Page 28 of The Witches of Cambridge

We were on Gallows Hill, and from here it was possible to spy the sea. I wondered what the land had looked like before the Puritans had come to settle, before they turned forests into fields, and men and women into ashes. They seemed convinced they were doing God’s bidding, but who could truly believe it was the Almighty’s wish to have a rope strung around the neck of one of his ministers? They say that witches cannot recite the Lord’s Prayer, but Burroughs did so easily, and when he did, people in the crowd began to whisper. There was a flicker of doubt all around, and I saw Increase Mather grow pale.

“Let him walk away,” my mistress said to her husband. “He is a minister in God’s service. Stop this now.”

Reverend Mather would not grant his wife’s request. “It’s been decided,” he said, as if the trial were a river whose course he could not change. Some men who appear to be strong are weak deep inside, and he was one of those. “I’d do no different if I were the judge.”

The case had been determined upon spectral evidence—nothing more than the claims of neighbors, stories of cows that could talk and girls who saw imps in the hedges and signs from the devil in their morning porridge. This was the sort of proof the Reverend had approved, at least for now. I spied acres of rye below the hills, and I knew what could result from such damp weather; the rye would rot and be covered with purple-black growths. Once eaten, the rot would make people see things that weren’t there, an invisible world created in their own minds, a fantasy used to send people to their deaths.

I kept my eyes downcast when they hanged George Burroughs. Daisies were growing up through the grass, and I saw there was still beauty in this world despite the evil that men did, and I put my hands over my ears when the crowd began to cheer. They say that witches are foul, that we steal children and enchant men, but we do not murder the innocent, and we do not applaud what is wicked in the world.

Later that night, I heard the servants gossiping in the kitchen. They said there were witches everywhere, and if a hundred hangings were to follow it still would not be enough. They looked at me when I entered the room, so I was quick to agree with them, even though I believed them to be fools.

“Amen,” I said with great modesty. “The world is filled with incredible things.”

I had gone to the kitchen for an elixir for my mistress; I would make a tea of thorn apple and henbane and willow to treat her inflammation. The servants asked about my mistress. They had seen her shuddering and wondered if she was possessed. That was when I understood that I could do something to change the course of what was happening to the women of this town, something that might bring peace. I needed to give Increase Mather something worth fighting for.

Most Puritan couples slept with wooden boards between them on the bed, but I told the servants not to go into the Mathers’ room, for if they did they would see something God didn’t intend them to see. My mistress and her husband were people who had sexual relations nearly every night. It was quite a scandal, I said. The servants looked at me, ready for more gossip, and more than willing to believe the worst. I’d been to hell, and I remembered how it had begun. It was gossip and nothing more that had caused my mother’s death. I had stood in the crowd, just as I had when George Burroughs was hanged, unable to put a stop to the deeds of cowards who believed in lies. That was why I felt a responsibility to those who were already lost and those whose lives might soon be taken. Perhaps there was something that would cause Increase Mather to fight the battle for us. Let him have just cause.

I lingered in the corridor after leaving the kitchen so that I might overhear the servants’ chatter. “The Reverend’s wife,” the cook said with a tone of fear. “She ate an egg with the shell still on.”

The cook’s serving girl added, “When she took the stairs, she lifted off the ground.”

I had often dreamed of a dark angel who came to the service of those in need, carrying a burning torch that would illuminate the truth. Now I saw that it was my own fate I’d dreamed of. To save the many you sometimes had to sacrifice the few. If my master had something to fight for, he might see to ending the trials. Let them think my mistress was a witch and let my master come to realize how easy it was to indict the innocent.

The next morning I waited for the Reverend to leave his desk at the inn for his daily walk. I followed him past a neglected garden of low bushes filled with thorns; one snagged me, but I did not bleed. I never did. From here, we could spy the sea, so bright it was almost green on this day. My master’s walks were his time to think, and now I would give him something to think about that would provide him the chance to end what the witch-hunters had begun.

“Did you want something?” he said, irritated when I began to follow him. He’d never paid me the least bit of attention. I was nothing but an annoyance, a fly against a windowpane, a stone in his shoe.

“I did,” I said softly. I frightened myself with the depth of my intentions and the darkness inside me. To fight what is foul, one has to see through the dark and not shy away from what is evil in the world.

