The Witch Hunter's Tale

by Sam Thomas

“My God, I thought he would never finish,” Martha whispered once we were safely on our way home. Elizabeth delighted in such blasphemy, of course, and even I had to suppress a smile when the two of them took to aping the preacher’s frantic arm waving, each one trying to surpass the other in outrageousness.

  When we returned for the afternoon service, we discovered that the same minister would preach again, and their smiles vanished. Martha moaned as he strode down the aisle and whispered that she hoped to get home before dark. And while none in the congregation was so vocal as she, I did not have to look far to find expressions of dismay on my neighbors’ faces. At the outset, his sermon seemed little different than the one he’d delivered that morning, full of hellfire and sin, but of little interest to any who were not already among the godly. I sat back in my pew and began to compose a list of medicines I would need from the apothecary.

  “All men know that God has revealed himself to man through his prophets, his patriarchs, and his apostles,” the preacher bellowed. “Today He reveals Himself through the Ministers of the Gospel. And because he is God’s opposite in every way, just as God has his preachers and prophets, Satan has his soothsayers, his pythonesses, and his witches. Where Ministers of the Gospel provide council to the weak and succor to the weary, witches provide only deceit, damnation, and death.”

  At the mention of witches I sat up in my seat and glanced at Martha. She had heard him as well and stared raptly at the preacher. To my relief, Elizabeth paid him no more mind than she had in the morning, choosing instead to play with the ribbons on her dress.

  “If any man in York thinks it merely a curiosity that such evil creatures have come to so godly a city, he is mistaken. Such visitations are never mere happenstance. Rather, we must take it as a sign from God Himself. By permitting the devilish sin of witchcraft, He means to rouse the godly from their slumber. He means to tell us that our work is not yet done, that man still wallows in his sinful nature. God has set a question before us. Will we cleave to Him and His Word, or will we seek comfort in Satan and his wicked spirits? In Exodus, the Lord God tells us, Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. Will we heed Him? Or will we show ourselves to be rebels of the worst kind?”

  When the preacher paused to let his audience consider the question, I realized that Joseph had commissioned this sermon as surely as he had commissioned the pamphlets that now flooded the city. Together the pamphlets and sermons would drive the city into a state of alarm, and once the fear had reached its peak, Joseph would begin his witch-hunt. He would offer the people a fire that would cleanse the city of all malignancy.

  As I looked at the crowd around me, I prayed that my friends and neighbors would not fall under this mountebank’s spell. But by the look on their fevered faces and the angry glint in their eyes, I knew that the minister’s words had done their job. York’s residents would do the minister’s bidding. The only question was, what would he demand of them?

  “I can tell from looking at you, my dear people, that you see the threat that lies within the city, and for this I am glad. But you must now wonder how you can discover these witches, women of supreme cunning who—with Satan’s aid—have hidden themselves in the city.”

  A few in the audience nodded their heads.

  “I must tell you, the discovery of witches is no easy thing,” the minister continued. “And it is not to be entered into lightly. Nor is it the duty of the common man to punish witches. If you find one, you must stay your hand from action.”

  The preacher paused, and I could see looks of puzzlement on his listeners’ faces. If they could not act, then what could they do?

  “While you shall not punish the witches yourselves, it is your duty, yea your sacred obligation, to find them out and to acquaint the Justices of the Peace with their names. And once you have done your part, you may be assured that your city’s magistrates will do theirs. Once you have found Satan’s sirens, his temptresses, his murderesses, the Justices will see them tried and punished. The Lord would not have it otherwise.”

  Cries of Amen! Amen! echoed through the rafters of the church, but to my ears the parishoners were crying up not the glory of God but the shameful ambition of sinful men.

  “And as to the punishment, there can be no doubt.” The minister’s voice fell to a whisper, and all the parishioners leaned forward in their seats, desperate to hear every word. “The Lord demands that every witch, truly convicted, is to be punished with death.”

