The Witch Maker (20 page)

And people were listening to him! For the first time since he had cast off his cassock and left his church for ever, people were
listening
to him.

There had been great changes in the village since Meg had been killed. Tom and Harry Dimdyke had been arrested and tried, and were soon to be executed. The rest of the village had been denounced from the pulpits and in the countless broadsheet ballads.

Hallerton was an evil place, full of evil folk, it was said. The villagers were beyond redemption for what they had done. They would burn in hell, just as Meg had burned on the Green. Though it was not visible to the naked eye, the Mark of Cain was on them, and would go with them to their graves. They were less than human – less, even, than animals.

The villagers had ignored such rebukes at first. They had done right, they claimed. Anyone who had known Meg Ramsden would have done the same. But then the weeks passed and the rebukes continued – and slowly the dam of reassurance had begun to crack.

Perhaps there had been another way, people began to say.

Perhaps, despite her evilness, Meg had not deserved the fate the village had inflicted on her.

Doubts spread. Could the rest of the world be so wrong? people began to ask themselves.

Soon there were some who openly admitted that they had sinned. Children would suddenly burst out weeping. Grown-ups would strike their own heads with their bunched-up fists. The blacksmith mutilated his own hand with a red-hot iron, to show that he was penitent. A farm labourer hanged himself from an old oak tree next to his cottage. The village was dying of guilt and self-loathing. And then Roger Tollance – a dead soul himself for so many years – had spoken.

‘We must all play our parts,' he repeated to those assembled on the Green. ‘We must unite again, as we were united once before. We must reaffirm our moral purpose – must show that justice is on our side.'

‘And how will we do that?' one of the crowd asked.

Roger Tollance's eyes blazed with his new-found fervour.

‘We must not deny this thing that we have done,' he said – although, after denouncing Meg, he himself had done very little.

‘Not deny it?'

‘No! Rather, we must celebrate it. We must be defiant in the face of the Devil and those who follow in the wake of his forked tail. If all of England says that we are wrong, we must show them by our actions that we know we are right!'

‘What actions dost thou speak of, Roger?'

‘Jesus Christ died even before your grandfathers' grandfathers were born, yet every day his priests re-enact His triumph over death. Why then, should we not re-enact our triumph over evil?'

‘But how?'

‘The Witch is dead – her body turned to ashes. But were she amongst us once more, would we not burn her again? And this is the message that we must proclaim to all who will listen. We will suffer – we will all become martyrs if need be, as Tom and Harry Dimdyke will soon become martyrs – but we will not recant. We will never recant! And though those chosen to follow in the footsteps of Tom and Harry will have the greatest role to play, no one – from the tiniest child to the most aged amongst us – will be excluded. We all have our parts to play.'

‘Dost thou see the chair, Mary Dimdyke?' asked the voice in the shadows.

How could she fail to see it, surrounded, as it was, by candles rendered down from sheep fat by the faithful? And how could she look at it – how could any of them look at it – without seeing Meg Ramsden sitting there, as she had sat there on the last day of her life?

‘I s ... see it,' Mary said.

‘And wilt thou now sit in that same seat, as it is written thou
must
sit?'

What choice did she have? she asked herself.

There had been those, over the years, who had fled the village. But what had become of them? They had been swallowed up by the wicked world outside – a world in which darkness was allowed to prevail because none of those who inhabited it had the courage to fight back. They had – so deep village rumour proclaimed – rolled around in the sinfulness of that world, and died in misery.

Sacrifices must be made – that was what Roger Tollance had taught. And those who carried the blood of the Ramsdens and the Dimdykes must always pay the heaviest price.

‘Wilt thou sit, Mary?' the voice asked again.

‘I will s ... sit,' Mary replied.

She stepped between the candles, and lowered herself on to the chair. And immediately, as her own arms made contact with chair's arms, she felt a strange power – which both revolted and attracted – begin to flow into her.

She wanted to move, but she could not.

She wanted to say that this was all a mistake – but she knew that it was not possible for her to be right, and for generations of villagers to be wrong.

The man stepped from out of the shadows, and she could now see that it was Lou Moore – and that he was holding some kind of metal instrument in his hand.

‘Wilt thou submit, Mary Dimdyke?' he demanded.

She lowered her head, so that her eyes fixed on the flagstones which made up the floor.

‘I w ... will submit,' she said.

I
t was the morning of the last full day before the Witch Burning, and a beautiful morning it was. The sky was blue, save for a few of those tiny, fluffy clouds which always rush about trying to look busy on even the slightest excuse of a breeze. In the fields rabbits scuttled and hares lazed, while up above them skylarks and swallows swooped and glided. Gorse popped, and buttercups basked in the sunshine. Insects chirped cheerfully and even the croaking frogs managed to give the impression that they were glad to be alive. There was a feeling of total well-being in all the air which surrounded Hallerton, though none of it, of course, dared to enter the village itself.

Mary Dimdyke sat on her orange crate, watching her brother at work on the Witch. Today, despite the mild weather, she was wearing a knitted woollen cap on her head. It was the same cap – they
said
– that Roger Tollance himself had commissioned all those years ago.

‘For thou must go out into the fields and find the ewe which is the whitest of the white,' he had told the village women. ‘And from the wool that thou obtainest, thou must knit the cap that the virgin shall wear.'

Could it really
still
be the same cap? Mary wondered. Could it actually have survived that long?

Yes! she decided, answering her own question. In this village, it could! But not by magic, as outsiders might think. If it had survived, it had done so because the collective mind of the village had
willed
it to.

