Mist Over Pendle (8 page)

“All?” Richard Baldwin’s voice rose passionately. “All, d’ye say? All?” He turned from Dick Nutter and spoke directly to Roger. “When I’d seen poor Harry dead and quiet, I came out here in great unease of spirit. And there on this hillside, not twenty roods away, were two damned witches squatting like gorged crows--Demdike and her squinting bastard.”

“Who?” Wilsey spoke for the first time. “Which of them? Alizon? Or Squinting Lizzie?”

“In human pity, tell us a plain tale!” Roger sounded exasperated. “I grow giddy between this brood of women. Whom do you speak of now?”

Baldwin explained carefully, speaking clearly and with a slow patience.

“There are but three to think of,” he said. “There’s Demdike, the old beldame who began the whole damned brood. There’s her daughter whom she names Elizabeth and who takes second name Device from a fool she says married her. And....“

“Is that Squinting Lizzie?”

“So Wilsey says. And surely she’s afflicted of the eyes....

Beyond that, there’s the third generation, this whelp Alizon, who’s daughter to this Elizabeth Device and hence granddaughter to the Demdike.”

“Yet first you said....“

“I said that first there were Demdike and the whelp Alizon. And so there were. But the whelp ran off, and her mother must have took her place, for it was her I saw.”

“The grandmother remaining? I see.” Roger’s face had the faintest of smiles. “Then the matter, as you see it, stands how?”

“Is there need to say how?” Baldwin sounded impatient. “They’re known reputed witches, all of them. The whelp flings dung. Mitton makes at her, and the old one strikes him down. Then, her own power not sufficing, she calls Device, her daughter, to help make an end of him. Is it not enough?”

Roger looked slowly round the circle from one to another, as though searching out their thoughts.

“It would be enough,” he said quietly, “if I were sure that any power had struck him.”

“If you were sure?” Richard Baldwin’s stern voice shook with fury. “What meaning has sure if this be not it?”

Roger chose to answer him indirectly.

“This Mitton,” he said, “to be more just than courteous, might be called stout of girth. And none so young. It’s ill work for such a one to run up hills in the sun.”

“You doubt. You doubt all things.” Baldwin was flaming in accusation. “You doubt that this killed Mitton. You doubt all power of witches. You set aside the Holy Writ. You set aside what the King has writ. And you doubt! I tell you, whoever doubts the Devil’s power will doubt God’s power before he’s done. I have said to you before....“

“And you’d best not say it again.”

Margery jerked to attention. There had been a note in Roger’s voice which she had never heard in any voice before. It cut Baldwin short in the height of his fury, and he stopped, his hard breathing noisy in the silence.

For a moment there was open hostility. But both men kept their tempers, and Roger broke the tension with a sudden smile.

“We’d best not quarrel, Richard,” he said. “That’s how the Devil wins.”

But Richard Baldwin was harder to appease. He turned aside and spoke bitterly.

“Thou makest us to be rebuked of our neighbours,” he recited. “To be laughed to scorn and had in derision of them that are round about us.”

Margery picked up her scattered thoughts. She had sat in churches and at family prayers too often to miss the quotation, and suddenly she dared an intervention.

“The forty-fourth Psalm, is it not?” she said. “But Master Baldwin, is there not also a word in the eighty-ninth?”

She knew how to talk to puritans. He whipped round as though he had been stung, and she saw him groping for it. Then, before he had found it, she gave it him.

“What man is he that liveth and shall not see death?” She looked him straight in the eye. “I take that to mean, sir, that death is natural to men.”

A faint nod from Roger showed his approval. Baldwin turned from Margery to Roger. Then, still in silence, he turned back to Margery, and once again there was doubt in his eyes. The others stood in watchful silence.

“You’ve been well schooled, mistress,” he said slowly.

Then Roger spoke crisply.

“It’s matter of my duty as a Justice, Richard. Granting that a witch has power and may strike a man, I nevertheless can’t commit till I’ve determined that she’s in fact done so. Wherefore my duty here is plain. I must see these women. Where shall they be sought?’’

Richard Baldwin had recovered his poise. He looked Roger very straight in the eye.

“If I’ve misjudged this, I’ll be sorry for that,” he said simply.

“Thanks for that, Richard. Since we’re of a mind on it, we may seek the Demdike brood.”

