Chapter Fourteen

Joshua had taken his tobacco harvest to Rivers Grove to sell at the market.

“I’ll be away at least three or four days, my love,” he’d told her the night before under the moonlight after they’d made love. “I will not be any longer than I have to be.”

For some reason he’d been apprehensive about the trip from the beginning and hadn’t wanted to go. He’d been nervous about Sebastien and the roundup of witches in the last weeks, the coming so-called trials, which Joshua had learned would be no trials at all. He’d talked to his friend the chief magistrate about her and he’d promised to try to help. To intervene for her with Sebastien, based on the good things Joshua had recounted to him about her. Her healing. Her kindnesses to everyone. The way she cared so lovingly for her own two children.

Yet Joshua had still been worried; if selling his crops hadn’t been so essential to the family’s depleted coffers, he would have sent his overseer to sell the tobacco. Times were hard for all the farmers, competition stiff, and Joshua knew he alone could hope to achieve a fair price in the marketplace. He had friends and connections whereas the overseer didn’t.

She’d seen him off the next morning and bid him good luck.

“Do not fret. I am sure I will be safe until thy return.”

She couldn’t have been more wrong.

That afternoon Sebastien’s men pounded upon her door and demanded she accompany them for questioning before Sebastien. She’d had no choice but to go with them as she was, leaving the girls alone and terrified. They didn’t allow her to take anything, they were so afraid of her magic. Her reputation.

Sebastien’s men took her to the town jail and herded her into a holding cell full of other people. All accused of witchcraft, apparently, or other crimes.

Some of them were peculiar old women whose only sin was to be not fair of face or figure, not sound of limb, or of possessing little wit or sense. In her future time, Amanda thought, people would simply label them handicapped, mentally incompetent, or simpleminded. Most of the prisoners were merely unfortunates who people held grudges against, for whatever reason, like herself, and had no true idea why they were under arrest. Sebastien’s men had taken all of them from their homes in the last week. All proclaimed themselves not to be witches. They were wretchedly fearful, hungry, and filthy.

The food and drink, when it came at all, were moldy bread and dirty water. Yet it would have been hard to eat anything, with the foul stench of the place and the dirt. Slop buckets weren’t cleared out very often, but left to stink, attract flies in the sweltering cell, and breed germs.

It was so hot Amanda was soon drenched in sweat, only adding to her misery. She hadn’t eaten since an early breakfast, so soon enough the hunger pains were gnawing at her like little beasts.

Most of the prisoners huddled in the dark, straw-strewn corners and either stared into space or wept as if they were lost souls. They all were afraid of the questioning to come, for others had gone before them.

“Most never come back,” an old woman with hair falling out in patches revealed. “Tortured to death,” she said, “in another part of the prison. They die on the rack or from worse persuasions. Thou canst hear them screaming and begging come sundown.”

None could mention aloud the name of their accuser, Sebastien, without revulsion and fear.

“Aye, the guards come every evening and drag some of us away. For interrogation, they calls it, but,” an empty-eyed girl of about eighteen, her voice filled with horror, informed her, “if thee confesses thy guilt, I have heard, the torture halts and thou art condemned to die. All those be taken to another cell to wait. ’Tis rumored the hangings will begin in a few more days.”

That news silenced Amanda and pushed her into dismal apathy. For the first time, as she’d listened to what the other prisoners had had to say, she’d actually accepted the hopelessness of her position, the irony of it. If she didn’t confess to being a witch, they’d torture her until she did; then, as a professed witch, they’d hang her. That was justice in the seventeenth century.

It seemed all of the prisoners were familiar with the charges Sebastien had leveled against Rachel. She was the scandal of the day.

The old woman who seemed to have taken her under her wing from the first rambled them off for Amanda in a hoarse whisper: “The worst be that thee be accused of murdering thy married lover, Darcy. They found him dead this very morning in his barn. Sectioned up like a hog sent to the butcher. They say Sebastien wants you to hang for the crime. The lesser charges: that thou hast inflicted pestilence upon the crops of the honorable farmer Block and withered them as they stood in the ground, sent diseases to sicken his cattle, fever to the Watersons, and lastly, tainted the wells of certain of thy neighbors, Mistress Jacobs, and Mr. Ackerson.”

“Those are lies.” Amanda moaned, staring into the darkness about her at the shapes sleeping in the straw, yet also keenly aware that some of those things could have been done by Rachel before she’d come. Not Darcy’s murder, though. Unless Rachel was still here somewhere, or she’d had someone else do it. Amanda could only guess.

“They say also,” the wrinkled old woman in the tattered shawl and loose-fitting dress wound up with a cruel mocking in her tone, “that thee hast sold thy soul to thy master, Satan, as all of us have, in exchange for these powers and that thou art, therefore, a witch.”

Amanda cringed at the charges. Hopeless.

“I am innocent,” Amanda cried softly.

The old woman laughed bitterly. “Are we not all? Are we not all scared senseless of Sebastien’s branding irons, knives, and the rack?” The woman spat. “I had had hope, in truth, that thou were the powerful witch that they claimed thee to be...then thou might have freed all of us with one glorious spell.” Again the woman’s words were full of desperate sarcasm.

