“Quite right,” Mrs Dale said briskly. “With Him watching over us, the Devil cannot gain a foothold. I must go.”
Eleanor glanced at the window. “Won’t you stay for tea and crumpets?”
By the time the parson’s wife finally made to leave, the sky was purple and heavy with storm clouds, but, bursting with more news than she’d heard in a six-month, she failed to notice the downturn in the weather. Eleanor Dearborn waved her off with a kerchief embroidered with violets.
The stitching, she mused, fingering the petals as she waved, was far from expert. But then she’d only been nine years old when she’d embroidered the thing and how well she remembered sitting in the tiny kitchen behind her father’s tailor shop, legs crossed on the floor just like him, while his sister taught her to sew. The laughter, the cuddles, the hilarious unpicking came flooding back, as did the smell of bread baking in the oven, the songs that floated up to the beams and the rays of golden sunlight that streamed through the window while the needle flashed in her amateur hands. Then a thunderclap overhead banished childhood back to memory and, as the rain began to hammer against the window panes, Eleanor watched the parson’s wife leaning into the wind, her skirts sodden and her hair dripping wildly beneath her cap as she battled her way down the broad, open driveway. Tossing another log onto the fire, Eleanor Dearborn tucked the kerchief back inside her gown and reflected on how far she’d come from those happy days of embroidering violets.
And sighed.
“That was the house where the witch lived, down there.”
In his early forties with rugged features and prematurely grey hair, the stranger cocked one long lean leg after the other over the fallen tree trunk on which Eleanor sat and settled himself beside her.
“Which one?” she asked. “That one?”
“No. The one you were looking at before I arrived.”
“I was watching a squirrel.”
“Unusual to see one about on a cold day like this,” the stranger replied, crossing his arms. “Lucky you.”
She said nothing. He made no move to leave.
“Tom Jordan,” he said after a while.
“Eleanor Dearborn,” and as she turned towards him she could smell pinecones and hay.
“The witch was called Betsy,” he said after another long while. “Betsy Bellingham. Wicked woman by all accounts, too. Fornicated with the Devil and his cloven-hoofed spawn.” He ticked the points off on his long bony fingers. “Cast evil spells over the village. Kept a familiar that sucked babies out of the womb. Wicked,” he added with a cluck of his tongue. “Wicked, wicked woman.”
“Is that a fact?”
“Indeed it is fact,” Tom Jordan said with a crack of his knuckles. “The old dame confessed to everything, it’s all written down. Bewitching horses, bewitching cattle, turning her neighbours’ food inedible, and that was just the beginning. If you read her confession, you’ll see she cursed James Buckle to bring on rheumatics, gave his wife Janet an ulcer, dosed the carpenter with megrims and gave little Kitty the dairymaid cramps. Oh, and she confessed to night flying over this very hill, too.”
“Don’t tell me, with the Devil riding pillion on her besom.”
Eleanor turned her eyes back to the small thatched stone cottage nestled at the end of the lane, the one with a pheasant made of straw on the roof. She pictured the cottage three months from now, when the garden would be filled with cabbages and peas, parsley and roses, and where chickens would peck and lay eggs.
“That old dame ran quite a coven,” he continued easily. “Eliza Crowe, Margaret Drabbe, Jane Parcival, Annie Thomas and her daughter Bess, Katherine Pearson and old Lucy Hewitt. They’re all listed in the records, in the brodder’s own distinctive hand. Thirteen of them in the end.”
She studied the craggy face and dark violet blue eyes.
“I was in Milord’s courtroom earlier,” he explained cheerfully. “Thirteen trial accounts laid open for all to see.”
Not just to be seen, Eleanor thought. To be seen and feared. For only the crimes of murder, robbery, arson and rape were tried by the Assizes. Everything else was tried by the local JP. His courtroom carried more traffic than Farringham High Street.
“Still, they say the brodder’s work is nearly done,” Tom Jordan said.
Over his head, rooks cawed their territories around their nests while the buds of the blackthorn were thickening nicely. In the valley, a pair of hares boxed.
