The Blue Eyed Witch Read online

  He drank the local ale and finished his meal with a glass of brandy, which, after the first sip, made him raise his eyebrows.

  He was convinced, although he was too tactful to say so, that it had been smuggled.

  The Essex marshes had been notorious in the last few years for being a landing place for smugglers. Although it was a shorter passage from France to the South coast of England, it was also infinitely more dangerous.

  Large boats, especially built for the purpose, found it easy to land unobserved in Essex with a greater amount of cargo and without the anxiety that was attendant on every attempt to land on the South coast under the watchful eye of the coastguards.

  The brandy was in fact so good that the Marquis had a second glass. Then, knowing that his horses would be ready and waiting for him, he strolled into the yard.

  He thanked the landlord for his repast and tipped the two rosy-cheeked maids who had waited on him with a munificence that made them speechless with gratitude.

  He then climbed back into his phaeton and, picking up his reins, saw with satisfaction that the team of roans which were now between the shafts were as fine, if not finer, than the chestnuts which he had driven from London.

  They were in fact a new acquisition. He had purchased them at Tattersalls from a Nobleman who had been forced to part with them after a night of almost insane gaming at Wattiers.

  The Marquis gambled occasionally, but he had never had the wild intemperate compulsion that animated so many personalities of the period.

  Charles Fox, for instance, despite his brilliance as a politician, had developed as a young man an insatiable passion for gambling, which was to lead him into being almost constantly in debt throughout the whole of his life.

  In his mid-twenties he would arrive to speak in the House of Commons after playing Hazard at Almacks for more than twenty-four hours at a stretch.

  In three nights he and his brother lost thirty-two thousand pounds between them.

  All London laughed at the story that, when his father was informed of a rumour that Charles was to be married, the old man had said,

  “I am glad of that – for then he will go to bed for at least one night!”

  But whatever the reason for his being able to acquire the horses he was now driving, the Marquis was delighted that they had come into his possession.

  They were certainly outstanding and he decided that next time he went to Newmarket for the races he would drive them there and know with satisfaction that they would be unrivalled by any other team.

  The Marquis was now driving along narrow twisting roads that demanded all his skill.

  Once past Danbury and on to Purleigh, he reached a road which ran South of the Blackwater River.

  Now the Marquis was on familiar ground and he realised that shortly he would reach the boundary of his own estate.

  There was, however, first the small village of Steeple, which he did not own and, as he neared it, he saw to his surprise a large number of people moving along the road ahead of him.

  It was unusual at this time of the day, when most of the peasants were working in the fields, to find them congregated in the village.

  As he reined in his horses, the thought crossed his mind that perhaps this was one of the disturbances that might develop into a riot about which his agent at The Castle had written to Mr. Graham.

  Then he saw that the peasants, the men wearing their smocks and the women with shawls over their heads, had something or somebody whom they appeared to be dragging or carrying along with them.

  Small boys circling round the outside of the group were shouting and throwing pieces of grass or mud which they picked up from the side of the road.

  So intent was the crowd on what they were doing that the Marquis’s horses were almost upon them before they realised it.

  A few men at the back of the group turned round at the clatter of hooves, shouted to the others and the crowd moved to the side of the roadway.

  It was perhaps the expressions on their faces which made the Marquis certain that this was in fact a riot and made him pull his horses to a standstill and ask in a loud authoritative tone which none of the peasants could fail to hear,

  “What is going on here?”

  An older man, near to the phaeton, looked a trifle more intelligent than the rest and the Marquis addressed him,

  “I am the Marquis of Aldridge,” he said, “and I am on my way to Ridge Castle. What has happened? Why are you not working at this time of the day?”

  As the Marquis introduced himself, the elderly man’s finger instinctively went up to his forelock and before he replied he respectfully took off his battered felt hat.

  “We’ve a witch with us, my Lord!” he said. “And us be a-takin’ ’er for a duckin’!”

  “A witch?” the Marquis exclaimed in surprise. “How do you know she is a witch?”

  Even as he spoke, he remembered that Essex was a notoriously superstitious County and had a history of witchcraft and suppression of witches that dated back to Elizabethan times.

  “Us found ’er on the druid stones, my Lord,” the man answered. “’er be lyin’ there asleep after makin’ a sacrifice. The cock were with ’er – one of Bel Malden’s it be – and blood all over ’er gown!”

  The Marquis threw the reins to his groom and stepped down from the phaeton.

  “I will see for myself.”

  He was certain as he spoke that this was no witch, but some miserable old woman, perhaps wandering in her mind and a trifle senile. She would have incurred the enmity of the village simply because she lived alone and they were frightened of her.

  The Marquis’s tall commanding presence made the villagers who had been silent since he had drawn up his phaeton open the way for him to where they had laid the witch down on the ground.

  From their rough treatment of her and the mud and rubbish that had been thrown at her, her body, which was covered in what had been a dark cloak, looked singularly unpleasant.

  In fact at first sight the Marquis thought that in all probability the woman was already dead.

  The ducking of witches was, he knew, a Mediaeval and extremely cruel test.

