Daughters of the Witching Hill (41 page)

Nowell paused then, the way the Curate would, to make sure everybody was paying attention before explaining in detail some choice titbit about hell or fornication or somesuch.

"Such in general was the common opinion in the country where she dwelt, the Forest of Pendle, a place fit for people of such condition, that no man near Elizabeth Device, neither his wife, children, goods, or cattle, should be secure or free from danger."

By and by, Nowell got round to mentioning the actual charges against Mam. He held her to blame for working with Gran and Alice Nutter to bring about the death of Henry Mitton, who'd once refused my gran a penny. Hearing that last bit, I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing. What cause did Mistress Alice have to finish off a nobody like that old miser?

Mam never faltered. Before the packed courtroom, her back unbowed, she declared herself not guilty.

With grim forbearance Nowell asked Master Potts to read out her statement taken on the twenty-seventh of April, when she'd been arrested after the Good Friday meeting at Malkin Tower. Still my mother refused to relent. Stubborn as anything, she denied her previous confession, which Nowell had twisted from her by guile as he'd done with the rest of us.

Judge Bromley then asked the chief witness against Mam to be brought forward. The sight was enough to make my weak shivery legs give out and send me sprawling to the floor. My own sister appeared at the stand. Quite the little lady she looked, her dull hair curled into ringlets and tied up in a velvet band. She'd a rose-coloured gown that made her face seem less pinched and pale. So tiny was our traitor they had to stand her upon a table so the gentlemen of the court could get a gawp at her.

Mam let out such a roar. She wept and screamed and cursed and pleaded all at once. What cold cruelty could move a nine-year-old girl to condemn her own mother? Did our Jennet even understand how Nowell was using her, or did she think it a mere game to pose in her lovely frock and mouth the words he'd told her to say? I could only guess what Jennet made of us with our bone-pale faces and filthy clothes. Maybe that made it easier for her—she could pretend we were strangers.

Nowell could not have contrived a more grievous torture for my mother. The cat-o'-nine-tails would have been kinder. Yet looking at Judge Bromley, the jury, and the onlookers crowding close to stare, I knew they didn't see a woman devastated by her own child's treachery. What they saw was an odious witch and a freak besides, her cock-eye near bursting out of its socket as she railed and sobbed.

Mam's clenched fists were the fists of a weakling with bracelets of oozing sores round her wrists after being chained for months in that dungeon. To see our mother so unravelled, Jennet caved in upon herself and began to cry in shame and confusion, telling the judge she couldn't go on. I wagered that Nowell hadn't warned her it would be quite this harrowing.

Yet instead of removing Jennet from the scene, the guards wrested away my shrieking mother. Soon as she was gone, my sister was made to recite in her thin, shaky voice what Nowell had instructed her to say against Mam. Jennet, our pert little wench—Nowell had made her his creature through and through. His perfect tool. Now I understood why he had called me to court. He wanted me to see how eager my sister was to destroy us. We'd no hope left.

"My mother is a witch," said our Jennet. "This I know to be true.
Sundry
times"—no doubt, she'd learned that word from Nowell—"I saw her spirit come to Malkin Tower in the shape of a brown dog, which my mother called Ball. He'd ask her what she would have him do." My sister gulped for breath, her sweaty hands clutching at her fine skirt and causing it to wrinkle.

"And what
did
your mother bid Ball, her familiar, to do?" Nowell prompted.

"She said she would have him kill Master Mitton," Jennet said, not daring to look in my direction as she spun her lies. "Gran and Alice Nutter wished him dead. Ball said he'd do it and he vanished away. Three weeks later, Master Mitton died."

"Is that all?" Nowell asked my sister. "Do you wish to say anything more?"

Aware that everyone in that room was hanging upon her words, Jennet flushed and simpered as though she'd been crowned the Queen of May.

"My mother taught me two prayers," she said, falling silent as the crowd buzzed in consternation, no doubt assuming that these were no godly devotions but popish prayers that doubled as magic charms. "One to cure the bewitched and one to get drink."

