The Witch Hunter's Tale Page 2

  The four of us sat down to supper, and by the light of many candles and warmth of the hearth we were able—for a few minutes at least—to forget the desperate winter cold and banish the memories of Hester’s hanging. But when I looked at Elizabeth’s hair glowing in the firelight, I could not help remembering the desperate straits from which I’d rescued her, and I said a prayer that I could keep her safe.

  Once we’d eaten, I led Elizabeth upstairs to her room and put her to bed. We prayed for the city, the King, and the end of the wars. She added prayers for her mother, asking God to keep her safe from the cold. I lay with her until she slept, and then for a while longer. On some nights evil dreams still visited her. Usually they were of the man who’d killed her mother, and she’d awake screaming. I’d found that if I stayed with her after she fell asleep I could keep such nightmares at bay.

  Later, I retired to my chamber, wrote one letter to my cousin in Hereford and another to the steward of one of my estates there, and then climbed into my own bed. I could hear the wind outside my window and gave God thanks for the warmth and safety that He had given me.

  But a nightmare visited me not long after I drifted off to sleep, as my fevered brain transformed the howling wind into the dying screams of a bewitched child and mother. I woke with a cry, and I scrambled from my bed to splash water on my face in desperate hope of driving away the horrid dream. I knew that sleep would prove elusive and that the dreams would return if I did not exorcise them. While I had spent much of the day trying not to think about Hester’s crimes, I now closed my eyes and recalled them as best I could. On that night it was the only way I would find a measure of peace.

  Chapter 2

  Hester Jackson’s journey to the gibbet had begun the previous September with a child’s fever. We were in the midst of those happy weeks after the heat had broken, but before winter’s early arrival made clear that we had simply exchanged one curse for another. Looking back we should have known better.

  Sarah Asquith appeared at my door early one morning, pale and drawn. I’d delivered her of a son a few months before, and as soon as I saw her face I knew that something had gone wrong. I ushered her into my parlor and sent Hannah for barley water.

  “It is Peter,” she said, even before Hannah returned. The words rushed as if she’d been holding them in for days. She probably had been. “He has a fever, and I’ve tried everything I can think of: oil of roses, a salve of poplar buds … nothing has helped.” I could find no fault there. These were the same cures I would have suggested.

  “Is he still taking the breast?” I asked.

  She nodded. “And I’ve been taking cooling foods, but that hasn’t helped, either. We even paid for a physician to come. He sent me to an apothecary for some wormwood and sea green, but—” She shook her head. Nothing had helped.

  “Sarah, would you like me to examine him?” I asked.

  “Would you?” she asked, taking my hands. “I would be so grateful, my lady.”

  “Of course,” I replied, and the two of us set out for her home in St. Crux parish.

  As we walked through the city, I noted with sorrow the many changes that the war had brought. With so many men taken off to fight—carried by their zeal for God or by Parliament’s press-masters—it seemed as if York had become a city of women and old men. Wives became shopkeepers, daughters worked as craftsmen, and maidens searched in vain for husbands before resigning themselves to lives as spinsters. Every Sabbath the churches filled with prayers for the safe return of our men, but we knew that many would never come home, and few of us had any illusions that the time after the war would be the same as before. While I did not regret my own widowhood—marriage to Phineas would make any woman into a merry widow—I knew that few women had the wealth and family that made my own life so comfortable. Singlewomen, whether spinsters or widows, suffered a hard existence filled with poverty and want.

  The Asquiths’ parish of St. Crux lay in the heart of York, not far from Fossgate Bridge. After a decade in the city, I knew the twists and turns of York’s cobbled streets as well as I knew the lines on my face, but when I’d first come to the city it had seemed to be a maze designed by a madman. London is said to be worse, but I can hardly imagine such a thing.

  We passed through the Asquiths’ shop and climbed the stairs to the rooms above. William Asquith, Sarah’s husband, was one of the suppliers for Parliament’s armies, and had done very well out of it ever since the war began. When the summer’s drought made food even dearer, William profited yet again, and they had filled their home with rich furniture and covered the walls with sumptuous hangings. But I knew by my own hard experience that while wealth gives the illusion of safety, death is not so easily deterred. What had my estates done to protect Michael and Birdy?

