Daughters of the Witching Hill

by Mary Sharratt

  Alice Nutter bent close to me as though I were her own daughter.

  "Don't give up hope," she said with a knowing in her voice as vast as Gran's. "The one thing they can't take from us is what we carry inside ourselves. By Our Lady, you are bound for a better place."

  I wished I could believe her. Though I sought to understand the meaning of our travails, I saw only ruin and approaching death. The Red Lion's finest French claret wasn't near strong enough to blot out my terror of what lay before us. I tried to recall the serenity on Gran's face when she died, yet the memory seemed so fragile.

  The guards told us to empty our goblets and move along. Least the wine blurred the edges of things: the ache in my calves, the crowd lined up to heckle us. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a dark streak and then a black dog crossed my path. A black bitch. To think the creature had followed me all this way to Lancaster and I still didn't know her name. How hard Gran had tried to teach me to welcome my familiar instead of running away. What might I have become if I'd only possessed the courage?

  Seeing my face fold up in pain and regret, Mistress Alice reached her manacled hand to mine. "Courage, love. It's not we who must fear death, but those who persecute the innocent. Don't dwell upon dark thoughts. Think of the happiest and most blessed things you know."

  I thought about Nancy and how we used to laugh. Of how strong and healthy my body used to be in the old days; how I'd once raced through the fields, swift as the hares; how I had walked ten miles as though it were nothing, instead of staggering along breathless as I did this day whilst the black bitch kept pace with me, walking between me and the mob as if to ward me.

  The horde pressing in on both sides gawped at me and I gawped right back. Let them get a good look at the witch about to die before their greedy eyes. I scowled into the faces of the mean-faced brats gathered to point and screech. What a scruffy lot they were, almost as ragged as the prisoners in Lancaster Gaol. Public hangings were the biggest feast days they'd see now that there were no more processions, no more saints' days or holy days like there used to be when Gran was a girl. Pity welled up inside me when I thought of their bleak lives. Seeing a lass about Jennet's age, I offered her a smile, only the poor thing took a fright and covered her eyes.

  I'd never have children of my own nor ever know the love of a man, but die a maid like one of the virgin martyrs of the old religion. That notion made me burst out laughing. Glancing backward at Mam, I saw her frown, no doubt wondering how I could find anything amusing at a time like this. How I wished I could clasp her in my arms one last time, but the guards were stood between us, hastening us up the hill.

  Too soon the platform was before us, the gibbet with its nine empty nooses. Which would be mine? Swinging my head to search the throng, I saw no sign of Uncle Kit or the Holdens of Bull Hole Farm. But propped upon his litter was my lamed Yorkshire pedlar watching me go with tears in his eyes.

  "Pray for me," I begged him as the guards shoved me past.

  I choked at the sight of William stepping from the crowd to wave his last farewell. How my heart rattled as I remembered every act of kindness that young guard had shown me on the long march from Clitheroe to Lancaster.

  "I won't let you suffer, Alizon!" he shouted before the men could drag me out of earshot. "I'll pull your legs. Make it quick for you."

  What he promised was the greatest mercy I could ask for now.

  The guards harried us up the steps to the wooden platform where the hangman waited, his face hidden in a black hood. As far as my brother was concerned, hanging seemed like overdoing it. Our Jamie lay in a faint in the arms of his guards. He'd already died in his soul when they first chained him at the bottom of the Well Tower.

  We nine condemned witches were lined up; I was between Mam and Alice Nutter. John Bulcock wouldn't shut his gob but proclaimed his innocence to the bystanders who heaved in laughter. Off came our shackles and before I'd a chance to savour the lightness round my wrists, the guard trussed them behind my back, this time with rope. Next we were made to climb upon the long wooden bench. Only thing left to do was say my final prayers.

  The Latin words Gran had taught me came rushing from my lips in an unstoppable incantation whilst William and my pedlar stared as though unable to look away. Maybe John Law wondered if my death would break the spell and end his lameness. As I prayed that he would find healing and solace, the black bitch bayed and I felt that hum inside me again, thrumming through my veins and bones, the power rising. If only I'd allowed Gran to teach me before I happened upon John Law, I might have been a cunning woman and not a witch. Through the door of memory I heard her hoarse old voice.

  What hath he in his hand?

  A golden wand.

  What hath he in his other hand?

  Heaven's door keys.

  Stay shut, hell door.

  Let the little child

  Go to its Mother mild.

  I gazed straight into the sun, letting it sear my eyes. Ave, Maria. Ave, Regina Caelorum. A woman clothed in the sun.

  Three paths stretched before me. The right-hand path led to heaven, the left-hand path to hell, but the path betwixt and between led into the heart of the forest. From out of that bluebell wood the Lady cantered upon her moon-white mare with the silver and gold bells twined in her mane. Queen of Heaven—that name did not belong to her. She was a queen of earth, Queen of Elfhame, the one Gran told me about when I was a little lass in her herb garden. She's shown herself to you. Call out to her and she'll come to you again. When the Lady raised her hand to bless me, I wept in overpowering awe. In a blink she was gone. In her stead I saw Pendle Hill, its slopes green as the Lady's gown.

