by Karen Brooks
When Peter was in the midst of his fits, there were men who would try to still him, lift and bend his legs, turn his head. Even the strongest of them was unable to do so. Likewise, when they saw the gouges on his legs, the bite marks, the imprint of fingernails and what appeared to be bruises from pinching, they could find no evidence of who or what had made them. No instrument was to be found in Peter’s bedroom, and his parents and siblings denied harming him.
While Peter had days when nothing afflicted him, they were becoming rare. The more the reverend visited and spoke of Christian Shaw, Salem and other trials that found and punished witches, trials where the victim was hailed a hero by the good folk freed from bewitchment, the more frequent the attacks became.
The reverend told him Beatrix Laing had finally confessed to placing a charm upon him. Surprised to learn that Nicolas Lawson was involved too, Peter nonetheless dutifully reacted and shivered at the mention of her name, gratifying the reverend no end. Nevertheless, though the constables hunted for the wax image Beatrix claimed the two women had made, it could not be found.
When the reverend whispered to him that they would be bringing Beatrix Laing to his house on the morrow and into this very room so they could prove once and for all that she was indeed a witch, Peter knew his moment had come. The reverend was depending on Peter to help him prove to the bailies and any doubters in town that Beatrix Laing was in league with the devil. Only by doing this could he and Peter liberate Pittenweem from the curse this woman and her coven had brought upon them. A curse whose harm stretched beyond Peter’s suffering.
‘Look at how poor the catch has been of late,’ the reverend reminded him in hushed tones. ‘And what about all the drownings and poor crops? This isn’t the work of God, but Satan himself. Will you help me, Peter my son?’ His voice made Peter think of warm milk laced with whisky, of the sun-drenched fields beyond the braes in summer. Most of all, it made him think of the sweet lips of Sorcha McIntyre and what it would be like to feel them upon his own. If he helped the reverend to expel the devil and unite the town in Christ’s love, then maybe he would.
‘Aye, reverend. I will help you in whatever way I can. I live to serve the Lord.’ And you, Reverend Cowper, thought Peter. And you.
NINETEEN
By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes…
— Macbeth, Act IV scene i
Beatrix lay on the foul straw, watching the way the rain beading down the high window reflected strange patterns onto the walls. She tried to remember how many days she’d been locked inside the Tolbooth. Was it four or five? She could no longer be sure. From the moment the constables, acting under the orders of the reverend and the council, placed her inside this room beneath the chamber where she’d been first questioned then beaten, they’d determined to make her incarceration even more miserable.
Ensuring she didn’t sleep, they stomped on the floor above, banged the door of her room at intervals or, when they saw her dozing off, would burst inside, lifting her to her feet and forcing her to walk around the room for hours on end. At first she couldn’t work out how they knew when her eyes began to close and her head to nod. But before long she understood that what she thought were just marks on the ceiling were in fact strategic holes those in the council room above could use to watch her. Shamed at first that they saw her squat to piss or shit, after a few days she no longer cared, raising her skirts to bare her backside, thrusting her hairy quim towards them when she thought they might be looking. It made her feel better knowing they would be shocked or aroused when they knew they should feel disgust. The very thought lifted her heavy spirits. Dear Lord, she’d never felt so injured, so full of sorrow and fear. What must her poor husband think? Or her daughter, Cassie, and her sweet wee granddaughter, Elise? What had they been told?
Even so, these were small victories that she knew wouldn’t sustain her for much longer. Her body ached with fatigue and hunger; she couldn’t cease worrying her gum where her tooth had come out. All that before she considered what the pricking had done. Raising an arm to the dim light, she examined the marks the pricker, a young man from Leith with a pale complexion and mean pebble eyes, had left upon her. There were rows and rows of superficial and deep scratches. So many. Too many. Perhaps she’d been here longer than five days.
But it was over now. At least for the time being.
Rolling onto her side, wincing as the straw poked through her thin, filthy clothes, she caught a whiff of the bucket they’d left her. Told she was lucky to have it, especially after she threw the contents at the last constable to pass her some stale bannock and a watery kale soup, she knew it was because they were afeared where she’d shit if they didn’t. From the smell of the straw, someone had already used it to piss in and not just the rats that scurried about at night.
