Suffer a Witch Read online

  Elizabeth’s face hovered in front of her. “You did not see Mother,” she said.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “No, you didn’t! I’ve never seen her, and if I can’t, neither can you. She would visit me first. I was her first child and she loved me. You killed her.”

  Sybil wondered why her sister told lies.

  Elizabeth bent closer. “Did you know you were born without a face?”

  That was another lie. It wasn’t possible. Sybil blinked at her and said, “No face?”

  “Papa’s right. You are cursed. I saw you myself, the day you were born. There was something strange over you, a veil, and you haven’t been right in the head ever since. Mama died just after. ’Twas you who took her away from me. Now don’t you feel bad?”

  Curious, thought Sybil. Elizabeth seemed so convinced, yet Sybil knew the truth, had felt and heard her mother’s love. Shrugging, she climbed into bed without answering Elizabeth.

  Elizabeth blew out the candle. The last thing Sybil saw that night was her sister’s face filled with a peculiar envy.

  THE WHITE LIGHT THAT was Sybil’s mother glowed in the northeast corner of the room. Sybil’s eyes flashed over to her, but the light flashed away faster. “I fear that Father and I grow apart,” she said aloud, but quietly, because no one should overhear these conversations with the dead. “But my friends, Mother, they’re my true sisters. I don’t wish to cast away the bonds of my shared blood with Cathy and Elizabeth, but in soul, ’tis Pippa and Alice that I love. They understand my oddity. They know I see things that others cannot. Lillibet, Pippa’s mother, calls it the Sight.”

  She paused because she heard the creaking of the floorboard outside her bedroom, but then she heard the soft “meow” of Galahad, the old cat, their mouser.

  “My dreams are full of visions, things so real I can’t tell when I wake and when I sleep. Sometimes, Mother, I think you send them to me. Do you?”

  There was no response. Mostly Sybil’s mother liked to listen, not answer.

  “Others might call it devilry. But how could it be, when it helps people? The other day I looked into my face bowl and saw a sheep lying down in pain, near the copse on Baxter’s hill. I told Alice, who told her father, and they found a sheep in that very spot. It was in a breech birth. The lamb and mother both were saved, because Goodman Baxter got to them in time to help the laboring. So the Sight has done good.”

  Sybil felt the familiar hand of sleep begin to tug at her mind. “Goodnight, Mother.” She set aside her embroidery, blew out the candle, and had a rather frightening dream that a grey dog with bared teeth chased her down the road.

  THE NEXT MORNING OVER breakfast porridge, Sybil relayed her disturbing dream. Perhaps her sisters knew of someone who owned a greyhound.

  “Are you afraid of dogs, Sybil?” asked Catherine. Her hair was a dirtier shade of Sybil’s silvery ash blond and she was strenuous about keeping it beneath a coif.

  At this early hour, Sybil’s hair was still hanging about her face. Her scalp was sensitive to her hair being tugged into place.

  “No, dogs don’t frighten me,” said Sybil. “Except that one.”

  “Dreams mean nothing,” said Elizabeth. “To put much stock in them is to believe your own self more capable than God of revealing mystery.”

  “Did not Joseph … um … interpret the dreams of Pharaoh?” asked Catherine. Her question trailed off toward the end, as if she’d lost her nerve halfway through.

  “The land of the Egyptians was an impure place,” said Elizabeth, “and the Pharaoh an ungodly man. Joseph never tried to interpret his own dreams.”

  “How do you know?” said Sybil. “Perhaps his own dreams helped him interpret others’.”

  Elizabeth looked down her nose.

  Catherine poured her sisters a second cup of tea. It was bought from the Dutch traders and its complex taste made Sybil think of the hot foreign slopes on which it grew.

  “We are blessed to have this,” said Elizabeth. “Most families cannot afford it.”

  “Providence has blessed us,” said their father, entering the room dressed for the day. “I’m glad my girls enjoy the tea. I am not a man of fashion—the French drink excessive amounts of tea—but I do believe it fortifies our constitutions.”

  “May I?” asked Catherine, holding up the pot to pour him a cup.

  After their father drank his tea and retreated back to his study, Elizabeth said, “’Tis a shame that Winifred’s brother Thomas Radcliff is away at Oxford. He would be sought after here. But ’tis a necessary thing for a man to have letters, and an education toward the ways of God.”

