by James Morrow
The gaoler, quavering, said, “Tell me, Lord Adramelech, sir, how do I avoid ’em?”
“By one simple gesture. You will allow Isobel Mowbray’s niece to visit her.”
“M-Miss Stearne, you mean? Lovely girl. Splendid girl.”
“Miss Jennet Stearne, aye.”
“I shall arrange it betimes.”
“You will arrange it now,” Dr. Cavendish snarled, pointing toward the driver’s box.
Jennet vaulted into the lane and, head held high, approached the gaoler. “Hallo, Mr. Thurlow. I am well pleased that you have at long last assented to my petition.”
“H-happy to s-serve ye, Miss Stearne.”
Mr. Thurlow rotated ninety degrees and started back toward High Street, his crutch striking the cobblestones with clockwork regularity, Jennet following a yard behind.
“Gaoler, your generosity hath been noted!” Dr. Cavendish called after them. “When your sins send you netherward, I shall see to’t you receive a hundred sorts of comfort! Pepper in your sulphur soup! The best salve for your burns!”
j
BY NIGHT THE WARDER’S STATION of Colchester Castle was considerably brighter than by day, for a constellation of five oil lamps swung from the ceiling, their glow glancing off the white plaster walls. Jennet readily discerned the perplexity on the red-bearded gaoler’s face as Mr. Thurlow told him to surrender his key-ring. Upon seizing the brass circlet—it held more than twenty keys, each as large as a bodkin and encrusted with rust—Mr. Thurlow led Jennet down a torch-lit corridor where scores of human arms snaked through barred windows, their owners begging for ale and pleading for bread and wailing for meat. A grid of metal bars presented itself. Mr. Thurlow applied the proper key, pulled back the door, and directed Jennet up a spiral stairway that wound through the Great Tower like a bung-nail embedded in a wine cork, until at last they reached a slab of bolted iron.
“I have no wish to see you lose your employment,” she said, “and so I shall keep this interview brief. Howbeit, please know that if you whisper a word of my visit to any living soul, the Kali of Droitwich will have her way with you.”
“Not e’en the Spanish boot could make me recount this night.” Mr. Thurlow inserted a key and with a twist of his bony wrist unlocked the tower door.
“I desire privacy. Twenty minutes.”
“Ye shall have’t,” the chief gaoler said.
“Who’s there?” called a blessedly familiar voice.
Jennet crossed the threshold. Mr. Thurlow slammed the door behind her, the reverberations filling the tower like a cannonade.
Moonbeams the color of Cheddar cheese flowed through the lancet window, suffusing Aunt Isobel’s quarters with a coppery glow, whilst a dozen ensconced candles provided additional illumination and a small measure of warmth. The room was furnished, sparsely but adequately. Mattress, chair, dressing table, writing-desk, chamber-pot. A landed woman in the direst of straits evidently lived better than a dairymaid at the top of her luck.
Dressed in her plainest muslin gown, Aunt Isobel climbed off the mattress, a slow disjointed ascent suggesting an arthritic spaniel rising to greet her mistress. The philosopher’s features were drawn and sallow, like the smaller of the Bicephalic Girl’s two faces. Though badly ravaged by Walter’s razor, her scalp had retained its fertility, the nascent crop of hair emerging in unsightly gray tufts.
“Oh, Jenny, sweet Jenny, I knew I’d live to kiss your angel’s face again.” Isobel stumbled forward and flung her arms around her niece, their small bodies fusing like electrically charged rods of amber. “I told myself that just as the miles ’twixt Colchester and Cambridge didn’t stop that girl”—she placed the predicted kiss on Jennet’s cheek—“neither would the bars of my cell. Though I cannot imagine by what ruse you arrived here.”
Jennet proceeded to narrate the theatrics through which her new friend Dr. Cavendish had turned himself into Lord Adramelech whilst she became his ward.
Isobel, smiling, said, “Such a clever child my sister gave the world.” The smile declined into a grimace. “No doubt you’ve learned of Professor Newton’s perfidy.”
“Dr. Cavendish attended the trial. If I live to be a hundred, I shall ne’er forgive the geometer for raising my hopes and then dashing ’em to bits.”
“With mathematical geniuses, I’m told, one should expect a certain collateral eccentricity.”
