Suffer a Witch Read online

  “Dance for the spring!” Pippa declared, throwing her arms in the air and twirling around.

  “Look, look,” Sybil exclaimed. She pointed at the earth.

  A small bright green snake had emerged from beneath a slushy pile of mud and leaves. It slithered toward the fire, perhaps drawn by the warmth or the vibrations of the girls’ feet. Alice stepped back. She was gentle, afraid of snakes and spiders.

  Pippa reached impulsively for the creature, but it was gone before she could touch it. “Spring is upon us!”

  Then came the downpour of bad weather. The girls shrieked as sleet pelted their heads, and their ritual fire was extinguished behind them as they hurried home.

  MID-WEEK, ON THE DAY that the extravagant Catholics would have begun their Lenten fast, Matthew Hopkins rode with Sir Harbottle Grimston the short distance to Manningtree. His dog Elspeth ran at the heels of the horses. Hopkins was eager to meet the other man who shared his knowledge about the plague of witchcraft. When they were almost to the town, they spotted another figure coming from the other direction. Grimston raised a hand in greeting. “That’s him,” he said.

  The horses drew to a halt beneath the spiraling hulk of a diseased chestnut. Its drooping branches made Hopkins nervous. The tree looked like it was melting and it had spots on its bark. On the trunk, someone had carved a rune-like symbol. Witches, Hopkins thought, and the side of his face tingled. They were everywhere.

  The other man hopped off his palfrey. He was of small stature, with excitable hands and eyes that burned. “John Stearne,” he said.

  “Stearne, meet Matthew Hopkins,” said Grimston. “He knows much of identifying witches. He has read the Malleus Maleficarum, have you not, Hopkins?”

  Hopkins nodded. Along with Daemonologie, the Malleus Maleficarum—the “Witch’s Hammer”—was a text that had been used for hundreds of years to prosecute the crime on the Continent. It had been written by two monks who, Hopkins figured, must know what they were dealing with.

  “There’s a rot here in Manningtree,” said Stearne. “We’ll cut it out, by God’s will.”

  “By God’s will,” Hopkins agreed. He could see that Stearne believed as he did. “We will need Christian women as searchers, so we don’t contaminate our own souls by searching for the imps’ suckling marks on the bodies of fallen women.”

  Stearne bared his teeth. “Indeed.”

  “With so much happening, the King, the armies on the move … we cannot afford these troubles,” said Grimston. “It is as you say, John. Witchcraft is a disease that has infected us. It explains the plagues, the violence, the odd signs in the skies. These times have driven the people into the arms of Satan.”

  “Let us begin with the Widow Clarke,” said Stearne. “She has harassed her neighbors for too long. We shall put her in her place.”

  Hopkins was hungry to find the fallen women. If he could discover them … if he could destroy them … their black-bear-evil thoughts would cease tormenting him. He could find God’s peace. He smiled at his mentor and at John Stearne. Their presence told him he was doing the right thing.

  PHILIPPA WYLDE SAT IN church, fidgeting. She couldn’t help herself. Sermons made her restless, the wool of her dress made her skin itch, and the square bonnet pinned atop her head was not sturdy enough to contain her mass of hair. She tapped her shoes on the floor in a drumbeat pattern, earning a glare from Mrs. Radcliff several rows ahead. She sent a vicious grin and continued tapping her feet softly, gently, on the hardwood floor.

  Beside Pippa sat her mother, Elizabeth, whose hearing was not good enough to notice the noise of her shoes. Lillibet, as Pippa called her, was fifty-four years old and what she lacked in hearing, she made up with gimlet eyes.

  From the pulpit, the voice of the Reverend Peter Yates sailed through the rafters of the church. He was a soft-spoken man in daily life and had to project his voice with intent. As a result his tone was inconsistent. In Pippa’s opinion this fit with what he preached, logical inconsistency. She was not old enough to remember the time before Puritan ways had taken hold in East Anglia, but her mother was. Church had not always been so strict.

  There was, however, just one parish church for the forty or so families who lived in and around the country hamlet they called the Vale, so they had no choice but to attend.

