The Witches: Salem, 1692 Part 4

THE BOSTON AUTHORITIES issued a warrant for the arrest of George Burroughs on April 30. Burroughs then lived seventy miles north of Salem, in Wells, on the Maine frontier. Though he did so "with all speed," the Maine and New Hamps.h.i.+re constable was several days in conveying the minister to the village. He arrived on May 4. Hathorne and Corwin had issued fifteen warrants as they awaited his delivery, doubling the number of witch suspects; it was a season when you had more than the usual cause to worry about the stains on your conscience or the wart on your chest. One of Ann Putnam Jr.'s uncles was said to have kept a horse saddled at all times. Again allegations jumped town lines; the early-May arrests included several Beverly suspects. The Salem justices worked overtime to process the complaints, testimonies, and prisoners. They must have felt as beleaguered as the minister dislodged from his home and transported-against his will and as fast as rocky horse paths would allow-to his former parish.

As Burroughs rode south, as Deliverance Hobbs settled into the prison on what is today Salem's Was.h.i.+ngton Street, Hathorne and Corwin interrogated several new suspects, all accused by the village girls. Fifty-eight-year-old Dorcas h.o.a.r was well known to the court. A practiced palm reader, she had predicted deaths and infirmities. She had a tendency to appear just before people fell ill. Decades earlier she had consulted a borrowed book of fortunes; she apologized to John Hale when he discovered as much. That was before she became an accomplice of her minister's thieving servant, so devoted to h.o.a.r that she called her "Mother." The maid further terrorized Hale's daughter with reports that old Dorcas h.o.a.r would kill or bewitch her should Rebecca reveal their larceny. Rebecca Hale supplied a convincing digest of h.o.a.r's witchcraft; she had worked all kinds of sorcery in the Hale household. A singular-looking character, h.o.a.r fit the part, a middle-aged woman who trimmed her gray hair short save for a dark, matted, four-and-a-half-foot-long ponytail. Even to a minister, it appeared "like an elf-lock." h.o.a.r's fisherman husband had died suddenly the previous winter. When the coroner's jury called to examine the body, she had insulted the men, stamping her feet for effect. They were wicked wretches if they took her for a murderer! Like Sarah Good, h.o.a.r was downwardly mobile, having lost out on an ample estate.

As she entered the meetinghouse on May 2 the girls greeted her with convulsions. They explained that she had admitted to the murder of her husband; she boasted that she had killed a Boston woman as well. A new accuser had joined in the chorus. Like Mercy Lewis and Abigail Hobbs, eighteen-year-old Susannah Shelden had grown up largely on the Maine frontier, from which Indians twice drove her family. In the process, she had lost a father, a brother, and an uncle. The brother's body was recovered, scalped and mutilated. In 1688 the remaining Sheldens had settled in Salem; the village contributed to their support. It seemed that Dorcas h.o.a.r had visited Susannah as well, with her book and two black cats. As h.o.a.r denied the litany of charges, two girls cried that a bluebird melted into her body. A marshal struck furiously at the air; several saw a pale gray moth fly through the meetinghouse.

Hathorne met his two most combative suspects that spring Monday. As the girls described Dorcas h.o.a.r's cats, the book, the black man whispering in her ear, she exploded: "Oh! You are liars, and G.o.d will stop the mouth of liars." Hathorne reprimanded her: "You are not to speak after this manner in the court." h.o.a.r was unmoved. "I will speak the truth as long as I live," she spat back. Hathorne denounced her "unusual impudence"; it paled next to that of Susannah Martin, a blacksmith's widow. The tiny, seventy-one-year-old Amesbury woman could hardly take Hathorne's proceedings seriously. She had already once been accused of witchcraft decades earlier. Her husband had sued for slander; he won, although the accusations continued. Martin was said to have bewitched a woman to insanity, murdered her own infant, borne an imp. On a more pedestrian plane, she had accused a man of theft and quarreled freely with her children. She challenged her seat in the meetinghouse. Disinherited once by a stepmother and again by a nephew-in-law, she had sued, unsuccessfully. Eight accusers contorted as Martin took her place before them on May 2; Ann Putnam managed nonetheless to throw a glove at the older woman. Martin chuckled. "What?" gasped Hathorne, startled. "Do you laugh at it?" "Well I may at such folly," scoffed Martin. Hathorne upbraided her: "Is this folly? The hurt of these persons?" She had hurt no one, Martin contended, Mercy Lewis tumbling to the ground at her feet.

Precise and self-a.s.sured, Martin could only laugh anew at the girls' antics. "Do you not think they are bewitched?" asked Hathorne. "No, I do not think they are," Martin replied. Hathorne challenged her to provide a better explanation. Perhaps they dealt in black magic, she suggested. Did Hathorne not remember the Witch of Endor? She too had disguised herself as a saint; the devil could wrap himself in any shape. Martin's truculence elicited more agitation and some jeering. "You have been a long time coming to the court today, you can come fast enough in the night," taunted the Putnams' maid. "No, sweetheart," replied the elderly woman, injecting a rare note of sarcasm into the proceedings. If they were going to toss gloves at her, she would hurl words back. "Have you no compa.s.sion for these afflicted?" asked Hathorne. "No, I have none," she snapped. It was believed that if a witch touched a victim, her spell would flow back into her, reabsorbed, like electricity. The authorities ordered the afflicted to approach Martin. Four did so, John Indian vowing as he stepped forward to kill the sorceress. Repelled by her power, he collapsed to the floor.

