The Heretic's Daughter: A Novel - By Kathleen Kent Page 0,69
was quiet as we huddled under the oilskin, but I could feel my brothers watching me. I started to shake with the wet and cold and from a lagging fear. Tom put his arm around me and wiped the dirt from my hands with his scarf.
When the wagon bogged down in the road, Father gave the reins to Mother and he and Richard pushed the wagon from behind. Father looked at me once and asked, “All right, then?” I nodded my head but I was bitterly taken down that he had not flung himself from the wagon as well, scattering the girls like a flock of ground hens. I turned my back so he would not see the tears but Andrew saw and he patted me on the shoulder and said, “All gone. All gone.” And the whole way back he sat close to me, his moon face beaming, saying, “All gone, Sarah. All gone.”
ON THE 18TH day of May, Uncle was arrested in the early morning and taken to Boston Prison. When the Salem constable, Joseph Neall, arrested him at his home in Billerica, Uncle was so much in his cups that he was halfway to the jail before he became aware that he was going not as a physician to practice medicine upon one of his neighbors but as an accused practitioner of the black arts. There were by this date thirty-eight men, women, and children in the jails of Salem and Boston in common cells that were meant for half that number. On the 24th day of the month the new governor of Massachusetts, Sir William Phips, ordered that the Court of Oyer and Terminer be formed to hear and determine the outcome of the witchcraft trials. Nine judges were appointed to stand as guardians between the sanctified world and the damned.
Goodwife Easty, the sister of the sainted Rebecca Nurse of Salem, was arrested, released, and arrested yet again when the tormented children of Salem Village cried out with renewed vigor that she was sending out her specter to pinch and bite and choke them. On the 28th day, there were more warrants from Salem Village, and, as such things go, even secret things, word was spread of the impending approach of the constables. The news went from neighbor to neighbor to neighbor until Robert Russell appeared at our door and told us on the evening of May 30th that Mother was to be arrested at first light on the morrow and taken to appear in front of the magistrates in Salem Village.
We all stood about the common room, the remnants of supper strewn on the table, stricken blind and deaf as one would be after a thunderclap. Mother looked up at Robert as if he had just told her our ox was nesting on our roof, but when he begged her to consider fleeing as others had done, she shook her head and continued clearing the bowls and cups from the table. He turned to Father and said, “Thomas, speak to her. Make her see.” But Father said, “She does see. It is her choice to stay or go.” My anger jumped over my terror, pounding it harshly down, to hear Father speak so weakly on her behalf. Did he care so little for her, did he care so little for us, that he would not urge her, as Robert had done, to hide herself away until she could be safe again?
Richard, his face dark, his lips pressed tightly together, walked from the room and made his way to the barn, where he would stay until the constable came. Andrew walked round and round in ever tighter circles like a piece of wood caught up in some fearful eddy, until Tom took his arm and seated him at the hearth. Tom’s ragged breathing filled the room as he tried to keep from crying out and he finally sank to the floorboards as his knees buckled. I stood and looked from Father to Robert, unable to understand the cessation of blunt action, wanting to shriek into the silence or throw myself against something hard and unrelenting to keep my mother from the prison cart.
Some movement at the table made me turn to see her staring back at me, not in fear or in condemnation or even in sadness, but in a kind of furied understanding. She looked at me so long and with such complete recognition that it was as if we were alone in the room,