Suffer a Witch

by Morgana Gallaway

  Then it was packing up, settling his bar debts, and moving on. He was drinking more ale than he should, but it was the only way to help him sleep and to reduce his cough. His lungs rattled in this freezing weather.

  Mary Phillips, his loyal search-woman, said, “Why do you not seek an apothecary?”

  “Because the power of prayer is the best medicine,” said Hopkins. Apothecaries were too close to cunning-folk and herbalists for his comfort. They might know his name and poison him.

  Mary Phillips always fussed and worried over him. The Widow Phillips had no sons of her own and she took a motherly pride in Hopkins. Mary was the ideal—pious, stern, a whole-hearted believer in their task. She never complained about being summoned from her home in Manningtree for her skills as a search-woman.

  Today, though, Hopkins was alone on the road with his horse and with Elspeth. A frozen prickly hedge to his left guided the road across a flat, marshy land. Their progress was inhibited by the crunchy slush. Elspeth’s paws were mud all the way up to her joints.

  He coughed into his hand, and he wheezed, and he cleared his throat with a prayer to the Almighty. This was his job, he did it gladly, and soon the dappled white of a village appeared around a bend. Smoke hung in the sky and blended with the low clouds.

  He had not been here before. He wrapped the loose reins tight around his wrists, tight, pinching. How good that would feel. He could almost hear the Friday whispers.

  Yes, there were witches ahead.

  THE DAY BEFORE HER WEDDING and with some discomfort, Pippa thought about what was to come. Not Hugh—no, she was glad of him—but of the necessary formality in the church. Most people in the Vale got married in the church with Reverend Yates conducting the ceremony. It was natural and convenient to do so.

  Pippa, however, had not set foot in that church since the events of last summer, and so she had insisted that they be married at the fine stone parish church in Lavenham.

  This was the last night she would spend in the cottage where she’d grown up. Once she married, it would stay in the family as Sir John Felton’s property, and she planned on knocking out the back wall and replacing it with a large barn-type door. It would allow a flood of natural light from the south. She would receive customers here, pregnant women, and would still brew and sell medicines here. Traditions were long to change, and the folk were used to going to Lillibet Wylde’s place for a remedy.

  Besides, the Felton manor was too far from the crossroads, and it was not proper to invite in a stream of ailing people. Sir John was suffering from consumption and fading fast. His health demanded that Hugh and Pippa live at the manor, for it was accepted that Sir John would pass on soon. They would make it their home from the start.

  “Ready?” she asked Ursula.

  The raven said nothing, but was obedient and climbed onto Pippa’s shoulder when she held out her arm.

  Her most important possessions were in the small trunk that rested, open, on the floor. It contained everything that she needed for her new life—her father’s drawings, Lillibet’s brooch, the antique comb, her savings in coins, and a valuable piece of parchment, rolled up and tied with a red ribbon.

  Pippa took it out and unrolled it. Her letters had improved after a winter of poring over the books from the cave and she could read it with ease. She smiled. It was her midwife’s license, arrived in March.

  “Hallo!”

  She turned to see Winifred wearing a dove-grey dress and snowy white collar, face framed by a fashionable diadem cap.

  “Good morning!”

  “Are you ready?” Winifred asked.

  “Yes,” said Pippa.

  “Yes,” said Ursula in Sybil’s voice.

  Winifred laughed. “I’m excited for you.” She sat in the rocking chair near the cold hearth. “Tomorrow will be a happy occasion. But, Pippa, are you certain of marrying on May Day?”

  “Quite,” said Pippa. “It’s a rubbish superstition, no marriage on May Day. I suspect it might be the best day to marry, and it be kept from us.”

  Winifred groaned. “I had to abide the company of Elizabeth Yates last night. My mother hosted a gathering, a dinner and then Bible discussion.”

  “Sounds a thrill.”

  “Oh, it truly was! For good or ill, Elizabeth is engaged to a man from Stowmarket. A strong Puritan, and training to be a minister.”