The entire community believed her guilty, Hathorne informed Martin. "Let them think what they will," she sniffed as a litany of incomprehensible events were dredged up and laid at her feet. Witchcraft worked a tidying effect: Not only had Martin bewitched cows and drowned oxen, she had transformed herself into a black hog. Eighteen years previously she had walked several miles by foot in the muddiest of seasons without getting so much as her shoes wet. (How had she managed the feat? her accuser asked. She should have been muddy to the knees after such a journey! Martin had been matter-of-fact. She did not enjoy being wet. Swift, nimble traveling-especially travel that sounded to be airborne-was suspect. It was what Indians did. Martin's crime was worse: heavy, sodden skirts kept women confined; she had slipped her moorings.) On a clear moonlit night, Martin had appeared as a ball of fire. She had turned a dog into a keg. It was she who-disguised as a cat-had leaped through a window to strangle a man in his bed. More than anyone else, the seventy-one-year-old seemed to allow men to reveal that they were scared out of their wits, in fields, in forests, at night in their beds. Did she truly believe the girls dissembled? Hathorne prodded. She could not say. But did she? "I dare not tell a lie if it would save my life," Martin replied, again acknowledging what, by May, was rumored to be at stake. Others had arrived at the same conclusion; for the first time that week constables failed to locate a suspect. On Monday Salem merchant Philip English actually did vanish into thin air. A wealthy man, he would manage over a month in hiding.

Hathorne had scheduled Burroughs's examination for May 9; the minister's specter flew about madly in antic.i.p.ation. When not enchanting Keyser's fireplace, Burroughs tempted Mercy Lewis with a fas.h.i.+on book-she swore it had not been in his study when she worked in his household-and carried her up an exceedingly high mountain. Below her stretched "all the kingdoms of the earth." They were hers, promised the specter, if she would but sign over her soul. (Burroughs had taught Lewis well: she drew the description nearly verbatim from the book of Matthew, in which the devil tempts Christ, a text Lawson had cited in his March 24 sermon.) Burroughs a.s.saulted the doctor's niece, one of the few accusers who had not met him before. He was unknown as well to thirty-six-year-old Sarah Bibber when, in somber minister's garb, he pinched her and proposed she accompany him as she made her way to the village for that morning's hearing. He introduced himself neither as a conjurer nor as a wizard; only in the meetinghouse would she realize who her dark-suited escort had been.

The day before Burroughs's hearing, Parris administered the village sacrament, warning that those who partook of the devil's fare were not to drink of the Lord's cup. Through the summer, he reminded his congregants that there were but two parties in the world: "Everyone is on one side or the other," he would warn, unnecessarily. As those in his household well knew, each member of the community was already either with him or against him. The village was in the thick of a cosmic battle, one the devil and his troops would wage as long as they could. By the fall Parris compared their siege to biblical trials, cataloging enemies from Herod to Louis XIV, who seven years earlier had revoked the Edict of Nantes, depriving Protestants of their liberties; the Puritan devil reliably enjoyed a French connection, whether to kings, dragoons, priests, or fas.h.i.+on. Parris reproved anyone who doubted the conspiracy. "If ever there were witches, men and women in covenant with the devil, here are mult.i.tudes in New England," he proclaimed. Those infernal fiends occupied the most civilized and the most remote precincts. They had evolved from their traditional form. Where previously "some silly ignorant old woman" might have pestered, now highly knowledgeable, ostensibly devout sorcerers of both s.e.xes preyed upon the settlers, a most pernicious state of affairs.

Less than twenty-four hours later, George Burroughs walked into the same raftered room, wearing a sober black suit and waistcoat if not the distinctive flat, white collar of his profession. Having preached in the meetinghouse three times weekly for over two years, he knew its every plank intimately; he could not have retained fond memories of the building. In a contentious discussion there nine years earlier, he and John Putnam had attempted to settle their accounts, a resolution that eluded both men. In the course of that meeting Putnam encouraged a skittish marshal to extract payment from his former houseguest. Burroughs shrugged him off. He had nothing with which to settle his debt apart from his body. He then issued a challenge: "Well, what will you do with me?" The marshal appealed to Putnam. "What shall I do?" he asked, quailing a little before a clergyman. Thomas Putnam signaled to his brother; the two conferred outside. On their return, they were firm. "Marshal," John commanded, "take your prisoner." He secured Burroughs overnight at Ingersoll's. Ultimately the level-headed innkeeper saved the day; Ingersoll managed to persuade the Putnams that the debt had been paid. Burroughs could not have expected ever again to set foot in the village meetinghouse as either a minister or a wizard.

Hathorne and Corwin approached Burroughs's 1692 hearing differently from that of any previous suspect. By the time they deposed him on May 9 they had collected formal testimony and sat flanked by two additional justices. The first was forty-year-old Samuel Sewall, round-faced, with small, glinting eyes, thin lips, and a tumble of gray-brown curls. His brother, Stephen, housed Parris's daughter down the street from the town meetinghouse. The second was William Stoughton, former Ma.s.sachusetts deputy president. The presence of the two men spoke to the gravity of the situation. It also made it more ticklish. Burroughs and Sewall had known each other at Harvard. They had socialized over the intervening years; Sewall had loaned Burroughs money. Both Hathorne and Corwin knew Burroughs from their 1690 trip to Maine.

The grandson of a Cambridge-educated, Suffolk County rector, Burroughs grew up in Maryland, to which his parents had immigrated. The family was small and itinerant. An only child, Burroughs moved with his mother to Ma.s.sachusetts, where she joined the Roxbury church in 1657. His father, a merchant mariner, traveled the coast. Burroughs graduated from Harvard in 1670, a year behind Sewall and Bayley, the village's first minister. (He narrowly missed Parris, who arrived in Cambridge as he left.) Both parents returned to England, leaving Burroughs on his own. At least initially, he fell in with the Ma.s.sachusetts establishment. Sewall would journey to hear Burroughs lecture as late as 1691, eighteen months before he sat in judgment of him. In 1674, having married and served as a schoolmaster, Burroughs joined the Roxbury church and became a father. Shortly thereafter he accepted a pulpit in Casco, a prosperous settlement slightly smaller than Salem village, today a part of Portland, Maine. It was not a plum posting. Generally relations were frosty between eastern Maine and the Puritan establishment. Irregularities tended to creep into the preaching there, as Maine clergymen made concessions to their heterogeneous flocks. On a large bay, amid miles of farm-and marshland, Burroughs ministered to a collection of Anglicans, Baptists, and Puritans, to frontiersmen, seagoing traders, and recent immigrants. The frontier towns submitted to Ma.s.sachusetts's jurisdiction at about the time that Burroughs moved to Roxbury; in the process, they traded religious freedom for military protection. That did not relieve them of the need to appeal to provincial authorities for their scant share of resources. Ma.s.sachusetts delivered grudgingly and desultorily, despite the fact that much of the colonial elite-the Salem justices included-had large financial interests in Maine fis.h.i.+ng and lumber industries. Over and over officials washed their hands of the vulnerable frontier.* In 1690, Corwin and Hathorne had recommended that Ma.s.sachusetts withdraw its soldiers, with disastrous results.

