Six Women of Salem (46 page)

“Oh, Mother! We have forsaken Jesus Christ,” Goody Lacey wailed. “And the devil hath got hold of us. How shall we get cleare of this evil one?”

When Goody Foster murmured something to herself, the afflicted said she was talking with the Devil.

“I was praying to the Lord,” she protested.

“What Lord?” asked a magistrate.

“To God.”

“What God do witches pray to?”

“I cannot tell, the Lord help me.”

The two older women were taken from the room, and the granddaughter was brought in. As far as the four magistrates could see, Mary Lacey Jr.’s presence alone was enough to trigger violent seizures in Mary Warren.

“How dare you come in here, and bring the Devil with you, to afflict these poor creatures?” one of them scolded.

“I know nothing of it,” the girl protested. But when her touch revived Mary Warren, Mary Lacey exclaimed, “Where is my mother that made me a witch and I knew it not?”

In the past her mother, exasperated with her wayward daughter, had frequently exclaimed “devil take you” in their arguments. Now perhaps this expression had come terrifyingly true.

The magistrates told her to look upon Warren “in a friendly way” so as not to hurt her. Mary Lacey tried, but Mary Warren fell at her glance anyway, so Lacey began to confess. The words tumbled out in a torrent.

The Devil had appeared to her as a horse and as “a round Gray thing” a week ago or a year ago. He promised her “happy days” and “better times” and (blasphemously) that “I should want nothing in this world & tht I should obtain glory wth him.” However, “He bid me not to be afraid of any thing, and he would not bring me out; but he has proved a liar from the beginning.”

The Devil was hurting Warren now, but she herself could squeeze things to hurt folk: Warren, Timothy Swan, Mrs. Ballard, the child of James Fry. Sometime the sons of Martha Carrier helped her. The Carrier boys’ specters were in the room now, having received the power to hurt from their mother. (Martha Carrier had been the first arrested in Andover, even before Annie Putnam and Mercy Lewis were called in.) Mary Warren fought off all the specters in her seizures.

At one point, Higginson noted, Mary Warren saw the specter of “a Young man” on the table “& was Just then herself afflicted And this Mary Lacey said she saw Young Carrier Sitt upon Warrens Stomack.” Mary Lacey Jr. had much to say about the spectral depredations of Richard and Andrew Carrier and how their mother, Martha, had threatened her own family into joining Satan’s side—Martha whom the Devil had promised would be “Queen of Hell.” Once Mary Lacey Jr. confessed enough, she could take Mary Warren’s hand safely, both girls weeping, with Lacey begging forgiveness for hurting the other.

The magistrates brought back Goodwives Foster and Lacey so they could question all three generations together, and the session descended into a turmoil of accusations, admission, and confessions—both daughters now blaming their mothers, all three accusing others of being in the Devil’s snare. “Here is a Poor Miserable Child,” one of the magistrates observed, “a Wretched Mothr & Granmother.”

“[O] Mothr,” the granddaughter wailed, “Why did You give Me to the Divell. . . . [you] Have often wished that the Divel Would ffetch Me away alive O My hart will break within me . . . O lord Comfort Me and bring out all that are witches.” And to her grandmother: “O Granmother why did you Give Me to the Divel . . . doe not You deny it you have bin a verry bad Woeman in Your time I must Needs Say.”

Even in her fits Mary Warren would have heard the Lacey girl berate her mother and grandmother, this girl so at odds with her family that she had even run away from home the year before to hide out with neighbors. Mary Warren, however, had lost her own mother to a fever that had been brought on, she was sure, by the malice of a witch. What did she think when faced with a young woman about her own age, a confessed witch with no apparent loyalty to her own mother? Mary Warren is described as suffering severe seizures during the questioning, convulsing until the blood ran from her mouth. What might have the Lacey clashes triggered? How much was self-punishment for her own persistent accusations? If Mary Warren had known before that she had experienced spells of distraction, how much had she managed to convince herself was real since then? So many respected and educated gentlemen were
convinced
that the Devil was behind the current troubles. Who was
she
to counter that?

As the three suspects described how they signed the Devil’s membership list, “Mary Warren then had a fitt and Cried out Upon Richd Carrier.”

