Daughters of the Witching Hill

  Daughters of the Witching Hill

  Mary Sharratt

  * * *

  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT

  Boston New York 2010

  * * *

  Copyright © 2010 by Mary Sharratt

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce

  selections from this book, write to Permissions,

  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,

  215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Sharratt, Mary, date.

  Daughters of the Witching Hill / Mary Sharratt.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-547-06967-8

  1. Witchcraft—England—Lancashire—Fiction. 2. Trials

  (Witchcraft)—England—Lancashire—Fiction. 3. Witchcraft—

  England—History—17th century—Fiction.

  4. Lancaster (England)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3569.H3449D38 2010

  813'.54—dc22 2009042057

  Book design by Melissa Lotfy

  Map by Jacques Chazaud

  Printed in the United States of America

  DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  * * *

  FOR MY MOTHER

  * * *

  Dedicated to the memory of Elizabeth Southerns,

  alias Mother Demdike.

  And to Alizon Device, Elizabeth Device,

  James Device, Anne Whittle, Anne Redfearn,

  Alice Nutter, Katherine Hewitt, Jane Bulcock,

  John Bulcock, and Jennet Preston.

  * * *

  She was a very old woman, about the age of Foure-score

  yeares, and had been a Witch for fiftie yeares. Shee

  dwelt in the Forrest of Pendle, a vast place, fitte for her

  profession: What shee committed in her time, no man

  knowes.... Shee was a generall agent for the Devill in

  all these partes: no man escaped her, or her Furies.

  —THOMAS POTTS, The Wonderfull Discoverie of

  Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, 1613

  * * *

  A CHARME

  Upon Good-Friday, I will fast while I may

  Untill I heare them knell

  Our Lords owne Bell,

  Lord in his messe

  With his twelve Apostles good,

  What hath he in his hand

  Ligh in leath wand:

  What hath he in his other hand?

  Heavens doore key,

  Open, open Heaven doore keyes,

  Steck, steck hell doore.

  Let Crizum child

  Goe to it Mother mild,

  What is yonder that casts a light so farrandly,

  Mine owne deare Sonne that's naild to the Tree.

  He is naild sore by the heart and hand,

  And holy harne Panne,

  Well is that man

  That Fryday spell can,

  His Childe to learne;

  A Crosse of Blew, and another of Red,

  As good Lord was to the Roode.

  Gabriel laid him downe to sleepe

  Upon the ground of holy weepe:

  Good Lord came walking by,

  Sleep'st thou, wak'st thou Gabriel,

  No Lord I am sted with sticke and stake,

  That I can neither sleepe nor wake:

  Rise up Gabriel and goe with me,

  The stick nor the stake shall never deere thee.

  A charm to cure one who is bewitched, attributed to

  Elizabeth Southern's family and recorded by Thomas Potts

  during the 1612 witch trials at Lancaster.

  * * *

  I. BY DAYLIGHT GATE

  Bess Southerns

  1

  SEE US GATHERED HERE, three women stood at Richard Baldwin's gate. I bide with my daughter, Liza of the squint-eye, and with my granddaughter, Alizon, just fifteen and dazzling as the noontide sun, so bright that she lights up the murk of my dim sight. Demdike, folk call me, after the dammed stream near my dwelling place where the farmers wash their sheep before shearing. When I was younger and stronger, I used to help with the sheepwash. Wasn't afraid of the fiercest rams. I'd always had a way of gentling creatures by speaking to them low and soft. Though I'm old now, crabbed and near-blind, my memory is long as a midsummer's day and with my inner eye, I see clear.

  We three wait till Baldwin catches a glimpse of us and out he storms. Through the clouded caul that age has cast over my eyes, I catch his form. Thin as a brittle, dead stalk, he is, his face pinched, and he's clad in the dour black weeds of a Puritan. Fancies himself a godly man, does our Dick Baldwin. A loud crack strikes the earth—it's a horsewhip he carries. My daughter fair leaps as he lashes it against the drought-hard dirt.

  "Whores and witches," he rails, shrill enough to set the crows to flight. "Get out of my ground."