  Sarah led me straight to the chamber at the back of the house where her son lay. I caught my breath as soon as I saw the child, and Sarah cried out. The maidservant who sat on the side of the bed holding the child’s hand looked up at us and burst in to tears. He seemed so pale, so still, that I knew we had come too late. I crossed to the bed and felt the boy’s cheeks and chest, but I found neither warmth nor breath. I turned to Sarah, and she buried her face in my neck. I felt a wail rising up through her body before it burst into the room with a force powerful enough to shake the rafters themselves.

  After a few moments, Sarah pulled herself away and lay on the bed next to her son. She cradled his head, kissed his hair, and told him that she loved him. Sorrow welled up inside me and I clenched my jaw to keep my own tears from bursting forth, but it was in vain. Like a flood intent on washing away all that lay before it, my tears poured out as I mourned the death of Sarah’s son, the deaths of my own children, and the deaths of so many other young ones that God saw fit to reap like stalks of grain. I do not know how long I stayed with Sarah. She sent her maidservant to find William, who had gone in search of another physician. While we waited, Sarah and I held the boy and each other. Sarah cried. I prayed for her and wondered that God would take her only son.

  We buried the child the next day, and I left William and Sarah to comfort each other. That night I prayed that Sarah soon would come to me, thrilled and frightened to find that she was with child once more. I would not encourage her with false promises that this time the child would live—my own example would give the lie to such words—but I would do my best to calm her fears. I would remind her which foods she should take and which she should avoid. I would visit her as her travail neared, and tell her that the second time would not be as difficult as the first. I’d say that she would be a wonderful mother and that together we would do our best for her child.

  But I never got the chance to say any of this. Two weeks later Sarah was dead.

  * * *

  Looking back at the events that followed, I could not help wondering what evil might have been avoided if Sarah’s husband had called me to her bedside sooner. Hester Jackson might never have been hanged, and the horrible aftermath would have been avoided. But what use is there in such vain thoughts? Perhaps it was God’s will.

  According to Sarah’s gossips, a few days after the Asquiths buried their son, Sarah and William were sitting at supper when Sarah was taken by a gripping pain in her side. She took to bed and for a time she seemed to improve. But the pain returned, and this time it was accompanied by vomiting and a fever similar to the one that had carried off her son. She demanded water, but no matter how much she drank she could not be satisfied. When her belly became stretched, William summoned a physician, but he could no more help Sarah than he had little Peter. He said that Sarah’s illness was unlike any he’d ever seen, and that he doubted it was natural. It was this physician who, perhaps because he could find no cure, suggested that Sarah might have been bewitched.

  Once that seed had been planted in Sarah’s and William’s minds, it did not take long to grow. Desperate to break the curse, they sought remedies wherever they might be found. William rode out of the city and hired a ble
sser who tried to countercheck the curse that had been laid on Sarah. The blesser did his best, but he had no more success than the physician. He told William that unless he discovered the witch who had cursed his wife, she surely would die. Sarah’s condition grew worse, and death hovered over her. With every passing moment, William grew more frantic and racked his wits for the name of someone—anyone—who might have bewitched his wife.

  Finally he found an answer: Hester Jackson.

  The previous month, just a few days before Peter had fallen ill, William had been in his shop when Hester entered and begged of him a little food. She was a poor old woman, she said, and with bread so dear she had nothing to eat. When William turned her away, Hester had muttered something under her breath. He thought nothing of it at the time, but with all that had happened since, he was convinced that Hester had taken her revenge by bewitching both Peter and Sarah. If we lived in some country hamlet, William might have broken the curse by burning a bit of thatch from her house, but Hester’s home, like so many in fire-frighted York, had a tiled roof. On such small happenings do men’s lives turn.

