The Witches: Salem, 1692 Part 6

On May 11, puckish George Jacobs had exhorted his seventeen-year-old granddaughter not to admit to witchcraft. To do so, he warned, was to wind up complicit in her own death. He was wrong. With one exception, no confessor was so much as arraigned. Abigail Hobbs, t.i.tuba, and Margaret Jacobs remained safely in jail along with nine other self-described witches, a break with all precedent. And while in the past the spellbound often found herself under clinical study, she had not before played an interpretive role. Justices and ministers alone unriddled witchcraft. In 1692 so did afflicted girls, with the farsighted, diagnostic powers that since Thomas Putnam's insinuating April letter were day after day visible to all.

Late in July a Salem man noted that G.o.d had lifted a scourge: there had been no case of smallpox in a year. The Lord had however sent down a new plague. Its agent of contagion appears to have been a well-meaning Andover farmer desperate to save the dying wife who in twenty years had borne him ten children. Joseph Ballard first confronted a forty-nine-year-old relative. Had he anything to do with the peculiar "pains and pressures" that had incapacitated Elizabeth since the spring? The in-law dabbled in fortune-telling and black magic but could not help. He knew nothing of the matter. Ballard applied to the authorities, who-reprising an early-sixteenth-century Spanish practice-encouraged him to send a horse and escort for the Salem visionaries. The group almost certainly included Parris's niece and Mary Walcott. At Elizabeth Ballard's bedside the girls fell into fits. Directly or indirectly, they named frail Ann Foster, the seventy-two-year-old Andover widow who had crashed in flight.

Shortly thereafter a constable carried Foster to Salem village, a more arduous trip on horseback than by air. A Ballard neighbor on the southern edge of town, Foster was the widow of a much older, kindly Andover farmer. On July 15 she submitted to the first of several interrogations. Beginning just after Stoughton had sentenced five witches to death, she finished two days after their execution. Initially she denied any involvement with sorcery. She soon enough began to unspool a t.i.tuba-worthy tale. The devil had appeared to her as an exotic bird. He promised prosperity, along with the gift of the evil eye. She had not seen him in six months, but her neighbor Martha Carrier had been in touch on his behalf. If anyone remembered even to ask Foster about the ailing Elizabeth Ballard the record bears no trace.

At Carrier's direction, Foster had bewitched several children and a hog. She worked her sorcery with poppets. Carrier had announced the devil's Sabbath in May and arranged their trip. They were twenty-five in the meadow where Reverend Burroughs officiated. Three days later, from the Salem jail, Foster added the malfunctioning pole and the crash. She mentioned that two other men had attended the meeting, where she overheard a witch say they were three hundred and five in all. They would destroy the village. Stoughton had scheduled a hanging for the following morning; it was a hectic day for the justices, who ran out of time. John Hale asked if he might remain behind with the suspect. He was curious about a few particulars. By what conveyance, he asked, had Foster flown to Salem? How long had the trip taken? Where precisely was the meeting? It was Hale who heard first about the bread and cheese in Foster's pocket, details that do not appear in the court papers. He heard too of her anxiety: she shivered at the thought that George Burroughs and Martha Carrier would murder her for having spilled their secrets. Both sat chained nearby. They had appeared spectrally, with a sharp weapon; they intended to stab her to death. (Foster's son-in-law had slit her daughter's throat with a knife. And she hailed from a community that-unlike Salem-had suffered Indian attacks.) Confessing to witchcraft could save your life. It also proved taxing.

Both alone with Hale and before the justices, Foster appeared entirely cooperative. Soon enough they discovered that she had failed to come clean with them, however. It seemed that she and Carrier had flown and crashed on that Salem-bound pole with a third rider, who traveled silently behind Foster. So divulged forty-year-old Mary Lacey, a newly arrested Andover suspect, on July 20. Lacey lived on the north end of Andover; a search of her home turned up rag and quill bundles that looked suspiciously like poppets. Foster had also withheld the details of a chilling ceremony. Dipping their heads in water, six at a time, the devil baptized his recruits; henceforth they were his. He performed the sacrament in a nearby river to which he had carried Mary Lacey in his arms. On July 21 Ann Foster appeared before the magistrates for a fourth time, to account for the omissions in her story. It made for a particularly sensational hearing: Mary Lacey, who supplied the missing details, was her daughter.

July 21 was a lecture day, the first after the ma.s.s hanging; the weather continued hot and uncommonly dry. The justices spoke as if from a great height, with a condescension veering into derision. "Goody Foster," one began-it was likely Hathorne-"you remember we have three times spoken with you, and do you now remember what you then confessed to us?" An officer read her statement aloud. She swore to its every word. The justice commended her; she could expect more mercy than the others for having admitted to her part in the "very great wickedness." But she had hardly been forthright. Why had she not mentioned that her daughter had flown with her? How long had her daughter been a witch? Here she was fl.u.s.tered. "Did not you know your daughter to be a witch?" persisted Hathorne. She did not, and was taken aback to hear as much. Would she recognize her confederates if she saw them? Had there been two companies of witches in the field? She knew only that Carrier had been at the meeting. Mary Warren helpfully chimed in; a specter affirmed that Foster had recruited her own daughter.

The authorities understood that she had done so about thirteen years earlier. Was that correct? "No, and I know no more of my daughter's being a witch than what day I shall die upon," replied the Andover widow, sounding as firm on the subject as she had been on the details of the misbegotten Salem flight. Again she was reminded of the value of unburdening herself: "You cannot expect peace of conscience without a free confession," coaxed a magistrate. If she knew anything more, Foster swore, she would reveal it. At this the magistrates called her youngest daughter. Forty-year-old Mary Lacey had barely entered the meetinghouse when she berated her mother: "We have forsaken Jesus Christ, and the devil hath got hold of us. How shall we get clear of this evil one?" Under her breath, Foster began to pray. "What G.o.d do witches pray to?" a justice needled. "I cannot tell, the Lord help me," replied the befuddled old woman as her daughter delivered up fresh details of their flight to the village green and of the satanic baptism, a staple of Andover witchcraft; the fear of Baptists seemed as ingrained there as that of Indian ambush. Her mother, Mary Lacey clarified, rode first on the stick. She elaborated on the satanic ceremony. Questions fertilizing answers, she supplied the "queen of h.e.l.l" appellation.

