Six Women of Salem (3 page)

In 1674 Elizabeth Clungen, a desperate woman who had been living in the neighborhood, left her four-year-old child at the Nurse household, then, according to the county records, “went away out of the jurisdiction privately.” Elizabeth, whose own identity is obscure, had been married to one Thomas Clungen, who had earlier lived in Ipswich. She and Thomas were in Salem when their daughter, also named Elizabeth, was born in August 1670. Perhaps Thomas soon died. By the time her daughter was four, Elizabeth left a quantity of household furnishings stored at Goodman Richard Sibley’s and ­entrusted the child to the Nurses—or, rather, to Rebecca. After Elizabeth did not return, Francis appeared before the authorities and “in charity took the child into his care and custody.” The Essex County court ordered the Clungen property inventoried—iron cookware, bedding, a chest, and a silk waistcoat among other items—and granted a chair, a lamp, and a few other items to Sibley as payment for “house room, room & trouble about the goods.” Francis paid the Clungen’s debts with some of the other items and retained the rest “for the use of the child.” Unfortunately, what became of mother or child is unclear. Such were often the fates of the impoverished and dispossessed.

Having been relieved of militia duty and having served a term as constable, Francis occasionally sat on grand juries and trial juries in Essex County’s Quarterly Courts, gave evidence in land cases, and helped inventory the estates of deceased neighbors. In 1676 he was part of a coroner’s jury that considered the alarming death of Jacob Goodall, a slow-witted man allegedly beaten to death by Giles Corey. (The court decided that Corey was not the sole means of the man’s demise but set him a heavy fine nonetheless. This essentially favorable ruling made some folk conclude that Corey had bought his way out of a murder charge and its accompanying noose. Goodall’s death and the “thwarted” justice would continue to be a topic of gossip.) In 1677 Francis was named guardian of the orphaned teenager Samuel Southwick, whose grandparents, Lawrence and Cassandra Southwick, had been exiled from Massachusetts years earlier as convicted Quakers.

While all this went on, worsening relations between the settlers and the native peoples erupted in 1675 into the conflict known as King Philip’s War. Both sides suffered great losses, but the Indians lost nearly everything, including self-rule.

Once that disaster subsided locally—for skirmishes continued to the Eastward on the Maine and New Hampshire frontier—Francis made a down payment on a three hundred–acre farm to Reverend James Allen on April 29, 1678. (Francis had evidently rented that land or another farm nearby because the coroner’s jury he had served on was made up of men from the same neighborhood.) Allen lived in Boston and had acquired the farm through marriage to the widow Elizabeth Endicott, whose first husband, John Endicott, had inherited the farm from
his
father, Governor John Endicott. The governor had once owned the whole peninsula between the Crane and Cow House Rivers with his Orchard Farm to the east and Governor’s Plain to the west, where Francis and Rebecca settled. Endicott heirs still owned most of Orchard Farm, but lawsuits flared disputing the widow’s right to let the land pass out of the family when there were no Endicott heirs from her first marriage. However, Nurse was not part of that legal tussle, and the courts eventually recognized Allen’s right to the land. (Though conflicting boundary surveys did lead to disputes between Francis and Zerubabel Endicott, who cut wood on the disputed land. Francis twice sued him for trespass and twice lost.)

The terms of purchase were somewhat unusual in that the full price of £400 was not due for twenty-one years (and both Francis and Rebecca were already in their late fifties). Within that time Nurse would pay rent of £7 a year for the first dozen years and £10 yearly thereafter. He would be credited for improvements made to the farm and reimbursed, if he did not complete the transaction, for any improvements over the value of £150. Best of all, any proportion of the principal paid before the twenty-one-year deadline would count as the purchase of an equal proportion of the land, so that if he could not pay the whole £400, he would not lose the entire farm.

