The Heretic's Daughter: A Novel - By Kathleen Kent Page 0,60

forcefully and said with an edge, “You must never speak of the red book to anyone. Promise me now that you will keep this one thing a secret, even among your brothers. Promise me.”

The only secrets I had ever kept were girlish confidences with Margaret. But here was a different thing. My mother was demanding of me to keep a secret about a large leather-bound book of which I knew nothing. Her face was backlit by the growing flames from the hearth, and though her eyes were in shadow, I could feel her questioning gaze. It was the first time she had asked me for anything beyond the labor of my two hands. I nodded and whispered, “I promise.”

She raised a forefinger to her chest, tapped it several times, and then pointed to me, the movement of her finger forming the illusion of a thread connecting us, breastbone to breastbone. She said, “Someday I will tell you what is in the book, but not today. Come, it’s time to start the baking. I hear your father stirring.”

She turned away but I could yet feel the glint of fear in her, like a flame inside a hooded lantern. I did not see the red book again for the whole of the winter, but I kept my promise not to speak of it.

We started our lessons that day as Mother had promised, and, as she was patient with me, the scratchings of my quill soon grew into passable letters. Sometimes as we sat at table side by side practicing some tiresome Bible passage, she would place her left hand over my right and guide it from chaos to order, and I came to seek out the closeness of our bodies. What I dreaded most was copying from a catechism book by the great Cotton Mather, passages such as “Heaven is prepared for pious children; Hell is prepared for the naughty” or “What a sad thing ’twill be, to be among the devils in the Place of Dragons.”

When my fingers could no longer write she would read to me so that my head would increase in knowledge, much as a pillow casing will swell, the more goose down is forced into it. She had a little tract of poems by a woman named Anne Bradstreet whose works had been published by an Andover pastor. Late into evening the words became a boat on which we floated, out past the cornfields covered over with snow, out past the murmet unclothed and barren but for the drifts wrapped round it. Out beyond great marbled stones that slept under ice until the warming action of the earth in spring forced them tumbling to the surface.

To sing of wars, of captains, and of kings,

Of cities founded, commonwealths begun,

For my mean pen are too superior things;

Or how they all, or each their dates have run;

Let poets and historians set these forth,

My obscure lines shall not so dim their worth.

With her reading done we would sit in silence, perched together on our bench, our minds wandering far away, and I would rest my head upon her shoulder and she would let it lie there for a while.

THE LAUGH WAS a childish thing. It burst out loud and injurious over the reverently meditating parishioners. The stunned Reverend Barnard was poised at the pulpit, his mouth open as if to call back into his throat the pious words he had only just released. His eyes searched me out but he did not know me at first. Some goodwife sitting in front turned her head around and hissed at me as one would hiss at a yowling cat.

I had not meant to laugh. I had been sitting quietly listening as the Reverend repeated a sacrament-day sermon given two Sundays before by his colleague Samuel Parris in Salem Village. The daughter and the niece of this Reverend Parris had begun having strange fits, and it had been given out that the girls were under an evil hand. I had listened with delicious fearfulness as he told of the girls’ torments as they twisted and cried out or fell motionless upon the floor. At times they were bitten or pinched by unseen agents and at other times they raced about their rooms, leaping into the hearth as though they would fly up the chimney. I had looked up into the rafters, wondering if the invisible world was even then gathering to make mischief in Andover as well. Reverend Barnard had called for a day