March of 1692
Old Witch Gaol
The bolt scraped behind her after they shoved her inside.
Lils stood in the middle of the cell for a moment, not sure what to do with herself. She felt as if she was underwater, muffled, like these things had happened to someone else.
Hanged by the neck until dead.
She sat down in the straw before her legs could decide the matter for her. After a while, the slot at the bottom of the door scraped and a wooden bowl was pushed through. The guard didn’t say anything.
It was the same white gray-ish mash they’d given her every day, oats boiled down to paste in water with no salt, no butter, nothing. A little skin was already forming across the top as it cooled, and it smelled like wet cardboard. On any other day, she’d have choked down around half of it and given up.
Today she picked up the bowl and held it in both hands, and the warmth of it came through the wood. Something about the last dumb animal comfort of a warm thing to hold undid her.
This might be the last dinner I ever eat.
Lils thought of the macaroni that Aunt Ivy often made, the kind with three cheeses and the crispy top. How she would likely never be able to taste that again, that perfectly golden cheesy crunch.
She ate all of the slop, scraping the wood with her fingers.
When the bowl was empty she set it down and laid herself back down in the straw, pulled her cloak up, and promptly passed out.
◆◆◆◆
Lils woke to the dark of evening, and the village outside had collectively pulled its shutters and banked its fires and turned in. She could hear a dog barking in the distance, and the scrape of a cart wheel, no doubt docking for the eve. The ordinary sounds of people who got to be alive, to live their lives without thinking twice about it. As long as they were good, God-fearing Christian folk, of course.
That was when she noticed something under her head.
She lifted up, confused, and felt a pillow. A small one, no bigger than a folded shawl. It was lumpy, the cloth mismatched and roughly stitched along its edges in tight little sutures. Lils lifted it to her nose; Lils smelled faintly of straw and something else underneath, something herbal.
“Thou were dead to the world,” said Bridget from the corner. “I tried to wake thee for the evening bowl and thou’d not stir, so I let thee be.”
Lils turned and saw Bridget sitting, her back to the far wall, knees drawn up under the rough blanket. Lils could just make out her face.
“Did you—” Lils’s voice cracked, dry from sleep and from crying. “Bridget, did you make this?”
“Lord knows I had the time,” Bridget replied. “And a needle I snuck in. There’s chamomile in it, and a bit of lavender from the bundle I had in my pocket when they took me. It’ll not do much, but aye it’s better than stone.” A pause. “I stitched it whilst thou slept and put it under thy head. Thou didn’t so much as twitch.”
Lils looked down at the pillow, at the tiny, mostly even stitches. At the work of it, done in the almost-dark by a woman who had been dragged from her home and falsely accused, who had every reason in the world to curl up around her own fear and give nothing to anyone.
She’d made a pillow for her, so her head wouldn’t lie on stone.
“Bridget,” Lils said, “I’m so grateful. Thank you.”
“Oh, it’s a sad little thing and we both know it. Eat thy bowl, it’s there by the door.” She tilted her head. “And then thou’lt tell me. I’ve been waiting the whole day to hear it, and have nearly gone mad with it. They took thee out before light and brought thee back at noon looking like a ghost, and thou slept the day through. So.” Her voice was carefully level. “How did it go, thy examination?”
Lils reached for the cold slop bowl.
“It wasn’t the examination,” she said. “Not this time. ’Twas the second part of the trial.” She turned the bowl in her hands. “They’d already heard the girls. This time it was just witnesses… and they presented evidence against me.”
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Bridget went still. “Aye, false evidence I’m sure of it. And did something else happen then?”
“Samuel got up,” she said. “He testified on the stand. And they brought out—” A necklace from my best friend who’s been dead a year. A phone that lit up because the battery wasn’t all the way dead. “—things they called proof, but were not what they thought. And nobody asked me to speak, not once during the entire trial today.”
She made herself say the rest, and spit it out quickly.
“Hathorne found me guilty, and I’ve been sentenced to hang.” She swallowed. “I don’t want to hang, Bridget. I’m scared.”
Saying the words out loud to another person made them even more real. In the meetinghouse it had felt like theater, a thing happening to Eliza Proctor, a name and a fate that wasn’t hers. Here in the cell, to Bridget, she could be real about it.
“Aye,” Bridget said at last. “I feared as much, when they kept thee so long.”
And then, a change in the older woman’s breathing.
“They came for me this afternoon as well,” Bridget said. “Whilst thou slept. The magistrate sent word down with the guard. “I’m to hang on the next morning. At the gallows on the hill, not long after first light.” She lowered her hand.
