Witch Hammer

by M. J. Trow

  Sledd looked back over his shoulder, to the sight of his troupe all fanning themselves and turning their faces to the breeze to try to cool themselves down after the hottest day they could remember for years. He opened his mouth to speak, but thought better of it. He went in, dragging the plank which served for a door to behind him.

  There was very little room inside the hut and the heat from the fire meant that the choice for Sledd was even more limited. He took a seat on a small stool over in the corner, furthest from the hearth. The woman sitting by the fire turned to look at him and he was surprised to see that she was not what he had been expecting. The skinny arm that had beckoned him could surely not belong to this woman, who was one of the fattest he had ever seen. Feature rolled into feature and taken overall she looked like something which had melted, like a candle which had been added to and burned over years, decades even. Where a foot showed under the ragged hem of her dress, it was overlaid by running fat. He looked around for the other person, although Heaven knew where he or she could be hiding.

  ‘There is no one else in here, Master Actor,’ the woman said. ‘I will not keep you long in my little home. People would talk to see you here alone with me. A lady must watch her reputation. So listen well and do not interrupt me. You should leave this place while you can. The stones are not welcoming to those who come uninvited.’ She looked at Sledd from under sagging brows. ‘I know you will not take heed of anything I tell you, but I will tell it all the same. Don’t try to count the stones; it can’t be done. Don’t speak a secret near the Whispering Knights; although they whisper, they cannot keep their counsel and words spoken here echo around the world. Respect the King Stone. Don’t look for me again, for I won’t be here.’

  Sledd nodded, then shook his head. He wasn’t sure whether he was agreeing with something or not.

  She looked at him again and shook her head with a sigh. They were all the same, all those who blundered into the sway of the Rollrights. ‘How many come with you to the Stones?’ she asked him.

  Sledd started to count on his fingers, his eyes cast up to the sod roof over his head.

  Her sigh this time was deeper. ‘Master Actor, just hear this. Leave a copper coin for every man, woman and child who is with you at the foot of the stone which watches, and all will be well. Now, leave me. You are making me feel the cold.’ She threw another log on the fire and huddled over it, rubbing her hands together. He could almost hear the fat sizzle. He edged past her and out of the door and it took all of his actor-managerial skills not to run like a scalded hare across the grass to the wagons.

  ‘No one there, Ned?’ Marlowe asked, sitting on the tailboard of a wagon eating a pear.

  ‘Why do you ask?’ Sledd said, wiping the sweat from under his eyes.

  ‘Well, you just peered in at the door and then came back. I thought you would have gone in if there was someone there. Thomas said he could see an arm, but it just looked like a shadow to me.’

  Sledd swallowed hard. ‘There was a woman in there, as fat as a maggot. She had a fire burning, red and hot as Hell. She told me some things . . . I can’t remember them, but I will in a minute. Just let me sit down, I don’t feel too well.’

  Marlowe hopped down from the cart and beckoned to one of the women. ‘Ned’s not feeling quite the thing,’ he told her. ‘Fetch some water, will you? I’m just going over there, to investigate that hut, or whatever it is.’ He strolled off across the grass, the slanting shadows from the stones pointing the way.

  Closer to, there wasn’t a hut at all, it was just a trick of the eye because of how the old stones leant on each other. Marlowe could tell that there had once been a fourth stone and perhaps even a roof, but there was nothing there now. In the corner, just visible as the shadows lengthened, there was some ash from a fire, but when he touched the ashes, they were cold. He stood up straight and looked around him, then back towards the wagons. With a final glance back at the ashes, he brushed his fingers on the stone and walked slowly back to the circle.

  In the grove just up the hill, the fat woman turned her head on her great neck and spoke to her companion. ‘He’ll take watching, that one.’

  ‘Right enough, Sister. He’s as tricksy as Lucifer. We must watch him as hawks will watch a mouse.’

  ‘No, Sister,’ the fat woman said, with a nod which set her chins vibrating silently. ‘We must watch him as a mouse watches a hawk.’

  ‘Eerie, this place, isn’t it?’

  Ned Sledd spun at the sound of the voice, but at first he couldn’t see anybody. Just the shafts of the dying sun from behind the stones that hurt his eyes and he looked away, dazzled. ‘Who is it?’ he snapped. ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘Scot,’ came the reply. ‘Reginald Scot. We met at Clopton Hall.’

