Spellbound Page 2

  Using her shoulder to shift the bonnet back into place, she implored her captors. “Please, good sirs. My husband, Thomas Cooper, knows not of this charge against me. He hath been several days gone, venturing to Beverly to purchase a heifer. ’Tis a false charge of witchery upon me. He shall bear witness to my goodness.”

  “Silence, Goody Cooper,” replied one of the marshals, a young man Sarah recognized as a former hand on her farm. “Your pleas mean little as we are but dutiful servants of the law.”

  The less polite marshal reeking of cider bent toward her ear. “Aye, with a husband ‘several days gone’ you and your sisters in abomination had many a night to gather in the wood to conjure and compact with the devil.”

  “I beg, sir,” Sarah insisted. “I have done nothing of the sort.”

  “Speak not your lies, Goody Cooper,” he replied. “Like the pretenses of all you night-flyers, they will soon be made plain before the wise and venerable tribunal assembled at Salem.”

  They ushered her into the dank cellar that had been fitted with irons to accommodate the growing number of accused. Sarah shuddered at the raw, chill air and fetid stench of prisoners crowded into cells meant to house no more than three or four at a time. She started at the clank of the key ring against the bars as the first marshal unlocked the heavy, foreboding cell door. After a forceful palm pushed her inside, the other marshal completed their appointed task with a slam of the door.

  Sarah shielded her nose against the odor of unclean bodies and sickness with the back of her hand as she moved in the darkness among the dull moans and sobs of a dozen or more women and girls. She came to stop when she kicked a lump on the ground, a lump whose groan was unrecognizable as human. She lifted her shackled hands to the wall torch and bent it toward the ground to see what she’d nearly fallen over.

  “No, please, no.” The beseeching voice emanated from under a protective arm.

  Sarah reached down to touch the dark-skinned woman’s shoulder. “Pray, calm yourself, woman. I mean not to hurt you.”

  The woman lowered her arm. “Praise be to God,” she whispered, never looking up to see who was addressing her.

  The accent, the voice, although thick with sorrow and fatigue, sounded familiar. After the figure lowered her arm, Sarah froze. Once able, she parted her dry lips and blurted, “Ayotunde?”

  The woman opened her eyes and raised her head from the strewn pile of hay on which she curled as tightly as a mouser sleeping before a hearth. “Miss Sarah?” she asked, rubbing her eyes. “My Lord, my Lord. That be you, Miss Sarah?”

  Sarah’s heart fluttered as she stared at the beautiful face she had missed so dearly over the years. Even surrounded by such sadness and inhumanity, she could not deny the pure joy at seeing her beloved childhood and adolescent companion and caretaker again. “Yes, it is I, my friend. I thought my eyes were deceived when I looked upon your face. How do you fare within these vile walls?” She crouched and helped her as she struggled into an upright position.

  “Your visage do fill me with hope,” she said, struggling to smile. “But wherefore you be taken in, Miss Sarah?”

  Sarah sat beside her on the makeshift bed of hay. “The town has lost its sense, Ayotunde. I be named to witchcraft by the Parris children.”

  “Aye. Reverend Parris’s girls do accuse many, but you?”

  “I give their unholy vengeance good reason when I run them off the property as the troublesome imps they are. Then betimes the marshals come to me with a warrant and shackles.”

  “How do they come to charge you, Miss Sarah? You are no base woman in town, no beggar…or slave.”

  Sarah’s heart grew somber at Ayotunde’s awareness of her own lot. “It matters not in these times. And my husband be yet in Beverly on his errand. He will not learn of this till he return to our empty home.”

  “Oh, Miss Sarah,” Ayotunde said. “It grieve my heart to see you so wretched. God’s grace surely will shine on you.”

  Sarah took her hand. “If there be a God, He must surely shine on you, too, Ayotunde. I will implore the magistrates as to your innocence as strenuously as I shall my own.”

  “Aye. Bless you, Miss Sarah.” Ayotunde stared at her with dark, weary eyes, her once beautiful brown skin now ashen, her hands spotted with sores. “’Tis heartening to see you again. It be a fair work of Providence.”

