The Wheelwright's Daughter

by Eleanor Porter

  I turned to Tom in alarm. He spread his hands before him, and shrugged. ‘What good would it have done you to know?’ he said. ‘When you weren’t at the house they took Ruth. Took her cat, too. Dragged the poor woman off, with old Ben weeping on her skirts. They’ve penned her in that room above the stables where you learned the boys their letters.’

  ‘Let them take us, Tom, and go on to Worcester,’ I said, ‘and if you would help us, seek out if there are any learned men in the city who might come to our aid.’

  41

  Back in the Schoolroom

  It was strange to find myself so reduced in the only place I had felt power. A corner of it, at any rate. They had made a kind of cell with a dusty school bench along one wall and a load of straw. There was light enough, from the gaps beneath the eaves. Ruth sat huddled as though trying to press herself into the walls. Her face was full of shock, and she was slowly wagging her head and mumbling. I do not think that at first she knew me, but then her face broke into a smile, which turned into a little cry.

  ‘I prayed that you had got away, child.’

  I kneeled down in front of her and took her hands in mine. ‘I am so sorry, Ruth,’ I said. ‘Your kindness has brought you misery and torment. It is all on my account, all of it.’

  ‘Enough of that. You did not command me. I couldn’t leave you to be torn to bits. Don’t speak of that again. I am old enough and foolish enough to make choices for myself, Martha. Oh, but I fret about Ben. This will not go easy on him.’

  Rough hangings cut us off from the rest of the room and a guard sat beyond them, though there was little need for him; neither of us could have done much to escape. He must have been one of the bishop’s men. He was not local. He seemed mightily nervous of me, and shrank back when I approached, till he picked up a hazel stick to keep me at a distance.

  I did not know what they had done with Jacob. At first I thought he was simply at the other end of the room and I called out to him, but there was no reply and the guard came forward and struck me with his hazel stick and bade me keep quiet if I did not want more stripes. And so it was for hours. No one came near us. Outside we heard the noises of the stables and the farm: horses coming and going, shouts from the men. Mice ran freely through the straw and a rat or two loped along the far wall. Ruth’s cat, Comfrey, was in a nailed crate and couldn’t get at them; she mewled pitifully.

  I sat on the floor before Ruth and she combed my hair with her fingers over and over and then she plaited it. She had a fine voice for one so old and knew a great many songs and she sang them softly, so as not to annoy the guard. We thought he couldn’t hear, but at one point, when she had fallen silent, he growled that she might sing that one again, the one that began ‘In Worcester city there lived a maiden’.

  I was not happy – I could not say that – for I knew well enough what awaited us, and more, that I had drawn the few people I cared about in all the world into mortal danger. My back stung and however I sat I could not be comfortable. Almost worse, they had taken my white dove from my pocket, ‘a better bit of evidence they couldn’t have wished for’ and like a fool I’d cried to keep it, saying it was my mother’s, which made it all the better for them, of course. Yet an odd kind of peace had taken root in me, and I looked back at the way I had fallen into despair with astonishment. I knew in my heart at last that I was not an evil thing to be cast out as the body works up a splinter to the surface and expels it. I had a place here as much as they, and there were people who loved me. I did not want to die. It was fierce and new, this feeling. I felt it even to the tips of my fingers.

  One night Ruth had been taken to a barn to be questioned. Father Paul had appeared like a moth, she said, in his flapping cassock, though he bore the light himself. For an hour he had paced around her, exhorting and cajoling. If she confessed, he said, the Lord in His unspeakable mercy would save her soul; even now He would save it.

  ‘I tell you, Martha,’ she said, ‘he leaned his long face into mine with such supplication, such passion in the Lord’s great love that I was moved to weep; had he continued I think I must have succumbed for he seemed to be speaking in the voice of Christ Himself, full up of suffering and pain in His love for me and all I had to do was relent and release myself unto Him.’

  ‘I’ve felt it myself,’ I said. ‘It’s as though his gaze could see into my heart and find what I myself was not aware of, as though I could be washed clean and new, if only I would unstopper myself and flow into forgiveness.’ Father Paul’s hands, I remembered, smelled of lavender, and his nails were always clean. Sometimes, as he leaned towards me calling me to repent, his whole body had trembled in his love for Christ. ‘What did you do, Ruth? You must not confess to wickedness you were never guilty of.’

