Six Women of Salem (26 page)

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.”