It was very strange. The women sat on her bed and on her bench. Elizabeth passed around cups of ale for them. It was as though Sybil were a silent spectacle.
They waited and they watched.
Tiny muscle spasms crept along Sybil’s arms, stretched as they were. The hours passed. Elizabeth thumbed through her Bible, murmuring to herself.
“Anything comes in,” said Phillips, “say so at once. It could be one of her imps.”
“What are you watching for?” Sybil asked.
“You know very well,” said Mary Ford. “They will come to you. The imps cannot go long without suckling.”
Outside, the twilight bled into full night, and the sky filled with stars. More hours passed. The candles flickered on the bedside table. The women ate bread and sausages, brought to them by Martha. Sybil’s stomach growled at the sight, for she’d not been given tea or dinner.
“Elizabeth, might I have some ale? I’m so thirsty.”
“Hush,” Elizabeth said, and turned back to her Bible.
Martha hovered at the door, curious. “What you be doing?”
“Watching for the girl’s imps,” said Widow Moore, and belched after swallowing a mouthful of bread.
“Imps!” Martha drew back. “Demons, like?’
“Imps be demons in disguise,” said Mary Phillips. “Take the form of animals and insects, they do. They do a witch’s bidding and return to her for their nourishment.”
“Oh,” said Martha. She hesitated and there was a frown’s wrinkle on her broad forehead.
“Something to say, Martha?” asked Mary Ford, leaning forward eagerly.
“No … well …”
Sybil prayed. No, God, please, let her walk away … Martha, do you not love me?
“She does have a-a blackbird,” Martha said, looking both sorry and fearful. “I seen it in a box in here, and in the garden. I do believe the bird is lame, and Miss Sybil helped nurse it to health again.”
“Nurse it?” Mary Ford screeched.
“A bird, as a pet?”
“So that explains the odd noises I hear from this room,” Elizabeth said, standing up, triumphant.
Sybil prayed that Ursula had possessed the good sense to hop away from the back garden. If only her wing was not hobbled. If only she could fly away.
Elizabeth swept out of the room with Martha. “I will see if it’s to be found in the garden,” she said. From out the window behind her, Sybil could hear a ruckus, and Martha exclaiming, and the sound of flapping—skirts, or wings.
“Got ’im,” Martha could be heard to say.
Her, thought Sybil.
There was a watchful silence when Elizabeth reappeared in the doorway clutching Ursula. The search-women stared at the raven. Ursula—who knew no better, and was used to being rewarded for speech—opened her beak and said, “Sybil!”
It was a ringing imitation of Sybil’s own name in Sybil’s own voice.
Elizabeth screamed and dropped Ursula, who flapped her one good wing and careened to the floor.
“Oh, Heaven help us, God be with us!” Mary Ford grabbed at her chest and her eyes rolled in her head.
“Devilry!” Widow Moore cried. “Devilry!”
Mary Phillips was white in the face. “I never seen anything so unnatural,” she said. “Not ever. This be no bird. This be an imp.”
The women stared as Ursula hopped over toward Sybil. Tied helpless as Sybil was, she could not even nudge her pet away. Please go, she tried to tell the bird, save yourself.
It was quite silly, how much Sybil cared about what might happen to Ursula, above concern for herself. Closing her eyes, the darkness behind her lids swirled in jeweled colors around her, and she thought again of Tom Radcliff and where he was. In a battle, perhaps? Fighting beside the King, or perhaps with a noble?
“There be next to no doubt,” said Mary Phillips. “But we must make sure. We must prick her.”
Sybil’s eyes fluttered open again. A long sharp bodkin had appeared in the stranger’s hand.
“We will find the Devil’s mark on her. When it don’t bleed, or when she don’t jerk in pain from the needle, then ’tis proof that Satan has marked her as his own.”
The women clustered together on the other side of the room. “Here, you women use these, as well” said a whisper. They had opened Sybil’s sewing box. As one, they turned, and the wavering light of the candles made grim shadows of their noses and eye sockets and half-open mouths. Sybil noticed how Mary Ford’s tongue darted in and out of her mouth, lizard-like.
