Alice had woken well before dawn. Christopher was sleeping next to her, sleeping heavily like a man who has not slept enough for a long time, sleeping carelessly, on his back, his arm thrown out, like a child who is safe.
She had made him get up, taken him down the secret passageway between her bedroom and her study. Locked him in. Left him. She did not know if she would see him again. He wanted to leave for Lancaster. She knew that she loved him.
‘Hoghton Tower,’ said Roger Nowell, pausing his horse and breaking her thoughts. ‘It is a splendid house.’
They had reached the mile-long drive that led to the house. The de Hoghtons had come to England with William the Conqueror, but this house, fifty years old, had been built by Thomas Hoghton, who had scarcely been able to enjoy it. He would not renounce his Catholic faith and had been forced to flee to France.
‘He was harbouring Edmund Campion,’ said Roger Nowell, ‘Remember him?’
Alice remembered. ‘Burned alive for his faith.’
‘Thomas Hoghton was lucky to escape himself. He used his money to found the Jesuit Seminary at Douai in France,’ said Roger Nowell. ‘Christopher Southworth trained as a priest there.’
Alice glanced across at him, but his face was straight ahead, admiring the house.
‘Hoghton’s son Richard has no heart for religion but a good nose for politics. Consequently he has kept the house and good King Scottish Jimmy gave him a knighthood last year.’
‘Are you not fond of our King James?’ said Alice.
‘He is a meddler, and when the King is a meddler, the rest of us must be meddlers too. Do you think I enjoy sending old women and their crazed offspring to the gallows?’
‘Then do not ask me to help you.’
‘Then do not ask me to help you, Mistress.’
He dropped his horse back a little, leaving her to ride ahead. He could not help noticing her figure, her posture, her hair, the quality of her beauty. He had never been interested in her before. He checked himself. This was not the time.
Alice Nutter was dressing in her room. She was careful to look her best. Her maid fastened her magenta dress and hung her neck and her ears with emeralds. When the maid had gone, Alice took a small phial from her bag and wiped her face with a few drops. There was not much left in the stoppered bottle. John Dee had made it and given it to Alice. It was not the Elixir of Life but it was the Elixir of Youth.
She came downstairs to find Potts talking to a small, balding genial man. ‘As a London gentleman I find these country entertainments very tedious,’ said Potts.
‘Then why attend them?’ asked the owlish man.
‘I am a guest of Magistrate Nowell. I am in Lancashire on matters of the Crown. Yes, the Crown,’ said Potts, fluffing himself up. ‘I may say nothing, but you would hardly believe the witchery popery popery witchery I have uncovered.’
‘You must be exhausted,’ said Alice, joining the two men. ‘You look exhausted.’
The genial gentleman smiled at her. Potts glared. A bell rang. A servant announced the start of the play.
‘Shakespeare,’ said Potts. ‘An upstart crow. Melodramatic and mediocre. Macbeth – that was a ridiculous play. And to my mind very suspicious too.’
‘Suspicious?’
‘The foul hags, witches, beldames, prophesying to Macbeth – do they not have “the pilot’s thumb” to throw in their infernal pot?’
‘They do …’
‘Aha! And that is the thumb of Edmund Campion, Jesuit burned for treason, harboured here in this house, oh yes, while Shakespeare himself was a tutor here.’
‘And that means …?’ said the genial gentleman, trying to follow.
‘Witchery popery popery witchery – all the same thing.’
The genial gentleman shrugged and offered Alice his arm. ‘May I escort you in to the play?’
Alice nodded, just as Roger Nowell came forward looking for her. He barely glanced at Potts. He bowed to Alice’s companion.
‘William Shakespeare.’
Potts was suddenly nowhere to be seen.
As they took their seats for the play, Alice and Shakespeare were talking. He had met her many years ago, he said, when he was new to London, just come from Stratford, and she had her house on Bankside by the Swan Theatre. She had welcomed him like a northern woman. He liked northern women for their forthrightness and their kindness – he had met many of them when he was a young man here at Hoghton Tower.
