Page 62 of The Witches of Cambridge

THE FIRST WITCH OF CAMBRIDGE

1707

Dear Reader,

Eventually, Increase Mather resigned from Harvard, for he would not yield to the school’s demands, refusing to move to Cambridge. He wanted nothing to do with the clay marshes and the murky river and the women in black who gathered on the common land. Soon after, his son the Reverend Cotton Mather, said to be the one to follow in his father’s position, was overlooked when the next president of Harvard was appointed. Cotton Mather immediately announced that he felt the school wasn’t staying true to its Calvinist ideals of Puritanism. Thereafter, he would throw himself into the wilds of Connecticut to create a school that would become Yale, named after the Boston benefactor Elihu Yale, who’d made his money in diamonds from southern India.

What these men might or might not do didn’t matter to me, for Mistress Mather had saved me from prison and given me my new life. When she sent a servant with a note asking me to come see her, I did so that very day, asking no questions and needing no reasons. I hadn’t seen her in the years since my daughter, Hyacinth, was born, though we had sent letters to one another. I avoided the Mather family, for, in truth, I feared them. There were few others who had been as cruel and heartless to those said to practice witchcraft. When I received May’s note, I cut open a winter apple, and there among the black seeds I saw her sorrowful future. I understood there was very little time left for us to say our goodbyes, for she was calling me to her deathbed.

I brought my daughter with me across the river to Boston, even though it was nearly winter, with ice already forming in the shallows. When we arrived, Increase Mather was weeping in his study and didn’t bother to greet me. He’d never cared for me. Perhaps he thought his wife had sacrificed too much for me, and it was likely he wished she had left me where she found me, in a ward for criminals and madwomen. Leave her here, I’d heard him whisper to her the first night I spent in their rented rooms in London. If you take her to Boston, you’ll regret it. But she never had regretted her decision. I’d made sure of that.

Fortunately Cotton Mather wasn’t in the house when I arrived. I should have learned to hide my feelings by then, but had he seen me he would have known nothing had changed from the day we sat in the carriage on the way to Salem and he slipped his hand beneath my skirt. I tried not to think about that journey; I’d blocked it from my mind as if it had happened to someone else.

May Mather was in her bed in the darkened room. Her children had gathered around, but now they left us together so that I could say goodbye. The physician had come to bleed and purge Mistress Mather, something I would never have allowed had I been there, for all that served to do was weaken her further and convince them that her black blood weakened her. Such practices adhered to the belief that we carry the evil of original sin inside us and have to rid ourselves of it. I had seen evil, and I knew it wasn’t inside Mistress Mather. I’d brought a syrup of poppy and sage to relieve her pain, along with belladonna to ease her journey into the next world. She was grateful for all I did, and she wept when she saw my daughter. Here was life. Here was the future.

“I didn’t know how ill Amadis was,” she told me with regret. “It was a mistake to have sent him to you.”

“You weren’t wrong to do so. Look at the gift he gave me.”

May Mather gazed at Hyacinth’s face. “What do you want for her?” she asked.

“Everything” was my answer. “The whole wide world.”

Hyacinth signaled to me, and I leaned down so that my daughter could whisper that she had seen Mistress Mather’s death in the room with us. Hyacinth had the sight in a deep way. She saw both life and death; they stood beside her, one to the left, the other to the right. She was usually calm regarding such matters, for they were a natural part of life, but now my daughter was distressed. Every time my mistress breathed out, the air was gray, for her breath was shallow in her chest. “Can we save her?” Hyacinth asked. She had such a pure, clear voice. I shook my head, because it was impossible, and Hyacinth began to cry.

If Mistress Mather hadn’t stopped in the prison, if she hadn’t taken me to Boston, if she hadn’t sent me my beloved, Hyacinth would not be here now. Snow was falling, and it was as if we were in a globe. True friendship isn’t easy to find, but when you do find it, it is the greatest gift. When that happens you rescue one another, you do so again and again, until it is no longer possible. The hour of the impossible had arrived. Life was slipping away from my mistress.

I burned birch bark in a small brass bowl, then opened the window and watched the smoke spiral into the air. Birch trees signify birth, but also rebirth. I had carved Hyacinth’s cradle from birch, and burning birch shavings would help to carry my dear benefactress to the other side. The snow on the windowsill had turned black, marking the fact that May was slipping away. When my mother was hanged, I watched her spirit leave her, and I had carried her spirit with me ever since. The time had come once more for death to enter the room. I went to my mistress and took her hand. I did my best to give her some of the strength my mother had given to me. I told her we would never leave one another, and that the end of life was not the end of love.

“I brought evil into the world,” Mistress Mather said. I knew she meant her son Cotton, whose philosophy and writings had encouraged the deaths of nineteen women in Salem, fourteen by hanging. She had wanted everything for him, she had suffered to bring him into the world and had loved him with all her heart, but there are things beyond one’s control, and her son had made his own fate. “I should have told him the truth about his background, for I fear there is a war inside him, and he will never accept who he truly is. He hates himself, and therefore he hates those he most resembles. How can I ever leave this world and be blessed?”

She needed to be forgiven, and although I was not a reverend, I had been a daughter to her, and if a daughter cannot bless you, who can?

“You also brought so much good into the world,” I told her.

The snow outside was ending. The world was quiet now. I understood why men feared women’s knowledge, and their power. We did not have to speak to be heard. The light was fading into a bleak afternoon. It was difficult to tell the difference between the sky and the earth.

“This will be the last snow I will ever see,” Mistress Mather said. “And the last we’ll see of each other.”

I thought of how she had lifted me up and given me grace, and now I leaned close and whispered, “You can let go.” I told her we would find each other inside the beating heart of the earth. They say witches cannot cry, but in that moment my daughter saw me weep for the first time. She saw that my tears were black.

“Mama, what are we?” Hyacinth asked. Her realization that we were not like other people had frightened her.

“Today we are women in mourning,” I said. “And tomorrow we will remember the beauty of the world.”

Mistress Mather’s daughters and daughters-in-law had remained in the hallway, afraid of the specter of death. Even my daughter knew that death could not be caught from another, nor could it be denied. Mistress Mather passed from this life at three in the afternoon, the same hour she had found me in Bridewell prison. The circle was closed. Not long after I had washed her hands and feet to rid her of the ills of this world, Cotton Mather burst into the room. He knelt beside his mother, but he did not weep. He was cold, colder than he’d ever been. I pitied my mistress; she’d had a son who felt nothing, someone who couldn’t even mourn his mother.

“Perhaps we should suspect she’s been poisoned,” he said to me as if I’d had a hand in my mistress’s death.

“I loved her completely,” I told him. “I was merely by her side.”

I did not say, If you want to look for blame, turn to face a looking glass, but he clearly knew my thoughts.

“You’ll get what you deserve,” Mather told me. I could see that the more he wanted me, the more he despised me. He had a wife, and would soon have another, but some men can never have enough. When he looked at me, he saw a woman who couldn’t be controlled.

“As will we all,” I responded.

It was dangerous to speak to a man like Mather in such a tone, as if it were a curse, but I was glad I did. I saw the pride in Hyacinth’s eyes when she gazed at me. This is who we are, I wanted to tell her. Women who cannot be coerced, who will rise from the ashes, who never lose sight of who they are.