Petronilla was Dame Alice's loyal bondswoman from the start; she was a dagger thrown back and forward between those ruby-weighted hands. The first Sabbath made her retch in a corner, but she said nothing, told no one, never broke trust. The girl had no malice of her own, but her mistress's orders girded her like chain mail, and obedience made her brave.
The most inexplicable thing is that at no point in her eventual imprisonment and trial did Petronilla try to run away. Did she keep hoping Dame Alice would return from England to burst the doors, with all the force of law or simply a click of her stained fingers? Or did the maid simply keep her garbled faith, offering herself as ransom for her vanished mistress, waiting on the pleasure of the dark master? Or, more likely, did some portion of her drugged conscience feel her execution to be a proper end to the story?
What is clear is that she was not one of the weeping, piteous victims who flock across the pages of history. She embraced her death as a final order. Does that make her mistress's betrayal better or worse? All the records have to say on the matter is that at the hour of her death, Petronilla declared that Dame Alice was the most powerful witch in the world.
I feel slightly faint. I am standing on a street corner with a slightly crazed expression on my face. A small girl leaning against a lamp post watches me; she has a purple birthmark the shape of a kidney. "Lights changed ages ago, Mrs.," she points out.
I cross without answering her. I should be looking for the gaol, but I can't face it yet. I wander up the hill, past Dunnes Stores, a stall selling local fudge, a poster inviting costumed revellers to a Quentin Tarantino Night.
St. Canice's seems almost small after the great cathedrals of England. Its walls are gray and serene; beside it, the round tower pencils the clouds. I look for the grave, but they must have moved it. Inside the church I finally stumble across the headstone, one of the dozen propped against the walls. With difficulty I make out the old French letters framing a fleur-de-lys cross. Here lied José de Keteller, they say. Say thou who poddest here a prayer.
José de Keteller came to this town in chain mail with a long sword, I remember, an old-style legitimate killer. Learned Gaelic, grew a long moustache, finally even rode without a saddle in the native way. A peaceful settler, shaping himself to the island on which fate had placed him, he was hardly to know how his surname would be immortalised by his iron-willed daughter. Why is it so much worse to execute husbands than infidels, I wonder? Most of us are descended from killers, one way or another.
None of this is telling me anything I don't already know, and my ankles are beginning to ache. In the Museum, I take my shoes off for a moment to stretch my feet on the smooth wooden floor. What a motley collection we have here: grisset and candle-mould, cypress chest and footstool, a copy of a will specifying what a certain widow would inherit from her husband if she did not remarry or have carnal knowledge of any man willingly (this last bit makes me smile), and an ancient deer skull with antlers six feet wide. On a dusty shelf I find huge metal tongs, for stamping "IHS" on holy wafers. My heart begins to thump again.
Downstairs in the bookshop, I calm myself with a collection of photographs of Irish lakes. The salesgirl assesses me as a browser, and turns back to the phone, demanding (in an accent that I have not heard in a long time) to know who said she'd said she fancied that spotty eejit. I turn the pages, recognising the heads of birds on the water. I move on to the small history shelf, where I learn that the town's most famous witch was, in fact, framed.
"Alice Kyteler (possibly a misspelling of Kettle, a fairly common English surname)," I read in one hardback
was a victim of a combination of the worst excesses of fourteenth-century Christo-patriarchy. Threatening to men by virtue of her emotional and financial independence, this irrepressible bourgeoise, who always kept her maiden name through repeated widowhoods, aroused the hostility of avaricious relatives and a misogynistic Catholic establishment. As in so many other "witch trials," powerful men (both church and lay) projected their own unconscious fantasies of sexual/satanic perversion onto the blank canvas of a woman's life.
I can't help smiling: blank canvas, my eye. There is a grain of truth there, of course: before she ever trafficked with darkness, the citizens of Kilkenny resented the Kyteler woman's fine house, her bright gowns, every last ruby on her finger. But that hardly makes her innocent.
The girl on the phone is eyeing me wearily. She is letting her friend speak now, the faraway voice winding down like clockwork.
How the late twentieth century loves to issue general pardons. At this distance, it cannot distinguish the rare cases of serious evil from those of farmer's wives burnt out of neighbourly malice. Dame Alice should not be lumped in with the victims. She was the real thing. She could be said to have deserved the punishment she never got.