  Heads nodded in grim determination. They would follow the minister’s instructions to the letter. When the service finally ended, the four of us hurried up Stonegate fighting the wind with each step. Elizabeth skipped ahead with Hannah close behind, while Martha and I trailed after so we could talk.

  “It seems that Joseph is building a solid foundation for his witch-hunt,” Martha said.

  “I can’t imagine ours is the only parish to which he has gifted such a sermon,” I said. “By the time he is done, Joseph will have made the entire city into his deputies. The people will find the witches, and he will hang them.”

  “He’s making the people into his allies,” Martha agreed. “Once they have joined with him in hunting and hanging witches, what power will they deny him?”

  I did not reply. Rather, I wondered how we might escape the coming storm.

  Chapter 7

  The next morning Martha and I were called to the travail of Lucy Pierce, and my mind thus was blessedly drawn from witchcraft and death to childbirth and new life. Lucy lived just outside the city in Upper Poppleton where her husband owned a few acres of land and rented some more. All told, he was able to provide well enough for his young wife, and the two of them lived in a small, well-built house north of the city wall.

  In Lucy’s chamber, heavy curtains covered the windows, keeping out the worst of the wind, and with a fire roaring in the hearth we were more than warm enough. When Martha and I entered, the women greeted us and then fell silent as I examined Lucy. I found that her labor had not yet begun in earnest, so the half dozen women who had gathered in the birthing room returned to gossiping.

  When the talk turned to witches, witch-hunting, and the previous day’s sermons, it became clear that Joseph had indeed paid for sermons to be preached against witches throughout the city; the women came from different parishes, but all had heard the same sermon. No less disturbing was the fact that Joseph’s plan seemed to be working. While a few women were apprehensive about the hunt, most seemed eager to have it.

  “Mr. Hodgson and Mrs. Hooke will rid us of the scourge of witches, they will,” said Sarah Crompton.

  “By the time they are finished, Mother Lee won’t trouble us any longer,” Grace Hewitt replied.

  “Aye,” said another woman. “And if any woman can find the Devil’s Mark, it’s Rebecca Hooke.”

  I marveled at how quickly they had forgotten Rebecca’s cruelty in the delivery room, but after a moment’s consideration I realized that they knew the situation better than I. If Joseph were to succeed in extirpating York’s witches root and branch, his Searcher would have to be utterly merciless. Rebecca was the perfect choice.

  “You’re going to accuse Mrs. Lee of witchcraft?” I asked carefully.

  Several women nodded, and Sarah Crompton spoke for them all. “She’s vexed us for years. Any time we deny her demands for a little coal or a pound of cheese, she sees that we pay for it. She bewitched my churn so I couldn’t make butter, killed two of Grace’s piglets, and kept Goodwife Butler’s ale from brewing.”

  “We’re lucky she’s not done worse,” Grace Hewitt added. “But we’ll not take the chance that she might. If we stand together against her, Mr. Hodgson will see her hanged.”

  As I considered the situation, I realized that Joseph’s scheme to make the town his own had succeeded, at least with these women. Once he’d rid the neighborhood of a witch, what would they deny him? He could ask for money, for power, for anything at all, and the people would rush to give it to him. Worse, as Joseph
gained power, Rebecca would be at his side, perfectly positioned to take her revenge on me for all I’d done.

  “What if she doesn’t hang?” Lucy Pierce asked. A note of fear crept into her voice. “What if the jury acquits her? What will she do to us then?”

  The women looked warily at one another.

  “We cannot dwell on that,” Grace Hewitt said doubtfully.

  “Those are strong words from a woman whose children are grown,” Lucy replied. “If we accuse her and she’s not hanged, she’ll have her revenge on all of us, won’t she? I’ll not have her bewitch my child.”

  An uneasy silence settled over the room. While nobody thought witches made for good neighbors, thus far Mrs. Lee had not proven herself anything worse than a nuisance; nobody died if butter wouldn’t churn or if beer turned sour. But if they charged Mrs. Lee as a witch and she didn’t hang? It would be a declaration of war against one of Satan’s own, and only the Lord knew what evil she would unleash upon her accusers.

