Six Women of Salem

by Marilynne K. Roach

  That would be Samuel Wasselbe, so many years ago now. “If it please your worship I know nothing of it.” The afflicted insist that she hurts them for sure, that she has been foisting the Devil’s book on them. Bridget shakes her head angrily at that and tells the afflicted that everything they say is all false. In response, their heads all wrench back and forth.

  Samuel Braybrook describes how, earlier that day, Bishop told him that “she had been accounted a Witch these ten years, but she was no witch, the Devil cannot hurt her.”

  “I am no witch,” Bridget repeats.

  “Goody Bishop,” asks Hathorne, “what contract have you made with the Devil?”

  “I have made no contract with the Devil. I never saw him in my life.”

  “She calls the Devil her God,” Annie Putnam shouts.

  “Can you not find in your heart to tell the truth?” asks Hathorne.

  “I do tell the truth. I never hurt these persons in my life. I never saw them before.”

  Mercy Lewis cries out that Bishop’s specter had come to the Putnam house the night before and admitted that her master—the Devil—was making her tell more than she wished to tell. Hathorne, believing the accusations, orders Bridget to explain how the afflicted were tormented. “Tell us the truth,” he demands.

  The afflicted continue to shout at her and convulse, jerking like puppets at Bridget’s every move. “I am innocent,” Bridget insists. “I am not come here to say I am a witch to take away my life.”

  “Why you seem to act witchcraft before us, by the motion of your body.” says Hathorne. “Do you not see how they are tormented? You are acting witchcraft before us! What do you say to this? Why have you not an heart to confess the truth?”

  “I know nothing of it. I am innocent to a Witch. I know not what a Witch is.”

  “How do you know then that you are not a witch?”

  “I do not know what you say.”

  “How can you know, you are no Witch, and yet not know what a Witch is?”

  “I am clear,” she snaps. “If I were any such person you should know it.”

  “You may threaten, but you can do no more than you are permitted.” He acts as though God would not permit me to hurt him, even though I can hurt the girls, she thinks.

  “I am innocent of a Witch.” And no, she continues, she did not give the Devil permission to use a specter in her likeness to harm people.

  Marshall George Herrick, whose trade is upholstery, chimes in to ask, “How came you into my bedchamber one morning then, and asked me whither I had any curtains to sell?” He must have dreamed that, thinks Bridget, just as the afflicted break in with accusations of Bridget’s specter killing people.

  “What do you say to these murders you are charged with?”

  This was too much. “I hope I am not guilty of Murder.” She rolls her eyes and then the eyes of the afflicted roll back into their sockets. She denies causing this to happen or knowing who might have done it. “I know nothing of it. I do not know whither there be any witches or no.”

  “Have you not heard that some have confessed?”

  “No. I know nothing of it.”

  John Hutchinson and John Hewes contradict this, for they had told her just that.

  “Why look you, you are taken now in a flat lie,” says Hathorne.

  “I did not hear them.” Bridget protests, but she is held over for trial. As the afflicted writhe in a painful commotion, the guards march her out, back to the lock-up, past the gawking onlookers, with Will Good among them. Surely, asks Samuel Gould, it must trouble her to see how the afflicted suffer.

  “No,” says Bridget.

  But does she think someone bewitches them?

  Bridget answers only that she does not know what to think. She knows that she is innocent, but she also realizes that no one there is listening to her side of the story. If the law won’t listen, then what recourse has she?

  ____________________

  What Mary Warren had said in court earlier was not taken as conflicted confusion but rather as a confession. She had had time to collect herself but convulsed at the very start of this round of questions.

  “Have you signed the Devil’s book?”

  “No.”

  “Have you not toucht it?”

  “No.”

  The afflicted, who were calm enough when the suspect seemed to be confessing, reacted the while to her denials. Mary too fell into seizures again, and they were severe enough that the court sent her out into the fresh air.

  “After a considerable apace of time,” according to Parris’s notes, the officers brought her back inside. But her fits prevented her from answering anything, and the court ordered her taken out a third time.

