by James Morrow
And so I ask you, reader, can we blame Isobel Mowbray for wanting to give the world an argumentum grande? When she commissioned Jennet to find Newton’s lost proof, at least 500,000 convicted witches, and perhaps as many as a million, had already fallen victim to the brutal nonambiguity of Exodus 22:18. Our heroine will not have an easy time of it. Krämer and Sprenger may have been loonies, but Von Mespelbrunn, Carpzov, Rémy, and their ilk were among the most formidable minds of the Renaissance. What do you say to a bishop whose Bible tells him he must not suffer a witch to live? On what grounds might you answer a magistrate who knows that wayward teats and bloodless blemishes constitute infallible evidence of Satanic compact?
How implausible to suppose that any argument might sway a judge
who believes it his sacred duty to dispatch as many witches as possible to Hell, where all the lakes are
of burning sulfur, and not
one is filled
with
j
Water,
Jennet decided,
would turn the trick. She’d
read about the method in a book concerning
the savage red Indians of America: how they would contrive to wake themselves at dawn by drinking deeply at bedtime. The night
before Aunt Isobel was scheduled to meet the flames, an event the Witchfinder-General had strictly forbidden his daughter to attend, Jennet consumed a quart of water, climbed onto her mattress, and pulled up the counterpane. Her mind was abuzz. Argumentum grande…Newton’s lost proof…find it…the geometry, optics, hydrostatics…find it…the planetary mechanics…find it…missing calculation…find it.
Much to Jennet’s dismay, Dr. Cavendish had been as horrified as Walter by the thought of her observing the burning. For nearly an hour following her reunion with Isobel in the Great Tower, she’d quarreled with the curator over the circumstances of her hypothetical appearance on the execution field.
“If we were two parliamentarians,” Dr. Cavendish said, “me a lord, for example, and you a commoner, we would resolve this issue through a compromise. I’ve no doubt you’re familiar with the concept.”
“Aunt Isobel once told me that a compromise occurs when a person gives up something he pretends to want so as to gain an object for which he feigns indifference.”
“Indeed.”
And so they compromised. Jennet could patronize the execution, but only if a full one hundred yards separated her from the stake. Dr. Cavendish would install his Gypsy wagon on the far side of the field, and with the aid of a telescope they would together watch from the roof.
As it turned out, she didn’t need the water, for she failed to fall asleep that night. Even before the sun’s first rays touched the town, she was on her feet, improvising an effigy from a sack of flour and a bundle of rope. She set the false Jennet in her bed, then slipped out of the house and skulked along the misty length of Wyre Street, bound for Colchester Castle. The air smelled of honeysuckle. A scraggly gray cat bolted across her path and disappeared down Culver Lane, doubtless in quest of the mice who populated the Trinity Church burial ground. From the trees came the cawing of perhaps a hundred crows, an avian parliament debating some matter inaccessible to human ken.
The birds had fallen silent by the time she reached the castle yard, and the flower-scented winds now carried the fragrance of cooking fires and the stench of upended chamber-pots. She made her way along the west wall of the keep, striding past the spindly monument marking the spot where two Royalist commanders had been shot on orders from the Parliamentarian General following the Siege of Colchester. Might there come a day when the sentence against Aunt Isobel would seem equally reprehensible? wondered Jennet as she vaulted the crumbling remains of the Roman wall. Or would history in its lunar progress decide that the witch had received too lenient a punishment?
Magistrate Grigsby’s men had evidently visited the execution field earlier that morning, for a single wooden stake, thick as a pig and twice a man’s height, now projected from a low hill at the center of the green, directly across from the gallows. Laced with tinder and kindling, a heap of logs encircled the obscene obelisk. The logs looked dry and old to Jennet: a quick fire, a quick consummation—good.
To her left loomed the Gypsy Wagon, plugging a breach in the Roman wall and poised to retreat down St. Helen’s Lane. Having played out their parts in the great Adramelech hoax, the Bloodsucker, the Maw, the Kali, and the Rat-Baby no longer decorated the chassis but now lay sleeping with their brethren. Clay pipe fixed betwixt his teeth, Dr. Cavendish supplied Damon and Pythias with their oats. Seeing Jennet approach, the curator offered her an articulate scowl. You should not have come, his countenance said. You should have stayed in bed.
