“The Devil whispered the lines to Burroughs,” some among the afflicted said. “He could not speak so well otherwise.”
The hangman kicked the ladder away.
Burroughs dropped and slowly died.
The crowd muttered, and their tone was angrier than it was before. Mary couldn’t see over their heads, and too many of the people were looking her way, toward the afflicted. She caught snatches of conversation discontent that the law had hanged a minister, one who prayed so well, a man ordained of God. Were they going to hit someone?
Reverend Mather spoke out over the rising din from his horseback vantage point. She heard most of what he said: not ordained (that was true) folk tests could not be trusted (yet the court used the touch test—did Reverend Mather know that?) nor outward appearances, for even the Devil had disguised himself as an Angel of Light to deceive. Mary knew that a shining angel-like personage had been reported among the specters. What did that mean?
The crowd pulled back, objections dwindled, and the threat of riot subsided. The hangings continued—the whole messy, reeking process of wringing a soul from its body. When the last corpse stopped swinging, the crowd began to pull away. They moved back down the ledge to the road, while the deputies began to dispose of the bodies—to a waiting grave, to waiting relatives. The day was hotter than ever, and nothing seemed to have been settled.
Thomas Brattle, treasurer of Harvard College, was one of the gentlemen who attended the executions of August 19. The conduct of the condemned impressed him, especially that of “Proctor and Willard, whose whole management of themselves, from the Goal to the Gallows, and whilst at the Gallows, was very affecting and melting to the hearts of some considerable Spectatours.” He could not forget their prayer “that their blood might be the last innocent blood shed.”
Oddly, Brattle did not mention Reverend Burroughs, whose last words from the ladder would be reported by Robert Calef, his claim of innocence phrased “with such Solemn and Serious Expressions, as were to the Admiration of all present; his Prayer (which he concluded by repeating the Lord’s Prayer), was so well worded, and uttered with such composedness, and such (at least seeming) fervency of Spirit, as was very affecting, and drew Tears from many (so that it seemed to some, that the Spectators would hinder the Execution).”
In Boston, meanwhile, Philip and Mary English planned an escape, or at least Mary did—family lore would have much to say on the matter—for the outcome of the trials was not in the least encouraging. Philip’s £4,000 bond allowed the couple visitors and some restricted movement about town, especially to attend religious services. The oldest of Boston’s three Congregational churches, the First Church, was closest, its meeting house halfway between the jail and the town house, where the legislature met. Reverend Joshua Moody was one of the two ministers there, and one August Sabbath, according to the family story, he invited Philip and Mary to attend. On that occasion he delivered a sermon on the text Matthew 10:23: “And when they persecute you in this citie, flee into another,” the minister announced from the pulpit. Moody himself had been hounded by the royal governor of New Hampshire, who insisted that Moody conduct the more ceremonial Church of England services that were against the minister’s Congregational principles, then forbad him to deliver any sermons at all. Moody had no intention of conforming to the Episcopal practices so many had left England to avoid, so he relocated to Massachusetts. (Boston had a Church of England congregation, but no one had to be a part of it—or a member of any of the churches there, for that matter.)
After the service Moody and Reverend Samuel Willard of the nearby Third Church visited the Englishes in their rented quarters. Some of the Oyer and Terminer judges attended Willard’s church, but he himself had warned, in a series of sermons, that the Devil raged against Christians without the help of recruited witches. Although the judges in his congregation seem to have ignored it, his stance prompted “unkindness, abuse, and reproach from many men” and may have led to him being accused around the time of Rebecca Nurse’s trial. Fortunately the court informed that accuser that she was mistaken. (Samuel may have been a distant relation of the condemned John Willard of Salem Village, who was not as lucky.)
Now, according to later family lore, the two ministers spoke more directly to the Englishes.
Had they taken note of his sermon? Moody asked.
Philip replied that he had, but what exactly did Moody mean?
Their lives were in danger, said the minister bluntly, and they should do everything they could to escape. “Many have suffered,” he told them.
