Instead of garlands, we'd iron rings round our necks and shackles round our wrists, but our ankles were free as we struggled up the steep cobbled streets. This was the first time we'd been allowed to set foot outside the castle or breathe fresh air or walk beneath the blue sky. The breeze touched my fresh-washed hair, for Alice Nutter had bribed the guards to bring us water and soap. Round my clean body hung a fine kirtle of blue-green wool, for Mistress Alice had procured garments for us at the last moment so that we would not have to march to the gallows in our lousy soiled rags.
The guards had Alice Nutter and me marching side by side at the head of our sorry train with the seven others following behind. Beneath her breath, Mistress Alice murmured of a woman clothed in the sun, crowned in a diadem of stars, who crushed a serpent beneath her heel. How I wished I'd her firm faith, ever unshakeable. But if I lacked Alice Nutter's conviction, at least I could try to bear myself with dignity and grace as she did. Even though the glaring August sun hurt my eyes, I kept them open. This was my last chance to try to make sense of what had happened to us.
Halfway up the hill, our guards took us into the Red Lion Tavern so that we might have one last mug of ale before meeting the hangman. The ceiling was low enough to make the guards stoop, and the rushes on the floor were none too clean. Though it was a sight better than the dungeon, it oppressed me to know that this dingy room was the last I'd ever see. The ale the tavern keeper pulled from the barrel looked like weak and sour stuff. But Alice Nutter took command, a lady once again, for her son had brought her best gown to wear on this, her last living day. Heavenly blue brocade, it was, stitched with silver threads. She told the tavern keeper to put away his ale and bring out his best French claret.
So the tavern keeper poured us each a goblet brimming with blood-dark wine. Sipping the heady stuff, I remembered Chattox's tale of how Gran and her spirits had conjured wine out of nowhere. I pictured Gran and Chattox sat up in Malkin Tower, feasting away in secret, those two most infamous witches of Pendle Forest drinking from the same cup whilst their imps lit up the place like a thousand candles. What a sight that would have been.
Here in the tavern, Chattox gulped down her wine as though it were bitter medicine whilst Annie Redfearn hovered beside her, not touching her own cup, no doubt pining for her Marie, lost to her forever. Mam was giving Jamie her full care, for he was in a bad way, so weak that she had to tip the wine into his mouth for him. What a wretched ending for the lot of us.
Alice Nutter bent close to me as though I were her own daughter.
"Don't give up hope," she said with a knowing in her voice as vast as Gran's. "The one thing they can't take from us is what we carry inside ourselves. By Our Lady, you are bound for a better place."
I wished I could believe her. Though I sought to understand the meaning of our travails, I saw only ruin and approaching death. The Red Lion's finest French claret wasn't near strong enough to blot out my terror of what lay before us. I tried to recall the serenity on Gran's face when she died, yet the memory seemed so fragile.
The guards told us to empty our goblets and move along. Least the wine blurred the edges of things: the ache in my calves, the crowd lined up to heckle us. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a dark streak and then a black dog crossed my path. A black bitch. To think the creature had followed me all this way to Lancaster and I still didn't know her name. How hard Gran had tried to teach me to welcome my familiar instead of running away. What might I have become if I'd only possessed the courage?
Seeing my face fold up in pain and regret, Mistress Alice reached her manacled hand to mine. "Courage, love. It's not we who must fear death, but those who persecute the innocent. Don't dwell upon dark thoughts. Think of the happiest and most blessed things you know."
I thought about Nancy and how we used to laugh. Of how strong and healthy my body used to be in the old days; how I'd once raced through the fields, swift as the hares; how I had walked ten miles as though it were nothing, instead of staggering along breathless as I did this day whilst the black bitch kept pace with me, walking between me and the mob as if to ward me.
