The Heretic's Daughter: A Novel - By Kathleen Kent Page 0,117

there were indeed witches sitting hand to foot with the innocent. There was no walking about now in the “good” cell. There was only room for shifting about. And only by mutual consent. There was never a time when it was completely silent. Many of the women had caught a rumbling cough from the damp, and the nights were noisier than the days. Sarah Wardwell, a neighbor to the north of our house in Andover, was imprisoned with an older daughter and a baby not one year old. The baby, sickly and small, wailed long and fitfully in the hours before dawn. Samuel Wardwell, the baby’s father, lying in the men’s cell, would be condemned and hanged before the month had ended. The woman with the rotted tooth cried in agony through the night and most of the day, finding no relief from the liquor that was poured in greater and greater amounts down her throat. Liquor that had been given to me, too, to stop my own screams of terror and agony as my mother was taken from her cell for the last time.

Upon hearing the end of Mother’s footsteps upon the stairwell, I had pulled wildly at the bars, the rising shrillness of my voice cutting like a knife through the thick air of the corridor. I felt strong arms enveloping me, pulling me back, and heard a voice say sharply in my ear, “Hush, now. You cannot let your mother hear your cries. It will only distress her more. Hush. Hush and be brave for her sake.” But I could not stop the wailing, the thrashing, and the grinding of my teeth as I fought the women who held me in their arms. I was a mad thing. No longer child. No longer reasoned. No longer restrained. I hit and kicked and bit until my jaw was forced open and a bitter, choking liquid was poured into my mouth and I was forced to swallow or be drowned. The liquid was poured a second and then a third time, and within a few minutes the beast retreated from the door and a spreading warmth spilled from my belly into my legs and then into my chest, my arms, and my head. My mind retreated from itself, and my tormented thoughts became like a twisted sheet beneath a thickly padded blanket. The restraining arms that held me loosened their grip, and someone, perhaps Goody Faulkner, whose belly was swollen with child, cradled my head in her lap and sang to me with a whispering, tuneless breath.

“Lulay, my little tiny child, bye-bye lulee-lou-lay,

Lulay, my little tiny child, sleep now until the day.”

I stared at a low beam above my head and watched the rough knots and channels in the wood become the grimacing faces of men and women, some wearing half-masks and hats piled like giant gourds on their heads. A splintered crevice became a horse racing against the grain and a sworling crevice became a merchant’s ship that threatened to sail from the edge of that narrow and rustic terrain. The beam was a world unto itself, fantastical and somehow set apart from the surrounding indistinct haze of my cell. Suddenly I had a clear and piercing thought that supplanted every imagining. Someday, after many, many tomorrows, the beam that straddled my sight would be the only part of the cell left whole when all the stones had been carted away and the rest burned to ash. The jail that seemed so impenetrable and everlasting would fall like any cellar. The mortar would soften. The beams would crack and sag. The rock would collapse. And the rubble would fill the gaping spaces so that no passerby could stop and say, “Here and here was my great grandfather or grandmother or distant aunt kept in darkness and in wasting despair.” Before another hour had passed, and before I closed my eyes to fall into the chasm of sleep, the figures on the beam had begun to move.

THE RITUALS OF the days became as always. The slops to go up, new straw to throw down. Visits from families with food. Fridays brought the sheriff’s wife. Saturdays the surgeons. Sabbath days, prayers all round. Mondays came the ministers to pray, to beg for a confession, or to harry with condemnation and excommunication. On the 9th day of September the fourth trial of the Court of Oyer and Terminer was held and six more women were condemned: Martha Corey, Mary Easty, sister