Page 13 of The Witches of Cambridge

THE FIRST WITCH OF CAMBRIDGE

1692

Dear Reader,

If you have found this letter, you were meant to remember what has been forgotten. When you walk, I walk with you. When you weep, I weep for you. I was born with magic, but my story was not my own until I took it upon myself to tell it. Words will break your heart, but what would you be without them? Writing is the antidote to sorrow, and the first step of magic. I couldn’t allow my story to belong to the men who were convinced that the world belonged to them, speaking with the vocabulary of greed without realizing there was another language, ours, the language of snow and hyacinths, of fields of grass that would hide our footsteps when we fled, the language of women, which is the oldest alphabet of all.

When I was a child, I was a resident of London. Not that I was ever truly young. I wasn’t allowed that luxury due to circumstances and fate. I was poor and female, and that was all people saw. They didn’t notice the light inside me, and when they said I was nothing, I believed them, until one day I suddenly believed in myself.

Before I came to Boston, I had been interned in Bridewell Prison in London, named after a palace, which I can assure you it was not. It was nothing more than a foul pile of bricks set near Tothill Fields, Westminster, in London. I had been my mother’s helper as a laundress, and then a lady’s maid, and finally a criminal when I was judged a thief. The moment you stepped through the entryway of the prison, fleas and lice would attack you, and that was hardly the worst of it. Here in prison, the young were set among the old, the mad with the sane, murderesses slept beside women who had stolen ten pennies’ worth of flour to keep their families fed. The dozen or so women who had been judged to be witches lived in the worst squalor, locked inside iron cages to ensure their magic wouldn’t work, for iron was thought to deter them. I knew from the start that it was better to be sentenced as a thief than it was to be tried for witchery, and so I was quiet about my talents. I bided my time. My mother had always told me to tell the truth, unless the truth would get me killed. In that case I should keep my mouth shut.

Many of the women in prison paid for their crimes by being sent to the colonies to be indentured servants for seven years, working alongside enslaved African people in the fields, sleeping in sheds, and praying for the days to pass quickly. I had decided that I would do whatever I must to have a different sort of life. Take me to the river, and I would swim across, even if I was bound in ropes meant to drag me down. I was born with the will to survive. Anyone would think I was a fool to have faith, considering the life I had known, but I had the gift of divination, and I knew there was another world awaiting me outside Boston.

I was taken to jail after my first master insisted upon giving me his wife’s silver ring, expecting the payment of my body in exchange for his unwanted gift. I refused it, but my master would not take no for an answer, and he insisted I accept it. Right away the ring turned black in my hands, for silver is an element that is changed by people like me. Then he came into my room and slipped his hands beneath my blanket. When he was done with me, I cursed him, then I made certain he would never do to any other girl what he had done to me. When he died from poisoning, the authorities insisted that I was the cause, for hemlock had been found in his cup. They should have taken note of the satisfied expression on his wife’s face, for she was the one who had done away with him. Instead, they dragged me to prison, for I was no one in that world, considered to be worthless property, as young girls often are.

My chance at a new life came when Mistress Maria Mather arrived for a tour of the prison. How I came to Cambridge might seem arbitrary, but I believed it was the fate I made for myself. The Mathers had journeyed to London so that the master could argue for help for the crown colony of Massachusetts and to ask for a charter for Harvard College, where he had been named president in 1685 and would remain so until 1692, the first man in the colonies to be awarded a doctorate of divinity and of sacred theology. One of Increase Mather’s goals was to be rid of their current governor, whom he thought far too liberal. In that he was successful, as he was in all other things. The king allowed Reverend Mather his choice of a new governor so that Puritan values would be upheld, a moral and religious earnestness in which there was no room for other beliefs and practices. The master’s friend Mr. Phips was given the honor of becoming governor, a position that, in the end, would cause him nothing but grief.

My mistress had journeyed from Massachusetts with her husband, and rather than sit in her room and drink tea, she attempted to see what good she could do in our city. I knew right away that she was a woman of noble intentions, one who placed others above herself.

