BOOK EXCERPT: Devil Knows: A Tale of Murder and Madness in America’s First Century

DEVIL KNOWS A TA L E O F M U R D E R A N D M A D N E S S I N A M E R IC A’ S F I R S T C E N T U RY

DAV I D J O SE P H KO L B

GARN PRESS N EW YO R K , N Y

Published by Garn Press, LLC New York, NY www.garnpress.com Garn Press and the Chapwoman logo are registered trademarks of Garn Press, LLC Devil Knows: A Tale of Murder and Madness in America’s First Century is a work of fiction closely based on history and geography. References to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously, and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the fictional nature of the work, and all situations, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2015 by David Joseph Kolb All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please send an email to Garn Press addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator.”

Book and cover design by Benjamin J. Taylor “Theater of Action: and “Family Tree” illustrations by Scott Rosema Library of Congress Control Number: 2015946936 Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kolb, David Joseph.

Devil knows : a tale of murder and madness in America’s first century / David Joseph Kolb. pages cm ISBN: 978-1-942146-22-3 (pbk.)

ISBN: 978-1-942146-23-0 (hardcover) ISBN: 978-1-942146-24-7 (e-book) 1. Salem (Mass.)—History—Colonial period, ca. 16001775—Fiction. 2. Witches—Violence against— Massachusetts—Salem—Fiction. 3. Trials (Witchcraft)— Massachusetts—Salem—Fiction. 4. Quaker Women— Persecutions— Massachusetts—Salem—Fiction. 5.

Pennacook Indians—Fiction I. Title.

PS3611.O58241 G67 2015 813`.6—dc23 2015946936

Author’s Note Devil Knows: A Tale of Murder and Madness in America’s First Century is a work of fiction closely based on history and geography. A few of the names and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and in those cases, any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Several figures are not fictional, however, and of main interest to the reader is that of Mary Bradbury, whose escape from certain death is at the heart of this story.

The circumstances surrounding Mrs. Bradbury’s remarkable cheating of the hangman – the only convicted “Salem witch” to so succeed – are shrouded in the mists of history. Nor did her great-ancestor, the late author Ray Bradbury, shed any light on her strange story.

“It is a truth (and it would be a very sad one, but for the higher hopes which it suggests) that no great mistake, whether acted or endured, in our mortal sphere, is ever really set right. Time, the continual vicissitude of circumstances, and the invariable inopportunity of death, render it impossible. If, after long lapse of years, the right seems to be in our power, we find no niche to set it in. The better remedy is for the sufferer to pass on, and leave what he once thought his irreparable ruin far behind him.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne “Go tell the world, What Prays can do beyond all Devils and Witches, and What it is that these Monsters love to do; and through the Demons in the Audience of several standers-by threatned much disgrace to thy Author, if he let thee come abroad, yet venture That, and in this way seek a just Revenge on Them for the Disturbance they have given to such as have called on the Name of God.” The Rev. Mr. Cotton Mather

Frontpiece Theater of Action, New England c.1692

i

Family Tree Cotton and Mather Families of the Story

ii

Prelude

1692: The Witches

“IT’S CLOSE DOWN THERE, I’LL ADMIT,” Arnold laughed or, rather, guffawed, to the other. A dreadful sewage stink seeped from the hole he has just bullied open by using his considerable brawn to wrestle aside its heavy lead cover.

At his elbow, maintaining his grim silence, was the midnight visitor to John Arnold’s prison, a very tall, strange old man, who had bribed the constable to see the notorious Salisbury witch Mary Bradbury, reputed to have the power to cast a spell on good butter by making it teem with maggots. “‘Suburb of hell’ it’s been called,” again joked the squareheaded, boxy form, the burly chief of the ominous structure that haunted Boston’s Queen Street.

Taciturn as an Indian, the other man refused to be drawn in to the warm circle of the jailer’s humor. He was sick, too, Arnold could tell. Deadly sick. Could hardly stand.

The constable waved the stench of the hole away from his face with the fan of his hand, but he needn’t have bothered – in the clammy warmth of the antechamber, the rot of the old jail, the vii

1692: The Witches

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damp earth of the living cemetery below and the rank odor of the nearby harbor that leached out from his own moldy clothes were equally disagreeable.

“Well, then,” said Arnold after an uncomfortable silence. “To the matter at hand …” He pulled a torch from its sconce and thrust it at the opening in the dirt floor. The flame flared as it fed on the fetid flow of air from below.

The show of light had its effect. Beneath the men’s boots, the sounds of groaning and clamoring for succor grew louder. Some scuffling broke out.

