The Yorkshire Witch

by Strevens, Summer;

  When Mary arrived in Bramley a few days later, William had failed to obtain the necessary shaped iron, and had to go to Stanningley, a neighbouring village, to fetch it. On his return the ‘shoes’ were nailed into place according to instruction, Mary taking with her the pincers for supposed despatch to Scarborough where they were to remain in Miss Blythe’s possession for a stipulated period of eighteen months, the same time-frame allotted for the removal of the ‘guinea notes’ stitched into the Perigos’ bed.

  A few weeks after the threshold charms had been put up, about the middle of October, William Perigo received another letter from Miss Blythe, delivered by the post boy from Leeds. It read:

  ‘My dear Friend --- You must go down to Mary Bateman’s at Leeds, on Tuesday next, and carry two guinea notes with you and give her them, and she will give you other two that I have sent to her from Scarborough, and you must buy me a small cheese about six or eight pound weight, and it must be of your buying, for it is for a particular use, and it is to be carried down to Mary Bateman’s, and she will send it to me by the coach -- This letter is to be burned when you have done reading it.’

  The last instruction with regard to burning the letter was one consistently repeated in all future correspondences received from Miss Blythe. Though sometimes the manner in which the letter was to be burned varied - ‘with a candle’, ‘in straw on the hearth of your wife’ even ‘at some public house in Leeds’ where William was to buy a pint of beer first, the end result was the same, Mary achieving the destruction of incriminating evidence by the very hands of those she was swindling.

  At the beginning of December 1806, another letter was received, with a request for more money:

  ‘My dear Friend --- You must go down to Mary Bateman’s on Tuesday next, and take four guineas notes with you and she will give you other four in exchange for them, which I have sent, and when you read this letter it must be burned.’

  From the time this letter was received through to March 1807, many further correspondences were sent, supposedly from Miss Blythe, roughly every fortnight, either carried by Mary Bateman’s son or arriving in the post. The letters demanded the surrender of various articles of furniture, clothing and other property, and of course money, all through the agency of Mary Bateman, and all to be sent on to Scarborough during the eighteen-month period stipulated by Miss Blythe. During this period, the Perigos handed over in the region of £70 in hard cash, and on each payment, William received silk bags into which he believed Mary had stitched what purported to be the coins and notes he had made over, and these were duly sewn into the Perigos’ bed as before. With regard to the household items extorted from the Perigos during this period, at Mary’s trial these were listed as amounting to the following:

  One Goose

  Two Pairs of Men’s Shoes

  A Goose Pye (pie)

  A Tea Caddy

  Several Shirts

  A Counterpane (bed covering)

  A Piece of Woollen Cloth

  A Silk Shawl

  A Light Coloured Gown Skirt

  A Light Coloured Cotton Gown

  Two Pillow Slips

  Six Strokes* of Malt

  A Quantity of Tea and Sugar

  Two or Three Hundred Eggs

  A Pair of Worsted Stockings

  A Pair of new Shoes

  A Pair of Black Silk Stockings

  Three Yards of Knaresbro’ Linen Cloth

  Ten Stones of Malt (63.5kg)

  A Piece of Beef

  Three Bottles of Spirits

  A New Waistcoat

  Sixty Pounds of Butter

  (a little over 27kg)

  Seven Strokes* of Meal

  Two Table Cloths

  Two Barrels (327 litres)

  Two Napkins

  *A ‘stroke’ or ‘strike’ was a unit of volume used for dry measure and equivalent to 2 bushels, that is 16 imperial gallons - a little under 73 litres.

  Miss Blythe’s demands continued however. In March 1807 she wrote:

  ‘My dear Friends. – I will be obliged to you if you will let me have half-a-dozen of your china, three silver spoons, half-a-pound of tea, two pounds of loaf sugar, and a tea canister to put the tea in, or else it will not do -- I durst not drink out of my own china. You must burn this with a candle.’

