Chapter 11 -- Decent Men

  So this was what it came to, after all these years at the bar, as lawyer and as judge: John Adams had to sit in judgment in Cambridge over a witch trial. Oh, the ignominy of it. For a time he had been something of a philosopher, and caused an international incident over his involvement in the Appalachee Revolution. He had spoken for union between New England and the United States, daring the Lord Protector to arrest him for treason. He had called for a ban on trade with the Crown Colonies as long as they trafficked in slaves, at the very time that his fellow New Englanders were loudly calling for the right to enter into such trade. There wasn't a question of import in New England since the 1760s that John Adams hadn't been a part of. He had even founded a dynasty, or so it seemed, now that his boy John Quincy was governor of Massachusetts and chairman of the New England Council. And for the past fifteen years he had distinguished himself as a jurist, winning at last the love of his fellow Yankees when he refused an appointment to the Lord Protector's Bench in England, preferring to remain "among the free men of America."

  And now he had to hear a witch trial. The toadlike witcher, Quill, ad come to see him when he arrived in Cambridge last night, reminding him that it was his duty to uphold the law-- as if John Adams needed prompting in his duty from the likes of Quill. "I have not exceeded the law in any respect," said Quill, "as you'll see even from the testimony of the witches, unless they lie."

  "God help us if a witch should tell a lie," John had murmured. Quill missed the irony entirely and took the answer as an affirmation. Well, that was fine. John didn't mind if he went away happy, as long as he went away.

  John should have died last year, when he got the grippe. He had it on the best authority that the Boston papers had all planned on a double-page spread for his obituary. That was precisely the space devoted to the eulogy of the last Lord Protector to shuffle off his mortal coil. It was good to be considered at a level with rulers and potentates, even though he had never quite succeeded in joining New England to the United States, making it impossible for him to play a role in that extraordinary experiment. Instead he remained here, among the good people of New England, whom he truly loved like brothers and sisters, even though he longed now and then to see a face that didn't look like every other face.

  Witch trials, though-- it was an ugly thing, a holdover from medieval times. A shame on the face of New England.

  But the law was the law. An accusation had been made, so a trial would have to be held, or at least the beginning of one. Quill would have his chance to get some poor wretch hanged-- if he could do it without violating the prerogatives of the bench or pushing the powers of the law beyond their statutory and natural limits.

  Now at breakfast John Adams sat with his old pupil, Hezekiah Study. I adhere to a double standard, John admitted to himself. Quill's visit to me last night I thought highly improper. Hezekiah's visit, equally intended to influence my judgment in this case, I plan to enjoy. Well, any fool can be consistent, and most fools are.

  "Cambridge is not what it used to be," said John to Hezekiah. "The students don't wear their robes."

  "Out of fashion now," said Hezekiah. "Though if anyone had known you were coming, they might have put the robes back on. Your opinion on the subject is well known."

  "As if these boys would so much as part their hair for a relic like me."

  "A holy relic, sir?" asked Hezekiah.

  John grimaced. "Oh, so I'm to be called 'sir' by you?"

  "I was your student. You gave me Plato and Homer."

  "But you wanted Aristophanes, as I recall." John Adams sighed. "You must realize, all my peers are dead. If I'm to have anyone on this earth call me John, it will have to be a friend who once called me 'sir' because of my seniority. We should have a new social rule. When we reach fifty, we're all the same age forever."

  "John, then," said Hezekiah. "I knew God had heard my prayer when I learned that it was you and no other who drew this case."

  "One judge is coughing his life out into bloody handkerchiefs and the other is burying his wife, and you think this is how God answers your prayers?"

  "You weren't due, and here you are. A witch trial, sir. John."

  "Oh, now you've knighted me. Sir John." He wanted to laugh at the idea of his ever being the answer to someone's prayer. Since his own prayers seemed rarely to be answered, it wouldn't be quite fair of God, would it, to play him as the prize in someone else's game of piety.

  "I know how you feel about witches," said Hezekiah.

