Read Chapter 2: The Iron Bracelet

The jailer’s wife had fingers like grubs—pale, damp, and quick to burrow. Mercy watched them crawl over the small pile of her belongings spread on the straw tick that served as her bed: a worn leather satchel, a shift too blood-stained for even the village poor to want, a pair of cracked wooden clogs she’d outgrown two winters past.

“This’ll do,” the woman said, holding up Mercy’s mother’s silver locket to the single slit of window-light. The chain swung, catching a dull gleam. “Pretty thing. Heavy.”

Mercy’s throat closed. “That was my mother’s.”

“Was,” the jailer’s wife agreed, and dropped it into her apron pocket with a sound like a dropped coin. “See that you get your meals hot, girl. The rats here have no manners, and cold porridge draws them something fierce.”

She turned and left, and the cell door’s iron bar thudded home with a sound that Mercy felt in her teeth. The dark returned—not full dark, but the sickly grey of a cellar light that never quite reached the corners. The straw rustled. Something small and quick skittered past her ankle, and Mercy drew her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them.

Her mother’s locket. Buried with her, Mercy had thought. But no—the midwife Goody Shaw had found it among Mercy’s things after her mother’s fever, and said it was Mercy’s inheritance now. Her mother had been a healer too, in her quiet way. Fewer accusations in her time. Times were meaner now.

The belladonna sprig. That was what she should be thinking of. The black, dried berries, the purple-bell flowers crushed to pulp, tied to her doorpost with a length of red wool. A warning, or a mark. Someone had set her trap before the constables ever came.

But all Mercy could see was the locket’s gleam disappearing into that woman’s pocket.

She did not sleep. The night passed in scratched sounds and distant moans from other cells, the curses of men in the gaol’s lower pits, the patter of rats bold enough to run across her legs. By the time the first true light—pale and hostile—crept through the slit, Mercy had mapped every crack in the mortar, every rusted nail, every way a person might try to claw their way free.

None of them would hold. She knew that too.

They came for her near midday: two constables she recognized from the village, Hobbs and Carver. Hobbs had been the one to hold her arms in the meeting house. He had the decency to look away when he unlocked the door.

“Magistrate wants you,” he said, not meeting her eyes.

“Wants, or needs?” Mercy rose slowly, her joints aching from the cold stone floor. “I was under the impression I was already judged.”

Carver spat past her feet. “Shut your mouth, witch.”

“I’m not a witch, Carver. I delivered your wife’s last child. Held her hand while she pushed. You do remember your son, don’t you? The one I caught by the ankle when he came out blue?”

Carver’s face reddened above his beard, but he said nothing. Hobbs took her arm—gently, at least—and led her out.

The meeting house was cold even with the fire in the hearth. The magistrate’s seat had been raised on a platform so that his shadow fell across the whole room, and Hathorne sat in it with his black coat buttoned to his throat despite the warmth of the flames. His clerk sat at a small table with a quill, his head bent, already writing.

Hathorne did not look up when they brought her in. He was reading from a sheaf of papers, his lips moving soundlessly over the words. Mercy stood in the center of the room, where the accused always stood, and waited.

Finally, he set the papers down and studied her. His face held no menace—only the weary certainty of a man who believed he was doing God’s work.

“Mercy Hart,” he said. “You stand accused of malefic witchcraft, of sending your specter to torment Goody Elizabeth Proctor and her daughter Abigail in the dead of night. The girls report that a black dog with your face has been seen at their window, scratching and howling. That pins have appeared in Abigail’s bed, and that you pricked her arm with them while she slept. That you have attended a gathering in the woods behind the Hart cottage, where a drum was beaten and a sacrament was eaten of unblessed bread.”

Mercy’s hands were shaking. She pressed them to her skirts. “I have never been to any gathering. I know nothing of pins or black dogs.”

“Your familiar,” Hathorne said, as if explaining to a slow child, “might take such shapes without your knowledge. The Lord Satan works through his vessels even when they resist.”

“Then how is it my fault, if I resist?”

The clerk’s quill paused. Mercy glanced at him—young, dark-haired, with a jaw that looked set to grind its own teeth. Nathaniel Godfrey. She knew the name. Everyone did.

So he was to be the one to record her foolishness. Of course.

Hathorne leaned forward, folding his hands on the table. “You are known in this village as a healer, Mercy. You gather herbs. You brew tinctures. You have spoken openly of the properties of certain plants, plants that induce visions, plants that cause sleep, plants that—if misused—might stop a heart.”

“I am a midwife’s apprentice,” Mercy said, forcing her voice steady. “I learn what I need to help women bring life into this world. That is all.”

“And yet,” Hathorne said, picking up another paper, “your neighbor, Goody Porter, testified that she saw you walking in the woods at midnight on the night of the full moon last, carrying a bundle of green things.”

“I gather certain herbs by moonlight,” Mercy said. “Their potency is stronger then. It is a practice older than this village, older than this colony. It is not witchery.”

Hathorne’s eyebrows rose. “Herbs that are stronger when gathered by moonlight. Do you hear what you are saying, girl? That is the language of a hedge witch, not a Christian healer.”

“It is the language of my mother, who learned it from her mother, who was a midwife in Ipswich for forty years.” Mercy’s voice caught, and she hated it. She would not cry here. She would not.

Hathorne sighed and shuffled his papers. “This court does not wish to see a young woman hanged on spectral evidence alone. I am a man of reason. I will grant you three days to prepare a defense. You will bring witnesses who can speak to your character, or evidence that refutes the accusations made against you. If you cannot, the spectral evidence will be accepted, and your trial will proceed.”

Three days.

“Three days,” Mercy repeated. “In your gaol.”