Ordinarily, Arnold would have hurled curses at the mutterings wafting up from the darkness, or even tipped a pot of boiling soup onto the weak voices calling to him from the pit, depending on his mood. But that would not be right in this case, his good sense warned him.

The constable, all too familiar with the scum of the earth, had rarely seen such a hard old bird as his visitor, ailing as he appeared to be. He was no Puritan, this one.

Despite summer’s heat and humidity, the stranger wore a long frockcoat, buttoned from his knees to his neck, covering the entirety of his lean frame. A broad, black cloth hat was pulled low over his forehead. There was a disreputable feel about him, the look of a spy maybe. The constable was glad he had called in one of his watchmen to witness the proceedings, just in case.

“Stand back now,” Arnold warned him.

The man’s eyes narrowed into slits. One large, heavily veined hand gathered his coat’s skimpy lapels tightly around his throat.

The other was balled into a fist.

Arnold grabbed his club from the guard table. This was a thick, yard-long cudgel with a leather strap hanging from its thinner end

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Prelude

that he meticulously wound around his right wrist.

“Wouldn’t want to lose you, Billy,” he explained without purpose to the thing, giving the stained wood a kiss.

Tentatively, he dipped his foot onto a black step below the level of the ground, measuring in his own mind the advisability of further descent. But, after all, a bargain was a bargain. The thought took the edge off his cheer.

There was a third man in the room, a frightening looking creature with hair as orange as a pumpkin who was absorbed in nibbling his dirty, disgusting fingernails.

“Claude,” called back Arnold to his assistant, “stay awake or I’ll skin you to the ankles, I swear it.”

Arnold went down. The stranger responsible for initiating this illegal and inadvisable journey followed.

There were only eight steps to the bottom. Four feet away, on either side, two passageways loomed, both black beyond the light Arnold’s torch threw.

From the left side, there came a hubbub of complaints and shuffling feet, which stopped well short of the men’s view, as if those approaching to plead their case dared come no nearer the steps, which, in fact, was the rule. Many a head had suffered the deadly knock of Billy’s kiss for coming within the constable’s sight.

Arnold’s torch pointed to the right.

“Through there,” he indicated to the old man, who was now shaking worse than ever. “The chill,” he added helpfully, “you get used to it. Now as to the smell …”

“Never mind,” snapped the shivering man. “Where is she?”

Arnold ignored the question. A lay of the land, so to speak, must be given first to visitors, distinguished or, in this case, not so

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distinguished.

“These over here …” – the constable’s torch hand pointed left again – “… these are the real characters. But they’ll give ye no trouble.”

He looked at his guest, the man’s pained face distorted by the flickering fire.

“I see you’re shakin’ again. No need to worry. They won’t come any nearer to me and Billy.” He glared over his left shoulder, staring down the narrow passageway, crowded with shapes that could only be felt, not seen.

“AIN’T THAT RIGHT?” Arnold roared at them. The gobbling of the hallway’s invisible audience died down to frenzied whisperings.

The constable sidled closer to the old man, nodding in the other direction.

“Your witches are there,” he said.

“Witches?” snarled the man. “What do you mean? There’s another?”

“A little girl imp of Devil. The mother lies face-down beneath Salem now. Hanged, she was, as yours will be soon enough.”

“She’s there, you say?”

“The third cell.”

“The key?”

“No key. The door is held with a bolt that you pick up. A brazier stays lit further down. It’ll give you all the light you need.”

“It’s not locked?”

“The witches are chained,” said Arnold, a proud note in his voice, “iron being proof against their powers. I made the rings

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Prelude

special, me being an anchorsmithy back in the home country.”

The old man turned to go down the passageway Arnold called to him. “The ones for the child,” he boasted.

“They needed some craftwork.”

Within a few feet the corridor veered to a sharp turn. It was shored up by crudely mortared stonework that dripped with the humidity collecting within the deep hole out of which this dismal complex had been carved from beneath the main prison.

Just as Arnold foretold, the old man, teeth chattering with fever, came upon a brazier burning in a corner, its thin smoke drawn straight up through a hole above it. At its foot a living skeleton in rags tended the meager flame, hands and face blackened by coal dust, silently squatting in his squalor. Otherwise, the passage was empty. Not even a rat’s tail was to be seen.

The visitor ignored the wretch, counting off the cell doors. At the third, he walked up to it and peered through the grate at the top. An overpowering miasma of human scat assaulted his reeling senses.

“Mary Bradbury?” he called into the dark.