  Pippa’s gaze wandered along the pews. She picked out the important people. Near the front was her friend Sybil Yates, the Reverend’s daughter, and Sybil’s elder sisters. All were fair, but the other two had none of Sybil’s odd, effervescent manner. Their mother had died in childbirth with Sybil, leaving their father to raise them with the help of a house-woman.

  Pippa could sympathize. She’d been three years old when her father had died of heart failure after riding on a hot summer day. Lillibet, already almost forty years old at the time, had been left to raise her alone.

  Pippa didn’t usually miss the father she’d never known. Lillibet was her idol, often more of a mentor than a mother, and Pippa wanted nothing more than to be just like her someday.

  On the other side of the aisle from Sybil sat the Radcliff family. They had a daughter about Pippa’s age, named Winifred, but they were a wealthy merchant family, reserved and snobbish, and kept to themselves. She didn’t envy their seats in the front pew, however. The Reverend had a tendency to spit when he said words like penitence, punishment, and propriety.

  Winifred rubbed her eye after the Reverend said “compunction.” Pippa held back her giggles.

  “There be no reason for feast nor fast,” Yates was saying. “In God’s eyes are all days equal, and so there be worship on all days, and on all days do we glorify God and His Son …”

  Pippa was distracted as Lillibet knotted and unknotted an embroidered handkerchief, marred by a few small stains. The hands, too, were knotted and stained with age spots. Many times Pippa had admired their skill when gutting a river fish, or chopping herbs, or knitting.

  In the row at a diagonal to her sat Alice Baxter with her parents and four younger siblings. Alice did not notice Pippa. She was too busy wiping the nose of her eight-year-old brother with a cloth, and then nudging her sister to pay attention to the sermon.

  “And so God sayeth to Job …”

  Pippa turned forward again and peeked at the well-formed head of Hugh Felton. The view of him was blocked by old Widow Moore and the exuberant rolls of her chin. How disappointing. Church was the only time Pippa was guaranteed to see Hugh. Her heart and body ached for the man who had been her childhood friend … but he sat at the front, with his family, and she sat toward the back, only a few rows ahead of the beggars. Pippa turned her eyes away from Hugh, her most desperate dream, and willed the service to be over. Her feet continued to tap. Her thoughts continued to wander. She had too much energy to be contained in the long day of services.

  At last, people were standing up. Pippa was poked by her mother.

  “Work to be done,” said Lillibet.

  “That chicken,” Pippa remembered with a low groan. They’d had a bounty that week, a chicken in payment for a willow bark tea that Lillibet had made for Lady Felton, who suffered headaches. The chicken was meant as a Sunday roast and it was Pippa’s job to kill it and then pluck it. She did look forward to the meat, though. Sustenance in the Widow Wylde’s house was often in the form of less expensive eggs, milk, nuts, or tripe.

  Outside the plain wooden church, the villagers gathered to chat, the most sociable time of the week. Lillibet spoke in a low voice to newly-married Margaret Howell. She could be overheard to say, “If ye rock the cradle empty, ye will have babies plenty …” Lillibet was the only bishop-licensed midwife in this fold of countryside. It often ran through the maternal line … along with Lillibet’s other calling.

  They were known as cunning-folk, and it meant that witchery was in their blood.

  Pippa inched away from her mother, unnoticed, and joined up with Alice and Sybil.

  “I h-h-h-hear you have a chicken f-from the Feltons,”
said Alice. She had a stutter, except when she was in the woods with her friends. Alice almost never spoke to anyone else. Even now her body was turned inward, shying away from her neighbors who might tease or judge.

  “Mmm,” said Pippa with a smirk.

  “Is it up to you to pluck it?” asked Sybil.

  “Mmm.”

  “Cannot be shy with chickens,” said Sybil.

  “Or F-F-Feltons,” said Alice, laughing.

  “I don’t know what you mean!” Pippa laughed too, secretly pleased that her friends had reason to tease her about Hugh’s family. “But you must be excited, Sybil. I heard something about a letter from the Americas. Your father?”

  “Yes, he’s begun correspondence with one of the ministers from the Plymouth Colony. Sometimes I wonder if he would move there himself, were it not for my sisters and our home here.”

  “How th-thrilling!” said Alice, clasping her hands. “Such a n-n-new place. It must be f-f-frightening there.”

  “I hear there are savages,” said Pippa, “who run naked through the forest.”

