As my eyes followed the path of fleeing crows, I saw the beacon blazing away atop Pendle Hill. Near turned to stone at the sight. Such fires were lit only in times of dire need. Whilst the little lads pointed and charged about yelling in their excitement, I offered up a silent prayer that we in Pendle Forest would be spared from this evil, whatever it was.
The boys whooped and swarmed toward a rider trotting up the track and when that rider drew near, I found myself staring at the stern-set face of my half-brother, Roger Nowell.
"Magistrate!" the boys shouted, some of them remembering to bow and bob.
"Back away, you lot," he ordered. "You'll spook the horse."
But I clucked my tongue at the stallion. Ignoring the rider, I stroked the horse's sweat-lathered neck to calm him, then finally screwed up the courage to face my half-brother who towered over me like some avenging archangel, the tip of his polished boot level with my forehead. He was handsome as he was arrogant: a man in his thirties, heading toward his prime. His chin seemed to jut out even stronger than when I'd seen him last, and his hair was the same chestnut brown mine had been before it turned grey. Did he, too, see the likeness between us? Did he even remember he'd an unlawful half-sister, seed of his dead father's folly?
"The beacon, sir," I said. "What news have you?"
"The Spaniards mean to invade." Full impatient, he was. No doubt eager to be gone and to spread the word to more important souls than the likes of me. "Their ships attacked the Queen's Navy off the south coast."
"Christ's wounds," I muttered.
Hunger I'd known and the press of want and going without. When I was five, Old King Henry sent his troops to sack Whalley Abbey and butcher the monks. But a foreign invasion was something beyond my most fearful imaginings.
"The King of Spain," I said aloud, looking up into my half-brother's cold eyes. "That would be Philip. Dead Mary Tudor's husband."
"Indeed," he said. "And should he succeed, our days shall be just as dark as they were under Mary, with decent Christians burning at the stake."
The Spanish would bring back the old religion: the mass and the feast days. The priests could come out of hiding. But it would mean the end of the new church in this country. Families like the Nowells who had hitched their fate and fortune to the Queen's religion would be left high and dry. And what would it be like to be ruled by foreigners, I fair wondered. Did any of us want this, even those of us who had longed for the old ways to return?
My half-brother leaned down from his saddle to scrutinise my face as though trying to decide where my loyalties lay.
"Aren't you that Demdike? That herbwife?"
I could not speak but only nod like some simpleton. What did he know of me, my half-brother? What rumours had he heard? Would he trouble me for my work in charms and spells, or would he try to drive me from Malkin Tower, which, by rights, belonged to him?
"You'd best go see to Alice Nutter," he said, nodding back toward Roughlee Hall. "When I spoke to her just now, she was looking poorly."
"Yes, sir. I'll go to her straightaway, sir."
Digging his spurs into the stallion's flanks, my half-brother cantered away, leaving me to choke on his dust.
"What did he mean?" one of the boys asked, tugging my sleeve. "What are Spaniards?"
"Folk from foreign parts." With my apron I wiped my smarting, dust-stung eyes. "There's to be war."
My mouth went dry at the thought of our John Device being pressed into the navy and wrenched away from Liza just as she was about to birth their firstborn. If our men were sent away, the crops would rot in the fields. Tibb had not prepared me for this.
But the little lads darted about as though this were some grand adventure. Rubbed me the wrong way, their merriment did, the way they laughed as they pelted each other with their slingshots, playing at war as though it were nowt but a game. I confess I fair lost my temper, shouting at them till they leapt, wild-eyed, showing me a sight more awe than they had the Magistrate.
"Mistress Alice is paying you to shoot the crows, not each other, you dunderheads. Now do as you're told. Spaniards or no, we'll still have to eat this winter."
God willing, we could save the harvest yet, if the women banded together to cut the grain. Leaving the boys to worry the crows, I rushed along to Roughlee Hall to see what I could do for Mistress Alice.
