Free The Witches: Salem, 1692 by Stacy Schiff Page B

away. “Sarah Good, do you not see now what you have done? Why do you not tell us the truth? Why do you thus torment these poor children?” he chided. The wrenching and writhing continued; Good could not help but agree that something afflicted the girls. But what did she have to do with it? she asked bitingly. Like everyone else, she knew that Hathorne had arrested two other women. One of them was his culprit.
    The fourth or fifth time Hathorne asked who bewitched the children Good supplied an answer. She named Sarah Osborne, apprehended the same afternoon, her house turned upside down for evidence. Recovered, the girls clarified that Osborne and Good together tortured them. Hathorne returned to the muttering. What was it Good said when she stalked away from people’s houses? He implied that she was either tossing off an incantation or conferring with her devilish accomplices. Muttering qualified as something else too, New England code for all that was suspect and subversive. The word smacked of iniquities and insurrections. It led directly to anarchy; where murmuring broke out, mutiny could not be far behind. To the minds of their captives, Indians muttered. Cotton Mather had recently written off murmuring as “the devil’s music.”
    Good was caustic at best, insolent at worst. “Her answers were in a very wicked, spiteful manner,” noted one of the court reporters, detouring into the third person, his editorial comment supplanting Good’s voice. Appearances were on his side. Weather-beaten and bedraggled, Good looked as miserable as her reputation. A child would have taken her to be aged. She was in fact thirty-eight; she had had a baby three months earlier. She continued to resist her well-dressed examiner, who had to drag answers out of her. As for the muttering, she finally relented: “If I must tell you, I will.” She had recited the Commandments. Pressed for details, she changed her story. It had been a psalm. She paused, silent, before floundering (“muttering,” in the opinion of a clerk) through a portion of it. “Who do you serve?” persisted Hathorne, swerving slightly. “The God that made heaven and earth,” Good replied, though perversely she hesitated to pronounce the Lord’s name. She could explain her Sunday absences: she had not come to meeting as she had no proper clothes.
    If she did not seal her fate with her acrid answers, her husband did so for her. Someone in the room volunteered that William Good had voiced suspicions of his wife, submitting that she “either was a witch or would be one very quickly.” Hathorne pressed the hapless weaver for specifics. Had he witnessed any diabolical acts? He had not. But his wife had comportedherself rancorously with him. Tears welling in his eyes, he felt compelled to admit “that she is an enemy to all good.” If there were gasps in the room, they went unrecorded; Ezekiel Cheever—enlisted that day as one of several clerks—had no reason to preserve them. The years of poverty had not been kind to the marriage; the report of Sarah Good’s lack of sympathy for their hosts’ livestock had also originated with her husband. The night before his wife’s arrest, William Good would reveal, he had noticed a witch mark—a sign the devil was known to stamp on his recruits—just below her right shoulder. It had never been there before. He wondered if anyone else had seen it. Hathorne remanded Good to prison.
    He grilled middle-aged Sarah Osborne, his second suspect, with the same rigor. Like Good, Osborne had tenaciously pursued a substantial inheritance, in her case after the 1674 death of her husband. That claim proceeded slowly. In the meantime, she had taken up with and married her Irish farmhand. Rumors had circulated about her for years, the most recent of which she had spent bedridden. Hathorne met again with denials, if from a better-humored, less shabby defendant. Osborne refused to implicate Good, whom she had not seen in some time and