‘I—,’ begins Alden but is straightaway interrupted.
‘The providence of God rewards the virtuous and punishes sinners,’ Mr. Noyes announces with some force. ‘It has nothing whatsoever to do with accusing the innocent.’ That seems to clinch matters for the justices, and Alden is remanded to Boston prison.
As he trots home through the hot afternoon, past fields and villages and country people going about their business, Sewall has the uneasy sense that nothing is as it seems, that up is down, white black, that the world all round him, now shimmering in early summer heat, is in fact nothing more than an insubstantial curtain or covering; and whatever lies beyond it is stirring into life, preparing to emerge into the day.
CHAPTER 15
Pies!’ shouts the pie-man. Nearby a beer-seller with a barrel on a handcart is calling, ‘Beer!’ In the distance a ship flies up the coast under curved white sails.
People have come from every walk of life for the opening of the trials, countrymen and women in shawls and smocks, old dames smoking pipes and their gnarled men in fustian frocks or deerskin jerkins, tradesmen in doublets and breeches, wealthier people from Salem and Boston with brass buttons to their waistcoats or virago sleeves to their dresses. As Sewall waits in line with his eight fellow judges he is conscious of the way the bright scarlet of their cloaks of office is slashed across the jostling mass like a wound.
There are some familiar faces. Nicholas Noyes is back at the head of the judicial procession—he has been made chaplain to the Court of Oyer and Terminer. Perhaps it’s better that his role should be defined in this way—it might prevent him from trying to sum up the proceedings. Samuel Parris has been relieved of his position as clerk, and brother Stephen is standing in his stead at the end of the file, carrying his portable desk and looking surprisingly clerkly for such a bustling and busy person. In the mêlée is another face Sewall knows well. Thomas Brattle, treasurer of Harvard College.
He and Mr. Brattle were in England at the same time. They saw the sights of London and attended a concert at Covent Garden, the first professional music-making either of them had ever experienced. They sailed back to America on the same ship too. Mr. Brattle began spitting blood in the middle of the Atlantic and Sewall nursed him until, to the surprise of both men, he recovered.
And yet they’ve never quite achieved the bonds of friendship. Mr. Brattle will inspect you with bland blue gaze and a little smile, then quietly dismember whatever it is you have happened to assert. There are sharp lines graven around his mouth, as though that organ is not just articulate but articulated, so as to enforce the greatest possible precision in its utterances.
‘Good day to you, Mr. Brattle,’ Sewall says.
‘Good day to you,’ Mr. Brattle replies. ‘Your honour.’
When the crowds have shuffled in, Mr. Noyes steps forward and intones a prayer, that the Lord might guide the judgement of the jury (who have been installed on benches to the right of the judges), inform the wisdom of the judges, and protect the blessed plantation of New England in its time of greatest danger, that the Devil’s attempt to pluck out its Christian heart might be thwarted.
The accused is a middle-aged woman called Bridget Bishop who was remanded at one of the earlier examinations. She has a sharp nose and mouth, small black eyes like currants and, bursting from under her little cap, long straggly hair that’s turning from dark brown to grey, giving it an unclean look. She is wearing a grey dress with a white apron and shawl
The court hears there have been rumours about her for a very long time. Ten years ago a little girl called Priscilla developed fits after Bishop had come to her parents’ house to demand payment of a debt. As soon as the front door shut behind the unwelcome visitor, Priscilla began screaking (said her father in his country idiom), and Sewall can hear that sound biting into his soul like a saw (little Hull had screaked in his fits). The child died two weeks later.
When Bishop was thwarted in a land transaction (she’s a businesswoman on a petty and local scale, just like Goody Osborne, now awaiting trial), a sow belonging to the other party went mad and began knocking its head against a fence. Dolls with pins in them have been found up the chimney of a house she formerly owned. She once changed somebody’s black piglet into a thing like a monkey. She had an argument with a farmer and then his cart got stuck in a hole that appeared out of nowhere, right in the middle of a meadow that up till then had been flat as a pancake.
