Daughters of the Witching Hill (21 page)

Putting her lips to my ear, she whispered words I would never forget. "Your father's bound for heaven, sweetheart. When you miss him, you can pray for him. God will listen and your father will know that you keep his memory alive in your heart."

After kissing my forehead, Mistress Nutter went to Mam and Gran, not saying a word, but clasping their hands and standing with them in silence a spell, her head bowed with theirs.

I turned to my father's grave, now piled high with holly, pine boughs, and ivy. It being the dead of winter, there were no flowers to be had. Mistress Nutter's words rang inside me like a promise: I could pray for Father and he would look down from heaven and know how much I loved him.

A small, thin hand reached out to offer me a bough of sweet-smelling juniper. I found myself staring into the wide brown eyes of Nancy, the Holdens' youngest daughter, one year older than I was. She gave me a shy hug, patting my back till I hugged her in return.

Folk were kind in showing us their sympathy. Anthony Holden paid for the funeral and delivered a sack of meal to Malkin Tower so we wouldn't go hungry. Mistress Nutter rode by to bring us winter apples and a flask of dark-red wine. But nothing could take away the anguish of losing both Father and our livelihood in one blow.

The omens were too powerful for Master Holden to ignore. Not only had his best cowman died, but he'd lost a quarter of his herd, and what could have caused that but blackest witchcraft. Though he made no accusations against Chattox, he'd the good sense to move his remaining cattle from the fields near Malkin Tower back to the pastures near his own home. His son Matthew, the boy Gran had once cured, was now old enough to take Father's place as cowman.

After burying my father, we came back to an empty shippon. No more work for Mam in the dairy, no more fresh milk or cream, butter or cheese. With Jamie too simple to find good, steady work and me too young, Mam wandered from farm to farm, doing whatever was asked of her in exchange for bread.

Though Gran carried on with her cunning craft, she was never the same after my father's death. A filmy grey caul began to creep over her eyes, clouding her sight, till after a year or so, she needed me to lead her round by the hand. Jamie held Chattox responsible for Gran's blindness, but Gran herself said that it was the price she'd paid for living so long when most folk died much younger. There was a price to be paid for everything, so Gran believed.

With Gran losing her sight, we'd every reason to believe that God had forsaken us. If the hardship didn't finish my family off, the grieving would. Our Jamie was inconsolable. Once I found him battering the gateposts with his fists. I had to beg him to stop and I took his hands in mine before he reduced his own to bloody stumps. My brother just couldn't get it through his head that our father had left us to slumber in the sod. Gran staggered round like a ghost as though she blamed our tragedy on her misbegotten spell. As for Mam, it was as though her life had come to an end. By night she wept till the flesh round her eyes was raw and bruised.

For the life of me, I tried to forgive my mam for what happened next. Before I was even born, she'd forsaken her own powers. What she did after Father's demise seemed like madness. If she heard Gran whispering the most harmless blessing, she'd leg it out the door as though she thought that even the most good-willed healing charm was the Devil's work. If Mam so much as heard me murmur the Ave Maria, she'd order me to leave off with the popish wickedness.

Found religion had Mam, and not the comfort of Gran's old faith with the saints and the Mother of Mercy, either, but the new religion in all its harsh austerity. If I didn't know better I'd say she was bewitched, that she'd come under the spell of the new Church Warden, Richard Baldwin of Wheathead, who singled out Mam for his special attention. His wife being ill, he had hired my mam to help in his household and there she became wise to his ways, learning his Psalms by memory since she couldn't read. Mam spent more time at his home than ours, and when she did show her face at Malkin Tower, she near did our heads in with her talk of sin and brimstone, the chosen few and the damned multitudes. Maybe she believed that if she bore this splintery cross, she could redeem herself, wash her soul clean of shame. In truth, she embraced more than religion during her first year of widowhood.

Goodwife Baldwin was bedridden and ailing, never to recover, and full senseless most of the time. Though a Puritan, Dick Baldwin was still a man with needs he could no longer ignore, and Mam was so lonely, so willing to make any sacrifice to win a man's love again. And so it came to pass. She offered herself to that horse-faced man with a smile like vinegar. Where Father had been gentle and yielding, Dick Baldwin was stern and severe. Perhaps Mam hoped his staunchness would lend her the strength she needed to endure her loss. No doubt, in her heart of hearts, she nursed the hope that he would marry her when his wife passed on, as the woman was sure to do any day or week. Mam was already doting on Baldwin's small daughter to prove her worth as a stepmother.

