The sloshing cup in Higginson’s hand shook like a windblown sheaf of paper. The old man’s other hand, planted firmly on his cane, shook as well, so hard that it sent the cane from side to side. Still, the three men drank to success while Jeremiah thought, but dared not say: Higginson’s one foot is in the grave, the other slipping, while Cotton Mather is the definiton of an opportunist. What private conversations have they had? What do they figure to collect from their schemes? Have I struck a bargain with the devil?

All three men now emptied their cups, but this caused even more ghastly coughing coming from deep within Higginson’s gut. Regardless of Higginson’s difficulty, they all shook hands after Mather, at the last moment, snatched on a white glove.

Then Jeremiah Wakely put aside his cup and said, “I’d best be off…prepare for my trip back to Salem.”

As Jeremiah rushed off, he gave a fleeting thought to Serena Nurse. She represented the only true penitence that’d come of his having left Salem a decade ago. She’d likely be well married by now, perhaps with a toddler if not two, and she’d scarcely give him a glance. As for his giving her a glance, it’d likely be from afar if at all.

She’d be untouchable of course, and she’d surely have forgotten all about him by now. Serena hadn’t been the only reason he’d not wanted this duty, but she remained the only reason he’d not spoken of. To speak of the depth of his pain and longing to such men as Mather and Higginson might well have gotten him a cheery pat on the back and a bit of a chuckle but hardly understanding. At least he imagined as much now as he made his way along the closed-in, dark streets of Boston’s North End, going for his lodgings.

The few lamps that lit his way only made the darker corners and hideaways blacker still: places that cloaked piratical Portuguese sailors waiting for a berth alongside the usual scoundrels and human jetsam. His path took him within speaking and hearing distance of such men lolling about a tavern or locked away in the North End jail. All signs said that a cutthroat might leap out at him at the next footfall. Someone who might as casually kill him for what loose coin jingled in his pouch as say “G’evenin’ gov’ner.”

As he passed ships in the harbor, the rigging beating an ominous sound in a building wind, he thought of how Reverend Mather had meant to keep Reverend Higginson’s presence in Boston their little secret until the old man came storming from behind that door.

Did everyone in the church have a secret passion or something to hide? What did it gain Mather the Younger to align himself with the most powerful churchman in Salem Town, a seaport doing twice the business with England and foreign ports as Boston these days? A seaport destined to become the center of all commerce in the Massachusetts Bay Colony?

Sleep on it, he told himself.

It’d been a long journey to Boston from Casco Bay, Maine, where his last assignment had taken him to another troubled parish. Then the Puritan leadership kept close watch on a former minister of Salem Village, Reverend George Burroughs.

The minister had left Salem in disgrace and under a dark cloud; in fact, he’d left from a jail cell. Nonpayment of debts that’d accrued from two funerals—one for his wife and the other his children, all dead of a plague. Reverend Burroughs had resettled in Maine as a possible heretic. However, Jeremiah’s reports, he believed, vindicated the man, and so he imagined that was one fire he’d doused—and that perhaps his work served a noble purpose after all. But thus far, only Reverend Cotton Mather had read his reports on the matter and no action one way or the other had been taken in the Burroughs affair.

To be sure, George Burroughs proved a colorful character indeed for a man who earned his living from behind a pulpit. Jeremy thought him a minister who might fit in with that colony of misfits—Rhode Island.

By the time Jeremiah found his bed and undressed for sleep, as sleeping naked was his preference, it’d grown quite late. He lay on his rough mattress and pillow in the crowded Red Lion Inn, wakeful yet.

Again he was thinking far more of Serena Nurse than he was of riding off to Salem out of some sense of duty. He worried far more about his first confrontation with her than any eccentric minister or possible heretic, or of Mather’s cow-towing to Higginson, for that matter.

In fact, the image of Serena, ten years younger than today, swept out all other thought. He remembered her golden hair, often flowing loose, always luxurious and framing a heart-shaped, smiling face. He recalled how she smelled as fresh and wonderful as the new morning’s dew that once they rolled about in as foolish and young hearts. He recalled how creamy and smooth her skin was against his, and how sweet her lips to his taste. Her hands so tender and warm, her arms welcoming. All romantic memories that wanted so much to push away the awful reality of the situation.