They approached her. The last thing Sybil saw before she fainted in a rush of heat was the sharp gleam of her own sewing needles.
HOPKINS HAD LEARNED SEVERAL interesting tidbits from Renshaw the innkeeper. The first was that Philippa Wylde’s mother Elizabeth—or Lillibet, as she was called—was not only the village midwife, but also the cunning-woman. How easy it was to extend those activities into witchcraft. A young woman and her mother, living in that cottage alone, no man to protect their morality … just the sort of women Satan chose to do his divisive work.
Renshaw also told a story about the year Philippa was born. There had been plague, and a mysterious disease that felled entire families of cattle. And that was the year Lillibet Wylde, already in her late thirties, had given birth to her first and only child. She and her husband had been desperate. Then this miracle babe was born to elderly parents. Renshaw whispered that Lillibet had discovered a secret charm to create pregnancy that she now sold to other barren women. Some said that Lillibet lay with the Devil in exchange for a child. Then, of course, a few short years later her own husband had died quite suddenly. It all pointed to evil-doing.
Of course, Hopkins needed no proof to know that Pippa was a witch, but he could hardly give that sort of testimony to the magistrates. What he did do was make sure he was present during the official watching of Pippa and the Widow Wylde. They were just the kind of witches to convince others to sign the Devil’s Register, to weave them into their plots, spiders at the center of the Vale’s web.
Perhaps they have the Devil’s Register itself.
Of all the witches he’d met, these might be the most powerful, and he was tantalized and terrified. He would press them about the Register’s location.
Pippa’s name was already written in his own notebook. What he’d seen in the forest was enough for him. On a wooden beam in his room at the inn, there was already a single tiny crooked cross made in haste during a long night. He’d done it with the bodkin.
He liked to scratch things.
So it was that Hopkins, along with Priscilla and Mary, his searchers from Manningtree, and two more local women sat inside the cunning-est cottage he’d ever seen. There was a cabinet full of mysterious herbs. A magic cipher was inscribed over the door—not carved in this generation, for it was worn-away, but this had been a family dwelling for a long time—and upon a search of the place, a box had been found with the odd accoutrements of Lillibet Wylde’s work. Horseshoes, iron nails, cuttings of hair and feathers, small clay jars—witch-bottles, they were called—and even what Hopkins suspected to be the pure white feather of a swan.
Also in the cottage, resting on a shelf next to the Bible, was a book on midwifery. Hopkins flipped through, blushed at the illustrations, and hastily replaced it.
“Do you know your letters?” he’d asked Widow Wylde.
“Well enough to read me Bible,” she’d said cheekily.
The sun was at a low angle in the sky, and the cottage’s southwest-facing window allowed a solid shaft of light to break through the stuffy air. It was a perfect condition to search their bodies for the Devil’s marks. It was time.
Pippa was spitting mad, Hopkins could tell, and this pleased him. Perhaps she could be goaded into confession.
“’Tis time for the searching,” he said to the search-women. “Priscilla, you will be the pricker.”
Pippa stared at him with murder in her eyes.
Hopkins had the urge to order al
l the other women out of the cottage, to embrace Pippa, to squeeze the truth out of her. Instead he murmured to her, “Look at me not with that ill aspect. I am but doing God’s duty.” He wished that he was allowed to take to the needle and the bodkin, but that was only for male suspects. He would prick the accused man, Ashley Potter, when his watching was scheduled in two days’ time. For now, he had to wait outside.
To see her bare flesh again would be too much for him to bear.
When the door closed behind him, he could hear the shrieks of protest from inside. “Let me alone!” was the old woman. The words of the daughter were somewhat more ripe, although not past the limit where it might have been a demon’s influence.
She is cunning, that one, Hopkins thought. Both of them. They have thrived as cunning-folk. Many cunning-folk were men, and tended towards a literate, or at least semi-literate, trade or artisan background. They were difficult to prosecute on charges of witchcraft so Hopkins most often left them alone. Too much risk they would counter-sue. However, these women were without a man, and still they kept their cottage with food on the table. Their relative success could only stem from a Satanic pact.
