I have Reverend Green enthralled. His eyes gleam in the firelight, and his pretty mouth with its well-formed lower lip is parted, unaware of revealing his black-stained teeth. A shiver travels up my spine and spreads deliciously over the top of my head. To my shame I feel myself basking in his attention. It’s more intoxicating even than the cider Bridget Oliver used to serve us at her inn, when we’d laugh and sing late into the night while playing at the shovelboard.
I know it well, this feeling. It’s not to be trusted.
“It went on thus,” I say. “Two weeks or so without change. And then one day, early February it was, my mother sent me to the parsonage to drop off some things and ask Tittibe after some onions and a pound of rye meal. That was the day I started to understand.”
“What, Ann? What did you start to understand?”
I gaze on him, and let my eyes smolder with the knowledge I am about to impart.
“To understand,” I say, “what girls are capable of.”
By the time I spot the corner of the slatted fence that marks the kitchen garden of the Parris parsonage, I can’t feel my feet. They’re there on the end of my legs like two stumps of wood, and a new sugaring of snow has been drifting down from the sky since last night, settling on my shoulders, the top of my head, the tip of my nose. I look like I’ve been rolled in goose down. The snow muffles all sound, swallowing my footsteps, so I can hear only the crunch of my footfalls and my own labored breath. My mother’s laden me with a basket of linens she was having our girl mend for Mrs. Parris, as our servant is English and so has a finer touch with a needle than a common Indian woman, or so Mother says.
I stop by the fence corner and drop the basket at my feet, shaking out my arms and flexing the fingers in my mittens to see if I can bring feeling back to them. I stamp my feet but in vain: there’s no blood for them to be had. I shake my cloak and skirts, knocking loose the freshest layer of snow. My breath circles my head like a halo and I pause, listening.
Silence.
I like the quiet in winter. Our house is so busy, with Mother’s friends, Father and his business interests, always a strange hat on the peg near the door. At least one servant, usually two, though one just served out his indenture and he’s left us shorthanded, Mother complains from behind her needlepoint near the fire. And all us children, as many as three to a trundle, which makes for warmer feet in wintertime, but also plenty of wakefulness between the scratching and the snoring and the nightmares of all my younger brothers and sisters.
Usually I linger an extra minute or two on the way to an errand, enjoying the time to myself. But today I’m too cold. I want a hot drink and to rest the soles of my feet near the kitchen hearth, and maybe be asked to stay for supper, even though it would mean enduring Abby’s glares.
Abby hates being made to wait on me. I can’t prove it, but last time I was pretty sure she spat in my peas.
I’m on the point of taking up my linen basket again when I hear it.
At first, I think it must be a bird. My ears twitch and I listen. The birds have been gone for weeks.
There it is again: a high, distant shriek.
It goes on for a long time.
I take up the basket and hurry. The snow sucks and drags at my feet, and I scramble, floundering under the weight of all my layers of wool, wading off the path into deeper drifts, stumbling, falling, catching myself by sinking my arms in up to the elbows in crusts of ice.
As I make my way nearer the parsonage, the shriek grows louder.
My first thought is of Betty. Little Betty’s died.
I raise my fist to beat on the door when it swings open and I behold the ashen face of Mrs. Parris.
“Oh, Ann!” she cries.
She gathers me to her bosom, the linen I’ve brought scattering unheeded to the floor. Inside I spy Susannah hiding under the table in the great hall, her tiny hands pressed over her ears. Tittibe stands rod-straight by the fire, her eyes wide. A man’s voice is bellowing something incoherent in the loft overhead. I catch only snippets of words, like “God” and “cast out” and “merciful heaven.”
The shriek has been interrupted only long enough for the being generating it to draw breath, and then it continues with renewed force. The sound fills the house, almost shaking the rafters. Little Susannah starts to cry.
“It’s been days and days,” Mrs. Parris says, her voice catching. “I can’t . . . I can’t . . . I can’t take much more, Ann. I was at the point of sending for your mother.”