With the brothers repeatedly implicated for this torture, the four magistrates issued an arrest warrant for Richard and Andrew Carrier, “Sons of Thomas Carier of Andivor Husbandman.”

The Foster and Lacey women were committed to the Salem jail, and the court was left with a strong suspicion that here was a whole family in thrall to the Devil.

The following day, Friday, July 22, eighteen-year-old Richard and sixteen-year-old Andrew Carrier were in the custody of Andover constable Joseph Ballard, whose wife still pined in her fevers. Ballard brought them to Thomas Beadle’s tavern in Salem for questioning by the same four magistrates.

At first the Carrier brothers “returned Negative Answers to all” the magistrates’ questions, while Mary Lacey Jr. spun elaborate tales of how she and they went about torturing people at the Devil’s behest and while the afflicted said they saw the Devil and Martha Carrier among other specters, all of whom were preventing the boys’ confessions.

As the details accumulated, all of the afflicted “were Grevously tormented,” especially “Mary Warrin in a bad ffitt & blood Runing out of her Mouth.” Andrew Carrier caused that, said Mary Lacey Jr. Andrew uncharacteristically “Stammered & Stuttered Excedinly in Speaking,” but nonetheless, he denied it all.

Consequently, as the court’s notes have it, “Richd and Andrew were Carried out to another Chambber—And there feet & hands bound a Little while.” As John Procter would soon write, the court “tyed them Neck and Heels till the Blood was ready to come out of their Noses,” a rare form of punishment for civilians. Returned to the court, the brothers confessed. With Mary Lacey Jr., they described the witch meetings in detail, their means of inflicting pain, their many victims, and their Devilish baptisms. The magistrates noted that Andrew no longer stammered, speaking plainly as he ordinarily did. At one point Mary Warren spoke up to say his specter told her that “the Divel baptized him wthin this Month at Shawshin Riuer, the Divel put his head into the Wattr.”

The five new confessors implicated other suspects, Burroughs especially, plus Rebecca Nurse and the four other women recently hanged.
Those
five had all declared themselves to be innocent, but the dead cannot defend themselves. Now, as far as the court was concerned, the confessions of these Andover suspects annulled the earlier claims.

They also implicated Goodwife Martha Emerson (Martha Carrier’s niece and Roger Toothaker’s daughter), who was arrested on the same day and examined on the next.

On Saturday, July 23, John Procter, speaking for other prisoners as well, addressed a letter to several Boston ministers:

[Due to] the Enmity of our Accusers and our Judges, and Jury, whom nothing but our Innocent Blood will serve their turn, having Condemned us already before our Tryals, being so much incensed and enraged against us by the Devil . . . [they humbly asked the] Reverend Gentlemen [to present] this our Humble Petition to his Excellency [the governor], That if it be possible our Innocent Blood may be spared, which undoubtedly otherwise will be shed, if the Lord doth not mercifully step in. The Magistrates, Ministers, Jewries [i.e., juries] and all the People in general, being so much inraged and incensed against us by the Delusions of the Devil, which we can term no other, by reason we know in our own Consciences, we are all Innocent Persons.

He referred to the five recent confessors from Andover and their accusations, “which we know to be Lies,” and to some of the petitioners as attending the Devil’s Sacrament when they were in fact locked in “close Prison.” Two of those five were Carrier’s sons who “confessed” only after enduring the torture of being tied neck and heels. Procter’s own son William had been so bound, released not by a false confession but by a jailer’s mercy.

“They have already undone us in our Estates, [and now they want] our Innocent bloods.”

Therefore, the petitioners begged that their trials be moved from Salem to Boston or, if not, that other magistrates be put in charge of their cases or at least that some of the ministers attend their trials and do what they can to save them.

Whatever the Boston ministers may have done in response, if anything at all, did nothing to change the venue or the court’s methods. Governor Phips was frequently absent, overseeing frontier defenses Eastward in Maine, leaving the lieutenant governor in charge: William Stoughton, chief justice of the Court of Oyer and Terminer.

