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November 1692
Mercy’s vision is hazy as they drag her down the slope from the nameless Salem Village hill that will one day be called Proctor’s Ledge, her murderers thinking her already dead. Her neck bruised and her throat all but crushed from the noose as they fling her on the misshapen pyre. The corded bundles already piled high with the accused the townsfolk have rushed to finish killing before Governor Phips’ newly instituted Superior Court of Judicature – a much-too-late correction of his own establishment of the Special Court of Oyer that sent nineteen to the gallows, and another to be crushed to death – can quell the witch-hunting craze that’s swept through Exeter, Middlesex, and Suffolk.
Even as three hundred years of witch trials abroad petered out, that conflagration banking, Salem’s own rose swift and brutal in the “New World.” The influx of refugees of King William’s War – flooding down from Nova Scotia, Quebec, and upper New York, into New England – sparked a different blaze. Unfamiliar faces bred swift suspicion and resentment both of outsiders and those who stood with them among Salem’s own. Greed and grasping fear spreading like a sickness, a plague ravaging right quick the counties in and around Salem Village proper. Reason burning away swift and sure in that frenzy.
In its absence came the murder of women and children, religious fervor demanding the punishment of the body to save the soul. While men and women driven by hate damned their own.
Twenty souls history remembers fed to that fear. Those more who died in jail cells, awaiting trial, frequently forgot. But even they were not the last. A conflagration let burn so hard proving difficult to quell once people get a taste for it – for the tang of its ash rising to the sky, and the taking of land and spoils once the dead no longer have use of them.
But as Mercy lies there, head lolled up and angled to face the sky, the barely twenty years she’s lived seeming both far too brief and far too much, the night thick and smothering above her before the pyre is lit, all Mercy can see is an endless field of stars.
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Denounced because she would be neither bedded nor wedded, Mercy had desired no one, neither in union, nor in ardor. A thing easy to declare “unnatural” when your body is considered little more than a vessel for some man’s get. But many of the townsfolk were hungry, too, for her family’s land; good for growing, “too green and giving without supernatural aid” they’d called it. Instead of considering it care, and some green lore, too, passed down from mother to daughter in endless turning like the seasons.
