Six Women of Salem (53 page)

“But that stubborn old man kept refusing to cooperate. He even said, ‘More weight,’ as if
he
was directing the job.”

“Oh, how do you know what he said? I hear you were puking your guts out.”

“That was later . . . and you didn’t hear his ribs crack.”

A third guard chimed in as the voices receded down the corridor: “I hear that after Corey finally died the sheriff had to poke the man’s tongue back into his mouth with the tip of his cane.”

The prisoners kept an appalled silence. Would the court order pressing for any of the others? No one knew.

Martha Corey, widowed by this nastiness, had long before dismissed Tituba, Good, and Osborn as “idle slothful persons,” easy prey for prowling devils. But Tituba has to admit that she admires how the woman faced her death. By all report, she had said her piece from the gallows, another one of her public prayers that shocked the men so. And the week before that, Reverend Parris and the deacons from the Salem Village Church had arrived at the jail to excommunicate Goody Corey—
her,
the Gospel woman herself. Tituba heard only snatches from down the hallway and overheard more from jail yard gossip. Goody Corey had refused Reverend Parris’s prayers, boldly and right to his face—not that
that
stopped him—and talked back to his comments, something Tituba had never dared to do. Yes, she has to admire the woman for
that.

Mistress Bradbury’s escape is likewise encouraging, though Tituba, as she hears the rain increase, does not imagine anyone is working to help her break out. She thought she heard some furtive noises that night, of people moving around, the grate of a key in a lock, hushed voices and the shuffle of an old woman too long in chains. Looking back, Tituba thinks that the escape must explain those sounds—as well as the angry voices the following morning.

Outside, rain drips from the eves.

Not so encouraging is Samuel Wardwell’s swift trial and condemnation. He confessed as Tituba has. He accused others also and was far more vigorous about it than she ever was. Yet he was not kept alive as a future witness but instead put before the grand jury within days when he gave up the pretense, admitted his innocence, and was tried and condemned. Now he is dead, hanged with the latest batch of eight.

How does this affect her own future? Tituba can only guess.

The sound of the rain increases to a hiss, and a damp breeze wanders through the small window.

(
16
)

Mary English, shivering in the sea wind, draws her cloak closer about her.

Her new maid is busy watching the boats maneuver among the wharves and a larger ship tacking along the channel. It seems strange to look south into the harbor instead of east, but New York City lies at the southern tip of Manhattan Island. The buildings are different too—Dutch architecture and Dutch speech instead of English for the most part. Her maid’s native Dutch is more fluent than her English. Sometimes it is a trial to communicate with her new servants. Mary is used to the French she heard in the streets of Salem and at home, but here there are more tongues and peoples. It is a good enough place, though, and they
have
found helpful people, but it is not home. Philip is more comfortable here than Mary is—her husband has traveled so much and so far, so this is hardly surprising. Mary finds herself comparing everything to Salem—the harbor, the houses. Salem is deadly to them as things stand, but she is homesick and Philip’s talk of locating here permanently vexes her.

She calls to her maid, and they begin the walk home from the market. As the wind picks up she feels a tightening in her chest, fumbles for the handkerchief in her pocket, and presses it to her mouth to muffle a cough—and another cough. On the flight south or here in this alien city she has caught something she cannot shake.

Philip is home before them, full of fresh air and news from the marketplace.

“Finally!” he says in a triumphant tone. “The fools in Massachusetts are admitting doubts, consulting New York ministers for their advice in handling the witch accusations.” Philip knows how the accusers ought to have been treated from the beginning. “Liars all of them,” he has said often enough. “Fools. Maybe someone will listen this time,” though he has his doubts about Will Stoughton. “That obstinate
cochon
never changes his mind.”

He goes on about this and about how the province of New York is the place in which he should have settled years ago. The news is hopeful, but it makes Mary all the more homesick. Although New York was unlikely to prosecute witch suspicions, the politics here can be savage: the leaders in the government that took over after Andros’s fall were drawn and quartered as traitors when the new royal governor arrived.