  Whether the Perigos’ resources were exhausted, or they had begun to doubt the powers of the heavily exacting Miss Blythe, when the china, silverware and other items failed to arrive by April, Miss Blythe put pen to paper again, pressing the requests made in the March letter which had not been forthcoming, along with a demand for a new bed and bedding as she was unable to sleep in her own bed due to the battle she was having with the spirits that had taken over Rebecca Perigo. Presumably, these same spirits had previously had some detrimental effect on Miss Blythe’s china and spoons too, as her March letter mentioned. Upping her demands, Miss Blythe wrote again to her ‘dear Friends’ that she would:

  ‘…be obliged to you if you will buy me a camp bedstead, bed and bedding, a blanket, a pair of sheets, and a long bolster must come from your house. You need not buy the best feathers, common ones will do. I have laid on the floor for three nights, and I cannot lay on my own bed owing to the planets being so bad concerning your wife, and I must have one of your buying or it will not do. You must bring down the china, the sugar, the caddy, the three silver spoons, and the tea at the same time when you buy the bed, and pack them up altogether. My brother’s boat will be up in a day or two, and I will order my brother’s boatman to call for them all at Mary Bateman’s, and you must give Mary Bateman one shilling for the boatman, and I will place it to your account. Your wife must burn this as soon as it is read or it will not do.’

  At this point the Perigos’ faith must have revived, along with their flagging finances as, accompanied by Mary, William dutifully purchased a bed and bedstead from the shop of a Mr Dobbin and the other items from a Mr Musgrave, both in Kirkgate in Leeds, at a total cost of £16 including the required set of china and various other items. All of the purchases were then delivered to Mr Sutton’s, at the Lion & Lamb Inn on Kirkgate, there to await collection by the boatman of Miss Blythe’s brother. At least one person’s suspicions were however aroused at this time, as Mr Dobbin, from whom the bed and bedstead had been purchased, commented that ‘it was a strange thing to send a bed so far’ and at this point we should perhaps examine the susceptibility of the Perigos, as their submission to Miss Blythe’s demands seemed gullible in the extreme. Indeed, the judge presiding over Mary’s trial put forward that ‘it is impossible not to be struck with wonder at the extraordinary credulity of Wm. Perigo, which neither the loss of his property, the death of his wife, and his own severe sufferings could dispel.’ Yet, in spite of William’s ‘uncommon want of judgement’ it must be borne in mind that Mary’s adeptness in identifying the psychological weaknesses of those ripe for exploitation, and her powers of persuasion were such that the Perigos were merely the latest in a long line of others who had fallen victim to her machinations. Clearly, Mary was a supreme exponent of the art of capitalising on the superstitious beliefs that people still firmly held in the early nineteenth century and used this to rob the unwary of all their worldly possessions. As the Perigo affair was to prove, Mary was certainly adept at playing the ‘long game’.

  As the deception wore on, Mary must have been astute enough to realise that either the couple were out of cash, or harbouring a growing suspicion, as she now brought into play the stratagem that was her hallmark. When the cover for her frauds looked to be wearing thin, to avoid discovery and exposure, Mary’s victims had to be eliminated. To this end, Miss Blythe wrote another letter paving the way for Mary to start poisoning William and Rebecca Perigo, and to give the lie some additional bite, and exacerbate those fears of the Perigos which had seen them fall into Mary’s clutches in the first place, Miss Blythe warned that death was imminent, should her instructions not be fully complied with. At the end of April 1807, the fo
llowing letter arrived:

  ‘My dear Friends --- I am sorry to tell you you will take an illness in the month of May next, either t’one or both of you, but I think both, but the works of God must have its course. You will escape the chambers of the grave; though you seem to be dead, yet you will live. Your wife must take half-a-pound of honey down from Bramley to Mary Bateman’s at Leeds, and it must remain there till you go down yourself, and she will put in such like stuff as I have sent from Scarbro’ to her, and she will put it in when you come down, and see her yourself, or it will not do. You must eat pudding for six days, and you must put in such like stuff as I have sent to Mary Bateman from Scarbro’, and she will give your wife it, but you must not begin to eat of this pudding while I let you know. If ever you find yourself sickly at any time, you must take each of you a teaspoonful of this honey; I will remit twenty pounds to you on the 20th day of May, and it will pay a little of what you owe. You must bring this down to Mary Bateman’s, and burn it at her house, when you come down next time.’

