Devil's Mistress (44 page)

“There will be no locks and chains upon you, love.”

“You do not need them, you know,” she told him. “Long ago, you chained my heart.”

“Well, your nature is such that every once in a while you must be taken a little into hand.”

She sniffed indignantly. Michael moved against her and she turned to Sloan. “I think we’d best put him to bed now. Sloan, when do you think we should tell him the truth?”

Sloan thought long before he answered. “Brianna, he is young. I say this not to hurt you, but when he is grown, he will not remember Robert. Yet, when the time is right, we will tell him everything. We owe it to Robert—and we owe it to Michael. Robert was, in his way, a very great man, and Michael should always know that he was loved by such a man.”

Brianna nodded, and stood on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. “Thank you, Sloan,” she whispered.

He set his arm around her, and they moved across hemp and rigging to go belowdecks. They placed Michael in his small bunk and went into the captain’s cabin, smiling as they both started to douse the lanterns at once.

“Tell me about Loghaire, Sloan,” Brianna urged him later when they both lay awake beneath the moon.

And so he did. He told her about the rock-hewn castle, and about the sea, and about the gray mists and the flowers on the slopes when springtime came. But when he was done, he turned to her and said, “I shall never give it up, but I like New York. It’s young and fresh and exciting, and I’d have a home there.”

“Can we really?” Brianna asked excitedly.

“Aye, we can. We will.”

She was silent for a moment, and when he prodded her she said, “One day I wish to go back to Salem. To laugh in the magistrates’ faces, perhaps. And yet it’s more than that. Oh, there was terror there, but there are good people, too, and sometime I would like to see how they have fared.”

“We will go back—when you wish, and when the time is right. Such madness does not last forever.”

He pulled her into his arms.

“We’ve a world to sail, my little witch. My sorceress. I feel that we may fly as the clouds do, for the past is behind us, and perhaps through all we have suffered, we will have learned to cherish our lives, and to live richly.” He rose above her, kissing her, touching her, setting her aflame as only he could do.

She laughed suddenly, catching his eyes in the moonlight. “My Lord Treveryan—I do believe that I did, in truth, become the devil’s mistress. For you, my love, are a devil of the lustiest kind!”

In the fall of 1693 Sloan and Brianna returned to New York. Sloan purchased the house he had so wanted. It was an immense rambling mansion, surrounded by both fields and sea, and Brianna found the same enthusiasm for it as Sloan did. They had not given up the ancestral home in Wales; they had just both somehow become colonists, and felt a yearning for that western side of the ocean.

They had known, however, before they left Wales, that the Salem witchcraft trials had come to an end. The last hanging had been that of September 22, 1692. Public protest had finally started to rise in unison and been given some assistance from outside influence. Joseph Dudley—once deputy governor under Andros—had plied his mind to the legal question and written to a number of the French and Dutch clergy. Their response had been filled with no-nonsense good sense—how could the girls, they wondered, possessed by some demon of soul or mind, point out evil in others? They did not call the girls “mountebanks,” as Brattle of Boston was doing, but they suggested a pathetic illness.

Governor Phips of Massachusetts, who had never known where the truth lay, took swift and decisive action. By the time a special court of oyer and terminer met again, spectral evidence was no longer to be accepted. Three were condemned—three who insisted that they were witches—but Phips, refused to sign death warrants.

The man had determined to wash his hands of innocent blood. In May of ninety-three he issued a general pardon. The jails were to be cleared.

Brianna, in moving into her beloved home in New York, really had no great passion to return to Salem at that time. But Eleanor, who had married her Philip that long ago day when they reached New York, came to see Brianna, and informed her that many of the accused—though pardoned—were still in prison because they could not pay their jailer’s fees. Fields had lain dormant in Salem during the year of havoc and the relatives of many had fled Salem, so they simply had no way to pay.

Brianna mulled over the information for a while, then implored Sloan to take her to see what they could do. They couldn’t free everyone, but they did what they could.

And it was while they were there that Brianna also felt a gnawing penchant to return to the farm that had once been hers. For some reason the place had not been seized. Sloan found her later, seated on the deacon’s bench, staring about her with a little smile.

She looked at him sheepishly and a bit ruefully, and he thought then that no matter how long he lived, he would never cease to think her eyes the most beautiful he had ever, seen, the most expressive—and bewitching.

She stood, greeting him with a kiss. When his arms came comfortably around her, she said, “Sloan, I know you’ll think me mad, but I’d like to keep this place too. Since Powells came here and died here … well, I am family. I couldn’t live here again, but it’s beautiful property, Sloan! Eleanor and Philip have been talking about returning, and I thought we could let it to them until they bought a place of their own.”

She spun about then, looking up at him eagerly. He smiled, kissed the tip of her nose, and then her lips.

He realized then that she had never asked him for anything worldly. Not plate, not gowns, nothing. “If you wish it, my love, then we shall keep it. But we shall have a rather large number of homes, don’t you think?”

She laughed. “It’s quite possible, too, that we shall have a rather large number of heirs. Michael shall have the title and Loghaire—but what of the child we’re expecting in the spring?”

He was stunned by the news—awed and completely overjoyed. He hadn’t been there to see Michael born; he’d never held a tiny babe and known the wonder of anxiously awaiting a child.