She ran her good fingers over her broken ones. After that first day when the reverend’s men had beaten her bloody and they’d decided to search her house and poor Nicolas’s for the figurine she admitted making, she’d been left to suffer. If it hadn’t been for the Tolbooth keeper, old Alick, she wasn’t sure she’d even be alive. Bringing the medicines Sorcha, Nettie and Janet had smuggled to him, along with some cloths, he had splinted and bandaged her broken fingers together.
‘This be a sorry business, Beatrix,’ he’d said. ‘I want no part in it.’ He worked using his one good hand and his teeth, asking her to help with the fingers she could move, and deftly bound her digits together. He’d also given her some whisky Sorcha had sent him by way of thanks for what he was doing to numb her pain. It had worked that night — and for a few nights after. Bless him.
But that was before the pricker arrived. When had that been? She frowned. She recalled one of the bailies complaining about it being cold for mid-May. Not that it mattered in here. It felt like a lifetime ago. She still couldn’t bear to have her breast brush against anything, not even the fabric of her shift. And as for her cunt…
What was the pricker’s name? He’d told her. Ah, that’s right, Mr Bollocks. Nae, that was what she called him every time she saw him to help reduce the terror he inspired. She refused to think of him as The Pricker. It was Bollard. That’s right. How one so young could take so much pleasure from causing an eldren woman pain, she could barely credit. Cast from a devil’s mould he was, and yet she was the one they believed possessed and recruiting others to an evil cause.
Yet they never found the waxen image. She could guess why. God bless her friends. Instead of releasing her, the reverend and bailies chose to inflict additional pain and deprivation upon her — in order to extract what from her? More lies? Lies to confirm their supposed truths? It wasn’t right. None of this was right.
The first day Mr Bollard came to her room, he examined her. He rolled back her sleeves, lifted her skirts, pinched, pulled, poked, prodded, delighting when she yelped, frowning when she made not a murmur. Forcing open her mouth, he’d inserted his fingers, before making them crawl across her scalp. All the time, she was being watched by the council through the holes above. She could hear them, see the moving shadows as the light changed. Cowards. They should be in the room with her, with him. Hear, smell, look in her eyes and know her contempt. She’d shouted at them. ‘If they burn me, then any woman who speaks her mind, contradicts you lot, is equally guilty and must burn also. Tell that to your wives, gentlemen…’
The shuffling above had stopped.
‘Och,’ said Mr Bollard, his mouth close to her ear. ‘I like them defiant.’ He raised his voice and tilted his head so he spoke to the ceiling. ‘Means they take longer to break.’
She shuddered just thinking about it. The tears started then. She’d tried to resist, she really had.
When the constables, those foolish Stuart lads, acting under orders from Mr Bollard, stripped her naked in front of the reverend and two of the bailies, who’d been in the room all this time as if to undermine her accusation of cowardice, she knew she couldn’t last much longer. She was bone-
weary, so very sore and, as much as she disdained admitting it, terribly afraid.
When Mr Bollard showed her his special leather satchel with its set of needles designed to ‘encourage’ her to talk — bits of dull iron, inches long, brass tacks and other tools — any courage she had left fled. Pulling them out one by one, he’d run his long fingers up and down the shafts, caressing the metal as if it were a living creature, whispering something to each piece before placing it upon a table brought into the room for the purpose of displaying the instruments that would, she’d no doubt, shatter her.
Ashamed of her unclothed body, despite her bold actions of past days, Beatrix had hunched in the chair as best as she could with her hands and feet tied, aware of how pendulous her breasts, how shrivelled her stomach. As she’d stared at her wrinkly knees, she’d tried to think of anything rather than the high-voiced man with the clean-smelling clothes who’d until this moment, apart from playing with his needles like a lover his mistress, mainly threatened her. Now he held up his implements one by one, remarked on the differing thicknesses, the little cross-bar that prevented him from inserting them too deeply into her soft flesh.
