Shakespeare's Witch

by Samantha Grosser

  A trio of riders arrived, hooves clattering loud on the cobbles, the horses’ breath puffing in clouds around their faces. The riders clapped their gloved hands with cold as they dismounted and the ostler’s boy came running to lead the horses away. Tom watched the men disappear inside, ducking through the low doorway, a rush of noise and warmth spilling into the yard. The horses clopped across the stones and into the stables; he could hear the boy talking to them as he led them, voice sing-song and reassuring. Then, when they were stabled out of sight and the boy’s voice was lost in the storm, he took a deep breath and headed back into the hubbub of the tavern.

  Inside, the heat and noise assailed his senses. He paused in the doorway a moment to readjust before he headed across the room to the table he had left. Only Nick and Will were still there and he slid into his place and lifted the jug to pour himself another cup.

  ‘Where’s John?’ he asked when the men’s conversation paused.

  ‘He went out to piss,’ Nick replied.

  Tom shook his head. ‘I didn’t see him.’ A sudden tension grabbed at his innards. ‘So where is he?’

  The three men scanned the room and Tom stood up to see better. His eyes grazed the sea of heads but there was no sign of him. And, he realised with a new jolt of unease, there was no sign of Jane either. The fat man was still at his table. Without a word to the others, he moved back across the floor toward the door that led upstairs. When he got near, one of the other girls stepped into his path, breasts offered up to him with a none-too-coy tilt of the head.

  ‘Where’s Jane?’ he asked her. He had had her once, he recalled, but he could not remember her name. After Jane she had been a disappointment. But then, most of them were.

  ‘With your friend,’ she simpered. ‘Didn’t you know?’

  ‘My friend?’

  ‘The boy. The pretty boy.’

  The unease lurched into fear and he pushed past her, almost running in his haste. He knew the way well, taking the narrow stairs two at a time, forcing a descending customer to flatten himself against the wall as he pushed past him. The man shouted after him with a half-heard curse as Tom ran along the landing to the end of the corridor and the rooms the whores used. Outside it he paused to take a breath. Perhaps he was wrong, he thought. Perhaps Jane was in there now giving John the time of his life, drawing him back to the normal pleasures of the flesh. But he knew that it was not so. Deep in his blood he could feel the darkness, the knowledge of foul forces at work.

  He raised his fist and knocked. There was no answer. He didn’t wait to knock again but threw open the door and burst in. Jane was sprawled across the bed as he had seen her many times, her skirts lifted, her head turned on the pillow towards the door. For a heartbeat he thought, hoped, she would speak to him, but even in the flickering light of the pair of candles that lit the room, he knew the stare in her eyes for what it was, unseeing and lifeless.

  Briefly, he flicked his gaze across the chamber just to check, but the window was open and John was long gone. Squalls of rain swept in through the opening and the pale curtain billowed in the wind. He stood stupidly for several breaths, struggling to make sense of it, his insides hollowing out with an unexpected grief that was ferocious; he had never known such pain was possible. Then, gathering his strength and forcing himself to reason, he stepped forward and lowered her skirts to cover her legs. Had John fucked her before he strangled her? A final act of lust that had destroyed his fragile mind beyond repair? Why? Why had he done it? He recalled the desperate look in John’s face – Was it love with her too?

  His legs buckled under the weight of his grief and he sank to his knees beside the bed. Jane’s blind eyes seemed to follow his movement but there was no anger in her look, no blame, and he was grateful for that. He took her hand but it was already cold as stone and so he let it drop, unnerved. Footsteps behind him, men’s boots on the boards, and then Nick and Will were beside him.

  ‘Oh my dear God,’ Nick murmured. ‘John did this?’

  ‘The other whore said he went with her,’ Tom answered. His voice sounded loud in the quiet room and absurdly, it bothered him he couldn’t remember the girl’s name. Nick touched his fingers to Tom’s shoulder and Tom was thankful for the contact. Then a rustle of fabrics at the door was followed by a woman’s shriek. Nick turned and strode toward the girl, the whore whose name Tom couldn’t remember, and grasped her arms in strong hands of reassurance and command, bending so that his face was level with hers.