  “Do you like Thomas, Elizabeth?” asked Catherine.

  Elizabeth pretended to contemplate. “Though he’s a year younger than I—him twenty-one—I think I should not object to him. Perhaps he’ll surprise us all by returning for a visit at the end of his term.”

  “I think not,” said Sybil, who knew Thomas would not be home, because he was not at Oxford at all. He was fighting in the King’s army. That was a secret Sybil would keep.

  The Radcliffs were Royalists, but amongst neighbors who all favored the Parliament, General Cromwell, and the New Model Army, the merchant family kept their politics carefully hidden.

  “Sybil, what would you know about Thomas Radcliff?” Elizabeth said. “He pays no attention to flighty girls.”

  Sybil tilted her head and shrugged. All this talk of Thomas—Tom, as she knew him—pulled her away from the present moment. In her mind’s eye it was last year, last winter, when Tom asked her to tell him silly stories and when she knitted him a crooked scarf. “’Tis meant to be crooked,” she said, “it folds easier about your neck.” She’d showed him how it worked. Then he’d kissed her, first on her red nose, then on her lips. “Hmm,” she said to her sisters, “is it not strange how in winter, tea and hot beverages warm us? And how in summer, when the air is hot, the same thing with a sprig of mint can cool us?”

  “You make no sense,” said Elizabeth.

  “No sense,” said Catherine.

  “Thomas aside,” said Elizabeth, “I expect other matches might be made this summer. Winifred’s cousin Jonas Martin is visiting soon, from Stowmarket, and will bring his family connections. They’re in the printing business, Bibles and such. A virtuous man.”

  Elizabeth and Winifred Radcliff were great friends and shared this sort of thing with each other, often with quiet Catherine listening to their chatter.

  “There are fine men to make husbands in the Vale already,” said Sybil.

  “Hugh Felton,” said Elizabeth, and sighed. The eldest Felton boy was the true aim of Elizabeth’s acquisitive heart. He called at the house on occasion. It could even be called courting. Hugh and Elizabeth went for walks around the village common in full view of their watchful parents. After these evenings, Elizabeth was always flushed and excitable, the same way she got when she was about to win at marbles.

  “Do you see,” said Elizabeth, “how that girl throws herself at him? What is her name? The cunning-woman’s daughter.”

  “Pippa,” spoke up Catherine. “They call her Pippa. That’s what Sybil calls her.” She pointed across the table as though this were a sin on Sybil’s part.

  “Philippa,” Elizabeth’s voice dripped across the table. “Just as well, it is. She’ll fall on her face for him and be reminded of her proper role in society.”

  “But wasn’t her father a yeoman?” said Cathy.

  “He’s dead,” said Elizabeth. “So she’s nobody.”

  “Unless you have a baby someday,” said Sybil. Her fingers traced the rim of her teacup and she peered inside at the black swirls of tea leaves at the bottom. “She will be a midwife like her mother and her grandmother.”

  “I’m quite sure Isabel Moore will receive the license. She’s much more respectable.”

  Isabel Moore thought she had knowledge of midwifery on account of having three children. Sybil remembered that Isabel had purchased a conce
ption potion from Lillibet, so she must not be everything she claimed.

  Elizabeth continued, “It disgusts me how brazen Philippa acts around Hugh. He is the son of Sir John Felton! He’ll take an upright wife into his family.” Elizabeth clucked and bristled in her chair. Sybil was reminded of a snooty hen. Elizabeth continued, “I predict that girl will go the way of Anne Buckett. Quite lewd.”

  “I hear a redbreast,” said Sybil, standing up with a clatter. “Do excuse me!” She twirled out the kitchen door and into the garden, where the tittering laughter of her sisters was just another faint sound on the breeze. She swung herself around the trunk of a tree and slid down it to wait. A few minutes later the robin redbreast landed on the thorn hedge and trilled at her. She smiled. “Greetings, Robin!”

  Through the window she could see the figure of her father, hunched over the large English-printed Bible, and his head was in his hands as though despairing.

  Sybil was untroubled. She watched the billowing motion of the laundry, the white sheets that Martha had hung on the line, and she wondered if that was what men at sea witnessed when they traveled to far-away places. Her thoughts were likewise carried away on the wind.

