( 7 )
Mistress Mary English and hired girl Mary Warren both wait in the Salem jail along with Mary Esty, Edward and Sarah Bishop, and Abigail Hobbs, with her father, William and stepmother, Deliverance for the next stage of the court’s proceedings. Philip is not there. His visits to Mary had stopped abruptly, and his absence is troubling. Finally word came to her that he too had been accused and had run away a step ahead of the arrest warrant. So far he eludes capture. She prays the servants are taking proper care of the children.
Goodwife Hobbs, earlier besieged by specters, had been herself accused and then confessed that she too was a witch—then thought better of it. Yet once she denied the confession, her specter began to torment the afflicted once more. Now the magistrates question her again in the jail. Jonathan Corwin takes notes.
Just what has she done to cause her specter to torture the afflicted again? they want to know.
“Nothing at all.”
“But have you not since been tempted?”
She begins to weaken. “Yes Sir, but I have not done it, nor will not doe it.”
“Here is a great change since we last spake to you, for now you afflict and torment again.”
The magistrates are still convinced that if a confession gives the afflicted victims temporary ease, that shows the suspect has renounced a previous pact with the Devil. But, as Mary Warren knows all too well, if a suspect tries to withdraw a confession—and her specter again attacks the girls—then the suspect must have rejoined the Devil’s side, the recantation being only half-hearted or a lie. Honest people tell the truth. The Devil is the Prince of Lies. “Now tell us the truth. Who tempted you to sign again?”
“It was Goody Oliver,” Goody Hobbs says, referring to Bridget Bishop by her second husband’s name, a woman already arrested. “She would have me to set my hand to the book, but I would not, neither have I, neither did consent to hurt them again.”
The magistrates seize on the capitulation and ignore her denials. What about her earlier accusations? Had not Goody Wildes appeared to her and tempted her to sign the Devil’s book?
Off to the side among the other prisoners, Mary English understands how the magistrates interpret the matter but wishes the woman would stand up to them. Mary Warren knows too well what the magistrates expect and what they will do about it.
Goody Hobbs’s resolve wilts further. Yes, she saw those things. Yes, she was tempted. Yes, the specters ordered her not to tell about them. Yes, she did confess before. Yes, yes, yes. Yes, she signed. “It was Goody Oliver that tempted me to deny all that I had confessed before,” she says, defeated at last. “All that I confessed before is true.” She names her fellow witches—Osborne, Good, Burroughs, Oliver, Wildes, Nurse, the Coreys, and the Procters—but she does not know who the man with the wen is.
Someone had overheard her talking with disembodied voices. The witch specters, she says, brought a feast of roast and boiled meat to the jail, but she did not eat any of it.
Yet the magistrates clearly account her a confessed witch.
Later, after the magistrates leave, Mary Warren tries to explain what it is like for a confessor. “The magistrates might as well examine Keysar’s daughter that had been distracted many years,” she says, naming an odd woman well known in Salem town, “and take notice of what she said as well as any of the afflicted persons.”
“When I was afflicted I thought I saw the apparitions of a hundred persons” for “my head was distempered.” She did not know what she said then in her fits. And when she was well again she could not say that she had seen the apparitions at the times she said she had seen them.
Distempered, distracted, or dissembling? Mary English and the other prisoners listen and remember.
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Although it is not clear whether the other suspects in Salem’s jail witnessed the magistrates interviewing Goody Hobbs on May 3, the gist of the encounter would soon become common knowledge there and in the town at large.
The magistrates did not believe Mary Warren’s attempted recantation, and they told her firmly that they did not. Had not she herself told them that the specters promised to stop hurting her if she joined them? Now that her pains had stopped, what else were they to think? She must have agreed to join her tempters. That made her a witch, did it not? And being an admitted witch—for she had said she was—she would be locked up with the rest of the prisoners, people she had accused, people whose guilt she had revealed. How would she like that? And how did she think the other witches would receive her after her betrayal? Her thin retraction would hardly help her with them, now would it? She would be locked up with the likes of Burroughs, the ringleader of them all.
To judge from what other reluctant “confessors” would say, Reverend Noyes may have lectured her on what she had done, as he saw it, until Mary realized that he and the magistrates would believe a damning confession of witchcraft but would not believe a retraction of the confession, no matter how often she repeated it.