  “Shhh!” Alice admonished her.

  “Did I hear something about savages?” Hugh Felton approached. He tipped his buckled hat at them. Its brim created a deep shadow on his face, but the light still reflected from his bright blue eyes.

  “The Americas,” said Pippa.

  “My father soon anticipates the company of a minister from the Massachusetts Bay colony,” said Hugh. “I hear he’s returned to convince others to join them. He would tell us the truth about savages, naked or otherwise.”

  Pippa blushed to hear him say the word “naked.” It set her mind off into places that were indecent for a seventeen-year-old virgin girl. “I do not know anyone from the New World.”

  “He’ll be at the textile market at Lavenham,” said Hugh. “We’re going with the Radcliffs this week. Winifred is always good company. Ah, my mother is gesturing at me. A good day to you all.” He tipped his hat once more, lingering an instant longer on Pippa.

  As soon as Hugh stepped away, another girl intercepted him: Elizabeth Yates, Sybil’s oldest sister. Elizabeth gazed up at Hugh, and there was a voracious gleam in her pale eyes. Pippa noticed how fresh and white Elizabeth’s expensive collar was in comparison to her own. It made Elizabeth’s skin look clearer than it was. Hugh complimented her; Pippa could tell by the way she blushed.

  Many villagers said that Hugh was courting Elizabeth. Some—like Goody Brewer, that old gossip—said that he’d made her an offer of marriage.

  Looking wistfully after Hugh, Pippa wished that she, too, had a reason to go to Lavenham. All she could think of was that they were almost out of poppy seeds for the pantry. Lillibet would be proud of her for thinking ahead, but it was not enough of an errand to take the full day at the market. Besides, she didn’t want to run after Hugh. He might tire of her if he saw her every day. “We do need poppy seeds, though,” she murmured to herself.

  “Shall we make cakes?” Sybil suggested. “With the seeds?”

  “That wasn’t my purpose,” said Pippa, startled at how Sybil paid so much attention. She noticed that Elizabeth was walking away from Hugh, her skirts swaying around her ankles, and he was watching. Sighing and turning away, Pippa explained, “Sugar is far too expensive to waste on a cake!”

  “Oh.” Sybil did not keep track of prices on things, or numbers of any sort. “Whatever you do with poppy seeds, will you teach us?”

  “I’ll ask Lillibet,” said Pippa.

  The girls fell quiet when old Joan Buckett and her daughter Anne passed by. Joan held her wooden charity cup with a claw-like hand. It was a Sunday and thus people were made uncomfortable whether they gave Joan a spare coin or not. Sybil moved to give her a penny, but recoiled when Joan Buckett leered at them. Anne waved, then spat into her hand with a half-cackle, half-cough.

  The girls edged away. Alice whispered, “Sh-sh-she scares me!”

  “That’s only because she used to shake her stick at us when we were little,” Pippa said, but she still craved a safe distance. When the threat had passed, no one dared look back for fear old Joan would speak to them, or perhaps whisper a hex to steal their youth and beauty.

  PIPPA SAT UNDER THE shade of an ancient yew tree, scrubbing out a cauldron. The ground beneath the yew was dead ground because of its poison. Lillibet adored the tree, not least because it kept her from weeding that section of yard. Pippa liked the tree too, because in all her years it had never changed, nor would it change for centuries more. The yew tree was immortal.

  The snake at their secret fire festival had been wise to come out of hibernation. Winter was done and it was now late March. On the small grassy knoll next to Lillibet and Pippa’s cottage, bright yellow daffodils clustered, their heads tipped towards each other in joyful conspiracy to keep growing.

  Their property was set apart from the rest of the village as though hiding from its neighbors, its door turned to the northeast instead of a cardinal direction, and its roof beginning to sag at the beams. There were three small windows set in the rough stone—one for each wall but one. The door was plain wood and on the lintel above it, scratched marks could be seen along with a dried bunch of vervain herb: sigils of protection.

  The yard was fenced with wood planks. It kept the large creatures like chickens, geese, goats, and pigs in or out, although rabbits still molested the lettuce in the garden. Pippa had suggested that they acquire a dog to protect the beds, but her mother had said, “Having pets don’t look right.” Perhaps a stone fence one of these years—it would be more permanent, and keep the rabbits out.

