The Heretic's Daughter: A Novel by Kathleen Kent

Author:Kathleen Kent
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Witchcraft, Fiction, Trials (Witchcraft), Sagas, Historical, Salem (Mass.), General
ISBN: 9780316024495
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2009-10-19T10:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

MANY YEARS AFTER I was married and my children grown, my own dear husband, John, paid a costly sum to have a clerk sent from Connecticut to Salem Village to transcribe the documents recorded at the time of my mother’s trial. A great portion of the documents had been destroyed over time, some by the judges themselves and some by the families of the judges who had grown to fear the turning tide of sentiment against them. The remaining documents had been sealed against scrutiny for the passing of decades, until they lay near forgotten in the back of a wooden press that housed the birth and death registries of Salem Village.

I had no desire or thought to revisit the past in such a way. But one night, when the weather had turned to the cool of autumn and the smell of decaying things lay about, I had a dream. And in the manner of dreams, I knew that I lay heavily in my bed next to my husband, surrounded by the sleeping forms of my sons and daughters and their sons and daughters, and yet my spirit-self had flown to a place at the edge of the cornfields by my grandmother’s house.

It was night and there were long shadows in the field, and I stood listening to the swelling and rustling of the tassels on the corn. The murmet twisted on his pole with the wind as though he were looking at me, not with malicious intent, but with a calm waiting. The moon was full and it had a haze of silver around it, foretelling a sunrise filled with rain. But in that moment the sky was bluish black and clear of any clouds. The air felt liquid against my skin and warm, like the breath of a child. The murmet moved to and fro, pointing north and south, and then east and west, and soon there came a quivering and a shaking at the edge of the field. A little foot emerged from the corn, wearing a worn, overly large shoe with a silver buckle that flared in the moonlight. Then there appeared a hand wearing a black glove, then an arm, a little crooked body, and finally a dark head, the eyes saucerlike and glimmering against the green. And then I saw that the figure had not been wearing gloves; it was the black hand of Lieutenant Osgood’s slave boy.

He looked at me, very sad, and we gazed at each other for a while. His other hand was hidden in the corn, and when he brought it out, he was holding a small scythe, the kind one would clear bracken with, too small to trim a field. The edge was rimmed with a dark stain of red turned to copper. The boy shook his head as if to say, “It is a pity what I must do,” and then he pulled back a few stalks of corn, making a path for me, and pointed into the opening with his scythe.

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