Tidelands

“If the world was as Zachary sees it, we would all be afraid,” she said gently. “For like a poor fool he has peopled it with monsters to frighten himself. He speaks of me as a woman who lies with faerie folk. He denies his own children. He says I cast a spell that unmanned him. He says that I killed my poor sister-in-law, Mary. You know, if people around here believed just one of these things, they would test me as a witch?”

He shook his head in denial of the terrible accusations against her. “They must know you’re innocent!”

“You didn’t know.”

“I did! I do!”

“You know what they would do to me?”

“I don’t know.” He did not want to know.

“They have a ducking stool on Sealsea quay and they strap a woman into the seat, truss her like a kitten for drowning. The seat is on a great beam that the blacksmith—usually it’s the blacksmith—pushes down on the other end. The woman goes up into the air, where everyone can see her, then he lowers her down into the water, underneath the water. They take their time and when they judge that the trial has been long enough, they bring her up and raise her in the air again, to have a look at her. If she’s retching seawater, they say that the devil has protected her, and they send her to Chichester, for trial in the court before the judges, who will hear the evidence and may sentence her to death by hanging. But if she comes up white as sea-foam, and blue as ink at the lips and fingernails, her mouth open from screaming in the water, her hands like claws from tearing at the ropes, then they know she was innocent, and they bury her in the holy ground in the churchyard.”

“I’ve heard of such things but—”

“It’s the law that every parish should have a ducking stool. You must know that.”

“I thought it was just a ducking?”

She showed him a thin smile. “Yes, that’s what it’s called. Makes it sound light work, doesn’t it? And some women are only ducked. But of course, some drown.”

“Sir William should make sure it is only a ducking.”

She shrugged. “He should. When he’s here. But it’s better for Sir William that they duck a witch from time to time, and blame some poor woman for their misfortunes, than ask him whose side he took at Marston Moor, what he did at Newbury—and why they should pay their tithes to him.”

“That’s got nothing to do with it! He’s paid his fine for serving the king. And he’s been forgiven by parliament.”

“We’ll never forgive him,” she said, speaking for her brother, for all the men who hoped for a better life without a lord. “He took a dozen lads from Sealsea with the king’s cockade in their hats, and he brought only seven home.”

“But that has nothing to do with it,” he explained patiently. “And he’s a civilized man—he would stop a witch trial. He’s a justice of the peace—he would uphold the law. He’s an educated man, a lawyer. He wouldn’t hurt an innocent woman.”

She smiled at him as if he were a child. “No woman is innocent,” she remarked and her words made him shudder as if it were Zachary speaking. “No woman is innocent. The Bible names the woman as the one to blame for bringing sin into the world. Everything is our fault: sin and death are at our door, from now till Judgment Day. Sir William isn’t going to risk his own authority by stepping in to save some poor slut from drowning.”

He was chilled by her cynicism, and he did not want to hear her. He wanted her back in his bed, warm and responsive. She had been hardened by the cruelties of her life and he wanted her to be soft and melting.

“But it doesn’t matter to us,” he suggested. “And I daresay there was nothing in what Zachary said anyway, about your sister-in-law?”

“Mary died under my care,” she told him frankly. “And the world knew well enough that we quarreled like a cat and a dog in the same barn, every day since Ned brought her into Ferry-house and set her up in my mother’s place. I disliked her and she loathed me. But, all the same, I cared for her the best that I knew how. I didn’t know what should be done for her; I don’t think anybody would have known. Her baby came too soon, and it was a bitter stillbirth for us all. Then I couldn’t stop her bleeding. She died in my arms and I couldn’t save her. I don’t even know what caused either death: hers or the child’s. I’m not a physician, I’m just a midwife.”

“Zachary said it was his child, and you were jealous,” he said, and instantly regretted it.

She looked at him very coolly and levelly. She drew the sheet around her shoulders as if it was a silken stole. “He told you that, did he?” Suddenly she was cold. “Well, you must be the judge of what you hear. I’ve never defended myself against Zachary’s lies, and I’ll not reply to his foul words in your sweet mouth. But if it was his child—as he boasted to me, after she was dead and couldn’t answer back—then I doubt she was willing.”