The Minister's Daughter

by Julie Hearn

  You have to remember, I was only a child. An innocent girl I had no idea … no idea at all that the bloating of my sister’s belly and the tiredness that came upon her in the middle of the day were the results of her frolicking. She continued to insist that the cunning woman’s granddaughter had hexed her with her evil frog-charm, and I continued to believe it so.

  As summer turned to autumn I dreamed most nights of creatures that hopped and croaked and came to me for sustenance. In my dreams I hid from them—under the bed, mostly, or behind a velvet curtain. Once I dreamed I hid in a tree, but a fierce wind came to blow the leaves away, and the creatures swarmed around the trunk, looking, up at me with wet, red eyes. Waiting.

  Awake, my thoughts turned often to the cunning woman’s garden and the place where I had hidden my mother’s clasp. I had not buried it in the end—only placed it on a stone, beneath a bush with leaves that smelled of lemons. I couldn’t bury it. It was too beautiful to be stuck in the earth like a seed or something dead.

  “Fool!” Grace had hissed when I’d told her exactly where it was. “You should have concealed it better than that. You’ll have to go back.”

  But I wouldn’t. For the moon was waning and nothing would persuade me to walk those lanes again on dark nights. Nothing. And anyway, I liked to think of the jeweled frog sunning itself on a stone after it had been so long shut away in a box or squashed beneath our mattress.

  Then, as days turned into weeks, I dared to wonder whether we should fetch it home.

  “It’s not working, is it?” I said to Grace. “You’re still hexed, aren’t you? Let’s get the clasp back and leave everything to Father, like he said.”

  “Shut up, fool,” she replied.

  And then the Witch-finder General came from Essex to speak in our church. And the villagers threw the cunning woman in the pond to see if she would float. And she didn’t, but she died anyway and got put in the churchyard, since no one could say for certain that she was a witch and should therefore be buried facedown at a crossroads with nothing to mark the place.

  Father went round the house after that with a face like a thunderclap. And Grace grew mopier and even lumpier around the middle. And I began to wonder why Father and the Lord were taking so long to trap the canning woman’s granddaughter, when she was so much in thrall to Satan that she would let suspicion—even death—fall upon her own granny rather than confess.

  October came, damp and dismal, and I hated to think of the jeweled frog getting rained upon. What if it rusted? What if the wet and the cold loosened its ruby eyes or set a mold on its emerald skin that no cloth would ever remove?

  “I’m going back to get that clasp,” I told Grace as the moon ripened and the first frosts silvered the grass.

  “You’ll do no such thing,” she insisted, wringing my left wrist between both her cold hands until it stung. “You’ll leave it exactly where it is and say nothing about it to Father until I tell you.”

  “Oh, we mustn’t tell Father!” I squeaked. “Why must we tell Father? I thought this was our secret. We can’t tell Father, Grace. He would know then that I stole it. And that I went out alone at night. He would be furious!”

  “No, he won’t,” she replied. “He won’t. You don’t understand. Trust me.”

  Truly, she was far more privy than I to the workings of Father’s mind. And though I tried not to care, it rankled me more and more, to be so left out.

  The witch-finder paid us a second visit two days before All Hallows’ Eve.

  “What is happening?” I said to Grace as we bent over our samplers in the parlor. “Is he here to trap the witch at last?”

  “Ask no questions, and you’ll hear no lies,” she snapped. “Just pass me the blue thread.”

  It was chilly in the parlor, for no fire had been lit. Our housekeeper was busy in the kitchen, fashioning a chessboard from marchpane (the witch-finder had both a sweet tooth and a fondness for chess). There would be roast swan for supper, with a sauce pressed from oranges, and a pie stuffed with carp, salmon, and hard eggs. Grace and I would dine alone, though. We had been told to keep out of sight.

  “I’m using the blue thread for my unicorn’s eye,” I told my sister. “You’ll have to wait.”

  She didn’t argue or hurt me, as once she would. She just sat there in a lumpen huddle, with her hair draggling over her face and her hands idle.