A cold chill began to move through Lils, starting at the back of her neck. And for one suspended moment, the dread didn’t come. What came instead was a sense of relief. We go together. Whatever it is, however bad, I won’t be alone at the gallows. There’ll be one face I know. Bridget, who made me a pillow so my head wouldn’t lie on stone. She had been so afraid of being alone for it, more afraid of that than she’d even realized, and now she wouldn’t be. Some primal part of her was grateful, God help her, to this kind woman for the company —
And then the math caught up with her, that she’d been churning over for days, ever since the crow. Ostara, the vernal equinox. The crow and Ostara in red ink meant that Aunt Ivy and Holly had found the door. There was a when, and all she had to do was survive and get herself to a crossroads and the in-between would open and take her home. Just live until Ostara. Just get to Ostara.
The equinox, Ostara, was March twentieth.
And the morning Bridget and her were both to be walked up the hill and hanged by the neck until they were dead was the next morning. So the gallows and the crossroads doorway were practically the same dawn, stacked right up against each other, hours apart, maybe less — and she could not for the life of her tell which one came first. Whether the in-between would open in time to pull her through, or whether the rope would find her neck, with the door standing open and waiting and no one left to walk through it.
“Lils?” Bridget’s voice, soft. “Thou’st gone white as a spirit. Whatever is it?”
“Nothing,” Lils whispered. “I’m—” I’m trying to figure out if I get to live. “I’m just really tired.”
Bridget studied her through the dark a moment longer.
“They named thee Eliza,” she said after a while. "Yet when first thou came, thou told me you were cousin to Samuel Proctor. And didst thou say thy name wast Lily?” She wasn’t accusing, Lils could tell. This was the open-ended question of someone with a decent memory.
Lils looked at her, at this woman who would be dead within days according to history books. Who had nothing left to gain from anyone, who had spent her last good hours making a pillow for a sad girl she barely knew.
She was so tired of the armor. There was no Hathorne here to answer to for anymore… there was just her and Bridget, here in the dark cell.
“My name is Lilith,” she said quietly. “That much is true. I’m a Proctor as well but I’m — from a long way off. Further than you’d even believe if I told you.” She swallowed. “Eliza was real, and Samuel really did lose his sister. He’s just wrong about how, and about who he’s hanging for it. I’m not his sister.”
Bridget took this in without flinching.
“From a long way off,” she repeated slowly. Then, with the ghost of that dry humor: “Aye, I’d wondered. Thou’st been homesick since they threw thee in here, and not for anyplace in Essex County I know of.”
Lils almost laughed.
“No,” she said. “Certainly not anyplace in Essex County.”
“Well.” Bridget pulled her blanket higher. “Wherever it is thou’rt from, I hope…”
The bolt scraped.
Both of them flinched as the door swung open and the lantern light cut into the cell, blinking and unexpected, and Lils threw a hand up against it. The guard stood in the doorway. He was not the young one Bridget had spoken of, but the thick-necked one from that morning, the one who’d hauled Lils up by the arm.
“Bishop.” He jerked his head. “On thy feet. Thou’rt being moved.”
Bridget didn’t move. “Moved where? Tis the dead of night.”
“Magistrate’s orders. They’re separating the condemned.” He stepped in, and the lantern swung, and the shadows lurched across the walls. “Two of you in here whispering all day and night — they’ll not have it. Up you go now, before I haul thee up.”
“Wait—” Lils was on her feet before she’d decided to be. “She didn’t do anything, we were just—”
“Hold thy tongue, Proctor.” Bridget rose with as much dignity as she could manage, which was a surprising amount, brushing the worst of the filth from her skirts with her free hand like she was leaving a dinner she’d merely found tedious.
“Easy,” Bridget said to him, level. “I can walk m’self.”
The guard pulled her toward the door. And Bridget looked back over her shoulder, and held Lils’s eyes in the barely-there light.
“The pillow’s thine to keep,” she said. “And Lily—” the guard yanked her, and she raised her voice, getting it out before the door could take her— ”keep thy head, Dost thou hear me? As long as thou can—”
“Bridget! I hear thee!”
The door slammed, and the bolt scraped behind it. The white lantern light went with them, and the cell dropped back into its evening dark. Lils stood there in the sudden quiet with the words still ringing in her ears.
Stay in the in-between as long as you can.
Lils felt Stevon’s words echo after Bridget’s. She stood there a long while in the dark, the question churning in her mind. Then her legs gave out the way they’d wanted to all day, and she plopped down into the bed of slightly damp straw. Lils reached out and found the small lumpy pillow where it had fallen.
She pulled it up, pressing her face into it. Chamomile and lavender and straw hit her, the blessed work of a kind woman’s hands. A small mercy in this cold, mildew-ridden cell.
Outside and far off, up on a hill she could hear it now that the village had gone mostly quiet, except for a thin, steady sound, carrying down through the cold dark.
The sound of someone hammering something into wood.
Thunk, thunk, thunk.
She held onto the pillow, listening to them build. Lils put her head in the small pillow and screamed.