While clearing out her grandmother's cottage for sale, Connie Goodwin finds a parchment inscribed with the name Deliverance Dane. And so begins the hunt to uncover the woman behind the name, a hunt that takes her back to Salem in 1692 . . . and the infamous witchcraft trials.

But nothing is entirely as it seems and when Connie unearths the existence of Deliverance's spell book, the Physick Book, the situation takes on a menacing edge as interested parties reveal their desperation to find this precious artefact at any cost.

What secrets does the Physick Book contain? What magic is scrawled across its parchment pages? Connie must race to answer these questions - and reveal the truth about Salem's women - before an ancient family curse once more fulfils its dark and devastating prophecy . . .

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Do you have any special writing rituals? For example, what do you have on your desk when you’re writing?

The hardest part of writing for me is, of course, getting started. Even if I am in the middle of a project, if I am starting a new segment of it – like a chapter, for example – I spend a lot of time agonizing without actually getting anything written down. I will find anything else to do: laundry is perfect, because you can really draw out the folding process. This can go on for hours or days. Then I will usually push through the fear long enough to get something written, like a page or so, which I promise myself can be thrown out later.

My desk is fairly spare. It contains a jar of pens, a box of graham crackers, a photograph of my husband, a couple of finger puppets, and a small sculpture of an ancient Egyptian cat, a replica of one in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. My study is a small room in the attic of our house, probably eight feet by nine feet, with a sloping ceiling. When we bought the house the room was painted black, with a trompe l'oeil cloudy sky overhead. I repainted the whole thing flat white, and nothing is hanging on the walls except for one mirror, to catch the light from the window. The desk faces the only window in the room, which looks out over an auto repair shop roof and down the street to a sign that says “Not a Through Way.”

Sometimes, home offers too many distractions (laundry to do, dog to walk, refrigerator to stare into), and so I work at a little table in a cafe in Salem. They make terrific coffee, sell half-sandwiches, and I can camp out by the screen door at the back, looking at a sliver of brick walkway and nothing else. I can be incredibly productive there, largely because I can't leave the computer at the table by itself. With no excuse to get up, all I can do is work.

I often play a game with myself that I have started to call “time travel tourism.” I will be walking along in Boston or Cambridge, and I will imagine what would happen if all of a sudden I stepped through some kind of time fabric rip, and found myself on the exact spot where I was standing, but in, say, 1877. How would people react to seeing a woman suddenly appear in blue jeans and a pea coat? Would anyone accept the cash I was carrying? Where could I go for help? Would the hologram on my driver's license prove that I was from the future? If I couldn't get back, how would I support myself? A lot of my writing grows out of these kinds of thought experiments.

How did the idea for this book originate?

To relax while studying for my PhD qualifying exams, I would take my dog on rambles in the woods along the old railroad tracks between Marblehead and Salem. We were living in Old Town Marblehead, a concentrated historic district of antique 17^th and 18^th Century houses. Many of them had horseshoes nailed in various secret places, including one tiny one over the door in the bedroom of our little rental house. Further, Salem one town over has built its tourist industry on the Salem witch trials, and I often found myself thinking how vastly the tourist account of the witch trials differs from the historical understanding of them. The book began as a thought experiment on my rambles in the woods: what if magic were real, but not in the fairy tale way that we now imagine it? In the seventeenth and eighteenth century, magic was very small, very personal, very tied to individual belongings, and to health. I tried to imagine what magic would have looked like, had it been real the way that the colonists understood it.

Of course I knew the general outlines of what had happened during the Salem witchcraft panic, but now, having settled only one town over, I started to think more specifically about how life must have felt for those women. Genealogy serves a paradoxical purpose: on the one hand, it provides extreme specificity, with concrete people living in a concrete moment in the past. It is a powerful way to feel personally connected to a time period that might otherwise seem hopelessly remote. But on the other hand, by the time we start looking at ten generations back, what we mean when we say "family" is actually several thousand people. At that point, the connection becomes less about "family," I think, and more about humankind. Everyone has a right to feel connected to the women (and men) caught up in the Salem panic, for the story touches deep reservoirs of feeling about community, religion, relationships, and spirituality still at work in American culture today.