“Is it Elizabeth?” I ask.
Mrs. Parris just looks at me, her eyes raw from crying. She shakes her head.
In the loft I hear a commotion and beating of feet, and the wail is replaced with high screams of “I’ll never sign, no, I never shall, you can’t make me! NO! NO, I WILL NOT SIGN!”
Mrs. Parris gasps and brings a hand to her mouth. Heavy footsteps, and we track their progress across the ceiling. Each deliberate footfall knocks loose a puff of dust from between the floorboards. Through the gaps in the boards we can see a shadow move.
The cries have lapsed into a formless screech, and a low male voice rumbles, “May God have mercy. May Christ bring his everlasting mercy on us all.”
Then the Reverend Parris mounts the ladder and lowers himself back into the hall with an exhausted grunt.
We stare at him, waiting for him to explain to us what’s befallen the creatures upstairs.
“Samuel?” Mrs. Parris whispers.
I’ve never heard Mrs. Parris use the Reverend’s Christian name before.
The Reverend collapses in the armchair at the head of the trestle table and rests his forehead in his hands.
“Tittibe,” he says absently to the slave, who has been lingering in the shadows cast by the low-burning hearth fire.
It’s cold in the parsonage, colder than at our house, everyone wrapped in shawls and extra woolen stockings. With this snow, they should have brought in more wood than that, is what I think, looking at the pitiful heap next to the hearth. I seem to remember some talk between my parents about firewood and Reverend Parris’s living from the parish being cut by some maneuverings by other villagers. Now I see how bad he has it.
He doesn’t name his wish, but she guesses it and sets a mug at his elbow. He takes it without a word and drinks. We wait. The screams continue upstairs.
Reverend Parris casts his eyes up to the attic, then brings his gaze to meet his wife’s.
“Betty continues much the same,” he says. “But Abigail’s worse. Much worse.”
Abigail! I’d had no idea she was unwell. I’d seen her only a few days earlier at Ingersoll’s Ordinary, where she had much to say about the wateriness of the soup.
Mrs. Parris emits a sigh of dismay, and Tittibe murmurs, “Ah, my poor Betty.”
“At meeting I’ll be calling on the congregation to pray for their delivery,” he says, bringing a closed fist to the tabletop. “But I fear the time’s come. You’ve tended them as best you can, and so have I. There’re the other children to consider, the burden this is placing on them. The risk. I’ve decided. A doctor must be called.”
“A doctor!” Mrs. Parris exclaims. “But . . .” She’s on the point of saying something else, but remembers me with a nervous glance and stops herself.
“Indeed. But,” Reverend Parris says, getting to his feet and striding to the window.
His back turned, he says, “Will he even come if I ask him? That’s a question. They think they can starve me out. Think I’ll be broken. Well, they’re wrong. I’ve faced worse.”
He glances at Tittibe, who sees his look and turns her back without a word. She’s been with Reverend Parris since before he was Reverend Parris. Since before Mrs. Parris. A dark look passes between them. One of those island looks.
“I just go check the children, then,” Tittibe says to the kettle over the fire
, not addressing either of the Parrises directly.
“There’ll be nothing to pay him with,” Mrs. Parris whispers once Tittibe is up the stairs.
I realize that there’ll be no onions, nor rye meal either, to spare in this house. The Parrises are proud; they won’t want Mother and Father to know. Maybe I’ll tell them I forgot to ask. God forgives a well-meaning lie such as that, surely.
“There won’t,” Reverend Parris agrees. “But one must be found all the same. Someone who might feel it his duty to help. Bill Griggs, maybe. I’ll make inquiries straightaway.”
The screams have continued throughout this entire conversation, but now they coalesce into a bitter howl of “BEGONE, WITCH! Rogue! I want none of you!”
A crash as an object is hurled across the room overhead and shatters.
Presently Tittibe reappears on the attic ladder, her eyes cast down. Once her foot falls on the floor near us, the screams overhead stop abruptly.