Casco could not offer Burroughs an organized church; he was never to be ordained. Nor could it offer him a house, Indians having destroyed that of their previous minister. The town did grant Burroughs two hundred acres of prime land, bounded on three sides by rocky coastline and affording misty, majestic ocean views. On that promontory he built a home. The attacks continued-the Wabanaki in Maine outnumbered the English six to one-but Burroughs did not budge. He was in his midtwenties when Indians again fell upon Casco in August 1676, obliterating the town. Burroughs managed to lead a group of ten men, six women, and sixteen children to a lush island, where they subsisted for some time on fish and berries before being evacuated to safety. In the wake of that attack the family of three-year-old Mercy Lewis temporarily fled to Salem. Burroughs wound up twenty miles north, in Salisbury. He eked out a living as an occasional minister until the Salem villagers found him, to install him with the Putnams.

Burroughs's steeliness can be read in the Putnam contretemps, for which he returned to Salem, proposing to settle his debt with his body. With equal determination he resettled in Casco in 1683. His former parish heartily welcomed him back.* Six years later, Cas...o...b.. now larger than Salem village-again found itself besieged when what would be known as King William's War erupted. Tensions between the French and English settlers ran high well before England declared war on France in May 1689. That September, more than four hundred French and Indians descended on the town with a roar. Burroughs joined in the seven-hour battle, waged in a field and orchard; a veteran Boston militia captain lauded him for his unexpected role. The a.s.sault cost the poorly equipped settlers dearly; two hundred and fifty of them were killed or taken captive. It was in that attack that fifteen-year-old Mercy Lewis was orphaned. She moved in with the Burroughs family, who must have seen her in even greater distress than she demonstrated before Hathorne. These were the raids that flooded Salem with refugees. Again widowed, still not ordained, Burroughs retreated down the coast to Wells, seventy-five miles north of Boston but now the frontier. Everything to the east had been destroyed.

Studded with two-story, thick-walled garrison houses, extending over both sides of a river thick with sturgeon and salmon, handsome Wells was the best-defended town in Maine. That was fortunate, as the summer of 1691 amounted to a protracted siege. Burroughs spent it behind rows of pickets while nearby settlements went up in flames. As a visitor noted of the Wabanaki, "It is taken for granted, without some speedy help coming, that they will not leave a beast alive in the whole province." In a sustained mid-June siege, they destroyed the Wells livestock and trampled the fields. (They were well armed thanks to the business-minded colonists. It was a poor Indian, noted a visitor, who did not own two guns.) Burroughs joined in signing an abject, late-July appeal for provisions to the Ma.s.sachusetts council. He pleaded anew for clothing in September. They were in rags, and without salt; the corn supply would last six months. They expected the enemy daily. Indians captured a seventeen-year-old who ventured out that week for wood. The winter was an agony and got worse; in a predawn raid on February 5, 1692, a hundred and fifty Indians plundered and burned the prosperous town of York, Wells's closest neighbor. Burroughs submitted an apocalyptic account to the provincial authorities late that afternoon. As the first witchcraft accusations emerged fifty miles south, Indians killed or carried off half of York, marching fifty captives through the snow to Canada. They slaughtered sheep, cattle, and horses. Having spoken with an escaped youth, Burroughs painted a h.e.l.lish picture of "pillars of smoke, the raging of merciless flames, the insults of the heathen enemy, shouting, shooting, hacking (not having regard to the earnest supplications of men, women, or children, with sharp cries and bitter tears in a most humble manner), and dragging away others (and none to help)."

The ravages reminded him of the pa.s.sage in Samuel in which David and his people discover their families taken hostage at Ziklag. Viewing the blackened, leveled city, they "lifted up their voices and wept, until they had no more power to weep." Evoking the destruction of Jerusalem, Burroughs switched to Lamentations: "And saith Jeremiah, mine eye affecteth mine heart, because of all the daughters of my city." He read the devastation as divine rebuke. "G.o.d is still manifesting his displeasure against his land," he wrote three months before his arrest. "He who formerly hath set to his hand to help us, doth even write bitter things against us." He closed with a variation on G.o.d's promise of deliverance in Jeremiah, which he hoped the Ma.s.sachusetts council might share: "If you will remain in this land, then I will build you up and not pull you down; I will plant you and not pluck you up." Burroughs stressed the "low condition and eminent danger" in which the settlers found themselves. Wells was next, and would soon have no choice but to surrender. The York raid had moreover claimed an eminent casualty. Shubael Dummer, the only ordained minister in Maine and a Sewall cousin, stepped out that Friday morning to be butchered on his doorstep, "barbarously murdered, stripped naked, cut, and mangled," as an eyewitness reported. Dummer's wife was carried off. She would not survive.

Cotton Mather too reported on York, in an address on the corruption of New England manners. The details and the atrocities were the same. Families were butchered, hostages in danger of being roasted alive. Hearts, Mather preached, should bleed over the carnage. But congregations should also wake, with a start, to York's warning. Where Mather wrote allegory, Burroughs submitted an SOS, if one ripe with biblical allusions. Like Sarah Good, he was both ferocious and needy, a musket-wielding man of the cloth and a public-spirited supplicant. He might well have observed that the hated Andros had better protected Maine than the inept, homegrown government that had ousted him; the insurrection-and the subsequent chaos-had only encouraged the enemy. Boston had withdrawn its forces, leaving men like Burroughs to beg for protection. Some went so far as to pet.i.tion the king after the Boston coup, there being, under the interim government, "no peace, order or safety in New England."