  For the fourth attempt the magistrates questioned Mary “in private” with the ministers attending (including Parris, who took notes) but not the noisy audience and evidently not the noisier afflicted either. This time Mary managed to talk between convulsions.

  “She said, I shall not speak a word but I will speak, I will speak satan—she saith she will kill me. Oh! she saith, she owes me a spite, & will claw me off.” This spiteful revenge was taken to mean Elizabeth Procter’s, but Mary seemed to be addressing the Devil himself. “Avoid Satan,” she shouted, “for the name of God avoid.” She fell into convulsions. Recovering, she cried, “[W]ill ye; I will prevent ye, in the Name of God.”

  The magistrates wanted to hear directly if Mary had actually signed the Devil’s book. “Tell us, how far have you yeilded?” But her fits were too severe for much clear speech. “What did they say you should do, & you should be well?”

  But she bit down on her lips to keep them closed, so the magistrates gave up for the time being.

  Mary’s whirling thoughts probably centered on survival. Although the magistrates believed she had joined the witches, she had not actually admitted that but rather blamed an unnamed woman of torturing and tempting her to do so. Everyone assumed she meant Elizabeth Procter, for the other afflicted reported that the specters of both Procters were present in court.

  Perhaps she consciously lied, hoping to buy the court’s forgiveness, although by then she may have believed the magistrates and accusers were right after all and then given voice to her conflicts with her mistress. As other confessors would later report, they had been frightened into confessing, some even doubting their own innocence. One woman’s brother would repeatedly tell her “that God would not suffer so many good men to be in such an errour about it.”

  The four prisoners were taken to the Salem jail where, later that evening, Mary brooded over the fact that more and more suspects were being arrested and that she was locked in with people she had accused, people with reason to resent and possibly torment her. She may have dreamed of an angry Giles Corey.

  Mary was more able to talk the following morning, and at that time the magistrates interviewed her again, but this time in the jail. In answer to their questions she spun a tale of John and Elizabeth Procter trapping her in a web of witchcraft.

  She had not realized they were witches until they told her they were, she said. Goody Procter declared as much the night after Mary posted her prayer request. The angry woman had pulled her out of her bed to berate her, for neither her master nor her mistress wanted her asking for public prayers. “The Sabbath Even after I had put up my note for thanks in publick,” said Mary, “my Mistris appeared to mee, and puld mee out of the Bed, and told mee that she was a witch, and had put her hand to the Book, she told mee this in her Bodily person, and that This Examinant might have known she was a Witch, if she had but minded what Books she read in.” As it was, Mary had marked the Devil’s book herself without realizing what it was until afterward. Goody Procter—in person, not a specter, Mary said—predicted the following night “that my self and her son John would quickly be brought out for witches.”

  Mary grew more agitated as she described Giles Corey’s resentful specter threatening her the night before with news “that the Magi
strates were goeing up to the farms, to bring down more witches to torment her.” She fell “in a dreadful fit,” caused, she said when she recovered, by Corey, although the man himself was locked in another room being questioned. She described the apparition—his hat and coat, the white cap, the chains, the rope around his waist. The magistrates ordered Corey taken from “close prison” and brought before them. As soon as he clanked into the room, Mary collapsed in a seizure, and the magistrates could see that the old man was dressed exactly as she had described. (The implication is that he was wearing something different from whatever he wore the day before at the examination, though a change of clothes seems unusual.) The magistrates—and probably Mary as well—had heard that old Corey had recently threatened to “fitt her for itt because he told her she had Caused her Master to ask more for a peice of Meadow then he was willing to give.” Procter and Corey, living in the same area, had been at odds before. When one of the Procter sons was careless with a lamp that burned Procter’s roof, his father blamed Corey for setting the fire out of spite over another quarrel—upon which Corey sued Procter for slander.

  Other specters rioted through the Village that evening of April 20, with one of them attacking Annie Putnam: “[O]h dreadfull: dreadfull,” Annie cried, “here is a minister com[e] what are Ministers wicthes to[o] whence com you and what is your name for I will complaine of you tho you be A minister if you be a wizzard.”