Did the book involve any special research?

Yes; I read all the major secondary source literature on the Salem witch trials and its period, including histories of the economic background of Marblehead and Salem, and used that reading to develop an undergraduate research seminar which I taught twice at Boston University. I read the records of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County to try to learn how people actually spoke during that time period, and also relied on a study of New England accent and slang terms in one chapter of a book on English settlements in America called Albion's Seed. I relied on the Salem witch trials online archive run by the University of Virginia for primary sources, like arrest warrants, court documents, and so forth. I read several histories of magic, especially work by the historians Keith Thomas and Owen Davies, to learn about the “cunning folk” tradition in early modern England, and to further my imagination of what magic might have looked like, if it had been real the way the colonists understood it. I read a number of contemporary histories of occult practice and Wicca, which were of varying degrees of usefulness, and also read academic journal articles on alchemy and the history of alchemical thought. For details of dress and interior I read several histories of material culture from the time period, most notably the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston's catalogue New England Begins: the Seventeenth Century. I can supply a bibliography upon request.

What do you think is the main point of interest for readers in The Lost Book of Salem?

There has been a lot of interest in the fact that I am descended from two accused Salem witches, Elizabeth Howe (who was hanged) and Elizabeth Proctor (who was spared). But I think it is also interesting to talk about the book's new approach to witches in general. We are accustomed to having a fairy tale notion of what witches are like: black pointy hats, warts, green skin. We are also accustomed to thinking about magic as acting on a macrocosmic level: good versus evil. The book proposes that we instead look at witches as they were understood to be, back when people actually believed in them. They were individual women, dressed like everyone else, with strange personality quirks, and the magic that they were accused of practicing was very personal and small: causing someone to fall ill, causing property to disappear, being able to be in two places at once. This book brings fresh insight to the witch lexicon, by bringing real historical research and imagination together.

Witches are the new vampires!

How long did it take for you to get published? Any rejection-slip horror stories or inspirational anecdotes?

I was shockingly fortunate with Lost Book, though the road to the writing life was circuitous for me. I had always written, usually just on my own, and had never considered that writing could be a viable way to support myself. A life in academia seemed like the natural alternative, leaving time for writing and thinking in between teaching and research. I slogged my way through the first half of my PhD program, often doubled up on teaching to make ends meet. In 2005 I was scheduled to take my qualifying exams, and the stress from preparing for that process caused me to lose ten pounds, in addition to developing near chronic insomnia. The only way I could escape from that anxiety was to take my dog walking in the woods, and since my mind if left unsupervised would automatically turn itself back to worrying, I started telling myself stories as a distraction. The outline for my first novel gradually coalesced out of these stories. After passing the qualifying exam I began work on my dissertation, while secretly starting to write the novel on the side. My dissertation was slow going, however, and funding quickly began to run out.

Meanwhile, without my knowledge, a close friend who is a novelist, Matthew Pearl, mentioned my project to his wonderful, marvelous literary agent. To my utter surprise and delight, she was able to place The Lost Book of Salem with Hyperion/Voice when it was finally finished, about three years after I first started to play with the ideas that went into it. The day that my first ever advance check arrived, I had $112 in my checking account and $130 in my savings account. And it was my turn to pay the rent.

What tips or advice do you have for writers still looking to be discovered?

The first, and most important, thing that I would say to an aspiring writer is that one should never be afraid to share your work with others. I initially balked at mentioning my novel project to any of my “real” writer friends, for fear that they would think it was silly just because it was different from the kind of work that they did. Of course if I had never said anything to anyone, Matthew Pearl would never have mentioned my project to his agent, and my book would probably still be sitting on my laptop, read only by my husband and me.