“Apparently, rumours of witchcraft have surfaced in Stoughton and so now, having rooted out all the witches in this part of the world, he’ll be wanting to curb their black arts elsewhere.” He pointed towards the far hills. “Another two days I give him, no more,” he said, nodding thoughtfully, and then smiled. “The King’s agent is nothing if not thorough.”
The King’s agent, she thought. The King’s agent . . .
Witchfinder, witchpricker, jobber, brodder, his was a profession which carried a multitude of names yet was charged with but one single task. To confirm or refute allegations of witchcraft. To drive out sin and the Devil.
“Thou shall not suffer a witch to live,” the stranger quoted softly, staring up at the cloudless blue sky. “It is written in the Bible. Exodus, Deuteronomy, Leviticus, Samuel, Galatians, Revelations and at least twice in the Acts, I believe. Our King is a deeply religious man.”
How true. Translating the Bible into English and taking a Danish wife to strengthen his commitment to the Protestant cause, James had even survived a plot last November to restore Catholicism to the land. A good man, the English cried! A good king! Intellectual and learned, he’d not only taken up Elizabeth’s cultural baton, he had positively run with the new flourish in art and literature, whilst continuing to encourage science and the Virginian colonies. To be sure, long live the King!
But there were two sides to every coin. Eleanor wriggled deeper under her furs. Before sitting the English crown on his richly dyed curls, James had researched extensively – some might even say passionately – the subject of witchcraft. Indeed, respected and talented scholar that he was, he was considered an expert on the subject and under him, hundreds (sic, hundreds) of women had been put to death. But of course that was while he was king only of Scotland, which was a long way, a lifetime, away.
Or was it . . .?
The law that he had introduced over here was pretty recent, and what did it say? That it was a hanging offence for the devilish act of witchcraft and, by the force of the same, killing or laming their neighbours or harming their cattle? Ah, but the King is a fair man, everyone said so. A just man. He doesn’t simply act on somebody’s say-so. He sends agents of the crown to investigate these allegations. A brodder, who carries with him a bodkin which he prods into the accused person’s flesh – and if the flesh doesn’t bleed, only then has he found a true servant of Satan.
And in Farringham’s case, Eleanor mused, thirteen true servants who had duly choked to death on the gallows.
“Who are you, Tom Jordan?” she asked quietly. “Why did you seek me out here this morning?”
His grey head turned and his face twisted in a crooked smile. “Seek you out? You have me quite wrong, I fear. I am just passing through.” He indicated the cage at the edge of the clearing. “I am the rat-catcher, see?”
“Which is what you were doing in Milord’s courthouse? Catching rats?”
“Big ’un, too.” His hands spanned a gap large enough for a cat.
“It could be a trick of the light,” she said, “but that cage looks remarkably empty to me.”
Tom Jordan’s chuckle came from deep in his throat. “Dead rats need no cage, Eleanor. It’s the live ones you need to keep hold of.”
Tipping his cap, he bade her good day and was gone before she could ask why the rat-catcher carried no bells.
Down in the village, ducks dabbled in the melted pond water, primroses lifted their heads to the sun on the roadside and a bearded man with sharply pointed features walked with his cowled head held
high. On his chest, several gold crosses dangled on chains. The brodder was proud of each one. Tomorrow morning, when he left this village for Stoughton, he would add another gold cross to his collection.
Another victorious medal in his fight against evil.
“It’s Robbie, isn’t it? Robbie Bellingham?”
A flabby young man, no more than thirty, whipped off his cap and turned pink. “M-ma’am.”
“Do I have smuts on my nose, Robbie? Or do you stare at all the gentry as though they’re chops on the butcher’s block?”
“No. No, no of course not, begging your pardon, but for a moment there, I thought I recognized you from somewhere.” He wiped his hands down the sides of his pants. “No offence, ma’am.”
“None taken.” Eleanor glanced up at the pheasant made of straw on the roof. Doubted it would last the spring storms. “The thing is, Robbie, since your mother was convicted of witching –”
“I didn’t know anything about that,” he cut in quickly. “She practised it on the quiet, did Mother.”
