Suffer a Witch

by Morgana Gallaway

  Then I will be saved.

  The slow return of sanity corresponded with the retreating voices of the girls at the brook. The further away he got, the better he was able to think.

  Never had the Bible’s admonitions against false ones and sorcerers made more sense. Never had he been more convinced that evil could put on a face of respectability. The Reverend’s own daughter!

  Often during these hunts Hopkins let the townspeople reach their own conclusions about who was guilty within their community. His job was not to accuse, but to discover proof of that accusation. In this case, though … he must take a more active hand. He must fight her. Pippa. It made his nether regions twitch again to think of that girl jailed, chained, restrained. He thought of her jerking and swinging at the end of a rope.

  Oh, but he had to get out of these woods, before he did something to himself he would regret.

  THE YATES HOUSE WAS STUFFY, dark, and the shutters tight. The flies knocked up against the walls from outside. The front door opened and closed, opened and closed. The muffled sound of voices from the hall reached Sybil in the garden. She sat in the shade of a rowan tree and mashed its red berries into a mixture of hartshorn gelatin. It was a pretty, glossy stain for the lips.

  Ursula was with her, out for some fresh air. The bird sat on a branch of the rowan tree, watching Sybil, occasionally squawking in that gravelly voice so like an old hag. So like old bones.

  Inside Sybil’s father’s office, Hopkins and Stearne received a stream of townspeople. They were either united in force against someone in particular, or there were a great many single accusations. Either way was bad. Either way made Sybil sick to be under the same roof with it. In and out, a parade of fear, and in they went to point their fingers and out again, feeling safer.

  When she was finished mashing berries, she went through the back door to the kitchen to clean the mortar and pestle, and to bottle the smooth mixture.

  Sybil peeked into the hall and saw that the door to her father’s office was an inch ajar. Voices drifted out, serious voices. She could not help her curiosity. The floorboards creaked as she approached. Sybil’s hearing had been a little off since her fever and she could not quite discern the words or the speaker.

  The door opened and she jumped to attention. It was her sister Elizabeth, hands folded in front of her, all piety. Elizabeth’s eyes were cast to the floor but as she passed, those eyes curved up to meet Sybil. They were sly. They were knowing. They went back toward the floor as though nothing had happened.

  But Sybil knew. The betrayal was a clinging stench around Elizabeth.

  Sybil climbed the stairs, slow and feather-light. Knocking on her sisters’ door, she found the other. “Cathy?” she asked.

  Catherine sat in front of the window, patching up a torn sleeve cuff, and refused to look at Sybil.

  You too, Sybil thought. She glided back downstairs and sat in the garden with Ursula on her lap. With thin fingers she stroked the bird and sang.

  Ursula said, “Win.”

  “Winifred Radcliff?” Sybil asked. “She stopped by, I know not why.”

  “Why.”

  The sound of footsteps pounding up the stairs was loud enough for Sybil to hear from outside.

  “Danger!” said Ursula, hopping down onto Sybil’s shoulder, talons clutching onto Sybil’s sleeve.

  The window to Sybil’s bedroom overlooked the garden and so she was able to see the hand that flung it open, and hear the voice of her father. “Well, then, let the light show us! What’s underneath?”

  There was a scraping noise. The bed.

  A hush.

  Then footsteps again, down the stairs, through the house, out the door. Sybil hurriedly set Ursula back on the tree branch and stood to face her father.

  “Sybil,” he said. His voice was quiet, as it always was when he wasn’t preaching.

  “Yes, Father?”

  “Come here.” He beckoned with a finger and they went upstairs to her room. A swooning sort of panic overtook her. The bed and the woven rug had been moved to reveal the sigils and charms scratched in chalk on the floorboards.

  “What is the meaning of this?” the Reverend asked.

  “I … Oh … Has someone bewitched me? I know not!”

  “You are a liar and a deceiver,” he said. His voice was calm. It was as if he were talking to a wayward parishioner, one who was not his daughter, and one whom he did not love.

  Sybil said, “It must have been during the fever. I was not myself.”

