‘It is quite simple, sir. The child is not my husband’s.’
‘Not your husband’s? Ah.’
‘It is not what you think. I was raped.’
‘Enough of this. Come, mistress, you must see this does not help,’ he coaxed. ‘Come quiet now. This is what we’ll do. I’ll take you to the kirk tonight and put you in the steeple. You can think upon your story there.’
‘I will come there if I have to, sir. My story will not change.’
‘Hush. If it does not, we’ll have the midwife try you. Come now, quietly.’
It was a form of words, no more, for she did not resist. She paused only to appeal to Tibbie, holding out her arms. Her daughter shrank away.
‘Did you cheat my father?’
Agnes answered quietly, ‘It’s true I am with child. The child is not your father’s. I wanted him to lie with me, so that he might accept it as his own. I meant no more than that.’
She touched her daughter’s cheek. ‘You must write at once to your uncle, and explain what has happened here. God bless you. Tom, take care of her.’
The kirk session had already met that week, and on the afternoon of Agnes’ arrest dispensed its justice in the marketplace, from which fleshly entertainment came the baxter, somewhat flushed. He was surprised to find another prisoner in the tower.
‘Wha’s that ye brocht?’ The Strachan wife?’ he demanded of the coroner. ‘The minister is out of town. We are no’ due to sit.’
‘Ah, she’s not for you. She’ll come before the circuit judge. She’s taken for the slaughter of her man.’
‘Archie Strachan, deid?’ The baxter gave a whistle. ‘Who’d have thought it, though?’
‘Poisoned,’ the coroner grinned. He knew that in committing Agnes to the kirk he had ensured her full confession when she came before the magistrate.
‘She has confessed, I doubt?’ the baxter went on greedily. He felt a frisson of excitement, stirred by his exertions in the marketplace, a mingled sense of pleasure and disgust.
‘There’s witchcraft involved. A convolute case.’
‘Witchcraft?’ The baxter’s eyes were open wide. ‘Tsk! You’d have her watched and waked?’
‘Aye, that I would. Twere better that she did confess before the session court.’
‘I see. That I do see. Come, then, tell me all!’
At dusk he took the gaoler’s key and let himself into the steeple where Agnes was locked for the night. ‘Mistress Ford,’ he told her pleasantly, ‘I have the candle. Here now, let me look into your face. A terrible thing, is this not?’
‘Master Brooke,’ she knew him; he was like the dyer, and she did not trust his kindness, ‘It is a mistake, and will be put right.’
The baxter had the softest hands, made white by the kneading of bread, the barley stone pumice of oatmeal and peas. Blank as a child’s and milk-clean, they harboured a sinuous strength. His fingertips had long since lost all feeling, numbed and scorched by force and fire. Only memory preserved their subtlety of touch, prodding and probing resistance, knocking and shaping the bread. He looked from these hands up at Agnes, pale in the candlelight, flexing his fingertips, plying the joints. ‘Ah, Agnes Ford,’ he said softly, ‘tis a sad, sad thing that has befallen you. Perhaps it was the demons drove you to it?’
‘What demons?’ she whispered. ‘I have done nothing.’
He considered this, inspecting his fingernails. Presently he said, ‘Did you hear the brangling at the cross?’
Agnes shook her head.
‘Ah, did ye no’? A woman was lashed for a whore, the mouth on her foul as you like! She’s to compear for blasphemy next week. The world’s a wicked place, what say you, Agnes Ford?’
‘I cannot think her much improved,’ she answered hoarsely.
‘By whipping? Ah, you’d be surprised.’ He smiled a little, dropping the words into the darkness. ‘Did you bewitch your husband?’
‘I swear it, I did not.’
‘Tell it to the minister, at the session court. Goodnight now, Mistress Ford.’
Without another word, he closed the door.
‘That woman is a witch,’ he informed the beadle. ‘There can be no doubt. Did you look upon her mark?’
‘I did not lift her dress,’ allowed the beadle sheepishly. ‘Did you?’
‘Forget the mark.’ The baxter changed the subject. ‘Guard her close. She will confess. She’ll come before the session when we meet. Meanwhile, we must wake and watch, observe her, mark the signs. You may take the first shift, and a shilling extra for your pains.’
