The Last Witchfinder

by James Morrow

  She continued her raillery for the better part of an hour, attacking Newton with every tome at her disposal, from Jean Bodin to Nicholas Rémy, Benedict Carpzov to Pierre de l’Ancre, Henri Boguet to Martín Del Rio. And then, at last, her energies spent and her furies mollified, she collapsed in the great reading chair, flaccid as a rag-poppet.

  “Were I Mr. Newton, I would feel entirely trounced,” Jennet said.

  Isobel released a long wailing sigh. “Nay, Jenny, ’twill take more than a cartload of quotations to counter Newton’s calculation. Instead we must learn the substance of his disproof and submit it to a rigorous dissection, laying its illogic bare, exposing its unreason to daylight.”

  “Will we write to Newton again?”

  “’Tis obvious he’ll destroy unread any additional missives from Mirringate,” Isobel said, shaking her head. She rose and removed the bedeviling document from her sleeve. “A question now hovers in the air, and it inspires me to protect Newton’s letter, when as a Christian woman I fain would feed it to the flame beneath my retort. ’Tis a simple question, five words long. Can you guess it, Jenny?”

  “My brain’s in a maze.”

  “It goes like this,” said Isobel. “What if Newton is right?”

  “What if he’s right?”

  “What then?” Isobel returned to her Bible and leafed through the Old Testament. “And so I reprieve Newton from the refiner’s fire”—she secured the letter within the Pentateuch—“and place him alongside Exodus 22:18, ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,’ in hopes that from this unhappy conjunction some species of the truth might one day emerge.”

  The Earth pursued its Keplerian gyre, slowly bearing Mirringate, Ipswich, and the English nation away from the sun. As the refrangible rays pierced the room, a benign inertia took hold of Jennet. For the first time since school had started she felt no desire to manipulate Heaven’s most essential star. She experienced no urge to refract these fading beams with a prism or collect them in the mirror of a microscope. Instead she wanted only to sit in the shadowed library, let the darkness seep into her bones, and ponder her suspicion that the world contained things of which neither monks nor mathematicians could give a sensible account.

  j

  BY TIRELESSLY APPLYING HIS HORSEWHIP and skillfully negotiating the rocks and ruts, Walter shortened considerably the journey from Chelmsford to Ipswich, so that he and Dunstan reached Mirringate well before the dinner hour. Although Jennet greeted him with her usual vivacious embrace and vibrant kiss, both she and Isobel soon vanished within a fog of bemusement as dense as any natural mist, and the remainder of the evening passed largely in silence. Throughout the meal Walter kept a steady watch on his sister-in-law. The signs were there all right—he could practically see them through her gown: a Devil’s blemish, a wayward teat, flesh so thick with iniquity that no running river would long retain it.

  After everyone had retired to the drawing-room for coffee, Isobel at last revealed the source of her solemnity. The experimentum magnus had not yielded the expected results. Despite careful scrutiny via the microscope, the philosopher and her pupils had found anomalies in one familiar only. Isobel would pay Walter for the two animals he’d captured on the southern hunt—the sea-witch’s ferret, the warlock’s owl—but she had no ambition to dissect them.

  Given his new understanding of Isobel’s nature, Walter was hardly surprised by the failure of her project. Why would a witch seek to invent a witch-test? Nevertheless he did a competent job of feigning both sympathy and perplexity, repeating the performance when Isobel explained how, after taking exception to her project, Mr. Mapes had removed his daughter from her sphere.

  Under normal circumstances Walter would have waited until the following day to bear his children home, but he was determined to wrest Jennet from the enchantress without delay. He told Isobel he was obliged to advise a Colchester priest the following morning concerning a case of demonic possession, and so he must depart anon. By nine o’clock his equipage was thundering free of the manor, Walter simultaneously lashing the horses and stroking his Bible. As the coach left Ipswich proper, he was certain he heard the Mirringate dogs, now transformed into hounds of Hell, giving chase. In his mind’s own mirror he saw these spawn of Cerberus, eyes a-flame, fangs a-gleam, saliva flying from their jaws like spindrift. He worked the whip more furiously still, as if he were Abraxas’s appointed executioner wielding a scourge, and thus he drove the team at a breakneck pace along the wooded, moon-drenched Gipeswic Road.

