Essex, 1647
In the shadows of dusk, Many-Shapes comes, through the woods and over the meadow, fleet to my devilish summoning. First, there’s a sound between the gnarled oaks, a pop of inrushing air, followed by the faint tang of sulphur. I sit in my frock with all the Patience for which I’ve been named, hardly daring to breathe.
The charm works!
I’d think Mam chasing crows from the farm if I didn’t know she’s ailing abed, too weak to make use of the musket. Below, the lanterns are twinkling in Lamb Corner, our village in the dell. I console myself that the Rector and the blasted Finder are too far away to hear it, the disturbance in the trees. According to the scroll I stole from the Widow Crump’s dresser, the noise is no less than the parting of worlds—mine and the one beyond, a dark and fiery region by all accounts. Aye, it’s a desperate endeavour. Against all my learning and God. And God knows the Finder will see me swing for it should he come to learn of the deed.
But God remains deaf to my prayers. My mother, I fear, is dying.
Out of the pit, Many-Shapes comes (I’m soon to learn its name, though mine suits it better). The imp comes in a form with no earthly equal, all raw, scaly and slender tailed, its tip resembling an arrowhead. Darting from the thicket, the creature appears to remember to hide itself. Quick as clay between a potter’s fingers it changes into a bat, fluttering low to the ground. Then a rabbit, black and sleek, bounding towards me. Through a sea of cowslip and thistle, the imp halts a yard or so from my knees, swaying in the shape of an adder.
The snake, I think, looks pleased with itself.
“Good even, Mistress Patience. Ground the salt you have and pricked your thumb. You spoke the summoning true.”
It’s late June and I’m wearing no shawl. Still, I run cold at the greeting. How does the imp know my name? Is there some black register below? Best not to ask such questions.
And I require a name of my own. For the covenant, the exchange. A hiss and the creature tells it as obliged. It sounds like Latin, or an idea of Latin, the very tongue of the damned.
Should I speak it in turn, the deed will be done.
“Many-Shapes, I’ll call thee,” I say, innocent as a new church bell. “First I would know you can do the witching I ask.”
The imp has a potent name, a binding name, and does not take kindly to dallying.
“Think me some merry-andrew, girl, to prattle and not come good? ’Tis a mighty throne of which you beg and all his power be ours.”
Somehow I doubt it. Nevertheless, needs must.
“Well I know his trickery, for they say he’s the father of it,” I say, bolder than I feel, a mere yellow-haired lass in the meadow. “And here you speak in serpent tongue, a warning in itself. I’m no fool, shapes.”
The creature takes my meaning. Another pop and he sits before me as a fox, small and tawny coated. It is hardly better.
“What’ll it be then, Patience?” says the imp. “A blinding over a stolen goat? Red piss in the smith’s bucket for not keeping his paws to hi’self? Or a blight on the crops hereabouts and a pox on the village besides?”
“Think me never so ruinous. Nay, ’tis a kindness I want.”
“A kindness?” The fox barks a laugh. “That is a grand asking. Would you petition us to cure England herself, all riven and weeping, and the devil take her? Your king languishes in a tower while ours makes ready to claim these lands. And yet you seek a kindness.”
’Tis true that Charles is in London with his crown around his feet. Ironsides has seen an end to the war, not that it helps me much.
And I tell the imp then the reason for my maleficium. How my mother has taken ill and can no longer run the farm. How the nostrums of the Widow Crump seem to do her no good. How the morrow stretches out like a claw, set to snatch away our land, with father never returned from the war and I too young to avoid an orphanage. And I mention the risk I’m taking, what with Hopkins come to Lamb Corner and the miller’s wife already sent off to Chelmsford to face the magistrate there. Time is running short.
“But first, imp, I would test your arts,” I say. “Ere any exchange takes place.”
Many-Shapes smiles, such as a fox is able. It tells me my terms are sound.
’Tis a simple charm, according to the imp. An exchange of forms, for what Many-Shapes desires is the one, it says, to walk at large in mortal flesh. And in turn to let me, Patience Sneed, go off skipping in beastly guise and the luck of Hell to me. A high price, I reckon, but worth it. If Mam gets to live. And this is only a trial, after all. May God have mercy on my soul.
The fox waves a paw. Girlish flesh ripples and bubbles, a sensation akin to burning. It brings to mind the way I’ve seen the Tanner strip the hide off a horse, all wet for the boiling pot, the fur turned inside out. Then I’m no longer a girl, but a fox. And I’m looking at myself, in my own eyes, a leaping girl in the grass.
