little progress? I do not really know. And so cold was I by the end of the hour that I did not care. Such is the burden of our human clay: our spirits soar to some icy heaven while our bodies creep back to the tame hearth.
My invitation to Degeulasse and his family had been accepted with alacrity and (still giftless towards two o'clock, no one at all having made any reference to my birthday) I was comforting myself by planning my soiree when a village boy rode up my drive on a donkey bringing a message from the vicar of Bidnold, the Reverend Timothy Sackpole. I was requested to come at once to the church.
'Why?' I enquired of the boy.
'I do not know, Sir.'
'How like a clergyman, not to give a reason!'
'Except that it be dire and urgent.'
'That is not a reason, lad. That is a tick of the ecclesiastical mind.'
As my horse was being saddled, this thought assailed me: had the conceited Sackpole somehow found out that this day saw the dawn of my thirty-ninth year? Did he foresee some divine punishment for this stumbling Aquarian if he were not brought before an altar before the sun set? Being only a little past the shortest day of the year, the sun was indeed going down already – hence the supposed urgency of the message? Though it amuses me to go now and again to hear a sermon from Sackpole, I am not seen at church as often as I should be, preferring to send my prayers to God in the quiet of my room or (as already described) in the company of a lardy cake. It was thus quite possible that this clergyman, who strikes me as a petulant person, should wish to deliver himself of some reprimand, the tone and substance of which I could already hear in my mind. He would begin by asking me to what I had given any thought on this the anniversary of my birth. I would reply that my mind had circled vainly about an empty table on which I had imagined Celia placing the gift of an embossed music case or a handsome picture frame. He would answer that such preoccupations will bar me from the Kingdom of Heaven…
But it was not to be thus. When I arrived at the churchyard, I saw in the light of the declining sun a small throng of people grouped about the gate and heard the sound of voices and weeping.
'Whatever is it?' I enquired of the boy on the donkey, but he did not reply; he was staring at the scene with some alarm.
I dismounted. As I did so, the Reverend Sackpole came towards me.
'Ah,' I said, 'what have we here, Vicar?'
'Thank you for coming, Sir Robert,' Sackpole said courteously, thus putting from my mind the suspicion that he was about to lecture me upon my lack of faith. 'It seems we have need of a medical man and Doctor Murdoch is not to be found.'
'Sackpole,' I said, 'I was once a student of medicine, but my studies were never completed. I am not equipped – '
'No great skill is being asked of you. Let us step aside a little from these good people – the boy will hold your horse -and I will explain what has happened.'
'Assure me first that you do not expect me to start saving lives.'
'What is requested of you, Sir, is your judgement.'
'My judgement? Well, let me tell you, Vicar, that that is not perhaps as sound as it once was. I am most prone to error.'
'Not one of us is infallible, Sir Robert, but this may prove to be a simple matter for you. Come.'
I followed Sackpole and we passed through a small door into the vestry of the church. The place was dark and smelled of hayseed. Sackpole closed the door and laid his hand upon my arm.
'There is,' he now whispered, 'a most horrible suspicion come among the village people: the suspicion of witchcraft.'
'Witchcraft? In Bidnold?'
'Yes. I shall tell you the tale as briefly as I may. The people outside, many of them weeping, as you heard, were mourners at a burial I performed at noon. The deceased was a young girl, Sarah Hodge, not seventeen years old and died in a sudden and terrible manner.'
'What manner was it?'
'I shall come there, Sir Robert. The matter before us is this: Was there some Devil's work done on Sarah Hodge – as now some of those parishioners outside maintain – or was there none at all?'
I looked at Sackpole. I saw that the clergyman was uneasy and would not hold my glance. Clearly, he was preparing himself to ask of me something mortally not to my liking, in all probability the examination of the corpse of the dead girl. I opened my mouth to pre-empt this request by telling Sackpole that the last
I held up my hand at this point and requested that the Vicar go no further with his tale until he had contradicted my assumption that I was being asked to make a medical judgement upon a corpse. Somewhat to my surprise, he informed me that the body of Sarah Hodge would remain undisturbed in the ground. He then, in a manner altogether nervous and afraid (somewhat confounding my view of him as a man of impenetrable conceit) told me the following story.
An old widow woman, known to all as Wise Nell, had for many years acted as midwife to the parish. She was also a healer and primitive apothecary, cultivating her own physic garden and said to have some power of healing in her hands, this power coming to her through her faith in God, or so she claimed. For some months now, Wise Nell had not been seen at church. She protested that a rheumatism in her knees prevented her from walking there. But the people of Bidnold began to notice a change in her demeanour (where, before she had been quiet and calm, she now seemed agitated) and in her hands, particularly in the feel of her hands! The skin had become hardened and calloused; the pressure of her palms now brought to the head or limbs of the sufferers a moment's icy chill. And the whispers began to be heard: Wise Nell is wise no longer, her love of God has been replaced by love of the Devil, the power in her hard, cold hands is the power of Satan…
'You must know,' said Sackpole at this point, 'what infinite terror is felt by a God-fearing people at the idea of witchcraft. And it is to the clergy that men come with all the tales of devilry, saying so-and-so is a veritable witch and such-and-such is the proof and now there must be a burning or a drowning or I know not what terrible persecution to be played out. And yet the entire matter, to my mind, is one of great difficulty and complexity for proof of innocence and proof of guilt may both be manufactured, and I have come to believe that in most of these cases only God sees to the heart of the thing. For this reason, I hoped never to hear the word 'witchcraft' uttered against any in Bidnold. And I will not deny it, I am afraid of what may follow.'
Sackpole took from his sleeve a somewhat grimy handkerchief and blew his nose. Still ignorant of what my own part was to be in this story, I waited for him to prise from his nostrils two small fillets of hardened mucus, and then asked him to continue.
'Well,' he said, 'we come now to the matter of Sarah Hodge. She was, as I have told you, a young girl with all her life before her and yet, it seems, had fallen into a dull melancholy, occasioned, some say, by that she had cut off her hair – of a rich chestnut brown colour – to sell for a few shillings to a wig-maker. I cannot say, Sir Robert, whether a young woman might so mourn the loss of her hair that she could weep for it for two months or more, but weep she did and would not eat and grew thin and weak and declared a loathing for all things.'
'Her parents are poor cottars and ignorant and had no knowledge of how to help her, but yet in the end sent her to Wise Nell, begging the old woman to do anything she could to revive in her some joy.'
'I am told Sarah Hodge was three hours with Nell. She was given a potion to drink which, she was told, contained the blood of swallows, birds of summer and symbols of man's ease.'
'When she came out from Nell's cottage, her cheeks were flushed, I understand, and her body most hot all over. She felt well, she said, with the blood of the birds inside her and wanted to dance. So her brothers, glad to see her happy again in spite of her shorn head, took up some tambourines and a pipe and played a tune for Sarah and she lifted up her skirts and began to hop about and kick her feet and would not stop for half an hour or more, her face growing more and more hot until the cheeks were a dark wine-red and still she danced on, tearing open her bodice and showing her breasts that were flushed like her face, on and on until suddenly she bent over and
