Suffer a Witch

by Morgana Gallaway

Pippa smiled suddenly, her heart lifting. “Thank you, ma’am.” She knew that Hugh loved his mother, and now she knew why—the lady deserved the title in her kindness.

  The group of women emerged from the rectory. What Pippa saw made her smile vanish.

  Two dark silhouettes were in the road, the sun a bright torch behind them, their faces in shadow. Fat flies buzzed around a pile of horse dung near their booted feet. Both men wore fashionable wide-brimmed cone hats. A sleek grey dog skulked at the heels of the taller one.

  Pippa turned to look up at Sybil’s house and she saw her friend’s slight figure peeking out from behind a curtain, like a ghost.

  Reverend Yates went to the strangers first, speaking in low whispers. They all shook hands. Then the Reverend turned to the curious group. “Lady Felton, good women. These men are here to help us. They are John Stearne and Matthew Hopkins. They are appointed by law as witch-finders!”

  Something quaked inside Pippa. When she tried to pin it down, it slithered away. She was troubled by witches and their powers of evil, else why would she learn the defense against them … but there was something else, too. Some sort of inner warning, like a church bell ringing in a fog. She edged to the back of the crowd, trying to conceal herself from the attention of the two men.

  “Providence!” said Winifred. “We’ve been afflicted in this village. Just this spring was young Francis Pye bewitched. And they say that one of Felton’s cattle fell to a hex, as well.”

  “Is that true, your ladyship?” asked Goody Renshaw.

  “Yes,” Lady Felton replied, with a quick glance at Pippa. “The cow was tested and found to be under the influence of a hex.”

  Lillibet had been the one to do the testing by making a cut on the animal’s ear, rubbing its blood in patterns, and it was rumored that Old Man Ashley, at his usual place in the pub, had complained of an earache at the same time. Hugh had told Pippa about it, although he was not convinced that witchcraft was the cause of the animal’s behavior, and rather suspected stomach worms.

  “Fear not,” said the shorter man. His voice was high and reedy. “I, John Stearne, and my partner Hopkins have much experience in such cases. We’ve brought professional search-women with us.” He gestured to one of the carts parked in front of the inn, where two primly dressed women sat. “It was Providence that brought us here in your hour of need.”

  Recognition flashed through Pippa after hearing their names again. The pamphlet about witches in Essex. These were the gentlemen Hopkins and Stearne. They were here to help. Although Pippa could not see the men’s eyes—Must the sun be so very bright?—she sensed someone looking at her. Reverend Yates, perhaps, who knew that it was her mother who had thus far done the job of detecting witchcraft.

  But, perhaps these other men would say that it took a witch to know a witch.

  Pippa wanted to go home. Lillibet always told her to listen to the “small voice” and so she did, moving behind the group and skirting around the pond instead of going the way of the inn. She found her mother scattering feed for the chickens.

  “All’s well?” Lillibet asked.

  Pippa almost told her about the witch-finders, but discovered that she didn’t want to name them or talk about them. Her throat felt constricted. Instead, she just nodded.

  “Get thyself to the kitchen, then, and prepare for tea.”

  It was with thoughtful hands that Pippa chopped an onion with some herbs. They had a large eggplant, gleaming purple, and it was to be stuffed with stale bread crumbs and vegetables. The kitchen work calmed Pippa. Lillibet was the cleverest person she knew and her mother would keep them safe.

  The summer wind was unrelenting and Pippa laughed when Lillibet lost her cap and had to chase it, cursing, across the lawn.

  SOMEWHERE IN THE NIGHT, a dog howled. Elspeth’s ears perked and her nails clicked on the wood floor as she danced in agitation. Night had fallen over the Vale and Matthew Hopkins was in his room at the Charter Inn with Stearne, inspecting a local map drawn for them by Goodman Renshaw, the proprietor. Like most innkeepers, Renshaw was full of useful information.

  From his east-facing window Hopkins could see the moon on the rise, a fat moon growing, and this made him nervous. Anything to do with nighttime made him nervous. But Stearne was there and they had several large candlesticks to light the room, and so Hopkins was able to focus on the task at hand.

