The Last Witchfinder by James Morrow

Author:James Morrow
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2014-06-01T16:00:00+00:00

C H A P T E R

The

Eight

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In Which Jennet at Last Meets the Avatar of Her Ambition, Tho’ with a Result She Did Not Foresee

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To conceal the scandalous nature of their relationship, Ben suggested that whilst crossing the Atlantic and living in London they should represent themselves as a middle-aged mother and her philosophically inclined son, but Jennet found this a monumentally offensive idea. “If we adopted such a ruse,” she declared, “I could ne’er again enter our love-bed without imagining myself Jocasta about to swive her Œdipus.” Having no desire to complicate their carnal life with mythic incest, Ben withdrew his proposal, whereupon Jennet convinced him that she should instead pose as a prodigy-monger in search of new specimens, traveling with her younger half-brother. Thus it was that in the guise of siblings they booked passage on the brigantine London-Hope, scheduled to sail from Philadelphia on the fifth of November, 1724, and reach England by Christmas.

The first of the voyage’s several disasters occurred when Jennet and Ben arrived on Vine Street Wharf only to learn that the berths they’d reserved in the great cabin had been appropriated by a Mr. Hamilton of Trenton and a Mr. Russell of Wilmington. The purser offered no apology, insisting that Mr. Franklin and his half-sister should have anticipated all along their displacement by “gentlemen of stature” (Hamilton being a New-Jersey barrister, Russell the master of a Maryland ironworks). And so it came to pass that Jennet and Ben spent the next seven weeks in steerage, sharing accommodations with two dozen other passengers and sleeping in hammocks whose sole pretension to privacy was a translucent linen curtain separating the sexes. Only by exploiting the London-Hope’s peripheral geography did the philosophers achieve connubial embrace. On one occasion they connected in the supply compartment atop a pile of sailcloth, another time in the cargo hold behind six hogsheads of sot-weed.

Even more troubling to Jennet than their wretched quarters was her unhappy stomach, which in the thirty-five years since her previous Atlantic crossing had grown sensitive to the sea’s vicissitudes. For each day that she was up and about on the main deck, she had to spend two in her hammock, sipping medicinal tea from the private store of their shipboard acquaintance, Thomas Denham, an affable Quaker merchant who shared the great cabin with Hamilton and Russell. By the midpoint of the crossing her condition had improved somewhat, less in consequence of Denham’s tea than of Ben’s tenderness, for he was ever prepared to sooth her with kisses, mop her brow with cool water, and read to her from Mr. Defoe’s romance of shipwreck and survival, The Strange and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.

The third, final, and worst misadventure happened near the end of the voyage, when Ben entreated the ship’s master, a sour old Jacobite named Bertram Annis, to let him examine the mail-pouches for the endorsements that Governor Keith had promised to place on board. Puffing discontentedly on his pipe, exuding smoke and irritation, Captain

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