Then Jim Wilsey cut in with a cheerful heartiness that helped to ease the tension.

“That’s good,” he said. “Then we’d best get us to the Malkin Tower. It’s home to them all, and they’ll be back there by now.”

“Like enough!” said Dick Nutter, and led them back through the garden to the house.

They mounted, all six of them, and took to the road again, riding now beyond the Rough Lee and with the Pendle Water still splashing beside them. Wilsey was riding with Roger, and seeing them deep in talk, Margery fell back. To her surprise, Richard Baldwin came alongside her. As usual, he spoke his mind without prelude.

“You’ll know more of Holy Writ than the Psalms, mistress?”

“I trust so, indeed.” She was watchful, and wondering what was coming.

“Tell me, then, what’s commanded for a witch in the Book of the Exodus?”

Margery felt more at ease. She knew this with certainty. Every puritan used this text, and she answered easily.

“In the twenty-second chapter? Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live?”

He nodded approvingly.

“Just so. And is not that enough?”

Margery sought evasions, that she might neither contradict this man nor range herself with him against Roger. And while she hesitated he pressed her again.

“And of this woman and her daughter and her daughter’s daughter, the three of them damned alike--what’s declared of such as they?”

Margery thought quickly and as quickly found the answer, thankful that these puritans all leaned on the same texts; and again she quoted it easily.

“The twentieth chapter? ‘I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.’ Is that it, Master Baldwin?”

It was, and Master Baldwin plainly wanted to discuss it further, but Margery would have none of it. She knew that look in a puritan’s eye, and she knew the sort of talk it presaged, and at this moment she felt that she could not bear with it. Her mind was on present matters, and she wanted to know where they were, where and what this Malkin Tower might be, and some more about this woman called Demdike. She was curious, too, about this man, and about the Grace he had called his daughter. So she asked him quickly where they were.

If he was disappointed, he hid it well. There was, as she was coming to perceive, a natural courtesy in Richard Baldwin, and it was not always over-ridden by his puritan bluntness. He looked about him shrewdly. They had come a couple of miles from the Rough Lee, and the Pendle Water had swept to the right and was now far from the road; he pointed to the curve of it.

“You see,” he said. “The Water’s gone from the road. It turns back on itself and goes to join the Calder. But see you now.”

They had topped a short steep slope, and before them the prospect had changed abruptly. In front of them was a long and grassy valley, rising and curving into the far distance; and here their road swung to the right, and then seemed to swing left again behind a grassy hill, as though it followed the shoulder of this valley. To their left a stony track led down to the bottom of the valley, and Margery could see its white streak as it wound up the slope beyond.

“That’s for Wheathead,” he told her. “It would bring you to the mill where I have my home and work. And one day, mistress, if you’ll take that ride, I’ll be glad indeed to greet you there.”

He looked across at her with a touch of shyness that sat oddly on him. Margery was in haste to answer.

“That, sir, I’ll surely do, and soon. My thanks for those words.”

She was both pleased and nattered. Clearly she was on the way to having his liking. Besides, she was as curious as ever, and she wanted to see his home and daughter. She would certainly visit this mill at Wheathead--but not, she thought, in orange-tawny and a plumed copintank.

A moment’s halt was enough for Roger, and then he led them off the road, so that they were riding on the bare grass and climbing obliquely out of the valley. Again it was Richard Baldwin who explained.

“You saw the road go round the hill? We may join it again this way. We do but shorten corners. It’s the Gisburn road and it runs along the crest of the valley.”

His meaning was plain when they had topped the crest. Here was a windy moorland with the thin road crossing it, straight and stark.

“And what more do you see?”

Richard Baldwin spoke quietly, and Margery had no doubt of his meaning. Set by the road, lonely and desolate, was another of the grey stone houses, but this time a mere cottage. It stood alone, far from the life of the Forest. No outbuildings ringed it. No animals, not a cow, nor a sheep, not even a chicken, seemed to belong to it. Its only sign of life was a wisp of smoke flattening into the wind from its single chimney. It stood alone and desolate, an outcast from the dwellings of men.

“So!” Richard Baldwin spoke with menace in his voice. “The Malkin Tower.”

