In a few days, a fresh round of trials would begin and his testimony would send their necks to be cracked, his sin to be cleansed. He breathed cool air through the pillow. His thoughts turned to something more pleasant: he needed to think about opening an account with a goldsmith banker in London. If he continued to earn such wages for his work, he would soon have a fortune to worry about.
THE CACOPHONY OF THE CROWD had been a dull rumble from inside the jail. When Pippa, Sybil, and the other unfortunates were hauled out of the cell where they’d languished, it was into a different world. Bury St. Edmunds was overrun with soldiers, witnesses, magistrates, prisoners, merchants, and the curious. Their feet and voices brimmed with excitement and fear. For those not directly involved in the assizes or in the army, it was entertainment on a long summer day.
The soldiers, in red coats and the rounded helmets of the Parliamentarian forces, were on high alert, for the King’s army was indeed marching on nearby Cambridge.
One step ahead, two back again, thought Pippa. Her hands gripped the wooden slats of the prison cart.
Her cheeks were wet with tears, for she hadn’t seen the full sun in weeks. The searing light felt like a thousand tiny cuts on her eyes. The noise, too, was overwhelming. Pippa would have thought so even on a normal day, used to the gentle quiet of the countryside as she was, but today it was like being tossed into a seething cauldron of humanity. She was almost grateful for the prison cart that separated her from the street.
Although not a word had yet been spoken, Pippa was already resigned to her conviction. Her sympathetic witnesses were either accused themselves, dead, or had dropped her like a hot stone—like Hugh. A dart of anger punctured her indifference for a moment. He’s either too dim to see that I was in danger, or he never cared about me from the beginning. She sighed. There was nothing she could do about it, or about him.
She was in this alone.
Of course, there was Sybil, sitting next to her. It must be worse for her. It was Sybil’s own father who’d abandoned her to rot. But they couldn’t convict a minister’s daughter … could they?
In ill news for Sybil, Pippa overheard a conversation between two rough-dressed men walking alongside the cart. From the sounds, they lived here in Bury and were attending the witch trials much as they would a sporting event. They spoke about a minister, a Reverend Lowes, who was on trial today for witchcraft. Pippa’s heart sank. No one was immune.
“Now there’s a wretch,” said one of the men, nudging his friend and pointing at Pippa. She felt like a freak in a side show.
“She’s an old hag, really,” said the other, snorting. “Witches make they-selves look poorly, so you take pity on them … then they git you!” He punched his friend and they veered off toward a pub.
The cart waited in traffic for what seemed like hours before it lurched forward and then stopped behind the courthouse. Pippa saw little of the building, for she was shackled and prodded forward, and had to keep her eyes on her feet to keep from stumbling. She saw a clean-swept floor and then she was sitting on a bench between Sybil and Joan Buckett, in a low-beamed room full of other chained individuals. They heard from another prisoner that Ash Potter had died during his incarceration.
Pippa was ashamed to feel relief. The truth about Joan Buckett’s stolen money would never be revealed in court, and Pippa would hang as a witch and not a petty thief.
Along the sides of the room, clerks ran with stacks of paper, looking twice as hassled as the gaol-keeper ever had. There was little talk amongst the prisoners, for what more could be said? This was happening to Pippa and she was no agent in her own fate. Was this what was meant by surrender to God? She closed her eyes and felt the first pins and needles of panic in her fingers. She might die tomorrow. This was the end, this dusty, smelly, crowded, foreign room. The apathy that had protected her in gaol ebbed away in the face of this excitement.
“My nerves cannot take this,” she whispered to Sybil.
“I know,” said Sybil. “Just … surrender, I suppose. Fret not over what we cannot change.”
“We could pray.”
Sybil began, “Oh Heavenly Father, be with us now and at the hour of our deaths …”
“Not aloud! And not that.” Pippa was beginning to have sore feelings toward the God of church. “Something … older … I know not … something about us, not about Heaven. We’re far from that right now.”