  Her father and attending neighbors watched as Annie writhed and gagged, appearing to fight off the specter as it tried to make her sign the Devil’s book. The girl resisted, shouting that ministers were supposed to teach children to fear God, not drag them to the Devil’s cause. “[O]h dreadfull dreadffull tell me your name that I may know who you are.”

  The specter persisted, torturing her to sign the book but at last admitting he was George Burroughs, the former minister in the Village and the Putnams’ adversary. According to Annie, he said that he had not only killed his own first two wives and several locals soldiering Eastward; he also killed Deodat Lawson’s wife because she did not want to leave the Village and the Lawson child in retaliation for Deodat’s chaplain service Eastward. This only seemed to verify what Tituba had said earlier. And, yes, the specter told the girl, he had recruited Abigail Hobbs—who had confessed as much. Annie went on to report, “[A]nd he also tould me that he was above a wicth for he was a cunjurer.”

  Ann and Thomas may have expected something like this to happen. They wouldn’t put it past Burroughs to join the Devil, for it only confirmed their dislike of the man, this minister whose replacement of their brother-in-law Reverend James Bailey drove Bailey and Ann’s sister Mary to Connecticut, where so many of the Bailey children died. The thought that Burroughs was capable of killing children could only further frighten Ann, who was still grieving for her own dead infants.

  The following day Thomas Putnam took action. Mirroring the language of Ezekiel 1:16, he composed a letter to the magistrates about these new developments that “we conceive you have not heard, which are high and dreadful—of a wheel within a wheel at which our ears do tingle”: the shocking news that a minister’s specter was now abroad among the witches. Thomas joined fellow Villager John Buxton to enter complaints in Salem against nine suspects. Five were from Topsfield: Sarah Wildes, William and Deliverance Hobbs (the father and stepmother of the confessor Abigail Hobbs), Nehemiah Abbott Jr., and Mary Esty (sister of Rebecca Nurse and Sarah Cloyce). Three were from Salem Village: Edward and Sarah Bishop (a stepdaughter of Sarah Wildes, no relation to Bridget Bishop’s husband), and Mary Black (Nathaniel Putnam’s slave). One was from Salem town: Mary English.

  Thomas Putnam also submitted his letter to Magistrates Hathorne and Corwin. As the surviving part of the note does not name the new suspect, perhaps Thomas included it as a request to discuss the matter directly with the magistrates, for the day’s complaints and arrest warrants did not include Burroughs.

  The magistrates again interviewed Mary Warren in Salem jail on April 21, accompanied by Reverend Nicholas Noyes and Simon Willard, who took notes. They wanted to know: the book that she had touched and saw the “flourish” in, might it have been a Bible?

  No, she said, she had been deceived. And no, she had not told Mercy Lewis that she had signed.

  Had Goodwife Procter brought the book? they asked.

  No, her master had. She was sitting alone eating a meal of buttered bread and cider when her employers entered the room with a book that looked something like a Bible—but it was not. They had held the volume open before her and told her to read from it. Mary made out the word “Moses” but could not read the rest, so John Procter handed the book to her. As soon as her fingertip touched it—barely touched the page—a black mark appeared. This frightened her, and when she moved her hand to place her finger on another line, her hand was drawn back to the stain. She knew there was nothing on her hands except perhaps butter or sweat—but not blood. She had not signed in blood, but when she picked up her bread, the darkness from her finger smudged it.

  And now, in jail, she cried out that she was “undon body and soul and cryed out greivously.” The magistrates were not sympathetic, however, and told her that if the Devil could use her specter to torment others, then she must have agreed to sign the book willingly.

  The Procters had tortured her, she protested, “threttoned with the hott tongss” and “thretned to drown her & to mak her run through the hedges.”

  To ease her mortal body’s pain, the magistrates replied, she had sold her immortal soul. They then asked if Mary had seen her master and mistress, as she too was sent to Salem jail. She thought she had seen her master (though in person or as a specter is not clear from the notes), saying, “[I] dare say it was he.”