The cap itched. She could have removed it if she'd wished. Because even though this was the most restricted of all societies, just about to enter the most restrictive of all its cycles, there existed no rule – amazingly enough – which said she
had
to wear it.

Yet despite the fact that she could have shed it with one rapid movement of her hand and arm, she did not. She couldn't – somehow – bring herself to.

Was it shame that prevented her taking off the cap? she asked herself.

If it was, it was shame without cause – for despite her proclaiming that she had submitted willingly, it had not been her choice.

Besides, shame was something the villagers had been told they should
never
feel. If they did what they should do – what they had to do – how could there be any shame at all?

Yet shame there had been, she thought.

Doris Raby had felt shame.

Beth Thompson had felt shame.

Her brother, Wilf, did not know about Doris and Beth. She should not have known about them herself until she was older. But she was a woman, and women shared their secrets, even when they were not supposed to.

Mary scratched her head through the cap.

‘Try not to think about it, our Mary,' Wilf said, looking up briefly from his work.

‘Who's speakin'?' Mary demanded.

‘I am.'

‘An' who are you? The Witch Maker? Or my brother?'

‘Your brother,' Wilf said. ‘I'll always be your brother, Mary, whatever happens.'

‘You weren't my brother last night!' the girl said with a sudden fury. ‘You could have stopped it if you'd wanted to!'

‘I tried,' Wilf said. ‘You heard me.'

‘You should have tried harder!'

Wilf shook his head. ‘It wouldn't have done any good. I
used
to think it might stop one day – but I don't believe it any more.'

‘How can you say that?' Mary asked.

‘Because it's obvious,' Wilf said, angry himself now. ‘If it wasn't obvious, I wouldn't be the Witch Maker, would I?'

Monika Paniatowski stood in the Meg Ramsden Museum, enthralled by the portrait of Meg.

There was real character – real force – in that face, she thought.

And though there was very little similarity between herself and the woman who had been burned for witchcraft – apart from their both having blonde hair – she liked to think that when she looked in the mirror she could see a similar strength and determination to Meg's staring back at her.

But were there other ways in which she was just like Meg, too?

‘
If Meg had been able to fulfil herself in a way most other women did, she may have been less interested in money and adultery,
' Tyndale, the ‘so-called' local historian had said the previous night. ‘
I believe the contemporary phrase for what she did is “displacement activity”
.'

‘Displacement activity!' Paniatowski repeated to herself, with disgust.

How like a man to produce an impressive-sounding phrase to explain away something he didn't even begin to comprehend. Only a bird with damaged wings could possibly know what it felt like to no longer be able to fly. And only a woman who was brought up believing that it was natural to have children could know what it was like to find out that, in her case, that simply wasn't true!

There have been so many changes in her life recently. She is a WPC. She's finding it tough – very tough – but she is confident that, in the end, she will succeed. And she seems to have overcome her aversion to men, an aversion dating back to a dark period in her childhood that she doesn't even want to think about now.

She's dating a man. She's even
sleeping
with him. She doesn't love him, but she likes him – and the sex is good. And then one morning, she realizes that her monthly period is several days late.

Could she be pregnant? She must be! She waits for the shock – the horror – to hit her. But it never comes. Instead she is consumed by a calm which is almost beautiful.

She considers the implications. She will have to leave the police – give up the job which she is learning to love. She will have to endure the pointing and the scorn which all unmarried mothers must endure. But she doesn't care about that! She really doesn't care!

She goes to the doctor's surgery and submits to all the usual tests. A few days pass, and she goes to see him again. He looks serious.

Well, Mrs Paniatowski ... he begins.

Miss
Paniatowski, she corrects him firmly.

Well, Miss Paniatowski, he continues, I have to tell you that you're not pregnant –
and it's highly unlikely that you ever will be
.

At first she is totally devastated, but then she tells herself that she will soon get over it. She and her mother survived years of being chased round Europe during the bloodiest war the world had ever seen. Compared to that, this bit of news is a doddle to handle.

She throws herself into her work. Her arrest rate is the highest on the Force. She is promoted. She quickly becomes the only female detective sergeant in the whole of Lancashire. And there are the affairs. Plenty of them. She is careful to promise nothing to the men she goes to bed with. She holds out no hope for them that there might be a longer-term relationship, and if it cuts them up when she drops them, then they only have themselves to blame. And then she falls for a colleague – something she'd sworn she'd never do.

And not just any colleague.

A man with a wife.

A
blind
wife.

A man with a baby.

And though he may think that it is he who has seduced her, she knows that it is she who has seduced him.

Monika gazed up at Meg's portrait again.

‘It's not the same at all,' she told the painted woman gazing complacently down at her.

It wasn't even close, she argued to herself.

Meg had taken her rage at her infertility out on the only world she knew – had revenged herself for her fate by making others suffer. She, on the other hand, had chosen to do something positive with the freed energy that her infertility had brought her. She served justice. And not for the sake of the power it gave her over others, but because justice needed to be served.

Falling for Bob Rutter was never intended to be a punishment on his wife, who, despite being blind, had been able to do something she could not do herself. How could it have been, when she had gone out of her way to make sure that Maria Rutter never learned about the affair?

She was not guilty, she told herself.

She was weak, as humans often are.

She was sometimes foolish – which made her far from unique.

But she was
not
evil. She had earned herself no place at the stake, and if hell existed, she had every hope of avoiding it.

So that was it! That was settled! And now it was settled, she could leave the portrait of Meg Ramsden behind her, and go about her work.