“Not so far as you believe,” said Sybil, smiling. “All right. I’ll think on it.” She closed her eyes and her lips moved. “Earth and air, fire and water … fathers, sons, mothers, daughters …”
Pippa repeated Sybil’s phrase over and over in her head, taking whatever comfort it might give. Earth and air, fire and water. Fathers, sons, mothers, daughters. Everything there was, and everything there had ever been.
A bucket of water and a ladle was passed around and she drank. It tasted gritty, like prison water. Pippa’s thoughts were an endless circle of worry and fear. What would happen in the courtroom? What would they decide? She knew it was false hope, a chance like the eye of a needle, but she couldn’t help but pray she might be the exception … that the jury would listen to her, would see her innocence.
Looking down at her grubby hands, she didn’t feel innocent. There was nothing respectable about her appearance. She was no better than Anne and Joan Buckett—pitiful, desperate. Willing to do and say anything to save her own skin.
The knot in her stomach turned and twisted. Tears gathered and she pushed them back, telling herself to hold on for the sake of her friend. She had to be strong for Sybil. Even so, a few tears managed to escape her control, hot tracks down her dirty face, and Pippa felt ashamed of herself for being so scared.
The accused were taken in groups of five and not seen again. They disappeared through a wooden door in the corner of the room and up some stairs. From the outside, Pippa could hear a milling crowd, an occasional bout of shouting or clapping, and the echoing strains of song-sellers and the honking voices of food vendors.
Another roar from above. The mob was its own beast, many minds acting as one, like a swarm of bees.
The godly, thought Pippa.
“Philippa Wylde.”
That was her name. There was a clerk standing nearby. A thrill of terror ran down her spine. Oh Jesus, save me, save me, save me … Victim, accused … was there a difference? She stood up. She turned to Sybil, whose name had also been called, and found her friend’s face calm but body shaking.
They ascended the stair beyond the door and entered the large courtroom. Pigeons flew about the rafters above, a menace to the sea of heads below. Pippa rummaged through the multitude of faces, looking for someone friendly, someone she knew, but they blurred together. She almost caught on a man with dark eyes and a beard in the front row … but couldn’t bear to look at him. The murderer who used law as his weapon.
She was led into the dock with the other four accused. A wooden half-wall divided them from the rest of the courtroom, and at the head of the room was a long table covered with a cloth. There sat the grand jury, all serious-looking men dressed as officials. There was also a chair on a wooden stand—for witnesses, she assumed—and a great many clerks writing things down.
A man wearing bright purple robes spoke, projecting his rich voice across the room. “The following are charged with the heinous crime of witchcraft. Katherine Tooly, of Westleton; Anne Buckett, of the Vale; Joan Buckett, of the same; Sybil Yates, of the same, and Philippa Wylde, of the same.” He cleared his throat and addressed the row of jurors. “Let it be known these are charges most serious. Take each case on its merits, and by evidence alone. A charge is not guilt. Wretched they may be, but not damned, unless by proof they are discovered to be guilty.”
This speech made Pippa feel a bit better, but from his manner the man in purple said this as a matter of routine before each arraignment.
First on the dock was Katherine Tooly. Asked how she pled, she answered “Not guilty.”
A clerk called out a name and a man in farmer’s clothes stepped up to the empty chair. He told the court of how Katherine—a middle-aged woman with a sad face—had done him wrong over the years through magical workings. With each point, the public cheered, booed, or shouted. They had their own measures of justice. One of the jurors asked, “Be there a confession on her part?”
“Yes,” said the man in purple, flipping through a stack of papers and handing over a scrap upon which Katherine had been forced to confess.
It was shocking how little time Katherine Tooly’s case was allowed. Anne Buckett was next.
Pippa sat up straight in her chair, for it was Robert Pye who took the stand against Anne. It made Pippa want to cry to see someone from home. Pye told the story of how Anne had bewitched his son Francis.
Knowing as she did that the curse on the Pye family was not Anne’s doing, Pippa’s heart was heavy. Oh, Lillibet. If only I’d followed your direction.
She noticed that her name was omitted from Pye’s testimony. He said nothing of how she’d helped “break” the spell.