‘We were all Catholics then,’ he said, ‘even when we were not.’
‘Ah, we were young then,’ said Alice.
Shakespeare looked at her curiously. ‘Even when we were not.’
She blushed. He was like an owl, bright-eyed, his head perched on his ruff. His eyes looked deeper than his gaze and Alice felt that he knew everything and that there was nothing she need say.
He was a wealthy man now, living in Stratford, no longer writing plays. He had travelled up to see The Tempest at Hoghton Tower because he was fond of the place and fond of the play. His company was still the King’s Men, and The Tempest had been chosen for the wedding of King James’s daughter, to take place the following year.
‘I have ridden out all the storms,’ said Shakespeare, ‘even the ones I wrote myself. Here, look, it begins …’
A tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning heard. Enter a Shipmaster and a Boatswain.
MASTER: Boatswain!
BOATSWAIN: Here, master. What cheer?
Alice’s mind moved in and out of the play. She remembered Shakespeare coming to her house – but he had had long hair, an earring, a beautiful beard. She had not recognised him this time.
As the play was performed, she seemed to hear Elizabeth’s voice again – and they were together in the house on Bankside, upstairs in their secret private rooms that looked over the River Thames and across London, the great city.
‘Did you sell your Soul, Lizzy?’
‘The Dark Gentleman will take a Soul. It need not be my own.’
‘I doubt another will go to Hell to pay for your pleasure.’
‘You do not believe in Hell or Souls, do you, Alice?’
‘I believe that you are changed.’
Alice looked up, startled from her dreaming by the stronger dreaming of the play.
ARIEL:
Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Alice fainted.
When she came to, she was in a small room away from the main hall. She could hear that the play was continuing. Her servant stood over her. William Shakespeare took the water from him and gave it to her. He said he was flattered that his little play had had such an effect on her.
She had got lost in time, she said. Time, he said, yes, yes, time was the kind of place where you could get lost.
Then she said to him, and she did not know why she said it, ‘Do you believe in magick?’
‘Why are you asking me, an actor and an old penman, when you worked with John Dee and Edward Kelley?’
‘You knew them?’
‘I knew anyone interesting to know. Tell me, do you think a stone statue can come to life? I have used that device in a play I am still revising called The Winter’s Tale. The end cannot succeed unless you believe, just for a moment, that a statue could perhaps step down and embrace you. Return what you had lost.’
‘John Dee made a metal beetle that flew like a living thing. He was arrested for it as sorcery.’
‘You can get arrested for anything these days. But I don’t think I can end my play with a metal beetle – however lifelike.’
‘You haven’t answered me,’ said Alice.
Shakespeare shook his head and sunk his chin into his ruff, making him look more owl-like than ever. ‘I have written about other worlds often enough. I
have said what I can say. There are many kinds of reality. This is but one kind.’ He stretched out his hands to indicate the walls, carpets, tapestries and stuffs around him. ‘But, Mistress, do not be seen to stray too far from the real that is clear to others, or you may stand accused of the real that is clear to you.’
The door opened and Roger Nowell entered, with some of the party. Everyone was praising Shakespeare, except for Potts who was skulking in a corner. To Nowell he said, ‘You do know, don’t you, that this playwright, as he calls himself, this Shakespeare, was well known to Catesby, chief among the Gunpowder plotters?’
Roger Nowell nodded, irritated.
Potts continued: ‘There were two buzzing hives of Catholics in England. A hive at Stratford-upon-Avon. A hive in Lancashire. All of the conspirators of the Gunpowder Plot met to make their plans at the Mermaid Inn in Stratford. Stratford, sir! Shakespeare sir! When the plot failed and they were routed, they fled, all of them, to Lancashire, hiding here at Hoghton Tower, or with the Southworths at Salmesbury Hall.’
‘I know that,’ said Roger Nowell.