  ‘Send a boy for the constable,’ he told her.

  The girl nodded but did not move, her eyes wandering over and over to the lifeless form of her friend on the bed. Her face was ashen.

  ‘Go,’ Nick said gently, stepping back from her. ‘Go now.’

  Taking a deep breath, the girl picked up her skirts and fled back down the passage. They could hear the patter of her shoes on the wooden steps, hurrying down them.

  ‘Should we stay?’ Tom lifted his head.

  ‘We should,’ Will replied. Then he shrugged, as though to say the decision whether or not they would was beyond him.

  Tom tried to think, to plan, wondering if it would look better or worse for him to remain, but the wheels of his mind would not turn and his thoughts moved heavily, like a cartwheel through winter mud. He shook his head in frustration, trying vainly to clear his head. He was vaguely aware of Will and Nick as they talked in low voices, and he heard them close the door on the gathering onlookers in the passage. But even through the fog, he understood that this murder might buy Sarah’s freedom. John was the criminal now, a murderer, and with no one to accuse her, Sarah would be free. Hecate had turned John’s darkness back upon himself as they had asked of her and Jane had been the sacrifice, the price to pay.

  ‘Get up now,’ Will was saying. Tom lifted his head, forcing himself to think, to concentrate. ‘Get off your knees. The constable will be here soon. You found her, is all. You came looking for John and this is what you found. She was nothing more to you than a whore.’

  The same words he had used to John about her that very evening. He wished he had been nicer to her, that she could have died knowing that he cared. But in the end she was just a whore, he told himself, and very few of them ever grew old. He pushed himself to his feet and shook the stiffness from his knees. He felt as though he had aged ten years.

  Then the three men stood in the silent room and waited for the constable to arrive.

  There was no sign of John at the house. The constable followed them home in case John in his madness had gone straight there, but after a cursory check through the rooms he left to report the story to the magistrate.

  Nick squatted to light the fire that Joyce had laid, and Tom went to the kitchen for wine. Will stood at the hearth, waiting for the warmth to begin. They were all of them drenched and dripping, and the night was still wild outside. They could hear the wind as it wailed in the chimneys, and the fire danced and flashed in the hearth. Then they drank and after a moment, they moved to settle themselves more comfortably. Tom reclined on the cushions with his back to the heat of the fire and nursed the cup between his fingers. It was good to be indoors.

  ‘Well,’ Will said at last. ‘This changes things.’

  Tom exchanged a glance with Nick: neither knew how much Will knew or suspected. More than he was saying, Tom was sure.

  ‘Where do you think he would have gone?’ Nick asked.

  ‘Church,’ Tom said without hesitation. ‘He’ll be praying for his soul and wishing he had a priest to confess to.’

  ‘Perhaps he does, at that.’

  Tom sat up. He had heard rumours years before that Will was a Papist too, another one among them with a secret faith. But this was an admission: it had become a more dangerous secret since the gunpowder treason a few months since, a Catholic plot coming close to blowing the king and his Parliament into dust. Every Papist was a suspect now. It was no longer just a question of faith but of loyalty.

  ‘Does he?’ Nick aske
d, and Tom knew the question was far less casual than it sounded.

  Will nodded. ‘There’s an ex-Jesuit priest who recanted to save his life that haunts the brothels on Bankside. He lives as a hermit in a hut in the forest. He comes and goes, disappearing for months at a time, then reappearing to tend to the broken souls who need him.’

  Tom looked once more to Nick but the actor’s gaze was fixed on Will. ‘You took John to him?’ he asked.

  ‘When I first saw the boy’s soul was troubled. I thought it would help him.’ He shrugged. ‘I thought he was overwrought by the play – the illusion of the witches and the Lady’s madness. I thought the Jesuit would bring him back to himself.’ He shook his head. ‘I should have known where it would lead. I should have seen.’