  Sarah forced a smile. “It is a blessed providence indeed to see your face, but the circumstance in which we meet again must needs be the work of some other, darker force running loose among the village.”

  “I am yet warmed by your smile.” Ayotunde managed to lift the corners of her mouth as she leaned her head against the wall, clearly depleted of physical strength.

  “Hath my brother made efforts to free you?”

  Ayotunde laughed herself mirthlessly into a cough. After wiping her mouth, she said, “He make none, Miss Sarah. He be the one to summon the authorities for me.”

  Sarah’s mouth dropped. “I do not understand, Ayotunde. How may he come to that when you be the caretaker of his children?”

  “I be tellin’ Noah and Joseph and Anna stories of my girlhood in Africa, how the children dance to drum songs and sing with merry hearts. Like I done with you as a child.”

  Recalling her own childhood with Ayotunde as her keeper, Sarah’s horror was not lessened by the explanation. She whispered, “Did you make the poppets dance like you done with me when I was a child?”

  Ayotunde swallowed with difficulty. “Aye.”

  Sarah tried to remain calm. “Had you been holding them in your hands as they danced?”

  She lowered her eyes and shook her head.

  “Oh, Ayotunde. You enchanted the poppets to do the magic dance before my brother’s children? Were they aghast? Had they run to their father in terror?”

  “No, no. They didn’t fear the dance, Miss Sarah. Mistress Elizabeth hear the children laugh and see them flit about dancing with the poppets. When she come in, she be struck with terror.”

  Sarah was silent for a brief period. How could Ayotunde be so careless with the secret craft she’d only ever previously shared with her?

  As if reading the full import of Sarah’s expression, Ayotunde added, “I thought my mistress be out in the fields gathering flowers.”

  “My brother’s wife out in a field gathering anything?” Sarah shook her head in despair. “She lay about the house as if Satan himself were waiting in the fields to claim her soul if she venture outside and dirty her hems.”

  “She scream as though Satan be in the children’s room dancing, too. Then she grip the children, held them to her skirt, and demand Master Joseph lash me and turn me over for cursing the children’s poppets.”

  Sarah’s face grew hot with rage. “God forgive me for such thoughts, but I should like to curse my dear father’s soul for willing you to Joseph instead of me while upon his deathbed.”

  “Property of the father be bequeathed only to sons.”

  “Aye, but you are not property to me, Ayotunde.”

  “Bless you, Miss Sarah, but I am yet. Who will put me to auction when I make my confession?”

  Sarah was horrified at the implication. “To what will you confess?”

  “To their cries of witchcraft. I must confess or they be marchin’ me to the gallows. Like they be doin’ to Goody Bishop at daybreak.”

  “Bridget? She be hangin’ the morrow?” Sarah gulped as she imagined the unimaginable fate about to befall her sometime friend. “Ayotunde, you must not confess. It is but a pretense. A plot is afoot in Salem Village, a cloud of evil hath rolled in purporting itself to the fearful multitudes as the cleansing of evil. But it is trickery. Something else be upon us.”

  Ayotunde shifted, seeming to struggle to keep herself upright. “They beat me, Miss Sarah. They beat me and say they hang me for a witch if I deny it more.”

  “Oh, this be a bitter chill that hath blown into Salem Village,” Sarah said, seething. “There have long been factions m
eant to disrupt our harmony. I have known it. I have seen the widow Bishop driven from her husband’s tavern by broken Christians claiming they be in service to God to redeem her soul. She be a good woman. She need no redemption from men of many acreage seeking to claim yet more on the land left her by her late husband.” Her hands shook with indignation, not for herself but for her friends. “You and Bridget and these children clinging to their mothers’ aprons,” she said pointing all around the cell, “be not the evil that we must fear.”

  Ayotunde chuckled softly. “You speak as a proper lawyer in the court.”

  Sarah sighed. “I am naught but a proper wife and servant of God.”

  “You be so much more,” Ayotunde said, a twinkle returning to her pallid eyes.

  Sarah gripped Ayotunde’s hand as she swallowed against her sadness. Then she was taken by a new idea. She bent to the floor and whispered, “Can you not make the jailers dance as you do poppets? Perhaps conjure a spell to send them into a slumber?”

