Aunt Dimity and the Village Witch (22 page)

“Good,” I said, relieved. “Work will take his mind off…other things. Keep an eye on him, Deirdre.”

“I will,” she said. “I, too, am very focused on my work.”

After a pleasant meal, my lunch mates and I strolled across the green to the schoolhouse. We arrived ten minutes early, but the joint was already jumping. The rejected volunteers had evidently forgiven Elspeth for spurning them because she sat among them, chatting animatedly about the weather, the rising cost of petrol, and the impact a seventeenth-century memoir might have on Finch.

Bree, with her customary foresight, had posted herself in the doorway to act as a lookout, in case Daffodil Deeproots or others of her ilk reappeared in the village. Charles and Grant chose seats in the back row, but I sat up front with Amelia in the chair she’d saved for me. As the automated bells in the church tower struck half past twelve, Lilian entered the schoolhouse, carrying the scroll I’d found in Dove Cottage and a notepad similar to the one she’d used to record the second page’s translation.

The villagers quieted as she made her way to the dais at the front of the schoolroom. She placed the scroll and the notebook on the long table that had last seen action during the Guy Fawkes Day committee meeting, then faced the assembly and gave a succinct summary of the memoir’s origins as well as the contents of its first and second pages.

“Sounds as if the rector admired Mistress Meg,” Dick Peacock opined when Lilian had finished her introduction. “Says she cured folk without asking for payment. What’s
fearsome
about that? Wish I could find a doctor today who put his patients before his bank account.”

A murmur of agreement rippled through the room. Lilian waited for it to pass, then picked up the scroll.

“The third page of the Reverend Gowland’s memoir is considerably longer than the first two,” she said. “I have translated it from Latin into English to the best of my ability in the short space of time I requested.” She exchanged the scroll for the notepad. “I will now read my translation to you. Please hold your comments until I’ve finished.”

I could tell by Lilian’s somber expression that something was troubling her, but she read the translation in a deliberately neutral tone of voice, as if she were reading the minutes of a duller-than-average committee meeting.

“The summer of 1652 was fraught with misfortune,” she began. “The rains failed, crops withered, livestock struggled, and my people knew hardship and hunger. To console my flock, I read to them from the Book of Job and preached that God in His wisdom sends trials to test and to strengthen our faith in Him. I reminded them of Christ’s suffering and bade them endure their afflictions as He did, humbly and with their minds turned always to the kingdom of heaven.”

Lilian flipped to the next page and continued, “But Jenna Penner twice stood up in church to contradict me. In the first instance, she testified that God had sent the drought to punish us for harboring a pagan. She railed against the woman in the woods who came not to church to sing God’s praises, but sang to her goats on the Sabbath, in mockery of God’s law. She said the woman who used black magic to heal would one day use it to do great harm. She warned that God would turn his face from us until we cast the wicked woman into darkness.”

Lilian flipped to the third page in her notebook.

“In the second instance, Jenna Penner stood in church to accuse the woman in the woods of killing her pig. Jenna said: ‘I saw the
witch behind my house, bathed in the full moon’s light, calling upon the Adversary to help her to take revenge on the one who spoke against her. She chanted strange words and made queer signs in the air with a forked branch. When she pointed the branch at my pig, it fell down dead.’”

Lilian’s rapt listeners shuffled their feet and shifted uncomfortably in their chairs. She forestalled any mutterings with a sharp look, then bent her head over her notepad and resumed reading.

“A visiting cleric heard Jenna Penner’s testimony and brought word of Mistress Meg’s offenses to the witch finder in Cheltenham. The witch finder and his men came to subject Mistress Meg to the required ordeals. When they came, I led the faithful to the house in the woods, for I wanted them to see justice done.”

Lilian looked up from her notepad. “So ends the text. It’s followed by another small drawing, or glyph. I’ve made an enlarged sketch of the glyph. If it means something to you, please speak up.”

She handed a sheet of white paper to Amelia, who held it out for me to see. On it, Lilian had drawn three arrows bound in the middle like a bunch of flowers. I studied it briefly, then shook my head.

“Doesn’t ring the faintest bell,” I said.

Amelia passed the sketch to Elspeth and it quickly made the rounds, drawing blank looks from everyone who examined it.

“Questions?” Lilian asked.