The cook was fixing breakfast, and she looked out the window to where we stood in an abandoned garden where roses had grown before the witchcraft mania had begun. She pulled the curtain back, all the better to see. She was waiting for something mysterious and unusual to happen, something that might mark me, since I was a stranger and therefore suspect. The slightest thing could be used against you; even something wondrous—a smile, a kiss, a bird fallen from its nest that you saved on a summer’s day—could be seen as evil. My mother’s crime was that she wore red boots. Witches were said to do that, but so did duchesses and queens. I had no power then, but my master had the ability to change things now.

“Shall we walk on?” I dared to say. We would then have privacy so that I could tell him the one thing that might change his tactics.

“If you insist,” he said.

He walked quickly so I might fall behind, but I kept pace with him. I wasn’t about to have him be rid of me. As we continued along the lane, I told him that the staff at the inn were saying that his wife was a witch. One had said she’d been seen rising off the ground.

The Reverend did not speak as I talked to him, but I could see the fear growing inside him. Fear is blue, like ice, but it burns, it burns until it turns white, until it becomes invisible, and even then, it’s still there.

“There is evidence against her,” I said.

“Impossible.” The Reverend’s face appeared chalky. I saw that he loved his wife, as she loved him in return, and that love did not necessarily bend to logic. It struck you like an arrow and then what choice did you have? He’d fallen in love with a woman who would have been jailed had she been anyone else. His wife never practiced her craft. She didn’t even have a witch’s garden; she had given it up for him. “They have no proof that she’s done anything wrong,” the Reverend told me.

“It is impossible,” I said. “And yet impossible things can happen. Isn’t that what your son says every day?”

When we returned to Boston, the Reverend locked himself in his study. When Cotton came to visit, my master said he was too engaged in his writing and could not be disturbed, and he turned his son away. That was the first step. I had faith in my plan, and in myself. I watched Cotton standing at the closed door, and I saw something inside him that was black as night. I was amazed to see that he was in possession of what people in the countryside in England call left-handed magic, or the Crooked Path. It was blood magic, the magic of tragedies and envy, self-importance and greed. I hadn’t known he had it in him, but there it was. His mother’s bloodline ran through him, but like the flower that had bloomed in my hand, it had turned from white to blood-red. I saw it because Cotton Mather dropped his defenses; he was in a fury, and I was glad to be hidden behind a velvet curtain on the day he realized what his father meant to do. He would go against his own son.

This I Declare and Testify, that to take away the life of anyone, meerly because of a Spectre or a Devil, in a Bewitched or Possessed person does accuse them, will bring the Guilt of Innocent Blood on the Land, where such a thing shall be done. Mercy forbid that it should (and I trust that as it had not, it never will be so) in New-England.

Increase Mather denounced spectral evidence and the witch trials, and there were those who said he made clear declarations that without sufficient grounds of conviction to be condemned, he would rather judge a witch as an honest woman than judge an honest woman as a witch. This attitude was meant to save his wife, but in the process, he saved countless others. They were still taking people in Salem into custody, and by the end of the witch trials, nineteen victims would be killed, but in the Reverend’s next sermon, he declared that it was better for a dozen witches to go free than for one innocent person to die. It was the beginning of the end of the witch hunt when Increase Mather delivered his speech at Simon Willard’s Third Church in Boston, advising his congregation to look inward rather than judge their neighbors.

O what makes the difference between the devils in hell and the angels of heaven? he asked those in attendance.

By now, the governor’s wife had also been accused of witchery, and rumors were flying so that no one was safe; many women were too afraid to leave their own houses. Mather and Governor Phips met and discussed the mania in Massachusetts, and they proclaimed that spectral evidence should not be enough to decide a person’s fate. All the same, Phips was done with the province of Massachusetts. I heard him say that the day he left London was the cause of his continuing misfortune, and I suppose he was right, at least for him. Cotton came one night soon after his father’s sermon, and I could hear the men quarreling. They were father and son, and Increase Mather would not go against Cotton publicly, but they no longer agreed, and without his father’s backing, Cotton Mather would not have the power he had previously wielded. I could feel the darkness within him even when I wasn’t in the same room; a door and a lock and key couldn’t protect you from someone like that. He had the worst traits of mortals stitched to the blackest magic. His soul was divided, and that division left him encased in rage. He hid it well until you saw it, and then it didn’t matter how handsome he was, or how educated. You could see he was a monster.

“Do they have nothing better to do than argue?” Miss May asked me, worried about her husband and son.

I knew the answer, though I didn’t say it aloud.

What men don’t understand they will seek to destroy.

