Six Women of Salem (55 page)

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Mistress Ann Putnam cradles the infant in her arms and watches her sleep. Dreaming of milk, though she has lately nursed, little Abigail makes nuzzling motions with her lips. So tiny and perfect and alive—yet so vulnerable still. Even after seven other births, Ann sees that the little life is amazing—God’s work. Ann hugs the baby close as if to hide the child from vengeful eyes, but this makes the baby whine and protest, so she relaxes her hold.

The day is darkening already, with winter drawing close. She expects Thomas and Annie to return at any moment but startles anyway at the sound of voices and the thump of hoof-fall in the door yard. Tommy throws the door open, announcing, “Father is home!” Slamming the door once more, he rushes out in a gust of cold air and the acrid scent of dry fallen oak leaves that swirl on the floor in his wake. He is eager to help his father rub down the mare, and Ann hears their voices receding toward the stable.

Annie enters, looking chilled and more subdued than usual after such journeys.

“Did it go well?” Ann asks.

“Yes.”

But her mother hears a hesitation in her voice, so she presses, “What happened?”

Annie saw the specters and so did Mercy. Four witches, all arrested—the same neighbors the dying woman suspected. Annie does not think Mrs. Fisk will survive even if there is an arrest. The doctor does not think she will either, though the family tries to hope and intends to enter a complaint before the magistrates.

Thomas stamps in, bringing more cold air. His wife instinctively draws her baby closer. As he warms himself at the hearth, he completes the story, providing details Annie didn’t want to impart. When they approached Gloucester by the Ipswich Bridge, their party encountered an old woman. No, he doesn’t know who she was, but by her scowl and the fact that they were on a life-saving mission at the behest of a dying woman’s kin, and not for the first time—which should have been obvious, given local knowledge—he does not doubt that
she
was a witch as well. The withering look she gave them sent the girls, Annie included, into fits. They flinched and convulsed, their pain obvious, but there was no sign of concern from
that
old baggage. No, she just glared at them, in contempt of their pain. And then she kept on walking.

“But that was not the worst of it,” Thomas continues, tugging off his boots by the fire. The other people present, the Gloucester folk who had escorted them as well as a few bystanders—not
one
of them did anything to help.
No
one apprehended the woman, much less lifted a finger to help the girls.

Ann shudders, and her shudders rock the sleeping Abigail in her aching arms.

How could people become so blind to the danger? Considering the current lapse in the trials, it all seemed odd . . . more than odd—threatening. And with so many people’s views of the matter changing, shifting like so many weathervanes, as if merely being tired of hearing about a problem made it go away.

Although two of the Towne sisters were hanged and—God willing—are no longer a threat, as Ann cannot but hope, one remains while the ghost of the second, Mary Esty, has been reported exhorting a girl in Beverly. And wasn’t there a girl in Boston equally beset?

To Ann, it is obvious the witches are still out there, still crowding the jails and others still running free despite these latest arrests. This was not over. No it was not.

What were people thinking of? Were they thinking at all?

____________________

A
lthough the most recent Gloucester suspects were soon under arrest, the Herrick girl in Beverly changed her story about the specters that threatened her. One was the ghost of Mary Esty, whereas the tormentor looked like Mrs. Hale, the minister’s wife. But Mrs. Hale’s likeness was false, the girl said to Reverend Gerrish of Wenham and Reverend Hale himself on November
13
. The apparition was a devilish disguise to deceive the girl and to incriminate an innocent woman. That was what Goody Esty’s ghost wanted the Herrick girl to know. This revelation appalled Hale, not only because the initial report placed his wife in danger but also because it meant that
any
of the year’s reported specters could have been false as well—and probably were. He had had doubts before, but they had not been strong enough to fully change his opinions.

What might Rebecca Nurse’s family and the late Mary Esty’s kin have thought of Hale’s epiphany? Hale and others now wondered: Was Goodwife Esty, that good woman, not satisfied with presenting the petitions before her death to help the other prisoners, now working from the next world to expose the Devil’s lies? Or was this the girl’s face-saving excuse when not enough people believed her fits were real? In any case, the growing public doubt was encouraging.