  “I try many time till I have fallen over in a near faint. I fear I know not how to conjure against living things. I never learn of no other powers since they take me from my mother as a child.”

  Despair began creeping into Sarah’s heart. “Have you no powers at all to remedy our dire affliction? What of the yarns you spun for me when I was a girl, stories of spells, incantations, magical herbs?”

  “They be just stories, Miss Sarah,” Ayotunde whispered. “I have no familiarity with the black arts.”

  Sarah glanced from side to side to ascertain no one was overhearing them and moved closer. “But it be possible you do possess other powers.”

  Ayotunde gave a lethargic shrug.

  Sarah crouched down and whispered in her ear. “Ayotunde, I know poppets dance not without the touch of a human hand. But I have witnessed you make them do it. I saw you compel sparrows land on my arm when I’m but a little girl. Birds such as they have a natural fear of man, yet they flitted about me like I am their kindred. You possessed that power. I have forgotten it not.”

  Ayotunde clutched Sarah by the shoulder with a remarkable burst of strength. “I enchant the poppets to dance, but it were not I with the power to make the birds come. It was you.”

  * * *

  When Sarah woke on the cell floor, she shook her head, gathering her wits enough to realize her reunion with her former house servant, whom she had loved so deeply, was no blissful dream framed within a nightmare.

  “Miss Sarah,” Ayotunde said as she gently tapped her face. “Do you hear me?”

  “Yes, yes.” Sarah rose to her knees as she pressed her palms against her burning cheeks. “I fear this ordeal hath weakened me. Strange words now find their way to my ears in my affliction.”

  “’Tis not an affliction. The words I spake you be true, Miss Sarah. I were wont to keep the secret of your charms from your girlish heart so long that when you blossomed into womanhood, I spared you the knowledge for your own good. But the time finally come for you to know.”

  “How knoweth you of these charms I possess?”

  “I watch you grow up, Miss Sarah. I believe you have the power to transcend.”

  “How mean you to transcend?”

  “There be incantations that can move you in body from here to there.”

  Sarah was stunned into silence. She’d always felt herself different from her fellow Puritan sisters in that she had often taken walks along the forest edge to gather herbs for healing and commune with furry and feathered wood dwellers, two practices forbidden by her religion and marked as enticements of the devil. Although she knew she was not nor had ever been in allegiance with the devil, she sensed the necessity to keep her activities hidden from others throughout her life.

  “What you speak of confounds me greatly, Ayotunde,” Sarah said. “In your knowledge, I am capable to move mine own self, soul and body, from within these walls to yonder yard outside?”

  “Aye, Miss Sarah.”

  “Ayotunde, have you not gone daft in your ordeal? I am no witch as the warrant binding me here thus charges.”

  “Aye, you are not a witch as the warrant charges, a dark spirit meant to harm others. Yet you be a witch none the less.”

  Sarah’s mind was tempest-tossed as she struggled to reconcile Ayotunde’s words. Were it possible that she spoke the truth? Were Sarah indeed a witch? If witches existed in the service of good as well as evil, then perhaps it could be true. This, however, was neither the time nor the place to contemplate the moral implications.

  “Ayotunde, if thou speakest true, teach me now how to transcend so that I may free us of our confinement.”

  Her countenance seemed more forlorn in the flickering torchlight. “You cannot free me,” she said, holding back tears. “Only you can transcend.”

  “Then I cannot go,” Sarah replied without faltering. “How might I leave my beloved Ayotunde here to rot in chains as I fly free? I shall stay and leave myself to the fate to which I have been dispatched.”

  “No, Miss Sarah, no. You will die. They be hangin’ witches that don’t confess.”

  “I have hurt no one, Ayotunde. I have done no crime against my neighbors. I will give a false confession of bewitchin’ to no one. Methinks my eternal life be worth more than this earthly one.”

  “Surely mine be, too, Miss Sarah. Please. Please don’t forsake yours for mine. ’Tis but a wretched one I been born into.”