“Ha!” the girl says, with lips no longer my own.
But this will not do and I say so. The girl who was once me tuts and speaks a word. Then I’m a crow, flapping above the meadow, heading skyward on clumsy black wings with Many-Shapes gleeful below.
“Return anon for the binding,” the girl, the imp, says. “Then wassailing I shall go all about these lands. Spared the reaper or no, your mother is bound to grieve your loss and who has the stomach for that?”
I, who knows the exchange will break my mother’s heart, thinks it the only way.
“Caw!” I reply and go sweeping away, over the fields to Lamb Corner.
Crows, I learn, see much.
Over the river, I go, a stray arrow of night. Below, I spy Gillam the Blacksmith on the river bank, but the lass he lies with isn’t his wife. And I wheel over the mill, the vanes still and the windows shuttered since the goodwife went off in the cart to Chelmsford. Closer to town, I see Urswic the Rector outside the moot hall, portly under the glow of a lamp. He’s in parley with a man clothed equally black, with the buckle of his hat glinting silver in the moonlight. His cloak marks him out as the Finder, Hopkins. (Now there’s a man whispered of from here to King’s Lynn and his reputation precedes him.) Fluttering past, I make out talk of shillings and the little priest looks cowed by it, rubbing his warty chin.
“None advised me it would prove so costly,” he says and reddens a little.
Hopkins looks like he wants to smile, but ends up coughing instead, a kerchief pressed to his lips.
“Is this not God’s work, sir?’ the Finder replies, peevish. “Strange to cavil at the price of it.”
Then I’m off down Goodly Street and around the church, leaving judgement and feathers in my wake. At the corner, I avoid the lash of a claw from the Widow Crump’s cat, fat and black on the garden wall. The gleam in its eyes reminds me of Many-Shapes, the smirk the imp gave me on arrival.
Gently, I alight on the upstairs sill where the cat can’t reach me. Grubbe Hill is too steep to climb in Mam’s condition and Crump was pleased to take her into her cottage, swearing to nurse her back to health. For my part, I’ve been milking the goats all week and my hands (what were my hands) are sore from grinding, from churning butter and sweeping out the yard. Worse, the farmhands fain not hearken to a girl. I oft find them slacking in the fields. They grumble about pay and the slant of the morrow, what with their master gone and their mistress taken ill. I’m grateful for the old woman’s help, which she’d offered despite a dispute over wool two years ago. Mam only paid half for the shoddy hanks in question and a ‘good day to thee’, but the Widow, it seems, has made peace with it.
Good Christian charity, a sense of kindness, fills my sleek little breast as I peer in through the window.
Like a candle, it is soon snuffed out.
“The lass is young,” the Widow Crump is saying, perched on a stool next to the bed. “How is Patience supposed to fend for herself? I’ve seen the way that Gillam looks at her when she takes the plough horse for shodding. Sin is in his eye! Up on the hill all alone . . . It ain’t right, Mistress.” The old woman speaks in sorrowful tones, but the hearth picks out her smile, toothless and veiled from Mam. “Though it pains me to say it, my nostrums have failed. I can’t say you’ll last past Sunday.”
On the sill, I flutter at the news. But the sight of my mother is the proof of it. She lies there gasping, damp with sweat. It’s as if someone has taken a shard of the glass I peek through and pushed it through my miniature heart.
Sunday!
But then Mam is speaking, a whisper in the room.
“You’ll take care of her, won’t you, Asaph? When I am gone . . . ”
“How’s an old woman meant to do that? What right do I have to your lands and your keepings? No husband, no mother . . . The church will claim the lot.”
As if expecting this objection, Mam fumbles for the bedside table and the drawer there. All she manages is a flap of her hand. The Widow is quick to assist her, tutting and plucking out the intended object. The parchment rustles in the gloom.
“Why, the deeds to Grubbe Hill Farm! Surely you jest, Mistress.”
But the leer on the Widow’s face. She all but drools on the spot where her signature should go.
“I’ll place it in your charge, friend. Only swear you’ll pass it on to Patience when she comes of age.”
Mam is too faint to see the way that Crump plucks out a quill from the very same drawer. There’s a bottle of ink besides, shimmering like blood. She guides my mother’s hand to the parchment. Her own is swift, a hungry scratch. Then the business is done.
