Children of Salem

Chapter Fifteen

Jeremiah and Serena located an old cabin on the Nurse property, one long out of use except as emergency shelter and storage. There was also a shelter beside the cabin large enough for the horses. In the storm, they left their mounts tethered and saddled, rushing indoors hand-in-hand. They’d become absolutely soaked and chilled.

“So early for such rains,” she complained, her arms flailing with the wet.

“Haven’t been this wet since . . .” he began.

“Since when?”

“Since that day you pushed me into the Frost Fish.”

“You had it coming, remember? The game was called Even-Stephens!”

“What? For kissing you?”

“You needed a good cooling down that day, Jeremy Wakely.”

“What’re we to do? Stand here and shiver?”

“Build a fire. Surely, in all your worldly travels, by now you’ve learned how?”

“Watch me.” Jeremy went to work at the cobwebbed hearth, starting with kindling and some gunpowder from a pouch he carried. Soon a fire was building, and next roaring, sending most of its heat straight up and out the chimney. Still, the fire glowed bright and cast an orange glow about the old cabin, filling it with a warm feeling but when he looked around, no Serena.

Jeremy could not find her, yet they were in a single-room cabin. She’d disappeared in the manner of a phantom, and for a half moment, he gasped at the trick of light as she stepped from behind a stairwell at the center of the cabin leading to an attic room overhead. “Bit warmer upstairs,” she said. “She’d wrapped a sheet around her like a shroud, tied tightly against her body.

Jeremy had already peeled away his shirt and he stood before the fire in silhouette, his broad shoulders and muscles outlined against the fire behind him. “You should bring down your clothes to dry ar the fire,” he suggested.

“And you,” she countered, tossing him a blanket to use.

“Ah, yes, and I should undress?”

“Yes, by all means. Get those wet clothes off and wrap yourself in the blanket.”

She retreated back up the stairs, her footstep so light as to be near undetectable. Jeremy wondered what was so interesting about upstairs, but he worried now with getting the rest of his drenched clothes off. The blanket tied about him, he grabbed an old chair to drape his shirt, pants, socks, and unmentionables before the fire. “You really should bring down your clothes to dry,” he called up the stairwell now.

“There’s a fine view of the storm from up here,” she replied. “Great bay window to look out.”

It was a clear invitation to join her. Jeremiah cautiously took the stairwell, barefoot, wrapped in the woolen blanket. The warmth had returned to his body, and for that he felt grateful.

When his head came above the floor on the second landing, he found Serena propped on her side, head in hand, supine on an old oaken bed, staring out the window she had spoken of as a crooked sword of lighting streaked the night sky overhead to stab at the earth.

“Come watch the fireworks!” she called out to him on seeing he’d entered the room.

“What use has a man of fireworks in the distance, when all the beauty of the world lies here before me?”

This took her attention from the storm, and she gazed into his longing eyes. “So you are a flatterer. I wonder how many others have you said such words to.”

“I have remained ever faithful to you, Serena. I swear it.”

She sat up, the sheet covering her now sliding sensuously down from her shoulders, exposing her soft breasts and inviting nipples and aureoles. “Are you sure?” she asked.

“S-Sure?” Inwardly, he was shouting the word sure. “Absolutely.”

“No, I don’t mean like that.”

He unconsciously reached out and cupped her breasts in his hands as if mesmerized. “What do you mean?” he absently asked, fondling her, lowering his head into her and passionately kissing her.

“Are you sure, Jeremiah Wakely,” she said while gasping at his touch, “that I’m not just some-some passing fancy for a man passing through on-on his way to elsewhere?”

“I assure you, my love is real.” He kissed her breasts now, one after the other.

His hot breath on her nipples sent her arching into his tongue, and with her head thrown back, her neck now taking the brunt of his kisses, she gasped out more words: “Then I’m not some-some diversion for a rolling s-stone?”

“Never.”

“A trifling you’ve merely . . . stumbled ’pon? Jeremiah Wakely?”

“No, never.” He continued smothering her in kisses.

“Never you say, yet-yet you left me once before.”

“I was a fool.”

“And now?”

“A wiser man.”

She firmly held him at bay now with a stiff arm. “Do you count me wise as well?”