Some local families had journeyed to the capital for the election, staying with kin to enjoy the festivities. By week’s end all were back, and news filtered through the region: of the fast day that the General Court had ordered for May 26 to ask Heaven’s mercy on the time’s troubles, but without specifying the witch scare; of the second arrest warrant for the elusive Philip English; and of old Bray Wilkins’s illness and his grandson Daniel Wilkins’s odd behavior.
Ann Putnam perhaps contented herself with getting much of the news from Thomas, who still escorted Annie and the maid Mercy to the hearings. It was safer that way for her and the child to come, posing less risk of having further fits and seizures. Although the afflicted discovered more and more witches, the Putnam household was not backing away from their perceived duty in opposing them.
Ann Putnam could only watch as specters besieged Annie. Though Rebecca Nurse was bodily imprisoned, the girl said that the woman’s specter still roamed freely to attack the afflicted and brag of her many murder victims.
On May 2 Annie and Mercy had stood with the other afflicted girls, Goodwife Sarah Bibber, and John Indian against yet more suspects, two of them defiant widows. The light-fingered Dorcas Hoar, known to consult books on fortune-telling, muttered imprecations against her accusers. Susannah Martin was openly scornful, laughing when Annie threw a glove at her. She labeled the afflictions “folly,” and although she claimed some concern for the afflicted, she nonetheless addressed Mercy with dripping sarcasm and talked back to the court. Not only did she not believe that her accusers were bewitched, but she also made sinister reference to their master, as if the afflicted were the witches.
“You said their Master,” the magistrates observed. “Who do you think is their Master? “
“If they be dealing in the black art, you may know as well as I.”
This only drove the accusers to worse convulsions, and when the bench asked her to explain how it was that her appearance hurt the girls, she countered with a reference to the story of a spirit counterfeiting the form of the Prophet Samuel. “He that appeared in [the] same shape as [a] glorifyed saint can appear in any ones shape.” Others had pointed out the parallel, but again the court brushed it aside.
“Have not you compassion on these afflicted?” the magistrates asked.
“No, I have none.”
The magistrates ordered the latest prisoners, none of whom had confessed, straight to Boston to await trial. The law had to send someone to Maine to apprehend Reverend George Burroughs. Philip English, as Marshall Herrick reported, was still not to be found.
Burroughs himself arrived in Salem May 4, escorted from Wells, Maine, then locked by himself into an upstairs room of Thomas Beadle’s tavern. But no further hearings would happen yet, for Hathorne and Corwin were in Boston, representing Salem in the annual election.
The Burroughs specter, meanwhile, still besieged Ann Putnam’s household.
Ann watched helplessly as specters attacked Annie and the maid. On Saturday, May 7, Thomas and Edward Putnam along with visiting neighbors witnessed Mercy Lewis, who had worked for the Burroughs family in Maine, flinch away from an invisible specter. Her former employer, she told them, continued to push a book at her to sign. It was not the same volume the specter had brought earlier but rather a new sort of book, one she had never seen before. The specter claimed there was no harm in it. “I tould him I did not beleve him,” said Mercy, “for I had been often in his studdy but I nevr saw that book their but he tould me that he had severall books in his studdy which I never saw . . . counjuring books . . . and he could raise the divell and that he had bewicthed his Two first wives to death.”
When Mercy asked the specter how he could torment people when his body was locked up in Salem, the specter boasted, “that the divell was his sarvant and he sent him in his shap to doe it.” Then the specter fell to tormenting Mercy “most dreadfully,” but the girl would not give in. Thomas and Edward heard her shout, “Mr. Burroughs I will not writ in your book tho you doe kil me.” As Thomas wrote soon afterward: “we ware redy to fear that every joynt of hir body was redy to be displaced.”
Nor did Mercy and Annie give in the following day, a Sabbath, and a Sacrament Sabbath at that; although they, along with the Williams and Walcott girls, were sorely tortured.
“We cannot drink of the cup of the Lord and the cup of Devils,” said Reverend Parris, stating his sermon’s text. “You cannot be partakers of the Lord’s Table and the table of Devils.”