  Desperate to save his wife, William went to the Justices and accused Hester of witchcraft. Some said that if a witch were taken by the law, her curses would be broken. I do not know if this was William’s hope, but if so, he was disappointed. Hester utterly denied that she was a witch and said she could not lift a curse that she had not cast. Because William stood alone against her, the Justices refused to make an arrest. Sick with fear and grief, William hurried home, only to discover that even as he’d stood before the Justices accusing Hester, Sarah had died.

  With his wife and child newly dead, William found himself alone with his anger and sorrow. Though he never said as much, I think he blamed himself for the death of his family. If he had not denied Hester Jackson a pennyworth of charity, she would not have bewitched Peter and Sarah. But no man can bear such guilt for long, and soon William began his quest to avenge the destruction of his family. He found allies among his neighbors, who said that Hester had always been a bad neighbor and that they had long suspected her of witchery. One woman claimed that Hester had bewitched her churn so she could no longer make butter. Another said she so corrupted a cow that it would not give milk. People remembered that Hester’s mother had long been accounted a witch, and that her aunt (or was it some other relation?) had been hanged as a witch in Lancashire (or was it Cheshire?) some twenty years before.

  After the Justices arrested Hester, the rumors and gossip took on lives of their own, and on some days it seemed that York talked of little else. And while the town might disagree on some of the details or challenge the more extravagant claims, no one denied her guilt.

  “I heard that the devil came to her in the shape of a handsome young man,” Hannah confided to Martha and me one evening. “And he left her an imp, a mouse named Mousnier, to work evil for her.”

  Martha did not even attempt to suppress her snort of disgust. “What, is the devil now a Frenchman? Or does he just employ French mice as his imps? Once their tongues start wagging, the people of this city are crack-brained fools.”

  “Who are we to judge Satan?” Hannah replied, offended by Martha’s scorn. “They say that a company of devils traveled with the Queen from France when she came to marry His Majesty.”

  “And the devils brought their own devil-mouse with them?” Martha shook her head in disbelief and stalked out of the room.

  While Martha could mock the idea of devils and their mice crossing the Channel on a boat, I knew that once people began to gossip about devils and Hester’s imp, I could look forward to a visit from a Justice of the Peace.

  As I expected, two days later a note arrived calling me to the Castle to search Hester’s body for the Witch’s Mark. While the summons did not come as a surprise, I was sorry all the same.

  “You’ll do that?” Martha asked.

  “I have little choice,” I replied. “If Hester had an imp, she must have a teat from which he sucked. And who better to find it than a midwife?”

  “Will I accompany you?” Martha asked. I could hear the uncertainty in her voice. She’d become my apprentice to learn the art of midwifery, not to search old women for signs of witchcraft.

  “It is a part of being a midwife,” I replied. “But remember this: Examining a witch is a delicate thing, and we must tread carefully. So many in the city are convinced that Hester is a witch—” I paused, trying to find the right words.

  “That if we don’t find the Witch’s Mark they will turn their anger on us?” she asked.

  I nodded. “Since she is already known to be a witch, they would wonder why we couldn’t find the Mark. After all, it must be there.”

  “They wouldn’t accuse us, would they?” Martha asked.

  “No, they never would,” I replied with a laugh. “Midwives are the last ones to be called witches. Who is more trusted by their neighbors? No, we are the women who send witches to the gallows, not the women who are sent.”

  “I do not like such work,” Martha said.

  “Nor do I,” I replied. “But it must be done.”

  “And if you find the Mark you’ll send Hester to her death?”

  I paused before answering. A few years earlier I would not have hesitated to perform this duty. But in the time since Martha had come to my house, I’d had a hand in more deaths than I cared to count. And while none could be counted as murder, my appetite for blood, even the blood of the guilty, had long been sated.

  “If I must,” I said at last. I could hear the doubt in my voice.

  I decided to wait until morning before sending a reply to the summons, and that night I petitioned the Lord to take the cup from my lips.

  To my surprise, God answered my prayers in the affirmative. The next morning, hours before sunrise, I heard a knocking at my door. Hannah answered, and by the time she came upstairs to get me I’d already started to dress. There was only one reason for someone to come to my house so early.