  The hangman fit the rope round my neck, the hood over my head. Frantic, I prayed as the rope bit deep into my skin. I chanted till he kicked the bench from beneath my feet, leaving me to swing and kick and judder. Queen of Heaven, Queen of Elfhame—I held them both in my heart. A magpie landed in a meadow of lad's love and then that magpie became my grandmother, except she wasn't old or lame or blind. Full beautiful, her chestnut hair crowned in blossoms, she turned to me and called my name.

  Inside my bursting skull a rare light blazed. From down the forest path I saw a wreath of roses, a garland of green, a diadem of stars.

  V. A LIGHT FAR-SHINING

  Bess Southerns

  24

  YOU'LL NOT FIND our graves anywhere. God-fearing folk do not bury witches in consecrated ground or even in the unhallowed plot beyond the churchyard walls where the suicides and unchristened go. After I died in gaol, they burned my corpse, then buried my charred bones on the wild heath overlooking Lancaster Castle. Three months on, they did the same to Alizon, Liza, Jamie, and the rest of them hanged upon that dazzling August day. No crosses mark our resting place, just heather and nesting lapwings. Only our names and the lies they told about us lingered on.

  Away in Pendle Forest, Roger Nowell ordered his men to bring down Malkin Tower stone by stone till only the foundation remained. Yet he could never banish me and mine from these parts. This is our home. Ours. We will endure, woven into the land itself, its weft and warp, like the very stones and the streams that cut across the moors.

  What is yonder that casts a light so far-shining?

  My own dear children hanging from the gallows tree.

  Hanging sore by twisted neck,

  How they gasp and how they thrash.

  Stay shut, hell door.

  Let my children arise and come home to me.

  Neither stick nor stake has the power to keep thee.

  Open the gate wide. Step through the gate. Come, my children. Come home.

  * * *

  Afterword

  All the major characters and events portrayed in this novel are drawn from court clerk Thomas Potts's account of the 1612 Lancashire witch trials, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, published in 1613. In this meticulously documented case, seven women and two men from Pendle Forest were hanged as witches, b
ased largely on "evidence" given by a nine-year-old girl and her older brother, who appeared to suffer from learning difficulties.

  Before the reign of James I, witch persecutions had been relatively rare in England. But James I's book Daemonologie, a witch-hunter's manual, presented the idea of a vast conspiracy of satanic witches threatening to undermine the nation. Shakespeare wrote his play Macbeth, which presents the first depiction of a witches' coven in English literature, in James I's honour.

  To curry favour with his monarch, magistrate Roger Nowell arrested and prosecuted no fewer than twelve individuals from the Pendle region and even went to the far-fetched extreme of accusing them of conspiring in their very own Gunpowder Plot to blow up Lancaster Castle. Two decades before Matthew Hopkins began his witch-hunting career in East Anglia, Nowell had set himself up as the witch-finder general of Lancashire.

  Thomas Potts paid particular attention to Elizabeth Southerns, alias Old Demdike, the one alleged witch who escaped the hangman by dying in prison before she could come to trial. In England, unlike Scotland and Continental Europe, the law forbade the use of torture. Thus the trial transcripts supposedly reveal her voluntary confession, although Nowell, as magistrate, may well have manipulated or altered her statement. What is interesting—if the trial transcripts can be believed—is that she freely confessed to being a charmer and a healer. Local farmers called on her to cure their children and their cattle. She described in rich detail how she first met her familiar spirit, Tibb.

  The belief in familiar spirits appears to have been the cornerstone of British witchcraft and cunning craft. Elizabeth Southerns's charms and spells, recorded in the trial transcripts, reveal no evidence of diabolical beliefs, but use the ecclesiastical language of the Catholic Church, the old religion driven underground by the English Reformation. Her charm to cure a bewitched person, quoted in its entirety on the flyleaf of this book, is a moving and poetic depiction of the passion of Christ as witnessed by the Virgin Mary. The text is very similar to the so-called White Pater Noster, an Elizabethan prayer-charm that Eamon Duffy discusses in his landmark work, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400—1580.

  It appears that Elizabeth Southerns was a practitioner of the kind of Catholic folk magic that would have been fairly commonplace only a generation or two earlier. Pre-Reformation Catholicism embraced many practises that seemed magical and mystical. People used holy water and communion bread for healing. They went on pilgrimages, left offerings at holy wells, and prayed to the saints for intercession. Some practises, such as the blessing of wells and fields, may have had pre-Christian origins. Indeed, looking at pre-Reformation folk magic, it is often hard to untangle the strands of Catholicism from the remnants of pagan belief. I am indebted to Dr. Sam Riches at Lancaster University for her course, Late Medieval Belief and Superstition, which made the pre-Reformation Church come alive for me.