As Thomas and Ann Putnam shared in the Lord’s Supper with the other full members, they, like many others, must have wondered about the apparent swarm of neighbors who had drunk the Devil’s sacrament, pledging themselves to evil, a situation serious enough that Thomas and John Putnam Jr. headed to town that same day to enter complaints against a brace of new suspects from Reading and Woburn.
But that was not the last of the specters, because Annie now reported one of an old gray-haired man calling himself Father Pharaoh and claiming that even her own father addressed him so, as unlikely as that was. Annie refused to call such a wizard her grandfather. Thomas Putnam and Robert Morrell witnessed “her hellish temtations” and heard her shout, “I will not writ old pharoah I will not writ in your book.”
But once again the Putnam household witnessed the most vicious assaults from the George Burroughs specter. It threatened to kill Mercy Lewis if she dared to witness against him. “[H]e tould me,” said Mercy, “I should not see his Two wifes if he could help it.”
But Annie saw the two dead Burroughs wives, and the sight of them terrified her even more than the sight of their husband’s specter. They looked like corpses, Annie told her parents, dead women wrapped in winding sheets ready for the grave. The two ghosts, from what Annie said, grew angry at their husband, reminding him how cruelly he had treated them, telling him that they would be in Heaven when he was in Hell. At this insubordination, Burroughs’s spirit vanished, leaving the wives to speak their piece.
The first wife told Annie how her husband had killed her in the Salem Village parsonage, stabbing her under one arm. The ghost drew her sheet aside to display the wound. The second wife said that Burroughs and his present wife had murdered her in a boat going Eastward “because they would have one another.” The ghost wives pleaded with Annie to bring their complaints to the magistrates and charge their husband with their murders right to his face. If he still wouldn’t admit the crimes, they might have to appear in court themselves, Annie reported.
Ann remembered the first wife, buried now in the Village; the second had been a Hathorne widow when she married him. Such terrible developments likely seemed chillingly logical to Ann and Thomas: What would murder mean to someone who threw away his own soul?
The following morning, the day of Reverend Burroughs’s hearing, Mercy Lewis, recovering from “a kind of a Trance,” said that his specter snatched her away (in spirit, presumably) to “an exceeding high mountain” from which he showed her “all the kingdoms of the earth.” Burroughs “tould me that he would give them all to me if I would writ in his book,” Mercy told the Putnams, “and if I would not he would thro me down and brake my neck.” Yet she defied him, answering that “they ware non of his to give and I would not writ if he throde me down on 100 pichforks.”
However, Mercy survived these threats and was well enough to go off to the Village meeting house with Thomas and Annie to serve as a witness in the day’s hearings. At some point Thomas wrote a summary of her vision to show the court, a document that refrained from commenting on the obvious parallel to the Scriptural episode in which Satan tempted Christ in similar manner and in which Christ—like Mercy Lewis—refused to be tempted.
Considering how Ann and Thomas felt about Reverend Burroughs, the man’s hearing was probably too enticing to miss, regardless of whatever precautions against more convulsions she may have taken previously.
With a minister accused of going over to the enemy, two assistants, William Stoughton and Samuel Sewall, had journeyed north from Boston to preside over Burroughs’s hearing in Salem Village along with local magistrates John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin. Stoughton, aged about sixty, a Dorchester landowner and career politician, had, like Sewall, studied for the ministry before turning to secular pursuits. He had served on the Governor’s Council even under Sir Edmund Andros (when Goody Glover was condemned as a witch) and, despite the unpopularity of that regime, retained his same position as assistant. Samuel Sewall, twenty years younger than Stoughton, was a Boston merchant and office holder who had quit his position in the Boston militia under Andros over a matter of conscience. Both men had reputations of fairness. Stoughton expressed no doubts about the validity of spectral evidence. What doubts Sewall had of the situation at this point he kept to himself.
Ann and the rest of the onlookers in the meeting house had to wait while the magistrates first questioned Burroughs privately, “none of the Bewitched being present” (as Samuel Parris recorded), which was a professional courtesy. Once the magistrates and the prisoner repaired to the packed meeting house the racket began.
Right at the start Susanna Sheldon declared that Burroughs’s two dead wives had appeared to her to accuse him of killing not only three children when he was Eastward, two of them his own, but of murdering them as well, the first smothered, the second choked. The magistrates ordered Burroughs to turn and look at his accuser, which resulted in Susanna and most of the other afflicted falling to the floor. If someone even spoke his name, they were affected.