As if that were not enough, Potts then read Jamie's statement of April twenty-seventh so that Mam might be condemned by her son as well as her youngest daughter. Our mother had made a clay picture of Henry Mitton, so Jamie had said, and she had planned the Good Friday gathering at Malkin Tower. His eyes huge, Potts was about to read further when Nowell cut him off as though he wanted to save the juiciest bit for later.

At that, the guards led Mam back to the bar where she was made to listen to how Jennet and Jamie had declared her guilty of murder by witchcraft. Still she denied everything, but that made no difference to Nowell, who then asked Potts to read the most damning part of Jamie's statement.

Potts's hands shook as he held the parchment aloft and read in a half-strangled voice till Nowell silenced him and summed up my brother's confession in the most chilling words.

"Elizabeth Device was the principal agent behind the solemn meeting at Malkin Tower, that great assembly of witches, where they connived a plan to blast asunder this very castle with gunpowder and also to murder Master Thomas Covell, the King's appointed gaoler, who little suspected or deserved any such villainy against him."

Even I forgot to breathe, for this was the most audacious claim yet—far more disturbing than even the clay pictures. Only seven years ago, Guy Fawkes and his band of papist rebels had plotted to blow up Parliament. Now Nowell was accusing us poor simple folk of the same kind of conspiracy—highest treason. Oh, my brother and his foolish talk.

Nowell paused before delivering his final blow. "I shall remind my Lord Judge and the gentlemen of the jury that the evidence against this woman was delivered by
her own children.
"

Riven by those words and by Jennet's hot little face turned away from her, Mam's knees buckled. Finished off, she was, like a horse flogged till it collapsed and lost all will to rise again.

After the guards banished Mam down the Well Tower, Nowell summoned my brother to the bar. Jamie's eyes rolled up with only the whites showing as he slumped in the arms of the two men straining to hold him upright.

"This miserable wretch," said Nowell, "would have us believe that he is too ill to speak or hear or stand. Whether he brought this condition upon himself by his wish for an untimely death to avoid his trial and the just judgement of the law; or whether by his shame to be openly charged with so many devilish practises; or whether his condition was brought on by reason of his long imprisonment, which was done with more favour, commiseration, and relief than he deserved, I cannot say. I can only speak of the charges against him."

Nowell charged Jamie not only for the murders of Anne Towneley of Carr Hall and John Duckworth of the Laund, as I'd expected, but also for the deaths of John and Blaze Hargreaves, kin of our Constable Hargreaves. I couldn't recall that my brother had ever had much to do with those characters. Little difference that made. Seeing that my brother was too senseless to plead either guilty or not guilty, Nowell asked Potts to read out Jamie's previous statements. So the Londoner read out how my brother had wanted to be even with Mistress Towneley who had struck him between the shoulders and accused him of stealing peat, or so he said; and with John Duckworth who had promised him an old shirt and had never given it to him.

When Nowell asked Jamie if these statements of his were true, my brother lolled his head, which Nowell took to be a nod of agreement.

Next Jennet appeared as a witness to Jamie's crimes. Growing used to the attention, she spoke with more mettle than before, smiling to the judge and jury. "My brother fashioned a clay picture of Mistress Towneley to bring about her death. Then my brother called upon Dandy, his spirit, who appeared to him in the shape of a black dog."

I bristled to hear this, thinking she had mistaken the black dog that had followed me home with Jamie's familiar, which he had always spoken of as a foal that flew through the air.

"Within my hearing, Dandy asked what my brother would have him do," Jennet continued. "My brother answered he would have him kill John Hargreaves of Goldshaw and Blaze Hargreaves of Higham. Dandy answered that he would have his best help and so vanished away."

"Do you swear this upon oath, Jennet Device?" Nowell asked her.

"I do, sir," she said, near doubling over in her sweeping curtsey.

