The Heretic's Daughter: A Novel - By Kathleen Kent Page 0,70
shrouded together in silent speaking. Or in an enveloping cocoon made of mother’s milk and kettle iron. But it lasted only until Hannah started her crying. Robert told us that Aunt Mary and Margaret were also to be arrested, and then he left us with promises that should Mother change her mind and flee, or if she was detained overly long in Salem, he and his wife would do their best to care for the rest of us.
Mother stayed at the hearth long after my brothers and I had gone to bed. I turned and thrashed and shook Hannah’s arms from around my neck but could not sleep. Finally, I crept from my room and saw that Father had joined her at the fire and they sat facing each other, speaking in whispers.
“They are like dogs sniffing their own asses,” Father said. “There’s no’ so sweet a smell as the corruption you put forth yourself.” Mother exhaled a laugh and moved her head closer to his, and I knew they had been speaking on Mother’s warrant.
“I will speak reason to them. They must listen,” she said. “Then these girls and their stories will crumble and fall like so many cards on a tilted table. They’ve had so many shambling, half-witted women in front of them that the magistrates are starting to harken to this nonsense. Well, I am not confused and I am not afraid of them. They are lawyers and judges and must rule by law.”
He reached out and took her hands in his, resting his forearms on her lap. His thumbs worked the inside of her palms and he said, “Martha, they will not listen to reason. How can they, when all they have built here is to keep themselves propped up on the backs of others? You do yourself credit to believe in your own strength and courage. But they will not hear you. They cannot.”
She took one hand from his and stroked his head where the hair hung long and ragged and said, “If I do not do this thing, then it may go on and on. ‘Nothing of the greater good comes without struggle and sacrifice in equal measure, be you man or woman, and in this way are we freed from tyranny.’ Those are your words.”
He made an impatient gesture and said, “They are not my words but words of those who gained from them by being murdered and put to rot in unmarked graves.”
She laid a finger to her lips and said, “Would you give me this light and then put it out again? Would you have me run away? And then what am I? I am only a servant with a boot on my back. And what am I to my children or to you? Can you love me as you have when I abandon what I know to be true? I am not afraid, Thomas.”
And Father answered, “Aye. That’s why I am afraid.”
The floorboards beneath my feet shifted and Mother saw me hiding in the shadows. She rose and told me to get dressed quickly. I threw on my skirt without its apron and shoved my feet into shoes without their stockings, thinking all the while that she had changed her mind and would leave, taking me with her. But my hopes were ended when she said to Father, “I’ll return in two or three hours’ time. There is something I must give Sarah.”
The night was very dark as the moon had waned to nothing, but the weather was close and warm and soon the shift under my arms was damp with sweat. She walked so swiftly that I ran to keep pace with her, a canvas sack she carried bouncing heavily against her thigh. We walked along the pathways leading to Robert’s house but soon cut south into the forest of oak and elm and I knew we were going to Gibbet Plain. I thought of the mushrooms and flowers, the bloodroot and violets, that must be growing in every corner of the field, but I could see very little of it through the dark. About a hundred paces into the meadow, Mother led me to a small hillock where a lone elm grew, and then she stopped and turned to me.
She spoke with such intensity that I blinked against her breath. “You know where I go tomorrow?” I nodded. “Do you know why?” I nodded again, but she said, “Say it, then.” I opened my mouth and said in