Court officers removed the two older women, to escort their fresh-faced daughter and granddaughter into the room. Ballard had also accused lovely, strong-minded eighteen-year-old Mary Lacey Jr. of having bewitched his wife. Mary Warren fell at once into fits; Mary Lacey Jr. was instructed to touch the arm of the convulsing girl, two years her senior. The Procter maid recovered. At first the Andover teenager was unhelpful. "Where is my mother who made me a witch, and I knew it not?" she cried, a yet more disturbing question than the one posed in June, when a suspect wondered whether she might be a witch and not know it. Asked to smile at Warren without hurting her, Mary Lacey failed; Warren collapsed to the floor. "Do you acknowledge now that you are a witch?" Lacey was asked. She could only agree, although she seemed to be working from a different definition. A recalcitrant child, she had caused her parents plenty of trouble. She had run away from home for two days; she gave her mother regular cause to wish that the devil would carry her off. But she had, she insisted, signed no pact. The justices reminded her of her options: if she desired to be saved by Christ, if she expected mercy, she would confess. "She then proceeded," noted the court reporter. She was more profligate with the details than her mother or grandmother; it was a hallmark of Salem that the younger generation-Cotton Mather included-could be relied upon for the most luxuriant reports. Mary Lacey Jr. had some practice already with flights of fancy. It appeared easier to describe satanic escapades when an adolescent had already been told, or believed, that she cavorted with the devil. The record allows a fleeting glimpse of her sense of herself. "I have been a disobed-" she began, after which the page is torn. She gave naughty Abigail Hobbs a run for her money.

The eighteen-year-old also picked up precisely where Abigail had left off; it is impossible to believe the two had not met. Twice in the night a strange noise had disturbed Mary in her bed. That had been the previous week, a year earlier, sixteen months before-the details morphed as they emerged. The devil visited the first time in the shape of a horse, the second as "a round, grey thing." Had he appeared to her when she ran away from home, asked the magistrates, conflating supernatural crimes with adolescent misdemeanors? "No," Mary replied, "but he put such thoughts in my mind as not to obey my parents." He did direct her to afflict several people, including Elizabeth Ballard, mentioned now for the first time. Mary worked her sorcery with poppets. She implicated her mother and grandmother, Martha Carrier, and Carrier's teenage son Richard. What form did her satanic worship take? "He bid me pray to him and serve him and said he was a G.o.d and lord to me," she admitted. The bargain too got more lavish; she would want for nothing. She implicated another Carrier son before divulging something else. "Does the devil require anything of you besides hurting persons?" asked a magistrate. Indeed he did. The witches were to recruit actively. They were to renounce their church baptisms, a prospect that struck at the very foundation of New England.

Mary Lacey Jr. unraveled the mysteries of how a man might manage to spend his day planting English corn while simultaneously communing with the devil and how his neighbors might fail to notice his flight. "Sometimes we leave our bodies at home, but at other times we go in our bodies," she explained, "and the devil puts a mist before their eyes and will not let them see us." She illuminated a more pressing matter, too. "Do you hear the devil hurts in the shape of any person without their consent?" asked the justices, who seemed to think a teenager might be able to solve their legal riddle. "When any person strikes with a sword or staff at a spirit or specter, will that hurt the body?" one asked. Lacey affirmed that it would. Both her mother and grandmother sported injuries. The revelation worked an immediate effect: with the validation of spectral evidence, Mary Warren stepped forward. She grasped Lacey's hand. This time the Procter servant suffered not a twinge of discomfort.

Only then was Mary Lacey Sr. returned to the room. As if affixing a caption to the stirring scene, one of the justices intoned: "Here is a poor miserable child, a wretched mother and grandmother." It took little more to provoke an emotional outburst. "Oh Mother, why did you give me to the devil twice or thrice over?" the eighteen-year-old pleaded, tears streaming down her face. Mary Lacey Sr. apologized. The teenager managed a spot of revenge: her mother had so often scolded that the devil should fetch her away. Her wish had come true! "Oh, my heart will break within me. Oh, that mother should have ever given me to the devil thus," she sobbed. She prayed that the Lord might expose all the witches. Officials returned her grandmother to the room. Three generations of enchantresses now stood before Higginson, Gedney, Hathorne, and Corwin in the village meetinghouse. Mary continued her rant: "Oh, grandmother, why did you give me to the devil? Why did you persuade me? And oh, grandmother, do not deny it. You have been a very bad woman in your time."

Either a new interrogator took over or Foster simply sank under her granddaughter's onslaught. The justices henceforth addressed her as "old woman." The teenager, a justice reminded Foster, showed signs of repentance. She could be pried from the devil's grasp; Foster herself courted devouring fire and everlasting flames. It was time she told the whole truth. With her granddaughter's help, Foster coughed up a few additional details. She had been a witch for about six years. (The eighteen-year-old immediately upped the number to seven. Foster acknowledged that "she did not know but it might be so.") The justices read Mary Lacey Jr.'s confession to the two older women. They confirmed having traveled together to the witches' meeting. They had signed the devil's book in red ink. They worked their sorcery with poppets. Carrier had boasted to Mary Lacey Sr. as well that the devil would make her queen of h.e.l.l. Foster's daughter corroborated the flying accident. The three rode together to jail as a clutch of warrants made their way to Andover.

The next day eighteen-year-old Richard and sixteen-year-old Andrew Carrier appeared before the magistrates at Beadle's Tavern, where Burroughs had been held. They were to answer to charges of having afflicted Mary Warren. (Lost in the shuffle, Ballard's failing wife would live another five days.) Both Carriers were fine-looking young men, strapping and smart. Both denied any knowledge of witchcraft. The suspects were landing faster than the authorities could process them; hearings tended to overlap. Comely Mary Lacey Jr. lent a hand, prompting the justices and jogging defendants' memories. She answered for the boys. They had flown with the devil; at his instructions, Richard had plunged an iron spindle into a victim's knee. They had stabbed another man to death. Mary's mother protested that she had taken no part in that attack. Her daughter corrected her, as the eighteen-year-old had obviously so often been corrected herself: "Yes, Mother, do not deny it." Mary Lacey Sr. proceeded to confirm several names and to describe the torture instrument as well as a practice session in which the witches burned their victim with a pipe. Her daughter shared none of her mother's hesitation, picking up on each of Hathorne's suggestions and running with it. She was less successful with Richard Carrier, who contradicted everything, from the nocturnal flights to the pipe attack. In a tone that indicated a certain familiarity, Mary prodded him. They had murdered together! Did he not remember the conversations on their flights? What about his plans to recruit his brother and kill Ballard's wife? At this the afflicted began to tremble. Blood trickled from Mary Warren's mouth. The authorities hurried the boys into an adjoining room.

They proved less obstinate on their return. Richard appeared first, admitting to the charges in clipped sentences. For a full year he had served the black man. They had met for the first time in town, when the stranger surmised that Richard felt nervous about riding home in the dark and offered to accompany him. Richard had subsequently done his bidding. He had twice flown to Parris's pasture. The devil had baptized him with five others; Richard had lent him his likeness to torture Elizabeth Ballard. On Andrew's return to the room, his older brother greeted him with the news that he had confessed. The sixteen-year-old was a different witness this time around; where earlier Andrew had "stammered and stuttered exceedingly," he now expressed himself fluently. He had signed with the devil in June. They had met at night, in an Andover orchard. Both boys proved highly credible. With their clear-eyed a.s.sistance, the justices arrived finally at the explosive heart of the matter.

