The Last Witchfinder

by James Morrow

  C H A P T E R

  The

  Third

  abababababababab

  Concerning Robert Hooke, Antagonist to Isaac Newton and Author of the Three Laws of Priapic Motion, a Triad Certain of Arousing Controversy Even in an Age of Reason

  j

  If houses were mortal, Jennet thought, if they contained not only wood and stone but also breath and flesh, then Mirringate Hall had surely gone to its grave. Staggering up the tree-lined carriageway, she saw that the manor had passed into the same gray domain occupied by airless moons and anatomized hares. The guardian dogs were nowhere in evidence—stolen away, perhaps, or else in flight from the general despond. In the gardens chaos ruled, threads of bryony stifling the rose campion, weeds strangling the helpless larkspur, beetles consuming the luckless hollyhocks. Someone had shuttered the windows, a discouragement to thieves most likely, or else a protection against urchins wielding rocks, though in Jennet’s reeling mind the weathered boards became pennies on the eyes of a corpse.

  She mounted the steps to the porch, seized the brass frog, and hammered it thrice against the plate. She waited. The descending twilight cooled her aching flesh. Her knees throbbed. Her stomach rumbled. At length she heard footsteps in the atrium, and then the door swung back to reveal the frowning figure of Rodwell, holding in one hand a beeswax candle and in the other a cocked pistol.

  It took her several thousand words and nearly twenty minutes to convince the steward she’d not come to collect evidence against his mistress—au contraire, she was here to obtain a document by which she might inspire the great Isaac Newton to visit Colchester Assizes and argue Lady Mowbray’s case.

  “You’re on a dangerous adventure for a mere girl of ten,” Rodwell said.

  “A mere girl of eleven,” she corrected him, “since February the fourth.”

  He relaxed his scowl, uncocked his pistol, and guided her into the kitchen, where he proceeded to lay out a glorious meal of moldy cheese and stale bread. Whilst preparing his favorite drink, the Oriental beverage called tea, he explained that the other servants had absconded in terror, certain that Lady Mowbray’s coven would soon invade the manor and force the staff to participate in unspeakable rites. He himself had declined to join this exodus, for he would “sooner court eternal damnation than compromise an ancient loyalty.”

  Even as she admired Rodwell’s constancy, Jennet realized that recent events at Mirringate had broken him. Never a vigorous man, he displayed his demotion—chief steward to unpaid sentry—in a dozen outward signs, from shuffling gait to stooped demeanor to gelid eye.

  “Marry, I do fear for your safety, Miss Stearne.” He poured his tea from a ceramic pot into a porcelain bowl. “Even if you were a grown woman, I would bid you abandon this scheme, for the roads ’twixt here and Cambridge-Town be a-swarm with blackguards and brigands.”

  “All I need do is get to Trinity,” she said, gobbling down a hunk of cheese as big as her fist. “If my arguments move Mr. Newton, he will surely escort me back to Colchester.”

  “I would offer you my lady’s carriage, but yesterday a band of scalawags made off with the horses.” For a full minute the steward attended to his tea, growing more pensive with each sip. “Now that I think on’t, I own no particular views concerning witchery. My strongest opinions involve the maintenance of Turkish carpets. If Mr. Newton’s a skeptic in the matter of evil spirits, then I shall be one too!”

  Shortly before retiring, Jennet visited the library, its every volume now jacketed in dust. Spiderwebs hung from the globe and its stand, as if the model’s gravity had turned material in her absence, manifesting as gossamer strands of attraction. Rushing to the great Bible, she saw that, praise Providence, Newton’s letter was still in place, pressed against Exodus 22:18. She removed the missive, slipped it inside the Principia Mathematica, and carried the volume to her customary bed-chamber. Thanks to Rodwell’s industry, the four-poster lay ready to receive her, and after setting Newton’s masterwork beneath her pillow she climbed onto the mattress and fell instantly asleep.

  Contrary to one of Elinor Mapes’s many preposterous theories, the Principia’s proximity did not enhance Jennet’s geometric competence that night. Her dreams were devoid of conics, and she awoke no more favorably disposed toward parabolas than when she’d gone to bed. And yet she felt renewed, ready to track down not only Professor Newton but any other natural philosopher who might save Isobel, whether Herr Leibniz in Germany, Signor Malpighi in Italy, or Mijnheer Huygens in Holland.

