Six Women of Salem (50 page)

The same anecdote had Mary speak sense to him. “Do you not think that they, who have suffered already, are innocent?”

Philip agreed reluctantly.

“Why then, may we not suffer also?” asked Mary. “Take Mr. Moody’s advice.”

The ministers declared that if Phillip would not try to save them both, they would take his wife to safety themselves. They had made arrangements already with the jailer, with various “worthy persons” of Boston, even, some would say, with the governor himself.

And escape they did, for both Philip and Mary English were established in New York by early October.

The story has a few variants as it passed from generation to generation as well as several problems and contradictions.

In one version Philip escaped alone on horseback, with the horse’s iron shoes nailed on backward to confuse trackers (the same story also applied to Captain John Alden).

More often the couple are said to have used a coach provided by Boston sympathizers or New York merchants, with Mary in the coach, Philip on horseback outside, or both in the coach with their eldest daughter, Mary, Susanna having been sent to boarding school.

One variant had the coach waiting outside South Meeting House (Reverend Willard’s Third Church) during services. When the Englishes left the building under guard, friends jostled between the couple and the guards, crowded the latter back inside, and somehow locked the doors to allow Philip and Mary to get a good enough head start.

Another story had a “conveyance” meet them by the prison door at midnight and spirit them to New York along with letters of introduction to the governor there, some from Phips himself, while officials turned a blind eye to the departure.

A midday escape would attract too much attention, reversed horse shoes seem fanciful at best (a sure way to lame the steed), and the only known coach in all of Massachusetts belonged to the governor’s lady. (Philip owned a carriage of some sort, but that was in Salem, inaccessible.)

Although Mary, Lady Phips, was sympathetic to the prisoners, the coach would only draw attention to itself. Moreover, roads outside Boston were not yet suited to such a vehicle. Boston itself was still a peninsula, with the road south connected to the mainland through a guarded gate and over a narrow neck flooded by the month’s highest tides. A ferry ran north to Charlestown, itself built on another peninsula, with another ferry going to Winnisimmet and the road to Salem over the wide marshes. All of these choices were exposed to view even without a coach involved.

That Moody and Willard would help engineer an escape, however, is quite plausible. Reverend Willard’s son John had already helped Captain Cary secret Mistress Cary away from the Cambridge jail and into hiding.

The couple did not take any of their children with them into exile. The eldest daughter, Mary, stayed in the household of Philip’s business associate George Hollard, and Susanna, who had lived with her parents in the jailer’s house, stayed with the family of the absent Captain Alden. The sons must have been provided for elsewhere, but on this, tradition was silent.

Philip had contacts with merchants in New York as well as in Boston. He was not however, on good terms with Governor Phips, “his great enemy,” as one of the afflicted girls said. Mary English, despite her husband’s politics, was of similar rank with Lady Phips, who, like her husband, had grown up in Maine but was far better educated. Mary English is remembered as determined to escape. Mary Phips would be rumored to have aided a woman prisoner to escape.

The governor and his wife were named William and Mary—just like the monarchs. Legal documents tended to begin by invoking the names of the king and queen. How closely did the guards read the repetitious official documents transferring prisoners anyway? Mary Phips wrote and signed a warrant to discharge one of the imprisoned women, and one of the jailers accepted the document. Thus, the prisoner found her freedom and the jailer lost his job. Despite her rank, Lady Phips had committed an act that would be illegal even if witchcraft were not involved. So soon she too was rumored to be a witch.

When historian Thomas Hutchinson heard the tale a generation later he did not believe it until the former jailer showed him a copy of the warrant and told him the whole story. However, Hutchinson’s account of the incident referred to the prisoner as a “poor woman”—which could apply to Mary English only if he meant “unfortunate”—and did not mention Philip’s presence at all. Certainly, Mary Phips herself was called a witch around this time, but no one leveled formal charges against her.

Concerning the English family, a descendant wrote, “It is a tradition in this family that several of the Boston clergy espoused the cause of Mr. and Mrs. English when confined in jail there; that Cotton Mather, who was a great friend of Mrs. E[nglish],” said, that though she was accused, “he did not believe her to be guilty; that her accusers evidently believed her to be so, but that Satan was most probably deceiving them into that belief.”

Certainly by now, as the accusers named more suspects of higher rank, the magistrates and justices tended to assume the charges were mistaken at best, particularly if they knew the suspects, trusting their own opinions of their peer’s reputations—Judge Corwin’s mother-in-law, Mistress Margaret Thatcher, for one.

The law knew where the various fugitives had gone. No one tried to extradite them back to Massachusetts but rather kept an embarrassed silence. They called for no hue and cry as they had when a privateer and some prisoners of war escaped from Boston jail in July that same summer.

Some years earlier Reverend Increase Mather had donned an uncharacteristic cloak and wig to leave his house unidentified in order to sail for England and negotiate the new charter in spite of Governor Andros’s displeasure. The Englishes may well have done the same, taking a sea route to New York by using Philip’s maritime contacts: quietly leaving their lodging in the jailer’s house, aided by coins and a blind eye even if not the forged warrant, and dressed, perhaps, in a more rustic manner than usual, they slipped away to the wharves and into a small craft that took them to a larger vessel that was waiting for the turn of the tide.

Philip later estimated he had run up £50 in expenses during their nine weeks in Boston, not all of it yet paid. (In contrast, Salem Village allotted Reverend Samuel Parris £60 a
year,
when they paid him at all. Because neither Philip nor Mary had been tried, he assumed that his posted £4,000 bond would protect his possessions from confiscation. He was mistaken.

