Devil's Mistress (38 page)

Sloan was quickly on his feet, eyes narrowed as he watched his friend’s approach. “What is it?” he demanded. He felt the invasion of a dread that tensed his muscles, tore at his gut, made a mist of the day around him.

“I’ve just come from the home of some of Stoughton’s kin. There’s to be an examination at Corwin’s house, Salem, at ten this morning.” He drew a deep, shaky breath. “They’ve pulled in Brianna.”

There was something very frightening about the way they came for her. It was not like Scotland, where she could hope to run and fight, nor was it like England, where she’d been condemned before she was caught.

It was all very quiet, and very polite. The constables were just at the door, and then they were handing her the warrant—and insisting that she come with them immediately for her examination.

She handed back the warrant. “This is absurd, and I can’t possibly leave my husband. He is very ill.”

Her show of cool outrage didn’t make any difference. She was told that a woman would be sent to stay with Robert, and she might have a minute to take her leave of her husband, if she so chose.

Brianna closed her eyes tightly, then entered the bedchamber with a heavy, heavy heart. She was not so frightened as she was worried. Forcing a smile, she tried to show him a face of complete bravado. “It seems, my husband, that it is my turn to stand before these fools!”

His eyes closed. “No!” he gasped. His pallor terrified her, and she sank to the bed at his side, holding his cheeks between her hands. “Robert! Have faith in me—I am not afraid of them. Believe me when I say that I’ve met the devil in the flesh already in Matthews; these men at least take time to question, misguided as they may be. Oh, trust me, Robert, it will be well!” She paused, gathering strength and will. She’d never spoken about Sloan to him; now she had to. “Robert, no matter what happens, whether they condemn me a thousand times over, I will be all right. Treveryan will spirit us away. And I am not on trial yet—I must go up for examination first.”

He opened his eyes, and his fingers came, trembling, to her cheeks. He touched her softly, as if to memorize the contours of her face and the feel of her flesh. She cried out and leaned against his chest, holding him tenderly.

“Goodwife Powell!”

The constables were pounding on the door. Her time was up. Robert threaded his fingers through her hair. “No fear, my love, know no fear.”

She tried very hard to smile at him. “I am not afraid, Robert, except that they are taking me away from you. But it will not be long; it cannot be long.”

“No,” he said. “It will not be long.”

She hurried to the door, then smiled back at him. “I love you, Robert,” she told him, and then she rushed out, before her courage could fail her.

When the constables reached for her arms, she wrenched herself away. “You needn’t escort me. I see no girls yet whom I might afflict with my gaze or touch. And I am perfectly capable of walking on my own.”

When she was taken to the home of one of the magistrates for her examination, she almost lost control. Some of the ministers were debating furiously against the use of “witch’s teats” for evidence, but prisoners were still being searched for such things on the body. And though her clothing was not cruelly stripped from her as it had been in England, she was taken to a private room by several goodwives and told that she must disrobe or have the matter removed from her hands. Seeing that a protest would serve her only further humiliation, she shed her things and stood in silent lockjawed fury and misery while she was poked and prodded and felt with disgusting intimacy. Nothing so cruel as the prick was used here, nor did it seem necessary. She had a small mole on her shoulder, and the goodwives were solemn as they surveyed it.

“We will look again later,” one of the matrons promised her, meaning to be kind. “Perhaps it will be gone.”

“No! It will not be gone!” she assured them. “It has been there since I was a child, and therefore, if I am a witch, I’ve been one for years!”

She had good reason to regret her outburst later. From the private room she went before the magistrates. She was ordered not to look away, and so she could not see the group of girls and young women who screamed and cried as if they were poked by knives—but she heard them. Her arms were held now by the constables, and she was not allowed to shake them off. All she could do was stare straight ahead.

“Who afflicts you?” the magistrate demanded of the girls.

“Goody Powell! Oh, she strangles me! Where she touched me in the flesh, she strangles me now! Help me, dear Lord, I cannot breathe!”

“Oh, I see her! There she sits upon the structure beam; it is an incubus of Satan that she suckles, a creature like a wolf!”

A cacophony of voices rose, high and shrill and so profuse that order was lost for several minutes.

“Why do you afflict these girls?” the magistrate demanded of her.

“I do not!”

“Then who does?”

“Their own sickness!”

“You merciless witch! Appease their pains!”

She was dragged to the girls and forced to touch them. They quieted, and the matrons were brought forward. The kindly women stated that she was perfect in flesh and form, except for a mark upon the shoulder. Before the testimony was done, one of the girls started shouting out an oracle again, stating that the devil, too, had found her perfect, and cherished her for his sabbaths.

“Oh, you will rot in hell for a liar!” Brianna could not help but scream out.

One of the constables wrenched her arm. She was not behaving very well for a Puritan goodwife standing before the duly chosen law.

A farmer stepped forward then; a man she was certain she had never seen before. But apparently she had seen him, somewhere, because he knew of her.

“She were a witch in the old country, sirs. My brother did hear that she was tried and condemned in England.”

“Goody Powell—is this true?”

Chills eased their way through her, slowly, seeming to numb her against thought and speech. She could not lie. If she were caught in a lie, nothing else she said would have any bearing.

“I was condemned—but by a puppet court, and by a man later recognized as mad.”

The screams started up, and the girls were hushed. Someone came up to say that she had looked at his cows—and that the animals had consequently drowned themselves. She realized then that the man was a villager who had frequently cut his cows through their vegetable garden—and whom she had ordered not do so again.

“She cursed my cows, she did!”

“What do you say, Goody Powell?”