“Tsk. What should one do with so many acres?” the Widow Crump says, but she looks fit to dance a jig. “Now, time for your medicine, Mistress, vain though it may prove.”
Through a crow’s eyes, I see it all. The Widow stirs the nostrum in her little black pot. The bright yellow petals she adds to it. Honey to mask the taste, no doubt. With what appears to be a muttered charm (likely from one of her scrolls), Crump brings the drink to my mother’s lips.
Henbane. I mark the plant as no other. Henbane for sleep and death.
A crow caws. A cat hisses. Crump glances at the window, but I am gone.
Over the river, I fly, my little heart fit to burst in my horror. Over Gillam the Blacksmith who has finished his labours and is heading for the inn, leaving the lass to weep under willows. Past the mill all shuttered and dark. In a ball of feathers, I alight in the meadow before the grinning form of Many-Shapes. She is yellow haired and scrawny, this girl, but triumph shines in her eyes.
But her pleasure is short-lived.
“What do you mean, you changed your mind? My name need only slip off thy tongue. Does your mother not ail so?”
“Aye. But it’s naught that a lack of nostrums won’t fix. I shall go to the Marshal.”
“Such was not our accord.”
“Oh, indeed?” I tap the scroll with one trembling claw. “No such name has been spoken. And my need for thee has since flown.”
’Tis plain from its face that it hadn’t reckoned on this, the spying of a crow and murder at hand. What need of a spell when the law will serve? Happenstance or no, the imp has given me what I asked for. And all free of bond.
Many-Shapes ripples. I ripple too, myself again. It becomes a bull, fire-eyed and snorting. Horns to spear the gangling lass who appears unfolding before him. I shiver with tears on my cheeks, cold in the evening breeze. According to the scroll, without uttering its name, the imp cannot hold me. Nor can it harm its summoner, for all the stamp and fume of it.
“Aye, you’ve got one over,” Many-Shapes says, grunting. “’Tis unwise to thwart the business of Hell, girl. I’d warn you to think twice.”
But there is no time to think. Only to run. Back down the hill on girl legs, calling for Galfrid the Marshal.
There is a witching afoot.
“I see,” Hopkins says in the moot hall and his eyes burn bright. “Further deviltry in Lamb Corner. An old widow who covets a farm. And apparently a girl so small and aloft she can peep through an upstairs window.”
The Finder coughs. When his kerchief comes away I can see that the linen is spotted with blood. Mayhap the pox dogs him so; he’s sunken in the chair despite his fine hat and buckles. There’s some who say that the Doors of Hell have all blown wide and breathe plague upon England, along with years of war. Of witching. Standing in my frock before him, I curse myself for my folly. Galfrid the Marshal scarce hearkened to my tale ere he was marching me for the hall and the Rector. And under the regard of his guest, the Finder. Fright makes the lot of us fools. A farmer’s daughter should’ve known better.
Scrolls and summonings. What would Mam say?
“There . . . there was a ladder, sir,” I stammer the lie. “Against the cottage wall.”
“And would we find the ladder there now, lass? With but half an hour passed?”
“Come, sir.” This from the Rector, wobbling at the implication (and likely the thought of his pouch, lighter by the minute). “Patience Sneed is merely a girl, innocent and sweet. There’s no need for -”
“And what, pray tell, appeals most to Satan?” Hopkins stares, a flash of embers that remind all present of his reputation, a ghost of it through his fatigue. “’Tis innocence the Dark One seeks to corrupt. Maidens like these are the honey that draws him, imps sniffing them out.” He licks his lips as if he can taste it. “And oh, how they suckle so!”
It makes me tremble with wonder. What was it that led me to theft, rummaging in the Widow’s dresser for the infernal scroll? Fear for my mother, aye, and for our land. The Good Book counsels against fear, yet I surely feel my share of it, standing in the hall. It strikes me like cold water in the face. None are blameless in the Finder’s eyes. Even a church bell can strike a false note. All of us dance over flames.
“You said it yourself, sir,” Urswic says and puffs himself up. “ ‘He utterly denyes that confession of a Witch, when she confesseth any improbability, impossibility, as flying in the ayre . . . ’ You wrote that in your damnable book.”
“Oh, cease prating, man.” With this, Hopkins pounds the arm of his chair. “You’re as bad as Gaule with his insufferable objections. Am I Witch-Finder General or no? You shall leave the finding to me.”
“Aye, and pay through the nose for the privilege.”