  As dawn yielded to morning, Rodwell fed her a hearty breakfast of radishes, salted ham, and coffee, then gave her a satchel full of hard bread, plus a small calfskin purse a-jingle with coins.

  “Come dusk, you must play the Blessed Virgin and seek a room at the inn,” he insisted.

  “I’m hardly worthy of such a comparison,” she said, stuffing the Principia into the satchel, “though Aunt Isobel once explained to me what a virgin is, and why I fit the criterion.”

  “Just promise me you’ll abandon all thought of reaching Cambridge-Town today.”

  “You have my word. Solemn as blood.”

  “I’ll be praying for your protection, Miss Stearne, hour after hour, sometimes silently, sometimes aloud”—he offered a smile that stretched far beyond his few remaining teeth—“till God and all His retainers are positively sick of the subject!”

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  A GENTIAN-BLUE SKY SHIMMERED above Ipswich as Jennet began the second leg of her journey. Bulbous clouds filled the celestial acreage like fat sheep grazing in a heavenly meadow. Avian melodies wafted through the air, robins, thrushes, wrens, a solitary skylark. If angels had animal familiars, she decided, those servants were surely songbirds.

  She had walked barely three miles down the Sudbury Road when a Gypsy wagon came lumbering toward her, drawn by a pair of lackadaisical dun horses and driven by a plump, agitated man of perhaps thirty-five years, his frazzled red periwig and threadbare gold-lace suit suggesting the wardrobe of a disinherited duke. As he halted his team, Jennet saw that gilded scrollwork decorated the wagon, the curls and spirals framing a lurid red inscription, MUSEUM OF WONDROUS PRODIGIES, and below that, TEN MONSTERS FOR SIXPENCE, and below that, DR. BARNABY CAVENDISH, CURATOR. The driver—Dr. Cavendish, presumably—cast an inquiring eye on Jennet, doffed his silver-corded hat, and asked whether this road would take him to Mirringate Hall, for he had business with Isobel Mowbray.

  “Have you not heard the news? She lies in gaol on a false charge of sorcery.”

  “Oh, what a pity,” Dr. Cavendish moaned, peering at her from behind his optical spectacles. “What a shame. By reputation she’s keen on natural curiosities, and ’twas my intention to sell her this priceless museum of mine, assuming we might agree on a price.” He seized a hefty bag of oats and, vaulting to the ground, began feeding the uglier of the two horses. “Whate’er shall I do, Damon?” he asked the swayback. “Solicit Lady Ambrose, I suppose, who’s rumored to be of a philosophic bent.” He offered Jennet a frolicsome grin. “My monstrosities have fetched me a decent living o’er the years, but now I’m looking to try my hand at indolence.”

  “’Tis your lucky day,” she said, her plan forming only slightly ahead of her words, “for I happen to be Lady Mowbray’s blood-niece. Hear me now. Ere she was imprisoned, my aunt enjoyed a correspondence with the great Isaac Newton. On reaching Cambridge-Town, I shall present myself to this same personage as Mirringate’s official”—she took care in pronouncing the word—“liaison to Trinity College, then ask him to intervene in her case. I would gladly introduce you to Mr. Newton as an honest impresario with a valuable commodity to sell.”

  Dr. Cavendish frowned, snorted, and started to nourish the less homely horse. “I must say, Pythias, for a liaison this girl doesn’t own a very ornate carriage.”

  With an indignant grunt she pulled the Principia from her satchel and whipped out Newton’s letter. “If you think I play you false”—she held the document before the cura
tor—“just examine this paper, for’t bears the crest of Trinity College.”

  He snatched the letter away and accorded it a protracted glance. “’Sbody, ’tis authentic for fair. Prithee, forgive my misplaced skepticism.” The curator clucked his tongue. “Do you really imagine Mr. Newton might fancy my museum? Ten freakish stillborns and fœtuses, collectively portending the end of the world, the coming of the Antichrist, the fornications of the Devil, the treachery of the Quakers, the calumny of the Catholics, the perfidy of the Jews, or the workaday wrath of God, depending on your religion.”

  “’Tis probable you’ll find a customer at the university—if not Mr. Newton, then a sage of his acquaintance.”

