Don’t you know what it is?”
Maggie stirred uneasily on the stool. “I know. Of course I do. I know.”
“Right. Look, it’s like this squishy plastic stuff he puts on his Thing. Before he puts it in you. So you don’t get pregnant. Is he using that?”
“Oh.” Maggie twisted a lock of her hair. “That. No. I don’t want him to use it.”
“Don’t want…Are you crazy? He
“Why?”
“Because if he doesn’t, you’ll have a baby.”
“But you said before that a woman needs to be—”
“Forget what I said. There are always exceptions. I’m here, aren’t I? I’m Mr. Wragg’s, aren’t I? Mum was panting and moaning with this bloke Paddy Lewis, but I came along when she was cold as ice. That’s pretty much proof that anything can happen no matter if you get fulfi lled or not.”
Maggie thought this over, running her fi nger round and round the last button on her coat. “Good then,” she said.
“
“I want a baby,” she said. “I want Nick’s baby. If he tries to use a rubber, I won’t even let him.”
Josie goggled at her. “You’re not yet fourteen.”
“So?”
“So you can’t be a mummy when you haven’t fi nished school.”
“Why not?”
“What would you do with a baby? Where would you go?”
“Nick and I would get married. Then we’d have the baby. Then we’d be a family.”
“You can’t want that.”
Maggie smiled with real pleasure. “Oh yes I can.”
LYNLEY MURMURED, “GOOD God,” AT the sudden drop in temperature when he crossed the threshold between the pub and the dining room of Crofters Inn. In the pub, the large fireplace had managed to disperse enough heat to create pools of at least moderate warmth in its farthest corners, but the weak central heating of the dining room did little more than provide the uncertain promise that the side of one’s body closest to the wall heater would not go numb. He joined Deborah and St. James at their corner table, ducking his head each time he passed beneath one of the low ceiling’s great oak beams. At the table, an additional electric fire had been thoughtfully provided by the Wraggs, and from it semisubstantial waves of heat lapped against their ankles and floated towards their knees.
Enough tables were laid with white linen, silverware, and inexpensive crystal to accommodate at least thirty diners. But it appeared that the three of them would be sharing the room only with its unusual display of artwork. This consisted of a series of gilt-framed prints which depicted Lancashire’s most prominent claim to fame: the Good Friday gathering at Malkin Tower and the charges of witchcraft that both preceded and followed it. The artist had depicted the principals in an admirably subjective fashion. Roger Nowell, the magistrate, looked suitably grim and barrel-chested, with wrath, vengeance, and the power of Christian Justice incised upon his features. Chattox looked appropriately decrepit: wizened, bent, and dressed in rags. Elizabeth Davies, with her rolling eyes uncontrolled by ocular muscles, looked deformed enough to have sold herself for the devil’s kiss. The rest of them comprised a leering group of demon-lovers, with the exception of Alice Nutter who stood apart, eyes lowered, ostensibly maintaining the silence she had taken with her to her grave, the only convicted witch among them who had sprung from the upper class.
“Ah,” Lynley said in acknowledgement of the prints as he shook out his table napkin, “Lancashire’s celebrities. Dinner and the prospect of disputation. Did they or didn’t they? Were they or weren’t they?”
“More likely the prospect of loss of appetite,” St. James said. He poured a glass of fume blanc for his friend.
“There’s truth in that, I suppose. Hanging half-witted girls and helpless old women on the strength of a single man’s apopleptic seizure does give one pause, doesn’t it? How can we eat, drink, and be merry when dying’s as close as the dining room wall?”
“Who are they exactly?” Deborah asked as Lynley took an appreciative sip of the wine and reached for one of the rolls which Josie Wragg had only moments before deposited on the table. “I know they’re the witches, but do you recognise them, Tommy?”
“Only because they’re in caricature. I doubt I’d know them if the artist had done a less Hogarthian job of it.” Lynley gestured with his butter knife. “You have the God-fearing magistrate and those he brought to justice. Demdike and Chattox — they’re the shrivelled ones, I should think. Then Alizon and Elizabeth Davies, the mother- daughter team. The others I’ve forgotten, save Alice Nutter. She’s the one who looks so decidedly out of place.”
“Frankly, I thought she looked like your aunt Augusta.”
Lynley paused in buttering a portion of roll. He gave the print of Alice Nutter a fair examination. “There’s something in that. They have the same nose.” He grinned. “I’ll have to think twice about dining at aunt’s next Christmas Eve. God knows what she’ll serve in disguise for wassail.”
“Is that what they did? Mix some sort of potion? Cast a spell on someone? Make it rain toads?”
“That last sounds vaguely Australian,” Lynley said. He looked the other prints over as he munched on his roll and sifted through his memory for the details. One of his papers at Oxford had touched upon the seventeenth- century hue and cry over witchcraft. He remembered the lecturer vividly — twenty-six years old and a strident feminist who was as beautiful a woman as he had ever seen and approximately as approachable as a feeding shark.
“We’d call it the domino effect today,” he said. “One of them burgled Malkin Tower, the home of one of the others, and then had the audacity to wear in public something she’d stolen. When she was brought before the magistrate, she defended herself by accusing the Malkin Tower family of witchcraft. The magistrate might have concluded that this was a ridiculous stab at deflecting culpability, but a few days later, Alizon Davies of that same tower cursed a man who within minutes was stricken with an apopleptic seizure. From that point on, the hunt for witches was on.”
“Successfully, it seems,” Deborah said, gazing at the prints herself.
“Quite. Women began confessing to all sorts of ludicrous misbehaviours once they were brought before the magistrate: having familiars in the form of cats, dogs, and bears; making clay dolls in the persons of their enemies and stabbing thorns into them; killing off cows; making milk go bad; ruining good ale—”
“Now there’s crime worthy of punishment,” St. James noted.
“Was there proof?” Deborah asked.
“If an old woman mumbling to her cat is proof. If a curse overheard by a villager is proof.”
“But then why did they confess? Why would anyone confess?”
“Social pressure. Fear. They were uneducated women brought before a magistrate from another class. They were taught to bow before their betters — if only metaphorically. What more effective way to do it than to agree with what their betters were suggesting?”
“Even though it meant their death?”
“Even though.”
“But they could have denied it. They could have kept silent.”
“Alice Nutter did. They hanged her anyway.”
Deborah frowned. “What an odd thing to celebrate with prints on the walls.”
“Tourism,” Lynley said. “Don’t people pay to see the Queen of Scots’ death mask?”
“Not to mention some of the grimmer spots in the Tower of London,” St. James said. “The Chapel Royal, Wakefi eld Tower.”
“Why bother with the Crown Jewels when you can see the chopping block?” Lynley added. “Crime doesn’t