Hopkins erupts at this. His words become lost in a splutter. When he sits back, exhausted, there’s less white on his kerchief than red. I see it then, a trace of the crow still with me. The way his shoulders sag, the grey at his temples, tells me the man has no stomach for argument. He has made up his mind.
Once he’s recovered himself—once Galfrid has touched the Rector’s arm and urged him to silence lest he too face an accusation—Hopkins glares down at me.
“A Test then.” He smiles in a petty triumph, perhaps coloured by the chance of sport. “Bring the Widow. Bring them both. We have the means to extract the truth of it.”
Somewhere in the night, a fox barks.
Ha!
That’s what it sounds like to me.
There are things that no one should suffer, let alone a girl. Come midnight, I stand stripped to the waist and bleeding, after many the press of a bodkin. And there are some pricks that do not sting, though they feel dull on my flesh. Blunted is my guess. We all heard the protests of the miller’s wife, the way she called down judgement on the Finder, calling him a swindler and a knave. Before the cart came along and the rope drew taut, that was, leaving none to defend her. To my eye, Hopkins looks anything but false. In the three years he’s scoured the east, he’s had time to perfect his role. He is narrow eyed, fastidious. He mutters scripture with ne’er a stutter. The bodkin goes in and out. Hopkins goes around and around until I’m a heap on the floor, him stroking his beard.
“’Twas Satan who lured you to these ends,” the Finder says and it isn’t a question. “Singing in your heart.”
“Nay. ‘Twas my love for Mam.”
“Love for Satan! Did ye lift your skirts for him, girl? Did ye let him suckle ye?”
“Nay, nay, I swear it!”
And on and on, hour after hour. Satan, Satan, Satan. And suckling, suckling, suckling. These are his favourite words. A chant to bludgeon the stoutest. To break the bones of the hills all around.
“Stop,” I gasp at last. “Satan. Suckling. Stop, I beg you!”
Stony faced, the Rector and the Marshal look on, men who’ve known me since I was a babe. Fear shines in their faces at the Finder’s words of witchcraft and woe, of imps that come in the shadows of dusk to tempt the purest of heart. Of the damned like me.
When pain betrays me, I tell him. I tell him of the Widow’s scroll. Of Many-Shapes, the bargain I renounced. I tell him of the crow and my evening flight. Merely a girl, the Rector said, and that has proven true. With a girl’s anguish, I tell Hopkins the truth of it.
“Enough,” Urswic says far later than he should.
The Finder, bodkin in hand, rewards him with a satisfied smirk.
They decide to lock me in the cellar. In the dark.
Come the morrow, I go to Chelmsford.
I’m not alone long. At some point near dawn, the cellar door opens. The Marshal throws in what I take to be a sack, filthy on the cold stone floor. When the door slams shut, ’tis only the sobbing that tells me it’s the Widow Crump. Old Asaph, who had her eye on Grubbe Hill Farm. The sodden, broken form of her slumps on the ground and it soon becomes clear that she isn’t fit to speak—not with words that string together at least. Whatever kindness Hopkins has shown a girl has not been granted an old woman.
It seems I have a companion for the road.
For the rope.
Do the shadows whisper it? I’m doing what I can for the gammer, binding her wounds and giving her water when the thought enters my mind. It’s black in here and reeks of damp, and the Widow keeps moaning about the fair price of wool, but I’m too weary to mark it. The voice has an echo that the space should not allow. The stars that glint in the corner belong to a rat, I see, sat on its hind legs and watching. Watching it all. Gloom, doom or no.
’Tis Many-Shapes. Many-Shapes has come.
“I told you,” the imp says. “Thwart not the business of Hell. Now you have fallen foul of it.”
“Oh, indeed?” I find myself past caring, pricked and discarded as I am. “Strikes me I’m paying the price either way. And here lies the Widow. If she’s here, then she no longer sprinkles petals in a pot. I pray that is kindness enough.”
“Aye, until her poor heart breaks, hearing of her daughter swing.” The rat gives a twitch of its whiskers. It may not understand my care for the old woman—there’s scorn in its eye for that—but there’s also admiration, I think. “Ah, you’re a clever one. There’s not many who get the better of us. And it isn’t too late to save your hide, girl. We have business as yet outstanding.”
The rat, like the adder, like the fox, looks pleased with itself.
But I’ve since confessed my sins.
“I shall go to the gallows with a light heart.”
The rat, for its part, squeaks laughter at the lie.
