“Has your imp a name?” Sybil asked.
Winifred looked at her, confused.
“She’s teasing you,” said Pippa, although she was not sure.
“How about Lip?” Sybil suggested. She hummed to herself.
“They came with no warning,” said Winifred. “Middle of the afternoon. I thought the accusing was done.”
“Someone must have come forward, but I can’t imagine who would hold such a grudge against you,” said Pippa.
“Nor I.” She sighed. “Seems that the accusation is enough.”
“Ye should a’ been more generous,” rasped Joan Buckett from her corner.
“You!” Pippa lunged at her. “Was it you who accused her? Any of us?” Masked by her aggression was the fear that Joan would find out her secret, and tell the court how Pippa and Ash had conspired to steal from her.
“I was more than generous with you, for all your ingratitude,” Winifred added to Joan.
Joan laughed. “Like them men’d listen to an old witch like me. ’Twaren’t me. Hold them wild horses in ye, Pippa Wylde.”
“It wasn’t them,” said Sybil. Her voice was, as always, clear and musical and so very out of place in the dripping wooden cage. She leaned back against the slats and closed her eyes.
“I wonder why Alice is not with us,” said Pippa. “They did not swim her, either.”
Sybil bit her lip. “Did they make you recite the Lord’s Prayer?”
“Yes … I can’t imagine how she passed that test. I hate to think her speech was evidence enough to those witch-finders.”
“But she not be with us now,” said Lillibet. “I can’t help but pray they’ve let her go.” Then she muttered, low so only Pippa could hear her, “Alice was innocent, and I am not.”
“What?” Pippa whispered.
“’Tis punishment,” Lillibet murmured. “We brought this on ourselves. My … fault …”
“What do you mean?”
Lowering her voice even further, Lillibet said, “For what we did. What I did. Sarah Ford. I never should have meddled … my fault, I brought God’s punishment onto you. I’m sorry …”
Pippa glanced around to make sure the others weren’t paying attention. “No! Lillibet, no, that was not your fault,” said Pippa, but the possibility of retribution was a fresh concern. As you sow, so shall you reap, she thought, and was this the reaping of the murder of an unborn child? That had been Sarah Ford’s mistake, her decision. God couldn’t be angry at the scissors that cut the thread. Yet … here they were, stripped of home and position and safety. A tear slipped down Pippa’s cheek, merging with the raindrops that already soaked her skin.
Pippa could not forget how Lillibet had confessed on her behalf. Noble as it was, there was little chance Pippa would escape the same fate. There were none to vouch for her character in Bury St. Edmunds, and none to listen to her. And if there was a divine hand in this, the life of a cunning-woman and her daughter in exchange for the seed of life they’d helped to destroy … Pippa could not escape. Despair leaked into her heart.
She had the rare ache of missing her father, John Wylde, who would have been able to protect them. If he’d been alive, Lillibet would never have had to use her cunning magic at all. They would not have needed Sarah Ford’s fee. They would have been safe and rich.
Pippa took her mother’s hand.
They hit a hard rock and the cart groaned at the seams. Despite the damp clinging of her petticoats and the grittiness of pond water in her hair and in the cracks of her toes, her eyes fell shut. But there was no mistaking the nightmare that would follow, the evil end of their journey: the gaol at Bury St. Edmunds.
It was a hot, stinking day in the town of Chelmsford and a massive crowd gathered at the main square. Looming above their heads, a gallows had been built of wood and metal and rope. Caught in the throng, Matthew Hopkins tugged at his collar. It felt like the collective body heat was contributing to the temperature.
As he moved, Hopkins received his share of attention. People nudged and whispered to each other; the fingers of little children pointed at him. “There goes the Witchfinder General. Matthew Hopkins ’imself.”
Two days previous, he’d testified in his first major trial. He’d given evidence against most of the women scheduled to hang this day. The raving, hot, drunken crowds had hushed to hear his voice. The trial jury, a collection of freeholders, farmers, and merchants, had agreed with all his results. He’d been nervous at first, but had reminded himself that he was God’s lawyer. Name the witches. Name them, and be free.
