“I’ll not stop you from speaking,” she said, going to a barrel in the corner and taking off the wooden lid, then scooping out cornmeal and putting it into an iron pot. “But do not assume I’ll help you. ’Tis impossible to do magic safely here. These halfwits are all obsessed with Satan.” She poured a frothy liquid into the pot from a pewter pitcher, and then attached the pot to an iron arm that hung over the hearth coals. She raked the coals and blew on them a little. “This will take some time,” she said. “Give you a chance to explain yourself.”
It would have been extremely rude for me to say so, but I was in no hurry to be fed. My digestion was a mess. Our research into the fate of the late General Schneider had uncovered evidence of an epidemic that had started in the village of Nagyb?rzs?ny at the same time as his brief stay there. It was some sort of bowel complaint that had taken a number of lives before burning itself out. The village’s isolation had prevented it from spreading farther, and the surviving locals had, of course, attributed it to witchcraft. But the lesson to us was obvious: time travelers could infect historical communities with diseases to which they had no immunity, and vice versa. So I’d been given every vaccination and antiviral drug known to modern science before stepping into the ODEC, to protect myself. And to protect the people of Muddy River, I’d taken a course of antibiotics that had killed everything in my gut, and scrubbed with disinfectant immediately before the mission. I wasn’t sure what would happen if I ate Goody Fitch’s gruel.
I began to tie the skirt at my waist, and opened my mouth to speak, but before I could say anything she spoke again, and as she did so, also came to fuss over my skirt.
“They’ve been mad with witch-hunt zeal because ’38 nearly killed us all,” she said. “Muddy River had just been chartered, we had all barely begun to build our homes and clear our gardens, and we were almost destroyed before we could take root. We had to plant the corn twice because it rotted in the frozen ground, then the spring was too wet, the summer too hot, and full of tempests, then it rained all autumn until October, when the snow came and never left. Many other settlements along the Charles did not survive the year. They attributed Mother Nature’s handiwork to witchcraft, and the survival of the village to the Lord’s Grace. I saved the village, but they do not know it, and they may never know it. If they even suspected, they would not thank me, they would kill me for witchcraft because they believe witchcraft is the work of the devil. Stupid folk.” She tied the drawstring sharply tight around my waist. “That was the very year they excommunicated Anne Hutchinson, one of the best among them. And then brought in a slave-ship. And they call themselves Christians. Thick-waisted you are, for your size,” she said.
“I did not grow up wearing stays. No women of my time did.”
She made a bemused sound, and then continued her monologue as she helped me into the waistcoat. “Stab themselves in the foot. I cannot imagine this place will ever amount to anything.”
“Why did you come, then?” I asked.
“I wanted to meet new witches,” she said. “I am from a family of chroniclers and sages, I have always been encouraged to learn as much as possible. I was curious to compare information with the witches here—I assumed there must be some. My husband was never a Puritan but he favored their thinking and was anxious to be gone from England for his own reasons. So we sailed to Boston. Later we took the first chance to settle away from the peninsula. I had great hopes. But the settlers are all such sanctimonious asses that none of the native witches will speak to me about witchcraft, or anything else. They fear I will try to lead them away from their own gods and beliefs, that is how relentless and irritating these Puritans are. There are so many plants here we don’t have back home, and I fain would learn them, but I find nobody who can teach me.”
That was my in. “Like partridge-berry?” I said as casually as possible. “Or perhaps you still call it squaw-vine?”
She stopped suddenly as she was buttoning the waistcoat, and then resumed. “How do you know about that?” she asked. “That is the very plant I am most keen to understand. It seems to me it requires magic to find out all its possibilities.”
“And cranberries,” I added, “but maybe those are easier to understand.”
“Cranberries are magnificent,” she agreed. “And the elderflower, which I know from its cousin in England. But the squaw-vine is something else again.”
“It grows near pine trees,” I said. “Do you know that much as yet?” She nodded cautiously, looking at me with new interest. Thank you, Rebecca, I thought. Well done.
“I know a lot about it,” I continued, in an offering tone. “How and when best to harvest it, what parts of the plant are most useful—I know a great deal, although not of course what can only be known through magic, since I’m not a witch. But I can help you. If you’ll help me.”
She was tempted by this offer, I could tell, but remained uncertain. “Do you understand the danger you are putting both of us in?” she asked.
“I also know some interesting things about skullcap,” I added. “And bee-balm.”
She shook her head. “I know them already. They haven’t the scent of the squaw-vine. They’re just medicinal, not magic. The squaw-vine calls to me. But in a language I do not speak.”
“We’ll fix that,” I said. “Help me with my errand, and when I return, I’ll tell you everything I know. And then you’ll send me back to where I came from.”
A pause. “I will,” said Goody Fitch. “What are you called?”
“Melisande,” I said. “I am unmarried.”
“I am Goody Fitch,” she said. “My Christian name is Mary.”
“I know,” I said, then briefly told her my errand: that I must obtain a copy of the newly published Bay Psalm Book, coop it safely into a barrel to protect it from the elements, and then bury it in a very precise spot in a field to the northwest of the palisaded village of Cambridge.
Instead of questioning why I needed to have the book, or to bury it, she simply asked, “Why there, particularly?”
I considered how fully to answer. “That is where a descendant of yours will eventually live,” I said. “Someone I know in my time. They need a copy of the book. If I do not . . . reserve one for them now, they will never be able to get one.”
To my surprise, she responded to this news with an outburst of laughter. “How preposterous to imagine civilization ever flourishing in such a backwater!” she said. “And how disappointing to think my own begotten will not have the sense to get out of such a place!”
I bristled on behalf of my adopted city. “Cambridge becomes one of the greatest places of learning in the world,” I said—rashly, for it is always ill-advised to speak of future times. “It easily rivals, arguably outshines, its British namesake.”
“Bollocks,” she said, amused. “A terrified village with the greatest invention in the world—a printing press!—and all they do with it is publish religious nothings. The only school in the New World and what do they teach? Only religion. And only their religion.”