The Last Witchfinder Read online

  By one o’clock the servants had laid out the midday meal, the meaty fragrances fusing felicitously with the scent of the gillyflowers Rodwell had arranged about the dining-hall. It was in Jennet’s opinion a disagreeably noisy luncheon, all slurps and gurglings, with nary a word spoken concerning Galilean acceleration, demonic possession, Newtonian optics, Satanic compaction, or any other worthy topic. Upon consuming the last of their lamb stew and pheasant pie, Walter and Dunstan departed for Witham, and then Isobel directed her under-gardener, the jaunty Mr. Fynche, to bear the familiars upstairs to the anatomization theatre.

  The moment she entered the white gleaming chamber, Jennet experienced her customary misgivings. This was her least favorite room in Mirringate, a place where God’s normal aspect changed for the worse: no longer the Sublime Mechanic who’d wrought a glittering cosmos bejeweled with comets and stars, He was now the Inscrutable Sculptor whose favorite media were dripping tissues and sloshy gobbets and disgusting gouts of blood. She still remembered with revulsion the time Aunt Isobel had found a pregnant cat, killed by one of the manor dogs, and insisted that they anatomize it. Six blind dead kittens had yielded to Isobel’s instruments that day, crammed into the birth-sac like so many furry slugs.

  For the afternoon’s lesson Isobel invited her pupils simply to sit in the theatre and observe the familiars, watching for behaviors that might be demon-driven. Other than the odd asymmetries that emerged as the spider constructed her web, and the snake’s apparent attempt to transfix the hedgehog in the adjacent pen, the creatures engaged in no sinister acts.

  “They hide their diabolism well,” Isobel said. “And so we must resort to the knife.”

  On Tuesday morning, after the servants had finished feeding the animals and cleaning their cages, Isobel, Elinor, and Jennet donned leather aprons and linen cuffs, and the experimentum magnus began in earnest. Isobel ordered Mr. Fynche to strangle the black hare from Swaffham. She placed its corpse on the surgical platform, then seized her knife, split open the chest, and bent back the ribs to reveal the arcana within, the glistery nodes and slippery nubs and moist curds. Much to Jennet’s satisfaction, the hare’s exposed mysteries worked more to arouse her curiosity than unsettle her digestion. She wondered how a similarly splayed human would look. People differed dramatically on the outside—there being at least a hundred varieties of lip, as many sorts of chin, a myriad possible noses—but their livers and lights probably appeared much the same.

  Taking up her dissection tools, Isobel guided her students on a layer by layer, organ by organ journey through the hare. Carefully, ever so carefully, Jennet and Elinor extracted bits of brain, dabs of heart, tittles of viscera, slices of muscle, and chips of bone, securing each nugget betwixt shilling-size glass disks. For three hours the girls took turns at the microscope, examining the specimens and draughting them as accurately as they could, until a dozen separate vellum illustrations littered the surgical platform.

  Their efforts went unrewarded. Detail for detail, each sketch seemed identical to the corresponding picture in both Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septum and Casserio’s De Vocis Auditusque Organis Historia Anatomica. No spells were inscribed on the hare-familiar’s skull. No scaled and spiny animalcules cruised its blood. Its spermatozooans evinced no sign of iniquity.

  “We need a better microscope,” Elinor said.

  “Mayhap we don’t look hard enough,” Jennet said. “Would not a true experimentum magnus oblige us to scrutinize every last speck of tissue?”

  “I know an even simpler explanation,” Isobel said. “This animal’s naught but a natural-born hare.”

  “So Mr. Stearne erred to submit it in evidence to the Swaffham grand jury?” Elinor asked.

  “Aye,” Isobel said, “though I cannot blame him for labeling the creature amiss, as he was engaged in watching a suspected witch when our innocent hare hopped upon the scene.”

  “’Twould appear we’ve bled the beast to no purpose,” Jennet said.

  “Nay, child, there be purpose a-plenty here, for by its death this hare hath taught us an invaluable lesson. We fallible mortals must take care lest we see Satan’s hand in happenstance.”

  Isobel and her pupils spent the rest of the morning dissecting and sketching the snake-familiar. As before, the results disappointed, for no fragment of the serpent’s innards deviated from the illustrations in the Padua manuals.

  “So once again my father was deceived?” Jennet asked.

  “Either that, or I am wrong to imagine a familiar must harbor some secret sign of its depravity,” Isobel said.

  After the midday meal they undertook a scrupulous study of the toad, but not a wisp of witchery accrued to their labors.

