Suffer a Witch

by Morgana Gallaway

“Why would he do that?” Winifred demanded. “Why would he tell you such a thing?”

  “You didn’t know?” Sybil said. She’d always thought Winifred at least suspected it. “Tom is going to marry me when he returns. So you’re going to be my sister someday.”

  “What? What?” Winifred turned to glare at Pippa, who had a knowing smile on her face. “Did you know all this, as well?”

  “Yes,” Sybil answered for her. “He used to kiss me in your garden. It was very nice. And I love your garden, with all the pretty roses and the lavender.”

  Winifred straightened back against the wall, eyes turned upward. Her head shook back and forth. It was a long time before she said anything, until finally she seemed to pull herself together and looked into Sybil’s eyes. “You like the roses, then?”

  Sybil laughed. “Yes, the white ones most especially.”

  “They’re my favorites, too.” Winifred gave a tiny smile.

  “So, do you believe that someone found out about Tom?” asked Pippa.

  Winifred hiccupped, but answered, “It makes a kind of sense.”

  “None others knew, though,” Sybil assured her in a whisper. “Just your family, and my sisters.”

  “Your sisters?” Winifred said. “Elizabeth! That mean-spirited harpy would—”

  “No, she means her spirit sisters,” Pippa interrupted. “Me and Alice. Good God, no one would tell Elizabeth anything so sensitive!”

  “Oh,” said Winifred, mollified. “But Alice, your other friend, where is she?”

  “In another gaol, I imagine,” said Sybil, closing her eyes, trying to see with her mind’s eye. Alice’s face floated there, her tender mouth frowning, her eyes full of pain. “I pray she keeps well.”

  Winifred’s eyes narrowed. “Are you certain she’s trustworthy?”

  “Of course!” said Pippa, offended. “It’s Elizabeth you have to worry about.” Her mouth twisted. “Now she’s got exactly what she wants.”

  “Hugh Felton?” asked Winifred.

  “His choice is made,” said Pippa. “He chose her.”

  This pained Sybil, too. She knew what it was like to be forgotten. She would never forget the cold look on Elizabeth’s face during the ordeal at the pond.

  “We were always friends,” Pippa said of Hugh, a plaintive note coloring the air.

  Winifred admitted, “I did hear from my mother that he was betrothed to someone. He’d said as much himself. I did not realize it was …”

  “Elizabeth,” said Sybil, most sorry.

  “I don’t hold it against you,” said Pippa, reaching across Winifred’s lap to squeeze Sybil’s hand. “We cannot choose our family.” She extricated her other arm from around Lillibet’s sleeping form and clasped Winifred’s arm. “And as for you, I pray that whoever accused you is made to pay.”

  “Thank you,” said Winifred, straightening her soiled bodice. “Shall we pray together?”

  “I think we should,” said Sybil, and they all clasped their hands and bowed their heads in silence.

  THROUGH THE GLOOM SYBIL saw that Pippa had awoken from a nap and was playing a game of scratch with Winifred on the floor. They had folded their legs together to make a square foot of space. Now that they were friends, Sybil remembered how Winnie—as they’d been calling her—had visited during her fever. Now that Winnie was thrust into this situation, Sybil was impressed with her steady mood and her ladylike manner, untainted even in this cave of suffering.

  As Sybil swam across the sea of limbs and bodies to get to her friends, a claw gripped her arm. “Christ rose to save us,” said the crinkled voice of an old woman. No one knew her name, for she had been one of the first in this cell and spoke nonsense most of the time. “We rejected Christ. Die, speckle, die!”

  Christ rose under the hill, thought Sybil, and pried her arm away from the scary old hag.

  “Ho! Watch where you’re puttin’ them feet!” someone said. There was no avoiding it, but Sybil felt bad nevertheless.

  “Hello, darling,” said Winifred. She stretched her legs out as best she could and pulled Sybil into her lap as though she were a small child. “Lord, Sybil, you must start eating! You’re as a feather.”

  “I’m not hungry,” Sybil said. “I’ve been giving my ration to Joan Buckett. She’s poorly, more than me.”

  “I order you to stop that nonsense,” said Winifred. She was herself weak, Sybil could tell, and her throaty voice sounded much less compelling than normal.