“I do, and Serena, the time away from you has proved me a fool, and tasting you has made me a genius.”

“A genius, eh?”

“It’s proved that I love you.”

Tears formed in her eyes on hearing these words. “Honestly?”

“Honestly, and in honest love there is respect.”

She smiled wide at this. “Respect is it? Is that what you call—”

He cut off her anger. “I love you.”

“I will make love to you, Jeremy, here, now.”

“What?” his confusion appeared complete.

“But I am unsure if either of us know one another well enough anymore to know if we’re still in love.”

“I think I follow that, yet my heart says it is so, that I love you and always have—since childhood!”

“We’re not children any longer, Jere.”

“My feelings haven’t changed. Have yours?”

“What consequences may come of making love cannot be so complicated as being in love.”

“I accept the consequences.” He returned to kissing her on the mouth.

She struggled to find the strength to push him away again. When she did, she said, “Especially now, Jere, you must promise that after all this time—”

“You’re not fearful of breaking with the commandments, so much as afraid of me?”

“I am not afraid of either consequence,” she lied. “But I want this to mark the last time you will leave me.”

“I see. I—”

“I’ve waited ten years to feel your body close to mine, and I’m not waiting ten more—not even for the Ten Commandments—to find out if you are what I want from this life.”

“I don’t know what to say,” he confessed.

“Say nothing more.”

“But—”

“Shut up and come into me.”

Awkwardly, nervously now, his mind swirling with what price she’d placed on their lovemaking, he lowered himself over Serena, taking her in his arms. The warmth and energy coursing through their entwined bodies seemed as blazing and as chaotic as the lightening in the sky outside—or the hearth near the bed as a second hearth cut of the same chimney stones squatted at one end of the attic, and from it additional heat poured forth.

The lovers were soon exchanging a giddiness and joy along with their embrace and passions. Jeremy’s unbridled passion unleashed, Serena felt a wave of ecstasy and a sense of freedom and weightlessness that defied being beneath the only man she had ever loved. All inhibitions had fallen away as easily as her sheet and his blanket.

And it felt right; it felt proper. It felt like the natural bonding that she imagined her parents had felt as young people.

Until a horrendous cackle like that of a banshee trapped in the chimney rose and fell, spiraled and repeated as if some unholy of unholies had entered the chamber. The sound proved terrifying, and it interrupted the lovers.

“What in the name of Hades?” she cried out, for a moment believing that her earlier defiance against the Commandments had come back to roost. She and Jeremy had both started with the screeching traveling up the chimney.

“I know that voice,” he calmly said, “and it’s not God, but Goode.”

“The old bat! Was she asleep in the chimney when you kindled the fire?”

“I think she’s below—”

“Below?” Serena covered herself.

“At the hearth, warming herself.” He pointed to the fireplace across the room, and they both heard the mutterings of the old woman rising with the heat. Something of a cooing chant, the words unintelligible but frightful at once.

“Well chase her out!” pleaded Serena.

“On a night like this?”

“She’s trespassing. Likely on some vile errand!”

“And she’s a disgusting hag, I know.”

“And a witch who may well put a hex on us both or steal our horses if we’re not careful, and oh to have her interrupt our pleasure this way after ten years’ wait?”

“I’ll go down . . . send her packing.”

Jeremy re-wrapped himself and started down the stairs when he heard the door slamming repeatedly, as if in time with the thunder claps. When he wheeled to see the source of the noise, there stood Goode, eyes ablaze with anger and hatred, directed at some object she repeatedly slammed the door closed on. In a moment, Jeremy focused on the blond-headed, pudgy doll, a likeness of nine-year-old Betty Parris.

“Stop with your curses and your witchery against the child!” he shouted at the hag. “Stop it or a curse will befall you the likes of which—”

But she was gone, waddling off into the storm, cackling, screeching, slamming Betty’s doll-image against tree trunks as she went, muttering what sounded like ugly words as she faded away. Jeremy had only gotten a quick glimpse of the doll but he couldn’t miss the needles hanging from it, nor the cuts and scrapes to the face and arms, along with scorched areas.

Jeremy slammed the door and bolted it, turned and took a single step up the stairs, wanting to rush back to Serena’s arms, but she had come down and stood on the step above him, blanket in one hand, the sheet wrapped about her. “Is she gone?”

