Hour of the Witch

Thomas chastises Mary for asking to join John Eliot without Thomas’s approval, but Mary, prepared for this critique, tells him she wanted to make sure it was a possibility before bringing it to his attention. She thinks about her plan, which will help her to get the poison from the Hawkes and diminish suspicion that she is evil, though Mary begins to wonder whether she might be.

Both John Eliot and Thomas agree to allow Mary to visit the Hawkes. Mary learns from Jonathan that Peregrine is feeling sick, and the physician compares her illness to Hannah’s recent illness, which Mary suspects was due to poison. Mary wonders whether she is only imagining such possibilities.

Mary travels to the Hawkes, and Esther agrees to trade Mary the poison for some clothes for her children. While there, Esther’s children look through a book Mary brought: The New England Primer, which includes a woodcut of the martyrdom of John Rogers and his family, burning at the stake for their allegiance to the true word of Christ.

After her visit, Mary ventures to the docks to see Henry Simmons, regardless of the consequences. When she does, she tells Henry she is plotting an escape from her marriage, though she doesn’t tell him she plans to murder Thomas. On her way home, she picks up boots and coats to trade with Esther, feeling hopeful about her possible future.

Mary visits Esther again, trading the clothing for a bottle of wolfsbane, or monkshood, poison. When she returns to Boston, she sees Rebeckah Cooper and discovers that Peregrine has lost her baby. Rebeckah tells Mary she’s pleased her divorce was denied because if she were an independent woman, both the deaths of William and Peregrine’s child might be further evidence that she is a witch.

Mary hides the bottle of poison under a loose floorboard in their bedroom and, later, discovers the mark of the Devil—a five-sided star enclosed in a circle—carved into the bottom of her front door frame. She quickly ignores it so Catherine won’t see it. She goes to see Henry again at the docks and they kiss.

That evening, Thomas returns home late and drunk from the tavern. He tries to sleep with Mary, but she is menstruating, and, after he violently reacts, he cuts his foot on the loose floorboard where the poison is concealed. In his rage, he takes the nail he loosened and stabs it into Mary’s hand, yelling to Catherine that she is the one who has fallen on the floorboard. While he sleeps, she removes the poison from its hiding place so Thomas won’t discover it in the morning.

Mary, still trying to discover who buried the Devil’s tines and now who carved the mark of the devil in her door, searches Catherine’s trunk and her home, finding nothing. She follows Catherine while she’s on an errand, and sees her visit Goody Howland. Mary still has no answers, but she determines that, once Thomas is dead and she is free, it won’t matter anyway.

Preparing to poison Thomas and frame Catherine, Mary takes two three-pronged forks from her parents and practices falling ill. She hopes to suggest Catherine has poisoned both her and Thomas, but Mary will fake only illness, pretending she didn’t consume enough of the poison to kill her. Mary pours all of the wolfsbane into Thomas’s tankard of beer and hides the bottle and the tines in Catherine’s trunk. She invites Squire Willard, her neighbor who previously reprimanded her for disciplining the children throwing rocks at the Quaker, as a witness.

Halfway through dinner, she realizes she cannot go through with it. Thomas, who usually gulps down his beer, has only had a few sips. Believing this to be a sign from God, Mary decides not to kill him and knocks his beer over so he won’t finish it. Instead, she plans to stage her own death, writing a note to Thomas, which she’ll hide alongside the now-empty bottle of wolfsbane. She removes the bottle and tines from Catherine’s trunk.

She visits Henry once more, telling a neighbor, Valentine Hill, that she only wishes to forgive him his transgressions on behalf of Thomas and herself. Instead, they plan together to escape on a trading ship, the Amity, to Jamaica the next day.

The ship doesn’t arrive when expected, however, and instead arrives with the New Year. Mary visits her mother and Peregrine, and though she doesn’t say so, prepares to bid them farewell. When she visits Constance, however, Constance knows what Mary is doing and gives her a hug.

Refreshed and ready to leave her life in Boston behind, Mary returns home, only to discover that Caleb Adams, Thomas, Catherine, and a few other government officials are gathered round her kitchen table. On the table are the tines, a coin with the mark of the Devil, and her note with the satchel she had packed for her departure.