Meanwhile, she neglected Jamie and me, her own half-orphans who needed her as never before. So what did my brother and I do but learn to place our trust in Gran instead of our inconstant mother. In our loneliness, Jamie and I stuck together like two burrs. If anybody was fool enough to call my brother an idiot in my earshot, I'd lob the offender's head with a rain of earth clods and manure. By and by, folk learned not to mock Jamie when I was at hand. God knew Jamie needed every bit of succour I could give him, for his lot was never an easy one. After Master Holden moved his herd from Malkin Tower, my brother was left to wander from village to farm, begging for work and food.

As for Chattox, she got her comeuppance in a manner of speaking, or at least her daughter Betty did. Though my family had never breathed a word to the Constable of the theft at Malkin Tower, Betty Whittle just couldn't keep herself out of harm's way. Being a witch's daughter, maybe she thought she was too crafty to be caught, or that Gran's reluctance to condemn Betty had proven to the whole parish that she could do as she pleased and get away with it. Then Betty made the mistake of robbing her landlady. On laundry day at Greenhead, Betty was brazen—or gormless—enough to snatch a linen sheet hung up to dry. Wasn't like stealing from poor, simple folk, this. The servants raised the alarm, and the gardener caught Betty round the waist. Margaret Crook, sister to dead Robert Assheton whom folk said Chattox and Annie Redfearn had bewitched, sent for the Magistrate, who examined Betty at Read Hall. Then off to Lancaster she was marched. On account of her poverty, the Judge took pity, sentencing her not to the gallows but to a living death in prison. When Betty did meet her end, it wasn't in a public spectacle, dangling on the end of the hangman's rope. Instead, a month after her trial, she perished of gaol fever, louse-ridden and half-starved.

After that Chattox seemed well gutted, dragging herself round like some sick and beaten dog. No one denounced her now because she had grown too pitiful. Least she seemed to know enough by then to leave my family alone.

Our spot of good luck during those years of mourning arose from a dispute over property boundaries. It came to be known that Malkin Tower and the tiny plot of land upon which it was stood belonged not to the Nowells of Read Hall as folk had believed, but to Alice Nutter, who was the most gracious landlady we could have wished for. A great almsgiver was our Mistress Alice. She would never let her tenants suffer hunger or turn them out of their cottages. Assured that our home at least was secure, Gran, Jamie, and I rubbed along well, just the three of us, resigned to Mam's desertion.

But soon enough my mam returned to the fold. She reaped nothing but bitter disgrace from her dealings with the pious Master Baldwin, who trusted himself to be one of the Elect to inherit the heavenly and everlasting kingdom of his narrow-hearted God. Instead of marrying her, he cast her out as a wanton as soon as she confessed she was carrying his child. Left her to bear his bastard alone did Baldwin, without surrendering a penny to feed mother or babe. Gran brought out the tansy, offering to brew a dose for Mam. She told my mother that she'd be a fool to have this child, but Mam was so heartbroken, so ill-done-to, and she saw this baby as her one consolation, a blameless new life she could cherish. The baby would love her, so Mam hoped, even if Baldwin despised her. Only Gran's fearsome repute as a cunning woman and her vow to reveal Baldwin's shame stayed the Curate and the Constable from pillorying my mother for her out-of-wedlock pregnancy.

Often I asked myself how differently our fates would have spun out had Mam heeded Gran's counsel and never allowed Baldwin's bastard to see the light of day. As it stood, our lives were forever changed. In 1603, the year our Queen died and her Scottish cousin rose to the throne, Mam gave birth to my half-sister, Jennet—borne of Baldwin's unholy lust and my mother's unending grief.

O
F ALL MY FAMILY,
I alone could pass as a girl like any other. I wasn't simple like my brother, nor cock-eyed like my mam, nor a bastard like my sister, nor a cunning woman like Gran. Though I loved my family more than anything, I cherished the fact that I wasn't marked out as the rest of them were.