In the ground near Malkin Tower, Jennet went on to say, Jamie had buried three human scalps that Chattox had once given Gran. With a lurch I remembered the skull Betty Whittle had left at Malkin Tower, how Jamie had buried it behind the manure pile those many years ago. Loved to tell tall tales, did our Jamie. My brother was a whimsical soul. In his memory, the skulls must have trebled. Now he would hang for his fault of confusing the truth with his unruly imagination.

Before Nowell could usher my sister out of the court, my eyes hooked into hers fearsome as Gran's would have done to burn forever in her memory that I had stood witness to her betrayal. Haunt her all her days, this would. Her deed was worse by far than anything she claimed the rest of us had committed. She, and only she, was the true murderer. After sending us to our deaths, she would never again know a family's love or a moment's peace.

Jennet's sallow face flushed red. Her singed curls flying, she spun away from Jamie and me, her siblings whom she had doomed.

Didn't take long for the jury to reach their verdict. Chattox, Mam, and Jamie were found guilty on all charges.

After the guards delivered us back into the reeking gloom of the Well Tower and chained us once again to the ring in the floor, Mam wept in her thwarted love for Jennet. Pulling against my manacles, I tried to hold her as she used to hold me when I was a little lass crying out for my dead father.

"She's too young to know what she's doing," Mam said, as if scrambling to find any excuse to pardon my sister.

Deep down she must have known, as I did, that Jennet was old enough to know right from wrong. Old enough to know what it meant to hang a person. Our Jennet must have passed by the gibbet same as we had when Nowell brought her down to the castle. Silent, I embraced my mother whilst trying to rid my memory of those bodies rocking at the end of the ropes, left to dangle like hogs on slaughter day.

"My little girl ... she wants us dead," Mam said, finally admitting it to herself. "Jamie spoke against me, too, but he's only simple. He never meant it to end like this."

My brother shivered on the damp stone. I stroked his face and called his name, but it was like speaking to a straw doll, leaving me to wonder if he would even come back to himself when the hangman fit the noose round his neck. Perhaps he wouldn't survive the journey to the gallows. So far away my brother seemed, as though halfway to purgatory or some other place that he kept secret from us.

"Let him rest, the poor lad." Mam caressed his hair that had grown back crooked and uneven, sticking out every which way. "Listen to me, love." She reached for my hand. "I don't think they'll charge you with murder. That pedlar of yours is only lame. God willing, they might let you go free."

I shook my head, not wanting to be ensnared by some fragile hope that would only be smashed to pieces before my eyes. Even if Mam was right and they released me, how could I return to Pendle Forest and live out the rest of my life if my loved ones had been hanged, thanks to Jennet's lies? I hated to think what I'd do if I ever encountered my sister again.

"Pray," Mam urged me. "Like you used to, love. Pray that you at least will be spared."

Four, five months ago I would have prayed till my knees turned to pins and needles. But I scarce knew how to pray anymore. Five months of darkness and degradation had shaken up everything I thought I knew or believed in. Both the old religion and the new seemed a mockery. I asked myself, as Nancy had done before me, if heaven even existed. What was left to believe in, what anchor for my soul? Only my recollections of Gran gave me succour: her strength and that bliss on her face when she departed this life.

Of the eleven of us, only Alice Nutter's faith endured. When Covell called her Satan's whore, she stared straight into his eyes and shook her head. Bound for the saints and angels, she was. Feet away from us, she prayed even now, the murmur of her words rising and falling with her ragged breath till, of a sudden, Covell and the guards burst in.

"Alice Gray!" shouted our gaoler, shining his torch in the old woman's face. "You are summoned to court."

Alice Gray clamped her lips together as if to keep herself from moaning in fear whilst the guards unlocked her shackles and yanked her to her feet.

"Good luck," Mouldheels called out to her friend. Behind Covell's back, she mouthed the words
you'll need it.

The afternoon dragged by. Seemed a curious thing that Alice Gray's trial should last so long when Mam, Jamie, and Chattox had been tried and sentenced within the space of an hour and a half.

When the guards finally brought back Alice Gray, we could see straight off that she'd endured a great shock. Her eyes were round as coins, as though she'd beheld a procession of dancing spectres.