A Crowning Mercy

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Can she not be covered?” the Reverend Palley’s strong, indignant voice demanded.

  Cloth was found, a piece of sacking that was stuffed under the door in winter to keep out drafts. Her shame galled her. She was defiled.

  Faithful Unto Death Hervey stared at her. Her head was bowed, her upper body draped with the sacking. He slowly raised a finger that pointed at her, “A witch revealed!”

  They were reluctant now to let her go. Caleb Higbed peered hopefully at Faithful Unto Death. “Are there other tests?”

  “There are, sir.” Hervey began his pacing again. “A woman suspected of witchcraft can be thrown, bound hand and foot, into a pool. If she sinks, gentlemen, then she is innocent. If she floats, then the devil is holding her up.”

  Higbed chuckled. “Then every dead dog in the Tower moat must be an angel of hell.” He seemed to consider for a moment taking Campion to the moat or river, but evidently decided it was impractical. “Another test?”

  Hervey nodded. “There is one, sir.”

  “Pray proceed, Brother Hervey.”

  Faithful Unto Death reached into a pocket and brought out a black-bound Bible. “The Lord’s Prayer, gentlemen, the Lord’s Prayer.” He turned the pages. “It is a fact that no witch can repeat the words of the Lord’s Prayer. They are words of such power, of such holiness, that the devil will not allow his own to utter them! Oh! She might say the words, but at some point she will choke, or cry out, for the filthiness inside her will revolt against the purity of the words.”

  It was not the kind of test that the lawyers had in mind, preferring some other examination of her body, but they were tempted. The simplicity of the test worried one man who muttered that where would they be if she succeeded, but Caleb Higbed waved the Reverend Faithful Unto Death closer to Campion. “We must be sure, Brother Hervey, we must be sure! This is a tribunal of law and we must be fair to the prisoner!”

  The Bible, open at the sixth chapter of Matthew, was put on her lap. The pages, tightly bound, immediately fanned upward, obscuring the text, but Campion had no need to read the words. She knew them. She sobbed still, but quietly now, as the Reverend Faithful Unto Death went behind her. “You see, gentlemen? She cannot even begin! She is dumb!”

  “‘Our Father!’” Campion silenced him with a sudden, strong voice, a voice that came from an inner strength and a determination to fight back against this persecution. She had prayed, quickly and silently, for this strength, and now her voice rang hard and clear in the stone room. “‘Which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.’” She poured her soul into the words, giving them the breath of meaning, intelligence and love. Her eyes were closed, but her head was up, and she spoke the words, not to this tribunal, but to the Christ of love who had also faced enemies who were priests and lawyers. “‘Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.’” None of the lawyers moved, even the clerks stared, wondering if she could finish. Her voice was strong. “‘And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.’” And Faithful Unto Death Hervey, close behind her, jabbed the knife through the bars of the chair, digging the point into the skin over her ribs, twisting, and she cried out with the sudden pain, her eyes opening.

  “You see!” Faithful Unto Death was fumbling the knife into his pocket. “She cannot say the words! She cannot! See how she twists? See the agony of the fiend within her?” He took the Bible from her lap. “She is a witch!”

  “No!”

  Faithful Unto Death was backing away from her, his finger pointing at her. “A witch!”

  “‘Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven.’” She was shouting the words defiantly, but Faithful Unto Death stepped close to her, slapped her once, twice, and then a third time.

  “Blasphemer!” Faithful Unto Death bellowed.

  The audience were roused now, growling at her, applauding Faithful Unto Death. Campion’s face hurt. The noise behind her was threatening and Caleb Higbed, fearing that these decorous, legal proceedings were getting out of hand, thumped his right hand on the table top. “Silence! Silence!” He waited for the excitement to die, then smiled. “I think we’ve heard enough. Yes?” The lawyers nodded. Caleb Higbed shuffled the papers in front of him. “The hour of lunch approaches and I know we must be hungry.” He chuckled good-naturedly. “I have to thank the Reverend Faithful Unto Death Hervey, and of course the Reverend Palley.” The two divines gave him small bows. Caleb Higbed looked at Campion. “An interesting morning. We shall present our findings, our presentment, to the Grand Jury and they will decide whether you are to stand trial.” He smiled at her, then nodded to the soldiers. “You may take her away, and thank you for your help!”

