in witchcraft?’
At first it looks like a girl on the front row is putting up her hand to answer, but it is just a yawn.
So I answer my own question. I try my best not to remember what this topic makes me remember. I try to cement over the cracks in my voice.
‘People believed in witches because it made things easier. People don’t just need an enemy, they need an explanation. And it’s often useful, in unsettled times, where ignorance is everywhere, for people to believe in witches . . . Who do you think believed in witches?’
‘Stupid people,’ someone says. It is a mumble, hard to locate.
I smile. There are fifty-five minutes left of the lesson.
‘You’d think so. But no. It was all kinds of people. Queen Elizabeth the First passed a law against them. Then the one after her – King James – he considered himself an intellectual and he even wrote a book about them. The first technology to lead to fake news wasn’t the internet, it was the printing press. Books solidified the superstition. Almost everybody believed in witches. And there were witchfinders who travelled around the country, finding . . .’ There is a sudden sharp pain, an intensifying of the headache, radiating from my inner brain, causing me to hesitate, dangerously, mid-sentence.
The yawning girl on the front row now looks concerned. ‘Are you all right, sir?’
‘Yes, I’ve just got a bit of a headache. I’ll be fine.’
Then someone else. Another girl, near the back: ‘So how did they find out if someone was a witch or not? What did they do?’
And the question flaps around my head like a crow in a dark room.
What did they do?
What did they do?
What did they do?
Suffolk, England, 1599
My mother was, in the tradition of parents, quite a complicated and contradictory human being. Moralistic but a devout lover of pleasure (food, music, the aesthetics of nature). Deeply religious but seemingly as comforted by singing a secular chanson as by prayer. A lover of the natural world who was visibly anxious every time she left the castle. Fragile, but also tough and stubborn. I never knew how many of her oddities had sprung from grief and how many from her own inherent nature. ‘There is not one blade of grass, there is no colour in this world that is not intended to make us rejoice,’ my mother told me once, shortly after arriving in England. ‘That is what Monsieur Cauvin says.’
I didn’t like Monsieur Cauvin. Or Calvin, I should say. Because he seemed to be the source of all our problems. Well, he had been. But I had taken the baton. And our problems were getting worse now, quite quickly, and I knew – when they came and knocked on the door – that there was nowhere for us. Nowhere in the world where we could be safe.
The witchfinder, the ‘pricker’ as his job was known, was called William Manning. He was a tall solid square-faced man, from London. Thinning hair but broad-shouldered and strong, with thick butcher’s hands. He was half blind, or appeared to be, on account of the cataract over his left eye. We never saw him arrive in the village, though I do remember waking to hear two galloping horses heading east past our house.
The rider of the other horse was the Justice of the Peace. I never knew him as anything other than Mr Noah. He was dressed in fine clothes and fancied himself a gentleman. He was also tall, but grey-skinned. Death-like. Cadaverous (a word I wasn’t to pick up for another two hundred years or so).
We were county-level news now, though we had no accurate idea of our importance until the hard quick knock on the door.
William Manning grabbed my wrist. He had a tough grip. He pointed with his free hand to a small pink blotch on my skin, but was careful not to touch it.
‘The devil’s spot!’ Manning said, with grim triumph. ‘Mark there, Mr Noah.’
Mr Noah looked. ‘I see it. Most sinister.’
I laughed. I was scared. ‘No,’ I told them. ‘It’s a flea bite.’
I still looked thirteen. They expected the obedience of a boy, not the insolence of a young man. Manning glowered at me. There was no other verb, then or now. But then his attention turned to my mother.
‘Undress yourself,’ he said, his voice quiet and stern. I hated him. Right then. I had never really known hate before. Only in the abstract, for the men who killed my father. But I had never known what they looked like. Hate needs a face.
‘No,’ I said.
My mother was confused. Then, when she understood, she said no and insulted them in French. Manning was an ignorant man, masquerading as a man of learning, and had no idea of the language she was speaking.
‘Mark her. She speaks like a devil. She is invoking foul spirits.’
It was at this point that he asked for the door to be closed, as an assortment of villagers – including Bess Small herself, her face full of gleeful disapproval, standing next to poor Alice Gifford – were now there on our doorstep, excited by the unfolding drama. Mr Noah closed the door. I stood between Manning and my mother. Manning pulled out a dagger and held it at my throat.
Mother undressed. She cried. I felt my eyes warm up too. Fear and guilt. This was all my fault. The fault of my physical strangeness, of my body’s inability to age.
‘If you say another word, your witchmother will be killed right where she is, before you or Marbas can see it different.’
Marbas. The infernal spirit who could cure all diseases. I was going to hear the name a lot over the coming hours, as that nightmare day unravelled itself.
My mother was naked. There by the table and the tin pottage bowls. And I saw Manning’s eyes feast on her, hating her for his own temptation. He stuck the tip of his dagger against her skin and pricked her, first on her shoulder, then her forearm, then near her navel. Little bulbs of blood.
‘Look at the darkness of the blood, Mr Noah.’
Mr Noah looked.
The blood was blood colour. Because it was ordinary human blood. But Mr Noah saw something else in it, or imagined he did, as he was impressed by Manning’s air of authority. ‘Yes. It is most dark.’
People only see what they have decided to see. I have learned this lesson one hundred times over, but it was still new to me then. My mother winced every time that dagger touched her, but to Manning she was faking it.
‘See her cunning? Mark the counterfeit of pain on her face. She has made some kind of trade, it would appear. The most unusual death of John Gifford appears to be the price of her son’s eternal youth. Quite a malevolent trade.’
‘We have nothing to do with John Gifford’s death. I helped thatch his roof. That is all. My mother never even knew him. She stays in the cottage most of the time. Please, stop doing that!’
I couldn’t watch any more. I grabbed Manning’s arm. He hit the dagger handle against my head, then his other hand grabbed my throat and he repeatedly struck