  ‘Well, he fell to threatening and then I was safe.’ She smiled grimly and her voice shook. ‘I might be pardoned, he said, if I confessed to your being a witch. Oh, Martha, it does not take much, after all, for neighbours to turn on one another. To be safe from sin is hard enough, but to be safe from your neighbours! He says there’s those come forward who swear that Comfrey over there is my familiar, that these marks on my forehead are where he has sucked my blood, that I caused Joan Nesbitt’s cow to sicken – though that’s not such a wonder: she’s been against us since Ben caught her boy in the kitchen garden. Goody Reynolds swears that at Mass she has heard me say my prayers in Latin, because Satan forbids the English. He says – oh, Martha, I am sorry, but it is better that you know – that I was confederate with your mother in her youth and she a proven witch.’

  ‘Did you know my mother, Ruth?’

  ‘No, child. I heard about her, of course, and pitied her. Your father in his sickness dwelled on the part Jane Reynolds played, how she was supposed to help your mother’s case, but had vented poison on her. I pieced the story from fragments: Jane hoped to gain favour with the mistress; her mind had been so worked on that she saw salvation in sending Bessie Gould to the rope. She’s a weak-minded thing. She’s going about now with a tale that you are not your father’s child, but got upon your mother by a Saracen sailor and dedicated to the devil from your birth.’

  ‘Father Paul told you this?’

  ‘Yes, and more. He was seized with joy, and said so, in the devil being unmasked and the evil purged from the land. He says your blood is rank. You caused the very bones of the land to fester and collapse. For the parish to be whole again all the rot must be cut out. Then the sick would be made whole. Oh, Martha, I think we must pray for a miracle, for the evidence against you is terrible and if I didn’t know you and love you I should think you an abomination.’

  ‘Please, tell me all. It’s better I hear it from you. It will come out. Chiefly, it is the pulling down of God’s holy chapel and bewitching Owen, is it not? And no doubt they are saying that Jacob, too, has been enchanted.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s the young boy, above all. Everything turns on him, especially after the baby died.’

  Some time in the afternoon there was a great noise of furniture being dragged up into the space outside our cell.

  ‘Last time I was here she made Jacob Spicer sit down on one of them benches and he turned it over,’ Ben Ladding’s voice said. ‘There weren’t no love lost then, I can tell you. Reckon she must have worked on him good and proper if she’s got him silly for her.’

  ‘Not just the devil has laid with her, then,’ said another I did not recognise. ‘Fancy a bit yourself at all?’

  Ruth squeezed my hand.

  ‘Set them down and get out,’ the guard barked.

  When they’d left he ducked into our cell. He leered at me. ‘The Father’s bringing your love-shaked boy here for a talking. Wants you to hear how he turns on you. He’s not to know you’re here, not till the Father chooses, at any rate. D’you hear? Any sound from you, either of you, and I’ll thrash you. Then I’ll call one or two of the lads in so he can flip you on your back to find what the devil thinks so tasty. They’re not very particular – might
even do the same to granny here.’

  I heard Jacob’s footsteps first: he was shuffling. Had they beaten him? I looked at Ruth and she pointed. There was a burn hole in the hanging; if I stood up tall I could see through it. The room had been swept clean and a table with a chair behind it had been set out. Jacob was standing before the table, his hands tied in front of him. It was almost more than I could do to stay silent. Just a few feet! His head was bowed, but he looked up when Father Paul entered, and I saw that his left eye was swollen. Ruth had come to stand next to me and she put her finger to my lips and wiped my face. I had not noticed I was weeping. I was like the thrush surprised from the nest with all her perfect dappled eggs exposed, and what thick grubby fingers might come nesting? What hope had Jacob against Father Paul?

