Read Chapter 12: A Midnight Meeting

The meeting house bell had not yet struck nine when the cart rolled to a stop at the edge of a woodlot, two miles past the Ipswich boundary. Nathaniel helped Mercy down from the straw, her wrists still raw from the shackles that had been removed only an hour before. He had called in every favor owed to the Hart family to arrange this, and the risk of it showed in the lines around his mouth.

"There's a crofter's hut a quarter mile through those pines," he said, pointing into the darkness. "Ruth is there. She won't speak to me, though. Says she'll only talk to you."

Mercy pulled her shawl tighter. "She trusts me because I am accused, as she fears she will be."

Nathaniel nodded grimly. "I'll keep watch at the tree line. If anyone approaches, I'll whistle twice like a whippoorwill. You'll have until the moon reaches its peak, no longer."

The path was soft with pine needles, muffling her steps. The hut appeared as a dark shape against the deeper black of the forest, a single candle burning behind a cloth-covered window. Mercy knocked twice, then once more, as Nathaniel had instructed.

The door cracked open. Ruth Putnam's face appeared, pale and hollow-eyed, her hair unkempt beneath a woolen cap. She looked at Mercy for a long moment, then pulled the door wide.

"You came." Ruth's voice was a whisper, cracked from disuse. "I thought perhaps you would not."

"Four days hiding in a hut with no fire," Mercy said, stepping inside and taking in the cold room, the bread crusts on the table. "You must be half frozen."

"I am half dead already." Ruth wrapped her arms around herself. "Better that than what awaits me in Salem."

Mercy sat on the stool across from Ruth, studying the girl's face. She was barely sixteen, and already the weight of the town's madness had carved years into her features. "You disappeared the night you took a draught from Dr. Willard. You told someone you had a letter to deliver to someone who owed you a truth."

Ruth's eyes widened. "How do you know that?"

"I have friends who listen." Mercy leaned forward. "What was in that letter, Ruth? What did you know that made you flee?"

For a long moment, Ruth was silent. Then she reached into her bodice and withdrew a folded paper, creased and worn from handling. She did not offer it, only held it against her chest.

"There is a girl in Andover," Ruth said slowly, "who died last spring of a fever. Her mother came to Dr. Willard for a remedy. He gave her a tonic of henbane and nightshade, telling her it would ease the child's suffering. The child did not die of fever, Mercy. She died of the remedy."

Mercy's blood went cold. "You know this how?"

"Because I was there when Willard told my mother. He bragged of it, thinking I was asleep in the corner." Ruth's voice trembled. "He said the mother paid well, and would pay more to keep the secret. He said a dead child was worth more than a cured one when the family had coin."

The old anger rose in Mercy, hot and familiar. Her mother had spoken of Willard with a tightening around her mouth, had warned her daughter never to accept any remedy from him, no matter how ill she was. Mercy had thought it mere professional rivalry. Now she understood it had been knowledge and fear.

"That is murder," Mercy said carefully. "Why would a physician want dead patients?"

"Because the living ones talk. The dead ones pay." Ruth's voice dropped lower. "But that is not why I left. I left because of what he did to Abigail Proctor."

Mercy stilled. "Tell me."

Ruth set the letter on the table between them but kept her hand over it. "Three weeks ago, Abigail came to our house, weeping. Her mother had taken ill with a wasting sickness—not bewitchment, a true sickness of the lungs. The doctor told her he could cure her mother, but only if Abigail did as he asked."

"Asked her to do what?"

"To accuse you."

The words hung in the cold air between them. Mercy felt them land like stones in her chest.

"Why me?" she heard herself ask. "He was not even in Salem when the accusations began."

"He had heard of your mother's remedy," Ruth said. "He wanted it. He went to your mother years ago to buy it, and she refused him. He never forgot. When you began practicing her methods, attending births, treating the sick, he saw his chance." Ruth's eyes met Mercy's. "He said you would be hanged, and no one would question why it was you and not another. No one important, at least."

The candle guttered, casting strange shadows across Ruth's face. Mercy forced herself to breathe slowly.

"Abigail agreed? She knew she was lying?"

"She believed the lie herself, by the end." Ruth's voice broke. "He gave her a draught each time she was to testify. She would drink it before the examinations, and within the hour she would see shadows, feel biting things upon her skin. She would shriek and point at whoever Willard told her to point at. She told me once that she thought perhaps she was truly bewitched, because the visions were so real. But I watched him dose her, Mercy. I watched her drink and I watched her change."

"If you knew this, why did you not come forward?"

Ruth's laugh was bitter and short. "How does a Putnam girl accuse a physician? My mother had already taken his payment to testify against you. My father is the constable's cousin. There is no one in Salem who would believe me against him." She looked down at the letter. "There is no one, except perhaps you. And you are in a cell."

Mercy extended her hand, slowly, palm up. "Let me see the letter."

Ruth hesitated, then slid it across the table. Mercy unfolded it, expecting a confession, a record of witnessing. Instead, she found an address in Boston, written in Ruth's own hand, and a name: Samuel Sewall, Judge of the Court of Oyer and Terminer.

"You meant to deliver this to the judge."

"I meant to deliver it in person, but I could not get past the guards at his house." Ruth's face crumpled. "Then I learned the court does not convene until the week after your trial. It was too late for you. It remains too late for you, unless... unless something else is found."

Mercy folded the letter and tucked it into her own bodice. "Judge Sewall will be in Salem for my trial. No man of law would miss such a spectacle."

"You cannot reach him from a cell."

"No." Mercy stood, her legs stiff from the cold and the crouching. "But Nathaniel can."

She moved toward the door, then stopped and turned back. Ruth looked smaller than ever, hunched over the cold table with the candle burning low.

"You cannot go back to Salem," Mercy said. "Willard will learn you are alive, and he will silence you."

"Where else can I go?"

"Stay here another night. Nathaniel will return for you at dawn and take you to his aunt in Billerica." Mercy paused. "She is a woman who has no patience for physicians who poison children. You will be safe there."

Ruth nodded, tears spilling down her cheeks. "I am sorry, Mercy. For what my mother did. For what my family has done."

Mercy did not answer. There was no forgiveness she could offer that would matter, not yet. She stepped out into the cold night and followed the sound of the whippoorwill's call back to Nathaniel.

He met her at the tree line, his face worried in the moonlight. "Well?"

She pressed Ruth's letter into his hand. "Judge Sewall. Ruth's testimony written down, her name and the dates of every dosing she witnessed. Deliver it to Sewall when he arrives for the trial."

Nathaniel took the letter but did not look at it. "And Abigail? If Willard is controlling her with these draughts, we still cannot prove it in a court that trusts spectral evidence."

"No." Mercy's jaw tightened. "But I know now what he is doing. He found his tool in Abigail, dosing her with the very herbs that grow in my own garden." She looked up at the moon, near full, counting the days. "He uses her because she is young and frightened. But he has made a mistake."

"What mistake?"

"Henbane and nightshade leave traces." Mercy turned to face him. "They leave their mark in the body, and they leave their mark in the mind. If we can find one person who saw him dose her, or one bottle of his remedy kept aside, he is finished."

"And if we cannot?"

Mercy's voice was flat, hard. "Then I am hanged in six days, and he takes my mother's recipe from my grave, and the only record of what he has done will be in the memory of a girl hiding in a hut who no court will believe."

She climbed into the cart, and Nathaniel drove them back toward Salem in silence. Behind them, the moon rose higher over the pines, and somewhere in the dark, Mercy knew, another pair of eyes had been watching the woodlot from the far side of the road—waiting, as they had been since the ledger went missing, for Mercy to lead them to what remained.