‘It astonishes me what you know and yet refuse to know. You fly near the edge, sir, near the edge.’
Alice, a little way off, stood up to leave the room. Potts regarded her. ‘That lady is a mystery, sir, a mystery. If she were my mystery I would look deeper into it.’
‘I am not as idle as you imagine,’ replied Roger Nowell.
Alice went upstairs to her rooms to change her clothes. It was not yet dark, but it was not light: the Daylight Gate. And if you could pass through – to what – to where?
Alice lay down on the big bed with a single candle and the fire burning low. She closed the bed curtains and closed her eyes. She was beginning to fall asleep when she heard someone or something moving about in the room.
From the cabin of her bed what she could hear sounded like water.
Not rain, not river. The strange combination of a being made of water. Something was treading about her room. Not as a solid – as a liquid.
Then she heard the sizzle and hiss of the wood in the fireplace as the fire was put out.
Her mouth dry; forcing herself to move, she swung out of bed and opened the bed curtains.
The room was not there.
Alice was standing on Pendle Hill. Black moor, bleak fell, straggling forest, sullen streams, a small tarn, a moss pool, heathy waste, morass and wood. Driving rain.
By a group of standing stones she saw Elizabeth Southern, her hair down, naked, smiling at her. Elizabeth was untroubled by the weather, pushing the hair out of her eyes as she used to do, seemingly not cold or wet. She stretched out her hand to Alice. Alice went towards her through the rain and the wind. If this was the end, then let it be the end, the end would come some time, today, tomorrow, or the next day.
Alice touched Elizabeth’s naked body, but as her hand stroked the skin she had loved so much, the skin gave way, like soaked paper, and Alice’s hand went through her, or, more correctly, into her. It was like reaching into black water.
Alice pulled back, her hand and arm dark and dull with the thick black viscous substance that was Elizabeth.
Elizabeth was laughing, and as she laughed, her white skin began to spot with dark eruptions. The firm white flesh became distended and pulpy. The eruptions burst like boils. Her hair turned grey, then loosened from her scalp, falling away from her like dirty water. The skin on her bones hung in useless folds. She had no teeth. She was laughing at Alice, her mouth like a gap. She was suppurating, liquefying.
‘As I am so shall you be.’
Alice covered her face with her hands. She stood in the howling gale and relentless rain trying to keep upright. She would not look at Elizabeth.
‘What do you want from me?’ she shouted into the wind and the rain. There was no answer. Forever, it seemed, in the wind and the rain, and there was no answer.
Alice was crying. Then there was silence. A sick dead silence.
When she looked up, she was in her room. The fire was lit low. Everything was as it had been before.
She was soaking wet.
At supper that night Potts was regaling the company with his ‘discovery’ of a nest of Lancashire witches now under lock and key at Malkin Tower. Alice lost patience.
‘There was no Sabbat – you stayed up all night on Pendle Hill and what did you find? Nothing! And nothing at Malkin Tower but a pack of desperate miserable spoiled lives.’
‘You are heated in your defence,’ said Potts, ‘though their lair is on your land and they are under your protection –’
Shakespeare interrupted: ‘What is a Black Mass? The rusty candlesticks and hasty altars you find in remote places, wild, and away from men, are the remnants of the Catholic High Mass, sometimes celebrated in secret, if it is to be celebrated at all.’
‘You do not believe in witchcraft then?’ said Roger Nowell.
‘I did not say that. I say that it suits the times to degrade the hoc est corpus of the Catholic Mass into satanic hocus pocus.’
‘It is all the same,’ said Potts.
‘It is not the same,’ said Shakespeare.
‘I wonder about your sympathies, sir,’ said Potts, ‘and you and your company of strolling players in receipt of the King’s generosity.’
‘We are the King’s Men,’ said Shakespeare. ‘And besides – I began this play The Tempest with a shipwreck in sympathy with the King’s own shipwreck by supernatural forces on his way back from Denmark to Berwick.’
