When a witch is young: a historical novel

by Philip Verrill Mighels

While Garde, heart-broken, pale and ill, was restoring her uncle’s keys to their accustomed hook, in the morning, Adam and his retinue were taking a much-needed sleep in the woods.

Having recovered his own good sword and his leather jerkin, from the place where he had concealed them, on the evening of his capture, he had led the beef-eaters into a maze of trees where no one in Boston could have found them, and here he was doing his best to prove himself a cheerful and worthy companion, to share their natural distresses.

Refusing at first to eat of the luncheon provided by Garde, the rover finally yielded to the importunities of his companions, and thereby got much-needed refreshment. By noon they were far on their way toward New Amsterdam, their only safe destination. They kept close to the edge of the woods, as they went, remaining thereby in touch with the farms, on which they depended, in their penniless condition, for something to eat.

By sheer perversity, Adam wore away his lameness. He bathed his foot often and he also wrapped it in leaves, the beneficent qualities of which he had learned from the Indians, years before, and this did as much, or more, than his doggedness to make repairs in the injured tendons.

They were many days on this wearisome march which contrasted, for Adam, so harshly with that other stroll, to Boston, from Plymouth. On many occasions they went hungry for a day and a night together. But what with cheer and good water, they lost nothing of their health.

With boots beginning to gape at the toes, and with raiment dusty and faded, they arrived, at last, at the modest house, at the corner of Cedar and William streets, in New Amsterdam, where Captain William Kidd resided with his wife. Here they were made welcome. On behalf of himself and his comrades, Adam presently secured a working passage to Hispaniola, where he meant to rejoin William Phipps, in the search for the sunken treasure. He could think of nothing else to do, and he had no longer the slightest desire to remain on American soil.

Prior to sailing, however, he wrote a long, detailed account of his finding the man and his Indian child, with all the incidents related thereto, which he forwarded straight to Henry Wainsworth. This concluded his duties. He only regretted, he said in his letter to Henry, that he could not apprise him of what disposition had been made of the body of the little man, Henry’s nephew, when the minions of Randolph took it in their charge.

This letter came duly into Henry Wainsworth’s possession. Having been aware, as no other man in Massachusetts was, that his refugee brother was living his isolated life in the woods, Henry was much overcome by this sad intelligence. He made what cautious inquiries he dared, with the purpose of ascertaining what had become of the little body. He then made a pilgrimage into the woods, stood above the grave which Adam had made, and then, taking a few worthless trinkets, as mementoes, from the deserted cabin, he came sadly away.

But not Henry’s sadness, nor yet that of Garde, served to do more than to signalize the sense of affliction which the citizens of the colony felt had come upon them. They had been a joyless people, with their minds and their bodies dressed in the somber hues suggested by a morbid condition of religious meditation, but at least they had enjoyed the freedom for which they had come so far and fought so persistently. With their charter gone, and the swift descent upon them of the many things which they had found intolerable in England, they were a melancholy, hopeless people indeed.

But even as Garde’s sorrow typified that of her fellow-beings, so did the fortitude and uncomplaining courage, with which she endured her burden, typify the stolid suffering of the citizens of Massachusetts, in this hour of their first great “national” woe.