The Heretic's Daughter: A Novel - By Kathleen Kent Page 0,115

to me, drawing the invisible connecting thread between us: the thread of hope, of continuity, of understanding. Her last act of will was to climb the stairs unaided, without stumbling and without crawling, and then the door above us was swung on its hinges and closed.

Cell-blinded and groping, she would have been placed in the cart with the four men, her hands tied perilously in front, so that she would have had to struggle to keep her balance when the cart turned sharply from Prison Lane to Main Street. The cart would have made its way past the houses of the judges, and of some of the jurors as well, and more than a few people would have lined the streets to watch the cart as it made its way west towards Gallows Hill. The cart would have crossed over the Town Bridge, which spans a finger of the North River with its sulfurous tidal pools, and then, where the road splits into the Boxford Road and the southerly Old Road, the cart would have struggled up the rutted path to the lower ledges of Gallows Hill. And there, gathered to watch, would have been dozens of men and women and children from Salem Town and Salem Village and other towns besides, their souls to be warned and chastened and at length profited by the lessons of the hangings. In the gathering would have been ministers and with them the greatest of his calling, the Reverend Cotton Mather.

Today there is only a stand of locust trees to mark the spot. But then there was one giant oak tree with sturdy branches that could have supported the weight of twenty, let alone a pitiful, strawlike few. A ladder was set up against the trunk of the tree and the sheriff, well known to all, would have donned his mask of office, not to hide his face but because it was the proper English custom to hood the executioner. To save his strength he would have taken the heaviest of the men first, leading John Proctor and then George Burroughs to stand on the ladder, slipping the noose around their necks and then pushing them out into the lessening air. John Willard would have been next and then George Jacobs.

Last would have been my mother, the frail body, already slackening into the embrace of a long-awaited release, carried, shoulder-borne, by the hangman to her place on the ladder. The splintering rope slip-tied around her neck. The push into the warm summer currents. The sky blue and cloudless as though God would watch with an open face and wide-awake eyes, no clouds to hinder the revealing rays of the sun. No rain like the shedding of tears, nor wind to punish the watchers in a tightening crescent of fearful expectation around the tree. The worn and cracked shoes, creased from years of treading the earth, now kicked free from struggling feet. The neck stretching, breaking; the gate to life closing and then collapsing. The eyes searching against the closing of the lids. Searching and finding the tall figure standing alone at a small rise behind the crowds. The giant of Cardiff standing for all of us as he promised he would do, bareheaded and still, etched against the disappearing light of the world, the needle to the true compass that pointed north beyond Salem towards Andover and, beyond that, to her final home.

CHAPTER NINE

August–October 1692

I AM DREAMING and in this dream I am in Aunt’s root cellar. I know it is the cellar because it is cold and damp with the fusty smell of things that have grown hard and bulbous beneath the soil. Through the brown velvet darkness appear dimly the drying baskets Margaret and I used to fill in the autumn and then empty again through the long winter. I can hear footsteps above my head. Someone is pacing the length of Uncle’s common room and I hear the sound of voices in conversation, and laughter, too, soft and muzzy like carpenter’s dust through joists below the floorboards. There is life above me and light. But the cellar door is closed and I have in my hand but one end of a candle that has burned through most of its wick.

I cry out but no one hears me. I kick against the earthen walls but can find no release. My ears remain sharp to the surrounding darkness, and a rustling, like voices sighing, comes from every part of the cellar. It