Today in Salem: 15 men crowd around the lifeless body of Roger Toothaker, lying in the corner of the men’s cell. The coroner has summoned them as a jury, and after interviewing the other eight men who are in prison, they decide Toothaker died of natural causes.
Toothaker called himself a doctor, counter-magician, and folk-healer, and even bragged that he could find and kill witches. He’d failed to save himself, though, from accusation, jail, and now death. Unfortunately his jail bill of four weeks hasn’t been paid, so he will stay where he is for today. If his bill isn’t paid tomorrow (unlikely, since his wife is also in jail), he’ll be buried with a shovelful of lime in a pauper’s unmarked grave.
While the Coroner’s Jury is at their unpleasant task, Governor Phips is mopping up the foamy puddle of beer he’s just spilled, quickly sliding the document he’s reading out of the way. It had arrived yesterday, and he’d started reading it then, but it’s long and dense, and his attention keeps wandering to the frontier wars in Maine.
Days ago he and his Council had asked the area’s most prominent ministers for their advice. Now they’d responded, and their message was mixed. They disagreed with using spectral evidence and the “touch test,” when an accused person was forced to touch an afflicted girl, who invariably and instantly recovered from her fits. Couldn’t the Devil be behind both of those phenomena?