“Okay, I want you men to sound off, and Nigel here will take your names, and if we need speak to you by light of the sun, we’ll come find you then. Now sound off!”

“John Tarbell!”

“Ben Nurse!”

“Joseph Nurse!”

“You know me,” said Jeremy.

Serena cleared her throat and sent up a coughing jag, to which Jeremy said, “Young Killean Wakely, my half brother visiting from Woburn.”

“Put him down, too,” ordered Herrick.

“We only stopped at the cemetery plot,” said Ben. “We’re returning from John’s home to my father’s place.”

“Coming from a birthing party!” added Joseph, returning to the reins and his seat beside John. “Tarbell’s done fathered another one again—or haven’t ye heard?” He slapped Tarbell on the back and the two laughed good-naturedly. “Makes four, right, John?”

Tarbell spoke with a drunken slur. “Plenty of Canary wine!”

“So you mean fellows had naught to do with breaking out prisoners down at the jail?”

“A jailbreak? Tonight?” Ben sounded amazed at the notion.

“You may search our wagon, but you’ll find naught but a few jugs of whiskey,” Joseph added.

“Gotta keep Tarbell happy the way you do a bear!” Ben joked.

When the night riders didn’t laugh with Ben, he shouted, “All right then, do you see any prisoners here? Go ahead, search the wagon! We’ll get down and you can have at it.” Ben leapt off and onto the dirt path.

“If we were to break anyone from jail, it’d be our dear, sainted Mother,” Joseph added. “Do you see Mother Nurse here?”

“Fact is,” replied Herrick, giving the wagon and its occupants a cursory look, “your mother was one of a few who didn’t escape the jail.”

Jeremy had noticed a number of prisoners too sick or too depleted to stand much less run from the jail. He spoke up. “If we’d had any notion there’d been a jailbreak ahhh . . . do you need men to help you, sir?”

The men with Herrick grumbled at this, and there was a brief discussion before Herrick returned with, “We’ve enough men, but thanks for the offer, Mr. Wakely.”

Jeremy and the others instinctively knew the others did not trust them. “Well then if you’re satisfied, Sheriff,” said Joseph, “we’ll be on our way.”

Ben, seeing his bluff had worked, leapt back onto the wagon.

“Yes, be off,” said Herrick.. “But when these escapees are caught, if they should point a finger at you Nurse men, you will be arrested for aiding and abetting fugitives, some of whom have been condemned as witches.”

“And good luck to you.” Jeremy waved Herrick and his men off.

The moment Herrick and his men rode out of earshot, Serena whispered, “You’re the consummate liars Ben, Joe! And you, my husband. So I am now your brother?”

“Half brother!”

She lightly thumped him and laughed.

“I’m sorry about your mother, dear heart. Really I am. I’d hoped that faced with our all of us well intentioned children of hers, putting our lives on the chopping block that . . . well she’d change her mind and come with us.”

“My prayer too. Unanswered.”

“You have to admire her determination and faith.”

“I do. Still it saddens me.”

“She’s dying for her faith,” muttered Ben, who’d gone solemn.

“There’re worse things to die for,” Jeremy assured the others.

Serena dropped her head and her weight against him. Jeremy held her close.

“She’s already dead.” It was Ben, still full of self-recriminations at having failed this night.

The rest of the trip home was uneventful and silent. Each of them had gone to their thoughts, and their thoughts were cast in fear.

Chapter Three

July 19th came like a fast wind. Rebecca and the four others to be executed with her stepped from the jail and clambered up the boards laid over the muck by Gatter, boards leading up and into the jail cart. It’d had a former life as an ox cart, but with modifications, the huge, creaking wooden wheels now carried an entire metal cage forged of wrought iron. Flat bars as thick as a man’s arms. Now the Witch Cart as it was called was filled with the five to be sent to heaven or hell depending on what an onlooker believed. The cart seemed to rattle, but this noise came of the shackles around the ankles and wrists of the accused. A new order since the jailbreak was that prisoners be kept in chains at all times.

