Daughters of the Witching Hill

by Mary Sharratt

  "You're late!" he told the guards. "I expected you two days ago."

  The head guard grovelled like a beggar. "Not easy to make good progress, Master Covell, sir, with two lame old women in tow."

  Covell waved a dismissing hand to silence him. "What a sorry lot you are," he said, looking us prisoners up and down. He'd a good gawp at Gran and Chattox, then threw Annie Redfearn a passing glance before staring at me long and hard. I made myself go cold inside so I wouldn't flinch.

  "I am your gaoler," he said. "You whores of Satan took the Devil as your lord, but he has no power here. I'm your master now." He thumped his chest. "And it's proper humility you'll learn. It's I who has the final word on how you're kept and what you'll eat, if indeed I grant you leave to eat."

  He paced before us, his polished boots echoing on the stone floor, his muscled arms swinging as if to prove how easy he could smite us.

  "Our sovereign majesty King James holds witches such as you in deepest contempt and that's how you'll be treated. You're to be closed prisoners. That means no visitors."

  Under her breath, Chattox laughed, no doubt in bitter amusement at the thought of anybody being daft enough to seek us out in this place.

  Hearing her smothered chortle, Covell's face creased. Flew up to her, he did, with long sweeping strides, and backhanded her across the face. Him, a man in his prime, striking an old woman. Chattox seemed too stunned to even wipe away the blood that ran from her nose. Her daughter wept.

  "I'll tolerate no disrespect," Covell told us.

  How he loved this, I thought. Bullying the helpless. A mighty wrath took hold of me and I wished horrible things on Master Covell—wished that Gran's Tibb would cause boils to erupt on his pocked, oily cheeks and knot his bowels till he doubled over in torment. I wished that those heads impaled upon the spikes outside would appear in Covell's dreams to deliver the night terrors, that those who had been drawn and quartered, their innards yanked out whilst they were still alive, would stand over him, dripping blood upon him till he drowned in it. I wished him to sup on all the agony he had ever dished out.

  Covell addressed our guards. "Take the witches down the Well Tower."

  Meek as clipped ducks, the guards rushed us out of his sight.

  "You'll not want to cross Master Covell," William whispered as he marched me along. "Edward Kelly was in here and him a gentleman, a friend of Dr. John Dee, the conjurer to the old Queen. Made no difference to Covell. Kelly was in for forgery. Covell had him put in the stocks and slashed his ears off himself. Nasty business, that man. Mind yourself, Alizon. Keep your head down and your mouth shut except when he asks you a question. That's the only way you'll preserve yourself here."

  Down spiralling steps they drove us, down and ever down into the bowels of the castle till we, whom Covell called Satan's whores, were delivered into the depths of hell. A tower is meant to be a lofty thing, rising into the sky. Even our lowly Malkin Tower had the wind and starlight pouring through its glassless windows. But this Well Tower sank beneath the earth. Its dank walls seeped and dripped with water. Its only light came from a tiny window at the far end, but the floor sloped down into utter murk. At the very bottom an iron ring was set in the slimy stone floor, and we were chained to the ring and to each other. Then, taking their torches with them, the guards abandoned us in utter darkness.

  ***

  We crouched upon sparse straw that was crawling with lice.

  "A pity there's no clay down here," Chattox said, her voice ringing out like a ghost's in that murk. "Covell," she began, but even she was too defeated to finish her sentence.

  "Clay pictures won't help us," said Gran. I'd never heard her so hopeless.

  I chanted my Aves. This time I'd no need to hide my Latin murmurs, for there was no one to hear us at the bottom of the Well Tower. On and on I prayed, pleading for solace, for some vision of salvation. But the chill certainty settled inside my empty stomach. In Covell's mind, we were already tried, sentenced, and damned.

  19

  CHAINED IN THAT INFERNAL GLOOM, I fair forgot the light. A fleeting fancy, it seemed, that we had walked across open moorland and seen nesting lapwings only days ago.

  My monthlies began and I'd no rags but could only hitch up my skirts and bleed upon the mildewed straw, hanging my head and not daring to look up when the guards brought in our cold gruel.

