“What is to be done, Mr. Wakely? I beg you if you know anything, anything that might help, please! I’d give my life for it.”

“I have no potions, no medical knowledge, but true, I have seen children in this condition in past.”

“You have!” she grasped at this straw.

“Yes, sad to say. Always seems a girl child. I imagine your Betty has been terrified into believing the power of . . . well, the witches.”

“Believing the power of the witches is what tortures her?”

“Believing in their efficacy, yes. In the power they claim to wield over her. You recall that when Goode was arrested, that they found a bell, a book, a candle on her?”

“Yes, so?”

“They also searched her haunts, and they found a doll. A doll I had seen her with before—a doll very much in Betty’s likeness, which has not been recovered. I suspect it was burned in a fire.”

“A likeness of Betty, yes, I know but it weren’t destroyed by Goode.”

“What do you mean?”

“My husband in his well-intentioned efforts to bring Betty round, he . . . he brought the damnable thing in to our house.”

“He did?”

“He thought it might shock Betty into knowing that the witch could not any longer harm her. He plucked out every nail and needle before her eyes.”

Jeremy gritted his teeth. “To what result?”

“Betty flew into a worse frenzy than ever, and has ever since exhibited this! This you see now.”

“I suspect that Betty, and perhaps other village children, were led into some dark games, thanks to Tituba and Goode, and at one such meeting, Goode presented the very doll, and I suspect Betty fell immediately ill due to the idea that Witch Goode had placed a hex on her.”

“As-as a result of seeing her likeness stuck full with nails and needles.”

“Goode placed a curse on her father, and everyone in the village knew this. Betty could not be immune to fear of Goode and Tituba at that point.”

“That Mary Wolcott was in on it, too. I just know.” Mrs. Parris’ eyes filled with tears. “But what reparation can I do? Nothing works!”

“I have only known one cure for this sort of thing.”

“Name it and name your price, sir.”

“No price.”

“What then?”

“You must pack Betty into a carriage and take her as far from Salem as you can possibly go.”

“Leave?”

“Leave, yes. Remove her from the influence of evil lying over all Salem now.”

“And it will save my Betty?”

“I assure you, it is your and Betty’s only hope, and point out to Betty each time you cross a body of water that witches can’t cross God’s pure water, no matter their other powers.”

“Is that true?”

“Absolutely.”

She nodded and rolled her hands one over the other until she they resolved to spiral skyward as in prayer. “Then it will be done and done now. I have relatives in Connecticut. We’ll have crossed three rivers.”

“A good number, three,” he assured her. “Go there at once. I’ll arrange for a carriage while you pack. The man you sent with the note. Is he trustworthy?”

“He is. He was Tituba’s man but they were not married. He is broken-hearted over what’s happened.”

“Will he accompany you to your relatives?”

“He will.”

“Excellent. Find him, pack, and I’ll fetch the carriage.”

“Then your answer is—”

“Distance, yes, distance and time.”

“Put distance between Betty and the witches.”

Jeremy didn’t split hairs on the matter, but she’d also be putting distance between them and Parris, who had likely acerbated his daughters bewitchment far more than had Goode. Bringing her the doll to gander at while in such terror already? “I’ll be back in an hour with your transport. What monies do you have?”

“I’ve hidden away enough.”

Her words could be taken two ways, Jeremy thought. He then rushed off to make plans to get this sick child and mother away from this cursed parsonage. It was something practical he could do; something to be accomplished that didn’t involve invisible forces or frustration of this Earth. The desire to help Betty and her mother and follow through with getting them away propelled him. But it must be done swiftly and definitely in Samuel Parris’ absence.

Chapter Eleven

In a matter of hours, while Samuel Parris paraded about the countryside with the Salem seers, children who continued to unearth witches at every turn for the judges and the ministers to condemn, Jeremiah Wakely worked to get Mrs. Parris and Betty out of Salem as quietly and efficiently as possible. Among the ten young women of the village atop white horses gone to Beverly today, the village of Reverend John Hale, was Anne Putnam, Mercy Lewis, and Mary Wolcott. The fingers of these three alone had pointed out more witchery and mischief than all the others together—and in fact more witches and warlocks than in the entire history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

It’d become a weekly ritual to place these children in a wagon and on horseback, take them to Ipswich and other neighboring villages to seek out and identify other offenders remaining at large.