“God will not permit them to touch me,” Philip insisted. (Family tradition wholly ignored Phillip’s earlier escape and his month hiding in Boston, burrowed, when necessary, under a pile of dirty laundry.)
The same anecdote had Mary speak sense to him. “Do you not think that they, who have suffered already, are innocent?”
Philip agreed reluctantly.
“Why then, may we not suffer also?” asked Mary. “Take Mr. Moody’s advice.”
The ministers declared that if Phillip would not try to save them both, they would take his wife to safety themselves. They had made arrangements already with the jailer, with various “worthy persons” of Boston, even, some would say, with the governor himself.
And escape they did, for both Philip and Mary English were established in New York by early October.
The story has a few variants as it passed from generation to generation as well as several problems and contradictions.
In one version Philip escaped alone on horseback, with the horse’s iron shoes nailed on backward to confuse trackers (the same story also applied to Captain John Alden).
More often the couple are said to have used a coach provided by Boston sympathizers or New York merchants, with Mary in the coach, Philip on horseback outside, or both in the coach with their eldest daughter, Mary, Susanna having been sent to boarding school.
One variant had the coach waiting outside South Meeting House (Reverend Willard’s Third Church) during services. When the Englishes left the building under guard, friends jostled between the couple and the guards, crowded the latter back inside, and somehow locked the doors to allow Philip and Mary to get a good enough head start.
Another story had a “conveyance” meet them by the prison door at midnight and spirit them to New York along with letters of introduction to the governor there, some from Phips himself, while officials turned a blind eye to the departure.
A midday escape would attract too much attention, reversed horse shoes seem fanciful at best (a sure way to lame the steed), and the only known coach in all of Massachusetts belonged to the governor’s lady. (Philip owned a carriage of some sort, but that was in Salem, inaccessible.)
Although Mary, Lady Phips, was sympathetic to the prisoners, the coach would only draw attention to itself. Moreover, roads outside Boston were not yet suited to such a vehicle. Boston itself was still a peninsula, with the road south connected to the mainland through a guarded gate and over a narrow neck flooded by the month’s highest tides. A ferry ran north to Charlestown, itself built on another peninsula, with another ferry going to Winnisimmet and the road to Salem over the wide marshes. All of these choices were exposed to view even without a coach involved.
That Moody and Willard would help engineer an escape, however, is quite plausible. Reverend Willard’s son John had already helped Captain Cary secret Mistress Cary away from the Cambridge jail and into hiding.
The couple did not take any of their children with them into exile. The eldest daughter, Mary, stayed in the household of Philip’s business associate George Hollard, and Susanna, who had lived with her parents in the jailer’s house, stayed with the family of the absent Captain Alden. The sons must have been provided for elsewhere, but on this, tradition was silent.
Philip had contacts with merchants in New York as well as in Boston. He was not however, on good terms with Governor Phips, “his great enemy,” as one of the afflicte
d girls said. Mary English, despite her husband’s politics, was of similar rank with Lady Phips, who, like her husband, had grown up in Maine but was far better educated. Mary English is remembered as determined to escape. Mary Phips would be rumored to have aided a woman prisoner to escape.
The governor and his wife were named William and Mary—just like the monarchs. Legal documents tended to begin by invoking the names of the king and queen. How closely did the guards read the repetitious official documents transferring prisoners anyway? Mary Phips wrote and signed a warrant to discharge one of the imprisoned women, and one of the jailers accepted the document. Thus, the prisoner found her freedom and the jailer lost his job. Despite her rank, Lady Phips had committed an act that would be illegal even if witchcraft were not involved. So soon she too was rumored to be a witch.
When historian Thomas Hutchinson heard the tale a generation later he did not believe it until the former jailer showed him a copy of the warrant and told him the whole story. However, Hutchinson’s account of the incident referred to the prisoner as a “poor woman”—which could apply to Mary English only if he meant “unfortunate”—and did not mention Philip’s presence at all. Certainly, Mary Phips herself was called a witch around this time, but no one leveled formal charges against her.