Then again, that was cunning-magic, and might condemn her as well as help her. The court could even reprimand Pye and his wife for turning to that instead of prayer.
“The court calls Master John Stearne.”
When Stearne took the stand and told the court of Anne Buckett’s confession and the result of her swimming ordeal, something black twisted inside of Pippa. Stearne’s reedy voice told thin lies.
Still, Anne’s verdict was plain from the look on the jurors’ faces.
Next was Anne’s mother Joan, against whom Stearne also testified. Joan looked the part of the witch with the magnificent wart on her nose, her greying puff of hair, and her rough voice. Again Pippa prayed her thanks that Joan didn’t know who had stolen from her. Instead the old woman seemed to be quite mad, and she was unrepentant. When the man in purple asked how she pled, she said “Guilty,” with clear relish.
The crowd drew back in their seats, hushed and enthralled.
As with Anne, the jurors were convinced of Joan’s guilt, and the man in purple waved his hand at the clerk to get on with it.
“Sybil Yates, please stand. How do you plead?”
Sybil, clear and angelic, said, “Not guilty.”
MATTHEW HOPKINS SUPPRESSED A yawn and fanned himself with his hat. Lord, but this chamber is hot, he thought. Although it was gratifying to speak his piece in court, it was uncomfortable. Sweat coursed down between his shoulder blades and gathered in the pits of his folded knees. Summer was his favorite season because it offered the longest hours of daylight, but he didn’t appreciate the lack of proper ventilation in the court at Bury St. Edmunds. Mosquitoes and flies buzzed in the air, and the circulation from outside was hampered by the narrowness of the windows. The room smelled of cloth dampened by sweat, of the dusty odor of a city in summer, of yeasty ale-breath. Hopkins wiped his forehead with his handkerchief.
At present, John Stearne was testifying against the witches from the Vale, that back country hamlet. The older woman with the rat’s nest of hair had actually pled guilty. I knew I was right about her, he thought. About all of them. Especially—
But he cut himself off there. He had to stay alert and focused.
This trial was different from his first at Chelmsford. The Bury magistrates and the sergeant, Godbold—dressed in the official purple robes—had been less than enthusiastic about the number of witchcraft cases flooding their chamber. It meant the assizes would go on for days in order to get through the hundreds of accused witches. Perhaps we did our job too well for them, thought Hopkins disagreeably. Would they let such evil go unpunished?
Godbold in particular had been skeptical of the ordeals used by Hopkins and Stearne, hinting to the grand jury that they were too harsh and yielded questionable results. Hopkins was gratified that old Joan Buckett had stated her guilt in addition to Stearne’s testimony. It made him look more believable.
With a frown Hopkins regarded the jury. They were not as zealous or dedicated as he would have hoped. The costs of incarcerating over one hundred and fifty accused witches was outweighing the rightful fear of their craft. Already one of the magistrates had complained to him that many of the smaller villages could not afford the prison debt. Hopkins had replied, affronted, that it was not his fault that a plague of witchcraft was upon the land.
The magistrate had also hinted, and not very subtly, that Hopkins himself was out for profit, mentioning that at twenty shillings per interrogation, and hundreds accused … Hopkins coughed into his fist and shifted in his chair, trying to calm his anger. It not his fault that God’s work paid well.
The magistrate didn’t know the things he knew.
Sybil Yates was up and so was Hopkins, testifying against her. He nodded at the other witnesses ready to speak against the changeling girl.
At first Hopkins did not recognize Sybil, for her eyes were large and sad inside her head. The gaol had not gone easy on her and she seemed to have shrunk in size and age. She could have passed for a child. Harmless, innocent … Have no sympathy, suffer her not! he warned the jury in his head.
Her pure voice said, “Not guilty.”
But Hopkins had her confession, the one she’d signed herself. He smiled and stood and took the stand. He’d been sworn-in many trials ago to tell the truth as he knew it. “I have proof in the form of a confession signed by Miss Yates.” He handed it over to Godbold, and a clerk entered it as evidence. Hopkins told of how Sybil had boasted of reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards, how the search-women had found an unnatural mole near the girl’s privy parts, and most shockingly, of the raven imp which had come into the room during the watching.