  “No,” he mused, “you were not. Your sisters heard you speaking to someone. Your sisters heard the Devil reply.”

  How you must have waited for this chance, Elizabeth, Sybil thought. How you must cherish it now.

  The late afternoon sun had vanished behind the bulk of the church next door, leaving the room and her father in shadow. “I cannot be a hypocrite,” he said. “There has always been something about you, child. I have wondered on occasion about your very parentage. Your peculiar birth. Your mother who—” He stopped and shook his head. “I cannot have the cast of suspicion on my house, not when honorable men are working to find the witchcraft at work here. You must remain in your room until I decide what to do. Martha will bring your meals.”

  “But, Papa, I—”

  He held up a swift hand. “Do not argue.” He stepped toward the door and, half-turning, said, “And attempt not to contact your coven of friends. They are a wicked influence, especially that Philippa Wylde.”

  The door closed behind him. There was no lock on it, for no lock was needed. Where was Sybil to go? There was nowhere to hide. She had no one outside of the Vale. Her prison was made of air and roads and houses and, most of all, made of people. And so she stayed in her cage, and held on to the charm from beneath her mattress that she had sewn for herself, and waited.

  Pippa was in the yard and there was a large pile of grain in front of her. A mountain of long, dimpled grey-brown ovals. Rye, thought her dreaming self. She was supposed to sort it into two bowls: a large wooden one on the right, and a smaller bowl of solid gold on the left. When she began to pick through each grain, she saw that some of them were black with the ergot fungus. The black grains she placed in the gold bowl. The normal ones went into the wooden bowl.

  “Work harder,” said Lillibet, looming over her, wearing a black dress.

  Pippa’s fingers picked through the pile fast as they could. If she let the wrong grain into the wrong bowl, something bad would happen.

  “Hurry,” said Lillibet. “Not much time.”

  The sun was going down and soon Pippa would have no light to see the difference in the grains. Slowly, slowly, the pile began to diminish and each bowl grew to full. Pippa became quick at laying her hand flat so she could pluck out the black ones and set them into the gold bowl. The rest were tossed into the wood bowl.

  One after the other, in handfuls.

  The blazing arc of the sun had just slipped over the horizon when Pippa rushed through the last of the grain. There! It was done.

  Lillibet crouched in front of her. “Well done, child. But you can take one bowl only. Which one will ye have?”

  Pippa thought hard. On the one hand, the wooden bowl was large, and held enough healthy grain to make a great deal of bread. It would last her awhile, but not forever. On the other hand, the small bowl was itself a golden treasure, and if she ate the ergot she would either see a vision of great magnitude or she would die in agony.

  “Beware,” said Lillibet. “Choose the gold and you must hide, or someone will steal it. Choose the wood, and you must forget the gold ever existed.”

  Pippa was reaching for the gold bowl when her eyes snapped open. It took her a few moments to realize she was awake, for everything was dark.

  A hand clamped over her mouth, and she screeched in alarm.

  “Hush! Say nothing! Get dressed!”

  Lillibet took her hand off Pippa’s mouth and retreated, scuttling down the ladder like a spider, and Pi
ppa scrambled into an upright position. “Lillibet? What’s happening?”

  “Do as I say.” Then her mother mumbled and knocked over an empty jug in the kitchen.

  “I had the strangest dream,” said Pippa, still trying to process the difference between waking and dreaming.

  “Hurry, child. ’Tis almost midnight, and there’s something I must show you.”

  Frowning, Pippa climbed into her bodice and skirt. Normally Lillibet liked discussing dreams. Something was very wrong. What if Sybil’s fever has recurred? she thought, and the fear of it spurred her into action. Tying up her bodice and buttoning her petticoat, she clambered down the ladder after Lillibet, who was readying her cloak.

  “What’s happening? What’s wrong? Lillibet, please, speak to me!”

  Her mother stared out the open door in the direction of the forest. In the candle’s circle of light, pale drops of rain glinted.

  “The witch-finders,” Lillibet said. “I have something to show you—something that I know you’re not prepared to see. But my way is forced. I must pass along the secret, for I have a terrible suspicion that …”

  “That what?” Pippa whispered.