  At last, praise all his guardian angels, he piloted his children through East Gate and thence to Wyre Street Livery. He secured the coach, arranged for the groom to tend the horses, and guided his children into the house, easing the drowsy Jennet and the torpid Dunstan onto their respective mattresses. He pulled up their counterpanes and kissed their cheeks, then trudged into the sepulchral privacy of his bed-chamber.

  Unable to sleep, he decided to profit by his insomnia and draft a new epistle to White Hall, for the longer he thought about it, the more he realized that the overthrow of King James was inevitable. In this letter he welcomed Prince William and his wife to England “on behalf of our nation’s proud corps of cleansers.” He added that, when the new monarchs got the opportunity, they might wish “to consult the Earl of Sunderland, former Lord Privy Seal, concerning a proposed government office called Witchfinder-Royal.”

  During the subsequent weeks, as September’s strident winds blew across East Anglia, Walter periodically returned to Ipswich and interviewed the seven complainers identified by the Reverend Mapes. Just as he feared, each had suffered a calamity explicable only as the maleficium of his sister-in-law. After speaking with everyone on Mapes’s list, Walter conducted his own investigation, soon turning up a clockmaker whose pieces no longer kept proper time, a tulip-bulb merchant whose inventory had contracted a blight, and a spinet tuner recently gone deaf, all three disasters having befallen their victims following unscrupulous commerce with Lady Mowbray.

  At the end of the month he betook himself to Lucius Tuttle, the local magistrate, whom he’d interviewed five years earlier when an Ipswich tanner had cried out his uncle for a warlock. Though the case had proven a mere instance of internecine rivalry, Tuttle had emerged in Walter’s eyes as a man of uncommon perspicacity and nuanced intellect. Now, as their second colloquy progressed, Walter was pleased to discover that the magistrate still retained his ability to see, as it were, the shade within the shadow.

  Lady Mowbray, Tuttle noted, was a woman of means, and she doubtless intended to complicate the proceedings by hiring a lawyer. There was a great danger of the whole business going awry, with results that would reflect badly on Tuttle’s office. To wit, he would not bring the woman before his grand jury ere the case was rooted in proof and clad in iron.

  Upon outlining these expectations and receiving Walter’s pledge to meet them, Tuttle scowled and said, “I shall now make bold to ask an indelicate question. Am I correct in my understanding that the defendant is your relation?”

  “My relation, aye—not by blood, but truly by the sacred memories I hold of her sister, my late wife,” Walter said.

  “She is your sister-in-law, and yet ye would see her on the gallows? I thank God I’ve ne’er faced such a dilemma.”

  “Do you recall the biblical account of General Jephthah?”

  “Something about a bargain with God,” Tuttle said.

  “General Jephthah proposed a most terrible covenant,” Walter said. “If the Almighty granted him victory over the Ammonites, Jephthah would make a holocaust of the first person he saw upon returning from the war. Little did Jephthah know ’twould be his own virgin daughter comes prancing out to greet him.”

  “Such a sad story,” Tuttle said.

  “For a time it confounded me that our Heavenly Father would sanction the sacrifice of an innocent child, but then I saw the solution, shining forth like the mene mene on the wall.”

  “Pray tell.”

  “�
��Tis a simple answer, firm and splendid as a sapphire,” Walter said. “Read betwixt the lines in the Book of Judges, and you will see that Jephthah’s daughter was assuredly a witch.”

  j

  A MARK, A MOAT, A LOWLY TOAD. Like the Great Red Hurricane in Jupiter, Jennet’s thoughts swirled about a nebulous center, her mind a-jumble with fears and fancies, notions and ghosts. A mark, Satan’s kiss, bloodless even after the pricking needle had descended a full half-inch into her aunt’s calf—or so Walter had sworn to the Ipswich grand jury. A moat, circumscribing Hadleigh Castle, casting out Isobel before nine sober citizens. And then, finally, “a scabby little hop-toad,” as Dunstan told it, “jumping straight toward Aunt Isobel the instant the watching began.” A mark, a moat, a lowly toad—plus a parade of witnesses, testifying to Lady Mowbray’s plots against them: and so the grand jury had no choice but to return a billa vera. Because there was that mark, you see. The moat had spoken. A familiar had appeared. Maleficium had occurred.

