The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs, page 1
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About the Author
Copyright Page
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For Louis
Acknowledgments
Deep and heartfelt thanks to my fabulous editor, Barbara Jones, and her right hand, Ruby Rose Lee, for doing yeoman’s duty shepherding this story into the book that it has become, to Hannah Campbell for the great Thanskgiving ellipsis slaughter of 2018, and to everyone else at Henry Holt for giving this novel such a welcome and happy home. My gratitude also to my agent, Suzanne Gluck, and her own right hand, Andrea Blatt, for career and life guidance on matters both mighty and picayune.
I began percolating this story while a visiting scholar at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, where I enjoyed work space, library services, good fellowship, and lively meals through the generosity of the center’s director, Margaret Levi. I conducted the research and writing of this book while in residence at the Wertheim Study at the New York Public Library, a resource of research, space, and time so abundant and luxurious that I dream of never leaving. And I completed revisions and copyedits at my favorite café in Salem, Massachusetts: Front Street Café. Thanks to Chris and all the staff for feeding me, caffeinating me, and giving me the wifi password. Everyone should go eat there immediately. Just don’t take my table.
My love and thanks to the CASBS class of 2015–2016, the vinho verde sharers of Tuesday Dinner, the players of the Springfield Street Coffee Table, the castaways of End Times Island, the cast of the Real Housewives of Ithaca, Gen Xer trivia night at the Lobster Shanty, and the crew of the Menage, all of whom keep me sane and writing in their own special ways.
Novelists’ families must contend with sharing their home with someone who only has one foot (and sometimes no feet) rooted in reality, and for their patience and forbearance I thank my parents, George and Katherine S. Howe, my brother-in-law, Eli “the Ward” Hyman, my sister-in-law, Rachel Hyman, and Milo, who personally ensures that I leave the house at least once a day. Most of all, thanks to my husband, Louis Hyman, who fires my imagination more than anyone else, who makes sure I never lose the plot, and who keeps me from going so deep into the zone that I can’t find my way back.
Finally, I owe this book most of all to the readers of The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane who told me—in bookstores, over email, on Twitter, and on the occasional airplane—that they wanted to read it. I never dared to believe I might have a career writing novels, but as it happens, just because you don’t believe in something doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Thank you.
PART I
AETITE
And Ruth said, Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.
Ruth 1:16
King James Bible
The Devil has made us like a Troubled Sea; and the Mire and Mud, begins now also to heave up apace.
Cotton Mather,
The Wonders of the Invisible World, 1693
Prologue
Easthorpe
Essex, England
Candlemas, 1661
The first clod hit Livvy Hasseltine’s face—a starburst of cold mud exploding hard on her jaw. Livvy spat dirt, dropped her basket, and turned to run. The taste of dirt and sheep soil in her mouth.
“Get out of here!” one of the boys screamed. The others bayed like hounds. Another clod sailed by her ear. Livvy hunched her shoulders, trying to make herself small. Cloak flapping behind her like sparrow wings.
Split-wood fences and stacked stone paddocks walled both sides of the road. Cold late winter mist lay so thick that Livvy couldn’t see much farther into the fields behind the fences than a rod or two, but she could hear the soft lowing of shaggy-backed cows, their jaws working the cud as she fled by. One of the fields had the bull in it. She didn’t know which one.
Livvy grasped up her skirts around her knees, her boot heels landing hard in puddles touched with ice. Veering left, she slithered through a gap in the fence, hoping she had guessed right, dashing past a knot of sheep settled together in a wooly row against the chill, soft ears flapping. She slid down a rolling hillock of damp turf and her coif flew off, a pale dove lifted away by fingers of fog. Brown fringe of hair falling into her eyes. She glanced behind her, through the cloud rolling heavy between the cottages of Easthorpe, this mean little village where they never used to live. How many boys? Three, their shadows moving after her down the lane. She could hear their breath. Their syncopated feet.
“You! Satan spawn! Longtooth demon beast! Best you run!”
“Which way she go?”
“This way!”
“I got her.”
Another clod came sailing through the fog and fell with a splat six feet behind her. Livvy picked up speed. Woolen stockings bagging at her knees.
Livvy’s breath came high and tight in her chest, her cheeks flushing scarlet. She wasn’t a runner. She didn’t like to go outside the cottage, most days. She preferred it near the hearth, teasing the flames with a poker, helping their landlady by sweeping up ashes or shelling peas. It was a mistake, to go out. To be seen. Livvy was a watery girl, prone to fevers. Her skin clammy and hot. Livvy craved quiet, and warm things, and she loved her straw pallet in the attic and holding the turnspit dog to her chest, feeling him warm asleep and his heart beating under her hand. Livvy wished she’d stayed in their rented corner of the cottage loft. Invisible. Unknown.
The mud clinging to her eyelashes made her eye start to water. Sure, the water was from mud. Not from crying.
“We’re coming for you, little girl!” Laughter, shouts. Sheep bleating in alarm.
