Children of Salem

was Ti’shuba.

BOOK THREE

Chapter One

Circumstances in Salem and its environs moved rapidly during June, far too fast for Jeremy or anyone to make any further proper appeals. Twenty days after the hanging of Bridget Bishop, the cantankerous innkeeper with as foul a mouth as any sailor in Salem Harbor, five more accused, arrested women were judged guilty in the Court of Oyer & Terminer—among them, Rebecca Nurse.

The others on the June 30^th list of recalcitrant guilty were Sarah Goode, to no one’s surprise, Susannah Martin of Amesbury, the vixen who’d caused Henry Carr to hang himself twenty years before—or so Anne Carr Putnam said; Elizabeth How of Ipswich, and Sarah Wilde of Topsfield. Along with the accusations of the Salem seers against her, Goode had been condemned on the word of her eight-year-old, mentally distracted child Dorcas. All of the other accused had stood adamant against the court as had Goode—most of them cursing the court, the judges, and their accusers in no uncertain terms.

Rebecca Nurse alone had maintained her calm resolve, and she’d even blessed her accusers and the judges. She had insisted that “This court and the magistrates and ministers, including Mr. Parris, are all misguided, and your deliberations are not guided by the hand of God but those of Satan himself, who, in my opinion, has orchestrated the entire delusion fallen on Salem.”

The judges pounded their gavels and held firm to their seemingly honest values and well-intentioned viewpoints, and superstitious beliefs, and entrenched customs which masked their hidden motives from the mob. At the same time, the official attitude that’d become so entrenched in Salem could not be so well hidden from those Parris called the ‘dissenting brethren’.

Judge and Major Richard Saltonstall voiced the ruling of the court deciding Mother Nurse’s fate along with her four ‘covenant’ sisters. “All of these women whose hearts are turned to stone against us by the Dark One,” he said after gaveling for silence, “all four are guilty of witchery and murder, offenses punishable by death. Sentence of hanging to be carried out on nineteen July, 1692.”

The date was set—less than four months since Rebecca’s arrest, She, along with three others found guilty to be hung at Watch Hill—which the common man had dubbed Witch Hill. For Jeremy and the Nurses present at the trial wherein Jeremiah Wakely had tried again to introduce the history of animosity between Sister Putnam and Susannah Martin as well as the animosity of three years between Reverend Parris and the Nurse family, but he was drowned out by the hue and cry of the afflicted children who had now perfected their act.

An opposing wail and hue and cry against the injustice of it all fell on deaf ears, and it drew the glaring eyes of the seer children, who seemed to be taking names of those who disagreed with the court.

On leaving the courtroom, the meetinghouse converted into a venue for the Boston authorities, the same venue as Rebecca’s excommunication, Jeremy cautioned the others to remain calm.

“Calm? Calm?” asked Ben.

Joseph agreed. “Damn it, man, we have only twenty days between now and Mother Nurse’s being summarily executed by these swine who—a”

“Keep your voices down,” pleaded Jeremy as the seer children, all smiles, passed from the meetinghouse and down the street, all with a lilt in their step. “Tweny days, which means we’ve got a lot of planning to do.”

“I say we uncover the weapons back of the wagon and take her now!” Ben looked from Jeremy to the other Nurse men.

“You’d fail, Ben,” Serena stood with Jeremy.

“Look round us,” added Jeremy to which the others studied the number of armed guards and militia. “Putnam has seen to it we dare not.”

Serena nodded. “There’re too many of them right now.”

The family, Serena and Francis included, watched Mother Nurse being loaded into the jail cart to be returned to her cell. Ben made a move for a weapon, which lay beneath a blanket back of the wagon, but his brother-in-law, John Tarbell, placed his huge paw atop Ben’s. The two stared long into one another’s eyes, and for a moment everyone thought Ben was going to tear the gun from hiding and start firing and making demands, but he hesitated under Tarbell’s firm hand and words: “We all know ’tis time to act, Ben, but Jeremy’s right.”

Jeremy repeated the litany that he’d preached for days now should the verdict go against Rebecca, as most on their side never believed she could be found guilty. “We need a plan, we must act as one, and we must act with great caution.”

“And we do it by cover of night.”

A hundred sets of eyes in the village watched he Nurse contingent leave peacefully for their farms. The accusations had caused warrants and arrests against many of their clan as it had the Parkers, the Proctors, and others who’d stood by and read into evidence their belief in the piety and true heart of Rebecca Nurse, Goodwives Easty and Cloyse, as well as Elizabeth Proctor and others.

Some villagers expected retaliation against those who’d sworn out arrests, those who had carried out arrests, and quite possibly the magistrates themselves, if not Reverend Parris and villagers who supported Mr. Parris. Among them Thomas Putnam, who’d surrounded himself with more and more militiamen, recruiting many young boys in his camp as well. Some as young as fifteen and sixteen joined the standing militia. In fact, not since the Indian Wars of that murderous, marauding King Phillip had the colony seen so many militiamen drilling daily on the green and firing off that damnable cannon, which as the Nurses, Eastys, Cloyses, and Tarbells rode in their wagons and on their horses from the village, was fired off as if in jubilation of the verdicts handed down today.

Jeremy shouted to his new family, “What expedient measures they take—firing cannon and shot at the very invisible enemy they claim no one can see but the children. Next they will have little girls firing muskets and that bloody cannon at flying broomsticks!”

But no amount of rancor or anger from Jeremy roused a word from the others as each was lost in his and her own thoughts, their attention wrapped about the cursed verdict against Rebecca. Finally, Serena said in so quiet a voice as to seem a butterfly—and yet she was heard by all over the sound of the wagon wheels—“If they can condemn our Mother then no one—no one is safe!”

Even so, there would be no retaliation against any enemy today, not from the Nurse men, or from any of those who’d chosen to marry into the now tainted family. Not today. Today old Fancies Nurse, looking as if a tree had caved in on him and having seen his wife condemned and to be publicly hung alongside the likes of Sarah Goode, had gone mute and sad beyond words. He led his sons, sons- in-law, and remaining daughters-in-law homeward, passing Corey’s Mill—now taken by the authorities like Bishop’s Inn, and next they passed Proctor’s well-located establishment.

“If they don’t get Proctor’s place next,” muttered Ben through gritted teeth.

“It’ll be your place, Pa,” finished Joseph.

“Aye, going for the Nurse lands,” agreed Serena.

“Was their first and largest goal from the beginning,” finished Jeremy.

The procession looked like a funeral parade.

Chapter Two

Nurse Home, late evening, July 11, 1692

With Mother Nurse’s execution date set, this determined Jeremiah Wakely on a path to break the law, as every legal means, strategy, and scheme had been exhausted. He and Serena, with the help of her brothers, planned a prison break and an exit strategy. They must move under cover of darkness when they made their way toward the village jailhouse, knowing they could not wait any longer as the moon meant to increase in size and brightness over the next two weeks, and that no night beyond this one would be as good cover.

They also had it on good authority that Mother Nurse had been returned to the village lockup to await hanging on the nineteenth.

At Francis’ home, where he’d been convinced to wait this out, the Nurse men, Jeremy, and an insistent Serena, using topographical maps that Jeremy had finagled from the courthouse, planned Mother Nurse’s rescue.