The Last Witchfinder

by James Morrow

  Sniggering in the manner of a sensualist enjoying an obscene jest, the witness hopped off the stand and scuttled down the aisle. As he disappeared out the main door, a cacophony filled the air, a thundering conglomeration of chattering, nattering, whistling, and gasping. Walter could not decide whose face to savor first, but he soon settled on Sir Humphrey, who appeared to be suffering an attack of apoplexy. He shifted his gaze to the judge, who seemed about to relinquish his breakfast. Cavendish, meanwhile, trembled with rage. Collop beamed from ear to ear. Isobel remained her usual granite self.

  “Order!” Bucock screamed, pounding on the bench with a walnut mallet. “Do you hear me? I shall have order in this hall! Order! Order!”

  But what did it matter, Walter mused, whether order obtained in one puny courtroom, when such perfect and beautiful order suffused the universe at large?

  j

  LIKE DR. HALLEY’S GREAT COMET of 1682 pursuing its wide adventurous orbit, Jennet followed her chosen circuit: past the Moot Hall, through the Dutch Quarter, around the gallows, across the castle yard, down High Street, and back again. Each time she made the loop, she managed briefly to distract herself with a verse or two from Nature’s eternal epic—a blue cornflower, scarlet poppy, white rose, floating butterfly, darting finch, trilling lark, fidgeting honeybee—but her eyes always returned to the three hempen nooses swinging in the breeze.

  According to Mr. Shakespeare, humankind was a magnificent piece of work, noble in reason, infinite in faculties, in action like an angel, in apprehension like a god, but of late she’d come to doubt that hypothesis. What honeybee had ever built a gallows? What lark had ever sung out its sister for a Satanist? The world’s most vengeful rosebush had never scratched malefactor in an innocent woman’s flesh.

  She continued her revolutions: a third ellipse, a fourth, a fifth. Before she could begin her sixth such journey, the main door of the Moot Hall swung open, and Mr. Newton stumbled onto High Street, tricorn askew, periwig aslant. Had he finished testifying already? Had he presented his demon disproof in a mere half-hour?

  Seeing Jennet, he pivoted toward St. Martin’s Lane and broke into a run, curls flying in all directions. He was laughing—laughing and giggling like the most long-gone lunatic ever to wander the corridors of His Majesty’s Refuge for the Mentally Deranged.

  “Professor Newton!” she cried. “Wait!”

  She was about to give chase when Barnaby Cavendish burst from the building, eyes wild with distress, face white with mortification.

  “Oh, my poor Miss Stearne,” he moaned, waddling toward her, “our man hath played us false!”

  Jennet grimaced. “False? How so?”

  Dr. Cavendish pulled himself up to full height and, in a gesture that evoked a duelist aiming his pistol, pointed toward the fleeing geometer. “He told ’em they were too stupid to understand his proof!” Securing his wig with the flat of his hand, he sprinted down St. Martin’s Lane in pursuit of Newton. “Stop, poltroon!”

  “He said naught about desires of the mind?” Jennet asked, following, stomach a-churn and sick at heart.

  “Not one syllable,” Dr. Cavendish replied.

  “He offered ’em no theorems against the demon hypothesis?”

  “He offered ’em only blasphemies and scandal!”

  Upon reaching Sainsbury’s Livery, Newton commenced to bridle his horse, all the while singing a sea-chantey about a man-o’-war encountering a frigate crewed by harlots. When Jennet and Dr. Cavendish arrived, the geometer greeted the curator with a tipped hat and a friendly clap on the back.

  “Thou art a punctual man, sir,” said Newton. “Hitch up your museum, and we’ll be off to London!”

  “I wouldn’t sell you my prodigies for a king’s ransom!” Dr. Cavendish screamed.

  “The Society’s short on king’s ransoms at the moment, but we can still give you eight guineas per specimen.”

  “I would sooner sell my freaks to a gang of Popish plotters looking to put James back on the throne!”

  “’Tis true I had my sport with the jurymen”—Newton heaved his saddle onto his horse—“but only because such peasants cannot follow a reasoned argument.”

  “I would sooner sell my monsters to the poxiest trollop in Fleet Street!” From the stable floor Dr. Cavendish obtained a roundish mass of straw, dirt, and dung. “I would sooner sell ’em to Judas Iscariot himself for thirty shillings and a brindled pig!”

  “I believe we might raise the offer to nine guineas per monster,” Newton said.

