Nocturnes

by John Connolly

  The most comprehensive guide to the identification, interrogation, and, finally, immolation of witches was the Malleus Maleficarum, the “Hammer of Witches,” coauthored by the German Dominican Heinrich Kramer and Father James Sprenger, the dean of theology at the University of Cologne. Kramer and Sprenger pinpointed the seed of witchcraft in the very nature of the female species. Women were spiritually, intellectually, and emotionally weak, and motivated primarily by carnal lust. These fundamental flaws found their most potent expression in witchery.

  The coming of the Reformation did little to undo such beliefs. If anything, any existing tolerance for the so-called “wise women” of village life was to be stamped out along with any other evidence of old pagan ways, leading Martin Luther himself to declare that they should all be burned as witches.

  It would be 1736 before the crime of witchcraft would officially be removed from the books of law in England, almost 120 years after the capture, trial, and execution of the three women known as the Underbury Witches.

  Croft drove the two policemen to the heart of the village of Underbury, where they checked into a pair of small but warm rooms at the back of the Vintage Inn. When they had refreshed themselves, and taken some tea, the two policemen were brought to the local undertaker’s. Waiting for them were the village doctor, Allinson, and the sole representative of the local constabulary, Constable Waters. Allinson was young, and a recent arrival in Underbury with his family following the death of his uncle, who had previously dealt with the births, illnesses, and various manifestations of mortality in the area. Allinson walked with a slight limp, a vestige of childhood polio, which had excused him from service in France. Waters, in Burke’s view, was a typical village copper: cautious without being careful, and with a modest intelligence that had not yet evolved to the stage of wisdom. All four men stood by while the undertaker, a man seemingly composed entirely of creases and wrinkles, slowly uncovered the body that lay upon his slab.

  “We haven’t done much with him yet, on account of you gentlemen coming down from London,” he explained. “Lucky it’s been cold, or else he’d be on the turn more than he is already.”

  The body revealed to them was that of a man in his early forties, with the bulk of one who labored in the fields during the day, at the dinner table in the evening, and in the pub at night. His features, or what remained of them, were discolored, and the men could smell the greater decay already taking place inside him. There were long vertical wounds across his face, and similar injuries to his chest and stomach. The wounds were deep, and penetrated far into his body, so that his innards were clearly visible to them. Rolls of torn intestine extruded from two of the cuts, like the larvae of some dreadful parasite.

  “His name was Malcolm Trevors,” said Waters. “Mal to most people. Single man, no family.”

  “Good Lord,” said Stokes. “It looks as though an animal attacked him.”

  Burke nodded to the undertaker, and said he would be called if he was needed. The little man exited quietly, and if he felt any sense of injury at his exclusion he was far too practiced in his trade to show it.

  Once the door to the embalming room was closed, Burke turned to the doctor. “You’ve examined him?”

  Allinson shook his head. “Not fully. I didn’t want to interfere with your investigations. I have taken a closer look at those wounds, though.”

  “And?”

  “If it’s the work of an animal, it’s like none I’ve ever seen.”

  “We’ve sent out word to the circuses and fairs in the area,” said Constable Waters. “We’ll soon find out if they’ve lost one of their beasts.”

  Burke nodded, but it was clear that he had little interest in what Waters had just said. His attention remained on Allinson.

  “Why do you say that?”

  The doctor leaned over the body of the dead man and pointed to smaller abrasions to the left and right of the main cuts.

  “You see these? In the absence of any other evidence, I’d say they were left by thumbs, thumbs with deep nails on the ends of them.”

  He raised his hand, curled the fingers slightly as though grasping a ball, then raked them slowly through the air.

  “The deep wounds come from the fingers, the ancillary, angled cuts from the thumb,” he continued.

  “Couldn’t someone have used some kind of farm implement on him?” asked Stokes. The sergeant was London through and through, and his knowledge of agriculture extended no further than washing the dirt from vegetables before cooking them. Nevertheless, he had a pretty fair suspicion that if one were to open up any barn between here and Scotland there would be enough sharp objects contained within to fillet a whole tribe of men such as Trevors.

  “It’s possible,” said Allinson. “I’m no expert on farm tools. We may know a little more once I’ve taken a closer look at the body. With your permission, Inspector, I’d like to open him up. A more detailed examination of the wounds should confirm it.”

  But Burke was once again leaning over the body, this time looking at the hands.

  “Can you pass me a thin blade?” he asked.

  Allinson took a scalpel from his instrument bag, then handed it to the policeman. Burke carefully placed the blade beneath the nail of the dead man’s right index finger and probed.

  “Get me something to hold a sample.”

  Allinson gave him a small specimen dish, and Burke scraped the residue from beneath the nail into it. He repeated the process with each nail of the right hand, until a small scattering of matter lay upon the dish.

  “What is it?” asked Constable Waters.

  “Tissue,” answered Allinson. “Skin, not fur. Very little blood. Hardly any, in fact.”

  “He fought back,” said Burke. “Whoever attacked him should be marked.”

