The Witch Maker (27 page)

Dimdyke thrust the burning brand forward, until it was inches from Raby's face. Even had they been expecting it, most men would not have been able to avoid flinching from the flame – but Raby didn't even blink.

‘Wilt thou, with thy water, quench this flame?' Tom Dimdyke demanded.

Alf Raby shook his head with a decisiveness Woodend would never have thought him capable of.

‘Nay, not I!' he said, in a loud, certain voice.

‘Then let all men know that thou dost will this burning,' Tom Dimdyke pronounced.

He withdrew the brand a few inches, took a step to the side, and thrust it towards the girl standing next to Alf, who, not by chance – for nothing here was left to chance – was Mary Dimdyke.

‘Wilt thou, with thy water, quench this flame?'

‘N ... nay, not I!' Mary said, with a fervour which matched Raby's.

‘Then let all men know that thou dost will this burning.'

And on and on it went, all down the line. The same question, the same answer, the same warning.

‘It's obscene!' Paniatowski gasped.

‘Aye, that's the right word for it,' Woodend agreed.

As if responding to some secret signal – which he probably was – a small boy of three or four ducked under the rope.

‘Burn the Witch!' he said, in a squeaky, but passionate voice.

‘Aye, burn the Witch!' the rest of the villagers screamed. ‘Burn her! Burn her!'

Tom Dimdyke nodded solemnly, turned around, and approached the Witching Post.

Thomas stepped forward, the burning brand held high for Meg to see. The woman bound to the hard stone post felt a little of her old spirit returning to her, and spat at her brother-in-law. And he laughed in her face – afraid of her no more.

Thomas bent, and held the brand against the heap of faggots. Smoke began to rise immediately, obscuring Meg's view of those she so despised – of those who hated her and wished her to die a painful death.

The smoke grew thicker. It insinuated its way into her nose and into her mouth. The burning process had begun in earnest. Yet the heat she felt was still no more than a distant rumour of the agony to come.

Around her, the villagers were chanting. ‘Burn the witch! Let the witch burn!'

She felt a tightening in her throat. She fought against it harder than she had ever fought against anything before. She needed to keep her throat clear, she thought – for she had promised herself that in her last breath before the screaming took control of her, she would curse them all.

Then she realized that the tightening she felt did not come from within, but from without. And in the moments before she lost consciousness, she finally understood what Harold Dimdyke had said earlier about showing her mercy.

A slight breeze suddenly blew up. It was not strong enough to disperse the thick smoke, yet it did manage to rearrange it enough for Woodend to be able to catch sight of the dark shape standing on the pyre.

Wilf! It was bloody Wilf! The Chief Inspector had assumed that while everyone had been watching Tom and the villagers, the boy had climbed down. But the stupid young bugger was still there!

What was he doing? Didn't he understand – hadn't anybody told him – that if the smoke overcame him he would collapse into the fire and be badly burnt? How could he just stand there like that?

But he wasn't
just
standing there, Woodend realized with horror! He was
doing
something. He was strangling the Witch! Wilf had waited until the smoke had screened his actions from the other villagers – just as Harold, his ancestor must have done in his time – and now he was strangling the bloody Witch!

And it didn't matter that this witch was no more than a collection of cleverly contrived pieces of wood. It didn't matter that there was no life in her to be extinguished. Meg had been strangled, and so this Witch – the spirit of Meg – must be made to suffer the same fate.

The smoke thickened again, but not enough to hide the fact that the bright, greedy flames were climbing ever higher.

Jump for it! a voice in Woodend's brain urged the lad. Jump for it, you stupid young bugger!

And even as the thought was running through his mind, he found himself wondering why he was not saying the words aloud.

Wilf emerged from the thick black cloud, leaping clear of the conflagration and landing on the ground with practised ease. Behind him, the relentless flames continued to gobble up what had taken him a full ten years of his young life to produce.