“Indeed she must have done.” She studied the weak chin and blinking pale eyes. “For you not to have noticed any of her abominations in such a small cottage.”
The silence was as brief as it was uncomfortable, at least on his part.
“Well, I knew about the cat, of course.” He wrung his cap in his hands. “Saved it myself when it was a six-week-old kitten, once Farmer Preston said white cats were deaf and therefore no good as mousers. He’d have drowned it, you know, if I hadn’t stepped in.”
“That was a very noble gesture, Robbie.” Pity he didn’t mention it at Betsy’s trial. Perhaps it slipped his mind.
“And I saw the candles,” he said, “but I didn’t think anything of it. I mean to say . . . candles? Everybody has candles.”
“Except these were different?”
“Not to me, they weren’t.” Again, he was quick to distance himself. “Looked like any other candle to my eyes, only how was I to know Mother shaped them into human form during the night, melting them so the victim sickened and died?”
“Did someone die, then?”
“No,” he said, frowning, “but the Parson got toothache and Thomas Collins started getting the megrims, and like I said at the trial, I didn’t think anything odd about Mother’s rags, either.”
“Rags?” Eleanor queried.
“Aye. She told me it was an old north-country custom, keeping rags to make into a mat. In fact, I can remember as a child her often telling me that she’d been shown how to make rugs with the clippings, only never had the time to make one herself. But the brodder got the truth out of her in the end. She’d been making rag dolls to burn and cause pain, she had. That’s how James Buckle got his rheumatics and that’s how Farmer Preston’s best milking cow came over sick.”
“She admitted it?”
“Oh, yes.” He seemed almost proud of the fact. “But I’m sure you didn’t come all the way down here to talk about me, ma’am.”
That’s funny, she thought they were talking about Betsy. “No, indeed. As a matter of fact I came because I’d heard that you’ve been down on your luck since that unfortunate trial and as it happens, I am in need of help at the Manor.”
“That’s mighty kind of you, ma’am.” He turned a different shade of pink. “I won’t deny folk don’t come near us these days and as a result times are a bit hard, but though I’m a mason by apprentice, I can turn my hand to any job you –”
“Actually, Robbie, it was your wife I was hoping to employ.”
“Mary?”
“Mrs Dale assures me that she is a dab hand with a needle and in my condition –” she gave a delicate cough “– well, suffice to say a good seamstress would not go amiss.”
The cogs of Robbie’s brain turned slowly, but turn they eventually did. He remembered now how the rumour mill said Sir Geoffrey’s wife had only wanted a few rooms brightened up at Blackestone Manor, at least for the time being. Summer, she insisted, was the time for the bulk of the work. Not March, when she risked a chill from the workmen’s comings and goings, and Robbie, who yearned for a baby himself, understood all too well that she wouldn’t want to harm a much longed-for child.
And what did it matter, she could see his mind reason, who got the work, as long as food came to the table?
Oh, dear. After ten years of marriage, Robbie still did not know his wife.
Or his mother.
“That’s the spot where they buried the witch,” a familiar voice rasped in her ear.
“Where?” she asked, squinting.
“The mound you were staring at before I arrived,” he said, coming to stand alongside her. “Unconsecrated ground, not blessed by the church and forgotten by everyone else.”
“I was watching the rabbits.”
“Unusual to see them out at this time of day,” Tom Jordan replied, crossing his arms. “Lucky you.”
She said nothing. He made no move to leave. He still smelled of pinecones and hay.
“Did you hear about the parson?” he asked after a while. “Took sick during the night with skin rashes and blisters, vomiting and diarrhoea, while this morning he lapsed into stupor interspersed with delirium.”
“I had not heard the news, although it sounds a lot like baneberry poisoning to me.”
“Exactly the physician’s diagnosis. He is of the opinion that his wife, whilst still suffering the effects of the chill she caught from the storm, must have muddled them up with sloe berries, but at least she can rest easily. The malady is not fatal.”
True, Eleanor thought, but convalescence is invariably lengthy.
