Daughters of the Witching Hill

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT
Boston New York
2010

Copyright © 2010 by Mary Sharratt

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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selections from this book, write to Permissions,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sharratt, Mary, date.
Daughters of the Witching Hill / Mary Sharratt.
p. cm.
ISBN
978-0-547-06967-8
1. Witchcraft—England—Lancashire—Fiction. 2. Trials
(Witchcraft)—England—Lancashire—Fiction. 3. Witchcraft—
England—History—17th century—Fiction.
4. Lancaster (England)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS
3569.
H
3449D38 2010
813'.54—dc22 2009042057

Book design by Melissa Lotfy
Map by Jacques Chazaud

Printed in the United States of America

DOC
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

FOR MY MOTHER

Dedicated to the memory of Elizabeth Southerns,
alias Mother Demdike.

And to Alizon Device, Elizabeth Device,
James Device, Anne Whittle, Anne Redfearn,
Alice Nutter, Katherine Hewitt, Jane Bulcock,
John Bulcock, and Jennet Preston.

She was a very old woman, about the age of Foure-score
yeares, and had been a Witch for fiftie yeares. Shee
dwelt in the Forrest of Pendle, a vast place, fitte for her
profession: What shee committed in her time, no man
knowes.... Shee was a generall agent for the Devill in
all these partes: no man escaped her, or her Furies.

—THOMAS POTTS,
The Wonderfull Discoverie of
Witches in the Countie of Lancaster,
1613

A CHARME

Upon Good-Friday, I will fast while I may
Untill I heare them knell
Our Lords owne Bell,
Lord in his messe
With his twelve Apostles good,
What hath he in his hand
Ligh in leath wand:
What hath he in his other hand?
Heavens doore key,
Open, open Heaven doore keyes,
Steck, steck hell doore.
Let Crizum child
Goe to it Mother mild,
What is yonder that casts a light so farrandly,
Mine owne deare Sonne that's naild to the Tree.
He is naild sore by the heart and hand,
And holy harne Panne,

Well is that man
That Fryday spell can,
His Childe to learne;
A Crosse of Blew, and another of Red,
As good Lord was to the Roode.
Gabriel
laid him downe to sleepe
Upon the ground of holy weepe:
Good Lord came walking by,
Sleep'st thou, wak'st thou
Gabriel,
No Lord I am sted with sticke and stake,
That I can neither sleepe nor wake:
Rise up
Gabriel
and goe with me,
The stick nor the stake shall never deere thee.

A charm to cure one who is bewitched, attributed to
Elizabeth Southern's family and recorded by Thomas Potts
during the 1612 witch trials at Lancaster.

S
EE US GATHERED HERE,
three women stood at Richard Baldwin's gate. I bide with my daughter, Liza of the squint-eye, and with my granddaughter, Alizon, just fifteen and dazzling as the noontide sun, so bright that she lights up the murk of my dim sight. Demdike, folk call me, after the dammed stream near my dwelling place where the farmers wash their sheep before shearing. When I was younger and stronger, I used to help with the sheepwash. Wasn't afraid of the fiercest rams. I'd always had a way of gentling creatures by speaking to them low and soft. Though I'm old now, crabbed and near-blind, my memory is long as a midsummer's day and with my inner eye, I see clear.

We three wait till Baldwin catches a glimpse of us and out he storms. Through the clouded caul that age has cast over my eyes, I catch his form. Thin as a brittle, dead stalk, he is, his face pinched, and he's clad in the dour black weeds of a Puritan. Fancies himself a godly man, does our Dick Baldwin. A loud crack strikes the earth—it's a horsewhip he carries. My daughter fair leaps as he lashes it against the drought-hard dirt.

"Whores and witches," he rails, shrill enough to set the crows to flight. "Get out of my ground."

Slashes of air hit my face as he brandishes his whip, seeking to strike fear into us, but it's his terror I taste as I let go of Alizon's guiding hand and step forward, firm and square on my rag-bundled feet. We've only come to claim what is ours by right.

"Whores and witches," he taunts again, yelling with such bile that his spit sprays me. "I will burn the one of you and hang the other."

He speaks to Liza and me, ignoring young Alizon, for he doesn't trust himself to even look at this girl whose beauty and sore hunger would be enough to make him sink to his knobbly knees.

I take another step forward, forcing him to back away. The man's a-fright that I'll so much as breathe on him. "I care not for you," I tell him. "Hang yourself."

Our Master Baldwin will play the righteous churchman, but what I know of him would besmirch his good name forevermore. He can spout his psalms till he's hoarse, but heaven's gates will never open to him. I know this and he knows I know this, and for my knowing, he fears and hates me. Beneath his black clothes beats an even blacker heart. Hired my Liza to card wool, did Baldwin, and then refused to pay her. What's more, our Liza has done much dearer things for him than carding. Puritan or no, he's taken his pleasure of her and, lost and grieving her poor murdered husband, ten years dead, our Liza was soft enough to let him. Fool girl.

"Enough of this," I say. "Liza carded your wool. Where's her payment? We're poor, hungry folk. Would you let us starve for your meanness?"

