The roots of the yew tree had wound themselves through Lillibet’s buried body and drawn her skull toward the trunk. The tree’s gentle brown death-fingers clutched the skull by the nose-hole, the eye-holes, the place where her neck had been. Decay had done its work quickly, leaving the clean bone, and Pippa touched it reverently. It was almost waxy, and shone in the thin October light.
It had come to the surface for her.
Pippa looked up into the dense branches of the yew, knowing that the tree had taken nourishment from what was left of Lillibet, knowing it had transfigured her into its own eternal growth.
“Thank you,” she whispered to the tree as her digging loosened the roots’ hold on the skull, and Lillibet’s head was given up to her for safekeeping.
Take me head when I be dead. Pippa shook her head at her mother’s incredible foresight. How had she known?
Pippa would have to ask for herself. She tucked the clean skull into her skirts and took it inside. She would use it tonight.
The sun began its daily decease in a cold burst of orange light. Pippa cleaned the kitchen without being tempted to eat anything. A few months ago she would have been complaining of starvation, with so little in her stomach, but she had learned the hard way to quiet her pangs. To ignore them. My spirit is starved, she thought. She was tired all the time.
“I’ll see you in the morning, maybe,” she told Ursula.
The bird looked at her with a knowing eye.
“I cannot go on this way. I must find me power,” she said.
Ursula bobbed her head and ruffled her feathers.
The sun vanished behind the woods. For a startling moment, the tops of the trees were consumed in red. Pippa doused the fire in the hearth. It would be a disaster to lose the cottage to a careless spark. She packed a skin-sack of water, a blanket, and carefully wrapped Lillibet’s head in a clean kitchen cloth. Then she approached Ursula. “May I have another feather?”
Ursula was docile as Pippa’s hands ran along her lame wing. A feather was released just as before. “Thank you, girl!” She fed Ursula a live cricket from the jar she kept in the kitchen.
“Thank you, girl!” said Ursula.
The door was closed behind her and the nebulous edges of twilight were perfect for concealing her path. Few were brave enough to be outside on this night, for superstitions were stubborn. The mist had returned, as though a veil were cast over the hard earth. There was no moon in the sky, for it was horned and dying, and would not rise until past midnight.
The woods were silent and waiting. Even the animals did not stir. It was time to disappear into hibernation. Pippa arrived at the cave’s hidden entrance and the rolling boulder seemed hushed, too. “Shhh,” she whispered to herself.
There would be found rubies of wisdom.
She crawled in and placed her blanket, water, and Lillibet’s head in the tunnel. She took a few moments to collect kindling. The twigs were dry and snapped easily in her hand—perfect for a fire. Some large wood pieces were already inside for later.
Ensconced within, Pippa took a sip of her water and pulled out one of the grimoires. She turned page after page. It was a printed book, The Key of Solomon, and it contained some very complicated magic. Necromancy, the invocation of demons … Pippa put it away. She did not feel up to that sort of thing.
There was that smaller book bound in indigo leather—the one Lillibet had caressed. The pages were thick, as though the binding was homemade, and the letters were handwritten. She opened to a page that said, “The Healing Fever.”
Using her finger to guide her along, Pippa read aloud. “The Healing Fever. To see the truth of all things.” Next to this passage was an illustration of a mushroom—Pippa had seen them growing in the cow pastures—and the words, “Fairy’s cap.” A warning seemed scrawled in the margin, and she read, “Not to be eaten every day, or on church days, or but twice every year.” She paused. “Hmm.”
She leaned over and set Lillibet’s skull on the floor across from her. It shone in the flames, a pure deadly white. “Is this the thing to do?” she asked the skull.
It did not reply.
“Lillibet, you were an odd duck,” she said.
Her fingers tapped along the many jars and bottles in the cave. There it was—a glass with a ribbon wrapped around it. The ribbon was labeled, “Fairy’s cap.” The mushrooms inside were dried and brown, long and thin. Pippa took the jar and shook out a handful. The heads of the mushrooms were conical, like a hat. “Hmm!”
