Defending the Dead (Relatively Dead Mysteries Book 3) (27 page)

Sarah greeted Leslie and Abby with a smile. “Ham? Chicken? Cheese? Help yourselves. Abby, I made more coffee. Hope you don’t mind.”

“Of course I don’t. And I have to say, you trained your son well.”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

They took their sandwiches back to the dining room to eat. Abby could see Leslie relaxing. She had to feel sorry for the woman: she’d been going along happily raising her children, and by doing the simple good deed of giving Abby a job Leslie had tossed a grenade into the heart of her life. Not that anyone could have foreseen such a thing, but it would be traumatic no matter how it happened. Abby was willing to give Leslie all the time she needed to come to terms with her new reality—she knew all too well that it wasn’t easy, and that was without involving a child. She was so lucky to have Ned and Sarah to prop her up, although in a way they were all learning together.

Sandwiches finished, table cleared, they were ready to plunge in once again. After she had described her findings, Abby was getting more and more comfortable with her narrative. Maybe there would never be hard evidence to support any of it, but to her mind it fit in terms of human emotions and interactions, even allowing for the centuries between. Humans were still humans, weren’t they?

“Hey, Abby—can we get this rolling?” Leslie demanded. “I’ve got to get home sometime today.”

“Of course. I gave you the basic picture of Salem Village at the time this began in 1692, and who some of the major players were. I think it all comes back to the Reverend Samuel Parris.”

“So what’s new about that? It’s not like he’s exactly a mystery figure,” Leslie said, her voice tinged with skepticism.

“Hear me out. Pretend this is forensic psychology, if you want. Samuel Parris was born in London in a wealthy family, but he was the second son, so when his father died all he got was a crummy small sugar plantation in Barbados, and even that was wiped out by a hurricane. So he decided to try his luck in Boston, and he moved there in the 1660s. He bought himself a warehouse and a wharf and tried to be a businessman, but not terribly successfully. He married and had three kids. Somewhere in there he put in two years at Harvard, but sources take some sort of glee in saying he left without getting a degree. Then he decided he wanted to be a minister and started shopping around for a church.”

“You could do that then?” Sarah asked.

“So it seems, although I can’t claim to be an expert on how the church operated then. Anyway, he set his sights on Salem Village. Maybe he thought that getting in on the ground floor with a relatively new church would pay off in the long run. Still, even if he had a long-range plan, he made the villagers jump through hoops before he agreed to take the position. He wanted better pay. He wanted to own the parsonage and its land, which was unusual at that time. He wanted free firewood. It took him a full year to say yes, and he did get most of what he asked for. What does this tell you about the man?”

“He was a self-serving jerk with a sense of entitlement?” Leslie suggested.

“That’s pretty much the way I see it,” Abby agreed. “Although there’s no shortage of those. So in November 1688 he gives a trial sermon to the villagers, and he’s officially hired in June of 1689. He moved to Salem Village with his wife and three kids: his son Thomas, who would have been about eight, his daughter Elizabeth, about six—who we will meet again—and his daughter Susannah, who was a babe in arms. He also comes with an Indian couple, Tituba and her husband John. They originated in South America, but apparently our Samuel bought them in Barbados. And then there’s Abigail Williams.”

“Who was one of the first accusers, right?” Leslie asked.

“Yes. If you want a mystery figure, she’s it. Some early sources say that she was a niece of Samuel’s, but no one has ever found any proof, and I didn’t see any Williamses in his genealogy. More recently people have suggested that ‘niece’ is a kind of honorary term, and she might have been no relation at all, just someone the family adopted and was willing to raise. Maybe a refugee from one or another of the Indian massacres that took place farther north—I’ve read that Salem took in a number of orphans from those. Now, you might suggest that Abigail was there to help mother Elizabeth with the new baby, but she was awfully young for that, and besides, there was daughter Elizabeth, who was only a year or two younger than Abigail, not to mention the slave woman. Why was Abigail there? But we’ll come back to her. By the way, I’ve found no mention of what happened to the son Thomas, and his name doesn’t come up in any court records during the witch trials. Baby Susannah would have been too young to take any part. As an aside, she lived to 1706, and never married. Are you with me so far?”