  Lillibet rounded on her. “Put on your cloak. Take off that white collar, and leave your cap. No one can see where we go. We’ll not even take lamps.” Lillibet’s hands roved over Pippa’s arms, tucking the white parts of her cuffs beneath her sleeves so they did not show. Then Lillibet dashed over and closed the shutters on the window. She tucked an errant strand of hair behind her ear. Her mouth was set tight.

  Pippa had never seen her mother so agitated.

  “We must be especially vigilant tonight,” said Lillibet. “We have enemies in the Vale, and they will be watching movement.” She sighed. “At least there’s a rain. Forces the people to stay inside and hides the noise of our feet.”

  “You really don’t want anyone to see us!”

  “Pippa.” Her mother reached her hands up to Pippa’s taller shoulders, gripping like talons. “What I’m about to show you can never be revealed to anyone. ’Tis a secret place. And if anyone sees you going there, and follows, and finds it, then an accusation would be made.”

  Pippa was wide-eyed, edgy with anticipation. “Accusation of … what?”

  “Witchcraft.”

  A shiver of a premonition skated through Pippa’s mind.

  “Not much time,” said Lillibet, and Pippa recalled those very words from the dream she’d just had.

  The door swung open, Lillibet blew out the candle, and she was into the beckoning night. Pippa followed. Their cottage was at the end of the footpath so from there it was into the woods along the tracks left by animals. At first it was the same route to the apple grove. Others would have feared the landscape at night, but Lillibet and Pippa knew every stone, every tree, every blade of grass, every hole where an unwary person might twist an ankle. The soft rain broke up to reveal the glow of a half-moon, to Lillibet’s apparent dismay. “Too much light,” she muttered. Then they were safe, out of the fields, into the forest. In the deep shade of the trees, in the tangle of holly and oak and ash and thorn, in the gentle rustling of their new leaves and old branches, the forest itself seemed a third party to their errand.

  Sure-footed as a young doe, Lillibet followed some hidden path. Pippa could see her only as a silhouette against the dappled white of moonlight that penetrated the forest canopy. Lillibet’s words had lit a fire in her mind. Enemies in the Vale. Witchfinders. Accusations. Surely Lillibet can’t be afraid of those two charlatan men?

  “Do you know where we are?” Lillibet turned, interrupting Pippa’s thoughts, and she spoke in a whisper so low that it was almost indistinguishable from the soft sighs of an oak tree next to them.

  “Yes.” On the path to the grove.

  “Now, I show you the sign.” Lillibet’s ghostly hands reached outward. She came up against the smooth grey trunk of a small rowan tree. “Here.” She seized Pippa’s hand and held it against the wood.

  At first the trunk felt normal, a hard, smooth curve. Then Pippa was startled by the deep groove of a carved sign. It was a straight line—no, several lines—and Pippa, blind, traced her fingers over it. After several minutes she knew what it was: the old symbol, the pentagram, a star-shape inside of a circle. It was for protection.

  The rowan tree was powerful, for that same tiny symbol could be found on the tree’s red berries. The wood could repel hexes from black witches. Pippa had used it for the treasure-hunting rod, and she flushed at the memory.

  “This rowan tree is where we turn,” said Lillibet. “Remember it.” Her voice was whisper-quiet and yet made of iron.

  Pippa was surprised she’d never noticed the symbol before. She must have walked past this very tree in broad daylight many times. Then again, the carving was behind a curve in the trunk and might be shadowed even in the sunshine. Excited by this discovery, she followed her mother through a tiny archway of prickly holly leaves. They plucked at her clothing and their sharp edges scraped her exposed face.

  “Twenty-two paces,” whispered Lillibet. She paused and glanced around, the bones of her neck standing out. Satisfied, she beckoned to Pippa.

  They arrived at a cluster of large boulders overgrown with moss. The moon lined the edges in silver. A lime tree grew out of the crack between two stones, its twisted roots snaking over the ground and flowing in between smaller things. She had never seen this fold of land before. It looked doubly alien in the night.

