Read Chapter 1: The Summons

Damp straw stuck to Mercy Hart’s cheek, and the sting of a rope around her wrists pulled her from a dream of summer meadows. The door of her cottage crashed open, splinters flying. Two men in leather jerkins filled the doorframe—Constable Bickford and his son, their faces grimed with the same dawn fog that crept along the lane.

“Mercy Hart,” Bickford boomed, his voice too loud for the small room. “By order of the magistrates, you are taken for examination upon suspicion of witchcraft.”

Sleep still clung to her limbs. She pushed herself up, bare feet finding the cold floorboards. “Witchcraft?” The word tasted like ash. “You have the wrong door, Constable. Goody Putnam has the palsy, not I.”

The younger Bickford grabbed her arm, his grip bruising. “Don’t make this harder than it is.”

“I have a boil to lance at the Thatcher farm at first light,” she said, her voice steadier than her hammering heart. “Let me at least fetch my satchel.”

Bickford’s eyes flicked to the corner where her leather satchel sat, worn and stained with a hundred poultices. He shook his head once. “Nothing leaves with you.”

They dragged her into the yard, and the morning cold bit through her thin shift. A crowd had gathered—neighbors who had smiled at her a fortnight past, who had bought her feverfew and chamomile. Now they stood in a loose crescent, faces shuttered, whispers like dry leaves rattling. Somewhere a child began to cry, and a mother hushed it too sharply.

Mercy searched the faces. There, at the front, stood Goody Proctor, her round face blotched red, her Bible clutched to her chest like a shield. Beside her, her daughter Abigail—fourteen, solemn-eyed, her dark hair pinned beneath a white cap. Mercy had taught Abigail to identify yarrow and plantain last spring when the girl had come asking about a rash. The girl had smiled then, bright as a new penny.

Now Abigail smiled too, but it was a different thing entirely—thin, knowing, the smile of a cat watching a sparrow’s wing flutter.

“You know what I saw,” Abigail said, loud enough for the crowd to hear. “In the woods, gathering at night. Her and others. The black man reading from a book.”

The black man. Mercy almost laughed—Salem Village had no black man save Titus, goodman Townshend’s freed servant who attended meeting every Sabbath without fail. But laughter would hang her faster than any accusation. She pressed her lips together.

“I’ve never been in those woods at night,” she said, addressing the crowd, not Abigail. “Ask anyone. I’m abed by dusk most evenings, and up before the rooster.”

“Your mother knew the Devil,” Goody Proctor said, her voice cracking. “We all remember. And the apple does not fall far from the tree.”

Mercy felt the words land like stones. Her mother had died twelve years past, fever and fits, in this very cottage. She had been a healer too—and a woman who had made enemies. Goody Proctor had never forgiven her for the midwifery blunder that cost Goody Proctor her first child. Mercy had borne the weight of that grudge her whole life.

“My mother died in prayer,” Mercy said, her jaw tight. “You were there at her burial. You sang the hymn.”

“The Devil can wear a saint’s face,” Goody Proctor shot back.

The crowd’s whisper grew, a noise like rising wind. Mercy felt the rope bite harder as the younger Bickford yanked her forward. She stumbled, nearly fell, and someone in the crowd laughed—a dry, nervous sound.

She looked back over her shoulder. Her garden lay behind the cottage, rows of sage and rue and pennyroyal catching the first pale light. She had planted every one of those seeds herself, had coaxed them through drought and frost. Now they looked like evidence against her, green witnesses to her guilt.

They marched her along the lane toward the meeting house, and the crowd followed, a slow funeral procession without a body. At the crossroads, Mercy saw another cluster of people, and her heart surged—Goody Thatcher, whose husband’s boils she had lanced, and Goodman Reed, whose daughter’s fever she had broken with willow bark. But when she caught their eyes, they looked away. The Thatchers crossed to the other side of the lane.

Proof of healing counted for nothing when the Devil walked abroad.

The meeting house loomed ahead, stark white against the grey sky. Its double doors stood open, and the smell of old hymn-books and taller-wood rolled out, familiar and suddenly terrifying. Mercy had stood in that room every Sabbath, had listened to the minister thunder against sin, had felt herself small and mortal. Now that smallness pressed down on her like a physical weight.

Inside, the benches were filling. The townsfolk filed in not for worship but for spectacle. Mercy was shoved toward a raised platform at the front where a single chair waited, rough-hewn and empty. A stool for the accused, she realized. A stage for her shame.

“Sit,” Bickford ordered.

She sat. Her wrists had gone numb from the rope, and her feet were raw from the walk. She had not eaten since yesterday’s noon meal. Her stomach turned over, but she kept her face plain as any Quaker’s.

The magistrates had not yet arrived. Mercy scanned the crowd again, looking for a friendly face, a moderate voice, anyone who might speak for her. There was Goodman Farnum, whose wife she had helped through a hard birth last winter—he met her gaze, then looked down at his own boots. There was Mistress Hale, whose rheumatism she had eased with comfrey salves—she was whispering earnestly to her neighbor, not meeting Mercy’s eye at all.

No one would speak for her. No one dared.

