“Unable to work her magic on we who are strong, Thom, they attack our women.”

Thomas Putnam’s eyes widened. Every illness, each hardship he’d ever faced had this moment a new light flooding over it. “I see.”

“You need but open your eyes, man.”

“What do we do, Samuel?”

“Women and children they attack, you see, because they’re more easily deceived.”

“Stands to reason.”

“Weaker of mind and body, you see.”

“More easily attacked, yes.”

“And they’re more easily tempted away from the light.”

“So true.”

“Because we are strong in our faith,” continued Parris. “Too strong to be shaken.”

“Agreed but what now? What can we do?”

“There is a great deal we can do? And we will, Thom, we will.”

“May God preserve us.” Thomas crossed himself in the manner of a Papist. Parris frowned at the gesture.

“So far as I’ve been able to ascertain, Thomas, the bewitching began with your children during the time when George Burroughs was minister here.”

“Began with my children? But the curse on the parish came before Burroughs. Dates back to when James Bailey ministered here.”

“Yes, but you miss my meaning. Bailey is Burroughs.”

“What?”

“Burroughs is Bailey.”

“You mean they worked in tandem?”

“I meant they are the same evil in different guises.”

“Before my Anne and I were wed, that Bailey enchanted her . . . made her do foolish and shameful things.”

“And he may well have made her barren.”

“Barren?”

“Do you really think it a coincidence that after he was run off and Burroughs took over that your every child conceived by your wife before and after Burroghs’ time here never came to fruition? Withering on the vine?”

Thomas looked both stricken and like a man who has finally stepped from darkness into light. “By my word, you’re right. All the time Bailey was here, she was sullen, Anne was, and with Burroughs here, my wife lost two sets of twins—four children in all, and another she could not bring to full term.”

“And who were the midwives that Reverend George Burroughs sent to your wife in a show of Christian spirit?”

“Why ’twas always the same ladies of the church.”

“Exactly. I’ve seen the records. Exactly . . . ”

Putnam swallowed hard, picturing each of the midwives who’d ever attended his wife during those dark days, among them Rebecca Nurse and her sister Sara Cloyse. “I-I-I need to tell Anne this.”

“Are you sure she can withstand such news?”

“Yes, she must know all of it.”

“I daresay she does know deep within,” suggested Parris, “but do share my suspicion. Anne has a fighter’s heart, and she’s earned the right to know.”

“Damned witches at her the entire time.”

“Pretending goodness in the guise of midwives.”

“And somehow they slipped up with little Anne Junior, eh?”

“By God,” repeated Parris. “Right again!” A long silence settled in over the minister and deacon. “Don’t you see our path is clear, Thom?”

Putnam’s blank expression proved confusion could be cavernous, yawning, bottomless, and profound.

God the man is thick, thought Parris, but said, “Your daughter’s fits . . . those convulsions she’s given to?”

“Yes?”

“Not unlike those my Betty is enduring now!”

“Fits, yes. Anne’s always had the fits. But now your child? The same?”

“Betty has never had fits of any sort until now.”

“I’m sorry to hear it. My heart drops whenever Anne goes into her fits.”

Another long silence during which Thomas could hear the disturbed sleep of the child in a room overhead. “Tell me, Thomas. Does your daughter speak of a dark, stout man dressed in black broadcloth who comes holding a mockery of our Bible? A black book. A man who bids she sign in his unholy book, and for this he promises an end to her suffering?”

“She’s not said such to me, but perhaps she’s confided in her mother.”

“Betty calls out in her feverish kicking and screaming the words King of Witches—that George is King of Witches.”

“King George?”

“No, fool! Sorry. Forgive me, Thom. George is George Burroughs.”

“A minister for Satan, him?”

“Yes, yes, I say. He is their leader! A real coven requires a male leader, a cunning man, a Pan. Tituba and Goode have both confessed to dealing with this man, and that he is the one who lured them into temptation and into the work of the Devil.”

“But Burroughs is no longer among us.”

“He comes on the night wind! Comes flying from afar to be with his coven.”

“I last heard he had a ministry in Maine.”

“No doubt another one with rot and evil at its core. You still fail to see my main thrust, Thomas.”

“And that being?”

