The Vanishing Witch (66 page)

One of the servants pulled off my gauntlets and began to rub my hands and head with ice from a pond to bring me to my senses. And my wits returned just long
enough for me to see the smile of triumph that passed between my wife and her so-called son. I knew in that instant that they were lovers and I knew, too, that they had murdered me. That was my last thought as life ebbed from me, and the very last thing I saw as a living man was my wife and her lover, standing hand in hand. And so I found myself dead. Strangely I was as aware that I was dead as
I had once known I was alive, which, trust me, my darlings, is a curious sensation until you grow accustomed to it.

At the funeral Catlin sobbed piteously on her son’s shoulder. It was a tragedy everyone said, a terrible accident. Although that didn’t stop the whole manor, indeed the whole village, speculating as to the cause of my sudden reckless flight and why I had been babbling about the
hounds of fire. Some said the hare my goshawk had caught was a witch in disguise or my horse had trodden upon a patch of St John’s wort and become hag-ridden; others said the devil’s hounds had come to drag me to everlasting torment.

Many believed the latter, and rumours began to circulate in the village that I, Warrick, had been a debauched and evil man, who had raped innocent girls, then cast
them aside. I’m surprised they didn’t add that I had eaten their babies too, for I had, it seemed, treated my poor long-suffering wife with such cruelty that she had been nothing short of a saint for suffering me so long.

The villagers would have been sadly disappointed to learn that the devil didn’t rise up and drag me screaming to the fires of Hell, but neither did any angel reach down and
haul me up to Heaven. Since the thief crucified beside Christ was the only one to speak up for Him as He hung dying, you’d have thought that Jesus would have assigned a corner of Heaven’s kitchen for the not-quite-saintly of this world. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that a man who’d ended his days on a cross might have some fellow feeling for the unjustly condemned? But all kings who come at last to
their thrones are quick to forget that once they had wiped their own backsides, as any beggar, so there were no angels for me. And I’m glad of it, for how else could I be here to protect my beautiful daughter? Besides, I’m not sure they let ferrets into Heaven and I’d miss old Mavet.

Oh, that bitch of a wife killed my poor little Mavet too, all because he came running to my coffin. He knew something
was wrong, could smell the poison. Ferrets have more love and loyalty in a single claw than most men do in their whole bodies. So she locked him in a box and threw it on a fire, just to be sure the imp wouldn’t draw attention to the glove.

And that, as you will have realised, is how she did it. No witchcraft, no spells, just an unguent of her own devising, smeared inside that thoughtful gift.
It works as well on nightcaps and bed linen. Her ointments made her victims grow sick. Sometimes they went mad, but always they died. As I told you, my dear wife had a rare talent.

But now you want to know what happened after the fire. Well, of course, you do, my darlings, and I shall tell you. When the smoke cleared, Robert was found by his neighbours lying unconscious in the corner of the solar
where he’d crawled. Miraculously he lived, if you could call his existence living. Badly burned, he was taken to the infirmary of St Mary Magdalene where the lay sisters tended him throughout his few remaining years. He did not leave their walls again, save for that last journey to the church to be buried by his guild brothers between his two loving and faithful wives. Whether he was happy confined
to the nuns’ tender care, no one ever knew, for the only sounds to escape from his mouth were grunts.

‘Eat your swill, like a good little piglet,’ the lay sisters would say, as they spooned the grey gruel down his throat.

And they’d laugh at their own merry wit, when Sister Ursula was not within hearing, of course, for they’d precious little else in life to offer them amusement, save the pleasure
of tormenting those whose lives were even more miserable than their own. There was no hippocras in St Magdalene’s, at least not for the likes of them or poor Robert.

As for dearest Edward, he was arrested as soon as those two orphaned children tearfully explained to the sheriff how that wicked man had lit the fire. He was charged first with the murder of his mother, but a charge of treason was
swiftly added. For he was Robert’s steward and to attempt to kill your master is, as we all know, treason. And after the summer of rebellion, the justices were not disposed to take a lenient view of such matters. Where would we be if any Tom, Dick or Harry thought he could rise up and overthrow his masters?