A fraction of her old courage returned. Shrugging, she ate one.
“Show me the truth,” she said, and ate another, and another.
They had a mild, nutty taste, like a dry wafer.
“Show me the truth.”
She ate all five of them, because she knew where to find more, and because she wanted the truth.
She wrapped the shining rope of Sybil’s hair twice around her wrist, like a bracelet.
The book was unclear as to what she might expect from eating old mushrooms. Taking another sip of water, she stoked her fire and added a larger piece of wood. The kindling had caught well. She felt like she ought to pray, but the Bible was not among Lillibet’s books here. Instead she watched the way the fire glinted off the surface of the tiny pool, and the way the ruby down there wavered and winked.
Her mood lifted. A pleasant numb tingling started in her legs and arms. She had an urge to laugh. A few minutes later, she did.
Then she found Ursula’s feather and tossed it into the fire. It sizzled and hissed and threw a golden spark.
The handwritten book had a charm written on the corner of a page. The words were difficult to make out, for they were nonsense. It took her a long time to read them aloud, to form the words, for her mind had wings and it swooped this way and that. The stroke of every letter was a long thread and her eyes followed their path on the page, wondering where they would lead her.
“Sun et Siphereth by the love of Jesus Christ does Jehovah stay, Jeh Jeh Jeh, The Dryads play, Kam a-Umi, Nalgah, present the loom, weave the scorpio, Have mercy, God the All, I am, Will I am, our ward does Thomas gard.”
The page was square and her fingernail was round. It took a long time to move her hand. She followed the words to where they would lead her. “By the love of Jesus Christ. The Dryads play.”
Time melted. Her mind skipped a pace. It skipped forward, it danced backward. Nothing in the world existed except the book. The book. Everything was in the Book.
Her eyes swung toward the fire. A spider crawled through it. It folded its eight legs and rested beneath a blazing log. The flame was bright as the sun, glowing and soft, an orange rose at the center of the universe. Liquid silver ran down the forked branches of a stag’s antlers and landed in the coals.
She was in the heart of the world. The fire beat a drum and the chamber pulsed, in and out, breathe in and breathe out. The world was warm, the world was melting, she was fevered.
What did I eat?
She laughed and laughed. The fire peeled away the skin of the deer. The smoke lifted and was whisked away into the night. Looking up, she saw through rock and root, through leaf and branch, through air and to the stars that pulsed with the same great orange heartbeat.
Crackle and burst. The sound of sizzling meat. The sound of burning feathers. The sound of a thousand tiny births and deaths.
She melted and became the cave. She was the mind and the earth was her body. For many long years she stared at the face of the Green Man, who gazed back at her from inside a pulsing coal. He blinked and then he was … Jesus Christ Jehovah does the Dryad play? He had a long white beard and kind eyes. He blinked. He sees me, He sees me, and it was gazing into Winifred’s looking-glass. You are the same man, you are the same thing, she realized. I am you and you are me. God the All. The face was Hugh. He blinked. She smiled at him, happy to see him here inside the great mind.
The book was heavy on her lap and she set it aside for a better look at the fire. It w
as the center of the universe.
The book had the names of the witches in it.
The man in the fire blinked at her, and she was in a dark place, she was sliding down … down … she was lost in a black vein and she was frightened. A heart’s attack. The man in the fire was Matthew Hopkins. There was his sharp beard, there were his fanatic’s eyes with red on the rims.
Looping downward, and again, caught inside an endless knot. She was back in the gaol. Lillibet lifted into the air, spine arched, muscles kinked and twitching, eyes wide, grotesque mouth pulled into a laughing grimace. Matthew Hopkins stared at her and she was captured. There were ropes around her wrists and she tugged at them, frantic, crying. Screaming. Wailing. Tugging.
Tight, too tight, I can’t move, I can’t breathe. She was dying.
There was a rope around her neck. She tugged. The world dropped from beneath. There was nothing solid and she swung. She hung.
“Witch,” he said. “Choke me.”