And the children—how are they faring? Sooner or later the witch scare has to end, but will Philip let her return? She longs to be in her own home among her own things, though many of their goods were confiscated after their escape became known. She thinks of her girlhood sampler. Where is it now? Things like that are not just possessions, earthly goods as opposed to treasures in Heaven. They hold her history and maintain ties to her past, to her mother.

Philip has lived in so
many
places—it isn’t the same for him. He does not long to see Salem again, the light on the sea, the blue and distant islands, the long back of Marblehead across the harbor, beyond the bristle of Salem’s masts and spars—home.

____________________

T
he September hangings marked a turning point in the witch trials. Enough people harboring uncertainty had joined those who opposed the trials that officials allowed a month’s pause until the next session on November 2 so the legislature might convene in Boston to rewrite the laws of Massachusetts. This created a breathing space as well as an excuse to pull back. It gave the Nurse family time to plan and hope.

But not everyone thought the court had been mistaken.

Neighbors in Lynn, Boston, Reading, and Gloucester still feared—and accused—their neighbors. A girl in Andover thought a certain dog was an imp, so someone shot the creature dead. Another dog acting strangely in Salem Village was thought to be the
victim
of witchcraft, ridden by the specter of John Bradstreet (the Andover magistrate’s brother), but someone killed this animal anyway. Critics of the court’s methods remarked acidly that this was the only afflicted victim who was punished; clearly they thought the human afflicted needed punishment. Mary Warren must have heard this view expressed, must have seen disapproving glares directed at her, which now replaced the approval that had encouraged her deadly antics all summer. Nevertheless, for the time being both Dudley and John Bradstreet as well as John’s wife fled to New Hampshire.

At some point the afflicted in Salem named a gentleman in Boston who, instead of fleeing, immediately informed his accusers that they were liable to an expensive lawsuit if they continued. The accusers backed down, abruptly and conveniently unsure of their identification.

Another unidentified Boston man “of no small note,” convinced that his ailing child was bewitched, brought the child all the way to Salem for spectral diagnosis and received the names of two Boston-area women whom he already suspected: Mrs. Mary Obinson and Mrs. Elizabeth Cary. Yet when he returned home and made his complaint before Boston magistrates, they refused to have any part of it; Mrs. Cary was in New York by then anyway, but Mrs. Obinson, a quarrelsome woman in a turbulent marriage, was spared arrest.

Reverend Increase Mather gave the man a severe dressing-down. Was there not a God in Boston, Mather snapped, that he felt he had to go to the Devil in Salem for advice? Mather had recently finished writing a lengthy essay,
Cases of Conscience
, that marshaled the reasons why spectral evidence should
not
be used in court. Increase made it clear that he believed in the reality of witches but did not trust the court’s present methods of discerning them. Spectral evidence, he argued, had its source in the Devil and therefore could not be trusted. On October 3 his son Cotton Mather had read the piece to the monthly meeting of Boston-area ministers in Cambridge for its first public presentation.

Suspects were still being arrested, however, for on the same day as the reading of
Cases of Conscience
, Sarah Cole of Lynn faced the Salem magistrates, her very presence sending Mary Warren into the usual fits. Mary recounted the names of other suspects’ specters consorting with the defendant, but Sarah Cole was convinced that specters besieged
her,
blaming her own sister-in-law. The most self-incriminating information she admitted now was, when she was a girl, using a Venus Glass and egg “to see what trade their sweethearts would be of”—folk magic that some of the afflicted girls had tried themselves.

By October 6 the court had already begun releasing prisoners on bail, beginning with the children and young people from Andover—even Mary Lacey, who had accused her own mother and grandmother. Bail was high, far higher than Reverend Parris’s £60 yearly salary—when he was paid, as he had not been—and would be forfeited if the defendants were not produced for trial when called. Neighborhood men joined forces to assemble the required sums: £500 sterling each for Mary Lacey Jr. and John Sawdey; somewhat less for five others, including Martha Carrier’s daughter Sarah. At least twelve more would be released before the year ended.