TWO MONTHS EARLIER, when most of Salem village had occupied itself with sheep-shearing, with churning sweet, spring milk into b.u.t.ter, with sowing Indian corn, a great swarm of witches had alighted in Parris's brilliantly green meadow. You might have heard the trumpet that summoned them; it resonated for miles around. The beating of a drum and a great commotion followed as, from as far away as Connecticut, over the course of hours, in a rustle of arrivals, witches descended on the village by every manner of aerial transport. Not all of them could say precisely how they swept into Salem. The Andover witches arrived in a matter of minutes. Mary Lacey Sr. of course sailed on the ill-designed stick with her mother and Martha Carrier. Richard Carrier did not recall the date of the a.s.sembly but-his memory refreshed-conceded that he had flown to the village with Mary Lacey Jr. They did so on an unwieldy contraption; a.s.suming the shape of a horse, the devil carried the teenagers on a pole balanced across his shoulders. One farmer traveled alone on a branch. Most flew three or four to a pole. Ann Foster and Martha Carrier's picnic had preceded that flurry; others from the Andover contingent joined them. Foster counted only twenty-five witches. Richard Carrier reported they numbered about seventy in all. Mary Lacey Jr. estimated attendance at a hundred. The devil appeared in the shape of a black man with a high-crowned hat, another Swedish import. One celebrant noted a cloven foot.

The witches indulged in a satanic ceremony, all the more subversive as women officiated. Rebecca Nurse sat at the head of the communion table, at the devil's side; with an incantation, she and Elizabeth Procter handed around crimson-colored wine and bread. Nurse a.s.sured Abigail Hobbs that the wine was blood "and better than our wine." Parris's niece confirmed that she saw the celebrants eat and drink. What was it they served? "They said it was our blood, and they had it twice that day," she testified, adding a vampiric twist. As for the bread, it was "as red as raw flesh." One partic.i.p.ant watched Martha Carrier pour the wine. Mary Lacey Jr. recalled that there had not been enough bread to go around. Some had been reduced to stealing provisions, while others, like her grandmother, had brought their own. Not everyone partook. Even at a satanic congress, there were pockets of resistance, despite the phalanx of a hundred and five spectral swordsmen stationed nearby. Sixteen-year-old Andrew Carrier drank from an earthenware cup but did not eat. He was too far away to hear what the devil said when administering his sacrament. Abigail refused the sweet bread and wine; her mother pa.s.sed up a tankard. Ann Foster kept her distance. A particularly disobliging recruit, Mercy Lewis spat at those who offered the red bread. "I will have none of it!" she howled. Some who accepted the drink found it bitter.

Reverend Burroughs officiated over the sacrament in the presence of two other men. Despite repeated interrogations no one could identify them, although at least one was a minister. The Coreys, the Procters, John Willard, and several other suspects attended, including four women who had now hanged. Several of the men sported very handsome apparel; Burroughs appeared in high spirits. The devil offered his great book, which all signed, some in blood, some with their fingers, others with sticks and pens, one on white bark, usually in red. Only one partic.i.p.ant balked, to his immediate regret. He provoked "dreadful shapes, noises, and screeches, which almost scared him out of his wits." Most noted the names of their confederates on the page. They signed ordinarily for six to eight years; the pacts grew longer as the summer wore on. While there was some disagreement about the particulars-no one was better with the mind-boggling details than Mary Lacey Jr., who had the best memory in her family-there was none about the a.s.signment. Beginning with the Parris household and continuing to Salem town, they were to destroy every church in Ma.s.sachusetts Bay. In their place they would establish Satan's kingdom, where his recruits could expect happy days and better times.

The deviance was of a piece; desire comes in a wealth of luscious varieties. The devil seldom waved vaguely from a high mountain at garden-variety kingdoms below. He traded in specifics. He offered Richard Carrier new clothes and a horse; he enticed Carrier's brother with a house and land. He would pay the debts of a struggling farmer with a large family. For an Andover carpenter, the devil proposed a captaincy in the militia. He promised Stephen Johnson, age fourteen, a pair of French fall shoes; he lured another teenage boy with a suit of clothes. He a.s.sured an Andover thirteen-year-old that he would pardon her sins. A child could have a black dog. He tempted an older Boxford woman with a cla.s.sic: How did revenge on her enemies sound? The enticements could be gender-specific. A fifty-five-year-old would have the "abundance of satisfaction and quietness" she so desired. (He did not produce it; she grew only more miserable. Hanging their heads, many noted that the devil had failed to deliver on his promises, as if his reneging on his offer somehow invalidated the deal.) Theatrically inclined Mary Lacey Jr. could count on glory, a commodity unavailable at home. The devil spread around the grandiosity; several heard Martha Carrier boast that he offered her the queen-of-h.e.l.l t.i.tle. She would rule with a minister. Masquerading as Burroughs, the infernal one promised relief from all fear. To another recruit he held out something more spectacular yet. Not only did he intend to "abolish all the churches in the land," but he would make all men equal. Why not cancel Judgment Day and eliminate shame and sin? No one admitted to having signed his soul away without a reward.

Two days after the Carrier boys offered their rueful accounts, John Procter arranged for paper to be delivered to him. The first man to have been arrested, Procter had been in prison since April. Most of his family had joined him. In irons, he composed a pet.i.tion on the Salem prison floor. He too had been deposing suspects; the blunt tavern owner who had bellowed early on that the unruly girls would benefit from a beating pieced events together differently, however. Indeed five people had confessed that week. He had spoken with each one; all had fabricated their accounts. How, asked the insanely literal-minded Salem farmer on July 23, could he have attended a diabolical sacrament when he had been shackled in prison? Among the five who had attended the Sabbath were the Carrier boys. Procter happened to know their fate. The court reporter had noted that the boys were carried out "and their feet and hands bound a little while." Procter revealed that to be something of a euphemism. Andrew Carrier had achieved sudden fluency for a reason: escorted from the room, the teenagers "would not confess anything 'til they tied them neck and heels till the blood was ready to come out of their noses." Only then had they divulged what they had never done. Procter was all the more outraged as his son too had been strung up, blood gushing from his nose. The torture would have continued overnight had a merciful official not intervened.*

Had Procter attended the hearings he might have commented on a different brand of torture: The authorities pummeled the Andover facts into shape. Mary Lacey Jr.'s testimony is shot through with prompts and leaps, suggestions and propositions; the court dangled deliverance before her as temptingly as the devil dangled glory. Accounts tended to conform in their general outlines, clearer by August, which made the confessions more precise too. As for the discrepancies, the justices wrote them down to satanic wiles. Too much consistency would, under the circ.u.mstances, have appeared suspect; the devil addled the brains of his recruits. It made perfect sense when Mary Lacey Sr. could not answer additional questions. The devil, she feared, had made off with her memory. As she climbed the stairs to her hearing, another suspect resolved to confess. Once inside the room she found she could not. The archfiend "doth carry things out of her mind," she explained.