  Sledd relaxed. Rehearsals had not been going well and he wasn’t at all sure that the Rollrights were a good place for a mummers’ play to be practised. It was no more an amphitheatre than he was – the acoustics were all to buggery for a start, you couldn’t hear someone standing next to you, but you could hear a whisper a hundred feet away. And that damned old hag tending her fire had set his nerves on edge.

  ‘Master Scot –’ Sledd extended a hand – ‘if I didn’t know better, I’d swear you were following us.’

  Scot chuckled. ‘You delude yourself, Player King,’ he said. ‘No, something else entirely has brought me to Meon Hill.’ He sat down on a stone and began to ease his boot which was chafing his ankle. ‘Master Shaxsper.’ He nodded to the glover-turned-actor, seeing the same worried look on his face he’d read at Clopton. ‘So glum, sir?’ he asked.

  ‘Glum?’ Shaxsper straightened. Sledd was trying the man out as the Turkish Knight and he was beginning to regret it. Only in half costume as he was, Shaxsper cut quite a comic character in his turban and didn’t seem to know quite what to do with his scimitar. ‘No, sir, just cautious.’

  ‘All right, everybody.’ Sledd clapped his hands. ‘We’ll take a break. Thomas, work on your timing. You missed Joseph’s cue for the thunder.’

  ‘That’s because he didn’t give it,’ Thomas explained, ever the professional.

  ‘Well, well. Will –’ Sledd threw a look at Shaxsper – ‘we all know the Turkish Knight isn’t exactly real, but try to do something with the accent, will you? You sound like a Warwickshire fishwife.’

  ‘I’m a playwright!’ Shaxsper reminded him, but Sledd wasn’t listening.

  He sat wearily down next to Scot. ‘Do they have fishwives in Warwickshire, Master Scot?’ he asked, swallowing heartily from a leather bottle.

  ‘Not my county,’ Scot told him. ‘But I know of these stones, though.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘That one over there, the tall one standing alone.’

  Sledd followed the man’s pointing finger. ‘What of it?’ he said, in an airy tone, trying to put the memory of the woman and her hellish fire behind him.

  ‘That’s the King Stone,’ Scot said. ‘What day is it?’

  ‘Er . . . Wednesday, I think.’

  ‘No, no. I mean the date.’

  ‘Um . . .’ Sledd’s calendar was in one of the wagons so he couldn’t be sure. ‘July twenty-second, isn’t it?’

  ‘The Feast of St Mary Magdalene,’ Scot murmured.

  Sledd looked at the man. He tried to steer clear of religion and politics, finding that the two were a dangerous concoction in the theatre. And in these insane times both of them could kill a man. ‘Is that important?’ he asked.

  ‘It might be.’ Scot nodded. ‘We’ll find out come midnight.’

  Sledd frowned. ‘Midnight? You’re talking in riddles, sir.’

  ‘At midnight,’ Scot said softly, drawing closer to Sledd as he told his tale, ‘on the feast days of certain saints, just as the nearest church clock strikes, that stone becomes a man. Or a king, to be precise.’

  Sledd blinked and broke the other man’s hypnotic spell. ‘Rubbish!’ he scoffed, but his eyes flicked to where the hag had bent
over the flames in her hut, over in the lee of the Whispering Knights.

  ‘“Seven long strides you shall take, says she,”’ Scot said, suddenly declaiming and making Sledd jump, ‘“And if Long Compton you can see, King of England will you be.”’

  ‘What’s that?’ Sledd asked. ‘John Lyly? Nicholas Udall?’ It wasn’t Kit Marlowe; that much was certain.

  ‘It’s an old wives’ tale,’ Scot told him. ‘There may not be too many fishwives in Warwickshire, but they make up for the lack in old wives. You can take my word on that.’

  On a whim, Sledd stood up and took seven long strides to the west. He looked out against the purple clouds that crossed the dying sun to the black of the land that lay beneath. ‘I can’t see a damn thing,’ he said. ‘Not a solitary light. Ah, well, there goes my claim to the throne.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Scot called to him. ‘Long Compton’s to the north. You’re looking in the wrong direction.’