“Then you’ll be the first to do so,” the imp says. “And nor a guarantee for your soul. Don’t be a fool, girl. You need only speak my name. As a worm, you can wriggle through the dirt and into the village. Or a spider through a crack, perhaps. Speak my name and know freedom.”
I want to tell Many-Shapes that freedom fled me the moment I went rummaging in an old woman’s dresser, despite the righteous ire in me. Two women will die, but one shall live. And Grubbe Hill Farm shall remain in Mam’s keeping, up there by the meadow. But I hold my tongue. There’s anticipation on the rat’s face, hunger. How it longs for freedom itself. To wheedle its way out of this hole and go walking at large in mortal flesh.
That would be the greatest sin of all.
Instead, I say, “Get thee from me, Many-Shapes. Let me pray in peace.”
And where once was a rat, a servant of Hell, there is only a curse stirring the dust.
Then blessed silence.
The hanging is on a Monday. High on the gallows, I can’t tell where the smoke from the city chimneys meets the lowering sky. The wind seeps chill through my frock, no more than rags and filth. The crowd watches and waits in the square, some weeping, some grinning, a grubby, threadbare sea. Yet every eye is fixed on the scaffold. ’Tis the stage from which I’ll dance when the hatch springs open, the rope snaps taut and the pit consumes me. Old Crump has gone ahead by a day.
For my part, I do not cry. Nor do I pray. God has made himself clear.
But Many-Shapes has spoken true. My heart is a stone in my chest.
Mam will be waking now, I tell myself. Wondering why no one has stoked the hearth. Why the Widow is not there.
’Tis enough, I think.
The Chelmsford magistrate barely hearkened to my plea. The courts are swamped and the gaol fit to burst. In his long black robe, the man stood and recounted the testament of Hopkins, the Good Work he has done in Lamb Corner, and while some may have grumbled, most of the people cheered.
Now the hangman, hooded, draws close along the boards. He offers me a sack to cover my face, but I shake my head and he gives a grunt. Admiration even here. He puts a noose around my neck, gently. It isn’t out of courage though. I want to see the crowd. I want to see if it’s out there, the one who brought me to this pass.
Lord have mercy on my soul.
But it is no longer clear to me which Lord, nor where my soul shall go to.
There.
I spy him, Many-Shapes. It’s up there on a ledge of the courthouse, looking down on me in spite. Black winged. Black eyed. Many-Shapes wears the form of a crow. I know it’s done so to taunt me. Will it caw in delight when they throw me on the cart, fit for an unmarked grave? Few can thwart the business of Hell. It said so itself. The imp seems vexed by it. Like the hungry faces below, it came to see me swing.
I close my eyes. With all the Patience for which I’ve been named, I wait for the hangman’s footsteps to move away. For the creak of the ratchet lever. For the crack of the hatch opening. The hiss of the old hemp rope.
Then I’m counting seconds and air.
With my last breath—surely my last—I utter it. The name that Many-Shapes gave me.
It sounds like Latin, or an idea of Latin, the very tongue of the damned.
In the shadows of dawn, a crow comes. Through the woods and over the meadow, it flies to the window of the farm. It pecks on the glass, rat-a-tat-tat, but the woman who sits at the parlour table doesn’t look up from her weeping. Like yesterday, like the day before that, she’ll allow herself only an hour. A long day lies ahead. A day in which to milk the goats, grind the grain, churn butter and sweep out the yard. To chastise the farmhands for slacking in the fields. To the devil with those who’d neglect Grubbe Hill, she’ll say, bought with war and her daughter’s blood, though she only half guesses the truth of it.
Crows see much, aye. They see the Tanner with his boiling pot, the same as on any morn. They see Gillam the Blacksmith in the smithy who’s been thinking of the Tanner’s wife. They see Hopkins making his way from Lamb Corner, the man slumped and coughing in the saddle, his kerchief spotted with red. They see the Rector wringing his hands in the church, his chin turned anywhere but skyward. Come Sunday, he’ll avoid meeting the eyes of the Marshal in the pews, despite the fine words he speaks in the pulpit.
A crow sees shadows where there should be none—on the cobbled stretch of Goodly Street, on the sunlit side of the mill, on the fringe of the woods where the oaks can’t reach. A crow knows the shadows for doors. Doors all over England and all leading somewhere, to a dark and fiery region by all accounts. To one who waits.
And a crow—as much as one is truly a crow—knows that in time, with patience, she might find her way back to girl shape.
The thought is a kindness.
They say that when the lass swung, her cry sounded much like a caw.