Procter knew that his trial had been set for August 2, along with that of George Burroughs; he wrote with some urgency. Addressing himself to five eminent Boston ministers, Increase Mather and Samuel Willard among them, Procter warned that a terrible miscarriage of justice was about to take place. He spoke not for himself but for his fellow prisoners. All were innocent. None could expect a fair hearing. They had conferred and could suggest no other explanation: the devil incensed the magistrates, ministers, juries, and people against them. Procter was characteristically forthright: The suspects were condemned before they set foot in Stoughton's courtroom. Already their estates had been decimated. He knew but did not include the details of his own: upon his arrest, George Corwin had descended on the Procters' fifteen-acre farm, selling and slaughtering the cattle. He confiscated the family's belongings, emptying a barrel of beer for the sake of a barrel, and a pot of broth for the pot. He left their young children without a sc.r.a.p of food. Procter pleaded for either new judges or a less biased venue. The crowd in the Salem courtroom was as bloodthirsty as the magistrates. Might at least some of the ministers come to Salem to see for themselves?

He did not rail against the court, as had Cary, or against the charges, as had Alden. He cast no aspersions on the bewitched. While everyone else secured glory, happiness, and French fall shoes, he demanded only a fair trial. He sent his appeal to those men he surmised would be sympathetic; three hailed from Boston's First Church, a congregation that included no witchcraft judges. (Ironically, it had been Parris's Boston home.) He added a few lines designed to unsettle his correspondents. It was the highest of compliments that the devil insolently copied them, parodying baptisms and communions. But they themselves had begun to resemble their enemies. Stoughton's court, charged Procter, acted like a bunch of inquisitors, engaging in behavior "very like the Popish cruelties."* They too figured in a Puritan's worst nightmare; Cotton Mather never hesitated to insert a word like "dragooning" into an account of a diabolical meeting. His father had credited Catholicism with heedless witchcraft prosecutions. Indeed the court seemed to have fallen under the spell of all it reviled.

IF IT WAS supremely difficult to outwit the devil, it was more arduous yet, plain-speaking John Procter would discover, to pry open a padlocked mind. If he received a response to his letter, it would not be in the form of a change of venue. He took the stand as scheduled in Salem twelve days later. But Procter chose the correct address for his pet.i.tion. Insofar as there was resistance-or at least rumbling-in the ranks, it occurred among the most prominent clergymen, the Bostonians to whom the magistrates would appeal for guidance, the experts on the invisible world, with which most had firsthand experience. Increase Mather had published the influential 1684 volume to which his son's Memorable Providences stood as a sort of salute. The elder Mather had explicitly questioned various witchcraft claims. "It is also true," he had observed, "that the world is full of fabulous stories concerning some kind of familiarities with the devil, and things done by his help, which are beyond the power of creatures to accomplish." Witches could no more transform themselves into horses, wolves, or cats than they could work miracles. Willard had famously treated his strangled, pinched, and roaring sixteen-year-old servant in 1671. When he wrote up the episode, he termed it "a strange and unusual providence of G.o.d," resisting both the words "witchcraft" and "possession." Each of the five ministers to whom Procter wrote had prayed with John Goodwin in 1688. Three had endorsed Memorable Providences. Most had signed off on the publication of Lawson's Salem village sermon.*

While the Salem ministers, magistrates, juries, and people marched in lockstep, as Procter complained, the Boston clergy lurched all over the place. The day after Rebecca Nurse was hanged, a group of ministers could be found at the home of Captain John Alden, in his seventh week in prison. Like Sewall, Alden was a longtime member of Willard's Third Church, the sole Boston congregation that supplied both witchcraft suspects and judges. Along with several ministers, a group of prominent Bostonians took turns leading prayers and singing psalms for the feisty sea captain. Samuel Sewall himself read a sermon. The presence in the room of a witchcraft judge indicates either some calculation or some confusion on the ministers' parts; when they entreated the Lord to intervene on Alden's account, did they pray for justice or innocence? Either way they were at least willing to address the Almighty on his behalf. In prison John Procter begged Reverend Noyes for some consolation, to be flatly rejected "because he would not own himself to be a witch." Together Alden's friends prayed through the afternoon of July 20, concluding with the 103rd Psalm: "The Lord works righteousness and justice for all the oppressed." Some prayers at least were answered; a drenching, much-needed rain fell that evening.

Among themselves the clergy wrangled still with the question that so perplexed the Salem magistrates that they were reduced to soliciting advice from an eighteen-year-old girl. Might the devil impersonate someone without his knowledge or cooperation? They had settled on that question for discussion at the end of June; it acquired a greater urgency by the time they climbed to Harvard's airy, second-floor library on the morning of August 1. Their partic.i.p.ation in the Alden fast would seem to suggest that some indeed believed an innocent could be abused. Eight ministers attended the August meeting, including three to whom Procter had appealed. Increase Mather moderated in a room strongly redolent of tobacco. All agreed: the August answer to the question of whether you might be a witch and not know it was yes. (In June the Salem justices had said no.) At the same time, the ministers wriggled a little. While such a thing was possible, it was "rare and extraordinary." The heist of an innocent was unusual, "especially when such matters come before civil judicature." In other words, the blameless infrequently wound up in court. That statement validated the justices and their proceedings. It also provided a loophole through which the ministers could, if necessary, drag someone they might need to exonerate.

At least a few of those men exerted themselves to see that some cases never landed in court. If only tacitly, they agreed with John Procter: while there were witches in Ma.s.sachusetts, there were no reprieves in Stoughton's courtroom. (More cynically, there were witches in Ma.s.sachusetts, but not among their friends.) Two days after the Salem justices ordered a new set of Andover arrests, Captain Cary's wife somehow managed to slip her eight-pound Cambridge chains. It is noteworthy that we have the report from Sewall, who expresses neither outrage at her escape nor fear that a murderous witch, whom his court was meant to prosecute, might be on the loose in the Boston area. Already a few Salem men had vanished into thin air. (John Alden would disappear in mid-September, to be hidden in Duxbury.) Before the court reconvened for its next session, Joshua Moody, among the ministers to whom Procter appealed, a.s.sisted in another escape.

