Crane Pond (11 page)

N
icholas Noyes is in his garden pruning a standard rosebush, his stout body bent as far as it will go (not very far) towards the plant he's addressing, rather as if paying court to a green and spindly maiden.

‘Come in, come in,' he says impatiently when he becomes aware of Sewall's arrival, as if he's been waiting for him. He ushers him towards the open front door with his pruning hook. ‘You're just in time.' Noyes opens the door to the kitchen. ‘Anne,' he calls to his housekeeper (Mr. Noyes is a bachelor), ‘lay another place at table, if you will. Mr. Sewall is come to dine with me.'

Sewall's mouth falls open in dismay; for a second he almost tries to object and explain, but Mr. Noyes is rubbing his hands together in anticipation, and he can't bring himself to. They have a fine piece of roast beef with pease pudding. Anne has added a few drops of vinegar to the latter, just as Sewall likes, and the food is so good he almost forgets this is his third dinner in succession. They drink beer with it and while they eat they have the discussion of Revelation that Sewall has promised himself.

Both men agree that the angel who straddles the Atlantic Ocean has his left foot on the New World, prophesying its discovery as the land where the Millennium will be inaugurated. Chapter 17 of Revelation tells of the seven angels who pour out their vials in turn by way of preparation for that event. The sixth pours his into the River Euphrates, which consequently dries up to enable the Kings of the East to make their way across it. Noyes and Sewall suspect that this episode stands for the successful crossing of the ocean and that the Kings of the East are the English settlers.

For Sewall himself, this theory receives support from a claim by the great missionary John Eliot who in 1663 published a translation of the Bible into Algonquian, and who believed that the Indians were descended from the lost tribes of Israel and that when they were all converted to Christianity Jesus would once again walk the earth, the American earth. Mr. Noyes, by contrast, agrees with Cotton Mather that the Indians are in fact the Anti-Christ, and that they represent the final impediment to the Second Coming. ‘The Indians are dark and swarthy, like the Black Man himself,' he tells Sewall.

‘According to Mr. Thorowgood,' Sewall replies, ‘the Indians share a number of customs and rituals with the Jews. They hate pork, and practice circumcision. Also they segregate their women in a little wigwam apart from the rest of the tribe during their feminine seasons—' Just as he says the last phrase, in comes Anne with their pudding, a handsome cake accompanied by glasses of sack-posset. Sewall looks anxiously at her face but she shows no sign of having heard his reference to feminine seasons.

As soon as she has left, Mr. Noyes, in a very loud voice, exclaims: ‘Bombardo-gladio-funhat-flami-loquentes!' then stares at Sewall, his eyes angry as those of a charging bull. He takes a spoonful of sack-posset and swallows it in a strangely adversarial fashion while his look remains fixed.

Sewall looks back at him in amazement. To fill in the difficult pause he takes a spoonful of sack-posset also, but consumes his in a tentative, even interrogative manner. ‘Do you recognise that word?' Mr. Noyes finally asks him. ‘It's Mr. Cotton Mather's coinage. Cod Algonquian. I took the trouble to learn it by heart.' He clearly takes pride in his second-hand ownership of this portmanteau word. ‘It's meant as a satire on the long-winded speech and furious warlikeness of the Indians.'

‘There are Latin words buried in it,' Sewall says, ‘though as I understand the matter, the true Algonquian language may be flecked with elements of
Hebrew
, at least according to some scholars, which fact if proved would confirm the Biblical ancestry of the Indian nation.'

‘Some scholars find Hebrew there, some find Phoenician, some Trojan. Do you know what I find? Nothing. Nothing but pagan Indian. That's all
I
can detect. If the Indian language possessed good civilised words the people might be guided by them towards good civilised behaviour, instead of murdering, raping and scalping our poor brothers and sisters.'

‘But they
will
have a word to guide them, the word that guides us all. Some of the friend-Indians have it already, and others will gain it when they study Mr. Eliot's Bible.'

