Page 66 of The Witch

If I could verify that this bone really is three hundred years old, then I wouldn’t need to call the police. They don’t care about a potential crime that took place three centuries ago. I could bury these remains back in the earth, and we could go on with our lives.

There’s only one person who might be able to help me with that.

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1692

CAROLINE

I stand trial for alleged witchcraft today.

I would have liked to change into one of my finest outfits, so that Magistrate Putman might see that I am an upstanding woman. But Archie has not come to bring me any of my frocks, so instead, I am wearing the same uncomfortable woolen dress that Strickland brought me two days earlier. I had only the dirty water in the washbasin to clean my face and hair, and I look quite ragged. I do not have a mirror, but if I ever looked to be a witch at any time in my life, it would be today. I will see my husband today for the first time since my incarceration, and I wish he did not have to see me like this.

I eat my pottage in the morn, sitting on the straw bed. I try my best to keep the food down, but my stomach is filled with butterflies. If I am found innocent, I will never have to sleep in this cell again. But if I am found guilty…

Jonas is sitting in his cell, quietly eating, his expression blank. The bruises on his face from Strickland’s baton are a vivid purple—there is one on his forehead, just below his hairline, and a second on his cheekbone. But what is far worse are his other bruises. Yesterday, when he took off his shirt to wash, there were bright purple splotches of various sizes and shades all along his ribs on both sides. ’Twas painful to even look upon them.

“Are you not frightened?” I blurt out.

He looks up at me in surprise. “Why should I be frightened? You are the one on trial today. Are you not?”

“But you will go to Boston tomorrow,” I point out. “You will soon have your own trial. And you will verily be found guilty and put to death.”

He considers this for only a moment. “Yes.”

“So are you not frightened?”

He takes another bite of the cornmeal pottage in his bowl. “I am not.”

“Why not?” I ask, almost angrily.

Why should he be so calm when I am trembling like a leaf? Why should he nibble his pottage peacefully while the little I could keep down sits like lead in my stomach?

“Caro…Mistress Eldridge.” He looks back up at me, blinking eyes tinged with bruises. “I told you on the day that you came that Hitty Atkins spoke of you to me. Since that time, Hitty’s words have never left me.”

I recall how he mentioned that on my initial day of confinement. Back then, I was reluctant to listen to any word he had to say. But now the winds have shifted. “What did she say concerning me?”

Jonas opens his mouth as if to answer, but before he can, the cellar door swings open. My stomach drops. It must be the sheriff, come to bring me to the courthouse in Town Hall.

Sure enough, Sheriff Bixby appears at the foot of the stairs, holding a ring of keys. He smiles at me, and I do not smile back.

“Are you ready for your trial, Mistress Eldridge?” he asks.

I lift my chin, keeping my head held high as Hitty did. “I am, Sheriff.”

Sheriff Bixby unlocks the door to my cell. I join him, relieved to at least be out of that tiny enclosed space, but some of my joy is tempered when he claps a pair of manacles on my wrists. As I follow the sheriff to the stairwell, Jonas tosses his bowl of food aside and darts over to the bars of his cell.

“Caroline!” he calls out.

I do not answer him, but I pause for a moment, waiting to hear what he will say.

“Good luck to you,” he says.

Magistrate Putman will accept spectral evidence. Your trial will go as Hitty’s did.

I do not thank him. I allow Sheriff Bixby to lead me up the stairwell out of the jailhouse. Very soon, this will be over.

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