  “There,” I said after a while. “I’ve finished. I’m going to the kitchen now, to see about lighting our fire.”

  She said nothing, just took the thread and began unwinding it round one finger.

  “I’ll bring you back a slice of orange,” I added in an effort to be pleasant. “If there is one to spare.”

  “Don’t trouble yourself,” she answered me. “Just go.”

  In the hallway !hesitated, hearing the drone of men’s voices in my father’s study. There was no one to see me, so I crept closer and pressed my ear to the closed door. It was a sin to listen at doors. I knew that. But I had my dear sister’s best interests at heart.

  My father was pacing the floor. I could hear his feet treading the boards. His speech was rapid and impatient.

  “We need more proof,” he was saying. “Firm evidence.”

  The witch-finder’s reply was little more than a murmur. I had to strain to hear it.

  “Your daughter’s … affliction,” he said with a slight cough. “Won’t that be seen as proof enough?”

  “Perhaps” my father replied. “Perhaps not”

  He paused, and I held my breath. Could they hear my heart, thumping through the wood of the door?

  “Well then” said the witch-finder. “The death of the infant. Might not that have been caused by witchcraft? For its mother, I understand, has made much of the girl—ill-advisedly, you might say—since that bungled business with the old crone.”

  He meant Amos Bramlow. The dead infant was Amos Bramlow, a village brat.

  “I don’t know” my father replied. “The babe had been ailing since birth. He was never going to make old bones.”

  I heard a clinking of glass as if something was being poured.

  “Well then” the witch-finder continued, a note of impatience in his voice. “Let us take a different tack. Might the girl have a familiar? Think, man. A cat or a goat. A pet piglet, perhaps? Any living creature that might conceivably be one of Satan’s imps in disguise?”

  And then the parlor door swung open, and there stood my sister, holding her sampler over her stomach.

  “Patience Madden,” she called out, her voice pealing and echoing round the hallway. “What is the meaning of your lingering outside father’s study, with your ears flapping like a rabbit’s?”

  And the study door flew open so fast, I all but fell into the room.

  I am in trouble, I thought. Of the worst kind.

  Father was glowering in the doorway as if he wished me several counties away, in somebody else’s family. I thought fleetingly of the marchpane chessboard. I had hoped for a taste of it, once a game had been played and the board partially eaten—a sugared pawn, perhaps, maybe even a castle. Not a bishop, though. It would have seemed sinful indeed to bite the head off a bishop—even one made of almond paste. But it would be crusts and water for me after this, I was sure of it.

  To my confusion, things took a very different turn.

  The witch-finder was sitting in Father’s chair with his boots up on a footstool. He wore splendid boots, trooper’s boots with silver spurs, like big spiky insects, fastened to the heels. He was looking past Father and me at Grace, as if she were a statue or a painting that wasn’t quite to his taste but interested him all the same, and delicately twirling a point of his mustache between finger and thumb. He didn’t appear to care that I had been caught eavesdropping. It didn’t seem to bother him in the slightest.

  “Well, well,” he said. “Good evening, ladies.” And I watched Father move aside as the witch-finder surged to his feet and strode across the room, his spurs jang
ling.

  “Come in, come in,” he bade us, “and allow me to shut the door, for I cannot bear a draft.”

  Cautiously I sidled into Father’s study with Grace close behind me, like a fat shadow. The room smelled of spices, tobacco smoke, and claret. A good fire burned in the grate.

  The witch-finder returned to Father’s chair, sat back down, and poured himself another drink. There was paper, pen, and ink beside him on a low table.

  “Stand here, girls, where I can see you,” he said. It seemed wanting in manners, his behaving with such authority in another man’s study, but it was not my place to say so. And Father did not seem to mind. Indeed I sensed relief in the way he kept to the shadows while Grace and I stood politely in front of our guest, waiting to be conversed with or ordered away as he wished.

  “Now, then” The witch-finder leaned back in Father’s chair and regarded us with eyes like ice and honey mixed. “Tell me again. When the cunning woman’s granddaughter came to your bedchamber, what did she do?”

