The Witch Hunter Page 18

  The ever-knowledgable Thomas was only too happy to air the fruits of his recent researches among the books in the cathedral library and conversations with his priestly aquaintances. ‘Generally, the Church shows little interest in the transgressions of cunning women,’ he said. ‘Though there have been various pronoucements on the issue for centuries.’ He warmed to his theme, the latent scholar in him bubbling to the surface. ‘The Synod of Elvira in 336 punished apostasy by refusing to offer communion. Then the Frankish bishops at Worms in 829 stated that it was the Devil who aided witches to prepare love potions and poisons and to raise storms. The Synod of Reisbach in 799 demanded penance for withcraft, but no actual punishment …’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, clerk, will you stop lecturing us,’ boomed Gwyn. ‘We’re not pupils in your cathedral school!’

  John was more sympathetic and motioned for Thomas to continue. He poked his tongue out at the Cornishman and carried on.

  ‘When the issue is forced upon its attention, the Church prefers to divert it to the manorial courts – or presumably, here in Exeter, to the burgesses’ courts. Only if some conspiracy to cause criminal damage is evident will the consistory courts intervene – and even then, they always hand over persons they convict to the other courts for sentencing.’

  ‘You should have been a bloody lawyer, not a priest, Thomas!’ growled Gwyn with mock sarcasm, as he was really quite proud of the little man’s erudition.

  ‘What do you mean by criminal damage?’ demanded the coroner.

  ‘Well, in the villages, if a mare drops a foal or the chickens stop laying, then the owner may claim he has lost profit because a witch cast a spell on them, at the instigation of some neighbour who holds a grudge.’

  ‘Where I come from in Cornwall, the folk don’t bother with all that nonsense,’ boomed Gwyn. ‘They just form a lynch-mob and hang the suspected culprit from the nearest tree!’

  ‘We all know what tribe of savages you hail from!’ squeaked the clerk, dodging a playful swing from Gwyn, which would have knocked him from his stool if it had connected.

  ‘Calm down, you childish pair!’ snapped de Wolfe. ‘Where and when is this court being held tomorrow, Thomas?’

  ‘It will be in the chapter house, after terce, sext and nones. But it is a closed hearing, Crowner, only churchmen will be admitted.’

  ‘I am the coroner for this county, damn it!’ roared John.

  Thomas shook his head. ‘No matter, sir. The secular powers have no jurisdiction there. Not even the sheriff could attend.’

  ‘Can you worm your way in, Thomas?’ asked Gwyn.

  The clerk managed to look both sly and sheepish. ‘I had thought of slipping into the back row. My usual garb and my tonsure often make me inconspicuous in such company.’

  ‘Do that, then let me know straight away what transpires there,’ commanded his master. ‘It’s a damned scandal, having a secret inquisition. Even our sheriff’s court, for all his corruption, is at least open to the people.’

  Walter Winstone’s intention was to use Edward Bigge to fabricate a story to incriminate Theophania Lawrence and to make similar accusations against Jolenta of Ide through the false testimony supplied by Edward’s wife, Emelota. Both these were to be fed through to the obsessively receptive ears of Gilbert de Bosco, so that as with Alice Ailward proceedings could be taken against them in the bishop’s court. Unfortunately, the apothecary had unwisely paid half Edward Bigge’s fee in advance, the other part to be given once he had given his lying evidence to the canon. On Monday morning, with twenty pence in his purse, Bigge decided to celebrate and went drinking, first in the Anchor Inn on the quay-side, then at the Saracen on Stepcote Hill, so that by noon he was uproariously drunk.