  ‘There are those,’ Father Paul said at last, after simply staring for a long while, till Jacob shuffled on his shackled feet, ‘who assert that you have been an accomplice to the witch since before the catastrophe – I will not call it a Wonder – and that you found the boy because you were in league with her. And then there are others who declare you are a good son and a true Christian who has been worked on cruelly, so that you have abandoned a pretty sweetheart and an honest home to follow after this lame Jezebel. Which is it, Jacob? Which is it?’

  Jacob said nothing.

  ‘Because,’ the Father went on, ‘I am of the latter party. Why would a good, strong lad, affianced to a beauty, loyal son to a worthy mother, abandon all to a tawny shrew unless he were bewitched? Listen, can you hear it? A host of peewits came this morning to cluster on the field outside. Why is that, do you think, Jacob? “Bewitched” – they cry it out for you, “bewitched”.’

  ‘She is not a witch.’ Jacob spoke so low and hoarse I could barely hear the words. ‘She is not a witch and I have married her. She is my wife.’

  ‘Oh, she’s a witch, all right, and Ruth Tranter’s another, and any marriage conducted by witches cannot be allowed to stand. She lay with Satan long before she lay with you. Those lips you kissed were greasy with filth from the fiend himself.’

  I was fearful of the effect of these words, but I saw Jacob throw his head back and look at the priest through half-closed lids. Father Paul got up and walked around the table and his voice grew soft, though he made sure that it was strong enough to carry.

  ‘You could walk free. You are the victim, not the malefactor. Do you think she cares about you? No, no. Recollect. I have heard how she scorned you when you sought to learn how to read God’s holy word. She knew you were destined for Agnes Simons, that both families desired it. She is made of envy and of lust. Women are all appetite – the ancients tell us this. The womb is hungry for seed. It must be kept in check. And in one who has forsaken her God and her faith, what limits are there on her desires?’

  Jacob glanced away then. I could not see if he reddened, but he looked confused. Oh my darling, I thought, do not weaken.

  Father Paul put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Ecclesiastes 7:26 tells us: a woman like that is bitterer than death, she has cast her heart abroad as a net men fish with and her hands are chains. The man who pleases God will escape her but the sinner will be taken with her. She told you she loved you and no end of pretty words – we all know she is clever. Such cleverness in a woman is dangerous, unnatural. When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil. A woman is a liar by nature and she stings whilst she delights. Unless they are ruled by faith they cannot help but deceive. I say a liar by nature – I have cause. Wasn’t Eve fashioned from a bent rib? There was a crookedness in her from the beginning. Think how the Lord sought to remind you of this by striking the witch a cripple.’

  He had begun walking around Jacob slowly, talking gently, occasionally pausing to put an arm on his shoulder. And occasionally, as he did so, he would glance towards us and smile his long-lipped smile, so that I pulled my eye away, convinced that he could see it, though surely it was not possible.

  ‘It is scarcely your fault – she is as wily as the serpent. How can you be surprised, for her mother was a witch before her and fornicated with the devil? From this coupling she was conceived. Her father had none of her, though he damned himself on his own account – and how could he not, living with women such as that? It is written that it is better for a man to dwell with a lion and a dragon than to keep house with a wicked woman. Think, son, the lion and the dragon are her bedfellows. She waked a dragon under the earth and pulled down God’s house. What else is a woman but a foe to friendship, an unescapable punishment, an evil of nature, painted with fair colours? All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman.’

  Still Jacob said nothing, but his eyes followed Father Paul as he circled as far as he could without shifting his feet and then he tilted his head back, but whether in scorn or confusion now I could not tell.

  ‘Do you fear God and damnation?’

  ‘I fear God and damnation.’

  ‘You are a simple man and she has subtle arts. This longing you feel for her, it is worked upon you. Think of the Lord Jesus, who died on the cross, for your sins. And think of the fires of hell. I am the keeper of your soul in this parish. Just as your beasts look to you to guide them, let me guide you.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said at last, swaying a little where he stood; his voice a rough whisper. ‘I love her and I want to love God. You tell me I cannot do both. But there is no wickedness about her. She trusts in the Lord Jesus just as I do. I think she does. I am sure of it.’

