The Last Witchfinder

by James Morrow

  Isobel, Lady Mowbray,

  MIRRINGATE HALL,

  IPSWICH

  Word by wretched word, phrase by onerous phrase, Jennet struggled to accomplish her translation, her weariness compounding steadily, as if the bag of musket-balls from the previous day’s Galilean demonstration lay upon her neck. When at last both girls were finished, Aunt Isobel, ever the adjudicator, announced that she would favor neither rendering but instead amalgamate them into a third. By the time Mr. Mapes returned to the manor, the letter was ready for posting.

  Upon learning that his daughter had Latinized an epistle intended for Isaac Newton, the Vicar proposed to secure its delivery, his present house guest being none other than Robert Gutner, Rector of Trinity College. Isobel eagerly accepted Mr. Mapes’s offer, explaining that her nascent correspondence with the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics might ultimately yield precious insights into the modi operandi of fallen angels.

  “Will Mr. Newton write back?” Jennet asked after Elinor, the Vicar, and the momentous missive had departed.

  “Most probably.” Isobel strode across the crystal-gazing parlor and, reaching the east window, pulled the curtain shut. “True, he subscribes to the deplorable Arian faith”—she removed the circular patch, admitting a shaft of the setting sun—“but I’ll warrant he’s still a proper soldier in the war against Lucifer.”

  Jennet said, “For all he made a jest of’t, Mr. Mapes seemed truly to take umbrage when you mentioned Newton in the same breath as our Savior.”

  “I shall ne’er again press the point in the Vicar’s presence, though I’ve heard that Newton himself doth not forswear the comparison. And why should he? Both were born on Christmas Day. Each apprehended more of light than any soul around him. And thanks to my letter ’twill not be long ere Newton realizes that he, like Christ, hath been appointed a scourge of demons.”

  Aunt Isobel lifted a prism from the table and, catching the solitary sunbeam, painted the day’s last rainbow on the wall.

  C H A P T E R

  The

  Second

  abababababababab

  In Which Is Posed the Theological Conundrum, When Doth a Scientific Dissection Become a Satanic Devotion?

  j

  On Thursday morning Andrew Pound summoned his grand jury to Saxmundham Meeting-House, a rude timber-framed structure in which the town’s most prominent citizens periodically gathered to resolve boundary disputes, appoint one another to important offices, and set suspected witches along the path to speedy prosecution at Norwich Assizes and thence to protracted torture in the bowels of Hell. By the time Walter and Dunstan arrived, the hall was packed to the rafters, every bench crowded with wide-rumped burgesses lighting clay pipes and telling bawdy jokes, but fortunately Mr. Pound had reserved front-row seats for the master pricker and his son. Walter guided Dunstan to their place of honor, right beside the town’s dyspeptic mayor, and surveyed the jurors, twelve somber men lined up behind a walnut table like the Apostles awaiting Christ’s arrival at the Last Supper.

  Three deep metallic tones rolled down from the belltower, filling the hall, and then an equally imposing silence descended. Mr. Pound rose and asked the first witness, a spindly farmer named Ned Jellaby, to stand before the jurymen. A wave of admiration washed through Walter. He always felt profoundly humble in the presence of anyone willing to speak against a witch. Often as not, the victim would paint himself as the perpetrator of some un-Christian act, for only by admitting that he’d wronged the accused sorceress could he establish beyond doubt that his troubles traced to Satanic intervention and not to mere bad luck.

  Gesturing toward Gelie Whittle, Mr. Jellaby testified how on the first Sunday in March he’d turned her away from his cottage door, where she’d come begging for a piece of cheese. Ere the week was out his hens had stopped laying, and they’d remained unproductive for a fortnight. No sooner had the hens recovered than seven of Jellaby’s pigs died of a strange wasting malady.

  As the hearing progressed, three additional witnesses came forth bearing tales of maleficium. The town blacksmith revealed that he’d provoked Mrs. Whittle by failing to invite her to his ale-brewing party, her wrath culminating in “the worst case o’ the flux a man hath e’er known.” A seamstress explained how, after spurning Alice Sampson’s proposition that they go into business together, she’d suffered “a crampin’ in the fingers” that had cost her a month’s income. Likewise denouncing Mrs. Sampson was an elderly cordwainer who postulated a connection betwixt his refusal to give her a free pair of shoes and the subsequent destruction of his shop, “blasted to ashes by Heaven’s fire.”

