THAT was me. My beginning.
I lived on old fish and sour milk, for months. If I cried, she lay me down amongst the reeds and I would sleep—maybe it was wind sounds, or the wet. Ghost baby she called me, because of my eyes which are pale and wide. I crawled in the spring-time elm wood. I walked in the next summer, by the cherry tree. Later, still, I’d sit on a fallen log by the church and ride it—my wet, wooden horse. I had ivy for reins, and a saddle of leaves.
Autumn was also good for mushrooms. She showed them to me like she showed me herbs—this one is for sickness. This brings poisons out. And these ones… she’d say, twirling a stalk before my eyes, are for supper! Let’s run home and cook them! And we would run, hair out.
Still. Winters were best.
And they were hard ones in Thorneyburnbank. A duck froze on the burn—it squawked until a fox came, and left its webbed feet in the ice. There were icicles we sucked, Cora and I. The millpond could be walked on, and once, a tree broke from all its snow and buried a cow—they had to dig for it with spades and hands. All night they dug, and the cow lowed so crossly that they did not hear the Mossmen taking horses from the forge. Also, one winter, there was a wooden box—put beneath the yew tree, and not buried, for the ground was too dark, iron-hard. The box was broken by dogs and crows who knew meat when they neared it. Poor Widow Finton. But she was dead and never felt it. All things must eat.
I saw the crows again in Hexham square.
That was the day they hung the Mossmen by the neck.
Five of them. I was maybe twelve years old when Cora came to me, her eyes on fire, and said this is bad, very bad… She meant for us—but not so bad that we stayed away from it. She knotted my cloak, and we trod through the snow to the town. And the sound! There were more folk in the square than when the judge came, or when the Christmas market did. All jeering and jabbering. I climbed on a barrel to see what they saw, which was the word scaffold. Five ropes in neat circles. It chilled me in a way no snow had done. And the crowd laughed at the men who stood by their ropes with their hands trussed up behind. These I thought are Mossmen. Just men with scars, and sad eyes. The yellow-bearded one was there. He saw the crows, like I did—perched on the scaffold, cleaning their wings. I felt so sorry for him. I thought I could hear his thumping heart, his quick breath, and the crowd cheered when the ropes were put over the Mossmen’s heads. Bang went the door, and bang went the next, and bang and bang and the last man was crying for mercy. Sorry for my sins, he pleaded, and shook. And maybe the door was bolted still or the cold had frozen it, I don’t know, but it didn’t open—so they took him to a rope that had a Mossman hanging from it, and they cut the dead man down and strung the live one up and used that rope again.
Folk need a foe.
Cora muttered this. She also said, I should have known…For did you see the bats? Did you, Corrag? All gone… They’d flown away the day before. They’d streamed out from beneath the bridge with their leathered wings, and not come back—and Cora said that creatures do this, before a death. Like weather, they feel it coming. They sense trouble in their wings, their paws, their hooves—and flee.
Foe… she said. She scattered bones by the hearth that evening, tore herbs so our cottage smelt green. I knew what troubled her. All my life, she had sung let them raid! But they did not raid as they hung with the frost on them, and crows pecking by.
LATER, Cora fell on the floor and arched her back up. She had the second sight this way—the sight I didn’t have. I knew to stay by her, and stroked her hair until it passed.
When she sat up, she whispered, do I have a gallows neck?
It was late. I was sleep-heavy, and she looked strange to me—fear, I think it was. She held up her thick, black hair, said do I? Say the truth.
I always did. So with the hearth being the only sound, for the burn was frozen and the owl was silent that night, I said the truth to her. She knew it, too.
A pretty neck, but yes—it was gallows-made.
Spring came in. Water sounds all over—the burn roared with snowmelt. Up came the clover in the marshy parts which made sweet milk, and cattle fat. This is when I took the knife to the pig and killed it—a terrible thing. I think I was taken with some spring madness, or it was the Mossmen’s deaths in me. I don’t know. But Cora was cross. She said why kill it in spring when we had made it through the winter, and was I a simpleton? The meat did not sit well in my mouth, or my stomach. Poor pig.