“Yes,” said Henry Cook. “What does the rector mean when he talks about Mistress Meg’s ordeals? Does he mean they tortured her?”

“It depends on your definition of torture.” Lilian’s manner changed from neutral to scholarly as she continued, “By the mid-seventeenth century, most educated Englishmen regarded extreme forms of torture as an unreliable means of extracting the truth from a suspected criminal. Techniques such as flaying, branding, the gouging out of eyes, and the breaking of bones on the rack were, therefore, no longer used to coerce confessions from alleged witches.”

“Well, that’s good, isn’t it?”
Henry said uncertainly.

“It was progress of a sort, I suppose,” Lilian allowed. “Unfortunately, witch-hunters resorted to less flagrant forms of torture. The three principle forms were known as swimming, pricking, and watching and walking.”

“What’s wrong with swimming?” asked Millicent.

“The swimming test was meant to prove that a woman had rejected the water of baptism and was therefore both a heretic and a witch,” said Lilian. “It involved tying a woman’s limbs together or tying her to a chair, and tossing her into a pond or a river. If the woman sank, she was released from custody. If she ‘rejected’ the water and floated, she was found guilty as charged. As you can imagine, the swimming test resulted in many drownings. On the other hand, buoyant women were sent to the gallows, so they weren’t much better off than their more leaden sisters.”

“They did that to Mistress Meg?” said Millicent, aghast. “After all the good she’d done?”

“I don’t know,” said Lilian. “The Reverend Gowland doesn’t specify the types of ordeal Mistress Meg faced.”

“What about the other thing?” said Opal. “The pricking?”

“Pricking was a way of finding a witch’s mark,” said Lilian. “It was believed that all witches had a place on their bodies that wouldn’t flinch or bleed if pricked with a needle. Sometimes a dagger like needle—a bodkin—was used for the pricking. A woman could be stabbed hundreds of times by a witch finder intent on finding a witch’s mark.”

“They stuck Mistress Meg with needles?” Opal said, her face pale. “Hundreds of times?”

“Again, I don’t know,” said Lilian. “Gamaliel doesn’t say.”

“What was the third one you mentioned?” asked Selena Buxton, almost fearfully. “The watching and walking?”

“It was, perhaps, the most wicked torture of all,” said Lilian. “I
regret to say that some elements of it are still practiced in so-called civilized countries. Watching and walking combines acute sleep deprivation with starvation. A suspected witch’s clothing would be taken from her. She would be dressed in a simple shift and made to sit in a cell for hours, sometimes for many days and nights, without sleep or food, while the witch hunters watched her.”

“What did they expect to see?” asked Selena.

“They hoped the witch’s familiar—a demonic cat or dog or, in Mistress Meg’s case, a demonic goat—would turn up to feed her,” said Lilian.

“They thought a
goat
would appear in the cell, carrying a plate of
food
?” Henry said incredulously.

“You have the general idea,” said Lilian. “When no familiar appeared, they ordered the suspect to walk barefoot around her cell for hour after endless hour, while they pelted her with questions. I doubt that many women survived watching and walking without giving the witch hunters precisely the answers they sought.”

Selena bowed her head, Opal shook hers, Millicent clucked her tongue in disgust, and Elspeth shuddered. Charles and Grant looked uncharacteristically grim. Dick and Henry were clearly revolted, Amelia bit her lip, and gentle George Wetherhead looked as if he might faint. I wrapped my arms around myself, as if an icy breeze had blown through the room. I’d foreseen Mistress Meg’s tragic end, but hearing my hunch confirmed gave me no pleasure.

“Makes you sick to think of it,” Dick muttered.

“What’s sick,” snapped Lilian, in a voice that was far from neutral and no longer scholarly, “is the willingness of one human being to brutally torment another in the name of God or country or anything else. I’d hoped for something better from Reverend Gowland, but he was, after all, a man of his times. He, and others like him, stood by and did nothing while an innocent woman was taken away to be tortured and hanged. If and when we recover the memoir’s fourth
page, I shall find it distasteful in the extreme to translate his description of Mistress Meg’s miserable death.”

She stepped off the dais, passed the scroll and the notepad to Amelia, and left the schoolhouse, her eyes blazing with fury. A hushed silence ensued, followed by the rustling noises of people collecting their belongings and getting quietly to their feet.