  A surfeit of ale and cider always made Edward Bigge loquacious, usually at the top of his bull-like voice and he reeled out of the Saracen shouting to the world at large that he had had a narrow escape from the Devil. The inhabitants of the area around that disreputable alehouse were all too familiar with noisy drunks and normally no one would have taken any notice of the slurred ranting of yet another inebriate. However, as Edward weaved his way up to Smythen Street, the continuation of Stepcote Hill, he came across an unfortunate old fellow who was looking into the open front of one of the blacksmiths’ forges that gave the street its name. Pinning the man against the door-post, he leaned towards him and uttered a confidential whisper that could be heard twenty paces away. ‘I saw Satan, as plain as I see you now,’ he hissed. ‘Huge and black he was, with horns on his head and red fire coming from his nostrils!’ His voice rose as got into his drunken stride and three men and a woman coming down the street stared at him with curiosity. ‘She conjured up Beelzebub as plain as the nose on your face,’ he roared at the disconcerted old man. ‘This cunning woman over in Bretayne can kill cattle ten miles away and put a spell on husbands so that they leave their wives and cleave to another woman! I saw her bewitch someone myself, with the bats flying out of a great book she had there!’

  One of the men passing by stopped at this, then turned to the woman and yelled at her. ‘I told you it was a curse, you damned fool! I was bewitched when I took up with that girl!’

  The woman gave him a shove in disgust, but he was already moving towards Edward Bigge, shouting as he went. ‘What cunning woman is this? They should be struck from the earth for the evil they wreak.’

  The drunk turned and looked blearily at the newcomer, giving the terrified old man the chance to slip away. Two smiths and three of their customers came out from the interior of the forge to see what all the commotion was about.

  ‘I said, who was it?’ demanded the passer-by. ‘I live in Bretayne and similar magic has been worked on me, I swear!’

  Even though his wits were slowed by ale, Bigge preened his new self-importance. ‘I went to her just for a potion for stomach-ache – but she raised the Devil and frightened the life out of me, so I ran!’

  ‘What was her name, damn you?’ yelled the exasperated questioner.

  ‘Theophania, she was. Theophania Lawrence.’

  One of the smiths lumbered up closer to the pair. ‘I went to her some months back, with a flux of my bowels. Two pence she took from me, but nothing did she do for my guts.’

  Almost as if by another sort of magic, a small crowd began gathering, like iron filings to a lodestone. People came out of the adjacent forges and from some vegetable stalls opposite, to listen to what was going on. Inside a minute, three more people began telling of their good and bad experiences with cunning women and Edward Bigge, encouraged by the attention, spiralled into more and more fanciful accounts of his session with Theophania.

  ‘The room went dark and there was a smell of brimstone. She grew twice as tall and green lights came from her eyes like rays!’ he ranted, his imagination fuelled by the Saracen’s strong cider.

  The man who had demanded the witch’s name became caught up in the excitement and turning to his sceptical wife, took her by the shoulders and shook her. ‘See, I told you it was not my doing with that girl. I was bewitched! She should be stopped, that bloody hag.’

  By now more than a dozen people had congregated in the street, many primed by the sermons they had heard in the city’s churches the previous day. With the priests’ exhortations fresh in their ears, they were easy prey for the infectious hysteria that started to ripple through the crowd. Now everyone was gabbling about their experiences with sorcerers and memories of mere cough medicines and poultices for ulcers were magnified into spectres of goblins and huge black cats. Every ill that had befallen them in the past few years was suddenly attributed to the curses of wizards – and those who had lost silver coins, had miscarriages, watched their pigs die of a fever or had their thatch catch fire, attributed it all to the evil works of cunning women in general and Theophania Lawrence in particular.

  Within ten minutes, idle gossip had passed through rumbling discontent into open hostility, a mood that fed upon itself and turned uglier by the m
inute. Edward Bigge, who knew that his purse had become appreciably lighter since spending the weekend drinking the apothecary’s money, had enough sense left within his fuddled brain to see an opportunity to recover his funds if he aided Walter Winstone’s scheme even more.

  ‘I know where she lives, this scandalous bitch who summons up spirits from Hades,’ he yelled thickly. ‘We should confront her with her evil deeds and get her to repent!’

  He pushed himself from the wall against which he had been leaning and stalked unsteadily up Smythen Street, shoving his way through the now fevered crowd.

  ‘You needn’t tell me where she lives,’ screamed a toothless woman. ‘I live in the next lane. She put a curse on my son so that he was born with one leg shorter than the other!’

  ‘Ay, ask her what she has to say for herself!’ shouted another.