Unlike Petronilla de Meath, not mentioned in the historical analysis. Petronilla, who should have been set free when the whole sony mess was concluded. Why could she not have been shaken out like a wide-eyed cat from a sack, to run across country and live some ordinary life?
It is too hot in here, all at once; too cosy, with a tub of Connemara Marble Worry Stones going cheap beside the till, and remaindered Romance stacked high on a table between the symmetrical stares of Décor and Archaeology. I replace the books neatly and leave.
Outside it is cooler, at least; the edgy breeze of late afternoon fills the town of Kilkenny. I walk along the main shopping street, wondering where the gaol could have got to. A hamburger carton impales itself on my heel; I kick it off. My toes feel crushed; my head is beginning to pound. Anything could have been built on the site of Petronilla's last months: a hardware shop, a B&B, a public toilet. A gaol is by nature anonymous; all it requires is four walls or a hole in the ground, a barred square of light if you're lucky.
I pause outside a pub offering Live Trad To-Nite. I stare at the five narrow bars just above ground level, the darkness behind them. All they hide is a cellar of beer barrels, but if I close my eyes I can almost see her pallid hands caressing the iron. Petronilla in the shadows, crouched in her dirty smock, once good linen, a present after her first year of service. A face like a drop of honey, looking out of a bedraggled wimple—unless they shamed her by leaving her head naked. Did her pale hair come down at last, escaping coif and cap and veil, falling back into girlhood?
I rest my palms against the pub's gray slate, ignoring the glances of passersby, and try to conjure up the rest of her. Would there be marks of torture, the telltale insignia on wrists and soles? Probably not; there would have been no need, since she seems to have told the whole story freely once her mistress had escaped to safety. Besides, they probably preferred to bring the girl unmarked to the stake, a perfect sacrifice to the fire-breathing dragon. Where would they have done it, I wonder—outside the gaol, outside the city walls, or in the busy thoroughfare of the market square? Which supermarket sits on Petronilla's ashes now? Pressing my fingertips so hard against the cement that they turn gray, I ask every question I can think of. Was there anyone there that day who, remembering alms or a kind word or just the turn of her cheek, had enough mercy on the girl to add wet faggots to the kindling? Was there enough smoke to put her to sleep before flames licked the arches of her feet?
This is one of the times when I wish I still had the ability to cry.
Petronilla is not here. There is nothing left. I do not know what I was hoping for, exactly: some sign of presence, some message scratched for me on the prison wall, some whisper from her walking ghost. I shut my eyes more tightly, but all I can hear is an inane pop song leaking from a taxi window. Hold on, the singer begs, Every word I day is true. Hold on, I'll be coming back for you.
I let go of the wall; the pads of my fingers are scored and pockmarked. As I stare at them they plump into their usual shape. The daily miracle, the return to the same healthy flesh. How long must it go on?
I stride back to my car, through a crocodile of French schoolchildren; in the car park, I have
some difficulty remembering what colour Volvo I rented. Automatically I fasten my seat belt. I have never tried to kill myself; I am afraid to discover that it would not work. I shrug off my shoes and lean my head back on the padded rest. What on earth am I doing here?
My ring is cutting into my finger; I pull it off and stare at it. Rubies to stave off disease; this is my last one. Once in Birmingham someone tried to mug me, and I cracked his nose with this ring.
Time has not absolved me of anything. The clothes have been transformed, the name is different—I change it every fifty years or so—but the face in the rearview mirror is the same. And in almost seven centuries of exile I have not managed to forget Petronilla.
It is almost funny, is it not? One would think that a woman who in her esoteric researches had stumbled across the secret of immortality would feel free. Exhausted by life's repetitions, yes, starved for fresh food, tormented by the bargain she made, but in some sense free. To wander, at least, to move, to leave behind the quarrels of mortals. I never expected to be so haunted by one face that I would have to make my way back to Kilkenny.
More than any husband or lover or child; more than anyone I have hurt since I went into exile; more than anyone I left without warning (when they wondered why I was not ageing) or killed with my bare hands (when they deserved it). Petronilla's is the only death I still regret. Leaving her behind was the worst thing I have ever done.