HATHORNE AND CORWIN built a careful case against Burroughs, soliciting evidence from sixteen people. They also took the exceptional step of deposing their suspect privately. That interview took place at Ingersoll's, although on this occasion the sixty-year-old innkeeper-familiar with the Maine skirmishes, which had sent his own family scurrying south as well-made no move to defend his former minister. To some extent we are left to extrapolate the charges from Burroughs's denials. The first was the gravest and surely weighed as heavily against him as the slaughtered wives. When, inquired the justices on the morning of May 9, had Burroughs last taken communion? The Maine frontier was thinly populated; fewer than four thousand English settlers made their homes there. They were not always eager to expose themselves to the dangers of travel for the sake of the Sabbath, a day on which much ceased but Indian ambushes did not. If only out of necessity, Burroughs was less orthodox than his inquisitors. He was also either blunt to the point of self-destruction or Parris-who recorded his testimony-made him seem so. When had he last taken communion? It had been so long he could not say exactly, Burroughs replied, though on a recent Sabbath, he had attended a morning meeting in Boston and an afternoon one in Charlestown. He remained a full member of the Roxbury church. He had baptized only the eldest of his children, among the original residents of the Salem parsonage. Parris did not note that the minister lived far from any address at which he might conceivably have baptized the others.*

The interrogation veered swiftly from the orthodox to the occult. Burroughs's second wife had complained of visitations in the night. What of the terrifying creature that had bolted from the roof, raced along the chimney, and flown down the stairs? A slave swore it had been a white calf. On another occasion something rustled by the bed, breathing on Sarah Burroughs while she lay at her husband's side. It dematerialized when he woke. Burroughs denied that his house was haunted although-he had a perverse habit of raising questions, if not hackles-he could not help but add that there were toads. He sounds nearly to have been amusing himself. He had no particular reason to think himself vulnerable; witches were women of sour disposition and humble circ.u.mstances. They were more often acquitted than convicted. Ma.s.sachusetts did not try ministers for witchcraft; he still had his champions. As recently as three months earlier he had been holed up, half starved, in a lice-infested garrison surrounded by several feet of snow, a vicious enemy bearing down. He had twice barely escaped with his life. He had witnessed appalling sights; he knew of ears and noses hacked off and stuffed into mouths. He had little time for diabolical toads.

The dead wives came next. There was some reason why various Burroughs women might be flying about Salem posthumously denouncing the minister. The Putnams were far from alone in testifying that over the weeks their minister had lodged with them, "he was a very sharp man to his wife." In Maine, Sarah Burroughs had lived in a fear that had nothing to do with enchanted white calves. Her husband scolded mercilessly and controlled obsessively. He convinced her that he heard every word she uttered in his absence. It was reported that, returning from a strawberry-picking expedition with Sarah and his brother-in-law, Burroughs had vanished into the brush. His companions hollered for him. He was nowhere to be found. They rode home; somehow he had preceded them, on foot and with a basket of berries. He afterward admonished his wife for the vile things she had said about him in his absence. The devil could not know as much, protested the brother-in-law, to which Burroughs cryptically replied: "My G.o.d makes known your thoughts unto me."*

A week after his wife had given birth, Burroughs kept her on her feet to berate her at length. When his daughter blamed him for the resulting illness he chided her as well. (The night before Burroughs's hearing, Shelden testified, the spectral wizard told her that he had killed two of his own children. The charge may have seemed plausible to those who knew the family, in which daughters sided with a stepmother.) While Burroughs had neither choked nor smothered his wives-or stabbed them, as others maintained; again the discrepancies tended to flit about unnoticed-the choice of verbs was interesting. Burroughs believed in secrets, something that sat poorly with a community dedicated to mutual surveillance. It would emerge that he had attempted even to silence the woman to whom his daughter complained. Should his wife fail to survive, the neighbor was not to mention the tongue-las.h.i.+ng. Burroughs may have mistreated Mercy Lewis as well; a special violence crept into her accounts of her former employer. She would not write in his book, she insisted, "if he threw me down on 100 pitchforks." Avenging females hovered everywhere in 1692 Salem.

A fairly consistent portrait emerges, if not of a sinister black man who abducted girls on whom he pressed diabolical books, then of a tyrannical husband. During their stay with the Putnams, he and his first wife had quarreled so violently that they appealed to their hosts to arbitrate. (The request may have amounted to mere politeness. It would have been impossible to argue privately, even in the comfortable Putnam home.) Again roguish Burroughs either kept or hoped to keep secrets. He had insisted his wife sign an agreement that she would reveal none of his private affairs, a request that in itself sounded incriminating, the more so at a time when doc.u.ment signing a.s.sumed a diabolical taint. He discovered as much that morning. The justices had done their homework: Had he made his wife swear that she would write her father only those letters of which he approved? Burroughs denied the charge, of special interest to Hathorne. Sarah Ruck, the second Mrs. Burroughs, currently flitting about in her funeral shroud, was his brother's widow.* Her father lived in Salem, where he was about to serve as foreman of a grand jury.

The Salem marshal led the compact, dark-haired Burroughs into the meetinghouse, where he was instructed to look only at the justices. Susannah Shelden, the Maine refugee who had buried more relatives than any of the other girls and whose father had died months earlier, offered up her conversation with the two dead wives. The justices asked Burroughs to face his accuser, standing several feet from him. As he turned, all or nearly all of the bewitched fell screaming to the ground; Parris could not properly say how many contorted amid the mayhem. What, the justices asked, did Burroughs make of all this? He agreed they had before them "an amazing and humbling providence." He understood nothing of it. He doubtless cited Scripture; he was as fluent in biblical wonders as anyone in the room, something Parris had no reason to indicate in his notes and that Reverend Noyes did his best to suppress. Burroughs did point up one irregularity-"Some of you may observe that when they begin [to] name my name, they cannot name it," he observed of his accusers-but was drowned out.