  They took her to her fetid cell, threw her in and the door clanged on her unchanging winter night. She sat in the straw, glad almost to be alone in her own place, and she scrubbed her breasts with the sacking, scrubbed till the skin was chafed and her nipples sore, but nothing could remove the sense of defiling filth. She leaned her head against the cold, wet stone, and cried. She was doomed.

  Ebenezer Slythe had watched his sister’s humiliation. He had sat at the end of the last row of benches and he knew she had not seen him. She had been in no state to see anyone, and he smiled as he remembered her former confidence. As a child, oppressed by Matthew and Martha Slythe, she had always retained a hopeful air, a sense that life would be better, and Ebenezer had resented her ebullient, vivid personality. He had resented that she could run, skip, laugh, while he was imprisoned in a twisted, lamed body. Now he had seen the life wrung from her soul.

  He waited until the room cleared, then followed the lawyers out on to the small patch of grass before the Tower’s chapel. Caleb Higbed saw him, made excuses to the men he talked with, and came across. “Mr. Slythe. You’re content?”

  “And grateful to you, sir.” Ebenezer did not want to offend Caleb Higbed, a successful and influential lawyer. “I assume there will be no problems?”

  “Problems, ah!” Caleb Higbed stretched his back, turning his rubicund, kindly face to the sun. “What a lovely day! You know there’s a field of poppies at Houndsditch? I passed it yesterday in the sunlight and it was quite wonderful! I’ve often pondered how many wild flowers grow in our city. We have some scarlet pimpernel in Gray’s Inn, and very good they look too.” He smiled around him, looking at sunlight on gray walls. “Now then, problems. Shall we walk? Or are you enhorsed?”

  “I’m riding back.”

  “Ah! You see so much more on foot, Mr. Slythe, you truly do.” He looked at Ebenezer’s limp. “Still, I do understand. Problems.” He had stopped again. “I do wonder, Mr. Slythe, I truly do, whether you would not have been wiser to restrict the prosecution to simple murder. I suppose there’s no doubt but that she did slay her husband?”

  “There’s no doubt, sir.”

  “A soul will go to hell for murder as surely as for witchcraft. Still, it’s too late to change the charge, I suppose?” He looked hopefully at Ebenezer.

  “Sir Grenville, sir, was insistent on witchcraft.”

  “Ah! Sir Grenville! Good Sir Grenville!” Caleb Higbed laughed. “A Chancery man, but we can teach him no law, eh, Mr. Slythe? Indeed not. So witchcraft it will be, with an added touch of murder.” He turned to watch a file of soldiers march toward the main gate. The sun flashed on pikes and breastplates. “Such a fine sight I always think.” He looked back to Ebenezer, smiling. “I’ve no doubt the Grand Jury will find for us, no doubt at all, but I have one small worry. Small, Mr. Slythe, but a worry nonetheless.”

  “Sir?”

  “It is a question, Mr. Slythe, of maleficio.” He nodded, as if he had made a good point.

  Ebenezer, respectful and grave, smiled. “Maleficio, sir?”

  “Ah! The lawyer’s disease! Expecting those who are not lawyers to understand us. Maleficio, Mr. Slythe,
is demanded by the Witchcraft Act of ’04. In brief, the act says that no person can be convicted of witchcraft, teats or no teats, unless the prosecution establishes that they were motivated by maleficio. That they had previously stated, clearly stated, that they wished to destroy the victim of their malevolence. In your sister’s case, Mr. Slythe, we must have proof that she intended to kill her husband by witchcraft, and that she had publicly said as much. Do you follow me?”

  Ebenezer shook his head in astonishment. “But that’s nonsense! No witch will announce her intentions!”

  “Ah, nonsense! How often our laws seem nonsense to the young! And how right you doubtless are, but the law is the law, Mr. Slythe, and we are, so to speak, mired in it. I think what we need is either a witness who will testify that she heard your sister expressing malice and an intention to kill, or we need a confession.” He shook his head. “I had great hopes of Palley, but he failed.”

  “A confession?”