The two small rivers that bordered the Endicott lands narrowed inland into creeks as they reached the Nurse property, forming a peninsula called Birchwood. To the north was the Conamabsqnooncant, which the settlers called Duck or Crane River. To the south flowed the Soewamapenessett, called the Cow-House or Endicott River (Endicott’s cow barn was near its shore), and it bordered William Towne’s former farm. The road from Salem to Ipswich crossed these two salty streams near the Nurse property by Rum Bridge (at Philips’s tavern) to the south and Hadlock’s Bridge (named for the neighboring farmer) to the north.

Francis built a house here on a gentle rise above the fields and meadows. It probably had one room downstairs and one room above and faced south, with its back to the winter winds. (Another house stands there now, with some of its timbers recycled from an older building.)

In 1680 Elizabeth Morse of Newbury, an elderly woman formerly beset by poltergeists, was convicted of witchcraft, but because the branches of government could not agree on the degree of her guilt, she was spared from hanging and returned home to a form of house arrest instead.

Rebecca’s mother, Joanna, died in 1682 after ten years of widowhood, and the Towne estate was divided among her children: land to the three sons, household goods to the three daughters. “Francis Nurs with the consent of Rebeka” made his mark on the agreement. Her two sisters made their own marks: “Mary Esty, formerly Mary Towne” and “Sarah Bridges.” (This youngest sister would soon be widowed and marry a second time to Peter Cloyce.)

Shortly after this time Francis may have faced some manner of financial pinch, for he mortgaged the farm back to Reverend Allen in 1684, a situation apparently soon remedied. Not so quickly resolved, however, was the loss of the Massachusetts Charter that year. England revoked all charters in its realm, then restored them as each colony, business, and any other organization proved its loyalty to the crown. Massachusetts, however, resisted, so England combined all the colonies from Maine to West Jersey into one province, and in 1686 sent the royally appointed Governor Sir Edmund Andros to rule with the help of a regiment of redcoats.

In 1688 Goodwife Glover of Boston was hanged as a witch (under Andros’s government).When news arrived the next spring that the Glorious Revolution in England had overthrown King James II and placed William and Mary on the throne, Boston rebelled, jailed Andros, and shipped him back to England. Unfortunately, his absence encouraged more frontier attacks from French and Indian forces.

Then, in the fall of 1689, someone’s pigs dug up Rebecca’s garden. This exasperated her enough that she, with her youngest son, marched over to Benjamin Holton’s house and exchanged heated words about wandering swine and the damage they caused. Holton fell ill and died not long afterward, a circumstance that would later cause considerable trouble.

At the beginning of 1690 the aging Francis divided some of his fields into long, narrow strips of and conveyed them to his son Samuel Nurse and to his sons-in-law Thomas Preston and John Tarbell, adding to the land he had already given them. The youngest son, Benjamin, and his wife were living at the homestead and working his father’s farm. Then, in June 1691, Benjamin was called to militia duty Eastward (Maine and New Hampshire). Rather than risk his son’s life, or lose his labor, Francis hired a neighbor to take his place, an arrangement that was legal at the time. John Hadlock had served his own term six months earlier but accepted the job in return for the military pay plus two shillings six pence a week from the Nurse family and the loan of a gun. Hadlock returned on leave the following December to collect twenty shillings from Francis, who had arranged payment through his friends Jonathan Walcott and Daniel Andrews.

Thus began 1692 for the Nurse family.

Benjamin was safe at home with his wife and their new baby. Rebecca was by now rather hard of hearing and not feeling her best. Nonetheless, she had her faith and her family around her, and what could be better than that?

Bridget stands in the marketplace, glaring over the gag that muffles her mouth as she watches the people watching her.

Arms folded before her, she stares down the gawkers, those who gaze directly and smirk to see her there, the brats who shout insults, the adults who look shocked to read the caption pinned on the front of her cap, those who whisper to each other and glance away as if fearful of
her
glance.

With his black staff of office to show he is on duty, a constable stands by her to make sure that she does not leave before her time is up and that onlookers remain orderly. Now and then he gossips with his friends among the passersby, making nervous jests to keep his confidence, edgy about having to remain so close to such as she, as some folk think of her as more than merely a scold. Thus the constable is tethered here as well by her sentence and for the same amount of allotted time. This gives Bridget a modest amount of satisfaction.