Although repeated warrants had gone out for his arrest, forty-one-year-old Philip English could not be found through the month of May. A hulking, heavyset man, Salem's most prominent shipowner spent at least some of that time crouching behind bags of dirty laundry at a Boston home, where officials failed to locate him.* Born Philippe l'Anglois on the Channel island of Jersey, English had flourished in Salem, where by 1692 he had acquired fourteen buildings, a warehouse, a wharf, and a fleet. A devout, especially well-educated thirty-nine-year-old, his wife, Mary, descended from one of the town's first families. She was arrested on April 21, the day Thomas Putnam dispatched his portentous letter. Until that time the couple occupied an ornate, many-gabled home, among the finest in Salem town. They employed a large staff, unsurprising as the entrepreneurial Philip English imported Jerseyan servants to Ma.s.sachusetts. He traded extensively with French, Spanish, and West Indian ports; his twenty-one ships plied the coast from Nova Scotia to Virginia. English was a leader of the community, if one who interpreted his constabulary duties as he saw fit, a matter the hard-driving businessman had found himself explaining to the court years earlier. Until July he had occupied the town pew next to Stephen Sewall's. He did business with Justice Sewall. He was as well the landlord of a relative of Ezekiel Cheever, the sometime court reporter.

A glint in the eye, English was not above offering up a corner of one neighbor's land to another, only to explode when afterward accused of fraud. He proved among the more inexhaustible of New England litigants, suing aggressively and rapaciously. By one count he had appeared in court as a plaintiff at least seventeen times over the previous two decades; by any count he displayed a fierce faith in Ma.s.sachusetts justice. A conspicuously successful immigrant with an unapologetically independent spirit, English spoke with an accent, hailed from an Anglican island that belonged to a Catholic country, and contributed to the support of a Huguenot refugee community on whom the Dominion government smiled where the local populace did not. He preferred the Andros regime to Phips's, in part because he admired competence. He had made the familiar ascent from juryman to constable to selectman, a post to which the town had elected him in March. English might have been accused of many things, but-aside from his seemingly magical money-minting ability-he could hardly have imagined witchcraft to figure among them.

Thomas Putnam filed the original complaint against Philip English on behalf of four Salem village girls, but Susannah Shelden, the eighteen-year-old orphan, nearly single-handedly carried on the campaign against the couple. English lunged over the pews to pinch her in meeting. He bit her; he threatened to slit her throat. He consorted with a figure in a high-crowned hat. He had drowned a man at sea. It was English who intended to kill their governor. Shelden saw Mary English with a yellow bird at her breast. She had been a witch for twenty years. By June, six weeks after the initial warrant, English joined his wife in custody. His name came up regularly in court over those weeks. While in the nonspectral world he did business with several justices, in the spectral world he routinely consorted with Burroughs and Procter.

English too may have been-or was expected to be-on the docket for August 2. In any event as the details of the diabolical Sabbath emerged, the Salem merchant and his wife consulted with Reverend Moody. A senior clergyman, Moody was an especially warm, witty man. He had experience with the frontier-where he had served as both a minister and a Phips army chaplain-and the supernatural. He had supplied tales for Increase Mather's volume. He too had been hunted by the authorities for an unG.o.dly infraction. Under the Dominion government eight years earlier, he had refused to offer communion in New Hampshire according to Church of England rites. Friends attempted to persuade him "providentially to be out of the province." He had ignored them, to wind up with a six-month prison sentence for contempt of His Majesty's laws. (He remained in custody for thirteen weeks, longer than English had now been.) Late in July Moody preached from Matthew 10:23, a text that includes the line, "If they persecute you in one city, flee to another." His message was transparent, though subjected to some debate by the prisoners, who reviewed it with Moody and Samuel Willard. Had they absorbed his message? asked Moody, probably on July 31. English wondered if he might elaborate. The minister insisted he escape. English hesitated. He had known life on the lam. He had his principles. His business affairs were already in a state of disarray. "G.o.d will not permit them to touch me," he is purported to have said. His wife demurred. Did he believe, she asked, that the six who had hanged were witches? Her husband did not. What was to prevent their deaths too? "Take Mr. Moody's advice," she pleaded. More commonly a stickler for discipline, Moody evidently insisted that if English did not carry his wife to safety, he would do so himself. Already he had arranged for several Bostonians to convey the couple out of Ma.s.sachusetts. The suspects fled.

Days after they had done so, the grand jury heard testimony that English had murdered a neighbor's son with witchcraft. (The neighbor could also report that, while riding home after having informed a friend of English's designs on his land, he had suffered a nosebleed so severe that it soaked his handkerchief and sullied his horse's mane.) A sixteen-year-old Salem servant swore that the couple had threatened to tear him to pieces. By the time he testified, the fugitives were miles from Salem, en route to New York, where Governor Benjamin Fletcher was said to have offered them asylum. That was entirely possible, although Fletcher did not arrive until August 30. New York would play a crucial role in the crisis but not yet. The two colonies were in close touch if on an uncordial footing, their agendas very much at odds. Fletcher would observe that the North American colonies were "as much divided in interest and affection as Christian and Turk." They had little inclination to extend any favors to the new Ma.s.sachusetts administration.*

PHILIP AND MARY ENGLISH submitted the same questions to the Boston clergy that John Procter had so eloquently posed a week earlier. They got different answers. They escaped because they had the ear of moderate, influential ministers, men who could privately circ.u.mvent a system they publicly supported. But Alden, Cary, and the Englishes escaped as well for the same reason that so many stumbled and stammered and went blank before the Salem magistrates. Even in 1692, the rich were different. From the beginning New England's founders had harped on hierarchy. Still aboard ship, John Winthrop had in 1630 declared that the Lord had seen to it in his wisdom that "in all times some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity, others mean and in submission." While all served under the Lord, Stoughton had reminded his 1668 audience, "some are stewards in higher, some in inferior ranks and capacities." As some enjoyed greater abilities, so some stood to prosper more fully. We were not born equal, and we would not die so. Why, then, pretend to be in the course of our lives?*

There was an elite even among servants. (t.i.tuba figured amid the lowest of the low.) Providence occupied various tiers, with cherubim and seraphim, archangels and angels. All devils were not created equal; there were trifling and dominant ones, mighty fiends and base goblins, some better qualified and more accomplished than others. "There is a monarchy among them," noted Cotton Mather, apishly copying the visible world. As Philip English, or Ma.s.sachusetts's self-made governor, or even John Richards, the witchcraft judge who had arrived in Ma.s.sachusetts as an immigrant servant, demonstrated, financial ranks could be fluid. Largely static and self-perpetuating, caste was less so. And as uncertain as you might be of your place in the universe, you rarely lost sight of your standing in society. The social register of meetinghouse seating-inviting feuds and grudges, invasions of laps and elbows in the ribs-was but one manifestation of that hierarchy. So serious was that business that Woburn required a committee to seat its seating committee. A Newbury woman would proceed, in a manner "altogether unbecoming her s.e.x, to climb, ride, or stride over" a five-foot pew, disturbing the congregation, to make her point, in a seat by the wall. Those who a.s.sumed places not their own paid heavy fines. There was every reason why a middle-aged Andover farmer with a large family should hunger for an equal society as there was every reason to a.s.sociate one with the devil. "Whoever is for a parity in any society, will in the issue reduce things into an heap of confusion," warned an early Ipswich minister. Parris was acutely sensitive to cla.s.s for a reason: in Barbados he hailed from a distinct elite. The island concentrated power and property in a very few hands. In the same way, his daughter-and her afflictions-attracted an attention no other village girl could have commanded.

