The Last Witchfinder

by James Morrow

“Gelie Whittle, I aver that this virtuous current hath vomited thee forth!” Walter shouted as Pound and Greaves hauled her bowed, dripping, shivering body free of the water and back over the bridge wall.

  They set her in the center of the span, where she jerked and spasmed like a gaffed flounder expiring on the deck of a fishing smack. Crouching beside her, Walter severed her ankle thongs with his pocket-knife and untied the mask-o’-truth. She exhaled fiercely.

  “Wilt thou therefore confess to thy witchery,” Walter asked, “or must we bring thee before Mr. Pound’s jury?”

  “I could no more put my name to your paper than I could set a Bible a-flame,” Mrs. Whittle sputtered. “’Tis as sinful to claim compact with the Devil where none exists as to deny such intercourse when it be true!”

  “You bear an imp teat ’twixt your legs!”

  “’Tis naught but the womb God gave me!”

  “You bear an imp teat, the Alde’s flow hath spurned you, and now you speak of taking a torch to Scripture!” Walter said. “The jurors will hear the whole of’t, Mrs. Whittle, pap and river and blasphemy—they will hear all three!”

  j

  ON WEDNESDAY MORNING Jennet’s fellow student arrived at the manor, Elinor Mapes, eleven years old, a bitter and conceited child who never tired of noting that her father was the Vicar of Ipswich, whereas other girls’ fathers were merely farmers or cobblers or joiners or witchfinders. By way of convincing herself she was in fact fond of this disagreeable person, Jennet had on several occasions made overtures of friendship, reminding Elinor that they shared a bond of bereavement, Sarah Mapes having succumbed to a malignant fever not many months after Margaret Stearne had died in childbirth. But the object of Jennet’s amicable advances invariably greeted them with scorn.

  “Would that Elinor knew as much of kindness as of Copernicus,” Jennet said to Aunt Isobel.

  “‘This you should pity rather than despise,’ as Helena advises Lysander,” Isobel replied.

  “Mayn’t I do both?”

  “Both?”

  “Pity and despise Elinor at the same time?”

  Isobel rolled her eyes heavenward.

  The source of Elinor’s disgruntlement was not far to seek. Whereas Jennet was privileged to live at Mirringate during the cleansing season, her schoolmate had to return home each night to beguile her father’s solitude—an insufferable situation for a student like Elinor, who was in her own self-satisfied way a true lover of knowledge. Although Jennet struggled to avoid trumpeting her special status, she periodically succumbed to temptation, making mention well within Elinor’s hearing of the previous evening’s telescopic exploration, micrographic adventure, pendulum experiment, or visit to the alchemical laboratory.

  Elinor’s bile was fully aboil that morning, threatening to scald whomever it touched, much to her father’s evident discomfort. Jennet felt sorry for him. Although generally indifferent to clerics, she held Roger Mapes in the highest regard, as he seemed not merely a man of God but a godly man, his very self a sermon. No mere succession of phrases, however eloquent, could preach so persuasively as did Mr. Mapes’s goodness.

  “Prithee, tell me what novelties have come to your school of late,” he said as he followed Isobel, Jennet, and his glowering daughter into the library. He was a tall, well-favored man with an array of moles on his left temple suggesting the constellation Cassiopeia. “A vacuum-pump mayhap?”

  “I have just now collected an astonishing book.” Isobel lifted the Principia Mathematica from its niche, presenting it to the Vicar. “’Twould appear that what Jesus Christ accomplished for our souls, Isaac Newton hath done for our senses.”

  “Lady Mowbray, you can turn a phrase for fair.” From Mr. Mapes’s pursed lips came a titter not entirely merry. “Christ and Newton, a most…audacious analogy.” He restored the Principia Mathematica to its shelf and withdrew from his satchel a slender volume entitled Satan’s Invisible World Discovered. “George Sinclair is certainly no Newton, but I imagine your brother-in-law might profit from this treatise, which I recently acquired wet from the press. Consider it my gift to him.”

  “Walter will be most appreciative,” Isobel said, taking the book in hand.

  “What use hath a pricker for such rarefied information?” said Elinor. “It takes no special wisdom to plant a pin in a beggar-woman’s bum.”

  “Miss Mapes, you will not use vulgar language,” the Vicar said.