‘Two shillings,’ said the beadle narrowly. ‘If she is a witch, there is a risk.’
The baxter tutted, ‘Tsk, there is no risk, because, you see, you will restrain her, that she may not use her artifice or conjure you with tricks. Neither heed nor talk with her, but place her bread and water only just in reach. Better, keep her chained. And keep her dark and waking, and I’ll warrant you may hear her devils yet. Peace, man, they won’t harm you! Two shillings, then. So be it. You shall have another when she hangs.’
‘You must pay me to release her, even if she hangs,’ the beadle pointed out. ‘Two shillings now, and two for her release, and two for her confession, and another when she hangs.’ He counted on his fingers. ‘Seven shillings in all. We’ll call it eight.’
The baxter raised an eyebrow ‘Would you rob the parish to despatch a witch?’
‘Witches are expensive. There’s the pyre or scaffold, and the lockman’s fee, a quantity of rope and kindling for the fire . . .’
‘Aye,’ the elder chuckled, ‘there’s ay a price to pay. Well then, Jock, I cannot promise, but the parish is likely to meet you. If ye’ll mind her while the lockman comes, I’ll put it to the minister to approve your fee. I can’t see he’ll dispute it. As ye ken yourself, he does not care to know the details of these things.’
‘He’s a guid man,’ posed the beadle doubtfully.
‘Aye, that he is, the better to be clear of this. He’s weak in heart and stomach, and he will not like this news. Therefore we’ll not disturb him till the time is ripe. Meanwhile, guard her well.’ The baxter winked at him. ‘Ye widna want her devils makin’ eyes at you.’
Watching and Waking
The beadle had set the lamp behind him low on the ground where the prick of the light did not show his face. Still she seemed to know him for as he approached she cried hoarsely, ‘For pity, Jock, I am with child!’ He blanched a little at the calling of his name, cupping her face in his hand, and placed his necklace tenderly, like a lover’s trinket, at her throat. The wall supplied a collar and a chain, the partner of the jougs that rattled at the mercat cross, and this the beadle used to encircle her, beading her neck with twin bracelets, buckling its manacles close. He restrained the witch so that she might not sit or lie, the better to arouse and wake her. If she fainted it would wirry her or strangle her, and jerk her back into life. He forced the rusted padlock fast against her breast, where it hung grinding and pendulous. Agnes could taste it, metallic like blood. The beadle retreated as soundless as he came and taking up the light, he closed the door. He left the witch alone and in the dark.
Depriving her of light and speech, the beadle felt less afraid of the witch. He set the lamp upon the table by the psalter, and the tremor within him began to subside. He was a candlemaker by trade. Now, to calm his nerves and while away the hours of night watch, he wove strips of hemp into candlewicks, laying them carefully out on the board. And when the witch’s pleas came loud enough to unnerve him, he whispered his catechism under his breath, and sang to himself.
He would have liked to use the branks to still her tongue, but the baxter had forbidden it; ‘Allow her loose her voice, and your silence shall shape her confession.’ So he sat quiet, methodically fashioning his wicks, until he heard her falter and fall still. Only then did he take up a splinter of light to peek through the grating, undo the locks and feel for her face in the darkness, prodding and pricking h
er awake again. It thrilled him to go to in to her, a cudgel by his side to keep him safe. Once she pawed his sleeves and clung there close. He had to shake her off. When she could stand no longer, he roused her choking from the irons with water to her lips, and sat her squarely on a stool below the chain. In doing so he saved her life. That done, he flashed the splinter flame before her eyes to reassure himself that she was conscious, locked the door and left her till the hangman came to make the second shift. This lockman, more accomplished in the arts of torment, was less fearful than the beadle of approaching her. Cheerfully, he kept her waking. It was he who forged the plan to ring the handbells night and day, that starting from her sleep, she might not know the passing of the hours. And so the two of them did watch and wake her, hour by hour and turn by turn. And neither of them spoke to her, but pricked and teased and stung her, buzzing round her dreams like flies, until the baxter, when he came by for his third watch, was pleasantly astonished to remark the change in her.