A very different set of incriminating reports followed. Several men testified to Burroughs's strength. It was legendary, especially as he was a small man, even "a very puny" one, in the estimation of statuesque Cotton Mather. Burroughs had hoisted a barrel of mola.s.ses with two fingers. He had fired a seven-foot shotgun with one hand. While a companion had gone off to the fort for help, he had unloaded an entire canoe of provisions. In September 1689, a time when a prodigiously strong, stouthearted leader came in handy, many had admired his fort.i.tude; it was that month that the minister won praise for his role in the Cas...o...b..ttle. "None of us could do what he could do," recalled a forty-two-year-old Salem weaver, who had attempted to lift the shotgun but-even with two hands-could not steady the weapon. What had inspired awe at the time appeared as wizardry now. Many had heard secondhand of Burroughs's exploits; others had heard directly from him. He displayed as prodigious a talent for boasting as did his specter. Where once he might have solicited those tributes, Burroughs now disowned his feats. (He had, he explained, merely rested the shotgun on his chest.) Lurking behind the accounts was what may have been the most pertinent charge against him. He had survived every devastating Indian attack unscathed. Abigail Hobbs, Mercy Lewis, and Susannah Shelden had not been so lucky; others who might have testified about Burroughs's wielding an impossibly heavy musket could not do so because they were dead. By no account an agreeable man-plenty of supercilious baiting and bl.u.s.tering accompanied the domestic cruelty-Burroughs managed to join abusive behavior at home with miraculous feats abroad. All evidence pointed to the same conclusion: he was a bad man but a very good wizard.

Though he rode to jail in Boston directly from the hearing, Burroughs continued to haunt the week's proceedings. He may still have been in transit when toothless, gray-haired George Jacobs hobbled into his hearing the next day, his long figure bent over two canes. Jacobs was at least seventy and possibly closer to eighty, in the eyes of his neighbors an exceptionally old man. A prosperous, longtime Salem farmer, Jacobs sounds like nothing so much as an aging rascal. Before his interrogators, he chortled and quipped. As the justices introduced his accusers, Jacobs invited the girls to speak up. He eagerly awaited their story. Parris's niece offered her testimony. Jacobs could only laugh. Asked to explain himself, he interrogated his interrogators: "Your wors.h.i.+ps, all of you, do you think this is true?" Their credulousness struck him as incredible. He did not shy from a challenge; he would admit to witchcraft if they could prove it!

Like George Burroughs and the take-no-prisoners John Procter, Jacobs had been firm with his servant, whom he very likely beat. A sixteen-year-old boy would later testify that Jacobs had threatened to drown him. The charge resonated. A generation earlier, Jacobs had been prosecuted for having drowned several horses, trapping them in a river with a barrage of sticks and stones. (He claimed he had simply attempted to run the trespa.s.sing animals off his property.) Over two days of hearings, it emerged that the spectral Jacobs had beaten the girls with his canes. Several produced pins that the old man had stuck into their hands. Sarah Churchill, his former servant, urged Jacobs to confess. "Have you heard that I have any witchcraft?" he asked, looking not at her but at the magistrates, as directed. "I know you have lived a wicked life," Sarah chided, which seemed sufficient.

Did Jacobs tend to family prayer? inquired Hathorne and Corwin. He did not. A prayerless house was understood to be a haunted one; the magistrates pressed the old farmer to account for his negligence. He did not wors.h.i.+p with his family, Jacobs explained, because he could not read. That was no impediment; "Can you say the Lord's Prayer?" prompted the justices. "Let us hear you." All understood those lines to be a sort of talisman before which evil fled. Jacobs made multiple attempts, stumbling every time. Nearly every witness who appeared before Hathorne and Corwin would do the same; as another wizard nervously quipped a week later, himself mangling a clause, the accused appeared to be every bit as bewitched as their accusers.* Otherwise words came easily to Jacobs. He bantered with the justices. He could not help them with their inquiry, he feared. They could burn him or hang him; he knew nothing of witchcraft. He was no more guilty than his examiners. "You tax me for a wizard. You may as well tax me for a buzzard," he protested. "I have done no harm." Having been beaten black and blue by the elderly farmer, having been urged to write in his book, having been offered gold and many fine things-all before she had yet learned his name or set eyes on his nonspectral self-Mercy Lewis offered a more convincing explanation: Women were if anything more dangerous in 1692 than the men who claimed that they flew into bedchambers to lie heavily on their chests for hours, were aware. "I verily believe in my heart that George Jacobs is a most dreadful wizard," swore Lewis. Along with nine additional witches, Jacobs that week followed Burroughs to jail in Boston, where the old man who beat girls with his canes and the minister who abused wives had occasion to get to know each other intimately, enough so that Burroughs may even have caught sight of the triangular witch's teat that officials discovered below Jacobs's right shoulder.

Accusations exploded in the wake of a minister's imprisonment; hearings and prison depositions could barely keep pace. Mercy Lewis took the lead in testifying, to become the most active accuser. Ultimately she would be afflicted by fifty-one people. A retentive girl, she wove psalms and sermons into her visitations, offering the most imaginative testimony. (Maine refugee Susannah Shelden tended to divulge murders. She emphasized witches who suckled birds, hairless kittens, pigs, turtles at their b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Ann Putnam Sr. made a sideline of dead infants. Her daughter introduced new suspects.) At some point, Lewis moved to the household of Constable Jonathan Putnam, who had just lost a baby to what the family a.s.sumed to be witchcraft. Mary Warren, the Procter maid, waffled as recently as the day of Burroughs's Salem return, when she was heard to say that the magistrates might just as well listen to Keyser's crazy daughter as to any of the afflicted girls. Within the week she reversed course again; she would prove the most sensational witness for the prosecution. She plucked pins from her body. She spat blood in the meetinghouse. Her tongue protruded from her mouth for so long it turned black. Her legs locked together and could not be separated by the strongest of men. The court reporter did not elaborate on this unconventional intercession: here were grown men attempting to pry apart a twenty-year-old girl's knees.