  Jennet’s throat became as tight as a drumhead. Salt tears filled her eyes, burning the delicate jelly. She lurched half-blind toward Dr. Cavendish. “Dear God, they’re certain to hang her now,” she wailed, throwing herself against the curator’s comforting rotundity.

  With his free hand Dr. Cavendish stroked her head. “Aye, Miss Stearne, I fear as much.”

  “Ten guineas, ’tis my final proposition!” Newton said. “You won’t get a better price anywhere in England!”

  Dr. Cavendish hurled the dung-globe. It struck Newton squarely in the side, besmirching the gold-lace bindings of his waistcoat.

  “Good sir, ’twould appear our business relationship hath ended.” Through a series of maladroit gestures Newton mounted his horse. “As of this moment, the Royal Society buys its prodigies from another vendor!”

  Dr. Cavendish grabbed a second handful of ordure and threw it at their nemesis. The projectile landed harmlessly in the dust. Newton gave his horse a kick. With a sudden snort the animal bolted from the stable and charged toward High Street, bearing away England’s strangest knave, philosophy’s greatest sage, geometry’s reigning genius, and—Jennet could not escape her conclusion—Aunt Isobel’s last hope.

  C H A P T E R

  The

  Fourth

  abababababababab

  A Public Burning Enlightens Colchester, Tho’ Not Before the Convicted Enchantress Prepares Our Heroine for Both the Female Mission and the Male Emission

  j

  Now that Sir Humphrey’s key witness stood exposed as a man whose morals occupied no position above depravity and whose mind merited no diagnosis save lunacy, Walter assumed that the remainder of the trial would prove deficient in surprises. At first the day indeed unfolded as he expected. The defense finished its dispirited presentation. The jurymen reached their inevitable verdict. The clerk of arraigns came forward and placed the black silk cap atop Judge Bucock’s wig.

  “Oyez, oyez, oyez!” the bailiff cried. “My Lord the King’s Justice doth strictly charge and command all persons to keep silence whilst sentence of death is passed on the prisoner at the bar!”

  But then something astonishing occurred. As Harold Bucock offered his concluding remarks, Walter had the sort of revelation a man might normally be granted only after spending a month in the African desert, drinking dew and eating roasted locusts. For the first time ever, he understood the most confounding verse in all Scripture. If any man come to me, ran Luke 14:26, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple. And, of course, the Redeemer might also have said, and sisters-in-law. He could easily have added, and sisters-in-law who worship the Devil.

  “Within two days following the departure of these assizes,” Bucock announced to the Court, “the Colchester magistrate will impose upon Isobel Mowbray a lethal ordeal of whatever variety accords with his proclivities.”

  To hate one’s own relations! Ah, the singing, soaring power of that idea! To stand prepared to battle Lucifer in whatever arena he chose, even the souls of those to whom you were bound by flesh and wedlock—in such audacity lay Christianity’s true greatness. What difference did it make whether a man was Catholic or Protestant, Quaker or Puritan, Arian or Anabaptist, so long as he might hug those massive pillars of paradox his Savior had erected seventeen centuries earlier?

  “Let us not deceive ourselves,” Bucock continued. “As a wealthy landowner
, Isobel Mowbray already possessed those prizes that commonly bestir her sex to seek out Satan. She did not want for a horse-drawn coach, faithful retainers, fine clothes, or glittering jewels. Ergo, we can only conclude that she entered upon the demonic compact”—his voice reached an apex of indignation—“for its own hideous sake! In setting evil influences loose in Ipswich, this woman acted not as the Dark One’s servant but rather as his collaborator! And so I call upon Mr. Grigsby to give his imagination free rein in staging her demise. I exhort him to make the execution of Isobel Mowbray the most festive such event yet seen in Essex. Let it be said that when Perdition’s would-be queen came before the Colchester magistrate, he punished her as extravagantly as the ecclesiastics of Loudun chastised Urbain Grandier.”

  Fixing his gaze on Isobel, Walter saw that the judge’s damning deduction, his hypothesis that she’d actually sought to reign in Hell, inspired in her not a flicker of remorse. Her face displayed only the same absurd Stoicism with which she’d thus far endured every other such accusation.

  “Prisoner at the bar, do you wish to make a statement ere the Court returns you to Mr. Grigsby’s custody?” Bucock asked Isobel.

  The enchantress said nothing.

  “These honorable assizes now stand adjourned,” the judge said, ramming his mallet against the bench.

