by Julie Hearn
“So you’re the Kings son, then?” is the first thing she says, the words gravelly in her throat.
“I am,” he replies. “But don’t stand on ceremony. I get tired of people fawning around me like lapdogs.”
She is quiet again for a while. He has given her his coat to wear. It wraps her twice round and is slowly warming her through.
Then: “You shouldn’t have pardoned me,” she tells him.
“What?”
“You shouldn’t have pardoned me in front of the minister and them others. I never did the things they said, so I didn’t need forgiveness—not yours, the King’s, the Lord’s, nor anyone else’s.”
He looks at her in astonishment—her mutinous face, her raggedy hair—then bursts out laughing.
“I’ve just saved you from the gallows!” he chortles. “And … and …”
“I know.” Watching him—this boy, this prince—rocking with laughter, Nell feels her own mouth start to twitch.
“You did say not to fawn,” she adds, a big grin breaking on her face. “And I did save your life first.”
“Yes, but …”
“’Tis true.”
“But …”
“Well then …”
They are both laughing now, laughing so hard that it hurts. And it seems to Nell as if the carriage is laughing too as it bumps and jolts along.
All of a sudden she wishes her granny was with them. Her granny would have been cackling louder than either of them, out of sheer relief for the continuing of Nell’s life. And wouldn’t she so love to have seen the coast?!
Sea sand, Nell thinks to herself as her giggles subside. Coral, white and red; foam of the sea; stone pumice; sea salt and crabs claws; a feather from the back of a gull bird … We could have done with some of those things. Granny, couldn’t we?
And the answer comes slipping into her head as she leans back against her seat, suddenly exhausted.
So gather them yourself. And use them.
Do your job, girl.
And be happy.
The Witch-finder General leaves the village at first light the following day—with half his usual fee. It is fair to say that he is not a happy man. The minister’s housekeeper watches him go, his heavy cloak flaring like his temper as he clatters out of the courtyard on his fine horse, without so much as a “fare thee well” or a “thank you” for his hearty breakfast.
A rude person, the housekeeper decides, turning away from the kitchen window. Ill-bred for all his smart talk and the tremendous shine on his boots.
A gust of rain smacks the window glass. The housekeeper sniffs. He will have a filthy ride of it, that witch-finder, all the way back to Essex. And serves him right. Arrogant bogger.
The kitchen door creaks open, and in sidles the minister’s younger daughter.
“What is you want at this gray hour?” snaps the housekeeper. “Creeping round in your shift like an ill-bred wench. For shame!”
Patience Madden ignores all of this.
“What will happen to the witch’s body?” she says, her voice high-pitched and feverish. “Will she be divided into twelve pieces, like the Levite’s concubine, and sent to all the coasts of England? Or will she be eaten by dogs, like Jezebel?”
The housekeeper takes three steps toward the door, her face grim and angry.
“Shoo!” she hisses, pushing the girl from the room. “Go back to your bedchamber this instant, missy. You and your poisonous fancies!”
Closing the door, she marches back across the kitchen and sticks her hands in a bowl of groats, left to steep all night in a quart of hog’s blood.
They will need a good meal this day, the minister and his daughters. Something heavy and meaty for their jumpy bellies to work on. Something to distract them from their nerves, which are going to be as tight as lute strings now that the witch is pardoned and as free as a bird.
Lucky brat, she muses. Lucky, lucky little chit. To have been saved from the gallows like that, in the perfect nick of time. What were the odds? What power, presence, or spell made that come about?
The minister’s housekeeper adds cream, chopped thyme, parsley, succory, endive, sorrel, mace, pepper, and a shower of suet to the bowl and begins pummeling the mixture as if it were somebody’s face.
She has never set much store by magic. Piskies, yes, she believes in them, having seen one so recently with her own two eyes. But magic? The stuff of dreamers, weaklings, and gullible oafs, she’s always thought. Yet what else but magic—and the most extraordinary spell, at that—would bring a prince of the realm galloping to the rescue of a common girl?
“Poppycock,” she mutters to herself as she pounds and squishes away at the ingredients for blood pudding. “Fiddle-faddle, bafflegab … pie in the sky.”
And when she’s done taking her anger and spite out on the food, she slaps it into a pot and boils it ferociously.
Later it will give the minister heartburn and make Grace Madden puke. Patience, being wiser than anyone has noticed, will take one sniff and refuse to eat it.
For who’s to say what the difference is between a love potion concocted with kindness on a waxing moon and a blood pudding mixed in anger on a filthy winter’s morning? Who’s to say what has an effect? What is magical, what isn’t, and why?
Who truly understands?
No one has set foot in the cunning woman’s cottage since the mob came to trap Nell for a witch. For one thing it would take a brave soul to cross the threshold of a place where Satan was often made welcome. For another every villager knows there is nothing in there worth stealing, except a good solid cauldron—and as Mistress Denby keeps pointing out, who would fancy making stew in a witch’s pot that has probably held everything from rats’ tails to babies’ bones in its time?
