Kathleen Kent - The Heretic's Daughter

I thought of Father returning to Gallows Hill to lift Mother’s stiffening body from its narrow trench and I shuddered. Dr. Ames pulled my shawl tighter around my shoulders and sat with me silently for a while, clasping and unclasping his fingers in mine. I felt my eyes grow heavy against the touch of his fingers and I longed for sleep. A sleep that would go on and on, undisturbed and peaceful. When Mother used to wake Father on a Sabbath, his deep voice would rumble from beneath the blankets in Welsh, “I am asleep and don’t waken me.” But the sleep he summoned was from a fairy tale and meant a deeper sleep, an enchanted sleep. A misted, reveried decline that would outlast time. I felt my mind floating free with my drowsiness but I heard the doctor begin to speak, and there was an edge to his voice that made my ears twitch to listen.

“I do not know how much you know about your father, Sarah. About his past, before coming here from England. It may be that you know very little of him, and it is not for me to tell you of past deeds that would be…,” he said, and he paused, carefully selecting his words. “Your father was a soldier and fought long and hard for Cromwell. Many men here fought proudly for Cromwell and his Parliament but it is a pride quietly kept. But before your father fought for Parliament he was a soldier for the Crown and supported the King as did all his kinsmen. Over time he came to believe, as did many great men of that time, that the suffering of the people came mainly from that King. The tyranny of the King’s unfair laws of taxation and religious intolerance…”

I had opened my eyes, and he paused and smiled at the look of childish incomprehension on my face.

He squeezed my hand and said, “You don’t know what I’m speaking of, do you?” I shook my head and he continued. “Then I will only say that your father is the bravest of men. He carries on his shoulders the terrible weight of his convictions and his losses. Losses that would have planted a lesser man into the ground. Do you think he would have let a group of deluded girls keep him from doing his duty to his wife?”

I said softly, “I cannot say what he will do. He did not save my mother.”

He bowed his head for a moment and said, “It is easier to kill a tyrant with a sword than disassemble whole counties in the grip of superstitious dread. He could not save her, Sarah, without putting you and your brothers at terrible risk.”

When I did not answer him he started gathering up his tools and vials into his bag and said as he rose to go, “He will not rest until he can carry you from here to home.”

With dismay I remembered the message I was to give Father and I grabbed for the sleeve of his black coat and said, “I have forgotten to give him your message.”

He patted my grasping hand and uncurled it from his sleeve, saying, “Then you will tell him when next you see him. It is important for him to know he has our fellowship. Sleep now and I will visit again soon.” He parted with Tom, asking him to watch over me, making certain that I ate my share of the bread he had left us.

I slept deeply for the remainder of the day, and when I woke at dusk, I felt a tightening and a rawness like the tickling of a moth in my throat. I slept again for several hours and woke with flames in my head and bone-shaking chills. A first dry cough was quickly followed by a rattling one that came from somewhere deep in my chest. Tom put his hand to my neck and then quickly pulled it away as though the palm had been scorched. He beckoned for Goody Faulkner to come closer, but when she saw I was not well, she pulled back, saying only, “You must keep her well wrapped. And ask your father to bring soup or soak her bread for she must not eat anything solid. Keep her head bathed. There is nothing more that can be done.” She pulled her daughters closer to her and three pairs of eyes regarded me with more fear than sympathy.

FOR THE SECOND time in Salem jail Tom sat sick watch, covering me with his coat through the cold nights, trading his own bread and meat for any bit of mash or soup or small beer that could be passed down my burning throat. And within a few days I entered into that fevered state where awakenings are indistinct and fragmented and dreams are etched clear and bright upon the memory. It is a realm close to madness where what is heard and seen during the fever can never be trusted to be substantial once the sickness has been burned free.

Once, I saw the cell door open wide of its own accord and a dark man, long of limb and impossibly lean, swung back and forth on it like a walking stick on a swaying branch. He had sharp-angled features and he placed a finger to his pursed and smiling lips as though we shared a wicked secret. When I looked to Tom to show him the man and looked back again, he had disappeared. The prison door was closed fast and not another person had raised their head to give any sign they had seen the taunting man. I heard the disembodied voice of Father or Dr. Ames calling me and telling me to get up and begin breakfast or to sit up and start the treadle on the spinner. When I answered them, my voice sounded deafening and petulant in my own ears.

At times I felt hands turning me over onto my back, though I struggled to stay buried in the straw, shielding my eyes from the blinding pinpricks of light that were held close to my eyes. Damp cloths were pressed onto my forehead, but I brushed them off as quickly as they were applied, for they felt like the hands of the dead being laid across my skin. I wanted only to sleep and yet in the depths of night when the cold shuddering of my limbs would start and the racking coughs threatened to crack all my ribs, the time between midnight and dawn seemed to last forever.

I could hear the rustling of vermin close by and once I saw two rats regarding me with a keen and somewhat sympathetic intelligence in their red eyes. They sat upright on their haunches and began to speak together, their voices high and wavering like the voices of old women. One said to the other, “It seems that they have hung a dog in Salem a few days past.” And the other responded, “Aye, and I hear another is to be hanged in Andover at this very hour.” They laughed confidingly together over this as would old friends over a good jest, but when they looked back at me their teeth were pointed sharp and yellow. I heard the sound of a small cat meowing, pitiful and puny, as though from the inside of a drowning sack. The rats shook their heads sorrowfully at me and the biggest one said, “It is very small and not like to live. And there is so much blood…” They fell back down into the furtive crouching attitude that all rats have taken since the days of Adam and soon vanished within the dark and crawling rushes on the floor.

Once I woke from a dream and found I was speaking with someone sitting next to me. There was a slight, but not unpleasant, ringing in my ears, and my sight was so clear that it seemed as if black lines had been drawn around every object, putting each thing in sharp contrast to everything else. A tight band was clenched around my chest and the passage for breath had been squeezed into one slender cord. I heard myself say, “But why must I stay?”

I felt some pressure on my fingers and when I turned my head I saw Tom sitting next to me, holding my hand. His face was glistening and wet and when I looked into his eyes, I saw that he had been crying. I tried to comfort him but my tongue felt swollen and lazy, and so I could only lie very still and listen to the low and broken sound of his voice. He said, “Do you remember last June, Sarah, after they had taken Mother and it was just us and Father in the fields?”

I lowered my chin slightly to nod, even though movement seemed beyond my abilities, and he continued, “We were plowing the fields for planting. And something happened. I… I looked behind me down the rows that had been furrowed the day before and the day before that and then I looked ahead of me and all I saw were stones and stumps to be taken out. For the rest of my life and for always, there would be a strap round my shoulders and rough earth waiting to be cleared. I couldn’t see for the blackness of it. And so I shrugged off the harness and went to my bed.