  Off in the corner was a stinking bucket meant to receive our waste, but it was a struggle to use the thing in the dark. Soon it filled to brimming and we were left to sit chained in our own filth. Though we huddled up together, we were never warm, and we'd huge gaping sores from where our shackles rubbed our wrists and ankles raw. Lice settled into the seams of our kirtles and smocks.

  I became a creature of darkness, and feared I'd soon go blind as Gran. More beast than human, I stank worse than any pig. And so we were left to fester till the August Assizes, five months away.

  To count the passing days, I made scores by hacking my wrist shackle against the stone. Maundy Thursday came and then Good Friday when Gran asked me to say the old prayers, though they came stiff and wooden off my tongue. In this pit of hell, my faith was slipping away from me as though it were a cord I no longer possessed the strength to grasp. It wasn't that I'd become a doubter like Chattox—it was much worse. Nowell's, Baldwin's, and Covell's words infected me upon this holiest of days. Whores and witches. Whores of Satan. Could the three of them all be wrong, the High Sheriff, the Church Warden, and the Head Gaoler of Lancaster Castle? Rotting in this eternal night, I could well believe that I was as debauched and devil-led as they made me out to be.

  But for Gran's sake I chanted the prayers till my murmurs settled into an unearthly drone. Then Gran went still as a corpse, which was how she'd whiled away many an hour during our imprisonment. It had taken me some time to realise she wasn't asleep as much as away. She'd the gift to leave her body behind, casting it off as though it were a pile of lousy clothes, whilst her spirit wafted weightless from this dungeon. My chanted Latin became the stream on which she floated into her world of visions. Even Chattox dared not disturb her when she fell into her deathlike trance.

  Upon Good Friday, I will fast while I may. My empty stomach left me with a hollow floating head as I wrestled Nowell's leering devils and sought to picture something holy and pure. The darkness played tricks on my mind, causing me to see things that weren't there, and upon that Good Friday, as I chanted over Gran's unmoving body, I fancied I saw a magpie arise out of her breast and fly upon black-and-white wings through the prison walls. A tug, I felt, as though that bird were transporting me, or a part of me, bearing me along with her.

  I thought I must have lost my mind, for I floated insubstantial as a ghost before Malkin Tower on that Good Friday afternoon. Our friends and neighbours had come together: Alice Nutter, pale with worry; the Bulcocks; Mouldheels and some friends of hers; Mam's old friend Jennet Preston, come over from Yorkshire and fussing over our little Jennet, her namesake. There was our Jamie, roasting a stolen sheep upon a spit to feed them all. Even Uncle Kit and Aunt Elsie had come, though from the tight, uneasy look on my aunt's face, I could tell she'd no desire to be there. For as long as I could remember, Elsie had sought to keep Kit and herself well apart from my family at Malkin Tower, as though she feared our ill repute would taint her children.

  The others, paying little mind to my cringing aunt, pressed forward to pay their respects to my mother whose grief seemed to devour her from within. Clasping her hands, they told her how terrible it was that Gran and I had been dragged off to Lancaster. Soon everyone gathered round the table to sup upon Jamie's mutton and Alice Nutter's fish. The image before me was so clear I could almost taste the trout upon my tongue. But then a mighty commotion arose as Hargreaves barged through my mother's door and started taking down everyone's name. One after the other, our company fled home, some on foot, others on horseback, vanishing into the low-hanging fog.

  The picture faded and another appeared. Hargreaves l
aid a coaxing hand upon our Jamie's shoulder. He offered my brother a flask of spirits strong enough to make his eyes water. Reeling from the drink, our Jamie pointed to a spot under Gran's old elder tree. As Hargreaves began to dig, little Jennet came to watch, her eyes big as trenchers, till the man unearthed a clay figure and turned it over and over in his trembling hands.

  Wrenched from the scene, I fell as though from a great height, plummeting down the Well Tower where my bones smashed to splinters. A band of pain encircled my head like a crown of thorns. In the stillness of that dungeon came a skriking worse than the hounds of hell. Gran writhed full senseless. She raved, her forehead throbbing hot.

  Jennet, she had screamed. Jamie. You'll murder us all. The clay picture—had we shared the same vision?