  They laughed and Sledd felt the hold of the old woman grow a little weaker. Reginald Scot seemed more rooted in reality than most men, but since Sledd made his living by pretending to be someone else and lived with others who did the same, that might not be so amazing after all. Whatever the reason, Sledd felt a little safer with Scot around. ‘Join us in our evening repast, Master Scot,’ he offered. The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach and if he could catch him in a quiet moment, when his belly was full of food, he might be able to find out the truth about these stones.

  ‘I would love to, Master Sledd, but, surely, your purse is a little light, what with what happened to Lord Strange . . .’

  Sledd dismissed his politeness with a wave of the hand. ‘The weight of my purse is not relevant, Master Scot. I don’t know who owns these lands, but whoever they are, they are light a few coneys tonight. You look like a rabbit stew man to me. Can I tempt you?’

  Scot looked out at the darkening land, then at Sledd. ‘I won’t argue with you, Master Sledd. It smells delicious already.’

  Joyce Clopton sat by the side of her father’s bed as the day died softly in the west. He had always liked this time of day, when all the birds were flying home to their nests and the night animals met the day ones briefly as they went about their business. He liked to listen as the house quietened, as the timbers shifted in the brick, as the tick of the cooling slates echoed down into the spaces of the house. And now he was dying, going home for the last time. In a perfect world, the priest would have performed the anointing of the sick, but, in the absence of the priest, her father was as yet unshriven. The bread and wine waited at his bedside for the viaticum, the last communion, which in extremis anyone could give for his soul’s comfort, but Joyce could not bring herself to give them yet. To give them would be to admit that all hope had gone. Since he had left her in all but body less than twenty-four hours before, Joyce seemed to have hung on his every breath, each one drawn, it seemed, from a great distance inside his body. They came less often now and each exhalation was a sigh. There was a tap at the door.

  ‘Mistress?’ Boscastle put his head round the door and whispered. He was at that age where death was not looking over his shoulder yet, but he had seen many people die. He had known Joyce since she was born and knew that she was as stubborn as her father, and as soft hearted. He didn’t want to leave her alone with the dying man but also didn’t want to intrude. He was a perfect servant in every way. ‘Mistress, go and rest. I will sit with your father for an hour or so. You can come back then.’

  Even in the twilight of the room, her eyes flashed back at him. ‘We don’t have an hour or so for me to go and rest. But I would be grateful for your company.’

  The steward picked up a stool from just inside the door and carried it to the other side of his master’s bed. He had so much to tell her, to ask her, but this was not the moment. As soon as this old man stopped breathing, neither he nor Joyce had a home at Clopton any more. Blake had approached him, asking him to stay on as steward, but he could no more serve Edward Greville than he could fly. His answer, in measured, steward’s tones, had made Blake blench and the clerk snort with suppressed laughter. No, homelessness was in his future, all right.

  The room seemed full of the old man’s breathing. Boscastle found himself counting the cycles of ragged indrawn breaths and the silences, as a frightened child might count the seconds between lightning and thunder, to tell how many miles away the storm might be. Boscastle knew that Death was not miles away from this room. He was standing at the foot of the bed, watching and listening for his moment to intervene.

  ‘Mistress,’ he said, reaching across his master’s coverlet to touch her hand. He nodded to the bread and wine. ‘I think . . . if you want . . .’

  She looked up at him, her eyes brimming with tears. ‘So soon?’ she asked, her voice low.

  He nodded.

  She stood up and took up the sliver of bread. Boscastle slid his arm under Sir William’s neck and lifted him a little, the baronet’s head heavy on his shoulder. The man’s daughter bent over him, making the sign of the cross and muttering the benediction under her breath. She touched the crust to his lips and then, with another genuflection, put it into her own mouth and swallowed it. In the silence as she prayed, there was another long and shuddering breath from her father.

  ‘Quickly,’ Boscastle said. ‘Oh, mistress, the wine. Quickly.’

  She snatched it up, spilling a little on the sheet in her haste and touched it to her father’s mouth. His eyes opened and he looked up at her. ‘Joyce,’ he murmured, sipped the wine, swallowed it and died.