The horde pressing in on both sides gawped at me and I gawped right back. Let them get a good look at the witch about to die before their greedy eyes. I scowled into the faces of the mean-faced brats gathered to point and screech. What a scruffy lot they were, almost as ragged as the prisoners in Lancaster Gaol. Public hangings were the biggest feast days they'd see now that there were no more processions, no more saints' days or holy days like there used to be when Gran was a girl. Pity welled up inside me when I thought of their bleak lives. Seeing a lass about Jennet's age, I offered her a smile, only the poor thing took a fright and covered her eyes.
I'd never have children of my own nor ever know the love of a man, but die a maid like one of the virgin martyrs of the old religion. That notion made me burst out laughing. Glancing backward at Mam, I saw her frown, no doubt wondering how I could find anything amusing at a time like this. How I wished I could clasp her in my arms one last time, but the guards were stood between us, hastening us up the hill.
Too soon the platform was before us, the gibbet with its nine empty nooses. Which would be mine? Swinging my head to search the throng, I saw no sign of Uncle Kit or the Holdens of Bull Hole Farm. But propped upon his litter was my lamed Yorkshire pedlar watching me go with tears in his eyes.
"Pray for me," I begged him as the guards shoved me past.
I choked at the sight of William stepping from the crowd to wave his last farewell. How my heart rattled as I remembered every act of kindness that young guard had shown me on the long march from Clitheroe to Lancaster.
"I won't let you suffer, Alizon!" he shouted before the men could drag me out of earshot. "I'll pull your legs. Make it quick for you."
What he promised was the greatest mercy I could ask for now.
The guards harried us up the steps to the wooden platform where the hangman waited, his face hidden in a black hood. As far as my brother was concerned, hanging seemed like overdoing it. Our Jamie lay in a faint in the arms of his guards. He'd already died in his soul when they first chained him at the bottom of the Well Tower.
We nine condemned witches were lined up; I was between Mam and Alice Nutter. John Bulcock wouldn't shut his gob but proclaimed his innocence to the bystanders who heaved in laughter. Off came our shackles and before I'd a chance to savour the lightness round my wrists, the guard trussed them behind my back, this time with rope. Next we were made to climb upon the long wooden bench. Only thing left to do was say my final prayers.
The Latin words Gran had taught me came rushing from my lips in an unstoppable incantation whilst William and my pedlar stared as though unable to look away. Maybe John Law wondered if my death would break the spell and end his lameness. As I prayed that he would find healing and solace, the black bitch bayed and I felt that hum inside me again, thrumming through my veins and bones, the power rising. If only I'd allowed Gran to teach me before I happened upon John Law, I might have been a cunning woman and not a witch. Through the door of memory I heard her hoarse old voice.
What hath he in his hand?
A golden wand.
What hath he in his other hand?
Heaven's door keys.
Stay shut, hell door.
Let the little child
Go to its Mother mild.
I gazed straight into the sun, letting it sear my eyes.
Ave, Maria. Ave, Regina Caelorum.
A woman clothed in the sun.
Three paths stretched before me. The right-hand path led to heaven, the left-hand path to hell, but the path betwixt and between led into the heart of the forest. From out of that bluebell wood the Lady cantered upon her moon-white mare with the silver and gold bells twined in her mane. Queen of Heaven—that name did not belong to her. She was a queen of earth, Queen of Elfhame, the one Gran told me about when I was a little lass in her herb garden.
She's shown herself to you. Call out to her and she'll come to you again.
When the Lady raised her hand to bless me, I wept in overpowering awe. In a blink she was gone. In her stead I saw Pendle Hill, its slopes green as the Lady's gown.
The hangman fit the rope round my neck, the hood over my head. Frantic, I prayed as the rope bit deep into my skin. I chanted till he kicked the bench from beneath my feet, leaving me to swing and kick and judder. Queen of Heaven, Queen of Elfhame—I held them both in my heart. A magpie landed in a meadow of lad's love and then that magpie became my grandmother, except she wasn't old or lame or blind. Full beautiful, her chestnut hair crowned in blossoms, she turned to me and called my name.
Inside my bursting skull a rare light blazed. From down the forest path I saw a wreath of roses, a garland of green, a diadem of stars.
