Six Women of Salem (5 page)

On December 14, 1687, Christian Mason was presented by the grand jury on “suspicion of taking away a piece of brass out of Salem Mill about five months since.” Clerk of the Court Stephen Sewall issued summons for Dolbier and Stacey to appear the following day as witnesses.

According to Stacey, after fetching the brass from Dolbier, he went immediately to Edward Bishop’s house to confront Bridget, “Whereupon,” Thomas later testified, “the said Bridget Bishop kneeled down on her knees and asked him forgiveness and said she was sorry that she had taken the brass and that she would do so no more.” In addition to this impromptu confession (according to Stacey), Bridget repeated her apology some while after this encounter at his mill. Once again she fell to her knees and begged forgiveness. (Perhaps, thinking she was a witch as well as a thief, he thought that this unlikely tale of Bridget’s ostentatious remorse would encourage the court to be easy on her, thereby persuading her not to take spectral revenge on him.)

Yet Sewall issued a warrant for the sheriff or a deputy to “forthwith seize the person of Bridget the wife of Edward Bishop” and bring her to court “for feloniously taking away a piece of brass sometime last summer from Thomas Stacey.”

Then later, on March 6, 1688, Deputy Jeremiah Neal brought Bridget before Justice John Hathorne at the next county court. There Stacey again charged Bridget with the theft. Thomas said she “twice acknowledged herself guilty,” sticking to the story he had given in evidence back in December.

When the court questioned Bridget, however, she made it conspicuously clear that Stacey had
not
come to her house after fetching the brass from Dolbier. Furthermore, according to Bridget, Stacey had spoken to her about the matter only
once
at the mill, and she had certainly not admitted to
any
theft then or later—to him or to anyone else. She did not recognize the thing and did
not
know where it came from. Finally, she had
not
tried to sell the brass—she only wanted Dolbier to identify it.

Despite her assertions, the court ordered that she be committed to Salem jail until her trial at the next Session of the Peace in Ipswich. Fortunately, Edward Bishop and William Reeves posted £20 surety before Judge Hathorne so that Bridget could avoid jail—for the time being. Unfortunately, the record falls silent at this point. Presumably, for lack of convincing evidence, her case was dismissed.

This victory, such as it was, neither calmed nor cowed Bridget. She told Stacey that it was
his
doing that she had been arrested. He had already done her “more mischief than any other body,” because “folks would believe him before anybody else.” William found these recriminations most threatening and knew who to suspect when, one dark night en route to his barn, he found himself tossed bodily against a stone wall and down a bank. And when he passed Goody Bishop on the road by the brick kiln, his horse’s tackle “flew in pieces and the cart fell down.” More seriously, he suspected Bridget’s malice after his healthy baby daughter Priscilla died unexpectedly in 1690 after two weeks of agonized crying.

So seldom is the appearance of
anyone
of the times described that even a scrap of detail helps bring the character to greater life. With Bridget, two witnesses mentioned articles of clothing worn by her alleged specter, items that prompted the supposed victims to identify the apparition as hers. (Most people’s wardrobes were seldom extensive.) Because two of the specified items were red, many assume that Bridget was a flashy brazen character—or at least that the authorities disapproved of her attire. Richard Coman had the waking dream of seeing Bridget “in her red paragon bodice and the rest of her clothing that she then usually did wear,” whereas William Stacey would testify that her specter wore “a black cap and a black hat and a red coat with two eakes of two colors.”

A woman’s coat was a petticoat (a skirt) that could be worn in multiple layers for warmth. An eake is an addition. Bridget may have added either decorative embellishments or just patches of whatever she had available to mend an old garment that was growing older. A bodice (from the word body) was an upper garment of a woman’s dress, generally boned or otherwise stiffened. Paragon was a heavy wool or a wool mixed with either silk or linen, sometimes printed or watered, used for clothing or furnishings. It was made in varying qualities and was not necessarily expensive or, as people may have viewed Bridget’s attire, extravagant.