  Slashes of air hit my face as he brandishes his whip, seeking to strike fear into us, but it's his terror I taste as I let go of Alizon's guiding hand and step forward, firm and square on my rag-bundled feet. We've only come to claim what is ours by right.

  "Whores and witches," he taunts again, yelling with such bile that his spit sprays me. "I will burn the one of you and hang the other."

  He speaks to Liza and me, ignoring young Alizon, for he doesn't trust himself to even look at this girl whose beauty and sore hunger would be enough to make him sink to his knobbly knees.

  I take another step forward, forcing him to back away. The man's a-fright that I'll so much as breathe on him. "I care not for you," I tell him. "Hang yourself."

  Our Master Baldwin will play the righteous churchman, but what I know of him would besmirch his good name forevermore. He can spout his psalms till he's hoarse, but heaven's gates will never open to him. I know this and he knows I know this, and for my knowing, he fears and hates me. Beneath his black clothes beats an even blacker heart. Hired my Liza to card wool, did Baldwin, and then refused to pay her. What's more, our Liza has done much dearer things for him than carding. Puritan or no, he's taken his pleasure of her and, lost and grieving her poor murdered husband, ten years dead, our Liza was soft enough to let him. Fool girl.

  "Enough of this," I say. "Liza carded your wool. Where's her payment? We're poor, hungry folk. Would you let us starve for your meanness?"

  I speak in a low, warning tone, not unlike the growl of a dog before it bites. Man like him should know better than to cross the likes of me. Throughout Pendle Forest I'm known as a cunning woman, and she who has the power to bless may also curse.

  Our Master Baldwin blames me because his daughter Ellen is too poorly to rise from her bed. The girl was a pale, consumptive thing from the day she was born, never hale in all her nine years. Once he called on me to heal her. Mopped her brow, I did. Brewed her feverfew and lungwort, but still she ailed and shivered. Tried my best with her, but some who are sick cannot be mended. Yet Baldwin thinks I bewitched the lass out of malice. Why would I seek to harm a hair on the poor girl's head when his other daughter, the one he won't name or even look at, is my own youngest granddaughter, seven-year-old Jennet?

  "Richard." My Liza makes bold to step toward him. She stretches out a beseeching hand. "Have a heart. For our Jennet's sake. We've nothing more to eat in the house."

  But he twists away from her in cold dread and still won't pay her for her honest work, won't grant us so much as a penny. So what can I do but promise that I'll pray for him till he comes to be of a better mind? Soft under my breath, masked from his Puritan ears, I murmur the Latin refrains of the old religion. How my whispered words make him pale and quake—doe
s he believe they will strike him dead? Off to his house he scarpers. Behind his bolted door he'll cower till we're well gone.

  "Come, Gran." Alizon takes my arm to lead me home. Can't make my way round without her in this dark ebb of my years. But with my inner eye I see Tibb sat there on the drystone wall. Sun breaks through the clouds to golden-wash his guilesome face. Dick Baldwin would call him a devil, or even the Devil, but I know better. Beautiful Tibb, his form invisible to all but me.

  "Now I don't generally stand by woe-working," says my Tibb, stretching out his long legs. "But if you forespoke Master Baldwin, who could blame you, after all the ill he's done to you and yours?" He cracks a smile. "Is revenge what you want?"

  "No, Tibb. Only justice." I speak with my inner voice that none but Tibb can hear. If Baldwin fell ill and died, what would happen to his lawful daughter, Ellen? Her mother's long dead. Another poor lass to live off the alms of the parish. No, I'll not have that burden on my soul.

  "Justice!" Tibb laughs, then shakes his head. "Off the likes of Dick Baldwin? Oh, you do set your sights high."

  Tibb's laughter makes the years melt away, drawing me back to the old days, when I could see far with my own two eyes and walk on my own two legs, with none to guide me.