“Aye, the foul thing is gone, yes.”

“Thank God. That woman unnerves me—has all my life.”

“She has that affect, yes.”

“Are you sure she’s not disturbed the horses?”

“She doesn’t get on with Dancer, I can tell you. Not to worry, she’s gone now. Addled and gone.” He withheld telling her about the old woman’s torturing a likeness of Betty Parris. Instead, he leaned in to her kiss, after which he asked, “Back to bed?”

“No.”

“Moment lost? That damned hag.”

“No, not lost.” She rushed past him, laughing and snatching the blanket from him as she went. While he stood nude and confused, she sent the blanket billowing up and out. Jeremy watched it cascade before the hearth. She’d created a pallet before the flames. “Come back to me here, Jere.” She peeled away the sheet again, revealing firm round breasts and a curvaceous body. She laid down, her arms outstretched to him, inviting him like some Siren of yore, he helplessly thought. But his love was no cruel Siren. He instinctively knew this was right, despite all custom, despite all commandments. This was love.

Jeremy’s hands tightened about hers as he again lowered himself over Serena. In the firelight, which bathed them, she glowed with an aura as if surrounded by some ethereal corona. Serena’s energies were personified in the flames, a kind of metaphor for her desires, his own reflected as well. The red and blue flames entwined one another from the source, comingling with one another in their rise and fall and spiral and eddy as did the limbs of the lovers.

Serena’s body melded with Jeremy’s, and together they felt as if levitating about one another, as if their joy in touch of one another would leave them on the ceiling. “I am enchanted,” he whispered in her ear and kissed her neck, finding her breasts, and moving down along the ravine of her torso, gasping and kissing her everywhere he could in a frenzy now.

“More, more,” she moaned in ecstasy.

Firm now, he forcibly entered her with reckless abandon, rushing his lovemaking, as if fearful she might disappear beneath him, as if this were all just a dream so that if he did not hurry, it would dispel in an instant.

“Slowly, Jeremy. I am not going anywhere,” she promised as if reading his mind.

He slowed his lovemaking, panting as she held him, her nails clawing.

“Yes, yes, Jere, like that, yes.”

“I love you,” he chanted.

“Don’t say it, Jere, unless it be true.”

“It is . . . it is.”

“And in time,” she answered, “I may perhaps . . . again learn to love you.”

# # # # #

As they rode back to Serena’s home, Serena began making plans for their future together. “You know why I took you to my brother Francis Junior’s old place?” she asked at one point, talking nonstop and skipping from subject to subject. “Do you?”

“To get in out of the storm, of course.”

“Of course,” she repeated in a mocking tone. “How thick is your skull?”

“What?”

“Typical man.”

“What?” He shrugged beside her where they rode atop horses that bumped one another as they sauntered along.

“We didn’t avoid a storm, silly! More like we leapt into one.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m not following you, Serena.”

“Jesus take you! Look here, the old place is lovely but abandoned, sad and-and useless it is, you see, but—”

“I dunno? We made good use of it.” His smile spread wide.

“I mean with Francis gone, it’s been no good to anyone.” She’d earlier explained that the eldest son had gone off to farm in Connecticut. “Sitting up there on that knoll all to its lonesome.”

“The house? You mean the house?”

“Yes, the house! Aren’t you paying attention?”

“It did feel an unhappy house until we entered.”

“Exactly what I am driving at, Jeremy.”

He wondered exactly what she meant.

Serena went on as they cantered. “It ought be a useful place, useful to the Nurse compound, I mean, and what with you back and our feelings for one another unchanged, and-and—”

“Serena, are you proposing we . . . that you and I make a home of the house?”

“Think of the memories we’ll always have there, and besides, it needs a family.”

“Whoa . . . just slow down a moment.”

“Slow down what?”

He grabbed her reins and halted both horses. “Serena, I do love you, but I’m not likely to become a farmer or a father anytime soon.”

“I didn’t propose you become a farmer or a father—anytime soon!”

“If I were to accept the gift of a house on the Nurse property, then I’d be expected to work the land just as the Tarbells and the Cloyse men, and—”

“Well now, is that such a bad thing? I mean, you’re not going into the ministry, and you’re done chasing shadows down in the village, I should hope.”

