The Warlock's Curse (2 page)

Anson Kendall had never been a cruel man, and his father had despised him for it.

Determination Kendall had been an inquisitor of highest renown, in great demand throughout the colonies as a Special Magistrate for the Courts of Assistants who had witches to be tested and tried. Anson could not remember a time when he did not travel with his father (his mother having died in childbed), but the beginning of his service as his father’s assistant—and his father’s harsh assessment of him—he could trace with painful clarity to his eighth year. Lacking other assistants, his father had deemed him a big enough boy to turn the thumbscrews on a young witch. Oh, how the girl had screamed. Anson could not bear it. He fled the room in tears. Determination found him vomiting behind a hayrick.

“God hates a coward,” Determination had sneered. It was the first time Anson had heard those words, but it would not be the last.

Determination’s belief in the unredeemable evil of witches was brilliant in its purity. His ears listened for accusations of milk-souring and cattle-foundering and babe-smothering as if they were a melody that pleased him. He was deaf to sweeter notes; tales of nurse-women who used magical arts to succor the ailing, or cunning-men who read the weather to augur auspicious times for sowing.

Anson, though, had wondered. Perhaps such creatures could not be said to be in God’s favor, but were they truly in Satan’s service?

He never shared such doubts with his father, of course. Determination would have accounted them blasphemous; proof of a weak, unguarded mind tainted by close proximity to the evil they faced every day. He might begin to look for marks or blots on his son’s Body for any special fondness for cats or rats or black dogs. And looking for them he would find them, and Anson might find himself in thumbscrews, facing the flames.

His father served a fierce and implacable God, the kind that sacrificed sons.

But Anson was a clever enough boy, and remaining beneath the threshold of his father’s scrutiny was as simple as keeping his lips pressed tightly together. Determination’s righteous mind was far too occupied with higher pursuits to even notice his son’s persistent silence, far less attempt to prise out whatever seditious thoughts might lay behind it. What small free time he had was dedicated to penning his magnum opus, a treatise he called the
Malignia Veneficas Americae
. He wrote at night, by the weak flickering light of a tallow candle, after the subjects of that day’s inquiries had been locked away to suffer ‘til cockcrow.

His great addition to the scholarship of witchcraft was to delineate its schools. He detailed the unique practices of blood witches and earth witches and showed the ways in which they differed. He wrote of less common kinds of witches, those who could turn the Bible itself inside out to summon power—speaking the Lord’s Prayer in reverse, or confounding sensible individuals with stories and follies that left them dazed and vulnerable. These last, Determination wrote, were the hardest to detect, for their sorcery was exceeding subtle and sometimes barely distinguishable from mere politics or persuasion. Much simpler to uncover were the blood witches, barbarous fiends who drew their power from the living, agonized blood of humans.

Witches like Aebedel Cowdray.

When they first heard of Aebedel Cowdray, Determination was at the zenith of his power and prestige. His treatise had been published to great acclaim. England’s Witchfinder General himself, Matthew Hopkins, had proclaimed it a
novum malleum
—a new hammer in the never-ending battle against sorcerous criminality. Determination found himself in greater demand than ever, each day bringing a fresh batch of summons from villages and towns desperate for aid in their prosecution of local malefactors.

Travelling to answer one such, they had stopped for the night at an inn, where Determination had happened upon an old colleague, a German witch hunter by the name of Eisenbach. As old men will, the two had fallen into commiseration about the wicked ways of the world. Eisenbach had lamented particularly the New World’s lax attitude toward
der hexenmeisters
, so different from the admirable strictness of his own native land.

“One need only look at Aebedel Cowdray to see how servants of evil are coddled in America!” Eisenbach had seethed, slamming down his tankard so hard that foam flecked his grimy sleeve.

Cowdray’s name not being familiar to father or son, Eisenbach proceeded to outline the specifics of the man’s notoriety, how he lived and traded openly as a warlock in the lower colonies, keeping homes and offices in both South Carolina and New York.

“He’s a slave trader. His great success comes from the fact that he performs some sort of unholy rite upon his blackamoors. It makes them wonderful placid, far more than such beasts are by nature.” Eisenbach leaned forward, relishing the telling as much as Determination did the hearing. “He does a thriving trade with the plantation owners in the Carolinas and the West Indies. They have thrown their fortunes in with his, and as they have no wish to see their investments ruined, he will never be prosecuted, howsoever rank his sins!”

Determination snorted with outrage. Eisenbach, baring his rot-pitted teeth in a grimace, had further inflamed him with tales of Cowdray’s riches, of his fine velvet coats and his cuffs of silk edged with lace, of how the warlock had ruined scores of virgins and lured good married women from their hearths to dance with the devil in the full moon’s light.

“And naught can be done about it,” Eisenbach had concluded, eyes sparkling as he looked over his tankard at Determination. Determination had said nothing in answer, but Anson had always remembered that moment. His father, like God, would not be mocked.

Later, as they were preparing for sleep, Determination had been strangely pensive.

“The abomination’s very name chilled me,” he mused, as he removed his heavy boots. “As if I had heard it before. But I am sure I have not. And yet”—he dropped a boot to the floor with a thump—“I feel as if someone has walked over my grave.”

But the morning brought them renewed vigor and work, for they were to interrogate a whole family of witches, sin-shackled from the centenarian grandfather all the way down to the newborn infant son. And with such pleasures facing him, and many similar subsequent pleasures, Determination put Cowdray out of his thoughts.

It was, Anson often reflected, surely the happiest time of his father’s life.

It had been the happiest time in Anson’s life as well, even though he was plagued by night-horrors so extreme that the brightest light of day did not completely dispel them. Even though he could never stop his hands from shaking. Even though the screaming of tormented witches had taken up residence in his brain, and sometimes the only way he could find peace was to cut his own flesh with a sharp knife, releasing the screams on a warm trickle of blood. Because it was at that time, in Anson’s eighteenth year, that his father decided he must take a wife.