  ‘Can you be sure? Can you? You’ve heard of the mermaid, Jacob, that sings in the sea and lures poor fishermen to their deaths? You are like one of those sailors, Jacob, who has listened too long. She has twined her voice around your soul and now you are drowning. Open your ears to God.’ Father Paul almost cooed in Jacob’s ear. Then louder, ‘Cast out the serpent,’ and then in a shout, ‘Begone!’ so that Jacob recoiled in surprise. ‘Get thee gone, Satan.’ He grasped Jacob’s shoulders and clasped him close. ‘Sweet Lord Jesus, welcome this lost sheep back to the fold.’

  Jacob sank to his knees and began to weep. I could not bear it; I could not bear to watch. Still I heard Father Paul’s voice.

  ‘She has confessed. Everything. She told us of the place and how it happened and the charm she used. Look, a carved dove, she had it in her hand when she corrupted you, didn’t she? Tell us how she seduced you and you will be free, and your mother will not be brought in as an accomplice and you will not lose your house and your goods, and I will give you water.’

  I returned to the peephole. Jacob was still on his knees but he had recovered himself and he was not weeping. Father Paul had resumed his seat behind the table and was furiously writing. Jacob cast his eyes around the room; his gaze drifted vaguely towards us. I did not dare speak, but I pressed my whole body against the hanging and he must have seen for he started and glanced quickly at the priest and the guard, then turned again to me. ‘Wait a little,’ he said, getting to his feet.

  Father Paul looked up. ‘No, no, it must be now. I have everything ready. This is the true testimony of Jacob Spicer, stable-hand. Go on…’

  ‘Please,’ Jacob said, standing, ‘I must pray. I lost my way, almost. I was almost lost, but my good angel strengthens me. I must pray to learn how best to tell you.’

  ‘I can help you with the words. I am the Lord’s vassal here.’

  ‘My head swims. I am dizzy. I feel a great need of prayer, sir. I swear to you that I am a God-fearing man and have never served any master but the Lord Jesus and Sir William.’

  Father Paul looked at Jacob for a long time, then walked round and stood behind him. ‘Do not provoke His anger,’ he said softly. ‘Cast out Satan or we will drive him hence by force. Till tomorrow, then.’

  42

  Bargains: the Witch’s Mark

  The next morning the guard roused us, though we had already been wakened by the clatter of the horses.

  ‘You’d best make yourselves ready, you’ve a visitor.’

  We w
ondered who it could be, for we knew Ben was not permitted, though Ruth longed to hear from him. I had certainly not expected Agnes.

  We both stood there, staring, till Ruth took a hand from each of us and placed them together palm on palm and although Agnes pulled it away she did not step back.

  I hung my head. ‘Aggie, Agnes, I have not done the things they accuse me of, but I have wronged you and for that I am sorry.’

  ‘You can’t undo it,’ she said sharply.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘and I wouldn’t if I could. I am sorry for the hurt I caused you. I should not have deceived you. I don’t think he did – deceive you, I mean – not for long or perhaps at all. He did not understand himself.’

  ‘You saw to that, they say.’

  ‘No, truly, unless my wishing made it so. I used no herbs or charms, Agnes.’ I paused. ‘Do you love him very much?’

  She looked at me a moment, then shrugged and sat down on the bench. ‘I don’t know. It was always to be. He’s the best-looking boy around here and he’s a good heart.’ She looked pensive a while. ‘I think I loved him, though in my heart I knew I might do better,’ and without thinking she patted her hair and I knew I had not lost her utterly. I sat down next to her and leaned my head on her shoulder, and this time, though she winced a little, she let me. I would have hugged her if my hands had not been bound.

  ‘They told me about your back, Martha. What my father and the others did. Let me see it.’

  It was scabbing up now, but it made her gasp. ‘He was wrong to do that,’ she whispered. ‘Listen,’ she said, as she helped me back on with my robe. ‘I know about Owen. Mother could not keep it from me and nor should she, his own sister. My father would see, too, if he were not blinded with rage. My mother is afraid we will lose him again if things go badly for you, but he is too frail to face my father, let alone the courts. And after what happened to Ruth and Jacob, she is afraid of his being taken alongside you, for all he’s just a child. But she said to tell you she would do what she could for you.’