  “’Tis most discouraging,” Isobel said.

  Next she opened up the rat-familiar, and this time the three philosophers found something of note. A ghastly glutinous mass had colonized the rodent, spreading outward from its bowels to possess its liver, spleen, and kidneys. Sliced into specimens and placed on the Van Leeuwenhoek stage, the mass stood revealed as a true Satanic contrivance, its tiny constituents piled against each other in purposeless whorls, a hideous parody of Mr. Hooke’s well-ordered cells.

  “This be the Dark One’s handiwork for fair,” Elinor said.

  “Father will rejoice in our discovery,” Jennet said. “Evidence so plain and palpable as this, ’twill surely convince those demon-deniers for fear of whom he barred me from the southern hunt.”

  “Alas, no.” Isobel pointed to the preternatural tumor. “A single strand from Satan’s loom will hardly silence the skeptics. I’faith, tomorrow we shall continue our experimentum magnus, for’t might yet yield some truth or other, but methinks that to muffle the doubters we shall need a rather different cloth.”

  “You can count on me to help you weave it,” Jennet said.

  “And myself as well,” Elinor said.

  “My good children,” Isobel said. “My dear scholars.” She raised her arms, curling them into the shape of tongs, and were she not dotted with blood, Jennet surmised, she would have gathered both girls to her breast. “Hath a teacher e’er been blessed with better pupils? Not in many a generation, I’ll wager—not since the immortal Aristotle betook himself to Philip’s court to tutor the brilliant young Hephæstion and Hephæstion’s even brighter friend, that audacious boy whom posterity would call Alexander the Great.”

  j

  AT FIVE O’CLOCK Rodwell appeared in the anatomization theatre and, averting his eyes from the gore whilst simultaneously pinching his nostrils against the stench, announced that Mr. Mapes had arrived to retrieve his daughter. Aunt Isobel bid the girls remove their aprons and avail themselves of the washing bowl. A sensible directive, Jennet decided, and so she took great care in scrubbing from her fingers all residue of the dissected creatures—the flecks of tissue, film of gut, and crust of lymph.

  Ablutions accomplished, Aunt Isobel and her pupils descended to the ground floor. The Vicar awaited them in the front parlor, grasping in one hand a basket of autumn chestnuts and in the other a pail of fresh strawberries. He’d brought them for the entire household, he explained, Rodwell and the servants included.

  “Doubtless you are aware that in the Kingdom of God there are neither masters nor servants,” said Mr. Mapes to Isobel, “nobles nor serfs, princes nor peasants.”

  “I would ne’er deny that Mirringate’s a far cry from Eternity,” Isobel said, “but I believe we treat our maids and footmen with kindness.”

  “I meant no criticism,” Mr. Mapes said, “though I am fascinated by how the early Christians”—he passed the strawberry pail to Jennet—“sought to replicate heavenly circumstances by holding all their goods in common. Food, tools, clothing, houses: they shared everything.”

  Jennet selected an especially plump specimen, though she imagined that the average early Christian would have picked a puny one. Briefly she studied the strawberry, compelled by its lilting perfume, subtle bumps, and cardiac sh
ape, and then she devoured it, the sweet juices exploding gloriously in her mouth.

  As Elinor told her father of the day’s subcutaneous explorations, his chronic smile expanded from the usual thin crescent to become as large and beguiling as a slice of melon, and Jennet was not surprised when he asked to visit the anatomization theatre and see the wondrous microscope. Isobel assented with an impassive shrug. Guiding Mr. Mapes up the staircase, Elinor related the history of the experimentum magnus, from Mistress Mowbray’s decision to seek empirical evidence of Satanic intervention, to their initial failures, to the day’s thrilling proof of a rat’s contamination by the Dark One.

  The instant Mr. Mapes stepped into the sanctum of their science, his smile collapsed, and his eyes grew hard and dull as musket-balls.

  “’Tis not right,” he said.

  “What’s not right?” Elinor said.

  Glancing all about her, Jennet immediately comprehended the Vicar’s distress, or so she believed. The place was a horror-show, gutted carcasses littering the surgical platform, splotches of blood marring the dissection tools, snippets of gizzard staining the Van Leeuwenhoek stage. A barbed stench clung to every particle of air in the room.

  “Alas, Lady Mowbray,” the Vicar said. “Alas, alas, alas…”

  “Alas, what?” Isobel said.