# # # # #

From his Inn doorstep down the street, Deacon Ingersoll, unusually quiet and reticent, watched Jeremiah Wakely purchase a carriage at the livery stable and calmly take carriage and horse the back way to the parsonage. A small crowd had by now gathered to watch as Jeremiah and Ichabod, the Barbados man who’d been seeing Tituba on occasion, bundled Betty Parris into the covered carriage, followed by Mrs. Parris, who climbed onto the seat beside her blanketed daughter. With Ichabod at the reins, the horse started off at a slow processional step, but two houses along, he snapped the whip and the horse whinnied and snatched the carriage into a speedy exit out of the village and onto Ipswich Road, racing away.

Jeremy was pleased to have heard Mrs. Parris, the entire time that she’d held tight to the bundled baby girl, comforting Betty and reassuring her with words like going now, escaping this place, crossing water, better on the other side, Mr. Wakely’s right.

Jeremy felt the cold stare of the crowd upon him. He calmly, resolutely found Dancer in the Parris barn, led her out, stepped into the stirrups, and rode with head held high through the village. Over the heads of the crowd, he noted a slight wave of approval from Nathaniel Ingersoll just before the deacon turned and reentered his Inn and Apothecary.

At the same time, a mixed array of grumbling rose from the crowd, a crowd that had only grown and had become uglier as the minutes ticked by. Jeremiah eased his mare through the crowd, making for Gatter’s jailhouse, a place that had become all too familiar of late.

He felt the mean stares of the people trailing him like so many knives being hurled at his back, and he sensed the mob working up its courage like a single-minded animal. He’d seen mobs before, but he’d never been the object of one till now.

“They at our wake, girl,” he whispered in Dancer’s ear where he leaned into her mane. But Jeremy would not give them the satisfaction of acknowledging them whatsoever, and at the same time, he felt a terrible gratification that none of the accusing, gifted children had been left behind by Parris and his entourage. For even so much as a single one of the little devils would surely have pointed him out a warlock for his actions this day. Removing the minister’s daughter from the village. Removing ‘evidence’ from the venue. He realized that once the seer children heard the story of what’d happened his name would be at or near the top of their lists of who must next be accused.

# # # # #

Jeremiah found Serena precisely where he imagined he would, at the barred window of Gatter’s filthy hole, a jail not fit for the lowliest pirate in all history, a place a rat would feel uncomfortable in.

Serena’s two baskets lay empty at her feet where she stood, hands clasped by her mother, Rebecca. Jeremy’s first glimpse of Mother Nurse tore at his heart. She was in need of bathing, her hair wild and tangled with dirt, sweat, and heat. The jail, overcrowded as it was, had become a giant oven, but Gatter had allowed Rebecca a moment outside as he determined her safely shackled.

“Go now, children! And don’t come back,” Rebecca was saying to Serena and Ben, who stood with the wagon, his face a mask of anguish.

When Jeremiah came closer, the crooked, bent jailer, Gatter, held a hand up to him. “What business ’ave ye here, Mr. Wakely? Come to join in the tears and wailin’, ’ave ya?” He followed with a belly laugh that jangled his large keys before the laugh turned into a consumptive coughing that doubled the stunted, little man over. He disappeared in this condition with Rebecca in tow by her chains, replacing her in the grimy dark interior, unfastening her chains, and locking the door behind him.

Gatter shook his head at the young Nurses and Wakely as if they were all fools to be here this way with people looking on. He then wandered off to the back of the short stone building that looked like an earthen oven. In Gatter’s wake followed a chorus of wheezing, snorting, and hacking.

Jeremy understood why people believed in trolls, for Gatter was just that. Rumor had it that he remained drunk day and night. Which meant he had a bottle hidden somewhere nearby—likely where he was headed now.

Ben took this opportunity to pull Serena away from their mother, where she stood at the barred window, her hands wrapped about Rebecca’s. Ben pressed one of the guns he’d brought with him through the bars to his mother, but Rebecca refused it, shoving it back at Ben, who missed catching it. The thing hit the ground but thankfully did not go off. Ben picked it up and gave his mother a hard stare. “Take it, Mother. If not to use on Gatter then to put yourself from misery.” When Ben forced it a second time, she threw it back at him and angrily muttered, “I am no coward, Ben. I do this in His name. Now take your sister and go from here and neither to return!”