  "You also know how I feel about the law," said John. "I may disbelieve in the crime, but that doesn't mean I'll have any bias in the handling of the case." Oh, let's stop the pretense that the question has come up casually. "What's your interest in it? Didn't you used to defend these cases, back when you were a lawyer?"

  "I was never a good one."

  John heard the pain in his voice. Still haunted after all these years? "You were an excellent lawyer, Hezekiah. But what is a lawyer against a superstitious, bloody-minded mob?"

  Hezekiah smiled wanly. "I assume you know that the blacksmith's lawyer was arrested last night."

  Quill hadn't seen fit to mention this little ploy, but John had learned it from the sheriff. "I can see it now. Lawyer after lawyer steps forth to defend this man, only to be accused, each in turn, and locked away. Thus the trial continues till all the lawyers are in jail."

  Hezekiah smiled. "There are those who would regard that as the best of all possible outcomes."

  John chuckled with him, then sighed. "Don't worry, Hezekiah. I won't have defense attorneys locked up in order to bolster the witchers' case. You shouldn't be talking to me about this, though."

  "Oh, I knew what you'd do about that," said Hezekiah. "If Quill thought he could get away with that-- well, you'll see when you meet the lawyer. He has Quill by the character!"

  "That would be a slippery place to try to hold him."

  "No, it wasn't the lawyer. It was another matter I wanted to bring to your attention."

  "Bring it in open court then, Hezekiah."

  "I can't. And it's not evidentiary, anyway."

  "Then tell me afterward."

  "Please don't torment me, friend," said Hezekiah. "I wouldn't attempt anything unethical. Trust me enough to hear me out."

  "If it's about the case..."

  "It's about the accuser..."

  "Who will also be a defendant in her own trial."

  "She'll not be tried," said Hezekiah. "She's cooperating with Quill. So this can have no compromising effect on an action in court."

  "Don't blame Quill for her. She came up with this accusation on her own."

  "I know, sir. John. But she's not your normal accuser. Her parents were hanged for witches when she was a newborn. Indeed, her father took the drop, as they say, before she was even born, and her mother but weeks afterward. She found it out only a few days ago, and it put her in such a state that--"

  "That she brought false accusation against a stranger?" John grimaced. "You have a fleck of yolk on your chin."

  Hezekiah dabbed at it with his napkin. "I think the accusation is not false," said Hezekiah.

  John glared at him. "I'm glad you didn't say anything to compromise this blacksmith's case."

  "I don't mean that it's objectively true, I mean that she's being forthright. Her intent is pure. She believes the charge."

  John rolled his eyes. "So how many should I hang for one girl's superstition?"

  Hezekiah looked away. "She's not superstitious, sir. She's a sweet girl, good-hearted, and very bright. She's been studying with me, and sitting in on lectures."

  "Oh, right. The girl and her professors. That's why Harvard got raided by the tithingmen and half the faculty hauled off for questioning."

  "She didn't initiate that, sir. She refuses to accuse any but the original defendants."

  "Till that rope-happy ghoul runs her into the ground."

  "You should have heard the blacksmith's lawyer accuse Quill of using torture. Out on the common in front of everybody." Hezekiah smiled at the memory. "He held the strings and Quill danced for the crowd."

  John liked the image as much as Hezekiah did, but he was a judge, and the first skill he had perfected was the ability to remain solemn and suppress even so much as a twinkle in his eye. "So you're here to tell me that this girl, this Purity, means well as she tries to get this young man hanged."

  "I mean to say it isn't a case of vengeance for spurned love, or any such thing as are usually at the heart of witch trials."

  "Then what is it? Since we both know..." John glanced around and lowered his voice. "That the one certainty in this trial is that there are no witches."

  "The boy was full of brag about some knack or other. All she knows is what he told her, or someone in his party. But she believed it. She's doing this because she must believe in the law that hanged her parents. If she did not believe that the law was right, then the sheer injustice of it would drive her mad."

  "Oh, now, Hezekiah. 'Drive her mad'? Have you been reading sensational novels?"

