The Heretic's Daughter by Kathleen Kent

Author:Kathleen Kent
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: FIC000000
ISBN: 9780316039673
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2008-09-02T22:00:00+00:00

FATHER RETURNED ONE day to the house with a black, cross-haired lurcher on a short chain. He was a noisy beast, of middling size, and Father put him in the barn to give warning when intruders were about the place. Mother said the dog would do his best to mangle the cats, but Father said we would just have to do with a few more mice in the barn. Once the days had warmed everything into a proper thaw, we chained the brute at the side of the house facing the road so that everyone who passed that way could see his menacing teeth. Father was the only one to feed him so he would learn who his master was. And we were warned to stay well away from the ground circumscribed by the length of his chain, as he was snappish and quarrelsome over his food.

Our days entered the plodding rhythms of the yeoman. The sun came up and over and down again like the arc of the seeds we sowed from our grain sacks, or the rise and fall of the prodding stick plied to the back of the ox to make him plow faster. Andrew turned fifteen on the 7th day of April, and even though his body had continued to grow, it remained pale and soft, his mind as gentle and cradled as a child’s.

Robert Russell married the Widow Frye and came to our house for the wedding feast. The new Goodwife Russell was plump in the face and broad across the waist but she was settled and kind and was young enough to bear Robert the sons he had never gotten with his first wife. That she was kind and motherly to Elizabeth, Robert’s niece, when the gossip went that Robert had bedded the girl, showed her true good nature. She would brook no ill words about Elizabeth from anyone and kept her within the house when most women would have turned her out. Soon her good opinion restored Elizabeth’s virtue so that my mother remarked dryly, “Remarkable that with a few words maidenheads become like reputations. Easily broken, easily mended.”

Robert Russell was our source of news, as he often bartered in Andover and as far away as Boston. At the end of April he told us that twenty-five more men and women had been arrested and were held in Salem Village for consorting with the Devil. Among those arrested was Elizabeth Proctor, a midwife and brewer of simples, and a few days later her husband, John Proctor, was taken to Salem Town jail for coming to her defense. Some arrested were old and nettlesome women. Some were well-to-do, like the Bishops, man and wife, and Philip English, who later bribed his way to freedom. Some were slaves, and one was the former minister of Salem Village, the Reverend George Burroughs, who had been brought back in chains from Maine. The arrested were from surrounding Topsfield, Ipswich, Reading, Amesbury, Beverly, Salem Village, and one from as far away as Boston.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.