“I can no more excuse Newton on grounds of eccentricity than I would a cannibal on grounds of appetite.” Jennet clasped Isobel’s right hand, each finger as thin and brittle as a winter twig. “Oh, my dearest aunt, I fear they mean to hang you. I’Christ, I shall be there, denouncing your tormenters and praying for the rope to break.”
“Attend if you must, but know that Mr. Grigsby hath more than a simple gallows jig in mind. He promises the people an old-style burning.”
It seemed to Jennet that the Sussex Rat-Baby had suddenly begun feasting on her entrails. “A burning?”
“At the stake.”
“Is that not illegal?”
“Merely uncivilized.”
“You must be passing scared. You must be entirely frightened.”
“So frightened I’m numb with’t. Ah, but Mr. Grigsby and I have struck a bargain. I shall make no speech at the stake, and he will see to’t I receive a mercy strangling.”
“Then promise me you’ll make no speech.”
“’Tis certainly my intention to spare myself the fiery torture.” Like the revitalized but bewildered Lazarus taking the measure of his tomb, Isobel shuffled toward the writing-desk. “Were this a Dutch cell, I could offer you every amenity. A slice of cake…”
The tears, Jennet knew, would arrive soon, a matter of minutes, a matter of seconds. “We’re going to rescue you.”
“A saucer of coffee.”
“Dr. Cavendish and I shall pluck you from the pyre.”
“A fresh pear. You’ll do naught of the sort, child. Mr. Grigsby’s marshals would murder you on the spot.”
“Then I shall die in a worthy cause.”
“Miss Stearne, you are squandering these hard-won moments. Softly now. I have a gift for you.” From the topmost drawer of her writing-desk Isobel produced a manuscript stitched together with yarn, delivering it into Jennet’s grasp. “Voilà.”
The cover-page bore a title, A Woman’s Garden of Pleasure and Pain, rendered in the philosopher’s ever spiraling hand.
“’Steeth, hath my aunt written a book?”
Isobel nodded and said, “I have attempted in these pages to give my reader at once a body of knowledge and a knowledge of bodies. Life hath much in store for you, Jenny. Ere long the bloody courses will begin, even as Nature blesses you with roundish hips and wondrous lusty notions. Young men will soon be, as my husband was wont to put it, ‘lying through their lips for to lay you ’neath their loins.’ I’ve set it all down, plus charts, tables, and diagrams.” She rapped her knuckles on the manuscript. “Welcome to womanhood, child of my heart. The path lies thick with snares and barbs, but ’tis a truly worthy gender, especially when you consider the alternative.”
“You will keep silent at the stake,” Jennet said, and now the anticipated tears arrived, falling from her cheeks and staining the cover-page of A Woman’s Garden of Pleasure and Pain.
“For all I ache to tell the world my opinion of witchfinding, you may be sure the strangling will come off as arranged.” Isobel reached toward the book and brushed a fallen tear, blurring Pleasure into Treasure. “Chapter One informs the reader how to keep her lover’s ardor from augmenting the human population.”
“I shall memorize every sentence,” Jennet said.
“Sir Edward was eager for an heir—what man is not?—and yet he cherished me even more than his posterity, and so we eschewed all connection on my fertile days. Ah, but even the most wary wife must now and then yield to the moment, and so you’ll find herein directions for socking your husband’s virility in a Belgian adder-bag.” As her aunt drew closer,
Jennet noted a constellation of scabs atop her head, residue of her cropping by the master pricker. “I have a second present for thee. ’Tis largely in the nature of a challenge, but ’tis also a gift, for ’twill bestow a purpose on your life, and what boon could be greater?”
“None, I should imagine,” Jennet said, perplexed.
Isobel backed away and, sitting down before her dressing table, ran a hairbrush through her tenuous and pathetic locks, each strand as delicate as a spider’s thread. “History pursues a lunar sort of progress, with present fore’er cycling back to past,” she said at last. “At the moment witch-cleansing’s on the wane, but betimes the hunt will wax, if not tomorrow, then the next day, or the next.” She froze in mid-stroke. “To wit, you must construct a treatise. ’Tis your female mission for the next ten years, twenty years—howe’er long it takes.”
“A treatise?”
