Read Chapter 10: Aftermath of Truth

Nathaniel found her with her forehead pressed to the bars, watching the thin grey light that passed for morning seep through the high window of her cell. The air carried the sour smell of last night's cabbage and the damp of the November floor. She didn't turn when his boots scraped on the stones.

"You found Ann Putnam." Not a question.

"I did." He crouched so his face came level with hers through the grate, and she saw the weariness pulling at the corners of his mouth. "She told me everything—what she knew, at least. The man who paid her to testify against you is Dr. Samuel Willard."

Mercy had expected a blow, and here it was. She closed her eyes and let the name settle into her like a stone dropped into deep water. Samuel Willard. She knew the face—thin and bloodless, with pale eyes that measured everything in coin—and she knew the ambition. For years he had hungered after her mother's work with a envy that festered in the quiet spaces of Salem's meetings and dinners.

"He came to our house once," she said slowly, "after my mother died. My father let him in because his manner was soft and his words were full of sympathy. But his eyes moved over our shelves the way a thief's hands move over a merchant's counter."

"What did he want?"

"Her remedy." Mercy opened her eyes. "The one she made for the keeping sickness—the tonic that made the Shadwick boy walk again after the fever had curled his legs beneath him. After she died, he hoped the secret had passed to me. I told him I burned all her papers." She almost smiled. "I did not. But he believed me because he wanted to believe the knowledge was lost to everyone but himself."

Nathaniel leaned his forehead against the bar. "He was already at the Putnams' bedside when their children began to sicken. He's been prescribing their draughts for years. It was not difficult for him to aim their terror."

"Terror he manufactured."

"I think so." He hesitated. "Ann told me that Abigail Proctor swallows a dose of his fever remedy each morning and evening—something pale and bitter that she takes willingly because she believes it pleases God to drink what the good doctor offers. It would be simple enough for Willard to mix something into it that makes her believe she sees wolves in the shapes of women."

Mercy's fingers closed around the belladonna leaf still hidden in the fold of her sleeve. She had carried it for two days now, a green accusation that weighed almost nothing and everything. "Nightshade, or henbane, or a dose drawing deeper from poppy than any sleep should reach. I know the plants he would use, and I know he learned them poorly—a man who steals remedies he cannot reproduce will misjudge the amount. Give Abigail enough of the wrong thing and she will genuinely believe her visions. She will shriek and froth and swear to any shape the magistrates suggest."

"And the magistrates will believe her because she is a girl in a fever of faith."

"Faith has nothing to do with it." Mercy's voice was flat. "Hathorne believes because belief serves him. He and Willard have circled each other for years, sharing the same suppers, the same clients, the same hatred of any woman whose knowledge outshines their own."

Nathaniel stood and began to pace the narrow passage beyond her cell. The light from the lamp he carried threw his shadow, long and restless, across the stones. "If we can show that Abigail is drugged—that her every vision comes after her dose of Willard's remedy—the court will have to question the rest. All the accusations. All the testimonies."

"And if we cannot show it, I hang."

"You will not hang." He stopped and faced her, and for a moment his voice carried something raw beneath the steadiness. "I will not let that happen, Mercy. I do not have the ledger anymore, but I have your father's list, and I have Ann Putnam's confession, and I have you."

It was the strangest thing anyone had said to her since her arrest. She looked at him standing there in his clerk's plain coat, his hands stained with ink, his eyes holding her with a conviction she did not entirely know what to do with. He was the son of the man her father had ruined. He was the one person in Salem who could vanish and lose nothing. And still he stood.

"You should not have said that," she murmured.

"Then I am glad I did."

A door opened somewhere above them, and the jailer's voice called down that the prisoner's sister had come with food. Nathaniel stepped back from the bars, straightening his coat, and by the time Patience descended the stair with a basket in her arms, he was again nothing more than a clerk finishing his morning duty.

Patience's eyes moved between them, sharp as a sparrow's. Her neckcloth was starched and white, her hair pinned tight beneath her cap, and her hands trembled only slightly as she set the basket on the floor by the grate. "I brought bread. And dried apples. Goody Everly said the jailer would let you have them if I begged hard enough." She did not ask what Nathaniel was doing there. Mercy loved her for that.

