Assignment One: The Trials Of The Accuser

Author's Note: I recently decided to give myself an assignment of sorts in order to keep myself writing and the creative juices flowing.  I am going to either come up with a new 'project' idea, or build on an idea that I'd already created at least once a week.  I know many writers do this to get themselves into practice and also for the discipline, and I feel its something I sorely need to do as well.  I want to do this for a living, and its been confirmed and encouraged by many I know.  I feel God pressing me to keep moving with this and hopefully that also means I will soon be published, or at least well on the way.  It really should be daily, but... right now, once a week will better fit my schedule.

I'm posting some of these to the Blog so that there is a record of the stories/ideas and then I can build on them later.  I just need a written record.

This first entry/'assignment' is from the idea of writing a novel/story from the perspective of one of the accusing girls involved in the Salem Witch Trials.  Its always been a fascinating subject for me and my favorite movie 'The Crucible' with Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder, among others.  When thinking of inspirational material to write about - 'hatching' I call it - this has been playing around in my mind.  So this will be a story from the perspective of Ann Putnam Jr. , age 12 or 13, who, ironically enough, is not even mentioned in the movie.  Historically, she was one of the most vocal of the accusers, yet also the one who publicly confessed and apologized to the church for accusing innocent people (particularly Rebecca Nurse) once the incident had died down.  I have done some research and plan to do more in the future.  Can you IMAGINE the guilt and emotion that these girls must've gone through once everything had quieted down and they realized the enormity of what they had done???

On a somewhat divergent topic, I have often found in my own writing that, as a writer and introvert both, I  introspect even as I delve into the lives and stories of other characters.  Sometimes, a piece even takes on an exploration of a certain emotion that I myself struggle to figure out in its entirety.  Although I had not seen it as such even as the ideas and words began forming and then flowing onto the page, this work will be one such a case.  It is an exploration in many ways of guilt....  In the sense of introspection and relating to my work, this one seems to run very deep...

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Ann Putnam stared at the hard ground and its lace-work of frost that lay beneath the oak's branches.  She did not move.  In the distance, the elders were huddled in a small group speaking to each other in hushed voices.  She knew they spoke of her.  It did not matter what they said.  They could do nothing more to hurt her than had already been done.  They could not damage what already lay broken.  An icy numbness tore at her hands and cheeks and settled somewhere deep within her breast.  The harshest penitence was the one she gave herself, and no demon's dagger could pierce as deep or as sharp.

She felt eyes and turned her head slowly as though dreading what she would see.  Reverend Paris was looking at her with a gaze horribly full of fearful dismay.  She quickly averted her gaze.  Paris' eyes lingered on her for a long moment before moving back to his conversation.  Ann could feel his gaze every second it lingered and she waited tensely until  his attention had gone.

Then, movement somewhere in the field ahead of her caught her eye.  A blackbird taking flight?  Or a misplaced shadow...?  Her breath instantly became quick and shallow stuttering from her blue-tinged lips in frosty vapor.  Her pale skin seemed to lose any color that had remained and she stared from her blood-shot eyes to see if the movement would come again.  

A sudden sharp caw came, not from the field ahead, but from the tree-branch directly over-head.  She started violently and stared back into the beady eyes of the crow.  It looked down at her curiously and cocked its head in study.  A young girl it saw, thirteen at most.  Red veined blue eyes looked back with fear and with a tormented reckoning that one normally saw only in one far older than she, a veteran of war perhaps, a condemned prisoner who spent his last days in a stone-cold cell.  The impression sat ill on a child lending an unkindly light to the society that had born her.  Her brown hair was, as was proper, pulled back and hidden beneath a ridged bonnet, her budding figure hidden beneath a shapeless black dress.  Somewhere beneath the too-pale skin, the red nose and veined eyes, and the haunted look there was beauty, and one might assume she would be lovely given a few more years.  But the prettiness was largely lost now, hidden behind unconscionable care.  

The crow opened its beak and laughed riotously, merciless, devoid of pity.  Ann turned her eyes away from the bird and back to the jewel-frosted field.  She saw no more movement.  But it had been there she knew.  It was aware of her every movement and every passing, every gesture and thought. 

She could endure the cold no longer and so turned and ran for the house.   Many eyes watched her go, but none followed. 

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Ann headed for the common room of her home to warm herself by the fire.  The gabled house was empty at this hour as most of the adults still lingered outside and the servants shivered around coal stoves in their quarters.  Night had not yet fallen, but it was bitterly cold and all were bracing for the icy wind that would buffet the town once the sunset had completed.

The large stone fireplace welcomed her, but as from a great, impersonal distance as she approached and lifted her hands towards the flames.  The warmth seeped into her cold skin, but it did not run deep enough to melt her icy insides.  Her face contorted and she could not suppress a sob.  How had it come so fast and moved so far?  It had been a year since the accusations and the trials began and she and her friends had stood by and cheered as nineteen souls hanged on the gallows for crimes they had not committed.  Countless more had been accused and languished in jail for weeks, five of whom died there.  And Giles Corey, pressed beneath the stones...  She closed her eyes as tears fell to her cheeks, but the images of each face as they were led to the scaffold would not disappear.

The shuffling of a soft footstep startled her and she whirled around.  The girls were come to her.  Ann felt as great a dread from the sight of them as she would from an army of imps. Once she had been one of them.  Now, she was as displaced even among them as Lucifer from glory had fallen.