Status was on abundant display at all times: at home, in the seating arrangement around the table, on the street. The village girls knew well who enjoyed social distinction and who did not, as they knew who was worth what. Pride in apparel was a privilege reserved for the rich; the devil promised silks and fine clothes as much for what they advertised as for how they looked. Only a gentleman could sport a gold-laced coat. Exceeding one's rank in apparel was an offense for which men answered in court as often as women.* Infractions occurred with regularity. Any number of women defended themselves against the charge of illegally donning silk hoods, a privilege afforded to those whose husbands' estates were worth above two hundred pounds, a category that did not include the wives of John Procter, Samuel Parris, or Thomas Putnam. (It did include the mother of Nicholas Noyes, who successfully challenged an accusation that she dressed above her station. The number who fended off such charges spoke less to sumptuous Puritan dress than to lavish New England envy.) Social rank determined the order of Harvard graduates. Cotton Mather took second place to a cousin, the then governor's grandson. Stoughton led his cla.s.s. Higginson's eldest son was first among the 1670 graduates, Burroughs last. The alphabet did not suggest itself as an alternative means of ranking students until 1769.

Justice was even-handed but punishments contingent on social rank. Unless his crime was particularly egregious, a gentleman was not whipped; a master and his servant accomplice received different sentences. When convicted in 1684, Reverend Moody requested he be spared the common jail, "it being so cold and nasty a place, that it would be cruelty to send me thither, considering my education and manner of living." He served his sentence in a private home. Sumptuary laws existed to keep people in their place. A witchcraft trial did too, while jostling the social order. Indian servants did not normally tussle on the ground with ship captains' wives any more than adolescent girls normally tutored learned men on jurisprudence. At the same time, no one who escaped in 1692 was without a fortune or a close relationship with a minister willing to collude on his behalf, essentially the same thing. Witchcraft too proved hierarchical and patriarchal. Witches drew their powers from a figure who was above a wizard. He was, as Ann Putnam Jr. early on revealed, a conjurer. He also happened to be a man who never, in all his many mutations, changed gender.

Ann Foster could fly across Ess.e.x County at high speed, but-the widow of an Andover farmer, even a prosperous one-she could not escape. One Rowley man broke his sister-in-law out of the Ipswich prison. She did not get very far; he paid a fine. When a warrant went out for sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Colson, accused by the village girls in May, she was nowhere to be found. Word had it that, poised to flee Ma.s.sachusetts, she hid in Boston or Cambridge. Early in September the constable and his men tracked her to the home of her Reading grandmother. (Her mother, grandmother, and aunt had been rounded up in the meantime.) When they came for Elizabeth on a Sabbath morning, the men found the house locked tight. The deputy constable called to a colleague for a.s.sistance; suddenly they heard the back door fly open. Out sprinted the teenager. Sticks in hand, the constables gave chase, bounding across a neighbor's field. Nearly upon Elizabeth, one breathlessly called out: Why did she bother to run when he would surely catch her? He got no reply. The sixteen-year-old continued as fast as her legs would carry her and her skirts would allow, stumbling in the field, picking herself up again, shaking her hand behind her as if striking at her pursuers. Outrun, the two men sent their dog ahead. He leaped around the teenager but did not attack. The chase continued to a stone wall at the edge of some brush. By the time the constable reached the thicket Elizabeth had vanished. He beat the scrub; a great cat raced toward him, to stare him in the face. It scrambled off when the official attempted to strike it with his stick. It took little to understand that Colson had transformed herself. Hers was a daring escape, a fox hunt in which the fox prevailed. It left two grown men scratching their heads. Colson nonetheless wound up in the Cambridge jail ten days later. Meanwhile the whereabouts of Mary and Philip English appears to have been an open secret. No one tracked the couple-dogs at their heels and sticks in hand-as had been the case with fugitives in earlier capital cases.

Nor were arresting officers a suspect's worst enemies. When the authorities came for sixteen-year-old Martha Tyler, an Andover blacksmith's daughter, she attempted no headlong lunge for the back door. A pious girl, she had no crime to which to confess. That was before the ride to Salem, which she made with her brother or stepbrother. He spent the three-hour trip goading her. She begged him to stop; she knew nothing of witchcraft. On their Salem arrival she was led into a room, her brother on one side of her and John Emerson, the Gloucester minister, on the other. Emerson could see the devil before her. He swatted him away with his hand. The two men pressed her, Emerson mercilessly: "Well, I see you will not confess! Well, I will now leave you; and then you are undone, body and soul, forever." A schoolmaster, he knew something about extracting truths from adolescents. Her brother commanded Martha to stop lying. She was a witch. "Good brother," she pleaded, "do not say so; for I shall lie if I confess, and then who shall answer unto G.o.d for my lie?" He stood firm, insisting that her complicity was established, "that G.o.d would not suffer so many good men to be in such an error about it, and that she would be hanged if she did not confess." Martha capitulated. She preferred any dungeon to more psychological bludgeoning, as others would discover that they preferred to confess than to suffer long periods on their feet, without sleep, under ruthless interrogation. Many no longer knew what to believe. Others came to believe what they were told.

As the August court session approached, time seemed to accelerate; apprehensions built all around. Even as the grand jury a.s.sembled in Salem town, to which there was a general migration, Hathorne and Corwin continued their village hearings. On the Sat.u.r.day that Elizabeth Cary escaped from prison, they interrogated Mary Toothaker in the village. A midwife, she had been widowed six weeks earlier, when her husband of thirty-seven years-an accused Billerica folk healer-had died in jail. Her eldest daughter had already confessed. Given the fact that Toothaker's younger sister was Martha Carrier, the justices must have examined Toothaker intently. She resisted their allegations, having promised herself twenty times over that she would prefer to die on the gallows "than say anything but that she was innocent." But perhaps, she now realized, wavering, that had been the devil speaking? With no clobbering minister or relative at her side, she pummeled herself. Was she having trouble confessing because she was innocent, she brooded, or because the devil silenced her? He sometimes interfered with her prayers. Might she unwittingly have covenanted with him? Warily she felt her way, trying to satisfy the authorities without mutilating the truth. To stand firm on her innocence was, she understood, to prove guilty of sinful intractability. Bewitched girls meanwhile tumbled about her. She finally confessed. By gripping a dishcloth tight in her hands, she had afflicted a long-suffering Andover man. She was convinced-or she convinced herself-that she was a witch. She had been one for just under two years. The devil promised her happy days with her son.

