The Last Witchfinder

by James Morrow

  Even after delving into Mrs. Sampson’s most intimate region, the very cavern of her sex, Walter failed to detect a preternatural nipple. Her right shoulder, however, displayed a suspicious black blotch, and so he took up the Paracelsus trident. The instant he touched the tines to the excrescence, he felt a tingling in his fingers, as if he were fondling a sack of mealworms. He seized the long needle and, over Mrs. Sampson’s shrill protestations, probed the mark. Even after the point had descended a full quarter-inch, the spot proved as bloodless as an apple—and therefore as damning as an errant teat.

  As Mrs. Sampson got dressed, he set about examining Mrs. Whittle, shucking her smock, tying down her torso, removing her hair. He studied the revealed terrain, first pricking the anomalies—all perfectly natural, as it happened, for they bled freely—then employing his sensitive fingers in seeking a teat. Ere long he found one, concealed within her privy shaft, poised to nourish the toad-familiar.

  Mark and teat: for Walter this was confirmation enough, but juries were partial to redundancy. “We must corroborate these findings,” he explained to Pound and Greaves whilst the prisoner wriggled back into her smock. “In the matter of the Whittle woman, ’tis my opinion the cold-water test will serve our ends, but with Mrs. Sampson we’re obliged to try a watching, for the wretch is so bony that even the sacred Jordan would strain to spit her out.”

  “I see before me a man adept at his trade,” Greaves said.

  And Walter thought: the constable speaks truly—I am adept. He was especially proud of locating the teat obscured by Mrs. Whittle’s female organ. Such sharp powers of discernment, he felt, such tactile perspicacity, bespoke a mind attuned to the very forces through which King Solomon and his descendants had recovered in part the knowledge of good and evil that Adam had forfeited at the Fall. Yes, it was gratifying that Isobel now sought to make his profession as impersonal and empirical as planetary mechanics: in the last analysis, however, he saw himself not as the heir of Galileo or Kepler but as the child of John Dee, Robert Fludd, and all those other holy hermeticists whom England could call her own.

  “Witchfinding’s in sooth an art,” he said, offering the constable a nod. “And now we’re off to the river, that we might swim Mrs. Whittle and determine whether she hath indeed signed the Devil’s book!”

  j

  JENNET SPENT THE MORNING in the third-floor conservatory, peering beneath the world’s surfaces, contemplating its hidden struts and secret fretworks. When properly adjusted—eyepiece focused, mirror angled to catch the ascendant sun and illuminate the stage—a microscope became a magical passkey, unlocking a universe that only Jehovah Himself could see unaided. Under Van Leeuwenhoek’s lenses, a louse grew as big as a lobster, a wood tick appeared strong enough to pull a plow, and a rose petal disclosed its constituents, the honeycomb-like “cells” of Mr. Hooke’s Micrographia. Mixed with water and placed upon a Van Leeuwenhoek stage, a bit of scum from Jennet’s nethermost tooth stood revealed as a fen inhabited by creatures with hairy legs and grasping tentacles.

  At one o’clock Aunt Isobel declared that the day’s second lesson would begin, then led Jennet down the corridor to the west cupola. The instant she saw the two leather bags on the window seat—one labeled PISTOL SHOT, the other GOOSE FEATHERS—Jennet guessed that Isobel would now require her to demonstrate Galileo’s celebrated principle of uniform acceleration.

  “Which will hit the ground first?” Isobel asked, depositing the bags in Jennet’s grasp. “Lead or feathers?”

  “They will hit the ground together.”

  “Together?” Isobel guided Jennet through the cupola window and across the sloped roof of the master bed-chamber. “Why do you believe that?”

  “Because Mr. Galileo says ’tis so.”

  “Nay, Jenny. You should believe it because of what occurs before your eyes when you put the conjecture to a test.”

  At her aunt’s bidding Jennet leaned as far over the edge of the roof as she could without herself becoming an object of uniform acceleration. The gravel walkway shimmered in the afternoon sun, arcing past an oak tree in whose commodious shade the Mirringate dogs now dozed.

  “On the count of three, you will drop lead and feathers in tandem, studying them throughout their descent,” Isobel said.