The Reverend and Mrs. Parris exchange a look. The only sound is of little Susannah under the table, quietly weeping, unattended.
“Ann,” Mrs. Parris says, touching my arm. “You go up.”
“Me, Mrs. Parris?” I say, scarcely able to find my breath.
“Yes, you. They’ll be pleased to see you. You’ll go up, won’t you?”
I can’t disobey the minister’s wife if she tells me I must go. And so I do.
“Yes, Mrs. Parris,” I hear myself say over the sound of blood rushing in my ears.
I mount the ladder, my arms shaking. The feeling has started to come back into my feet, but they’re not all there just yet, and I struggle to keep my footing on the narrow steps.
When I achieve the loft, in the thin gray light of windows frosted thick with snow, I find Betty in her trundle, eyes open wide, bedclothes gathered tight up under her chin.
And in another trundle, her hair streaming loose over her shoulders, a warm woolen blanket tucked across her lap, sits Abigail Williams.
Grinning at me.
Chapter 10
DANVERS, MASSACHUSETTS
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 2012
Everyone in Father Molloy’s advisory gasped. And then, slowly, inexorably, it began.
The giggling.
I could tell we were trying to keep it together, I could tell that it was partly out of shock, and fear, and discomfort, but none of that mattered, the giggling was pressing up through our chests and nothing we could do would stop it coming out and filling the entire advisory classroom.
The Other Jennifer was bald. And I don’t mean shaved-her-head bald. I mean bald. I mean gleaming pinkish-white skin on her scalp, so gleaming it looked polished, marred by one incongruous mole tucked behind one of her ears. The Other Jennifer still had her eyebrows and her eyelashes, so it wasn’t like cancer-patient bald, either. It was bizarre, and horrible, and yet it was also hilarious. The laughter came bubbling up in me as much as in anyone else.
“Oh my God,” Jennifer Crawford said, bringing her hands up to her mouth, her eyes wide with laughter.
The Other Jennifer stood before us all, her silk Elizabeth Taylor scarf hanging from her hand, her face a twisted mask of humiliation and pain.
“You think this is funny?” she screamed, her voice shrill.
The giggling swirled around her in eddies. Some of us tried to make it stop, and choked with the effort. Others of us didn’t try all that hard. The Other Jennifer was popular, but she wasn’t well liked in the way that Clara and Elizabeth were. Popularity can be funny that way.
“Oh my God, Jennifer,” Jennifer Crawford sputtered from behind her hands. “What happened to your hair?”
“Girls,” Father Molloy started to say. “I’m serious, now—”
But it wasn’t Father Molloy who commanded our attention.
“Jennifer,” Clara said, turning in her seat and addressing Jennifer Crawford.
The sound of her speaking brought us all to heel. Her voice was quiet, almost conversational. And she didn’t sputter or say, “Tzt tzt tzt HA.”
Instead she simply said, “I don’t think that’s very cool, do you?”
Clara leveled her gaze at Jennifer Crawford, who shrank before the interrogation of the queen.
“C’mon, I was just—” Jennifer Crawford started to protest.
Without bothering to get out of her seat, Clara rested a hand on the Other Jennifer’s arm. The Other Jennifer was vibrating with tension, her hands clenched at her sides, as though she couldn’t decide whether to run away or smack Jennifer Crawford in the face. At Clara’s touch, the Other Jennifer blinked, and the tension in her body uncoiled by a perceptible degree. She looked down at Clara, who tilted her head to the side in an interrogatory way.
Our giggling died down as we watched. Within a minute the advisory room was silent.
The Other Jennifer turned back to Jennifer Crawford, and held her in a steady glare while she lowered herself into her seat.
“I mean,” Clara continued, even more quietly, “they still don’t know for sure what’s wrong with us, you know? I think you could have, like, a little more respect. Don’t you?”
Jennifer Crawford hunched in her chair like a chastened puppy.
“I guess,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.