  “’Twould be my supposition, child,” Isobel said, looking sharply at Elinor, “that in obtaining impractical knowledge we please God far more than when we cultivate applicable ignorance. I trust you grasp the distinction.”

  Before Elinor could reply, Isobel turned to the Vicar and asked, “Will you do us the honor of attending the day’s first lesson?”

  Mr. Mapes assented with a smile, whereupon Isobel guided everyone down the hall and into the crystal-gazing parlor, the churlish Elinor all the while staring crestfallen at her shoes.

  “Our aim this morning is to duplicate a demonstration devised by Mr. Newton himself,” Isobel said. The room lay in a swamp of gloom, its windows occluded by black velvet. “This past winter Miss Mapes and Miss Stearne read a piece from the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions in which Newton—”

  “’Twas called ‘A New Theory About Light and Colors,’” interrupted Elinor.

  “In which Newton”—Isobel inhaled pointedly—“proposed a new theory about light and colors.” She set a triangular glass prism in the center of the table, strode toward the east window, and removed a circular patch from the curtain. A shaft of white sunlight shot across the parlor and, striking the prism, transmuted into a rainbow that decorated the opposite wall with brilliant ribbons of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. “What conclusion did Newton draw from this first experiment? Miss Stearne?”

  “According to the received laws of refraction, the spectrum before us should be circular,” Jennet said, “for the chink in the curtain is circular, as is the sun itself. And yet we see this oblong form. Mr. Newton hath judged the traditional optics to be in error. A prism doth not alter light’s nature but rather separates light into its components.”

  “Très bien!” From her writing-desk Isobel obtained a second glass prism and two identical white boards, each bearing a shilling-size hole at its center. “Next Newton performed what he called his experimentum crusis. Miss Mapes, will you favor us with a replication?”

  “Certainement.”

  Elinor set one perforated board upright behind the standing prism, then positioned the other board vertically about eight feet farther along the table, so that a portion of the refracted light passed through the first hole and struck the second board, bestowing a ray of purest red upon both the immediate barrier and the parlor wall beyond. “If the old optics is correct, we could now place the second prism thus”—with a confident flourish Elinor fixed the glass pentahedron behind board number two—“refract the red ray as it emerges from the second hole, and in consequence project new colors on the wall. But, as you can see, the red ray remains red.” Slowly, methodically, she moved the original prism about its axis, isolating each color in turn and delivering it to the second prism. The orange ray stayed orange; the yellow hoarded its hue; the green held true—likewise the blue, the indigo, and the violet. “No matter how we align these prisms, we can effect no further transmutations.”

  “And what therefore is Mr. Newton’s final hypothesis concerning light?” Isobel asked.

  “He hath declared light to be a confused aggregate of rays,” Jennet cried, “differently refrangible, and endued with all sorts of colors!”

  “I was about to say that!” Elinor shouted.

  “In a bug’s rump you were!” Jennet insisted.

  “I was! I was!”

  “Softly now, children, for you’ve both learned your optics admirably.” Like a mariner reefing a sail, Isobel uncurtained the east window. The glorious morning sunshine spilled into the room. “Miss Mapes,
your father should be proud.”

  “Proud as a man can feel without making a sin of’t,” the Vicar said. Bending low, he kissed his daughter’s cheek—but after this show of affection came a rather different display, Mr. Mapes rising to full height and presenting Isobel with a mien of supreme discontent. “Lady Mowbray, you know I’m not one to condemn the pleasures of crystal-gazing, for where’s the harm in idle divination? This prism business, however—alas, I do not approve, for I find it to be a grotesque parody of God’s most basic gesture.”

  “You perplex me,” Isobel said.

  “Genesis Chapter One tells how the Almighty’s first act was to divide light from darkness, a great splitting such as you’ve had these children perform, and in Chapter Nine we learn that he fashioned a rainbow to seal his covenant with Noah.”

  “True,” Isobel said, “but doth not Christ in Matthew Chapter Six bid us imitate God in all things?”

  “Aye, and yet—”

  “To mimic the Almighty is not perforce to mock Him.”

  Mr. Mapes grinned, and from this gentle arc there came a musical laugh. “So, Lady Mowbray, you have once again outscriptured me.” His mouth reassumed the horizontal. “Confect these spectra if you must, but keep mindful that true creation is the enterprise of our Heavenly Father alone.”