  "I mean it quite literally. She has a deep faith in the goodness of our Christian community. If she thought her parents were falsely accused and hanged for it--"

  "Who were her parents? Is it a case I..." And then, doing the arithmetic in his head-- the girl's age, that many years ago-- he realized whose daughter she was. "Oh, Hezekiah. That case?"

  Tears spilled from Hezekiah's eyes. "What I wanted you to know, John, was that the one who seems to be the accuser is merely the last victim of that wretched affair."

  John answered gently. "New England is a lovely place, Hezekiah. We have our share of hypocrisy, of course, but generally we face up to our sins and the frailty of human nature, and confess our wrongs right smartly. But this one-- how did it ever go that far?"

  "You didn't see what I saw, John," said Hezekiah.

  "No, don't tell me. You need no excuse, my friend. You stood alone."

  "I couldn't... I could not."

  John laid his hand over Hezekiah's. "Thus we take a good breakfast and render it indigestible," he said. "Come, now, there's no blame attached to you."

  "Oh, but there is."

  "So you're defending her, to make up for it?"

  Hezekiah shook his head. "I've looked after her all her life. It's my penance. To stay here, in obscurity. There's blood on my hands. I won't have more. The young lawyer who's languishing in the jail, he's the one. When you let him out, when he defends his friend, see if he doesn't give you a way to resolve the whole matter. All I ask is that you not bring charges against the accuser."

  "This English barrister can do it, but not you?"

  "I took a vow most solemnly before heaven."

  "And deprived the New England bar of an honest man. The bench as well. You should be in robes like mine, my friend."

  Hezekiah brusquely wiped the tears from his cheeks. "Thank you for seeing me, John. And for treating me as a friend."

  "Now and always, Hezekiah. Will I see you at the trial?"

  "How could I bear that, John? No. God bless you, John. He brought you here, I know it. Yes, I know you think God is a watchmaker who installed an infinite spring--"

  "A quotation I never said, though it's much attributed to me--"

  "I heard the words from your lips."

  "Stir your memory, and you'll recall that I was quoting the line in order to refute it! I'm no deist, like Tom Jefferson. That's his line. It's the only God he's willing to worship-- one who has closed up shop and gone away so there's no risk of Tom Jefferson being contradicted when he spouts his nonsense about the 'rational man.' Him and his wall of separation between church and state-- such claptrap! Such a wall serves only those who want to keep God on the far side of it, so they can divide up the nation without interference."

  "I'm sorry to have brought your old nemesis into this."

  "You didn't," said John. "I did. Or rather, he did. You'd think that he'd stop getting under my skin, but it galls me that his little country is going to be part of the United States, and mine isn't."

  "Isn't yet," said Hezekiah.

  "Isn't in my lifetime," said John, "and I'm selfish enough to wish I could have lived to see it. The United States needs this Puritan society as a counter-influence to Tom Jefferson's intolerantly secular one. Mark my words, when a government pretends that it is the highest judge of its own actions, the result is not freedom as Jefferson says, but chaos and oppression. When he shuts religion out of government, when men of faith are not listened to, then all that remains is venality, posturing, and ambition."

  "I hope you're wrong about that, sir," said Hezekiah. "Many of us look to the United States as the next stage of the American experiment. New England has come this far, but we are stagnant now."

  "As this trial proves." John sighed. "I wish I were wrong, Hezekiah. But I'm not. Tom Jefferson claims to stand for freedom, and charges me with trying to promote some kind of theocracy or aristocracy. But there is no freedom down his road."

  "How can we know that, sir?" said Hezekiah. "No one has ever been down this road?"

  "I have," said John, and regretted it at once.

  Hezekiah looked at him, startled, but then smiled. "No matter how precise your imagination, sir, I doubt it will be accepted as evidence."