  Mr. Mapes closed the door, as if to quarantine the filthy spectacle from the rest of Creation. “Last month I chose to overlook your sacrilege in comparing Isaac Newton with Jesus Christ”—a band of sweat ringed his brow like a liquid tiara—“and later that day, when you blithely violated God’s sunbeams, you persuaded me to ignore the blasphemy entailed. But now I see before me the vilest sort of slaughter-house, and I cannot escape my conclusion that Mirringate hath become steeped in perversity.”

  Until this moment Jennet had not realized that the Vicar was capable of a single harsh word, much less several dozen. “The fault is all mine, Mr. Mapes,” she declared. “I have neglected my duty to keep this room clean and wholesome.”

  “This be no slaughter-house, sir,” Isobel said, her voice edged with indignation, “but a classroom dedicated to Baconian science.”

  “The Almighty hath ne’er smiled on the butchering of dumb creatures,” the Vicar said. “Recall that when our Savior entered Jerusalem, he o’erturned the tables of those who sold doves for sacrifice, crying, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer!’”

  Isobel grimaced and proceeded to mop the Van Leeuwenhoek stage with a damp rag. “Let me suggest, Mr. Mapes, that a philosophic dissection is its own variety of prayer—a reverent reaching into hidden realms. Doth it matter so greatly that our devotions are assisted by surgical platform and microscope instead of baptismal font and votive candle?”

  “Whate’er the distinctions betwixt a philosophic dissection and a Satanic sacrifice, I fear they’re insufficient in God’s eyes,” Mr. Mapes said. “You may call this slab a surgical platform, but methinks a witch would know it for an altar to the Dark One.” He clapped a hand to his breast. “I must ask that you join me, Lady Mowbray, as I drop to my knees and beg Christ to unbind you from this foul allegiance.”

  Instantly Mr. Mapes assumed a prayerful posture. Jennet gasped and winced, her guts aboil: the Vicar’s argument seemed devoid of sense, an imbecile’s rant, a tale told by Macbeth’s idiot.

  “For all I admire thee, Mr. Mapes,” Isobel said, “I shan’t confess to a sin I haven’t done, especially before the High Court of Heaven.”

  “You will not pray with me?” Mr. Mapes said. “That is your final word?”

  “My soul’s gate stands evermore unlocked, inviting God to enter and inspect what impieties may lie beyond,” Isobel said. “He requires no cleric to help Him lift the latch.”

  Mr. Mapes regained his feet. “I must perforce declare I’ve come to a difficult decision.”

  “Are you fond of wine, sir?” Isobel asked. “Mayhap a splash of Rhenish would settle your nerves. What decision?”

  “I am withdrawing my daughter from your tutelage.”

  “Father, no,” Elinor said.

  “Do my ears deceive me?” Isobel said. “You would deprive me of this promising pupil?”

  “I would protect her soul from peril, aye,” Mr. Mapes replied. “I won’t say that Lucifer himself hath breached your estate, but I truly sense him sniffing round the pale.” Taking Elinor by the arm, he sidled toward the door. “Come Monday morning, child, we enroll you in the Ipswich Royal Grammar School.”

  “Hear me, Father—I desire only Mistress Mowbray for my tutor,” Elinor pleaded.

  “Prithee, reconsider,” Isobel told the Vicar. “Surely you know how easily a person may impose a false explanation upon some troubling phenomenon. ‘This dream is all amiss interpreted.’ Julius Cæsar, Act Two.”

  “’Tis well established the Devil can quote Scripture.” Mr. Mapes yanked back the door and ushered his daughter into the hallway. “’Twould not surprise me to learn that Shakespeare rolls as smoothly off his tongue.”

  He closed the door behind him with an explosion like a thunderclap, and to Jennet it seemed as if the very portals of Heaven had just slammed shut in her face.

  j

  SURTOUTS BILLOWING IN AN UNSEASONABLY fierce wind, the ursine Chelmsford magistrate and his equally bulky constable herded their bound prisoners—three murderers, three thieves, a coin clipper, and two convicted witches—across the Common past the crowd of jeering spectators, headed for the horse-cart and its accompanying gallows. As Walter surveyed the triad of nooses, suspended from the cross-beam like an ellipsis in some great book of justice, his anger reached the boiling-point. Evil incarnate deserved greater respect than this. The Chelmsford magistrate would never use a Bible as his doorstop or a crucifix as his paperweight, and yet he thought nothing of mixing in his Satanists with miscreants of the most banal sort. To trivialize the Devil was to slander the Lord.