“The other twelve members of Betsy’s coven are also spread around in unmarked graves,” he said, returning to the subject of the mound with a nod of his head. “Fat lot of good their witching did their families, though. They’re nothing short of pariahs in this village, and when rents and prices are rising faster than wages, poverty stares a lot of Farringham in the face. It was kind of you to offer Mary Bellingham work.”
Eleanor thought of the speed with which King James was going through the realm’s finances while standards continued to plummet.
“Children should not be visited with the sins of their parents. It’s hardly Mary’s fault that her mother-in-law sold her soul to the Devil.”
“Indeed no.” His nod was tight lipped. “Though there are some who claim Mary was the first to accuse her.”
“That business about turning Farmer Preston’s bull into a toad?”
“Rumour has it Mary was seen at the gate that very night.”
“Nonsense,” Eleanor said. “No respectable seamstress hangs round farm gates at midnight.” She tutted loudly. “Next people will be saying she was part of the coven!”
“No, no, the brodder is convinced he has got to the root of the witchery. The number thirteen has a nice ring to it, I suppose. How is Mary’s stitching, by the way?”
“Excellent. She is busy embroidering a night gown with violets right now, as it happens, and I have to say her workmanship is faultless.”
“Good,” Tom Jordan said, and there was an expression in his eyes that she couldn’t identify, though it looked for all the world like a twinkle. “I’m sure you two will get along famously.” He bowed. “But if you’ll excuse me, I have rats to catch.”
“Big ’uns?”
He spanned a gap between his two hands large enough for a dog. “Huge.”
And with a chuckle that came from low in his throat he was gone.
Sitting alone in his finely appointed quarters, a bearded man with sharply pointed features pushed back the cowl from his head and belched loudly. As the King’s agent, the brodder was in a position to command the best accommodation and the finest foods, and, best of all, he never needed to dip his hands in his purse. Not for this flagon of fine, golden malmsey. Not for the succulent capons, nor the dainty sweetmeats, nor the crusty pies bursting with apples. And most certainly he did not have to pay for services of
that broad-hipped, buxom beauty who did things that his poor wife would faint at. But the hour was late, and tomorrow the brodder was setting off for Stoughton, his work in this village all done. He wished to savour his success with the best company he knew, and he knew no better company than his own.
From the corner of his eye, he thought he saw something black and furry dart across the floor, but when he rubbed his bleary eyes it was gone. He must have been mistaken – rats don’t infest such sumptuous accommodation – so he returned to task of counting his crosses.
And licked his lips at the prospect of collecting another in the morning before he left.
Solid gold, they’d be worth a fortune one day.
“Why, Mary, this nightgown is exquisite.” Eleanor held it up to the lamp light. “You’ve done a truly excellent job.”
“Thank you, my lady.” Her thin lips pinched in pride. “Like I told my husband, good skills will always find an outlet.”
A picture formed of a young couple sat either side of the fire, him flabby and pale as he stared into his ale, her hard to the marrow as she carped and gloated in equal measures. Squawking like a magpie as she stitched and sewed, reminding him how she had found work when the man of the house had found none, eroding his confidence with her nagging and bullying, undermining him whenever she could.
“Indeed they do,” Eleanor said, linking her arm with Mary’s. “Now let us take a walk.”
“At this time of night?” Green eyes flashed in distaste. “It’s cold out.”
“As cold as the grave,” she agreed sweetly. “But here. You may borrow a fur. I wouldn’t want you catching a chill.”
Torn between making excuses or hobnobbing with gentry, the furs swung the balance for Mary. Obviously, you could see her thinking as they strolled through the village, Madam was lonely. And as they climbed Bramber Down with the aid of a lantern, you could see the calculations going on inside her head at how much a live-in companion might pocket.
Above them, the moon rose full and yellow.
“It was good sport, wasn’t it?” Eleanor said at last. “I mean a bull, for heaven’s sake. How the village must have laughed when Farmer Preston found that toad.”
The Mammoth Book of Jacobean Whodunnits Page 30