Today in Salem: The elderly jail keeper brings 4-year-old girl Dorcas Good into his kitchen, where two ministers and two magistrates are waiting. She’d been questioned at the examination with Rebecca Nurse, but the crowd was noisy and the girl intimidated. Sending her to stay with the jail keeper was the right thing to do at the time. Perhaps they can get more information from her this way.
One of the ministers is elderly, soft-spoken but eagle-eyed, and it’s he who first speaks to the little girl.
“Come here, child,” he says, “and tell me if you see things that others cannot.” Dorcas bites her lip and looks over at the cruel magistrate Hathorne, who is already leaning in and frowning. The soft-spoken minister raps the table with his knuckles, and she jumps a little, looking first at his face and then his hand.
“A little snake,” she says, and holds her own hand up. “It sucks on my hand.”
Now all four men are leaning in. Where? they ask, pointing to freckles and spots. No, no, no she says and points to her own knuckle, where the men can see a dark red spot the size of a flea bite.
The cruel magistrate Hathorne takes over from the soft-spoken minister. Did the black man give her the snake? Was it the Devil?
No no no, Dorcas says again. Her mother did.
The two magistrates exchange glances. Familiar spirits like snakes often drink nourishment from a witch’s wounds. Perhaps Dorcas is a witch, and her mother, the beggar Sarah Good, may be responsible.