  “She’s right, Syb,” said Pippa. With a thin hand she petted Sybil’s hair. “You must keep up your strength.”

  “All right,” said Sybil, although she knew, and her friends did not, that there was no reason to keep her strength. In the precious moments of sleep that she carved for herself amidst the coughing and stuttering, she had been having a recurrent dream. In the dream she was walking through the forest, their forest, and there was a clearing up ahead filled with white flowers. Every time she slept she drew closer to the meadow. When she reached it, she knew there would be some sort of ending. This did not frighten her much.

  She looked toward Lillibet on the other side of Pippa. “How does she do?”

  Pippa’s face was shadowed. “Time will tell.”

  “I would pray for willow to ease her pain,” said Winifred, “if there were any hope of attaining it.”

  “Or valerian,” said Pippa.

  Sybil looked more closely at Lillibet. She was half-reclined against the rough stone wall and a deep wrinkle seemed to cleave her forehead in two. She’d been suffering headaches for the last day and the muscles on her jaw and neck were stiff and twitching. A thin sheen of fever afflicted her skin. It was difficult to tell if Lillibet’s color was normal, for everyone here was malnourished and pale as a fish’s underbelly.

  “Get, get!” Winifred snapped, brushing at a large mangy rat that threatened them. “Filthy creature!”

  “Me imp,” crooned a woman a few feet away. She was called Margery and openly declared herself as belonging to Satan. “Come to me, Bucky Tom!”

  “Be quiet, you old fool,” said Pippa, who had argued with Margery on the first day and called her a fake. “It’s just a rat.” Nevertheless she helped Winifred turn it around towards Margery. “Eat it, if you like!”

  Sybil whispered, “Do you believe Margery’s really a witch as she says?”

  “No,” said Pippa.

  “She does seem a bit confused,” said Winifred.

  Across the cell, in a different corner, a woman convulsed and groaned. Her feverish murmurs were a steady stream beneath the general noise. She had been fevered for three days and had the dreaded lump on her neck.

  “Gaol rot,” muttered a woman nearby. She was part of the newest group of prisoners brought from Bury’s hinterlands.

  “What’s that, gaol rot?” Winifred asked her.

  “She been in here too long,” said the woman, chewing on a piece of straw picked up from the floor. “Me husband died of such a rot two years ago.”

  “Your name is Anne?” Sybil said.

  The woman peered at her, startled. “Why, yes, Anne Alderman. How’d you know, child?”

  The name had occurred to Sybil in a flash of knowing, as things often did, but there was no explaining this so she shrugged.

  “Ah, you be usin’ witchcraft!” said Anne.

  “No,” said Pippa, placing a hand on Sybil’s shoulder and smiling. “She’s just cunning.”

  “Cunning-folk, then?” Anne asked.

  “Minister’s daughter,” replied Sybil, and Anne laughed hard for a few seconds.

  “No other cunning-folk been accused, you must be the only ones,” said Anne. “I reckon most of them had the good sense to stay away from all this. In our village it’s a cunning-man and he even helped to watch the witches.” She shook her head.

  “You said your husband was imprisoned?” Winifred asked.

  “That’s right. For a’listenin’ to the preachings of Bishop Laud, and then giving suc
h sermons hisself. He waren’t no minister, mind you, but he was listened to by some. They accused him of being a Royalist and then he came here to this very gaol.” She spat into her hands and rubbed them together. “I been here before to visit ’im. But he died before any trial ever started.” She nodded across at the sick woman. “Looks like nothin’s changed.”

  “You were accused as a witch?” Pippa asked.

  “That’s right. Me husband used to have cattle, see, but I had to sell some on account of having no more money. I kept the best milkers for meself, as any sensible person would, but the beasts I sold to me neighbor … two fell sick and thrashing, and died. He accused me of bewitching them.”

  “Did you?” asked Winifred.

  “No, ’course not! At least … I don’t think I did. Maybe I had some ill thoughts toward that neighbor, for the price was less than fair to me.”

  “Perhaps he feels guilty for cheating you,” said Sybil, “and tried to justify it by calling you a witch. Then he wouldn’t have to look at you every day and be reminded.”