And so the noisy, rattling of chains filled the air with each turn of the wheels on the cart pulled by two oxen provided by Judge Corwin. The cart bounced over rough terrain and trundled off toward Watch Hill and the gallows—at times looking as if it might tilt completely over. When the cart would teeter on the verge of tilting, Anne Putnam, Mercy Lewis, Mary Wolcott and other girls who’d joined them in accusing so many people of witchcraft would shout and scream that they saw a crowd of other witches—invisible to the general public—trying desperately to knock over the cart to impede its progress and stop the hangings.

To be sure, the villagers had turned out in droves to witness what might happen next; everyone was curious for one reason or the other. Most curious to see if the accused might not at the last break and shout out their guilt and beg for the milk of human kindness and the olive branch offered by the judges and the ministers: that if the guilty but state their crimes and name names of others equally guilty of bewitchments and murder, that they would be spared. That their stone hearts could be melted, and that they could be rehabilitated to the love of Christ and God, and the hatred of the Antichrist.

Many another in the holding cells across the colony had repented, so why not these facing the rope—minutes now away?

Other villagers came in the hope of seeing the witches hung no matter what they confessed. Still others came to see the result of their handiwork—among them Reverend Samuel Parris, while others came to bid loved ones a final adieu even if from a distance, like the proud and upright Nurse family.

The sky, a brilliant, blinding mix of sunshine, blue, and scattered pure white cloud looked down on the falling-apart ox drawn cart. Children chased alongside the jail cart, some throwing clumps of dirt and rocks at the accused within, and a crowd the likes of which Salem had never seen awaited the cart at its destination below Mr. Fiske’s finely wrought gallows with its equally spaced six platforms of which only five would be put to use today.

Suddenly, Sarah Goode raised a fist to them, cursing the children who dared throw rotten eggs and apples and tomatoes at the bars, splattering ugly juices onto the condemned. The celebrated children capable of seeing into the Invisible World of Satan only shouted back, ridiculing Goode and the others in the cart.

Rebecca Nurse knew of the Invisible World only from her reading about it in books—one of them penned by Increase Mather. She believed the notion had a place in every Puritan text. But at no time in the history of Essex County or the Massachusetts Bay Colony had anyone seen into this world—certainly not to the degree and accuracy of determining that an invisible witch held a knitting needle dripping with blood, one that she plunged into children who then fell into a dead faint.

But for now, Rebecca must concentrate on God’s glorious other world—also invisible to men, also taken on faith alone, that place where she was staring at the entire time where she stood in the cart—skyward. She took in the azure expanse of it, and the inviting clouds that seemed to be opening up and beckoning her within. The crowd around her had faded into nothingness.

People seeing her in a sort of trance began to point and speak of Witch Nurse’s looking so at peace. Hearing this going around, the chief accusing children began to call it not peace but an attempt to contact an army of witches to descend upon them all.

Rebecca heard none of this; she was beyond it, above it. The idea that she was in God’s hands and would soon be in God’s house controlled her entirely now, and it was in this frame of mind that she remained calm and in an attitude of acceptance and prayer, which many in the crowd both recognized and understood. Among these the entire contingent from her large, extended family—many of whom, Serena and Jeremy among them, felt a sense of overwhelming pride in her and peace for her, as if they together all sent up a shared prayer and each word was the same.

Whereas Goode, and to a lesser degree the other women condemned to die this day, presented a picture of hatred and rancor as they engaged the crowd, cursing at them all as if dealing with a single rabid animal they must destroy if by no other words than a dying woman’s curse, Rebecca conveyed as gentle a nature as a lamb led to slaughter but without the innocence; rather in her eye was a knowing look when she did chose to scan the crowd—a look that said, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.” It was an attitude she’d preached to the others in the cell with her this entire time, and she had given hope and faith beyond the gallows to any number of her converts behind bars, and in fact, she had even converted her jailer, Weed Gatter—or so it was being bandied about. In fact, those who shared the cart to the gallows with her had all taken her teachings as Rebecca, no matter her excommunication and condemnation before the authorities and her accusers remained a teacher of the Good Book. And the only soul that had not been touched by her and converted to the faith that kept Rebecca strong in the face of this horror tale remained Sarah Goode.

The others in the cart now bowed their heads and began to pray with Mother Nurse. They prayed now for a speedy end.