  “Entirely mindful,” Isobel said.

  “God’s the author of all things, and Christ the cause, but ’tis Lucifer uses the world as his workshop,” Mr. Mapes said, slipping out of the crystal-gazing parlor. “We must be evermore vigilant, lest we become the Devil’s apprentices.”

  j

  FOR THE WATCHING of Alice Sampson, Walter had been planning to use the normal venue, Granary Street Livery, and so he was keenly disappointed when Mr. Pound informed him that the building had burned down the previous summer, a disaster most plausibly ascribed to Satanic mischief. No sooner had the magistrate finished deploring this diabolism, however, than Mr. Greaves stepped forward and volunteered his own barn, presently dedicated to the raising of poultry. Though Walter was not eager to spend his afternoon in an atmosphere of chicken droppings, he elected to accept this turn of fortune without complaint. He’d become a demonologist for the glorification of his Savior, after all, not the gratification of his senses.

  Shortly after the midday meal, Walter, Dunstan, and Mr. Greaves retrieved Mrs. Sampson from the gaol, carted her down Mill Lane, and chained her to a rusting plow in the farthest corner of the constable’s barn. Upon Greaves’s departure, Walter deployed an empty rooster-pen within inches of the suspect, then sat on the dirt floor beside his son and poured water from his leather flask into a tin cup. He drank. The barn was even worse than he’d anticipated, as malodorous and inhospitable as a chamber-pot, the hot sun conspiring with the poor ventilation to breed a stifling heat. Splotches of pale speckled excrement lay everywhere. Grimy brown feathers covered the ground like the molt of a winged imp.

  Great was Walter’s pride when, instead of lamenting this miserable environment, Dunstan merely took up his sketching-folio and proceeded to render Greaves’s largest goose in pen and ink. There was a kind of holiness, Walter felt, in the way Dunstan could exercise his drafting talent whilst sitting but ten feet from an accused witch. For his immediate future, obviously, Dunstan would pursue the cleansing profession, but after he’d been installed in Heaven, posterity might one day declare him a saint.

  From his son’s potential canonization Walter’s thoughts turned naturally to the tantalizing and auspicious fact that England’s present king was a Papist. For whilst the master pricker was Church of England pate to paunch, he had to admit that the most impassioned rationale for cleansing wasn’t Protestant in origin—it wasn’t Perkins’s Discourse on the Damned Art of Witchcraft or Glanvill’s Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions—but Catholic: the Malleus Maleficarum, that great Bludgeon Against Evildoers, that mighty Hammer of Witches, written two hundred years earlier by the Dominican friars Krämer and Sprenger. Assuming James the Second survived his present political difficulties, it seemed reasonable to suppose that he would heed Walter’s petition, chartering the post of Witchfinder-Royal and filling it with Walter himself.

  But until the dawning of that blessed day, his authority would derive from one source only, the woefully flawed Parliamentary Witchcraft Act. True, this sorry statute had improved on its predecessor of 1563, making the Satanic covenant a crime in itself, but the 1604 law was still keyed to maleficium, to evildoing, with the result that the average English jurist demanded to hear evidence of diabolical intervention—a blighted crop, a miscarried fœtus, a murderous lightning-bolt—ere sending a sorcerer to the gallows. On the Continent, meanwhile, witch-cleansing remained a more enlightened enterprise. Not only did the Papal Inquisitors understand the stake to be a more appropriate execution method than the noose, they never confused mere maleficium with a witch’s ultimate depravity: her worship of Lucifer, her X in the Devil’s register.

  Dunstan finished drawing the goose. A ripe time, Walter decided, to test the boy on his Malleus. If Dunstan was to prosper in his destined occupation, he must know his Krämer and Sprenger chapter and verse.

  “What three classes of men do the friars identify in Part Two, Question One?”

  “The friars name those persons whom a witch can ne’er injure,” Dunstan replied, setting his folio aside.

  Walter offered a nod of approbation. “And who are the first class?”

  “Men who engage the powers of Christ and Cross in performing exorcisms.”

  “Aye. And the second class?”

  “Those who in various and mysterious ways are blessed by the holy angels.”

  “And the third?”

  “Those who administer public justice against the Devil!”