Red was actually a favorite color but was fairly expensive if the dye could stand up to light and occasional washing without fading to rust. Black dye—a soberly fashionable color—was also expensive and subject to fading unless it was of good quality.

Despite the stereotypes later generations would foist on their memory, Puritans did not confine themselves to black and gray; earth tones were the most commonly available dyes. But inventories that specify color contain such surprises as the occasional violet, orange, sky- or lion-colored garments, for men as well as women.

Bridget was not necessarily flashy, but she was not a shy character either. Although the courts had twice decided that Bridget was neither a thief nor a witch, gossip and suspicion continued to dog her. Such irritating rumors, she was all too well aware, could, under the wrong circumstances, prove deadly indeed.

Mary sits by the light of a second-story window in a seaport town as she stitches. From outside she hears the cries of gulls, the thump and rattle of cargo being unloaded from ships, and the shouts and curses of sea-faring men. She holds a narrow linen strip nearly two feet long to the daylight and counts off the fine threads with the tip of her needle, then she draws a line of bright silk through this backing until it lies smooth and straight, making a tiny, perfect X.

She is fifteen and has been working on her sampler off and on for months. She has practiced and practiced again, pulled apart and done over the stitches she is learning until hand and eye and intention begin to work in concert and she can concentrate on the intricate interlaced designs—stylized flowers and fruit.

Once done, this strip that shows her skill will be a dictionary of stitches that skilled housewives need to know for making and mending the family’s clothes and for marking the linens before entrusting such valuable items to a laundress.

When I’m grown and mistress of my own household,
she thinks . . . but she pauses and sighs.

The breeze through the window is as damp and salty as tears. Just this spring Aunt Starr has died, leaving a family bereft and all her housewifely preparations cut short. Sorrow and death intrude unexpectedly even with the godly, even with the loved.

Mary sighs again and then turns to the work at hand.

Nearly done at last, she admires the rows of stylized strawberries and acorns, pansies and tulips, roses and honeysuckle. Across a ground of fine linen (grown in New England fields) twine flowery bands worked in lustrous blue, pink, and green silks from China.

China!

So far away,
she thinks, where silken strands are gathered from worms as skilled as spiders, passed from hand to hand by traders and then brought to Salem in ships like her father’s.

She checks the straightness of the stitches with a critical eye, while outside quarreling gulls squawk and swoop over the roof. Men’s voices also approach, arguing in a lower tone. Running stitch, cross-stitch, Algerian eye, back stitch and double running, seeding and buttonhole, Spanish stitch, and long-armed cross.

She has worked the alphabet in ordinary cross-stitch and prepares to add her own name at the lower right, but the letters take up too much room to allow all of it on one line:

MARY HOLLINGWOR

TH

She secures and cuts the thread.

There . . . done at last.

The voices come closer, grow louder, and she recognizes the handyman’s with another gruff and resentful voice right outside the gate. Then she hears her mother’s voice, sharp and commanding, interrupt them. Father is away at sea, but he left Mother in charge at home. The arguing stops, and she hears the hired man mumble something subdued. Mary peers from the window in time to see the other man slouch off, grumbling toward the harbor. So that is over. Mother can always speak up when necessary, no matter what other folk might say.

Mary holds the sampler at length. So practical an item and how ­beautiful—she allows herself a rush of pardonable pride and then runs downstairs to show it to her mother.

____________________

M
ary was approximately fifteen when she worked her sampler, which is real and still survives, nearly four centuries later—one of the few extant artifacts from the hands of one of the accused. The particularly rich stock of family lore her descendants repeated (some of it more fanciful than factual) claimed that
Mary
learned the needlework in Boston at the school of a Madame Piedmont, so she may have stitched it in that city instead of at home in Salem. Certainly such institutions of female accomplishment were available for Mary’s daughters at the end of the century. Generally students boarded with the schoolmistress or elsewhere; Mary had relatives in Boston with whom she might have lived, such as her father’s half-brother William Hunter. The stories agree that she received a better education than did most girls of her time. She could certainly write—descendants preserved a scrap of her poetry—and her mother possessed a dictionary when few such volumes were published even in Europe.