Sheriff Thomas went so far as to suggest that Edward had been trying to start another
rebellion, right there in Lincoln. Thomas was commended for his vigilance in arresting the ringleader before anyone else could be hurt. And when his term as sheriff thankfully came to an end, he prospered very nicely under his new royal patronage.

Naturally, Edward tried to blame my sweet, innocent daughter, but that only compounded his guilt. Diot, slow-witted but ever loyal, fearfully confessed
that she thought Edward had already tried to poison his master, which the good physician, Hugo Bayus, claimed he had suspected from the start. Gossip is a powerful weapon. It’s been known to send men to the gallows.

But at least Master Edward had the comfort of not being alone in his final agony for, rest assured, I was there, waiting for him, when his spirit finally left his tortured body. As
I told him, it’s never wise to make enemies of the dead, for you have to spend the whole of eternity with them. And, believe me, his torments were only just beginning, for that old hag, Eadhild, took quite a fancy to young Edward, so much so that she forgot about me.

As for my beloved daughter, I’ll say only this – remember, if you ever take your gaze from a witch, even for a moment, she will
vanish.

The weather-lore, anti-witchcraft charms and spells that head each month and chapter are taken from medieval ecclesiastical writings, recorded British folklore, and from medieval spell books, known as grimoires.

Poison –
Throughout history there have been many alleged incidents of people being murdered by means of clothing impregnated with poison. King John of Castile was said
to have been killed by a Turk who put poison in his boots and Henry VI was rumoured to have been murdered through the wearing of poisoned gloves. A certain Madame de Poulaillon confessed to having dipped the tail of her husband’s shirt in a solution of arsenic to bring about his death, though he got wind of the plot and had her arrested before harm was done.

To find out if she really could have
killed her husband in this way, Dr Lucian Nass shaved the rump of a guinea-pig and gently rubbed it with an arsenic preparation; it died two days later, showing symptoms of arsenic poisoning. This suggests that a combination of the friction of impregnated clothes or bedding against skin, with body heat and sweat, might allow small quantities of certain poisons or hallucinogens to be absorbed, which
would, over time, accumulate in the body to cause illness, delusions and eventually death.

Witchcraft –
In England, during the reign of Saxon King Athelstan, murder by witchcraft, which included the use of spells and charms, was made punishable by death. As with all crimes, trial was often by ordeal. William the Conqueror reduced the sentence to banishment. The death penalty for practising witchcraft
was not reintroduced until 1563, but even then the crime had to involve injury to people or their livestock before a sentence of death could be passed. But people accused of witchcraft in earlier centuries could find themselves accused of the far more serious crime of heresy, which carried the death penalty.

The inspiration for the character of Pavia/Catlin in this novel came from the trial records
of a wealthy Irish woman, Alice Kyteler, who in 1324, with eleven members of her family, was accused of seven counts of witchcraft and sorcery. Bishop Ledrede claimed that Alice was the leader of a group of witches, who held nocturnal meetings at which they sacrificed to the devil and used spells to entrap and murder men. It is the first recorded instance of a woman being accused of gaining
her supernatural powers through sexual intercourse with the devil.

Alice had had four husbands and the accusations of witchcraft were initially brought by the sons of the first three, who swore she had murdered their fathers for their money and was attempting to kill the fourth. This charge seems to have arisen because the sons of the first three marriages had been disinherited in favour of her
favourite son William Outlaw. Petronilla, Alice’s maid, was burned alive at the stake for heresy after confessing under torture, but Alice herself escaped and vanished without trace.

The last witchcraft trial to be held in England took place in 1944. Helen Duncan was arrested in Portsmouth on 19 January 1944 and prosecuted under the 1735 Witchcraft Act. It was alleged that she had used witchcraft
to obtain military information, predict the sinking of a ship, and pretended to conjure the dead, using a parrot medium called Bronco. The prosecution claimed that she regularly produced ectoplasm and, though court witnesses offered to show how easy it was to fake this, the judge refused to allow the demonstration and Helen was found guilty and sentenced to prison for nine months.

After her release
she returned to conducting séances, but in 1956, the police raided the premises when she was in a trance. She collapsed and died. The official cause of death was diabetes, but her supporters claimed her death was caused by damage to her psychic energy from being suddenly brought out of a trance.

