‘No!’ said Alice. ‘We are old friends but you are superstitious and I am not. Roger Nowell rode hastily in a damp dawn; that is all there is to it. He may believe it is witchcraft. That does not mean that it is.’
‘Alice, I believe it is witchcraft. Roger Nowell believes it is witchcraft. The name he spoke was Demdike and then that little trumped-up man come for the Assizes –’
‘Potts.’
‘Potts said your name.’
‘Mine?’
‘Alice! You sent the poor fool Robert Preston to me with his tongue bit out, and all the gossip is that you sided with the Demdike cat who did the biting. Stood between a witch and a ducking is what is said at the Dog. I drink there. I hear things. I hear your name too often now. If Roger Nowell does not recover you will be the one to blame.’
‘This is not about witchery.’
‘Alice, I know you are hiding the priest. I am not the only one who whispers it.’
‘He is gone,’
‘Good.’
‘What would you have me do?’
‘Go to Malkin. Discover the enchanted poppet. Destroy it before Roger Nowell dies.’
The Spider Speaks
AT THE DOG, James Device was locked in an upstairs bedroom. He did not care. He was fed and he had somewhere to sleep out of the April rain.
Jem sat on the window seat in the bare room with its straw pallet bed. He wasn’t used to being alone unless he was poaching in the forest, and in the forest you never were alone. There were other creatures looking for food too. Jem was friend to the otter and the badger, the fox and the rabbit, and if he had to trap a rabbit or snatch fish from the otter, that did not make them any less his companions. He knew the trees too, and leaned against them with his troubles and sometimes his happiness. He had not been happy for a long time.
He felt in his pocket. There was the spider.
She was a big spider, about the size of the palm of his hand. He looked at her. He liked her beady eyes and bristled legs. He stroked her black body. She carried a sac of eggs.
‘James Device,’ said the spider, ‘tonight you must make full confession of the crimes of your grand-dam, your mother and your sisters.’
‘But not little Jennet.’
‘But Alice Nutter.’
‘And then I will be free forever, won’t I?’
The spider waved two of her legs. Jem thought she was waving for freedom.
‘I will find thee a nook that will serve as support for a web and I will hang a bat nearby as a feast for you. You may eat him alive and use his leather wings for flight of your own. A spider that is not a fly yet can fly.’ He laughed at his own wit.
‘James Device,’ said the spider, ‘run away.’
‘Run away? But what about my reward?’
‘I have given you my advice,’ said the spider.
‘You told me to confess! You told me you would protect me! You told me I should be greater than Alice Nutter.’
‘Eight legs could not carry you fast enough away,’ said the spider.
Save Me
TOM PEEPER AND Constable Hargreaves finished drinking at the Dog and set off towards Malkin Tower. They each carried a net and a club. They were looking forward to using them.
Alice Nutter and the herbalist were already at the tower. Alice on her cob, the herbalist on her donkey. They had agreed that Alice would argue with the guards at the front of the tower while the herbalist made her way unseen to the north part at the rear, where she knew the secret way in and out.
The herbalist let her donkey go to eat new shoots on the hawthorn, and was not surprised to see Jennet Device sitting leaning against the tower. The child regarded her and said nothing. She was used to grown people wanting something from her.
‘Jennet! I know you can go inside.’
‘What if I can?’
‘Then go inside and get the poppet your mother has made!’
The child shook her head. ‘I can’t do that. It is enchanted.’
‘But not to you. And if you bring it I shall give you something good.’
The child looked interested. The herbalist took a chicken leg out of her pocket. She threw it to the child who caught it in one hand and devoured it, bones complete, all the while keeping her eyes on the herbalist.
‘And that was only the leg. You shall eat the whole bird. And you shall have this sixpence.’ She took out the big shiny coin that still bore the image of Elizabeth.
Without a word Jennet disappeared as if into the air. The herbalist sat down. She would have to wait.
At the south of the tower Alice Nutter remonstrated with the guards to let her in; it was her property. The guards refused. As this row increased, the band inside the tower crowded to the slits to watch. The head and the poppet were left untended.
