Slipper

by Hester Velmans

  “You are afraid the poor girl’s uncle will prey upon her virtue, are you not?” she asked her new footman and confidant.

  Thomas, who had fed the good lady enough hints about Sir Edmund’s lecherous activities and his previous conduct toward his niece to lead her to this conclusion, cast his eyes down.

  “Don’t be afraid. I share your suspicions.”

  Thomas looked up gratefully. “It’s not just for myself, you understand ma’am, but for my Bess’s sake. She’d take it so hard if anything happened to that girl. Raised her as her very own, she did.”

  “Of course she would take it hard,” said Lady Doughby, “of course she would.” She was touched by the footman’s fondness for his Bess, whom he had described in tender detail, and the young girl who had been her charge. It occurred to Lady Doughby, not for the first time, that servants’ affections were so much more straightforward than those of her own class, where other considerations, primarily monetary, took precedence over sentimental attachments. In her world, it was hammered into one from the youngest possible age that such attachments were precarious at best, and that it was unwise to set store by them. It was a world where arranged marriages wiped out romantic dreams, where excessive maternal doting was nipped in the bud by the custom of handing the baby over to a wet-nurse until it was safely past the dependent stage, and where filial love (and this was what Lady Doughby regretted most of all) found a substitute, at best, in correct filial duty.

  “But Thomas,” she said, with a sigh. “You know that I cannot intervene directly. I have no connection with the family.”

  “You see if I—I would never ask this otherwise, milady, but…” he tried, “if you will give me leave to go to Dorset, then I might be able to help in some fashion.” Seeing that there was no negative response, he continued, “To protect her, perhaps, from…”

  The ingenuous Thomas was taking advantage of Lady Doughby’s sympathetic nature, and they both knew it. But since she was the one who had encouraged from the very start of their association this cozy familiarity, and had extracted confidences from Thomas which were not ordinarily a part of a footman’s job description, it was a little late for her to draw back now.

  And so it came about that Thomas found himself on the open highway, savoring the unfamiliar taste of freedom.

  He made his way to Dorset in record time, considering that he’d set out on foot. Fortunately, there was ample opportunity for hitchhiking. Despite the threat of footpads and highwaymen, few of the coachmen or farmers who overtook him along the road refused to stop for him, for the fellow’s evident delight in his unexpected adventure was infectious to behold. Beaming excitedly like a schoolboy on an outing, he had no trouble convincing fellow travelers that he was harmless and would provide them with good company if invited to hop on.

  Arriving at Belweather Manor, however, Thomas found very little to be delighted about.

  Belweather Manor was a squat, vine-covered structure at the foot of a tall hill dotted with grazing sheep and horses. It looked, thought Thomas as he strolled up the drive, as if the animals were nibbling at the roof’s chimneystacks and drinking from the gutters. An afternoon rainstorm had washed away every trace of haze, making what was left of the day bright and brisk. As he drew near the house, he had to stop himself from breaking into little skips of excitement.

  Beaming with anticipation, he walked around to the back, noting with approval the neatly swept stone yard and the tidy chicken run. He twisted an iron ring and pushed open a door—made of heavy wood, like the doors at the front, only single and uncarved— and recognized, by the tiles on the floor and the smell of cooking, that he had come to the right place.

  The servants seated at their supper looked up, surprised to see a stranger.

  “Where’s Bess?” he asked.

  “Bess?” repeated Mrs. Kettle, her mouth open.

  “Yes. Bessie Goose. I’m her Thomas. Thomas Boothby. She must have told you about me. Hasn’t she?”

  His voice faltered because everywhere he looked, he saw only expressions of dismay.

  “Thomas. Yes, of course, Thomas,” Mrs. Kettle stalled. “Here, sit down, you’ve had a long journey, haven’t you…”

  “Something has happened to Bess. Tell me!” As there was no answer, Thomas panicked. “She’s not—she can’t be…?”

  “No, of course not—!” cried Mrs. Kettle.

  “As good as,” muttered Brackthorn, one of the gardeners.

  Thomas swung around toward the source of this alarming comment. He heard himself croak, “What’s happened to her? Lord, what’s happened to her?”