As someone was about to read Mercy Lewis’s statement of her recent tortures—probably Thomas Putnam, who had written it out—Burroughs looked at Mercy, who then “fell into a dreadful & tedious fit.” The afflicted witnesses were, for the most part, overcome by fits that prevented them from speaking against Burroughs until the convulsions subsided, making the whole process more difficult than usual. To the magistrates, the “Preternatural Mischiefs” convulsing the afflicted were such as “could not possibly be Dissembled.” Mrs. Ann Putnam certainly accepted their reality.
Mary Walcott also reported that the ghost wives demanded vengeance, adding that Burroughs had unsuccessfully tried to kill his first wife and their child while she was in labor. (This surely reminded Ann of her own dead children.)
Elizabeth Hubbard had not seen the ghosts but, like all the others, had been tormented because she would not sign the book. Annie Putnam and the rest affirmed that Burroughs’s specter was most insistent with the book. The magistrates asked Burroughs what he made of all this.
He replied that “it was an amazing & humbling Providence” but that he did not understand it. “[S]ome of you may observe,” he noted, “that when they begin [to] name my name, they cannot name it.”
Who, Stoughton asked him, did he think “hindered these witnesses from giving their testimonies?”
The Devil, Burroughs supposed.
“How comes the Divel so loathe to have any Testimony born against you?” Stoughton countered, and this, the magistrates thought, greatly confused Burroughs.
Sarah Bibber, a married woman, was tormented during the proceedings and said she witnessed the other spectral afflictions but that Burroughs’s specter had not hurt her nor had she even seen him in person, though his spirit had tried to lure her away from attending court that morning.
Susanna Sheldon had more to say, and in the confusion no one seemed to heed that Annie’s story of Burroughs’s dead wives being stabbed under the arm and killed in a boat contradicted not only Susanna’s tale of the ghosts telling her they were smothered and choked but also Mercy Lewis’s earlier account that Burroughs had killed them through witchcraft. It was enough that the women’s ghosts and now the ghosts of two children, according to Susanna, accused the man; attention to such crucial details was lost in the rising clamor. As Parris noted, some of “The Bewitched were so tortured that Authority ordered them to be taken away” to recover. If Annie Putnam was one of these, her anxious, watching mother would not have had much sympathy for the accused, certainly not for a man who was notoriously harsh to his first two wives, who supposedly kept one of them working even after the birth pangs came upon her.
Others testified, including confessors Deliverance and Abigail Hobbs as well as John and Rebecca Putnam, who recalled that, when he boarded with them, “he was a very harch sharp man to his wife.” He also had wanted his wife to sign and seal a covenant “that shee would never reveall his secrits” when John and Rebecca felt that the marriage vows were sufficient. Now the court was left imagining just what secrets Burroughs tried to hide.
Elizer Keyser told of an unnerving encounter with the confined Burroughs at Beadle’s tavern, after which Keyser saw a cluster of glowing balls of lights in his own darkened chamber that very night, surely a “diabolicall apperition.” (Elizer was a brother of the long-distracted Hannah Keyser who Mary Warren had mentioned as being not in her right mind.)
Various men spoke of Burroughs’s uncanny strength, for rumors told of Burroughs hefting a heavy barrel of molasses from a canoe by himself, which he denied, or holding out a long-barreled gun with one hand like a mere pistol. He tried to explain how he had balanced it, but no one was convinced.
That day the court also examined three other suspects, including Bethia Carter of Woburn, and kept all for future trial. (Elizabeth Procter may have been surprised to see Bethia joining the prisoners, for in her youth the woman had accused Elizabeth’s grandmother, Ann Burt, of bewitching her and testified as much at the resulting court case. Goody Burt had survived that encounter, so perhaps Elizabeth took a grim comfort in that.) No notes for the examinations of the other seem to have survived, and most of the reasons why they were suspected are only conjecture; the surviving paperwork does not indicate that Goody Carter’s daughter Bethia Jr. was arrested as ordered. By the end of the session the suspects also included Sarah Churchill, who was originally considered an afflicted witness but now regarded as a confessed witch.
