Read Chapter 11: The Physician's Mask

The straw outside Mercy’s cell had grown damp with the evening’s chill, and she had taken to pacing a narrow trench in it, three strides each way, like a tethered goat. Nathaniel stood at the bars, his face half-lit by the guttering candle he’d set on the floor between them. He had not spoken for a full minute, and the silence had begun to itch.

“Say it plainly, Nathaniel,” Mercy said, stopping mid-stride. “You think I am a fool for believing Willard wants my mother’s recipe above all else.”

“I think you may be right,” he said, and the admission startled her enough that she lowered herself to the stool. “But I also think a man who pays a family to swear false testimony does not do so for a cup of tonic, no matter how potent. There must be something in that recipe that keeps him from sleeping. Something he cannot abide.”

“He watched her die,” Mercy said quietly. “He was there, at her bedside, when the fever took her. He asked her for the formula the week before she passed. She refused him. Told him it was not his to own, that it was a woman’s knowledge, and no physician’s ledger would ever hold it.”

Nathaniel’s jaw tightened. “And you hold it in your head.”

“Every leaf, every measure, every step of the simmering. She made me repeat it back to her three times the last night she was lucid, until I could say it in my sleep. I thought she was merely proud. Now I wonder if she knew he would come for it after she was gone.”

“Then he has waited seven years,” Nathaniel said. “That is a patient man. A patient man with a grudge is worse than a furious one.”

Mercy nodded. “He could not take the recipe while I was free. I would have refused him, as my mother did. But if I am hanged for witchcraft, my knowledge dies with me—or so he believes. Unless he means to offer me a bargain at the last hour, a reprieve in exchange for the words he covets.”

The thought sat between them like a third prisoner, and neither spoke for a moment. Then Nathaniel said, “Patience has not returned from the meetinghouse. It has been six hours since the sexton’s bell rang for evening prayer.”

Mercy felt a cold thread draw tight across her chest. “She would not linger. She knows the risk. If she was caught with the ledger, the deacons would have brought her straight to Hathorne, and word would have reached you by now.”

“Unless word is being kept quiet,” Nathaniel said. “Unless they are building a case against her before they show their hand.”

He had barely finished the sentence when a commotion sounded from the far end of the gaol—boots on stone, a woman’s voice raised in protest, and the unmistakable clang of a door being thrown open. Mercy pressed herself against the bars, craning to see down the corridor.

Two constables appeared, dragging a slight figure between them. The woman’s cap had come loose, and auburn hair spilled across her face, but Mercy knew the set of those shoulders before the woman lifted her chin.

“Patience,” Mercy breathed.

Her sister’s wrists were bound with rope, and a welt rose along her cheek where someone had struck her. The constables shoved her into the cell across the corridor—the same one Mercy had been told belonged to a woman who had confessed to consorting with the Devil and had been left to rot until her execution.

“Mercy.” Patience’s voice cracked, but she did not weep. She looked at her sister through the bars of her own cage, and even in the dim light, Mercy saw that Patience was not merely frightened. She was furious. “They took the papers. Every page I had pulled from the physician’s records. They found them in my apron and called them a witch’s ledger.”

Mercy turned to Nathaniel, her voice low and hard. “Who arrested her?”

“Constable Bickford,” came a voice from the corridor, and Mercy’s blood chilled as Deputy Constable Bickford stepped into the lantern light, his broad face gleaming with satisfaction. “And I’ll thank you to keep your voice down, mistress, or I’ll have you both moved to the pit.”

“On what charge?” Mercy demanded.

“Conspiracy with the Devil,” Bickford said, savoring the words. “And theft of church records. Magistrate Hathorne signed the warrant himself, not two hours ago. Your sister was seen leaving the meetinghouse with papers in her possession. When confronted, she gave a false account of her purpose there.”

“I was checking the banns for my betrothal,” Patience said, but her voice shook, and Bickford laughed.

“A betrothal you have never once mentioned in my hearing. And no ring on your finger.” He stepped closer to Mercy’s cell. “And you, Mercy Hart, are in no position to argue the merits of evidence. You stand accused of the same crime. It seems witchcraft runs in the blood.”

Mercy gripped the bars until her knuckles went white. “If you have touched her—”

“We have not,” Bickford said, and there was something almost disappointed in his tone. “The good physician has advised that the afflicted girls be kept clear of all prisoners until their testimony is taken, lest they be further tormented by the presence of witches. Your sister will be held until her examination. That will be all the touching that is needed.”

He turned and walked away, his boots ringing against the stones, and the gaol fell quiet once more.

Patience waited until the lantern light faded before she spoke, her voice barely a whisper. “Mercy, I found something. Before they took the papers. I had time to read one page.”

“What page?”

“The physician’s ledger for the Proctor household. He had written beside Abigail’s name: *‘Dose doubled at sundown—observe visions. If she speaks, name Hart.’*”

Mercy felt the world narrow to the sound of her own heartbeat. “They wrote it down. They wrote the instruction to name me.”

Patience nodded. “But the ledger is gone now. Bickford took it straight to Hathorne. It will be burned or buried, and no one will ever see it.”

Nathaniel moved to Patience’s cell, his face unreadable. “Did you see where Bickford took it?”

“He gave it to his deputy, a boy named Josiah Turner. He watched them lock it in a chest in the magistrate’s chamber. There is a key, and it hangs on a peg behind Hathorne’s desk.”

Mercy looked from Patience to Nathaniel. “You cannot get into that chamber. It is guarded at all hours.”

“Not all hours,” Nathaniel said slowly. “Hathorne takes his supper at the parsonage every evening at six. The gaoler locks the chamber door, but the window is unlatched. I have seen it from the yard.”

“Then you will be seen climbing to it.”

“I will not be climbing,” Nathaniel said. “I will be walking in through the front door, as the magistrate’s clerk, to file a complaint about a missing ledger. And I will need someone to cause a small distraction while I am there.”

Patience rose from the floor of her cell, her eyes bright with a desperate hope. “What kind of distraction?”

“The kind that looks like madness,” Nathaniel said. “But I think you are both practiced enough in that performance by now.”

Mercy looked at her sister, at the bruise rising on her cheek, at the rope still looped around her wrists, and felt something harden in her chest—not fear, not grief, but a clean, sharp resolve.

“He will not take you, Patience,” Mercy said. “I swear it. Whatever I must do, whatever I must become in the eyes of this town, he will not take you.”

Patience smiled, a thin and trembling thing. “Then let us give them a show they will not soon forget.”