The Heretic's Daughter: A Novel - By Kathleen Kent Page 0,131

in the early part of August, Margaret was taken away by the Indians. A small party of Wabanaki on horseback had approached the settlement in long coats and hats and so were mistaken for neighboring townspeople. Aunt was hacked down and killed, as were ten or twelve others living in that part of Billerica. They laid a headstone for my cousin next to her mother’s because it was believed that even though her body was not found, her soul must have taken flight at the moment of capture. I was told it was a pleasant place where the headstones were set, although I would never travel there to see it. For many years after, I had dreams of Margaret, and in every one of them she was alive.

By 1701, Father, at the age of seventy-five, began to travel for great stretches of time to Colchester in Connecticut. Sometimes leaving with Richard, and sometimes with Tom, he carved out a great homestead for his children and grandchildren. In time following, Tom and even Andrew would marry, and altogether my three brothers would have twenty-nine children. Tom had five girls before his first son was born and he named one of his daughters after me. His fourth daughter he named Martha. He was the only one of us to name a child so. I think none of us could bear the thought of losing her again if the child did not survive.

When I was twenty-three, I went with Father and my brothers and their wives to Connecticut, carrying with me Mother’s red book. I had dug it up from the ground early one evening a few years before, unwrapping the soiled layers of oilskin to find the book, for the most, dry and whole. I quickly opened its pages and saw my mother’s writing, slender-veined and feathered, but shut it fast again, unable and unwilling yet to read the words inside.

We built two houses in Colchester, and soon after, I met and married my husband. I was made Sarah Carrier Chapman in September of 1707 and within a few months I made ready to read the book. I believed that I had come to the place of womanhood that could bear the weight of her words. But as I held it in my lap, I felt a cautioning dread building inside of me and I sat with it closed in my hands for hours. I feared some passage within would change the felicity that I had knit together with my father or somehow change the memory I held of my mother. And as I was with child, I harkened to the midwife’s warning that too much fearful discovery would mar the unborn. I hid it in Father’s old oaken chest in the cellar, and though it was never far from my thoughts, there was always another birth or death or laying-out that kept the book hidden.

In 1711 the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed an act to reverse the attainders of the wrongly accused. In recompense for Mother’s death, Father would receive from the court a little over seven pounds English money, the amount for her food and shackles. He was only ever granted what he had spent in her care. The reverse of attainder meant that Mother’s sentence of guilt had been made null and void. Nine of the condemned women were not recompensed by the Crown. The best of their valuable houses and land had been seized, never to be returned. In the spring of 1712 we returned to collect our recompense and to carry back with us in two wagons what was left in the Andover house and barn. For the last time we visited Mother’s grave on the great meadow, the stones overgrown to a grassy point, and planted rosemary for the fragrance it would bring in the summer and the remembrance it would bring in the winter.

Father died at age one hundred and nine in the tender middle part of May 1735. Still living at his passing were five children, thirty-nine grandchildren, and thirty-eight great-grandchildren. He had taken to lapsing more and more into the Welsh tongue, as older men of his time and place of birth were wont to do. His hair had not much grayed and he stood always straight and sure-footed. He often walked the six miles to our nearest neighbor, an ailing widower, with a bag of grain on his back. The day of his death found him restless and searching