  Elizabeth Southerns had the misfortune to live in a time and place when Catholicism itself became conflated with witchcraft. Even the act of transubstantiation, in which the communion bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, was viewed by some Protestants as devilish sorcery. Keith Thomas's social history, Religion and the Decline of Magic, is an excellent study on how the Reformation literally took the magic out of Christianity.

  Although it is difficult to substantiate that witches and cunning folk in early modern Britain worshipped pagan deities, the enduring belief in fairies and elves is well documented. In his 1677 book, The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft, Lancashire author John Webster mentions a local cunning man who claimed that his familiar spirit was none other than the Queen of Elfhame herself. In 1576, Scottish cunning woman Bessie Dunlop, while being tried for witchcraft and sorcery at the Edinburgh Assizes, stated that her familiar spirit had been sent to her by the Queen of Elfhame. For more background on this subject, I highly recommend Emma Wilby's scholarly study, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits.

  Mother Demdike is dead but not forgotten. In 1627, only fifteen years after the Pendle witch trial, a woman named Dorothy Shaw of Skippool, Lancashire, was accused by her neighbour of being a "witch and a Demdyke," indicating that the name Demdike had already become a byword for witch.

  Jennet Device, Demdike's granddaughter and Nowell's "instrument of God," whose testimony sent her mother, sister, and brother to their deaths, was herself accused of witchcraft in 1633, along with eighteen others, including Miles Nutter's wife. Her accuser, ten-year-old Edmund Robinson, later confessed that he had fabricated his tale in order to escape punishment for coming home late when bringing in his mother's cows. Before he revealed his perjury, three of the alleged witches had died in prison.

  In the writing of this novel, I have taken some fictional liberties. Robert Assheton in the book is based on Robert Nutter of Greenhead, and Anthony Holden is a composite of John Nutter of Bull Hole Farm, mentioned in the trial transcripts, and his brother Anthony. Anthony Nutter's daughter, allegedly killed by Chattox's witchcraft, was named Anne, not Nancy. I changed both families' names to avoid the confusion of having too many Nutters in the novel. Henry Bulcock is a composite of Henry Bulcock, who believed that Alizon Device had bewitched his daughter but who declined to speak against her in the trials, and Christopher Bulcock, the husband of accused witch Jane Bulcock and the father of John Bulcock.

  There is some controversy as to whether Roughlee Hall was indeed Alice Nutter's home. The Victoria County History of Lancashire: Volume 6, published by D. S. Brewer, states that she lived at Roughlee Hall, which was built in 1536 by Miles Nutter, her father-in-law. The relevant passage supporting this is accessible online: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/source.aspx?pubid=486. However, Gladys Whittaker, in her pamphlet Roughlee Hall, Lancashire: Fact and Fiction, currently out of print, argues that Alice Nutter lived at Crow Trees Farm near Roughlee.

  In his speculative local history, The Lancashire Witch Conspiracy, John Clayton suggests that Elizabeth Southerns may have come to live in Malkin Tower, a substantial dwelling for someone of her class, because she was the illegitimate offspring of an important family. I have taken this speculation one step further by making her Roger Nowell's illegitimate half sister, although there is no evidence supporting this.

  All the magic charms and spells presented in this book are based on documented Lancashire folk magic. Most of the spells were drawn from the witches' own confessions and the information provided by Jennet Device. The spell in which the hen is burned alive was inspired by a nineteenth-century case in which a Lancashire cunning man burned a black cockerel to break a local wizard's curse. This is described in John Harland and T. T. Wilkinson's book Lancashire Folklore.

  My endless gratitude goes out to Jane Rosenman and Wendy Sherman, who believed in this book from the very beginning. It has been a great blessing to work with editors Adrienne Brodeur and Andrea Schulz, whose brilliant insights and critique proved invaluable in midwifing this book. My copyeditor, David Hough, has been wonderfully supportive and sensitive to the material.

  I wish to thank all my readers and well-wishers who helped me along the way. My husband, Jos Van Loo, patiently read draft after draft and helped me explore the tracks of Pendle Forest as we hunted down the sites of my characters' homes. Sandra Gulland, Katharine Weber, and Judith Lindbergh were generous enough to read this novel in manuscript. I would be a lost soul without my fabulous writers group: Cath Staincliffe, Pat Hadler, Trudy Hodge, and Jo Hughes.

  Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers, home of the seventeenth-century poet William Drummond, provided the perfect setting for writing the first draft. I am indebted to Dame Dru Heinz for her generosity. Enduring friendship goes out to my fellow writers in residence—Caroline Carver, Helena McEwen, David L. Hayles, Rhona McAdam, and Sian Williams—and to Jacob Larsen, administrator of the gnomes.

  Lastly, my heartfelt thanks go out to the people of Lancashire for sharing the stories of their history.

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  Mary Sharratt, Daughters of the Witching Hill