  “Hmm,” said Anne. “I believe you be a minister’s daughter. Your language is good.” She poked Winifred. “So’s yours.”

  “She’s not supposed to be here,” said Sybil. “I don’t think she’ll be here for much longer.”

  “What do you mean?” Winifred asked with unease.

  “You won’t die of gaol fever,” said Sybil. “I mean … I don’t know. I just feel something will happen.”

  As she said it, there was a clang and a shout from the corridor. The way brightened as several men with lamps entered, bringing with them a chained group of men and women. The gaol-keeper was there, looking exasperated. All the times Sybil had seen him, he looked exasperated. It was the hassled look of a cattle farmer with too many livestock in the pen.

  Every woman in the cell ceased her speech or humming or moaning to watch. Sometimes the guards told them news. There was one guard in particular, a round young man with most of his teeth missing, who usually passed along the prison gossip. He was with the keeper now.

  “No room in here,” said Winifred as she watched the prisoners parade past the bars.

  The keeper said the same thing as he raised his lamp, shining a light into the chaos of the cell, and then shaking his head to move on. “I got a hundred in here as is, we’re beyond capacity,” the keeper told Bucktooth, the head of the guard, a cruel man with protruding front teeth. “Put them in the solitary cells.” He laughed as though this concept were funny. Sybil had not seen the solitary cells—including the men’s cell where they’d put Old Man Ash—but she could imagine they were overcrowded too. “The next lot after these, send them on to Ipswich.”

  Sybil closed her eyes and thought about Ipswich, another city in Suffolk, and remembered that dream storm that had swept through her home, that hungry dream worm … how it must have visited hamlets, villages, and towns all over the land. Hundreds accused … she opened her eyes to see them. They were mussed, hair encrusted with dirt, and clothing stale, and faces without hope.

  Even in prison, women would be women. Small cliques had formed within the cell—some of the women already old friends, others new acquaintances forged within a common misery, like their Winnie.

  “Ugh,” said Winifred, picking a flea off her sleeve. It jumped off in the direction of a mother and daughter huddled next to her.

  Sybil tilted her head so her eyes were at the level of the hunched, curled bodies around her. A flea feast, she thought, smiling, for she could see dozens of other fleas hopping about from one person to the next. At least something was having a good time. Is this the nature of torment? Sybil wondered. That one party suffers and another celebrates? She could still see the gleam of needles and the matching gleam in the eyes of the search-women.

  Some minutes or hours later, the gossipy guard brought a cart with a large tureen of gruel. “Get out your bowls,” he called. There was a scramble as the women reached into their pockets or under their knees for the small wooden bowls. Most stood up and formed the queue so that the guard could slop two ladlefuls into each woman’s bowl. “Stay there, I’ll get yours,” Pippa told Lillibet, holding both bowls in her hand.

  When a prisoner died, her bowl became precious property, at least for a few feedings before the guards noticed the lifeless body. Then the guards demanded the return of the bowl, too, for there was a rule of one serving per prisoner.

  Staring down into the cloudy, lukewarm liquid in her own bowl, Sybil decided there was slight difference between drinking it and fasting on purpose, so at Winifred’s insistence she drank down the broth. A tense gag threatened to reject it. She coughed and wiped her mouth. “A tasty brew,” she said. “Like stewed saliva.”

  Pippa choked on her own mouthful and then laughed after swallowing.

  The foul stuff seemed to form a whirlpool in Sybil’s gut. She groaned and curled into a tired ball on the floor.

  “Rest for awhile,” Winifred agreed.

  From the floor Sybil watched as Pippa attempted to feed Lillibet without success.

  “Ah, me head,” was all Lillibet could say through clenched teeth. “I’m … so tired … canna’ swallow …”

  “Take a bit of soup, Lillibet, please?” Pippa said, edging the bowl up to her mother’s lips, trying to force open the unyielding jaw.

  Sybil was reminded of the throbbing headache of her own fever and wondered if Lillibet had something similar.

  “Come back to bite ye now,” said Anne Buckett to Pippa. Anne was crawling past them to where she lived on the other side of the crowd.