  When asked if he then said anything to her, she replied, “[N]othing”—John Procter had said nothing to her.

  Then Mary convulsed, as if fighting off spirits. “I will tell I will tell,” she cried. “[T]hou wicked creature it is you stopt my mouth but I will confess the little that I have to confess.”

  The magistrates wanted to know who she was trying to tell them about in spite of Goody Procter.

  “[O] Betty Procter,” Mary addressed the specter rudely, then explained to the magistrates: “[I]t is she it is she I lived with last.” Turning back to the specter, she cried, “It shall be known thou wrech hast thou undone me body and soul.” To the magistrates Mary then said, “[S]he wishes she had made me mak a through league.”

  Her mistress did not want her to tell anyone that she was a witch. The Procters didn’t want anyone to know what went on in their household with that termagant of a woman. John Procter had threatened “to make away with him self becaus of his wives quarrilling with him”—his specter had just now reminded her of that.

  How had Mary known that her mistress was a witch? asked the magistrates.

  Mary, rising from yet another fit, repeated her desire to tell: Goody Procter had said that Mary might have realized “she was a wich if she herkend to what she used to read,” for her mistress had many books and even carried one in her pocket when she visited her sister in the nearby town of Reading.

  Then the magistrates asked: Before Mary touched the book and made the black mark, had she known her mistress was a witch, and how did she know it?

  Goody Procter told her “that same night that I was thrown out of bed,” said Mary. It happened the night after Mary posted the “note of thanks giving . . . at the meeting hous.” And it was her mistress in her bodily form, not her specter, as far as Mary knew.

  The specters of Giles Corey and Sarah Good had pestered her with the book since she came to prison, and “she afirmd her mistris was a witch,” wrote Simon Willard. Yet Mary tried not to accuse John Procter directly. Despite what she had already said, “she would not own that she knew her master to be a wich or wizzard.”

  As for Mary’s claim about ignorantly signing the book with a mark, the magistrates still did not believe that she had been i
gnorant. Mary denied any willingness, denied giving the Devil permission to afflict with her counterfeit appearance, and denied sticking pins into images. The Procters had spoken of such magic, but Mary had never seen images in their house. As for magical potions, Goody Procter did use a vile-smelling green salve on Mary for a past ailment—it had come from Elizabeth’s mother, Goody Bassett in Lynn—but that was the only ointment she knew of.

  Reverend Noyes pointed out that as she had touched the book twice—hadn’t she suspected it was the Devil’s book before she touched it the second time?

  “[I]t was no good book,” she conceded.

  What did she mean by that?

  “[A] book to deceiv.”

  The magistrates issued the latest batch of arrest warrants for suspects to be questioned the following day in the Village. Different branches of Mary English’s descendants would relate various—and possibly embroidered—accounts of her arrest. In one version the household had retired for the night when Mary and Philip heard the loud rap of the front door’s brass knocker, followed by the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Assuming it was someone calling about a business emergency, Philip got up to pull on his clothes and attend to the matter. But when the servant entered, officers of the law followed close on the man’s heels, filling the room. They flung back the bed curtains, read the arrest warrant to Mary, and ordered her to get up and come with them.

  Philip was furious. Mary remained where she was. She was not about to appear before these men in her shift, and she was not going to leave in the middle of the night. She remained calm while her husband fumed, and the officers, nonplussed, reconsidered, as they were reluctant to lay hands on a gentlewoman in her own bed. They compromised: they would leave a guard about the house, but she must come with them in the morning. Once they withdrew, Philip spent much of the night pacing angrily while Mary remained in bed.

  The officers returned at an early hour. This time Mary told them firmly that it was not her usual time to rise, and they retreated again. Finally she rose and dressed properly, breakfasted with her family, and told the servants what needed to be done. The servants were grief-stricken and would have tried to protect her from the arrest party, but she forbade it. Then Mary instructed her children to attend to their studies and bade farewell to them all. Only then did she consent to leave, informing the guards that she was “ready to die.”