  “That’s fitting,” said Pippa. She hoped that marriage would take Elizabeth away from the Vale. She was like a tenacious weed, always popping up to cause trouble.

  “There be talk that he could take over from the Reverend Yates,” said Winifred, familiar with the look on Pippa’s face. “You know Elizabeth doesn’t want to leave here. She hates us too well.”

  Pippa could only laugh, for she had won Hugh Felton. Elizabeth Yates might hate her forever because of it, but she was a small-minded creature and Pippa had no time for her. “So when can we expect that happy match?”

  Winifred’s mouth tilted up. “Certainly not until after you and Hugh have been married. She was spitting last night about it. She’s convinced that you’re so weak in moral character that you’ll run off with a pack of demons and leave pious Hugh behind.”

  Pippa laughed, hard and strong. It was almost a cackle. “She thinks I’m a witch still?”

  Winifred winked. “She knows no difference between white and black magic.”

  “She wouldn’t,” said Pippa.

  “My father was in Stowmarket recently, on business.” Winifred paused. “He says that the witch-finders have been there.”

  Her words drifted in the air longer than they should have. Pippa did not know what to say at first. She was surprised at her own lack of reaction. “Oh,” she said at last.

  “They’re still doing … that. Father brought home a pamphlet about hangings along the coast during the winter. He was involved, Matthew Hopkins.”

  “I’d like to see them try it again here,” said Pippa with a humorless grin.

  Winifred looked frightened. “Pippa, look not like that, it’s wicked.”

  “Wicked, wicked me.”

  “They cannot continue like this,” said Winifred. “The witch-finders, I mean. They’ll bankrupt the countryside. We might be safe here, but the rest of the country remains in their grasp. The only reason they get on with it is because the royal justice courts are disbanded. If there was some order, it would cease. Oh, but I wish this war would end!”

  “I know,” said Pippa, who did not know much about politics, but that word had arrived about Thomas Radcliff just before Christmas. He had been dead for the better part of a year, perishing of battle fever following a wound. Mr. Radcliff’s hair had turned white at the news.

  While sorrowful on behalf of her friend, Pippa was glad that Sybil hadn’t arrived all alone in Heaven … that Tom had been waiting for her.

  Winifred, still thinking of the witch-finders, said, “What do we do?”

  “Let us wait,” said Pippa. She understood the value of patience and timing much better now. To everything there was a season, and Matthew Hopkins’s reaping would come. On the equinox of spring she had done scrying with the obsidian glass bowl in the cave. She’d seen her hand in his fate. “Perhaps at some future time, you and I will know what there is to be done about Hopkins.”

  “You’re right,” said Winifred, who had natural patience, where Pippa’s was learned.

  It reminded her, though. “How is the Reverend Yates?” She had not attended church since before the Vale trials.

  “Aged. Worn. There is nothing wrong with him specifically, but there seems a great weight upon his shoulders.”

  “Good.”

  “Be not bitter toward him, Pippa. He is a victim of wrong thinking. I’m quite certain he regrets what he said and did.”

  “Do any of them regret it? Or would they do it again?” she wondered aloud.

  “Here’s your cap,” said Winifred, holding out the folded white linen.

  “No, I’ll wear me hair
free today,” said Pippa. It was her last unbound day. “Ready!”

  They walked out the door. Ursula was still perched on Pippa’s shoulder. She took the bird with her now about the village, a spark in her eye that dared anyone to say a word against it. If she were destitute and in rags, the young boys might have thrown stones at her and called her a witch again. As it was, she wore fine thin wools, and too many depended on her for their herbs and teas and charms to find husbands.

  It was a bursting, lively day and the deep cloying scent of flowers caressed the valley. Clouds were puffs of white meringue in the sky. Along the way they picked colorful wild blooms from alongside the footpath and gathered them into a cheerful bouquet. “She’ll like this,” said Winifred.

  They turned onto the main road and past the crossroads. When they passed the ducks at the pond, Ursula ruffled her feathers at them and Pippa giggled, for it tickled her neck. She was no longer distressed by the pond. She was also no longer afraid of the church, despite her distaste for its sermons and its minister.