  Pippa did not dignify that with a response.

  The cold hand of fatigue crept upon Sybil. She closed her eyes and the pained murmurings around her faded in and out. The last thing she heard before falling asleep was Lillibet hissing, “Can’t open me jaw.” There was some vague alarm associated with this, but Sybil couldn’t think of what it might be.

  AFTER A LONG SLEEP, another feeding, and a recitation of her daily prayers, Sybil felt better. It must be the addition of the gruel into her diet—disgusting food was better than no food, according to her stomach. “I feel quite fine,” she said to Winifred.

  “Unfair,” said Winifred, “you made yourself worse off at the beginning so you could start eating now. Your body has been offered hope. Mine is just falling down.” She placed her hands on an abdomen grown frighteningly thin in just a few weeks. Winifred had been the plumpest of them. “But then,” she said just as Sybil thought it, “I had much more to spare than you did. ’Tis more extreme for me … but I think more dangerous for you.”

  “Did Jesus not fast for forty days?” Sybil said. “I might do the same.”

  “This counts as a fast,” said Winifred. “That gruel is little better than the juice from meat, and a bit of fat floating in it.” She sighed. “My strawberries must be ripe now …”

  Sybil could not hear or see it, but she knew that a tear had formed in Winifred’s eye as she thought about the garden of which she was so fond.

  The unquenchable thirst for a large, ripe red strawberry danced in Sybil’s mind and she thought she might cry too. Oh, Lord, release me from this prison of a body, she thought, for it was her body to which she was a slave. Her hunger, her cold, her deprivation … the dank cell was nothing to compare to her body’s invisible chains.

  “Sybil. Winnie.”

  It was Pippa, picking her way across the floor with a cup of water. “Help me hold her head.”

  Lillibet was pale. At times, out of the corner of her eye, Sybil would see a flash of a white light above Lillibet’s head, or a moving shadow across her body. Something was very wrong.

  Pippa dropped brackish water into her mother’s mouth, and the girls helped the old woman stretch out on the floor. Lillibet’s arms and legs twitched, and her hands curled into tight fists.

  “’Ey!” protested Margery, who was jostled out of the way. “Watch yourselves or I’ll curse ye.”

  “Be quiet,”
said Winifred.

  Hissing at them, Margery crawled over to harass a different part of the cell.

  Lillibet’s face was frozen in an expression of surprise. Her jaw and throat were hard to the touch.

  Then, with a violence that made the shadows tremble, Lillibet arched upward, her spine bent like the curve of a yew-branch bow. Her agitating muscles rippled under her skin. Her jaw was locked into a sardonic smile and a low whine escaped her throat.

  “A demon!” cried a woman nearby.

  “She be possessed, cursed!”

  “Satan has come for us!”

  “Do something!” Winifred said, reaching out toward Lillibet.

  Sybil remained still. To witness such pain made her want to disappear.

  Just as abruptly as the fit began, Lillibet slumped back down, motionless. Pippa hovered over her mother, her face panicked. “She’s a-fevered,” said Pippa, desperate hand on Lillibet’s forehead. “I know not what’s wrong! I know not what to do.”

  Lillibet was silent. There was no improvement, no motion in that inflexible jaw. For an hour they waited, hoping for some sign, some instruction from the ailing wise woman.

  They took turns watching over her.

  Later that day, or night, or dawn, or dusk, there was a treat: the guards tossed several large loaves of old bread into the cell. This happened on occasion and it was left to the women to divvy it up. The process was unfair, for the weakest could not fight over it, and the bullies got the largest share.

  The guard rattled a stick along the bars and the bread was flung into the sea of outstretched hands and starving, quivering mouths. Violence erupted—fingernails were made into claws, elbows into weapons, feet and hands clambering over each other and reaching for the prize.

  Fortunately for the Vale sisters, Pippa was in the thick of it, hollering. She emerged from beneath a pile of bony bodies with half of a loaf tucked slyly into a fold of her skirt. “Here,” she whispered, dividing the bread into three equal pieces.

  “What about Lillibet?” Sybil asked.

  “She can’t open her mouth to swallow,” said Pippa, looking upset. “Besides, fever’s not to be fed.”