  “Oh, dear,” Mrs. Kettle blubbered. Tears came to her easily. “She’s gone and got herself accused of witchcraft. Can you believe that? Our Bessie!”

  “Witchcraft!” The news knocked him off his feet and he collapsed onto a stool. “Oh God!”

  “Satan, you mean,” said Brackthorn darkly. “Are you in league with her?”

  “What are you saying, what are you saying!” cried Mrs. Kettle. “Brackthorn, watch your tongue! She hasn’t even been tried yet!”

  “Beg pardon,” Brackthorn sneered at Thomas. “But I know she’s a witch. Don’t tell me she is not. I know witches. I always recognize ’em.”

  “Oh yes?” Lena the laundress yelled at him. “And why didn’t you ever say something, all these years? All these years she’s been rubbing you with poultices for the ague, and you couldn’t get enough of it, ‘Rub me aching shoulders,’ you used to beg her, ‘There’s none but you, Bessie, can make old Walter feel better’…”

  “See, it’s what I’m telling you, woman, she had me bewitched, same as Mistress,” Brackthorn insisted. “Anyhow, it’s she as laid t’ ague on me shoulders in the first place.”

  “How do you know that…” began Mrs. Kettle. Thomas interrupted them.

  “Where is she now? Can I see her?”

  “Oh no, you can’t do that,” said Mrs. Kettle. “They have her locked up. There’s a witch-finder, Master Boulderdash, don’t worry, they say he’s ever so good, he’s with her now…”

  “Where?” asked Thomas grimly.

  “In the jail at Bitterbury, but…” It was the nearest town, some five miles away.

  “Right,” said Thomas, and turned toward the door.

  “Where are you going?” asked Mrs. Kettle, alarmed.

  “To find her,” he snapped.

  “Oh dear, oh dear,” she keened as he strode out the door, “he shouldn’t go, he shouldn’t go, he’ll have himself accused of witchcraft same as her…”

  But Thomas was already out of earshot.

  In Bessie Goose’s time, witchcraft was a serious business. A primitive superstition that should have vanished with the Middle Ages, the belief in witches retained its popularity in England thanks largely to King James the First, who used his personal crusade against the devil to polish his public image. (During his rule, one confessed witch testified that she had heard the devil swear James was the greatest enemy he had ever faced. What sane politician would refute such a brilliant endorsement?) By the time the witch-hunt mania began to wane at the century’s end, some forty thousand people had been executed as witches in England alone.

  The majority of the accused were old, poor, and female, and were often easily persuaded, through torture and their own credulity, that they were indeed witches, thereby contributing to the popular belief with their own fanciful confessions. Even if they maintained their innocence, their guilt was easy enough to prove. A common test was “swimming”: the accused was bound hand and foot into an awkward bundle—the right hand tied to the left foot, and vice versa—before being lowered backwards into a body of water. If you sank (and drowned) you were declared innocent; if you floated, you were a witch, and were executed. Another foolproof test involved being tied cross-legged to a chair or table and left to sit there without food or water for twenty-four hours under constant watch. A door or window was left ajar, so that one of your imps (creatures ass
igned by the devil to serve you) could come in and suck your blood. Since an imp could take the shape of an insect, any fly or mosquito that came into the room was suspect. If it evaded the guards’ attempts to catch or kill it, it was declared to be an imp, and your chance of being found innocent was not good.

  Fortunately, Bessie had not yet been subjected to these ordeals, since Dr. Hoogschotel maintained that such methods were hopelessly unscientific. Pricking, he said, was the only medically correct way to determine guilt. A diligent search with long needles would eventually turn up the devil’s mark on the witch’s body—a place where there was no sensitivity, where a needle would draw no blood. Arabella, upon receiving instruction in the technique from the good doctor, had undertaken this investigation, assisted by the equally assiduous Mrs. Limpid. Poor Mrs. Limpid had had quite a time of it holding Bessie down during the examination. They had finally found a spot in the right calf that did not bleed; but since repeated jabs drew howls from Bessie, the evidence was inconclusive. And so it was decided that they would defer to the opinion of the expert, Matthias Boulderdash, who was duly sent for.

