He looked up to see that the trap door was closed tight and that Mercy was not listening in. Although it was closed well, he still ushered his wife into their bedroom and closed the door.

“Why’re you acting so strange?” she asked. “What is it you wish to tell me, Thomas?”

“I have done it.”

“Done what?”

“As I swore I would.”

“You’ve gone to Andover?” Her eyes widened, a half smile forming.

“Yes.”

“To see the wizard?”

“What other reason to go there?”

“What’ve you learned?”

“Only what we already suspected, but it’s now confirmed in my mind, and not just what others have told me is so.”

“Confirmed how?”

Thomas described in detail his two visits to Wardwell and the final results. When he’d finished, she grabbed his hands in hers. “I knew it. How often’ve I told you so? How often?”

“It corroborates your brother Henry’s indictments.”

“If only the dead could indict the living.”

“God forbid!” he said with a gasp. “If so, we’d all be in stocks and chains.”

“Not the righteous among us! No need for them to fear,” she countered.

”But he—Wardwell, he has, and we will act on Henry’s behalf, Henry and the children.”

“Poor Hopestill.” Mrs. Putnam teared up. “I’d so thought she was going to survive long-long-er.”

Hopestill had been their last child before the birth of Anne Junior. There’d been an earlier Anne Junior, but they’d lost her as well and saw no harm in naming their tenth attempt at a child Anne Junior as well. Their combined hope had in fact completely abandoned them after Hopestill’s death, and now what a cruel irony her name had become—Hopestill. Not a stillborn but dead nonetheless before she could learn to properly suckle a teet. And then cruel fate had given them a new hope, a new glimmer of faith as time brought about Anne.

They huddled now together, husband and wife, secure and sure in the knowledge that’d been brought to them by the spirits and corroborated by the wizard and his magic mirror.

Chapter Five

Boston, the following day

Jeremy woke up in the arms of the only woman he ever loved, and rousing, he tried to not wake her, but failed miserably. She didn’t say a word but beckoned him to stay, her arms outstretched where she lay in repose. For the sake of propriety, they had rented two rooms, and Jeremy had made a great show of going to his room, dropping his traveling bags, and loudly stating how tiring the trip had been from Salem. A mistake, as the landlord, a lady who had introduced herself as Mrs. Fannie Fahey, wanted all the juicy gossip coming out of Salem some sixteen miles away. It took some time then for Jeremy to extricate himself from the lady’s interest while Serena laughed at his predicament from behind her closed door at the Fahey House. Once he did so, he had slipped from his room to Serena’s, and they had slept together.

They had also made long, languid love, but they had to do so without benefit of making a sound—not a whoop, not a holler, not a gasp or a sigh to heavy. They feared being found out by other boarders or Mrs. Fahey and possibly thrown out for their distasteful behavior and contempt for the mores of the day. So they had made passionate love in absolute silence, relying on touch and sight and smell and taste alone—no auditory asides, no pounding of the heart even, and surprisingly, they had found the suppression of sound in their lovemaking more than just a challenge as it had somehow become an added spice.

He could not resist her silent plea now for him to return to her and to again make love to her. They were both nude and he eased into her, and now with half the house awake and moving around outside, the game of silent lovemaking was even more of a dare and a spice. It proved near unbearable not to shriek out at moments of greatest passion. Even to keep their kisses quiet proved difficult work. Still as their hands roamed one another’s bodies, as their lips played over one another, they smiled at the game they’d discovered here at the Fahey House. Part of the play that made the touching and lovemaking so powerful was the idea that disapproving citizens just the other side of the walls and doors would be scandalized should they be discovered here like this, unwed yet very much in the throes of love.

“We can’t go on like this, Jeremy,” she whispered—or rather gasped—into his ear before plunging her tongue into his mouth.

“I know . . . must make an honest woman of you.”

“And soon.”

“Absolutely . . . ah! Yes.”

They fell away into one another’s arms, trying desperately to not let their giddiness and joy so overtake them as to send up a howling, which is what each very much wanted to do by this point.

