‘You mentioned she had no kids of her own,’ Woodend said.
‘That’s right. And I might further have suggested that was part of the problem. If Meg had been able to fulfil herself in the way most other women did, she may have been less interested in money and adultery. I believe the contemporary phrase for what she did is “displacement activity”.’
Paniatowski bridled. ‘You mean that if a woman doesn’t have kids to tie her down, she’s bound to turn into a first-rate bitch!’ she demanded.
Tyndale gulped. ‘No, I wasn’t meaning to suggest—’ he began.
‘Of course you weren’t,’ Woodend said, attempting to rapidly smooth over the cracks.
But Paniatowski didn’t want them smoothing over. ‘And why is it always the wife’s fault?’ she asked. ‘Maybe her husband had no lead in his pencil. Maybe the reason she took her pleasure elsewhere was because he wasn’t enough of a man for her.’
‘I ... er ...’ Tyndale said, helpless in the face of this fresh onslaught.
‘From what Mr Tyndale’s just told us about her sleepin’ around, she’d have been almost bound to get pregnant if she’d been able to,’ Woodend said.
‘Besides, her husband did have a child,’ Tyndale said, in an attempt to insert himself back in the conversation. ‘He married again, before Meg’s ashes were even really cold. Of course, he never actually saw the baby, because, by the time it was born, he was dead himself, but—’
‘It’s all so very convenient, isn’t it?’ Paniatowski interrupted. ‘Meg was a strong woman, so there must have been something wrong with her. And from that it’s only a short step to saying that everything that happened to her must have been her fault!’
Woodend stood up. ‘Let’s go an’ get a breath of fresh air, Monika,’ he said in a tone which made it plain that he was issuing an order.
Paniatowski followed him through the door. A chill breeze was coming in off the moors, and when it hit her, she shivered.
‘Now what the bloody hell was that all about?’ Woodend asked.
Paniatowski shrugged. ‘I just get sick of people – men especially – assuming that—’
‘Listen, Tyndale’s not a criminal,’ Woodend said harshly. ‘He’s a member of the public, who’s tryin’ to help us as best he can, an’ I will not tolerate him bein’ spoken to in the way you just have.’
Paniatowski looked down at the ground. ‘Sorry,’ she said.
‘An’ so you bloody-well should be,’ Woodend told her. ‘We’re goin’ back in there, an’ when we do, you’ll treat the man with the respect he’s entitled to. Understood?’
‘Understood,’ Paniatowski muttered.
Tyndale was still sitting at the table where they had left him, though from the look of apprehension as he saw Paniatowski approach, it was plain that he had at least considered flight.
Woodend and his sergeant resumed their seats. ‘So Meg’s husband remarried straight away, did he?’ Woodend said, as if there had been no gap at all in the conversation.
‘That’s right,’ Tyndale confirmed.
‘I suppose it’s hardly surprisin’ that he didn’t spend long in mournin’ after the way Meg had humiliated him,’ Woodend continued. He paused, and gave his sergeant a warning look, but Paniatowski seemed completely wrapped up in her own thoughts. ‘I shouldn’t imagine Mr Ramsden did a great deal to stop the trial and burnin’, either.’
‘Mr Ramsden?’ Tyndale repeated, mystified. ‘Her father? I thought I’d already told you that he was dead.’
‘Not her father,’ Woodend said. ‘He wouldn’t have been called Ramsden, would he? It’s her husband I’m talkin’ about.’
‘Ah, I see what you mean,’ Tyndale said. ‘You’re wrong, but that’s probably my fault for explaining it badly. Her husband wasn’t a Ramsden at all.’
‘Then why was she?’
‘Strictly speaking, she wasn’t. But that’s the way things were in villages. Whoever they were married to, women were habitually called by their maiden name until the day they died.’
‘Which, in Meg Ramsden’s case, was probably long before she would have gone naturally,’ Woodend said. ‘Anyway, I take it that this husband – whatever his name was – didn’t do too much to stop her being burned.’