They were riding swiftly now, down the bare slope of the grass. The awful cottage drew nearer, and Margery could soon see that its desolation was not of position only. It was decayed, ramshackle, desperate. There were holes in the thatch and cracks in the walls; the bounding fence was torn into crazy gaps. But for the smoke, she would have supposed the place derelict and abandoned these twenty years. If this was a human habitation, it surely ought not to be.

Under the horses’ feet a hare sprang from nowhere and went bounding and leaping over the tufted grass. Roger turned in his saddle.

“You saw it?” he called.

“The hare?”

“What our country folk would call a malkin.- And here we are! The Malkin Tower!”

They hitched their horses to what was left of the fence and Jim Wilsey led them to the door. This was his privilege as Constable, and Roger followed behind him. Margery, in the rear, had time to note the pitiful ruin of the place, the split and battered door, the broken windows, the litter of filth on the ground about.

Whatever these Demdikes might be, the Malkin Tower was testimony to their poverty and squalor.

Wilsey kicked sharply on the door and set the crazy thing shivering. He waited, kicked again, and looked inquiringly at Roger. Margery guessed why. Wilsey, as Constable, was an officer elected of the parish; but the King’s peace lay on the crazy door, and only the King’s Justice might give leave to force it. But so much was not needed. A bolt screeched, and the door swung slowly open to disclose a man--or the semblance of one.

Margery looked in surprise. She had expected a woman, and even if she had expected a man she would hardly have expected such a man as this. He was a tall thin fellow, in shirt and tattered breeches, and with sacking tied about his shirt in the place of a jerkin; and shirt, sacking and breeches alike were slimy with dirt. His head rolled above a long thin neck, and his eyes rolled in his head till they showed their whites. His dirt, his fantastic dress, and his idiot looks made it hard to fix his age, though he was obviously young. Margery guessed that he might be about twenty. And no sooner had he opened the door than he loosed a great whooping laugh; then his mouth dropped open, and he stood gaping.

Wilsey wanted no more invitation. He marched in, Roger after him, and shouldered the fellow aside. One by one the others followed, and all the men stayed covered.

The dark low room was as foul and ruinous as the rest of the place. A heavy rough-hewn table filled most of the mud floor. To the left of it, set against the wall, was a long wooden chest. Beyond, on the back wall, a low bench covered with rags and straw looked as if it served someone as a bed. To the right of the table a peat fire smoked on a cracked stone hearth. By this hearth, sunk in the shadows, sat three women.

Margery had heard endless talk of witches. She had read of them in books and in many a lurid broadsheet. Once she had been in the crowd to see one hanged. But she had never seen a living witch at close quarters, and she stared now with undisguised interest at these three women. Unquestionably they were the three generations Baldwin had spoken of. One was pitiful in extreme old age; one was in vigorous middle life; and the third was a young girl whose age might have matched Margery’s. This, no doubt, was the ‘whelp’ of Baldwin’s tale.

A crackling word from Wilsey brought all three women to their feet, while the fellow who had let them in moved to the window. Tom Peyton hooked one of the stools from the hearth and set it at the table’s end for Roger, who moved slowly to it. Wilsey, as Constable, stood to his right, Tom Peyton to his left. Baldwin and Nutter hovered behind him. Margery moved to the chest by the wall, thinking it would serve her as a seat; but before she reached it there was an interruption.

Roger, in settling himself, pushed his long legs under the table. At once there came a quick squeal and a rustling in the straw. Then, from the other end of the table, a child shot out, rushed wildly at the door, and ran head down into Margery.

Margery grunted, and held on to the frightened child. Roger jumped to his feet, and the gaping fellow by the window loosed his idiot laugh again. For a moment there was confusion. Then Roger seated himself again. Tom Peyton silenced the laughter with a vicious jab in the stomach, and in another moment Margery was sufficiently recovered to look curiously at her capture.

The child was very young, a girl who could have been no more than eight, and something in her won Margery’s sympathy at once. It was not only her pitiful state of fright, not only her unkempt neglect, not only the coarse rough smock that clothed her; beyond all these, this child was attractive. She had a strong cleanly-cut little face, clear grey eyes, and hair that might have been golden without its dirt; and though she looked pinched and underfed, she was nevertheless well limbed and of good proportions. She pulled and struggled for a moment. Then she gave it up and buried herself in Margery’s cloak. Margery pulled her out of it and tilted the little face towards her own.