For two weeks, aided by a man from Alfreton, who knew the land well, we scoured the woods in search of Nur and her gaggle of God-cursed wretches. In vain. We swiftly found the clearing and its circle of mean huts and hovels, and burnt everything in it to the ground – but the only soul we found there was an aged woman, blind, and unable to walk, who revealed nothing under questioning except that Nur and her coven, some forty females of varying ages from barely ambulant children to toothless hags, had left some days ago and headed north. The old crone seemed almost to welcome the knife, wielded efficiently by a Nottingham sergeant, that slit her throat and ended her miserable existence on this Earth.
It was a frustrating time. I had been out-fought by a woman with no deep knowledge of war nor the stratagems of battle, and made to look an utter fool. She eluded me, and left no trace. I sent messages north to Kirkton and Robin’s garrison there, but nothing had been seen or heard of the Hag of Hallamshire or her coven. We scoured the wilder parts of Nottinghamshire and South Yorkshire by night and day, and found nothing. I was at a loss. After four fruitless weeks, I dismissed the conroi men back to Nottingham, and returned, shamefaced, to Westbury and Goody. Perhaps Nur had worked some kind of charm of concealment. Or maybe, more simply, after years of living wild without the comforts of civilized life, she was adept at moving through the countryside without disturbing a soul.
There was one great boon that my otherwise fruitless struggle with Nur had bestowed on me. That embarrassing contest with the witch had cured me of my malaise. I worked hard in that time; I slept little, but deeply, and drank hardly at all. Without knowing it or wishing it, the mutilated Saracen bitch had cured me of my melancholy, when no other remedy could.
Nevertheless, that summer saw the beginning of a long period in which I never truly managed to find ease. A time of nervous uncertainty, of general but constant fearfulness, a time that frayed the nerves and made everyone short-tempered and quick to anger: it was the season of the witch.
Country folk are superstitious. They always have been and always will be. So in Westbury, from the summer of the Year of Our Lord eleven hundred and ninety-six until the early spring of the next year every minor disaster was an attack of witchcraft, every accident must be black magic: if a cow gave birth to a stillborn calf, it was Nur’s malice; if a bucket of milk, left out too long in the warm sun went sour, it was her sorcery; a frail grandfather of four score years died suddenly in the village – Nur must have stolen his soul. Every misfortune, every setback – even those with patently obvious causes – was laid at her door; and folk whispered that it was in truth my fault for angering her. People spoke openly – though wisely not in my presence – of the curse that lay over Westbury, and wondered how it might be lifted. To make matters worse, the harvest was bad that year – Nur had clearly brought the rain clouds in August and a succession of heavy, pounding rainstorms to crush the standing wheat.
I asked Arnold, the local priest, to exorcize any evil spirits that inhabited the village and the manor, and the little man made a great show of bumbling about the place in his best robes with his servant holding a huge leather-bound copy of the Holy Bible, mumbling prayers in bad Latin and splashing holy water about with enthusiasm. But the villagers refused to believe it had worked, and when a nervous girl claimed she had seen Nur and her witches riding broomsticks across the face of the full moon, nobody was inclined to disbelieve her.
We saw no sign of Nur at all in that period, but there was evidence from time to time that she had not forgotten us and that she had agents of her evil in the area. Not long after the meagre harvest, in late August, Goody found a figure made from plaited wheat straw in her bed in the newly rebuilt guest house; long black thorns had been stuck in the belly of the doll, and through its eyes. Goody was shaken and brought the horrible object to me, and I burnt it – and from then on Goody abandoned the guest house and slept in my chamber. Chastely, I hasten to add, with a long round pillow separating us in the big bed. Though I did on more than one occasion feel the stirrings of an almost overwhelming lust, watching her lovely sleeping face, or catching a glimpse of her white body as she dressed in the morning, I restrained myself. It was a small price to pay for the reassurance of having her under my watchful eye.
In October, we received a letter from Robin telling us that Thomas was impressing all in the army with his courage and prowess, that Little John had been ill with an ague but had now recovered, and that the Bishop of Paris, Maurice de Sully had finally succumbed to the Crab that had been slowly eating his belly, and all Paris, all France, was in mourning for him.