‘Far from it,’ Tyndale told him. ‘In fact, he was one of the main instigators of it.’
‘Along with the Dimdykes.’
‘I really have made a mess of explaining things, haven’t I?’ Tyndale said. ‘He didn’t help the Dimdykes. He was a Dimdyke. Harry Dimdyke. The man who tied her to the stake.’
Twenty-Eight
Mary Dimdyke, the nineteenth virgin since the death of Meg Ramsden to go through the ritual, took a deep breath at Lou Moore’s front door before knocking. When the door swung open, she slipped off her shoes and stepped through the gap.
It was a warm evening, but the inside of the cottage had none of the heat of the air outside, and Mary felt a chill on the soles of her bare feet. She looked around her. She couldn’t see much. The electric light had been switched off, and the room was lit by half a dozen tall candles in the centre of the floor.
The people sitting beyond these candles were no more than dark shapes. Mary wondered for a moment if her brother was there – but then realized, of course, that he was not. This was a vital part of the process, but it was not one that the Witch Maker had a role in.
‘Art thou Mary Dimdyke?’ asked a deep voice from beyond the circle of light.
‘I am,’ Mary said.
‘Dost thou know why thou art here?’
‘I h ... have been called by the sp ... spirit of Roger Tollance.’
And around the room, her words were echoed by everyone gathered there. ‘The spirit of Roger Tollance ... the spirit of Roger Tollance ... the spirit of Roger Tollance ...’
Mary knew the whole story of Roger Tollance, of course. Everyone in Hallerton knew the story.
Roger Tollance had been nothing when it all began. Less than nothing. A shell of a man who had once been a priest but had lost his faith in God and replaced it with a faith in drink.
For a while he had fallen in with a group of strolling players who, their own theatre in London having been closed due to outbreak of the plague, had taken to touring the provinces to make a living. They had been hard-drinking men themselves, but in the end even they had not been able to take Roger’s excesses, and when the company had moved on from Hallerton, they had simply left him behind.
That he had remained had been due less to his desire to stay than a lack of will to go on. A man could scrounge as easily in Hallerton as he could anywhere else, he had probably told himself – easier, since there was no competition.
For years, children had pointed at him scornfully as he lay drunk in the street. Adults, feeling pity for him, had offered him a space in their barns, where he had lain down in the straw with the beasts of the field. Sores had covered his face and body. He stank. No one had ever imagined that he would become a great man – the saviour of the village. No one had thought, in those long-gone days, that his spirit would still be being invoked nearly four centuries later.
‘Dost thou come here of thy own free will?’ a disembodied voice in the corner of the room asked Mary.
No! she wanted to scream. I come because it is expected of me. I come because even my own father and my own brother will not protect me from this.
But aloud, she said, ‘I do c ... come of my own free will.’
‘And why dost thou come?’
‘Because I must pl ... play my p ... part. We must all pl ... play our p ... parts.’
‘We must all play our parts,’ Roger Tollance said, standing on the Green on the blackened spot where Meg Ramsden had been burned.
And people were listening to him! For the first time since he had cast off his cassock and left his church for ever, people were listening to him.
There had been great changes in the village since Meg had been killed. Tom and Harry Dimdy
ke had been arrested and tried, and were soon to be executed. The rest of the village had been denounced from the pulpits and in the countless broadsheet ballads.
Hallerton was an evil place, full of evil folk, it was said. The villagers were beyond redemption for what they had done. They would burn in hell, just as Meg had burned on the Green. Though it was not visible to the naked eye, the Mark of Cain was on them, and would go with them to their graves. They were less than human – less, even, than animals.
The villagers had ignored such rebukes at first. They had done right, they claimed. Anyone who had known Meg Ramsden would have done the same. But then the weeks passed and the rebukes continued – and slowly the dam of reassurance had begun to crack.
Perhaps there had been another way, people began to say.
