Children of Salem

She wheeled on him and angrily shouted, “Yes, the same as was sent by Increase Mather into Salem, just before all of this witch hunt business began, yes—orders stemming from you, Mister Phipps.”

“One and the same, yes.” He avoided her eyes.

“Increase, your trusted friend, he spoke highly of this Wakely as I recall.”

“He did indeed. Trusted his judgment.”

“As you did, and yet you take the reports of others against him as fact?”

“He is accused of breaking prisoners out of the Salem jailhouse!”

“And when they come to lock me away in the jailhouse here, William? Will you break me free? What I hear is that Mr. Wakely took back what was his, and it’s rather romantic, his facing a loss of everything—his reputation, his very future, his life for his love.”

Sir William Phipps did not miss the innuendo. “I’d do the same for you, Lizbeth! You know I’d give up everything here—” he swept a hand through the air—“to keep you safe.”

“Wakely told me a horror tale about a child aborted in Barbados by a Dr. Caball, a man I have heard my father speak of—a miscreant who has no education and is no doctor at all but a butcher whose services go to anyone with coin.”

“Tell me then the whole story and how Wakely came by it.”

Mrs. Phipps laid out everything she’d learned about Parris, including his connection to her father and this man, Caball, and the fact these two men conspired to hide Parris’ mistake.

“How do you know this information is correct, Elizabeth?”

“When I was a young girl, my father came home with an infant, a child of mixed race.”

“Really? To raise as his own mistake?”

“He made some peace with Mother about the child, and he and my mother raised the child. I asked mother about it once, and she simply said, “Your father saved this child from a certain death. He is a good man.”

“Then there was no murder in Barbados of this Tituba Indian’s child.”

“No, only what appears to be an attempt that my father learned of and stopped. He must have convinced Parris to allow him to take the child. The mother, in a drugged state and afterward assumed the worst.”

“What became of the child?”

“He was trained in the ways of a man servant, and he is still in my father’s service. His name is Reginald.

“How can you know this is—was—the same child?”

“How can you know that it isn’t?”

“And if this confessed witch, Tituba is telling the truth . . . Parris is not the man he pretends.”

“What will you do, William? What will your office make of my being accused a witch? They strip the witches to search for imperfections on their bodies, calling warts by another name—the teet where suckles a demon or familiar! Will you stand by as you have so long now when they strip—”

“By all that is holy! By God and by my hand, no one will dare touch you, Lizbeth!”

“And when they come for me, armed men of your court system?”

Phipps thought of the scenario and it tore at his heart. “I have my own guard, and they are loyal men. Men who have fought with me in the provinces and the territories against the heathen horde. Men who will kill on my word.”

“But suppose these same men are superstitious and believe the accusations and subscribe to the chosen children of Salem who have now accused me?”

“Lizbeth!” he went to her and kneeled, his head in her lap. “What would you have me do?”

“I have several requests, beginning with an immediate decree to open every jailhouse door and release anyone inside accused of murder or mischief by way of witchcraft.”

“Done! It is done.”

“And you need to hand down an edict that will immediately shut down the Court of Oyer & Terminer.”

“Done!”

“And in time, you must summarily replace Sir William Stoughton as the head of the judges, and possibly replace the entire General Court.”

He hesitated a moment. “In time, yes.”

“And immediately strip these two lesser judges of any power whatsoever to oversee any trial of any sort ever again.

“Done, dear.”

“And to remove from Salem Town a man named Noyes, a minister.”

“Remove a minister of—”

“A man who cannot fill the shoes of your old friend, Nehemia Higginson.”

“And I suppose you also want the removal of—”

“A thing you should have done from the beginning of the growing feud in Salem Village.”

“Remove Samuel Parris.”

“Put it to him. He can hang for high crimes and misuse of his office, or he can disappear.”

“Done.”

Chapter Nine

Flyers and town criers went about Boston, Salem, and the colonies declaring the word of the top legal authority in the colony, Governor and Sir William Phipps. He had acted swiftly to quell any possibility of any further defamation of his wife’s character. He also declared a moratorium on arrests for witchcraft, trials for witchcraft, and executions for witchcraft. By carriage, he traveled to Salem, accompanied by Reverend John Hale, their two wives, surrounded by his private armed guard.

Governor William Phipps took a series of meetings with the judges, and especially William Stoughton. He took private meetings with Cotton Mather, Reverend Noyes, Samuel Parris, and he examined letters that rent his heart, letters of appeal for reason and caution both by and on behalf of the executed—Rebecca Nurse, John Proctor, Reverend George Burroughs, Mary Easty, and Sarah Cloyse among them.

Phipps took meetings individually with the seer children only to find himself called out by them as the most clever of all the wizards and warlocks in all of New England, and that he might just be the Antichrist with the Black Bible. In fact, he’d been given the scepter of the Black Minister leading the witches at their black Sabbath, the scepter of the heretic.

Before returning to Boston, Governor Phipps ordered the jails in all of Massachusetts opened and everyone arrested on the say so of the Salem accusers released on the basis of insufficient evidence. This included all those found guilty and condemned to die by the Court of Oyer & Terminer—the very court he’d asked Stoughton to convene. The court he now proclaimed at an end. These decrees were posted on the meetinghouse doors in every hamlet and town, and to be sure, they were posted at Ingersoll’s Inn and Apothecary, and Ingersoll was stripped of his duties as postmaster.

News of Phipps’ finally taking action, while far too late for Rebecca Nurse and nineteen others executed, and one man tortured to death, and some three hundred incarcerated, quickly spread and made the front page of every pamphlet in Essex County. An assessment was ordered to determine precisely how many accused prisoners had died of consumption and disease while in custody, but no exact figure could be established as those accused of witchcraft were numbered in with those arrested on other charges who passed away while in the care of the state.

On the way back to Boston, from behind the curtain within the Phipps carriage, Mrs. Phipps asked, “So what weight do you give, husband, on the documents recovered that Jeremiah Wakely had asked be posted but were never forwarded?”

“So you’ve heard the tale?”

“Not much gets by my attention, as you well know.”

“I’ve seen the vileness behind the parsonage walls, the vileness within this man Parris thanks to Wakely’s meticulous notes. There is this one sermon in particular, and there is a detailed report of a sham exorcism.”

“I should like to see Wakely’s reports some time.”

“They are not comfortable bedtime reading, my dear.”