He’d like that cranky old lawyer in Ipswich to see him now.
Wearing a quiet smile, he moved through the packed bodies, knowing that he had done God’s will. All around him, the audience was settling in with bread, ale, cheese, sausages, and a ravenous appetite for the death about to be served.
Not everyone was enthusiastic, however. A man could be heard grumbling to his partner. “Costing ’em a pretty penny to have this hullabaloo. The town don’t have much to spare as it is, and who’s to pay for the incarceration of all these witches? Pounds, I heard, been racked up in costs.”
His friend said, “Small price to pay for the ridding of witches. They cause more trouble out of prison than in it.”
“If they be witches at all, and not poor ignorant women,” said the man.
A skeptic, thought Hopkins. They were in the minority. Most people had reached the conclusion that witchcraft was real, and it behooved them to pay the witch-finders to sniff them out. What, indeed, was the price of an immortal soul?
He spotted a narrow stair against a building and stepped up out of the masses. Sighing with relief when he was several feet above everyone else, he waited for the first group of the condemned to appear.
The crowd roared, the cheers beginning at the edge and moving like a great wave to each throat … there was the procession of prisoners in carts … soldiers guarded the way, shoving bystanders out of the way so the doomed cargo could get to the gallows.
Hopkins noticed the hangman marching back and forth on the high platform, checking the integrity of the knots dangling from the beam. He wore a black hood made of thin wool that covered his face. A job for a strong Christian, thought Hopkins, feeling a momentary affinity with the hangman, for both men carried the burden of justice on their shoulders.
At the base of the platform the witches were blindfolded and led up the stairs. Their lips were moving, some of them, but their last words were lost in the noise of a thousand free, redeemed people. It was just as well. Witches were prone to throw curses when they were at the end of their rope.
One of the women was being half-dragged up the stairs because she had only one leg: the widow Elizabeth Clarke. She did not frighten Hopkins anymore. She was just a wretched old woman who had sold herself to Satan. This was a mercy killing as far as Hopkins was concerned. The only thing that surprised him was that she was still alive after so many months in prison.
A thunderous cheer rose up as the final noose in the row was tightened around Clarke’s throat. She wavered and wobbled on that single leg of hers.
Even above the multitude, Hopkins heard the simultaneous crack of five necks as the doors were loosed beneath the feet of the condemned. They jerked and swung. The crowd screamed its approval.
He pretended that it didn’t affect him.
Yet, as he watched the drunken sway of the hanged witches’ feet, a persistent crawling sensation tickled his gut. It was he, Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General, who had put these women in their place … he who had brought them to their death.
He took in the hot, excited faces of the mob, saw the sick pleasure that twisted them into howling imps themselves. This is not for your entertainment! He burned with annoyance at the crowd.
His deepest spiritual quest had turned into a mere spectacle on an idle summer’s day. None of these common people knew the dangers he faced, the evil he confronted, the battles he fought. Not for the first ti
me in his life, Hopkins felt trivial and small, as if he were the only one who understood the stakes, a lone voice shouting against a gale.
The sun grew higher in the sky as he lingered on the steps above the square, caught up in his thoughts. It took thirty minutes for the witches to hang until dead. In the interim between new batches, the people milled about, gossiping and eating and fighting. The thrill was gone from the discolored bodies that swung from the gallows. His dissatisfaction grew.
You can stop.
The thought came out of nowhere. It was clear, calm. Hopkins regarded it. His eyes lifted up to the blue sky. Perhaps he hadn’t meant for it to go this far. He’d never seen a person hanged before. He’d never even seen a person die before this day. Every woman who walked across that platform to the waiting noose was there on his testimony. They were the sacrifices to his self-purification. Sacrifices? But the Lord gave up His own Son that no blood sacrifice would ever again be required.
As though there was an imp on one shoulder and an angel on the other, two parts of Hopkins began to argue.
One voice said, This has gone far enough. Give up now. Let the rest go free.