Twenty years old and a refugee from Maine, Sarah Churchill came from a fairly prominent family, though it was one known for violence (her grandfather) and fornication (her mother). Sarah was working as hired help for George Jacobs Sr. over on Cow House River when she experienced convulsions as if bewitched. Her master was unsympathetic to her flailing. Long known as combative and now beset with arthritis, old Jacobs called her a “bitch witch” and apparently beat her with one of the two walking sticks he needed to support himself. However, she had ceased to have fits—Jacobs’s beatings may have cured them—and the magistrates assumed that her pain had stopped because she had given in and joined the witches. The afflicted reported her specter tormenting them, and at last, like Mary Warren and Deliverance Hobbs, she “confessed.” Her name, she told the court, was written in the Devil’s book twice, listed with the names of her master, Jacobs, his son, and his granddaughter.
According to Abigail Williams, old Jacobs had made his granddaughter Margaret and the maid Sarah Churchill put their hands to the Devil’s book along with his own son George Jacobs Jr., his wife, Sarah, as well as “another woman & her husband viz: Mr. English & his wife” (Philip and Mary English). At some point Sarah Churchill also said that Ann Pudeator brought her a book to sign and that Bridget Bishop, “alias Olliver,” also tormented her.
Sarah was afflicted again at Ingersoll’s the evening of May 9 after her confession, at which time Mary Walcott identified the specter as Sarah’s master, old George Jacobs, “a man with 2 staves.”
The latest suspects were probably kept in the Village’s watch house overnight before being crowded into Ingersoll’s cart, which had been rented for the journey to Boston jail But Sarah Churchill, now that she was understood to be a repentant witch and thus a potential witness against her coconspirators, was kept in Salem, her arrival a matter of interest to Mary Warren; here was yet another imprisoned witness whose change of heart was not believed.
At Thomas and Ann Putnam’s home around midnight Mercy Lewis reported Jacobs’s pursuing specter, carrying his two walking sticks and the Devil’s book, beating her because she refused to sign and threatening to kill her that very night because she had witnessed against his maid Sarah that day and persuaded her to confess.
Because of this, Hathorne and Corwin issued an arrest warrant on the following day for George Jacobs Sr. and his granddaughter Margaret Jacobs. They ordered these suspects brought to town for a hearing in Thomas Beadle’s tavern, where Burroughs had been confined earlier. Sarah Churchill was taken there as a witness, and when she was returned to the Salem jail she had a distressing story full of contradictions that would give Mary Warren even more to worry over.
Sarah had testified against her master as she was expected to do, accusing him of hurting her despite the fact that the old man insisted on his own innocence. She must also have witnessed against Jacobs’s granddaughter Margaret, whose case notes are lost, for Margaret broke down and also confessed that she had indeed joined the witches.
But, as Sarah Churchill tried to explain later, the authorities had pressured her to confess. She had belied herself, she said, because they would not believe her. They threatened to lock her up with the other accused witches—people she had charged, who were thus bound to be resentful. They had kept at her until she was afraid not to confess, not to lie in the face of that stony disbelief. If she told Reverend Noyes only once that she had signed the Devil’s book, he would believe her. If she told him a hundred times that she had not, then he would think that she lied. Mary Warren knew what that was like.
Meanwhile, John Willard’s specter was also active, for Jonathan Corwin wrote an arrest warrant for the man at some point that day, May 10, and entrusted it to Constable John Putnam Jr., Annie’s uncle. But when Constable Putnam reached Will’s Hill, he found Willard was not at home.
Sarah Churchill returned to court on May 11, joining Mercy Lewis, Annie Putnam, Abigail Williams, Elizabeth Hubbard, and Mary Walcott, to continue her accusations against Jacobs and his granddaughter. Margaret Jacobs, having confessed, unlike her aggressive grandfather, accused both Mary Warren and Goodwife Alice Parker—Mary Warren’s enemy.
In Boston on May 10, the day of the first Jacobs examination, Sarah Osborn, unwell to begin with, died in jail. Her nine weeks and two days of imprisonment, as enumerated by the jailer, left an unpaid bill of £1:3:0. Hers was an unhappy and squalid death hastened by illness, no doubt, yet it was a more merciful escape from the prison than a trip to the gallows would be.