As Agnes lay waking, Meg Cullan slept. Through long nights of sickness, Giles Locke had attended her, calming the demons that kept her in thrall. When he was content at last the seizures were discharged, he was reluctant still to leave her side. He wrote out stern commandments for her rest. His prescriptions vexed and baffled Lucy Linn. Yet, as she could, she did comply, and with the promise of a nurse, both Giles and Hew returned to college life. And so they went on quietly, until one afternoon, some three days after Agnes’ arrest, Hew called in at the merchant’s house to find his cousin weeping in the hall. This in itself did not alarm him. He was used to Lucy’s fancies, and resigned himself to comfort her. He had fetched her salts and cushions, herbs and wines and comfits, enquired upon her health and bairn and husband, all to no avail, before the floods had settled and the tale began to spill. It came out in blurts, like a blocked water fountain, blunted with spouting salt tears.
‘That girl! I did not think she would be bold enough to come here! God forgive me! What will Robin think!’
Quick-witted as he was, Hew could not untangle this.
‘There is nothing that cannot be managed,’ he assured her patiently. ‘Tell me, who has come? Has someone threatened you?’
She shook her head. ‘The Strachan girl,’ she whispered, ‘came here to beg for help. My God! If Robin knew!’
‘Tibbie Strachan? Why?’
‘Have you not heard? It is her mother Agnes, taken for a witch. And she has killed her husband and is in the tower. And Tibbie says that they torment her there, and force her from her rest. My God, Hew, Agnes is a witch, and she was here!’
Hew’s mind had begun to make sense of this parcel of words. He felt chilled to the pit of his belly. He spoke very calmly, clasping Lucy’s hands.
‘I had not heard this. Our college walls are thick. Agnes killed her husband? How?’
‘With poisoned seeds. She had them from a witch. And she is taken to the kirk, till she confess, and name the witch, and both shall surely hang. If Robin knew I had her in the house!’
Hew pressed on urgently, ‘Was it Tibbie, then, you had here in the house?’
‘Tibbie? Twas Agnes. Pity, Hew, don’t blame me!’
She flinched from him, and fleetingly he almost pitied her.
‘You will not tell Robin,’ she whimpered. ‘Pray, don’t let him know. Professor Locke insisted on a nurse, and Meg was wild and frothing and the maid afraid to sit with her.’
‘And so Agnes nursed her,’ Hew concluded desperately.
‘Aye, do not blame me,’ she clutched at him. ‘For I doubt she did no harm. But Agnes is a witch!’
He shook his head. ‘It was not your fault. I should have found a nurse for her. Though I think it very likely that the matter is mistaken. Agnes Ford is not a witch. In any case, she cannot come here now, so put her from your mind.’
‘You think not?’ Lucy blew her nose. Unburdening had brightened her.
‘It matters not, though, if she is a witch,’ she remarked with unexpected shrewdness. ‘Come the session court, she will confess. And to think, I had her here!’
Hew forced himself to smile at her. ‘Well then, you see, there’s no harm done. We’ll keep this quiet, Lucy. You have not told Meg?’
She shook her head regretfully. ‘I do not speak to Meg. Tis only these last days she has been sensible. It is an uncouth ailment, and I do not fault the maid. That’s why I was so glad to have had Agnes. No, I have not told her. The physician is insistent, she must not be vexed.’
‘It’s proper that we keep it so. Poor Lucy,’ he expressed a sympathy he did not hold at heart, ‘this is hard for you.’
‘It has been,’ she simpered, clutching his sleeve. ‘But I can bear it now.’
It was harder to conceal his true concerns from Meg. He did not like to lie to her. Sleepy as she was, she sensed something amiss. ‘What has happened to you, Hew? You have a cut upon your throat.’ She traced the scratches with her finger.
‘A close shave from a drunken barber.’ Gently, he removed her hand. ‘You were gone for days. I’m glad to find you waking. I have been afraid for you.’
‘I am recovered,’ she replied a little sourly. ‘Only Giles enforces rest. And he is most officious. Pray advise him, I am well.’
‘You must listen to him, Meg. The seizures were severe. You remember little, I suppose?’
‘Nothing, till I woke up yesterday. Lucy says you brought me here with Giles, and that Giles has since attended me. It’s good of him, though he has been boasting how well he has cured me.’