  He was looking at me, but it was Grace who answered.

  “She cursed me, sir, in the Devil’s name. She caused me to burn. Then she threw an evil charm that did land upon my belly and cause a strangeness that persists and has yet to leave me.”

  Slowly the witch-finder reached for the pen, dipped it in the ink, and began to scratch words on a piece of paper.

  “And you witnessed this?” he said to me, his pen poised.

  “Yes, sir,” I replied, since it was truly so.

  “And you understand, child, what has come to pass as a result of this evil deed?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said again, although I understood only that my sister was afflicted with a bloated middle that rippled occasionally in the night as if there were waves in it.

  “And there is no doubt in your mind that your sister’s—ahem—condition was brought about by witchcraft?”

  “No, sir.”

  How innocent I was. How stupid.

  The witch-finder could not fault me. He wrote some more.

  “If we trap the witch, will Grace’s belly go down?” I dared to ask.

  He cocked his head then and allowed himself a tight-lipped smile.

  My sister’s hand moved with all its old stealth and purpose.

  “Oh!” I yelped, feeling the nip through my clothes. “Why did you—?”

  But she interrupted me, her voice shrill and scared as if she were the one being hurt.

  “There is something else” she cried. “Something I hardly dare speak of, for I fear the witch’s power so. Patience knows of it. She was there. She will vouch for it.”

  The witch-finder stopped writing. He laid down his pen and gave my sister his full attention. I stared at her too—in complete surprise.

  “Tell me” the witch-finder bade her.

  “A jeweled clasp” Grace continued. “A precious thing that belonged to our dear mother. She stole it. The cunning woman’s granddaughter stole our mother’s clasp. She was wearing it beneath her apron when she threw her evil charm. I glimpsed it as she moved. So did Patience.”

  I watched the witch-finder’s face grow more animated as he listened to my sister lie. He turned excitedly to where my father stood.

  “Can this be verified?”

  “It can indeed.”

  And Father left the room, his face grim.

  We waited in silence for him to return. The witch-finder was writing so fast that he had knocked his claret cup over. Luckily it was empty.

  I pictured Father unlocking the carved wooden chest and lifting the lid. I imagined him delving among my mother’s gowns, bodices, and mantles to find the small box hidden beneath them, like a heart. I tried to picture his face the exact instant he discovered that our mother’s secret, hidden treasures had indeed been plundered and that the jeweled frog was missing.

  I tried to still the panic that rose in me, knowing that it was I, Patience Madden, who had taken the jeweled frog and should by rights be punished. And now here was my sister, lying through her teeth—shifting all blame for the theft onto the cunning woman’s granddaughter.

  I could have confessed right there on the spot. I could have burst into tears and trusted my superiors to show mercy: the witch-finder, the Lord, my God; and the minister, my father. But the witch-finder was smiling as he blotted his page of evidence; the Lord seemed very far away; and child as I was, something told me that my father would not welcome the truth being spilled abroad. For didn’t he want to trap the witch? Didn’t we all?

  The cunning woman’s granddaughter, I told myself, deserved to be trapped, by fair means or foul, for bewitching my sister with this strange bloating disorder. I could not blame poor Grace for seizing this chance to get back at her tormentor, nor could I expose her for a liar when she was clearly possessed still and desperate for an end to her torment. The witch-finder and Father, I decided, were best left in ignorance of the part I had played in bringing the witch to justice. And the Lord, who sees everything, would surely understand.

  Then Father returned. His arrival made me jump, for it seemed only an instant since he had left—hardly long enough for him to have gone upstairs, unlocked the chest, and located the box.

  “It’s gone,” he announced. “My wife’s emerald and ruby clasp. The one shaped like a frog—shaped like the very creature the witch hurled at my daughter.”

  The witch-finder poured two cups of claret—poured them so merrily that they slopped.