  “Freely given, if possible.” Higbed nodded. “Which raises another point, Mr. Slythe.”

  “Sir?”

  Caleb Higbed squinted up at the great White Tower. “Kestrels nested there last year, I haven’t seen them this year. A colleague told me they had been shot, which is a pity. Yes, Mr. Slythe, another small problem. You can, I am sure, torture a confession from her, and most valuable that would be, but if she is to be tortured then I think she may end up looking even more wretched than she does now. Am I right?”

  Ebenezer nodded to the lawyer’s eager, friendly face. “True, sir.”

  Caleb Higbed smiled. “We’ll convict, fear not, Mr. Slythe, but we must take all precautions. I thought I discerned beneath the layers of filth on your sister the lineaments of beauty. Indeed so. Is she a pretty girl?”

  Ebenezer frowned. “She is.”

  “You are puzzled!” Higbed laughed. “I think you will find twenty years in the law have not addled my head, Mr. Slythe. Think of this. Your sister will be taken before a judge and jury. We will tell them, we will prove to them, that she is a witch, a murderer and a Royalist! And what do they see? They see a wretched girl, thin and pale, crying helplessly, and who can blame them if they feel some pity?” He raised a hand. “Oh, I’m sure they will convict, but there is a chance, a tiny chance, that they will see in her fragility a helplessness that arouses their pity. I know two things of men and women, Mr. Slythe. The first is that if a man pities a woman, he will try to help her. We don’t want to risk that.”

  Ebenezer shifted his weight, dipping on to his maimed left leg and straightening again. “The second thing, sir?”

  “Ah, the second thing. If men see a woman in the pride of her beauty, dressed in the finery of her gender, they will often resent it. Why should one man be allowed to possess such a woman while they are condemned to share a bed with a shrewish, sickly, ugly old wife?” He laughed. “I speak not from personal experience! And when, Mr. Slythe, our jury of freeholders see such a beautiful, proud woman they have but one thought in mind. If they cannot possess her, they will destroy her! Have you noticed, Mr. Slythe, how men like to destroy beautiful things? So give them something to destroy! Besides, she’s supposed to be a witch! A Royalist! Make them hate her!”

  “I should clean her up?”

  “How acute you are. More than that! For a small sum, a paltry sum, ten pounds only, you can have her housed well here, with matrons to attend her. She must be washed, clothed, and she must be fed! Buy her a pretty dress, something that will show her off! Make her look like a harlot, as Goodwife described her! And get a confession!”

  Ebenezer frowned. He could think of no way of getting a confession except by pain.

  Higbed laughed. “Sir Grenville says you’re a rising young man, Mr. Slythe, and not bereft of intelligence. Think of a way! You’ll find one! And have her cleaned up! That way we’ll be sure!”

  Caleb Higbed bade Ebenezer farewell, and walked back through the city, beaming greetings at old acquaintances. It was none of his business why a brother should want a sister destroyed, nor were such family quarrels so unusual. He doubted, personally, whether witchcraft existed, but lawyers were not paid for their beliefs, only their skill in making other people believe. He would prosecute, and he had no doubt that he would win, and it would be a small favor to Sir Grenville Cony who was a fount of patronage and success. He nodded cheerfully to the guards at Ludgate. “A fine day, my men, a fine day!”

  God was in his heaven, the King had lost at Marston Moor and all was well in a Protestant world.

  In her cell, rocking in seeming madness, Campion sang a line over and over, her voice wavering in the chill dankness. “‘Teach me to hear mermaids singing, teach me to hear mermaids singing.’” She was doomed.

  Twenty-one

  All was not well with Faithful Unto Death Hervey. Ambition is a hard master, not satisfied with small gains, wanting only complete success, and that complete success eluded Faithful Unto Death. He could not complain too loudly, for Ebenezer had provided him with an ample house in Seething Lane, a house that was magnificently kept by Goodwife, yet comfort in London was not enough. Fame still eluded him.