“Please wait,” I begged when she walked by me on that day. Fate had come to me, and I was ready for it. If you don’t grab it, it will walk right past you. “You’ll never find a truer servant if you take me with you,” I called after her.

If she paid a small sum to the prison, she could take me on as an indentured servant. The prison would be happy to be rid of me, since I talked back on behalf of myself and any other woman who was being mistreated. Mistress Mather might have kept on walking, but when she looked at me, our fate was sealed. I thought it was likely that I reminded her of herself when she was younger, when her parents agreed that she should marry her stepbrother, the man who forced her to renounce her truest self, who loved her yet never allowed her to be who she really was. Later, she told me I resembled an angel in the Bible she kept by her bedside, and that was what caused her to gaze upon me with such interest and compassion. The matron had clipped my red hair down to my scalp when I first entered Bridewell, saying it was the devil’s color. I wore a white gown, as did all the inmates, one so thin my teeth chattered. I looked forlorn and lost, but I wasn’t. I was waiting for an opportunity to show who I was.

During Mistress Mather’s visit, a madwoman rushed out of a corner when she spied our esteemed guest. She unexpectedly grabbed our visitor by the throat, driven by her own reckless imaginings, wanting to hurt someone as badly as she herself had been wounded. I was the one who pulled off the attacker, and I kept the assailant restrained by sitting on her, pinning her to the floor as I ignored the rats nearby. Angels do what they must, as do women who have no choice but to make their way through the sorrows of the world.

Mistress Mather brought me to their lodgings and begged her husband to allow her to take me in. I could see he didn’t want me near by the way he looked at me; he was repulsed by my shorn hair and my filthy hands, but he didn’t deny his wife her request. Whatever his flaws, he loved his wife, even though his career and his reputation always came first. His name, Increase, was a translation of Yosef, Joseph in the Bible, and although he and my mistress were not related by blood, they had grown up together and had always believed they were two halves of the same soul. I was well aware that the Reverend wished he could toss me out the door and watch me disappear into the streets of London, but there was no way to get rid of me now. I had saved Mistress Mather, and she would do nothing less than save me in return.

I had already begun to realize that despite our circumstances, my mistress and I were not so different from one another. We both had secrets. Most people do, but we shared a single trait that could cause us to have our lives taken from us should anyone discover what we were. I realized this the first night, when she pricked her finger on a spindle. The drop of blood that fell was black, the same strange color as my own. My mother had told me that there were scores of women who studied the Nameless Art and could heal with herbs and potion and tonics, but that we were different. Magic ran through us, it was in our bloodline, something we could never deny.

On my first night of freedom, Mistress Mather quickly tied a cloth around her hand so that no one would see what she was. All the same, I understood that even though her name was Mather, she was no different than me.

We were the women they wanted to burn.

I accompanied the Mathers on their voyage across the Atlantic when they returned from London. There was a widespread fear of witches among sailors, who believed ships could be bewitched, for they lived a world where anything seemed possible. There were all manner of astounding creatures in the ocean, each one a rare and unusual miracle. Whales and sharks swam by us as if our ship was nothing more than a speck of dust set upon the ocean. Great jellyfish that appeared to contain all the world within their many arms and legs glowed green in the darkness of the night. There were seas of plankton, forests that grew upside down. I sat on the deck and watched the endless waves and knew how fortunate I was that Mistress Mather had rescued me. I would always be grateful to her, and after that voyage, I have always been beside her when she was in need. I have helped her in her times of illness, administering the Eight Herbs Charm, a mixture of nettle, chamomile, thyme, fennel, lavender, rosemary, ginger, and apple boiled in water and ashes, to protect from illness and toxins. I have been more of a daughter to her than her own daughters, but there is one difference between us, a philosophy I learned during the time of my incarceration. She had decided to hide who she truly was and to always place her husband first, and I had already learned I must trust myself above all others. Even then, I was yearning for a time and place when no one could tell me who I could be.