The Witches: Salem, 1692 (23 page)

Phips could not have expected the supernatural assault, having left London the day Boston’s jailers clapped irons on the first three suspects. It is impossible to say what he made of the ambush, more an annoyance than an urgent matter of state. Witch-hunting offered none of the glory of sunken treasure or Indian scalps. The conquest of Canada—rich in furs, fish, and precious metals—remained his priority. He was neither a reflective man nor a letter writer; the realities of his career have been largely subsumed by Mather’s fantasies. Phips directed his attention to reconstituting a government. From sheriffs to justices, he had positions to fill all around; many awaited audiences with him. He would mention Salem’s “perplexed affair” to his British superiors only in mid-October, by which time both he and the Mathers had reason to reframe the onslaught of the invisible world. On his arrival, Phips would note five
months later, “I found this province miserably harassed by a most horrible witchcraft or possession of devils, which had broke in upon several towns. Some scores of poor people were taken with preternatural torments; some were scalded with brimstone; some had pins stuck into their flesh; others were hurried into fire and water, and some dragged out of their houses and carried over the tops of trees and hills for many miles together.”
^*
He was operating wholly on hearsay. Neither he nor Mather had witnessed any of those phenomena.

Although Phips mentioned satanic possession in October, the prospect surfaced rarely in the interim.
^†
Cotton Mather instead urged upon Phips the parallel with Sweden’s earlier scourge. In that assault a “hellish crew” of no fewer than seventy witches had preyed upon three hundred children, ages four to sixteen, carrying them over central Sweden by various conveyances, assisted by cats and birds. They assembled in a lush meadow, where they met Satan himself and—with blood—inscribed their names in his book. The Swedish witches threatened to kill commissioners and tormented ministers, one of whom had earlier been unable to make sense of a searing headache. Mather noted that those who had rooted out the Swedish malefactors had so well acquitted themselves of their task that they were instantly rewarded “with a remarkable smile of God,” a fact that appears nowhere in accounts of that witchcraft. (He did not yet mention that seventy were put to death, of which only twenty-three had confessed, or that hundreds of Swedish children afterward admitted that they had lied. He must have noticed that what began with quotidian curses bloomed rapidly into a satanic cult. In Sweden too a knot of young children targeted a group of families, very often their own.)

Sweden’s was the witchcraft crisis from which derived the dizzying aerial malfunction that resembled Ann Foster’s. And it was the week of Phips’s return that Martha Carrier and Ann Foster crash landed as they soared over the treetops to Parris’s much-discussed meadow, Foster’s leg folding beneath her. Around the same time, Carrier jostled a twelve-year-old neighborhood girl at meeting. The child afterward heard the older woman’s disembodied voice in the bushes; Carrier threatened to poison her. The first to be served in Andover, a warrant went out for Martha Carrier’s arrest on May 28. Three days later, in an ill humor, she appeared before Hathorne to defend herself against charges that she had bewitched Abigail Williams and Ann Putnam Jr., on whom she had never before set eyes.

HATHORNE AND CORWIN
had postponed their mid-May hearings on account of Phips’s arrival. With it came a rash of new allegations. Orders went out to round up the extended family of George Jacobs, the jocular old man who had invited the justices to burn or hang him if they could prove him guilty but who bore that telltale sign below his right shoulder. When the Salem constable arrested Jacobs’s daughter-in-law, a half-sane woman then nursing a baby, her three older children ran after her in tears until she disappeared from sight. Charitable neighbors took in the orphans. Their uncle, a close neighbor, could not do so; also accused, he had fled, along with Jacobs’s son. That brand of flight was less available to women. George Jacobs’s bright, soulful seventeen-year-old granddaughter landed in jail.