Now fresh smells were starting to seep into the air: the wood smoke of the skeleton, which was quite different to the wood smoke from the faggots; the burning wool of the scarlet dress; the stink of the sheep fat as it bubbled and cooked. And overlying it all – though he told himself it was only his imagination – Woodend was convinced he could almost
taste
the incineration of Mary's beautiful golden hair.

The minutes ticked by, the fire died down, and all that was left was a blackened stone post and a heap of smoking ashes. But the performance was not over. Not quite yet.

Four men, mounted on black horses and dressed in the ancient livery of the High Sheriff of Lancaster, rode on to the Green and came to a halt before the Witching Post.

‘Who hath done this?' their captain demanded.

‘We have
all
done this,' Wilf Dimdyke answered.

And the villagers agreed.

‘We have all done this! We have all done this!'

The captain shook his head – perhaps in disbelief, perhaps in disgust.

‘Who am I to take with me to Lancaster?' he demanded. ‘Who will bear the guilt for this shameful act?'

‘There
is
no guilt, for this was no shameful act,' Wilf said in a deep, confident voice which seemed to belong to a much older man. ‘But if any men must die, then we – the Dimdykes – are more than willing to be those men.'

The captain thought for a moment, then nodded to two of his men-at-arms. The soldiers each reached for a length of rope which was wrapped around their saddle horns, dismounted, and walked over to where Wilf and Tom were patiently waiting for them.

‘Put your hands together!' one of the soldiers barked. ‘Put your hands together and hold them out!'

Father and son mutely obeyed, offering their clenched hands as if they were about to pray. One soldier wrapped and knotted the end of his rope tightly around Tom's wrists, the other around Wilf's. They tugged on the binding, to test that it was firm, then walked back to their horses, leaving a trail of rope behind them. Neither Wilf nor Tom moved so much as a muscle.

The soldiers remounted. Once in the saddle, they tied the other end of the ropes firmly around their saddle horns.

‘Onwards!' the captain said.

The soldiers spurred their horses, and set off at a slow trot. The ropes which connected the Dimdykes to the saddle horns became taut, and Wilf and Tom were jerked forward. The procession made its way to the edge of the Green – the horses moving with graceful ease, Tom and Wilf running behind with all their might – then turned on to the street and was gone.

Now – finally – the Witch Burning was over. The visitors gave a collective sigh, and began to drift away. The locals waited until most of the intruders had gone, then started to leave themselves – slowly, as if even the simple act of walking were an effort after all they had been through.

‘Very impressive,' Paniatowski said sombrely. And then, perhaps in an attempt to shatter the tension which she had felt building up in her during the performance, she added flippantly, ‘Of course, they've taken a bit of a dramatic licence with the whole thing, haven't they?'

Woodend said nothing. Paniatowski waited for a moment, then decided the silence was becoming unbearable.

‘I mean, it's a bit like a Hollywood film, isn't it?' she continued, knowing she was almost babbling, but not caring. ‘You know what I mean, sir? They compress time. In a way, I suppose they have to – because if they didn't, the audience would get bored.'

There was still no response from Woodend.

‘What I'm trying to say is that it couldn't have happened exactly like it's been played out,' Paniatowski persisted. ‘We've just seen the sheriff's men ride up right after the burning, but we know that, before he was arrested, Harold Dimdyke had time to get married again and sire a child. So in practice, it must have been days – perhaps even weeks – before the arrests were made.'

‘What?' Woodend asked.

‘I was just saying there must have been quite a considerable time between the burning and the arrests, don't you think?'

‘Aye, probably,' Woodend agreed.

‘Is something the matter, sir?'

‘I'm thinkin',' Woodend said, perhaps a little more harshly than he'd intended.

And he was. Fragments of the puzzle had been drifting idly around his brain ever since he had first become involved in the case.

But that was all they'd been.

Fragments!

Slivers of a whole picture, each of which meant nothing on its own.