Even worse: Bishop’s body was examined by a team of nine women with experience in such matters, and a bulge of flesh, otherwise known as a witch’s teat, was discovered in a place with no name, the dim and dingy and unfrequented part of the body that lies between the pudendum and the anus. Bishop denied that such a thing was there and accordingly was examined again by the women a few hours later, by which time the teat had disappeared. Compelling demonstration that the Devil was responsible. Who else would be able to remove such evidence once it had been discovered?
But it’s the evidence of his own eyes that affects Sewall most. From the moment when Bishop was brought into the court the accusers began to scream, stagger like drunkards, fall over. When she turns her head towards the public in the main body of the hall (perhaps trying to appeal to them), the heads of the afflicted children all turn too, and they cry out in pain at the unwilled movement. When she raises her left hand in a gesture, all the left hands of the afflicted rise up, even though some try to restrain the delinquent limb with their other hand. Every action on the part of Bishop is immediately reflected in the multiple mirrors of those poor children.
A fourteen-year-old called Deliverance Hobbs is called before the jury to testify (she’s just a year older than Sewall’s daughter Hannah and, cheeks pinked by the occasion, thick spectacles perched on her nose, not unlike her). In a quavering voice Deliverance describes how Bishop, or rather her spectre, came to her and endeavoured to make her sign ‘our book’. When she resisted, Bishop took her to a field belonging to Mr. Parris’s manse. Here a general meeting of witches had already assembled. They were taking part in a diabolical sacrament of bread and wine, an alternative to the Christian observances conducted in the nearby meeting house. What Deliverance saw, thinks Sewall, remembering his conversation with Judge Stoughton about Mr. Parris’s proximity to the witchcraft, was Devilish worship taking place just to one side of the communion of saints.
Mr. Stoughton sums up for the benefit of the jury. Bridget Bishop is not on trial for turning a piglet into a monkey or for making a hole in the centre of a meadow. This is merely evidence suggestive of witchcraft. What is under consideration are crimes committed by her—in her capacity as a witch—against certain children. He raises his head and glares at Bridget Bishop. ‘Such crimes took place in full view of the court of examination, and have been repeated today. The children were hurt, tortured, afflicted, pined, consumed, wasted and tormented.’
Mr. Stoughton is about to ask the jury to consider its verdict when his attention is arrested. Mr. Brattle has risen to his feet in the middle of the public seating area. ‘Excuse me, your honour,’ he says in that quietly spoken, inexorable way of his.
‘What is it, Mr. Brattle?’
‘I wish to come forward as a witness.’
‘The case is concluded. I have just reminded the jury of the charges that they must consider.’
‘My testimony relates to the formulation of those charges, your honour.’
‘We have already called all the witnesses necessary. The matter has been thoroughly explored.’
‘All the evidence has been hostile to the accused. I wish to speak in her defence.’
Silence. Mr. Stoughton stares at Mr. Brattle. Mr. Brattle looks unwaveringly back. Stephen looks up from his desk to see what he should be writing next. Then Judge Saltonstall breaks the deadlock. ‘I think, Mr. Stoughton,’ he says, ‘that we should find out what Mr. Brattle has to say.’
Mr.
Stoughton continues to gaze at Mr. Brattle for a few more moments. Very slowly he inclines his head.
Mr. Brattle comes to the front of the room so he can address the jurors directly. ‘You heard the charge in the mittimus,’ he says. ‘That those children across the room were hurt and tormented and so on and so forth. Well, take a good look at them. They seem perfectly all right to me.’ The jury all peer over towards the girls, who shift uneasily at this inspection.
‘Gentlemen of the jury,’ puts in Mr. Stoughton. ‘We are not claiming that the children are in torments at present. But think back a few minutes, when the Devil was trying to stop them bearing witness against the accused. It was a different spectacle then.’
