Page 48 of The Witches of Cambridge

THE FIRST WITCH OF CAMBRIDGE

1695

Dear Reader,

I hear the wolves howl at night, but I’m more fearful of the men who hunt us than I am of any wild animal. Without my beloved Amadis, there was no one to protect us from witch-hunters. This is why I take precautions, and why a hedge of brambles surrounds my property. Turn right at the river, walk past the elm trees, make your way through the tall stalks of grass that reach your waist, continue on through the darkness, wear black so that no one will notice you. And still, it is not always possible to avoid those who fear women such as us. There were times when a witch-hunter managed to find us, even here in Cambridge, and when he did there was nowhere to hide. It happened to a girl of fifteen named Cora Bell, who was hanged on the Common on Midsummer Eve. Cora had been walking home with her younger sister, Amelia, who was not quite thirteen. They appeared to be quite plain, simply two ordinary girls wearing black dresses and red boots, their pale hair braided. Cora already knew she must be careful not to be too beautiful, too suspect, too obvious, too much herself. She had an eleventh finger, so she wore knitted gloves when she went into town. Even in Cambridge we understood that we must be ready to fly away as the birds do and look down from above. We perch in trees, we walk in the marsh and the fields, we light bonfires. We are made of air, water, earth, and fire, and we always have been.

The girls’ mother, Suzanne, was a Scottish baker, and Cora’s job was to pull a handcart and deliver bread, with Amelia sometimes accompanying her. That was when the witch-hunter spied them, crossing the Common, accompanied by the black bird that was always with Cora, a fledgling thrown from its nest that she had nursed back to health. It was a hot August evening, and the girls were singing an old song that was often a farewell, in this life or the next.

So fill to me the parting glass

And drink a health whate’er befall

Then gently rise and softly call

Good night and joy be to you all.

Tom Boyle, a witch-hunter, came up behind them. He grabbed Amelia and tore off her clothing, doing as he pleased, even after the crow began to attack him. Cora came up behind him and hit him with a sharp rock so that he let go, pawing at his bleeding skull. Cora had let out an urgent shout for her sister to run, which she did; she ran so fast she was flying, she ran until it was impossible to tell if she was a crow herself.

Once Tom Boyle had what he wanted of Cora, he hanged her, to ensure that she couldn’t make a claim against him. The other girl had disappeared, but who would ever believe her if she accused him of wrongdoing? Still, the crow kept at the witch-hunter, striking at his face until Boyle was covered with his own blood. He hurried to the constable to report an act of witchcraft. Look at the proof, he declared. He held his eye in his hand, plucked out by the devil himself disguised as a crow. Look at my face! he cried, pockmarked and ravaged and bloody, with an empty eye socket.

Cora’s crow refused to leave the tree where she had been hanged. His plumage turned snow white as he mourned her. He had no water and nothing to eat; still, he never left. We wept and had the funeral in the old cemetery, the one wolves are said to inhabit at night. Let there be wolves. We had no fear of them. Let there be payment for what had been done in the name of false civility and judgment. Women belong to us, the lawmakers had decided. Your body, our choice, they said. Cambridge had been our heaven, but it was not any longer, not unless we reclaimed it for ourselves. The constable’s men came after the bird, for farmers in Cambridge said he was bad luck. They did their best to trap him in a net or shoot him with their rifles, but they never could manage to be rid of him, and eventually they let the elusive creature be. Don’t walk past the elm tree, fathers told their sons. Don’t look for evil, lest it come searching for you.

I saw the fellow who took credit for the girl’s hanging. I came upon him at the blacksmith’s, a bandanna wrapped around his head to cover the space where his left eye had been. He’d gone from town to town searching out women who were said to have powers, midwives and healers, old women who did nothing more than spin wool, and young women who were too beautiful to be trusted by their neighbors. It was our bad fortune that he’d made Cambridge his home. No one had hired him. Since he’d lost his eye, no one opened their doors to him anymore. We don’t want to be nearby when the witches take revenge, that’s what they said to one another. We laughed when we heard that. Banish us from the garden, drown us a thousand times over, we will still be the thousand branches on a single tree.

“Don’t look at me, girl,” Tom Boyle said when we crossed paths at the blacksmith’s shop. He called me that even though I was more than twenty-five and hardly a girl. I hadn’t been a girl since the year I turned ten, when they murdered my mother because she was poor and unwed and wore red boots and had amulets pinned inside her dress. I continued observing the witch-hunter despite his order, and at last he stalked away, muttering that I would get what I deserved. I was glad he couldn’t divine that I had carried a daughter within me.