  2

  BY DAYLIGHT GATE I first saw him, the boy climbing out of the stone pit in Goldshaw. The sinking sun set his fair hair alight. Slender, he was, and so young and beautiful. Pure, too. No meanness on him. No spite or evil. I knew straight off that he wouldn't spit at me for being a barefoot beggar woman. Wouldn't curse at me or try to shove me into the ditch. There was something in his eyes—a gentleness, a knowing. When he looked at me, my hurting knees turned to butter. When he smiled, I melted to my core, my heart bumping and thumping till I fair fainted away. What would a lad like that want with a fifty-year-old widow like me?

  The month of May, it was, but cold of an evening. His coat was half black, half brown. I thought to myself that he must be poor like me, left to stitch his clothes together from mismatched rags. He reached out his hand, as though making to greet an old friend.

  "Elizabeth," he said. "My own Bess." The names by which I was known when I was a girl with a slender waist and strong legs and rippling chestnut hair. How did he know my true name? Even then I was known to most as Demdike. The boy smiled wide with clean, white teeth, none of them missing, and his eyes had a devilish spark in them, as though I were still that young woman with skin like new milk.

  "Well, well," said I, for I was never one to stay silent for long. "You know my name, so you do. What's yours then?"

  "Tibb," he said.

  I nodded to myself, though I knew of no Tibbs living anywhere in Pendle Forest. "But what of your Christian name?" After all, he knew me by mine, God only knew how.

  He lifted his face to the red-glowing sky and laughed as the last of the sun sank behind Pendle Hill. Then I heard a noise behind me: the startled squawk of a pheasant taking flight. When I turned to face the boy again, he had vanished away. I looked up and down the lane, finding him nowhere. Couldn't even trace his footprints in the muddy track. Did my mind fail me? Had that boy been real at all? This was when I grew afraid and went cold all over, as though frost had settled upon my skin.

  First off, I told no one of Tibb. Who would have believed me when I could scarcely believe it myself? I'd no wish to make myself an even bigger laughingstock than I already was.

  Ned Southerns, my husband, such as he was, had passed on just after our squint-eyed Liza was born, nineteen years ago. He blamed me for our daughter's deformity because he thought I'd too much contact with beasts whilst I was carrying her. In my married years, I raised fine hens, even kept a nanny goat. There was another child, Christopher, three years older than Liza and not of my husband, but he was far and away from being the only bastard in Pendle Forest. The gentry and the yeomen bred as many ill-begotten babes as us poor folk, only they did a better job of covering it up. Liza, Kit, and I made our home in a crumbling old watchtower near the edge of Pendle Forest. More ancient than Adam, our tower was. Too draughty for storing silage, but it did for us. Malkin Tower, it was called, and, as you'll know, malkin can mean either hare or slattern. What better place for me and my brood?

  But folk whispered that it seemed a curious thing indeed that one such as I should live in a tower built of stout stone with a firehouse at its foot that boasted a proper hearth when many a poor widow made do with a one-room hovel with no hearth at all but only a fire pit in the bare earthen floor. In truth, my poor dead mother got the tower given her for her natural life—towers named after slatterns hide guilty secrets.

  When my mam was young and comely, she'd served the Nowell family at Read Hall. Head ostler's daughter, so she was, and she'd prospects and a modest dowry besides. But what did she do but catch the eye of Master Nowell's son, then a lad of seventeen years? The Nowells were not an old family, as gentry went, nor half as grand as the Shuttleworths of Gawthorpe Hall or the de Lacys of Clitheroe. The Nowells' fortunes had risen along with the sway of the new religion. Back when Old King Henry's troops came to sack Whalley Abbey, the Nowells sent their men to help topple the ancient stone walls. The King rewarded their loyalty by granting the Nowells a goodly portion of the abbey's lands. One of Old Man Nowell's sons went to faraway Cambridgeshire to make his name as a Puritan divine, or so I'd been told. Far and wide, the Nowells let it be known that they were godly folk. But even the pious are prey to youthful folly.