‘I fear the reverse may be true,' Noyes replies ominously. ‘Which is to say that the Indians are guiding the weaker members of our community towards their own pagan wickedness. Do you know what Tituba had to say at her second examination? I attended and heard her with my own ears. She said that she met a man who claimed to be God, can you imagine? It's bad enough when some rogue impersonates an honest man, but to strut around pretending to be God!' He shakes his head in disbelief at the scandal. ‘Then this
Mr.
God says he will see her again the Wednesday following, at the minister's house. At Mr. Parris's own house! And at the appointed hour no less than four apparitions troop in with him, his diabolical retinue I suppose you might call it.' He cuts himself another slice of cake, then offers the knife to Sewall somewhat as an afterthought. Sewall has to remind himself that Mr. Noyes is a man used to eating alone. He almost refuses the offer, feeling quite replete by now, but then thinks that might suggest he is offended, so takes the knife and cuts himself another slice. ‘These apparitions then had the impudence to enter Mr. Parris's study, where he was praying,' resumes Mr. Noyes.

‘Did Mr. Parris see them for himself, in that case?'

‘Of course not! If you are in conversation with the true God, the false one is no more than a worm underfoot. So there we have them, side by side: God and
Mr.
God, that is to say, God and the Devil: true religion and wicked impiety. Just as white people and savages have lived side by side in this colony since our fathers settled here.'

He sighs with satisfaction at having brought his argument to a close, then goes on to explain what happened next. Mr. God told Tituba he would return the following Friday. When he came he had a book with him. He wanted Tituba to sign it by way of agreeing to serve him for a period of six years. The man offered her a pin fastened to a stick to write in his book with, a blood quill, telling her to scratch her arm and then put an X. There were other names in the book, nine in all. Tituba couldn't read, of course, but Mr. God said that Goody Good was one of the signatories to this satanic contract, and also Goody Osborne. Somehow Tituba herself avoided signing after all—‘So she
claims
, at least,' Noyes says. ‘Though you mustn't believe all that a slave like her tells you.'

‘I must keep my mind impartial,' says Sewall, ‘since I may be trying these cases in due course.'

‘You will keep a clear head on the matter,' says Mr. Noyes, ‘particularly since yours isn't obscured by a periwig. I am writing an essay on that topic. In it I explain that anyone with any skill at physiognomy will know that that hair—' he points across the table at Sewall's declining hair—‘cannot grow on this head—' he points upwards towards his own absence of hair—‘any more than saltmarsh hay can grow on the top of a hill.'

Sewall almost protests at the unkindness of this comparison, but instead looks across at the clock. ‘Almost time for the ferry,' he says. ‘I must hurry. Thank you so much for an excellent meal, and please congratulate Anne for me also.'

As he heads towards the door, Mr. Noyes grasps him by the elbow, puts his face up close, and solemnly says, ‘Malleus maleficarum. Hammer of heretics. That is what you must be, Mr. Sewall, when the cases come to trial. The witchcraft is spreading apace. It has already infected some who are close to us, or who seemed to be.'

Sewall recalls that
Malleus Maleficarum
is the title of a book published two centuries ago, to do with hunting down witches. ‘That is what we all must be, in this time of threat,' Nicholas Noyes concludes. ‘Hammers.'

 

It's six o'clock when Sewall arrives home. Hannah opens the door to him. ‘Ah, my dear,' he says, ‘I've something to tell you.'

‘I have something to tell you, too,' she replies. She looks a little tired and strained, as she often does after a headache, but is wearing her good gown of sprigged muslin (he imported the material from London especially for her as part of a consignment he was shipping over) and a starched lace cap. ‘Mr. Stoughton is here.'

Sewall is too startled to speak. For Mr. Stoughton to turn up at his house in person, without a prior arrangement, and wait for his return until becoming benighted, suggests some emergency has taken place. ‘I insisted he must sleep here,' Hannah continues. ‘He can't ride all the way back to Dorchester at this time of night. Sarah is busy preparing a late dinner or early supper for the two of you, whichever you wish to call it. I expect you're hungry after your day on the ocean waves.'

‘I must go in directly and see what he's come about.'

She smiles a little wanly. ‘I'm glad to have you back safely.'

‘Laus Deo.'

‘What was it you wanted to tell
me
?'

‘Oh.' He's been so busy speculating about Mr. Stoughton's motive in coming here that he almost forgot. ‘A family matter. I'll speak to you about it when Mr. Stoughton's gone.'

‘I know he's an eminent man,' Hannah says, ‘but . . . '

‘But what?'