I felt right sorry for little Jennet. Though Mam had named her after Jennet Preston, her dear childhood friend, and though she had insisted on giving her the surname Device so that my sister would at least bear the name of a good and kindly man, Jennet was the cuckoo in our nest, Baldwin's seed growing up at Malkin Tower. With her mousy hair, her pinched face, her cold blue eyes, she was the very picture of him. Like Baldwin himself, little Jennet seemed to spurn Mam's love. Kept herself to herself, that child. If I tried to cuddle her close, she shoved me away.

"In God's name, I wish Mam wasn't so
ugly,
" our Jennet told me one morning, lying beside me upon the pallet we shared.

She was seven years old and had wrenched me awake from a dream of Gran trying to fit a wreath of roses round my head.
Time for the procession. You'll lead them all on Assumption Day.

"And I wish Gran wasn't such a frightful old thing," my sister rattled on in her singsong.

Sitting up, my head still ringing from that dream, I looked to the door leading into the next room where Mam and Gran were fixing breakfast, and I prayed that neither of them had heard the little traitor. God forgive me, but there were times when I fair wished I could pack the brat off and send her back to Baldwin. Let him try raising her.

"Suit yourself," I told Jennet. "Go find yourself another family."

Leaving my sister to chew on that, I dressed and tied my hair up with the rose-coloured satin ribbon Nancy Holden had given me for Christmas. That summer I was fifteen and Nancy was my dearest friend in all the world.

"I'm off to work at the Holdens," I told Mam on my way out the door. So eager was I to be with my friend, I hadn't the patience to wait till the porridge was ready.

"Work?" Mam looked up from the pot she was stirring. "You're more like to while away the hours gabbing with that girl."

"Leave her be," said Gran, winking at me as though she knew just what I had dreamt.

In truth, our gran did look a frightful thing. Her coif was askew and her grey hair, thick and unruly, sprang out every which way, but most unnerving were her eyes, milky and clouded. When she aimed those eyes at you, you'd quail, for she truly
saw
folk with those cauled eyes of hers—saw what they hid inside and was never fooled by their masks or their lies.

"A true friend is the most precious gift," Gran said, smiling wistful, and I thought with sadness how she had once been friends with Chattox before it turned bad.

"I'll bring back bread," I said, kissing Gran's cheek. "And buttercake!"

At Bull Hole Farm, they'd wool to card and spin, cream to churn into butter—more chores than hands in their household. Whenever I was in need of honest work or just wanted to call in, they welcomed me. Even when I was doing some lowly task, it was never drudgery if I could pass some time with my friend.

Soon as I neared the house, Nancy darted out, apron flapping, eyes sparking in her gladness to see me. Taking my hands, she pulled me into the kitchen where her mam made much of me.

"Our Alizon!" Sarah Holden said. "I'll wager you've eaten nothing this day."

Arms a-flutter, she sat me down at her scrubbed table and brought me a bowl of steaming beef broth with barley and onion. Nancy poured me a mug of small beer.

"No use working on an empty stomach." Clucking and fussing, Mistress Holden filled my bowl again soon as I'd emptied it. I think she loved to stuff me because her own daughter was so thin, without much in the way of appetite, and she wanted to set an example for Nancy as to how much a healthy girl could eat.

Nancy's mam wasn't a bit like mine. Sarah Holden had no deformity, no blot on her reputation, but was her husband's stouthearted wife, her children's proud mother: a broad-faced country woman with strong cheekbones and clear brown eyes.

Though I knew it disloyal of me, and I feared it made me no better than cold little Jennet, I envied Nancy her mother and her happy home. The only daughter left in the house now that her sisters had married, Nancy was her mam's pet and she, in turn, loved to cosset her small nieces and nephews, half-orphaned after her brother Matthew's wife had died having the last baby. Whilst I was sat at the table, the children crowded round to watch me eat, all of them laughing and joking and jibing. Well I remembered the story of how Gran blessed and mended Matthew when he was no bigger than the tousle-headed tot cuddled up by my side. That was why I, Mother Demdike's granddaughter, was ever welcome here. Yet I allowed myself to fancy I was no kin to Gran, but one of the Holdens' own; that Nancy, not Jennet, was my blood-sister; that Anthony Holden, respected by everyone, was my father; and Matthew, strong and kind, the older brother who looked after me.