The Last Witchfinder Read online

the last ingredients to enter a witches’ brew, hard

  behind the goat’s gall, the hemlock root, the wolf’s tooth, the lizard’s

  leg, and so many other wonderfully horrid things. Near the end came the Tartar’s lips, the tiger’s guts, and the finger of a strangled babe. Finally you cooled the concoction with baboon blood, all the while chanting, “Double, double, toil and trouble, fire burn, and cauldron bubble.”

  Although Jennet had never actually seen a witches’ brew, she hoped the day was not far off when she might accompany her father, Witchfinder-General for Mercia and East Anglia, on the cleansing circuit, thereby beholding not only an enchanted soup but all the other astonishing components of a Sabbat, the flying horses, singing pigs, wizards dancing widdershins, and altars piled high with silver apples made of moonlight. As it was, however, at the start of the spring hunt Walter Stearne always placed his daughter under the care and tutelage of his widowed sister-in-law, Isobel Mowbray, whilst Jennet’s younger brother, Dunstan, was privileged to join their father as he set about delivering the English nation from the Devil.

  This arrangement would have occasioned in Jennet an intolerable envy but for the irrefutable fact that Aunt Isobel was the cleverest woman in Christendom. Aunt Isobel the philosopher. Aunt Isobel the geometer. Aunt Isobel the mistress of Mirringate Hall, that carnival of marvels, chief amongst the prizes accruing to her long-dead husband’s mercantile genius. In the Mirringate astronomical observatory, Jennet had once spied the very quartet of Jovian satellites that had inspired Galileo Galilei to cast his lot with the Copernican universe. In the alchemical laboratory she’d oft-times heated the pigment cinnabar, sublimating it into a slippery silver pearl of mercury. The crystal-gazing parlor was the scene of many attempts by Jennet and Isobel to glimpse future events in polished mirrors and clear-quartz globes, with results that seemed to neither confirm nor disprove the validity of scrying.

  The burgeoning spring of 1688 found Jennet particularly anxious to continue her studies, for Aunt Isobel had recently acquired a Van Leeuwenhoek microscope of the newest design. Climbing into the Basque coach that morning, settling onto the velvet seat alongside Dunstan, she felt throughout her body an uncanny exhilaration, as if her heart had become a passenger on one of her mother’s girlhood kites. Their father, in the driver’s box, snapped his whip, and the horses lurched out of Wyre Street Livery into a Colchester dawn alive with birdsong and the incisive scent of dog-roses, bound for Mirringate Hall.

  Thanks to Aunt Isobel, Jennet knew many stories about her mother, whose life’s juices had gushed out of her as she’d struggled to bring Dunstan into the world. Passing their school-girl years in the verdant environs of the River Stour, the two sisters—sole offspring of Oliver Noakes, a successful Parham apothecary—had in time come to share many enthusiasms, most especially a fondness for æolian machines. Margaret and Isobel Noakes had fashioned their own pinwheels, weather vanes, and toy sailboats. They’d constructed soaring paper birds and fluttering parchment butterflies. They’d stretched red silk handkerchiefs on birch-wood frames, launching each kite to such an altitude that it became an ominous crimson comet hanging in the Mistley sky.

  On Jennet’s eighth birthday, Aunt Isobel presented her with Margaret Noake’s crowning achievement, a four-bladed windmill, thirty inches high. Silk sails puffed full of breeze, the cedar cross turned smoothly on its axis, grinding the softest flour in Creation.

  “It still works!” Jennet exclaimed.

  “You doubted it would?” Aunt Isobel said. She was a small woman, compact as a stone, intense as an owl. “Your mother and I took our pastimes seriously, child. We ne’er confused fun with frivolity.”

  “Fun versus frivolity…”

  “A subtle distinction, aye, but ’tis to the subtle distinctions a natural philosopher must be evermore attuned. My husband once came home bearing both the skull of a human imbecile and the skull of a Sumatra orangutan, then challenged me to say which was which.”

  “The skulls looked much the same?”

  “They were twins for fair. But then I noticed that in one specimen the aperture permitting egress of the brain-cord was set an inch lower than in the other. Ergo, I knew the first for the imbecile’s skull, since ’tis only we humans who walk fully erect!”

  j

  THE JOURNEY FROM COLCHESTER to Ipswich had never seemed longer to Jennet, but at last they were strolling amidst the boxwood hedges of the Mirringate gardens, and finally they were sitting in the east parlor, eating biscuits and admiring the new microscope. Hand-carried by Aunt Isobel all the way from the Low Countries, the device rested on a squat marble table beside a porcelain vase holding three tulips—yellow, purple, red—likewise Dutch, recently burst from their bulbs.