  Winifred opened the iron gate into the graveyard.

  There was a small, fresh mound of earth near the entrance—the Moores’ fourth and youngest child, who’d died of fever. They passed by the new and the old graves and crossed to the very back of the burial ground.

  A headstone adorning a grave was set at a diagonal to the rest of the orderly rows, for it had been dubious to bury Sybil there at all.

  Winifred laid the flowers down and Pippa allowed the raven onto the ground to walk about in freedom.

  Ursula pursued an earthworm that wriggled near the stone’s edge.

  “I’m getting married tomorrow,” Pippa told Sybil. “To Hugh. I’m certain you already know that, for you can see from Heaven above. Tell Winifred who she’s to marry!”

  “No, don’t!” Winifred said. “I wish not to know!”

  “An older man, I think, and very rich,” said Pippa, looking archly at her friend.

  “We miss you, Sybil,” said Winifred.

  Unbeknownst to either of the girls, the Reverend had been in Bury at the time of Sybil’s hanging, although he did not see it himself. He’d been there to pay for and retrieve her body. Because she was a convicted witch, she’d been buried at this strange angle, and there was a rumor that she was face-down with a stake driven through her, to prevent her rising on the Day of Judgment. Still, it seemed that after her conviction the Reverend had begun to change his feelings toward his daughter … reason, or guilt, or even love.

  The grass was greener over Sybil’s grave, and at the foot grew a thick cluster of ground ivy with tiny bright purple flowers.

  Every week, on a Friday, Pippa and Winifred visited. Sometimes there was already a bouquet, left by someone else in the Vale who missed Sybil, too.

  “I never realized how much work was involved in packing a household,” said Pippa as they walked beneath the shade of the graveyard’s yew trees on their way out. “It will take me the whole of the day.”

  “Do you need help? I have chores for my mother but perhaps after …”

  “No, I’m organizing as I go. Thank you anyway, I—” Pippa stopped. There was a figure at the gate with a handful of daffodils.

  “Just keep walking,” said Winifred.

  Pippa’s face was neutral, blank as white stone, and they passed Alice Baxter without trouble. Alice was little seen in the village, except for delivering milk on occasion, and no one had heard her speak since the day in court. Some said she’d been cursed by Satan himself for betrayal; others thought it was the crushing guilt of false witness.

  Alice lowered her eyes and backed away from Winifred and Pippa. She said nothing, not even a stutter, and half-turned until they were gone.

  “She’s in church all the time,” said Winifred.

  “Her own mind will punish her suitably,” said Pippa, on the brink of feeling sorry for her former friend, for she knew the trapdoors of the mind.

  “Ah, well,” said Winifred, sighing in that pragmatic way of hers, with no reason to hold a grudge against an inferior person.

  The rest of the day was taken up with Pippa in her cottage cleaning the table, folding the blankets and linens with herbs to repel moths and insects, and then bathing and washing her hair. These were the things that ought to be done with a mother or a grandmother or a sister, but she had none of these and so she did them in lively solitude.

  “Sybil,” said Ursula from the corner.

  Pippa looked up. Sybil, she agreed. Then she smiled, because along the left side of her face she felt a strange sort of warmth, an unseen light.

  For the wedding ceremony the next day, she would wear a fine black silk bodice and petticoat. It had once been Winifred’s and the skirt had been too short for Pippa, so they’d improvised with a contrasting black band of wool around the bottom to make up the difference. She could not afford a new collar and so she’d stitched a black bird and flowers on the corner of her white church collar. The flowers had sharp petals because Pippa was impatient with the precise stitching associated with smooth curves … even if it was for her own wedding.

  After bathing indoors she allowed her hair to dry in natural waves. It would be styled into loops the next morning.