Clara stared at her for another long minute, and then she swept the classroom with her eyes, implicating all the rest of us in Jennifer Crawford’s disobedience. We stared hard at our hands. We had giggled, every last one of us. We were guilty.
When Clara decided that we had been placed on sufficient warning, she resettled herself in her seat, folding her hands on the desk. She nodded at Father Molloy, as though granting him permission to continue with whatever it was that he was about to do.
Father Molloy blustered his way back to the front of the classroom with a lot of “Well, all right then”s, interrupted by the hiss of the antique PA system crackling to life.
“Holy Mary, Queen of Knowledge, pray for us. Amen. Attention, seniors. Would Colleen Rowley please report to the nurse’s office? Colleen Rowley to the nurse’s office. Thank you.” Hiss, pop, click.
All eyes in the room swiveled to me.
“Me?” I asked.
I looked at Emma. She shrugged. Her eyes glimmered with private thoughts.
Then I looked at Deena, who mouthed It’ll be fine, and at Anjali, who nodded and waved her hand dismissively.
“I guess you’re up, Colleen,” Father Molloy said to me.
I stood, gathering my belongings, baffled about why I was being called so soon. I mean, I knew they’d be talking to all the seniors. But somehow I’d assumed they’d go in alphabetical order. I thought I’d be going well after Emma and Anjali.
Father Molloy came over and rested a hand on my shoulder.
“You know,” he said, “you shouldn’t have to do this. It’s none of their business.”
I was surprised that he would say that. I wondered if it was true, that they really didn’t know what was making everyone sick.
“I don’t mind,” I said.
But his words made me hesitate.
Father Molloy looked hard at me. “None. Of their business,” he said again, enunciating every word.
I nodded, but gathered my books to my chest and moved to the classroom door, tracked by a dozen pairs of the eyes of the girls of St. Joan’s.
“Colleen,” Nurse Hocking said, looking up at me from some papers on her desk. “Thanks for joining us today.”
Us?
The school nurse was looking pretty plush these days. Like she was getting her makeup professionally done. She was even wearing heels. I knew that she was in the habit of giving a quote or two to the reporters every morning, fluff about how the girls were doing fine, how no, she was not at liberty to share their diagnosis for reasons of confidentiality, but t
hat she could assure the community that the school was completely blah blah blah blah blah. For a while we’d all made a point of watching every newscast every night, hoping to glean more information. But quickly we’d learned that the only information that was going to show up on the news would be put there by Nurse Hocking. Most of us figured that we could do a better job of gathering information ourselves.
“Have a seat,” Nurse Hocking said.
She gestured to the chair on the opposite side of her desk.
The school nurse was accompanied by a woman in a suit whom I’d never seen before. She also held a clipboard, and she was doing her best to blend in with the curtains.
“Hello,” I said directly to her.
“Please,” Nurse Hocking said, indicating the chair again. “Sit down.”
“Um,” I said, lowering myself into the chair and watching the woman in the suit. “I didn’t know there’d be anyone else here?”
“Oh,” Nurse Hocking said with a wave. “Don’t worry. She’s authorized.”
I suppose I could have asked a dozen questions at that point, reasonable stuff like Authorized by whom? or even Who is she?, but I was nervous and confused. And I still trusted Nurse Hocking—I mean, she was so young and pretty and nice, and she gave me notes to get out of field hockey if my cramps were too bad, and she didn’t even try to laugh it off or make me feel like I was faking. Honestly, it felt a little weird having someone else there, okay, but it didn’t occur to me to object. How old do I have to be before I start disagreeing with doctors?
There was a floor plan of the upper school pinned to the wall behind Nurse Hocking’s desk, and it had seven red push pins in it, each with a Post-it note underneath, and a date. The Post-its were all connected with different colors of yarn.
“Now then,” Nurse Hocking said, opening a file folder. “This shouldn’t take too long. I apologize for some of the questions we’ll be asking you. Some of them might seem pretty personal. But I assure you that everything will be kept completely confidential.”