  Obviously the last instruction to burn this particularly incriminating correspondence in Mary’s presence was a very necessary precaution in view of the instructions contained in it and the plan of poisoning that Mary had initiated.

  ‘The chambers of the grave’ were indeed to prove prophetic words. A compliant Rebecca went to see Mary with half a pound of honey, and as the letter instructed, Mary mixed into it some of the special ‘medicine’ that Miss Blythe had prepared. Rebecca left with six packets of powder, marked for daily incorporation into the Perigos’ puddings, Mary reminding her that they must be used in the precise manner directed, or they would all die, Mary and Miss Blythe included.

  On 5 May, another letter arrived from Miss Blythe, instructing the Perigos to start eating the powder laced puddings on 11 May – but observing the culinary caveat that on each of the six days no more pudding than was sufficient for them both should be prepared, and that nobody else was allowed to eat any. If there were any leftovers these should be disposed of immediately. Miss Blythe was also clear that should either William or Rebecca become ‘sickly’, under no circumstances were they to call a doctor as he would not be able to help them. Finally, this letter, like all the others, was to be burned.

  Not only had Mary Bateman succeeded in acquiring a great number of goods and a considerable amount of money from the Perigos, the couple were now about to conveniently poison themselves and destroy all the written incriminating evidence substantiating Mary’s involvement into the bargain.

  On 11 May, a Monday, William and Rebecca dutifully began the regimen of pudding eating. Initially they suffered no ill effects, however on the sixth day, the quantity of powder in the packet marked for use on Saturday being five to six times larger than the previous doses, Rebecca made a small cake along with their pudding, to use up all the powder. On tasting the cake, William commented to his wife that it ‘tasted very keen’ and that ‘if the pudding tasted as bad he would not eat it’. True to his word, after one mouthful he found the pudding so nauseating that he could eat no more. Rebecca on the other hand, clearly keen to swallow what she thought would be the resolution to all her problems, managed three or four mouthfuls. Unable to eat any more, she went to take the unfinished pudding to the cellar; on her way however she was seized with the ‘most violent vomitings’. Yet to Rebecca, this sudden downturn in her state of health was indicative of the illness predicted in Miss Blythe’s letter, and accordingly she broke out the special honey, a teaspoon of which was to be taken by them both in the event of sickness. William ate two spoonfuls, while Rebecca took six or seven. Predictably they both rapidly took a turn for the worse. William described a ‘violent heat’ coming out of his mouth which was very sore and that his lips turned black, accompanied by a violent headache ‘twenty times worse than a common head-ache’ and his vision disturbed so that ‘everything appeared green to him’. Rebecca, who of course had eaten far more of the poison than her husband, vomited incessantly for twenty-four hours, but would not hear of a doctor being called as this would be going against Miss Blythe’s express instructions, and the charm would be broken. Instead, she ate even more of the honey. While Rebecca’s symptoms initially mirrored William’s, they quickly became more extreme; her tongue swelled so that she was unable to close her mouth and she complained of a constant thirst. As the poison progressed through her system and the symptoms worsened, her strength failing over a week of agonising torment and suffering, on Sunday 24 May, Rebecca Perigo died. Yet even on her deathbed, she was still under Miss Blythe’s influence, her last words to her husband being that he not be ‘rash’ with Mary Bateman, and that he himself should keep the appointment with Miss Blythe, whom Rebecca was supposed to have met at Mary Bateman’s house the following day.

  While the self-administration of the poison Mary had supplied was carefully timed so that the meeting with the mythical Miss Blythe would never take place, and indeed the entire fraud perpetrated against the Perigos would never come to light, the fact that William Perigo had survived the attempt on his life now posed a serious dilemma for Mary; but not one that her resourcefulness, or so she thought, could fail to resolve.