Full of shame, I ran away. I hid in the elm wood all day, crouching by a log, and when I rose up in the dusky half-light I did not see the log, and fell. Pop! A neat sound by my shoulder. Then, a pain—a huge, hot pain, so that I stumbled back to Cora with my right arm very mangled, and my shoulder pushed high up. I wailed, as I ran. The pig’s revenge said Cora dryly, and she pressed my bone back in its proper place. Pop again. And marjoram was laid upon it, which can help.
And things grew. The crops grew well, that year. That made Cora’s purse clink, for women were making babies with all that corn in them. Mostly it was feverfew, for the easy birth. Comfrey dried up old milk. She sent me out for fern, also, and told me how to cut it—with a single slice, and thinking kind thoughts. Fern has its dark powers—for the secret cleansing of a woman, shall we say.
And creatures made babies too—calves, and chicks that went peep. There was a striped cat too whose teats were like thumbs, who purred when I stroked her. She was good. But one day, with dandelions blowing, I saw her lying on the ground. There was a bucket by her, and Mr Fothers in his hat. He was staring at the bucket, and then he marched away—and I thought why is the striped cat so still? The lovely striped cat? I straightened my back. So very still… And then I thought run! I had such a fear in me that I threw my dandelion away and ran, and in the bucket I found water, and five dark newborn kittens mewling for their lives. Their paws scraped the metal. Their eyes were closed, so I pushed the bucket over, said wake up! Don’t die! They rolled into their mother, who was dead and not purring now.
Cora, when I carried them home, said, what happened to them? So tiny… And in a lower voice she hissed who did this? For she had a proper hatred of people drowning things.
We fed them. We laid them by the fire and dropped cow’s milk on their tongues. I sang ancient songs to them like they were my own, and Cora said how dare that man? How dare he? A life is a life—each life… She narrowed her eyes at his name. She kicked the kettle and it bounced outside. But she softened when she stroked the kittens, and felt their grainy tongues against her hand. Mr Fothers hated creatures but we never did.
They lived—all five. They were meant to drown on a dandelion day but they did not. Instead, they grew into quick, ash-coloured cats with eyes as green as mint is, and they rubbed against our shins, tails up. I liked how their gentle heads would butt against my own. In time, they sniffed out the fish in the thatch. I remember them that way—high up in the rafters, crunching the bones of the stranded fish, their noses silvery with scales.
MAYBE I should not have saved them—those cats. They brought more than dead mice to the doorstep, in the end.
Mr Fothers started it. Maybe he didn’t like how I saved those five. Cats, he said? Green-eyed? And he spoke bad words about me, like how I squatted in bogs. Like how, one twilight, I’d shifted into a half-bird and screamed my way home from the elm wood. Her right arm was a wing…This is true.
So it went. Small things which once meant reivers—no moon, or worms in the miller’s flour—no longer meant reivers, for the reivers were dead. Who, then, caused this? Where was the blame? People were quiet, at first. People bit on their tongues.
It was king that made it worse. The proper trouble started then—in the year that King James fled away to France, and in his place came the Orange, Protestant one with his very black wig. He sat on the throne still warm from James, and England called this glorious. What a revolution! they said. But Cora didn’t think so. She sucked her bottom lip. She looked at stars for a long, long time. One night, I
tugged her sleeve. I asked, what does this mean? And she shook her head, said trouble, I reckon—that’s what it means. Kings always do. And it did. For king makes blood boil over. It makes the air feel thick, and strange, and so just as the wind span the weathervane, so eyes turned to look at the cottage by the burn with its holly and bog-water.
Slowly, there was more.
Small doings. A calf was born with a white star on its head—neat, and clear. Very pretty. But curious, too, so it was talked of—a marked calf… said the men. How uncommon. And then Mr Dobbs, whose field the calf was in, took to sneezing all day and all night. Cora said it was the air being full of flowers—but no one else thought so. And an owl screeched down from the church tower at midnight, and the cherries from the cherry tree were tarter than most years. A rat was seen on the half-moon bridge. And in late summer, when the air was heavy with heat and no wind, and the skies flashed with a storm, Mr Vetch’s affections moved away from his wife and onto the fair-haired buxom girl who sold ribbons, in Hexham. Mrs Vetch was distraught. He’s lost his mind, she wailed. Out in the street, wringing her doughy hands, she wailed, it’s a bewitching! A madness! Surely, it is…
We watched this. Cora and me.
