Free Six Women of Salem by Marilynne K. Roach

However, James soon fell strangely and alarmingly ill, with sensations running about his body as if some “living creature” were scampering invisibly throughout, “ready to tear me to pieces.”
    This ailment continued off and on for nine months, no matter what Dr. Anthony Crosby (the first physician in nearby Rowley) prescribed; not even a posset of steeped tobacco seemed to help. William Bradbury, meanwhile, mended his quarrel with the widow Maverick. He signed a renunciation to any claim against her late husband’s estate on March 5, 1672, and married her a week later on March 12 — discouraging news for James, whose condition failed to improve.
    At last Dr. Crosby admitted that he believed James was “behagged” and urged his patient to tell who might have done it. James (as he later claimed he said) hesitated to accuse anyone “counted honest,” but he suggested his romantic rival’s mother, Mrs. Bradbury. Dr. Crosby declared that “he believed that Mrs. Bradbury was a great deal worse than Goody Martin” (referring to Susannah Martin of neighboring Amesbury, an assertive woman who more than one resident in the area suspected of being a witch).
    Mistress Mary Bradbury, however, was a respectable matron married to Thomas Bradbury, town clerk, schoolmaster, and frequent magistrate. One night soon after James had named Mrs. Bradbury aloud, he felt a cat—or something else—hop onto his bed. He was certain he was “broad awake,” yet he could not move to strike it off. If the thing was not Mrs. Bradbury in the form of some creature, surely it was an imp or familiar that she had sent to plague him further. When the thing came again another night, James did manage to move and, he thought, hit it. From then on Dr. Crosby’s medicine finally worked, and James no longer doubted that Mrs. Bradbury was the witch who had caused his ills on behalf of her son. (That both William and Rebecca died in 1678, a mere six years after their union, did not change his mind.) James never married and continued working for his father at his various enterprises.
    Possibly around the same time Ann’s brother John fell in love with Mrs. Bradbury’s granddaughter Jemima True. Despite his brother James’s experiences with the Bradburys, John convinced himself that his father would approve of the match and would give him a marriage ­portion—he lacked enough to start married life—but George Sr. most certainly did not approve. Furthermore, “some in the family” persuaded John’s father that the boy was too young. The girl was a year younger as it was, and the match evaporated. Soon afterward John became uncharacteristically melancholy, “by degrees much crazed,” and so he ­remained.
    In 1672, some months after William and Rebecca Bradbury’s wedding, when Ann was eleven, her third brother, William, married Elizabeth Pike (a daughter of Robert Pike, who had often opposed Reverend Wheelwright’s imperious tactics), and her sister Mary married James Bailey of Newbury. Bailey was a young man not long out of Harvard (or “the college,” as it was called). Two months after the wedding a committee of men from Salem Village offered him £40 a year to serve as their minister.
    Salem Village—also called Salem Farms—was a rural neighborhood of Salem itself, a long walk inland northwest of the harbor. The men there had petitioned the selectmen for years to have charge of their own security—rather than leave their families unprotected while they trudged into town to stand watch—and to establish their own church with their own minister. The same problem of distance had already whittled away Salem’s outlying areas, and the town fathers were unwilling to lose any more. But the farmers were determined, so they took the matter all the way to the General Court, at last winning permission on October 8, 1672, to establish their own parish. Their victory meant that now they were responsible for building and maintaining a meeting