Meanwhile, on the same day, July 23, Richard Carrier and Mary Lacey Jr. joined Mary Warren to testify against Goodwife Martha Emerson. Again, Mary Warren’s convulsions seemed the most severe among the afflicted. She fell into “a long dumb fitt” but was able to communicate by raising her hand to second a neighbor’s tale of his being hag-ridden by Emerson’s specter—forced by the witch to serve as her steed in the night.

After denying the charge, Goody Emerson reluctantly confessed, hoping to save her own life, for she was not only Roger Toothaker’s daughter but, like Goody Sibley, had also actually attempted countermagic in the past and the court knew it. Confession and becoming a cooperating witness could at least earn a reprieve. Her hesitation, she said, was due to the threats from her aunt Carrier and Goody Green of Haverhill, who “took her by the throat & . . . would not lett her confess.”

But despite the accusations from Mary Warren, Mary Lacey Sr. and Jr., and Richard Carrier, Goody Emerson had second thoughts about the spiritual consequences of her lie. “[A]fter ward,” said the court’s notes, “she denyed all & sd what she had sd was in hopes to have favour & now she could not deny god that had keept her from that sin.”

“[T]hough he slay me,” she told the court later, “I will trust in him.”

Though what good the recantation might do before the earthly courts was another matter.

But the Lacey and Carrier confessions did not save Elizabeth Ballard, for the woman died of her fever on July 27.

So witches were still about and still dangerous. Annie and Mercy tirelessly continued their sessions in Andover, identifying the nest of witches there. The suspects initially denied their guilt and involvement, but neither the girls nor the public were fooled. From the stories Annie brought home, even some of the women’s
husbands
believed their wives had joined the Devil. And in the face of such certainty, most of the women confessed.

Yet, Ann knew, others persisted in their claims of innocence. Mary Bradbury, for all that the Carrs and the Putnams could say about her and despite the Lacey woman’s witnessing Bradbury’s baptism by the Devil at the falls, refused to confess.

The day after Goody Ballard’s death, Thomas Bradbury addressed a petition to the court:

July the
28
:
1692

Concerning my beloved wife Mary Bradbury . . . wee have been maried fifty five yeare and shee hath bin a loveing & faithfull wife to mee, unto this day . . . wonderfull laborious dilligent & industryous in her place & imployment, about the bringing up o[u]r family . . . eleven childeren of o[u]r owne & fower grand-children . . . Shee being now very aged & weake, & greived under her affliction may not bee able to speake much for her selfe, not being so free of Speach as some others may bee I hope her life and conversation hath been such amongst her neighbours, as gives a better & more reall Testimoney of her, then can bee exprest by words

own’d by mee Tho: Bradbury

By July 22 Thomas Bradbury had managed to gather well over one hundred names on a petition supporting his wife’s character as a good Christian and a helpful neighbor. Like Francis Nurse, Bradbury was not about to cease in his efforts for his wife. This would not have comforted the Putnams, though they well knew that in the end Francis Nurse’s efforts had come to nothing.

Meanwhile ordinary legal matters went forward. Simon Willard, who occasionally took notes for the court, helped appraise the estate of the late Thomas Oliver, Bridget Bishop’s second husband. With the widow’s life interest in the property now expired upon her death—by hanging—the land and chattels would now be distributed among the Oliver heirs. The inventory was brief and itemized only what Oliver had owned at the time of his death thirteen years before: an acre “with the old house that was late upon it,” about ten acres in North Fields (since sold), and “a little table and a chest.”

By now Mistress Mary English had at least moved to better quarters. After Philip was brought to the Boston jail back on June 1, he and Mary moved into a room in the prisonkeeper John Arnold’s house, a prerogative for gentlefolk who could pay the extra fees. This was still confining and a far more humble accommodation than their own grand mansion, but it was more likely to be away from pickpockets, prostitutes, and—they hoped—fleas.

Family lore noted that they were even allowed to move about the town by day at least to attend religious services—if accompanied by an armed guard, whose salary they also paid. They had one of their daughters brought from Salem, six-year-old Susanna, to live with them in the jailer’s house, and they found places for the other children to board in Boston. Philip’s friend George Hollard funded their immediate expenses and provided their meals.