Weyward(43)

It had been very cold that day, and I had walked through great banks of snow which soaked my boots and the hem of my dress. My breath was like crystals in front of me. The valley was always at its most beautiful in the morning. I remember thinking that it was as if it had been made so on purpose, to remind us to keep living.

The cows looked almost majestic in the field: the gold dawn turning their flanks amber. The power in those flanks as they ran towards him; the muscle rippling. As if they were different animals entirely, and had spent their days chewing cud, biding their time until this moment of glory. The sharp cries of the crow reeling above had mingled with the men’s shouts. I could feel the ground shake with their hooves from where I stood, under the trees at the edge of the field.

It was over quickly. The cows returned to their former selves, with only the white roll of an eye, the heave of a flank, to show what had gone before. And the body. John’s body.

I saw Grace come out of the farmhouse. I gathered up my skirts and ran, the winter air sharp in my lungs. As I ran, I unfastened my cloak, so that I could cover the body. I didn’t want her to see. The limbs like broken tools, the pulped face. I knew then that I would see that face, again and again, until I took my last breath.

They are dismissing the Kirkby boy now. His Adam’s apple quivers as he walks down the aisle of the court, stiff in his new clothes. He has done his master proud. On the way home – I imagine – he will go over each detail of the trial until it is polished and sparkling, ready to show to his parents, the other villagers. The prosecutor’s questions. The ancient stone of Lancaster Castle; the soaring rafters of the courtroom. Grace, pretty in her white cap. And in the dock: Altha, the witch.

Witch. The word slithers from the mouth like a serpent, drips from the tongue as thick and black as tar. We never thought of ourselves as witches, my mother and I. For this was a word invented by men, a word that brings power to those who speak it, not those it describes. A word that builds gallows and pyres, turns breathing women into corpses.

No. It was not a word we ever used.

I did not know, for a long time, what my mother thought of our gifts. But I knew what was expected of me, from a young child. She named me Altha, after all. Not Alice, meaning noble woman, nor Agnes, lamb of God. Altha. Healer.

She taught me how to heal. And she taught me other things, too.

‘They say that the first woman was born of man, Altha,’ she said to me once when I was a child, for this was what we had heard the rector say in church that Sunday. ‘That she came from his rib. But you must remember, my girl, that this is a lie.’

It was not that long after we’d attended Daniel Kirkby’s birth that she told me this. ‘Now you know the truth. Man is born of woman. Not the other way round.’ I asked her why Reverend Goode would lie about something like that.

‘It comes from the Bible,’ she told me. ‘So the rector isn’t the first to tell that lie. As for the reason: it is my belief that people lie when they are afraid.’

I was confused.

‘But what could Reverend Goode be afraid of?’

My mother smiled. ‘Us,’ she said. ‘Women.’

But she was wrong. We were the ones who should have been afraid.

I sensed it in my marrow, much as my mother tried to shield me from it. There were strange happenings, in the years before she died. Long days and nights when she would be gone, having begged a horse from whichever family was in debt for our services. She would leave under cover of darkness, her crow flying ahead, its feathers stippled by moonlight. She would not tell me where she was going, only that if anyone were to ask, I was to say she was visiting relatives in Lancashire.

I knew that was not the truth, though. For we had no other relatives. Only each other.

One night, the autumn Grace’s mother died, a couple came to our door. The air was chill with the threat of winter and I remember that the woman held a babe to her breast; though it was swaddled in many layers, its tiny fist was blue.

My mother set her face tight, and I had the impression she did not want to admit them to the cottage. But she could not leave them out in such conditions, especially with the babe in such a state. She bade me put a pot on the fire, and spoke to them in hushed tones, but even so there was no escaping their conversation in our little cottage.

The couple had travelled from a place called Clitheroe, in the south, and had walked for many days and nights. It was no wonder they looked as they did: their faces haggard, and the babe half starved when out of his swaddling clothes, for his mother’s milk had dried up. They were heading to Scotland, they said, and thence across the seas to Ireland, where no one would know them.

The woman was a healer – though not in the way my mother was. She made the occasional poultice, that was all. But they feared this would not matter: two families had been rounded up, they said, near Pendle Hill, and tried for witchcraft. Nearly all of them had been hanged.

What names, my mother asked.

The Devices, they said. And the Whittles. More besides.

These names were unfamiliar to me, but my mother’s face blanched at their mention.

Things changed, after that.

The prosecutor called a second witness that day.

Reverend Goode himself. His black cassock flowed behind him as he walked towards the stand. It made me think of a bat’s wings, and without thinking I smiled. Then, I heard the hum of voices rise in the gallery and remembered I was being watched. I kept my face still. I looked for the spider, but it was gone. Only its web remained, glinting and delicate. I wondered if it was an omen, if the spider could sense what was to come.