Bittersweet memories of Serena afforded some comfort, despite his losing her, despite the ache in his heart. It was an image to lull and to anchor a man. Even a man without a home; to lull him into a desire for slumber over drink or gambling or worse vices still. Serena, he asked himself as he dozed off, do you remember or care to remember what we once had?

Chapter One

Swampscott, Essex County, Massachusetts, March 6, 1692 at the midnight hour

At two-score-ten and four, the woman in tattered clothes chewed tobacco, lit a candle, shakily stood alone in the abandoned McTeagh cabin, then waddled straight for her hidden magic needles and the doll.

The doll she’d paid dearly for was fashioned by Sam Wardwell, both blacksmith and cunning man, some openly called the Wizard of Andover. Sarah had made several trips to make payments, and each time Wardwell would display the doll in its progress from wood to realism. Sarah Goode believed the man a magician.

Further, Wardwell asked no questions beyond her specifications. He kept mum, too, and never knew that his creation was in the image of Betty Parris; that it was a doll that’d do harm to Reverend Samuel Parris’ eleven-year-old, little Elizabeth Junior, named for her mother.

The doll, once stuck full with pins—as Parris’s Barbados servant, Tituba Indian, had instructed—would thereby inflict pain on the minister’s daughter; thereby inflicting suffering on the minister himself. But only if Sarah used a lock of the child’s real hair, pinned to a swath of cloth belonging to the child made into a pouch harboring the child’s nail clippings. All items Sarah had bartered from the hands of Tituba, the Barbados witch and servant to the Reverend Samuel Parris. Aside from a few pretty shells and a green bottle, all that Tituba had wanted from the bargain was that Sarah Goode eventually destroy Reverend Parris.

The old woman was unsure if she believed everything that Tituba had told her about Reverend Parris—like the business of his having either stolen or killed Tituba’s infant at birth—and that it was his child—but Goode understood why the black servant hated her master. “Tit’shuba hates ’im ’cause what Parris done to her. Same as me—took her child same as my Dorcas.”

Goode’s candle flickered against a pinched, prune-dried face. The bowlegged Sarah must push and pull her weight on legs reluctant to take her the final step. It was, after all, a grave undertaking she had planned: to strike hard at a minister. A plan that would take her into the dark arts far deeper than ever she had practiced before—to commit witchcraft on a child.

This last reluctance held her; perhaps she ought not to do what her anger dictated. Perhaps she should show a measure of Christian forgiveness, mercy. But when she looked for such things as pardon and clemency, all she found were the vilest of Christian curses to hurl at the Reverend Mr. Parris.

In fact, none of the simple curses would do. Nothing as mundane as ‘may your dog ne’er hunt, may your pig ne’er grunt, may your cow ne’er milk, nor your worms e’er silk; may your lock ne’er latch, the wind take your thatch. Things had gone far beyond such humdrum incantation, and Goode had tried all the more tedious hexes on Parris, but the man’s protection proved strong against the commonplace. Besides, murderous thoughts had come of an old woman’s rage. So murderous and heinous that for days now, her incantations had continued nonstop. She’d gone without sleep.

She stopped in her machinations long enough to mutter another curse—this one the strongest yet directed at the minister’s heart: “May the hot coals of your hearth, Mr. Parris, fall ‘pon your home and burn your heart! May your legs go lame, and your ugly soul perish in flame! May your wife shrivel and die as winter grass, and may your children’s catechism turn to the Devil’s class.”

She ended with an aged tear escaping her left eye.

“No damming curse is ’nough,” the crone muttered. “A curse alone’ll not do. Not for the likes of you. Damn you for stealing wee Dorcas from me.”

She recalled how the minister had handed Dorcas over to a parish family to become a maidservant—used as a wee slave by strangers! “To learn a trade,” the minister had said.

Sarah knew better; it was outright theft of a child from her mother, and the minister had taken coin for placing Dorcas—as addled and sick a child as her. “Old Porter’ll use her badly, sure. But he’ll be cursed next!” She spat the names of villagers she hated. “Parris, Porter, Putnam—all three . . . the Devil take all of thee.”