Jennet, wriggling like a fish, poked up from below and saw the scene. The head was on the table. The poppet was propped behind it near to the ladder entrance to the cellar.
Jennet was as fast a thief as the rest of her Demdike clan, and smaller and lighter. In a second she had the poppet and was down the steps and out through the concealed hole and up in the ditch beyond. She threw the poppet at the herbalist who pulled out the pins, and put it into her saddlebag, and urged the donkey away. Jennet got her sixpence and her chicken. She took both with her into the bushes.
At Read Hall Roger Nowell was stirring. He could move his legs. He was still in a fever but he was no longer paralysed.
Tom Peeper and Constable Hargreaves rode slowly up to Malkin Tower. Neither man was pleased to see Alice Nutter.
‘We’re here on Crown business to take the prisoners to Read Hall,’ said Constable Hargreaves in his lumbering way, ‘and you may not enter the tower. If you have any argument you must address it to the Magistrate.’
‘She’ll be summoned there soon enough,’ said Tom Peeper.
Alice turned on him. ‘You have neither manners nor charm nor looks nor brains nor skill, and yet you are alive, while many women who did nothing but spin and weave and do their best have been hanged or burned. Can you explain that to me?’
‘I am not a witch, Mistress,’ said Tom Peeper. ‘As for looks, can you explain yours to me?’
Alice struck him across the face with her riding crop. He wiped the blood away and spat at her. ‘You’ll be burning soon enough.’
Before Alice could reply, the guards had planked the drawbridge across the fetid moat and opened the door into the tower. Elizabeth Device was first out.
‘She has certainly lost her looks,’ said Peeper. ‘Not that Squinting Lizzie ever had any. She should be grateful to any man that threw her a kiss the way you would throw a dog a week-old bone.’
‘Alice Nutter, save me!’ shouted Elizabeth Device.
‘You think she’ll fly you away, do you?’ said Constable Hargreaves. ‘Too late for flying work now.’
As Elizabeth came near, Tom Peeper coshed her on the shoulders. She fell down, cursing.
The other captives were led out. Constable Hargreaves threw his net over them to the front; Tom Peeper netted the rest to the rear. And so they were caught, like human fish, with a guard on either side. Miserable, ragged and afraid, they set off to Read Hall.
Alice watched them go. Elizabeth Device turned round, her face defeated and furious, blood running from her ear. ‘Alice Nutter! Save me or be damned with me!’
The Past
THE UNHAPPY BAND disappeared down the slope away from the tower. Alice walked round it, looking for the herbalist, but she had gone. Alice stood by the bush that concealed Jennet Device, but the child was still as a toad. Only her watchful eyes moved.
God, it was a dreadful spot. Alice hated it. She should have pulled it down. She would have pulled it down if Old Demdike had not begged her to leave it where it stood.
And Demdike had reason – of a kind. Her grandmother and her mother had taken refuge here.
Malkin Tower was the wild and forsaken place where Isolde de Heton ha
d come with her baby when she was an outcast from the abbey at Whalley, a fallen women, a Sataniser.
Here, with her fierce lover Blackburn, she had raised her child, shunned by all society. She was a noblewoman but they shunned her.
Here, days, nights, weeks, months, alone, she taught her child Bess Blackburn to scorn the crowd and to exult in loneliness. When Blackburn himself came back on his infrequent visits from raiding and robbing, the tower was lit up, and fearful passers-by claimed they saw imps circling the tower like bats. There were strange noises, laughter, shouting. And whenever Blackburn departed again, Isolde and Bess had new clothes and fresh horses and they rode about Pendle Forest and Pendle Hill away from the paths and tracks. If you saw them they would not speak to you.
Isolde died – or was spirited away, some say – by her demon lover. Her daughter Bess was sixteen then and, tiring of a solitary life, took the money piled in the tower – a substantial sum – and used it for a dowry to marry a man in Whalley.