It would take time for news of Goody Osborn’s death to filter back to Salem, where, on May 12, Constable John Putnam Jr. reported to Hathorne that suspect John Willard was nowhere to be found. The constable had searched Willard’s house over near Will’s Hill along with “Severall other houses and places,” all to no avail. As far as he could tell from Willard’s family and friends, “he was ffleed Salem.” (Her kinsman’s failure to seize this suspected witch could only have made Ann Putnam even more concerned for herself and her children.)
That same day Magistrates Hathorne and Corwin questioned Mary Warren again in the Salem jail. They had interviewed Abigail Hobbs the day before, finding her as cooperative as Deliverance Hobbs and Susanna Churchill. If Mary had hesitated earlier, had held back from further direct accusations—for neither the various hearing notes or the subsequent indictments indicate her presence in court since her own hearing—she now collapsed in a torrent of confession and accusation while Jonathan Corwin took lengthy notes.
She may have agreed with the charge of witchcraft because of fear or confusion, coming to believe that if the afflicted acted as if her specter were pursuing them, perhaps it was. The magistrates and the ministers, educated gentlemen all, were convinced that this was true. Maybe she believed—or almost believed—it was true, for they said that her actions could give the Devil permission to use her appearance even if she were not aware of it.
Or Mary gave in and agreed to the charge solely to save her skin. A proven witch would be put to death. But a cooperating repentant witch could be considered sufficiently free of Satan to live long enough to testify. So she did as she was expected to do—she confessed and accused her supposed coconspirators. Besides, Goody Parker had been named among the specters, and that was an accusation she could believe. That her own specter was also reported was an inducement to cooperate, to contradict that sighting.
Yes, she admitted, she had signed the Devil’s book, saying, “I did nott know itt [then] butt I know itt now, to be Sure itt was the Devills book in the ffirst place to be Sure I did Sett my hand to the Devills book; I have considered of itt, Since you were here last, & itt was the Devills book, [that] my Master Procter brought to me, & he Tould me if I would Sett my hand to th[a]t book I should be well.” So by now she was accusing John Procter as well as Elizabeth.
Mary, like others, seemed to embroider actual innocuous events to fit the magistrates’ expectations. She denied hurting the afflicted children with magic and then admitted to using poppets. Her mistress, Elizabeth Procter, had brought her a cloth doll representing either Abigail Williams or Annie Putnam. Her master brought her another poppet representing Abigail Williams. The specters of Goodwives Alice Parker (that woman who had killed Mary’s mother) and Ann Pudeator had brought her in prison other dolls as well, representing girls such as Mercy Lewis and Mary Walcott. Alice Parker and Ann Pudeator had bragged of the people they had killed, Mary said. Parker had caused the deaths of local men at sea and drowned Goody Orne’s son in Salem Harbor, washing him up by his mother’s very door. Pudeator poisoned her own husband. While Mary “was thus Confessing,” Corwin wrote, “Parker appeared & bitt hir Extreamly on hir armes as she affirmed unto us.”
Many witch specters continued to confront her, Mary said, naming other prisoners, ranging from Rebecca Nurse to Dorothy Good, telling how Goody Corey’s specter turned into John Procter’s on her lap. They paused in the session when Reverends Higginson and Hale arrived in order to observe. As Corwin read his notes aloud to the two ministers, Mary “Imediately ffell into dreadfull ffitts” when he read Goody Parker’s name. The woman’s specter had appeared, as did that of Goodwife Ann Pudeator when Hathorne spoke her name.
According to Mary Warren, the Parker specter had not only struck wealthy John Turner unconscious for a time when she knocked him out of a cherry tree in his orchard but also bewitched the power of speech away from Mary’s own sister. Yet Parker failed completely in her attempt to bewitch Mr. Corwin’s mare to prevent the magistrate from riding to Salem Village. Burroughs likewise failed to hobble Hathorne’s horse to thwart his trip to Boston. They were not that powerful. They could not bewitch Hathorne, but they could evidently attack Mary, who fell into such severe fits that Hathorne and Corwin issued an arrest warrant for both Pudeator and Parker and ordered Marshall Herrick to bring them in immediately for questioning. (The location is not specified but may have been Beadle’s tavern as before.) The afflicted witnesses against them would be Mary Warren and Margaret Jacobs.
When the marshall brought in Alice Parker, Mary English’s tenant and neighbor and Bridget Bishop’s friend, Mary Warren did not hesitate to accuse her. All the resentment at everything her family had lost—her sister locked in silence and her mother dead—due to this perceived enemy boiled over.
