I remain your servant,Increase Mather.
“Damn it!” Kim said after reading the third letter. She could not believe that she’d been lucky enough to find so many references to Elizabeth’s evidence yet still not know what it was. Thinking she might possibly have missed something, she read the letters again. The strange syntax and orthography made reading them somewhat difficult, but when she got to the end of the second reading she was sure she’d not missed anything.
Stimulated by the letters, Kim again tried to imagine the nature of the incontrovertible evidence used against Elizabeth. From Kim’s continued general reading that week on the Salem witch trials, she’d become more convinced that it had to have been some kind of book. Back in the days of the trials the issue of the Devil’s Book had come up frequently. The method that a supposed witch established a covenant with the devil was by writing in the Devil’s Book.
Kim looked back at the letters. She noticed the evidence was described as “Elizabeth’s handiwork.” Perhaps Elizabeth had made a book with an elaborately tooled leather cover? Kim laughed at herself. She knew she was taxing her imagination, but nothing else came to mind.
In Increase Mather’s letter, Kim noted that the evidence had elicited “impassioned and enlightening” debate among the students. She thought that description not only gave weight to the idea of the evidence being a book, but tended to suggest it was the contents that were important, not its appearance.
But then Kim thought again about the evidence being some kind of doll. Just that week she’d read that a doll with pins in it had been used in the trial of Bridget Bishop, the first person to be executed in the Salem ordeal.
Kim sighed. She knew that her wild speculations as to the nature of the evidence was not accomplishing anything. After all, the evidence could have been anything to do with the occult. Instead of wild speculation she had to stick to the facts that she had, and the three letters she’d just found gave her a very significant fact, namely that the evidence, whatever it was, had been given to Harvard University in 1692. Kim wondered what the chances were that she could find reference to it at the institution today, and if she were to try, whether they would laugh at her.
“Ah, there you are,” Edward called down from the top of the wine cellar stair. “Having any luck?”
“Strangely enough I have,” Kim yelled back. “Come down and take a look at these.”
Edward climbed down the stairs and took the letters. “My goodness,” he exclaimed when he saw the signatures. “These are three of the most famous Puritans. What a find!”
“Read them,” Kim said. “They’re interesting but frustrating for my purposes.”
Edward leaned against a bureau to take advantage of the light from one of the wall sconces. He read the letters in the same order that Kim had.
“They’re marvelous,” he said when he was finished. “I love the wording and the grammar. It lets you know that rhetoric was a major course of study in those days. Some of it’s above my head: I don’t even know what the word ‘sedulous’ means.”
“I think it means diligent,” Kim said. “I didn’t have any difficulty with definitions. What gave me trouble was how the sentences ran on and on.”
“You’re lucky these letters weren’t written in Latin,” Edward said. “Back in those days you had to read and write Latin fluently to get into Harvard. And speaking of Harvard, I’d bet Harvard would be interested in these, especially the one from Increase Mather.”
“That’s a good point,” Kim said. “I was thinking about going to Harvard and asking about Elizabeth’s evidence. I was afraid they might laugh at me. Maybe I could make a trade.”
“They wouldn’t laugh at you,” Edward said. “I’m sure someone in the Widener Library would find the story intriguing. Of course they wouldn’t turn down a gift of the letter. They might even offer to buy it.”
“Does reading these letters give you any better idea what the evidence could have been?” Kim asked.
“Not really,” Edward said. “But I can understand what you mean by their being frustrating. It’s almost funny how many times they mention the evidence without describing it.”