  As I struggled to rouse her, Gran's cries summoned the guards who pretended to be brave though the sight of my blind grandmother shrieking at the invisible seemed to turn their blood to ice. They made like they saw an old witch calling down damnation upon their heads.

  "She's mad with fever," I said, looking into each of their torchlit faces.

  William was nowhere. Perhaps his master thought he'd been overkind and forbidden him to see me again. In truth, I didn't know whether to be disappointed or grateful that he wasn't there to see me so despoiled. But he, at least, might have done something to help Gran.

  "She needs better food than the slop you're giving us," I told the guards, willing myself to speak as bold as Mam would have done. "Can you bring her no broth or blanket? Just feel her skin. She'll burn up and die."

  I searched their faces for any trace of compassion, but they drew back, anxious to be gone from this cursed well of despair.

  After the men had left, Chattox groped in the darkness, laying one hand on Gran's brow, the other on her heart, and began to sing the charms Gran must have taught her before they became rivals and foes. Lost in bewilderment, I chafed Gran's cold hand and listened as her old enemy strove to heal her. At last Gran's thrashing ceased and she slept on, calm and quiet.

  "How long have we been down here?" Gran asked me when she awakened.

  "Nineteen days." I moved her hand so she could finger the scores I'd hacked in the stone.

  "Only days? Feels like years. Is it May yet?"

  "Still April," I told her.

  Chattox rubbed her raw hands together. "It will never be May down here."

  Three more days passed with Gran floating in and out of fever. When I dared to sleep, my dreams carried me to unwelcome places. I saw our Jennet looking like an abandoned child, her hair dirty and matted, though that couldn't be. Our mam loved her and would never neglect her. But Mam was nowhere. I saw the Constable coming to arrest Uncle Kit and Aunt Elsie, only Elsie went down on her knees, wheedling and pleading. You can't take us away—we've nine children. In God's name, we've nowt to do with witchcraft. Everyone knows we've lived apart from that lot at Malkin Tower since the first year of our marriage. Prepared to strike any bargain, Elsie was, if only the Constable left her and Kit in peace.

  My false aunt hugged our Jennet to her bosom before scrubbing the child from crown to toe. She dressed the child in her own daughter Martha's best Sunday gown. How Jennet twirled round in her fresh, clean dress, as though she were another girl altogether—a witch's granddaughter no longer. I saw Roger Nowell riding to Uncle Kit's door, saw our Jennet dropping into a pretty curtsey for him. Where had she learned that? Chuckling, Nowell stooped down to smile into her eyes, the way a doting grandfather would do. Then he asked her, speaking kind and patient, if there was anything she wanted to tell him about her family at Malkin Tower. He slipped a bright shilling into her small white hand.

  The guards' lantern light revealed my mother's bruised and pummelled face, her shorn head, her wrists and feet shackled to mine and to the ring in the floor.

  No. I tried to force the vision away, but this was no dream.

  Straining against his chains, my brother buried his head in my lap and clung to me, his once-strong body full a-quiver with uncomprehending terror.

  Mouldheels swore like a soldier, saying she was no witch, she'd never had any dealings with spells or imps, how could anyone think she was a witch? Her friend Alice Gray squatted on bare stone, as did Meg Pearson. Chattox spat at Meg's feet and called her a hussy, for once Meg had dallied with Chattox's husband, now fifty years dead. Jane and John Bulcock stared round like lost children. On the far side of our circle, her head as bald as the others', was Alice Nutter.

  How could this be? How could Nowell throw a gentlewoman in with the rest of us? The Bulcocks, upstanding folk who had never troubled anybody, didn't belong here either. Nor did Mouldheels, Meg Pearson, and Alice Gray, old women who liked to gossip—what had their crime been but to come to Malkin Tower upon Good Friday to ask after Gran and me? Was anyone who had ever shown us fellowship to be suspected of witchcraft? Gran and I had been given a vision of that gathering and now our family and friends had come to join us in the Well Tower. Yet Nowell had spared Uncle Kit and Aunt Elsie. And Jennet.

  "What in hell's name are you lot doing down here?" Chattox asked when the guards had gone.

  Though weak and fevered, Gran fussed over my mother who sobbed in her arms, the fight knocked out of her, her voice pitched in a wordless moan of loss.

