Mist Over Pendle

© Robert Neill 1951

Published as ‘
The Elegant Witch’
in the United States

In December 1595 died Dr. William Whitaker, Master of St. John’s College and Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Cambridge. He left to his widow some books, some sermons, and the care of eight children, the youngest not a week
old. And since he had been a poor man, he left her very little else.

It soon appeared that she might expect little help from his College, for he had been more esteemed out of it than in it. He had been too stern a Calvinist to please the Fellows, who would have liked him better, as one of them had said, if they had found in him more of sweet England and less of sour Geneva. He had been known, too, for a habit which has never won liking for any man, a habit of being sorry for himself, of complaining that his preferment had never matched his deserts; and the Fellows thought this assertion a slight upon the worth of their Mastership. Nor had he mended matters by a vain attempt, some two years before, to leave St. John’s for the more lucrative Mastership of Trinity, which had then been vacant. So when he was gone, his widow, who had always echoed his sentiments with a tart and busy tongue, did not find the Fellows more generous than they had a duty to be.

Mistress Whitaker therefore withdrew, from Cambridge and conveyed herself and her children to London, where she might hope to find more generous friends. For Dr. Whitaker had not been her only husband. She had married him when she was already the widow of that Dudley Fenner whom all Kent knew and honoured as a puritan divine, and whose
Short And Profitable Treatise Of Lawful And Unlawful Recreation
had crossed every frontier in Europe. She had, indeed, borne Dr. Fenner two children and this, she supposed, might now commend her to his family and to such others as might still honour his name.

As she supposed, so it proved. She found his family and his friends, and she laid them under contribution. She extracted a little from the Fellows of St. John’s. She extracted rather more from Dr. Whitaker’s benefactor and uncle, the aged Alexander Nowell who was Dean of St. Paul’s and author of those famous catechisms of which the smallest still largely survives in the Book of Common Prayer. And thus provided she set up a modest home near Lambeth, where she felt herself securely within the aura of the Church. Here, in the years that followed, she devoted herself to the care of her children, and especially to that of the lately born infant. This youngest was a girl named Margery.

These were lean years and hard, for her means were small for what was to be done. But by perseverance and economy, by expedient and denial, she contrived to bring them all through the years of dependence; and as each came to a proper age she appealed to their father’s family for what was needed as a start in life. This, or as little of it as might suffice, each in turn received, for the Whitakers were not ungenerous. They were a family of some substance, holding a good estate at Holme in the County of Lancaster, and they gave to each a portion which, if it seemed little, did in fact suffice,. One by one, therefore, Mistress Whitaker sent her children out into the world: Alexander, the eldest, to Cambridge and a Fellowship of Trinity; Richard to a bookseller’s trade in Holborn; Prudence as housekeeper to Richard; Laurence into Holy Orders; Sarah and Elizabeth into parsonages as the wives and helps of divines.

Matters were so disposed, all but Margery having gone from home, when in May of 1611 Mistress Whitaker, exhausted by her long exertions, went into a distemper and shortly died.

When she had been decorously laid to rest and the funeral sermon gravely preached, the elders of her family met in Richard’s house above the bookshop in Holborn to discuss what has to be discussed at such a time; and when they had dined and some lesser matters had been settled, Prudence brought them to the greater one: what, she demanded, was to be done with Margery?

They looked at one another unhappily, for this had been in all their thoughts. Alexander coughed and tried to put it aside. The girl, he said, was young, the matter not urgent; it could properly wait till they met again. He was airy about it, and he was moving on when Richard stopped him. By his leave, said Richard, the matter
was
urgent; it could by no means wait till they met again.

Alexander flushed angrily. He was the eldest, and he was not used to being contradicted like that; but Prudence and Richard were of one mind about this, and they spoke that mind firmly. The young Margery had been their guest and ward for some days now, and they had cause to know it. Richard could recall no time when his apprentices had been so turbulent and, so disposed to dream at their duties, and Prudence had been asking bitterly how she was to order her house and contrive for her guests when it was one woman’s full work to keep an eye on Margery. So she and Richard spoke with one voice: something must be done with Margery, and would Alexander please say what?

If Margery had been at all like her sisters there would have been no problem, for she was now approaching her sixteenth birthday and might therefore be accounted almost of marriageable age; if she had been like her sisters the family’s name and repute would have tempted more than one good curate to contract for such a wife to grace his parsonage, bear his children, and support him through the ills of life. The trouble was, as her family had long since ceased to conceal from themselves, that Margery was not in the least like her sisters, in body or in mind. They were dark of hair and thin of face as their mother had been; devout of mind and sober of speech as their father had been; fitting wives for any divine. But this Margery was of another mould. She was lithe of limb and firm of muscle, and if she was not truly beautiful she at least caught and held attention--especially, said her sisters, masculine attention. She had a firmly moulded chin, a lean and humorous mouth, and eyebrows that lifted easily to point the meanings of her impertinences; her whole face, indeed, was eloquent, and it gave expression to a variety of sentiments--some of them, according to her sisters, being sentiments that a girl of her age ought not to have, let alone express. Her eyes, too, although they mirrored beyond mistake a quick and questioning intelligence, could yet hold a ripple of humour and a twinkle of mischief; and this they did, as her family thought, a great deal too often, and sometimes at scandalously ill-chosen moments. Her hair, also, set her apart in the family, for it was of an unusual brown; a brown a little darker than golden, but having in it an odd streak of red which lurked in the depths and gave a sudden glint when the sunlight caught it. Margery, in short, was the cuckoo in the nest, and how such a girl had been born into such a family none could tell. It was well indeed for Mistress Whitaker that she moved among divines; folk of another sort might have wondered shamefully.

