The Heretic's Daughter

During that particularly frozen winter, as history buffs know, a slave named Tituba tries to amuse some bored girls, with horrific consequences. One-hundred-and-fifty people are imprisoned as witches, and 19 are hanged.

(Five other people died in the squalid conditions of the prison, and one man was tortured to death.) One of the first executed was Martha Carrier, and all but one of her children would be imprisoned with her. Her husband, Thomas, escapes, possibly because of the fear his sheer size inspires, possibly because of his past in England, which Martha has recorded in a book she buries under an elm before her arrest.

It wouldn’t take paranormal abilities to know that Martha, who was resented by her neighbors, was likely to be named as a witch. But she refuses to run.

“I will speak reason to them. They must listen,” she tells her husband. “They’ve had so many shambling, half-witted women in front of them that the magistrates are starting to harken to this nonsense. Well I am not confused and I am not afraid of them. They are lawyers and judges and must rule by law.... If I do not do this thing, it may go on and on.”

The novel’s history isn’t perfect (Kent gets two of the accused witches’ names wrong, for example).

But she successfully re-creates the smothering, suspicious atmosphere of Puritan life, where canonical word was law, and showcases the flagrant absurdity of the “trials.”

At Martha’s, her accuser actually pointed out the wrong woman, until, realizing her mistake, she “changed the direction of her pointing, like a weather vane in a shifting wind.” When another girl announced that Goody Carrier had been a witch for 40 years, Martha replies (as she’s being tied hand and foot and dragged away), “a neat trick, that, as I would have been only two years old upon becoming a witch. Do you suppose I rode then upon my rattle?”

Kent also excels at showing both the horrors and petty injustices the imprisoned endured.

To get a confession out of Martha’s oldest boy, for example, the judges have Andrew tortured. A 4-year-old girl is manacled hand and foot.

If a prisoner wanted to eat, his family would have to bring the food. (The Carriers lived 12 miles away from Salem jail; Thomas journeyed by foot.) And the manacles had to be paid for by the accused’s family.

“The Heretic’s Daughter” doesn’t rise to the literary heights of “The Crucible,” still the pinnacle of works about the witch trials. For one thing, there are too many dreams and omens. Foreshadowing is like potpourri – a little is fragrant; too much sends you out of the room sneezing. Here, the result can be like a Glade Plug-In dialed up to seven.

And the ending feels rushed and unsatisfying, as Kent devotes just one chapter to wrapping up the Carrier children’s lives post-Salem and to answering the question of just what was in the little book that Martha buried.

But it’s an eminently readable novel, and a tribute to a woman who held steadfastly to the courage of her convictions.

Yvonne Zipp regularly reviews fiction for the Monitor.

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