Hue and Cry (33 page)

Depriving her of light and speech, the beadle felt less afraid of the witch. He set the lamp upon the table by the psalter, and the tremor within him began to subside. He was a candlemaker by trade. Now, to calm his nerves and while away the hours of night watch, he wove strips of hemp into candlewicks, laying them carefully out on the board. And when the witch’s pleas came loud enough to unnerve him, he whispered his catechism under his breath, and sang to himself.

He would have liked to use the branks to still her tongue, but the baxter had forbidden it; ‘Allow her loose her voice, and your silence shall shape her confession.’ So he sat quiet, methodically fashioning his wicks, until he heard her falter and fall still. Only then did he take up a splinter of light to peek through the grating,
undo the locks and feel for her face in the darkness, prodding and pricking her awake again. It thrilled him to go to in to her, a cudgel by his side to keep him safe. Once she pawed his sleeves and clung there close. He had to shake her off. When she could stand no longer, he roused her choking from the irons with water to her lips, and sat her squarely on a stool below the chain. In doing so he saved her life. That done, he flashed the splinter flame before her eyes to reassure himself that she was conscious, locked the door and left her till the hangman came to make the second shift. This lockman, more accomplished in the arts of torment, was less fearful than the beadle of approaching her. Cheerfully, he kept her waking. It was he who forged the plan to ring the handbells night and day, that starting from her sleep, she might not know the passing of the hours. And so the two of them did watch and wake her, hour by hour and turn by turn. And neither of them spoke to her, but pricked and teased and stung her, buzzing round her dreams like flies, until the baxter, when he came by for his third watch, was pleasantly astonished to remark the change in her.

As Agnes lay waking, Meg Cullan slept. Through long nights of sickness, Giles Locke had attended her, calming the demons that kept her in thrall. When he was content at last the seizures were discharged, he was reluctant still to leave her side. He wrote out stern commandments for her rest. His prescriptions vexed and baffled Lucy Linn. Yet, as she could, she did comply, and with the promise of a nurse, both Giles and Hew returned to college life. And so they went on quietly, until one afternoon, some three days after Agnes’ arrest, Hew called in at the merchant’s house to find his cousin weeping in the hall. This in itself did not alarm him. He was used to Lucy’s fancies, and resigned himself to comfort her. He had fetched her salts and cushions, herbs and wines and comfits, enquired upon her health and bairn and husband, all to no avail, before the floods had settled and the tale began to spill. It came out in blurts, like a blocked water fountain, blunted with spouting salt tears.

‘That girl! I did not think she would be bold enough to come here! God forgive me! What will Robin think!’

Quick-witted as he was, Hew could not untangle this.

‘There is nothing that cannot be managed,’ he assured her patiently. ‘Tell me, who has come? Has someone threatened you?’

She shook her head. ‘The Strachan girl,’ she whispered, ‘came here to beg for help. My God! If Robin knew!’

‘Tibbie Strachan? Why?’

‘Have you not heard? It is her mother Agnes, taken for a witch. And she has killed her husband and is in the tower. And Tibbie says that they torment her there, and force her from her rest. My God, Hew, Agnes is a witch, and she was
here
!’

Hew’s mind had begun to make sense of this parcel of words. He felt chilled to the pit of his belly. He spoke very calmly, clasping Lucy’s hands.

‘I had not heard this. Our college walls are thick. Agnes killed her husband? How?’

‘With poisoned seeds. She had them from a witch. And she is taken to the kirk, till she confess, and name the witch, and both shall surely hang. If Robin knew I had her in the house!’

Hew pressed on urgently, ‘Was it
Tibbie
, then, you had here in the house?’

‘Tibbie? Twas
Agnes
. Pity, Hew, don’t blame me!’

She flinched from him, and fleetingly he almost pitied her.

‘You will not tell Robin,’ she whimpered. ‘Pray, don’t let him know. Professor Locke insisted on a nurse, and Meg was wild and frothing and the maid afraid to sit with her.’

‘And so Agnes nursed her,’ Hew concluded desperately.

‘Aye, do not blame me,’ she clutched at him. ‘For I doubt she did no harm. But Agnes is a witch!’

He shook his head. ‘It was not your fault. I should have found a nurse for her. Though I think it very likely that the matter is mistaken. Agnes Ford is not a witch. In any case, she cannot come here now, so put her from your mind.’

