Read Chapter 32: The Missing Peace

The summer had brought green to the marsh, but it had not brought peace to Ruth Putnam.

Mercy watched her from the apothecary door, where she had come to collect a tincture for her mother's headaches. The girl stood at the edge of the garden, staring at nothing—or perhaps at something only she could see. Her fingers plucked at the sleeve of her dress, a habit Mercy had noticed since the spring.

"Ruth," Mercy called softly.

The girl flinched, then turned. Her eyes were the same pale blue they had always been, but something had drained from them, leaving a hollow quality that made Mercy's chest tighten. "Mistress Hart. Mother sent me for the willow bark."

"It's ready." Mercy stepped aside as Ruth approached, but she did not enter. She stood at the threshold, hands clasped, gaze fixed on the mortar and pestle on the workbench. "Ruth, I have asked you before. Will you sit with me?"

"I have no need of sitting."

"The night terrors. Are they still—"

"I have no night terrors." The words came too fast, too flat. Ruth's fingers found her sleeve again, twisting the fabric. "You must not speak of such things. Mother says it is unseemly."

Mercy studied the girl's face, the way her jaw tightened beneath the skin, the shadows beneath her eyes that no amount of daylight seemed to erase. Nathaniel had told her once that Ruth had been Willard's prize—the hysterical girl whose visions had launched the accusations. Mercy had assumed the release of that hold would restore her. But a bond like that did not break cleanly.

"Will you at least take a cup of tea?" Mercy asked. "I have fennel and lemon balm. Nothing that will harm you."

Ruth hesitated. Then, with a small nod, she stepped over the threshold. Mercy guided her to the chair near the hearth, where the summer fire burned low for the constant need of boiled water. She prepared the tea with practiced hands, watching Ruth from the corner of her eye.

The girl did not look at the bundles of dried herbs hanging from the rafters. She did not look at the glass jars of seeds and roots that lined the shelves. She looked at her own hands, folded in her lap, as if they belonged to someone else.

"I remember," Ruth said quietly, "the first time you came to our house. You brought a poultice for my mother's knee."

"I remember. Your father was not pleased to see me."

"He is never pleased." Ruth's voice was barely a whisper. "He is pleased when the crops are good. He is pleased when the cattle birth. He is pleased when the harvest brings a fair price. That is all."

Mercy set the cup before her. "Ruth, when Willard was here—what did he promise you?"

The girl's fingers trembled around the cup. "He said I was special. He said I could see things that other people could not, and that this was a gift from God. He said my father did not understand me, but he did. He said—" She stopped, swallowing hard. "He said he would take me away from the house. He said I would never have to go back."

Mercy's blood chilled. "Go back where?"

Ruth looked up at her, and for a moment, the hollow emptiness in her eyes cracked, revealing something raw and wounded beneath. "You know where."

And suddenly, Mercy did know. She knew with a cold, terrible certainty that settled in her bones like frost.

"Ruth. When he said that—what did Willard know of your father?"

The girl's face crumpled. "He knew everything. He watched for weeks, months. He would come to the house and pray with my father, and he would watch. And then he found me in the garden one day and told me that if I did not do as he said, my father would find out the things I had done. The things I could not help. The things he made me do."

Mercy's hand went to her own throat, where the memory of a rope's weight still lingered. "Made you do?"

"In the night." Ruth's voice broke. "When my mother slept. He would come to my room and he would talk to me about the devil and my sins, and he would tell me I was unclean, and he would make me kneel and pray until daylight. And then he would say that if I told anyone, he would go to my father and tell him how I had tempted him with wickedness. And my father would—" She stopped, shuddering.

"What would your father do?"

Ruth did not speak. She only pulled at her sleeve, pulling it up to reveal a thin white scar that ran from her wrist to her elbow, faded now but unmistakable. A mark that had healed long before Mercy had ever met her.

Mercy's breath caught. "He beat you."