  Jennet held out both bags as if waiting for some huge omnivorous bird to fly past and snatch them away.

  “One…two…three!”

  She opened her hands, sending both bags plummeting. They struck the gravel simultaneously—or so it seemed—the feathers landing silently, the lead with a muffled crunch. The dogs, startled, scrambled to their feet and bounded away.

  “What happened?” Isobel asked.

  “They hit the ground together.”

  “I shan’t disagree. Conclusion?”

  “I say that Mr. Aristotle’s physics serves us poorly in this matter. ’Tis obvious that an object’s weight affects not the speed at which it falls.”

  “Wrong, darling.”

  “Wrong?”

  “Doth one black hare prove that all hares are black? Doth one fanged snake prove that every snake will bite?”

  “No.”

  “Conclusion?”

  “I say that…I say that I must retrieve the bags and drop ’em again!”

  “Ah!”

  As the afternoon progressed, Jennet repeated the famous experiment, once, twice, thrice—eight trials altogether. In no instance did the lead outpace the feathers.

  “Conclusion?” Isobel asked.

  “’Twould seem reasonable to say that uniform acceleration’s a fixed principle of Nature.”

  “An excellent deduction, Jenny! You have made a sterling case for’t!”

  Weary now of contradicting antiquity, Jennet asked whether they might ascend to the astronomical observatory, as she wished to study the full moon, presently lying in pale repose above the horizon. Isobel insisted that for the nonce they must visit the library, so they could together examine her latest acquisition.

  “A book?”

  “’Tis much more than a book,” Isobel said. “’Tis in sooth the grandest treatise yet conceived by any man of woman born.”

  Thus it was that Jennet found herself betimes in her aunt’s favorite reading chair, cradling a volume entitled Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. The author was Professor Isaac Newton, whose essay called “A New Theory About Light and Colors” had constituted her assignment in optics during the winter hiatus. Whereas Newton’s ruminations on light had proven succinct and accessible, the beast now pressing her lap was something else entirely, quite possibly the world’s most profound book: certainly it looked the part and boasted the heft. Turning the pages and beholding the geometric figures, strange as any in an alchemist’s text, Jennet felt a peculiar quietude settle over the library, as if the other volumes had been paralyzed by reverence. Mr. Huygen’s Horologium Oscillatorium stood in awe of this Principia Mathematica, as did Mr. Harvey’s De Motu Cordis, Mr. Boyle’s The Sceptical Chymist, and De Magnete by Colchester’s own William Gilbert.

  Isobel strode to the center of the room, placing her palms on the great dusky Earth-globe, big as a cathedral bell. “What Mr. Newton hath accomplished, or so I surmise, is to take Mr. Galileo’s terrestrial mechanics, combine ’em with Mr. Kepler’s celestial laws, and weave ’em all into one grand theory of the world. ’Twould seem, for example, that whether we are speaking of planets or of pebbles, the mutual affinity betwixt two objects is the inverse square of their distance one from the other.”

  “Inverse square? I’m confused.”

  “No shame in that, even for so brilliant a child as yourself.” Isobel relieved Jennet of the Principia Mathematica, clasping it to her bosom. “Now hear my bold conjecture. ’Tis by mastering Mr. Newton’s principles that a demon makes itself a lord o’er acceleration and a ruler of the attractive force. Through this ill-gotten gravity that same spirit can send an enchantress streaking broom-borne to her Sabbat—or drive a bolt of Heav
en’s fire into a Christian’s crops—or raise a storm against an admiral’s flagship. Mark me, darling, our witchfinding family would do well to grasp the Newtonian system in all its particulars, for the devils who trap us in catastrophes are first and foremost geometers.”

  “My father’s a great lover of books,” Jennet said, “but I fear this swollen tome would bewilder him.”

  Isobel nodded and said, “A considerable time will pass ere England’s witchfinders confound Satan with cosines, for not only is the Principia a fearsome difficult work, there be but four hundred of ’em in the world.”

  “Then it must have cost you dearly.”

  “Not a penny. I received this copy in person from Mr. Pepys, who currently presides o’er the Royal Society. Ah, you ask, by what means did my aunt commend herself to a community that excludes dabblers by habit and women by policy? Simply this. She posed as both an expert and a man!”