  As his first impression had allowed, the Vale was an average farming hamlet, if a bit isolated. There was a manor house owned by a noble family called Felton, and a few large homes at the crossroads. The other prominent family in the Vale was called Radcliff, involved in textiles; Mr. Radcliff was often away in Lavenham, Colchester, or Ipswich. “But it be the son that’s the puzzle,” Renshaw had told them. “They say he’s away, studying a’ some university. But none’s seen him for well on a year now. Mrs. Radcliff comes from gentry and they say the family has sympathies for the King.”

  It was most intriguing.

  Radcliff, Hopkins thought, Royalist? He spread a hand over the map. “Farm laborers, yeomen, a smith, a brewer … all good folk, on the surface,” he mused.

  “A few beggars in their hovels,” said Stearne. “Passed them on the way in. Grim little places along the road, so filthy I could scarce distinguish them from a lump of mud.”

  “Such people often resort to witchcraft,” said Hopkins. “Their tendency is toward knavery and theft. A small leap to consort with Satan. We shall ask about them first.”

  “Indeed,” said Stearne. He smiled. “All along this way have I found evidence of the evil pact.”

  “As have I,” said Hopkins. In his travels since he last saw Stearne, he and the search-women had rooted out a witch at nearly every stop. His purse had grown fat with his commissions. “How was Lavenham?” he asked his companion.

  “A fair number of ordeals uncovered it. All the accused have been sent to Bury ahead of the assizes.”

  “And here we’ve met, both at the same village. There must be a real coven here,” said Hopkins. His own words frightened him. He imagined a group of witches cavorting with their imps around a fire … dancing, drinking … bare breasts and loose hair … monsters with a thousand teeth, sharp as knives … every sin committed and Oh, Satan himself in attendance. Oh, I am there, too. He blinked his eyes to clear his mind.

  “My guess is on the beggars,” said Stearne. “A place as small as this cannot have much room for the lazy and insolent.”

  “Yes, it will be a good place to start,” said Hopkins.

  Later, when Stearne had left for his own room—the Charter Inn had but two guest rooms, and the search-women were sleeping on mattresses in a curtained area downstairs—Hopkins tried to sleep. His mind wandered to the forest nudging against the Vale. What a perfect meeting place it must be for witches. He reminded himself to ask about it.

  In that middling place between wakefulness and sleep, his mind wandered, his defenses down, and he was snatched back into a time when he hadn’t known to be suspicious.

  MATTHEW HOPKINS, AGED NINE, crept into the kitchen to find their house-woman, Deborah, spinning in place, her generous hips rolling, her skirts twitching around her ankles. She was a buxom woman with a narrow waist, a ready smile, and eyes that were every bit as dark as his. Deborah was the same age as Matthew’s mother Mary, but the two women didn’t get along. “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Dancing,” said Deborah, reaching out to seize Matthew’s small hands and twirl him with her.

  He giggled. In the back of his mind, he knew his father would disapprove of dancing, but his bond with the servant was special and she allowed him to see her private, joyful moments. They became Matthew’s moments, too.

  The dawn’s light made the kitchen seem silvery, like they were underwater.

  As the room went topsy-turvy, he saw a grouping of stones and flowers laid out in a pattern on the plank table. He pointed, looking up at Deborah with the question in his eyes.

  “Shhh,�
� she said, placing a finger on her pretty lips. Then she smiled, the kind of smile that meant it was all a great secret.

  When they stopped spinning around the kitchen, Matthew’s head felt all wobbly, like he was one of those wooden-bob dolls. He focused on the table, where a bunch of dried herbs were placed inside the stones that formed the outline of a heart. Deborah had picked the stones from the brook, for he recognized their color and their soft roundness from the caress of the water. He touched one, the pinkish one at the bottom point of the heart.

  “No,” she whispered. “These are my special stones.”

  “What’s special about them?”

  “In a manner all and some, into my wound of love do come,” Deborah recited, and a wistful look passed over her as she gazed down at Matthew. In a more even voice she said, “They are to bring love back into this house.”

  “You love me, though, Deborah?” He meant it to be a statement, but it came out as a question.