I did no harm to my first husband, the richest moneylender in Kilkenny; I bore him a son and fed him tidbits of roast rabbit on his deathbed. As for my second—in my grandmother's time I could have followed the old ways and left him after a year and a day, but under Common Law I was his for life, to stamp his mark on. I bent under his weight like a reed, and in the pool of humiliation I brushed against my power. He was sick already—the beatings were getting feebler—but the poison sped him on. My third ... yes, I remember. I despatched him in a night, after I caught him in the linen cupboard ripping the skirt off Petronilla. The night before his funeral I dropped his heart in the River Nore.
As for my fourth, John le Poer, he was a loving man who shut his ears to the rumours circulating about me. But by then, you must understand, I had signed with my own blood, and the sacrifice was called for. His hair came out in handfuls, when I brushed it at night; his nails began to bend backwards. Petronilla never claimed to understand the rituals, but she knew that whatever Dame Alice said had to happen. When John, made suspicious at last by the gossip of my dead husbands' disinherited children, talked to Bishop Ledrede, it was my faithful maid, my flawless echo, who repeated to me every word they had said. When my husband wrenched the key from my belt and burst into my room, finding and forcing open the padlocked boxes, I kept one curious eye on Petronilla. She wept because the story was almost over, but she showed no shame.
I was charged along with eleven accomplices, most of whom barely knew me to see. The seven charges told of dogs torn limb from limb and scattered at crossroads, fornication with Ethiopian hobgoblins, and a dead baby's flesh boiled in a robber's skull. The grease I used to keep my face soft was listed as a sorcerous ointment for the staff on which I flew across Kilkenny town by night. Bishop Ledrede was widely read, and had a vivid imagination. He was not to know that power is composed of simple elements, once you have stumbled across it.
Ledrede did not prosecute me for the money his spiritual court could hope to confiscate; like myself, he was motivated by wrath and glory. And so, when I had indicted him for defamation and sailed to England with all my jewels, when my son William had agreed to pay for the reroofing of St. Canice's as a penance, and when the other accused accomplices had melted into the night, then the Bishop focused his gaze on Petronilla. She was all he had left.
It was not that I could not have brought her with me, torn her out of prison somehow; I simply never thought to. That is my crime: that in the urgency of my flight, full of the sense of my own devilish importance, I did not even condemn my maid deliberately, but carelessly, as I might have said, "Pick up that sarsenet gown."
I have had plenty of time to think of her since. In almost seven centuries of wandering I can make an informed comparison: I have met no one who loved so well or was so betrayed. She was not a natural killer: she ground poisons together out of mute loyalty, and what purer motive is there than that?
It is so long since I have killed, I have almost forgotten how. It is not worth risking nowadays. They lock you up, take down what you say, and never put an end to it. Oh Petronilla, how I envy your death. Not the manner of it, the pain and squalor, but its definition. How it took you by the hand and led you away before your bursting youth could dwindle.
Unless I am casting a web of glamour over the story to lessen my guilt? But that is not how it works. My envy and my guilt pin each other down. Petronilla's, short and powerless, is the life I did not lead, and cannot lead no matter how long I drag on, and will never fully understand. Petronilla's exultant face is the one I cannot leave behind me. She follows, just out of view, and all the rippling voices are hers.
Quiconques veut d'amors joïr
Doit avoir foy et esperance
Having had faith and hope enough to last her short lifetime, did it come down to love in the end? Was that what she feasted on, among the rats in Kilkenny gaol? How could I be loved by such as her?
For all my sheer elastic skin, I am a hollow woman. My ribs are an empty cauldron now; my breath couldn't put out a candle.
I start the car. My one faith is that I will find some trace of Petronilla. My one hope is that she will teach me how to die. My only love now, the only one whose face I can remember. There, around some corner, she burns, she burns.
Note
My main source for "Looking for Petronilla "is the entry for 1323 in Raphaell Holinshed's The Historie of Ireland (1577). The Bishop of Ossory's Latin manuscript account of the trial was edited by Thomas Wright as A Contemporary Narrative of the Proceedings Against Dame Alice Kyteler (1843). A useful account of the case is found in St. John Seymour's Irish Witchcraft and Demonology (1913, 1989). The song quoted is the anonymous rondeau "Quiconques Veut d'Amors Joïr," available on the Gothic Voices album The Medieval Romantics.
Petronilla de Meath was burnt alive in Kilkenny in 1324. Dame Alice is said to have escaped to England.
The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits: Stories Page 19