  “Wonderful!”

  “’Twas a bonny ruse: a loose shirt to mask my bosom, a golden periwig to conceal my locks, and—voilà—I was Monsieur Armand Reynaud of L’Académie Royale des Sciences, in which guise I traveled to London and spoke to Mr. Pepys’s sages on ‘La Grande Tache Rouge de Jupiter.’ I nearly fell to giggling when, right before my talk, I o’erheard Pepys brag how his august body had thus far learned natural philosophy from one woman only—the female skeleton in the Society’s anatomical collection.”

  “Oh, how I wish they knew the truth!” Jennet squealed.

  “On the evidence of this gathering, our gender hath been deprived of naught. Save for my argument that Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is really a kind of thunder-gust, plus a few diverting remarks from Mr. Wallis concerning cryptography, ’twas a frightfully dull affair—and poorly attended, too, Mr. Newton being at his mother’s farm, Mr. Hooke away on business, and Mr. Boyle abed with a fever. Ah, but you’re wrong to suppose they ne’er learned of my mischief, for at meeting’s end, in a fit of pique, I pulled off my wig, announced my sex, snatched up my Principia, and jumped into my carriage!”

  “Merveilleux!” Jennet said, practicing her French.

  “A jolly sight indeed—fifteen falling jaws plus twice as many bulging eyes. And now we climb to the observatory, Jenny, where Rodwell hath laid out our supper and the Hevelius telescope stands ready to show us the lunar landscape, every dip and ridge. The moon wants mapping, child of my heart, and we’re the philosophers to do’t!”

  As Jennet followed her aunt out of the library, she once again felt an intimation that the Principia Mathematica was a work so powerful and majestic that all its predecessors had prostrated themselves before it in inky

  adoration. No book in Isobel’s collection was immune to this idolatry—

  not De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium by Nicolaus

  Copernicus nor Siderius Nuncius by

  Galileo Galilei nor even De

  Harmonice Mundi by

  Johannes

  j

  Kepler

  never became

  an object of the legendary

  Newtonian wrath, and neither did

  Copernicus nor Galileo, though it must be allowed

  that this circumstance traced less to collegial congeniality

  than to the fact that all three scientists were dead before my father was born, Galileo passing away less than a year prior to Newton’s advent. While I am nowise prepared to defend my father’s penchant for cultivating enemies, I shall admit that in one particular instance—the case of René Descartes—his vindictiveness proved productive, sending him down pathways he might otherwise have left unexplored.

  Because Descartes rejected atomism, my father became an atomist. Descartes’s vortex theory of planetary motion inspired Newton to demonstrate that vortices couldn’t account for Kepler’s laws. Descartes’s fondness for describing motion algebraically goaded Newton into imagining a dynamics based on algebra’s alter ego, geometry. Because no such branch of mathematics existed, he proceeded to invent one. Speaking personally, I wish the world had adopted my father’s original term, fluxions, for his brainchild. Calculus is such a frosty word.

  As for the balance of Newton’s spleen, there is nothing to be said for it. He might have been the smartest man ever to walk the Earth, but he was not the noblest. Typical was the John Flamsteed affair, wherein Newton maneuvered the Astronomer-Royal into publishing the latter’s work prematurely, merely so my second edition might be spiced with Flamsteed’s lunar observations. In 1712 the poor man’s garbled and embarrassing catalogue appeared under the title Historia Cœlestis Britannica. A few years later Flamsteed managed to buy up three hundred of the wretched things, nearly the entire print run. He heaped the copies into a pyre on the grounds of the Royal Observatory, inserted a lighted torch, and, as he subsequently wrote, “made a Sacrifice of them to Heav’nly Truth.”

  A bonfire of books. The thought curdles me. Some say my species is imperishable, but they lie, for ours is a chillingly provisional immortality. Although we commonly outlive our creators, the curious scholar need look no further than the inferno that razed the Library of Alexandria to realize that a book may vanish irretrievably, leaving behind only a whiff of carbon and a pile of ash. Gutenberg, of course, did much to allay our angst—for us the coming of movable type was equivalent to the arrival of gonads among you vertebrates—but the fact remains that visions of extinction haunt all texts. The moral of my dread is simple. Treasure each volume you hold in your hands, and read it whilst ye may.

