An Instance of the Fingerpost (43 page)

Did I, or anyone else, need a franker confession? The calm way she confessed to her power frightened me mightily, and I did my best to summon the contrition she wanted. But she was right on one score: I felt little; her devils made her see true.

‘You are making me suffer,’ I said in desperation. ‘It must stop.’

‘Whatever you suffer is less than you deserve until you have a change of heart.’

She smiled, and my breath caught in my throat as I saw the look on her face, for it confirmed everything I had feared. It was the clearest admission of guilt that any court of law ever heard, and I was only sorry that there was no one else around to witness that moment. The girl saw that I had understood, for she pitched up her face and let out a peal of laughter.

‘Leave me be, Jack Prestcott, lest worse befall you. You cannot undo what has been done; it is too late for that, but the Good Lord punishes those who transgress and will not repent.’

‘You dare speak of the Lord? How can you even utter His name?’ I shouted in horror at the blasphemy. ‘What are you to do with Him? Talk of your own master, you fornicating witch.’

Straight away, her eyes flashed with the darkest anger, and she stepped forward and struck me on the face, grabbing my wrist and pulling my face to her own. ‘Never,’ she hissed in dark voice which seemed more like that of a familiar than her own, ‘never talk to me like that again.’

Then she pushed me away, her breast heaving with emotion, while I too was winded by the shock of the assault. Then, lifting her finger at me in a warning, she walked off, leaving me trembling in the middle of the empty street.

Less than an hour later, I was seized by a violent griping of the
guts which left me curled up on the floor, vomiting out my stomach so violently I could not even cry out in pain. She had renewed her attack.

I could not talk to Thomas about this matter; he could not give me any help at all. I doubt that he even believed in spirits; certainly he was of the opinion that the only proper response was prayer. But I knew that this would be insufficient; I needed a powerful counter-magic fast and there was no means of getting it. What was I to do, run after Blundy and ask her if she wouldn’t mind pissing in the bottle Greatorex had given me? Unlikely to be successful; nor did I feel like breaking into her cottage and ransacking it for the charm the Irishman said she must be using against me.

I must point out one thing here, which is that my account of my talk with Blundy is accurate in every single detail; it could hardly be other, for her words were engraved on my mind for years after. I say this, because it contained confirmation of everything I knew, and justification of everything that occurred thereafter. There is no room for doubt or misinterpretation: she threatened me with worse and she could hardly do me harm in any other way except through her magic. I do not need to persuade or assert on this matter: she admitted it quite freely when she had no need to do so, and it was only a matter of time before she made good on her promise. From that moment I knew that I was engaged in a battle which would end in the destruction of one or the other. I say this plainly, for it must be understood that I had no choice in what I did: I was desperate.

Instead of Thomas, I went to see Dr Grove, for I knew that he still believed in the power of exorcism. He had once lectured us about this, when he had heard of an affair of sorcery in nearby Kineton when I was about fifteen. He warned sternly about dabbling with the devil and that evening, most strangely and generously, led us in prayer for the souls of those suspected of compacting with darkness. He told us that the invincibility of the Lord can so easily turn back Satan’s powers, if it is genuinely desired by those who have delivered themselves into his arms, and it was one of his major contentions with
the Puritans that, by disparaging the rite of exorcism, they not only lowered the priesthood in the eyes of the population (who continued to believe in spirits whatever their ministers said) but also removed a potent weapon in the never-ending battle.

Apart from catching a glimpse of him in the distance when once I was walking down the High Street a few months earlier, I hadn’t cast eyes on him for nearly three years and I was surprised when I entered his presence once more. Fate had been kind to him. Whereas I remembered a man barely enough fed, with threadbare clothes a size too big for him and a mournful expression on his face, now here before me was a roly-poly character evidently too eager to make up for lost time in the matter of food and drink. I liked Thomas and wanted only the best for him but I felt then he was wrong in thinking Grove unqualified for the parish of Easton Parva. I could see him already rolling down to the church, after a good dinner and bottle of wine, to lecture his parishioners on the virtues of moderation. How they would love him, as well, for everyone likes a character to fit the part life has allotted to him. The parish, I felt, would be a happier place with Grove as its leader than with Thomas, even if it would be less mindful of the awesome fear of the Lord’s chastisement.

‘I am glad I find you well, Doctor,’ I said as he allowed me into his room, as packed with books and as littered with paper as I recall the quarters allotted to him at Compton Wynyates.

‘You do indeed, Jack, you do indeed,’ he cried, ‘for I no longer have to teach snotty-nosed youths like yourself. And, if God’s will be so, will shortly no longer have to teach anyone at all.’

‘I congratulate you on your escape from servitude,’ I replied as he gestured me to move a pile of books and sit down. ‘You must relish your improved estate. From being a family priest to being a Fellow of New College is a grand recovery for you. Not that we were not all extremely grateful for your earlier misfortune. For how else would we have had such a learned tutor?’

Grove grunted, pleased at the compliment, but half-suspecting I was joking at his expense.

‘It is indeed a great improvement,’ he said. ‘Although I was grateful to Sir William for his kindness, for if he had not taken me into his household, I would have starved. It was not a happy time for me,
I’m sure you realise that. But then, it turned out to be an unhappy period for you as well. I hope that life as an undergraduate is more to your taste.’

‘Well enough, thank you. Or at least it was. At present, I am in grave trouble, and I need to beg you for help.’

Grove seemed concerned at this bald statement, and earnestly asked what was the matter. So I told him everything.

‘And who is this witch?’