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Mary Warren, face to face with Alice Parker, does not doubt her accusation. Not now, not with this woman. She may only half believe her own confession, but even when she had declared that her fits were part of a distraction, even when she tried to recant, she had no reason to doubt the reality of witches, of malefic magic, of the Devil’s malice. Someone could be causing her misery and the afflictions of the other women and girls, and who would want to do such things? Goody Parker is so obvious a threat. Does not the woman go rigid and blank, as though her soul flits elsewhere, invisible to her victims? If anyone is a witch, this woman is for sure, one of the Devil’s willing servants.
But Goodwife Parker denies the charge, denies bragging about murder victims, denies saying anything to Mary, much less threats. “I never spake a word to her in my life.”
“You told her also you bewitched her sister, because her father would not mow your grass,” says the magistrate.
“I never saw her.” After all, Goody Parker’s dealings had been with Mary’s father.
Does the woman even remember the young girl present somewhere during her dispute with Goodman Warren? Mary is older now, but Mary has not forgotten. She has relived the scene again and again in her mind. Now she raises her hand to strike Parker’s lying mouth, but when she tries to step forward she cannot proceed but instead jerks backward, pushed down by something invisible.
While Mary struggles to recover herself, Margaret Jacobs accuses Parker of sending her spirit to Northfields, where old Jacobs’s farm is.
Marshall George Herrick reports that when he arrested the prisoner she had said, “[T]hat there were threescore Witches of the Company.”
John Louder, who also suspected Bridget Bishop, was there too and says the same.
Goody Parker says she does not remember what number she had said or who had told her about it. But no one believes her, least of all Mary.
All through Goody Parker’s examination convulsions thrash Mary, her words are choked off and strangled. She persists and gradually is able to tell her tale—of the sorrows that have eaten into her heart ever since her father’s encounter with Parker, of the grief that has become rage. She tells the magistrates how her father had promised to mow Parker’s grass crop “if he had time.” But he had not had time, so that woman came to his house and threatened him, saying “he had better he had done it.” Soon after that, Mary’s sister, Elizabeth, fell ill, then Mary’s mother. Her mother died, and the sister was left deaf and dumb, imprisoned by silence.
Goodwife Parker stands there, looking astonished and shaking her head as though she knows nothing about this.
But even that was not enough for Parker, Mary continues, speaking now to the prisoner as well as to the magistrates. For Parker’s specter pursued Mary still, bringing poppets and a needle, weapons with which to torment the other girls. When Mary refused to torment them, refused to join Parker in the Devil’s work, the specter threatened to run the needle through Mary’s own heart.
Mary now stares the accused directly in the eye—or tries to—but she cannot meet the witch’s gaze but instead falls as though struck. She hears her enemy speaking, calling on God to prove her innocence. “I wish God would open the Earth and swallow me up presently, if one word of this is true.”
But although the earth does not open, the magistrates and other onlookers see Mary’s reaction as the result of Parker’s evil magic being cast then and there, right before them in the court, “dreadfully tormenting” Mary, punishing the girl for standing up to her.
Along with some thirty other witches, Parker took part in the Devil’s bloody sacrament at Reverend Parris’s pasture, Mary says when she can continue. The woman had boasted of that and of chasing John Louder along Salem Common. And all during this questioning Parker kept sending her own specter directly out of her body to afflict Mary.
Reverend Noyes speaks up to remind the defendant of an earlier time when Goody Parker was ill, when he visited her to inquire about then-current rumors of witchcraft. He had asked “whether she were not guilty,” and Goody Parker had answered that “If she was as free from other sins as from witchcrafts she would not ask the Lord mercy.” That reply is now taken to be an evasion rather than a reference to sins she did not commit.
At this Mary convulses in a “dreadful fit,” during which her tongue pulls from her mouth, straining until it turns dark.
This is too much for the defendant, who snaps, “Warrens tongue would be blacker before she died”—black with lies, that is.
The magistrates ask Goody Parker why she afflicts and torments Mary.
“If I do,” she answers, “the Lord forgive me.”
But the court does not believe Goody Parker’s claim of innocence and holds her for trial. Mary Warren can rest assured the witch who destroyed her family will get her just desserts.