He came to his knees and kissed her hand, and swore roughly that they should have a dozen homes if she wished. She touched his dark hair and marveled aloud, “Sloan, that you should love me so is surely the greatest wonder of life. Once I thought that I was cursed, but no woman has ever been so blessed!”

It wasn’t their second son, however, but their third, Robert, who loved the farm—enlarged and improved with the years—with all-encompassing passion. Like his father and his brothers—and even his two younger sisters—Robert loved the sea. The Treveryans owned a fleet of ships by then; ships that serviced the Colonies, and ships that sailed the ocean. But Robert Treveryan always returned to the farm, just as his eldest brother always returned to the castle in Wales, and his middle brother, Sloan, always returned to the grand house in New York.

And it was Robert who learned of his mother’s wishes one day. They were walking along the Salem wharf; Sloan and Brianna had just returned from a voyage to Loghaire, and while Sloan supervised the unloading of the cargo, Brianna had greeted her third son with maternal glee and spirited him away.

Robert, at thirty, had his father’s adventurous spirit and the rugged appeal of a very good-looking devil, but his looks were his mother’s. His eyes were as blue as a summer’s day and his hair was as dark as the night. While Brianna observed her son with the greatest pride, she had no idea that he was returning the assessment.

In her early fifties, she was still as slim as a nymph. There was but one streak of white to her hair, and it added mystery and sophistication to her beauty. Perhaps to other eyes she had aged, but never to him, Robert thought—and certainly, never to his father.

She wasn’t usually a “nagging” parent, but on this particular day she had been after him about settling down with a wife so that she might see an abundance of grandchildren. He was wondering how to hush her politely when she ceased the discourse of her own accord.

His eyes were leveled at the Burying Point, and she smiled suddenly, as if she had thought of some secret joke.

“Do you know, Robert, I’d like to be buried there. Oh, don’t look at me so strangely! I’m not intending to die for a long, long time, not until you’ve given me some grandchildren! But I’d like to be there, right in front of that old magistrate Hathorne! For all those questions he put before me!” She fell silent for a minute. “I think I forgive him. And Corwin. And even Matthews …” She paused, grinning at him wryly, and he thought he must be seeing her just as she had been as a very young girl. Young and so lovely that an envious person might readily have called her “witch.”

“I forgive him, but I’d still enjoy a chance to make him squirm for eternity!” She laughed and pulled him along. Sloan would be waiting at the wharf, and Robert knew that she had never been able to bear leaving his father for long.

Years later, when he did kiss her good-bye for eternity, he remembered her words. And he laid her to rest where she had pointed that day, beneath the spidery limbs of a sapling tree.

As the years passed, the roots of the tree encroached upon her marker, enwrapping it. Just as the New England fog swirled in and out throughout the centuries, enwrapping her memory in legend.

There are no witches—are there? Of course not. We of the twentieth century are very much aware that hags do not fly across the moon on brooms, hurrying to obey the summons of their master, the devil.

In the seventeenth century even learned men believed in witchcraft, and people did “practice” witchcraft in varying degrees—fortune-telling, palm reading—and practiced some very criminal rites, such as La Voison did at the French court. To practice witchcraft was a crime punishable by death.

But innocents suffered under that pretext by the hundreds and thousands. In various towns in Europe thousands upon thousands were burned for the crime. In Scotland they burned, and in England they hanged—in great and pathetic numbers.

Salem happens to be the dark spot in our country’s history. And no one can deny that women such as the pious and very courageous Rebecca Nurse and men like the gruff John Proctor were completely innocent of any such practice. But too often it seems that the Puritan fathers are unjustly condemned for being just that—Puritan fathers. Belief in witchcraft was just as common among the other Protestants and the Roman Catholics of their day.

Where did the reality lie at Salem? Centuries later, none of us can really know. Many theories have been expounded—some claiming that petty land quarrels instigated performances from the afflicted girls. Others believe in a true state, not of simple hysteria but hysteria in a very clinical and physical sense.

I tend to agree with this theory. The writings of the Puritans’ contemporaries suggest that there were indeed terrible afflictions, and it must be remembered that clinical hysteria can cause physical manifestations.

There is also the suggestion now that a virus in the wheat might have caused some of the girls’ hallucinations. But one would have to wonder why such a virus would only afflict so few. Perhaps the virus was guilty of producing some of the evidence offered in court—like that of a herd of cattle seeming to go insane and commit mass suicide owing to the evil eye and threat of a “witch.”

There have been many books written on the “witchcraft” of Salem, Massachusetts. For readability and differing opinions, I suggest Marion Starkey’s
The Devil in Massachusetts
and Chadwick Hansen’s
Witchcraft at Salem.
Also, in the course of writing this book, I had the opportunity to obtain a three-volume set of books originally compiled in the thirties by the Public Works Administration containing verbatim transcripts of the Salem witchcraft outbreak.

They are titled
The Salem Witchcraft Papers,
Volumes I, II, and, III, and are published by Da Capo, Press, Inc.

Finally, there is no better place to study this history—pathetic and shameful, but noble, too, in the supreme faith and courage of so many—than the Essex Institute.