  But it wasn't imagination. John had seen. Had seen it as clearly as he saw Hezekiah standing before him now. It was a sort of vision that God had vouchsafed to him all his life, that he could see how power flowed and where it led, in groups of men both large and small. It was a strange and obscure sort of vision, which he could not explain to anyone else and had never tried, not even to Abigail, but it allowed him to chart a course through all the theories and philosophies that swirled and swarmed throughout the British colonies. It had allowed him to see through Tom Jefferson. The man talked freedom, but he could never quite bring himself to free his slaves. Abolitionists criticized him for hypocrisy, but they missed the point. He wasn't a lover of freedom who had neglected to free his slaves; he was a man who loved to control other people, and did it by talking about freedom. Jefferson had stood naked in front of the world when he tried to silence his critics with the Alien and Sedition Acts almost as soon as Appalachee won its freedom from the Crown. So much for his love of freedom-- you could have freedom of speech as long as you didn't use it to oppose Jefferson's policies! Yet as soon as the acts were repealed-- after years of hounding Jefferson's enemies into silence or exile-- people still talked about him as the champion of liberty!

  John Adams knew Tom Jefferson, and that's why Tom Jefferson hated John Adams, because John really was what Jefferson only pretended to be: a man who loved freedom, even the freedom of those who disagreed with him. Even Tom Jefferson's freedom. It made them unequal in battle. It handed the victory to Jefferson.

  "Are you all right, sir?" asked Hezekiah.

  "Just fighting over old battles in my mind," said John. "It's the problem with age. You have all these rusty arguments, and no quarrel to use them in. My brain is a museum, but alas, I'm the only visitor, and even I am not terribly interested in the displays."

  Hezekiah laughed, but there was affection in it. "I would love nothing better than to visit there. But I'm afraid I'd be tempted to loot the place, and carry it all away with me."

  To John's surprise, Hezekiah's words brought tears to his eyes. "Would you, Hezekiah?" He blinked rapidly and his eyes cleared. "You see, now, you've moved this old man with your kindness. You found the one bribe I'm susceptible to."

  "It wasn't flattery, sir."

  "I know," said John. "It was honor. May God forgive me, but I've never been able to purge my heart of the desire for it."

  "There's no sin in it, John. The honor of good men is won only by goodness. It's how the children of God recognize each other. It's the feast of love."

  "Maybe God did bring me here," said John. "In answer to my own prayers."

  "Maybe that's how God works," said Hezekiah. "We pray for a messenger from God-- who knows but what the messenger also prayed for a place to take his message?"

  "What does that make me, an angel?"

  "Wrestle with Jacob. Smite his thigh. Leave him limping."

  "Once your allusions were all to Homer and the Greek playwrights."

  "It's the Bible now," said Hezekiah. "I have more to fear from death than you do."

  "But longer to wait before it comes," said John ruefully.

  Hezekiah laughed, shook John's hand, and left the table. John sat back down, tucked in, and finished. The meeting had been more emotional than John had expected, or than he cared for, truth be known. Emotions had a way of filling you up and then what did you do with them? You still had to go on about your life.

  Except for Hezekiah Study. He had not gone about his life. His life had ended, all those years ago, back in Netticut, on the end of a couple of ropes.

  And my life? When did it end? Because it has ended, I see that now. I'm like Hezekiah. I took a turn, or didn't take a turn; I stopped, or failed to stop. I should have been something else. I should have been president of a fledgling nation of free men. Not a judge at a witch trial. Not a stout little man eating the dregs of his breakfast alone at table in a boardinghouse in Cambridge, waiting for Tom Jefferson, damn him, to die, so I can have the feeble satisfaction of outliving that bastard son of Liberty.

  Oh, Tom. If only we could have been friends, I could have changed you, you could have changed me, we could have become in reality the statesmen you pretend to be and I wish I were.

  ***

  Purity could hardly sleep all night. It was unbearable, yesterday, the running, running, running. And yet she bore it. That's what surprised her. She sweated and panted but she kept on and on and on, and all the while she ran there was a kind of music in the back of her mind. As soon as she tried to listen to it, to find the melody of it, the sound retreated and all she could hear then was the throbbing of her pulse in her head, her own panting, her feet thudding on the grassy ground. But then she'd stagger a few steps and the music would come back and it would sustain her and...