  “If we stand together, we cannot fail,” Grace Hewitt repeated. “We have read the books and heard the sermons. Mr. Hodgson will not let her escape justice.” A few women nodded, but others seemed more concerned at the prospect of failure.

  “What if she bewitches my child?” Lucy asked. The women fell quiet.

  I did not know Mrs. Lee well enough to say whether she was a witch, but I did not envy the women the terrible decision that lay before them.

  Rap, rap, rap!

  A harsh knocking at the window broke the silence.

  Grace gasped, and we all stared at the curtain.

  Rap, rap!

  A cry escaped from Lucy’s lips, and she looked wildly about the room. I felt my heart hammering in my chest as I strode to the window and threw back the curtain to find a cracked window, but nothing else. I peered through the frosted glass as best I could but saw neither man nor beast.

  “It was just the wind,” I said, though I could not explain how the wind could knock on a window or crack the glass. No doubt the women could hear the hollowness in my voice, but none challenged me, for they, too, wanted it to be the wind.

  I drew the curtain and tried to turn the conversation to a topic other than witches, but with little effect. A darkening mood settled over the gathering as the women returned to the question of what to do about Mother Lee. I wished that Lucy’s child would come, if only to hurry the day along.

  A bit before midnight, Lucy’s final travail began, and we gathered around her. Lucy sipped caudle between labor pangs, and all seemed to be in order until the child began to make his way into the world. As his head appeared I saw that it was grey and hairless, and the skin peeled away at the gentlest touch. While Lucy could not see the child from her perch on the birthing stool, she could read the faces of her gossips.

  “What is wrong?” she cried, looking down at me.

  “Nothing yet,” I said. I glared furiously over my shoulder at the women. They should be a help, not a hindrance. “Let us have the child into the world.” I prepared myself to work as quickly as I could, but only a few moments later, the smell of death and decay assaulted me. I could not say why or when, but the child had died in Lucy’s womb. A soul-tearing sorrow welled up inside me as I looked up at Lucy. There were few things I dreaded more than telling a mother that her child would not live. I could see the horrible combination of desperate hope and knowing fear on Lucy’s face. She knew what had happened, but she prayed that I would tell her she was wrong, that her child was not dead.

  “I am sorry, Lucy,” I said. “Your child has died. There is nothing to be done.”

  Grief creased her face, and she clamped her eyes shut as a moan welled up within her. “Ah, God,” she cried as another labor pain struck. Even in death the child demanded to be born. Lucy’s gossips held her tight and cried along with her as I brought the child into a world he would never know.

  “Do you want me to baptize him?” I asked. Most churchmen would fly into a rage at the question, but at times such as this I worried less about the Church’s law than the women in my care. I did not know what baptism might mean for the child’s soul, but I knew that it mattered to his mother. Lucy nodded, and I whispered a prayer over the water I poured on his head. I dipped my fingers in oil and made the sign of the cross, and it was done. Afterward, I swaddled his tiny, shriveled body just as I would a living child, and gave him to his mother. I left Martha with the women and slipped out of the delivery room. It was my sad duty to tell Lucy’s husband what had happened.

  Henry Pierce took the news as well as any husband and father could, nodding slowly and wiping away a tear. A friend who had joined him for the evening put his hand on Henry’s shoulder, and the two men embraced. Henry turned back to me. “What about my Lucy?” he asked. Relief spread across his face when I assured him that she was in fine health.

  “You may go in when Martha has finished binding her,” I told him. “It should not be long.”

  The moment I returned to the delivery room, I knew that the women had transformed their sorrow into fury, and I did not need to ask who was the object of their rage.

  “It was Mother Lee who did this,” hissed Sarah Crompton. “She bewitched the child to death, and that knocking on the window was her. She wanted us to know what she’d done.” The other women nodded.

  I marveled at the dark magic that the grieving women had worked on themselves. In mere minutes their love for Lucy had become hatred for Mother Lee.

