devil’s daughter. She’d been held down in the schoolyard, stuck with pins to see if she would bleed. Jane had none of her mother’s powers. The spirits did not speak to her. She did not see signs of what was to come in tea leaves at the bottom of the cup. She longed for the voices, the signs, but they did not come. What she did have, what she held on to fiercely, was fury. Fury that she had not been born special like her mama. Fury at the way she and her mother were treated. Fury at what the people in town had done to her grandmother.
All her life, she carried a box of matches in her pocket, waiting.
Earlier that morning, when the children had circled her in the yard outside the school, Lucy Bishkoff had pulled up her dress and pulled down her underthings to see if she bore the mark of the devil on her skin. Jane felt something breaking inside. A dam letting go, her fury pouring through, overtaking her. And then, for the first time in her life, she heard a voice, loud and clear: not the voice of a spirit, but the voice of her own rage.Punish them,it said.Punish them all.
When everyone was still outside, she went into the schoolhouse, snuck back to the supply cupboard, made a nest of crumpled paper, lit the edges with a match. Then she went back out and waited. Once everyone was inside, sitting down for lessons, she used the strongest branch she could find to bar the door.
Crouching in the root cellar hours later, her heartbeat pounding in her ears, she smelled the smoke on her clothing. Heard the screams of the children. They screamed and screamed and screamed in her mind. But she told herself they deserved what they got. The whole town deserved to be punished.
She waited in the dark root cellar, listening to the echoes of the screams, waiting. But Mama did not come for her.
Eventually, she grew tired of waiting; her legs had turned to pins and needles and she was cold all over. She cracked open the door, stepped outside, the afternoon sun blinding. She staggered, squinting like a mole-girl, and moved toward home, willing herself to be slow and cautious. Where was Mama?
When she got to the bog, she saw that what was left of their little house was smoldering. Gone. All gone. There was a crowd gathered at the opposite end of the bog, by the big white pine. She moved closer, stealthily, and saw what they were all looking at.
. . .
At first, when she ran away from Hartsboro as a girl of twelve, she didn’t know who she was without Mama.
She’d spent her whole life being Jane Breckenridge—daughter of Hattie, the witch of the bog, the most powerful woman in the county.
Then she was a no one. A street urchin with no last name.Smith,she said when she had to make one up.I’m Jane Smith. I come from downstate. By the Massachusetts border. My parents, they died when I was a baby and I was raised by an aunt, then she died. Now I’ve got no one.
People take pity on you when you are young and pretty and have a sad story to tell. People are drawn to sorrow.
She was taken in by a kind Baptist family in Lewisburg—the Millers. They had a large farm outside of town. Jane learned to rise in the dark hours before dawn to milk the cows, gather eggs from the hens, collect wood for the old cookstove in the kitchen. She went to church and prayed, read the Bible each night. Learned to fit in. To be someone else.
And now, now Jane was a married woman with children of her own. Her son, Mark, he was a good boy. At eleven, he looked more and more like his father every day. He took after him, too—did well in school, was strong and well-liked. But her girl child, Ann, Jane worried for her.
And, if the truth be told, Jane was actually frightened of her.
The girlknewthings. Things no six-year-old should know. Things that she said her toys and dolls told her. She had a favorite doll that she was always whispering to. It was a doll Ann had made herself from rags and scraps from her mother’s sewing basket—she loved to sew, Jane’s girl. The doll was a funny-looking thing: a patchwork of colors with a pale face, an embroidered mouth like a red flower petal, and two black button eyes. Her hair was a tangle of black yarn braided together.
“What’s your dolly’s name?” she’d asked Ann, not long after she’d made her.
“She’s Hattie,” Ann said.
Jane stepped back, clapped a hand over her mouth to keep from screaming. Ann giggled, thought Jane was laughing, too. “It’s a silly name, isn’t it?” she said, grinning. “It must mean she likes hats!”
Jane had never told her about her grandmother. About her real name or where she’d come from. No one living knew the truth about Jane.
“Hattie says hello,” her little girl told her. “She says she knows you.”