Then the door at the back of the meeting house opened, and Mercy heard the scrape of boots. She turned, expecting Magistrate Hathorne’s black robes, but instead saw a young man she recognized only vaguely—the clerk, Nathaniel Godfrey, who kept the records for the magistrates. He was perhaps five-and-twenty, with a face more suited to laughter than ledgers, but now his brow was furrowed. He carried a quill and a wax tablet, and he took a seat at a small desk beside the magistrates’ bench, his gaze flicking to Mercy for the briefest instant.

In that instant, Mercy saw something she had not expected: recognition, and something that almost looked like unease. The Godfrey family had farmed the next valley over for generations. Their name had been mentioned once, long ago, in a quarrel over boundary stones that had gone badly for her father. She had assumed the grudge had died with her mother.

But Nathaniel Godfrey looked at her now, and his hand trembled slightly as he dipped his quill into the inkpot.

“Magistrate Hathorne,” the younger Bickford announced, and the crowd fell silent.

Hathorne entered like a tide coming in—slow, inevitable, filling the room with his presence. His black robes swept the floor, and his face was set in the stern lines of a man who has long since made up his mind about the world. Behind him came Magistrate Corwin, softer-featured but no less grim.

Hathorne climbed to the raised bench and settled himself, unfolding a paper. He did not look at Mercy. He looked at the crowd, at his fellow magistrate, at the ceiling rafters—anywhere but at the woman he was about to destroy.

“Mercy Hart,” he said, and his voice carried to the farthest bench. “You are charged with sundry acts of witchcraft—with afflicting Abigail Proctor, aged fourteen, and her mother Goody Martha Proctor, by specter and malice, causing them great distress of body and spirit. How do you plead?”

Mercy’s throat was dust. She made herself breathe, in and out, as she had taught women in labor to breathe. “I am not guilty, Your Worship. I have never set so much as a thought against Goody Proctor or her daughter. I have tended them when they were sick. I have poulticed the girl’s ankle when she twisted it last harvest.”

“The Devil doth know many crafts,” Hathorne said, his voice flat. “And herbs are not innocent tools in wicked hands.”

“I am not wicked. I have lived my life in plain sight of my neighbors. Ask them—” She gestured toward the crowd, but the gesture made the rope bite harder, and she winced. “Ask anyone here if I have ever been less than honest in my dealings, less than charitable in my ministrations.”

“Charity is a cloak,” said a voice from the crowd, and Mercy saw Abigail Proctor standing, her face pale with excitement, her hands clasped beneath her chin as if in prayer. “I saw her at the meeting last Sabbath. During the sermon, she sat with her lips moving. ‘Twas not prayer—perhaps, but imprecations against the minister.”

A murmur ran through the crowd. Mercy shook her head slowly. “I was speaking the collect to myself, child. I did not know it was a crime to repeat the words of the Book of Common Prayer.”

“We do not use that papist book here,” Hathorne said sharply.

“Then I misremembered the psalm,” Mercy said, exhausted. “I am a poor scholar. I know my plants better than my letters.”

Nathaniel Godfrey’s quill scratched across the tablet, and Mercy saw him pause, look up at her once more. His lips parted, as if he meant to speak, then closed. He lowered his eyes to his notes.

“The court will examine you further in the days to come,” Hathorne said. “Meanwhile, you shall be remanded to the jail at the back of this building, where you shall remain until your trial. Security for your person shall be set by the magistrates.”

“How long?” Mercy asked. She hated how small her voice sounded.

Hathorne finally looked at her. His eyes were as cold as winter ponds. “Until God reveals the truth of your soul, Mistress Hart. For some, that takes a very long time.”

The younger Bickford seized her arm again and hauled her from the chair. The crowd began to talk, a rising hum of relief and excitement and fear. Mercy stumbled down the aisle between the benches, and as she passed Abigail Proctor, the girl reached out and touched her sleeve.

Mercy stopped. She looked into that fourteen-year-old face, at the bright eyes and the smile that had grown sharper with each passing moment.

“You will be sorry for this,” Mercy said, and she did not know if she meant the accusation or the touch or the whole world of it.

Abigail’s smile did not waver. “The Devil’s creatures always say that.”

There was nothing else to say. Mercy let Bickford drag her through the back door of the meeting house, out into a small yard where a squat timber structure stood, iron bars set into its single window. The jail. She had passed it a hundred times, had thought of it only as a place for drunkards and debtors and once, long ago, for a man who had killed his brother over a cow.

Now it was her home.

The cell was dark and smelled of mold and old straw. Mercy’s ankles were shackled to a ring in the wall—not tightly, but enough that she could not stand fully upright. She sank down onto the pallet, felt the damp soak through her shift.

She had three days, perhaps four, before they came to examine her. Three days to prove her innocence in a town that had already decided she was guilty. Three days to find out why Abigail Proctor—why anyone—would set this trap.

Outside, through the bars, she could see the lane, and the coming-and-going of the townsfolk. She could see the edges of her own world receding: her garden, her pots of salves, her future.

But she could also see something else. She clutched the one thing the constables had not taken, hidden in the hem of her shift: a folded sprig of belladonna, dried and black, that she had found tied to her doorpost two nights past.

Someone had left it as a threat, or a message.

Mercy pressed the dry leaf between her fingers and thought of poison, and of the hands that had placed it, and of a girl’s smile that did not waver.

She would not die in this cell. She would find the truth, even if she had to dig it out of the earth with her bare hands.