Weyward — Chapter 22: Altha

22

ALTHA

I feared that they all believed the Kirkby boy. The men and women in the gallery, but also the judges and the jurors, who were the ones that mattered.

They believed that I’d been there, that I had set John’s own cows on him, as if I were some great puppeteer. As if I were God himself.

While I sat in the dock, still watching the spider, I thought back to that morning, the morning that John died. I’d woken with the light, as I always did. I looked out of the window and saw the sky was still pink and new. I remember I thought of beginnings, as I dressed and put on my boots. Then I set off on my walk. I always took a walk at that time, in the weeks leading up to the new year. It had become my habit.

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.

The rector took the oath. A thin man, his face was pale and pinched from years of sermons. ‘Reverend,’ said the prosecutor, ‘would you be so good as to tell the court where you preach?’ ‘Certainly,’ said Reverend Goode. ‘I am the rector of St Mary’s church,

Crows Beck.’

‘And how long have you held this post?’ ‘It will be thirty years this August.’ ‘And in that time, have you been familiar with the Weyward family?’ ‘Yes – though I am not sure that “family” is the proper term.’ ‘What do you mean, Reverend?’ ‘While I’ve been there, it has been just the two of them. The accused and her mother. Now only Altha remains, since Jennet passed some years ago.’ ‘Has there never been a male member of the household?’ ‘None that I have been acquainted with. It appears that the girl was born out of wedlock.’ ‘And did the Weywards attend services, Reverend?’ Reverend Goode paused. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They came every Sunday, even in winter.’ ‘And has the accused kept up her attendance, since her mother’s death?’ ‘Yes,’ said Reverend Goode. ‘For this, at least, I cannot fault her.’ I hated slinking into the back of the church, feeling the other villages shrink away if I took the same pew. But I knew I had to go, as my mother and I had always done, to avoid being dragged before the church courts.

At Reverend Goode’s last words, the prosecutor looked like a cat who’d been handed a dish of cream. ‘“For this at least”, Reverend? What can you fault her on?’ ‘One hears things, in a small village,’ he said. ‘Like her mother, Altha tends the sick. Sometimes she has favourable results. She’s nursed quite a few villagers back to health in her time.’ ‘“Sometimes” she has good results? What of the other times?’

‘Sometimes the patient has died.’ I remembered the last death I’d witnessed, before John’s. Ben Bainbridge’s father, Jeremiah. He’d passed ninety winters: had been the oldest person in Crows Beck for two score years. His mind had died long before, leaving only his body behind. His eyes were blue and clouded, and I remember looking into them as I sat by his deathbed, wondering what he was seeing in the world beyond this life. He had said his wife’s name with his last breath, his body shuddering like leaves in the wind. Old age, it was.

And nothing more. There was nowt I could do but ease the pain of his lingering.

They could not pin that death on me. Not that one.

There had been others, too. Times when the patient’s skin was so blanched with approaching death that I knew I could do little. The Merrywether woman, who’d died in childbed, her blood lapping at my wrists, the babe a mere knot of still flesh. These ones had been past my help.

I expected the rector to produce a litany of these deaths. But he did not.

After all, he had stood at their gravesides and told their families that their loved one’s passing was part of God’s plan. It would not do well for him to say, now, having taken his sacred oath, that God had planned for them to be murdered by a witch. ‘They did die, sometimes,’ he went on. ‘Though death awaits us all, along with reunification with our Father in Heaven, if we have lived well.’ I felt the gallery grow restless. They were not here for a sermon.

Someone coughed, another giggled. I saw one judge lean close to another, to murmur something.

The rector had the prosecutor in a bind, now. But he needed the church to stand with him, on the matter of witchcraft.

He paced. ‘Thank you, Reverend. And thank you for the great service you have done to your country and king, in coming forward to report this crime. For it was you, was it not, who wrote to me, informing me there was suspicion of a witch in Crows Beck? And that it was suspected that this witch had had a hand in the death of John Milburn?’ ‘Yes,’ said the rector slowly. ‘It was.’ ‘Reverend,’ said the prosecutor. ‘Did you see the body of John Milburn?’ ‘I did. He was injured most grievously.’

‘And did you bring the accused to his corpse, to see if it bled anew at her

touch?’ ‘No, sir.’ ‘But, Reverend, would this not have been conclusive proof of murder?

Why was this not done?’ ‘Master Milburn had already been buried, sir, by the time suspicion fell upon the accused. It was his widow’s wish that he be laid to rest quickly, the sooner he could be reunited with his maker.’ ‘Thank you for that explanation. And could you tell the court how it was that suspicion did fall on the accused? What caused you to make the report?’ ‘Someone in the parish spoke to me of their concerns. They were certain that an innocent life had been taken, through a wicked contract with the devil. They wanted to do their duty, by their Lord and maker.’ ‘And who was that person?’ Reverend Goode took his time in telling the court who had brought suspicion on my name. Who had consigned me to sit on the cold, hard seat of the dock by day and dream of death by night. ‘It was the deceased’s father-in-law,’ he said finally. ‘William Metcalfe.’ The courtroom grew loud, the whispers from the gallery like the drone of a hundred insects.

The prosecutor was finished with Reverend Goode. He climbed down from the stand slowly, and I saw his age in his faltering movements. The intimidating figure I remembered from childhood was diminished. Soon he too would start his journey from this world to the next. I wondered what he would find there.

I was taken back to the dungeons. Night had already fallen for me.

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