Hannah lowers her voice to a whisper. ‘He frightens the children. They've scampered off to their holes like mice being chased by a cat.'

‘I'll go and beard the lion in his den,' Sewall tells her. ‘Or rather in
my
den.' He places his hands on her hips and squeezes gently, then walks past her to his study.

 

Before Sewall and Mr. Stoughton can settle down to talk, Sarah comes in and summons them to dine. ‘You'd better have it at once,' she says, ‘before it gets cold.'

Hannah and the children had their dinner before his arrival and stay tactfully (or fearfully) out of the way. Sarah has baked a dish of pigeons with parsnips, and Sewall has Bastian bring up some of his Passado from the cellar. Sewall pours them each a glass of wine, and then serves Mr. Stoughton a couple of the birds. He hesitates over whether he can get away with only taking one himself, but Stoughton is watching the platter intently as if to make sure of the symmetry of the meal. Sewall has to encourage yet another lie to blossom into truth: in this case the lie of appetite must justify itself by consumption. The mendacities have come thick and fast today, some deliberate, others accidental, wave upon wave of them, yet never, as far as Sewall (inspecting his own intentions) can see, intended with malice. He sighs at the swarming complexity of it all, and takes a second pigeon.

Stoughton has come on Salem Village business, as Sewall guessed. ‘At present we have no proper powers to engage with this outbreak, despite the urgent need to act,' Stoughton tells him. ‘New England is in danger of being lost.'

‘I suppose that is what our rulers feared when they drew up a new charter for us.'

‘I am not talking about the Court of St James. New England is in danger of being lost even here,
in
New England. There is a dark time coming on our colony—on our province, as we must learn to call it when the new charter takes effect.'

A dark time. Sewall recalls little Joseph's prophecy, two years ago: the bad people are coming.

‘The number of accused witches is growing very fast,' Stoughton says, ‘upwards of twenty already.' Twenty? Mr. Noyes told Sewall only this afternoon that Tituba had counted nine signatories in the Devil's book. Fast indeed. ‘Worse still, the outbreak isn't confined to the Goody Goods of this world who never bother to attend divine service.'

Stoughton pauses, as if visualising the Goody Goods of this world (a sorry company indeed) in his mind's eye. ‘The flotsam and jetsam.' He cuts himself a morsel of pigeon breast with a deft manoeuvre of his knife that would have done credit to a surgeon, impales a slice of parsnip to accompany it, slips the portion into his mouth, and immediately begins chewing with tiny but very rapid movements, like a squirrel consuming a nut. ‘Yesterday a woman called Nurse came up before the examiners. She's a widow of some means and one of the congregation of the saints, a covenanted member of Mr. Noyes's church in Salem Town since the days when the Salem Village congregation couldn't participate in the full covenant itself. But because it's not always possible for her to travel to divine service there, she also goes regularly to Mr. Parris's meetings in the village. At the end of her hearing she was remanded in custody to await trial.'

Unlike Mr. Stoughton, Sewall has been chewing slowly to allow his digestion as much time as possible to reconcile itself to each instalment, but now hurriedly swallows his mouthful. ‘How can that be, if she's one of the saints?' he asks. He's assumed all along that the witch congregation (if that's the correct word for it) will be drawn from those outside the Christian community, from those who have not taken the covenant or who have lapsed from it and no longer go to church.

Mr. Parris, Stoughton continues, knowing Mrs. Nurse's examination was just about to take place (he is acting as clerk to the court), preached a remarkable sermon on this difficult issue last Sunday. Mr. Stoughton has received a full report. The text was John, chapter 6, verse 70, when Jesus says to the disciples: ‘Have I not chosen you twelve, and one of you is a Devil?' The church is a garden, Mr. Parris had concluded, and contains weeds as well as flowers. ‘He admirably prepared the way for what was to follow,' Stoughton affirms. ‘The indictment of a member of the congregation. Of two congregations.'

‘But should he have done so?' Sewall asks. ‘Isn't that a kind of interference in the course of justice?'

‘All Mr. Parris has done is define the possibility of a certain kind of wickedness. You might as well say that the Ten Commandments, by telling us that murder is a sin, are being unfair to murderers. Rebecca Nurse is simply awaiting trial. The course of justice will be
our
responsibility, at a later date.'