Phantoms and specters meanwhile commingled. Ann Putnam Sr. reported on several milky-white figures at her bedside. Two were ghosts, but the third was John Willard, her dark-haired neighbor. Willard had evidently helped to round up several initial suspects until he tired of the girls and swore they should all hang. In spectral form he confided in Ann that he had murdered at least thirteen villagers, whom she named. The litany of unfortunate explanations left everyone scrambling to reexamine domestic misfortunes and mysteries, of which there is never a shortage. All over Ess.e.x County, stomach cramps, bladder problems, numbness, deafness, and every brand of deviance-including unexpected kindness-suddenly made sense.

Not every terror was airborne. Sarah Churchill, George Jacobs's princ.i.p.al accuser, left the May 10 hearing in tears, wringing her hands. She took her distress to Ingersoll's niece. Though she had sworn as much, she sobbed, she had never set her hand to the devil's book. What she had testified was "altogether false and untrue." Her confidante would not accept her recanting. In tears, Churchill insisted. Why on earth then had she lied? asked the older woman. The justices had threatened to lock her in the Salem dungeon with Burroughs, Sarah explained. She preferred to perjure herself than be chained in a dark hole with a wizard. The problem, she moaned, was one of disbelief rather than credulity. If she told Reverend Noyes a single time that she had signed the devil's book, he would believe her, "but if she told the truth and said she had not set her hand to the book a hundred times, he would not believe her."

Late in May, as eighty-one-year-old Salem farmer Bray Wilkins prepared to ride to Boston, his granddaughter's husband paid a call. Would Wilkins pray for him? The young man-it was John Willard, the Putnam neighbor-was frantic. He had been accused. Wilkins put him off as politely as he could. The two had long been at odds; the Wilkins clan had not taken to Willard. Who should turn up just as Bray Wilkins sat down to table days later in Boston but the young man. He cast an evil eye on the family patriarch; for days afterward the old man suffered an excruciating urinary blockage. On the painful return to Salem-Wilkins felt "like a man on the rack"-he appealed to Mercy Lewis. By May the girls served as traditional witch-finders; parents of ailing children made pilgrimages to consult with them. They might only be eleven or twelve, but under Parris's supervision, they could explain how several head of cattle a community away had come to freeze to death six years in the past. Mercy saw Wilkins's grandson-in-law pressing on the old man's stomach, clear as day.

The witchcraft claimed its first fatality that month. Early in May, Bray Wilkins's seventeen-year-old grandson Daniel also ranted about John Willard. Daniel may have been among those who knew that Willard beat his wife. He may already have heard rumors of witchcraft. He swore that Willard should hang. Several days later, the teenager fell ill. He was soon unable to eat or speak. A doctor attributed the sickness to preternatural causes, a diagnosis with which the visiting Mercy Lewis agreed. At Daniel's bedside at dusk she watched a gauzy Willard torture the limp, dazed boy. He gasped for breath. Over the next day Lewis, Mary Walcott, and Ann Putnam Jr. all reported Willard at his throat and chest, choking him. The specter spoke with the three girls. On Sat.u.r.day the fourteenth, he announced he would shortly murder Daniel "if he could." He had not, he explained, strength enough; he would apply to Burroughs for renewed powers. On Tuesday, the specter vowed he would kill Wilkins that moonless evening. Three hours later, he breathed his last. "Bewitched to death," Parris wrote after the seventeen-year-old's name in the village church record.

The culprit turned up forty miles away, having eluded arrest for nearly a week. His flight seemed to confirm his guilt; he caused such a stir in the watch house that the marshal had no choice but to shackle him. Alarmed, the marshal urged the justices to press ahead in their investigations, to prevent further casualties. Hathorne and Corwin examined the suspect promptly. "What do you say to this murdering and bewitching your relations?" they challenged the young man. Willard insisted he wished no harm to any human being. The girls' testimony was read aloud. It was familiar, down to the charges of wife-beating. Several relatives-and nearly all who testified against Willard were family-recalled the sticks he had broken while thras.h.i.+ng his wife. He had left her cowering under the stairs; she had not expected to recover from the blows. Through the hearing, ghosts flew about the room, cl.u.s.tering around Willard. Did he believe the girls were bewitched? Hathorne inquired. "Yes, I really believe it," replied Willard, the next to trip, perilously and five times, over the Lord's Prayer.

Quietly, having been wrenched from her sickbed in February and mentioned only occasionally since, Sarah Osborne-the frail villager who had worried Indians might drag her off by her hair-died that week in prison. It took a st.u.r.dier soul to survive nine weeks and two days in a raw, rank cell through the coldest months of the year on scant rations and in heavy irons. On May 10 Boston's jailer removed Osborne's body from among the villagers who had watched her slip away, none of whom would have quibbled with the 1686 description of the Court Street lockup as a "suburb of h.e.l.l." At the time no one ascribed her death to witchcraft. She, rather than Wilkins, would be Salem's first casualty.

VI.

A SUBURB OF h.e.l.l.

h.e.l.l seems a great deal more feasible to my weak mind than heaven. No doubt because h.e.l.l is a more earthly-seeming thing.

-FLANNERY O'CONNOR AT AN IDEOLOGICALLY fraught moment, a group of children suffer from an incapacitating disorder. Their bewildered families cast frantically about for a diagnosis; meanwhile the symptoms intensify under observation and the disorder spreads. A group of experts-ministers, in this case-weigh in, an unverifiable explanation gains favor, allegations bloom left and right, and seventy people find themselves clapped in airless cells, accused of offenses they can only half imagine. These things happen, and not only in the seventeenth century. What could not yet happen in 1692 was any resolution. Hathorne could investigate the charges and incarcerate the suspects. Neither he nor any Ma.s.sachusetts magistrate could advance to the next steps-grand jury hearings and formal indictments-until the acting governor allowed the Salem cases to proceed to trial. An eighty-nine-year-old political moderate, very much a placeholder, he seems to have elected to stall. Sixteen years earlier he had reprieved an accused Newbury witch, the woman with whom John Hale spoke after her pardon. The colony teetered between governments or, more exactly, "between government and no government." It awaited the charter it knew to be en route. It awaited its new governor. All was in a holding pattern. "Salem is one of the few dramas in history with a beginning, a middle, and an end," Arthur Miller observed in 1953. The middle act opened now, as the panic gathered force and the jails of Ess.e.x County bulged with shackled witches.