  ‘How could you have seen?’ Nick demanded. ‘No one could have foreseen all this.’

  Sarah had foreseen it, Tom thought. All of it. She had warned Will where the play would lead them, and he had refused to believe in the truth of it. And now she was paying the price.

  Will tilted his head. ‘I’ve been away from the faith for too long. I had forgotten what it means to be a Papist. The priest would have told him to make his accusations, that the safety of his soul depended on it. I put Sarah’s life at risk.’ He nodded towards Tom. ‘I put both your lives at risk …’

  Tom looked down into the remnants of the wine in his cup, the dark blood-red liquid that held the light from the fire at his back. It seemed that Hecate had saved them, the power of the old goddess undimmed by the new religions.

  ‘Take us now to this priest,’ he said, half rising, ready.

  Will gave a half-smile and shook his head. ‘For why?’

  ‘To find John.’

  ‘And if you find him, what then? Will you give him to the authorities yourself? Hand him over to die after all he has been to you?’

  Tom sank back onto his haunches. So Will knew all of it. ‘To save my sister,’ he said.

  ‘Your sister will be saved,’ Will said. ‘There will be no one to accuse her at the hearing, only those of us to speak on her behalf.’

  Tom looked up then. Will must suspect the truth of John’s charges, yet he was willing to lie to save her. Tom felt a rush of affection – the other man’s loyalty to his mother through the years had never abated. And now this. He smiled his thanks.

  ‘And how and when John meets his fate is not for us to decide. Now I must go,’ Will said, draining the last of his wine and standing up.

  ‘Stay,’ Nick offered. ‘It’s late and the night is rough.’

  ‘Thank you. But I sleep better in my own bed these days.’ He smiled. ‘And there is the small matter of the play to consider …’

  ‘I’ll walk with you,’ Tom said. He had planned to stay himself but it would be safer for Will in the night with two of them, and he had nothing more to talk over with Nick.

  They left the house together. The night was beginning to clear at last, the rain blown elsewhere by the force of the wind, which still rattled the branches of the trees in the lane and set the dogs to howling. Now and then as they walked, the sliver of moon broke through the shifting clouds and Tom was glad to see it.

  ‘I’ll send a message to your mother,’ Will said.

  ‘Will there still be a hearing? She must still face the Grand Jury?’

  ‘She must. But it can only be a formality now. I will stand bond for Sarah tomorrow and she will be free to come home.’

  Instinctively, Tom’s eyes turned in the dark in the direction of the Marshalsea, unseen behind the houses. It hurt him to think of her there in the mire and misery, the cold. Nick had described to him the cell, and the thought of it made his skin crawl. Of all things for his sister, a cage would be the worst – she was a creature of the air and sky. He hoped Will was right about the court proceedings: he was a person of status, welcomed at Court by the King; his word must surely count for much. For himself Tom had little faith in the justice of the system. And John was still out there somewhere, still alive, still with his faith in his bewitchment. Until Sarah was acquitted by the court and truly free, there could be no certainty.

  The two men parted ways close to Tom’s lodgings and he watched the playwright walk away into the darkness. Then he doubled back and made his way to the playhouse to unearth the secret book from its hiding place and search for a different answer.

  Chapter Eighteen

  These Terrible Dreams

  They moved Sarah into a different cell and bound her naked to a stool. Allowing her neither meat nor rest, they hoped, she supposed, to weaken her into confession. The hours uncoiled with agonising slowness, moment by moment in a series of battles with the weariness that sent her swaying, brought up short each time she began to fall by the rope that was curled around her neck. The manacles that held her chafed against her wrists, rubbing them raw, and her legs pained from the pressure of the stool against them and no ability to move. The cold and stench she barely noticed any more.

