The Witch Hunter's Tale (2 page)

“For that, you can buy the book,” Newcome said with a wolfish grin. “But I’ll tell you this—it is said that he strikes such fear in the hearts of witches that when he comes to a town, they search out a Justice and confess of their own free will. They say that hundreds have been executed. After today’s hanging I shouldn’t be surprised if the same thing happens here.”

“Here in York?” Martha asked. “Are you sure?”

“Sure?” Newcome asked. He turned the word over on his tongue as if it were new and entirely unfamiliar. “Who can be sure of anything in such unsettled times? But it is what I have heard. And once the hanging starts…” His voice trailed off, and I looked toward the gibbet. Hester’s body swayed slightly in the wind. I suddenly felt cold in a way that had nothing to do with the winter weather.

I glanced at Martha and saw the concern on her face mirrored my own. I thanked the chapman for his offer, and we resumed our journey home. As we walked away, I could hear Newcome crying out his pamphlets, selling blood to a bloody-minded people.

When we turned onto Stonegate, the street that would take us home, the north wind howled against us, seemingly intent on ripping our cloaks from our backs. I pulled mine more tightly around me, but it made no difference. I gave thanks when we turned out of the wind and onto my own little street. Though I’d lived in my house for nearly ten years I still found wonder in how much had changed in that time.

I’d made the long journey from Hereford to York as a young widow—could I have been just twenty-three years old?—promised in marriage to Phineas Hodgson, a man I’d never met. As it turned out, Phineas was among England’s least competent merchants, and from our first day as husband and wife until he died in 1642, I spent most of my waking hours defending my estates from his foolish schemes. My two beautiful children, Birdy and Michael, were the only good that came of the union—God’s way of balancing the scales, it seemed. But Michael died soon after he was born, and in the months that followed, death visited my home with terrifying frequency. After Michael, he took Phineas, and a few months later he returned for Birdy. In less than a year, my maidservant Hannah and I found ourselves the only survivors of this dreadful reaping.

It was midwifery that kept me afloat when I feared I might slip beneath the waves of melancholy that battered me so, as I threw myself into that work with what little strength I still had. When a mother was in travail, I could not think about my own lost children, and the friendships I made as a midwife kept my spirit alive. Soon after, Martha appeared at my door begging for a position as a maidservant. I took her in and began to train her in the mysteries of midwifery. A few weeks later, we met an orphaned boy named Tree, and he became a son of sorts. While he still lived at the Castle in the care of one of the jailors, he often came to my house for a meal or to spend the night in a feather bed. Though they did not know it, Martha and Tree, my newfound sister and son, had begun the work of healing my grief-ravaged soul.

When we opened the front door to my home, the newest member of my household raced out of the kitchen and, with masses of red hair streaming behind her, fell into my arms. “Ma,” Elizabeth cried. “Hannah has made cakes, and they are almost done!”

Elizabeth’s mother had been one of the doxies murdered the previous summer, and Elizabeth had come to live with me in the aftermath. When she first came to my house, she had been entirely unsure of what to call me.
Lady Bridget
seemed too formal for such a little one, better suited to friends than family. She’d called her own mother
Mum,
and wouldn’t use that name. I had told her that she could call me whatever she liked, and eventually she settled on
Ma
. I could not have been happier. In her first months with me, Elizabeth kept a safe distance as she mourned her mother and the life she’d lost. But gradually her wounds healed, and while I still found her crying from time to time, such occasions had become far less frequent. Elizabeth took Martha and me by our hands and led us into the kitchen, where Hannah was indeed removing cakes from the oven.

“I thought you would need something sweet after such a day,” she said. Hannah had been with me for over twenty years, and she knew me well. I gratefully accepted one of the cakes.

“Can I give one to Sugar?” Elizabeth asked. A small cat had entwined himself around Elizabeth’s ankles and was meowing plaintively. Without waiting for an answer, she broke a corner off her cake and offered it to the cat. Sugar sniffed the crumb, concluded it was not to his liking, and stalked off with Elizabeth close behind trying to convince him to try it. Once Elizabeth had left the room, Hannah looked at me expectantly.