  ‘Don’t ask her, just hang her!’ screamed another, who had drunk almost as much as Edward Bigge.

  Almost as if it were a living entity in itself, the crowd flowed behind Edward, who was closely followed by the man alleging that his infidelity was due to Theophania’s curse. As it moved along, more people attached themselves to its margins. Most had no idea what was going on until they were sucked into the hysteria by the exaggerated explanations of the inner core. By the time the mass of people had wheeled left through a lane and emerged into Fore Street, there were more than half a hundred shouting and gesticulating citizens, with a penumbra of excited urchins and barking dogs. Crossing the main street, several horsemen and two ox-carts were forced to stop, until the mob flowed into another lane on the opposite side, below St Olave’s Church, and slithered into the stinking lanes of Bretayne.

  One of the town constables heard the tumult from as far away as Carfoix in the centre of the city. It was Osric, the skinny Saxon, and he hurried after the tail of the crowd as it vanished into Bretayne. Grabbing a boy who was capering along behind them, he yelled at him to discover what was going on, but got little sense from the lad.

  ‘They’ve found the Devil down here, they say! They’re going to hang him!’ he gabbled and twisted free from Osric’s hand to run after the mob.

  Having unsuccessfully tried to stop Alice Ailward from being arrested a few days before, the constable had a sudden foreboding that even worse trouble was going to come of this and that again he would be powerless to prevent it on his own. He turned around and ran as fast as his long thin legs would carry him, back towards Rougemont Castle.

  The crowd flowed inexorably on through the mean lanes, oblivious of the debris underfoot and the filth that ran in the gutters. Many of the locals appeared from hovels and alleys to discover what was going on and while some joined the mob, others violently defended their neighbour Theophania. Scuffles broke out on the periphery but had no effect on slowing down the shouting and chanting vigilantes.

  As they reached the house where she lived, Edward Bigge threw up a hand dramatically and pointed at her front door. ‘In there it was!’ he yelled. ‘That’s where she conjured up Satan and, for spite, put a spell on me. Since then, I’ve not been able to satisfy my poor wife. This witch took all the manhood out of me!’

  This new accusation had been suggested to Bigge by the other man’s claim that Theophania was the cause of him cuckolding his wife. The clamour increased and a burly youth, who had not the slightest interest in witchcraft but who enjoyed a good fight, dashed forward and with a mighty kick, smashed open the flimsy door.

  There was a scream from inside and, as several men fought to get through the door, Theophania was seen cowering at the back of the room. As if it were not enough that fate already seemed set against her, it so happened that she was in the process of changing her kirtle to put it in the wash. She stood cringeing in her thin chemise, her long grey hair unbound and uncovered, hanging down lankly over her shoulders. To cap it all, at that moment a black cat jumped from a chair alongside her and with a squeal of fright, wisely took off through the door and vanished behind the house.

  ‘A witch, a naked witch! With a coal-black cat!’ screamed the mob, in transports of delight at this confirmation of their hysterical suspicions. A surge of bodies pressed against the doorway, with Edward Bigge yelling, ‘Beware of Beelzebub – she’ll set the Devil upon you!’

  In spite of several of Theophania’s neighbours punching out ineffectually at the edge of the rabble, the leading men and several wild-eyed women burst into the room and seized the screaming old dame, who had collapsed into a corner.

  With frothy spittle at the corners of his mouth, a fat man who was the sexton at St Petroc’s Church, frenziedly waved his arms in the air and repeatedly howled at the top of his voice, ‘The testaments demand that thou shalt not suffer a witch to live! Obey the word of the Lord thy God!’

  Osric the constable nearly burst his heart in his haste to get help from the castle and the last few yards up the hill to the gatehouse had reduced him to a gasping wreck by the time Sergeant Gabriel came out of the guardroom to meet him. When his laboured breathing allowed him to speak, he gasped out his news and the leader of the garrison’s men-at-arms wasted no time in getting a posse together. Turning out the four men playing dice in the gatehouse, he yelled at another three, who were passing across the inner ward. After sending the man on sentry duty at the gate to alert the coroner upstairs, he set off with his men at a fast trot down towards the town, leaving Osric to recover his breath. By the time his heart had slowed sufficiently, John de Wolfe and Gwyn had clumped down from their chamber and the burgesses’ constable was able to tell them what he had seen.