  “B’m’faith, you’ve hatched a splendid scheme!” Dr. Cavendish declared, handing back the letter. “Join me in the driver’s box, child, and we’ll be off to hobnob with the Platonists!”

  For the first time since Aunt Isobel’s arrest, the Great Jovian Hurricane lifted from Jennet’s soul and blew away. Perhaps Barnaby Cavendish was a scoundrel, but he seemed at worst an imbalanced mountebank and quite possibly a true benefactor. If her luck held firm, she and Mr. Newton would stand face-to-face by sundown.

  In her eleven years Jennet had known people who talked much and yet said little, such as Elinor Mapes, and also people who talked little and yet said much, such as Rodwell, but until meeting Dr. Cavendish she’d never encountered anyone who both talked much and said much. His life’s history was tortuous but rarely tedious, byzantine but hardly boring. She recalled one of Aunt Isobel’s favorite maxims, Comes jucundus in via pro vehiculo est: “An agreeable companion on the road is as good as a coach.” And now, suddenly, she had both.

  Orphaned by the plague at age nine, Dr. Cavendish had survived for many years through what he termed “the ancient craft of soliciting alms” and “the demanding art of theft.” Though not in fact a doctor of any kind, he’d studied natural philosophy for six months at Christ’s College, Oxford, eluding starvation via a sizarship, “running errands and emptying chamber-pots for the highborn students.” Amongst his clients were several scholars whose passions ran to anatomy and embryology, and his frequent visits to the dissection theatres soon instilled in him “an undying affection for Nature’s mistakes.” Before leaving Oxford, he’d learned not only “how to fix a fœtal monster in brine” but also “how to convince the average Englishman that touching the preservation jar will bring him luck.”

  “I should like to see your specimens,” Jennet said.

  “Nay, I must refuse you,” he said, “as they’re not a sight for an innocent girl, even so worldly an innocent girl as yourself.”

  Ten miles beyond Sudbury, Dr. Cavendish grew excited when they came upon a dilapidated inn, the Fiddling Pig, and he forthwith quit the road, directed Damon and Pythias through a stone archway decorated with a sculpted swine playing a viol, and parked the wagon in the courtyard. He snatched up a sheaf of handbills and scurried off, hopeful of enticing some patrons away from their ale and into the sixpenny fascinations of his museum.

  Shortly after the curator’s departure, Jennet realized that her curiosity concerning their forbidden cargo had swelled into a preoccupation. Durst she spy? Yes, she decided, for whilst the idea of seeing fœtal prodigies troubled her, the idea of being afraid to see them troubled her even more.

  She slunk her way to the rear of the wagon and furtively ascended the stepladder. The door opened outward. Fumbling in the gloom, she soon found the tinderbox, then lit the ensconced candles.

  Figures emerged from the darkness, bottled things with woeful redundancies and distressing deficits. For an instant it seemed that she’d been shrunk to the size of a gnat’s eye and placed in a dollop of pond scum, so uncannily did the prodigies suggest the creatures she’d observed through Aunt Isobel’s microscope. She steeled herself and, starting on her left, examined the specimens one by one, each a-float in a protective fluid and sporting a label giving not only its name but also a preposterous account of its postnatal adventures.

  The first exhibit, the Kali of Droitwich, was a four-armed female fœtus. In Jennet’s recollection, the original Kali had six arms, but this was still an impressive abomination. Then came the Lyme Bay Fish-Boy, who had no arms at all, only flipperlike protrusions, his ancestry further expressed by the dozen scales on his chest. She disagreed with Dr. Cavendish’s decision to call the next specimen the Sussex Rat-Baby, for whilst the pathetic creature was indeed covered with fur and bore a long pink tail, he looked more like a monkey than a rat. Continuing her investigations, she contemplated the Cyclops of Bourne with his single staring orb, large as a lemon…the Bird-Child of Bath, adorned head to toe with feathery excrescences…the Smethwick Philosopher, his brains bursting from his fractured skull…the Tunbridge Wells Bloodsucker, each tooth as sharp as an embroidery needle…the Bicephalic Girl, her left head proportioned pleasingly, her right hideous and misshapen. The last two prodigies were the most unnerving. Jennet could not bear to linger by either Perdition’s Pride, his face a horrid mass of naked muscles and exposed bone, or the Maw of Folkestone, who had no face at all, only a gaping hole.

