Martha Corey had lived in Salem my entire life. Nay, longer. I had often looked over from gossiping with Mary or trying to discipline my younger siblings and seen her scowl. I tried to avoid her eyes, and I had always a sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach when I saw her. I had thought it to be merely nerves. Now I knew better.
“Martha Corey has long given me chills,” I told the wolf.
“And Kendra?” the wolf encouraged. “What will you say about her?”
It was cold, so cold, and my fingers felt stiff with it. I dug them into the wolf’s fur, and I remembered. The memory was on the tip of my mind, where it seemed like it had happened to someone else. Yet I knew it was me.
“Once, we were leaving church on a fine summer day. There was a bird singing in the oak tree. I looked up at it and saw that it was a mother mockingbird, sitting on her nest. I bent down to lift up Deliverance, that she could see it more clearly, see the eggs. She was only three then.”
“You are a wonderful sister,” the wolf said.
“Yes. But as I did this, the bird swooped down on Deliverance and me, squawking and angry, and it made as if to peck at our eyes. It was at this exact moment that I saw Kendra Hilferty, staring at us.”
I remembered it now, as though it had just happened. Kendra stood there, as if frozen when the bird swooped down on us. Then she saw me seeing her, and only then she ran toward me, swinging her arms and yelling at the bird to stop. At the time, I had thought her kind. Now I realized that it was she who had sent the bird to torment me. She had only chased it away to keep others from recognizing her trickery.
“She sent a bird to peck at my sister, to attack me. I know it was her.”
“Indeed, she is evil,” the wolf said, calmly. “Thank the Lord you were there to protect Deliverance.”
“Yes.” So many times, I had been impatient or annoyed with Deliverance. If only I had realized that she, like I, had been victimized by a witch. Who knew what she was suffering?
“Yes, you are such a good girl,” the wolf said.
And then I remembered other instances, so many other instances, when I had tripped in town and twisted my ankle just as Kendra Hilferty turned the corner, or when I had a headache or heard a bump in the night and knew Martha Corey was behind it. Indeed, I was fortunate to be alive.
I told the wolf all of it, and he walked round and round me, his coat warming me until, finally, I was able to slip into untormented sleep for the first time in a week.
It was Mother who found me in the morning, alone and half frozen in our yard.
“What happened?” she asked, summoning my father to carry me in. “Why are you out here?”
As my father scooped me up in his arms and carried me inside, I whispered, “Witches.”
7
Kendra
Every night since my arrest, I had been tormented, poked, and pecked at with questions, questions about why I tortured children, why I consorted with the devil, and whether I had seen anyone else while I was doing so. To all, I answered simply no. Or I did not know. Another woman had been arrested, added to our cell. Rebecca Nurse was old, at least seventy, an esteemed member of the church, a grandmother. She was not harsh, like Martha, but kind and dear, and when she saw me, she walked over and caressed my cheek, saying, “It will end. The Lord will keep us safe.” She said that to me every day. She believed it, believed that if she was good, no evil would come to her. I hoped so. If a woman of such dignity and godliness could be found guilty, what chance was there for someone like me, someone who actually was a witch?
It had rained every night for a week, thunder and lightning, which bothered me even though I could not see the sun. My trial was in a week’s time. James visited me every night telling me news of the town.
“It will end,” he said last night, as every night. “I believe it will end.”
“How can you be so certain after what happened in . . . with your mother?”
“It was . . . different. My mother, she was a good woman, good to me, but one who always lurked about the outskirts of society. The women accused here at first, they were the same, women like Tituba and . . .”
“Me?” The rain pounded upon the roof above.
“Yes. You are a stranger. You are no one’s daughter, no one’s grandmother. People know little of you. But now they are accusing women like Rebecca Nurse, fine, God-fearing women.”
“I am not God-fearing?” I asked.
“Are you?” he asked back with a smile.
I considered it. I knew I was unlikely to die. Therefore, I never feared hell. There were other sorts of hells for me, but not one with a horned man with a pitchfork, not one with flames. Since my parents’ deaths, I had not even been sure if God existed, but if he did, he had no dominion over me. That is what it was to have nothing to lose. “No.”
He nodded. “And there is something else,” he said. “Mary Warren.”