____________________

Edward Bishop brushes the sawdust from his knees and then stretches, hands clasped over his head, trying to unknot his shoulders.

I’m getting too old for this,
he thinks as he sits in a scrap of shade.

A group of younger workmen has collected off to one side, tackling their noon meal in a larger pool of shade.

Edward shades his eyes with one hand and looks down the road toward a familiar figure approaching through the heat: his stepdaughter Christian Mason, who has one arm hooked through a basket and her child Susanna clutching the other. “It’s fish today,” she says when she reaches the woodyard. Setting down the basket, she lifts out a napkin-wrapped bundle and a stoneware bottle. Edward accepts the package and opens the napkin across his knees to reveal a slice of cold fish pie in an indestructible rye crust.

“Good,” he says, chewing.

No bones anyway,
he thinks.

Christian rests in the thin shade while he eats, keeping an eye on her daughter, who is occupied with a handful of smooth pebbles.

“So do you hear from that husband of yours?” he asks.

“Still at sea or coasting along off Maine,” she says.

“Does he ever think of moving back there?”

“Not safe,” she says. No, not with the Indians and French attacking so often, but then again, Salem hasn’t proved safe either.

Edward is grateful for his stepdaughter doing for him—cooking, washing his shirts, all the chores and necessities he has no time and little skill for. He is so starkly aware now that he is a widower.

“Grandpa?” Susanna pipes, but her mother shushes her.

“Don’t bother your grandfather. I
told
you.”

“But he’ll know.”

“Susanna.” Christian looks reproachful, frowning at the child, who in turn looks defiant, and just then Edward sees Bridget in both their faces, mother and daughter. It takes his breath away.

“Ask me what?”

“A child’s silliness. You shouldn’t be bothered.”

But it is too late. Susanna blurts out, “Polly won’t play with me anymore.”

“Who?”

Christian sighs. “A neighbor’s child. They don’t want their children playing with Susanna anymore.”

“
They
say Grandma is a witch. Is that true?”

“Of course not,” says Edward. He wishes he were certain. “Just ignore them.”

Susanna accepts this advice. “Good,” she says, then adds, “When is Grandma coming home?”

Her mother looks as if she might cry. “Be quiet! What did I tell you?” Christian slaps the girl. “Just
stop
it! We don’t talk about
that.
”

Susanna cries for real but softly, burying her face in her petticoat.

“Time for work,” says Edward. He stands up and hands back the napkin.

Christian takes the basket. Mother and child head back slowly along the sun-baked street.

The other workmen watch but say nothing.

(
15
)

Mary Warren, if she still doubts her fits as mere distractions, shows no sign of hesitation about Alice Parker. Not
this
woman, whose quarrels had killed her mother and deafened her sister. In her mind’s eye she sees her mother trying to get a word in edgewise during Parker’s rant against Mary’s father, sees the baleful look of disgust that Parker shoots back while never stopping her own harangue, sees her mother ill and fading, growing weaker and weaker until she can no longer rise from bed, tossing and feverish, with her hands picking at the sheets and her mouth moving with words she is too weak to say aloud until at last all movement stops.

It is a wonder that Mary does not catch the illness, but the little sister is not so lucky, smoldering with fever as well but living through it to wake muffled in perpetual silence. No, Mary does not doubt Parker’s malice nor where she got her power to harm.

Later, just thinking about that day as she sits in the jail with Abigail Hobbs, Sarah Churchill, and the other confessors, Mary expects the witch’s spite to find her. The woman is elsewhere in the building, after all—not that distance matters much with magic, certainly not for those who can separate soul from body at will. She shudders at the thought, and the shudder becomes a spasm until Mary convulses, bent in half, gasping for breath.

The other prisoners stare and wonder who is after Mary
now
.

____________________

O
n the
first of the month more suspects arrived from Andover to Salem for additional questioning: the young sons of other defendants, more of Reverend Dane’s family, and most of the Wardwell family—Samuel and Sarah Wardwell, their nineteen-year-old daughter Mercy, and her elder half-sister Sarah Hawks. (Only the youngest of the Wardwell children were left behind to fend for themselves, with neighbors wary of taking them in.) All of the new prisoners confessed to the charges when faced with the writhing crowd of bewitched witnesses, the afflicted from Salem, including Mary Warren, and girls from Andover.

Samuel was known as a fortune-teller and had made no secret of it, telling neighbors—especially if they asked—who would marry whom, how many children they would have, and who would be injured by illness or mischance. Moreover, he claimed he could make straying cattle come to him—no easy task. Although he began by insisting on his innocence, he admitted his fortune-telling
might
have encouraged the Devil’s attention and ended by confessing. According to the record “He used to be much discontented that he could get no more work done, and that he had been foolishly Led along with telling of fortunes, which sometymes came to pass, He used also when any creature came into his field to bid the devil take it, And it may be the devil took advantage of him by that.” He said he had signed the Devil’s contract on the promise “that he should never want for any thing,” and for the last fortnight he had tormented the neighbors with his magic. Martha Sprague of Andover and Mary Warren were most afflicted during his examination.

His stepdaughter Sarah Hawks had turned a sieve to tell the future, and all the family admitted a dangerous discontent that let the Devil in. Samuel himself, as a confessor, soon joined the afflicted to accuse other suspects.

During the commotions that ensued the following day, September 2, when Andover widow Mary Parker (no relation to Alice Parker), faced the grand jury. Mary Warren convulsed alarmingly and had to be dragged, flailing, “haveing a pin run through her hand and blood runeing out of her mouth,” to the defendant for a healing touch. Warren then identified the woman as the same whose specter she had seen at an earlier hearing, perched on a beam above the court in Salem Village.