As the rising sun parted company with the horizon, the performers began arriving, props and equipage in hand, and betimes the spectators themselves entered the green, first in two’s and three’s, then in groups of a dozen or more.
Jennet and Dr. Cavendish scrambled into the driver’s box and thence to the top of the wagon, where the promised telescope—a brass Hevelius reflector—lay propped against the chimney, casting its shadow across the roof like the gnomon on a sundial.
“Colchester’s most pious citizens,” Dr. Cavendish muttered, gesturing toward the crowd, “all of ’em eager to spite the Devil by cavorting at his queen’s execution.”
Now a tavern-keeper appeared on the field, driving a pony-cart loaded with casks of ale.
“’Sheart, the man hath brought a hundred gallons at least.” Dr. Cavendish eased his rump onto the roof. “’Twould seem the piety quotient’s about to rise.”
Jennet dropped to one knee and assumed a cross-legged posture alongside the curator. She seized the telescope and clamped it to her eye, extending the tubes until the image grew crisp.
It felt blasphemous to be using this sacred device, designed to reveal the faces of planets and the courses of comets, in surveying so profane a spectacle, and yet she could not forbear to study the details. Near the eastern edge of the field, an ærialist costumed as a harlequin advanced birdishly along a tightrope strung betwixt a pair of chestnut trees, juggling two red rubber balls as he went. His audience included the Reverend Mapes and the regrettable Elinor; father and daughter were sharing a meat pie, starting at the antipodes and eating their way toward the center. On the northern boundary, not far from the River Colne, a company of thespians presented a bawdy anti-Papist satire in which the recently deposed King James wandered through Ireland converting the toads to Catholicism, baptizing them with his piss. Beside the satirists, a trained bear with a shimmering black pelt danced to the feral music of four pipe players and a drummer. As the bear’s gavotte built to a frenzy, Jennet spied her brother, seated on the grass amongst the spectators, alternately sketching with his wax crayons and adding his applause to the general acclamation. So powerful was her augmented vision, she could even see the subject of Dunstan’s drawing: a three-masted carrack riding a stormy sea.
Came the fateful hour of ten o’clock. The ærialist retired. The satire ended. The bear stopped dancing.
Telescope still fixed to her eye, she tracked a horse-drawn tumbrel as it rolled across the green escorted by Constable Wedderburn plus two marshals wearing orange doublets and helmets suggesting soup tureens. Mr. Grigsby held the reins. Her father sat alongside the magistrate, waving at the crowd as if he were Julius Cæsar bringing a captive barbarian king into Rome. In the bay stood the squat, modest figure of Aunt Isobel, clothed in a burlap shift, her outstretched wrists cuffed by iron manacles, the rusted chains looped around her neck and spilling down her chest like fiendish garlands. Behind her rode the executioner, a neckless man with olive skin and a tangled charcoal beard, gripping the chain that joined Isobel’s shackles.
“Prithee, Miss Stearne, go below.” Dr. Cavendish, rising, pointed to the trapdoor in the roof.
The crowd pelted the prisoner with stones, clods, pottery shards, decaying cabbages, and rotten turnips.
&nbs
p; “I belong here,” Jennet said. “She expects it.”
Mr. Grigsby halted the tumbrel. The executioner scrambled out and, using the timber as a stairway, climbed the pyre, dragging Isobel behind him. He chained her to the stake, then took from his pocket a black cloth hood and slipped it over her head. Jennet shuddered and moaned. Never again would she see her aunt’s living face, never again her antic eyes, sly smiles, challenging frowns.
Returning to the ground, the executioner stepped back and surveyed the stark tableau—timber, stake, hooded prisoner—as might the Painter-Royal assessing a recently completed portrait of King William. The revelers, passing pleased, gulped down ale and gathered around the pyre, determined to witness every nuance of the burning, an entertainment normally available only on the Continent.