  “God save His Majesty, King William!” the bailiff cried. “God save Her Majesty, Queen Mary!”

  Though not normally inclined toward self-indulgence, Walter felt disposed to celebrate his victory, and so four hours later, as dusk lowered its translucent scrim upon Colchester, he betook himself to the Red Lion. The Court and all its personages had cleared out, bound for Norwich, and yet the tavern was jammed to the walls, a circumstance that forced him to share a booth with three local leather-aprons, none of whom, he guessed, had ever read a line of Bodin’s Démonomanie des Sorciers or Carpzov’s Practica Rerum Criminalum. Barely ten minutes after he’d joined these rude artisans, however, his opinion of them improved, for it developed that they’d attended the Mowbray trial and had unanimously rated his performance erudite and dazzling.

  “It takes great skill, I’ve heard, to wield a Paracelsus trident,” the cooper said.

  “’Tis our Heavenly Father wields the trident.” Walter dipped his tongue into the foam atop his ale. “We cleansers are but His earthly agents. Of course, I must be evermore on guard lest I confuse the authentic Satanic vibration with a mere twitching in my fingers.”

  “Would ye say, then, that when a cleanser swims a witch, ’tis really God ties on the mask-o’-truth and lowers her into the water?” the soap-maker asked.

  “I would say that, aye.” Slowly and with considerable relish Walter took a swallow of ale: a mere carnal pleasure, to be sure, nothing compared to the spiritual satisfaction he’d known that morning upon deciphering Luke 14:26, but still an experience worth savoring.

  “The mask, though, was it not thine own invention?” the wheelwright asked.

  “’Tis the nostril clip makes it such a worthy device,” Walter said, nodding sagaciously, “fit to stand alongside Isaac Newton’s reflecting telescope.”

  In evoking the notorious name of Newton, Walter inevitably sparked a discussion of the geometer’s recent antics. Everyone agreed that Newton had disgraced himself utterly, though the wheelwright had extracted from the event “an instructive yet troubling insight.” In ethical philosophy, he noted, there was no such thing as wise laws issuing from a wicked lawgiver, whereas in natural philosophy a man’s deductions could be neatly severed from his defects.

  “Who amongst us would heed the advice of a horse-thieving Aesop?” the wheelwright elaborated. “Who would follow the lessons of a whore-mongering Bunyan? But if Euclid were a high-seas pirate, the area of a circle would still equal the square o’ the radius times three-point-one-four.”

  Walter found this observation so unsettling that he decided to quiet his mind with further applications of ale. He excused himself from his band of admirers, shuffled blearily across the tavern, and set thruppence on the bar. Upon receiving a fresh tankard, he consumed it with a haste that fell just short of sybaritism.

  A familiar face appeared before him.

  “Might I have a word with ye?” asked Caspar Grigsby, the Colchester magistrate, his coarse hands cradling a mug of buttered rum. He was a short but fearsome fellow, dense with gristle, as firmly planted in the world as a windmill or a tree.

  The two men sidled toward the hearth, where a serving wench with apple cheeks worked the spit-crank as if raising a bucket from a well. Impaled on the rotating shaft, a flayed boar offered its meat to the flames.

  “How greatly Judge Bucock’s commission doth weigh upon me,” Mr. Grigsby said. “He insisted I give my imagination free rein in executing Isobel Mowbray, and therein lies my misery, for I have no imagination.”

  “Piffle!” Walter exclaimed. “Every man hath an imagination.”

  “Bucock said her demise must aspire to extravagance. So what am I to do? Fill the execution field with jugglers and acrobats?”

  “There—’tis as I said! You have an imagination!”

  “Jugglers? Really?”

  Why not? thought Walter. “And acrobats. Let us mock the Devil with merriment! Let us flog his goblins with raucous displays of joy!”

  “Then there be the matter o’ the hangin’ itself—a dull spectacle, if ye ask me, e’en when ye get a dancer,” Mr. Grigsby said.

  “Remember, good sir, Bucock did not specify a hanging. You may recall that he evoked Urbain Grandier’s splendid and dramatic execution of 1634.”

  “’Twas before my time.”

  “For bewitching the Ursuline nuns of Loudun, the profligate priest was chained to a stake and roasted like yon boar.”

  “Roasted?” Grigsby gasped, eyes darting toward the spit. “Surely ye don’t propose…”

  Do I? Walter wondered. “I do.”

  “Burn her?”