  With a rope round the woman’s waist and usually stripped of most of her clothes, the supposed witch was flung into a pond in the belief that if she sank she was innocent and if she floated she was guilty.

  If the witch sank, as was to be expected, she was dragged back to the bank and tested again and again until usually she was drowned.

  The woman lying on the grass had, the Marquis saw, long dark hair which might suggest supernatural powers, but it certainly did not look as if it belonged to anyone elderly.

  It had soft lights in it. Then he noticed that on the top of her head there was a patch red with blood, as if she had been hit violently with a weapon of some sort.

  “You have certainly handled this woman roughly!” he said accusingly to the elderly man who had followed him to the witch’s side.

  “Us didn’t do that, my Lord,” the old man protested. “She’s the way us found ’er, except the women scratched ’er to see if ’er’d bleed.”

  This the Marquis knew was another test, for a witch was supposed to have special parts of her body which would not bleed even if she was pricked with a needle.

  It was usual for her to be scratched on her face and arms by those who dragged her in front of a judge.

  “There were blood on ’er gown from the cock,” the old man said as if he was anxious to convince the Marquis that they were justified in what they had done.

  There was no doubt, however, that the peasants were now somewhat apprehensive.

  They well knew that they had no right to take the law into their own hands – if they suspected a woman of being a witch, she should have been taken in front of a Magistrate to be sent for trial.

  Essex was proud of the fact that the first major trial of witches had taken place at Chelmsford in 1556 and there had been numerous instances all do
wn the centuries in which Essex witches had been brought to trial on monstrous allegations of witchcraft and sorcery.

  “Let me look at her,” the Marquis ordered.

  The elderly man bent down, turned the woman on her back and swept away the long dark hair that had fallen forward to cover her face.

  The Marquis could see at once that this was no old woman, but a very young one.

  Her face had been scratched so that there was blood on her cheeks and on her forehead. But despite it he was able to see the perfection of her features and the fact that the skin on her face, where it was not blood-stained, was extremely white.

  It was doubtful, he thought, if she was more than eighteen. There was something delicate and refined about her small straight nose and winged eyebrows, while her little painted face made it somehow impossible to think of her being connected with evil.

  “Look at the blood – the blood, my Lord!” the old man cried, pointing to her skirt.

  She wore a gown that the Marquis realised proclaimed her to be of a very different class from her persecutors.

  There was a muslin fichu, now torn and dirtied by rough hands, which had encircled the whiteness of her neck and there was a large patch of blood, doubtless from the dead cock, in the centre of her full skirts.

  “She was on the druid stones?” the Marquis asked.

  “Aye, my Lord, young Rod found ’er when ’e were passin’ on ’is way to work, ’e called the others and they sees ’er were a witch. No one but a witch, my Lord, would lie on them druid stones at night!” The Marquis knew this was true.

  There were many superstitions repeated and re-repeated about the huge stones which stood on a bare piece of ground overlooking the river.

  He himself had always believed that they were most likely to have been placed there by the Vikings as a landmark.

  But for the local peasantry it was a place of sacrificial magic, which had been there since the times of the druids and they would no more venture by the stones at night than spend the hours of darkness in a graveyard!

  “She was lying there unconscious as she is now?” the Marquis enquired.

  As he spoke, he noted that the witch’s eyelashes were very long and dark against the almost translucent clarity of her skin.

  “She be a-sleepin’, my Lord, after a sacrificial orgy,” a voice said from the crowd.

  It was a woman’s voice and the Marquis heard the venom in it.

  He remembered that women were always more virulent and more cruel in their persecution of witches than any man.

  It was the women, he thought, looking down, who had inflicted the criss-cross scratches on the girl’s cheeks and on her arms and some were so deep they had torn away the flesh.

  And it would have been the women who had clutched at the muslin fichu round her neck and perhaps incited the boys to bespatter her gown and cloak with mud and filth.

  He looked again at the great patch of blood and then asked,

  “Are you suggesting that this witch, if she is one, sacrificed the cock herself?”

  “That ’er did, my Lord!” said another woman from the crowd. “Wrang its neck and drank its blood, no doubt. Blood to give her power to fly to the Devil!”

  “Whatever the killing was for,” the Marquis said, “I asked you a question. Are you saying that she killed the cock herself?”

  “Aye, that’s what we says.”

  “That’s what ’er did!”

  More than one voice was speaking now and somebody came forward to throw the cock down at the Marquis’s feet.

  “There it be, my Lord! As you can see, its neck’s been a-twisted so ’ard ’tis broken off!”

  It had been quite a fine young cock, the Marquis noticed. It would have required considerable strength to have twisted the head almost clear of its body.

  It looked an unpleasant mess now with its broken neck and blood-stained feathers. He glanced at it for a moment. Then he said in a quiet voice that commanded attention,

  “If that is true, will one of you tell me why there is no blood on the witch’s hands?”

  Everyone present moved forward, craning their necks to stare at the girl’s hands, which lay limp and motionless on either side of her body.