She thinks she sees her daughter in the crowd, keeping to the edges and looking fearful. Her child’s concern touches her, but she shouldn’t have to see her mother mortified like this. Bridget catches the child’s eye and shakes her head, motioning the girl to leave, to go home, which she does, with regret and relief competing in her face.

Bridget has been found guilty of fighting with her husband, of shouting terrible insults at him.

And so she had.

And so had
he
—
fought and insulted her in front of their little girl, and not for the first time. The county court had found him guilty as well, but he was not here to be stared at and made a mockery. No, he was one of the onlookers. His older daughter—Bridget’s stepdaughter—had paid her father’s fine to spare him this hour of humiliation.

No one offered to spare Bridget.

Well, he
is
an old rogue and as bad as a devil to be married to,
she thinks as the interminable minutes unfold. The facts, damning as they might be, are no less true because Bridget shouted them in the presence of others. If she regrets anything, it is getting into
this
situation, having to endure the court’s public punishment.

Standing there, she is certain of one thing: fighting back she does not regret, nor landing a clout on his scowling face that resulted in such a satisfying
smack!

____________________

Bridget’s earliest record concerns her marriage to Samuel Wasselbe on April 13, 1660, at St. Mary-in-the-Marsh in Norwich, Norfolk County, England. Just what Goodman Wasselbe did and to whom he may have been related is another unanswered question. (The variously spelled Aslebee family of Andover would have two of their number accused of witchcraft in 1692
—
Rebecca (Aslebee) Johnson and Sarah (Aslebee) Cole
—
but presently there is no definite connection known between the families.) Samuel and
Bridget
’s son Benjamin was baptized in the same church on October 6, 1663. As this is the only record, presumably Benjamin died young.

Sometime between spring of the next year and the following winter Samuel himself died. Their daughter Mary was born in Boston, Massachusetts Bay, on January 10, 1665. The record there calls her a daughter of “Samuel dec[eased] & Bridget Wasselbee late of Norwich in England.” Mary is not mentioned again and, like her brother, apparently died in infancy.

Had Samuel lived to set sail for New England?

If so, he could have died on shipboard or shortly after landfall. He certainly died before the birth of their daughter in Boston. Either way Bridget had endured the discomforts of pregnancy on top of the miseries of a long sea voyage. Crossings could take anywhere from six weeks (if the winds were favorable) to several months, with passengers crowded together on a lower deck or into the few tiny cabins, lurching with the roll of the vessel, dependent on slop buckets for latrines, risking disease from such close quarters or scurvy from inadequate diet, and hoping not to encounter either pirates or tempests that could send them to the bottom of the sea with no one ashore to know their fate.

(Later the bewitched girls would accuse Bridget of murdering her first husband, Goodman Wasselbe. What spiteful gossip had they ­absorbed?)

The following year widow Bridget Wasselbe was in Salem, where she married widower Thomas Oliver on July 26, 1666. He too was from Norwich, where he had been a calendar, someone who put a smooth finish on cloth, and had even returned there from New England for a time (without his first wife, who remained in Salem, refusing to join him). Thomas had three grown children by his late wife, Mary: two sons in their thirties and a daughter, also named Mary, now married to Job Hilliard. (His first wife had been a turbulent woman, a Sabbath breaker who was also given to showering insults and threats of bodily harm onto those who crossed her. She not only called New Englanders “theeves and Robbers” and uttered “divers mutinous speeches” before Captain William Hathorne but also “said the Governor was unjust, corrupt and a wretch” for fining her on insufficient evidence for stealing two goats.)

With Thomas, Bridget had a third child on May 8, 1667, Christian Oliver,
and this daughter lived.

The marriage, however, was neither happy nor even compatible. Thomas had enough of a temper that he once openly defied a constable. (In 1669 he did, however, accept the official task of going “from house to house about the town once a month to inquire what strangers do come or have privily thrust themselves into the town.” The town’s poor fund could accommodate only so many, and not many at that, and Quakers were a constant headache.)