There was no answer. Then there was an answer. A chilling child’s cry.

“Beware!” gasped a thin, eerie voice from within. Chains rattled.

With shaking hands, the man undid the cell door. Despite the dim glow of the corridor’s brazier, it was impossibly black inside.

Yet he thought he could make out human shapes. His eyes may have been deceiving him, but he was certain two forms were cringing against the back wall.

His voiced choked as he called again. “Miss Mary?”

1692: The Witches

Not until much later did he remember the rest.

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Part I Hopestill

Chapter One

A Victim of the Small Pocks

DARK WAS DEVIL’S CLOAK thrown over Boston. By midnight it very effectively hid from prying eyes a strange procession from the prison’s infirmary.

Lit by a torchbearer, the party of six, including the unconscious unfortunate on the litter, wound its way toward the waterfront, stepping across the churned-up filth atop the street stones to the door of a bleak, windowless, featureless house near the Burying Place off Common Street that the Rev. Mr. Cotton Mather had procured for the interrogation.

Uneasily, they awaited an answer to their measured rap.

The litterbearers in the gloom behind Goodman Fain, its leader, were each a member of John Arnold’s notorious constabulary. Upon the litter resided a recently risen corpse (or so it had been related to Mather), a victim of the Small pocks. His resurrection, if it could be considered as such, was a remarkable achievement considering the victim’s advanced age.

Mather hurriedly finished his devotional, recalling from memory one of his grandfather John Cotton’s most treasured pas2

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sages, Revelation 3:20: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If any man hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him and he with me …”

The door squeaked open.

“Pray, inside, Fain,” said the bewigged, bandy-legged, fashionably dressed Mather, peering into the empty street as if he were expecting yet another visitor. He felt very blessed to see no one.

Stepping to his left, he motioned the litter crew toward the pinched-off room, indicating a crude pen on the floor, a low-edge box frame filled with fresh straw.

Into it they rolled the undressed, undead man. The constable’s assistant carelessly tossed a blanket onto the body.

Although the interior was lit by both the fire in the wellappointed hearth and a variety of tapers around the room, these lights only accentuated the shadows of Arnold’s men and their frightening features.

All had been badly scarred by the wicked pocks, hence their assignment to this duty, since they were in no danger of reacquiring the dread disease.

The one on the bed frame? Less fortunate.

To have been stricken with the Small pocks so late in life was generally conceded to be tantamount to a death sentence.

Yet, as Mather carefully explored the exposed flesh of the man’s head and neck, and then the hands, he could easily determine that life was far from extinguished in the nearly unconscious body. A mild case, if ever he saw one.

The tall, comatose form appeared to be in his seventies, possessed of a skeletal structure that was slight, almost wraithlike. On

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the other hand, the victim’s pleasantly composed face bespoke to Mather of a happy, perhaps even godly life. This he knew not to be true, further evidenced by the blue-black tattoo of an arrow on the man’s chest.

Mather paid little heed to the man’s weakness and barely audible moaning. He was intent on the color and shape of the ugly pustules protruding from the flesh.

The pocks were as reported by the constable, which came as a relief to the examiner – red, white, distinct, soft, few, round and sharp-topped.

Had these been bluish-green or black, densely clustered like evil fruit, the prognosis would have been death within days or even hours.

There was some bleeding from the nose, which Mather perceived, again, as a good sign. This was per the advice of the eminent Rev. Thomas Thatcher, whose broadside, “Brief Rule to Guide the common-people … in the Small pocks, or measles,” was one of his treasured volumes.

Old William Bradford, God bless him, had written of the Indians he had seen suffering from the pocks, and his phrase “dying like rotten sheep” had stuck in Mather’s mind this horrible summer of the year of Our Lord 1692.

Mather set his sore lips in a tight line. And this malady was just a single, mighty weapon in Devil’s arsenal! Just one!

There were so many others.

Goodman Fain interrupted Mather’s train of thought by holding out a worn possibles bag finely crafted out of dark hide. A skinner’s knife with a horn grip was attached to the strap, and some Indian beads made of tiny, colorful shells adorned the handle of a musket’s flash-pan pick, sharp as a pin, that was stuck into and

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under the flap.

“Ensign Foster’s belongin’s, sir. There weren’t nothin’ much in it save a bit of hair tied up, flints, patches, some lead shot and these few papers,” Fain said hopefully, holding forth some scraps that he couldn’t read, angling for a copper which was not forthcoming.

At the sound of his name, the man in the straw, Hopestill Foster, moved his sweating, feverish head a fraction.