  THE SUN WAS JUST past its zenith in the sky when Sybil meandered down the lane from the Baxters’ farm. She’d gone to visit Alice, helped her with chores, and played a clapping game with the younger girls. Sybil liked to invent such games with rhythm and rhyme. As she passed the back garden of the Radcliff house, she could not help peering through the hole in the fence. She’d done this when Tom was around and they would whisper confidences through the boards.

  The tidy, well-kept garden was not empty. Winifred, Tom’s sister, was bending over to pick a lone weed. She winced and shifted her posture; the whalebone point on the bodice was not designed for gardening.

  Closer to Sybil’s spying eye, a fat red ladybug chased the season’s first aphids on a strawberry plant. Chamomile had been planted to ward off evil spirits—Winifred knew a great deal about gardening—but ladybugs were the best cure for the tiny black pests.

  Winifred stopped to smell an odd, foreign-looking plant and wrinkled her nose at it. Then she got a speculative look on her face. Sybil felt sympathy for such a look. It meant Winifred was swimming in the pond of ideas, fishing for something. Then the rich girl took a long, deep breath and ran an impatient finger under the tight cuff of her sleeve. The cuff was lined with tiny pearls.

  It was a bit silly to wear such fine clothes for gardening. Sybil might have warned Winifred that it was just the sort of thing a Royalist would do. The Radcliffs tried very hard to fit in as Puritans, but they were not, and Sybil knew it all too well.

  Winifred’s brown hair gleamed beneath her head cap as she turned and went inside. Shrugging, Sybil skipped home, wondering if Winifred would ever be her sister-in-law … if only the civil war would end, and Tom would come home, and the Radcliffs wouldn’t have to be so tense and awkward and full of secrets.

  Later, as Sybil sat in her own less orderly garden, she heard voices drifting through from the parlor. Winifred had come to call on Elizabeth. They called on each other often. Sybil flinched at the sound of Elizabeth’s strident greeting, and at the superior tone in Winifred’s. She wished that her future sister was not so much like her current one.

  Unaware that Sybil was listening through the window, Winifred said, “I saw your sister running off to visit that farm. Baxter, is it? Rather low for her.”

  Elizabeth sighed. “She gets worse all the time. There’s something wrong with her. She’s always saying the oddest things.”

  “I don’t know how you put up with her,” said Winifred. A tone of eagerness crept into her voice. “What is the last thing she said?”

  “This very morning she jumps up from the table, cocks her head like a bird, and then leaps practically out the window, all arms and dancing legs. ‘Coo! Coo! I hear a redbreast!’”

  “Chirp, chirp!” Winifred added. “We ought to fashion her some wings as a gift, since she likes birds so much. Birds of a feather …”

  “And then tell her the wings work, and she ought to try jumping from the roof,” said Elizabeth. “She’s silly enough to believe it.”

  Winifred giggled. “It would be a tragedy.”

  “A tragedy?”

  “For the shrubberies below!”

  Elizabeth’s laughter rang louder than she usually allowed herself.

  A silent tear had formed in Sybil’s left eye, but it didn’t fall. Not yet.

  Elizabeth called Martha. “Bring us two slices of that cake,” she ordered. “Winnie, can’t we eat outside?” She claimed that sunlight cleared the spots she sometimes got on her face.

  “No, I’ll muddy my hems,” said Winifred.

  Sybil frowned. Winifred hadn’t seemed worried about her hems earlier, pulling weeds in her own garden.

  “Fine, let us open the other window, at least. I’ll have Martha do it.” Elizabeth sighed and Sybil could hear the creak as she sat down onto a chair. “I wish I might have new cuffs like yours.”

  This was the beginning of a familiar conversation. Sybil had overheard it several times before.

  “I wish the shape of my ears was as nice as yours,” said Winifred.

  “At least you have a bosom to speak of,” said Elizabeth, undoubtedly looking down at her own meager chest.

  “I wonder who speaks of my bosom!”

  “I wish someone would speak of mine!”

  By “someone” Sybil knew Elizabeth meant Hugh Felton.

  Winifred said, “But really, Elizabeth, I expect that you and I are the prettiest girls in the Vale. Certainly the most sought-after.”