‘Oh yes,’ says Brattle. ‘They were squirming on the floor or running about with their arms flapping like chickens chased by a fox.’ He looks back towards Mr. Stoughton with his bright blue eyes. ‘By a spectral fox, I should say. But I was watching them before the proceedings began, when they were as healthy a bunch of children as you could wish to see, hale and lusty to a fault, just as they are now.’ He turns back to the jury. ‘I ask you to reflect on the words in the mittimus. Pined. Consumed. These are terms that suggest a fading away, a sickness unto death.’ He swings back towards the children and points at them. Ann Putnam gives a little gasp then is silent again. ‘But these girls are neither pined nor consumed. On the contrary, they are fat and happy as pigs in muck.’ The vulgar phrase is uttered with as much precision as if it was Latin.
There’s another silence except for a little snuffling from some of the girls, shaken at the insult and this attack on their good faith. Bridget Bishop tosses her fading hair, sighs in satisfaction at the unexpected defence. ‘Mr. Brattle,’ says Stoughton, ‘I must object to the offensive language you have just employed.’
‘I’m sorry, your honour. That was the first example of cheerful good health that came to mind.’ Mr. Brattle looks round at all concerned, jurors, judges, the accusers themselves, to check his point has gone home. Sewall suspects that his reference to happy pigs was intended to undermine those witness statements that referred to porcine distress and transformation. Satisfied he has had an effect, Brattle returns to his seat.
‘To clarify this matter, I will make a ruling,’ Mr. Stoughton tells the jury. He pauses a moment in thought, pressing the tips of his fingers together. ‘You are not to mind whether the bodies of the said afflicted are really pined and consumed,’ he then says. The jury shuffle uneasily; Sewall does too. It’s hard to see what’s left of the charges given such a sweeping concession. ‘The issue to be considered is whether they suffer such afflictions as naturally tend to their being pined and consumed, and wasted, and suchlike. What matters in law, gentlemen, is intention rather than result. Do you understand this point?’
There is a slightly baffled silence, broken by Stephen, who repeats this wording in an interrogatory tone: ‘Tend to their being pined and consumed . . . ?’ Mr. Stoughton gives him the nod, and Stephen settles down to scribble this formulation on to his report.
The foreman of the jury, Thomas Fiske, gets to his feet. He is a tall thin man in a neat russet-brown jerkin and breeches, with short grey hair (his own). He runs a greengrocer’s in Salem and Sewall has in the past bought grapes and oranges from him as presents for his brother and sister-in-law when on a visit. ‘Your honour,’ Fiske asks, ‘is it like firing a gun, but missing?’
‘A more precise example would be to aim a gun, fire it, and severely wound the target. Who then (I refer to the target) recovers from otherwise certain death because she receives skilled medical aid. Though in this case the aid comes from God, who cures the afflicted when they put their faith in Him.’
‘Amen,’ says Mr. Noyes from his place in the front row of the public gallery.
‘Amen,’ repeats the room in general.
The jury finds Bridget Bishop guilty. She has made the children suffer afflictions that tend to their being pined and consumed. Stoughton casts his eyes each way along the row of judges to ensure, without it actually being spoken, that they are aware only one sentence is possible. Then he turns to address the convicted woman.
But before he can say anything, Judge Saltonstall intervenes. The General Court has not confirmed that the laws made by the previous governor and legislature remain in full force, he points out. Until that’s done, all sentences must be regarded as provisional. By the nature of things, a capital sentence is irrevocable and therefore cannot be passed until this issue is clarified.
Mr. Stoughton, obstructed for the second time in succession, seems to vibrate slightly. The silence goes on and on while Bridget Bishop waits to hear her fate. Her expression is blank. Finally, Mr. Stoughton speaks. ‘The sentence of death can be passed, since it can remain provisional, being only a sentence. Its execution must await the confirmation of the laws passed under the old dispensation. Does that satisfy you, Mr. Saltonstall?’
‘It does, Mr. Stoughton,’ Saltonstall replies with a little sigh.
Stoughton then turns to Bridget Bishop. ‘Goodwife Bishop, it is the sentence of this court that you shall be taken from here to prison, and from there to a place of execution, where you shall be hanged by the neck until you are dead.’ Then, more ponderously: ‘This sentence to be confirmed in due course.’
At the word ‘hanged’ a shudder runs down Bishop’s form. But the remote expression on her face remains and her little eyes continue to flitter aimlessly. Her body is aware of the horror that awaits while her mind seems impervious to it.