“The poor fool was attacked by a monstrous bird for no reason,” the blacksmith said. “He found his eye in the grass, but when he tried to shove it back in place, it wouldn’t stay. Now he carries it about in a tobacco tin.”

The witch-hunter was uneducated and poor, yet he rode a fine black horse, one I recognized from the Mathers’ stable. He had clearly been hired and bailed out of prison by my mistress’s son Cotton, and now there he was, waiting for me on the corner of Brattle Street, his hat pulled down, a scowl on his face. He hadn’t liked the way I stared at him, and now he came too close to my horse, the bay named Duke that had also belonged to my mistress, the fastest horse I’d ever known, and the most sensitive. I could tell that being near this beastly man caused Duke worry, for when the witch-hunter approached, my horse reared up, as if the devil had appeared. Tom Boyle stood between me and my horse, so I had little choice but to listen to what he had to say, even though I knew only a fool thinks he can replace his eye and he will see again. It was a fool who took a horse from Cotton Mather and imagined that the price to pay for it wouldn’t be steep.

“I see you have the Mathers’ horse,” I said.

“You seem interested in matters that shouldn’t concern a woman,” he commented as he studied me. Clearly, he was looking for the signs of a witch. Red hair, black eyes, red boots, a mole, a black cloak. People said these were the telltale marks, but that was a lie. We could look like any woman, your mother, your sister, your aunt. We could wear gray, braid our pale hair, we could go to church, work for a baker, clean your house. I didn’t have to study Tom Boyle to know who he was, a ruthless individual, the sort of canny and untrustworthy man who imagined that his power over a woman would be a cure for his powerlessness in the world. I’d known many such men when I was a girl in London, ones who thought a woman would never have the nerve to go against them. That wasn’t the sort of woman I was. I passed him by and said, “Excuse me.”

That’s what I said, but it wasn’t what I meant. I meant You had best be careful. I meant I know exactly what you’ve done. From the look on his face, Boyle understood what I’d left unsaid, and he let me pass. As I did, I reached into his jacket; I did so quickly, as if it hadn’t happened, but it had. I’d gotten what I wanted. I knew that certain tokens were powerful magic. Now whatever he’d once had was mine.

I was already seated on my horse when he realized the tin had been slipped from his pocket by nimble fingers. I had been a pickpocket in London for a time, and I was good at it. I had his eye with me, and he could yell and shout all he wanted, it was mine now. His luck turned after that, from bad to worse, and I can’t say I felt any regret. The women of Cambridge lit a bonfire on my property, not far from my garden. That was when we noticed that the girl’s mother, Suzanne Bell, was missing. Her bakery was shuttered, and there was no smoke circling up from the chimney. We never again saw her alive.

They say witches cannot drown, but that isn’t the whole truth. The murdered girl’s mother was found lifeless in the shallows of the Charles River. The constable’s men fished her out and left her there on the bank. She had placed stones in her boots, to ensure that she would sink to the bottom. There were stones in the lining of her coat as well, and several were clutched in her hands. Amelia would no longer have anything to do with us; she disappeared into the woods, where she built a ragtag shelter from sticks and stones. We buried Suzanne beside her older daughter, and still there were those who said they glimpsed her spirit walking by the river on cool evenings. They said she would walk there forever, for although she’d joined one daughter in death, she carried the guilt of leaving her other daughter on her own.

Amelia was pale and grew paler. Her hair had turned stark white. This is how it feels to be broken and still go on. She slept in the trees, until she managed to build a rustic shed of hazel wood and black stones that she painted with tar—a place that everyone called Lilith House. When she wasn’t able to seize fish with her bare hands, she turned to snaring eels, snagged in a net made from her stockings. She ate her catch without bothering to cook it, and perhaps that was why her eyes turned as black as the stones she collected. In summer, she picked cherries from the wild cherry trees, so that her mouth was always red, which made her teeth appear even sharper and whiter. She grew up to be a woman who could take care of herself.

It became clear that Amelia would also have a child of her own. No one spoke of who the father might be. But some people said he was a man on his way out west, someone she didn’t run the risk of falling in love with, while others said it was a witch-hunter she’d done away with.

I wasn’t surprised when it was said there was darkness within Amelia Bell. She had chosen to walk the Crooked Path, defying established rules, magic or not, choosing the left hand over the right. Amelia was just a young woman, one who still heard her sister’s voice telling her to run, one who whispered the old song she and Cora had been singing that night, turning it into a lullaby. I went up the hidden footpath to her house. I had brought apples and bread to leave outside her door, but when I knocked, she never answered. The only time I saw her was when I spied her in the soft falling dark of evening, building bonfires stick by stick, trying and failing to melt a heart that had already turned to ice.