“Chasing shadows?”

“Shadowing Mr. Parris then.”

“Serena, I have no intention of settling here in Salem, however—”

“However much I want it?” she asked, glaring at him. “As for me, I haven’t any intention of leaving home with the likes of you.”

“And why not come away from this cursed place with me?”

“It’s home, Jeremy. Has been all my life, and there’s mother and father to think of, and such a thing as family. But I suppose your never having had any real family, that family doesn’t mean anything to Jeremiah Wakely, now does it?”

“That’s hardly fair!”

“Your father brought it on himself, Jeremy; his own grief brought him down, not the village.”

Jeremy wasn’t prepared to hear this coming from her. “You really believe that?”

“I do.”

“And my mother?”

“Two things marked her more than her French blood, Jeremy.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“Illness marked her and her being an unrepentant Catholic; she would not disavow her Papist past. That’s what my mother told me.”

“What’re you saying? That my father put himself in the grave and pulled over the lid because he loved her?”

“Food was brought to the jail. Mr. Ingersoll, my mother, Reverend Deodat Lawson, and others tried to help him, but your father starved himself to death.”

“In debtors prison, left with a broken heart, and me a boy unable to affect a thing.”

“The food Mother took to him, Jeremy, it rotted beside him.”

“His fast was a protest, Serena!”

“To protest his wife’s treatment, I know.”

“He protested their withholding halowed ground for her burial.”

“That wasn’t your father’s entire protest.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“It was all to denounce Governor Andros, at a time when no one was speaking out against that tyrant.”

“Governor Andros?”

“Yes, for his being a liar and a thief, stealing from the church coiffures.”

“To lay down and die for a belief and for love at once . . . A protest beyond what the villagers did to him? I never knew.”

“Now you know, so perhaps the entire village isn’t to be painted with black tar.”

She reached across the divide between them and took his hand in hers.

Jeremy dropped her reins, returning control of her animal. “Still, Serena, though I love you, the idea of settling down on this land and becoming another farmer under your father’s hand, and in this village, it just isn’t appealing. I have larger plans.”

“I want to hear these larger plans then.”

Jeremy laid out his every movement from the night he met with Cotton Mather and Reverend Higginson until now, but this history only made Serena more adamant in her desire to see him out of such intrigue.

“Come away from that bed beneath Parris’ stairwell and stay at the house with us. Get to know father and mother again.”

“I’d like nothing better, dear one, but I have to finish what I’ve begun. It’s part of my larger plans—and how did you know I was sleeping beneath Parris’ stairs?”

“There is little goes on in the village that isn’t known by all, Jeremy.”

“Except that I am no minister.”

“Come away now, Jeremy, please before you are unmasked and thrown in the stocks as an imposter.”

“Parris hasn’t the power to affect an arrest on such charges! I have Mather’s backing in this affair.”

“Don’t underestimate what that man is capable of,” she warned.

“I’ve no doubt he is of a vile spirit, but, Serena, I have to finish what I’ve begun.”

She gave him a stern look of disapproval.

“I’ve told you how serious my work is.”

“Is it your plan to be Mather’s lackey for the rest of your life?”

“That’s not fair, Serena. When this is over, I’m promised a judgeship in the colonial province of my choosing, perhaps even Boston.”

“The scars of your past are still dictating your life, Jere.”

“That’s not—”

She snatched at her reins, and her horse reared on its hindquarters in response to her expert signals, and she shouted, “Find me then when you’re finished playing games, Jeremy! When you are once again your own man!”

“A man fulfills the contract he signs!” he shouted after her.

But Serena had galloped off toward home, leaving Jeremy alone with the final weak, winking stars before twilight. He feared losing Serena, feared their love could disappear like the night sky if it were not nurtured with care. He’d felt that way even as they were locked in embrace.

God, he thought, Mather must make good on his promises when all is said and done. He must. He must, and I will.

Then a looming fear filled Jeremiah. Suppose he lost his quiet war against Parris? Suppose he lost everything. Mather’s trust, his appointment, and most of all his fair-haired Serena? Losing her a second time, he’d never again have this gift in hand, and he knew it.

Chapter Sixteen