“Burroughs was an appointment according to record.”

“And?”

“Pushed on the village parish by the Town Councilmen!”

“Who at the time were . . . ”

“The parishioners who block me at every turn, beginning with—”

“Francis Nurse.”

“Whose wife and sisters by marriage oversaw the births—or rather deaths—of your children, man.”

The connective tissue began to find glue inside Putnam’s mind. “Hold on! Burroughs’ own family, wife and children, like Bailey’s before him, died of a fever when he was minister here as well, so—”

“So? So what? Don’t you see it? The man did away with his own.”

“Are you so sure of it?


“Am I sure? We are sure of it.”

“We?”

“The doctor, Corwin and Hathorne, and me, yes.”

“The Dr. Porter and the magistrates are in agreement?”

“And so are you, my friend, once you’ve gotten it in your head.”

“You believe the man did away with his own?”

“They could not be converted to his black religion, so pure of heart were they, so he arranged for their deaths.”

“Like my own dead children?”

“Precisely.”

“Have you evidence of it?”

“I have two witches in lock up who will testify to it.”

“You’ve spoken to the judges, have you?”

“I have, yes.”

“And you mean to bring charges against Burroughs?”

“Among others, yes, but I need your and Anne’s help.”

“Help? Which of my Annes?”

“Both, I’m sure.”

“But why?”

“It will not do for me alone to bring charges.” When Parris got a blank stare from Thomas, he stomped the floor, angry. “I want you and your wife to swear out charges so that Sheriff Williard then serves the warrants of arrest.”

“Serve warrants of arrest? To carry out . . . the charges.”

“It is our duty, Thom.”

“But you want me and Anne to swear out the complaints?”

“Yes, it’s crucial that it doesn’t appear all from one party, especially not from me.”

They’d begun their secret meeting in Parris’ kitchen as everyone in the house slept, and since had moved to the hearth. A storm had come up outside, and now Parris heard a noise on the stairwell, and a quick glance caught a nightshirt. Mary, eavesdropping. How much had Mary Wolcott heard? Mary had been tending to Betty, whose fits and screams had kept everyone up late into the night, and then she fell ill with fever. Seeing that Parris had found her out, she scampered back upstairs to the sick room.

“Go home to your wife, Thomas, and not tonight but soon . . . soon break this news to her. Determine if she agrees or disagrees with my conclusions, and when and if you swear out your warrants against those who’ve maimed your family for eternity, keep my name out of it. Understood?”

“Understood.”

At the door, after saying their good nights, the rain slamming into them, Parris added, “All your children who’d be men today like Nurse’s children, all working to a good end for all the Putnams, Thom, bearing you grandchildren, all murdered with needles stabbed into their innocent bodies right here and here.” Parris indicated each of his armpits. “Where no one might think to look. Puncturing the lungs and the heart from this point downward.”

“But why was little Anne spared? How?”

“I believe God saved Anne.”

“T-To bear witness?”

“You say she and her mother are visited by the dead children. What are the dead saying to your women?”

“Anne says they call out that they’ve been murdered, yes, but I never did believe it anything but rantings.”

“Get thee home to your two Annes, Thom, and sleep well this night if you can.”

Thomas wheeled and rushed off in the storm for his house, his mind filled with the images posited there by the minister. As he sloshed home, using a crutch, even in the darkness, he could see smoke curling and rising from a chimney miles away, an old, supposed-abandoned Nurse house, and he wondered whose fire it might be. Could it be a meeting of the coven that Parris had spoken of?

“How do these Nurse and Towne people fair so well?” he asked the night sky as a streak of lighting showered down with the rain and thunder. In his head, he could hear Parris’ considered answer: Through manipulation and cunning.

“Cunning begun with early land grants,” muttered Thomas to himself. How else had they so tricked his aged father into signing over that perfect tract of land to them and theirs? Signed over to Towne, and from Towne to the Nurses, all a put up job from the beginning thanks to that swift-talking Reverend Burroughs as well, but at that time Burroughs was in another guise as Reverend Jedidiah Allen of Boston. It’d all been the work of a warlock, a witch man.

Nearing home, Thomas shouted, “They mock our Sabbath with their black rites.”