  As the horse snorted and pawed the ground, the hangman, a cocky beardless youth whose grin suggested that he took a gratuitous pleasure in his profession, shoved the murderers into the back of the cart. Dunstan, thrilled, squeezed his father’s arm. Like a sailor looping a hawser around a mooring post, the hangman lowered a noose over the patricide’s head, then likewise tethered the fratricide and the wife killer to the cross-beam. Rather than firing his pistol and causing the horse to bolt, however, thereby mercifully breaking the prisoners’ necks, the hangman drove the cart away slowly, leaving the three to dangle. The patricide kicked. The fratricide jerked. The wife killer jigged. Apprehending the hangman’s virtuosity, the spectators broke into thunderous applause mingled with appreciative cheers.

  The instant Dunstan brought his hands together, Walter reached out and stayed the gesture. “Softly, son! The suffering of other persons must ne’er become for us a source of amusement.”

  “Aye, Father.” The boy jammed both hands in his pockets. “Tell me, though—do I forbear to applaud even when those other persons are witches?”

  “A witch is not a person, Dunstan, but a being lost to demons and darkness. And yet, now that I think on’t, I say that even in such cases there be room for Christian mercy.”

  The southern campaign had begun auspiciously. Shortly after arriving in Witham, Walter had testified against a warlock vagrant whose speciality was making cows go dry, and the grand jury had marked the wretch down for Chelmsford Assizes. Next had come Maldon, a harbor town of the sort where sea-witches oft-times roamed, and Walter soon found one, selling sacks of wind to departing sailors as a protection against becalmings; unmoved by the hag’s plea that her enterprise partook of white wizardry only, the Maldon jurymen had delivered a billa vera. But then the hunt turned sour, with not a single citizen in Chilford, Ilford, Gravesend, or Bexley stepping forward to voice a sorcery complaint. Walter had entered London in thrall to a melancholy as black as a Hobbesian’s heart.

  For a full fifteen minutes the murderers flailed about on the Chelmsford gallows like victims of the chorea dan
cing themselves to death, until at last they grew as still as fallen apples. The young hangman detached their earthly remains and tossed them in a handbarrow, whereupon the constable bore the bodies to an unhallowed pit on the eastern side of the Common. Now the hangman goaded the cattle thief, the coin clipper, and the Maldon sea-witch into the cart. Once again he guided the horse away at a lugubrious pace, subjecting each malefactor to a well-structured three-act strangulation: the dancing, the beshitting, the final throe.

  Although Walter could normally rely on the patrons of the Bow Street coffee-houses for news of Norwich Assizes, this past July they’d failed him, and he’d turned to a far less reliable source, The London Journal. Its reports did nothing to raise his spirits. Of the twelve witches he’d unmasked that spring, a mere four had been switched off. No one in London cared. The gossip-mongers trafficked exclusively in political intrigue—how William of Orange’s fleet lay weather-bound in the Dutch ports, and how the instant the wind changed he would undertake to secure the British throne for himself and his Protestant wife, the King’s elder daughter, Mary. Some said James would fight, his standing army being larger than William’s. Others said he would flee, a Catholic monarch ruling a Protestant country being an incongruity not endlessly sustainable. Such a wretched state of affairs, Walter thought. Ten million demons were colonizing England, and all anybody could talk about was the possibility of a second civil war.

  The hangman unstrung and disposed of the newly created corpses—witch, clipper, cattle thief—then set about affixing the horse thief, the jewel thief, and the Witham warlock as close to Heaven as they were ever likely to get.

  Before leaving London, Walter had visited White Hall to inquire about the status of his petition advocating for a Witchfinder-Royal. Although the King was with his army in Salisbury, trying to decide what sort of military response, if any, the Dutch situation required, Walter was permitted to speak with an overdressed and supercilious secretary to Lord Sunderland, Keeper of the Privy Seal. Amazingly, the popinjay unearthed a note indicating that—joy of joys!—Sunderland was preparing a favorable report on Walter’s proposal. Despite his circumspect nature, Walter immediately imagined a Witchfinder-Royal’s license decorating his front parlor and a Witchfinder-Royal’s cloak resting on his shoulders, for even if William assumed the throne, any endorsement by the renowned Sunderland would enjoy enormous authority both at White Hall and within Parliament. So confident was Walter of his forthcoming appointment, in fact, that he’d decided to celebrate, taking Dunstan to Chelmsford Common so they might together behold the Maldon sea-witch and the Witham warlock begin their passages to Perdition.