‘Ah, the Berwick witch trials,’ said Potts. ‘There has been nothing as sensational until now. The Lancashire witch trials will be the first trials to be written as record. A great advantage in the pursuit of Diabolism.’
‘Are you doing the writing?’ enquired Shakespeare.
‘In my legal capacity, yes. I have written plays also, you know.’
‘I didn’t know,’ said Shakespeare, ‘neither does anybody else.’
The table roared with laughter. Potts looked red and angry. Alice was enjoying his discomfort.
‘I wonder you dare venture out of doors in Lancashire for fear of meeting a witch or a priest,’ said Alice.
‘What do you mean by that?’ said Roger Nowell, looking not at Potts but at Alice.
‘Whatever she means,’ said Shakespeare, ‘this man’s a fool.’
This was sufficient to drive Potts from the supper table. Roger Nowell laughed with the rest, but he was uneasy too. Potts had found no flying witches. He was looking for a hiding priest.
It was late and Alice was getting ready for bed when she heard a soft tap at the door. She opened it to find Shakespeare standing outside in his gown and slippers. He put his finger to his lips. She let him in.
‘A word of advice from a man who has seen much. If you do not want to find yourself in the Well Dungeon at Lancaster Castle, leave England soon. Christopher Southworth must go with you.’
‘Why do you speak of him?’
‘Take heed what you are told. Take heed what you tell.’
Shakespeare opened the door. He said, ‘Often-times, to win us to our harm, the instruments of darkness tell us truths, win us with honest trifles to betray in deepest consequence.’
Alice did not sleep well. When she was ready to leave at the agreed hour of 9 a.m., she was told by a servant of the house that the fog was too thick and she and her party must wait until noon. Roger Nowell was nowhere to be found. Potts was dozing in the library.
She waited, restless, finally calling her maid, and going herself to order their horses. It was eleven o’clock. The groom who saddled her copper mare told her that Roger Nowell had ridden away unaccompanied at 6 a.m.
She had been tricked.
A Tooth for a Tooth
ROGER NOWELL AND Constable Hargreaves were standing in the thick fog in the graveyard of Newchurch in Pendle. They looked down in silence. The turf had been flung back and the shallow earth disturbed. The body within was partially uncovered; bones showed
in the earth and above ground. By the side of the grave was a skull, dry and bleached. The skull had been smashed at the jaw to remove the teeth. Bits of chipped bone were scattered about. The teeth had been carefully collected in a mound.
At another grave the ground had been re-dug but the body it held had not yet rotted to the bones and the mouldering flesh was exposed, with its busy colony of worms. The corpse had been mutilated. The head was gone, leaving only the black stump of the neck.
‘Happened last night,’ said Hargreaves. ‘They made off with the head and left the teeth. Must have been disturbed at their work.’
‘Aren’t the Demdike and Chattox locked up?’
‘All but James Device who is prepared to give evidence against his kin. He is dead drunk at the Dog.’
‘Then we cannot blame him. And much as you would all like to do so, we cannot blame Alice Nutter. She was with me.’
‘Her spirit can go abroad. The spirit of a witch can go abroad anywhere,’ said Hargreaves.
Roger Nowell did not answer that. ‘Did you search the Rough Lee?’
‘We did. I have a servant in my pay now. We found no Christopher Southworth nor any sign or sighting of him. But we found this.’
Hargreaves pulled out a silver crucifix on a neckchain. ‘In the bedchamber … In the bed.’
Roger Nowell looked at it closely. ‘Does she use it because she is secretly a Catholic or because she is secretly a witch? Does she kiss it or does she blaspheme it?’ He put the heavy crucifix in his pocket. ‘It is valuable evidence.’
‘James Device says he will testify against Alice Nutter.’
Roger Nowell shook his head. ‘His drunken word would not stand against a woman like Alice Nutter. And we have enough work to do, Hargreaves. I want the wretches in Malkin Tower brought to me this evening to make statements. Potts will be present, I am sure. And get these graves decently laid.’