  Her mind wandered – the natural inclination to escape the confines of her body’s suffering – but the thoughts were scattered, broken, fragmented, like the shadows in the dreams of a fever. Lines from the play whispered out of order, seeming out of nowhere, and the playhouse seemed a haven of impossible safety now. Images of its warmth and laughter flickered in the corners of her mind, intangible and fleeting, and for a while she could think of nothing but the stitching on the Lady’s nightgown, details of the intricate embroidery impressing on her brain.

  She wanted to picture Nick. Coaxing her thoughts from the playhouse, she tried to see the bed they had shared, following the mental trail, his hand on her breast, between her legs, the thrill of when he entered her. But the images eluded her: she could neither recall his face nor his voice, all memory of him lost. Grief-stricken, she turned instead to thoughts of her brother and found his presence was close and real: the soft reassurance of his voice murmured in her ear, and she could recall every detail of the touch of his hands, his lips, his member. She could bear anything with him beside her as her protector, she realised, and she held the images tightly, binding herself in his presence as armour against her fear.

  Now and then men whose names and offices she did not know came to witness her humiliation and ask once more the same questions, pacing around her, thrusting their faces into hers, jabbing at her body with bony fingers:

  Where did you learn your witchcraft?

  When did the Devil first come to you?

  Where are your familiars now?

  She kept her eyes averted from the contempt she saw in theirs, and her answer was always the same – I am no witch.

  The morning lightened slowly as the sun dragged its heels, discouraged by the gathering clouds that swept in from the river and made everything grey. When they finally came to fetch her and dragged her from the stool, she could not stand, so they had to hold her upright while they dressed her, fat male fingers struggling with the women’s clothes she had not the strength to fasten for herself. Clothed now and unbound, she unearthed the remnants of her strength from deep inside, and though her legs could barely support her as they hauled her from the cell, she was conscious that her spirit remained intact. They would force no confession from her yet.

  The examination took place at the magistrate’s house in the same fine room she had been taken to before. She was acutely aware of her own smell with its foetid stench of prison, and she had to swallow down the sense of shame it aroused. It was not her fault, she told herself. It was not of her own doing. Lifting her eyes, she saw the woven Witch of Endor gazing down from her tapestry and took courage from her presence.

  She faced Wickham across his desk, and when he bid the guards step back away from her, her legs buckled and she fell. From her place on the floor she heard him sigh before she felt herself being lifted into a chair by the rough hands of one of the guards. Briefly, she wondered how long it would be before her strength returned and she was able to stand. Wickham dismissed the guards and sto
od for a moment observing her. Then he moved round to the front of the desk and leaned against it just to one side of her, arms folded, still observing. She swallowed, eyes lowered now, aware that this man held the balance of her life in his palms.

  ‘Are you ready to confess?’ he began.

  ‘I have nothing to confess,’ she answered. But she did not look at him.

  ‘If you treat plainly with me and confess the truth, it will go better for you.’

  ‘I have done nothing to confess,’ she repeated.

  ‘But if you continue in your lies I will make sure that you hang.’ He leaned forward, closer, and instinctively she shrank away. ‘I know the truth about you, Sarah Stone,’ he said. ‘And you’ll come to confess it in the end.’

  She was silent: he had the power to grant bail or withhold it, and the thought of more days on the stool without sleep, without food, spun panic through her guts. Her weakness threatened to overwhelm her, and she blinked against the tears that prickled behind her eyes.

  ‘So I’ll ask you again – where did you learn your witchcraft?’

  ‘I am no witch,’ she whispered. But even to her own ears there was little conviction in the words. Time and ill treatment would surely wear her down in the end. She sent her thoughts to Tom, drawing his strength into her to bolster her own flagging will to resist. Was he here now? she wondered. Had he been arrested also? She did not dare to ask.

  ‘Your victim says otherwise,’ Wickham said, straightening, looking down at her, aslant. She refused to lift her eyes.

  ‘He says you gave him potions to inflame him with illicit lusts. He says you sent your imps into his dreams to turn him mad.’ He gestured to the papers on his desk. ‘It is all there …’