Perhaps, despite her evilness, Meg had not deserved the fate the village had inflicted on her.
Doubts spread. Could the rest of the world be so wrong? people began to ask themselves.
Soon there were some who openly admitted that they had sinned. Children would suddenly burst out weeping. Grown-ups would strike their own heads with their bunched-up fists. The blacksmith mutilated his own hand with a red-hot iron, to show that he was penitent. A farm labourer hanged himself from an old oak tree next to his cottage. The village was dying of guilt and self-loathing. And then Roger Tollance – a dead soul himself for so many years – had spoken.
‘We must all play our parts,’ he repeated to those assembled on the Green. ‘We must unite again, as we were united once before. We must reaffirm our moral purpose – must show that justice is on our side.’
‘And how will we do that?’ one of the crowd asked.
Roger Tollance’s eyes blazed with his new-found fervour.
‘We must not deny this thing that we have done,’ he said – although, after denouncing Meg, he himself had done very little.
‘Not deny it?’
‘No! Rather, we must celebrate it. We must be defiant in the face of the Devil and those who follow in the wake of his forked tail. If all of England says that we are wrong, we must show them by our actions that we know we are right!’
‘What actions dost thou speak of, Roger?’
‘Jesus Christ died even before your grandfathers’ grandfathers were born, yet every day his priests re-enact His triumph over death. Why then, should we not re-enact our triumph over evil?’
‘But how?’
‘The Witch is dead – her body turned to ashes. But were she amongst us once more, would we not burn her again? And this is the message that we must proclaim to all who will listen. We will suffer – we will all become martyrs if need be, as Tom and Harry Dimdyke will soon become martyrs – but we will not recant. We will never recant! And though those chosen to follow in the footsteps of Tom and Harry will have the greatest role to play, no one – from the tiniest child to the most aged amongst us – will be excluded. We all have our parts to play.’
‘Dost thou see the chair, Mary Dimdyke?’ asked the voice in the shadows.
How could she fail to see it, surrounded, as it was, by candles rendered down from sheep fat by the faithful? And how could she look at it – how could any of them look at it – without seeing Meg Ramsden sitting there, as she had sat there on the last day of her life?
‘I s ... see it,’ Mary said.
‘And wilt thou now sit in that same seat, as it is written thou must sit?’
What choice did she have? she asked herself.
There had been those, over the years, who had fled the village. But what had become of them? They had been swallowed up by the wicked world outside – a world in which darkness was allowed to prevail because none of those who inhabited it had the courage to fight back. They had – so deep village rumour proclaimed – rolled around in the sinfulness of that world, and died in misery.
Sacrifices must be made – that was what Roger Tollance had taught. And those who carried the blood of the Ramsdens and the Dimdykes must always pay the heaviest price.
‘Wilt thou sit, Mary?’ the voice asked again.
‘I will s ... sit,’ Mary replied.
She stepped between the candles, and lowered herself on to the chair. And immediately, as her own arms made contact with chair’s arms, she felt a strange power – which both revolted and attracted – begin to flow into her.
She wanted to move, but she could not.
She wanted to say that this was all a mistake – but she knew that it was not possible for her to be right, and for generations of villagers to be wrong.
The man stepped from out of the shadows, and she could now see that it was Lou Moore – and that he was holding some kind of metal instrument in his hand.
‘Wilt thou submit, Mary Dimdyke?’ he demanded.
She lowered her head, so that her eyes fixed on the flagstones which made up the floor.
‘I w ... will submit,’ she said.
Twenty-Nine
It was the morning of the last full day before the Witch Burning, and a beautiful morning it was. The sky was blue, save for a few of those tiny, fluffy clouds which always rush about trying to look busy on even the slightest excuse of a breeze. In the fields rabbits scuttled and hares lazed, while up above them skylarks and swallows swooped and glided. Gorse popped, and buttercups basked in the sunshine. Insects chirped cheerfully and even the croaking frogs managed to give the impression that they were glad to be alive. There was a feeling of total well-being in all the air which surrounded Hallerton, though none of it, of course, dared to enter the village itself.