Other prisoners managed to break jail instead, although escapees were subject to fines. On October 7, the day after the Andover releases, Sheriff George Corwin nearly confiscated the goods and chattels belonging to fugitives Edward and Sarah Bishop, but their son Samuel managed to borrow and pay the £10 fine, for which he received a receipt.

Boston Merchant Thomas Brattle, like Increase Mather, also composed his thoughts on why the court’s present methods could not be trusted, mentioning the people who had escaped to New York and the government’s reluctance to recapture them. His argument, dated October 8, circulated in manuscript.

Reverend Samuel Willard, who had been accused back in June—an accusation the court dismissed as an error—and who had helped Philip and Mary English escape, also wrote about the folly of accepting spectral evidence. This appeared in an anonymous pamphlet, though everyone seemed to know who was responsible for it.

At the same time Cotton Mather completed his account of the trials as requested by Lieutenant Governor William Stoughton, who perhaps hoped to fortify the public’s wavering support for the court that he led as chief justice. Stoughton called Cotton’s work an “Elaborate and most seasonable Discourse” in his letter authorizing its publication.

Although Cotton had previously warned against embracing spectral evidence, he accepted the court’s assurance that far more than that had been used to convict the defendants. This stance resulted in some uncomfortable feelings between himself and his father, though the two apparently came to agree that the two books presented dual aspects of this problem. Gossip concluded that the Mathers were at loggerheads, and historians have argued over the matter ever since.

Stoughton’s introductory letter referred to him “still Labouring and Proceeding in the Trial of the persons Accused and Convicted for Witchcraft,” but when Cotton’s book appeared around October 12, many people assumed the Court of Oyer and Terminer was canceled, though no official word confirmed that assumption.

On October 12 Captain Nathaniel Cary set out for New York to join, or rejoin, his wife with the encouraging news as nine men from Andover petitioned the legislature on behalf of their imprisoned wives, daughters, neighbors. Omitting the fact that, for a time, some of them had doubted their own wives’ innocence, the men noted that the approaching winter cold and scanty food not only added to the prisoners’ sufferings but might also prove deadly if prolonged. Therefore, might at least the repentant suspects “be released to their families to be cared for until the court sent for them?”

A second Andover petition on October 18 emphasized that several of the prisoners were church members with blameless reputations who were now “accused of witchcraft, by some distempered persons in these parts.” Furthermore, “we know not who can think himself safe, if the Accusations of children and others who are under a Diabolicall influence shall be received against persons of good fame.” Both documents complained of the burdensome court and jail fees that families had to shoulder.

Now and then the prisoners had visitors—relatives bringing food and clothing—if they were lucky—concerned friends and charitable neighbors coming to offer comfort as well as gawkers and the idly curious.

Then, possibly on October 19, two gentlemen from Boston, Reverend Increase Mather and Thomas Brattle, entered the Salem jail to speak with the prisoners. Both had criticized the court’s methods and now came to speak directly with the accused. Mather was prepared to take notes. He had spoken with some of the prisoners earlier, when they had held to their self-damning confessions.

Now
several Andover women were eager to recant their earlier stories.

Her confession, Mrs. Mary Osgood explained, “was wholly false,” the product of “the violent urging and unreasonable pressings that were used toward her.” None of it had happened.

Why then, Mather asked, had she provided such specific details about signing the Devil’s book, undergoing the Devil’s baptism, and the like? Because, she explained, the magistrates had dismissed her denials, insisting instead that she
had
done these things, that they knew when she had done them, and so she must tell them. So she had desperately searched her memory for likely occasions when it
might
have happened and, little by little, concocted enough of a detailed account that the magistrates might accept.