The Discoverer’s Man

His handkerchief, a pin or coin he’d touched, a button from his shirt, a feather caught on his coattail — such tokens would fetch a price ... Men came to shake his hand, or rub their warts upon his famous skin; young mothers held babies for him to bless with luck or wisdom — could he ward off the pox? — while others pressed bribes for the questions they would have him ask. One woman, facing down a blush, gave him a scrap of cloth, and asked that he get blood on it: she would return next day to pay him if he would care to nominate a fee ... ? Blood of a witch! Can you believe such a thing? I think you may be worldly after all. Boy that I was, I can only guess at what he must have made of me; and he, tricked out in a high-crowned hat, Geneva cape, staff, spurs, and bucket-top boots — he might have been a landed squire or country magistrate ... You think us credulous? Of course you do. So young, so quick to judge! Friend, these were days of comets in the air, various auguries, marvellous tempests, sights on the sea — that we might have a witch nesting among us was not the strangest news we heard. Proceedings would begin at dawn, he said. Next day we found ourselves at the chapel house uncertain who had summoned whom. It fell to me (though why is more than I can say: I had not then addressed a congregation) to tell how, ever since her husband’s death, Old Bess had shunned society; how week on week her vacant place in church would be remarked; how she had made a stranger of herself so long that when she turned to her next neighbour, begging a bowl of curds, she was denied; how she cursed him for this; and how his child sickened and died soon afterwards. I took my seat light-headed among murmurs of approval, part of the crowd once more, strange to myself for all my eloquence, and some three-and-ninety witnesses rose to give their evidence ... But then: “Ask not what mercy justice can afford until, as civil law requires, you hear the witch condemned out of her own mouth.” So: officers must be sent to search her home — he called it ten to one that they would find trinkets such as beads or crucifixes or other trumpery; meantime she must be stripped and should the devil’s marks be found about her (sure enough, two bitch’s teats hung down between her secrets and the fundament) then she must be kept from sleep and meat and watched most constantly. Old Bess confessed at first light on the third day. He seized on me to write her testimony: On First of May, Year of Our Lord Sixteen Forty-Five, Elizabeth Bell confessed she kept Familiars including, but not restricted to, a Greyhound called Vinegar Tom, a Ferret by the name of Littleman, a Shrew called Peck-in-the-Crown, and also a most verminous Mouse called News; and having summoned up and suckled them she sent her Imps to spread the Dropsy, and to kill Richard Tayler’s Horse and Michael Edwards’s Swine. And freely she confessed to having met all hugger-mugger with divers adjacent Witches in other Towns (we took their names)