“Sybil Yates: guilty.”
A tremor shook the courtroom. The blood daughter of a Puritan minister … but it was nothing to the tremor in Pippa’s heart. Sybil did not move in the seat next to her, but stared up at one of the pigeons misplaced in the rafters. Her eyes moved this way and that. Everything seemed black, except for the light in Sybil’s eyes.
Then, it was her turn. “Philippa Wylde: not guilty.”
She was startled back to attention. Did her ears deceive her? But no, the crowd was shocked as well, and whispered and commented and stared at her. She found Hugh’s face several rows in. He looked too relieved to even manage a smile, but his lips were moving in a prayer.
I’m free, she thought, not quite believing it.
“I protest!” shouted a voice.
Pippa saw Matthew Hopkins, red in the face and standing up to wave a fist.
“This is a mistake! She is the guiltiest of them all! I’ve seen her! I know her! She is Satan’s own creature!” He began to cough violently.
“Master Hopkins!” the sergeant said. “Sit down! This is the jury’s decision.”
“But I have proof! Test her again, watch her again, there can be no doubt …”
“Hopkins,” said the gravelly voice of one of the magistrates, “if you do not sit down, you will be held in contempt!”
Hopkins’s mouth twitched with rage, his fingers drummed along the rim of his hat, but he eased back down into his chair.
The purple sergeant cleared his throat. “The sentences are thus: the guilty are to be hanged from the neck until dead. The innocent—Miss Wylde—you are free to go.”
Someone was fumbling at Pippa’s hands with a key. The shackles fell off and she felt bereft. “Sybil,” she murmured, “Sybil!”
“Pippa!”
All around them was chaos. Soldiers were at the doors, the convicted were being dragged away, and Sybil was three steps away, and then four. The clerk was shouting down the stairs for the next group to be brought up. The public audience was standing, shouting, coming and going. Pippa didn’t know what to do. And Sybil was being taken away from her.
“Sybil!” she shouted, and plunged past a heavy-bodied soldier. She gripped Sybil’s arms. “I-I don’t know what to do. I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t leave me,” Sybil said, looking just as bewildered. “Please. Don’t leave me, Pippa.”
“I won’t! I’ll speak to someone, I—”
Someone had Pippa by the elbows from behind. “Stand aside, miss! No civilians allowed down there.”
The prisoners were being pulled through a door by their chained hands. Sybil turned and looked over her shoulder. A wisp of fair hair seemed to float on an invisible wind. Her shining eyes were full of fear, and sadness, and love.
“Oh, Sybil,” Pippa choked, watching until Sybil was gone. Turning once in a circle, she was surrounded by people and all alone. The faces of strangers swam in front of her face. What do I do? Where am I? Sybil! She was paralyzed.
“This way. Philippa Wylde, this way!” It was a clerk, a small and nervous man, and he wanted her to sign a piece of paper.
“What is it?” she asked with suspicion. She thought it was a trick by Hopkins to get her to confess to something. She skimmed the words and realized it was some sort of release.
“Your freedom,” said the clerk. “States that you was found not guilty and released.”
“Oh,” said Pippa, taking the feather pen with a shaking hand and signing. It was hardly legible. From the tip of the feather, a fat drop of ink fell next to her name, spreading outward in a dark circle, grazing her signature. A blot on her name.
She was shuffled off to the side, down some stairs, and out the doors in a stream of people. Some looked at her with disdain, for she was filthy, in rags, with unkempt hair and the desperate air of a beggar. How would she get home? Where was home? The Vale was not what it used to be, not to be trusted.
“Pippa! Pippa!” Hugh was in front of her, holding her hands. “Oh, Pippa, you’re here, you’re safe.” He peered down at her.
She could not quite pin him down. He was a wavering figure, one she’d dreamed in the gaol but never imagined she’d see again.
“Are you well?” he asked.
There was no answer to such a question.
“Philippa, dear. Come with me.” That was Hugh’s mother. What was her name? Constance. Constance Felton. The last time Pippa had seen her, Lady Felton had complimented her on her spirited reading. Indeed.