  And then, Pippa felt upside down, and had the peculiar sensation that she was no longer in the modern world … that she had stepped into a time long past. Ridiculous, she told herself, for she was in her very own forest, the trees that she knew as old friends. Yet, she felt as though that dear old friend had pulled off a mask, showing a face different from what she’d always known.

  “Where are we?” she whispered.

  Lillibet said nothing. She felt along the ground in front of a round boulder and tugged. The boulder moved. Then it rolled off to one side, aided by Lillibet. A tunnel yawned behind it.

  Somewhere nearby an owl hooted.

  Pippa had thought the forest was dark, but she hadn’t known what darkness was until she gazed into that tunnel.

  “All’s well,” said Lillibet, anchoring Pippa back into the present. “You feel this place? Its power?”

  “Yes. Yes, I feel it.”

  “Good. Come with me.” Lillibet ducked down and they were a few feet inside when Pippa heard the scraping of something on a rock. A spark flared and burst into light—there was a candle waiting near the entrance. “Now we close the door,” said Lillibet. She pushed aside a fern and showed Pippa the indentation where the boulder rested. A smaller stone held it in place; if the small stone was removed, the large stone would slide back. The inner side of the boulder was carved into a rough-hewn handle, so it could be pushed back open from within the cave. It was a simple mechanism and Pippa could not imagine how long it had been there.

  “Who built this?” she asked as Lillibet removed the small stone and the boulder glided into place against the night.

  “No one knows,” said Lillibet. “’Tis been here since I was a girl, and before that when me grandmum was a girl, and before that. Old as the Vale itself, older than the trees in the forest.” She paused. “Perhaps our old yew tree knows who built this.”

  In the confined space, Pippa could smell their damp clothes, but beneath it was the scent of age and herbs and earth.

  Lillibet crouched her way through the tunnel, which was much shorter than it had first seemed, and they emerged into a space the size of their cottage’s living area. There was room for one person to stand, but the walls—cracked, crinkled stone—sloped downward and it was more comfortable on hands and knees. Lillibet used the first flame to light a candelabra full of candles, all dripped into a single grotesque waxen sculpture. With the light to see, Pippa sat up and looked about her in awe.

  One side of the cave was packed with jars
, bundles of herbs, bottles full of strange liquids and, in a few cases, pickled animals. Pippa gazed at the bloated corpse of a green toad magnified in the curve of glass. She didn’t need to be told what they were—spell ingredients.

  Along another curve of wall was a small wooden shelf crowded with odd things. There were a few rolled-up parchments that looked like maps, there were seashells and bones, and there was a hand-sized piece of black obsidian, highly polished, carved like a shallow bowl.

  A stack of books rested on one end of this shelf, covered in a thick layer of cave dust. Pippa read the imprinted lettering on the top book: “Book of Secrets,” it said, and then beneath, “Albertus Magnus.” It looked bursting with those secrets and Pippa itched to hold it and see what was inside.

  She reached out for it and Lillibet made a noise to stop her.

  Disappointed, Pippa remembered that she hadn’t been ready to know of this cave, and that this was an emergency. But, rather than feeling unnerved by this magical place, or afraid that the witch-finders would find it and use it to condemn, Pippa felt at home. This was a safe haven. Even Lillibet, despite her worried frown at Pippa, seemed calmer than before.

  In the center of the room was a fire pit blackened with old charcoal. Pippa looked upward and Lillibet nodded.

  “There’s a natural crack in the cave. As a chimney it spreads the smoke to escape through the hill. The fire should be lit only with dry wood that smokes clear like mist. Else, others might see the smoke coming from beneath the ground and would guess what’s beneath. During the day a pinpoint of light comes in and moves across the floor.” With a bony finger she pointed to a wall, where someone had carved the track of the sun and marked the turning of the seasons with faces. For Easter and springtime Pippa saw his face again: the Green Man, wide-eyed and surrounded by leaves. After him was another male face, one with horns, and this horned man seemed to merge with the face of a young woman. The icons were hard-edged, primitive, the faces that lived in the deepest part of the mind.