  He could console himself with the first small signs of fame. Three ministers had called on him, two to learn from him the art of detecting witches. He had sent them away to pray that God would armor them against the devil. He had received one invitation to preach, but that Sunday it had rained torrentially and few parishioners turned up at St. Mary’s Overie. Besides, St. Mary’s was across the river in Southwark, and Faithful Unto Death dreamed of filling the preaching house that was once St. Paul’s with his impassioned oratory.

  The case of Dorcas Scammell had attracted attention, but the news of war, of the success in the north, gave London a greater subject for talk. A Royalist witch, locked in the Tower, was not so fascinating as tales of a beaten army and stories of good Protestants slaying the King’s troops. Dorcas Scammell’s execution would be popular, drawing the crowds to Tower Hill, but Faithful Unto Death knew too that a Roman Catholic priest had been discovered in Bedford and tried, and his execution would come first. Nothing cheered London so much as the sight of a burning Papist. It even made the shortages in the shops seem momentarily worthwhile.

  Fame was eluding Faithful Unto Death. He fretted over the problem, prayed about it, and paced long hours in his comfortable, upper chamber. The answer to his prayers, when it came, was astonishingly simple. It was late one night, the candles bright on his desk, when he was reading the newest Mercurius Britanicus London’s chief news-sheet, and he scanned the latest account of Parliament’s siege of York. It was going well, the commanders of the army winning the renown denied to Faithful Unto Death, when suddenly his hands shook with excitement. Of course! His melancholy torpor was over, he seized paper and ink and sharpened a goose-quill with fervent expectation. For two hours he wrote. He corrected, amended, and it was well past three in the morning when he leaned back, tired but happy, sure that he was at last to be rewarded.

  He was not mistaken. The editor of the Mercurius had been given small news to print since the glorious victory of the Saints at Marston Moor. The fall of York was daily expected, indeed he had already set the story in type and waited only for the messengers, but in the meantime there was not much to inflame London’s passions. Then, into his dusty, crowded office, came Faithful Unto Death with his account of Dorcas Scammell. The editor liked it.

  The story was printed at great length. It told of the devil appearing in London and burning down part of Thames Street. It described the murder of Captain Samuel Scammell, “a doughtie warrior of ye Lord,” and the editor commissioned a woodcut that showed Dorcas Scammell’s cat tearing the throat from an armed man whose sword was being restrained by a leering Satan. Campion, nails held out like claws, urged the cat on. The artist gave her black hair, a sharp nose, and missing teeth.

  The story then paid tribute to Ebenezer Slythe who had “putte familie love aside, preferring the Love of Almightie God, and in Sorr
ow and Pain broughte His Sister from Lazen,” yet that brief acknowledgment of his patron was as nothing compared to the glory given to himself by the Reverend Faithful Unto Death Hervey. He had written his account in the third person, and it dwelt lovingly on his discovery of her witchcraft, of the Devil’s mark, and how he had pinioned her to the floor “strengthened by the strength of Him who is Mightier than the Devil.” In his account, the Reverend Faithful Unto Death described the subduing of the witch as a titanic battle, a mighty foretaste of the clash between good and evil at Armageddon, but one which, strengthened by the Lord, he had won. Then, with a stroke of genius, he condemned Campion properly.

  The Reverend Faithful Unto Death Hervey had been puzzled when Ebenezer insisted on forgetting the presence of the crucifix in the jewel about Campion’s neck. He had asked Ebenezer and the young man had smiled. “Don’t you think there are enough plums in the pie, Brother Hervey?” Brother Hervey did not. Catholicism was the matter which scared Londoners. Witchcraft was not common in the capital, happening more in the country areas, but if Faithful Unto Death could give London a witch who was also a Roman Catholic then he knew he could arouse the interest and fanaticism of the mob. That groundswell of public hate and indignation would carry Faithful Unto Death to fame.

  Mercurius Britanicus revealed that Dorcas Scammell was a Roman Catholic. She bore, about her neck, a crucifix. “Itt was a strange Crucificks, that emblem of the Devil, that the Witch wore. She was att pains to Conceal it, to which end it had beene cunningly hidden within a jewelled Scale so that noe man might Perceive its proper nature. Yet Almightie God in His goodnesse Revealed it to His Servant Faithful Unto Death Hervey and thus Defeated the Wiles of the Evil One as Wee praye He will continue so to doe.”