In a loud voice he began to explain to the reverend and bailies what he intended to do, how he would proceed. She refused to listen. Rather, she allowed her mind to drift…
The first needle went in. Driving it slowly into her leg, above her ankle, it was the same spot Mr Bollard found yesterday after pressing and pulling her flesh in all sorts of places to get a reaction. Ensuring she was watching as he pushed it in further and further, he waited for a response. She sucked her breath in deeply. She knew she should have felt something, but because it was the exact place she’d injured her leg years earlier, it was most often numb. It was the reason she limped. Even so, it felt as if all he’d done was rest the cold cross-bar against her leg; as if only the very tip had broken the skin.
When it appeared he’d driven it in as far as it would go, he left it there and raised his face towards the bailies.
‘You see, gentlemen. A normal woman would be prone with suffering. I have pushed it into her until it can go no further. What happens? Nothing.’ He gestured with his hand, a showman with an act. ‘A witch has no feeling. Look, this canny one studies the iron like a familiar.’
Too late, Beatrix understood she should have howled the Tolbooth down.
Before she could amend her error, Mr Bollard extracted the needle swiftly. There was a trickle of blood, but not as much as Beatrix expected, not even after he’d done this a few more times.
She should have cried out, struggled against her bindings. But she was too tired, her mind foggier than the Forth in autumn. It was absurd, the whole thing. How had it come to this? She dwelled upon her husband, dear, patient Mr Brown; her daughter and wee granddaughter; her friends, no doubt working down by the sea.
‘This is why I needed her naked,’ Mr Bollard intoned, interrupting her woolgathering, a teacher at his lessons. ‘Yesterday, as requested, I examined her for devil marks, for those signs that indicate she is indeed a witch. There are a number, which I will reveal to you now.’ Before she could protest, Mr Bollard grabbed one of her breasts and, lifting it, pointed to a large mole that sat atop her ribs. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘This is a devil’s teat upon which the beast will suckle. As you can see,’ he weighed her breast in his hand, ‘it has been well used.’
There were some chuckles.
‘What rubbish,’ said Beatrix hoarsely, wanting to slap his hand away, to cover her modesty. She could do neither. ‘I’ve had that mark since I was a wee bairn…’
‘Exactly,’ said Mr Bollard and drove a needle into it.
Much to her shock, Beatrix felt little pain. Again, it was as if the needle merely grazed her.
‘Look, sirs,’ said Mr Bollard triumphantly, withdrawing the needle. ‘No blood.’
The bailies murmured, but they didn’t stop watching and leering. After a few more insertions, Beatrix understood what was happening. There were blunt needles, used to prove the so-called witch’s marks didn’t bleed, ones that retracted the moment they touched the surface of the skin, and long, sharp, painful ones designed to draw blood from the fleshier parts of her body.
Changing from one type to the other, Mr Bollard prodded and pricked again and again. Shafts of pain shot through her body, lodged in her throat. She struggled to breathe. Her body went rigid, her legs stiffened, her head rolled back.
Beatrix lapsed in and out of consciousness, unsure how long her torment went on. The light changed as clouds coursed across the sky. Grey, bruise-blue, silvery then pewter as rain began to fall. Before inserting each needle and withdrawing it, mapping her arms, legs and torso, Mr Bollard would repeat, in that reedy voice, ‘All you have to do is name your fellow-tormentors and this will stop.’
She would shake her head, swallow her wails, her moans.
At some stage, the Reverend Cowper appeared by her side, adding his churned-butter pleas to Mr Bollard’s, promising to pray for her, to help her seek salvation. He vowed to baptise her again so the evil spirit within her could be banished and she and anyone else she named would be welcomed back into the fold, into the Weem family, into his kirk.
It was tempting. Dear God, it was tempting.
When she spat upon his boots, the reverend said something to the pricker.
Thrusting his hands between her knees, Mr Bollard did the unthinkable. He pulled her legs apart. If she hadn’t been lost in a nether world of agony, Beatrix would have keeled over with the humiliation. Her womanly parts on display, like she was a wanton, a whore. She began to cry, to protest, but it came out as gibberish.