Sweat soaked through her shift and darkened the wool of her dress, painting circles under her arms and a vee down her back. Sweat plastered her ragged fringe to her forehead. Through the mist Livvy could only see rolling green-brown turf dotted with sheep, some goats, round-bellied and rubbing their horns together.
The mists parted before her as she ran, and knitted behind her, as though she were running in a dream, her feet not touching the ground, wet clods falling farther behind. Mist thickening. Gasping, Livvy spied half a dozen sheep trotting apart like the ripples in a pond full of stones. The boys were still coming.
Ahead, a shape—another cottage maybe, behind a line of trees. Livvy dug into the mist with her elbows, breath exploding out of her chest, pushing herself faster. The trees were thick and old, she didn’t know what kind, her mother would scold her for not knowing. No, she knew this one—an ash. Good. Livvy skidded behind the ash’s trunk, old with gnarled elbows, some branches hanging low. She flattened herself against the trunk. Hidden. Chest heaving. Hearing herself breathing, trying to force herself quiet, she swallowed her breath away, nostrils flaring.
“Where’d she get off to?”
“Footprint here.”
How close? Livvy’s pulse throbbed at her throat. The ash bark wet and crumbling under her fingers.
“She be running thataway.”
Murmuring behind hands, shuffling feet. They talked about her with oaths in their mouths.
Sounds of sleeves wiping noses and grumbling and the three boys—she didn’t know their names—jogged down the slope, leaping first one, then the next and the next, over the shallow, rocky creek that wound its way across the bottom of the field. Livvy held still.
The three voices called out for her, after her, they thought, stopping to pick up clods of mud and rock and hurl them into the mist where they thought she had fled. They drew away, down past the creek.
Livvy caught her skirts in her hands and dashed on the balls of her feet to the looming shape before her, stone walls, leaded windows, peaked slate roof. When she drew into its shadow she saw that it wasn’t a cottager’s house after all, but the church. A sedate little steeple at one end. Gothic points over narrow, dark windows.
St. Mary the Virgin.
Her mother warned her away from popishness.
“Naw, she didn’t go this way,” a distant male voice called.
“Let’s go back,” another suggested.
Livvy crept to the church door. Heavy, solid, oak, with iron latch and hinges. Livvy pushed on it with her shoulder and it creaked open, and she slipped inside and the door whumped closed behind and she was safe.
Dark. Damp. Cool. Almost cold. Livvy folded her arms across her narrow chest and peered into the dimness within. Rows of pews. A few candles on an iron stand in the chancel, flickering under an effigy of the Virgin with a naked baby standing on her lap. The cloying smell of melted wax and pine garlands left hanging since Christmas. The cold saints’ eyes stared down at her. Following as she moved.
Idolatry. It was a
Livvy edged around the stone walls, hunting for a place to conceal herself. Splinters of color moved over her face, cast from feeble sun through the stained-glass windows. Christ at the Resurrection.
She’d have to go back for the basket—they only had two. And the other had a ragged hole in the bottom, chewed by mice. She’d been carrying scrap greens, dandelions gleaned from the edge of a field. They’d be scattered and eaten by a goat by now. Livvy hated Easthorpe.
The alcove leading to the south door beckoned her, pointed roof and cool stone, shaded in darkness. Livvy crept around the corner, pressed her back to the stone wall, and slid to the floor. Outside, the boys called one to another. Close by. What would happen if they caught her? Perhaps they didn’t know themselves.
Brick quoins framed the pointed door. The church was sturdy. Ancient. She didn’t have a guess how old. She huddled on a rectangular stone slab fixed in the floor, the kind that hides a narrow stairwell leading down to tunnels stacked three deep with long-moldering corpses. The church walls draped with the clinging skeins of marriages and sacraments and deaths, centuries of private stories unspooling under the watchful eyes of the saints.
The voices outside faded. Livvy hugged her knees, staring into the late-afternoon darkness of the alcove. She watched the door. It was a boon being hidden away. Hiding in these few moments of quiet. In the cottage there was no hiding. She slept at her parents’ feet, with their landlady—a distant cousin of her mother’s—and her husband and her bevy of children snoring in the hall below. Eleven of them altogether. The attic air got heavy and wet from so much breathing.
Livvy’s eye tripped over a carved human shape at the topmost point in the quoin over the south-facing door. Something out of sorts about that shape. Odd, and like it was watching her. Only not like the dead-eyed Virgin.
Livvy got to her feet, touching her fingertips to the wall, and pushed her fringe away from her eyes, straining for a better look.
The keystone over the doorway was a different color and texture from the other stones. The church was multicolored rock cobbles, a rainbow of grays, and smooth stone—granite?—framing the doorways and the stained-glass windows. The keystone was different. Wrong. Sticking out of the shadows like a stubbed toe.
It was black chalkstone. Oblong, oddly shaped. Livvy crept nearer.
The carved shapes on the keystone were rough, untutored, unchurchlike. The kind of work a family would do for a headstone when they couldn’t afford to pay someone. Lines and curves, nonsense-shaped. Livvy stared harder, getting used to the darkness, and presently the scorings in the chalkstone resolved into the figure of a woman.