“The raven, black as the night, came straight to her,” Hopkins addressed the crowd as much as the jury. “Then … it was quite terrible, from what I was told … the bird opened its mouth and spoke.”
Gasps blossomed across the room.
“What did the bird say?” asked a magistrate, who was also a minister.
“It said—in the girl’s very own voice, like an echo—her name. Sybil. ’Twas the surest case of an imp I’ve seen in my considerable experience.”
A muttering of dread rumbled through the crowd. The slight figure of Sybil, who was eerily calm, had taken on the quality of a witch at last. Hopkins avoided looking to the left of her, where Philippa Wylde sat. He could feel her eyes on him.
“Thank you, Master Hopkins. The next witness is the Reverend Peter Yates.” The clerk paused and whispered to someone. “He is the girl’s father.”
Hopkins sat down in the front row and watched Reverend Yates ascend. From the way he licked his lips, he was nervous. Hopkins hoped he wouldn’t back out now.
Sworn in, Yates sat down and began to speak. “The girl was born eighteen years ago. My wife died during the birth after refusing the midwifery of the town’s cunning-woman, Lillibet Wylde. Elizabeth.”
Godbold asked, “Elizabeth Wylde?”
A clerk shouted out, “Dead!”
“Go on, Reverend Yates” Godbold said.
“I believe the midwife, who was also a witch and accused by this court—is she dead?”
“Dead!” shouted the clerk.
“Yes. So. The midwife bewitched my wife and caused her death. The child, Sybil, was never normal.”
“Are you saying that your child herself is bewitched, sir? If so, that be victimhood, and not for her to be tried for witchcraft,” said another jurist.
“No! What I say is—I’m loathe to speak of it, even after all these years—I say that girl,” he pointed at Sybil, “is not my own daughter. She is a changeling, a creature of Satan, planted in my own home!”
The crowd was justly horrified.
Sybil’s eyes blinked, wide and beguiling. Her lip quivered. “Papa?”
Yates
lowered his pointing finger and turned his face away. “You see, your honors, she came to us with … with a caul over her face. A veil, an unholy sight it was.”
The drama reverberated through all those present. Hopkins shuddered at the thought of a child born with no face. That was the surest witchcraft of all. As he looked at Sybil, he imagined her veiled, approaching him, and was glad he’d already given his testimony.
“She is not my own child by my wife. She is a creature of the Devil.” Yates stood down, staring at the hat that he turned in his hands, over and over.
“Next witness, Elizabeth Yates!”
The prim figure of the Reverend’s eldest stood and climbed up to the witness chair. Her hair was coiffed and her clothing spotless. She looked every bit the godly woman and Hopkins wondered why he couldn’t feel attracted to someone like that, someone who would make a fine wife.
“I have witnessed terrible things of Sybil,” Elizabeth told the court. “All her life she has been strange. But it was this very summer when she revealed her evil pact to me. She fell ill with what she claimed was the marsh fever. But I walked in upon her one night and she was conversing with a spirit, some terrible presence. I could see nothing, but her eyes were aglow with the talk.”
The courtroom was hushed, on edge to hear what came next.
“She then told me a nonsense rhyme. After, I suspected trickery, and we moved her bed …” Elizabeth paused and held a hand to her mouth. “There were Satanic symbols written beneath her bed, on the floor, where she thought none could find them.”
“Dear God,” said a magistrate.
“What was more, Sybil confessed herself to be part of a coven. The leader was her.” Elizabeth raised her finger to point at Pippa. The eyes of the crowd followed the line of her finger and registered Pippa with her dark hair, haunted eyes, and cheekbones chiseled by hunger. “They wrote the evil symbols on the floor.”
“What did the symbols look like?”
Elizabeth paused, as though thinking. Hopkins was proud of her performance. He and Stearne had coached her on how best to convince the jury. “Pagan. One was a spiral. The other was the Devil’s star. And then there was a magic square made of words. It must have taken great knowledge of the black arts to remember nonsensical letters like that.”
Suffer a Witch Page 25