Nods all around. Abby resumed her tale. “So, fast-forward to the winter of 1692. Parris has been the minister for three years, and they haven’t exactly been smooth sailing. Reading between the lines, I get the feeling that Parris didn’t get the respect he thought he deserved. He did have his supporters in the village, as well as his critics, and they were pretty evenly split, but there were a lot of arguments. And here’s where things get interesting.”

“How so?” Sarah asked.

“Did it never seem odd to you that the first accusers were living under the roof of the town’s minister? Abigail and young Elizabeth were the instigators of the whole thing. Why? Girls didn’t get much respect in those days. Why did anyone believe them?”

“Because they were under the minister’s roof,” Sarah said triumphantly.

“Yes—sort of authentication by proxy. If the reverend believed them, he had enough followers who would accept his word. After all, he didn’t get fired until years after the whole witchcraft episode. So he said he believed they were telling the truth. And one of the first victims they turned on is the Indian slave Tituba, who has lived with them for years. Why?”

“Isn’t there some story about how they were playing with magic, with Tituba showing them how?” Leslie asked.

“Yes, that came up in an early source, and has been repeated ever since. But didn’t you ever do anything like that, when you were their age? Play with a Ouija board? A Magic Eight Ball? I know I did. Both are still around—are they so different? And I have always wondered, once I heard the story—when did these girls,
and
the female servant, find the time to sit around playing at spells? I didn’t think anybody had that kind of free time back then.”

“Tituba made a convenient scapegoat,” Leslie said. “She was not English, and she must have had some kind of dark skin. Plus, she confessed pretty fast. So it was easy for everyone to point a finger at her.”

“All true. What’s more, the Arawak Indians had a tradition of magic rituals, and they even used hallucinogens in some of them.”

“Wait—you’re saying the slave Tituba dosed the girls with something to produce the symptoms?” Ned asked, sounding incredulous.

“No, I’m not. Think about it: whatever herbs or roots or seeds she was familiar with were most likely not available in Salem. I guess you could argue that as a port some particular items might have been brought in, but she lived maybe eight miles away and had no transport and presumably she had household duties. When was she supposed to go off to buy supplies like that?”

“Her husband?” Sarah volunteered.

“Maybe. The records say little about him—after he apparently helps brew a witch cake that was supposed to prove whether the girls were telling the truth. Before you raise objections, an awful lot of this information comes from sources that might be suspect, but once they’re out there, they get repeated over and over. What did he know about magic and brews? We don’t know. There’s no way to find out.”

“If there were some plant native to Barbados that can be found growing in or around Salem, that might be a clue,” Ned suggested.

“I’m pretty sure the climates in Barbados and the colony were not exactly similar. But please feel free to look for such a plant,” Abby said, smiling to soften her sarcastic comment. “Anyway, are you willing to accept that it’s unlikely that Tituba played the role that history has assigned to her?”

“There’s no record about how any other villagers felt about Tituba? Or the fact that the Parrises had servants at all? Did many other households in the village have them?” Sarah asked.

“That I don’t know, but it’s a good point. May I go on?”

More nods.

“Thank you. So Abigail Williams and Elizabeth, or Betsy, as she was known, started having fits and acting very strange in January of 1692. It went on for a few weeks, and then they were both examined by the town doctor, who couldn’t find any physical cause, so he declared that it must be witchcraft.”

“Whatever happened to him?” Sarah asked.

“I have no idea. Then came the witch cake episode, which was uncovered pretty quickly, and the reverend started holding prayer services—I’d guess he was covering his butt by then, since he’d been harboring the afflicted girls under his roof. And at the end of February the formal accusations were flying, and you probably know the rest. Tituba confessed really fast, and she and two others were sent to prison in Boston. And still the accusations kept coming.”

“How many came from Abigail?” Leslie demanded.

