The Prologue to Rookdale, a new novel coming out later this year

Here is a sneak peek at a new novel with witches and warlocks, set on the coast of Maine on the present day. The novel, Rookdale, will be released later this year.

No part of this preview can be used in any way without the express permission of the author. You can contact me through the blog if you wish to use any part of my work in order to obtain permission.

Rookdale is my copyrighted work, 2019

ROOKDALE

by 

Susan Buffum

Prologue

     I live three blocks from where I work downtown. Every day I pass old houses and buildings built in the mid-1600’s through the turn of the twentieth century. It’s rare to come across a structure built after the 1920’s here, unless you go north or south to the newer residential areas. Downtown Rookdale is actually more like a classic New England village. It is so scenic, so picturesque that it should be on picture postcards but as far as I know it isn’t. The town used to be called Rockdale, probably because of the ring of granite rocks out on the county road that jut up out of the earth like the broken teeth of a humongous dinosaur. Local legend is that the rock ring is haunted by ghosts of the witches hung, drowned or stoned to death back around the time of the Salem witch hysteria. It swept up the coast and into New Hampshire and then Maine.

     Rockdale wasn’t immune to the frenzy. Nine people were accused of witchcraft here in the late 1600’s, but the most famous “witch” was a real witch named Mercy Cooper who, it is said, transformed herself into a great black rook when she saw the sour-faced Magistrate Thayer coming to accuse her of sorcery and consorting with the devil. He had his constables with him. The story goes that this humongous black bird dove down from the branches of the great, silvery beech tree on the Cooper property and plucked the left eye right out of the Magistrate’s head. It then flew back up into the branches where it devoured the eyeball and then cawed raucously as if laughing. Of course there was a period of chaos after such a bizarre attack and no one ever saw where the bird flew off to. Mercy Cooper was found in her kitchen where she was dying wool for weaving. The dye, which happened to be red, was purported to be a potion containing droplets of the magistrate’s blood. She vehemently denied the accusation but was hauled off to jail protesting her innocence nonetheless. Of course, back in those days the men of Church and Law dominated the courts and poor Mercy Cooper had no one but her immediate family—a husband crippled in a farming accident and three sturdy teenaged sons—to vouch for her.

     She was found guilty of witchcraft and was promptly hung from the beech tree on her own property. The sons were not allowed to cut her down for seven days. How gruesome was that? Anyway, on the eighth day she was cut down from the tree and quietly buried in the family cemetery on the property with the Reverend Fowler intoning numerous prayers over her to trap her evilness beneath the earth, sprinkling her with holy water (while probably hoping to see and hear her not so fresh flesh sizzle). When he was finished with his religious falderal the Cooper’s quietly filled the hole with dirt and placed a simple stone with the name Mercy carved on it over her final resting place.

     Here’s the truth of it, she was a witch, and a damn fine one. It was just a fluke that she was singled out as she kept to herself mostly She made the mistake of cursing a sharp-tongued young woman named Abigail Smith who happened to be pregnant at the time. Abigail delivered a stillborn infant, not unusual at that time as medicine was very crude still and prenatal care was nonexistent and, of course, in her grief, she recalled Mercy Cooper cursing her and blamed the woman for the baby’s death, citing witchcraft. If Mercy had held her tongue she’d have been fine. Her weaving skills were, quite simply, amazing, and she made the brightest dyes from natural ingredients she found on her property and in the surrounding woods. She had a book she kept her dye recipes in, but rumor has it that the book was confiscated, presented at her trial as evidence of her sorcery and spell-making, and burned in the village square.

     You can find all this information in the Rockdale Public Library which sits between the Rockdale Historical Society and the Rockdale Municipal Building. These are now, of course, known as the Rookdale Public Library, the Rookdale Historical Society and the Rookdale Municipal Building, but the carved stone lintels tell you otherwise as it would prove too costly to replace them with the new name of the town so we’ve all learned to ignore the old names and just refer to them by their new names, which totally confuses tourists who can’t figure out where the hell they really are when they wind up out this way.

     By the way, I’ve spent a lot of time at the Rookdale Historical Society. It’s situated in an original 1600’s single-story house with three rooms with a small mid-twentieth century addition off the back that houses a tiny kitchen and a lavatory.  Mrs. Lydia Argyll is the curator of the collection of books, diaries, manuscripts, artifacts, antiques, old photographs, early family portraits and landscapes, crumbling old business ledgers and various public and private papers that comprise the collection housed there. She is about as old as the house—just kidding! But she’s got to be in her nineties at least. I love her dearly and have spent a lot of time there sipping Earl Gray tea and nibbling dry digestive biscuits while listening to her relate Rookdale’s history as if she lived through its entirety and had firsthand knowledge of all the families and events that have occurred here since it was founded in the late 1630’s.