Roughlee Hall was the grandest manor house in Pendle Forest. Richard Nutter's father had built it in the year of my birth. With its walls of golden stone and graceful arched windows of mullioned glass, it looked as though it could endure a thousand years. Rose and lavender bushes lined the path up to the door and offered their perfume to the sultry air. Beds of daisies and chamomile, there were besides. The lawn was so close-clipped that it resembled green velvet. All this I saw by peeking my head round the gate, left open by Nowell after his speedy leave-taking, so it appeared. But it wasn't for me to go knocking on the front door.
Instead I ducked behind the hedge and followed the path well-worn by servants' feet to the back of the house and its warren of outbuildings: the stables and shippon, the dairy and henhouse, the laundry house and storage sheds, all built upon the slope that rose behind the great house. Butterflies and bees danced over the kitchen garden and flitted through the orchard. I was about to head to the back door that was propped open in the heat when I caught sight of the lady, heavy with child, staggering beneath the apple trees. She stumbled and clung to one of the branches to hold herself upright.
"Mistress Alice?"
I took off at a run, my bare feet slapping the dusty cobbles of the yard and then the dry, tickling orchard grass. She started, her head jerking.
"Don't take a fright," I called out. "It's only me."
Seeing her face, I stopped dead in my tracks. Pale as an invalid, she looked, her face damp with tears. I could well understand why she wept, for war was woeful business and such a shock was never good for a woman in her condition. Little wonder Nowell had sent me to look after her. Maybe that half-brother of mine had a heart in that proud chest of his after all.
At first Mistress Alice seemed too distraught to say anything. No doubt she'd come out to the orchard for fresh air and some privacy, only to have me come charging in. Perhaps it shamed her that I'd caught her like this, weeping and undone. But I could scarce bring myself to leave her alone in this state.
"Mistress Alice, if you're feeling faint, it's best to sit a spell."
On this steamy day she had on a gown of thinnest silk, flimsy as a petal, but she was sensible enough to put her own health and that of the child over vanity, and allowed me to help her sit down upon the grass.
"Shall I fetch your husband?"
"This morning he rode for Samlesbury," she said, her voice bleak.
So she had been alone when Nowell stopped by to deliver his dreadful tidings. I watched her brush her forehead, setting her coif askew. One lock of jet black hair came loose to fan across her bloodless cheek. How much she had changed in the six years since I had first met her, that summer day under my elder tree, when she was still a timid young wife who feared herself barren. Pregnant with her third child, there wasn't a trace of girlishness left. The woman I saw before me was a matron. Yet she seemed troubled as she had been those six years ago. Something weighed heavy on her heart.
"Terrible news, this war," I said, wondering if she'd brothers who would be sent away to fight. Her husband himself was far too old for battle.
"God preserve every one of us. I never thought it would come to this." She spoke as though she'd known that there was some great evil on the way, but that it had turned out even worse than she suspected.
"I daresay you know much more of this business than I, Mistress Alice." I thought that her husband might have dealings with the mighty and powerful who knew just what the Spanish had in store for us. "But we might still prevail."
"It's a trap," she said. "One way or another, Nowell means to flush us out."
Her words made no sense to me, and I began to fear that the heat had gone to her head.
"You're dreadful pale, Mistress Alice. Shall I fetch you something to drink? A wet cloth for your forehead?"
"No, thank you. Just sit with me for a while." With her clear grey eyes, she gazed into mine. "You can predict the future, Mother Demdike. You said I'd have five children. Can you tell me anything more of my fate to come?"
"The far-seeing only comes to me in flashes. But," I added, anxious to comfort her, "I'd never had any inkling of bad fortune in store for you. Why should you fear the Magistrate?"
"I think you're canny enough to answer that question yourself," she said.
I could, I thought. Though she and her husband let themselves be seen at the New Church every Sunday without fail, everyone knew that they were Papists and that they sheltered travelling priests.