Mary Dimdyke sat on her orange crate, watching her brother at work on the Witch. Today, despite the mild weather, she was wearing a knitted woollen cap on her head. It was the same cap – they said – that Roger Tollance himself had commissioned all those years ago.
‘For thou must go out into the fields and find the ewe which is the whitest of the white,’ he had told the village women. ‘And from the wool that thou obtainest, thou must knit the cap that the virgin shall wear.’
Could it really still be the same cap? Mary wondered. Could it actually have survived that long?
Yes! she decided, answering her own question. In this village, it could! But not by magic, as outsiders might think. If it had survived, it had done so because the collective mind of the village had willed it to.
The cap itched. She could have removed it if she’d wished. Because even though this was the most restricted of all societies, just about to enter the most restrictive of all its cycles, there existed no rule – amazingly enough – which said she had to wear it.
Yet despite the fact that she could have shed it with one rapid movement of her hand and arm, she did not. She couldn’t – somehow – bring herself to.
Was it shame that prevented her taking off the cap? she asked herself.
If it was, it was shame without cause – for despite her proclaiming that she had submitted willingly, it had not been her choice.
Besides, shame was something the villagers had been told they should never feel. If they did what they should do – what they had to do – how could there be any shame at all?
Yet shame there had been, she thought.
Doris Raby had felt shame.
Beth Thompson had felt shame.
Her brother, Wilf, did not know about Doris and Beth. She should not have known about them herself until she was older. But she was a woman, and women shared their secrets, even when they were not supposed to.
Mary scratched her head through the cap.
‘Try not to think about it, our Mary,’ Wilf said, looking up briefly from his work.
‘Who’s speakin’?’ Mary demanded.
‘I am.’
‘An’ who are you? The Witch Maker? Or my brother?’
‘Your brother,’ Wilf said. ‘I’ll always be your brother, Mary, whatever happens.’
‘You weren’t my brother last night!’ the girl said with a sudden fury. ‘You could have stopped it if yo
u’d wanted to!’
‘I tried,’ Wilf said. ‘You heard me.’
‘You should have tried harder!’
Wilf shook his head. ‘It wouldn’t have done any good. I used to think it might stop one day – but I don’t believe it any more.’
‘How can you say that?’ Mary asked.
‘Because it’s obvious,’ Wilf said, angry himself now. ‘If it wasn’t obvious, I wouldn’t be the Witch Maker, would I?’
Monika Paniatowski stood in the Meg Ramsden Museum, enthralled by the portrait of Meg.
There was real character – real force – in that face, she thought.
And though there was very little similarity between herself and the woman who had been burned for witchcraft – apart from their both having blonde hair – she liked to think that when she looked in the mirror she could see a similar strength and determination to Meg’s staring back at her.
But were there other ways in which she was just like Meg, too?
‘If Meg had been able to fulfil herself in a way most other women did, she may have been less interested in money and adultery,’ Tyndale, the ‘so-called’ local historian had said the previous night. ‘I believe the contemporary phrase for what she did is “displacement activity”.’
‘Displacement activity!’ Paniatowski repeated to herself, with disgust.
How like a man to produce an impressive-sounding phrase to explain away something he didn’t even begin to comprehend. Only a bird with damaged wings could possibly know what it felt like to no longer be able to fly. And only a woman who was brought up believing that it was natural to have children could know what it was like to find out that, in her case, that simply wasn’t true!
There have been so many changes in her life recently. She is a WPC. She’s finding it tough – very tough – but she is confident that, in the end, she will succeed. And she seems to have overcome her aversion to men, an aversion dating back to a dark period in her childhood that she doesn’t even want to think about now.
She’s dating a man. She’s even sleeping with him. She doesn’t love him, but she likes him – and the sex is good. And then one morning, she realizes that her monthly period is several days late.
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