  Personally, Dr. Hoogschotel told Arabella, he was quite convinced the woman was a creature of the devil. He had heard reports of Bessie’s amateur medical practice; and for a lay-person, and a woman at that, one who had not the benefit of years of study in Europe’s various seats of learning, for such a person to gain the expertise and the modest successes attributed to her, was impossible, he swore, without the devil’s help.

  Now of course this was most unfair to Bessie, whose apprenticeship in midwifery had been thoroughly practical, if not academic. She had made the study of plants her life’s hobby, and it so happened that she knew more about their properties than most apothecaries of her day. Until Lady Clarissa’s illness, her ministrations had always been harmless at worst, successful at best; she genuinely cared about her patients, and had a motherly instinct for healing that was fundamentally altruistic as well as sensibly lucrative.

  On the other hand, is it fair to criticize Hoogschotel for defending his turf? After all, physicians have always put their faith in the gospel of rigorous scientific proof. Who can blame them for jealously guarding the Hippocratic secrets that are theirs to keep only after an expensive and grueling education?

  Arabella, who was not stupid, had challenged Hoogschotel at first.

  “But Doctor. Why would the devil, if he is indeed her master, aid her in curing people? Why not employ her for his most evil deeds?”

  “Ah, dere, lady, dere you have it. You see, de deffil is a cunning fellow. Diss is how he vorks. First, to gain de volks’ trust, de good cures. And den, as ve have seen here in de poor lady your sister, de curse.”

  For most of her thirty-odd years, Arabella’s life had been lacking in any form of excitement. Here, finally, was a riveting drama, playing itself out in her own family. It was an opportunity that came along but once in a lifetime—the thrill of the hunt, the commitment to a cause, the exhilaration of ferreting out evil and the prospect, possibly, of a heavenly reward. Pricking the alleged witch had provided her with an even greater sense of accomplishment than she usually derived from beating the servants; she had performed the task devoutly, happy in the knowledge that in this, she was performing a service for the Lord, a service which He would appreciate and which He would no doubt take into consideration when tallying the Heavenly Accounts.

  20

  PLUCK

  “Psst—Bess!”

  Bessie lifted her head from the bundle of rags she was using for a pillow. It was black with filth and blood.

  “Bessie!”

  Bessie lay rigid with fear on her pile of straw, her head and neck straining upward, the rest of her sore body paralyzed. Her eyes were bulging, her nostrils wide with terror.

  “Bess! It’s me! Thomas! Don’t you recognize my voice?”

  A moan came from her throat. “Art thou—the devil?”

  “The devil? What nonsense! Don’t you know me? It’s your Thomas!”

  “Thomas?” she whispered into the darkness. “Is that really you?”

  “Yes, Thomas, my sweet. Himself. Who else would I be?”

  “The devil. I am expecting the devil.”

  “Oh, come on now, Bess…”

  “He assumes many guises.”

  “Oh stop your foolishness, Bess! I am no devil. Surely you can tell the difference! “

  The cell in which Bessie was being held was really a cellar: a pit with steep sides dug into the ground, divided into two by a stockade down the middle. The ceiling was a wooden platform with a trap door in it. Above the platform there was a one-room hut that protected the jail keeper from the elements. The only way in and out of the dungeon was by ladder; it was lowered from above when needed. The floor and sides of the pit were bare earth, propped up with a smattering of wooden supports; the hygienic facilities consisted of a hole dug into the floor at one end of the cell. When the stench became unbearable, the occupant was handed a shovel, and told to throw a few spadefuls of earth into the hole. A colder, damper, smellier, muddier, nastier place is impossible to imagine.

  This dungeon, situated in the central square behind the pillory, was what passed for a prison in the town of Bitterbury, whose citizens believed in fiscal responsibility and poured all available resources into churches and bridges and fortifications of one sort or another. A decent prison was not high on the list of priorities, since most of the accused who were detained there were as good as dead anyway, and there was no point in throwing good coin after bad carrion.