"I need you to do something," Mercy said, drawing her sister close to the bars. The jailer had returned to his post above, and Nathaniel stood watch at the foot of the stair, his back to them. "Go to the meetinghouse and find the ledger Mr. Putnam keeps of the sick. Willard's visits will be recorded there, and his remedies as well."

Patience's eyes widened. "They will not let me read such a thing. I am a woman."

"Then be a woman who weeps." Mercy's voice was low and urgent. "Tell them your sister is ill and you wish to pray over the pages of those who have been cured. Tell them you want to understand what sickness stole from your family. They will not deny a woman in mourning, Patience, especially if you cry prettily."

Patience bit her lip. "And if they ask why I do not bring the matter to Dr. Willard himself?"

"Then you say your sister will not be attended by any physician, for fear of what his hands have done, and you want to know who else he has treated so you may ask them whether he is merciful." Mercy paused. "It is a good lie because it is half true. Find out which houses he has visited in the past month, and especially which of the girls who now swear to spectral visions have taken his fever remedy."

"You think he has done this to many."

"I think he has done this to everyone he needs to." Mercy reached through the bars and took her sister's hand. "Will you do it?"

Patience looked down at their joined hands, her face pale. "You ask me to steal with my tears."

"Willard paid the Putnams to steal my life with theirs."

For a long moment Patience said nothing. Then she squeezed Mercy's hand and nodded once, a small quick motion that carried more courage than any oath spoken under the meetinghouse roof. "I will go this afternoon. I will tell Mother I am visiting the Shadwicks to share a receipt for their boy's constitution."

"Tell Mother nothing of this."

"I never do." Patience gathered up her basket and curtseyed to Mercy as though they were standing in the parlor rather than on either side of iron. "You will be home soon, sister. I have been lighting a candle for you every night." She turned and climbed the stairs, and Mercy watched the hem of her skirt disappear around the corner before she let her breath out.

Nathaniel came back to the bars. "She has more steel than Ann Putnam's whole family."

"She will need it." Mercy's hands gripped the bars. "Nathaniel, my trial is set for the next full moon. That is seven days."

"I know."

"Seven days for you to search Willard's house, find his supply of poisons, and persuade a court that would burn my mother's memory that their most trusted physician is a liar." She let out a breath. "And Ruth Putnam is still missing, and the girl could be the one witness who places Willard at the heart of this, and she was last seen running to deliver a letter to someone who owed her a truth."

"I have not forgotten Ruth." Nathaniel's voice was quiet. "I will search the Putnam property at dusk. If she is hidden there, I will find her."

"And if she is not?"

"Then I will find the one she went to meet."

Mercy looked at him, this strange man who had chosen to stand beside her through no obligation but the quiet pull of his own conscience. Her father had named his father a thief and the name had stuck, and Nathaniel had grown up under the shadow of that stolen reputation, and still he had chosen the truth over the comfort of hatred. She did not know what to say to such a thing, so she said the only honest words she had.

"When this is done—if I live—I will speak the truth of your father's name to everyone in Salem who will listen. I will clear him of what my father did."

Nathaniel's mouth pressed into a thin line, and for a moment she thought she had offended him. But then he shook his head. "My father is dead, Mercy. The living are what matter." He held her gaze through the bars. "And I intend to see you among them."

He turned and climbed the stairs after her sister, and Mercy was left alone in the cold of her cell with the belladonna leaf folded in her sleeve and her mother's remedy—a recipe she had never fully transcribed, a formula that lived in her memory like a song learned by heart—burning like a coal in her chest.

Samuel Willard did not want her dead for revenge. He wanted her dead because she was the last person alive who could brew the tonic that had made her mother famous, and a dead healer's secret could be claimed by any man bold enough to say he had learned it before she died. She had been a threat not for what she knew but for what she remembered, and Willard had built an accusation from the terror of a frightened village to bury the knowledge she carried.

She pressed her forehead to the cold iron and breathed.

Seven days. She had seven days to outwit a physician who had spent years learning how poison could imitate the work of the devil. She had a sister with a talent for sweet lies, a clerk with a grudge he had chosen to set aside, a leaf of belladonna that could kill or cure depending on the hand that used it, and a memory of her mother's recipe that Willard would burn the whole town to possess.

It was not much. But it was more than he knew.