Like a stag striding majestically from forest to meadow, a tall priest walked free of the mob. Jennet yanked him into focus. Slung about the priest’s neck, a heavy silver cross spiraled beneath his jaw as he scaled the pyre’s northern slope. The crowd grew silent. The priest pressed a Bible into Isobel’s hands, loudly instructing her to make a good confession, then set his ear against her occluded mouth.
Dr. Cavendish lifted the trapdoor and secured it with an iron brace. “Go below, Miss Stearne.”
“I cannot.”
The priest took back his book, his sour face suggesting that Isobel Mowbray’s last words had displeased him. He shook his head, opened his Bible, and recited Psalm One Hundred in a stentorian but mellifluous voice. “Make a joyful noise unto the Lord all ye lands…”
“Once, in Würzburg, I saw a supposed witch burned at the stake.” Dr. Cavendish stared into the open trap as if deciphering a scene in a scrying-glass. “They strangled her first, but ’twas still for me a nightmare, more terrible than I can say.”
“Terrible for you”—Jennet kept the telescope locked on the priest as he descended the mound of logs and fagots—“and even worse for the woman.”
Mr. Grigsby lit a torch and passed it ceremoniously to Walter. The executioner pulled on leather gloves and, leaning a wooden ladder against the stake, climbed to the elevation of his faceless prisoner. He flexed his fingers in prelude to the choking—once, twice, thrice. The image went muzzy, its particulars sluiced away by Jennet’s tears. She laid the telescope on the roof and mopped her eyes with the hem of her gown.
As the executioner fitted his hands around Isobel’s neck, something wholly unexpected occurred. Despite the tightening fingers and the intervening hood, the philosopher managed to release a loud, coherent utterance.
“Darling Jenny! Mapper of moons! Maker of rainbows!”
Ice-water formed in Jennet’s bowels.
“I know you’re out there, Jenny!” Isobel’s words boomed across the green. “Hear me now!”
“Dear God, why doth she do this?” Jennet rasped. “She promised to keep silent.”
“Attend her every word!” Dr. Cavendish demanded.
Jennet seized the telescope, pressing it against her eye.
Upon receiving a nod from Grigsby, the executioner jumped off the ladder, plucked the torch from Walter’s grasp, and jabbed it into the bottommost fagots like a swordsman delivering a fatal thrust. An ecstatic cheer shot from the crowd as the pyre caught fire.
“’Tis not happening,” Jennet insisted.
“Hear me, child!” Isobel cried.
“What shall I do?” Jennet wailed.
“Are you blind?” Dr. Cavendish seethed. “Can you not see the flames? For God’s sake, tell the woman you hear her!”
The tongues of combustion sinuated through the pyre and began to rise, higher, higher, darting amidst the gaps in the logs. Flames met fagots with a popping noise suggesting a regiment discharging a score of muskets.
“I hear you, Aunt Isobel!” Jennet shouted. She set down the telescope and, gaining her feet, stretched to full height. “I hear you!”
“Newton’s proof!” Isobel screamed. “I can see it, child! Aristotle! The elements! Aristotle!”
“Aristotle!” Jennet echoed. Aristotle? “The elements!” Aristotle’s elements?
“Earth! Air! Newton’s proof! The elements!”
“Earth and air, aye! Earth and air and water and fire!”
“Water and fire!” shrieked Aunt Isobel, coughing as the smoke invaded her lungs. “Water and fire! Fire! Fire! Oh, God, the fire!”
“I shall find the proof! Aristotle! The elements!”
“Damn thee, Walter Stearne! Damn thy bones and blood!”
In dying, Isobel Mowbray became a kind of storm, her imprecations booming across the field like peals of thunder, her screams flashing through the air like lightning-bolts. The atmosphere thickened with smoke, hosannas, and the fleshy stench of Exodus 22:18.
Jennet, still standing, grabbed the telescope and put it to her eye, but she dared not twist the tubes.
Die, please die, please die.
“The elements?” Dr. Cavendish said.
She did not resist when the curator stepped forward and tore the instrument from her grasp.
Please die, please die.
Dr. Cavendish lowered himself over the edge of the roof and slipped into the driver’s box, resting the telescope on the seat. “Why the elements?” he muttered.
A roar filled Jennet’s ears, a pounding tide of blood.
“The elements,” Dr. Cavendish grunted, seizing the reins.