That word…she whispered. And she glanced up at the rumbling skies.
It took a day or so. But witch came in.
Whore, said Mr Fothers, as my mother walked by.
In church, Mr Pepper did his best. He said we are God’s children and He loves us all the same. But it stopped nothing. It did not calm Cora, who stood outside at night. She said what is coming? Something comes…I feel it. Then Mr Fothers said that Cora stole his grey mare when the moon was full. He said the horse sprouted wings, and they flew to the Devil and back. A flying horse? A flying lie is better. But he locked the mare up every full-moon night, and rode a brown cob instead. It kicked out at shadows, and snorted—but Mr Fothers preferred to risk his neck on the brown horse than his eternal soul on the mare.
HATE her? Cora? Oh he did.
I don’t know why. Her beauty perhaps. Her power, and her knowledge of the world, which was so strong that I felt it, as she passed—it brushed my skin, like breath. Maybe he heard of her meetings with unknown men by the Romans’ wall and he longed for that—to be such a man. To untie her bodice in the northern dark. But how could he? Being married, and church-going? Nor would my mother have let him. She said he had a chicken’s look about him—with a loose chin, and a look like everything was worth a peck or two. Foul man she called him. Fowl.
I see the goodness in most people, for most people are good. But his was hard to see.
He drowned the striped cat in a bucket. He threw stones at me. His wife was meek as a duckling is, and once she bought groundsel from Cora for a bruise that was damson-dark. It was hand-shaped, too—Cora told me. Mrs Fothers blushed, said she had fallen—clumsy me!—but we knew this wasn’t from falling. The poor lady tried for hemlock once but Cora didn’t keep it. That’s a very final herb—it kills you, and not kindly. Cora felt very sorry for Mrs Fothers’ lonely life.
These are proofs of Mr Fothers’ wickedness.
He beat his grey mare also.
And he killed my mother. I know it—here, inside.
I shall bring this all together like if I was sewing.
William sat on the throne. He was a wheezy king, and like he’d sent his wheezing out on horseback to the north, a consumption came up northern parts. Word came up of people dying foully in York. Cora said she had no herb to cure it if it came to Thorneyburnbank. So we waited. It never came to my knowing. But Mr Pepper fell down dead in church—from a tired heart, most likely—and folk muttered pest. Cora was restless and stood waist-deep into the burn. She eyed me very strangely and had no sleep in her.
They buried Mr Pepper under an oak which dropped its leaves on his box, like it was crying. And the new churchman who came in wore eye-glasses above a dark moustache. He was young and had the look of rats in him—all whiskers and quick-moving.
Ah said Cora seeing him.
There is worse than pestilence in our mortal world. There is falling from the sight of the God. There is the Devil’s work. There are those who know the Devil’s ways and is it not our duty to cleanse the earth? To rid it of such sinners?
Then there was a baby which came out blue, and dead.
Also, a hare was seen in the fields, washing its ears, and the moon rose behind it so that the whole village saw it—a hare, and a full, white moon…
Cora sniffed. She took me in her arms.
She kissed me over and over, and in my heart I thought not long now. For I had also seen the starlings flying west—a ball of them, rolling far away from us—and we slept side by side in those last few nights. Our hair tangled up, and blue-black.
A DOG barked in the village. And that night, Cora pushed the cats from my bed, grasped my hair in her fist and said Wake up! Wake now! I woke. I saw her eyes were very wide. She pulled me from my bed by my hair and I cried out, and was scared.
She said, take my cloak. Take this bread. Take this purse, Corrag—it has all my herbs in it. Every herb I ever picked, or knew, is in this purse, and it is yours now. Keep it safe. Promise me?
I looked at the purse. Then I looked at her—into her eyes which were shining.
And Corrag, a horse waits—outside, in the marsh. She grazes there, and you must take her and ride her. Go north-and-west. Ride fast, and hard, and you will know the place that’s meant for you, when you find it—and on finding it, stay there. She put her hand against my cheek. My little ghost baby… she said.