  They were small hands, white and soft with long, thin, sensitive fingers and almond-shaped nails.

  While everything else about her was bloody from scratches or dirty from mud, her hands were unblemished.

  As the peasants stared, there was only silence.

  “Those of you who kill your own cockerels for the pot,” the Marquis said, “are well aware that it requires considerable strength to twist a bird’s neck. It would be impossible to do so in the manner in which this cock has been treated without getting blood upon one’s hands.”

  “Perhaps ’er magicked it off?” someone suggested, but the voice was uncertain.

  “Let me put it to the test, my Lord,” the elderly man said. “If ’er sinks, ’er’ll be innocent right enough.”

  “You have no right to test a witch unless she has been brought to trial,” the Marquis answered. “You know that as well as I do and I expect that, when this girl regains consciousness, she will be able to give a reasonable explanation as to why she should have been left on the druid stones. And why, unless someone intended her to be persecuted, she should have a dead cock beside her.”

  The Marquis looked reprovingly round him and now the peasants were somewhat shamefaced.

  “Us were only a-doin’ what us thought be right, my Lord, and there’s several people round ’ere as thinks they’ve bin inflicted with the evil eye.”

  “Aye, that’s true right enough!” a chorus averred. “Will Halstead lost a cow last week. Well ’er be in the morn, dead as a doornail by dusk!”

  “That is not evidence that it was the work of this woman,” the Marquis said sternly. “Go back to your work and another time remember that the Magistrates are there to pass judgement, not you.”

  His tone was so severe that the peasants on the outside of the crowd began to move away sheepishly.

  The fire had gone out of them and now it was difficult to understand why the slight limp figure lying on the ground had aroused so much hatred, fear and animosity.

  “What’ll us do with ’er, my Lord?” the elderly man asked. “It be a long way to Chelmsford. I doubts if anyone’ll carry ’er in their cart.”

  The Marquis considered for a moment and then said,

  “I will take her in my phaeton.”

  “You’ll take ’er, my Lord?”

  “I will try to find out the truth about her,” the Marquis said. “I doubt if she is alive and, as you have handled her so roughly, you may all find yourselves charged with murder!”

  A shiver of apprehension ran through the rest of the bystanders and now they turned and moved away so swiftly it was almost as if they vanished.

  Only the old man and a vacant-looking youth were left, the lad still holding a handful of mud in his hand.

  “Pick her up!” the Marquis commanded, “and lay her on the floor of the phaeton!”

  The two men did as they were told.

  It was not hard to lift the unconscious girl. She obviously weighed little and they laid her down on the floor of the Marquis’s phaeton and pulled her dirty stained cloak over her body so that only her face and hair were uncovered.

  The Marquis got into the driving seat and thought as he did so that his groom relinquished the reins rather more quickly than was usual and hurriedly climbed onto his seat at the back.

  The Marquis brought his long whip down lightly on the horses’ backs and they started forward.

  He did not speak to the old man again and, as he drove on, he found that the street was empty. There were only a few ducks swimming on the pond in the centre of the village green where the witch would have been ducked.

  It was only another six miles to The Castle and, almost immediately on leaving the village, the Marquis was on his own land.

 
He saw with satisfaction that the fields which had been well ploughed were sown with wheat and barley.

  There was a smell of salt on the warm air and there was too the fragrance of wild flowers.

  The gulls were swirling overhead and the Marquis noted a large family of young partridges run across the road to safety just before the horses reached them.

  It was wild and empty, flat and yet somehow exhilarating as it had been when he was a boy.

  When he saw The Castle standing silhouetted against the blue of the sky, he felt a sudden elation within himself that was very unlike his usual cynical and bored attitude to everything.

  Grey and formidable, the tower was Norman and looked as if it was ready to repel any invader.

  The rest of the house, which had been added later, had the fine architectural and classical lines that William Adam – the Scottish architect – portrayed so brilliantly.

  He had made Ridge Castle exceedingly beautiful by incorporating the great Norman tower so that it blended with the new building without seeming in the least alien to it.

  The trees that surrounded The Castle protected it from the violence of the winter storms and now enclosed it with a soft green that seemed like emerald velvet.

  At the front there was a profusion of golden daffodils looking like a carpet of glory and the Marquis felt that they trumpeted his arrival and made him welcome.

  He drew up with a flourish in front of the pillared portico and the liveried servants who had been awaiting his arrival ran down to the phaeton.

  The butler, whom the Marquis had known as a child and who was now grey-haired and not as agile as he had once been, stopped on the last step.

  “Welcome, my Lord!” he said. “It is a great surprise that you should visit us after so long and I only hope we will make your Lordship comfortable.”

  “I am sure you will, Newman,” the Marquis said, “but I have with me an unexpected guest.”

  “A guest, my Lord?” the butler exclaimed in surprise, then, following the direction of the Marquis’s eyes, he saw what lay on the floor of the phaeton.

  “What has happened, my Lord?”

  “The villagers in Steeple were determined she was a witch!” the Marquis replied. “I saved her from having to endure the swimming test.”