‘A woman called Sarah Blundy. I see you know the name.’

Grove looked dark and angry at the mere mention, and I thought that perhaps it might have been better had I not said, but in fact I did well.

‘She has caused me great grief recently. Very great grief.’

‘Ah, yes,’ I said vaguely. ‘I did hear some slanderous talk.’

‘Did you indeed? Might I ask from whom?’

‘It was nothing, merely tavern gossip. I had it from a man called Wood. I straightway told him his words were shameful. I came close to boxing his ears, I must say.’

Grove grunted once more, then thanked me for my kindness. ‘Not many people would have had such an honourable response,’ he said curtly.

‘But you see,’ I continued, pressing my advantage, ‘she is a dangerous character, in one way or another. Everything she does causes trouble.’

‘The witchcraft is confirmed by astrology?’

I nodded. ‘I do not trust this Greatorex absolutely, but he was adamant that I was bewitched and that she was formidably powerful. And there can be no other source of it. As far as I am aware, no one else has cause to resent me in any way.’

‘And you have been attacked in your head and your guts, is that right? By animals, and visited in dreams.’

‘On several occasions, yes.’

‘But if I remember, you had such headaches when you were a child as well, is that not the case, or is my memory playing false?’

‘All people have headaches,’ I said. ‘I was not aware that mine were of any greater intensity.’

Grove nodded. ‘I feel you are a troubled soul, Jack,’ he continued in a kindly fashion. ‘Which distresses me, for you were a happy child, even though wild and untameable. Tell me, what concerns you, that your face is become set in such an angry expression?’

‘I am under a curse.’

‘Apart from that. You know there is more than this.’

‘Do I need to tell you? Surely you know the disasters that have afflicted my family. You must; you were in Sir William Compton’s family long enough.’

‘Your father, you mean?’

‘Of course. What distresses me most is that my family, my mother in particular, wishes to forget the whole matter. There is my father, his memory weighed down by this accusation, and no one except myself seems concerned to defend him.’

I had misjudged Grove, I think, for I had a childish apprehension of seeing him, half-expecting that the passing of years would be as nothing and he would again pull out his rod; it was as well that he was more able to treat me as an adult than I was to think as one. Rather than telling me what to do, or lecturing me, or giving advice I did not wish to hear, he instead said very little, but listened to me as we sat there in his darkening room, without even getting up to light a candle when the evening lengthened. Indeed, until I spoke of my troubles that evening in New College, I had not realised I had so very many of them.

Perhaps it was Grove’s way of religion that made him so quiet, for although no papist, yet he believed in the confessional, and would give absolution in secret for those who truly desired it, and whom he trusted to keep their mouths shut. In fact, it occurred to me that, if I so wished, I could at that very moment blight his chances for ever and secure Thomas’s place. All I had to do was beg him to hear me, and then report him to the authorities as a hidden Catholic. Then he would be too dangerous for preferment.

I did not do so, and perhaps it was a mistake. I thought Thomas was young and another parish would come along in due course. It is natural (so I now know) for youth to be in a hurry, but ambition must be tempered by resignation, enthusiasm by deference. I did not think so then, of course, but I like to believe there was more than
simple self-interest in my decision to spare Grove from the disgrace I could have visited upon him so easily.

Self-interest there was, as I shall reveal; in fact I later wondered at the mystery of Providence which led me to him, for my distress led me to my salvation, and turned the curse under which I laboured into the agent of my success. It is remarkable how the Lord can take evil and turn it into good, can use a creature like Blundy to reveal a hidden purpose quite the opposite to the intended hurt. In such things, I believe, are the true miracles of the world, now that the age of prodigies is past.

For Grove was teaching me again, in the best disputational fashion, and I never had a better lesson. Had my real tutors been so skilled, I might even have taken to my legal studies with more of a will, for in his hands I understood, if only fleetingly, the heady brew that argument can be; in the past he had confined his instruction to fact, and drilled us ceaselessly in the rules of grammar and suchlike. Now I was a man and entered into that age when rational thought is possible (a sublime state, given to man alone, and denied by God’s will to children, animals and women), he treated me as such in matter of education. Wisely, he used the dialectic of the rhetor to examine the argument; he ignored the facts, which were too tender in my mind, and concentrated on my presentation to make me think anew.

He pointed out (his arguments were too close for me to remember the precise stages of his reasoning, so I present here only an outline of what he said) that I had presented an
argumentum in tres partes
; formally correct, he said, but lacking the necessary resolution and thus incomplete in evolution and hence in logic. (As I write this, I realise I must have paid more attention to my lessons than I realised, for the nomenclature of the scholar comes back to me surprisingly easily.) Thus the
primum partum
was my father’s disgrace. The
secundum
was my penury through being disinherited. The
tertium
was the curse I had fallen under. The task of the logician, he pointed out, was to resolve the problem and unify the parts into a single proposal, which could then be advanced and subjected to examination.

‘So,’ he said, ‘consider afresh. Take the first and the second parts of your argument. What are the common threads which link them together?’

‘There is my father,’ I said, ‘who is accused and who lost his land.’

Grove nodded, pleased that I could remember the basics of logic, at least, and was prepared to lay out the elements in the correct fashion.

‘There is myself, who suffers as a son. There is Sir William Compton, who was executor of the estate and comrade of my father in the Sealed Knot. That is all I can think of at present.’

Grove inclined his head. ‘Good enough,’ he said. ‘But you must take it further, for you maintained that without the accusation, the first part, your land would not have been lost, the second part. Is that not the case?’