Find the book, he thought.
He closed his eyes and inhaled the scent of earth, grass, manure, smoke … but there was something peculiar in the smoke from the cottage behind him, an herb that gave it a sweet smell. He wrinkled his nose and coughed.
And coughed again.
He’d always been prone to coughs and colds since he was a boy, but this particular ailment had a stubborn hold on him. He was not worried, however. He prayed hard and often for the cessation of his cough, and God would provide him with the long health necessary to do his work.
Squinting his eyes, he wondered what the setting sun touched through the window … the bare skin of two women, one young and one old … the illuminating shine on parts that belonged to the night.
Hopkins wished that he could resist, but he couldn’t. He took slow, quiet steps toward the door, and leaned in toward the crack in the door jam, and stole a glimpse inside. He wished he wasn’t drawn forward from the low place in his gut, like an imp beckoned by its dark mistress. He wished he didn’t see Pippa, naked and bent over at the waist by the hands of the search-women, her inky hair hanging like a curtain in front of her face. How he hated that woman. She was every part of his nightmares, every part of his dreams.
He backed away from the door, boots crunching in the dirt and the remnants of long-ago broken pottery.
From inside the cottage, there was a gasp, and another one, and another. A small squeak of pain. A muffled sob. The pricking had begun. Hopkins smiled to himself as his mind’s eye saw that haunting white flesh pierced with sharp metal.
For a moment his vision was marred when he heard that hag, Lillibet Wylde, protesting at them to use the kitchen knife and please, not that rusty old nail. “Not that, please. Not the nail, put it down, not the nail!”
“Stop, stop it,” he could hear Pippa beg, and knew that it was for her old mother she spoke.
Prick.
Some time later, when the dark terminus of the east encroached on the sky, Mary Phillips the search-woman opened the door. She said, “The searching for unnatural teats, and the pricking thereof, is complete, Master Hopkins.”
He whirled to face her, hands clasped behind his back. “Excellent,” he said, and stepped across the threshold.
Pippa and Elizabeth were fully dressed again, but he could see tiny splotches of blood seeping through their linen bodices … just drops, really … a constellation of guilt. They both looked at the floor. Hopkins thought it was in shame. Good, he thought, good, we’re getting to them.
“The findings?” he asked, bringing out his pencil and notebook to record the testimony of the search-women.
“On the old woman, there was found an unnatural protrusion near her privy parts, that did not bleed when pricked, a sure sign of a Devil’s teat,” said Priscilla.
“No such thing,” the old woman whispered. “’Tis a simple hemorrhoid. Have ye not ever seen that before, in all your fumblings about the privy parts of strangers?”
“All of us saw the teat, and agreed upon its nature,” said Goody Brewer.
Hopkins peered down at Lillibet. “Have you anything to confess?”
“I’m no witch,” she said.
“We have evidence,” he said. “Lies will not save you. Only a confession before the law and before God will save you from sure dwelling in Hell.”
“And you’d help me arrive at that afterlife, wouldn’t you,” Lillibet said with equal contempt. She stared at him with the hazel gaze of a raptor. “I know what you’re about. I know what you fear, what haunts your dreams. You cannot hide from the eyes of an old woman like me.”
“Shut your mouth,” he snapped, avoiding those knowing old eyes. He scribbled in his notebook, “Devil’s teats found” next to the name. “And the other one? What marks did she have?” Hopkins’s pencil was poised over the book, ready to elaborate on Pippa’s guilt, to scritch scratch her name, her sin, into his registry.
The search-women paused. “Well, sir …” began Goody Brewer.
“Well?”
Priscilla spoke. “We couldn’t find anything unnatural on her,” she said.
Hopkins narrowed his eyes. How could the search-women fail him so? “Are you certain?”
“Yes, sir, she is … free of blemishes. Surprisingly so,” she added.
He bit down on his own tongue, relishing the pain, counting in his mind to stop himself from shouting. “She must suckle her imps in an unknown fashion,” he muttered. “From a sore in her mouth, perhaps?”