‘You think not?’ Lucy blew her nose. Unburdening had brightened her.

‘It matters not, though, if she is a witch,’ she remarked with unexpected shrewdness. ‘Come the session court, she will confess. And to think, I had her here!’

Hew forced himself to smile at her. ‘Well then, you see, there’s no harm done. We’ll keep this quiet, Lucy. You have not told Meg?’

She shook her head regretfully. ‘I do not speak to Meg. Tis only these last days she has been sensible. It is an
uncouth
ailment, and I do not fault the maid. That’s why I was so glad to have had Agnes. No, I have not told her. The physician is insistent, she must not be vexed.’

‘It’s proper that we keep it so. Poor Lucy,’ he expressed a sympathy he did not hold at heart, ‘this is hard for you.’

‘It has been,’ she simpered, clutching his sleeve. ‘But I can bear it now.’

It was harder to conceal his true concerns from Meg. He did not like to lie to her. Sleepy as she was, she sensed something amiss. ‘What has happened to you, Hew? You have a cut upon your throat.’ She traced the scratches with her finger.

‘A close shave from a drunken barber.’ Gently, he removed her hand. ‘You were gone for days. I’m glad to find you waking. I have been afraid for you.’

‘I am recovered,’ she replied a little sourly. ‘Only Giles enforces rest. And he is most officious. Pray advise him, I am well.’

‘You must listen to him, Meg. The seizures were severe. You remember little, I suppose?’

‘Nothing, till I woke up yesterday. Lucy says you brought me here with Giles, and that Giles has since attended me. It’s good of him, though he has been boasting how well he has cured me.’

Hew was too preoccupied to smile at this. ‘You don’t remember your nurse?’

‘What nurse?’

‘Someone undressed you.’

‘Was it not the maid?’ She flushed a little. ‘Hew, you don’t mean Giles!’

‘No, no,’ he reassured her hastily. ‘Look, here are your clothes on the stool. But I do not see the pocket where you keep your hemlock seeds.’

‘It’s there inside the dress. There is a little ribbon ties it to the sleeve.’

‘I see it now. It’s empty.’

Meg sat up in bed. ‘The scoundrel, Hew! Doctor Locke has taken it, and dosed me with the seed. He who has the nerve to boast he cured my fits without resort to
poisons
, as he calls them! Well! The quacksalve! We have found him out! He will not grant my arts superior to his.’

‘It seems that you have solved it,’ her brother answered grimly. ‘Well then, let us humour him. It will not do us good to wound his pride. What matter, though? You’re well. And if you rest a little longer, you’ll be quite restored to us.’

He tucked the empty pocket in his shirt and left her with a heavy heart.

When Hew had been a student in his first year at St Andrews, two men were taken from the town as witches to the scaffold. One was hanged, and one was burned. In the college the reporting of their trial was met with lewd excitement as the young men feasted on the details of their crimes. When the regents’ backs were turned they spoke of little else. Some had begged for leave to watch the executions, which was granted with good grace. Hew had felt the revulsion, squeamish and soft, that threatened him still to this day. The necromancers preyed upon his mind, both in the crude accounts of their confessing, sniggered in the hall from boy to boy, and in the heady whispers of their discourse with the dead. At length he almost had believed himself bewitched, haunted by these nightmare tales of demons and the engines that had moved the men’s confessions. Only Nicholas had sensed his friend’s disquiet, and had whispered to him on the night before the hanging that he doubted whether witches did exist. Hew was
startled from his fears. ‘Twere heresy, for sure, to say they don’t
exist
.’

‘Aye, heresy, for sure,’ his bedfellow had smiled at him.

This cheerful confidence had brought Hew comfort. He confessed he would prefer a whipping to the watching of an execution, witch or no. And so amidst the clamour they had slipped away to spend the afternoon upon the links, chasing conies through the dunes, where truant, they had forged their friendship far beyond the crowd. As the term progressed, Hew became acclimatised to torment and the ruthless casual cruelties of the kirk. He saw vagrants and whoremongers scourged through the streets, branded and bloodied like parcels of meat. Yet though their disfigurement moved and disgusted him, the cruelty had inured him to their suffering, for it turned their human faces to grotesques. Three years later, when he heard John Knox pour scalding words upon a witch before the pulpit, he watched her trudging forth towards the pyre with little sense of horror or regret. The flames found her shrivelled, dehumanised.