  Mr. Pound now bid his jurymen put their own questions to the defendants. Walter braced himself for mendacity. Predictably enough, throughout the interrogation Mrs. Whittle cleaved to the fable of her innocence, whilst Mrs. Sampson offered her impersonation of a madwoman. Since telling her story in the magistrate’s examination chamber, however, she’d contrived to make it even more implausible: now her lying tongue claimed carnality with the Devil himself. The jurymen reeled with revulsion as Mrs. Sampson described Lucifer’s virile member as “a great red salamander shot through with purple veins,” and they gasped in horror upon learning that his semen felt “cold as ice and heavy as lead.”

  The magistrate declared a twenty-minute recess, and when the hearing reconvened Walter came before the jury, recited his credentials—most notably his late father’s partnership with Matthew Hopkins, legendary witchfinder of the Civil War period—and laid out the evidence he’d assembled since his arrival. Against Mrs. Sampson: a snake, a Devil’s mark, a signed confession. Against Mrs. Whittle: a toad, a teat, her rejection by the River Alde, and, of course, “her shocking threat to set a Bible a-flame.”

  For the next hour the jurymen sat arguing loudly amongst themselves, much to the amusement of the spectators, who gave this bickering the same rapt attention a London theater audience might have accorded the newest entertainment from Congreve or Wycherley. Right before lunch, the twelve reached consensus, and it was all as Walter’s instincts had foretold: Gelie Whittle would go to the assizes, Alice Sampson to the asylum. Such a farcical verdict. The jurors might credibly discount Mrs. Sampson’s confession, but how durst they ignore the diabolical blotch on her shoulder, not to mention her snake-familiar?

  “Gelie Whittle, you have heard these good jurymen return a billa vera,” Pound said, voice booming, eyes blazing, “and so you will be carted anon to Norwich Gaol and held therein until your trial.” He indicated the cage in which the snake lay curled. “Alice Sampson, the jury hath pronounced unfavorably upon your sanity. Ergo, on the morrow my constable will bear you to Sudbury and thence to His Majesty’s Refuge for the Mentally Deranged, where you will spend the remainder of your days.” Smiling, he faced the jury. “Gentlemen, you have discharged your duties in full, and for that I thank you, even though Mrs. Sampson is no less an enchantress than was the scriptural Witch of Endor.”

  Later that afternoon, after a pleasant stroll along the Alde, its banks alive with droning dragonflies, croaking frogs, and other free-willed creatures not yet drafted into Satan’s service, father and son returned to the Horn of Plenty. Walter inked his goose-quill and wrote out a deposition so detailed that Gelie Whittle would emerge from Norwich Assizes a free woman only if the judge were an ignoramus. The tragedy, of course, was that these days the average judge did in fact aspire to ignoramity, seizing upon almost any pretext to throw a witch-case out of court. Whatever its virtues, the Restoration was proving a merry time for Lucifer. Even the intellectuals had lost their appetite for cleansing. Nearly a decade had passed since an Oxford don, Royal Society fellow, or Anglican theologian had lent his reputation to the hunt.

  The following morning, as the sun’s first light stole through the village, Walter and Dunstan descended to the tavern-room and breakfasted on boiled eggs and pease-bread, sharing their table with Mr. Pound. Walter delivered the deposition and presented his bill, two witches detected at
five crowns each, whereupon the magistrate handed over the specified fee minus a crown for Gelie Whittle’s toad-familiar. In the case of Mrs. Sampson’s snake, Pound explained, Walter needn’t pay, as it was the pricker who’d done the catching.

  “Allow me now to raise a matter o’ some delicacy.” Pound leaned across the table and squeezed Walter’s hand. “There be a minister in Lowestoft, a Mr. Ratcliffe, who sermonizes most vigorously against you. Witchery, he avers, is a crime impossible of proof, and your profession accomplishes naught but the breakin’ of innocent necks.”

  “Such unreason hath always been with us,” Walter said. “’Tis not the first time a cleric’s been lost to zealotry.”

  “Aye, but until his congregation realizes how unhinged the wight’s become, ’twould be wise to give Lowestoft a wide berth.”