After a long respite and with no more sounds coming in under the door from the hallway, Jeremy again stood and quickly dressed and slipped from the room, blowing her a kiss as he disappeared, and down the hall he went to muss up his own bed to keep the charade alive for Mrs. Fahey, while outside the windows of the boarding house, he heard the rhythmic noise of street hawkers and produce salesmen shouting out their wares and bartering over weights and measures.

# # # # #

Boston bristled with activity. The busiest area in the city proved the North End with the towering clock and bell tower of the North Church looking down over the ships in harbor at the seaport. In essence, Boston appeared a larger scaled Salem Town. While Salem was the port-of-call in the New World for Great Britain and many foreign countries, Boston had begun to rival Salem for the title and to outstrip Salem in permanent growth and population. In fact, there seemed a giddy explosion of activity and expansion and building here. Merchants, bakers, candlestick makers—all in all any business imaginable and some areas of ill repute as grimy and as reprehensible as to rival London some said—but not quite, Jeremy suspected.

As with most second generation New Englanders, Jeremiah Wakely hadn’t ever had the opportunity to see England or London—or any other place off the continent, and would not unless he became a seaman. A highly unlikely prospect, and while like many, he would like to one day see the “old sod” as England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland had come to be known among the colonists, he doubted mightily if he ever would. As a result of such certainty, many a colonist had long ago decided that being a born New Englander was plenty enough to worry a man in the here and now, and that England and London had naught that a man needed that he could not find and attend to on these shores.

Of course, it was a lie men told themselves to help in accepting the rough and primitive world into which their parents and grandparents had deposited them.

Jeremy and Serena married in a quiet ceremony at the North Church, a Reverend Stiles having been pressed into service to do the honors on a weekday. The best man was a deacon of the church, called last minute, along with a lady of the church to act as witness, and Serena still talked about the kindness of these strangers and how they had all cheered and clapped for the young couple.

Jeremy had purchased a pair of gold bands with what amounted to nearly the end of his meager funds, so while in Boston, he’d done some work at the local newspaper office, where he wrote a column under an assumed name, denouncing the witch hunt at Salem as “a fabrication with underlying motives too despicable for polite society to imagine.” Quite soon after the publication of his first “dispatches” from Salem as he called the pieces written under the pseudonym Alastair Cantwell, he was fired and the column running in the pamphlet-sized paper shut down as seditious and libelous.

Jeremy had been enraged by this, and he had fought with his editor, Horatio Sperlunkle, but the pressure from somewhere in a powerful seat proved too great, and so he’d been without sufficient funds now for a few days. But worse than the loss of money was the suppression of truth. Still, funds were a worry as soon, he and Serena would have nothing for the rent.

They continued to board at a Mrs. Fahey’s who charged a reasonable and fair rate. In fact, she stopped them in the hallway and insisted Jeremy take back half the rent she’d charged him before they’d become man and wife. Jeremy put up resistance, thinking it odd until Mrs. Fahey conspiratorially said, “I can’t charge a man for an unused bed. Now you two just take back the half.”

Mrs. Fahey, a stubbornly curious and naturally observant Boston lady had determined a great deal about Jeremy, Serena, and their situation. If Jeremy weren’t sure of her good nature and open heart, he might have believed the woman a spy if not a witch! Conniving busybody she was, yes, but as it turned out in a good way, he’d determined, so he long before now had settled on the term meddler to cover her interest in the newlyweds.

She did not appear to be reporting back to anyone save her small dog, Harry, she called him, after her late husband, who’d died at sea some years before. At breakfast this morning, Mrs. Fahey insisted that the two of them—newly minted husband and wife—go down to the piers and do her marketing for her, claiming that she must make beds and that she felt nauseous and unlike herself, ending with, “Certainly can’t ’spect me to suck in all them fishy odors at the pier? I’d likely vomit in public, a thing a lady must never do, correct, Serena? They take you for a witch, a lady losing her godly graced food.”

The notion was that if the food was graced, then a true witch’s stomach couldn’t abide it and must hurl it back.