I speak in a low, warning tone, not unlike the growl of a dog before it bites. Man like him should know better than to cross the likes of me. Throughout Pendle Forest I'm known as a cunning woman, and she who has the power to bless may also curse.

Our Master Baldwin blames me because his daughter Ellen is too poorly to rise from her bed. The girl was a pale, consumptive thing from the day she was born, never hale in all her nine years. Once he called on me to heal her. Mopped her brow, I did. Brewed her feverfew and lungwort, but still she ailed and shivered. Tried my best with her, but some who are sick cannot be mended. Yet Baldwin thinks I bewitched the lass out of malice. Why would I seek to harm a hair on the poor girl's head when his other daughter, the one he won't name or even look at, is my own youngest granddaughter, seven-year-old Jennet?

"Richard." My Liza makes bold to step toward him. She stretches out a beseeching hand. "Have a heart. For our Jennet's sake. We've nothing more to eat in the house."

But he twists away from her in cold dread and still won't pay her for her honest work, won't grant us so much as a penny. So what can I do but promise that I'll pray for him till he comes to be of a better mind? Soft under my breath, masked from his Puritan ears, I murmur the Latin refrains of the old religion. How my whispered words make him pale and quake—does he believe they will strike him dead? Off to his house he scarpers. Behind his bolted door he'll cower till we're well gone.

"Come, Gran." Alizon takes my arm to lead me home. Can't make my way round without her in this dark ebb of my years. But with my inner eye I see Tibb sat there on the drystone wall. Sun breaks through the clouds to golden-wash his guilesome face. Dick Baldwin would call him a devil, or even
the
Devil, but I know better. Beautiful Tibb, his form invisible to all but me.

"Now I don't generally stand by woe-working," says my Tibb, stretching out his long legs. "But if you forespoke Master Baldwin, who could blame you, after all the ill he's done to you and yours?" He cracks a smile. "Is revenge what you want?"

"No, Tibb. Only justice." I speak with my inner voice that none but Tibb can hear. If Baldwin fell ill and died, what would happen to his lawful daughter, Ellen? Her mother's long dead. Another poor lass to live off the alms of the parish. No, I'll not have that burden on my soul.

"Justice!" Tibb laughs, then shakes his head. "Off the likes of Dick Baldwin? Oh, you do set your sights high."

Tibb's laughter makes the years melt away, drawing me back to the old days, when I could see far with my own two eyes and walk on my own two legs, with none to guide me.

B
Y DAYLIGHT GATE
I first saw him, the boy climbing out of the stone pit in Goldshaw. The sinking sun set his fair hair alight. Slender, he was, and so young and beautiful. Pure, too. No meanness on him. No spite or evil. I knew straight off that he wouldn't spit at me for being a barefoot beggar woman. Wouldn't curse at me or try to shove me into the ditch. There was something in his eyes—a gentleness, a knowing. When he looked at me, my hurting knees turned to butter. When he smiled, I melted to my core, my heart bumping and thumping till I fair fainted away. What would a lad like that want with a fifty-year-old widow like me?

The month of May, it was, but cold of an evening. His coat was half black, half brown. I thought to myself that he must be poor like me, left to stitch his clothes together from mismatched rags. He reached out his hand, as though making to greet an old friend.

"Elizabeth," he said. "My own Bess." The names by which I was known when I was a girl with a slender waist and strong legs and rippling chestnut hair. How did he know my true name? Even then I was known to most as Demdike. The boy smiled wide with clean, white teeth, none of them missing, and his eyes had a devilish spark in them, as though I were still that young woman with skin like new milk.

"Well, well," said I, for I was never one to stay silent for long. "You know my name, so you do. What's yours then?"

"Tibb," he said.

I nodded to myself, though I knew of no Tibbs living anywhere in Pendle Forest. "But what of your Christian name?"
After all, he knew me by mine, God only knew how.

He lifted his face to the red-glowing sky and laughed as the last of the sun sank behind Pendle Hill. Then I heard a noise behind me: the startled squawk of a pheasant taking flight. When I turned to face the boy again, he had vanished away. I looked up and down the lane, finding him nowhere. Couldn't even trace his footprints in the muddy track. Did my mind fail me? Had that boy been real at all? This was when I grew afraid and went cold all over, as though frost had settled upon my skin.

First off, I told no one of Tibb. Who would have believed me when I could scarcely believe it myself? I'd no wish to make myself an even bigger laughingstock than I already was.

Ned Southerns, my husband, such as he was, had passed on just after our squint-eyed Liza was born, nineteen years ago. He blamed me for our daughter's deformity because he thought I'd too much contact with beasts whilst I was carrying her. In my married years, I raised fine hens, even kept a nanny goat. There was another child, Christopher, three years older than Liza and not of my husband, but he was far and away from being the only bastard in Pendle Forest. The gentry and the yeomen bred as many ill-begotten babes as us poor folk, only they did a better job of covering it up. Liza, Kit, and I made our home in a crumbling old watchtower near the edge of Pendle Forest. More ancient than Adam, our tower was. Too draughty for storing silage, but it did for us. Malkin Tower, it was called, and, as you'll know,
malkin
can mean either hare or slattern. What better place for me and my brood?