  “Yes, you are my darling,” she said.

  She always called him darling. Although she was just a servant, this made Matthew feel above his brothers, whom Deborah did not like nearly as well.

  “Love for who?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “You ask a great many things, my little questioner!”

  Matthew loved to find things out. Adults told him he asked too many questions.

  “Go on, get thee to work. Your father said he wanted you and your brother John to pick the early apples from the yard. Hard work is godly.” The last sentence was said out of habit. The Hopkins household was strict, for Mr. Hopkins was the minister, and he brought his sermons home to the point where even the servants quoted him.

  Matthew wrinkled his nose. He didn’t mind work, but his older brothers bullied him and foisted the worst jobs onto his small shoulders and teased him for the wavy curls of his hair. They called it “girlish.” Matthew couldn’t wait until he was old enough to crop his hair. He didn’t understand why his hair was not straight like his brothers’; no one else in their family had untamed locks.

  “Come ’ere,” said Deborah, pulling Matthew into a tight embrace. He was shoved up against her soft breasts and he wrapped his arms around her comfortable, familiar waist. “If you do your work hard,” she said, “and come in dirty, I’ll give you a bath meself. We’ll have our special time.”

  Deborah often took it upon herself to bathe Matthew. It was one more way that she made him feel loved.

  She spanked him on his way out the door to the yard. “Get to work!” she said.

  When he turned to look at her on his way out the door, he saw that she’d taken the bouquet of herbs from the middle of the heart and was pinching them between her fingers, and sprinkling them into the family’s porridge.

  PHYSICAL HEALTH HAD RETURNED to Sybil. She was able to walk and do her chores and her lessons. The fever circles beneath her eyes receded. Her eyes lost their jaundice around the edges and were clear white and blue once again.

  There was a shadow in her, though, a remembrance of the places she’d gone when she was ill. Sybil knew that the world was not quite as it seemed. In the fevered state of mind, things were real and yet unreal. She remembered what they had told her.

  Beware the man with the grey imp.

  Two days ago, when Matthew Hopkins came to her father’s door with that grey dog at his heels, she’d known fear. Folding, twisting, sharp fear. It was him. The dark man who had haunted her visions. He wore a short cape, and a hat, and expensive bucket-top boots. And when those terrible blank eyes rested upon her, it had taken all Sybil’s strength to resist fainting dead away.

  Elizabeth had nudged her when their father introduced them to the visitors from Essex. “Sybil!” she’d hissed.

  She’d remembered to dip a greeting, and gave her knees the command to bend just a little, and not succumb to the bone-limp weakness radiating from her core.

  “Do pardon me,” she’d said right after, and she heard Cathy making an excuse about her recent illness.

  Then, her father had told them that the men were witch-finders, bound by law to sniff out witches, and that the Vale would not tolerate any more wickedness. “’Tis been many years since a proper trial’s been held here,” he’d said, and Sybil knew that somewhere in his quiet demeanor, her father thirsted for such a thing. Losses must be accounted for. Justice must be done. His flock must be protected from the spiritual wolves that preyed from the feral forest.

  “Oh, Tom,” she sobbed to Thomas Radcliff, to her pillow, on Thursday night. “I wish you were here. I wish I was yours to protect. I wish there was no war. We might have escaped this.”

  For all of her doziness, and for all of her flights of fancy, Sybil was not stupid. She knew how this would go. She knew, and there was nothing she could do about it, and so she was a cloud pushed by a wind. She was a girl-woman on a broomstick drawn into the maelstrom.

  Sybil knew Matthew Hopkins. She knew his fabric. He was like a tangle in her embroidery, the kind that never loosens, the kind that hinders and unravels all the threads around it.

  Worse, he was a lawyer.

  Even Jesus denounced lawyers in Scripture and called them hypocrites. Sybil thought that was in the book of Matthew, but she would have to ask Elizabeth, who would know for sure.

  “I will confess my relief,” said Catherine at the breakfast table the next morning. “With the witch-finders’ help, things will seem less frightening.”

  “Some of us have not guarded our spiritual well-being,” said Elizabeth, pouring a generous amount of honey into her porridge and stirring it. “There is no escaping God’s justice.”