So although the cottage door remains ajar behind a thicket of dead stems and twigs, nothing has been disturbed. The cinders in the hearth are cold and gray, and the cunning woman’s broom has snails inching up its handle. Upstairs the turnip-shaped hole in the thatch has widened some more, and the blanket on the pallet is so wet, you could wring it out.
Mistress Bramlow enters quietly and stands beside the empty cauldron, remembering.
She has no fear of this place.
“Chook,” she calls softly. “Chook, chook chook.”
In her heart of hearts, she does not expect anything to happen. Still, it is worth a try.
“Chook? Chook, chook, chookie?”
Nothing.
With a sigh, she turns to go.
Then she hears it. A single cluck so faint that it sounds like a piskie’s hiccup.
Quickly she moves to the ladder and starts to climb.
It is so cold up in the roof space that her breath comes out in clouds.
“Chook, chook?”
Perhaps she is imagining things. Perhaps that sound was no more than the skittering of a mouse in the eaves or the twinge of a floorboard.
But, no … there it is again.
And over on the pallet, right in the middle: a slow movement as if some small thing has decided to get out of bed.
Mistress Bramlow holds her breath and stays where she is, standing at the top of the ladder, her cold hands gripping the topmost rung. It might be a piskie, after all. She has never seen a piskie and isn’t sure how she will fare if one pops up right here and now. It wont be pleased, she knows, to have been woken from its winter sleep. It will be in no mood to answer a question. It might even bite.
Another rustling, a little louder this time, and there the thing is.
Mistress Bramlow sighs with relief as a stupid brown head with a wobbly red comb lifts and slowly turns.
“Come along then, chookie,” she murmurs, climbing all the way into the roof space and walking slowly toward the pallet, with both hands outstretched. “Come along now.”
The dun chicken is too weak to struggle as she lifts it up and checks it over. The wound ripped by the witch-finder’s spur is still there, but it is miraculously cle
an and beginning to heal. And the rest of its body, although somewhat shrunken, is nowhere near as wasted as one would expect, given that no one can have fed, watered, or cuddled this creature for almost a month.
The weakness, Mistress Bramlow realizes, has more to do with misery than injury or starvation. The dun chicken has simply lost the will to live.
“Come on now,” she croons, tucking it gently beneath one arm. “You’ll be all right now, chookie. You’ll be all right with us.”
It must have found a stash of corn, she decides, going carefully back down the ladder. Or an old loaf. It must have drunk water from the washing bowl in the roof space—although how it got up there in the first place, with its leg all cut open, is a mystery.
Leaving the cottage, she has a go at closing the door, but the great wodge of dead honeysuckle is in the way, and unless she puts the chicken down and spends time cutting twigs back, the door is never going to shut.
“Oh, leave it,” she mutters to herself, turning away.
Nyit, nyit. Wise choice.
Left alone again in the cunning woman’s cottage, half a dozen piskies adjust their nose plugs and drift back to sleep. Five of them are up in the roof space, burrowed deep inside the mattress like lumps in a pan of porridge. Only one of them woke up when the sad-mother-one appeared to take the chicken away. And it was too snug in the soft darkness to even think about biting or flashing its arse.
It is glad that the chicken has gone. Smelly old thing. They had all felt sorry for it at first and had been perfectly willing to carry it up the ladder, to share their wonderful nesting place. They had even fetched water for it when it clucked in a parched-sounding way and fed it corn when it got too gurgly in the stomach region. One of the female piskies had even gone so far as to rub a salve of crushed juniper berries on its injured leg region, so the wound wouldn’t fester.
That was a particularly nice thing for a piskie to have done, but as it said at the time, who wants to wake up in the spring to find a dead chicken moldering in the nest?
Anyway the chicken has gone now, which means they can all snooze soundly throughout the winter.
Nyit. Smelly old bird.
In the downstairs room one piskie sleeps alone. The others don’t want it, because it snores too much and shouts out when it dreams. It is a male piskie, this one, and has a lot of sleep to catch up on after missing the start of hibernation to run the Errand.
Two others helped, but not much. And neither of them would have bothered if the oldest female in the tribe hadn’t insisted. You didn’t argue with this particular female. Oooooo no. Too mad, and too nasty, with sons in every ditch and a claim on all the best pickings.
One piskie to gather information. Another to write it down. A third to run the Errand—but only as far as the border. That’s what the mad old female had decreed, before taking to its nest in the minister’s garden.
The information had been easily gleaned.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
There’d been no ignoring it. Not for any of them.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
The piskie scribe had done a patchy job, using mud to make the words on bark peeled from a silver birch.
All of two minutes it had taken. Hardly an arduous chore.
Running the Errand, though … even without crossing the border. Ooooo what a challenge! What a footsore and miserable task to land on any male piskie looking forward to its winter sleep.
It had done it, though. Ooooo yes. Plod, plod across the moor with the message tied to its back region and a dozen will-o’-the-wisps lighting the way.
The fairymanchild and his horse had been waiting, as arranged, on neutral ground at the very edge of the border. A rare thing, cooperation between piskies and fairies. As rare as a blizzard in August.
Only for a Merrybegot would they declare a temporary truce—and then only with little love lost in the doing of it.
Give it here and begone, you smelly creature, the fairymanchild had hissed.