  “Aunt Isobel hath always been kind to you,” Jennet told Dunstan. They were tramping through Sowter’s Woods, loading their kindling baskets with dead twigs and dry birch-bark. “How can you imagine her covenanting with Satan?”

  “I’Christ, I’m sore perplexed. Father bids me take comfort in a prophecy from St. Matthew. ‘And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.’”

  “Mayhap that’s true. But much earlier in Scripture the author of Proverbs tells us, ‘He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind.’” She stomped each foot on the hard ground, left, right, left, right, seeking to get the blood flowing again to her toes. “Father is troubling his own house, Dunstan. He calls down a great wind upon the posts and beams.”

  “’Twould seem he believes that by putting his very own kin in the dock, he shows himself for a cleanser of prodigious integrity.”

  “His integrity, our aunt.”

  “Oh, dear Jenny, would that I could reason so prettily as thou. Give me a charcoal stick, and I shall speak sensibly in line and shadow, but words have ne’er been my friends.”

  “This wind will smite us all. ’Twill lay our family low.”

  Dunstan sighed mournfully, shuddered visibly, and, declaring his kindling basket full, stalked away.

  By the report of Jennet’s father, until the spring assizes convened Aunt Isobel would languish in the Great Tower of Colchester Castle, the ancient Norman fortress that now served as Essex County’s official prison-house. For reasons that he refused to discuss with either Jennet or Dunstan, Walter had instructed the town magistrate, Caspar Grigsby, that under no conditions should his children be permitted to visit Lady Mowbray or pass her a written message. Never in her life had Jennet known such an agony of frustration. Isobel was living right down the street, and yet she was as inaccessible as if shipwrecked on an uncharted island or banished to the back of the moon.

  Despite her father’s dictum, Jennet went to the castle every day, marching resolutely through the gloomy vestibule to the warden’s station. The chief gaoler, Amos Thurlow, a skittish ex-infantryman who’d lost his left leg to a Parliamentary cannonball during the Siege of Colchester, always seemed genuinely aggrieved to forbid her access to the cell block. “Understand my plight, Miss Stearne,” he moaned. “Mr. Grigsby will beat me like a stable boy should I let you pass.” Invariably these encounters climaxed with Jennet closing her eyes, sucking in a deep breath, and screaming in the general direction of the Great Tower—“Aunt Isobel! Can you hear me?’ Tis I, your Jenny! I know you ne’er wrote in the Devil’s book!”—where upon the crippled gaoler would grasp her arm with one hand, his crutch with the other, and brusquely escort her back to High Street.

  The long winter of 1689 proved the most terrible such season in Jennet’s memory. It was as if God had taken up some stupendous prism and split the sun’s bounty, so that only a single ray, the cold violet beam at the far edge of the spectrum, reached Essex. Everywhere she looked, ice flourished, hard and inhospitable. Ice stiffened the River Colne and stifled the baize looms of the Dutch Quarter weavers. It sealed the Stearnes’ front door, encased their shutters, locked their garden gate, and spiraled downward from their eaves in long inverted cones.

  As the frigid weeks elapsed, it became clear to Jennet that her father and brother had forsaken Aunt Isobel, turning against her as finally and emphatically as Othello had broken faith with Desdemona. A stroke of luck for Isobel Mowbray was an ipso facto setback for Walter Stearne. Each time he learned that his sister-in-law had purchased some privilege commensurate with her status—candles, clean linen, writing supplies, a hot meal—a fit of indignation would seize him, eyebrow to instep, and he descended into an impacted gloom upon hearing that the celebrated Sir Humphrey Thaxton would act as her advocate, for the man was in Walter’s view a shameless conniver who played upon a jury’s coarsest prejudices and soggiest sentiments.

  “’Twould mayhap interest you to know that many a scholar and philosopher doth of late reject the demon hypothesis,” Jennet informed her father and brother as they sat down to supper on the last day in February. “When Isaac Newton wrote to us, he averred that wicked spirits are but desires of the mind.”

  “That geometer hath his brilliance, surely,” Walter said, sipping claret. “Aye, and so did all those Sadducees bent on denying the existence of angels in the Book of Acts.”

  “Mr. Newton can prove witchery’s a fraud,” she said. “He can prove it as surely as he proved that light consists of rays differently refrangible.”