  By eleven o’clock father and son were back on the circuit, their coach rolling northward past an open field swathed in bluebells. A splendid vista indeed, God’s gardening at its most sumptuous, but Walter could not enjoy it, Mr. Ratcliffe’s fanaticism having put him in a sour mood. Only after they’d reached the Beccles Road, a mere fifteen miles from Lowestoft, did the proper strategy occur to him. Instead of following the seacoast, they would take the inland route along the border betwixt Mercia and East Anglia, so that by the time they entered Mr. Ratcliffe’s vicinity his parishioners would have either forgotten his raillery against demonology or else discounted it as a ploy to keep them from nodding off in their pews.

  “When we turn to Part Two, Question One, Chapter Fifteen,” Walter asked his son, “what problem is explicated for us?”

  “The problem of how witches stir up tempests,” Dunstan said, “and cause lightnings to strike both men and beasts.”

  “According to Krämer and Sprenger, what three aspects of demons must we consider in solving this mystery?”

  “Their natures, their sins, and…”

  “And?”

  “And their duties!” Dunstan declared, voice soaring, eyes dancing.

  “Marvelous! Now, by their natures demons belong to…”

  “To the empyrean of Heaven,” Dunstan said.

  “And by their sins…”

  “To the lower Hell.”

  “And by their duties…”

  “To the clouds of the air.”

  “From which vantage they can…”

  “Send storms against we mortals”—the boy smiled extravagantly—“whether by Lucifer’s command or a wizard’s incantation!”

  The northern hunt went as well as might be expected in an age when a man like the Reverend Ratcliffe could denounce his nation’s cleansers and still retain his flock. In Bury St. Edmunds the local magistrate had a pair of suspect hags waiting behind bars, and Walter left that agreeable village having obtained two indictments and pocketed ten crowns. In Thetford the pious old rector brought Walter three alleged heretics, and through the master pricker’s efforts the trio soon stood revealed not only as perpetrators of maleficium but as recipients of the Devil’s favors, a rat in one case, a spider in another, a stoat in the third. The harvest from Swaffham was more bountiful yet: four witches, four indictments, three familiars. A demon’s eye decorated each wing of the immense green beetle. The turtle’s shell bore the likeness of a human skull. On the flank of the great black hare grew the three Satanic digits, 666, limned in white fur.

  As they started along the seacoast, Walter resolved to grant Dunstan a more active role in the cleansing, and the master pricker was soon glad of his decision. Though King’s Lynn offered but a solitary suspect, the boy not only discovered the Devil’s mark behind her ear, he also bagged her familiar, an impish orange newt. In Sheringham, another one-witch town, Walter allowed his son to bind the accused woman and attach the swimming-rope. Turning his attention to her animal servant, a hedgehog sporting hundreds of dagger-sharp quills, Dunstan skillfully caught the creature without suffering a single puncture.

  One mile outside of Lowestoft, they came upon a moldering human skeleton seated atop a granite boulder, its bones sewn together by sailor’s twine. The skeleton’s white hands gripped a plaque that read, WITCHFINDERS NOT WELCOME. Walter and Dunstan proceeded to the town gate, where a straw effigy dangled from a noose affixed to the lowest limb of an oak tree, its shirt embroidered with an unambiguous epithet, PRICKER OF COLCHESTER.

  Dunstan said, “This all comes of that dastardly minister’s preachments—am I right?”

  “Aye, but I fear we face an even darker force,” Walter said, clambering down from the coach. “A great cloud’s descending o’er England, son. It fogs men’s minds and dazes ’em with disbelief.” He pulled his knife from its scabbard and cut the hangman’s rope, catching the effigy in his embrace. For a moment he stood motionless beside the tree, hugging the obscene simulacrum. “’Twould appear your Aunt Isobel hath spoken truly: our profession rises or falls on the new experimentalism. We must leave Lowestoft anon and bear the familiars to Mirringate, for the sooner we wed witchfinding to philosophy, the safer our nation will be!”

  Like an executioner hired to draw and quarter a regicide, he reached into the simulacrum’s abdomen and pulled out gob after gob of soggy straw viscera, then tore the creature apart and hurled each limb toward a field of wild celery. As the left arm sailed through the air, the glove jerked loose and landed in the middle of the road. A good omen, he decided, noting how the glove lay. The fingers pointed south, toward Ipswich.