“You must be exhausted. Come along, dear, come.” A motherly hand guided her shoulders out of the crowds and along a side street. “We’ll be driving home now, the light is long in the day and my husband’s horses are swift.”
Pippa wanted to say, I can’t leave Sybil, but she found that her voice did not work the way it should. She did not even register the houses rolling past her vision as they walked, the shops, the large and impressive structures of an ancient town. Hugh was steadfast by her side, and she soaked up the strength of his nearness like a snake basking on a warm rock.
“Here, the carriage.” Lady Felton was a woman with the easy manners of the gentry. She did not seem to mind, or even notice, Pippa’s state of degradation. She handed over a cup of ale. “Drink this.”
The bitter, fuzzy taste of it was almost foreign. It revived her from her confusion, though. “Thank you,” she said.
“Hugh, help her up.”
Hugh took her hand, and with the other hand on her waist, lifted her up into the carriage. It was a small open vehicle with fine wheels and a cushioned seat. Lady Felton climbed up next to her. They had a driver, a man from the Vale that Pippa recognized.
There was also a second cart behind them. Pippa turned to look at it and wonder what was bundled in the back.
“I signed for your mother’s body,” said Hugh gently. “We’ll take her home.”
Pippa blinked. “I thought she was in—in a—left in the mass grave.”
“She was,” said Lady Felton, “but we had her brought out and prepared for a home burial.”
It would have cost them, Pippa knew, and not just money but the taint of dealing with the gaol, the record of signing for a prisoner’s body. She could not begin to thank them.
“’Tis all right,” said Lady Felton as if knowing Pippa’s thoughts. “Here, have a bit to eat.” She handed Pippa a stack of biscuits wrapped in cloth.
Hugh climbed up next to the driver and the cart started forward. The wheels turned, bearing Pippa through Bury St. Edmunds, away from the assizes and the gaol and away from Sybil.
She bit down on a biscuit. It had sugar in it. It crumbled in her mouth.
A fly hovered around her face for a few minutes and then moved along.
She was shaking, so Lady Felton placed a steadying hand on her knee.
“He truly loves you, coming all the way up here to speak for you,” Lady Felton said. She tilted her head ruefully. “I don’t know you well, Miss Wylde, but you must be something special.”
Pippa could not see Hugh’s face, but from behind she saw that the tips of his ears were bright red.
Lady Felton continued, “I always said you were a good girl, your honorable father’s daughter. Now we see that you are, and always were, innocent of all this.”
Innocent. Pippa knew better. She was sullied, her faith shattered. The filth of the gaol clung to her. The word “witch” would follow her forever. Innocent was before the cruel invasion of a pricking bodkin, the prodding hands that defiled her in search of guilt. How could she ever be innocent again? But she offered a tiny smile to Lady Felton, hoping for silence.
Many miles later, Pippa turned around in her seat and looked across fields at the distant silhouette of the ruins of St. Edmund’s Abbey. The gentle sounds of the countryside surrounded her, but her ears still echoed with the brutal voices of the court, the gaol-keepers, the guards, the witch-finders. She did not feel safe. Any moment they would race after her on horses. Hopkins would use
that devilish grey dog of his to track her down.
I need to be in the cave, she thought. The thought was paramount—it swelled into a physical longing to be shut away inside the earth. Closing her eyes against her fear, she thought of the refuge in the forest that had once been Lillibet’s, and that she had now inherited.
Closer, closer, with every turn of the wheels.
THE SUN WAS TOUCHING the edge of the western horizon when they rounded the bend, topped the hill, and descended into the Vale. Thin columns of smoke rose as the women inside their cottages prepared evening meals. Pippa’s heart seized. She realized that home was not a place, it was a time. She wanted to return to the time before Matthew Hopkins had found her. The Vale was foreign to her now—or perhaps she was foreign to it.
“We’ll take you home,” said Hugh over his shoulder.
He didn’t understand. He couldn’t.
“Thank you,” said Pippa.
Lady Felton looked at her with sympathy. “Hugh tried to keep an eye on the place for you—at least the inside. We couldn’t do much about the pig and chickens.”
