Six Women of Salem (25 page)

The specter of prisoner Abigail Hobbs, Hawthorn says, was also reported to be torturing the witnesses, and
she
has confessed. “She owns that she had made a league with the Devil.”

At that, Mary collapses, convulsing.

Goodwife Corey and the Procters knocked her down, the afflicted cry, so she could not confess.

Mary writhes on the floor, unable to hear, see, or speak. Finally she chokes out some words. “I will speak!” She recovers a little and wrings her hands. “Oh, I am sorry for it, I am sorry for it.” But her jaws clamp down, bite off the words, and grind her teeth to prevent speech as she convulses again. “Oh, Lord help me, Oh, good Lord save me!” she sobs, then gags again. “I will tell, I will tell,” she manages, but she faints before she can continue.

Mary regains consciousness enough to mutter, “I will tell, I will tell, they brought me to it,”and the packed roomful of watchers assume that the “they” are vengeful Procter specters (rather than resentful afflicted). The convulsions continue, then: “I will tell. They did, they did, they did.” But the seizures begin again, worse than before, and the magistrates order her to be removed for the time being.

With so many against her, Mary is utterly confounded, not knowing what to believe. For the moment. at least, she may think that she really has stumbled into the Devil’s snare. Whatever she had said, whatever she had meant, she realizes, as she waits back in the lock-up, just what the court will accept, which possibility is currently the safest.

(
6
)

April
19
to
30
,
1692

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?

____________________

W
hat 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.”