“I’ve no sores in me mouth,” Pippa said. “Nor anywhere else, thank you.”
He refused to look at her. “You have concealed yourself with a glamour charm.”
She scoffed. “How can you believe any woman or man has such power?”
“This is the law!” Hopkins shouted at her. “And I am the lawyer, and the judge of what is valid evidence or not!”
“Sir, she goads you,” Goody Phillips said. “No good woman would do such a thing.”
“No good woman would not object to treatment thus!” Pippa retorted.
“Hush,” Hopkins said. “’Tis true that her attitude is that of the guilty. And worry not about the lack of marks. I feel certain with a long period of watching, the truth will reveal itself.” He snapped his notebook closed and poured himself a cup of ale from the kitchen table. “Bind them.” He eased himself into the rocking chair near the hearth of that sweet-smelling herb fire and leaned back.
Priscilla and Mary, the experienced searchers, tied Pippa first—her arms angled backward and her feet stretched upward against the chair, and secured together by a rope. The old woman was next, and Hopkins could tell she was in pain already at the wrists. The old ones often had trouble with their joints. The sooner the pain was unbearable, the sooner the confession, but his fee was the same no matter how long it took.
Hopkins witnessed a familiar descent. At first the two women were strong and silent. They would twist their hands or attempt to adjust their position. An hour passed; he stoked the fire. In his experience as Witchfinder General, Hopkins had seen every manner of reaction to the long wakefulness. Tears, resignation, laughter, pleading … or, as in the case of the young woman, a sort of flippant denial.
He stared at Pippa’s reddened wrists, at the sight of the rough ropes rasping against her delicate skin.
The front door was open, as were the windows, so that imps would be free to enter. The sounds of nighttime were a back chorus to the human noises in the cottage … the breathing, the shifting, the occasional snort or cough from the older women. The slurping of ale. The breaking of bread. It took sustenance to stay up all night and confront the spirit world.
Goody Brewer stood up. “I’ll bring tripe sandwiches from me house,” she said, “and a jug of fresh ale.” One of her tasks was supplying food and drink to the searchers.
She was being paid two shillings a day to do it.
It was eleven o’clock. The small hourglass on the table finished its whispering cycle. Hopkins felt the sand in his own eyes, dropping them closed. The Widow Wylde, he could see, was also starting to fade into a twisted nap, and he clapped his hands at her.
“Then I’ll sleep with me eyes open,” she said.
Hopkins just smiled and settled back into the chair.
A half-hour later, Goody Brewer reappeared with a plate and a jug. Hopkins saw Pippa’s hungry look. Her most recent meal was probably her breakfast.
“Confess,” said Hopkins, biting into a sandwich, “and you shall have something to eat.”
She pressed her lips together and averted her eyes.
The food revived his energy and he clapped his hands again at the drooping Widow Wylde.
“I want to sleep,” she mumbled. “Want … sleep …”
“No sleep until a confession!”
Another hour slid by, measured by the sand. Somewhere far away, a dog barked. It was approaching midnight, the witching hour. Hopkins felt a thrill to wonder if an imp would come. He was not afraid now. He had people around him and the room was lit with candles and the fire. The mundane sandwiches and ale were an anchor. He had done this many times now, and had seen many an imp before: flies, gnats, cats, birds, mice.
Nothing came through the door, however. A fleeting thought crossed his mind that the herb burning in the fireplace was meant to keep insects away. If that be the case, then the imps might just come up to the door. He said, “Keep an eye on the windows and doors. These witches may communicate the danger to their imps, and the imps merely approach without touching them.”
Sometimes the definitions had to be loosened a bit.
He brought out his Bible and began to read from the book of Exodus. His favorite verse was 22:18, for it was the direct command to do his work. He also found comfort in the stories of God’s commands to the Israelites, and the trials they suffered. He knew what trials were like.
It became clear that Pippa and her mother would require a great deal of softening before they admitted to anything. As the night wore on, Hopkins’s thoughts turned increasingly to the feather bed at the Charter Inn. He stood. “Keep watch. I’ll send Master Stearne in a few hours.”
Suffer a Witch Page 18