Concerning the English family, a descendant wrote, “It is a tradition in this family that several of the Boston clergy espoused the cause of Mr. and Mrs. English when confined in jail there; that Cotton Mather, who was a great friend of Mrs. E[nglish],” said, that though she was accused, “he did not believe her to be guilty; that her accusers evidently believed her to be so, but that Satan was most probably deceiving them into that belief.”
Certainly by now, as the accusers named more suspects of higher rank, the magistrates and justices tended to assume the charges were mistaken at best, particularly if they knew the suspects, trusting their own opinions of their peer’s reputations—Judge Corwin’s mother-in-law, Mistress Margaret Thatcher, for one.
The law knew where the various fugitives had gone. No one tried to extradite them back to Massachusetts but rather kept an embarrassed silence. They called for no hue and cry as they had when a privateer and some prisoners of war escaped from Boston jail in July that same summer.
Some years earlier Reverend Increase Mather had donned an uncharacteristic cloak and wig to leave his house unidentified in order to sail for England and negotiate the new charter in spite of Governor Andros’s displeasure. The Englishes may well have done the same, taking a sea route to New York by using Philip’s maritime contacts: quietly leaving their lodging in the jailer’s house, aided by coins and a blind eye even if not the forged warrant, and dressed, perhaps, in a more rustic manner than usual, they slipped away to the wharves and into a small craft that took them to a larger vessel that was waiting for the turn of the tide.
Philip later estimated he had run up £50 in expenses during their nine weeks in Boston, not all of it yet paid. (In contrast, Salem Village allotted Reverend Samuel Parris £60 a year, when they paid him at all. Because neither Philip nor Mary had been tried, he assumed that his posted £4,000 bond would protect his possessions from confiscation. He was mistaken.
____________________
Edward Bishop brushes the sawdust from his knees and then stretches, hands clasped over his head, trying to unknot his shoulders.
I’m getting too old for this, he thinks as he sits in a scrap of shade.
A group of younger workmen has collected off to one side, tackling their noon meal in a larger pool of shade.
Edward shades his eyes with one hand and looks down the road toward a familiar figure approaching through the heat: his stepdaughter Christian Mason, who has one arm hooked through a basket and her child Susanna clutching the other. “It’s fish today,” she says when she reaches the woodyard. Setting down the basket, she lifts out a napkin-wrapped bundle and a stoneware bottle. Edward accepts the package and opens the napkin across his knees to reveal a slice of cold fish pie in an indestructible rye crust.
“Good,” he says, chewing.
No bones anyway, he thinks.
Christian rests in the thin shade while he eats, keeping an eye on her daughter, who is occupied with a handful of smooth pebbles.
“So do you hear from that husband of yours?” he asks.
“Still at sea or coasting along off Maine,” she says.
“Does he ever think of moving back there?”
“Not safe,” she says. No, not with the Indians and French attacking so often, but then again, Salem hasn’t proved safe either.
Edward is grateful for his stepdaughter doing for him—cooking, washing his shirts, all the chores and necessities he has no time and little skill for. He is so starkly aware now that he is a widower.
“Grandpa?” Susanna pipes, but her mother shushes her.
“Don’t bother your grandfather. I told you.”
“But he’ll know.”
“Susanna.” Christian looks reproachful, frowning at the child, who in turn looks defiant, and just then Edward sees Bridget in both their faces, mother and daughter. It takes his breath away.
“Ask me what?”
“A child’s silliness. You shouldn’t be bothered.”
But it is too late. Susanna blurts out, “Polly won’t play with me anymore.”
“Who?”
Christian sighs. “A neighbor’s child. They don’t want their children playing with Susanna anymore.”
“They say Grandma is a witch. Is that true?”
“Of course not,” says Edward. He wishes he were certain. “Just ignore them.”
Susanna accepts this advice. “Good,” she says, then adds, “When is Grandma coming home?”