"Nowell thinks that we want this invasion," she said in a voice like ice. "He thinks we're set to welcome the Spanish, that we're part of some conspiracy to overthrow the Queen."
"But you would never." I stopped short, searching for words. "I don't always fancy the way things are, but better the devil you know than some foreign army."
Above the canopy of apple branches, smoke from the burning beacon blackened the sky.
"I love my country every bit as much as Roger Nowell does." She shook in her anger. "Little does he believe me. He keeps his eyes on us, Mother Demdike."
Her words left me numb. At first I thought she meant that my half-brother was watching the pair of us, and I remembered that look he had given me, staring down from his horse. But as she went on talking, I understood it was the Catholic gentry that she meant.
"My husband and I, the Towneleys, the Shuttleworths, the Southworths." She counted the names off on her fingers. "He means to gain the Queen's favour by uncovering traitors in his midst. He's lying in wait for one or the other of us to slip up and then he'll make his move."
"Hush now," I said, thinking that no good could come from allowing her to carry on like this. "You could harm the baby if you let yourself get so overwrought."
In truth, I doubted that even Nowell would presume to take on the richest and most powerful families, forcing his way into their homes and sticking his nose into every nook and cranny in search of Jesuits—it could backfire on him. Besides, if the Spanish did indeed land upon this shore, both Nowell and Mistress Alice would have plenty more to fret about.
"I'm no fortune-teller," I said. "But I saw you with five children, which means that you and your good man will both be alive and well for a while yet."
She reached for my hand. "Can you say a blessing for my family, to keep us safe?"
"Course I can." I squeezed her fingers.
She laughed soft. "My husband would think it wicked of me to even ask you. But what does he know?" She smiled for the first time since we'd been talking. "God has graced you with this gift and you've used it for much good."
Under the apple trees I murmured my charm over her whilst she listened, her head bowed as if in prayer.
On my way home I witnessed all manner of unrest. Beacons burned atop Blacko Hill and Slipper Hill. Looking east over Yorkshire way, I saw bonfires lighting up the Pennines. Roads and tracks were full of folk running and shouting like lunatics.
"It's a prophecy!" Old Man Sellar yelled out to me as I trudged past his farm, not a mile from Malkin Tower. "The bastard Queen will fall and the holy mass will return."
"Don't let the Magistrate hear you go on like that," I warned him.
Nowell would make much of what the gentry were up to, and yet I wondered if he'd ever spared a thought of what we common folk made of this new faith that had robbed us of our pleasures and joys. To be honest, I didn't give a toss about the Pope in Rome or any plots in faraway lands, but I yearned for the sense of sanctity and protection that hung over us then, the talk of miracles and wonders, a prayer and a saint to ward us from every ill and the solace of the Blessed Mother. Now we'd been left to stand stark and unshielded, to bear whatever cruel lot Providence cast our way.
I sought shelter in a copse of birch trees, resting my brow upon my knees, striving to still my ragged breath and racing heart. And then Tibb appeared, spotless as I was dusty.
"You might have warned me," I told him.
"Of the Spanish?" He knelt beside me, brown breeches on the dry earth. "Calm yourself, Bess. Folk will talk nonsense, but never believe a word of it." He took my clammy hands in his steady grip. "It's not the foreigner from across the sea you must fear, but the devil you
know.
"
Sweat trickled down my brow and caught in my lashes, blurring my view of his face. The devil I knew? I grew queasy at the memory of Nowell's eyes boring into mine, and when the vision of Nowell faded, I saw Tibb again, grave as Mistress Alice herself.
"What do you mean?"
"Have a care. Watch your step. Keep yourself out of his sight and mind as much as you can."
Tibb murmured his blessing over me, as I had just done for Alice Nutter.
After he had gone, I struggled to gather my wits. Tibb seemed to be saying that my fortune was somehow entwined with Mistress Alice's, and her a gentlewoman. At least Nowell stood to gain something by going after her and her husband: their fine house and their lands. But how would he profit from going after one as lowly as me?