  As Jennet climbed down the stepladder, her eyes throbbing as they passed from the darkness of the wheeled grotto to the bright summer sun, Dr. Cavendish escorted two orange-liveried soldiers toward the wagon, a private and a corporal in King William’s army. Assessing the situation, the curator grew visibly wroth—clenched teeth, a disapproving frown—but then he immediately amended this emotion with a conspiratorial wink.

  “Ah, I see my customer hath finished her tour,” he said. “I’ll warrant she was quite edified.”

  “’Twas easily the best use I e’er made of sixpence,” she said, hopping to the ground. “Your Fish-Boy is a wonder to behold. I shan’t forget your Rat-Baby if I live to be a hundred.”

  “Glad you liked ’em, child! And now, brave soldiers—”

  “Not only is the Bicephalic Girl amongst the world’s most amazing creatures, she hath completely cured my toothache,” Jennet continued. “And the Smethwick Philosopher made short work of my warts.”

  “At the Cavendish Museum of Wondrous Prodigies,” the curator said quickly, “we always aim to please.”

  Jennet considered that she might be overdoing it, but elected to press on. “As for the Cyclops of Bourne—”

  “’Tis a show of manifold riches,” Dr. Cavendish interrupted brusquely. The ruse had evidently run its course. “There be no better collection in Christendom.”

  “I’faith, I’ve ne’er seen a girl with two heads,” the private said, placing sixpence in Dr. Cavendish’s palm.

  “I’m intrigued by this child who’s also a fish,” the corporal said, likewise paying his admission.

  Whilst the soldiers clambered into the museum, Dr. Cavendish flashed Jennet a smile of exceeding complexity. With a single curl of his lip he managed to convey a general appreciation for her cleverness, a specific gratitude for her performance, and a sharp warning not to imagine herself better at mongering prodigies than he. It was a smile, she mused, worth preserving in a jar.

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  THE POOR TURNOUT from the Fiddling Pig irritated and depressed Dr. Cavendish—a twelve-pence profit, he declared, was more humiliating than none—with the effect that, after traveling another twenty miles, he insisted on visiting a second such ordinary, the Ram’s Head. This time around, nine men followed him out of the tavern, and, thanks in part to Jennet’s chicanery, they all became paying customers. True, two patrons declared the fœtuses fraudulent and demanded their money back, but, as Dr. Cavendish explained, such “narrow-minded skepticism” commonly plagued the prodigy trade, and he was in high spirits by the time they left the Ram’s Head, boisterously promising that the Museum of Wondrous Prodigies would proceed directly to Trinity College.

  As the flat, swampy environs of Cambridge-Town rolled into view, Jennet decided to entrust Dr. Cavendish with the particulars of her mission. He proved a sympathetic audience, for it
happened that forty years earlier his maternal grandfather, “a harmless dabbler in charms and potions,” had been beheaded for a sorcerer in Alsace. If Isaac Newton had indeed fallen upon a mathematical disproof of witchery, then Dr. Cavendish could imagine “no better an ambition than to turn this discovery into common knowledge.”

  Even though the entire university was now wrapped in the murk of dusk, its Gothic spires, clanging clock towers, stained-glass saints, and marble monarchs suffused Jennet with the sort of awe she normally experienced only whilst contemplating planets through a telescope.

  “’Tis as if the very heart of Heaven hath dropped from the clouds and settled upon the English fens,” she said.

  “If not the heart, then surely one of the better neighborhoods,” Dr. Cavendish said.

  They left the Gypsy wagon at Hobson’s Livery, hard by St. Benedict’s Church, then followed their instincts westward along cobblestoned alleys to the placid, mossy waters of the River Cam. Bantering amongst themselves whilst tossing pebbles into the slow current, three young men in black robes and scholars’ caps milled about on a stone footbridge, its walls decorated at regular intervals by granite spheres the size of cabbages. Dr. Cavendish puffed himself up and, approaching the trio, asked whether they were perchance under the tutelage of Isaac Newton.

  “Ah, Professor Newton,” said the tall scholar with mock enthusiasm. “Isn’t Newton the sage wrote that book neither he or anyone else understands?”