I worked for my mistress for two years, all the while devising my plan to run away and start life anew. When I went to her to tell her of my intentions, she wasn’t the least bit surprised. Mistress Mather handed me a purse filled with silver coins and told me she would miss me as if I had been her own daughter. She and her husband had ten children together, none of whom had any idea what she’d given up to marry the Reverend. She had confided that she’d relinquished her magic by the use of an ancient charm, and that although she had regrets, she had made her decision because she knew her husband would never accept that part of her.

They say witches can’t cry, but they’re wrong, for we cried together on that day. I went to the dock and crossed the river by ferry. I wore a black cloak and carried my belongings in a leather satchel. On the other side, I made my way along the marshes, passing Harvard College, riding through the Common where sheep were set loose to feed on the tall grass. The world was dark, spinning in the sky. I would think of all the women who had been hanged, and the ones who would now be set free. Someday I would have a shoemaker make me a pair of red boots, and I would wear them every day to honor my mother and the women who were judged by men like my master’s son, men who saw evil where there was none, who took it upon themselves to translate the words of God into a language that suited them.

I chose a new name for myself: Rose for the blooms that turned from white to red in my hands, Bridewell so that I’d always remember the prison from which I’d escaped. I taught myself to write so I could give evidence to those who followed me, and every word was meant for the women in my family. You have found me after all this time for a reason. If you don’t know your history, you have no way to change what your fate might be. If you don’t know who you are you can never save yourself or those you love. You can never walk through the darkness unafraid.

I bought acreage with my mistress’s silver. I was forced to use another name when I did so. I called myself Rob Bridewell, and I dressed like a man when I signed the papers, for women were not allowed to own property. That was the reason I let other women settle here, no matter their financial situation.

We are the women descended not from Eve but from Lilith, Adam’s first wife, the woman Adam had cast into the wilderness because she would not do his bidding. She was his equal, created from the same dust as he and not from his rib, and so she possessed a will of her own. Lilith’s name means night bird, but the Puritans are convinced it refers to a night witch, the bat woman who is a dark-eyed thief that can enter their houses and enchant them. The men who hunt us tell themselves they must. They say they do so because women are weak and must be herded like sheep. They write the laws and enforce them no matter the cost, yet thoughts of us terrify them in the middle of the night, waking them from their trivial dreams, in which they are the heroes of their own small lives.

We are the life-givers and the death-givers, we raise children and create the world, yet they call us witches. Even when the trials ended, the judges were replaced by gangs of men who vainly searched for us with ropes in their hands. They say we need to be punished for hurricanes, famine, any sort of pox. When they look at us, they don’t see their own failures as clearly. They lose their land with bad investments, they shoot one another, they fail their own sons, they’re afraid to look in the mirror, and each and every time they blame us. They prefer the girl who ate the apple, the one made from Adam’s own rib, who has been blamed for all of mankind’s evil. Let them call us she-devils, let them say we steal children from their beds. We know who we are. We are the women who nest in trees to gaze at stars, who can never drown. We are one with the earth, we hear its heartbeat when we lie in the grass and close our eyes, magic is all around us, in the snow and the rain. We are descended from a single word, wicken, which means to use magic. That is what is inside of us. Not fear, but hyacinths and reeds, lakes and clouds, everything that we breathe in and all that we breathe out.

More and more women arrived from Boston and Salem to build their homes on my property. They had been cast out of their houses due to the charms they kept by their bedsides, or their gardens filled with nettle and rue, or the children they decided to have when unwedded or not to have at all. They have been accused of many wrongdoings: prophecy, divination, speaking with devils, speaking with angels, using herbs for their own purposes, helping other women who were in need. The land I bought was land no one else wanted. The other women helped me clear out branches and stumps and plant an orchard; in return they could stay as long as they liked. On the night of the full moon, we danced the old dance with steps created at the beginning of time. It joins us to the world around us as we attempt to repair what the first men who came to this country tried to destroy.

It took an entire day to walk the length of my property, and I didn’t use more than I needed. Let there be foxes and turkeys, let there be a thousand blackbirds wheeling across the sky, let there be ripe apples in the fall, and dusty green tomatoes each summer. Let there be blueberries all spring so that the bears could eat their fill, their mouths turning a vivid blue. Women slept in fields, sometimes more than a dozen, dusted with pollen. Some of my neighbors wept for the loss of families who no longer spoke to them, others cursed those who had abandoned them. We were well aware that if we didn’t have each other, we would have no one at all. We told the stories we’d been afraid to speak aloud. We walked past the brambles, and each time we did, we held our hearts in our hands.