The dog’s bark came again, but closer.
I said, are you coming too?
She shook her head. You are going alone. You are leaving me now, and you must not come back. Be careful. Be brave. Never be sorry for what you are, Corrag—but do not love people. Love is too sore and makes life hard to bear…
I nodded. I heard her, and knew.
She fastened her cloak on me. She smoothed my hair, put up its hood.
Be good to every living thing, she whispered.
Listen to the voice in you.
I will never be far away from you. And I will see you again—one day.
I wore her herby purse about me. I wore her dark-blue cloak which dragged on the ground, and I hid crusts and a pear in its sleeve. Outside, in the cold night-time air, I found Mr Fothers’ grey mare hock-high in the rushes. I mounted her, and looked to the cottage with the fish in the roof and the holly and my mother stood before it, red-skirted and black-haired, with a grey cat sitting by her, and that was my mother. That is Cora for always now.
Ride, she said. North-and-west! Go! Go!
We galloped into the dark, over heath and moor. I took the mare’s mane for she had no reins on her, or saddle. I saw the ground beneath us rushing by. I was all breathless and afraid. At the Romans’ wall we rested for a time. The world was very quiet, and the mist was less. The stars were out and I never saw such a starry night—it was like all the sky was with us as we went north, and all the earth’s magick also. I spoke to the wall. I told it of Cora, and I told it I was scared. Keep us safe? I asked it. I am scared. I think the mare heard me for her ears were forwards, and her mouth was very gentle when she took the pear from my hand.
We crossed the wall by a lone sycamore.
Then we rode amongst trees for a very long time. I don’t know when we crossed into Scotland, but it was somewhere in those woods. I patted the horse, and saw that all I had now in the whole world was a cloak, a purse, two crusts of bread and Mr Fothers’ old grey mare.
This is my final stitch tonight.
Cora. Who thought the pricking men might take her but no, the gallows did.
I don’t know this for certain. But I think they snared her that night, and a few weeks later they tied her thumb-to-thumb. I think she said nothing. I think she was strong, and defiant, and knew the realm was waiting for her so why be afraid? I don’t think she was afraid. I think she shook her hair
free from the rope around her neck, and looked up at the sky, for she always looked up at the windy autumn skies. And then the trapdoor banged twice against its hinges, and she heard a crunch in her ears, and I wonder what she saw, in her last mind’s eye—if it was me, or her mother sinking under.
I also think that Mr Fothers saw it. I think he went home with a quietness inside him that had no name, and it grew in the weeks that followed. He saw Cora’s cottage be lost to the holly and storm-water. He thought of her with newborn calves or cherries, or with a lightning bolt that lit up the fields very briefly so that all things looked white and strange.
He found his stable empty and thought Cora did this.
When her cats slunk by him, his heart creaked open like a door.
Dear Jane
I am tired tonight, my love. Not in body, as such—as I was when we rode here, through the drifts and wind. But my mind is tired, which some may say is a far greater fatigue. I was grateful to leave that cell, and looked forward to the peace that a good fire and solitude can bring—and does bring, as I write this. I am glad of the hearth—a little light and warmth. I am also glad of this proper chair, for that three-legged stool that I perch upon in there is low, and may trouble my back, in time.
I was also glad of a meal. I did not think I had an appetite, after such an unsavoury place, but when I ate it restored me. Sometimes we are hungry when we think we are not.
You are, I am sure, anxious to hear of my latest encounter with the witch. I will tell you of it—but I will use less words than she did, for she talked more than I’ve ever done. I preach, Jane—I have preached, and written my pamphlets, and have I not been called the orator of the age? A generous name, perhaps. Yet I wonder if I have ever spoken as much as she speaks. Her talking is like a river—running on and bursting into smaller rivers which lead nowhere, so she comes back to her starting place. I listened to her and thought, is this madness? How she uses her hands asks this question, as well—for she is rarely still. She talks with her hands up by her face, like she’s catching her words, or feeling them as she speaks them. Can you see that? I am not one for description. My strength is in sermons, and not in decorative talk.
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