The woman was naked, save for a coif that covered her hair and ears. A tiny smile on her face, and round, staring eyes. Eyebrows drawn up, as though asking a question. Her ribs showed, breasts hanging, and she was squatting, the attitude of her hands insisting that the beholder stare upon her most secret parts. Her nakedness was bawdy. Unashamed. Carved alongside her, lightly, Livvy could just make out letters: E L U I.
Livvy smiled. She imagined that the chalk effigy smiled back.
“You there!” The voice shattered the peace of the alcove, and Livvy started.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
Livvy turned to find the young and disapproving face of the vicar. Black robes and a tight collar. His hair was thinning, and he had no cap on. In his hands hung pine garlands, drying and brown. Taking them down for Candlemas.
“I was just—” The silence in the church rang heavy in her ears.
“Who are you?” The vicar stepped nearer, squinting down at her.
“I’m…” Livvy had a horror of talking to strangers. They’d only been in Easthorpe some weeks. Enough to arouse suspicion, but not enough to have made friends.
“You’re one of Goody Redferne’s boarders.” He kept moving nearer. He had pox scars on his cheeks, making him look raw and burned.
“Aye,” Livvy managed. She took a step backward without meaning to and hit her heel on the wall. Pain flared up the tendons in her foot.
“From Lancashire,” he said, and when he said it his mouth twisted, and something changed in his eyes. “Just arrived.”
Above the southern door, the crouching carved woman seemed to be giving birth to all manners of escape.
“Aye,” Livvy said at length. “Pendle Hill.”
The pine garlands sighed softly to the vicar’s feet.
“And who be your mother, little girl from Pendle Hill?” He stepped nearer, his slipper crushing the desiccated needles. Livvy’s nose twitched at the sharp scent of the pine oil.
“Anna be her Christian name. Anna Hasseltine.”
“No,” the vicar said slowly. “I asked you, who be your mother?”
Confused, Livvy crept with her toes nearer the door.
“She—She’s—” Livvy stammered. “I’m—”
“What do you want here?” He was so close, only an arm’s length away.
“I was only—”
“You were only what?”
Livvy’s eyes traveled up to the squatting black chalk woman. Her hands on her knees. Her smile saying, Yes. Look at me. I know you. I knew you before you knew yourself.
“You be an abomination,” the vicar said, softly and so friendly-like that at first Livvy thought she must have misheard him.
“What?” Livvy said.
“You best be getting on,” the vicar said, dropping his voice to a sinister whisper. “Wee Cromwellian. Little spawn of the Pretender. I’m just back from London, you know.” He stepped near enough that she could feel his wet breath on her cheek.
Livvy’s wrists ached. In the pillory, back in Pendle, she’d been left so long the bones in her wrists grated together like dry pebbles.
“Oh, aye.” The vicar’s poxed eye gleamed. “I saw it all. Cromwell’s body dragged through the streets on a sledge. Hanged for a day, then his head hacked off. Driven on a pike twenty foot high. Mounted above Westminster Hall. Can you conceive it? The Lord Protector himself, slack-jawed, pecked by crows?”
Livvy’s feet inched her along the wall, away from the vicar, nearer the door. Three feet. Then two. Almost near enough to grasp the handle.
“Go on. Get out of here,” the vicar snarled. “There’s no call for the likes of you in God’s house.”
Her hand fell on the door. Pushed it open. The evening mist drifted in, carrying the smells of sheep and darkness.
“This were never God’s house,” Livvy said, too loudly, and stepped into the coming night.
Chapter One
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Early February
2000
“It would appear that we are nearly out of time,” Janine Silva said, eying her vintage Spiro Agnew wristwatch, and Connie Goodwin’s vision blurred with a surreal sense of déjà vu.
For six years, every major event of her graduate student life had taken place in this room. The new student welcome reception was held here—Connie had worn flip-flops, of course, which was appalling, but true. Her reading seminars were taught here. Her oral exams—the longest four hours of her life, so stressful that she had basically blocked them out the moment they were over. That was here too. Her practice job talk, before a panel of fellow doctoral candidates each wanting to ask a question more probing and picayune than the next, also here. And the dreadful, stultifying holiday parties, year after year, which she’d attended mainly so that she and her roommate Liz Dowers—Liz of the half-dimple smile and ability to actually lecture in medieval Latin—could make off with the cheese platter at the end. Years and years she had spent trapped in this room, like Theseus in the Labyrinth, an endless vista of sameness around this one conference table. And then, all at once, never again. Not since her final defense. In, what? 1995. Five years. A long time. And not a long time at all.
The room itself was essentially the same as she remembered. Pitted conference table, with a few fresh pairs of initials here and there, tattooed into the wood with ballpoint pen. The same stained blackboard, now hidden behind a freestanding whiteboard with an announcement for an undergrad study break next week—free pizza!—in blue dry-erase marker. The same white-whiskered portrait of an anonymous old man, gazing boringly out at his own receding importance. The same grimy window, with the same shutters, now pinned open to catch what remained of the thin winter light. Four in the afternoon, and already almost dark. February was the cruelest month in New England.