“Stolen?”
“I’m sorry.”
“There are worse things,” she said vaguely. It was too bad about Eli the pig. He would have made fine bacon someday.
The crossroads, the roundabout, the inn … all were unchanged in form. The front of the white church looked menacing, the cross black and the church white, all contrast and no compassion. She didn’t know how she could ever walk through those doors again. And she turned away from the pond, remembering the view from beneath the water, the shadow of the witch-finder playing over its surface as he waited for her to drown.
She was grateful that the crossroads was not busy this time of day. The only person about was Will Renshaw, sweeping the front stone of the inn, and he tipped his hat when she was let out of the cart at the beginning of the footpath. In her torn, dirty clothes, she felt naked as a babe—no personal effects, nothing to show for her time in prison except for the red welts around her wrists and an itchy case of head lice.
The path home was difficult in her weakened state. The incline was steep, but Hugh and Lady Felton aided her, and she was surprised to see a group of laborers standing in her yard with shovels.
“The Reverend won’t allow Lillibet to be buried on the church grounds,” said Hugh with a touch of anger in his voice. “I told him—”
“No, she would have preferred this,” said Pippa. She turned and saw the slight shrouded form of her mother’s body being carried up the path. “Under the yew tree.”
The laborers began digging. Their work was hindered by the stubborn roots of the yew, and Pippa murmured for them to be careful and not hurt the tree. They stopped when the hole was about four feet deep.
It was unconsecrated ground, and there was no service, and Pippa was glad for it. She didn’t think she could stand to hear what passed as holy words these days.
Lillibet’s wrapped form was smaller than Pippa remembered. She went to pull back the shroud but Hugh stopped her.
“You don’t want to see her like that,” he said. “The undertaker said she’d been exposed to the elements.”
She’s rotted away, thought Pippa, and wanted to cry. “How do you know it to be her?”
Hugh reached into a fold of the shroud cloth and pulled out a shining loop of braided hair. “She had this about her neck. I thought you would want it.”
“Sybil,” said Pippa, taking the braid with trembling fingers and thinking of her friend, who would spend this night imprisoned without hope.
Lillibet was laid in the grave and covered with soft scoops of earth. Pippa watched, while Hugh and his mother kept a respectful distance. The laborers finished, patting down the disturbed ground with the backs of their shovels, and filed away, murmuring their condolences.
Pippa put a hand to her face and discovered that her tears had dried. There was a shadow against the setting sun and she looked up to Hugh.
“I’ll come round tomorrow,” he said. “Winifred Radcliff will be glad to see you returned, as well.” His brow furrowed. “Pippa—do you want me to fetch her? She said they’d have you at their house.”
Touched as she was by Hugh’s felicity, she wanted to lick her wounds alone. “No, tomorrow would be better.” She tried to smile at him. She hated how her teeth were loose in her gums from malnourishment. “Hugh Felton, you’re a good man.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner,” he said. “I realized not how bad it would become. How bad it was. I never dreamt … I’m so sorry. This should never have gone so far.”
“I wish I would have known your feelings. It would have given me comfort in the gaol.”
Hugh winced. “Did you not know that I love you?”
“No!”
“You’ve always been mine, Pippa, since we were children. You must know that.”
“You never told me. How could I know, when you walk around with other girls, never making me an offer?” This was not going the way Pippa wanted. She didn’t have the energy for this fight. Marriage seemed like the least important thing in the world at this moment. All she wanted was to sleep, to be absorbed into the ground.
“I thought it was understood.” Hugh took off his hat and rubbed his forehead in frustration. “Pippa, say you’ll marry me. I’ll take care of you. Your father would have wanted it—your mother, too. Please marry me.”
Numbly, Pippa felt this was the cloak to cover the gaping holes in her life. Hugh had saved her from hanging. What else was left? She was too exhausted to think about what she wanted. She owed him an answer. She owed him a yes.
“Yes, Hugh. I will.”