Her mother looks as if she might cry. “Be quiet! What did I tell you?” Christian slaps the girl. “Just stop it! We don’t talk about that.”
Susanna cries for real but softly, burying her face in her petticoat.
“Time for work,” says Edward. He stands up and hands back the napkin.
Christian takes the basket. Mother and child head back slowly along the sun-baked street.
The other workmen watch but say nothing.
( 15 )
September 1692
Mary Warren, if she still doubts her fits as mere distractions, shows no sign of hesitation about Alice Parker. Not this woman, whose quarrels had killed her mother and deafened her sister. In her mind’s eye she sees her mother trying to get a word in edgewise during Parker’s rant against Mary’s father, sees the baleful look of disgust that Parker shoots back while never stopping her own harangue, sees her mother ill and fading, growing weaker and weaker until she can no longer rise from bed, tossing and feverish, with her hands picking at the sheets and her mouth moving with words she is too weak to say aloud until at last all movement stops.
It is a wonder that Mary does not catch the illness, but the little sister is not so lucky, smoldering with fever as well but living through it to wake muffled in perpetual silence. No, Mary does not doubt Parker’s malice nor where she got her power to harm.
Later, just thinking about that day as she sits in the jail with Abigail Hobbs, Sarah Churchill, and the other confessors, Mary expects the witch’s spite to find her. The woman is elsewhere in the building, after all—not that distance matters much with magic, certainly not for those who can separate soul from body at will. She shudders at the thought, and the shudder becomes a spasm until Mary convulses, bent in half, gasping for breath.
The other prisoners stare and wonder who is after Mary now.
____________________
On the first of the month more suspects arrived from Andover to Salem for additional questioning: the young sons of other defendants, more of Reverend Dane’s family, and most of the Wardwell family—Samuel and Sarah Wardwell, their nineteen-year-old daughter Mercy, and her elder half-sister Sarah Hawks. (Only the youngest of the Wardwell children were left behind to fend for themselves, with neighbors
wary of taking them in.) All of the new prisoners confessed to the charges when faced with the writhing crowd of bewitched witnesses, the afflicted from Salem, including Mary Warren, and girls from Andover.
Samuel was known as a fortune-teller and had made no secret of it, telling neighbors—especially if they asked—who would marry whom, how many children they would have, and who would be injured by illness or mischance. Moreover, he claimed he could make straying cattle come to him—no easy task. Although he began by insisting on his innocence, he admitted his fortune-telling might have encouraged the Devil’s attention and ended by confessing. According to the record “He used to be much discontented that he could get no more work done, and that he had been foolishly Led along with telling of fortunes, which sometymes came to pass, He used also when any creature came into his field to bid the devil take it, And it may be the devil took advantage of him by that.” He said he had signed the Devil’s contract on the promise “that he should never want for any thing,” and for the last fortnight he had tormented the neighbors with his magic. Martha Sprague of Andover and Mary Warren were most afflicted during his examination.
His stepdaughter Sarah Hawks had turned a sieve to tell the future, and all the family admitted a dangerous discontent that let the Devil in. Samuel himself, as a confessor, soon joined the afflicted to accuse other suspects.
During the commotions that ensued the following day, September 2, when Andover widow Mary Parker (no relation to Alice Parker), faced the grand jury. Mary Warren convulsed alarmingly and had to be dragged, flailing, “haveing a pin run through her hand and blood runeing out of her mouth,” to the defendant for a healing touch. Warren then identified the woman as the same whose specter she had seen at an earlier hearing, perched on a beam above the court in Salem Village.
On Saturday, September 3, Ann Putnam likely saw her daughter Annie off with Elizabeth Hubbard and the other visionary girls, escorted the sixteen or so miles to Gloucester, this time to help Goodwife Eleanor Babson and Mistress Mary Sargent, the magistrate’s wife, grown women of respectable families. Annie returned with the news that two more culprits had been identified—or rather their identity verified, as the afflicted women already had a good idea who tormented them.
Six Women of Salem Page 36