“That if I were a witch, I would take myself from this room.”

“Not even the devil has power so great,” she was told solemnly.

This evidence she could fully scorn, but then an elderly woman came to the front and spoke with a soft fervor. “She did ruin her husband, she did. She forced him to wed her when they were at sea—I knew a woman on the same voyage, you see. Goody Ratcliff said that her child was born too early, and that the devil had charged her to find a human father, within God’s chosen fold. Goody Ratcliff, too, had a dream in which she saw this woman come to Husbandman Powell at night, and force him to set his hand to the devil’s book. How else would Robert Powell have come before us if he had not been tempted by the likes of her?”

Brianna felt ill—maybe she was the cause of all of Robert’s troubles.

“Goody Powell!” The magistrate addressed her sternly. “Did you bring the devil’s book to your good husband and set him into a life of wizardry?”

“He is no wizard!” she snapped back.

And then, curiously, the room went silent. She was not allowed to turn, so she couldn’t see.

But she knew that the firm strides approaching the magistrates’ bench belonged to Sloan. She could feel his presence, and his air of power seemed to bring lightning to the room.

“On what evidence do you try this woman?” he demanded.

“We are not trying her here today, we are examining her.”

“On what suspicion?”

The magistrate sighed patiently. Sloan was, after all, Lord Treveryan—famed for his adventures under King William’s command.

“Witchcraft, my lord, the torture and torment of innocents. She was a known offender once—”

“Do you charge her for England, then?” Sloan’s voice thundered out. “For I have in my possession papers clearing her, signed by our sovereigns William and Mary themselves!”

He should have been ordered out of the room; but no one thought to order him. One of the magistrates spoke up.

“My lord, we do not charge her for England. We charge her for the mischief she causes here.”

“Then I would take her into my custody until her trial.”

“My lord, I cannot allow that to be. She will be remanded to the Salem prison, until such date for trial is set.”

“Ohhhh!”
One of the girls screamed. Brianna took a chance to turn about. It was one of the youngest of the accusers, a girl of about twelve. She was clutching her side and twisting around vehemently. “He strikes out, too, I feel his sword. He is angry, and he moves about the room with his blade flashing!”

There was silence. No one had, thus far, gone to such extremes to accuse a lord, a known friend of the king.

In that silence Sloan’s face hardened with the dark fury of a brewing storm. When he spoke, it was with a calm and grating elocution more frightening than the quick barbs of the magistrates.

“Should I hear my name mentioned—just once—I’ll have a writ sworn out immediately charging two thousand pounds for the defamation of my good character!”

He looked magnificent standing there, rigid with his fury, green eyes like a rage of fire. He wore a blue velvet frockcoat, fawn breeches, and high black boots. No hat adorned his head and his hair was dark and neatly clubbed. Never had he appeared so much the nobleman, or the knight ready to do battle.

“Now, then.” He turned back to the magistrates. “When will we see legal procedures here? When will concrete evidence be laid, and those who wish to testify in her behalf be given the chance to speak?”

The magistrate cleared his throat. “At the trial, my lord.” Brianna believed that if they hadn’t already come this far, the man might well have let her go, convincing the girls that they were “mistaken” about her identity. Powerful names had been mentioned before, without the accused ever being charged. It was one of the reasons that people were beginning to whisper on the street.

And Brianna was certain it was also a reason she could not be set free now; damning testimony had been given against her. If she did not appear for trial, the common folk would be wondering how it was possible that someone influential—or with an influential friend—could escape the net of the godly men determined to clear Massachusetts of the devil’s clan.

“Then I will see you at the trial, gentleman,” Sloan said simply. He turned about and strode out of the room.

Brianna realized bleakly that he had never looked her way.

Salem prison was not so bad, she tried to tell herself. The jailers tried to keep it clean; but even so, it was summer, and it was hot. She refrained from lying on her bunk until she was exhausted, because she was certain it crawled with bugs; she could occasionally hear the shuffle of rats about the walls.

She was in a small cell with two other women, sisters from Andover, still stunned that they had been charged. They were very godly women, calm and stalwart, and told her immediately that they would surely hang, for they would not confess to such “cow’s manure!” as was being bandied about. Brianna had not known anything about Andover, but the sisters told her that Ann Putnam and Mary Warren had been sent there as seers, since the town had none of its own. But after signing over forty arrest warrants on the say-so of their touch, Justice Bradstreet had refused to sign any more, and was now in peril himself.

Brianna was glad to be in with these unshakable ladies, because from the cell next to them frantic cries and moans could be heard; a young girl thrashing out and crying that she was “bewitched” rather than a “bewitcher.” Across the tiny hall an older man groaned with pain, but for what reason Brianna could not tell. The sisters told her in hushed whispers that constables sometimes came to take people away from their cells, and when the victims returned, they were half crazed and ready to say anything.

“That is illegal!” Brianna protested.

“It is not ‘torture,’ so say they,” offered Mathilda, the older of the two.

“It is ‘confinement’ for the purpose of confession,” Emily said scornfully.

“There is greater judgment,” Mathilda said with a grim smile.

Brianna was sorry that the two elderly women were as severely shackled as herself, for movement was very difficult. They had their Bibles with them, and they spent their time finding psalms that brought comfort.

Late at night, when the sisters were sleeping and she lay in darkness, she heard a whisper, and her heart soared, for she was certain it was Sloan.

It was not. Philip Smith was down the hall a bit, and across, from her. He was calling out her name. She struggled out of her cot, wincing as the irons chafed her flesh, and hobbled to the grate.