The Inquisitors Kendall, as they were coming to be known throughout the colonies, were amassing a respectable fortune. Anson must produce sons to carry on their good work. No one—least of all Anson—expected that it would be a love match.

It was certainly not love at first sight. Sarah Roarke—the youngest daughter of the modest, observant Roarkes of Salem—was not at all beautiful. But she was lively and spry, with a tendency to laugh more often than was theologically approved. When they were together, they never spoke of witches or sin or what methods of torture were best for small children. His hands shook less when she held them, and once, when they were allowed to sit up together after the rest of the household had retired, he fell asleep with his head on her shoulder and did not dream at all.

Money was settled on them from both sides of the family, and the newlyweds took a fine house on Port Street. Years passed and children followed: James, and then Abigail. Anson began to think of how he might use his growing stature as a householder to petition for a release from his father’s service. He began to imagine himself pursuing a new career, one more suitable to his nature—binding books or keeping a coffeehouse.

But the demand for the services of the Inquisitors Kendall did not diminish; rather, they increased with each passing year. And each year, Aebedel Cowdray’s name came to them more often, from the gossiping lips of the men who were his father’s closest associates.
The wickedest man in the New World
, he was called.
A blood-sorcerer whose hand no earthly authority can stay
.

It was an outrage. Unlike their usual targets, Cowdray was no crook-backed old woman who dabbled in herbs and spoke to her cats; he was a true demon, worldly and sly, infamous as a brute fornicator and worse. And yet, the law could not—or rather, would not—touch him. Cowdray’s protected existence made a mockery of all their efforts. What good their prosecutions, if the worst of the sinners was forever beyond their reach?

Determination’s outrage did not become obsession, however, until Old Mother Grax told them of Aebedel Cowdray’s snuffbox.

Old Mother Grax was a hunchbacked hedgewitch accused of causing her neighbor’s chickens to lay black eggs with serpents in them. The Kendalls hung her strappado to extract the names of her confederates; it was one of Determination’s favorite methods of interrogation. By this time, Anson had well-practiced techniques for distancing himself from the horror of it. He would pretend that he was simply watching someone else’s hands. He would imagine Sarah singing to him, as she did sometimes at night. She sang terribly, tunelessly and without rhythm, but it was the most beautiful thing in the whole world. He could lose himself in that remembered song, and it felt as if he was no longer even in his human Body and something else managed his brutal tasks. His father had accounted this a great blessing, believing that it was evidence of the Divine Spirit working within his son, but Anson had his doubts that the Divine Spirit could be so cold; distant and passionless as a frozen moon in a winter sky.

(Now, as he sat in the ladderback chair, watching Aebedel Cowdray die beneath seven stones, his father’s words made more sense, and Anson did not doubt the presence of the Divine Spirit, nor that it was cold, distant, and passionless.)

Under torture, the old witch-women usually babbled about Beelzebub, tales Determination deemed deceitful and useless. But when Old Mother Grax, mad with agony, had promised she would tell them of Aebedel Cowdray’s dark masterwork—a magical artifact he had been refining for decades—Determination had been intrigued. So intrigued that he did something his son had never seen him do. He eased the woman’s torment so that she might speak more freely. The old witch’s tale gushed forth.

According to Mother Grax, Cowdray had taken a small box of silver—a box such as might hold snuff—and he had sorcelled it to contain all of hell within its confines. Into this torment Cowdray could consign living souls stolen from human victims. Misery and agony being the true fuel of blood-sorcerers like Cowdray, the snuffbox thus represented a constant, ready supply of power. Power that would continue to grow as the pain and suffering of the imprisoned souls compounded.

Cowdray had been filling the box with souls taken from the African slaves in which he traded. Taking the soul killed some—those who were old or weak from strain or injury. But the young and strong could survive without souls, for a time. The ritual left them mindless, forgetful, directionless creatures—but they could work the fields, and they were placid and tractable, and as such they brought even higher prices than slaves with their souls intact.

“Monstrous!” Determination had whispered at the conclusion of this terrible recitation. He pressed her with questions in quick succession: where was the snuffbox? How could it be found? How could it be destroyed? But before she could answer any of these, Old Mother Grax’s pain-ruddied face had drained of color. Her rheumy eyes focused on the wall behind them.

“Alas, he is here!” She moaned in sudden terror. “Do you not see his shadow? There, there! Ah, master! Forgive a foolish old woman! Forgive me, Lord!”

The Inquisitors Kendall had looked around themselves, Determination clutching at the great red cross he wore around his neck, but they saw nothing. No dark shadow, no hint of malice or magic. So perhaps it was only fear that caused Old Mother Grax to expire as she did, quite suddenly, great gouts of blood flowing from her nose down her wrinkled chin.

“Of one thing I am sure: Aebedel Cowdray will not long be satisfied with the souls of heathens,” was Determination’s first grim conclusion. “Ere long, he will seek souls of greater merit, those of white Christian men.”

But, having decided to take the cause for his own, Determination was at a loss for how to proceed. Cowdray had carefully confined his business dealings to the middle and southern colonies. His main trading offices were in New York, whose governor—the indulgent sinner William Penn—had once released an old dame accused of maleficum with the infamous pronouncement, “You are at perfect liberty to ride on broomsticks, as I know of no law against it.” Enticing Cowdray to leave such safe harbor seemed nearly impossible.

Thus, when the Inquisitors Kendall sought audience with Governor Penn—with the intention of exhorting him to do his Christian duty and send Cowdray to face God’s justice in Massachusetts—they expected little succor. But while the chance of success was slight, they knew it was greater than any they could expect further south.