By December even some of the prisoners were encouraged enough to petition for release on bail, including Abigail Faulkner, who had already been found guilty of the charges and condemned to death once her baby was born.

Three days later, on December 6, eight Andover men likewise petitioned, describing the prison conditions that “Exposed [their wives and daughters] to great sufferrings, which daily Encrease by reason of the winter comeing on.” They had hoped for a general jail delivery, on bail at least, “but since that hath been so long deferred, and we are very sensible of the Extream danger the Prisoners are in of perishing, if they are not speedily released.”

In a plea for themselves and for “thre or foure men” also imprisoned, another petition from ten women in the Ipswich jail also described prison conditions. With the trials evidently suspended for the winter, they asked that they might be released on bail until spring. “We are not in this unwilling nor afrayd to abide the tryall,” they wrote, but hoped for the law’s compassionate consideration “of our suffering condicion in the present state we are in, being like to perish with cold in lying longer in prison in this cold season of the yeare, some of us being aged either about or nere fourscore some though younger yet being with Child, and one giving suck to a child not ten weekes old yet, and all of us weake and infirme at the best, and one fettered with irons this halfe yeare and allmost distroyed with soe long an Imprisonment.”

Samuel Ray of Salem Village posted bail in Salem on December 10 so young Dorothy Good could be brought home from the Boston jail, where she had been left chained and terrified for so long. But her father, William, now found her impossible to manage, and years later he would remark that she had “little or no reason to govern herself.”

No one petitioned for Tituba’s release.

And what might the Putnams have thought? The number of people discharged on bail until their trials, high though the sums were, could not have reassured them.

On December 14 the legislature passed a new law defining witchcraft, an offense already listed in October’s list of capital crimes. This “Act against Conjuration, Witchcraft and dealing with evil and wicked Spirits,” like the law it replaced, said nothing about signing with the Devil. However, rather than relying on common knowledge of these matters, the new language specified details of potential infractions. Anyone who conjured or invoked evil spirits, then entertained, employed, or rewarded them in any way, who dug up a corpse or any part of a corpse to use for magical purposes, or who used
any
of these means to lame or to waste, pine, and consume anyone else in any way would be executed, along with any of their accomplices, as felons.

However, if any person used
lesser
magical means—less than trying to kill another person, such as using spells to discover precious ores or buried treasure; find lost items; lure another person’s love; waste or destroy another person’s property, including livestock; or hurt someone bodily without killing them—then that malefactor would be imprisoned for a year. And once every quarter during that year the prisoner would be paraded out to stand for six hours in the pillory at the county seat wearing a placard pinned to the chest inscribed with a description of the crime in capital letters.

A
second
such offence would merit death.

(The legislature had by now forbidden the hated confiscations, even though they were still legal under British law. Because of this discrepancy, the witchcraft law made no mention of preserving the dowry of a male witch’s widow after his execution. Due to this oversight, the Privy Council would reject the
whole
witchcraft law in 1695. Thereafter, wishing to have no more to do with the whole distressing matter, Massachusetts would have no laws against witchcraft. England’s last witchcraft prosecution, in contrast, occurred in 1944.)

The Superior Court’s regular sitting for Essex County had passed, winter was closing in, and the mass of cases still needed sorting out. Governor Phips had written to London in October for advice in dealing with the press of witch cases. But waiting for the Privy Council to act plus the time required for letters to travel across the ocean and back created more difficulties for the crowd of prisoners awaiting trial. Not all of them could afford the high bails the court set, and not all of these could survive the frigid winter, for the jails were not meant to house people for long periods, even given the £16 worth of bedding, blankets, and clothes the legislature ordered for the poorer prisoners in Boston.