Friars of the Sack
– The Friars of the Order of the Penitence of Jesus Christ, were commonly known
as the Brothers of Penitence or Friars of the Sack because of the shapeless, sack-like robe, made of coarse cloth, they wore with wooden sandals. The order was founded in Italy and came to England in 1257, opening a house outside Aldersgate in London. They had friaries in France, Spain and Germany, but lost them in 1274, when Pope Gregory X banned all begging friars, with the exception of the four
mendicant orders of Dominicans, Franciscans, Austin Friars and Carmelites. But the English Friars of the Sack continued in defiance of the pope, surviving until the Reformation under Henry VIII. They lived an austere life, begging for all their needs, refusing to eat any meat and drinking only water.

In Lincoln there are records of a friary belonging to the Friars of the Sack in Thorngate, to
the west of Stamp Causeway and south of St Hugh Croft. It must have been established some time before 1266 because, in that year, the friars were granted part of the common land of the city to enlarge their oratory. But they appear to have left this site by 1307 when the Abbot of Barlings tried to acquire it. It is not known if this was when they left Lincoln, but they seemed to have vanished from
the city by the time of the Black Death in 1348.

Florentines –
The incident of the theft of goods from Lincoln merchants actually took place, though it was in 1375. Members of the societies of Strossi and Albertini of Florence left Lincoln with £10,000 worth of goods (nearly half a million pounds today), which they had not paid for, almost ruining the local merchants. The mayor and bailiffs seized
the goods of Florentine merchants living in the city who were members of the same society, among them Matthew Johan. The Florentines appealed to the King who ordered their goods restored, but the Lincoln and Florentine merchants eventually came to an agreement to enable the Lincoln merchants to recover the money owed to them.

Lincoln –
Sheriff Thomas (1351–1398) is recorded variously as Thomas
de Thimbleby of Poolham, Thomas Thimelby and Thomas Thimotby de Iruham. It is common to find great variations in the spellings of names of this period. He married Dorothy Swynford, and in the 1800s it was claimed she was one of the daughters of the infamous Katherine Swynford, John of Gaunt’s mistress. But there is no evidence that Katherine had a daughter named Dorothy, so it is unlikely they were
related.

In 1380, the old guildhall in Lincoln, where Robert first sees Catlin, was in a bad state of repair. The townspeople eventually took matters into their own hands and pulled it down around 1389, fearing it might collapse and crush people. In a letter to King Richard II in 1390, the mayor complained that certain of the townspeople were refusing to contribute to the cost of building a new
one. The King commanded that everyone should be made to pay, but the money raised seemed to have been misappropriated: in 1393 Sir John Bassy, mayor of Lincoln, was ordered by the King to investigate what had become of the funds to build the new guildhall and pave more of the Lincoln streets.

The new guildhall was eventually built over the Stonebow gate, which was the southern gate to the city
in both Roman and medieval times, but the complex of buildings was not finally completed until 1520. It is still in use today as the city’s council chambers and occasional court room, while the dungeons of the adjoining prison house the city’s treasury. Visitors can take guided tours around this fascinating ancient building.

The tower in the city wall, where Catlin and her lover meet, had ceased
to be used as a defensive tower by the 1380s and, in 1383, was leased by the mayor and people to John Norman with a plot of adjoining land in Butwerk. He was allowed to use it ‘without interference’ unless
ryderwak
was invoked: if the city came under threat in time of war or civil conflict the tower could be commandeered for defence. Sadly, it is no longer standing.

But the Greestone Stairs,
built before 1200, are still in daily use in Lincoln. Originally known as the Greesen from the Old English word for ‘steps’
,
it is a long flight of stone steps outside the city walls that linked the medieval dwellings of Butwerk, at the bottom of the city near the river, to Eastgate in the upper part. The steps led through the postern archway (the rear gate) into the cathedral grounds. For part
of the way, a broad stone track still runs alongside the steps, once used by ox carts and for dragging goods up and down. The Greesen is today reputed to be the most haunted street in Lincoln and numerous locals and visitors have reported feeling someone grab their ankle as they ascend the steps, causing them to fall heavily. They have the bruises and cuts to prove it!