by Julie Hearn
On the second Sunday in July my father preached the sermon that turned everything upside down. The one that set the villagers whispering, and wondering, and scared me so much that I had to grip the edge of the bench to keep from fainting dead away.
We knew, Grace and I, that this sermon was going to be particularly important, since Father had spent all week preparing it and strode so fast down the slope to church that we had to run to keep up. Grace had been ill in her stomach upon rising and was still rather green-looking as we took our places and bowed our heads in prayer. I half hoped she would vomit again and be shamed—and half hoped she wouldn’t.
My father’s face, as he began to praise the Lord, seemed lit from within, so intent was he on keeping evil at bay and so utterly certain of the way to do it. He looked glorious, like Moses, as he gazed down upon his congregation and asked for our help.
We were to be vigilant, he told us in his most solemn voice. On our guard, morning, noon, and night. For he had it on the highest authority that Satan was abroad in villages just like ours and that women in particular were being drawn straight to him, like midges to foul water.
Since the spring, he informed us, thirty-six women had come under suspicion in the place called Essex. And of those, a goodly number had already been tried and found guilty of doing wicked deeds in the Devil’s name.
“Witches,” he breathed, as if the word hurt his mouth. “Witches, all.”
He had no need to tell us their fate. We could imagine it well enough. The rope. The drop. The jeering crowds. I’ve no doubt I was looking as sickly as my sister by this time, and with sound reason.
With thumping heart, I cast over in my mind the things the Devil had said to me before galloping away from the orchard in a shower of sparks. He lied, I told myself. He surely lied. Because that is what the Devil does best. He lies. And anyway, I was not the one he sought that night. He did not take me with him, so despite what he told me, I was as safe as anyone else. Safe in body and soul.
All around and behind me: the sound of people breathing carefully as if the simple act of exhaling or coughing might somehow dislodge their own precious souls, leaving them vulnerable to wickedness.
My father had his eyes closed, and his arms raised toward heaven.
“The Devil is nobody’s fool,” he declared after a long and weighty silence. “The Devil will seduce your soul from you so swiftly that you will miss it no more than if he had stolen a button. And the Devil, good people, knows that England is divided. He knows full well that the King and his Parliament are too deep in conflict to notice the wheedling away of a soul here, a soul there … until it is too late! Too late! In a month … two months … a year … How many of us will remain to fight the great fight of righteousness? How many will be left to pit themselves against the loathsome, swelling ranks of Satan’s army?”
Not many, I worried to myself. Not many. Gone for witches, every one.
I could feel Father’s eyes scanning the church. Resting, probing, lingering. You could have heard a pin drop.
Then: “Beware one who wishes you ill!” Father thundered. “Beware the sickening of a child, the curdling of milk, or the failing of a crop. Beware a sudden ache in your bones. Beware all these things and more. And should ill health or luck befall you, look around. Look around! Seek out the witch who has cursed thee, in the Devil’s name, and have her answer for her sins!”
All day and into the evening those words of my father’s echoed in my head, mingling with those of the Devil, until they seemed like a single warning. It was too confusing for me. Too frightening. I had to speak. I had to tell someone.
And so I told my sister.
She was peaky still, and as subdued as I, as we retired to bed. For a while both of us lay there, lost in silence.
Then “Grace,” I whispered.
And out it all tumbled, in a great tearful rush. How I’d woken one night to find myself alone and had been drawn from the house all the way to the orchard. How the Devil had appeared to me as a small man with horrible sulfur-colored skin and made as if to lift me onto his horse and gallop me off to Hell. How I had slapped his nasty, shining hands away and clung to the stile for dear life.
“He said he had come for me and that we had to be quick,” I told her, a sob catching in my throat. “He said he was glad I was ready and waiting, for he so hated unnecessary talk or hanging around at cottage doors, where filthy little piskies might be. I told him I was waiting for no one, least of all him. And… and … he glared at me, Grace, while his black horse stamped fire and brimstone, and he said, ‘Aren’t you the Mary by God, then?’”