  “He’ll be long gone, then,” said Waters. “A man scarred in that way won’t hang around to be found out.”

  “No, perhaps not,” said Burke. “Still, it’s something. Can you take us to where the body was found?”

  “Now?” said Waters.

  “No, the morning should do. In this fog, we’ll risk trampling on any evidence that hasn’t been crushed or lost already. Doctor, when do you think you might complete your examination?”

  Allinson removed his jacket and began to roll up his sleeves.

  “I’ll start straightaway, if you like. I should know more by morning.”

  Burke looked to his sergeant.

  “Right then,” he said. “We’ll be off for now, and we’ll see you at nine tomorrow. Thank you, gentlemen.”

  And with that, the strangers left.

  The village of Underbury numbered barely 500 souls, half of whom lived on small farms some distance from the village itself, with its church, its inn, and its handful of stores, all set near the crossroads that marked Underbury’s heart. A visitor might have noted that the central area in which the two roads met was considerably larger than one might have expected. It was perhaps sixty feet across, and was dominated by a raised grass circle upon which no flowers grew. Instead, to alleviate its dullness, a statue had been raised to the Duke of Wellington, although the cheap stone used for its creation had already begun to disintegrate, giving the duke the physical appearance of one who was slowly succumbing to leprosy, or one of the more unmentionable social diseases.

  To understand the nature of the circle at the crossroads required a knowledge of local history of which few visitors could boast. Underbury, once upon a time, was a far more populous place than it now appeared to be, and was, in fact, the commercial hub for this part of the county. A vestige of those former days still remained in the form of the weekly farmers’ market held each Saturday in a field on the east side of the village, although in the past (and, indeed, in the present, in places other than Underbury) such markets traditionally took place in the very heart of the village. This practice came to an end in the latter half of the seventeenth century, when Underbury became the focus of the largest single in
vestigation into witchcraft ever undertaken in the British Isles up to that point.

  The reasons for the arrival of the witchfinders remain unclear, although an outbreak of illness among some of the children in the village may have provided the initial spur. Five children died in the space of a single week, all of them firstborn males, and suspicion fell upon a trio of women newly arrived in Underbury from parts unknown. The women claimed to be sisters of independent means, formerly resident in Cheapside. The eldest, Ellen Drury, was a midwife, and took over such duties in the village following the sudden drowning of her predecessor, one Grace Polley. Ellen Drury delivered the male children who subsequently passed away, and it was immediately said of her that she had cursed them as they passed from womb to world. Demands for the women’s arrest and questioning grew louder, yet the Drury sisters had managed, in their brief time in Underbury, to make themselves popular with many of the local women, due to their facility with various medicines and herbs. It may also have been that the Drury sisters could have been described almost as “protofeminists,” for they encouraged those who were victims of casual abuse from their husbands and male relatives to make a stand against such acts, and a number of men found their houses surrounded by groups of shouting women, invariably led by Ellen Drury and one or both of her sisters. In fact one resident, a farmer named Brodie, and a vicious man towards his wife and daughters to boot, was so badly beaten as he made his way home through his fields one night that it was thought he would not survive his injuries. Brodie subsequently declined to name his assailants, but gossip in the village intimated that the Drury sisters were abroad that night, and that their walking staffs were ingrained with Brodie’s blood. While few wept for the victim of the assault, who was left with a useless right hand and an impediment to his speech as a result of the attack, this was clearly a state of affairs that could not be allowed to continue. The deaths of the children gave the men of the village the excuse that they sought, and a pair of witchfinders was despatched from London on the orders of the king to investigate the occurrences.

  There is little that needs to be said about the manner of the witchfinders’ enquiries, for their methods have been recorded elsewhere. Suffice it to say that the Drury sisters were sorely tried, along with ten other women from the village, of whom two were married, three very ancient, and one barely twelve years of age. Marks were found upon their bodies—patterns of warts, unexplained folds of skin in their private parts—that were construed as evidence of the women’s diabolical nature. The young girl, under threat of torture, admitted to the practice of witchcraft, and claimed that she had seen Ellen Drury prepare the potion that took the lives of the newborn infants. She told her interrogators that the three women were not in fact sisters at all, although she did not know their true names. Finally, she added stories of debauches conducted in the women’s cottage, in which she was forced to participate, and of treasons spoken against the Church of England, and even against the king himself. A confession thus secured, the women were presented to the circuit court judges and sentence was passed.

  On 18 November, 1628, Ellen Drury and her sisters were hanged to death in the village square at Underbury, and their remains buried in an unmarked plot to the north of the cemetery, just beyond its walls. Their co-defendants were set to suffer the same fate, but the intervention of the king’s physician, Sir William Harvey, who was curious about the nature of the “witch marks” allegedly found upon the bodies of the convicted women, led to their transportation to London, where they were re-examined by the Privy Council and among whose members their fate was subsequently debated at leisure. Five of the prisoners passed away while imprisoned, and ten years went by before the survivors were quietly released to spend their final years in poverty and ignominy.