  Thomas, relying on his natural charm (although it was rather strained at this point, evident from the glint of sweat on his upper lip) had had no trouble finding out where Bessie was being held. The constable on duty had told him that there was one witch in the jail at present. This piece of information was leaked over a tankard of ale at The Worm, where the constable spent most evenings, as he confided to this friendly stranger, since not a single felon had ever succeeded in escaping from that pit, not even with Satan’s help.

  Now, under cover of darkness, Thomas was lying flat on his stomach on the floor of the hut and calling to Bessie through the chinks in the platform.

  “Up here! Look up!” he hissed. Bessie looked up; saw nothing but darkness; and started shaking again.

  “How do I know you are what you say you are?” she yammered. “My Thomas—you can’t be Thomas, Thomas lives in Hampshire …”

  “Believe me, Bess!” Thomas pleaded, and hastily whispered how he had managed to obtain leave from Lady Doughby.

  “If it is really you, then…”

  “Then what, love?”

  “Then—go away.”

  “No.”

  “Yes!”

  “Not before I obtain your release.”

  “Please, please go. I don’t want you here. Just go!”

  “I can’t go back now, Bess, you know I can’t.”

  “But…what if the devil…what if he should find you here…?”

  “By all that’s blessed, Bess, what’s all this talk of the devil! Have you seen him, then?”

  The question hung in the air a while. Then she burst out, “I don’t know, I don’t know! It’s what they keep asking me. I tell you I don’t know!”

  Thomas interrupted her. “The rack! They’ve had you on the rack, haven’t they!”

  “So?” said Bessie defensively.

  “Oh my poor soul!” Thomas had met an escaped felon once, a chicken-thief, who had told him of the agonies of that apparatus. “And they told you the devil would come…?”

  “Yes. They say the deadly nightshade proves that I am a witch, and a child has seen me flying through the air, and they want me to say who my familiars are.” Her voice rose to a whispered wail. “And I tell them I don’t know, I don’t know anything, I call on God to be my witness, that I know not of what you speak, and they say I am sure to remember soon enough, that Beelzebub will appear to me in person if I don’t confess soo
n, and then…It’s all for my own good, they say. My confession will be my salvation, and…”

  “Oh, Bess, you don’t believe them, do you? I know you’re no witch! By God’s truth, Bess, all you have ever done has been to care for people, you’ve never meant anyone harm. And I know you say the Lord’s Prayer at every turn, and…”

  “That I do,” said Bessie, swallowing a sob, “that I do—”

  “And all this talk of the devil, it’s nonsense, you know that, Bess, he won’t come to one such as you, they are just hoping to frighten you into thinking that he will. Oh, Bess! And then, when finally you do confess, do you know what this salvation is they’re speaking of?”

  Bessie gave no reply in the darkness.

  “You know that you will be burned at the stake, or hanged, and there’s not a one can save you then, not even your poor Thomas.”

  Thomas had no practical plan to free Bessie, only impractical ones. There was Lady Doughby—but he doubted her word would carry, since she did not know Bessie personally, and appealing to her meant a week or more in lost traveling time, during which…He shuddered. He considered enlisting the help of some of the other servants at the manor to break open the jail and set Bessie free; but from the gardener’s reaction he knew it was unlikely that they would be prepared to risk their own lives or livelihood. Lady Clarissa might have spoken up for Bessie, but that, too, was out of the question, since her voice had not come back. Sir Edmund and Lord Hempstead were away in London. This left only Lady Arabella.

  Bessie had told Thomas about Arabella’s part in the pricking, and his eyes had stung with hatred. It was so like her! Still—she had always been rather lenient with him, and perhaps he could turn on the charm once more, and make her see the injustice of this accusation…

  Here we can see that Thomas was not in full possession of his faculties, otherwise he would not have overlooked the fact that he had but recently resigned from Arabella’s employ to take up a post with one of her neighbors. This was an unforgivable affront to Arabella, and if you had innocently mentioned Thomas’ name to her in passing, it would have been plain that she was not at all favorably disposed toward this heinous, this odious, this treacherous creature who had once dared to call himself her servant.