In the course of her July 30 confession Toothaker implicated eleven others, including her sister, her nephew, her daughter, and Burroughs, whose meetings she had twice attended in the Parris pasture. More than anyone she illuminated how those accounts came about. She proceeded by fits and starts, as if she were choking or hyperventilating. Throughout she has her doubts. She thought she was at the meetings. She thought she set her hand to a book there. She thought the idea was to topple the church; she thought she heard the sound of a trumpet. She could not be certain as to which eminence deposed her. "The devil is so subtle that when she would confess he stops her," noted the court reporter. Satan deluded her with Scripture. Which verse? asked a magistrate. The psalm that included the line "Let my enemies be confounded," Toothaker replied. It led her uncharitably to wish her accusers dead.

Her approach to her faith was equally instructive; against the riptide of piety ran an undertow of doubt. Toothaker felt herself worse off for her baptism. She had not improved substantially since. The fear of Indians paralyzed her that spring; she woke regularly from nightmares in which she fended off a.s.saults. In the throes of her anxieties, a tawny man appeared. He would protect her, after which she was to pray to him. She readily consented. Perhaps, she now realized, she had been doing business with Satan all along! There was much confusion as to who the enemy was and if he might well be you. In the end Mary Toothaker made her deal with the devil, because he promised "to deliver her from the Indians," a rescue she mentioned three times. It turned out to be a brilliant bargain. Forty-eight hours after she confessed to witchcraft, Indians attacked Billerica.

WHEN YOU DESIGNATE yourselves "a flock in the wilderness," you are very nearly advertising for predators. A host of them had preyed-or been expected to prey-on New England since its founding. In the words of Mary Rowlandson (who may have had ministerial help with them), the Indians were "ravenous wolves," "roaring lions and savage bears." In Mather's pages Native Americans regularly turned up as tigers, the devil as a tiger or a roaring lion. The Quakers comported themselves as "grievous wolves." They joined the French and Indians to complete New England's diabolical menagerie, its lions, tigers, and bears. Bewitched at her May hearing, Ann Putnam Sr. went stiff as a plank. Only outside the meetinghouse did she find relief from the "paws of those roaring lions and jaws of those tearing bears"-words she borrowed from Lawson's March 25 sermon. As physical and moral boundaries blurred, so did the rampaging, ravaging predators. (Parris was far from alone in his thinking when, in a May sermon, he lumped together Louis XIV, his Catholic confederates, and a witch-and-wizard-instigating devil, at least two of whom were nowhere in the neighborhood.)* In most statements you could subst.i.tute the word "Indian" for "Catholic" without altering the meaning of the phrase. Inevitably it entailed subversion.

The Indians were of course also "horrid sorcerers and h.e.l.lish conjurers." That made sense; the wilderness qualified as a sort of "devil's den." Since the time of Moses, the Prince of Darkness had thrived there. He was hardly pleased to be displaced by a convoy of Puritans, in "a corner of the world where he had reigned without any control for many ages." In fact he was livid about it, a.s.serted Mather, who regularly muddied the zoological waters. Indians, wolves, and devils const.i.tuted the "dragons of the wilderness." To join the Church of England was, in Mather's estimation, to be bewitched. Quakers were a leprous people in the devil's snare. He deemed their religion every bit as wholesome as "juice of toads." Given the symbiotic relationship of an oppressed people and an inhospitable climate, it was from there but a short step to a colluding axis of evil.

The muddled fears produced a snarl of blame. When fire broke out in Boston, it was said to be the work of Baptists. Who slit the throats of the sheep grazing late on Cambridge Common? It had been wolves, but it made sense, late in 1691, to ban Frenchmen anyway. In 1689, agitating against Andros, Mather referred to the (fict.i.tious) decade-old Popish Plot, still vivid in the New England mind. The new Indian war seemed "a branch of the plot to bring us low." Mather ascribed Phips's disastrous Quebec campaign to the Anglican presence in Boston; it made the Lord angry. It helped that conspiracies came as naturally as did covenants to a New Englander, with his sense of sanctified mission and his insistence on purity. As an Indian informant put it, the colonists were as "apt to believe as children."* They felt themselves stalked on all sides. The Puritans had a natural Anglo-Saxon love of plot; as religion stood at the center of their lives, those became diabolical plots. Reverend Moody commented, in 1688, on the "unaccountable intrigues" that were afoot. Samuel Willard and Salem's John Higginson, moderate, prudent men, fiercely contended that Papist cabals either targeted or would soon target Ma.s.sachusetts. Well before spectral Frenchmen infiltrated Gloucester, rumors flew that a crew of Irishmen headed to Ma.s.sachusetts to establish Roman Catholicism in New England. Of course the shape-shifting, satanic saboteurs served an additional purpose: New England's enemies were its church's friends. They filled the pews. Particularly after a season of political storms, the common fears provided solid reason to band together. "O do not quarrel any more," pleaded Mather in 1690, "but unite immediately against your more united enemies."

In deposing Andros, the colonial elite had charged that their governor schemed to deliver them to "a foreign power." (That conspiracy too featured menacing redcoats and a crown, if not a high-crowned hat.) Cotton Mather spoke to the same fears in 1690, when he preached on New England in a state of "distress and danger as it never saw before." His was a law-enforcing, discipline-endorsing address; in their sins and discontents they had brought down "whole armies of Indians and Gallic blood hounds." The authorities had failed in protecting the flock. Without a charter, New England stood at the mercy of wild beasts. A Mather sermon on witchcraft could sound indistinguishable from a tirade against a royal governor, as was clear early in August when Mather addressed the Salem crisis head-on. He borrowed Mary Rowlandson's Indian imagery wholesale; en route to their "h.e.l.lish rendezvous," the diabolical monsters dragged "the poor people out of their chambers, and carry them over trees and hills, for diverse miles together." What exactly did an "army of devils" look like? Imagine "vast regiments of cruel and b.l.o.o.d.y French dragoons," Mather urged his parishioners, and they would get the idea. There was a crucial difference, however. When it came to marauding Indians, to "b.l.o.o.d.y and barbarous heathens," as Stoughton would term the French, you were gut-wrenchingly helpless. Witches you could do something about. When Indians raided Billerica on August 1, they butchered two women, their infants, and their teenage daughters, ages thirteen and sixteen. The judges traveled the same day to Salem, where all roads seemed that sweltering week to lead.

