Abigail Accusing Elizabeth Quotes

owed, Bronson’s wife, Abigail, had opened a packet of Mary’s letters to Elizabeth and found out their true opinions. Elizabeth, outraged at the violation of her privacy and frightened by Abigail Alcott’s spiteful accusations of disloyalty, packed and left the house—with its brood of three small daughters, Anna, Louisa May, and the baby Elizabeth, named for Peabody as another form of payment in kind—and the city of Boston to live with her family twenty miles north in the old port town of Salem.

More than half the women who were hanged in 1692 had previously been accused. Rebecca Nurse’s, Mary Esty’s, Elizabeth Procter’s, and Mary English’s mothers had been rumored to be witches. Samuel Wardwell had a Quaker uncle; the Nurses had raised a Quaker orphan; Alden had Quaker relations. Abigail Hobbs was happy to sell her parents down the river as only a fourteen-year-old will.

By the time the older girls began to contort, additional forces had come into play. The five who were to become the most vociferous accusers stepped in only after Tituba’s high-voltage testimony. Every one was a servant. They had reached the age when one ecstatically ambushes the grown-ups, when dependence grades into revolt. They may have had an agenda, which they pursued more subtly than did Abigail Hobbs. They knew stresses the younger girls did not, having ventured farther into the forest of sin and temptation that Elizabeth Knapp so brilliantly charted. They were more attuned to adult collisions, demands, confidences, advances, to wolves in sheep’s clothing. Was there a sexual element at play? One can make what one will of the piercing and pecking and pricking, of pitchforks thrown down, of backs arched suggestively upward and knees locked fiercely together.