Deliverance-or at least judicial relief-arrived at dusk on May 14 in the rotund and improbable form of an erstwhile Maine shepherd.* Sir William Phips, the new Ma.s.sachusetts governor, sailed past the spray of islands and into Boston's majestic harbor late that Sat.u.r.day. The snap of New England spruce met him even before he set foot on sh.o.r.e. Built on the slope of three rolling hills, the town-of handsome churches, extensive wharfs, a two-story town house, and a marketplace packed with well-furnished shops and tradesmen of all kinds-was surrounded by water on nearly every side. Boston was small enough still that you could walk easily from one end to the other in search of your lost cow. Brick, pitched-roofed mansions had begun to rise among its tight huddle of wooden homes. Still, you were more likely to meet a hog than a coach in its narrow streets. The interim administration had a.s.sembled at the wharf to welcome Phips; shouting acclamations, well-wishers thronged the pebble-stone streets, which echoed with celebratory cannon shots. Along with the new governor sailed Increase Mather and the colony's revised charter. The three were to rescue Ma.s.sachusetts, that "shaken and shattered country," from its post-Andros anarchy, from the "thousand perplexities and entanglements" that beset its people.

The rugged forty-one-year-old who made his way to the town house, accompanied by several hundred flag-bearing militiamen, some wielding muskets and pikes, others in breastplates or heavy leather doublets, was an odd man for the job. A burly, pleasant-faced gunsmith's son, Phips had spent his early years in the remote reaches of Maine; at twenty-two, he moved to Boston as a s.h.i.+pwright. Rough-hewn and wildly ambitious, he could not settle for being merely one of the first self-made men in American history. As Samuel Parris was setting up shop next door, Phips determined to seek his fortune, sailing to the West Indies in search of sunken treasure. An initial expedition yielded only two mutinies, the first of which he essentially suppressed with his bare hands. A third journey yielded a cache of gold, silver, and precious stones off the coast of Haiti. English patrons had underwritten the voyage; to London Phips sailed with thirty tons of silver. Writing centuries later, Keynes deemed his feat "one of the most extraordinary records of improbable success." The haul altered England's financial future, triggering an early stock-market boom and leading directly to the foundation of the Bank of England. At a time when five hundred pounds const.i.tuted a small fortune, Phips's share alone came to eleven thousand pounds.*

While the exploit won him medals and a knighthood, it did nothing to burnish his manners. Phips might be compared to Jason fetching the Golden Fleece, as a minister a.s.serted before Harvard's 1688 graduates, but he remained a rude and rascally frontiersman who proceeded by brawn and bl.u.s.ter, colorful overreaching and vigorous head-bas.h.i.+ng, earning reprimands from many, as he had done even from the aged provisional governor he now replaced. A decade earlier constables attempted to break up Phips's men, brawling late in a Boston bar. He stepped in on their behalf. When the constables threatened to notify the authorities, Phips roared that he "did not care a t.u.r.d for the governor, for he had more power than he had," a sentiment he expressed less decorously on other occasions. Brought to trial, he flung his papers at the justices. (Stoughton, about to become Phips's deputy governor, sat on the court that fined him.) His swearing and cursing impressed even veteran sailors. The fortune did nothing to suppress an appet.i.te for bribery and extortion.

It took a great deal to transform a rabble-rousing adventurer into an angel, but New England's preeminent mythmaker managed to do so, later describing Phips arriving in Boston at this critical juncture as if "dropped from the machine of heaven." While his contemporaries would have choked on the celestial equation, the timing was more problematic yet. "We are in daily expectation of Sir William Phips," Samuel Sewall had noted-nearly four months earlier, as the Parris girls shuddered with their first convulsions and weeks before the new governor had so much as embarked.* The charter Phips carried was already six months old, months that had worn down Ma.s.sachusetts, that "distressed, enfeebled, ruined country."

For all his recklessness, Phips could be said to have been a habitual late-arriver. Having learned to read and write at twenty-two, his grasp of both skills remained shaky. He apparently could not distinguish Dutch from English on the page and may or may not have been able to decipher his own December 1691 commission. It established him as governor by royal prerogative; under the old charter, his had been an elected position. In March of 1689 Phips had raced from London to Boston to deliver the news of England's Glorious Revolution, in which William III overthrew James II, a Protestant king supplanting a Catholic one. Aboard s.h.i.+p, Phips crowed that he would personally unseat Andros, the reviled royal governor; he arrived to discover the job had been done six weeks earlier. A year later Phips found his way to the North Church, where Cotton Mather baptized him, clinching his political future. In his case, the delayed rite raised no eyebrows. There had been, Mather explained, no settled minister on hand in Maine to perform the task.

In 1690 Phips led a combined naval and land expedition against Quebec, the capital of French Canada. Rumors of a Wabanaki-French alliance haunted New England, as they would continue to do; word flew that the enemy intended to destroy every town in the colony. Phips had enjoyed an earlier success against a French outpost in Nova Scotia, a success only slightly soiled by his men's pillaging. The 1690 expedition was rashly planned and repeatedly delayed; the French greeted him with heavy fire. He sacrificed hundreds of men to a ruinously expensive campaign, one London deemed "a shameful and cowardly defeat." Phips would play a role in altering North American financial history too; without funds to pay the returning soldiers and sailors or recruit new ones, the colony issued paper currency. Crippling inflation ensued. The economy in tatters, a French retaliation expected, trade at a standstill, a state of near-anarchy prevailed. The "poor people," noted a Boston visitor, "are ready to eat up one another." None of which stopped Phips from sailing to London to ask William III to bankroll an attempt to dislodge the French from North America once and for all. Maine's fur trade and fisheries stood in peril. (England would have cause for regret too, argued the settlers, should the French get their hands on the Ma.s.sachusetts s.h.i.+pyards.) It was on that trip that Phips and Increase Mather joined forces in the charter negotiation.