Bess Blackburn gave birth to one child. A daughter. She christened her Elizabeth after herself, though some say that Old Demdike was christened twice, once for God and once for Satan, in the black pool at the foot of Pendle Hill.
Alice walked quickly round to the front of the tower.
She entered, and stood in the awful room. The walls were black with smoke, shiny with grease, green with mildew.
She noticed a recess in the wall of the tower with a sack curtain drawn across it. Alice pulled back the curtain. It concealed a sleeping compartment, surprisingly clean and made comfortable with clean straw. The walls were drawn from top to bottom with alchemical drawings and hieroglyphs.
Alice studied the wall. She could read it. For a moment she forgot where she was and thought she was back at Bankside and she and Elizabeth were casting planetary conjunctions.
Here on the wall were moon calendars and calculations of the stars. Here was Demdike’s own astrological nativity. And here underneath it was Alice’s nativity, though not her name. With a shock Alice saw that the date of her death had been numbered too.
She backed out of the recess and drew the curtain. She was sweating. She turned into the room. It was dusk. The Daylight Gate.
There was a faint green luminescence coming from the rough table. It was the head.
She could not believe what she was looking at. The empty eye sockets, the collapsed nose, the fetid boiled skin that hung in strips off the skull. The mouth hole propped open with a stick, and the fat black tongue protruding out. Robert Preston’s tongue.
Alice had to hold herself upright and not vomit. There was no sound but her own short breath.
The loose mouth on the head seemed to twitch. The black tongue moved slowly up and down in the belched hole.
Then the head spoke. ‘Born in fire. Warmed by fire. By fire to depart.’
Alice cried out and ran from the tower, unhitched her pony and galloped down the slope without looking back.
The child Jennet Device poked her head up from the cellar and went up to the head. She patted it. She put the baby’s hand in front of its sagging mouth and sat down with her back against the wall to finish her chicken, singing a lullaby to herself that she knew from somewhere.
Thomas Potts of Chancery Lane
The examination of Elizabeth Device of the Forest of Pendle in the County of Lancaster. Widow. Taken at Read before Roger Nowell Esquire. One of His Majesty’s Justice of the Peace in the said County.
‘THE SERVANTS OF Satan,’ said Potts as the troop from Malkin Tower were brought into the hall at Read. ‘I have spoken already to the one they call Old Demdike. She sits in the gaol at Lancaster and does not ask for mercy. This is her daughter, you say. Then this is the one we should catch before the others.’
Roger Nowell nodded. He had no aches or pains now. He had not believed that a man could be laid low by witchcraft until he felt it in his body. Now he believed.
Potts began his work. He accused Elizabeth Device of treason. Did she not know the Witchcraft Act of 1604?
She was silent.
Potts enlightened her. ‘It is a capital offence, punishable by death, to conjure a spirit.’
Elizabeth Device said she had conjured no spirits and knew none.
‘And what of Old Demdike’s Familiar, Tibbs? And what of Ball, that belongs to you, they say, a small brown dog?’
There was a dog. There were plenty of dogs. She would not have it.
‘And what of the making of pictures of clay?’
She had made no pictures of clay.
‘And what of the maiming of John Law, Pedlar, by your daughter Alizon?’
She was not responsible for her own daughter nor for her own mother.
‘Call James Device,’ said Potts.
Jem came in. He had not run away on two legs or eight. He looked around at the finery of the hall. He was out of place, drunk, bewildered. But he knew what to do.
POTTS: ‘Have you a Familiar that serves you?’
JEM: ‘His name is Dandy. He is a dog.’
POTTS: ‘What does he do for you?’
JEM: ‘Fetches me things.’
ELIZABETH DEVICE: ‘And that is what a dog is for, you oaf!’
POTTS: ‘Silence here! James Device – do you confirm that your mother, Elizabeth Device, on Good Friday, called the Meeting at Malkin Tower?’
JEM: ‘She did do.’
POTTS: ‘And to what purpose?’
JEM: ‘To make a plot to deliver those in prison.’
POTTS: ‘Anything else?’
JEM: ‘To kill the gaoler there.’
POTTS: ‘Anything else?’