“I am sorry I do not have that power for I would surely use it to save all of you,” Amanda said. The other woman chuckled sourly.

“Someone must stop this travesty,” Amanda exclaimed angrily. Oh, if only she still had her powers! If only...cows could fly and the Earth was flat.

Night had arrived and the cell had become an impenetrable blackness. The guards had come a while before and had taken four of the prisoners away, wailing and pleading for mercy, to face Sebastien. Amanda wondered when her turn would come, and a deadly chill crept over her, freezing her limbs as well as her mind so that her body began to shiver and wouldn’t stop. She was sure that Sebastien had not forgotten her, not with murder as one of the charges. He’d just wanted her to have time to make a full meal of the fear.

Amanda felt her sanity slipping away for the first time in her life at the thought of what she would soon face. Making herself small in a corner of the cell, her ears achingly alert for the screams of the tortured, and her eyes wide open in the gloominess, she feverishly prayed that Joshua would return and save her.

He couldn’t save her. He was on his way to Rivers Grove and had not an inkling of her imprisonment. He wouldn’t be back for days. Yet as the hours crawled by, she obsessed over that impossible rescue more and more until it clouded her mind, violently shoving everything else out.

She thought of Maggie and Lizzy and Amadeus, and missed them all as tears trickled down her grimy face. She’d never felt so alone. Lost.

She missed her old safe life, too. Her sisters. Her friends. Even Canaan.

Jake. She sobbed silently to the walls around her. Oh, Jake, what I wouldn’t do to be back in your arms in our little cabin in the woods. But Jake was dead and that cabin was just smoking ashes, and she was centuries and worlds away from both of them.

She knew that no matter what she said or what she did when Sebastien questioned her, she was doomed. Better to admit what he wanted to hear right away and get it over with. The noose would be more merciful than the rack or the branding irons.

It was like being in a horror movie, except everyone else knew the script—their lines—but her. Torture. To be hanged by the neck until she was dead. Her eyes froze in shock, and then glazed into a raging fury.

Then the hideous screams began somewhere else in the building. The nightly questioning. The other prisoners awoke; some wept at the agony of those undergoing the torment, a few prayed for them, some pounded against the walls in anger. Most were quiet, and like Amanda, covered their ears after a while to shut out the bloodcurdling howling.

This couldn’t be happening! Of all the times to be without her powers. All the years she simply took them for granted. She wanted more than anything she’d ever desired in her life to be able to snap her fingers and have Sebastien and his friends all go to hell where they belonged. Release the ones being tortured. One woman screamed so hard her voice was nothing but guttural animal sounds.

Amanda thought, I can’t bear this. I can’t! The screams continued. On and on. She laughed insanely, scooting back like a terrified animal against the slimy wall. How truly alike Sebastien and his henchmen were to the demon high priest and his cult acolytes she’d torched in her own time. Except in the seventeenth century, they were honored and given power over others’ lives and deaths. The people couldn’t see what they really were. Monsters.

Somehow, they’d followed her here and soon would have their revenge for her destroying them then.

What had she ever done to deserve this end? You took lives, came back the guilty answer.

You crossed the line and broke the witches’ law.

Now you must pay in spades. With your life.

Joshua…She whimpered amidst the suffering around her. Where are you?

The cries stopped.

What answered her, looming above her in its translucent cowled robe of black, was Sebastien. His appearance startled her. How had he gotten in? What was he doing here?

Joshua cannot help you, witch. No one can help you. You are mine. Finally.

The face hidden under the cowl was pasty white and had the taint of the grave about it, but when the thing glared down at her, its eyes were incandescent holes.

Later, when we come for you, you shall suffer far longer and more exquisitely than any here will. I have a special treat in store, just for you...Amanda.

The phantasmal figure pointed a bony hand at her, and laughed evilly.

A torture that will disfigure you slowly but not kill, though you will pray to die. Beg to die.

Amanda cowered back against the wall from it in the dark, folding in on herself like a broken child. No one else could see the thing, she realized, or hear it. Just her.

It was the same high priest demon she incinerated in the future—or one like it. She wasn’t sure it was really Sebastien or something appearing in his form to torment her further. Even Satan.

“In the name of Jesus Christ,” Amanda hissed in a barely audible whisper and made the sign of the cross in the air before her, “leave me. Return to hell.”

It scowled at her and stepped back a little. I will for now...but we’ll be back for you, my sweet, later. Your cries of pain will give me and my Master such pleasure, and serve another purpose, as well.

Amanda blinked and the apparition was gone.

No one around her had paid any attention to her mutterings. The prison was a terrifying place and people lost their minds all the time, even before the torture.

She rested her head on her drawn up knees and slammed her eyes shut. I must hold onto my sanity. I must.

I must find a way to get out of here.

Then the brief silence ended and the tortured began to scream again.

Amanda laid her face in her trembling hands and wept like she hadn’t wept since Jake’s death.