There was no way out. She would die in this place, in this black pit, in this dark dark foul filthy place. Nothing was familiar. The ink blot shadows chased her. A word on a page, a name on a roster, guilty guilty guilty. She had not slept in months. He would find her, that face in the fire. She had signed her name “Philippa W.” and she was on the Devil’s Register.
“That not be your name,” said the skull sitting on the floor. “You have no name.”
A thousand names. The many-named. With great effort she turned away from the fire and crawled toward the skull, and yet did not move. The earth spun beneath her. She was a pendulum. Tick, tock. The lantern clock.
There was something important about that skull. Who was it? Something came forward out of the blank sockets. The light of the stars was inside. There was a twin universe, another orange flame, another heart. She recognized the eyes that turned and looked at her. They were familiar.
Lillibet, she remembered. Lillibet was here. That was her skull. The thought dropped like an anchor to the racing, raving mind, and she was yanked back into the cave—cave, orange flame, Lillibet is dead and I ate mushrooms and I’m in the cave—and she settled in to watch and listen.
“You are a witch,” said the skull. “As was I. Seek not to change your nature.”
“I am a witch,” her mind repeated.
“No one can harm you as long as you are here.”
“Here in the cave. Here in the orange heart of the universe.”
The flames licked and teased and danced. She watched them and learned the steps. It was time for more fuel. It was time for another leg of deer. Another leg of wood. Her hands clutched a log and placed it on a crisscross. Cross the T, cross on the church, black on white. The church of men had no place here. This was a deeper place of worship.
This was the pulsing center inside of her. The fire was life and she must feed.
For too long the fire had starved and choked, been beaten and prodded and pricked by needles. For too long had it been a coal sputtering in the darkness.
The skull smiled at her proudly.
“You control what happens to you. Sun et Siphereth.”
Lillibet was not dead. She was laid to rest here in the center of all things. She was eaten by the fire of life, bones that rested and fluttered at the base of the orange bloom, the bones of a thousand people, hung and drowned and prodded and pricked, but now resting on the floor of the cave. They were dead. The fire was alive. It consumed and it grew. Her heart was dancing and drumming and pounding to its crackle, its sparkle.
Narrowing her eyes, she saw his face again. Hopkins. He was here in the heart of all things. But he had no power here.
I fear you not. Her thought was the force of a dragon’s breath, a dragon’s head, a dragon’s tail that twitched in the coals. You have no permission to harm me. I fear you not. You will fear me. I am the thousand-named. She blinked and the face was the Green Man again, leaves circling and crowning his brow. He watched her from the forest, from behind the trees. He hid behind a glossy mulberry bush.
Her mind wheeled and twirled and then was still, clear as the crystals in the pool.
Fairy caps indeed, she thought, and laughed, for this was euphoria, and she knew the answer to every question ever asked.
Why did this happen to me? she asked.
“You only believe it happened to you, and that it was bad. But you asked for this very thing.”
The answer was a red ribbon tied around the branch of a yew. The answer was a rope that bound her hands, a rope that bound her neck.
The leering faces and the binding ropes had been real once, and real twice here in the cave. She understood. The only thing that had changed was her mind. It had wheeled and twirled and was now still.
She felt as though she could swallow that fire and it would make her stronger. This was the burning-bright knowledge that was forbidden. It was too much power but not for her. She gripped the end of a burning branch and lifted it out of the fire. She held it aloft and the smoke made patterned smudges on the rocks. She grinned to match Lillibet, resting on the floor.
In this dazzling faceted sobriety, Pippa knew why. I have seen your face, and I am not afraid, she said to the shadows and the ink blots and the ropes. I am a witch and I have seen what there is to see. The responsibility was feather-light. No more a burden than Ursula, resting on her shoulders, digging in with a good solid claw to remind her of her power.
The faces were still there—all of them. The bones still rested in their bleached thousands. The flames danced a happy jig, the outlawed kind. But none could condemn this fire burning bright. They could but drive it underground for awhile and it would emerge once more.
