( 6 )
Bridget Bishop is next. The guards have brought back Mary Warren, who looks like death warmed over, nearly stunned with terror and showing the whites of her eyes like a frightened horse.
The guards now escort Bridget to the waiting court. Whatever they say to her she ignores, preoccupied by the puzzle of who has accused her this time, here in a place of strangers.
Except for the magistrates, John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin, whom she has faced before, she recognizes no one in the packed meeting house—certainly not the cluster of afflicted witnesses—young chits, women old enough to know better, and an Indian man. All of them fall in fits at her approach.
She answers the charges firmly. “I am innocent. I know nothing of it. I have done no witchcraft.” She looks from side to side out over the audience crowding the room. “I take all this people to witness that I am clear.”
Hathorne, who does most of the talking, orders the afflicted to look carefully at the defendant and see if she is the same whose specter has been hurting them. Occasionally the afflicted will admit doubt when he asks the same question, but Abigail Williams, Mercy Lewis, and Annie Putnam all affirm that Bridget is the same.
“I never did hurt them in my life. I did never see these persons before,” Bridget protests. “I am as innocent as the child unborn.”
But the afflicted insist otherwise. Mary Walcott tells how she had pointed to Bridget’s specter so her brother Jonathan would know where to hit at it with his sword, and when he did she heard its petticoat tear.
“Is not your coat cut?” Hathorne asks.
“No,” she says, but the officers examine the garment and find a rent, a little two-way flap hanging loose, that looks, to them, like the tear described. Jonathan explains that his sword had been in its scabbard when he struck.
“They say you bewitched your first husband to death,” says Hathorne.
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 Magistrates 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 ignorant. 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.”
All of this prompts questions. If the law arrived so late at night to make the arrest, did they fear Mistress English might try to flee? In one family version Philip was present, fuming powerlessly, but in another he was out of town at the time of her arrest and absent during her examination as well. As for being “ready to die,” no one had yet been tried, much less condemned, but the crime carried a death penalty, as everyone knew.
Some of Mary’s descendants thought that some neighbors held Mary’s upper-class demeanor against her. Other descendants would blame the ignorant rustics at the Village for all the suspicions and accusations; apparently rumors clung to Mary and her deceased mother, who had sued the angry neighbor who called her a witch.
The latest batch of suspects were brought to Ingersol’s in Salem Village to be examined by ten o’clock in the morning of April 22. Like Bridget Bishop, Mistress Mary English may never have been in the Village before or known anyone there. Now she found herself elbow to elbow with nine other prisoners, farmers and farmwives for the most part: Nehemiah Abbott, William and Deliverance Hobbs, Edward and Sarah Bishop, Sarah’s stepmother, Goodwife Sarah Wildes, Goodwife Mary Esty, and a slave woman called Mary Black.
Mary English would have known the Bishops, at least by reputation. They ran an unlicensed tavern from their home that was the bane of their neighbors, one of whom had been Mary’s cousin Christian Trask. After quarreling with the Bishops, Christian committed suicide by cutting her own throat with a pair of tiny sewing scissors. This led many to believe that Sarah Bishop had bewitched Christian.
As the court assembled in the Village meeting house, the afflicted were already in a state, witnessing, they reported, a large assembly of witches in Parris’s nearby field. (Their proximity to Parris’s home was threatening enough for the minister, but as the field was part of the disputed parsonage land he had thought he owned, we can only speculate what additional fears for his reputation that incident may have caused.) According to various spectral testimony, male and female witches flew in from all the region to receive a Hellish sacrament of bloody bread and wine administered by Reverend George Burroughs with the assistance of female deacons Rebecca Nurse, Sarah Osborn, Sarah Good, and Sarah Wildes. At some point a trumpet sounded from somewhere—apparently this was not spectral, for everyone could hear it—and the afflicted said that Burroughs was summoning his crew. No one ever discovered who blew that horn.