“We’d best be in church tomorrow morning,” Henry said wisely. “We don’t want Mrs. Bunting any more upset than she already is.”

“You needn’t remind me to go to church, Henry Cook,” said Millicent. “I’m sure I’ve never missed a Sunday service.”

“You missed four Sunday services in a row last March,” Selena reminded her.

“I had pneumonia,” Millicent retorted. “Missing a service doesn’t count if you’re sick.”

“I don’t recall reading anything in the Bible about sick leave,” said Opal.

“I never said it was in the Bible,” Millicent barked.

The familiar strains of Handmaidens bickering came as a welcome relief after Lilian’s harrowing lecture. I glanced at the scroll in Amelia’s hand and felt strangely guilty for finding it.

“Will you be in church tomorrow?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, gazing fixedly at the scroll. “Mrs. Bunting invited me to sit up front with her.”

“New parishioners usually do.” I hesitated, then asked, “Are you all right, Amelia?”

“Mmm-hmm,” she replied absently, turning the scroll to look at it from different angles. “It’s a terrible thing, isn’t it? The way the past can haunt the present?”

“You don’t have to go on with the search, you know,” I said. “If it’s too disturbing for you, we can stop it right here, right now.”

“The search?” she said, as if coming out of a trance. “Must we go on with the search? Of course we must. Alfie would have seen it
through to the end, regardless of the outcome, and so will I.” She stowed the scroll and the notepad in her carpet bag, stood, and walked up the center aisle, saying, “Thank you for finding page three, Lori. I’ll see you at church tomorrow.”

I watched my new friend leave the schoolhouse, feeling as though I’d missed something important.

Twenty

T 
he three-arrow glyph stumped Aunt Dimity, but she thought she knew what I’d missed in my unsettling exchange with Amelia.

Night had fallen. Will and Rob were upstairs, asleep, and dreaming, no doubt, of winning the Grand National on Thunder and Storm. Bill was stretched out on the couch in the living room, reading the newspaper he’d abandoned to work on Monsieur Delacroix’s will, Stanley was sleeping on Bill’s chest, and I was in the study, curled comfortably in a leather armchair before a crackling fire, with the blue journal open in my lap.

“Enlighten me,” I said. “Tell me what Amelia meant when she said that the past haunted the present.”

I stretched my feet toward the fire as the familiar copperplate scrolled confidently across the page.

You’ve evidently forgotten that Amelia is related by blood to Gamaliel Gowland. If she feels a personal connection to him, his words are bound to affect her more strongly than they would someone whose interest in Gamaliel is purely academic.

“She’s depressed because her distant ancestor was a rat?” I shook my head. “I don’t buy it, Dimity. If I looked hard enough, I’m sure I could find a rat or two dangling from my family tree, but it wouldn’t send me into a tailspin. Amelia didn’t even know Gamaliel was her multi-great-granduncle until she read Alfred’s papers. Why would she care so much about him now?”

Because the memoir has brought Gamaliel Gowland to life, made him real to her, in a way a family tree never could.

“The memoir’s made him real for all of us,” I said. “And in that
sense, I agree with you. I felt pretty haunted by the past after Lilian’s talk about witch hunts. It made me think of how tempting it is, even today, to look the other way while terrible things are done to innocent people. I’d like to believe I’d rush to their defense, but maybe I’m not so different from Gamaliel.”

You? Look the other way? With your sharp tongue and quick temper? Ha! You would have chased the witch-hunters off with a pitchfork.

I chuckled ruefully. “Thanks, Dimity. I think.”

At any rate, I’m not convinced that the rector was a rat. His sermons weren’t aimed at finding scapegoats for the drought. They were stories of endurance in the face of catastrophe. Furthermore, he seems to have ignored Jenna Penner’s initial rant about Mistress Meg, and it was a visiting cleric, not Gamaliel, who used Jenna’s second tirade as an excuse to bring the witch finder to Finch. Perhaps Gamaliel was in love with Meg after all.

“If he loved her,” I said flatly, “he would have protected her.”

How? Remember the times, Lori. Superstition was rife, witch-hunting was legal, and rectors who refused to toe the line could be accused of advocating witchcraft. If Gamaliel had spoken out
—