  My mam, before her fall from grace, had been an upright girl, so the young Master Roger could hardly discard her as easy as he would some tavern maid. And that was why Mam was given Malkin Tower for the rest of her life on the condition that she never trouble the Nowells of Read Hall. Far enough from Read, it was, for them not to be bothered by the sight of her, but it was close enough for them to keep watch of her, should she seek to blacken their good name. My mam and I were never respectable—respect costs money and we hadn't two pennies to rub together. We'd Malkin Tower to live in but no scrap of land for grazing sheep. Most we could manage was a garden plot in the stony soil. By and by, I think the Nowells had fair forgotten us. When my mam passed on, bless her eternal soul, the tower was in such poor repair they didn't seem to want it back. So I stayed on, for where else had I to go? It seemed they preferred to have no dealings with me and that it shamed them less to allow me to carry on here like a squatter, not paying a farthing's rent.

  My natural father died some years back, happy and fat and rich. His eldest son, my own half-brother, also named Roger, had become the new master of Read Hall, part of it built from the very stones his grandfather's servants had carted away from the ruined abbey. Younger than me, was my half-brother, by some twenty years. Rarely did our paths cross, for the Nowells went to church in Whalley with the other fine folk, never in the New Church in Goldshaw with the yeomen and lesser gentry. But once, of a market day in Colne, I clapped eyes on Roger Nowell. Impossible to miss him, the way he was sat like some conquering knight upon his great Shire horse, blue-black and gleaming, with red ribbons twisted in its mane. That was some years ago, when my half-brother's face was yet smooth and unlined. A handsome man, he was, with a firm chin just like mine. I looked straight at him to see if he would recognise his own blood kin. But his sharp blue eyes passed over me as though I were nowt but a heap of dung.

  Over the years he'd become a mighty man: Magistrate and Justice of the Peace. We in Pendle Forest were careful not to cross him or give him cause for offence. On account of my being a poor widow, he granted me a begging license. Did it through the Constable without speaking a word to me. And so I was left to wander the tracks of Pendle Forest and wheedle, full humble, for food and honest work.

  But gone were the days when Christian folk felt beholden to give alms to the poor. When I was a tiny girl, the monks of Whalley Abbey fed and clothed the needy. So did the rich folk, for their souls would languish a fair long time in purgatory if they were stingy to us. In the old days, the poor we
re respected—our prayers were dearer to God than those of the wealthy. Many a well-to-do man on his deathbed would give out food and alms to the lowliest of the parish if they would only pray for his immortal soul. At his funeral, the poor were given doles of bread and soulcakes, so my mam had told me.

  The reformers said that purgatory was heresy. It was either heaven for the Elect or hell for everyone else, so what need did the rich have to bribe the poor to pray for them? We humble folk were no longer seen as blessed of the Lord but as a right nuisance. When I went begging for a mere bowl of blue milk or a handful of oats to make water porridge, the Hargreaves and the Bannisters and the Mittons narrowed their eyes and said my hard lot was God's punishment for my sin of bearing a bastard child. Mean as stones, they were. Little did they know. Liza, my lawful-begotten child, was deformed because her father, my husband, gave me no pleasure to speak of, whilst Kit, my bastard, borne of passion and desire, was tall and beautiful and perfect in form as any larch tree. Ah, but the Puritans would only see what they wanted to see. The most so-called charity they doled out was to give me half a loaf of old bread in exchange for a day laundering soiled clouts.

  But I'd even forgive them for that if they hadn't robbed my life of its solace and joy. In the old days, we'd a saint for every purpose: Margaret for help in childbirth, Anne for protection in storms, Anthony to ward against fire, George to heal horses and protect them from witchcraft. Old King Henry forbade us to light candles before the saints but at least he let us keep their altars. In the old days, no one forced us to go to church either, even for Easter communion. The chapel nave belonged to us, the ordinary people, and it was the second home we all shared. Dividing the nave from the chancel with the high altar was the carved oak roodscreen that framed the priest as he sang out the mass. We didn't stand solemn and dour during the holy service, either, but wandered about the nave from one saint's altar to the next, gazing at the pictures and statues till the priest rang the bell and held up the Host for all to see, the plain wafer transformed in a glorious miracle into the body and blood of Christ. Just laying eyes upon the Host was enough to ward a person from witchcraft, plague, and sudden death.