The caseload for Hathorne and Corwin was tremendous; on May 18, nine people testified to nineteen different afflictions. That Wednesday Rebecca Nurse’s younger sister Mary Esty was released from jail, where she had spent the previous three weeks. She had figured in no recent testimony. (There was no bail in capital cases.) Her husband, a Topsfield cooper, had served in every civic office, from selectman to tithing man to highway surveyor to grand jury man. He knew how the system worked; he fought to convince the court that the earlier testimony was in error,
not entirely difficult to believe of his mild-mannered wife. One witness violently disagreed. Within two days of Esty’s release, Mercy Lewis hovered near death. Her mistress summoned Ann Putnam Jr., who arrived with Parris’s niece; the girls appear to have been joined at the hip all spring. At Mercy’s bedside they described the same sight: Esty and her accomplices savagely choked their friend. She did so, they explained, because Mercy, her breath now ragged, refused to clear Esty’s name. Toward early evening on May 20 a diaphanous Mary Esty warned the teenager that she would not live past midnight. Under a sliver of new moon, a marshal raced to Topsfield to rearrest the fifty-eight-year-old mother of seven. By the time she sat shackled in Boston’s prison, Mercy Lewis had fully recovered.

Over the same days Susannah Shelden, the two-time Maine refugee, revealed that when Philip English, the town merchant who had for weeks eluded arrest, visited her with his book and a knife, he threatened to murder their new governor, “the greatest enemy he had.” Shelden was not alone in plaiting together the two conspiracies. Cotton Mather would do the same. The devil, Mather warned, angled “to sink that happy settlement of government wherewith Almighty God has graciously inclined Their Majesties to favor us.” The complots easily aligned: Five of the men who were to become witchcraft judges had together ousted Andros, an insurrection partly planned at Mather’s address. Hathorne took affidavits in that affair; Sewall responded to its critics. The justifications sounded familiar: having invaded New England, a crimson-coated, Crown-worshipping gang had subjected its people to barbarous usages. Their leader penetrated the colony’s meetinghouses. He collaborated with the French. He suborned Indians, one of whom swore that Andros had given him a book with the picture of the Virgin Mary; anyone who did not own that volume was to be killed. Andros intended to sacrifice the settlers to their “heathen adversaries.” He had summoned additional redcoats. He plotted to topple every town in New England, beginning with Boston.

At dawn on May 23, Nathaniel Cary, a wealthy, middle-aged Charlestown
ship captain, sailed with his wife to Salem village. Over the previous days, disturbing reports had reached the couple that Elizabeth Cary, then in her early forties, had been accused of witchcraft. At the advice of friends, they made the half-day trip to Salem. They could resolve the matter easily enough; the afflicted would not so much as recognize Elizabeth, none having met her before. The justices had crammed a great number of hearings into that Monday’s schedule; after conferring with them, Cary maneuvered himself into a prime meetinghouse seat. He watched with fascination as officials led in the prisoners, positioning them seven or eight feet before the bench and ordering them to face Hathorne and Corwin. Marshals remained at the defendants’ sides, holding arms aloft to disable their powers. It hardly mattered. Along with three older girls, Parris’s little niece Abigail stood between the suspects and the justices. If the eyes of the accused so much as drifted toward the bewitched, they shrieked. When they fell quiet, the justices pronounced them struck dumb. Cary labored to understand the difference between silent and entranced; he did not immediately grasp that, as Parris described it, the girls’ mouths had been supernaturally stopped. “Which of you will go and touch the prisoner at the bar?” Hathorne inquired. The most courageous fell to the floor before she had taken three steps. Hathorne ordered her carried forward, to pronounce her cured once the touch test had been administered. “I observed that the justices understood the manner of it,” Cary noted drily, unable to detect any change in the girls’ behavior himself. They roamed freely about, several times approaching his wife to ask her name. The improvised courtroom was a disorderly place; in the midst of it, Cary discussed his predicament with John Hale, whom he had known for years. The Beverly minister suggested a private interview with Elizabeth’s accuser, one he would arrange. Cary commanded ships; he knew something about making himself understood. He entrusted the matter to Hale.