  Sybil wanted to protest Elizabeth, to wheedle her, but her deeper voice told her it was too late for all that. Elizabeth refused to meet Sybil’s eyes. Since the relapse of the ague, Elizabeth had become coy, as though afraid to cross words with Sybil. It had been a welcome relief from the usual nagging and ridicule, but Sybil knew a suspicion had grown like a weed in her sister’s mind. It was possible she’d said something in the throes of fever that might be … misinterpreted.

  Lillibet, knowing the girls went into the forest to work their girlish magic, had always told them to keep quiet. That others would not understand the difference between black and white.

  At midday Sybil brought Ursula inside from the garden and tucked her safely in a box under the bed, with a bit of water and fresh grain should she get hungry. “Stay silent,” she warned the bird, for Martha did not approve of wild creatures in the house.

  On the way into the church that afternoon, Sybil reminded herself that evil witches there may be, but she was not one of them.

  The mood of the country folk was curious, and a little fearful. Many had never seen a witch trial and didn’t know what to expect. For months there had been rumors from other, presumably more wicked places, but none had thought it might afflict the Vale. The neighbors gathered at the church: Widow Moore, her daughter-in-law Isabel with three children in tow, and the Goodman Moore, the widow’s son, who wore a perpetual expression of bafflement.

  There was Goodman Powell, a young man with a strong face and still unmarried.

  Old Man Ashley, already quite drunk, swaying in the back.

  There were the Pye children with their parents. The infant girl was in her mother’s arms. The twins both appeared in good health, despite their recent brush with witchcraft. They would have something to say at this hearing.

  The Baxters were in attendance, all seven of them. Alice carried one of her youngest brothers, still in diapers.

  Next to Sybil, Elizabeth sat straighter: the Felton family was here. Elizabeth had a predator’s instinct for the things she wanted, and she wanted Hugh.

  The Radcliffs entered, along with Jonas Martin, their visiting cousin. “Do you suppose they’ve seen a great many witches?” Winifred could be overheard whispering to her mother as they took seats behind the Yates girls. “Will they be taking accusations today, do you think?”

 
“Witch,” Sybil whispered, “ditch. Snitch. Pitch. Tar and feather them.”

  “Are you feeling all right?” Catherine asked, looking at her sideways.

  “Fine,” she whispered, “I’m fine.” She turned around and saw Lillibet clutching Pippa’s arm. The older woman’s face was grim. Pippa, on the other hand, looked annoyed at having to be in church on a Friday afternoon.

  A light breeze drifted through the open windows. The movement of air was a slight relief on sweaty brows and necks.

  The church was the only building large enough for group meetings, so it also served as the hall where village business was conducted. For a moment Sybil gazed at the plain altar with its white candles and simple wooden cross. Cutting into her vision of the holy altar were the two witch-finders, dressed officiously, arms crossed.

  Sybil’s father stood in front of his flock. “Good people, this meeting is not for worship, although we stand in God’s house. We do His work today through earthly laws. I turn the floor to Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne, Witchfinders.”

  The small crowd was hushed and leaning forward, ready to hear more.

  “WORRY NOT,” PIPPA TOLD Lillibet. “Cunning-folk are in every village. This is all a spectacle because the summer’s heat breeds boredom.”

  “You know nothing of it, Pippa. Every generation this happens. Women are never safe from the accusation of immorality.”

  “But you’re the midwife. The bishop gave you the license.” Pippa considered that Isabel Moore might try to move in on the position. Midwifery was an occupation that always made men nervous—women’s mysteries were outside of their theology or understanding. It was important to some that midwives be the most scrupulous in matters of Christian belief, above all criticism.

  Isabel thinks herself as such, Pippa thought sourly, glancing at the Moores.

  Reverend Yates introduced Matthew Hopkins and Pippa got her first proper look at the witch-finder.

  Something about him made her uneasy. His stance was dominating, confident, and his rich doublet coat was tightly buttoned up to a strong-muscled neck. There was a sheen of sweat on his white skin. He wore a sharp goatee beard. His eyes scanned the crowd.