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  IT WAS MONDAY, and that meant Shakespeare. The girls were in the library, reading aloud from Aunt Isobel’s quarto of A Midsummer Night’s Dream—Act V, Scene 1, Jennet as Theseus, Elinor as Hippolyta—whilst the morning sun flowed through the Diocletian windows and placed its crimson kiss on the gilt spines and burnished globe.

  “‘The lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact,’” Jennet read. “‘One sees more devils than vast Hell can hold…’”

  A great commotion announced the return of the Witchfinder-General and his son. Dogs bugled and howled. Servants bustled about. Coach wheels cut furrows in the gravel. But for Jennet the real tumult occurred within; she could feel her heart’s Cartesian mechanisms, its thumping pipes and throbbing valves. Setting her finger on the next line, “That is the madman,” she anxiously rehearsed the arguments by which she hoped to persuade her father to take her along on the southern hunt. She would speak not only of her boundless desire to visit the Great City of London (which Aunt Isobel had once called “a fabulous world that, unlike Atlantis or Camelot, enjoys the status of actuality”) but also of her tutor’s willingness to discharge her prematurely, provided she agreed to spend her London evenings translating Virgil’s poetry and proving Euclid’s theorems.

  “Why do you stop?” Aunt Isobel demanded.

  “Father’s here,” Jennet said.

  “This is a school, child, not a wayside tavern. We ne’er engage in idle conviviality at Mr. Shakespeare’s expense.”

  “‘That is the madman,’” Jennet read. “‘The lover, all as frantic, sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt…’”

  At no point during the first hour of Walter’s visit did Jennet find an opportunity to speak with him, for the captive familiars claimed everyone’s attention. Rodwell had lined up the various pens and cages atop the garden wall, an array suggesting a trail of flotsam bobbing behind the wreck of Noah’s ark. The menagerie boasted an astonishing diversity, each beast the subject of an exquisite pen-and-ink sketch by Dunstan: sleek newt, chubby toad, elastic snake, stealthy stoat, brooding spider, torpid turtle, tense hare, ragged rat, prickly hedgehog, plus the corpse of a stupendous green beetle that had perished on the road. How deplorable, Jennet thought, that Lucifer had refused to let these animals pursue their God-given lives, recruiting them instead into his eternal war against all things clean and decent.

  Aunt Isobel presented Walter with the gift from Mr. Mapes, the treatise entitled Satan’s Invisible World Discovered, then fixed her gaze on each captive in
turn. “’Tis as I predicted. They are all ostensibly normal.”

  “Normal?” Walter protested. “Dost not see the skull-like blob on the turtle—the triad of sixes on the hare, the demonic eyes on the beetle’s carapace?”

  “Trifling aberrations,” Isobel said. “The evil of these beasties lies concealed, like a cancer waiting to devour some poor wight’s bowels.”

  As the confined creatures hissed and croaked and scrabbled about, Dunstan gleefully related how he’d run the hedgehog to earth. It seemed to Jennet a modest enough narrative, but Elinor was of a different opinion.

  “’Steeth, Dunstan,” she said, “you talk as if you’d trapped and tamed a unicorn.”

  “Aye, son, a tad less bombast would become you,” Walter said.

  Dunstan bowed his head and muttered, “In the future I shall attempt to constrain my vanity.”

  “Just as Elinor will try to curb her sanctimony,” Jennet snapped.

  Only after her father had secluded himself in the library, poring over Satan’s Invisible World Discovered, did she manage to approach him on the matter of her joining the southern campaign. In a voice she hoped was firm but not querulous, she explained how she dearly longed to walk the streets of London, and how she had her tutor’s blessing, and how she was not only older than Dunstan but just as stalwart and certainly no less intelligent.

  Alas, her father once again insisted that she remain at Mirringate. This time, at least, he forswore his usual rhetoric—what sane man would allow his only daughter into the presence of witches?—and instead employed a novel logic. A new mood was abroad in the land, he insisted, a skepticism that might easily prompt a town’s citizens to attack the very demonologists who sought to defend them. Under no circumstances would he expose her to such a hazard.

  Jennet suspected that her father exaggerated the risks, but his protectiveness nevertheless touched her heart. Withdrawing her petition, she knew a mingling of emotions—gratitude for his gallantry, admiration for his courage, sorrow over the loss of London.