JEM: ‘To conjure a spirit but she did not conjure a spirit.’
ELIZABETH: ‘You creeping piece of soiled earth! He lies!’
POTTS: ‘Why would he lie?’
ELIZABETH: ‘To save himself, you London fool!’
POTTS stood up. He was short but he stood up and drew himself to his full height. ‘I will not be abused by a witch and a trollop.’
ELIZABETH: ‘I am glad to hear it, for I am neither the one nor the other.’
POTTS: ‘Do you deny the charges against you?’
ELIZABETH: ‘I deny them.’
POTTS: ‘You, James Device, will you testify against your mother?’
JEM: ‘I will.’
POTTS: ‘And against all gathered here that were at Malkin Tower?’
JEM: ‘I will.’
POTTS: ‘Then there is little more to say. Magistrate! I recommend that you commit this Malkin-trash to the prison and we shall hear them again, before a Judge, at the Lancaster Assizes.’
ELIZABETH: ‘If he is testifying against me, then I am testifying against him. He escaped Malkin Tower by turning himself into a hare!’
There was silence in the room. Jem started to laugh. ‘I am safe, aren’t I, Constable Hargreaves, and Tom? There’s nothing anyone will do to me. I’ll go home now and look after Jennet.’
There was silence in the room. Hargreaves was looking at the floor. Tom Peeper was looking out of the window. Potts looked up from where he was busily writing his notes. ‘Take James Device away with the rest. The Judge will decide.’
Jem bolted for the window, but it was too late. Strong hands held him. He looked imploringly, uncomprehendingly at Tom Peeper. ‘You said I would get a billet at a farm, and a suit of clothes, and food, and a sweetheart …’
Tom Peeper laughed. ‘If the Judge lets you off, maybe you will. But your own mother has admitted you changed into a hare, and, Your Honour, that is what he told me too, but I thought he was drunk.’
‘Shape-shifting is common,’ said Potts. ‘Temporary but common. I have his own confession, now corroborated by his mother. That is sufficient.’
Elizabeth Device started laughing. A high mad laugh. ‘Well done, my fine fellow out of my womb. What have you gained? Nothing! And oh, what have you lost? Everything!’
‘There’s Jennet!’ shouted Jem. ‘She has to be fed
and cared for.’
Tom Peeper stepped forward. ‘I will take her on, Your Honours.’
Elizabeth laughed again, harsh and sick. ‘Will you then, after all these years? Well, well, and after all, you are her father.’
Roger Nowell looked aghast. Tom Peeper looked shifty. Constable Hargreaves looked at his boots. James Device had his mouth open. Then he closed his mouth, took his fists from his pockets and knocked down Tom Peeper with a single blow. The man was out cold on the floor.
‘There is one good thing you have done in your stinking life,’ said Elizabeth Device. ‘And it was no romance, gentlemen. Tom Peeper raped me. Said I should be glad of it, looking as I do.’
Jem turned to her with hatred. ‘You let me sell your own daughter to her own father.’
‘You would have sold her to someone,’ said Elizabeth. ‘At least he bought her a dress now and then.’
Roger Nowell stood up. ‘Enough. Get them out of here. The child Jennet will sleep and eat in my kitchen for the time being.’ He looked down at Tom Peeper. ‘Hargreaves, go and throw that live vermin into the pond. If he drowns, let him. If not, keep him out of my sight.
Hargreaves had his men lift up the senseless body.
‘You from Malkin,’ said Roger Nowell, ‘you will leave here at dawn except for Elizabeth Device and James Device who will leave at noon. Take them to the cellars. Feed them.’
‘There is one missing,’ said Elizabeth.
‘There is another witch?’ said Potts. ‘If you testify it will go in your favour.’
‘You lie!’ shouted Jem.
‘Will you make me a promise and have it witnessed?’ said Elizabeth Device.
Potts motioned for the others to be led away. Now there were only the three of them in the room.
‘I want no stocks, no chains, no hanging, no burning,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Write it down. Witness it, Master Nowell.’