It’s the lamp-lighters who find it first. They arrive with their ladders and dousers just before dawn, leaning for a moment against the linden trees that have never quite been the same since the equinox, ragged and twisting.
“Thought I’d gone mad,” one of them tellsThe New Salem Post, several hours later. “Thought my eyes was playing tricks.”
But his eyes are not playing tricks. On the plinth where Saint George once stood, proud and princely, there is now something lumpen and squat, vaguely shameful: a bronze pig, bearing a brand of three circles woven together.
The following afternoon Miss Cleopatra Quinn marches into Beatrice’s office at Salem College and lays three newspapers across the desk. BELOVED STATUE SUFFERS UNCANNY ATTACK, reads one headline. THE WITCHES ARE COMING! declares another.The Defenderoffers the more measured SAINT OR SWINE? AVALONIANS STRIKE A BLOW FOR WITCH-KIND.
“My, my, Miss Eastwood. I wasn’t aware I was fraternizing with such a troublemaker.” Beatrice assures herself that Miss Quinn means nothing in particular by the wordfraternizing.
“It was nothing,” Beatrice murmurs, barely blushing.
“Hardly nothing. You have the whole city’s attention, now.”
They do: the Women’s Christian Union, the Ladies’ Temperance Society, and the New Salem Women’s Association issued a joint letter of condemnation the previous week, and Mr. Gideon Hill is holding rallies each Sunday afternoon. A “modern-day coven,” he calls them, seeking to bewitch young maidens and seduce God-fearing husbands. (Just the reverse, Beatrice thinks, and then spends several minutes shocked at her own wickedness.)
And their numbers are growing. Agnes says they knock at all hours of the day and night: too-young girls run away from home, lost-looking mothers with babies in tow, grandmothers with sly smiles and witch-ways tucked in their pockets.
“Juniper wants another demonstration before the half-moon,” Beatrice says. “I haven’t found anything suitable—just the usual trifling spells to darn socks or shine silver—but Agnes thinks she might have what we need. It comes from that old witch-tale story about a boy who buys an enchanted bean from the Crone. Do you know it? One of the mill-girls told Agnes a rhyme that went with the story . . .”
But Beatrice trails away because Quinn isn’t listening. She’s looking out the window with her brow knit. “I hope you and your sisters know what you’re doing. I hope you understand that this kind of trouble”—she nods out to the square, where city workers are even now gathered around Saint George’s plinth, scratching their heads over the problem of relocating several possibly accursed tons of bronze pig—“demands a response.”
“From who?”
“The law. The Church. Every man whose wife looks at him sideways, not quite laughing, picturing him as a pig instead of a man. Every man who has ever wronged a woman, which is just about every man.” Her voice is tense, her arms folded. Beatrice doesn’t think she’s ever seen Quinn look worried.
“Well,” Beatrice says with forced cheer. “That’s why we’re looking for the Lost Way, isn’t it? Here are the materials we requested last week.” She gestures to the teetering stack of crates behind her desk.
Quinn turns away from the window, the worry banished by a childish eagerness. “The Old Salem papers?”
It was Quinn who connected Old Salem with the Lost Way. She was skimming through an antique book of nursery rhymes when a scrap of paper slid from the pages. It seemed to be the end of a much longer letter, just a few precious lines:
is true. What was lost has been found. Even the stars are not the stars I knew as a girl. Come soonest, my love. If we burn, let us burn together,
S. Good
October 10, 1783
Salem
Beneath the signature were three circles looped together, dotted with ink-drops that might have been eyes.
Quinn showed it to Beatrice and she felt a great wave move through her as she looked at it, an electric thrill that ran from her spine to her scalp. This was not a myth or a children’s story; this was ink-and-cotton proof that the Eastwoods were not the first wayward sisters to call the tower and its strange constellations.
She met Quinn’s eyes and found them molten gold. “October tenth. Mere weeks before Old Salem fell.”
Beatrice wished she shared Juniper’s talent for profanity. She settled for a hoarse, insufficient “Ohmy.”
Old Salem, where witching rose again in the New World, despite centuries of shackles and stakes. Where Tituba and Osborne and Good and the rest of them had worked their wonders and terrors, walking the streets with black beasts at their heels. Where men feared to tread and women feared nothing at all.
Until the honorable Judge Geoffrey Hawthorn arrived with his troop of Inquisitors. Legally speaking, they ought to have announced themselves and made their arrests, separated the sinners from the sheep, held lengthy trials, and permitted each witch to confess her sins as she was bound to the stake. Hawthorn felt it would be more efficient to skip to the end. He and his men came in the night, silent except for the snap of lit torches.
The city burned for days, along with every woman and child and unlucky cat inside it. The papers reported ash falling as far away as Philadelphia, where children played in the drifts, like snow.
Now Old Salem is nothing but a black blight a hundred miles north, occupied by crows and foxes and black trees. Sightseers still trickle through, Beatrice has heard, paying a nickel each for haunted carriage rides through the ruins.
Beatrice looks again at the stacked crates, which comprise the College’s entire collection of documents relating to Old Salem, and which Mr. Blackwell provided with only the slightest raising of his eyebrows and a mild “For the Hawthorn manuscript, I presume?” Beatrice made a gesture that might have been a nod.
None of it is properly transcribed or annotated, most of it is charred or scorched or merely unutterably dull, but somewhere between all the ledgers and receipts and housewives’ cookbooks there might—might—be the words and ways that lead them to that rose-eaten tower.