“A Malleus Maleficarum stood upon its head, an argument so grand and persuasive ’twill bring down the Parliamentary Witchcraft Act. Can you do this, darling Jenny?”
“I fear I lack the intellect.”
“You’ve all the brains the task requires and more. Mayhap you’ll have a fleshly babe someday, mayhap not, but in either case this argumentum grande will be your one true progeny.”
“Do you mean I am to search out Mr. Newton’s lost disproof of demons?”
Isobel dipped her ravaged head. “Newton in person hath naught to offer us, but Newton in principle will surely serve our ends. Of all the mortals in England, only you and I and the Lucasian Professor know that the cleansers might be crushed through mathematics. Ah, but the Lucasian’s within an ace of lunacy, your aunt’s about to die—and so I now dub thee Lady Jennet, Hammer of Witchfinders.”
“How do I even begin? Might some other Royal Society fellow set me on the proper path?”
“Alas, I fear that clan be riddled with demonologists, Mr. Boyle most conspicuous amongst ’em. ’Twill gain you more to study those who’ve actually written against the prickers’ trade: Reginald Scot, plus the three John W’s—I speak of Webster, Wagstaffe, and Weyer—the better to learn why their reasoning ne’er took hold. And then comes the daunting part.”
“Mastering Mr. Newton?”
“From sprit to spanker. The geometry, the optics, the hydrostatics, the planetary mechanics. You must graft the Principia onto your soul, darling Jenny. Find that missing calculation, and you’ll deliver many an innocent wight from noose, pyre, and chopping block.”
A key rattled in the lock. The door swung back. Propped on his crutch, Amos Thurlow limped through the jamb. “It’s been twenty minutes, Miss Stearne…”
Isobel rose from her dressing table, crossed her cell, and for the second time that night wrapped her niece in a deep and desperate affection. As their embrace intensified, Jennet imagined myriad germ cells
flowing from her aunt’s body into her own, quickening her mind with philosophic seed as surely as spermatozooans could quicken a
grown woman’s womb. I’m with child now, she thought.
An argumentum grande is growing inside
me. I have achieved a
mental
j
Pregnancy
rarely saved the life
of a convicted sorceress during
the witch-hunting centuries, but a full womb
was normally good for a temporary reprieve. The gestation would run its course, a wet nurse would receive the baby, and the prisoner would assume her appointed place on the gallows or at the stake. It was
not automatically clear what to do with the superfluous neonate. Sometimes a convent adopted the creature. Sometimes the father or other blood relation stepped forward. And sometimes the magistrate ordered a strangling, on the theory that the infant had become polluted in utero.
We call this epoch the Renaissance, a rebirth of art and classicism. Dear reader, it was nothing of the kind—or, rather, it was something of the kind for the average prince, aristocrat, merchant, or patronized painter, but it was nothing of the kind if you were just another peasant scrabbling to avoid starvation. In your experience the Renaissance was a nightmare, and if you cultivated habits that drew the witchfinders’ notice—if you told fortunes, trafficked in herbs, dabbled in magic, or practiced midwifery—you were vulnerable to the charge of Satanism.
When she told her niece that witch hunting was a cyclic enterprise, Isobel Mowbray spoke the truth. The world needed an argumentum grande in 1689—not as badly, perhaps, as in 1589 or 1489, but it certainly needed one.
Dayton, Tennessee, the sweltering July of 1925. The Scopes Trial. Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan square off over the Genesis account of human origins. Does biblical literalism suffer a setback? Indeed. Is this a victory for the theory of evolution? Hardly. For Darwin’s canny advocate, you see, has failed to make a positive case for natural selection—he has neglected to construct an argumentum grande—with the result that, through out the remainder of the century and beyond, America’s high-school science teachers will fully explicate evolutionary principles in their classrooms about as often as they lecture on necrophilia.
The Vatican, Italy, 1484. As the Renaissance gets up to speed, the newly installed Pope, Innocent VIII, conceives his famous Witch Bull calling for the extermination of Devil-worshipping heretics wherever they might rear their heads. He writes out the dictum on his bullsheet, then deputizes Heinrich Krämer and Jakob Sprenger to go on a fact-finding mission. Their labors result in the Malleus Maleficarum. The tome stands alone. Krämer and Sprenger have no peers and, more significantly, no antagonists. And so it happens that for the next quarter-century the odor of roasting witch-flesh becomes as ubiquitous in northern Europe as the aroma of candle wax and cow manure. How could it be otherwise? What human endeavor could possibly be as glorious as checkmating Satan? The next time somebody announces that he plans to get Medieval on your ass, tell him you’re going to get Renaissance on his gonads.