  “Jane Morris is in travail,” Hannah said as she helped me finish dressing. “Martha is gathering the necessary herbs and your valise.”

  “Thank you, Hannah,” I said. “Send a note to the Castle telling them I won’t be able to examine Hester Jackson. They should find someone else.” I paused for a moment to thank God for His mercy. Had I known that a more poisonous draught would follow, I would not have been so fervent in my prayer.

  Martha and I had only a few minutes to talk as we walked to St. Wilfred’s parish, where Jane lived.

  “I delivered Jane twice before you came to the city,” I said. “And she’s reached her time, so the child should be a strong one.”

  “Were there any problems with the earlier births?” Martha asked.

  “None at all,” I said. “Perhaps you should take the lead today?” A smile lit up Martha’s face, making it even more beautiful than it ordinarily was.

  “I was hoping you’d ask,” she said.

  As I’d anticipated, Jane’s travail was quick and without any problems. Martha acquitted herself marvelously.

  But the next afternoon it became clear that when I refused to examine Hester Jackson I had called a storm upon the city. Though the initial breeze seemed harmless enough, it was followed by winds and torrents powerful enough to overturn all good order and wash away many lives, including my own.

  * * *

  I was in the dining room helping Elizabeth with her writing when I heard the front door open and then the telltale gait of my nephew Will Hodgson. Elizabeth recognized it as well, dropping her quill and racing to greet him.

  “Elizabeth, your hands are covered in ink!” I cried out as I righted the inkpot she’d knocked over in her haste. Will shouted out in mock horror as Elizabeth approached, and I found them tussling in the entry hall. Will held fast to her wrists while Elizabeth insisted that she wanted to draw a mustache on his face. Since coming to my house, Elizabeth had become especially fond of Will, and I could not help thinking that it w
as because they had been orphaned within days of each other. While separated by years, they were bound by death.

  After I shooed Elizabeth off to find a basin and towel for her hands, Will retrieved his cane from where he had dropped it and came to embrace me. He had been born with a clubfoot, and he spent all his life trying to overcome this deformity. Other children had teased him relentlessly, of course, and Will had learned to defend himself with his fists. When his own father rejected him because of his misshapen body, Will seemed bound for a life of drink and violence. He had been pulled back into a respectable life by my good offices, but more by his love for Martha. They had not yet declared their affection to me, but I had seen and heard enough to know that they intended to marry once Will had established himself.

  For a time, such a match had seemed unlikely, if only because Will’s father, Phineas’s brother Edward, would never have allowed his son—even one with a club foot—to marry a maidservant. But the terrible bloodletting that had visited York the previous summer ultimately freed Will from such constraints. The first step in this strange journey was the return of Will’s older brother Joseph to the city after a time in the wars. Joseph proved to be zealous for the Puritan cause and unceasing in his pursuit of power. His return led to the deaths of half a dozen men and women, including Edward. In the aftermath, Joseph drove Will from their childhood home and seized their father’s wealth. While some men doubted Will’s guilt, none were willing declare his innocence in public; Joseph’s power and ruthlessness were too great, and the consequences of angering him too dire. Will mourned his father, of course, but realized that while he’d lost his wealth, he now had the freedom to marry whomever he chose.

  Will’s fortunes within the city took an unexpected turn for the better when, in the wake of Edward’s death, his godfather took an interest in him. George Breary had been Edward Hodgson’s friend and rival since they had been youths, competing first for the affection of York’s women, and then in business and in government. When the wars had started, Edward favored Parliament, while George remained loyal to the King. Despite all this, the two remained friends, bound by their love for Will and York. To my great pleasure, George recognized Will’s plight after Edward’s death and took him into his service. In the past months George had given Will greater responsibility for his business, even sending him to London in search of silk he could trade to the Scots. If Will’s fortunes continued to improve, he could hope to match his brother’s power and to marry Martha. That is what I begged of God, at least.