The Court of Oyer and Terminer reconvened in August with a new attorney general. For political reasons, Thomas Newton was replaced by Anthony Checkley, twenty-five years his senior and a friend of Justice Corwin's. Newton was a level-headed, affable, and conscientious civil servant, though not a barrister by training. Checkley had greater experience of the courts. He had prosecuted an earlier witchcraft case; he had served as attorney general in the Dominion government. He transferred at least eight suspects to Salem. They included no widows, folk healers, or acid-tongued beggar woman. Checkley instead prepared to prosecute four men, one of whom had attempted to elude arrest (John Willard) and one of whom had pet.i.tioned the authorities for a change of venue (Procter). George Jacobs, who guffawed that he was as much a buzzard as a wizard, joined them, as did Reverend Burroughs, the conjurer. Yet again it was clear where to begin. At ten in the morning on August 2, Stoughton opened the court with the case against Martha Carrier, the caustic queen of h.e.l.l, Ann Foster's Andover flying companion, a woman so guilty she had been a witch two years before she was born, who had alleged the girls were dissembling and out of their wits, whose own sons had accused her, and who had last been seen on May 31 as she was escorted off, hands and feet bound, from the tumultuous hearing that had left the outgoing attorney general slack-jawed in disbelief.

Carrier's grand jury was only just under way when word reached Ma.s.sachusetts that a ma.s.sive earthquake had weeks earlier devoured Jamaica. A third of the island's population perished; the town of Port Royal disappeared into the sea. Houses had been swept away and mountains overturned. The calamity had a biblical dimension to it, the more so in Cotton Mather's retelling: Forty ships capsized, though none from New England. Jamaica's Puritan minister escaped with his life. Mather had already decided to preach that Thursday from the book of Revelation. Hastily he incorporated the newest scourge into his August 4 sermon. Earthquakes too had diabolical origins; the devil raged among them, knowing his time to be short.

All of Boston turned out that Thursday for a citywide fast. Sermons on such occasions adhered to a formula; matching sins to afflictions, they warned of greater terrors were reform not in the offing. Mather worked effectively with the news. The people of Jamaica had been "pulled into the jaws of the gaping and groaning earth, and many hundreds of the inhabitants buried alive." More, he prophesied, was to come: "You shall oftener hear about apparitions of the devil, and about poor people strangely bewitched, possessed, and obsessed by infernal fiends." Addressing the events in Salem, he supplied details that had never turned up in court testimony, including more primitive practices than those to which a wily villain would need to reduce himself, like stolen money that floated into the palms of his recruits. More than twenty witches had now confessed, some as young as seven. They berated the parents who had sold them to the devil. "It would break a heart of stone to have seen what I have lately seen," Mather allowed, the first hint that he had visited Salem, though he did not attend a court session, for which he seemed strategically to be setting the scene. Mult.i.tudes of devils, swarms of devils, droves of devils descended upon "the distressed county of Ess.e.x." With invisible instruments of torture, they nearly ruined the site of the first gathered church in the colony. The plague, he warned, was spreading from town to town, near and wide.

Mather addressed a related peril. There was much "agitated controversy among us," he allowed, nodding to the skeptics, not as quiet in 1692 as they seem to have been today. He urged moderation. Pa.s.sion and rumor had run away with the story. He denounced the slandering and backbiting that encouraged the devil in the first place. Tipping his hand, he called once for compa.s.sion for the accused, twice for pity for the judges. They were up against the greatest sophist in existence. He appeared to have entwined New England in a finer thread than had ever been used before. The worthy judges labored to restore the innocent while excising the diabolical; it made for an arduous, hazardous operation. Mather was satisfied with the brand of evidence with which the magistrates had thus far prosecuted the "witch gang." But what of those for whom only spectral evidence existed? So snarled was the question that the honored magistrates had reason to cry, like Jehoshaphat, "We know not what to do!" The devil obscured matters by the minute so that they were all "sinfully, yea hotly, and madly, mauling one another in the dark."

Where the clergy a.s.sisted in escapes one minute and endorsed prosecutions the next (even Mather's August 4 sermon reads as both admonishment and encouragement); where a villager accused a neighbor, later to sign a pet.i.tion defending her; where a justice of the peace could submit his examination of a witch to the authorities with the proviso that he was entirely out of his depth; where an accused witch could not determine if the voice in her head was G.o.d's or the devil's-in short, where everyone else remained lost in the mist, one man continued entirely clear-eyed. It was inc.u.mbent on him to perform the hazardous procedure Mather described, excising the diabolical without lopping off innocents in the process. And as of August 1, when preparations for a new Maine expedition consumed Phips, that man happened to be both the head of the witchcraft court and the acting governor of Ma.s.sachusetts. Phips authorized him to proceed in his absence, although he remained in Boston that week. Having made an art of exceeding orders, he shrugged off the Salem mauling, which he left in the hands of his lieutenant governor and former political enemy, the ever-capable William Stoughton.

ON AUGUST 3 Martha Carrier appeared before a large crowd, one that included a flock of black-suited ministers, Lawson, Hale, Parris, and surely Noyes among them. We know nothing of her appearance, though-given her two months in an airless prison-Mather may well have been within his rights immortalizing the thirty-eight-year-old as a "rampant hag." Called to the bar, she acknowledged her ident.i.ty with a raised hand. The court charged her with having "wickedly and feloniously" practiced witchcraft. She pleaded not guilty. If she again expressed the magnificent disdain she had in May, it went unrecorded. Court officers led in a group of village girls, whose depositions paled beside the eye-rolling fits that accompanied them. Carrier apparently had manifested little sympathy. She seemed to feel as she had in May, when she had chided the justices: "It is a shameful thing that you should mind these folks that are out of their wits." Ann Foster's fifty-five-year-old son revealed that Carrier had said that it made no difference to her if the girls' heads twisted right off. There seem to have been some poisonous looks on all sides.

The evidence against Carrier had piled up steadily since her May hearing. Her older sister, two of her children, and a niece had confessed to having attended satanic meetings in her company. Susannah Shelden turned up to testify with her wrists again soldered together. They could not be separated. Thomas Putnam described the tortures his daughter and four other Salem girls had endured at Carrier's hands since May; their limbs nearly dislocated. Ann Foster's daughter dolefully confessed that she and Carrier had together taken the diabolical sacrament. Carrier had undone her entire family "by enticing them into the snare of the devil." Short-tempered and sharp-tongued, she tended to claw at the social fabric; she clapped her hands in young men's faces and wished graphic misfortunes on neighbors. Those curses worked wonders; a land dispute produced a swollen foot or a boil on the groin. Carrier's twenty-two-year-old nephew had returned to Andover from the war with a gaping, four-inch-deep wound. Before his aunt's arrest, he could sink a four-inch knitting needle into it. She a.s.sured him it would never heal; since her arrest, it miraculously had. (The neighbor's groin sores had as well.) He made no mention of church-toppling plots. He could however be said to have shed some ligh