  It was Rodwell himself who waited on the visitors, and as the gangling old steward poured out saucers of coffee from a silver retort (not the first time an alchemical apparatus had been pressed into practical service at Mirringate), the conversation betwixt Jennet’s father and aunt turned to the sorts of dreary political matters that for adults held such incomprehensible fascination. Would the King persist in imposing his regrettable religion on the affairs of state? Would he continue to risk his throne by appointing Catholics to head the colleges, imprisoning rebellious Anglican bishops in the Tower, and setting Papist officers over the army and the fleet? To Jennet it did not seem terribly important whether England lost her ruler or not. Obviously the nation could always get another. Surely this James the Second boasted at least one blood relation willing to wear the crown, especially as the position included scores of minions standing ready to empty your chamber-pot, soothe you with a viol, and feed you on marzipan and meringue the instant you snapped your fingers.

  Bored, Jennet studied the vapors rising from her coffee. Dunstan, equally unamused, leafed through his sketching-folio—his inerrant eye, she noticed, was attracted these days to gnarled trees and helical vines—until he found a blank sheet, whereupon he took out his sweet-smelling sticks of colored wax. In a matter of minutes he’d caught the essence of the red tulip, fixing its pulse and glow to the page: a living heart, she decided, beating within the breast of a fabulous Oriental dragon.

  “Mutum est pictura poema,” Jennet said.

  Dunstan glanced up from his folio. His pudgy face had of late acquired an unfortunate pummeled quality, like a bulging purse drawn tight by a miser’s anxiety. “What?”

  “‘A picture is a silent poem.’ Simonides.”

  Simultaneously changing the pitch of her voice, the cant of her spine, and the topic under discussion, Aunt Isobel gestured toward the microscope. “It hath six times the potency of its ancestors, I’m told, a siege cannon as compared to a slingshot. The secret lies in Van Leeuwenhoek’s lenses. They say only God Himself can grind better.”

  “A most impressive trinket,” Jennet’s father said.

  “’Tis no bauble, brother,” Aunt Isobel said. “Indeed, the day may soon dawn when you will count a microscope amongst your most important tools.”

  “Oh?” Walter said, frowning severely. “How so?”

  “Unless my instincts have betrayed me, ’tis by means of this invention that England’s witchfinders might finally put their profession on a sound philosophic basis, worthy to stand alongside chemistry, optics, and planetary mechanics.”

  Jennet contemplated the gleaming brass tube, portal to a hundred invisible worlds. She was eager to explore them all—the kingdom of swamp water, the empire of moss, the caliphate of fungus, the republic of blood.

  “’Tis gratifying you wish to so elevate my calling, Lady Mowbray,” Walter said, “but my usual tools are adequate to the task.”

  “Adequate to the task, but inadequate to a judge’s skepticism.” Aunt Isobel fluted her thin lips, siphoning up a mouthful of coffee. “Let me make bold, dear kinsman, to suggest that cleansing’s an imperiled enterprise. England’s a-swarm with doubting Thomases and the lineal descendants of Offa the Contrarian.”

  “I sh
an’t deny it.” Jennet’s father removed his snowy peruke, thereby altering his aspect for the worse, from handsome and dignified demonologist to bald-headed, sweat-spangled practitioner of a vanishing trade.

  Isobel set her palm against the brass tube, caressing it as if coaxing a prediction from a crystalline sphere. “I have an experimentum magnus in mind, certain to confound the skeptics, but requiring such materials as only you can provide.”

  For the second time that day Jennet’s heart flew heavenward, kite-borne, weightless. An experimentum magnus was coming to Mirringate—and if she learned her lessons well that season, mastering her Euclid and ingesting her Aristotle, Aunt Isobel would surely give her a rôle in the momentous project!

  “Each time you unmask a witch, you must catch and cage her animal servant for me,” Isobel said. “I shall need a dozen specimens at least, alive and feisty: rat, locust, toad—whate’er sorts have lately claimed the Devil’s affections.”

  “A peculiar request,” Walter said.