  The property was called Wylde-Wood Cottage by the folk, for it had belonged to Lillibet’s family, named Wood. Lillibet had been their only child and when she married John Wylde, the property had passed to him.

  Pippa’s father had been a prosperous yeoman, a free landholder with farms and tenants. His life had been the only thing to hold up the finances of his wife and daughter. When Wylde died, everything changed. They’d moved out of their stone farmhouse and into Lillibet’s old family cottage. By arrangement, all of Wylde’s land had gone to his neighbor Sir John Felton, including Wylde-Wood Cottage.

  Sir John was kind and refused rent from his friend’s widow, but it irked Pippa to be beholden to such charity from Hugh’s father. It reinforced their inferior position, but there was nothing she could do about it, and she had to be grateful.

  A break in the skittish clouds sent a tentative beam of sunlight to the rise of farmland opposite the Vale. A team of oxen could be seen pulling a plow. That field belonged to Sir John, like so much of the land in and around the village.

  Pippa paused her work to wave goodbye to the Goodwife Brewer, their nearest neighbor, who emerged from the cottage after a consultation with Lillibet. Goody Brewer sneezed into one hand and clutched a handful of chamomile flowers with the other.

  After the cauldron was clean and set upside-down to dry, Pippa went inside and climbed the ladder to the loft, her tiny cave of a bedroom, and took off her work apron. She owned three frocks: a best one of thin black wool for church and special occasions, a house dress of blue wool, and her work garment of brown linen. Likewise she had three collars: white linen edged with lace to go with her best frock, and two square beige collars that were admirably humble.

  Back outside, she found Lillibet preparing to leave.

  “I’m off to deliver these,” said Lillibet, waving a cloth sack full of clay jars at Pippa. They were filled with potions and tinctures. “Stay out of trouble, and work on those bottles.” She gestured at a pile of rustic pottery in the yard, jars of varying sizes and shapes, sorted by function. The folk called them witch-bottles, for the ingredients of spells would go inside, and it would be Pippa’s job to paint the symbols on the outside. Happy to be trusted with the task, she nodded and grinned.

  When Lillibet was out the gate, Pippa pinned on her apron once more and dragged the rocking chair outside. The vernal air was sweet in her lungs
and she drank it in. Using a brush and a bowl of homemade ink of blackberry and toad’s blood, she settled a large bottle on her lap and began to draw the horned face of the Devil. One swipe for his brow, another for his curved mouth, two more for the horns … then feathered strokes for his whiskers. This bottle was to protect against Satan’s influence. It would be filled with nails and thorns to bind him and then buried in a hearth or chimney. It was a well-known magical technique: when the Devil saw his face reflected back at him, he would go elsewhere. This bottle was for one of Felton’s new tenants.

  She had moved on to a similar witch-bottle when she heard distant thunder across the hills. “Hmm,” she said, wondering if there would be an early storm.

  Then, it was thunder in the yard, stamping feet and huffing breath: eight-year-old George Pye, one of Farmer Pye’s sons. “Pippa! Where’s Lillibet! We need help!”

  “What’s the matter?” She jumped up, spilling the crimson ink onto the dirt. Hannah Pye, the mother, had just given birth to a girl, and Lillibet had delivered her. What if there was something wrong with the babe?

  But it wasn’t the infant. “Me twin, Francis,” gasped George. “He been bewitched. Where’s Lillibet?”

  A twin-pronged jolt of fear and excitement coursed through Pippa. Bewitching! She’d never seen it directly, and had only made charms for general defense against it. Taking a deep breath and trying to act like Lillibet, she was calm with George and asked him to tell her the problem.

  It seemed that Francis had been about his usual chores that morning when he began to convulse. He’d dropped the plate he’d been washing and it had shattered on the floor. His eyes had rolled back into his head, and his teeth had clattered so hard that he’d bitten off a tiny piece of his own tongue.

  “God Almighty preserve us,” said Pippa. The prayer was real, but at the same time she was overcome with desire to solve the problem herself. She’d never been allowed, but Lillibet was gone … Pippa thought she knew how to break a hex. Once, Lillibet had explained the process, and she had mostly paid attention. She could prove herself now.