  Sarah’s emotions finally let go in a torrent. She collapsed on the floor into Ayotunde’s arms, her cries joining the chorus of guttural moans filling the darkness. “My heart doth ache for you, Ayotunde. It hath yearned to be joined with yours again since I took Thomas Cooper’s hand many a year ago. I begged Father include you in my dowry when I marry, but he wanted not to part with you.”

  Ayotunde stared longingly into Sarah’s eyes. “You fill my heart with joy, Miss Sarah, since you be a child, then yet more as a young woman. That be why you must take your leave of this jail. I cannot watch you wither here.”

  “I like not this idea of yours, Ayotunde. I must stay with you now. When Thomas return from Beverly, it may be he can save you, too.”

  Ayotunde looked up at her gravely. “The time for saving be long past, Miss Sarah. You must go. Now let me think on the incantation for your transcendence.” She closed her eyes and exhaled deeply.

  “But, Ayotunde…”

  “Hush.” She pressed two fingers against Sarah’s lips. After another breath, she pinched her eyes closed, and raised her hand before Sarah’s face.

  Sarah bit her lip against a sob as she watched Ayotunde mouthing indecipherable words. “I’ll come back for you, Ayotunde. I’ll find a way.”

  Ayotunde opened her eyes. “Aye, Miss Sarah. Find a way back to me.”

  Chapter Three

  Raven checked into her hotel on the outskirts of town and headed into Salem on foot. It wasn’t quite dark yet, and she wanted to get the lay of the land before Morgan divulged the purpose for sending her here. The shop windows were blanketed in images of witches, psychics, tarot cards, and other ghoulish descriptors. People wandered the streets, taking pictures, and pointing to different locations they intended to visit with their companions, completely unaware of the thin veil of the supernatural they were bumping up against.

  Raven had been exposed to this world since she was a child. She knew that things went bump in the night. She understood that the inconsistencies most people shrugged off to coincidence, circumstance, or a weird feeling were the hands of another side trying to latch on to a small piece of the lives they’d had before. Dead or alive were not the only two existences. No, that would be too easy. There were beings and entities that roamed about, each having a purpose that they were convinced was the most crucial in any realm. Some were good, some evil, and some, like Morgan, occupied the space in between. Most people were comfortable living with the concept that things were simply black or white. Raven knew the world was made up of a spectrum of gray, the extent of which would
cause most people to go insane if it were revealed.

  Raven felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up, and a shiver passed through her. She looked around, trying to locate the source of this small disturbance. Unlike other people who chalked this feeling up to a strange occurrence and forgot it instantly, Raven knew it indicated something was nearby. She noticed a bookstore across the street. The lights glowing inside illuminated a young woman moving books from a box to the shelves.

  Raven could tell, even from fifty feet away, this woman was different. The vibe was unlike anything she had felt before. She crossed the street to get a closer look, wanting to make sure nothing was lying in wait, preying on the woman in the store. She didn’t sense anything but couldn’t stop herself from opening the door either. She felt as if she needed to be inside.

  “Hello. Welcome to A Witch in Time,” said the young woman with a warm smile.

  Raven took a step farther inside. “A Witch in Time? That’s clever.” She shoved her hands in her pockets, unsure what to do next. Now that she was inside, she felt no evil presence, only warmth and tenderness.

  The woman smiled, pushing her black-framed glasses up her nose. She tucked her shoulder-length, burnt umber colored hair behind her ear and went back to unpacking boxes. “Thank you for saying that, but I had nothing to do with it. This bookstore has been in my family for generations.”

  Raven walked to one of the shelves and picked up the Complete Book of Witchcraft. “Do you believe in this stuff?”

  The woman came over and touched the cover. “Do you?”

  Raven was ready to tell her that she didn’t, her standard answer whenever anyone spoke on these topics. But the way the woman was looking up at her, seemingly transfixed, made Raven want to tell the truth. “I do.”

  The woman smiled and took the book, placing it back on the shelf. “Were you looking for something specific? I have a feeling you’re already familiar with that one.”

  “I don’t know what I’m looking for.” Raven didn’t understand where this small streak of honesty was emanating from, but she was strangely enjoying it.