Don’t misunderstand me. I’ve never shared Isobel’s touching faith in the power of sober discourse. The path on which she set Jennet that night in the prison cell suffered from a lamentable credulity, if not outright naïveté. I am well aware that the average member of your species will not abandon a pleasurable opinion simply because the evidence argues against it. Self-doubt is a suit of clothes that few of you ever acquire, and fewer still wear comfortably.
And yet the effort at persuasion must be made. There is something rather noble—and occasionally even effective—about an argumentum grande. I’ve found that pessimism can be its own sort of innocence, cynicism its own sentimentality. Isobel knew this, and in time my Jennet came to know it too.
By 1510 it seems that the campaign has run its course. Outside the Alpine valleys and Pyrenean France, a witch can’t get arrested. But then along comes Martin Luther and his Ninety-Five Theses, and by the middle of the century the Reformation evangelists have revived what the Catholic evangelists inaugurated. All during the 1560’s and 1570’s Protestant clerics oversee hundreds of sorcery trials in Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Hungary, Transylvania, and Scotland. Eventually the Counter-Reformation swings into action. Throughout the 1580’s and 1590’s, the Catholic reconquest brings a vigorous anti-Satanism to Bavaria, the Rhineland, Flanders, and Poland. Scores of learned and energetic Jesuits keep the witch fires burning.
It is an age of giants: Christians of a caliber that leave the likes of Walter Stearne in the shadows. Take Johann von Schöneburn, Archbishop-Elector of Trier, who sponsors the executions of nearly four hundred supposed witches between 1585 and 1593. Thanks to Von Schöneburn’s vigor, two Trier villages are left with only one female inhabitant apiece. Or take Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn, the Bishop-Prince of Würzburg, whose efforts turn Wolfenbüttel’s Lechelnholze Square into a forest, so densely packed are the stakes. At Von Mespelbrunn’s funeral, the court preacher praises the prince’s zeal in burning witches “according to God’s word.” Or take Nicholas Rémy, the witch-h
unting lawyer of Lorraine, whose Dæmonolatreiæ calls for not only the burning of convicted Satanists but the extermination of their children as well, the better to eradicate the unholy seed in toto. He dies in 1616, a beloved and respected scholar who has consigned at least 2,500 innocents to the flames.
Early in the seventeenth century another hiatus occurs, but then the Thirty Years War reinvigorates the hunt throughout the Rhine Valley. Among Catholic clerics, Prince-Bishop Phillip Adolf von Ehrenberg of Würzburg is particularly active: between 1623 and 1631 he burns nine hundred ostensible witches, including his own nephew, nineteen priests, and a handful of seven-year-olds judged guilty of having enjoyed sexual intercourse with demons. Not to be outdone by Von Ehrenberg, Johann Georg II Fuchs von Dornheim of Bamberg—the Hexenbischof, the Witch Bishop—builds a “witch house” featuring a torture chamber adorned with biblical texts, and by the time his ten-year reign is done he has supervised the incineration of six hundred putative sorcerers. On the Protestant side, meanwhile, there emerges the majestic figure of Benedict Carpzov, the Lutheran scholar whose Practica Rerum Criminalum maintains that even those who merely believe they’ve attended a Sabbat should be executed, for belief implies will, and will entails menace. Before ascending to his heavenly reward, Carpzov will read his Bible cover-to-cover fifty-three times, take Holy Communion at least once a week, and underwrite the deaths of 20,000 alleged witches.
The Thirty Years War ends, but the cleansings do not. As the 1660’s progress, the withdrawal of English troops from Scotland frees up Calvinist magistrates to torture and burn Devil-worshippers by the hundreds. In Sweden, meanwhile, Lutheran clergymen renounce the inhibitory ethics of the late Queen Christina (who’d ordered her generals to curtail whatever German witch-hunts they encountered during their campaigns). They experiment with persecution, find it to their liking, and forthwith immolate one presumed Satanist after another.