As she waited among the other prisoners, Mistress English learned how the others fared as they were returned from questioning one by one. Goodwife Deliverance Hobbs, like Mary Warren, had been afflicted, but now the other afflicted witnesses accused her. She admitted seeing spectral birds and cats and dogs as well as the shapes of people, including Sarah Wildes, who was also accused, and Mercy Lewis, who stood among Goody Hobbs’s own accusers. Gradually she weakened in her answers and, like her stepdaughter, Abigail (and Mary Warren), confessed. Deliverance’s husband, William Hobbs, did not confess despite the statements of the afflicted and of his own daughter, nor did Sarah Wildes or her stepdaughter, Sarah Bishop, and her husband, Edward Bishop. All were held for trial. Although Parris’s notes include the Mercy Lewis specter, the court did not take this accusation seriously, although the accusation must have troubled Mercy.
Nehemiah Abbott Jr. was also returned to the lock-up, but only temporarily. As the other prisoners learned, he too had insisted on his innocence, but for some reason only Annie Putnam was certain he was the spectral perpetrator. Then Mary Walcott said he looked like the pursuing specter that, she added, was seated on the beam above them. The magistrate reminded Abbott that the defendant before him had confessed.
“If I should confess this, I must confess what is false,” said Abbott, insisting as “I speak before God that I am clear from this accusation.”
For some reason Abbott’s insistence impressed the magistrates enough that they cautioned the afflicted: “Charge him not unless it be he.” Annie Putnam was certain Abbott was the same, Mary Walcott was doubtful, and Mercy Lewis said he was not the man.
All three agreed that the specter “had a bunch” or “a wen” by his eyes—a growth.
“[B]e you the man?” Annie moaned in a fit. “[A]y, do you say you be the man? Did you put a mist before my eyes?”
With even Annie uncertain, the court sent Abbott out for the time being. That must have encouraged the other prisoners.
Mary Esty, whose sisters Rebecca Nurse and Sarah Cloyce were already jailed, did not confess either. “I can say before Christ Jesus, I am free.”
And when the magistrates pointed out that she could see how the afflicted were tormented, she replied, “Would you have me accuse my self?”
Because even John Indian said that he had seen Goody Esty’s specter with Goody Hobbs, one of the magistrates asked how much she had cooperated with Satan in order for the Fiend to use a specter in her shape.
“Sir,” she answered, “I never complyed but prayed against him all my dayes. I have no complyance with Satan, in this. What would you have me do?”
“Confess if you be guilty.”
“I will say it, if it was my last time, I am clear of this sin.”
The magistrates seemed undecided enough to ask the accusers: “Are you certain this is the woman?”
The afflicted were speechless from convulsions, though Annie managed to say, “[I]t was like her, & she told me her name.”
But that slim doubt began to evaporate when the afflicted began mimicking Goody Esty’s gestures: their hands were clenched when she clasped her hands, Elizabeth Hubbard’s neck seemed pushed down when Goody Esty hung her own head. “Oh. Goody Easty, Goody Easty you are the woman,” Elizabeth wailed, “you are the woman.”
“What do you say to this?” the magistrate demanded.
“Why God will know.”
“Nay God knows now.”
“I know he dos.” Mary Esty, like her sisters, was not about to accuse herself.
“What did you think of the actions of others before your sisters came out?” asked the magistrate. “[D]id you think it was Witchcraft?”
“I cannot tell.”
“Why do you not think it is Witchcraft?”
“It is an evil Spirit, but whither it be Witchcraft I do not know.”
And like her sisters, Mary Esty was held for trial.
Mary Black, a slave belonging to Nathaniel Putnam, denied hurting by image magic, but when she pinned her neck cloth as the magistrate instructed, the afflicted reacted as if stabbed. Her case is hazy, but she too was held for trial. Sarah Wildes did not confess either, nor did Edward and Sarah Bishop, whose paperwork is lost.
Abbott was taken back to the court, but he did not return. The waiting prisoners learned that he had been released, with the charge dismissed. When the afflicted were told to look at him outside by daylight they had stared at the man’s knobby features and the swath of hair falling over his eyes, then decided that he was not the same person as the specter. Abbott lacked a wen next to his eye; this was even more encouraging.