“They hanged her,” I said. “Just as we knew they would.” Hannah nodded and looked away. It was not that I, or any of us for that matter, objected to the hanging of a witch. But having met her in prison, I could no longer convince myself that Hester
was
one. It is one thing to believe in the reality of witchcraft. It is another to see a neighbor hanged for the crime.

“We heard that a witch-hunt may soon come to the city,” Martha said.

“A witch-hunt?” Hannah asked, her face suddenly pale and drawn. She had read the newsbooks about the trials and hangings. “In York?”

“You should know better than to give credence to such chatter,” I said, a bit too sharply. “There is enough idle gossip as it is. There is no need to add to it.”

Hannah nodded, but I knew that the rumor would soon spread throughout the city with or without her help. Once a chapman knew something, it might as well be shouted from the city’s pulpits.

“Has Will come home?” I asked, eager to talk of something other than witchcraft and hangings.

“Not yet,” Hannah said. “He’s at Mr. Breary’s and said he might sleep there tonight.”

Will Hodgson was the final member of my household, having come to live with me in circumstances strangely akin to Elizabeth’s. Will’s father had died a bloody death just a few days after Elizabeth’s mother, and this shared history brought them closer together.

The four of us sat down to supper, and by the light of many candles and warmth of the hearth we were able—for a few minutes at least—to forget the desperate winter cold and banish the memories of Hester’s hanging. But when I looked at Elizabeth’s hair glowing in the firelight, I could not help remembering the desperate straits from which I’d rescued her, and I said a prayer that I could keep her safe.

Once we’d eaten, I led Elizabeth upstairs to her room and put her to bed. We prayed for the city, the King, and the end of the wars. She added prayers for her mother, asking God to keep her safe from the cold. I lay with her until she slept, and then for a while longer. On some nights evil dreams still visited her. Usually they were of the man who’d killed her mother, and she’d awake screaming. I’d found that if I stayed with her after she fell asleep I could keep such nightmares at bay.

Later, I retired to my chamber, wrote one letter to my cousin in Hereford and another to the steward of one of my estates there, and then climbed into my own bed. I could hear the wind outside my window and gave God thanks for the warmth and safety that He had given me.

But a nightmare visited me not long after I drifted off to sleep, as my fevered brain transformed the howling wind into the dying screams of a bewitched child and mother. I woke with a cry, and I scrambled from my bed to splash water on my face in desperate hope of driving away the horrid dream. I knew that sleep would prove elusive and that the dreams would return if I did not exorcise them. While I had spent much of the day trying
not
to think about Hester’s crimes, I now closed my eyes and recalled them as best I could. On that night it was the only way I would find a measure of peace.

Chapter 2

Hester Jackson’s journey to the gibbet had begun the previous September with a child’s fever. We were in the midst of those happy weeks after the heat had broken, but before winter’s early arrival made clear that we had simply exchanged one curse for another. Looking back we should have known better.

Sarah Asquith appeared at my door early one morning, pale and drawn. I’d delivered her of a son a few months before, and as soon as I saw her face I knew that something had gone wrong. I ushered her into my parlor and sent Hannah for barley water.

“It is Peter,” she said, even before Hannah returned. The words rushed as if she’d been holding them in for days. She probably had been. “He has a fever, and I’ve tried everything I can think of: oil of roses, a salve of poplar buds … nothing has helped.” I could find no fault there. These were the same cures I would have suggested.

“Is he still taking the breast?” I asked.

She nodded. “And I’ve been taking cooling foods, but that hasn’t helped, either. We even paid for a physician to come. He sent me to an apothecary for some wormwood and sea green, but—” She shook her head. Nothing had helped.

“Sarah, would you like me to examine him?” I asked.

“Would you?” she asked, taking my hands. “I would be so grateful, my lady.”

“Of course,” I replied, and the two of us set out for her home in St. Crux parish.

