She had good reason to regret her outburst later. From the private room she went before the magistrates. She was ordered not to look away, and so she could not see the group of girls and young women who screamed and cried as if they were poked by knives—but she heard them. Her arms were held now by the constables, and she was not allowed to shake them off. All she could do was stare straight ahead.
“Who afflicts you?” the magistrate demanded of the girls.
“Goody Powell! Oh, she strangles me! Where she touched me in the flesh, she strangles me now! Help me, dear Lord, I cannot breathe!”
“Oh, I see her! There she sits upon the structure beam; it is an incubus of Satan that she suckles, a creature like a wolf!”
A cacophony of voices rose, high and shrill and so profuse that order was lost for several minutes.
“Why do you afflict these girls?” the magistrate demanded of her.
“I do not!”
“Then who does?”
“Their own sickness!”
“You merciless witch! Appease their pains!”
She was dragged to the girls and forced to touch them. They quieted, and the matrons were brought forward. The kindly women stated that she was perfect in flesh and form, except for a mark upon the shoulder. Before the testimony was done, one of the girls started shouting out an oracle again, stating that the devil, too, had found her perfect, and cherished her for his sabbaths.
“Oh, you will rot in hell for a liar!” Brianna could not help but scream out.
One of the constables wrenched her arm. She was not behaving very well for a Puritan goodwife standing before the duly chosen law.
A farmer stepped forward then; a man she was certain she had never seen before. But apparently she had seen him, somewhere, because he knew of her.
“She were a witch in the old country, sirs. My brother did hear that she was tried and condemned in England.”
“Goody Powell—is this true?”
Chills eased their way through her, slowly, seeming to numb her against thought and speech. She could not lie. If she were caught in a lie, nothing else she said would have any bearing.
“I was condemned—but by a puppet court, and by a man later recognized as mad.”
The screams started up, and the girls were hushed. Someone came up to say that she had looked at his cows—and that the animals had consequently drowned themselves. She realized then that the man was a villager who had frequently cut his cows through their vegetable garden—and whom she had ordered not do so again.
“She cursed my cows, she did!”
“What do you say, Goody Powell?”
“That if I were a witch, I would take myself from this room!”
“Not even the devil has power so great,” she was told solemnly.
This evidence she could fully scorn, but then an elderly woman came to the front and spoke with a soft fervor. “She did ruin her husband, she did. She forced him to wed her when they were at sea—I knew a woman on the same voyage, you see. Goody Ratcliff said that her child was born too early, and that the devil had charged her to find a human father, within God’s chosen fold. Goody Ratcliff, too, had a dream in which she saw this woman come to Husbandman Powell at night, and force him to set his hand to the devil’s book. How else would Robert Powell have come before us if he had not been tempted by the likes of her?”
Brianna felt ill—maybe she was the cause of all of Robert’s troubles.
“Goody Powell!” The magistrate addressed her sternly. “Did you bring the devil’s book to your good husband and set him into a life of wizardry?”
“He is no wizard!” she snapped back.
And then, curiously, the room went silent. She was not allowed to turn, so she couldn’t see.
But she knew that the firm strides approaching the magistrates’ bench belonged to Sloan. She could feel his presence, and his air of power seemed to bring lightning to the room.
“On what evidence do you try this woman?” he demanded.
