Today in Salem: Melancholy, she said. She’d had a baby, then had a fit of sickness and felt melancholy. So she’d left the baby in the care of her older children while she took long walks in her orchards, taking comfort in the scent of ripening apples and praying that God would forgive her. That was twelve years ago, she said, ten since the baby had died.
She pauses and looks up at the prominent Rev Increase Mather, who, after receiving so many petitions to let the confessors recant, has come to the jail to hear the women’s stories for himself. He’s certain at least some of them are guilty. But all of them?
“Go on,” he says to the woman.
Now she’d been accused, she said, and the judges had pressed her to confess. They said she must be guilty, that she knew the time when she’d consorted with the Devil, she just needed to tell them. And, well, that spell of melancholy must have been it. Even if she truly in her heart did not believe she was guilty of witchcraft – which she didn’t – the judges would not relent. So she told them about it. The judges had seized on it, she’d confessed in fear, and now she was in jail.
Mather nods as if he sympathizes, but his expression is stern as he turns to the next woman, and the next, and the next, each saying that she’d confessed out of fear and under pressure.
Meanwhile even more petitions are arriving in the Court. The ruthless Judge Hathorne has begun putting them in a pile on the corner of his table, held down by a smooth stone that his ten-year-old son had slid into his pocket. It was a rare moment of playfulness on the boy’s part, and Hathorne had disciplined him for it. But he’d kept the stone. He doesn’t know why.