The second, and perhaps equally important, suggestion that I would make is that a writer must be able to listen to constructive criticism. I had been teaching freshman composition courses at Boston University while working on the novel, and one of the biggest pedagogical challenges for me in those classes was to reassure students that writing, while it feels very personal and closely tied to who we are and what we think, is actually a project separate from ourselves. Sometimes it can help to imagine a writing project as a daring cooking experiment, like grapefruit and fennel risotto (the most colossal dinnertime failure I have ever made). You're trying new things, learning technique and ingredients. Before it comes together, it is bound to need reworking. You might have to throw the whole thing out and start over, and that is okay. Teaching students how to revise and accept criticism was invaluable in helping me revise and listen to feedback about my own work. I think I went through ten or twelve drafts of just the first chapter of The Lost Book of Salem, and not just little tweaks either: entire points of view, characters, outcomes, and pacing changed several times over. Revision and criticism can only make the work stronger.

Prologue

Marblehead, Massachusetts

Late December

1681

Peter Petford slipped a long wooden spoon into the simmering iron pot of lentils hanging over the fire and tried to push the worry from his stomach. He edged his low stool nearer to the hearth and leaned forward, one elbow propped on his knee, breathing in the aroma of stewed split peas mixed with burning apple wood. The smell comforted him a little, persuading him that this night was a normal night, and his belly released an impatient gurgle as he withdrew the spoon to see if the peas were soft enough to eat. Not a reflective man, Peter assured himself that nothing was amiss with his stomach that a bowlful of peas would not cure. Yon woman comes enow, too, he thought, face grim. He had never had use for cunning folk, but Goody Oliver had insisted. Said this woman’s tinctures cured most anything. Heard she’d conjured to find a lost child once. Peter grunted to himself. He would try her. Just the once.

From the corner of the narrow, dark room issued a tiny whimper, and Peter looked up from the steaming pot, furrows of anxiety deepening between his eyes. He nudged one of the fire logs with a poker, loosing a crackling flutter of sparks and a grey column of fresh smoke, then drew himself up from the stool.

‘Martha?’ he whispered. ‘Ye awake?’

No further sound issued from the shadows, and Peter moved softly towards the bed where his daughter had lain for the better part of a week. He pulled aside the heavy woollen curtain that hung from the bedposts, and lowered himself on to the edge of the lumpy feather mattress, careful not to jostle it. The lapping light of the fire brushed over the woollen blankets, illuminating a wan little face framed by tangles of flax-coloured hair. The eyes in the face were half open, but glassy and unseeing. Peter smoothed the hair where it lay scattered across the hard bolster. The tiny girl exhaled a faint sigh.

‘Stew’s nearly done,’ he said. ‘I’ll fetch ye some.’

As he ladled the hot food into a shallow earthenware trencher, Peter felt a flame of impotent anger rise in his chest. He gritted his teeth against the feeling, but it lingered behind his breastbone, making his breathing fast and shallow. What knew he of ministering to the girl, he thought. Every tincture he tried only made her poorly. The last word she had spoken was some three days earlier, when she had cried out in the night for Sarah.

He settled again on the side of the bed and spooned a little of the warm beans into the child’s mouth. She slurped it weakly, a thin brown stream slipping down the corner of her mouth to her chin. Peter wiped it away with his thumb, still blackened from the soot of the kitchen fire. Thinking about Sarah always made his chest tight in this way.

He gazed down at the little girl in his bed, watching closely as her eyelids closed. Since she fell ill, he had been sleeping on the wide-planked pine floor, on mildewed straw pallets. The bed was warmer, nearer the hearth, and draped in woollen hangings that had been carried all the way over from East Anglia by his father. A dark frown crossed Peter’s face. Illness, he knew, was a sign of the Lord’s ill favour. Whatsoever happen to the girl is God’s will, he reasoned. So to be angry at her suffering must be sinful, for that is to be angry at God. Sarah would have urged him to pray for the salvation of Martha’s soul, that she might be redeemed. But Peter was more accustomed to putting his mind to farming problems than godly ones. Perhaps he was not as good as Sarah had been. He could not fathom what sin Martha could have committed in her five years to bring this fit upon her, and in his prayers he caught himself demanding an explanation. He did not ask for his daughter’s redemption. He just begged for her to be well.