  “Such a remarkable pupil!”

  As dusk came to Saxmundham, the prickers’ sufferings were finally rewarded. A lewd black snake wriggled out from behind a barrel of poultry feed and sinuated toward Mrs. Sampson. Walter rose, lurched forward, and grabbed the familiar, shuddering as its dry supple body coiled about his forearm. Such a valuable beast, he thought, shoving the snake into the rooster-pen—worth two crowns to Isobel Mowbray and perhaps a thousand times that much to Lucifer.

  “Look,” he said, bringing the imprisoned snake before Mrs. Sampson. “I’ve caught your slithery servant.”

  “A drink,” she rasped. “Prithee, good sir, some water.”

  “Even if you retract your confession, Mrs. Sampson, other evidence will send you to the assizes…”

  “A drink, sir.”

  “That blotch on your shoulder…”

  “I beg ye. A drink.”

  “And now this incontrovertible serpent.”

  “I thirst.”

  Walter winced. I thirst: the very words Christ had spoken from Calvary’s summit. After pondering the problem a full minute, he decided that her irreverence was unintended. He would give the wretch what she wanted.

  “Dunstan, bring a cup of water thither!” he cried.

  “Bless ye, master pricker,” Mrs. Sampson muttered.

  It took the boy but an instant to decant a pint and bear the tin cup across the barn. He passed the cup to Walter, who in turn pressed it to the suspect’s lips.

  “Enjoy this measure whilst you may,” Walter said as Mrs. Sampson gulped down his charity, “for in Hell you’ll partake of naught but kippers soaked in brine, and you’ll get nary a swallow of sweetness till Eternity is come and gone.”

  j

  ELATED BY HER SUCCESS in replicating Isaac Newton’s experimentum crusis, Elinor Mapes took to gloating, a demeanor she maintained all during the midday meal and throughout the afternoon’s first lesson, which had the girls ascending to the conservatory, studying pieces of dissected insects through the microscope, and draughting what they beheld with pen and ink. For Jennet it proved a congenial enough exercise, though she wished that Dunstan was at her side, likewise sketching the creatures. What grace he wo
uld have bestowed on the facets of the honeybee’s eye, the crenellations of the grasshopper’s leg, the lattice of the locust’s wing, or the feathery splendor of the moth’s antenna.

  Elinor’s gloating stopped shortly after the second lesson began, for its matter was the Latin language.

  “Last night I composed a letter to Mr. Newton himself,” Aunt Isobel announced upon ushering her charges down the stairway and back into the crystal-gazing parlor. From the writing-desk she retrieved a piece of vellum, its surface covered with the florid coils and ornate curves that characterized her penmanship. “The version that reaches his eyes must for courtesy’s sake employ the language of Virgil.”

  She set the vellum on the table, anchoring it beneath a prism, then equipped her pupils with paper, goose quills, ink pots, stationery, and Seylet’s English-Latin Dictionary. Together Jennet and Elinor studied Isobel’s letter, and briefly they became compatriots in misery, for the required translation would be no Roman teething ring, no amo amas amat, but a missive of Ciceronian complexity, awash in accusatives, beset by ablatives, and replete with verbs whose conjugations varied intolerably from tense to tense.

  13 April 1688

  Dear Professor Isaac Newton:

  I write to you as a Woman whose deepest Passion is to know the Secrets of Nature, such as those you have reveal’d in your recently print’d Principia Mathematica.

  Perusing this admirable Treatise, I am mov’d to an Hypothesis concerning the Phenomenon of Witchcraft. I believe that your various Theorems and Propositions may have inadvertently disclosed the Mechanisms by which Wicked Spirits, once summon’d by Sorcerers, undertake the malevolent Varieties of (as we Philosophers term it) “Action at a Distance,” namely the Raising of destructive Moon Tides, the Conjuration of Hailstorms, and the Blasting of Crops and Cattle with Lightnings from Heav’n.

  My Brother-in-Law, Witchfinder-General for Mercia and East Anglia, hath document’d these and other unholy Activities with scrupulous Thoroughness, and he would gladly provide you with such Attestations and Proofs as you may require. An Exchange of Letters on the various metaphysical Conundrums posed by Witchcraft would please me greatly, but if you would first address my immediate Conjecture, I would be evermore in your Debt.