"He beat me when I cried at night. He said it was the devil in me, making me restless." Ruth let the sleeve fall. "Willard knew about the scars. He would look at them and weep for my suffering, and tell me he was the only one who could save me from my father's wrath. But he was not saving me. He was using me."

Mercy moved to kneel before the girl, taking her cold hands in her own. "Ruth. You are not unclean. You are not wicked. Whatever he told you, whatever he made you do—none of it was your fault. Do you hear me?"

The girl's eyes filled with tears, finally, after all these months of emptiness. "I have told no one. Not even Mother. If Father knew I had spoken—"

"He will not know." Mercy squeezed her hands. "What passes between us in this room remains here. I swear it on my mother's grave."

Ruth wept then, great shuddering sobs that Mercy suspected had been locked inside her for years. Mercy held her, stroking her hair, murmuring words of comfort, until the tears slowed and the girl's breathing steadied.

When at last Ruth pulled back, wiping her face with the back of her hand, she looked younger. Not healed—the wounds were too deep for that—but seen. And perhaps that was the first step.

"Your mother," Mercy said carefully. "Does she know what your father does?"

"She knows he has a temper. She does not know the rest. She does not know about the nights." Ruth's voice steadied. "She believes he is a good man, a righteous man, a man of God. If I told her—"

"Then we do not tell her. Not yet." Mercy rose, retrieving a small brown bottle from a shelf. "This is a tonic for night terrors—poppy, chamomile, a touch of valerian. One spoonful before bed, no more. It will not cure what ails you, but it will give you rest."

Ruth took the bottle, turning it over in her hands. "You will not speak of what I told you?"

"I will speak of it only if you ask me to." Mercy hesitated, then added, "But Ruth—if your father ever raises his hand to you again, you must come to me. Noah Hart's widow will not stand idle while a child is beaten."

"I am not a child," Ruth whispered.

"Then you are a young woman who deserves better than what you have been given." Mercy's voice was firm, gentle. "And I intend to make sure you have it."

Ruth looked at her, and something passed between them—a thread of trust, fragile but real. She nodded, tucking the bottle into her apron. "I should return. Mother will worry."

"Will she?" Mercy asked quietly. "Or will she simply miss her willow bark?"

Ruth's smile was thin, but it was there. "Both."

She left, and Mercy stood in the doorway watching her go, her mind churning with what she had learned. Ruth had been Willard's instrument, yes. But she had also been her father's victim—a girl caught between two men who sought to control her body and her soul. Willard was dead, hanged in the chaos of the court's dissolution. But Thomas Putnam still walked free.

Mercy had seen Thomas at church, heard him pray with the loudest voice, witnessed him shake the hands of magistrates and ministers. She knew he had signed the complaints against her and others—his hand having been among those that had first condemned her to the gaol. And she knew, from Nathaniel's careful mention of a debt recorded at the county clerk's office, that Thomas's affairs had not been as prosperous as he pretended.

She turned back into the shop, her gaze falling on the ledger that Caleb Noyes had given her—the dead apothecary's record, the one that linked Willard to the poisonings in Boston. She had read every page, searching for anything that would broaden the canvas of Willard's crimes.

There was one page she had not studied closely. A page at the very back, water-stained and smudged, where handwriting that was not the apothecary's had made notations in a cramped, hasty script. She had assumed it was a merchant's record—a list of dried goods, perhaps, or supplies.

But now, as she drew the ledger from its shelf and turned to that final page, she looked again at the notations. Each line listed a property. A date. A price. A name.

Thomas Putnam, it read. And then a figure that represented more than Mercy's apothecary had ever earned in a year.

The date was March of 1692. The very week that Mercy had been arrested.

The very week that Thomas's property had suddenly doubled.

Mercy set the ledger down slowly, her hands trembling. Thomas Putnam had not merely signed the complaints against her. He had bought her land—her mother's land, the land that had been burned to the ground by Sower's mob—at a fraction of its worth, while she sat in gaol awaiting trial.

The accusation had been a business transaction.

And she had the proof in her hands.