  Ellen Drury was the last to die on the gallows. Even in her final agonies it was said of her that her eyes remained fixed on her tormentors, unblinking, until a relative of the unfortunate Brodie threw pitch upon her and set her alight, whereupon her eyes exploded in their sockets and her world went dark.

  Dr. Allinson worked into the early hours, examining the wounds left upon the body of Mal Trevors. The largest of them, as he later told Burke and Stokes over breakfast at the inn, extended internally from the man’s belly all the way to his heart, which had been pierced in five places by long claws or nails. At this point, Sergeant Stokes briefly lost his appetite for his bacon.

  “Are you telling us that a hand was pushed up through this man’s body?” asked Burke.

  “It would appear so,” replied the doctor. “I inspected him closely in the hope that I might find a fragment of nail but none was forthcoming, which I find surprising under the circumstances. It is no easy thing to tear apart a man’s insides in such a way, and some shattering would have been expected. It leads me to suspect that either the nails of the hand were unusually strong, or that the fingers had been artificially enhanced in some way, perhaps by the addition of metal talons that could be strapped on or removed as needed.”

  The doctor could add nothing more to the sum of their knowledge, and retired to his bed at the behest of his wife, who had arrived to do a little shopping and encourage her exhausted husband to return home. She was a woman of striking looks, a tall blonde with flawed green eyes that caught the light as though they were emeralds inset with fragments of diamond. Her name was Emily, and Burke exchanged only a few words with her as he escorted her husband to the door.

  “Thank you for your help,” he said, as Allinson buttoned his coat at the door of the inn, his wife remaining inside to exchange some pleasantries with the innkeeper’s daughter.

  “I’m sorry that I could not be of more assistance,” said Allinson. “Nevertheless, it is most intriguing, in a dreadful way, and I should like to take one more look at Trevors later before we leave him to the gentle ministrations of the undertaker. It may be that, in my exhaustion, I missed some detail that could prove useful.”

  Burke assented, then stepped aside in order to allow Mrs. Allinson to pass.

  And a most curious thing happened.

  Directly across from Burke was a mirror, advertising some brand of whiskey with which the policeman was unfamiliar. He could see himself reflected clearly in its surface, and, as she passed, so too was Emily Allinson, but through some distortion in the glass it appeared as though her reflection moved more slowly than she did, and Burke almost believed that it seemed to turn its face toward him even though the original stared fixedly ahead. That face, for an instant, was not that of Emily Allinson. Elongated and ruined, its mouth gaped and its face was grotesquely charred in places, the eyes like cinders in their sockets. Then Mrs. Allinson stepped outside with her husband and the vision was gone. Burke walked closer to the mirror and saw that it was deeply tarnished, as such cheap advertising tools tend to become. Its surface was mottled and uneven, so that even his own face shimmered and buckled like an image in a carnival tent. Yet he remained unsettled, even as he watched Mrs. Allinson escort her husband down the street, the doctor seeming almost to lean into her for support as they went. There were few males under the age of fifty wandering through Underbury that morning, although this was by no means unusual. Most towns and villages were now sorely depleted of their stock of young men, and Burke had no doubt that when the present hostilities came to an end it would still be many years before places like Underbury found some balance restored between the sexes.

  Burke returned to his sergeant, but he allowed the remainder of his breakfast to go cold and untouched.

  “Anything wrong, sir?” asked Stokes, who had rapidly regained his appetite with the departure of the doctor.

  “Just tiredness,” replied Burke.

  Stokes nodded, and finished off the runny yolk with a swipe of his toast. It was a good breakfast, he thought; maybe not as good as the breakfasts Mrs. Stokes cooked up for him, but very satisfying nonetheless. His good lady wife often offered the view that Inspector Burke could do with a little fattening up, but Burke w
as not one to accept invitations to dinner. In any event, Stokes understood that by “fattening up” his wife meant that Burke should be married, with a good strong table beneath which he could rest his feet while a woman fed him cooked meals, but Inspector Burke appeared to have little time for women. He lived alone with his books and his cat, and while he was always courteous in his dealings with ladies, even with those for whom the term “ladies” usually came with the appendage “of the night,” he remained distant, and even slightly uncomfortable, in female company. Such an existence would have proved insufferably lonely for Stokes, who fitted easily into the company of both sexes, but police work had made him conscious of the differences between people, and the complexity that lay beneath even the most apparently mundane of lives. Besides, he felt a great admiration, and even a fondness, for the inspector, who was a very good copper indeed. Stokes was proud to serve alongside him, and his private life was a matter for himself and no one else.

  Burke stood and removed his coat from a hook on the wall.

  “I think we need a little air,” he said. “It’s time to see where Mal Trevors died.”

  Burke and Stokes stood at one side of the post, Constable Waters at the other. It was still possible to discern traces of the victim’s blood upon the wood, and fragments of his jacket sleeve were caught in the barbs of the wire that formed a fence marking the verge of the property on which they stood. Beyond lay barren ground, then the low wall surrounding the church and the village cemetery.