  Chapter 7

  The End of a Crooked Road

  Despite his wife’s entreaties, shortly before she died, William Perigo took it upon himself to send for a surgeon from Leeds, a Mr Chorley, but as word of Mrs Perigo’s death reached him before he actually arrived in Bramley, it wasn’t until the day after his wife’s death that Perigo paid a visit to the surgeon himself. On examining his patient, and taking into account the symptoms described, Mr Chorley drew the conclusion that poison had been ingested. As a means of proof, Mr Chorley suggested that some of the flour used in the last fateful pudding be made up into a paste and fed to a chicken to see what harm befell it. Whether or not the flour used was untainted, or the test subject had a lucky escape, the chicken suffered no ill effects from the experiment. However, a cat which had been experimentally fed some of the cooked pudding (by the Perigos’ neighbours) did die immediately, and though Mr Chorley’s suspicions were clearly aroused, no further steps were taken to ascertain the real cause of Rebecca’s death at that time, and no autopsy was performed on her body. Chorley did later perform an autopsy on the body of a dog which had died as a result of being fed pills and a solution made from honey that the couple were directed to take. There was poison in the animal’s stomach.

  After his wife’s death, William went into Leeds to tell Mary that Rebecca had died. Mary’s surprising and admonishing reaction was that Rebecca’s life would have been preserved had she ‘licked up’ all of the special honey as directed in Miss Blythe’s letter. When William inferred that it was in fact the honey that had caused his wife’s death, an angry Mary remonstrated that if he would bring her what was left of the jar of honey she would ‘lick it up before his eyes and satisfy him’. What she would have done had William called her bluff we can only guess at, though she would have thought of something! Incredibly, even after his wife’s death, William Perigo seemed willing to continue his subjugation to Miss Blythe and not long after this confrontation, he received another letter from the lady, commiserating on Rebecca’s death but nonetheless blaming her demise, and the threat to her own and Mary Bateman’s lives, on Rebecca having ‘touched of those things which I ordered her not to’, presumably the ‘money’ stitched into the Perigo’s bed. Miss Blythe also said that Rebecca would rise from the grave to stroke her husband’s face with her right hand, and that William would ‘lose the use of one side’, but that Miss Blythe would pray for him. Of course, he should also burn the letter immediately after having read it. Was Mary paving the way for another murder attempt attributable to a stroke perhaps? She certainly had a problem on her hands with William having survived her previous attempt, and he had unwittingly thwarted another bid in not telling Mary he was taking a curative trip to the spa of Buxton on the instruction of his surgeon, Mr Chorley. It may be asked however as to why William
chose not to avail himself of one of the more northerly spas, resorts such as Harrogate, Ilkley and around Croft-on-Tees, or even those in Leeds itself like Quarry Hill. Perhaps he preferred to distance himself somewhat from the recent traumas culminating in the death of his wife.

  On his return from taking the waters, Mary upbraided the widower for not telling her that he was going to Buxton, as, had she known he was to take a journey, she would have would have given him a bottle, the contents of which ‘would have cured him on the road’. Assuredly the contents of that bottle would have done little to ‘cure’ William Perigo.

  After returning to Bramley, he continued to receive letters from Miss Blythe, full of renewed demands. Her powers of perception were great indeed, as in looking at William’s ‘planet’ she had seen his return from Buxton, and was sorry that if only he had stayed a few days longer, he would have had the opportunity of meeting Miss Blythe there herself.

  All of Mary’s nefarious deeds notwithstanding, she must be congratulated for the power of her imagination, as the incident she concocted to explain the necessity of Miss Blythe’s fictional trip to Buxton was outlandish to say the least. Apparently Miss Blythe had been injured when she and her brother had been thrown from their open carriage when the horse drawing it took fright at the sight of a hot air balloon! Astutely covering all the possible loopholes in her story, Mary was even meticulous enough to make sure that the next letter received from Miss Blythe was headed and dated as being written from Buxton, the small matter of the absence of a Buxton postmark explained away by Miss Blythe having enclosed her letter with another bound for Bradford, the letter to William having been posted on from there.