The other voice said, Witches meet in the trees and the dark places. We will consume you. Smack, our lips go. Smack and spack.
The problem was that Hopkins couldn’t decide who was the angel and who was the imp.
His mind turned to the heavy money sack resting in his hearth at home in Mistley. This witch-finding was a business. It was his work. How could he turn away from it?
The girl was innocent, and you knew it.
The vague image of a fair, unworldly girl floated in his head. He couldn’t pin down the particulars, but she was in a bad place, a dark place, because of him.
You can set us free.
Another face, with darker hair, with crackling hazel eyes that matched those of her mother. There were other ways to save Philippa’s soul. He could explain to her the wickedness of her ways. Even … if he dared … with gentleness and patience and the tender touch of hands, he could bring her back into the Puritan fold.
Hopkins stood up too fast and the blood swirled in his head. He could go to Bury St. Edmunds. He could propose a different approach, where he preached to the accused and brought them back to God’s flock. The witches could be rehabilitated, made to repent, and with hard work, become pure once more. Pure like him, not bad like him. He could recant on his evidence. Say it was a mistake. Say that their names were not in the Devil’s Register, after all. He could bring Pippa home, tuck her under his wing, show her, touch her. They could go to the New World together, to his brother’s parish in Massachusetts, and leave their mistakes behind. Pippa might grow to appreciate him, to love him, they could have special time … He could do all of these things.
Let us go, said the voice.
Before the next round of trials he would speak to the magistrate and have the women released. At least, he would have a few released, the important ones. He shivered to think of Lillibet Wylde free to roam the land and curse him … but not if he was in the New World. She couldn’t reach him there.
There were arrangements to make, ship’s schedules to inspect, and in a haze of excitement he rode for home that very night with Elspeth at his side.
THE WORLD WAS MADE of hard edges. Her soft bright hair had dimmed and gone brittle. Sybil’s fingers skimmed across the sharp crescent of her clavicle that jutted out from beneath her filthy bodice. If things kept on like this, her very bones would be starved out of her body.
Next to her was another pile of bones—a woman collapsed in upon herself. The sole indication that she lived was the motion of two fingers, idly picking at lice in her petticoat. The woman’s name was Mary and she came from a hamlet called Combs, near Stowmarket. Last week, when Mary was still able to speak, she’d told Sybil about the day Matthew Hopkins had arrived, and how she had been accused and watched and pricked. It was like speaking into a mirror, down to the pained eyes and the mouth cracked at the corners.
Sybil had lost track of the days and nights. There was no such thing as sunshine here. Time was measured by when they were fed cold gruel, a slop unfit for swine. Sybil found it difficult to swallow with the maggots and bits of gravel, so she’d opted for a voluntary fast.
“Fasting,” Pippa had whispered to her, the ghost of a laugh in her voice.
It was what drew Sybil to Pippa like she was a flame: that undaunted spirit. Every day they spent in the gaol, Pippa grew more infuriated. Sybil didn’t know where her friend found the energy for anger.
Lillibet, however, was not well.
The sleeplessness, the dehydration, and the brutal swimming had not been good for Pippa’s mother. The longer Lillibet went on like this—eyes glazed, lips cracked, hands shaking—the deeper Sybil’s worry for her.
The cell in which they lived was the size of a cottage and it held, at last count, forty-two women. Pippa had taken to naming them by that old sheep rhyme: “Yan, Tan, Tethera, Pethera …” They were women, but their humanity seeped away with every hour they waited. They wallowed in their own stink and in the common stink of others. The smell was a layered chorus of excrement, decay, dirt, grime, sweat, fever, blood … with a high note of fear.
It made Sybil eager for a trial, eager even for a death that would release her from this place. If she went to Hell, it could not be as bad as this. At least Hell, she imagined, had plenty of space to move about in one’s torment, unlike this cell where she knocked up against an elbow on one side and a rib on another.
She slid down the wall to sit in the only open space, beside Winifred Radcliff. The rich girl had been quiet so far. Her fine black wool dress was fraying. Sybil noticed the slight dimple on Winifred’s cheek that meant she was biting her mouth, perhaps to keep from screaming. The gleam of a tear lurked in the corner of her eye. Her fingers clutched at the rough floor.