As Phips walked that late-spring Sat.u.r.day afternoon from the Boston wharf the light drained completely from the sky. A hush fell on the city. From the town-house balcony he delivered half a speech-G.o.d had sent him to preserve his country, where all prior laws and liberties would obtain-then paused. The light was gone. He would not infringe upon the Lord's Day. The acclamations, the salutes, would have to wait until Monday. By candlelight the militia accompanied him to his red-brick mansion at the corner of today's Salem and Charter Streets, a beautifully appointed home with a brilliant harbor view. The crowd continued around the corner to the home of Increase Mather, to whom Phips owed his appointment. On Monday morning the authorities reconvened in the pillared town house, where they engaged in a six-hour debate as to whether the reading of Phips's commission should be resumed where it had been left off or whether it should be read anew, politics and religion stumbling over each other. At the same ceremony sixty-year-old William Stoughton, a veteran of two decades of civil service and of four regimes, took the oath as deputy governor.

Published two days later, the charter failed to accomplish all the colony-henceforth a province-had hoped. The colonists were to pay the price for having arrogated powers not their own; the Crown expanded Ma.s.sachusetts boundaries but curtailed its privileges. The charter demolished the political basis of the first decades, granting religious tolerance to all (except Catholics). Any man with substantial income could vote, irrespective of church members.h.i.+p. The colonists lost the right to choose their own governor; the installation of Phips was a compromise worked out in London by Increase Mather. Surely the province could overlook a royal appointment if its governor was a New England Puritan, reasoned Mather, who knew that the king preferred a military man at the Ma.s.sachusetts helm. Meanwhile, various Crown advisers lobbied for someone who shared their economic interests. Phips proved acceptable to all parties, in part because he belonged to none. Nor had he any political experience. He replaced what the Mathers referred to as "a knot of people that had no design but to enrich themselves on the ruins of this flouris.h.i.+ng plantation." The province could now count on better protection, the vacuum of authority having proved more traumatic than the royal invasion, the "alien incubus" that was Andros. Most important, the charter put an end to three years of gnawing uncertainty.

Increase Mather set about selling the doc.u.ment aggressively; he knew he proffered an imperfect bill of goods.* His countrymen might wonder how he had not obtained more. The real wonder, he proclaimed, was that he had secured so much. Indeed autonomy was a thing of the past. But their governor and lieutenant governor hailed from their ranks. Spared a Crown-imposed Anglican aristocrat, Ma.s.sachusetts got a Mather-baptized native son. The new doc.u.ment had its defects. But was not half a loaf better than none? Mather challenged in a spring sermon. Property rights were confirmed, religious rights guaranteed, political liberties and regular town meetings restored. Their governor could not pa.s.s laws or levy taxes unilaterally, as had Andros, whose courts were a mockery, who extorted monies, and who had exercised more power over New Englanders than did the king over Englishmen. Pleading and shaming, Increase Mather beseeched his compatriots to be happy with their lot and-appreciative, obedient children-to support their sovereigns. The last thing Ma.s.sachusetts needed was "an unthankful murmuring generation of men." Cotton Mather jumped on the bandwagon, selling the charter to the Second Church congregation, Boston's largest. He had already reminded his fifteen hundred paris.h.i.+oners that the Lord had spared them three years earlier. He had rescued them from those who declared them "a people fit only to be rooted off the face of the earth." Mather meant Englishmen rather than Indians.

A roar of dissatisfaction could be heard in the propagandizing. A people disobliged G.o.d, Cotton Mather submitted, in a sermon delivered on a day of thanksgiving for his father's safe return, when they comported themselves like "vultures and harpies." Men who had shown "unfainting industry" for their countrymen should not be thanked with infamy. In that sunny address Mather extolled ministers, magistrates, and civic leaders of all kinds, hardworking, underappreciated public servants, each of whom "must carry two handkerchiefs about him, one to wipe off sweat of travail, another to wipe off the spit of reproach." He reminded his audience of their good fortune and ample privileges. They should avoid divisions and contentions. Those invited malignant "breaches in G.o.d's hedge about us," allowing devils to break in, of which there was currently a "stupendous instance" nearby.

Two disgruntled camps weighed in: those who would settle only for the restoration of the original charter (the orthodox, for the most part), and those who preferred a return of Dominion rule to an ineffectual New England regime (the merchants). Many felt the colony had been shortchanged, that something had been irretrievably lost, always a summons to conservatism. The interregnum had taken its toll; not everyone was eager to fling himself into the arms of the new administration.* Prominent men who endorsed the charter bristled at Phips, who had so often run afoul of the law in his pre-angelic incarnation. Grumbling could be heard throughout the city of eight thousand, to the delight of the remaining Andros supporters. Increase Mather conveyed none of that disappointment to London, reporting instead on June 23 "that the people are very well pleased with their new charter." For his part, Phips had his hands full not only with the discontent but with Indians who ravaged the frontier-the devastating raid Burroughs described had taken place fourteen weeks earlier-and French privateers who ravaged the coast. The restoration of order, the dire need for sailors, a strategy by which to foil French and Indian designs, const.i.tuted his immediate concerns, as did the empty Ma.s.sachusetts treasury. For a loan the government turned to the ever-obliging Samuel Sewall, who had bailed out Burroughs several years earlier.

Phips could not have expected the supernatural a.s.sault, 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 reconst.i.tuting 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 hara.s.sed 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 a.s.sault a "h.e.l.lish 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, a.s.sisted by cats and birds. They a.s.sembled 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 G.o.d," 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 t.i.thing 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 G.o.d 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-wors.h.i.+pping 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 s.h.i.+p 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 p.r.o.nounce 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 s.h.i.+ps; 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 da