Please enjoy an exclusive excerpt from Deliverance from Evil.
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From Chapter 11: Salem Village, 1692
Morning daylight and damp spring air came through the windowas the fire
blazed brightly. Mistress Putnam held her sewing and pretty, smiling Mercy
Lewis worked at her spinning wheel. Only Ann was unoccupied. Her father had
told her he had asked the woman to come between ten o’clock and noon. He had
also said something else, concerning Mercy, after which Ann had taken the girl
outside to the copse. When they came back Mercy’s smile was wider than usual.
White-haired Uncle John Putnam was already here, sitting by the fire with
an air of complacency, his hands on his knees. Ann waited for the knock. But
there was no knock. Martha Cory opened the door and walked in, her posture
defiant, face angry. Thomas Putnam, who had been waiting outside, followed her
in.
Martha had known Ann all her life though, since she was still only a
child, had scarcely ever talked to her.
“I have been asked to come and see you.”
Ann started screaming. Her hands flew to her throat and the scream turned
to choking; her eyes rolled up in her head; her feet twisted so strangely she
staggered, tripped, and would have fallen but that Mercy Lewis caught her. Her
hands twisted as though palsied and her hips and knees turned in different
directions. She called, “Stop it! Martha! Stop it!” By this time her mother too
was screaming. Ann hissed, “There’s a yellow bird sucking there, between your
fingers!”
Martha Cory held up
her hand and, with a mocking expression, rubbed where she was pointing to show
this could not be so but Ann ignored her and ran across the room, colliding
with a stool, shouting, “I see a spit on the fire with a man on it! Goody Cory,
you’re turning the spit!”
Martha laughed, turned, and marched toward the door.
“The girl’s mad. Get her a physician.” Mercy Lewis snatched up a stick
and struck at some invisible object on the hearth.
“Martha hit her with a rod!” Ann wailed.
The corporeal Martha turned back to face her. “Just you wait!”
“Get that evil witch out of here!” said John Putnam, standing up.
Thomas pushed Martha toward the door and Mercy shouted, “I won’t! I
won’t!” at the invisible object.
“What does she want of you?” John Putnam asked.
Mercy’s hands went to her neck and she ran toward the fire.Thomas and
John seized her and sat her down on a chair whileMartha stood in the doorway.
Martha left. The chair moved toward the fire as though pulled by invisible
hands, as everyone said afterward. No one mentioned that Ann happened to be
directly behind it. Mistress Putnam ran out to fetch neighbors. The news of
what was happening spread through the village in no time.
Venerable, respected John Putnam corroborated everything Thomas and his
wife and daughter said. That afternoon he and Nathaniel Ingersoll rode to Salem
to make a formal complaint against Martha Cory to the magistrates.
* * *
Praise for Frances Hill and Deliverance from Evil
"Vivid
description gives the feeling that the Salem witch hunt
happened
five minutes ago."—Los Angeles Times
"Re-imagines
the superstition and hysteria surrounding the 17th-century Salem witch trials
in novelistic form."—USA Today
"Dramatic…[Hill]
fleshes out the gaunt records."—John Updike, The New Yorker
“When
history makes you week, it is the novelist’s job to give meanting to the
tears. Frances Hill has done this. Be as
brave as she had been and read this book.”—Sarah Dunant, author of Sacred Hearts
"An
entertaining and suspenseful drama [that is] also a cautionary tale for our
times."—Boston Globe