  “An interesting hypothesis occurs to me,” Dunstan said, slicing a morsel from his mutton chop. “Might not Newton be himself a devotee of the black arts?”

  “An astute supposition, lad,” their father said. “Cognatis maculis similis fera. ‘Wild beasts are merciful to beasts spotted like themselves.’ Juvenal.”

  “Mr. Newton’s no more a Satanist than I’m the Queen of Egypt,” Jennet said.

  “If not a Satanist”—Dunstan jabbed his fork in Jennet’s direction—“then a latter-day Sadducee.”

  “Recall St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians,” Walter said. “‘For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against spiritual wickedness in high places.’ These be fearsome difficult times, children. Turmoil in our family. Turmoil in our nation. Orange Billy hath put King James to flight across the channel, but belike ’twill take a war ’twixt England and France to keep him there, for nothing would please King Louis so much as to see his fellow Catholic regain the British Crown.”

  Jennet was not surprised that her father had diverted the conversation from demonology to government, for recent political events in England had evidently been most astonishing. As she understood the situation, her country had witnessed the abrupt dethronement of one monarch and instant ascent of another—a “Glorious Revolution” people called it, for such an outcome normally required much spillage of blood. James the Second was gone, his powers usurped in name by his daughter, Mary, and in fact by Mary’s husband, William of Orange. But the true ambition of Orange Billy—the name amused Jennet, suggesting as it did the buffoonish offspring of a marriage betwixt Bottom and Titania—was not so much to rule England as to make war on his ancient enemy, Louis the Fourteenth. In all probability Englishmen would again be slaughtering Frenchmen and vice versa, an activity for which neither race had ever found a substitute affording the same patriotic and aesthetic satisfactions.

  Spring arrived, the sun returned, and the great melting began. By day and by night, Colchester dripped—and yet, though the great star burned hot enough to restore the river and revive the baize looms, its power proved insufficient to ignite pity in either Walter Stearne or his son. A mild April passed, a mellow May, a fecund June, and on the third of July the Court arrived and began conducting assizes in the Moot Hall.

  Glancing up from his sketching-folio, Dunstan set his draughting pen in the ravine betwixt adjacent leaves. “Wednesday they convicted a man of horse thievery,” he told Jennet. Sister and brother were
in the garden, idling away the afternoon, Dunstan sketching, Jennet pruning. “He’s already hanged. Yesterday they found a woman guilty of cradle-robbing. She swings at dawn. Tomorrow Judge Bucock is to sentence a treasonous Jacobite.”

  “And what of our aunt?” she asked, uncoiling a dead vine from the snapdragons.

  “The witch-trial commences Monday. ’Tis likely all ten victims will testify.”

  “The only victim in the Moot Hall will be Isobel Mowbray.”

  Dunstan returned to his drawing—a watering can, a trowel, and a flower pot planted with violets, harmoniously arranged atop the cistern. “We must not pursue this subject, Jenny, as it promises to ruin our affection for one another.”

  “Our aunt is no enchantress.”

  “I am out of words, dear sister.”

  “She’s innocent as the lamb.”

  “My tongue hath gone all numb.”

  On Friday morning, shortly after she came awake, an idea took source in Jennet’s mind—a beautiful idea, she decided: beautiful, momentous, and terrifying. She sat up in bed. A sunbeam danced atop the counterpane. The idea hovered in the golden air, pulsing like the Holy Grail.

  How many miles to Ipswich? Only sixteen, she believed. She could walk there in less than a day. And from Ipswich to Cambridge-Town? About forty-five miles. Two more days on the road, perhaps just one and a half. If she left immediately she might with God’s help reach the university as early as Sunday afternoon.

  She would go to Ipswich, and thence to Trinity College, bearing Mr. Newton’s letter. She would implore the geometer to appear at Colchester Assizes and lay his pretty proof before the Court. “Witchery’s an impossible thing,” the world’s greatest brain would tell the jurymen. “Behold these propositions. Consider these theorems.” She would pin a note to her father’s door—BOUND FOR CAMBRIDGE, RETURNING SUNDAY—and then she would go. She would sleep in barns, drink from brooks, eat stolen apples. Her feet might blister, but she would go. Highwaymen might rob her, ruffians assail her, but she would go. She would bring back Newton. Before her father awoke, before the town stirred, before the Earth rotated another degree on its phantom shaft, she would go.