The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (25 page)

I was charged along with eleven accomplices, most of whom barely knew me to see. The seven charges told of dogs torn limb from limb and scattered at crossroads, fornication with Ethiopian hobgoblins, and a dead baby's flesh boiled in a robber's skull. The grease I used to keep my face soft was listed as a sorcerous ointment for the staff on which I flew across Kilkenny town by night. Bishop Ledrede was widely read, and had a vivid imagination. He was not to know that power is composed of simple elements, once you have stumbled across it.

Ledrede did not prosecute me for the money his spiritual court could hope to confiscate; like myself, he was motivated by wrath and glory. And so, when I had indicted him for defamation and sailed to England with all my jewels, when my son William had agreed to pay for the reroofing of St. Canice's as a penance, and when the other accused accomplices had melted into the night, then the Bishop focused his gaze on Petronilla. She was all he had left.

It was not that I could not have brought her with me, torn her out of prison somehow; I simply never thought to. That is my crime: that in the urgency of my flight, full of the sense of my own devilish importance, I did not even condemn my maid deliberately, but carelessly, as I might have said, "Pick up that sarsenet gown."

I have had plenty of time to think of her since. In almost seven centuries of wandering I can make an informed comparison: I have met no one who loved so well or was so betrayed. She was not a natural killer: she ground poisons together out of mute loyalty, and what purer motive is there than that?

It is so long since I have killed, I have almost forgotten how. It is not worth risking nowadays. They lock you up, take down what you say, and never put an end to it. Oh Petronilla, how I envy your death. Not the manner of it, the pain and squalor, but its definition. How it took you by the hand and led you away before your bursting youth could dwindle.

Unless I am casting a web of glamour over the story to lessen my guilt? But that is not how it works. My envy and my guilt pin each other down. Petronilla's, short and powerless, is the life I did not lead, and cannot lead no matter how long I drag on, and will never fully understand. Petronilla's exultant face is the one I cannot leave behind me. She follows, just out of view, and all the rippling voices are hers.

Quiconques veut d'amors joïr
Doit avoir foy et esperance

Having had faith and hope enough to last her short lifetime, did it come down to love in the end? Was that what she feasted on, among the rats in Kilkenny gaol? How could I be loved by such as her?

For all my sheer elastic skin, I am a hollow woman. My ribs are an empty cauldron now; my breath couldn't put out a candle.

I start the car. My one faith is that I will find some trace of Petronilla. My one hope is that she will teach me how to die. My only love now, the only one whose face I can remember. There, around some corner, she burns, she burns.

My main source for "Looking for Petronilla "is the entry for 1323 in Raphaell Holinshed's
The Historie of Ireland (
1577). The Bishop of Ossory's Latin manuscript account of the trial was edited by Thomas Wright as
A Contemporary Narrative of the Proceedings Against Dame Alice Kyteler (
1843). A useful account of the case is found in St. John Seymour's
Irish Witchcraft and Demonology (
1913, 1989). The song quoted is the anonymous rondeau "Quiconques Veut d'Amors Joïr," available on the Gothic Voices album
The Medieval Romantics.

Petronilla de Meath was burnt alive in Kilkenny in 1324. Dame Alice is said to have escaped to England.