  “I shall anatomize each familiar, then use this microscope in detecting signs of Satanic intervention, evidence on which no jurist durst turn his back. Mayhap I’ll find tiny incantations, written on a ferret’s bones in Lucifer’s own hand—or minuscule imps adrift in a raven’s blood—or monstrous animalcules fighting tooth and claw amidst a cat’s spermatozooans.”

  When Jennet heard this elaboration, her heart instantly descended. Was there no way to accomplish the great experiment except by entering those dark, slimy, stinking regions that lay beneath fur and feathers? It was one thing to cage and scrutinize a witch’s familiar, and quite another to cut the poor animal to pieces.

  “Sweet sister, ’twould seem you expect me to turn my coach into a menagerie,” Walter said.

  “Quite so,” Isobel said, “but consider this: I mean to pay you two crowns for every beast you fetch me.”

  Walter rose abruptly from the divan, restoring his peruke and brushing the biscuit crumbs from his waistcoat. He bowed toward Isobel and kissed her cheek. “I’faith, you shall have your specimens. Far be’t from a witchfinder to block the path of progress.”

  By the noon hour Walter and Dunstan were back in the coach, rolling away from the manor amidst a tumult of dust and the frenzied baying of the Mirringate dogs. Jennet stood on the portico and waved farewell, moving her raised hand back and forth as if polishing a scrying-mirror.

  “You wear a mournful visage,” Isobel noted, cradling a bowl of coffee.

  “I weep for the specimens,” Jennet confessed in a timorous voice.

  “I thought as much.”

  “Must we truly put ’em under the knife?”

  “Ne’er be ashamed of sympathizing with another creature, Jenny,” Isobel said. “Your mother, were she alive, would advocate for the vermin too.” Steam rose from her coffee, cloaking her face in a Pythian mist. “But I bid thee recall Monsieur Descartes’s well-reasoned deduction concerning the lower animals. He says they are machines at base and therefore insensible to pain. Keep mindful, too, that a witch’s servant hath lost all trace of primal innocence, being naught but a pawn of Satan.”

  Squeezing her eyes closed, Jennet tried to picture an animal familiar. At last she conjured the creature, a ferret of sleek form and conical snout. It nosed beneath the gown of a sleeping witch, fitted its mouth around the wayward teat in the center of her belly, and slowly sucked the black milk down, ounce by unholy ounce.

  Jennet opened her eyes. At its birth, no doubt, the ferret had been as stainless as any other dumb beast, but now it was a fallen thing, pet of devils, toy of demons, poppet of goblins. It deserved a fate no better than a philosopher’s glittering blade.

  j

  WALTER STEARNE WAS NOT a deep man, neither scholar, jurist, nor theologian, but he did a great deal of thinking all the same, and never so much as when riding the witch circuit. As he guided his coach along the road to Saxmundham that excellent Monday afternoon, Dunstan snoring beside him, he pondered a vexing dilemma. He had misled his family concerning his credentials, sorely and deliberately misled them. For in sooth he held no title to his trade—no Witchfinder-General’s commission, no Master Pricker’s charter—though certainly not for want of effort. Five times since the accession of James the Second he’d written to the Privy Council, pleading for a cleansing license of the sort Queen Elizabeth had routinely issued during her luminous reign, and in January he’d petitioned White Hall proposing the creation of a new government office, Witchfinder-Royal—but so far no response, yea or nay, had come down from His Majesty. Was it time to tell Dunstan, Jennet, and Isobel the truth? Not yet, he decided as the coach clattered into Saxmundham—soon, but not yet.

  As was their wont, father and son passed the night atop a goose-feather mattress in the Horn of Plenty, rising the next morning at seven o’clock. They broke their fast in the tavern-room—buttered eggs, fried oysters, peeled fruit—then drove to Andrew Pound’s house in Church Lane. The magistrate greeted them with his customary hearty hallo, and yet Walter immediately sensed that something was amiss: a stammer in the man’s voice, a stickiness in his demeanor. The cause of Pound’s distress was soon forthcoming. Only two accused witches, not the usual five, lay in his keeping, though one of them had that morning put her X to a confession.

  “Didst perchance catch their animal servants?” the cleanser asked.