At age seven, her father, William, had come to Salem in 1635 in the ship
Blessing
with his parents Richard and Susan Hollingworth, three Hollingworth siblings, and six Hunter half-brothers and-sisters from his mother’s first marriage. (These included eleven-year-old William Hunter, for although sharing the same given name for half-siblings was not common, it was not unknown, especially if the name were important to both sides of the blended family.) His surname was variously spelled Hollingsworth, Hollinsworth, Hollingworth (as Mary stitched on her sampler), and Hollingwood, and it may have referred to a holly tree—or perhaps not, as the name was sometimes written as Holland.

The family settled on the Neck, a peninsula at the end of Salem’s larger peninsula, at Point of Rocks. Salem Neck, with its narrow, easily fenced entrance, was mostly common land, reserved by the town as a Sunday pasture for local cattle. Granted, cattle had to graze, but the herdsman need not spoil his Sabbath driving them to more distant fields on a day when Scripture dictated that only the most necessary labor should be done. The Hollingworth shipyard stood near their home inside the Neck gate.

Attached by a narrow causeway to the southeast side of the Neck between Winter Harbor and Cat Cove lay Winter Island, also mostly common land. Fishermen rented space here from the town for their storehouses and stages, the wooden racks for drying and curing fish. Townsmen also built a fort at the tip to guard Salem Harbor from possible attack from French or Dutch warships and to serve as a ­setting-out point for their own vessels sent against Canadian privateers or “Turkish pirates.”

The patriarch Richard prospered as a shipbuilder and property owner despite occasional problems with the law, as when he traveled unnecessarily on a Sabbath (and earned a spell in the stocks) or proved prone to “much sleeping” during religious services (for which he was admonished). His sons Richard Jr. and William also followed the maritime profession, trading from port to port in their own ships.

Sometime before 1661 William married a woman named Eleanor and acquired a house on the shore in the neighborhood just outside the Neck gate (likely a wedding present from his father). Eleanor’s family, whose last name may or may not have been Storey, remembered her as being unusually well educated and possessing a mind of her own. The couple’s eldest child, Mary, was born in the new house or at Point of Rocks, depending on the account, around 1650 or 1651. (Mary gave her age as thirty-nine in 1692 and was supposed to be forty-two in 1694.) William and Eleanor also had two more children: William Jr., who, like his father, would be a mariner and merchant, and Susanna, who died young.

According to one source, the house burned in 1663, and the Hollingworths spent the next decade living nearby. During this time a Narragansett Indian called John was tried and ordered to be whipped ten stripes in 1669 “for striking Mr. Wm. Hollingworth’s wife dead” (meaning unconscious). The court then had John whipped another ten stripes for being drunk (and it fined the man who sold him the liquor). This may have been the same John who, with another Indian named Nimrod, was fined later that year for “the attempt of a rape of two women.” They had barged into various remote households when the husbands were absent and bullied the wives into serving them food while making bawdy, threatening remarks and gestures. Fortunately those women escaped.

By 1672 William, who still owned land, built a fine new home on the site of the burnt one. This new edifice boasted two rooms per floor, a large stone cellar, and facade gables—a sizeable house for the time. A storehouse stood nearby, and a wharf projected into Salem Harbor just across the public way that bounded the property on the water side.

By this time William had business dealings with one Philippe L’Anglois, a French-speaking merchant from the Isle of Jersey who had recently settled in Salem. His surname—variously spelled as Langlois, Langloys, L’Anglais, Lengloz, LeEnglays, and Lenglois—meant “the Englishman.” He soon anglicized it to Philip English.