When a witch is young: a historical novel

by Philip Verrill Mighels

This was the indictment, mildly expressed, that reached the ears of Garde Merrill concerning her lover. She was simply appalled. It was unbelievable, it was monstrous. She scorned to think it could possibly be true. And yet, if he had been in Boston several days before, as the story had it, why had she known nothing about it? The whole thing had been a gross fabrication. He could not have been in the town and going to a tavern to mix in a horrid brawl. He would certainly have come to see her immediately on his arrival. He had promised to return in about a week from a visit to the beef-eaters.

When she got as far as that, she suddenly tried to stop thinking. He had been gone many weeks instead of the one; the beef-eaters had not been with him when he had the alleged fight, nor when he was captured, and he had mentioned to her, on their walk from Plymouth, that he had once stopped at the Crow and Arrow, where the brawl was reported to have taken place.

Nearly frantic with the terrible thoughts in her head, Garde hastened to John Soam’s to get what she could of sober truth, which John would have as no one else might in the town.

She was mentally distraught when she came to her uncle’s. She had carried a dish belonging to her aunt Gertrude, to make an excuse for her late evening visit. She was more glad than she could have said that Prudence was away, for her cousin knew something of her feeling for Adam.

Garde, having been made welcome, had no need to ask questions. John Soam was telling the story of the night with countless repetitions. His wife cross-examined him in every direction which her womanly ingenuity could suggest.

Thus Garde discovered that it was undeniably true that Adam had been in town several days before; that he had been engaged in a terrible fight, in which he had inflicted grave injuries on Randolph and one of his “peaceable officers”; that he had then escaped back to the woods, from which, it was alleged, he had emerged solely for this fighting, and that, when captured, he had a half-Indian child in his possession.

John Soam had seen the body of the child himself. He had heard the examination, in his capacity of clerk to the court and magistrates. Rust was lame, he said, and he was a sullen man, who had returned no answers but such as cut wittily. He had not denied that the child was his own. He had absolutely refused to say whose it was and how he came to have it. He had come to the farmer’s house, at the edge of the woods, for purposes of robbery. There was every reason to believe that he had consorted with the Indians, and that the child was his. It was a pretty child, but many thought it looked as if it had been shockingly abused. There could be no doubt that, when he had found himself being taken, he had profited by the confusion to slay the little half-Indian boy.

Garde’s horror grew as she listened. She remembered terrible things that Adam had told her when he believed her a youth. He had excused Randolph’s conduct with Hester Hodder, hinting broadly that, in a case he had in mind, he thought another young woman—in this instance Garde herself—ought to forgive such a treachery to honor. He had even mentioned that she, when dressed as a boy and browned, reminded him of a young Indian woman whom he had known and liked. He had lived with the Indians as a boy; he had gone back to them as a man.

All those other dreadful half-confessions, in this new light, looked no longer innocent—the French damsel, the Countess, and the others. He had deceived her about going to New York to see the beef-eaters, she told herself, in agony. He had gone to the forest instead. And God only knew what things he had done in those silent woods! Had he abandoned the mother of his child, as Randolph had done——or had he committed something worse? for Hester, in the similar instance, had died so strangely.

At least it was plain that before Adam could marry again he would be obliged to abandon that Indian woman. And what if she were Indian? Was she less a woman? Would she suffer less agony? Garde thought of Hester, and of how the wild young thing had begged her not to take away the man who had so cruelly wronged her. The picture was almost more than she could bear. The whole affair fell upon her heart with a weight that crushed her happiness into a shapeless, dying thing. In whatsoever direction she turned, Adam’s own actions and words confronted her with the blank wall of hideous truth.