  “By far,” Elizabeth agreed. “Hugh comes calling almost every week now.”

  “And my cousin Jonas will be visiting from Stowmarket in a fortnight,” Winifred said.

  “Yes, that’s right! I suggested that he should know my sister.”

  Winifred laughed. “Oh, really?”

  “Humble Cathy, not Sybil! Good Lord. No one in their right mind would marry that creature. I don’t believe she’s truly related to me.”

  Blinking quickly, Sybil dashed away the second tear that sprang up. They didn’t know, and she didn’t want them to know, about the boy she loved. And he loves me, too.

  “A changeling,” said Winifred.

  “I imagine so. I would dread to think the same qualities were in me.”

  “I don’t think you have any of Sybil’s qualities,” Winifred reassured her friend.

  “I certainly have better taste in the company I keep,” said Elizabeth.

  “Sybil’s friends are so unsuitable,” said Winifred. “I saw them running barefoot a few weeks ago. They’re practically feral.”

  “And unclean.”

  “Downright threadbare.”

  “Horribly madcap.”

  “Wallydrags!” said Winifred. “Ninnies!”

  Elizabeth’s voice was full of the hysterical tears of laughter. “Ne’er-do-wells!”

  “Barking skullduggers!”

  Their howls must have brought Martha into the parlor, for the door opened and the older woman murmured, “Your cake, Miss Yates.”

  “Set it down on the table. And open that other window.”

  Martha’s footsteps retreated and the door closed again.

  Winifred giggled.

  Elizabeth said, “Lewd beasts.”

  There was a long, somewhat awkward silence and Sybil heard the sounds of forks and plates and chewing. Their words reverberated in her head. She felt winded, giddy, like after falling from a tree. Her intuition told her that Winifred wasn’t cruel, just carried away into Elizabeth’s mean streak. Still, Sybil didn’t know what was worse, to be genuinely malicious or to follow along with someone who was.

  Winifred was speaking again, and Sybil stayed quiet and still as she listened. “Did you see the hole in that Philippa’s collar in church the other day? It looked like a moth had eaten through it. How dreadful.”


  “W-W-WOULD YOU HELP me c-count the sheep?” Alice asked Pippa one day on Baxter’s hill. “I g-get so distracted thinking about each one, r-r-r-r-remembering who was taken with a cough last year and wh-who had a lamb the y-y-year before.”

  Pippa smiled. It was so like Alice to make friends with the farm animals. And counting sheep with a stutter could not be easy. “Do you still name them as you did when we were girls?”

  “No,” said Alice with a blush. “Well, n-none but Esther.” She pointed to a ewe with black ears who had a small lamb by her side.

  “Why Esther?”

  “Because she was m-m-mated to the king of Farmer Pye’s herd. ’Tis like the story of Esther in the Bible.”

  “I suppose it is! Here, we’ll sing the trick as we count them. The old way of counting sheep, you remember?”

  “N-n-not all of it.”

  “It’ll bring good fortune to them.” Pippa clapped her hands together and shouted at the sheep. “All right, all of you! Into the pen!”

  Alice’s younger brother Ralph—who worked as shepherd boy during the time he wasn’t in his grammar lessons—used his stick to prod the animals forward. “Oy! In ye go!”

  The sheep bleated in protest.

  “Say it now,” said Pippa. “With me!” As the sheep were herded by Ralph one at a time through the gate, she began, “Yan. Tan. Tethera. Pethera. Pip. Sethera. Lethera.”

  Alice joined in. “Hovera. Dovera. Dik. Yan-a-dik. Tan-a-dik. Tethera-dik. Pethera-dik.”

  The chant seemed to calm the sheep, as though somewhere in their collective memory they knew this was the rhyme of shepherds. There was a break in the thick clouds overhead and the hill lightened. Pippa loved the vantage point from here. She could see down to the Green Man Inn—like many of the other villagers, she refused to call it by its new name—and the road and across the Vale to the forest. She could even see her own home with a thin plume of smoke rising from the stone chimney.

  “A R-Radcliff c-cousin is coming for a visit,” said Alice when all the sheep were counted and the gate locked behind them. Although she and Pippa did not associate with the Radcliffs, their news was village news.