  More than three hundred years have passed since Jennet Stearne, sitting in Isobel Mowbray’s library, first held me in her hands, and I can still feel the pulsing thrill of that moment. The child did not requite my adoration that day, or the next day either, but in time she craved intimacy with my pages. Ah, what rapturous vibrations seized me when my goddess learned to determine parabolic orbits! How complete my epiphany when she conquered the mathematics of rectilinear ascent!

  Now, I must confess that much of what lies between my covers is as opaque to me as to anyone else. I am not wholly available to myself. “Homogeneous and equal spherical bodies, opposed by resistances that are as the square of the velocities, and moving on by their innate force only, will, in times that are inversely as the velocities at the beginning, describe equal spaces, and lose parts of their velocities proportional to the whole.” That sort of thing. But before you chide me for my ignorance, please remember that you too contain components of which you can give no coherent account. Who among you will say how many neurons are

  firing in her brain at the moment? Who is prepared to write me a lobe-by-lobe treatise on his pancreas? And what of that vital

  fluid now flowing through your veins? Can you

  expound upon it meaningfully,

  other than to call

  it

  j

  Blood

  never poured

  from the maleficent

  mark with which the Devil branded

  a disciple: every witchfinder understood this, from

  the lowliest justice of the peace to a master pricker like Walter

  Stearne. Nor did tears flow freely from a witch’s ducts, no matter how forceful the cleanser’s coercions. Nor did the Pater Noster leave a witch’s lips without suffering some degradation, gross or subtle. And pure water, of course—pure water, the medium of baptism—could not long abide the presence of a person fit to be christened only with shit.

  No one disputed that the best place in Saxmundham for swimming a witch was the sturdy stone arch known as the Alde River Bridge. When Andrew Pound revealed that, thanks to the April rains, the Alde’s waters ran deep, Walter remanded Dunstan to the coach that he might procure the necessary items: mask-o’-truth, thongs, twenty-foot rope. The boy obtained the tools in a trice, whereupon Walter prepared Gelie Whittle for the test, binding her wrists and ankles, lashing the rope around her waist. Throughout these preliminaries Mrs. Whittle attempted to recite the Twenty-third Psalm, lapsing into incoheren
ce upon reaching the valley of the shadow of death.

  Martin Greaves dragged Alice Sampson back to the gaol, returning anon to the examination chamber, and then the small solemn company started down Mill Lane. First came Walter and Mr. Pound, marching in tandem, followed by Dunstan, clutching his artist’s valise. Mr. Greaves brought up the rear, Mrs. Whittle slung over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes.

  Well versed in the principles of buoyancy, Walter knew that a witch would sometimes foil the waters by exhaling at the moment of descent, and so immediately after their arrival on the bridge he applied his brilliant invention, the mask-o’-truth. Whilst Mrs. Whittle remained balanced atop Greave’s back, Walter demanded that she take a deep breath, and then upon her compliance he clamped the cowhide napkin over her mouth and pinched her nostrils closed using the ingenious spring-clip. He secured the entire arrangement with leather thongs, trapping within her lungs the inhaled volume of air.

  “An awesome clever device.” Greaves set the prisoner supine on the span.

  Walter said, “I could ne’er have contrived it were I not sensible of the relevant philosophy, from Archimedes to Robert Boyle.”

  He knelt and lashed Mrs. Whittle’s manacles to her ankle thongs, bending her into the form of an ox-yoke. As Pound took hold of the swimming-rope, Walter and the constable picked up the suspect and set her atop the bridge wall as they might place a freshly baked pie to cool upon a window-sill, then levered her into the open air. Pound tightened his grip on the rope, locked his foot against the wall, and lowered Mrs. Whittle’s polluted flesh inch by inch toward the tell-tale river.

  Of all the proofs employed by witchfinders, swimming was the one most vulnerable to skeptical objection, and so Walter always ordered a sinker raised at the merest hint she might drown. Fifteen years in the profession, and he’d lost only two suspects to the cold-water test. In Mrs. Whittle’s case, however, no particular vigilance was necessary, for within five seconds of her immersion she shot to the surface, as if her stony heart lay sealed within a body of cork.