It was a sign that the Rev. Mather took at once as another from God. Yet of this revelation, the old man, Hopestill, was unaware.

As the minister fussed about him, lifting his eyelids, deducing his pulse rate and estimating his fever (which was increasing), the rough journey on the litter had produced in his unconscious state of mind a sense that he was back in England, a boy of 11, about to embark upon a voyage he had taken 60 years before, to Massachusetts Bay from England in 1632 aboard the miserable Winthrop fleet ship Lyon.

This traumatic event came upon him as the fourth unwanted son of a part-time smuggler named Faraday Foster, who sold his slow-witted youngest into indentured service to the Sandyman family. The Sandymans were tradespeople belonging to the Hooker Company, which is to say they were adherents of the Puritan renegade Rev. Mr. Thomas Hooker.

Including the newly acquired Hopestill, there were eight of them in their party going to the New Land – his new master Henry and Henry’s wife Eunice; their sons Samuel and Landon; their only daughter, the remarkably fat Priscilla; and Eunice’s two gnomelike parents, John and Margery Halfield. These latter, while cold and dismissive to Hopestill, were decidedly not cruel. The boy felt himself fortunate indeed.

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The voyage of a duration of six weeks was a storm-wracked ordeal from start to finish, and he remembered it just like that in his nightmare, his wet hair streaming across his face, the choking fear in his throat, his horror-stricken face telling the tale of the journey even though naught but moans passed his lips.

In the dimly lit single room of Mather’s house the guards from Arnold’s prison watched the old man relive it, struggling with his inner demons. They knew not what he saw, only that it was akin to the terror men face when they are alone and helpless.

“It’s a fit. A bad one,” remarked Goodman Fain, watching in awe as the prisoner thrashed about on the straw. “Swallow his tongue, he will, you mark me.” He looked about his cronies for a reply, received none and shrugged his shoulders.

His employer, a fatigued Rev. Mather, snorted at this fool’s ignorance.

In calm, measured tones, as if he were delivering a lecture, Mather observed to the others that Devil or one of his minions was hard at work exciting the aged man who writhed so weakly within the bed frame.

All agreed with this pronouncement.

Mather dropped his head and closed his eyes while Fain and his men shuffled in place and wrung their hats or hands, waiting.

Minutes passed. The minister lifted his face from silent prayer to assess Hopestill Foster’s pitiful, almost silent thrashing.

He glanced anew at the struggling old man and wondered if it was all for naught, whether the answers he had been seeking for decades would elude him again with this criminal’s death.

Mather shook his shaved head under the wig in defiance of such a possibility. God would not, could not, fail him now.

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Yet so many questions needed to be asked, prevented by the seriousness of the ailment and of the man Foster’s condition.

Did he assess wrongly? Mather stooped over his writhing patient.

There were not so many pocks upon Hopestill’s face, but lifting the thin rag of a blanket covering him revealed a body spotted with evil pustules here and there.

Again, far less than he had ever seen in the worst cases, but enough to make the prognosis up to God. At his signal, without a word, Tizzoo, his Carib Indian slave given to him by his father, crept over and refilled the minister’s cup of chocolate. He dismissed her back to the loft after he tasted the sweet drink and approved.

Mather was determined to stay, at least through this first night, to see if he could influence the outcome of the struggle between Devil and Christ Jesus for Hopestill Foster’s life.

The conflict raged before his eyes. He felt blessed with the sight, and if in some small way he could help, well …

“OOOHHHHHH! AAAAAWWWWWW!” Mather leaped from his chair in almost comic alarm. It clattered away from him.

From his unsuspecting lap, the cup and saucer of chocolate flew off to crash on the few flimsy floorboards within, the thin objects splintering into shards and bits.

The Small pocks victim screamed again.

Then louder once more, in greater agony.

The constable’s men looked on in alarm, none daring to act without a direct order. Worried cries called forth from outside in

Devil Knows

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the street.

Wrapped in a shawl, Tizzoo jumped down from the loft ladder barefoot. She, too, shrieked as the shrimp-colored bottoms of her feet were punctured by the broken china pieces from Mather’s cup.

Her cries were instantly stifled by the sight that greeted her.

Mahogany hands pressed against her open mouth in terror.

Mather cowered inwardly and shrank from the bed and the now-empty chair laying on its side.

For once, he was at a loss for words.

Eyes ablaze, his blanket having fallen away to reveal the full horrors of his naked, diseased body imprinted with that most curious tattoo of an arrow, Hopestill Foster gripped the sides of the bed frame and slowly raised himself up.