Y
OU'LL NOT FIND
our graves anywhere. God-fearing folk do not bury witches in consecrated ground or even in the unhallowed plot beyond the churchyard walls where the suicides and unchristened go. After I died in gaol, they burned my corpse, then buried my charred bones on the wild heath overlooking Lancaster Castle. Three months on, they did the same to Alizon, Liza, Jamie, and the rest of them hanged upon that dazzling August day. No crosses mark our resting place, just heather and nesting lapwings. Only our names and the lies they told about us lingered on.
Away in Pendle Forest, Roger Nowell ordered his men to bring down Malkin Tower stone by stone till only the foundation remained. Yet he could never banish me and mine from these parts. This is our home. Ours. We will endure, woven into the land itself, its weft and warp, like the very stones and the streams that cut across the moors.
What is yonder that casts a light so far-shining?
My own dear children hanging from the gallows tree.
Hanging sore by twisted neck,
How they gasp and how they thrash.Stay shut, hell door.
Let my children arise and come home to me.
Neither stick nor stake has the power to keep thee.
Open the gate wide. Step through the gate. Come, my children. Come home.
All the major characters and events portrayed in this novel are drawn from court clerk Thomas Potts's account of the 1612 Lancashire witch trials,
The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster,
published in 1613. In this meticulously documented case, seven women and two men from Pendle Forest were hanged as witches, based largely on "evidence" given by a nine-year-old girl and her older brother, who appeared to suffer from learning difficulties.
Before the reign of James I, witch persecutions had been relatively rare in England. But James I's book
Daemonologie,
a witch-hunter's manual, presented the idea of a vast conspiracy of satanic witches threatening to undermine the nation. Shakespeare wrote his play
Macbeth,
which presents the first depiction of a witches' coven in English literature, in James I's honour.
To curry favour with his monarch, magistrate Roger Nowell arrested and prosecuted no fewer than twelve individuals from the Pendle region and even went to the far-fetched extreme of accusing them of conspiring in their very own Gunpowder Plot to blow up Lancaster Castle. Two decades before Matthew Hopkins began his witch-hunting career in East Anglia, Nowell had set himself up as the witch-finder general of Lancashire.
Thomas Potts paid particular attention to Elizabeth Southerns, alias Old Demdike, the one alleged witch who escaped the hangman by dying in prison before she could come to trial. In England, unlike Scotland and Continental Europe, the law forbade the use of torture. Thus the trial transcripts supposedly reveal her voluntary confession, although Nowell, as magistrate, may well have manipulated or altered her statement. What is interesting—if the trial transcripts can be believed—is that she freely confessed to being a charmer and a healer. Local farmers called on her to cure their children and their cattle. She described in rich detail how she first met her familiar spirit, Tibb.
The belief in familiar spirits appears to have been the cornerstone of British witchcraft and cunning craft. Elizabeth Southerns's charms and spells, recorded in the trial transcripts, reveal no evidence of diabolical beliefs, but use the ecclesiastical language of the Catholic Church, the old religion driven underground by the English Reformation. Her charm to cure a bewitched person, quoted in its entirety on the flyleaf of this book, is a moving and poetic depiction of the passion of Christ as witnessed by the Virgin Mary. The text is very similar to the so-called White Pater Noster, an Elizabethan prayer-charm that Eamon Duffy discusses in his landmark work,
The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400—1580.
It appears that Elizabeth Southerns was a practitioner of the kind of Catholic folk magic that would have been fairly commonplace only a generation or two earlier. Pre-Reformation Catholicism embraced many practises that seemed magical and mystical. People used holy water and communion bread for healing. They went on pilgrimages, left offerings at holy wells, and prayed to the saints for intercession. Some practises, such as the blessing of wells and fields, may have had pre-Christian origins. Indeed, looking at pre-Reformation folk magic, it is often hard to untangle the strands of Catholicism from the remnants of pagan belief. I am indebted to Dr. Sam Riches at Lancaster University for her course, Late Medieval Belief and Superstition, which made the pre-Reformation Church come alive for me.