  “Burn her.” Walter contemplated the runnels of golden fat as they coursed down the boar’s flanks and hit the fire, each sizzle like a demon’s hiss. Burn her? Nobody had staged a public burning behind Colchester Castle in over a century—not since all those Protestant martyrs had been incinerated at the Popish Queen Mary’s behest—but that didn’t mean the custom was invalid. “Burn her,” he said again. If any man come to me, and hate not his sister-in-law. “Burn her at the stake.”

  “Forgive me, master pricker, but the stake—it simply isn’t English. We’re a gallows people. Leave fire to the French, I say.”

  “To the French?” Walter moaned. “Did the French write Revelation 19:20, which tells us that Satan’s prophets will be cast alive into a lake of molten brimstone? Did the French write Matthew 13:42, wherein our Savior makes clear his plan to gather up the wicked and hurl them into the Divine Furnace?”

  Grigsby stared at his rum as intently as a seer consulting a gazing-crystal. “Marry, sir, ye make a proper case for fire. I wish I knew my Holy Writ half so well as ye.”

  “For a magistrate, Scripture’s desirable—for a pricker, indispensable.” He lowered his voice, speaking softly into the hollow of his tankard. “And if a burning doesn’t show the Crown I’m the ablest cleanser yet born in England, I’ll gather up my family and move us all to Scotland.”

  j

  THEIR STRATAGEM WAS COMPLEX. It was knotty and gnarled and twisted, like the rat tumor she and Elinor Mapes had studied during the experimentum magnus, but Jennet could imagine no other way to visit her aunt one last time.

  On the third night following the trial, she and Dr. Cavendish lashed four foetal monsters to the Gypsy wagon, the ponderous bottles bulging from the chassis like buboes on a plague victim. Next she transformed the curator’s face—encircling his eyes with smudges of charcoal, supplementing his teeth with rose briars, decorating his forehead with wads of clay molded into conical goat-horns—until he truly looked the part he was to play, unscrupulous Adramelech, chief amongst Lucifer’s courti
ers.

  They drove the wagon out of Shire Gate Livery and piloted it up Queen Street—slowly, ever so slowly, lest they crack the bottles. Drawing to a halt in the castle yard, they spied on the youthful, red-bearded turnkey as he entered the keep to relieve his superior. After a moment one-legged Amos Thurlow came hobbling through the portal like a damaged cricket, then pivoted on his crutch and headed west toward the tippling-houses, doubtless seeking the comforts of rum. Dr. Cavendish cracked his horsewhip. The wagon bounced along High Street, soon catching and passing the chief gaoler.

  Upon reaching the Angel Lane intersection, the curator parked the wagon, clambered down to street level, and, seizing the lanthorn, swooped into Mr. Thurlow’s path like a hawk descending on a hare. The shocked gaoler nearly dropped his crutch. Dr. Cavendish released a froggish gasp.

  “You may address me as Lord Adramelech, Grand Chancellor of the Infernal Empire and Viceroy to Satan himself.” Dr. Cavendish pocketed his spectacles and raised the lanthorn to his chin, causing jagged shadows to play upon his features as the buttery glow lit his fangs and horns. Mr. Thurlow trembled like a man cast adrift on an ice floe. “’Twould behoove you to fall to your knees, bow your head, kiss my hand, and tell me that my very presence doth honor you.”

  Holding his crutch at a vertical angle, Mr. Thurlow lowered himself to his solitary knee and pressed his lips against Dr. Cavendish’s fingers. “Thy v-very presence d-doth honor me, Lord Adramelech, s-sir.”

  “Rise, gaoler.”

  Mr. Thurlow levered himself upright.

  “Behold the children of my loins!” Dr. Cavendish cried. Taking Mr. Thurlow’s arm, he brought him before the Tunbridge Wells Bloodsucker, then thrust the lanthorn forward, illuminating the razor-toothed horror. “At present he sleeps—ah, but how easily I could awaken this malicious imp and send him on an errand. He can bleed an Englishman dry in half a minute.” The curator walked Mr. Thurlow to the rear of the wagon and showed him the Kali of Droitwich. “One word from me, and tonight this demon creeps into your bed and strangles you using all four hands.” He shoved Mr. Thurlow toward the Sussex Rat-Baby. “At my command he chews both eyes right out of your skull.” The circuit ended at the Maw of Folkestone. “Here’s one mouth you don’t want clamped round your privy member. In sum, Mr. Thurlow, I see four lamentable fates on your horizon.”