Oooo! Pretty is as pretty does. Drunken idiot! Shimmering fool! the piskie had spat back before unshouldering the burden of its message and handing it over.
The fairymanchild had looked upon the piece of bark with obvious distaste.
The fairies would have done a more beautiful job, using proper parchment and ink pressed from scarlet berries. But at least the words had been legible:
Bah!
The fairymanchild had tucked the message into a fine velvet pouch and wheeled his horse around. No time to waste. No time for a nap or a quick cup of blackberry wine. The hours would have to be stilled, if not sent backward, if he was to get to Falmouth and alert the Prince before it was too late.
So off he had galloped in a shower of glitter, without bothering to say good-bye—which was just as well, since had he seen the piskie’s parting gesture, he might have stayed to fight and it could have led to war.
As it was he did his duty and completed the Errand according to plan. He woke the Prince by tickling his toes, then vanished, leaving the message where it would be seen and understood. And he slowed time just long enough for the Prince and his men to get to where they had to go, to rescue the fairy midwife.
And then he went home, put on his slippers, and drank himself into a stupor, deep in the ribs of the hill.
The piskie is exhausted. It doesn’t mind that the others have banned it from the cunning woman’s pallet, for it is a loner by nature and prefers a hard sleeping surface, anyway, to somewhere as soft and claggy as the inside of a mattress.
After a bit of scratching around, it has found somewhere that suits it perfectly—a wooden box, so well hidden that nothing and no one is going to disturb it. The lid was a bit stiff, and there was stuff inside that needed lifting out: a bit of old rope, a knife, a goblet, and a box of salt.
It has put all these things to one side, where it will see them when it wakes up.
The rope will be useful, come the warmer weather, for making a ladder or lots of belts for holding trousers up. And the goblet has sparkly bits round the rim, which the female piskies will want to wear in their hair. Even the salt might come in handy, for throwing in people’s eyes.
These objects, the piskie knows, must have been important to somebody once, to have been hidden away so carefully.
Still …
Finders keepers, it chunters, curling up in the empty box.
Nyit nyit. Zzzzzzzzz.
The Confession of Patience Madden
THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1692
We were never told, Grace and I, the exact circumstances of the witch’s escape. Oar housekeeper knew the full story but kept her counsel. Father knew it too, and it put him in the foulest of tempers for many a moon. I believe he brooded on it for the rest of his life. I believe he never quite got over it.
My sister became greatly agitated when it became clear to us that there had been no hanging and that the cunning woman’s granddaughter was alive and well and off who knew where with the one who had saved her from the noose.
“’Twas surely the Devil that took her!” she shrieked. “Satan on his black charger, striking sparks from the earth!”
“Enough of your conjurings, missy,” our housekeeper scolded. “’Twas a horse as white as milk and a gentleman as real as anyone. And there’s nothing can be done about it, so best you make what you can of a bad business.”
It was morning time. We were supposed to be dressing. We were supposed to be as we were.
I looked hard at my sister’s stomach, as big as a cannonball still, beneath her shift.
“What will happen to your belly now?” I asked. “Will it stay like that forever?”
Perhaps she’ll die, I thought. Perhaps she’ll keep getting bigger and bigger until she bursts like a seedpod.
I hoped it wouldn’t happen anywhere near me. I hoped it wouldn’t happen at all.
I hoped the cunning woman’s granddaughter would forget about hexing my sister and that the bloating would cease.
“Be still!” Grace roared before turning clumsily to our housekeeper and grabbing her big red hands.
“What if the witch talks?” she hissed. “What if she blabs, and word gets round? What if it means we can’t go to the New World after all? Father will surely kill me!”
What? What? What?
“Go where?” I cried. “What new world are you talking about? Tell me!”
I was fit to weep. They could have been planning a secret voyage to the moon, for all I knew about it.
Our housekeeper looked at me, her lip curling as if I was something that needed sweeping up or putting away.
“Leave us,” she said to Grace. “I’ll tell her what she needs to know.”
Dragging her feet, my sister threw a shawl around herself and left the room.
And our housekeeper sat down on the edge of the bed and told me: Come spring, my father, Grace, and I would be sailing across the world to live among our fellow Puritans in a new land. But first, before we went, we had to wait for my sister to be relieved of the Devil’s spawn.
“Now what else would you be asking?” she said. “Be quick, for I’ve a pudding on the boil.”
I had a dozen questions about the voyage to the new world. But they could wait.
“What is the Devil’s spawn?” I asked. “And how did it get there?”
The explanation took many minutes, I sensed my sister hovering beyond the door, but her presence was of no consequence to me. I listened, openmouthed, as our housekeeper explained frolicking to me in no uncertain terms.
“Well, that’s the measure of it,” she snapped at last. “Only it didn’t happen like that with Miss Grace, as well you know, for you were right here when the witch threw her nasty charm, and it landed slap bang on your poor sister’s tummy.”
I said nothing, only stared at her, hard.
“’Twas like the Holy Spirit descending on the Virgin Mary,” she continued, warming to her tale, “except there was nothing good or holy about it, for it begat the Devil’s spawn.”
She patted my hand, mistaking my expression.