No examination papers for Mary English have survived, only a family tradition of her attitude. Taken into the thronged meeting house, its interior dimmed by the crowd that blocked the windows, she faced the afflicted accusers: two girls, two young women, and a grown man—Annie Putnam, Mary Walcott, Elizabeth Hubbard, Reverend Parris’s niece Abigail Williams, and his slave John Indian. Presumably the fits and questioning proceeded as it had for the other suspects but without the doubts that freed Abbott. According to tradition, Mary, having learned what the questions were for the other prisoners, questioned the magistrates herself, demanding to know whether such proceedings “were right and lawful.” There were higher courts than the one she addressed, and she intended to inquire of them whether the current proceedings “were law and justice” and see “that their decisions should be reviewed by the Superior Judges”—or so her family would tell it. She may also have alluded to a Heavenly court where false witness would not deceive the Almighty.
Nevertheless, the magistrates held Mary English for further trial. Unless he had been out of town during his wife’s arrest (as one family story said), Philip English was presumably in the audience along with Isaac Esty for their wives, just as Francis Nurse had been present for Rebecca. Philip evidently kept his temper, for there were apparently no hotheaded objections like the ones that resulted in John Procter’s own arrest.
Hathorne and Corwin ordered Marshall Herrick to take all of the day’s defendants, except for fortunate Goodman Abbott, from the Village to the Salem jail.
But the afflictions did not cease. On the day after the latest hearings Annie Putnam recoiled from the specter of neighbor John Willard as he brought the Devil’s book and threatened her if she refused to sign. Ann and Thomas heard her beg the persecuting specter for mercy, promising not to complain of him if he would only stop hurting her. But on the next day, April 24—and a Sabbath at that—the specter hurt her so much that she cried out his name with all the visiting neighbors to hear.
Willard had been in their house in person, along with other neighbors, helping them and showing sympathy for the afflicted. He had even served as a deputy to convey arrested suspects before losing patience with the afflicted and refusing to help in the escalating arrests. “[H]ang them,” he had said of the afflicted. “[T]hey ar all witches.” And now, according to Annie, here he was among the witches, actively opposing the afflicted. His own relatives were suspicious of the man.
Word of Annie’s accusation reached the real Willard, who, then, like Martha Corey, determined to solve the problem by facing the girl directly to sort out the truth—and with no greater success. Ann Putnam watched as Thomas let Willard into their home and saw how the encounter only worsened her daughter’s continuing distress. Annie begged the man to stop tormenting her. She still refused to sign the Devil’s book but weakened enough to bargain, begging that if he would only stop hurting her, she would not complain against him. Willard, in response, denied he had anything to do with specters, but nothing was solved.
That was Monday, April 25. Annie actually had an easier time for the next few days, as if her pleading had yielded results. By Thursday the Willard specter was back, throttling the girl, beating and pinching her and threatening to kill her if she would not sign his book, just as he had whipped her little sister to death. Annie continued to resist, and, as she would later testify, “I saw the apperishtion of my little sister Sarah who died when she was about six weeks old crieing out for vengance against John willard.” Then, according to Annie, the ghost of Willard’s first wife appeared also in her winding sheet, right from the grave, to accuse her husband of killing her as well.
Ann could not see her dead child’s ghost, but such a revelation could only stab her heart with cold fear, fear for Annie, crushing sorrow for the lost Sarah, and fear for the baby to come. For some reason, however, the Putnams did not yet enter a complaint against Willard.
In Salem town, meanwhile, Philip English visited his imprisoned wife daily (according to family lore). This at least allowed her to get news of and make plans for the children. But confined as she was, her specter, like those of the other prisoners, was reported harming the afflicted along with the specters of Bridget Bishop and Giles and Martha Corey. A newly bewitched girl, Susanna Sheldon, was at this time beleaguered by all of them—pinched, bitten, prevented from eating, and threatened with the book. Mary English, she said, had a yellow bird familiar, while Bridget’s was “a streked [i.e., a streaked] snake creeping over her shoulder and crep into her bosom.”
