The Witch Hunter's Tale(26)

“I am sorry, Lucy,” I said. “Your child has died. There is nothing to be done.”

Grief creased her face, and she clamped her eyes shut as a moan welled up within her. “Ah, God,” she cried as another labor pain struck. Even in death the child demanded to be born. Lucy’s gossips held her tight and cried along with her as I brought the child into a world he would never know.

“Do you want me to baptize him?” I asked. Most churchmen would fly into a rage at the question, but at times such as this I worried less about the Church’s law than the women in my care. I did not know what baptism might mean for the child’s soul, but I knew that it mattered to his mother. Lucy nodded, and I whispered a prayer over the water I poured on his head. I dipped my fingers in oil and made the sign of the cross, and it was done. Afterward, I swaddled his tiny, shriveled body just as I would a living child, and gave him to his mother. I left Martha with the women and slipped out of the delivery room. It was my sad duty to tell Lucy’s husband what had happened.

Henry Pierce took the news as well as any husband and father could, nodding slowly and wiping away a tear. A friend who had joined him for the evening put his hand on Henry’s shoulder, and the two men embraced. Henry turned back to me. “What about my Lucy?” he asked. Relief spread across his face when I assured him that she was in fine health.

“You may go in when Martha has finished binding her,” I told him. “It should not be long.”

The moment I returned to the delivery room, I knew that the women had transformed their sorrow into fury, and I did not need to ask who was the object of their rage.

“It was Mother Lee who did this,” hissed Sarah Crompton. “She bewitched the child to death, and that knocking on the window was her. She wanted us to know what she’d done.” The other women nodded.

I marveled at the dark magic that the grieving women had worked on themselves. In mere minutes their love for Lucy had become hatred for Mother Lee.

“We’ll have our justice,” Sarah said. “She’ll hang for what she’s done.”

* * *

Martha and I stayed with Lucy until the next morning when the vicar arrived. He was a kindly man, and I knew he would care for the Pierces as best he could. I was more worried what would come of the gossips’ fury toward Mother Lee. The death of Lucy’s baby had convinced even the most timid of her neighbors that they must act, and since I had delivered the child I certainly would be called to testify about his condition when he was born and the cause of his death.

As Martha and I walked home, our breath hung before us in the still morning air. The cloud of the night’s events seemed to follow us even as the sun sat cold and distant in the early morning sky. Could it be the same orb that had threatened to burn the city to ashes just a few months before?

“How long had the child been dead?” Martha asked as we passed through Bootham Bar.

“There is no way to know,” I replied. “He was not newly dead, but fingernails had come in, so he was not long from being born. Around a week, but it is a hard thing to judge.”

“So the knocking at the window wasn’t Mother Lee bewitching the child.”

“No, the child was long dead by then,” I said. “But such observations won’t turn aside the matrons’ wrath.”

“Do you think that Mother Lee bewitched Lucy?”

I considered the question for a time before answering. “I don’t know,” I said at last. “I’ve seen such deaths before. They are extraordinary and troubling, but not necessarily unnatural. It could have been the work of a witch or the devil. Or it could have been that the child died. Sometimes children die.”

We walked in silence down High Petergate before turning onto Stonegate.

“When I was a girl,” Martha said at last, “there was a woman—Mother Hawthorne, we called her—who lived in our village. She was one of the poorer sort, and she often came to our door in hope of a little bread or a few pennies. But she was also a cunning-woman. When one of our neighbors lost her purse, Mother Hawthorne, would look in a glass to find out who had taken it. Other times maidens asked her to look in a pan of water to see who they would marry, and later to cast bones to discover whether their child would be a boy or a girl.”

“Every village has such a one,” I replied.

“When I was just a girl, perhaps Elizabeth’s age, my brother was bewitched.” Martha continued as if I hadn’t spoken. The mention of her brother took me by surprise. She’d not spoken of him since his death over a year before.