“Thank you,” he said, grasping her hand, holding back the kiss she knew he wanted to give. His mother was watching. “God keep you. I’ll return here tomorrow morning.”
Pippa nodded, but couldn’t muster a return. She hushed the inner voice that warned her there was more to life than this simple solution; that Lillibet’s dying words had demanded courage, not compromise.
The sky was blood red behind the silhouette of her ruined cottage. It was shocking how bare the thatch had become, and how many weeds had sprouted in the garden, and how much dust and dirt had built up around the door. The windows were blank, empty, as Lillibet’s eyes had been when she died. They stared accusingly at her.
I cannot be here tonight. She pushed open the door and in the gloom, saw that someone had stolen their store of grain and the barrel of ale. The herb cabinet was untouched; fear of witchery had kept the thieves away from that. The yard was quiet, for the animals were indeed gone.
Turning toward Lillibet’s bed, her heart sank to see the locked chest had vanished. With it had gone the pencil drawings her father had made of her mother and his own self-portraits, Lillibet’s amber and jet brooch, a Roman coin, and Lillibet’s mother’s fine-tooth comb made of bone and silver. At any other time this loss would have Pippa in a rage. Now, it was just one more thing.
She went to the wall and pulled away the loose stone. She half-expected their savings to be gone, but discovered that the money satchel was safe. Someone had scoured the fireplace, looking for the cottage hiding-place, but had been disappointed. She dragged the sack out and counted the shillings, pennies, and farthings that added up to just under one pound. The summer had been profitable after Sarah Ford, and with a coil of fresh guilt, Pippa remembered that she would never need to pay Joan Buckett now.
Pippa scratched her head furiously. She had to get out of her grimy dress. Climbing the ladder to her loft, she saw her blue petticoat and bodice intact. She dragged her fresh clothes down, then walked out to the brook and filled a bucket with water. Inside the cottage, heedless of the water that splashed around, she stripped off and scrubbed her skin and hair with the horsehair brush and a bar of lavender soap. The accumulated dirt was released layer after layer.
Frowning, Pippa would have to brew something complicated to kill the lice in her hair, so she would save th
at for later. Tomorrow she would go to the Radcliffs’, for she and Winifred needed to discuss their business in Bury St. Edmunds. Sybil was still there. They had to save her before the unthinkable happened.
The Feltons had given her part of their picnic, a half-loaf of bread and some goat’s cheese, and she placed it in a satchel with the household savings and the braid of Sybil’s hair. She hoped that the forest would welcome her, and that she would find her way.
The door was left open behind her and she walked fast through the fields, into the trees that swallowed her up, down the pathways that she knew and loved. The air was warm and clean. Every breath was a relief and as the trees swayed around her, the edge of panic that had stalked her for so many weeks began to ebb away. She pretended that Lillibet was one step ahead of her, leading the way to the cave as she had done before. Pippa followed.
Her hands felt the smooth bark of the rowan tree. The grooves of the symbol were a greeting beneath her fingers. “One, two, three, four …” she counted the paces into the thicket.
Pausing, hearing nothing but the forest, she scrabbled at the rock and it rolled aside. In, she thought, safe, home. The vines and ferns and leaves brushed at her face as she crawled into the hole. The match on the ledge was struck and a candle’s flame flared. Pippa yanked the holding-stone out of the groove and the boulder slid closed.
When she emerged through the tunnel and into the main cave, she found herself in the sanctuary where her imagination had gone during the worst times in the gaol. The water trickled pure and clear. The ruby in the pool was a glinting drop of heart’s blood. The herbs were in order, the books lined in a row, the fire pit charred with the remains of centuries past. Then, something different.
There was Lillibet’s chest, unlocked, resting on the floor. Pippa opened it and saw its contents in order. Her fingers touched the heirloom comb. Lillibet must have brought it here when the witch-finders came, she thought. She knew what would happen.
Pippa gathered the items from the chest in a small pile and placed Sybil’s braid on top. She laid down next to her history, the remaining tokens of her previous life, and blew out the candle. All was silent except for the soft plinking of her tears that hit the cave floor.
Suffer a Witch Page 27