Despite Winifred’s past snobbery, Sybil could not help feeling sorry for her. It could not be easy to be brought so low, so quickly. And Elizabeth had abandoned Winifred in her hour of need. See the kind of friend my sister can be, thought Sybil.
On Winifred’s other side, Pippa passed the water gourd with some reluctance. “Here, have a sip.”
Winfred took a choking gulp of the prison water that tasted of decay, of spittle, of minerals and dirt. “Thank you,” she said. Her voice was throaty and scratched. “Here, Miss Yates,” she said, passing it on to Sybil.
Sybil took the gourd and tilted her head. “You can call me Sybil, if you like.”
“Oh,” said Winifred. “Sybil.” She dabbed her mouth with the edge of her sleeve. “How long do you think we’ll be here?”
“Only God knows,” said Pippa.
They fell silent amidst the coughing and low murmurs of the other women. Then Winifred spoke again. “I wonder what they’re saying back home about us.”
“Nothing good,” Pippa snorted.
Winifred opened up into the conversation. “All of us accused had grudges against us. I don’t believe there ever were witches in the Vale. Too many stood to benefit from this.”
“Who had a grudge against you?” Sybil asked.
Winifred took a deep breath. “It’s all over now. I may as well tell you.”
A long moment passed and Pippa said, “Well?”
“I almost accused you,” Winifred said to Pippa.
Pippa’s eyes tightened, but she said nothing.
“Almost?” said Sybil.
“Yes, almost. I thought about it, but I didn’t. You see … I’m in a rather precarious situation, and I thought that by making an accusation, it would make me look better. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it, not after seeing those wretched Buckett women, who may be scandalous, but deserve not hanging over it. Mostly I just wanted the witch-finders to leave the Vale. They were disrupting everything. And so I spoke with Elizabeth, and we … quarreled. I suppose I do have an enemy.”
“What happened?” asked Sybil gently. She understoo
d how it was to quarrel with Elizabeth.
“I told her that she was taking it too far. I urged her to act with restraint, to not accuse unless she was certain, and how the witch-finders said they would dismiss frivolous charges. And then she said that I wasn’t a good Puritan, that I cared more for fine clothes than proper morals.” Winifred picked at her cuffs. “Perhaps she was right. Before this, my life was about pearls and lace and who spoke to whom after church and the new style of bonnets. But in the heat of our quarrel I didn’t think about that. Instead I told her that she cared not for other people, to go so far as to accuse her own sister—” Winifred broke off, looking chagrined.
“I already knew that,” Sybil said. “Go ahead.”
“Anyway, it ended when Lizzie called me pretentious and chubby. I told her that she was vindictive, spiteful, and spotty-faced.”
Pippa laughed and even Sybil had to smile, thinking of the look that must have earned from Elizabeth.
“It was quite a scene,” said Winifred.
“I’m glad you told her that,” said Sybil. “I would never have the courage!”
Winifred sobered. “Then they came and watched me in my garden, with their needles and … I’ve done everything to deserve this. I haven’t been a good person. I know that. If that be witchcraft, to keep an ill tongue, then I’m guilty after all. But I still cannot believe Lizzie would accuse me of this, just because of that one quarrel. That’s beyond cruel.” She lowered her eyes, brow furrowed in thought.
Pippa looked at Winifred with new warmth. Sybil knew what Pippa thought: an accusation of witchcraft might just be worth telling off Elizabeth Yates. Sybil’s thoughts formed in a different direction. Her eyes fluttered as she pieced it together. “Oh!” she blurted. “You mean about Thomas. Perhaps someone suspected your politics and wanted revenge?”
Winifred’s eyes widened. When she finally spoke, her voice was low and wooden. “What do you know about my brother?”
“Oh, that he’s away,” Sybil said airily. “That he’s with the army. The other army. He told me before he left.”
Suffer a Witch Page 21