  “We have her!” he declared. “For the likeness between the charm and the stolen item falls not by chance. And ’tis part of a witch’s trickery to draw power from a stolen ring, a locket, or even the paring of a fingernail, the better to possess her victim. This clasp. It would, I presume, have formed part of your elder daughter’s dowry by and by?”

  “Indeed” Father replied. “Undoubtedly.”

  “Then it is as good as hers already, and the witch knew it.”

  This was news to me, about Grace’s dowry. What would I have got, I wondered. The pins?

  “And there is something else,” Father was saying excitedly. “Something left by the witch, among my wife’s possessions. Look!” And he held up a feather. A big brown feather.

  Beside me Grace began to shake and to roll her eyes.

  “Her imp,” she moaned. “I’ve seen it with her, out in the lanes. She talks to it and coddles it like it were a child newborn.”

  The witch-finder grabbed the pen.

  “What manner of creature is this?” he asked.

  “A chicken,” Grace replied, clutching my arm and staring in horror at the feather as if the very sight of it caused her pain. “A great, ugly chicken.”

  “Her familiar,” the witch-finder declared, his voice thick with contempt as he licked his lips, bloodred from the claret.

  And so they had her.

  She was trapped.

  OCTOBER 1645

  With her granny gone, Nell feels too numb to work. Luckily she doesn’t have to, for the villagers place so much food and kindling on the cottage step that she knows she will neither freeze nor go hungry for as long as she needs to mourn.

  The piskies leave these offerings alone, out of respect, even though they are filching whatever scraps they can before bedding down for the winter, with plugs of beeswax in their nostrils, to block out the awakening call of too much information.

  At first Mistress Bramlow visits every day, to light the fire and make sure Nell is eating.

  “Come stay with us,” she offers. “Let me look after you”

  But Nell prefers to be alone. And anyway, the dun chicken is miserable too and would only molt and refuse its corn in a strange environment. It follows Nell wherever she goes, which for several weeks isn’t far. At night it roosts beside her up in the roof space, blinking up at the hole in the thatch as if it expects something—a tasty worm … the cunning woman’s spirit … who knows?—to suddenly appear there.

  On the day of the first frost Mistress Bramlow doesn
’t come. A Watcher trudges up the path instead, to let Nell know that baby Amos died in his sleep without so much as a fever or a cough to warn of his passing. It is not wholly unexpected, this little death, but the Watcher crosses herself before stepping over the cunning woman’s threshold and will not take the cup of cordial or the piece of apple pie that Nell offers out of politeness.

  There is no room in Nell for more sorrow.

  “Tell Mistress Bramlow that my feelings are with her,” she says dully.

  And the Watcher’s eyes gleam back at her suspiciously.

  Wretched little unwed, those eyes say. This is all your fault.

  That night Nell dreams of her granny for the first time since she died, and she wakes with tears trickling over her cheeks and pooling in her ears. It is another frosty morning, with the stars only just fading. And whether because of the dream or because the death of baby Amos has shown that things still happen, that events continue to unfold with or without the cunning woman there, Nell feels like getting up and going out. Just for a while. Just to breathe some fresh air and get her thoughts in order.

  “Stay here,” she tells the dun chicken as it cranes its stupid head above the pallet, waiting to be carried down the ladder.

  “I mean it,” she adds as it half flutters, half dives across the roof space, preparing to launch itself down the rungs rather than be left alone. “I won’t be long.”

  At the door she hesitates. She has her basket with her out of habit, just in case she finds a clump of something worth picking and using, and a small knife for cutting stems or digging up roots. What else might she need? Nothing, really.

  Still, she pauses, knowing only that leaving the cottage, even for a short while, is making her feel like a tortoise of the woods stepping out of its shell or a fledgling about to quit the safety of its nest. A charm, she thinks. I will take a charm of protection with me. Nettle and yarrow to allay fear and two rowan twigs, bound with red thread to the shape of a solar cross. Or the caul. The strongest charm of all. Yes, I will take the caul. In fact I will keep that caul close by me all the time from now on, and then I will feel safe.