  With the rasping breathing stilled, the room seemed to ring with silence. Boscastle gently let the old head slip back on to the pillow and closed the tired eyes. He pulled the sheet up over his face, tucking it in with deft movements. Soon, he would rouse the women who would come and do all that was needed to make the old man decent for the grave.

  He looked up, to offer words of comfort to Joyce Clopton. She stood there, almost as if she herself had been struck down. Tears ran down her cheeks and dripped off her chin, but she made no sound. ‘My Lady . . .’

  She held out a hand, palm out, as though to ward him off. ‘No kind words, Boscastle, if you please,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I could stand it.’ She backed off, away from the bed, towards the door. ‘I just can’t take another thing. He isn’t dead. He wouldn’t leave me. If I don’t see him, he isn’t dead. Don’t speak.’ Her voice rose with every strangled phrase and Boscastle instinctively moved round the bed to comfort her. But she was quicker than he was and she was out of the door before he could reach her. He stood on the landing and heard her frantic feet beat a tattoo down the wooden stairs and then the slam of a door. He moved across to the long gallery which marched the length of the house and watched her ghostly figure run like the hounds of Hell were after her across the park, until she disappeared into the elder copse at its edge.

  Lord Strange’s Men spent most of the next morning arguing about what to perform. They could drop Lady Godiva for a start, because nobody in Oxford would have heard of her. Because of Thomas’s tumble in the hay, he wouldn’t make a convincing Britannia and Oxford would never allow a woman on stage even if, at this last, dying moment, Sledd could find one. Could he perhaps become Gog or Magog, Hengist or Horsa – possibly, at a pinch, King Arthur? Then, there was the whole audience dimension to consider. The townsfolk would probably accept any old nonsense as long as it had a clown, a bit of tragedy, at least one duel and fireworks. There always had to be fireworks. But the scholars? If any of the university men came along, they’d expect something altogether more highbrow. Aristophanes? Sledd had heard the name somewhere. Could Kit Marlowe help? He was a scholar. Couldn’t he knock his Dido into shape? Hadn’t he been waffling on at dinner the other day about this Tamburlaine fellow? Sledd could play him with one hand tied behind his back. He wouldn’t even have to bother with an accent; who would know how the man sounded, all this time and all those miles from when and where he h
ad lived, because he was real, according to Marlowe.

  But, all morning, Kit Marlowe had said ‘No!’

  Reginald Scot sat with Marlowe near the Whispering Knights as a warm breeze from the south floated over the linen line the women had put up. The man was sitting cross-legged, scribbling furiously in his pocket book, dipping his quill into an ink pot balanced precariously on one knee.

  ‘Friend Shaxsper’s not half bad, is he?’ he said, nodding to the stage area where the ex-glover was going at it hammer and tongs with Martin, steel banging on steel.

  ‘Not like that,’ Martin said. ‘You’ve got to make it half believable, Shaxsper.’

  ‘Well, how then?’ Shaxsper snapped, slicing high into the air so his fencing partner had to duck.

  Marlowe smiled. ‘Indeed not,’ he agreed, ‘though how he’d fare in some dark alleyway, I’m less sure.’

  ‘Vicious life, acting?’ Scot enquired, seeing the purple fury in Shaxsper’s face.

  Marlowe looked at him and tapped his paper. ‘Not as vicious, I’ll wager, as witchcraft.’

  Scot chuckled. ‘The old crone,’ he murmured, ‘the keeper of the stones.’ With other men, Scot would have had to hiss a hurried, ‘No, don’t look.’ But Marlowe had instincts of another sort and he kept his eyes on Scot’s paper.

  ‘What about her?’ he asked.

  ‘What do you make of her?’ Scot asked.

  Marlowe marshalled his thoughts. ‘She’s here and there,’ he said. ‘She certainly was in the company last night, because the rabbit stew didn’t seem to go round the way it should have done and there is a lot of her to feed. Ned was certainly very scared by her; his bluff act might fool some people, but it didn’t fool me, nor you, I would guess.’

  Scot inclined his head in agreement.

  ‘She seems to have a skill at blending into the background, which for one of her size is quite incredible. I am quite good at seeing through subterfuge, and yet I find I must look at her from the tail of my eye to see her clearly at all and if she sees me looking at her even askance, she moves away.’