  "Liza's bastard," said Mouldheels. "The wench condemned us. Her and her witless brother."

  Too shamed to lift his head from my lap, Jamie stiffened as if bracing himself for a blow. Covell and Nowell's cronies must have beaten him, too.

  "Your brother told Nowell that your mam murdered Henry Mitton with a clay picture," Mouldheels told me. "He spoke against the lot of us. Said I murdered some woman in Colne. Said Jane Bulcock and her boy used witchcraft to drive some woman mad."

  Hargreaves and Nowell had ill-used my simple brother, of that I was convinced. Our Jamie had intended no ill to befall us, his family and friends. But Jennet would have known what she was doing. Spite ruled my cold little sister.

  "When we heard of the arrests, we all came to Malkin Tower to offer comfort to poor Liza," Alice Nutter said. "Then Hargreaves stormed in. I've never seen such impudence. He accused us of being a coven of witches gathered for an unholy sabbath on Good Friday." Her voice rang stark in her outrage.

  The new prisoners seemed right maffled, for they'd little enough clue what a coven of witches was supposed to be. Apart from my family at Malkin Tower, none of them had dealings with charms or the cunning craft.

  "Nowell," said Gran, "has made us his fools."

  "They've arrested Jennet Preston as well," Mistress Alice said. "She's been taken to York."

  "But what are you doing down here?" Chattox asked her. "Couldn't buy your freedom with that brass of yours?"

  "It's not as simple as that," Mistress Alice replied, and that was all she would say on the matter.

  Her dignity glowed like a candle in the darkness. Still it alarmed me to think that Nowell's powers had waxed to the point where he was emboldened to take on the gentry. Could nothing stop him now? But I wagered he'd met his match in Alice Nutter. A careful and canny one, she was. Even now she clung fast to her secrets, submitting to arrest on the false charge of witchcraft as if in hope that this would turn Nowell's head from her true crime. I knew she'd sacrifice her own life if that could spare her son Miles and the priest she'd sheltered from being drawn and quartered, their heads impaled on the iron spikes outside the castle.

  Annie Redfearn broke the silence, asking if anyone knew how her daughter fared.

  "Your landlady refused to take her in," Mistress Alice said. "So I asked Miles to find a place for her at Roughlee. She's working in the kitchen."

  Annie Redfearn reached across our tangled limbs to squeeze Mistress Alice's hand. "Bless you for your kindness."

  "Bless us all," Chattox said, though she sounded well dubious whether any manner of blessing could reach the twelve of us chained together in the dark.

  Arresting Gran and me and Chattox and Ann
ie Redfearn was never enough to satisfy Nowell's greed. As Gran had said, he fancied himself a great witch-finder and King Jimmy's fool book of demonology said that witches gathered in covens of thirteen. So what had Nowell done but round up our friends and neighbours till he had thirteen in number, including Jennet Preston, who was held in York.

  Not even that was enough to sate Nowell's hunger. In the nearest cell to ours, their cries and dolour sometimes reaching our ears, was another group of wretches: folk from Samlesbury accused of witchcraft on the evidence offered up by a child named Grace Sowerbutts. Roger Nowell would have everybody believe that Lancashire was fair bristling with Satan's army.

  Some army! What were we but a lot of half-starved wraiths. Though Alice Nutter did her best to bribe the guards to bring us better rations, Covell would grant us no mercies. After a few days even Mistress Alice was as soiled and sorry-looking as the rest of us, her cheeks sunken and eyes spectral. Soon enough, Gran wasn't the only one ailing with the shakes and shivers. The gaol fever struck our Jamie. A miracle it would be if any of us lived to see our trial in August.

  We'd no respite from each other, no escape from the others' moods, or sickness, or stinking flesh. None of us could scratch at our lice without yanking the chains that confined the others. Never any peace, what with Chattox's muttering and Mouldheels's temper. Meg Pearson began to lose her mind, skriking so horrified to make the rest of us leap out of our skins. Jane Bulcock and her son went into a stupor, mute and unmoving, as if wishing themselves dead.

  When Alice Nutter prayed, I joined my voice to hers. She took me under her wing and taught me prayers that even Gran had forgotten.