But now, at this Witch Burning which represented for the villagers the truth as they saw it, the fragments were coming together – and he was beginning to see a truth of his own.

The village was a kingdom, ruled over by the Witch Maker. He'd always known that. But until now he'd never seen the true extent of it – had never fully understood the depth of the obligations which were imposed on the monarch's subjects!

‘
She didn't have the mental strength of the other women,
' Alf Raby had said of his dead wife.

‘
What other women?
The ones who killed themselves?
'

‘No, the ones who didn't. She couldn't take it any more, you see. She just couldn't convince herself that she was doin' the right thing. I tried to tell her it was the same for everybody in the village – that we all did what we had to do – but ... but ... she just wouldn't see it.'

And she wasn't the only one.

‘She hanged herself, did my Beth,'
the postman had said mournfully to Monika Paniatowski.
‘I found her myself. It was so hard, so very, very hard. I really did love her, you know.'

‘I'm sure you did,'
Paniatowski had agreed.
‘Did you ever wonder why she did it?'

‘I
know
why she did it. She did it because she didn't believe. But I believe. I
have
to believe. It's the only thing that stops me from goin' completely mad.'

But did the man who'd driven those two women to their deaths care? Of course not! He was above such petty considerations. He had been put above the law by others, and had become a law unto himself.

‘The Witch Maker never marries,'
Constable Thwaites had said.

‘Never?'

‘Never.'

‘Not in the entire history of the Witch Burnin'?'

‘No, sir.'

But that wasn't to say he was always celibate – as Woodend had pointed out at the time.

Sacrifice was what they all talked about in this village, the Chief Inspector reminded himself – and to understand what that sacrifice entailed was to understand this case.

‘Have you actually made a sacrifice yourself, Mr Dimdyke?'
he'd asked Tom caustically.

‘Oh aye. Twenty year ago now. It was hard – but it was necessary.'

‘An' what form, exactly, did your sacrifice take?'

‘That's none of your business!'

But it
was
his business. It was
central
to his business.

There was more.

There were fragments he didn't even need to think about now – because once he'd seen the general shape of things, they slotted
themselves
into place.

There were details which were still not clear, but didn't matter – because he had no need to appreciate individual brush strokes once he had the whole canvas spread out before him.

‘Sir?' Monika Paniatowski said worriedly. ‘Are you all right, sir?'

‘No! I'm far from all right. But at least I've finally got my sense of direction back.'

‘I don't understand.'

‘It's time we had a talk with them Dimdykes, Monika,' Woodend said. ‘An' I mean a
real
talk this time.'

T
he blackboard outside the Black Bull had the words

‘CLOSED FOR A PRIVATE PARTY' crudely chalked on it.

‘Some party, eh, Monika?' Woodend said, hammering on the door. ‘More like a wake for the death of Free Will, if you ask me.'

The landlord opened the door a couple of inches. ‘Can't you read?' he demanded, pointing at the blackboard.

‘Can't
you
read?' Woodend countered, holding up his warrant card.

The landlord reluctantly opened the door wider, and Woodend and Paniatowski stepped inside. The villagers were all still in their traditional dress, but now they had shed some of their earlier seriousness and austerity.

They're drunk, Woodend thought.

He didn't blame them. He'd be drunk himself if he was caught in the same trap as they were – if he, too, could feel the jaws of history clamped tightly around his soul.

Tom Dimdyke and his son were sitting in the centre of the room, as befitted the guests of honour.

‘Glad to see the sheriff's men were all for show, an' that you've not
really
been arrested,' Woodend said jovially to them. ‘Or should I say, not really been arrested
yet
.'

Tom Dimdyke stretched across the table for his drink, and Woodend saw the rope burn on his wrist.

The visitors probably thought that when Tom was dragged away by the soldier's horse, he had used some clever trick to prevent himself from being hurt. But no such trick existed. And even if one had, Tom and Wilf would never have employed it – because there had been no tricks the first time this had all happened, so there could be no tricks now.