  Nothing much would change, she reflected. She would still live in the Vale, but in the Feltons’ old and lovely manor. It was fitted with modern conveniences and had a pleasant rambling quality, with large latticed windows, strong timbers, and stonework around the doors. Climbing vines gave it the look of the forest. Pippa was already determined to commission the carved image of the Green Man somewhere on the premises.

  She drank a mug of birch wine. She’d made it on her own this year. Goody Brewer had not uttered a peep about it. With the wine she ate a bread roll and a slice of ham and a handful of green beans, cooked in lemon water. The longest winter of her life was over, finally, and now she would start something new and wonderful.

  It was that magical time of the evening when the world was pale blue and the shadows were indigo. The farmers in the fields would be bringing in their herds for the night.

  In the corner Ursula said, “Thank you, girl.”

  “Shhh,” said Pippa.

  There were footsteps on the path outside and the gate swung open. She sniffed the air. Her heart beat faster—that drum, that great fire—and she smiled. She’d asked Hugh to come around. She wanted to speak with him, to make sure this was for the right purpose, and that her changing life was lined up with her precious inner self. She owed him a debt for helping her out of the witch trials, and for lifting her out of a life of certain hardship, but those were obligations and not reasons.

  “Pippa?” Hugh’s voice was so deep and so vibrant that it made her knees weak.

  “Hello,” she said, pulling open the door. “Walk with me for awhile? Just along the field.”

  “You’re not about to change your mind, are you?”

  “No … are you?”

  “No.”

  They left the cottage in semi-darkness. They walked together across the narrow wooden plank that bridged the musical brook. Hugh led the way. Pippa thought of how much had happened, and was yet to happen. A life together loomed ahead of them. That future was a physical pull over her.

  Was it the future she wanted?

  “Hugh,” she began, hoping there was no trace of trouble in her voice. “Before we go ahead with this, there are things about which I need to be sure.”

  She could feel his frown in the darkness. “No matter what’s happened to you, Pippa, I love you. I’ll be your husband. I care not for any history that might come between us.”

  “’Tis not that,” she said. How could she explain that it was not the accusation of witchcraft that disturbed her? That she had taken control of that word, witch, and that was what she had become? “You know that my family is cunning. I need to know that you won’t force me away from what I am.”

  To her shock, Hugh laughed. “Have you any idea why I love you? Or have
you just taken it for granted?”

  “Well, I …”

  “Pippa.” Hugh stopped and held her face in his hands. He loomed over her. “I know what you are. It is your cunning that I love most about you. From that day when we were children—when you enchanted me in the forest—oh, don’t think I’m ignorant of what you did! You bewitched me, and gladly was I bewitched, and from that day on, as you grew up to be so beautiful, you were special to me and different from any other girl I could ever be in company with.”

  “But, Hugh, I mean it. I am truly … there are powers that you cannot know, things I can never share with you.”

  “I mind it not,” he whispered. “In fact, I like you better for it. And after your terrible ordeals, you fear nothing. Now, you’re a sight to behold!” He smiled, then sobered. “I confess, for a short time, I did wonder. I was not sure that you were on the side of godliness. Right after you were accused I—I hesitated, thinking perhaps those men were right. But when you were taken away, Pippa, this village was empty to me, and I decided I cared not what you were. You could not belong to the Devil, for you belong to me.

  “I do not pretend to know your mysteries, but that matters not. I may have wealth and land and title, but without you I have no spirit.”

  Pippa unclenched the breath she’d been holding. He had saved her during the trials, of course, and had always been an upstanding person. But with his society and wealth, her position would be made safe, and that was what a man should do for her. Pippa knew she was lucky such a man existed in her village, or else she would have gone through life a lonely woman, scrapping out an existence, never secure enough in body to be expressive in that spirit he loved so much. “Thank you, Hugh. You are a good man.”

  Relaxing, they began to walk again. They passed a glowing cloud of fireflies. It was the first day of summer and the countryside gave them a soft welcome. The last weight of worry had vanished from Pippa’s shoulders and now she felt buoyant, floating on a tide of joy, with Hugh beside her. Her thoughts turned to the next day and she giggled.