Elizabeth’s accuser turned out to be Abigail Williams. Parris would not consent to the parsonage interview Hale had promised, however; his
niece would meet the couple only at Ingersoll’s. The Carys walked up the road to the bustling inn, where they found John Indian waiting tables. Court days were exuberant alehouse days; justice—for which neighborhoods turned out and for which court officers enjoyed generous liquor allowances—came as a gift to Ingersoll. John introduced himself as one of the bewitched; in exchange for a bowl of cider, he treated the Carys to his story, displaying his wounds. At an earlier hearing, court officials had bound a suspect’s hands with a cord. John’s hands had magically fused together as well, tied by a rope that cut into his flesh. He in no way connected his affliction to Tituba, a confessed witch who had now been in prison, he told the couple, for nearly three months. In the midst of his account the band of girls filed in, “to tumble down like swine,” Cary noted. A sort of demented acrobatics troupe, they had been together since the court’s adjournment. Someone called for a few women to calm them; time stood still as all waited tremulously for the girls to pronounce. Revived, they cried out in unison: Elizabeth Cary tormented them! Instantly an official stepped from an adjoining room, where the justices had congregated. He bore an arrest warrant. With or without the connivance of Reverend Hale, the Carys had walked into a trap.

Having traveled to Salem to clear her name, Elizabeth Cary found herself under interrogation. Hathorne and Corwin do not appear to have decamped from the ordinary when they instructed the Charlestown matron to stand, arms stretched wide, her neck twisted away, so as not to torment the girls. Two of them accused her. She explained that she had never so much as heard of either one in her life. Her husband asked if he might at least support one of his wife’s hands; Hathorne denied the request. Elizabeth began to cry. Might her husband, at her side, wipe the tears from her eyes and the sweat from her face? This Hathorne permitted. The room was stifling; Elizabeth felt faint. Could she lean on her husband? Hathorne barked that “she had strength enough to torment those persons, and she should have strength enough to stand.” The ship captain railed at the cruelty; Hathorne instructed him to remain silent or
leave the room. Who should appear next but John Indian, tumbling about on the floor although he had sat drinking cider only hours earlier with Elizabeth Cary, impervious to her supernatural powers.

Hathorne appealed to the bewitched. Who afflicted John? They could see Elizabeth Cary upon him. Again Hathorne enlisted the touch test, now in regular use; on those occasions when it failed to produce results, he urged the suspect to grasp harder, then harder still, until it did. Often the suspect did so blindfolded. Her touch, it was understood, enabled the poisonous particles emitted from the witch’s eye to return to her body; the blindfold allowed it to be reabsorbed without the victim’s being leveled by the witch’s gaze. Noyes in particular subscribed to the practice, to the distress of some suspects. Hathorne ordered Elizabeth to touch John but under no circumstances to look upon him; court officers carefully guided her hand. Grasping it, John pulled the Charlestown matron to the ground. The sight of his wife sprawled roughly on the floor alongside an Indian slave shocked Captain Cary into a hasty speech. He had just enough time to sputter that he hoped that God would take vengeance on the heartless justices when a jail warrant appeared for his wife. With much difficulty Cary secured her a room for the night, which would have proved sleepless even if there had been a bed in it, which there was not.

Along with Mary Esty and six others, Elizabeth Cary traveled the following day to Boston’s prison. It was the second delivery of witches since Phips’s return. He would remember that he ordered all suspects to be chained that Monday, but according to the jailer’s record—meticulous, as the accused bore every expense of her incarceration, from straw to blankets to chains—the prisoners’ arms and legs were already shackled. Puritan punishment was meant to be public, reforming, and swift; it required an audience. A malefactor was sentenced “to sit in the stocks one hour next lecture day, if the weather be moderate,” not for his comfort, but that of the requisite spectators. The entire community stood to suffer for a delinquent’s misdeed, his redemption crucial to their peace of mind.

Boston’s jail was that May also a crowded one; the majority of the
accused bedded down there. The stone facility announced itself from a distance with a stench of refuse and rotting wounds. Neighbors suffered along with the inmates. Visitors did not tarry long. In close quarters, at least some of the Salem suspects terrified one another. Others terrified passersby. Iron bars covered the open windows; one could reach out for provisions or in to touch a loved one’s hand. One could also spit and jeer; some came to the prison expressly for those purposes. When a seventeen-year-old servant girl visited on a May errand, Sarah Good, the Salem beggar woman, recognized her and pleaded for tobacco. What remained of her clothing barely covered her body. The girl replied by tossing a handful of wood shavings in her face, adding: “That’s tobacco good enough for you!” Good cursed her, working the same effect she had five months earlier on the Parris children. The teenager raved and fainted for weeks afterward.