Once a witch was named, there was little could be done to stop the turning of the screw, the long and slow trudging through darkness to death. Agnes was already in the shaft of sleepless dream, whose only light and end was her confession. To urge her not to confess, he was aware, was like urging her to walk alone across an open precipice, closing off from her the last glimpse of the light. Yet Agnes Ford must not confess. She must not denounce his sister as a witch. If Agnes once gave name to her, Meg Cullan would be wracked and bowed to the most intricate of cruelties, turned to human torchlight, rope around her neck. Therefore Agnes Ford must be released, and he must be her advocate.

He ran to the Mercatgait and hammered on the door of Archie’s shop.

Tibbie Strachan had changed remarkably since he had seen her last. The girl who looked out on the street bore no resemblance to the strumpet who had tossed her curls in kirk. She gave a bare glance at the stranger, and the apprehension in her voice did not quicken into curiosity.

‘We’re closed, sir. For bereavement.’

‘You’re Tibbie Strachan?’

‘Isabel, aye.’ She stared at him, grey with mistrust, her pet name discarded. ‘What would you want with me, sir?’

‘I come from the house of my cousin, Robin Flett, from Lucy Linn his wife, who has lately been a friend to you.’

A little colour pricked her cheeks as she said stiffly, ‘Lately, aye. You need not take the trouble, sir, to warn me from your family. Lucy made it clear.’ She began to close the door.

‘You misunderstand me. I came to speak about your mother. I’m a man of law.’

‘Aye, lass, tis true, he is a man of law, and you maun speak with him,’ urged an agitated voice. Hew saw the figure of Tom Begbie, shifting in the room behind her, peering through the crack.

The girl appeared to hesitate. ‘I know this man,’ persisted Tom. ‘He’s privy to the courts, and you must give him heed. Ye
must
.’

He shot Hew a look of appeal, as though only terror had halted his flight, and Hew had a sense of how little he or Tibbie could begin to comprehend the horrors that enfolded them. Masking pity in a frown, he played the part. ‘Aye, that’s right. And I must look into the case, and talk in private with you, Tibbie . . .
Isabel
.’

Without a word in answer, Tibbie led the way into the house. Hew held the door just long enough for Tom to flee this present threat before he followed her. She settled on a stool, arms in her lap, like a penitent in kirk, cowed into submissiveness. She had kept the chamber tidy since her mother left, the work folded neat in its basket, the pots scrubbed and clean. And Hew, who had come here intent upon helping Meg, felt with a prick the true depth of Tibbie’s tragedy, closed in the dark of her quiet neat house. Softly, he said, ‘Are you left here alone? With Tom Begbie?’

The kirk had soiled her conscience, for she rallied in alarm.

‘Tom lies in the shop. He does not sleep here . . . and besides . . .’ she spoke the words reluctantly, as if they were foreign objects in her mouth, rolled about her tongue like pebblestones, ‘he stays upon the trial, for he is wanted there.’

Hew inclined his head and answered gently, ‘For sure, I meant no impropriety. I only thought to ask, you have no friend? To see you through this time?’

Tibbie shook her head. ‘When my father was alive we were something in the town. Now all doors are closed to us. I hoped that Lucy Linn . . .’

‘Understand, it’s hard for Lucy, with her husband gone from home,’ Hew excused his cousin. ‘Yet she sends me in her place. I can help you. What was it that you wanted from her?’

‘Her husband Robin Flett does business with my uncle overseas. If I could send the tidings … but I know not where to – how to – send the news to him.’

‘Ah, is that all?’ he interrupted earnestly. ‘Then it is the simplest thing. I will write the letters and send them to the Scots house in Campvere. You will reach him there, you may be sure of it. Your uncle then will vouch for her, and Agnes may go free.’

‘You don’t understand. It is too late for that. My mother has been taken for a witch and imprisoned in the kirk. They will not let me see her there. Her friends – the people who were once her friends – will not intercede for her. And Tom . . .’ her voice was thick with tears, ‘Tom says they torment her, and that, witch or not, she will confess. I came into the kirk and heard her cries. I could not bear to stay. And yet the elders say that if I shun the kirk I am a witch as well, so I dare not shun the kirk, or stop my ears to block the sound. It is a torment, sir,’ she told him simply.

He shook his head, moved at this horror. He told her truthfully, ‘Aye, I understand you. Still, there may be hope. Tell me what has happened here. I’ll help you if I can.’