Out in the sunshine again Sewall has one thought—to get to Stephen and Margaret’s as fast as he can and enjoy a late dinner (he’s going to set off home by ferry tomorrow morning). Stephen has remained in court so that Mr. Stoughton can approve his report of the proceedings, but Sewall and Margaret can refresh themselves with a glass of wine while waiting for him. But he has only taken a few steps when someone grasps his elbow.
‘Good day once again. Your honour,’ Mr. Brattle says.
‘I am not your honour at present, nor anyone else’s. I am outside the court walking along the public street. Simply a citizen.’
‘In that case, what cheer, old friend?’ asks Brattle, making Sewall feel boorish.
They begin walking together along the road. Mr. Brattle is staying the night at the Ship Tavern and intends to catch the same ferry tomorrow as Sewall. Just as they are about to say their farewells, Mr. Brattle looks up at the inn sign. ‘I remember how you nursed me back to health when we were on our ship,’ he says. Sewall clicks his tongue to indicate that he doesn’t require any more gratitude in that respect. ‘Do you recall that concert we went to in Covent Garden,’ Brattle continues, ‘not long after we first arrived in London?’
‘The next time I hear such music will be in heaven.’
‘That wasn’t the only entertainment I attended there. In Covent Garden, I mean, not heaven. By no means heaven.’
This emphasis catches Sewall’s attention and he feels a sudden twinge of jealousy. Perhaps he should have been more enterprising himself, during his stay in England. ‘I went to the theatre,’ Mr. Brattle admits bluntly.
‘Oh.’ Sewall is disappointed it’s not something worse. ‘Another place. Another time.’
‘Indeed it was. I went on a number of occasions, in fact. Splendida peccata, I must say. I remember a tragedy by Thomas Otway, Venice Preserv’d. And a play by William Wycherley that proved unexpectedly filthy. But very funny. It was called—well, no matter what it was called.’
Sewall takes a deep breath. ‘I see.’
‘My friend, you don’t see. You didn’t see. That’s the point of what I am trying to tell you.’
Sewall realises this apparently spontaneous conversation must have been carefully crafted. ‘I didn’t see them because plays are—’
‘I know what plays are. They are sacrilegious because they appropriate God’s prerogative,
by inventing men and women. They are immoral because they are constructed of untruths.’
‘Mr. Mather the son has called them academies of hell.’
Mr. Brattle’s eyes briefly roll upwards, perhaps in annoyance at this forceful phrase, perhaps to remind himself of heaven. ‘I know all that,’ he continues, ‘but I know something else too. I know that the actors, whose profession is to lie for a living, lie so convincingly that while you’re watching them you believe everything they say is true. If they portray sadness you believe in their sadness. If pain, you believe in their pain. If they die on stage, you think they’re dead.’ His blue eyes look directly into Sewall’s. ‘The point I’m making, Mr. Sewall, is that those girls in the court, those so-called afflicted girls, are lying. They are acting out fear and pain and distress. Watching them at their tricks is exactly like watching a play in Covent Garden. They are play-acting.’
Sewall takes some breaths to calm himself. He can only argue successfully against Mr. Brattle by imitating his calmness. ‘And why should they do that, Mr. Brattle?’
‘I don’t know why. Because they are foolish children. Because children like to play games. Because they want to feel important. They want to have important Mr. Stoughton and his important justices’—important Mr. Sewall included, no doubt—‘and important Mr. Noyes and every other important adult hang on their every word and action. But let me tell you, they are simply lying, the whole lot of them. And so are the grown-ups who support them.’
‘I may not have seen plays, Mr. Brattle, but I have observed children. Indeed, I’ve had quite a number of my own, some that lived, others that didn’t.’ Mr. Brattle is not married himself. Sewall doesn’t want to adopt a knowing air but there’s so much at stake. ‘I’ve had ample opportunity to see for myself the sincerity of children. Far from trying to impress important adults, they’ve hidden themselves away in dark places where they can confront fear and sorrow all alone.’
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