“The what?” said Grace.
“The Mary by God. That’s what he said. And … and I told him I was no such thing. That I was Patience Madden, the minister’s daughter, and he wasn’t to take me.”
My sister took both my wrists in her cold hands and dug her nails in, hard. “You’re lying “she said. “This is one of your stories, isn’t it?”
“Grace,” I cried. “’Tis the truth, I swear it. He went away in the end, but he said he’d been certain sure I was this Mary by God, all ready … and … waiting. He … he …” I was blubbering hard by then. Too hard to speak properly.
“Be quiet!” Grace hissed. “Be silent before Father hears. You and your stupid, stupid fancies. I could kill you sometimes.”
And she kicked me on the shins and turned her back to me.
I continued to cry softly until I could cry no more. She didn’t believe me, it seemed, and in truth, I could scarcely blame her. Still, I felt better for having unburdened my self, for having shared the horror of it with someone.
After a while I began drifting toward sleep.
“That night,” Grace asked suddenly. “When you woke up. Did you wonder where I was?”
“No,” I fibbed, for fear of being slapped, “I didn’t think.”
“Because I was here all the time,” she lied. “All the time. Which just goes to show that you had a bad dream. That’s all. That’s all it was”
“Maybe “Ifibbed again.
“And if you so much as breathe a word of this nonsense to Father, I will make you wish yourself away with your Devil, truly and for all time,” she said. “Do you hear me?”
I said I did, and she spoke no more.
And I thought, as I pressed my tearstained face against the bolster, that if I pretended hard enough that I really had met the Devil in a dream, I might start to believe it.
JULY 1645
The rain has stopped. The sun is blazing again, and gardens are choked with roses, hollyhocks, and beans. There are no pot lids to worry about, and no one’s bones are aching. So for now, there are no mutterings or finger-pointings and the whole village seems to have sunk into a doze, beneath a blanket of pollen and heat.
Even Mistress Denby, upon finding a jug of milk gone sour, merely shrugs and mutters: “’Tis what happens, when it be hot enough to roast the skin off a piskies arse. There be no witch ill-wishing me and mine. That minister be making too much of faraway doings, if you asks me.”
Her husband grunts through a mouthful of cold beef and shifts his great buttocks on the household bench. He is not the healthiest of men—but no sane countrywoman would blame witchcraft for what is clearly the result of a lifetime of sloth and the gobbling and glugging of too much food and ale.
“Be you troubled again by bad wind?” Mistress Denby inquires. “Because if so, get you straight to the cunning woman for a nip of tansy and wormwood. Go on.”
Silas Denby swallows a lump of meat the size of a fist, winces, and reaches for his hat. It is as hot as Hell out there and a fair old walk to the cunning woman’s cottage. But he has had enough, for one day, of his wife’s nagging. And anyway, his guts are in turmoil, and wind as noxious as his is no joke.
Tee-hee-hee goes something in the ditch as he waddles and farts his way along the dusty lanes. Old Fatty Flatfeet. Tee-hee-hee.
Before turning off along a narrow tr
ack of beaten corn, he spies the minister’s daughter—the older one, the beauty—making her own way somewhere. She has a basket over one arm, covered by a cloth. Their paths do not cross, but he holds an explosion of wind in anyway and raises his hat in her direction before plodding onward.
Grace sees but ignores the greeting. Her father believes she is visiting Mistress Bramlow, to see how the baby fares. Her father believes she is a good girl, taking a different path and doing the Lord’s work.
In truth she has no interest in the Bramlows and no desire whatsoever to converse with the stout, evil-smelling Silas Denby. There is only one villager she wants—needs—to see, but he has been avoiding her for weeks. Perhaps he has grown tired of her. Perhaps he has decided she is not worth getting a whipping for, should her father find out. Who is to say?