“A few. Her biggest coup was accusing the Reverend George Burroughs, who had held Parris’s position in Salem Village earlier. Now, this was a man who appeared to have been beyond reproach, and who wasn’t even in Salem during the whole witch mess. In fact, he was living in Maine. On the strength of Abigail’s accusation, the man was dragged back from Maine, put on trial, and hanged. A minister. Abigail most likely never met the man. So where did this come from?”

“You’re saying that Parris engineered this whole thing,” Ned said flatly.

“Yes, I think so. He saw his grasp on his position in Salem Village slipping, and he figured out a way to turn the tide. He had means, motive and opportunity. And he succeeded.”

“You’re going to have to walk me through this,” Leslie said. “You make him sound like a megalomaniac, able to bend all sorts of other people to his will. How? Why?”

“I’ve got some ideas about that,” Abby said. “This may be oversimplified, but I think it hangs together. We’ve already seen he had a pretty big ego, even before he moved to Salem Village. He wangled himself a fancy house and set himself up with servants. That got expensive, and the townspeople started grumbling about footing the bills. Now, I’m not saying he wasn’t an effective minister. Sources say he definitely had religious enthusiasm, and was serious about the state of religion in Salem Village. The job mattered to him. When the villagers started complaining, he felt threatened, so he needed a distraction, and boy, did he find one: Abigail.”

“Why?” Leslie shot back. “Because she was easy to manipulate?”

“No, because he was sleeping with her.”

28

The reaction from the others was almost comic, as their jaws dropped in unison, and Abby fought not to laugh. “Got your attention, didn’t I?”

“You’re going to have to explain, Abby,” Sarah said. “Is there such a thing as historic libel? Or do I mean slander?”

“I believe the statute of limitations has run out either way. Let me give you my reasoning. I’ve told you why Samuel Parris wanted to keep his job. But haven’t you noticed that men with large egos and an inflated sense of their own importance also have large appetites in other areas?”

“That’s hardly proof of anything,” Ned commented.

“No, but it’s part of the big picture,” Abby said. “I found sources that said that his wife Elizabeth wasn’t very healthy. She had the three kids while they were still in Boston, and then nothing, although she was still of childbearing age—one author suggested she might have had a series of miscarriages. Maybe that’s one reason they had servants, because Elizabeth couldn’t do the daily tasks of any housewife then, although apparently Samuel had owned the slaves before he married. I know, it may be a stretch, but remember—I didn’t start this idea.”

“But Abigail was a child!” Sarah protested.

Abby turned to her. “Sarah, how much do we know about Abigail Williams? After three hundred years, nobody has figured out who her parents were, where she came from, how she ended up in the Parris household? We have only Parris’s word that she was eleven or twelve. Certainly she must have been close to his daughter Betsy’s age, but she could have been a couple of years older. Not a big difference. She might have been small at fourteen. But some girls did get married that early back then. Leaving that aside for now, there are other related bits of information that are interesting. One is that early in 1692, after the frenzy had begun, the Reverend Parris sent Abigail out of his house to live with a Samuel Sewell in Salem town. Sewell was supposed to be some kind of distant relative, but I haven’t had time to check that. Anyway, Abigail’s accusations dropped off rapidly once she was in the Sewell household, although they didn’t stop. What is even more interesting is that Samuel Sewell was appointed as a judge on the special Court of Oyer and Terminer that the new governor set up in May 1692.”

“Which proves what?” Ned asked.

“Parris and his maybe-relative Sewell had a hand in steering the outcomes of the witch trials. And they both controlled what Abigail could say.”

“That’s interesting, but pretty thin,” Leslie said.

“All right, try this on for size: Abigail’s last public appearance was when she testified in court on June third, 1692. She never appeared in any record after that.
Any
record. We don’t know where she lived, if she married, when she died. After setting off all this, she disappears completely. If this were a movie, I’d have forensic people in Salem looking for her grave. The daughters Elizabeth Parris and Susannah Parris lived long past 1692: did they know where she went? Did they ever tell anyone what had happened to Abigail? Did no one ask either of them? Or were people content not to drag up the old troubles?”

“So where did the whole magic spells and incantations and stuff come from?” Leslie demanded, still unconvinced. “Was it all a distraction?”