Isobel’s screams dissolved into an unearthly gurgling, and then her scorched throat at last grew still. Never had Jennet known a more blessed silence, but no sooner had it settled than her father, livid and sweating, broke from the crowd and rushed toward the Gypsy wagon.
“Jennet!” he cried, his voice abrim with rage and disgust. “Daughter, you will explain yourself!”
The crack of Dr. Cavendish’s horsewhip resounded like a pistol shot. Jennet crossed the roof, dropped through the trap, and landed on the museum floor. She rose and staggered amongst the monsters, weaving every whichway like a kite in a hurricane. As the coach rolled toward St. Helen’s Lane, she fell against the Sussex Rat-Baby, embracing the huge glass jar for support. Nausea possessed her. She vomited forth a foul, viscous, bitter gush of mucus, spilling the hot broth onto the floor like slop from a slush-bucket.
With the back of her hand she wiped the sticky fluid from her lips. “She’s dead,” she explained to the Sussex Rat-Baby. “She’s dead,” she announced to the Cyclops of Bourne. “She’s dead,” she informed the Bird-Child of Bath. “For this my aunt was once alive,” she told the Bicephalic Girl, “and now she is dead.”
j
THREE DAYS AFTER the successful and well-attended burning of his sister-in-law, Walter Stearne received a letter from the new Keeper of the Privy Seal—George Savile, Marquess of Halifax—inviting him to “a meeting concerning your curious proposition that our nation requires a Witchfinder-Royal.” At first he was uncertain how to account for his good fortune, but eventually he concluded that the Almighty had decided to reward his leniency. In electing to punish Jennet’s recent disobedience by merely boxing her ears and then confining her to her bed-chamber without food for three days, as opposed to birching her backside until the skin turned plum, he had gained favor in God’s eyes.
The momentous gathering was to occur on a Saturday afternoon at Blickling Hall, Sir Henry Hobart’s sprawling mansion in the valley of the Bure. Walter felt ashamed to be arriving in his shabby Basque coach, but his discomfort turned to delight when he realized that the post of Witchfinder-Royal would probably come with a conveyance fit for an earl. What other benefits, he wondered, might his new appointment entail? A house in London? A silver pricking needle?
With exultant heart and prancing step, he followed the steward into a drawing-room off the staircase, where Lord Halifax, a horse-faced man sporting painted cheeks and an unruly silver peruke, waited in the company of two other Privy Council members. Alexander Tancred, Earl of Gurney, was a person of loud laughter and wide girth, his jaw and brow m
ottled by the pox. Francis Chater, Earl of Wroxeter, as long and lean as his fellow aristocrats were plump, possessed a disconcerting habit of reaming his nostrils with the corner of his handkerchief.
A servant brought coffee, and the four men got down to business. Lord Halifax produced a copy of Walter’s ancient petition to the Crown, along with a paper that he identified as Lord Sunderland’s favorable report on the proposed office.
“Mr. Stearne, having read these two documents, I wish I could tell you that our attitude accords with Sunderland’s,” Halifax said. “Alas, we must withhold our endorsement until we fathom your peculiar religious views.”
“Peculiar?” A sinking feeling spread through Walter, the sort of queasiness he experienced each time he saw an accused sorcerer bob to the surface of a river. “I assure you, my Lords, I am a covenanted Christian who says his prayers each night.”
“In your letter to our former monarch, James the Second, you assert, quote, ‘Being of the Romish faith, His Majesty should be singularly sympathetic to the witchfinding enterprise,’ unquote,” Lord Gurney said. “You further observe, quote, ‘The Malleus Maleficarum is Catholic in pedigree,’ and also, quote, ‘European anti-Satanism becomes rational and systematic only with Pope Innocent’s Summis Desiderantes of 1484.’ Now, Mr. Stearne, although King James did indeed cleave to the Papist perversion, surely it hath not escaped your notice that England’s present rulers are Protestants, as are Lord Halifax, Lord Wroxeter, and myself.”
“And myself as well,” Walter said.
“Do you regard the Protestant faith as inferior to the Catholic when it comes to witch-cleansing?” Lord Gurney inquired.