Robert Walker - Children of Salem

“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.”

“All the same, I wish to see them.” The rough road made her slip and slide into him when the wheels hit a particularly bad spot. He took advantage of her being almost in his lap, and he kissed her passionately. She returned his kiss, very much in love with this man. But when she pulled away, she said, “Don’t think you can distract me. I still want to see those reports that should have come to Cotton Mather and then to your hands in the first place.”

“All right,” he conceded to the sound of the creaking coach. “After which the flames will see them.”

“You mean to destroy it all?”

“What good to perpetuate what has happened here. News of what really went on here gets back to England, it will make a mockery of what we’re here to accomplish on these shores, Lizbeth—a horrid mockery.”

“Ah, I see . . . politics?”

“More than politics. It could mean the survival of this-this experiment. We came here to build a New Jerusalem, to glorify God with a paradise on Earth. What will all the enemies of Puritanism make of what’s happened here?”

“Aye, plenty of people want us to fail. Among them my father.”

“The old cussed doctor, yes. He’s never believed in me, has he?”

“Afraid not, and I wish you’d forgive him that. I have.”

“He hasn’t any belief in our dream here in New England, and he has cursed me for taking you away from him.”

It was a sore point in their marriage and had always hung over them. He took her hands in his. “Write to your father in Barbados. Ask him directly about this man Caball and this Reginald’s origins—if you wish to pursue this Parris business any further —which I do not, my lady. Otherwise, it is dropped.”

“What of Parris then—the so-called ordained minister?” The coach again bucked hard and the driver slowed. From above they heard his urgent apologies for the road.

“Parris is done on these shores, Liz. I’ve ordered him out of the jurisdiction of the Bay Colony.”

“But then he will simply go elsewhere and spread his venom in Rhode Island or—”

“Drop it. The man has lost all influence and—”

“Lost his influence? While others’ve lost their lives, William!”

“—and-and any hold he may have had on this parish, including any land holdings he thought he had in Salem.”

“Lost his parish house did he?” She remained sarcastic.

“Including a tract he thought he had that touched on the Frost Fish River, a tract that would have set him up as an ore magnate. Turns out he held an interest in a nearby mine with his relatives here.”

“He should be taken out to those awful gallows we saw on the way in and hung!”

“An eye for an eye? That’s not like you, Liz.”

“If anyone deserves it in all this, if capital punishment means anything—”

“Lizbeth! He fades away quietly from this place.”

“And pays no price?”