On December 16 the legislature passed “An Act for Enabling the Justices of the Superiour Court to hold a Court of Assize and General Goale delivery within the County of Essex upon Tuesday the third of January next.” (This would be a sitting of the Superior Court at a special time in order to empty the jails by trying the prisoners within them.)

Four days later the governor and council finally acted upon the request for the public fast that had been pending since October. This document added other troubles besides just the witch trials and omitted dwelling on the “Indefatigable Endeavours of those Worthy Gentlemen [of the court], with Others, to Suppress that Crying Enormity” of witchcraft and how those efforts had instead led to “the most Astonishing Augmentation and Increase of the Number of Persons Accused, by those Afflicted”—the less said about that the better.

Now the fast was to consider “The Various Awful Judgments of God continued upon the
English
Nation, and the Dispersions thereof in Their Majesties several Plantations, by War, Sickness, Earth-quakes, and other Desolating Calamities; more especially, by permiting Witchcrafts and Evil Angels to Rage amongst his People: All which Loudly Call to Deep Humiliation and Earnest Application to Heaven as the best Expedient for Deliverance.”

Therefore, December 29, a Thursday lecture day, was ordered “to be Kept as a Day of Solemn PRAYER with FASTING” in the various towns, and “Exhorting both Ministers and People fervently to Implore Heavens Blessings upon Their Majesties, their Three Kingdoms and Plantations Abroad, and upon the whole Protestant Interest; That a Spirit of Reformation may be Powred [i.e., poured] down from on High, and Gods Anger Diverted, That Divine Conduct may be vouchsafed to all the English Governments, and Success attend their Affairs.”

And, they added, “all Servile Labour on said Day is hereby ­Forbiden.”

With the temporary Court of Oyer and Terminer dissolved and new trials pending, the legislature selected members of the new Superior Court on December 22. As before, the justices were John Richards, Wait-Still Winthrop, Samuel Sewall, and, this time, Thomas Danforth, who had earlier expressed reservations about the way the trials were handled. William Stoughton was once more chosen to be chief justice. The new clerk of the court, Jonathan Ellatson, sent an order to the Essex County towns to select jurors and grand jurors for the next session scheduled for Salem beginning on January 3.

The year moved to its close with congregations observing the public fast by reflecting on the tangle that beset the province. Kin of the people already hanged contemplated the belated public and legal change of mind—or at least the admission of doubt. People who still feared a real presence of witches wondered how to separate the possibly innocent from the surely guilty. Some of the witnesses who had testified earlier perhaps considered how to justify what the summer before had summoned in them. The prisoners, as familiar as they now were to the damp and the cold as well as the indifference to their suffering, still cautiously hoped the new trials would be different in tone—and outcome.

John Alden evidently hoped so, for he had been back in Boston by about mid-December, bringing messages from the parents (one hopes) of young Susanna English, who had been living with Mrs. Alden since the jail break, and to Mary English Jr., who was boarding with the Hollards. On the last day of the year, when Stoughton ordered the transfer of various prisoners from the Cambridge to the Salem jail prior to trial, two of Alden’s shopkeeper friends, Nathaniel Williams and Samuel Checkley, posted a £200 bond for his good behavior. This they did in front of Boston magistrate Jonathan Richards, who had been one of the Oyer and Terminer judges and who was now a member of the newly formed Superior Court.

The trials would resume in three days.

____________________

The year 1692 ends with absences: people gone, property gone, families broken.

Philip English’s wharf stands idle by his stripped warehouses, all lacking their customary bustle, while his impounded ships swing at the end of their moorings in the harbor with only a skeleton crew to keep watch. English’s Great House echoes under the step of the few remaining servants tending the nearly empty rooms.

In Bridget Bishop’s home her red bodice lies folded away in a chest among musk and lavender to repel moths. Ordinarily such a garment would be passed to the next generation, refashioned if necessary, but never wasted. But this bodice, having identified her spirit to the court, is too unlucky to wear—far too unlucky for a daughter or granddaughter to risk flaunting—so it remains unused and out of sight.