She knows, for he once told her, that he heads for the orchard whenever there is a lull at the forge and his lungs are bursting for a breath of fresh air. And that is where she finds him now, lying in the long grass and gazing up at the sky. His face is quite untroubled, until he sees her standing there. Then it clouds.
“I be with child,” she tells him. “By you.”
He says nothing. Only stares at and through her as if trying to remember her name.
Difficulty of breath, she tells herself. He is having difficulty of breath for the moment but will comfort me soon, and all will be well Father will see us married before the harvest is in, and I … I will teach him his letters … I will always be kind.
“It will be born in the dead of winter, I believe,” she says.
He clears his throat—a small, nervous sound, like something about to be netted and kept in a cage. Otherwise he gives her nothing. Not a word or a hug or any further hint of how he might be feeling, in case she takes it for some kind of promise.
“Will you stand by me?”
He looks away. He looks up at some branches, across at the stile, then back at the sky again. Anywhere except at her. She could be anyone, she realizes. She could be any thing. She could be the church’s lost statue of the Lady, weeping blue tears, and he would have looked away just the same.
“In the winter, is it?” he says at last. “A long time off still?”
“Yes.” Her voice is subdued; a whisper almost as she waits for all to be well.
“Then you could go to the cunning woman, couldn’t you? She could give you something. Some potion to get rid of it.”
Above his head there are apples growing. Cider apples ripening and reddening in the heat. They will grow bigger and redder and be picked when the time is right. The tree is not yet weighed down by them, but it will be soon.
It is Grace’s turn to clear her throat. The sun is hot on her head and against the back of her dress. She feels faint but remains rooted to the spot. This is worse than she imagined it would be, but she cannot believe it is hopeless. Not yet.
“Please,” she hears herself saying. “Don’t utter such things. I want you to stand by me. You must.”
She is too proud to walk over the grass to him, if he will not come to her. Too proud, and too conscious still, of the power she had over him not so long ago, when he wanted her more than anything and she still belonged to herself.
“If you don’t,” she adds, testing her power one last time, “I will despise you. I will think you a coward and beneath contempt.”
That gets to him. She can tell by his face that he doesn’t want to be considered beneath contempt. Not by anybody. Not even by her. And for a moment she—
“All right.” He is up on one elbow suddenly, giving her his full attention. “All right. I’ll stand by you. Only … I’ve been thinking, I have. There’s a garrison of the King’s soldiers two days’ walk away, and they be desperate needy, so ’tis said, for men and boys to join up. I been thinking of going. I were going to say to you, about me going …”
Hot and faint, Grace listens to what he is telling her. She hears the words “I’ll stand by you” with relief, but the rest of it… surely, the rest of it is no comfort at all?
“I’ll send for you,” he continues. “Or I’ll come back before the winter. But them traitorous Roundheads are laying siege over the border, and I’d be some coward, don’t you think, if I didn’t do my duty like other men?”
He is smiling at her now. And he would kiss her, too, if she wanted.
And she does want. She wants, more than anything, to believe in what he says. To see herself as the wife of a soldier and the mother of a little thing to love. She is no fool, though. Standing there, hot and horrified, the core of her remains as clear-sighted as ever.
He is lying, and she knows it. He is offering her a sop. Something to be going on with. Perhaps he even believes, for the time being, that he will send for her or come marching back to the village before the snow falls.
Perhaps.
Some moments pass.
Grace looks at the big old apple tree as if it might help her. There are piskies in it, so she has heard, but if they are up there now, she cannot see them.
The blacksmith’s son is still smiling. It would be easy enough to go to him—to pretend to have swallowed his lies and then try to bind him to her, properly, with cunning and sweetness. But, no. She cannot do it. For he would go anyway; she knows he would, leaving her all the more wretched for having beggared herself in order to be wed.
“Will you kiss me, then?” says the blacksmiths son.