  It was pointless going for their horses for such a short distance, so they all loped after Gabriel’s detachment and caught up with them outside Theophania Lawrence’s cottage.

  ‘No mob here, Crowner,’ panted Gabriel. ‘But this man says they’ve dragged her off somewhere.’

  Several of her neighbours were looked apprehensively through the shattered door into her dwelling, where the sparse furniture had been overturned and all her pots of lotions and bundles of herbs had been stamped into a mess on the floor. The neighbour, a rough-looking man with a fresh black eye and bloody nose, had obviously been one of those who had tried to defend the old dame.

  ‘They took her that way, Crowner, towards the city wall!’ He waved his arm vaguely downhill, towards the western corner of the city.

  De Wolfe wasted no more time on questions, but set off in that direction, leading Gwyn and Gabriel at a lope through the twisting, narrow alleys between a motley collection of small houses, huts and semi-derelict shacks. Faces peered fearfully from doorways and around corners, although the ubiquitous urchins danced around in their rags, hugely enjoying this diversion from their normally sordid existence. Lean, mangy dogs barked excitedly at the running men, who slopped and slipped through the running sewage as the lanes became steeper when they approached the slope down to the river. The top of the town wall was in sight over the roofs of the huts when they came upon a bedraggled figure climbing towards them. He wore a black monk’s habit, although his loud cursing would have done credit to a Breton fisherman.

  He held up his staff as they ran towards him, and now John could see that one entire side of the monk’s clothing was sopping wet with stinking fluid and that the side of his face was grazed and bleeding.

  ‘Those bastards pushed me over when I tried to stop them,’ he wailed. ‘They had some poor woman and seemed intent on doing her harm!’

  ‘Which way did they go, brother?’ shouted Gwyn.

  The monk, who must have been from the small Bendictine priory of St Nicholas higher up in the town, pointed his stick behind him.

  ‘Last I saw of the swine, they were clustering around the Snail Tower, yelling and screaming like a pack of Barbary apes. That was a good few minutes ago, so you’d best make haste.’

  Again, the coroner pounded on at the head of his small posse, making for the round tower that stood at the junction of the north and west walls of the city, just above the upp
er part of Exe Island. It was only a few hundred paces away and as they came past the last row of dwellings before the lane that ran inside the high walls, they saw the remnants of the mob melting away into the numerous alleys and paths that ran back up into Bretayne. The noisy approach of half a score of vengeful custodians of the law had scared away the rioters, but they left behind a chilling legacy of their activities.

  Turning slowly, with her feet a yard above the ground, was the body of Theophania Lawrence, hanging by a rope around her neck from an old iron bracket sticking out of the Snail Tower, which had once carried a sconce for a lighted pitch-brand.

  Her head lolled sideways on to her shoulder, her face purple as a token of her slow death from strangulation, rather than a broken neck. As a final indignity, her pathetically thin chemise was ripped down from the neck, exposing her sagging breasts, between which some at least partially literate rioter had crudely inscribed with a charcoal stick a large ‘W’ for ‘Witch’.

  Whilst Edward Bigge was drunkenly involved in the riotous events in Bretayne, his wife was pursuing the other part of her husband’s contract with the apothecary. Acting on the instructions that Edward had laboriously dinned into her head, she dressed as neatly as she could and went to seek an audience with Gilbert de Bosco at his house in Canons’ Row. She waited until after the last of the morning offices to make sure that he would be at home seeking his midday dinner – although in fact Gilbert had deputed today’s attendance at the cathedral to his vicar, as he kept his hours of worship close to the minimum allowed by the rules laid down by the chapter.

  When his steward came to his well-appointed study to tell him that a common woman urgently wished to see him, he was dismissive, especially as he could hear the clatter of pewter plates and the clink of a wineglass from his adjacent dining room, where his meal was almost ready to be served. But his servant’s next words caught his attention.