‘Behold. She speaks in tongues.’ He spread her legs as wide as her bonds allowed. ‘Look!’ he cried. ‘As I suspected, here is another one.’ Mr Bollard pinched the lips of her mull together, pulling at them and, before she could prepare herself, drove the needle through. This time, Beatrix screamed. It was like a cow bellowing. Blood flowed from the wound, hot and plentiful.
Cries rent the air, powerful, deep. Shockingly, she understood with a distant part of her mind, they were hers. She could take it no more — the pain, the utter abasement.
‘Nae more. Please, please, nae more.’
Mr Bollard inhaled sharply. The reverend moved beside her. ‘What?’ he murmured. It was like manna to her ears.
‘Please… no more. I can stand it no longer.’
‘Do you confess?’ asked the reverend. His voice was so very soft. An unguent, a salve to her hurting body, her aching soul.
‘Aye. I confess, I confess,’ she panted through ragged breaths.
There was an intake of breath. ‘What do you confess, Beatrix Laing?’ She heard the snapping of fingers and then a warm, wet cloth was run over her snottery face. It was so soothing, so nice. A sheet was draped over her body. The blood flowed between her legs, as if she’d given birth again. Aye, she remembered when young James came into the world. But he went to God soon after. Too many of her bairns went to the Lord…
‘To what do you confess, Beatrix Laing,’ repeated the voice. Harder this time. The wet cloth was taken away. The sheet began to slip from her body.
‘I confess that I renounced my baptism…’
There was a noise of disgust. ‘We know that already. Twelve years ago you renounced the Lord. What of it?’
‘I… I… did that so I might enter into compact with the devil.’
‘Did you now?’ She could feel the reverend’s sour breath on her cheek. He smelled of sweat — sweat and whisky. ‘What did he look like?’ The cloth began to pat her fevered brow, gently wipe her scorching cheek.
‘A black dog…’ said Beatrix, thinking how ridiculous she sounded. But she’d heard the reverend make mention of a dog the colour of coal. How it was the devil’s hound. Had not others accused of witchcraft in the pamphlets the reverend read to the kirk said the same? Beatrix remembered the story about young Richard Dugdale from Lancashire… he made mention of a mongrel,
did he not? ‘He came to me only once. It was upon Ceres Moor and he wore the guise of a black dog.’
‘Did you hear that, gentlemen?’ crowed the reverend.
‘I did,’ the men said in chorus. Like they were lads in school. There were more mutterings. ‘Dear God,’ said someone loudly.
Dear God. Dear God. Help me.
‘Tell me, Beatrix,’ whispered the reverend, resuming his position at her feet. ‘Who are your accomplices in this terrible bewitchment?’
Beatrix’s eyes fluttered. Her lips moved.
The reverend came as close as he was able without getting blood upon him. Already the sheet was sticking to her body where Mr Bollard had plunged his needles in and out, in and out.
‘Who, Beatrix, tell me who?’ Behind him hovered the pricker. The needle in his hand caught the light. He was an angel with a flaming sword, waiting to plunge it into her flesh. She could bear it no longer.
Beatrix fixed her eyes on the reverend. Light shone from his blurry face.
‘’Twas all of them, Heavenly Father. ’Twas all of them.’
The reverend made a noise of frustration. He signalled the pricker to start his work again.
‘Nae, please,’ said Beatrix hoarsely.
‘I need names, Beatrix. And I need them now.’
She felt the blunt edge of a long needle against her breast. It broke the skin as it was forced into her pliant, ageing flesh. She screamed. As she did, a slew of names spewed from her mouth. It wasn’t her saying them, the reverend said. It was God. He plucked them from her head. And a few more she’d not thought of besides. He was All-Knowing, All-Powerful. He forgave her.
At some point, the needle was extracted. Blood was wiped from her throbbing breast. She was covered again. Her modesty preserved.
There was a lull as Reverend Cowper stood and stepped away. ‘You heard her. We’ve no time to lose, we’ve already wasted a week.’
His voice had changed. Had God abandoned her already?