“In my gaol,” Hathorne agreed. “Where you will be safe from the devil’s influence, and where you are unlikely to spread further harm.”

He waved his hand. The constables stepped forward, but Mercy held her ground.

“Magistrate,” she said, and Hathorne paused. “The belladonna sprig. Tied to my doorpost with red wool, found the morning of my arrest. You have it among your evidence?”

Hathorne frowned, shuffling through the papers. The clerk—Godfrey—looked up sharply, his quill hovering.

“I have no record of such a sprig,” Hathorne said.

“It was there. Someone tied it to my doorpost. I did not place it myself—why would I mark my own door with a warning sign of my own crime?”

Hathorne’s eyes narrowed. “Are you suggesting someone planted this on you?”

Mercy opened her mouth, then closed it. The belladonna sprig, pressed between her fingers in the cell before the jailer’s wife had taken her belongings. She had hidden it in her sleeve, then in the straw, then—

The jailer’s wife. Her belongings. The sprig had been in her metal drinking cup, the one with the dented lip that she’d tipped into the straw when the woman came. It was gone now, buried somewhere in the filth, but it was not in Hathorne’s evidence. No one had claimed it.

Which meant whoever had tied it to her door had done so in secret. And whoever had reported her to the constables had done so in secret. And Goody Proctor and her daughter had told their story of pins and black dogs in perfect unison, as if rehearsed.

“I am suggesting,” Mercy said slowly, “that someone in this village has set a trap for me. And that whoever they are, they are not afraid of hanging me to spring it.”

Hathorne studied her for a long moment. His face gave nothing away. Then he nodded once.

“Three days,” he said again. “Find your proof, Mercy Hart. Because if you cannot, I will be forced to accept the evidence that already stands.”

The constables took her arms. This time Carver did not spit, did not even mock. He just looked at her with something that might have been pity, and led her back to the cell.

The cell was colder than she remembered. The straw had been kicked into a heap against the wall, and the light through the slit had shifted to a deeper grey. Mercy sat down slowly, pressing her back to the damp stone, and tried to think.

Belladonna. Nightshade. The plant the Puritans called the devil’s herb, the plant that could kill or cure depending on the dose, the plant she knew better than any other. Someone had tied it to her door to frame her, or to warn her, or—

She reached into her sleeve. The sprig was gone, but the memory of it remained: the crushed berries, the stem bent sharply as if snapped in haste. Whoever had placed it knew what they were doing. Knew she would recognize it. Knew the magistrates would not.

Three days. She had three days to find a witness, a shred of proof, anything that would stand against the spectral testimony of a weeping girl and her mother.

She had no one. The village had closed its doors to her the moment the accusation was spoken. Her only ally was a dead midwife who might have spoken for her, and a locket that was even now being sold for porridge money.

The lock rattled. Mercy looked up, expecting the jailer’s wife with her evening slop.

But it was not the jailer’s wife. It was Nathaniel Godfrey, the clerk, standing in the open doorway with his ledger pressed to his chest, his face drawn tight with something that looked like war.

“Miss Hart,” he said. The words came out stiff, as if dragged across broken ground.

“Clerk Godfrey,” Mercy said. “Come to record my dying words?”

He flinched. Good.

“I came,” he said, and stopped. Swallowed. “I came to tell you that your request for a hearing has been granted. Hathorne will hear your witnesses in three days’ time.”

Mercy laughed. The sound echoed off the stone, hollow and ugly. “I have no witnesses. Everyone in this town is either afraid of me or afraid of the accusation.”

“Then find evidence instead.”

“You think I haven’t tried? I had a sprig of belladonna tied to my doorpost, and it’s gone. The jailer’s wife took my belongings, and my mother’s locket with them. What evidence do you expect me to conjure from the air?”

Godfrey’s hand tightened on the ledger. He stared at a point above her head, unwilling to meet her eyes.

“There are inconsistencies,” he said, his voice very low. “In the accusations. The pins found in Abigail’s bed—the report lists them as iron, but Goody Proctor’s sworn testimony says brass. And the black dog was first described as a cat, in the constable’s initial deposition. Such discrepancies can be raised at trial.”

Mercy stared at him. The Godfrey family and the Harts had been at each other’s throats for sixty years over a strip of boundary land no one even farmed. His grandfather had gone to court over it. His father had stopped speaking to Mercy’s father at church.

And now he stood in the door of her cell, telling her about discrepancies.

“Why?” Mercy asked.

Godfrey’s jaw worked. He looked, for a moment, like a boy caught between his father’s hand and his own conscience.

“Because,” he said, and stopped. Then, quieter: “Because no iron bracelet has ever been made that could hold a witch, and they put you in one anyway. That tells me something.”

He turned and left before Mercy could answer. The bar thudded home, and the light through the slit faded from grey to dark.

Mercy sat in the dark, replaying his words. Iron bracelet. It had encircled her ankle when they brought her in—a cold, rusted circle of iron she had forgotten until now. She touched her ankle, found the skin chafed and raw beneath it.

An iron bracelet. On a witch. And still the cell held her.

Which meant either she was not a witch—which she knew—or the jailers did not truly believe she was one. And if they did not believe, then someone else had convinced them to lock her up anyway. Someone with a reason. Someone with a grudge.

Three days. And a Godfrey, of all people, was the only one reaching toward her.

Mercy pressed her forehead to her knees and tried to think of her mother’s locket, swinging in the jailer’s wife’s pocket. Of the belladonna sprig, buried in the straw. Of the black dog with her face, howling at Abigail Proctor’s window.

None of it made sense. And yet, all of it pointed somewhere.

She would find where. In three days, she would find where.