  “We’ll have our justice,” Sarah said. “She’ll hang for what she’s done.”

  * * *

  Martha and I stayed with Lucy until the next morning when the vicar arrived. He was a kindly man, and I knew he would care for the Pierces as best he could. I was more worried what would come of the gossips’ fury toward Mother Lee. The death of Lucy’s baby had convinced even the most timid of her neighbors that they must act, and since I had delivered the child I certainly would be called to testify about his condition when he was born and the cause of his death.

  As Martha and I walked home, our breath hung before us in the still morning air. The cloud of the night’s events seemed to follow us even as the sun sat cold and distant in the early morning sky. Could it be the same orb that had threatened to burn the city to ashes just a few months before?

  “How long had the child been dead?” Martha asked as we passed through Bootham Bar.

  “There is no way to know,” I replied. “He was not newly dead, but fingernails had come in, so he was not long from being born. Around a week, but it is a hard thing to judge.”

  “So the knocking at the window wasn’t Mother Lee bewitching the child.”

  “No, the child was long dead by then,” I said. “But such observations won’t turn aside the matrons’ wrath.”

  “Do you think that Mother Lee bewitched Lucy?”

  I considered the question for a time before answering. “I don’t know,” I said at last. “I’ve seen such deaths before. They are extraordinary and troubling, but not necessarily unnatural. It could have been the work of a witch or the devil. Or it could have been that the child died. Sometimes children die.”

  We walked in silence down High Petergate before turning onto Stonegate.

  “When I was a girl,” Martha said at last, “there was a woman—Mother Hawthorne, we called her—who lived in our village. She was one of the poorer sort, and she often came to our door in hope of a little bread or a few pennies. But she was also a cunning-woman. When one of our neighbors lost her purse, Mother Hawthorne, would look in a glass to find out who had taken it. Other times maidens asked her to look in a pan of water to see who they would marry, and later to cast bones to discover whether their child would be a boy or a girl.”

  “Every village has such a one,” I replied.

  “When I was just a girl, perhaps Elizabeth’s age, my brother was bewitched.” Martha continued as if I hadn’t spoken. The mention of her brother took me by surprise. She’d not spoken of him since his deat
h over a year before.

  “One morning he awoke, and his leg could not bend,” she said. “We didn’t know who had done it, but nobody doubted it was witchcraft. He dragged himself around the village screaming that he would have his revenge. I’d never seen him so afraid. Mother Hawthorne took him in, laid him on her table, and said a blessing over his knee. The next day he was fit as could be. He was the cruelest boy in the village, and she took him in and healed him. And do you know what the strangest thing was?”

  I shook my head.

  “In all the time she helped her neighbors, she never asked for a penny. If someone was kind enough to offer, she accepted it, but she never set a price or demanded to be paid after she finished. She was just trying to be neighborly in the best way she knew how. The only way she knew how.”

  We walked in silence. I did not think she’d finished her story.

  “Of course I don’t think much of her work was magic,” she said at last. “She just knew enough of village business to figure things out. When my father lost two shillings, and John Parker appeared in a new shirt, she knew to blame him. And when Sairy Smith asked who would marry her? Everyone in the village knew that Nehemiah Shaw had eyes for none but her. It wasn’t magic, it wasn’t the devil, it was just that she knew things, and she knew what people wanted to hear.”

  By now we’d gotten home and settled in the parlor. I could hear footsteps above, and I knew Elizabeth would soon join us.

  “What about your brother’s leg?” I asked.

  Martha laughed. “Healing him might have been the work of the devil. He’d not have caused such trouble with a bad leg, would he?” She paused. “I don’t know how she healed his leg, just as I don’t know what happened to Lucy’s son. But some things are counted as magic that are nothing more than common sense or happenstance. And these seem a thin rope with which to hang a woman.”

  “There was a cunning-woman in a village near our manor,” I said. “Widow Rugge. But she dealt more in vinegar than sugar. My parents told our servants that if she came to the door in search of food or wood for her fire, she should not be denied.”