“No,” she replies. “I will not.”
And she turns, feeling cold right through under the bright summer sky, and walks toward the stile.
The door to the cunning woman’s cottage is closed and half hidden behind a tumble of leaves and spidery honeysuckle. From inside comes the drone of female voices, singsong soft and intent on some kind of lesson.
“Two drams of lupine and thirteen grains of savin, mixed with peony and fennel … Ragweed, bruised and boiled in old hog suet with a pinch of saffron … The juice of barberries and licorice, made thick.”
“Good girl. That’s right. I believe that’s right. I think that’s right. And the living creatures most beneficial to sick bodies are … ?”
“Wood lice, silkworms, crabs of the river, larks, tortoise of the woods, hedgehogs, vipers, earthworms, foxes, and … and … what’s the last one, Granny? Can you remind me?”
“Grasshoppers.”
“And grasshoppers.”
“Yes. Good.”
Silas Denby clears his throat, thumps what he can see of the door, and since he reckons himself far enough away from a village full of pricked-up ears and clacking tongues, shouts: “Pardon me! May I enter? I be in need of a purge summat desperate.”
Too late, he spares a thought for those other sharp-eared pests, the piskies.
“Just a little purge,” he adds quickly. “For a slight gurgling in the belly.”
He gets no reply, but the door creaks open and in he goes.
The inside of the cunning woman’s cottage is as cool and dark as a priest hole, and just as cramped.
“Thank’ee,” grunts Silas Denby, plonking himself down on the only bench. He could do with a mug of strong cider after his long walk, but he knows all he’ll get here is something the color of piss that tastes vaguely of elderflowers and fizzes like a mean joke on his tongue.
“Thank’ee,” he says again as the granddaughter pours him a cup of exactly that, then retreats into the shadows without a word.
The cunning woman is looking him over with something of a twinkle in her mad old eyes. “Another purge, is it, Silas Denby?” she cackles. “Well, I’m afraid I don’t think so. A good purge will do a body mischief if constantly taken, and you have already taken more than is prudent for a man of your age and girth. Go home. Eat raisins of the sun. Be kind to your wife and be at peace with thyself. Go.”
Silas Denby blinks. What’s this? Has he trudged all the way here, through piskie-infested cornfields and the midday heat, for nothing? Nothing, that is, except a sip of fizzy piddle a
nd a lecture on how to behave?
He doesn’t think so.
“I need a purge,” he growls. “And not just for the wind. I be all out of sorts and in right bad spirits.”
The cunning woman flaps her hand at him, for the big nuisance that he is, and turns to her granddaughter. “Signs of melancholy in a man of advancing years?” she asks.
Nell, perched small and thin on a three-legged stool, considers the man on the bench. He shifts a little under her gaze, for it makes him feel like a wet cowpat that she has trodden in accidentally.
“Fearfulness and foolish imaginings,” she says. “The skin rough and swarthy, and the pulse very weak. Stinking breath. Thin, clear urine. Chronic impatience and a waning of lust.”
Silas Denby isn’t sure where to look. He would like to go home now, with or without a purge.
“Have you any of those signs, Silas?” the cunning woman asks him.
“One or two,” he mumbles. “The imaginings. The pulse, perhaps.”
Out of the corner of his eye he sees the granddaughter raise a hand to cover her mouth. She is laughing at him, the little vixen. There is a thumping great chicken on her lap, which, given the size of it, should have been in the pot with a few onions long ago. It is clucking softly as if it, too, finds the signs of melancholy in a man of advancing years unbearably funny.
That does it.
“A purge!” he roars. “That’s what I need, so don’t either of you hussies be telling me otherwise!”
The cunning woman shrugs.
“So be it,” she says. “Nell, fetch the bottle. The one I prepared on the last new moon.”
Nell hesitates.
“Maybe I should make up a fresh one,” she says, keeping her voice low. “Or we should do it together.”