Indeed, one of their favorite ploys was to alarm the jury with statements like, “If this has all been happening under your very noses in this village, imagine what is happening in the next village, in the whole county, all over England, throughout the world!” They were forever citing “leading authorities” who estimated that, judging from the numbers of known witches actually brought to trial, there “must be” ten thousand or a hundred thousand or a million witches.

“Suspect everybody,” they said. “There are so many witches it is impossible that you don’t know one.” And the clincher: “If you ignore small signs of witchcraft then you are responsible for permitting Satan to work unhindered in the world.”

All this might have had some meaning if it weren’t for one simple fact: Verily Cooper had a knack, and he knew that he had never had any experience of Satan, had never attended a witches’ sabbath, had not left his body and wandered as an incubus to ravish women and send them strange dreams of love. All he had done was make barrels that held water so tightly that the wood had to rot through before the joints would leak. His only power was to make dead wood live and grow under his hands. And he had never used his knack to harm a living soul in any way. Therefore, all these stories had to be lies. And the statistics estimating the number of uncaught witches were a lie based upon a lie.

Verily believed what Alvin believed: that every soul was born with some connection to the powers of the universe—perhaps the powers of God, but more likely the forces of nature—which showed up as knacks among Europeans, as a connection to nature among the Reds, and in other strange ways among the other races. God wanted these powers used for good; Satan would of course want them used for evil. But the sheer possession of a knack was morally neutral.

The opportunity was here not just to save Purity from herself, but also to discredit the entire system of witch trials and the witchery laws themselves. Make the laws and the witnesses so obviously, scandalously, ludicrously false that no one would ever stand trial for the crime of witchcraft again.

Then again, he might fail, and Alvin would have to get himself and Purity out of jail whether she liked it or not, and they’d all hightail it out of New England.

Cambridge was a model New England town. The college dominated, with several impressive buildings, but there was still a town common across from the courthouse, where Alvin was almost certainly imprisoned. And, to Verily’s great pleasure, the witcher and the tithingmen were running both Alvin and Purity. A crowd surrounded the common—but at a safe distance—as Alvin was forced to run around in tight circles at one end of the meadow and Purity at the other.

“How long have they been at it?” Verily asked a bystander.