She understood too what Lillibet had been. No church woman, but a wise woman, and one who knew that Pippa’s final initiation must be to confront Death, to take it by the hair, to unearth its beautiful, laughing face. She reached over and rubbed the top of the smooth pearled skull.
At last, at last, Pippa knew who she was.
A nightmare afflicted Matthew Hopkins, and he tossed and turned in yet another strange bed. When he startled himself awake, he discovered beads of sweat on his brow that had already cooled, and it made him shiver. Elspeth was curled into a tight, heat-conserving ball at the foot of his bed. She was his only constant in these dreary days.
The infestation of witches along Suffolk’s coastline was worse than he had hoped. They worked in clusters, in covens and in conspiracy, seven or eight or thirteen in one place. In the small villages and towns that edged the sea, witches often used the elements to wreak destruction on their neighbors. Hopkins had been troubled by stories of vast storms that sucked boats and houses into the water. One man had told of an elderly neighbor, a witch, who coveted his family. Then a great storm had arisen and swallowed his fishing boat and his two sons.
When Hopkins interrogated the woman, she’d taken some persuading, but eventually confessed to the entire deed and named three imps: Weedling, Eppie, and Yellow John. She had been hanged along with two others.
A meager light tinged the sky to the southeast. The sun would rise, and Hopkins knew it must be near eight in the morning. He rose out of bed and pulled the top wool blanket with him. Yawning, he sat down at the desk and lit the candle there.
So many inn rooms were alike, and yet they were all different—and none were home. It was also more difficult to ward off the nightmares and the whispers. This was an engaging life but sometimes he yearned for the familiarity of his house in Mistley.
Then again, he thought, when I feel the urge, hear the whispers, it means there are witches nearby. With the astounding success of the past year, Hopkins knew that he had a real gift. God had given him the ear to the ground to hear the witches. He no longer tried to shush the fell voices in the corners. Instead he embraced them, listened to their directions, followed them to their source, the warty and straggled women, the cunning men, the fallen souls.
Someday, when all the land was purged and Matthew Hopkins was t
he national Witchfinder General, the voices might be silenced.
As long as I feel it, the witches conspire. Where there is smoke, there also be fire. He smiled grimly to himself and held his glass inkwell over the candle’s flame. The ink had frozen overnight. With the other hand he opened the shutter a crack. The North Sea was a slate mirror. Ice had collected along the seams of the window. It was a most unfriendly sight.
Turning to his pages, Hopkins wrote some notes about the activities of witches in this area. He was planning a master’s manuscript to rival Daemonologie. Even King James I had not the experience he did, with scores of convictions, searchings and ordeals. Hopkins knew what worked and what did not.
He tapped off a fat drop of ink and put quill to paper. He must address the problem of swimming ordeals. In this weather, it was too harsh to swim a suspected witch, for guilty or innocent she would die of the cold water. There must be a different way to use the purity of water to produce a reaction.
He remembered reading about a technique used on the Continent in which a cloth is placed on the face and water poured over top.
“If the suspect twitches and screams and believes to be drowning, they reject their own baptism,” Hopkins said aloud, scratching notes. “If they take the water with faith and welcome, they are likewise pure of guilt.”
That would surely satisfy the naysayers.
Later in the day, after eating a hearty breakfast of eggs and sausage and bread fried in butter, Hopkins attended the town’s trial. Three witches were convicted and hung.
It was too long a wait for assizes and no one wanted to pay gaoler’s fees for months on end, and so some villages had taken to homespun trials. Hopkins preferred this form of justice, for it meant relief was instant. It had become a routine … a ritual … a purge.
After the witches were hanged and the villagers felt better—the relief after a vomit—Hopkins was paid. He commanded heavy fees now. Witch hunting was a monumental responsibility. When there were complaints about the cost, often running into the pounds, Hopkins always suggested the villages cut the pay for local search-women. After all, they had the benefit of living with the purified results. No witches. They should be grateful to him.
Suffer a Witch Page 32