Read Chapter 8: A Hidden Leaf

The gaoler’s keys had barely ceased their rattling in the lock when Patience’s face appeared at the bars, pale as candlewax, her fingers twisting the edge of her apron. She glanced over her shoulder down the corridor before pressing her mouth close to the gap.

“Mercy,” she whispered, breath coming fast. “I have something.”

Mercy rose from the straw, joints aching with the cold that never quite left the cell. “Patience, you shouldn’t be here. If they see you—”

“They won’t.” Her sister’s hand slipped between the bars, fist closed tight. “I told the guard I brought you a psalm book. He’s simple. Believes what he’s told.”

Mercy took the offered object. It was flat, dry, weightless—a single leaf pressed between two squares of rag. She did not need lamplight to know it. The ovate shape, the dusky green that had browned at the edges, the faint bitterness that clung to her fingertips even now.

“Belladonna,” she said quietly. “Where did you get this?”

“Mistress Harlow’s garden.” Patience’s voice dropped even lower, as though the plant itself might hear. “She lets me take cuttings for the stillroom, doesn’t check what I pick. I thought—I thought if you could brew a tea, a strong one, you could slip into a sleep that looks like death. They’d bury you, and I could come dig you up before the coffin’s sealed. I know where Father’s shovel is. I could do it, Mercy. I could.”

Mercy looked at her sister’s earnest face, at the desperate hope gathering in her young eyes like storm clouds. Patience was not yet seventeen, still soft where Mercy had grown sharp edges. She thought of her mother, alone in the house with all the whispers pressing in. Thought of what would happen to both of them if Mercy vanished in the night, leaving only the rumor of escape behind.

“No,” Mercy said.

“But Mercy—”

“Listen to me.” She kept her voice gentle but firm, the way she had spoken to feverish children and frightened mothers. “If I run, they will not think me innocent. They will think me guilty and clever. And when they cannot find me, they will take you. Or Mother. Or both of you, on suspicion of aiding a witch’s flight. Do you understand that? My escape would condemn our family to the same gallows they’ve built for me.”

Patience’s chin trembled. “Then what am I to do? Sit here in our empty house and wait for them to come for you?”

“You go home.” Mercy folded the leaf back into its rag and slipped it inside her bodice, next to her heart. “You tell Mother I love her. And you remember that I have a way to fight this that does not require running.”

Patience’s brow furrowed. “With what? A dead man’s list? That clerk you told me about?”

The sound of boots on stone echoed from the end of the corridor. Patience’s face went white, and she stepped back from the bars just as Nathaniel Godfrey rounded the corner.

He stopped when he saw her, hat in hand, jaw tightening almost imperceptibly. “Forgive me. I did not mean to intrude.”

“You’re that clerk,” Patience said, and her voice was harder now, a mother bear’s growl. “The one my father accused of stealing.”

Nathaniel’s expression did not flinch. “I am the one your sister chose to trust.”

“She’s in a cell for trusting the wrong people.”

“Patience.” Mercy stepped to the bars, taking her sister’s hand. “Go home. I’ll send word when I can.”

Her sister held her gaze for a long moment, then turned and walked away without looking back. The gaoler reappeared at the end of the hall, jangling his keys like a warning bell, and then Nathaniel was alone with her, standing on the other side of the iron.

“Your sister has more nerve than most men in this town,” he observed.

“She has more heart than the whole of it combined.” Mercy reached into her bodice and withdrew the rag, unfolding it to show him the leaf. “She brought me this.”

Nathaniel studied it with the cautious distance of a man who knew little of plants. “What is it?”

“Belladonna. Deadly nightshade. One leaf, properly prepared, can stop a heart. Three can send a person into a sleep so deep the living would swear them dead.” She held it up between two fingers, turning it in the thin light of the corridor torch. “But that is not the most interesting thing about it.”

“The most interesting thing?”

“Watch.” Mercy placed the leaf flat on her palm and pressed her thumb against its center, rubbing slowly. A faint dark stain spread across her skin. “Look at my fingers. See how they tremble? How the flesh pales? If I were to smear this juice beneath my eyes, my pupils would swell until the iris all but vanished. My lips would crack. My tongue would swell and thicken until speech became a struggle. A man of medicine would call these the signs of poisoning. A man of God would call them something else entirely.”

Nathaniel’s face went very still. “The magistrates would call them the marks of a witch.”

“They would now.” Mercy lowered her hand. “But consider—what if a woman in this town, a woman with access to herbs and a reputation already blackened by suspicion, were to show these very symptoms at trial? What would a jury see?”

“The proof of her guilt.”

“And what would a physician see, if he were honest?”

Nathaniel was quiet for a moment. “Poison. Not possession.”

“Just so.” Mercy wrapped the leaf again, tucking it carefully away. “I have spent my life learning which plants heal and which plants harm. But I have also spent my life watching the women of this town who know nothing of plants. Women who curse their neighbors in the street and faint at the sign of a crossing cat. Women whose tongues are sharp and whose tempers are sharper. I know what spectral evidence looks like because I know what it must imitate.”

Nathaniel’s brow furrowed. “You think Abigail Proctor is poisoned?”

“I think Abigail Proctor is loud, frightened, and easily led.” Mercy leaned closer to the bars, dropping her voice to a murmur. “But think on this, Nathaniel. Your ledger showed that debts were canceled on the day I was accused. Money moved. Conspiracies require coin. And if someone wished to make a false accusation stick, they would need a tool—a voice to shout witch loud enough that no one stopped to question why.”

“Abigail would not need poison to be a convincing witness. The girls of this town have been crying wolf for months.”

“And what did they eat before they screamed? What did they drink?” Mercy paused, letting the question settle. “Datura blooms in the summer gardens of nearly every household in Salem. Henbane grows wild along the fence lines. I have seen Abigail eat handfuls of berries from bushes that would make a strong man weep in his sleep—her mother lets her forage freely, believing the girl has a delicate constitution that needs wild foods to strengthen her blood.”

Nathaniel stared at her. “You believe Abigail’s mother is poisoning her?”

“I believe someone is.” Mercy’s voice was flat, certain. “I believe that Abigail’s fits, her spectral visions, her screaming at shadows—all of it could be manufactured by a careful hand with the right plants. Plants that are common enough to go unnoticed. Plants that a herbalist would know, but a magistrate would not.”

She watched his face as the weight of her meaning settled over him. The realization moved through his eyes like a slow tide.

“You want me to look for poison,” he said slowly. “In the Proctor household.”

“I want you to look for anything that does not belong. A jar of dried leaves kept somewhere a girl might find it. A cup that smells of bitter almonds. A servant who feeds the girl sweets that make her eyes go wide and wild.” Mercy gripped the bars. “If Abigail is being poisoned to cry witch, then whoever feeds her is the true maker of my accusation. And that person is not a frightened girl. That person is the reason my father’s list exists.”

Nathaniel was silent, his jaw working. Then he said, “I have been planning to search the Putnam property tonight for Ruth.”

“Then search the Proctor house as well. While you are looking for one missing girl, look also for the thing that makes another one lie.” Mercy stepped back from the bars. “And Nathaniel—if you find nothing, find me something else. Because if I cannot prove Abigail is drugged, I will stand before that court with nothing but a dead man’s list and the word of my own hands.”

The gaoler’s keys sounded again, closer this time.

Nathaniel nodded once, and was gone.

Mercy sat down on the straw, pressed her hand against the folded leaf in her bodice, and began to plan.