“The Physic Book’’ tells the interconnected stories of two women 300 years apart: Deliverance Dane, who was hanged during the “Salem panic’’ of 1692, and Connie Goodwin, who in 1991 is working toward her doctorate from Harvard on the history of American Colonial life.
The story begins in December 1681 when a widower summons Deliverance to his Marblehead cottage to save his desperately ill child. The child dies, setting in motion the persecution of Deliverance for witchcraft.
The story moves to Cambridge in 1991, where Connie is undergoing her qualifying doctoral exam under the supervision of her disagreeable mentor, Manning Chilton.
Meanwhile, Connie’s mother, a 1960s flower child living in Santa Fe, has asked Connie to spend the summer readying for sale her grandmother’s ramshackle Colonial-era house in Marblehead. It is there that Connie happens upon a piece of paper concealed in her family Bible bearing the name Deliverance Dane.
In a fascinating depiction of the detective work involved in historical research, Connie learns that Deliverance was almost certainly an undiscovered Salem witch and that her daughter possessed a book of spells that, if extant, could serve as the basis for Connie’s dissertation. Connie plumbs numerous Boston-area archives, in the process meeting and falling in love with Sam Hartley, a steeplejack whose specialty is historical restoration. Meanwhile, Chilton becomes increasingly desperate to get his hands on the book.
Connie’s voyage to locate the physick book (and discover her own heritage and powers through an unbroken line of women starting with Deliverance) is mirrored by the second story arc that takes us back to Salem and the lives of Deliverance, her daughter, and granddaughter. As Deliverance moves closer to her fateful destiny, Connie faces the possible death of her lover Sam, who is badly injured in a suspicious fall from a scaffold. The only way to save him is to find the spellbook and “physick’’ him back to health, pitting her in a race against time - and Chilton, who wants the book to gain for himself a position among the world’s top intellectuals.
