Magnolia Blood

Book excerpt: An irony of their personal history is that the vivid imagination so rampant in the world into which Dorcas had been born and then shackled is the only available source of how she arrived in her new home and who she actually considered herself to be there. She had moved from the coven of Salem witchcraft and its lingering aftermath to the covert of Beaufort. It became her hiding place. Like a bird or a snake, she hoped to lurk there in a kind of invisibility, but in time she produced a child. That little girl grew to adulthood in and around Beaufort. Her connection to weak-minded but crafty Dorcas lived in the daughter’s youthful mind, and stories about what had happened to Dorcas in Salem circulated in the village as well. Perhaps some of the passengers on board the ship that brought Dorcas to Beaufort had recognized her. Word spread. Her daughter became the subject of local gossip by 1720, just as Sarah Good and Dorcas had been during the witching days in 1692-93. And evil days such as those might come again. This time in Beaufort....