She said she saw Philip English among the witches as well, first when his specter climbed over his pew on the next Sabbath in the town’s meeting house to pinch her—while Philip himself probably sat in his newly refurbished seat. It followed her home along with “a black man with a hy crouned hatt on his head” who seems to have been either the Devil or the black-haired Reverend Burroughs, who kept presenting a book to her. The English specter told Susanna “that black man were her god and if shee would touch that boock hee would not pinsh her no more nor no bodie els should.” She continued to refuse the book, so the next day English’s specter pinched her again and threatened to kill her if she would not comply.
Philip’s sharp business practices had certainly made him unpopular, especially among people who owed him money. He had also spoken against the current government, for he much preferred Andros (a fellow Anglican and fellow Channel Islander) to Phips.
On Saturday, April 30, a week and a day after Mary’s examination at the Village, Thomas Putnam and Captain Jonathan Walcott swore out complaints against six more suspected witches: Salem Village’s former minister George Burroughs, who was now in Maine; Susannah Martin of Amesbury; Lydia Dustin of Reading; Sarah Morrell and Dorcas Hoar of Beverly; and Philip English of Salem (but not John Willard—not yet). Their victims were listed as Captain Walcott’s daughter Mary, Thomas Putnam’s maid Mercy Lewis and his daughter Annie, Abigail Williams, Elizabeth Hubbard, and Susanna Sheldon. Hathorne and Corwin issued arrest warrants for all of the suspects and scheduled the next examination for the following Monday at Ingersoll’s in the Village.
Perhaps the Sabbath gave Philip English the opportunity to hear of this development in time and, if he had not already left town, flee. Whenever Marshall George Herrick arrived at English’s house, he discovered that the suspect was not to be found.
While Philip found a hiding place, John Arnold began making repairs to Boston’s jail and to the “prison house” where he and his family lived: five hundred board feet of lumber, two hundred nails. He added the cost of these to the list of out-of-pocket expenses, which included chains made for Good and Osborn and the two blankets provided for Sarah Good’s infant child.
____________________
Tituba overhears scraps of news from the visiting families of Rebecca Nurse and Sarah Cloyce. Husbands and children make the long journey to Boston, which takes at least a half a day or more. They bring supplies and news and what comfort they can offer, but the arrest of the third sister, Mary Esty, is no comfort at all. Corey and Procter kin visit when they can. No one comes for Sarah Good. That woman has young Dorothy—the child clings, barnacle-like, to her mother—as well as the infant, who seems to be growing weaker. On the day Dorothy Good arrived with the latest prisoners, what relief and tearful joy on the child’s face when she saw her mother! But what despair on the mother’s face when she saw her daughter here in prison.
Sometimes an offended relative of the accused speaks directly to Tituba, but the words spoken are seldom more than an accusation. Yet even this, their outrage, can be viewed as an improvement. Not too long ago they never would have deigned to address her at all.
Her husband, John Indian, now among the afflicted accusers, convulsed during the hearings and between times in the taverns. Frustrated family members blame Tituba for her confession and the direction the courts have taken because of it. Did she know what that John Indian did? He accused our Sarah of biting him—her specter, that is—but a barbarous accusation nonetheless. And do you know how he rolls about on the floor with the afflicted white girls? What does that mean?
After the hearings for Goodwives Cloyce and Procter in Salem, Tituba learns, her John was given a ride back to the Village behind another man, two to a horse. Partway there he had a fit (or whatever it was the so-called afflicted had), during which he bit the man before him. Edward Bishop (the tavern owner, not Bridget’s sawyer husband), riding nearby, clouted John with his stick to make him let go, which he did. John claimed he was trying not to fall off the horse, for the spirits had bound his wrists. But Bishop was not impressed, even though others present wondered how the slave’s hands got tied so tightly that the cord bit into the flesh. After that, in a hardly surprising development, the afflicted named Goodman Bishop among their specters.
What can Tituba make of this morsel of information? Biting a white man—how satisfying that must have been for John. But how John’s inclusion with the afflicted might affect her own case—as an admitted witch not yet tried—that is another matter.