Hew was too preoccupied to smile at this. ‘You don’t remember your nurse?’
‘What nurse?’
‘Someone undressed you.’
‘Was it not the maid?’ She flushed a little. ‘Hew, you don’t mean Giles!’
‘No, no,’ he reassured her hastily. ‘Look, here are your clothes on the stool. But I do not see the pocket where you keep your hemlock seeds.’
‘It’s there inside the dress. There is a little ribbon ties it to the sleeve.’
‘I see it now. It’s empty.’
Meg sat up in bed. ‘The scoundrel, Hew! Doctor Locke has taken it, and dosed me with the seed. He who has the nerve to boast he cured my fits without resort to poisons, as he calls them! Well! The quacksalve! We have found him out! He will not grant my arts superior to his.’
‘It seems that you have solved it,’ her brother answered grimly. ‘Well then, let us humour him. It will not do us good to wound his pride. What matter, though? You’re well. And if you rest a little longer, you’ll be quite restored to us.’
He tucked the empty pocket in his shirt and left her with a heavy heart.
When Hew had been a student in his first year at St Andrews, two men were taken from the town as witches to the scaffold. One was hanged, and one was burned. In the college the reporting of their trial was met with lewd excitement as the young men feasted on the details of their crimes. When the regents’ backs were turned they spoke of little else. Some had begged for leave to watch the executions, which was granted with good grace. Hew had felt the revulsion, squeamish and soft, that threatened him still to this day. The necromancers preyed upon his mind, both in the crude accounts of their confessing, sniggered in the hall from boy to boy, and in the heady whispers of their discourse with the dead. At length he almost had believed himself bewitched, haunted by these nightmare tales of demons and the engines that had moved the men’s confessions. Only Nicholas had sensed his friend’s disquiet, and had whispered to him on the night before the hanging that he doubted whether witches did exist. Hew was startled from his fears. ‘Twere heresy, for sure, to say they don’t exist.’
‘Aye, heresy, for sure,’ his bedfellow had smiled at him.
This cheerful confidence had brought Hew comfort. He confessed he would prefer a whipping to the watching of an execution, witch or no. And so amidst the clamour they had slipped away to spend the afternoon upon the links, chasing conies through the dunes, where truant, t
hey had forged their friendship far beyond the crowd. As the term progressed, Hew became acclimatised to torment and the ruthless casual cruelties of the kirk. He saw vagrants and whoremongers scourged through the streets, branded and bloodied like parcels of meat. Yet though their disfigurement moved and disgusted him, the cruelty had inured him to their suffering, for it turned their human faces to grotesques. Three years later, when he heard John Knox pour scalding words upon a witch before the pulpit, he watched her trudging forth towards the pyre with little sense of horror or regret. The flames found her shrivelled, dehumanised.
Once a witch was named, there was little could be done to stop the turning of the screw, the long and slow trudging through darkness to death. Agnes was already in the shaft of sleepless dream, whose only light and end was her confession. To urge her not to confess, he was aware, was like urging her to walk alone across an open precipice, closing off from her the last glimpse of the light. Yet Agnes Ford must not confess. She must not denounce his sister as a witch. If Agnes once gave name to her, Meg Cullan would be wracked and bowed to the most intricate of cruelties, turned to human torchlight, rope around her neck. Therefore Agnes Ford must be released, and he must be her advocate.
He ran to the Mercatgait and hammered on the door of Archie’s shop.
Tibbie Strachan had changed remarkably since he had seen her last. The girl who looked out on the street bore no resemblance to the strumpet who had tossed her curls in kirk. She gave a bare glance at the stranger, and the apprehension in her voice did not quicken into curiosity.
‘We’re closed, sir. For bereavement.’
‘You’re Tibbie Strachan?’
‘Isabel, aye.’ She stared at him, grey with mistrust, her pet name discarded. ‘What would you want with me, sir?’
‘I come from the house of my cousin, Robin Flett, from Lucy Linn his wife, who has lately been a friend to you.’
A little colour pricked her cheeks as she said stiffly, ‘Lately, aye. You need not take the trouble, sir, to warn me from your family. Lucy made it clear.’ She began to close the door.
Hue and Cry Page 26