As we walked through the city, I noted with sorrow the many changes that the war had brought. With so many men taken off to fight—carried by their zeal for God or by Parliament’s press-masters—it seemed as if York had become a city of women and old men. Wives became shopkeepers, daughters worked as craftsmen, and maidens searched in vain for husbands before resigning themselves to lives as spinsters. Every Sabbath the churches filled with prayers for the safe return of our men, but we knew that many would never come home, and few of us had any illusions that the time after the war would be the same as before. While I did not regret my own widowhood—marriage to Phineas would make any woman into a merry widow—I knew that few women had the wealth and family that made my own life so comfortable. Singlewomen, whether spinsters or widows, suffered a hard existence filled with poverty and want.

The Asquiths’ parish of St. Crux lay in the heart of York, not far from Fossgate Bridge. After a decade in the city, I knew the twists and turns of York’s cobbled streets as well as I knew the lines on my face, but when I’d first come to the city it had seemed to be a maze designed by a madman. London is said to be worse, but I can hardly imagine such a thing.

We passed through the Asquiths’ shop and climbed the stairs to the rooms above. William Asquith, Sarah’s husband, was one of the suppliers for Parliament’s armies, and had done very well out of it ever since the war began. When the summer’s drought made food even dearer, William profited yet again, and they had filled their home with rich furniture and covered the walls with sumptuous hangings. But I knew by my own hard experience that while wealth gives the illusion of safety, death is not so easily deterred. What had my estates done to protect Michael and Birdy?

Sarah led me straight to the chamber at the back of the house where her son lay. I caught my breath as soon as I saw the child, and Sarah cried out. The maidservant who sat on the side of the bed holding the child’s hand looked up at us and burst in to tears. He seemed so pale, so still, that I knew we had come too late. I crossed to the bed and felt the boy’s cheeks and chest, but I found neither warmth nor breath. I turned to Sarah, and she buried her face in my neck. I felt a wail rising up through her body before it burst into the room with a force powerful enough to shake the rafters themselves.

After a few moments, Sarah pulled herself away and lay on the bed next to her son. She cradled his head, kissed his hair, and told him that she loved him. Sorrow welled up inside me and I clenched my jaw to keep my own tears from bursting forth, but it was in vain. Like a flood intent on washing away all that lay before it, my tears poured out as I mourned the death of Sarah’s son, the deaths of my own children, and the deaths of so many other young ones that God saw fit to reap like stalks of grain. I do not know how long I stayed with Sarah. She sent her maidservant to find William, who had gone in search of another physician. While we waited, Sarah and I held the boy and each other. Sarah cried. I prayed for her and wondered that God would take her only son.

We buried the child the next day, and I left William and Sarah to comfort each other. That night I prayed that Sarah soon would come to me, thrilled and frightened to find that she was with child once more. I would not encourage her with false promises that this time the child would live—my own example would give the lie to such words—but I would do my best to calm her fears. I would remind her which foods she should take and which she should avoid. I would visit her as her travail neared, and tell her that the second time would not be as difficult as the first. I’d say that she would be a wonderful mother and that together we would do our best for her child.

But I never got the chance to say any of this. Two weeks later Sarah was dead.

*   *   *

Looking back at the events that followed, I could not help wondering what evil might have been avoided if Sarah’s husband had called me to her bedside sooner. Hester Jackson might never have been hanged, and the horrible aftermath would have been avoided. But what use is there in such vain thoughts? Perhaps it was God’s will.

According to Sarah’s gossips, a few days after the Asquiths buried their son, Sarah and William were sitting at supper when Sarah was taken by a gripping pain in her side. She took to bed and for a time she seemed to improve. But the pain returned, and this time it was accompanied by vomiting and a fever similar to the one that had carried off her son. She demanded water, but no matter how much she drank she could not be satisfied. When her belly became stretched, William summoned a physician, but he could no more help Sarah than he had little Peter. He said that Sarah’s illness was unlike any he’d ever seen, and that he doubted it was natural. It was this physician who, perhaps because he could find no cure, suggested that Sarah might have been bewitched.