Of Margery’s talents and accomplishments there was less complaint to be made. It had to be admitted that the girl had put her quick wits to some good uses. The arts of reading and writing, which her sisters had gained slowly and with labour, had come to her easily and without need of compulsion. She added to them some rudiments of Latin, earnestly instilled into her by an eccentric divine who had fancied that they would make her a closer companion for the curate she would surely wed. In manners and deportment she was well instructed. She had as much of needle-work and the household arts as might properly be expected of one who had not yet ruled an establishment. She could do household accounts fairly and decently. And from a friendly neighbour, who was a Huguenot out of France and by trade a riding-master, she had learned something of the management of a horse.

She had, too, some other learning which her family had not noticed. In a house so frequented by the puritan clergy and their friends there had been no lack of talk--talk for the most part of theology and its many controversies; and for many an hour she had sat composed and silent while her quick mind took in more that the talkers dreamed of. If she had had a mind to, which she most assuredly had not, she could have expounded as well as any of them the doctrines of that John Calvin whose
Institutio,
it seemed, had dwarfed and superseded
De Civitate Dei;
she could have rehearsed the points in which this Calvin had been so impertinently criticized by the Dutchman Hermanns, whom they latinized into Arminius; she could have spoken of that Erastus whose
Explicatio
lent support to the claims of the civil power; and she could have added her private belief that all three of them had expended a vast deal of words upon a trifling particle of matter. But this belief, along with some others, she found it prudent to keep to herself.

Yet had this been all, the matter might have been arranged. Her admitted accomplishments and the worth of her family might have been set against that impertinent and disconcerting glance, and a husband might have been found, strong enough in arm and mind to keep her in a decent order. But it was not all. For it could hardly be denied that the girl’s interests were by no means where they should be. Though her face could remain impassive and dutiful when she so wished, it could also break quickly into an easy smile, which went with a flicker of the eye and an odd crinkle of the forehead; a combination, it was noted, which she seldom bestowed on members of her family. It was a charm, so her sisters said, which the girl reserved for men, and young men at that; and upon them it had been seen to have the most undesirable effects. Her family had not yet forgotten that dreadful Sunday, not six months gone, when, the sermon being but half done and the young visiting preacher just turning his hour-glass, this graceless girl had suddenly turned that smile and crinkle full upon him, so that he stumbled in his discourse, forgot his text, and seemed unable, through the whole of his second hour, to turn his eyes to any other pew. Nor, even after that scandal, had the girl shown any disposition to mend her ways and turn her thoughts to a devout and sober life. All that could be devised for her improvement had been tried. She had been instructed and admonished; she had been scolded and coaxed; she had been prayed for, and prayed with; she had been tenderly exhorted and soundly whipped; and all to no effect. She remained as she had always been; composed, inscrutable and deplorable, a menace to the peace and good name of her family

This, then, was the problem that her unhappy brothers and sisters had now to face. What was to be done with Margery? Where, indeed,
was
Margery?

It was Alexander who asked that, and they looked at one another with surprise. Nobody, it seemed, had thought of that. Her presence had not been thought necessary, and now she had to be hastily summoned while Alexander fidgeted impatiently. But for once she was not hard to find; and she came in quickly and walked to the table, graceful and alert in spite of the faded black of her kirtie and the prim severity of her thin white collar. Her young face was impassive as she stood quietly in front of Alexander, demurely waiting for him to speak. He was a big florid fellow, grave in the bands and black of a divine, and his podgy fingers tapped importantly as he spoke.

“How,” he demanded, “may such a girl as you, undutiful and undevout, be wedded to a godly man?”

The girl dropped her eyes and said nothing. He looked her over coldly.

“By your own conduct you are in a way to destroy yourself. What man who has the Grace within him would wed with such as you?”

Again he had no answer. The girl stood silent, hands clasped and eyes cast down. Alexander raised his voice. “Do you hear me speak?”

“Yes brother.” Her quiet voice was clear and musical. “Then why do you not answer?”

“In truth brother, I know not what to answer.”

“That I believe. And you should blush for it. Are you not ashamed to be our sister?”

“Yes brother.”

Prudence stirred suddenly, and Margery pressed her lips. She was wondering whether she had let that answer ring too true. She had no fear that Alexander would notice it. Alexander never noticed any of her subtleties. But Prudence was different, and Margery had learned to watch her eldest sister warily. Prudence, she thought, knew her and her ways a deal too well.

But Alexander was speaking again. With his head flung back and his fingers drumming, he boomed resonantly. How, he asked, could they marry this girl to any man they knew, esteemed, and wished to be connected with? Yet, that being barred, what else could be done with her? Were they to maintain her in an idle spinsterhood?
He
certainly was not. Alexander snorted at the prospect and rounded on Margery to tell her that she was an idle, insolent, godless baggage, the pride of the Devil and the shame of her family.