Confronting this spectacle of his own selfishness filled Peter with anger and shame.

He worked his fingers together, watching her sleeping face.

‘There are certain sins that make us devils,’ the minister had said at meeting that week. Peter pinched the bridge of his nose, squinting his eyes together as he tried to remember what they were.

To be a liar or murderer, that was one. Martha had once been caught hiding a filthy kitten in the family’s cupboard, and when questioned by Sarah had claimed no knowledge of any kittens. But that could hardly be a lie the way the minister meant it.

To be a slanderer or accuser of the godly was another. To be a tempter to sin. To be an opposer of godliness. To feel envy. To be a drunkard. To be proud.

Peter gazed down on the fragile, almost transparent skin of his daughter’s cheeks. He clenched one of his hands into a tight fist, pressing its knuckles into the palm of his other hand. How could God visit such torments upon an innocent? Why had He turned away His face from him?

Perhaps it was not Martha’s soul that was in danger. Perhaps the child was being punished for Peter’s own prideful lack of faith.

As this unwelcome fear bloomed in his chest, Peter heard muddy hoofbeats approach down the lane and come to a stop outside his house. Muffled voices, a man’s and a young woman’s, exchanged words, saddle leather creaked, and then a dull splash. That’ll be Jonas Oliver with yon woman, thought Peter. He rose from the bedside just as a light knuckle rapped on his door.

On his stoop, draped in a hooded woollen cloak glistening from the evening’s fog, stood a young woman with a soft, open face. She carried a small leather bag in her hands, and her face was framed by a crisp white coif that belied the miles-long journey she had had. Behind her in the shadows stood the familiar bulk of Jonas Oliver, fellow yeoman and Peter’s neighbour.

‘Goodman Petford?’ announced the young woman, looking quickly up into Peter’s face. He nodded. She flashed him an encouraging smile as she briskly flapped the water droplets off her cloak and pulled it over her head. She hung the cloak on a peg by the door hinge, smoothed her rumpled skirts with both hands, and then hurried across the stark little room and knelt by the girl in the bed. Peter watched her for a moment, then turned to Jonas, who stood in the doorway similarly wet, blowing his nose mightily into a handkerchief.

‘Dismal night,’ said Peter by way of welcome. Jonas grunted in reply. He tucked the handkerchief back up his sleeve and stamped his feet to loosen the mud from his boots, but he did not venture into the house.

‘Some victual before ye go?’ Peter offered, rubbing a hand absentmindedly across the back of his head. He was not sure if he wanted Jonas to accept his offer. The company would distract him, but his neighbour was even less inclined to idle chatter than he was. Sarah had always allowed that a wagon could crush Jonas Oliver’s foot and he would not so much as grimace.

‘Goody Oliver’ll be waiting.’ Jonas declined with a shrug. He glanced across the room to where the young woman perched, whispering to the girl in the bed. At her knees sat an attentive, dishevelled-looking little dog, some dingy colour between brown and tan, surrounded by muddy paw marks on the floor planking. Vaguely Jonas wondered where she might have carried the animal on their long ride; he had not noticed it, and her leather bag seemed hardly big enough. Mangy cur, he thought. It must belong to little Marther.

‘Come by upon the morn then,’ said Peter. Jonas nodded, touched the brim of his heavy felt hat, and withdrew into the night.

Peter settled again on the low stool near the dying hearth fire, the cooling trencher of stew on the table at his elbow. Propping his chin on his fist, he watched the strange young woman stroke his daughter’s forehead with a white hand and heard the soft, indistinct murmur of her voice. He knew that he should feel relieved that she was there. She was widely spoken of in the village. He grasped at these thoughts, wringing what little assurance he could from them. Still, as his eyes started to blur with fatigue and worry, and his head grew heavy on his arm, the vision of his tiny daughter huddled in the bed, darkness pressing in around her, filled him with dread.