  Pound guided Walter and Dunstan from his disheveled consulting room to the adjacent examination chamber, a cramped unfurnished space, spare as a crypt. “We bagged Mrs. Whittle’s beastie, aye, as plump a toad as e’er licked a witch’s happy sack.”

  “Hear me now,” Walter said. “My sister-in-law will lay down two crowns for that selfsame toad, as she wishes to anatomize it according to the new experimental philosophy. If I give you half the payment, might I take the creature with me?”

  “A generous bounty,” Pound said. The magistrate was a coarse and dim-witted fellow, deplorably fond of bear-baiting, but Walter still counted him a friend. “My share I’ll be depositin’ in the town treasury, since my apprehension o’ the familiar was all in a day’s work.”

  “Thou art an honest man, sir.”

  Pound summoned his constable, the thickset Martin Greaves, then ordered him to fetch the suspects from the gaol. A moment later the two brides of Lucifer stood before Walter, dressed in tattered burlap smocks, their outstretched hands manacled together. Silently he offered a prayer of gratitude, complimenting God on the admirable arrangement whereby a witch always grew powerless in the custody of a magistrate, constable, or pricker.

  The confessed Satanist, middle-aged Alice Sampson, was a walking scarecrow, her inner putrefaction declaring itself in a squinty eye and warty thumb. Gelie Whittle, by contrast, was a corpulent hag, her hair like cankered swamp-grass, her complexion rough as cedar bark. The constable had brought along Mrs. Whittle’s toad-familiar as well, imprisoned in a bottle, and Walter observed that it was exactly the sort of animal, all fat and satisfied, that the Dark One might give a favorite disciple.

  “Your father’s about to undertake a pricking,” he said to his son. “What five implements doth he require from the coach?”

  “The short needle and the long,” Dunstan said, beaming like a cherub.

  “Bright boy.”

  “The shaving razor.”

  “Excellent lad.”

  “The magnification lens.”

  “There’s a keen fellow.”

  “And also…”

  “Aye?”

  “Give me a moment, sir.”

  “Dost not recall the alchemical tool we acquired last winter in Billericay?” Walter asked.

  “The Paracelsus trident!”

  The boy dashed out of the examination chamber, returning, errand accomplished, ere their shadows had lengthened an inch.

  Upon receiving the devices, Walter explained to his colleagues that he would examine Mrs. Sampson no less rigorously than Mrs. Whittle, for a signed confession was no guarantee that Lady Justic
e would win the day. Standing before the grand jury, the admitted heretic would commonly repudiate her statement, insisting that she’d X’ed it only because the magistrate had befuddled her. Either that, or she would shamelessly ornament her narrative in hopes of convincing the jury to brand her a mere lunatic. In both such cases—denial and decoration—a professional witchfinder’s testimony typically proved the key to securing an indictment.

  “Alice Sampson,” Walter said, waving the incriminating document in her face, “I do accuse thee of consorting with the Devil, for by setting thy mark upon this paper thou hast confessed as much.”

  Barely had the accusation left his lips than, true to Walter’s forebodings, Mrs. Sampson spewed forth a torrent of fantastical rubbish. She described not a typical Sabbat (a dozen hags dancing naked round a bonfire) but a ceremony beyond the gaudiest confabulations of Popery itself: a thousand Satanists flying astride brimstone-belching horses all the way to Pendle Forest, where they submitted themselves to the obscene whims of the Devil’s own majordomo, Lord Adramelech. A score of unbaptized babes were by Mrs. Sampson’s account laid upon the altar that night, after which the coven consumed the infants’ flesh and drank their blood, abandoning the unspeakable feast only at daybreak.

  It was all too much. Unless Walter could discover direct evidence of Satanic compaction, the grand jury would rate the woman an addlepate, commending her to the madhouse rather than sending her to Norwich Assizes.

  For modesty’s sake, he ordered Dunstan back to Pound’s consulting room, then peeled off Mrs. Sampson’s burlap shift, strapped her to the table, and shaved her body, head to pudendum, harvesting the hairs like an angel scything Cain’s unwanted crop from the breast of the Earth. Assisted by the magnification lens, his eye roved across the landscape of the suspect’s skin. He scrutinized moles, sorted out blemishes, classified warts, and categorized wattles, searching for Mrs. Sampson’s insensible Devil’s mark—residue of the ritual through which the Dark One bound heretics to his service—and also for the teat Lucifer had sculpted from her flesh so she might give suck to her familiar.