both sides of the Atlantic – guilt and grief. A mother of five, after her youngest baby died, Alice Lake attested that the little thing had come to her in spirit form. Realising that this could be seen as a familiar of the Devil she immediately confessed that she had had sex before marriage, became pregnant and had tried to abort the foetus. The visitations by the ghost baby, she believed, were a punishment for her own crime against God. Poor woman – the trauma of her sin endlessly tormented her. When she was hanged her husband fled, leaving their four remaining children virtual orphans.
In 1651 there were three more – Mrs Kendall, of Cambridge; Goodwife Bassett at Fairfield in Connecticut and Mary Parsons, of Springfield. Mary had been fine until two of her three children died, whereupon she accused another local woman of witchcraft. This was not upheld and Mary declared that she had used witchcraft and as a result her five-month-old baby had perished. In a peculiar turn of events she was acquitted of witchcraft but convicted of murdering her child. As with Alice Lake’s husband, Mr Hugh Parsons also buggered off to a nearby town where he remarried, leaving their only child to fend for himself.
Two years later, in Hartford again, Goodwife Knap was sent to the gallows. Three years later Ann Hibbins was hanged. Her husband had been one of the magistrates who sentenced Margaret Jones to swing. Hibbins, though, tried to sue some builders who had worked on her house, stating that they had overcharged her. She won but local people considered the lawsuit to be ‘abrasive’ and she was subjected to an ecclesiastic court. Refusing to apologise to the workers, she was excommunicated and cited as ‘usurping’ her husband’s authority. Women didn’t bite back then, and as soon as her husband died she was made an example of. Witchcraft proceedings commenced and she was hanged as a witch, as one contemporary stated, ‘only for having more wit than her neighbours’. That same year, Goodman Greensmith was hanged at Hartford for, amongst other trumped-up accusations, ‘not having the feare of God before thine eyes’.
Then finally, poor Ann Glover in 1688. And what a tragic tale that was. Born a Roman Catholic in Ireland, Cromwell’s forces sold her into slavery and sometime in the 1650s sent her to Barbados. There, her husband was killed for refusing to renounce Catholicism. Somehow by 1680 Glover – known as ‘Goody’ – and her daughter wound up in Boston, working as servants for John Goodwin. However, after her daughter had an argument with the Goodwin children, some of them fell ill. The doctor visited, pronounced it to be witchcraft and, hey presto, Ann is up in court. The poor love couldn’t speak English, only Gaelic. When asked to recite the Lord’s Prayer to prove she is not a witch, Glover stumbles, unable as she is to speak the language. This is taken to be proof of her witch status so on November 16th of that year, Goody Glover is led out to the Boston gallows and hanged amid mocking shouts from the crowd.
I was pleased to see at the bottom of this account a little note detailing that in 1988 Boston City Council ruled that Goody’s conviction was not ‘just’ and proclaimed November 16th to be Goody Glover Day.
One woman, one day. At least Boston had the decency to do that. If they had a day a year for each witch hanged in Essex … At least Flick was on the case now.
But why hadn’t anyone tried it before? Perhaps because women never really thought it was their place to do so. Probably because, until recently, they didn’t have the means, influence, know-how or power to do so.
Witches were still seen as evil satanic things. I remembered how, a few years ago, Janet had attempted to hold a Halloween party for Lucy and Lettice and their friends. She’d not been able to secure a venue. None of the church halls would allow the booking, nor the local Conservative Club, nor their Constitutional Club. People still associated the witch with evil, malign spirits, wickedness and mischief. But we weren’t living in the seventeenth century any more and people really needed to wake up to just what happened back then.
The time was right.
I took out the map I had bought on the way home and spread it across my living room floor. With a red pen I began circling the places where