The Lies of Fair Ladies (15 page)

"Right, pal. Ditch that motor, for good. Okay?"

"Is it making that clattering noise again? I thought they'd
mended it." She unlocked her car door. "That garage is becoming so
unreliable."

"Meet me at the town library. Don't be late."

I borrowed the taxi fare, and left. Talk to some birds, you might
as well talk to the wall.

Thirteen

Our town library's a non-library. A theory of a library, it's run
by Scotchman, a skeletal prat whose sole function is thwarting. To him it's a
good day when he's successfully obstacled the whole public from borrowing
books.

"I need a book, please, Scotchy."

"Sorry, Lovejoy, but—"

"Allow me." I captured a young loafer. "Look, pal.
I don't know how to work their computer here ..."

The pimply youth's eyes ignited. He shot round the desk, shoved
Scotchman up and away, activated the computer. "Wotcher want, mate?"

"Anything on Matthew Hopkins. Old-timer, three hundred and
fifty years since."

Tap tap tap
. I'm computer
illiterate. These infants aren't. They live for them. But writing by any other
name.

"Witch-Finder General?" The youth gazed admiringly at
me. "A pop group? This library's no books. There's one at Grays, Thurrock.
Plenty in London." The security guard was being fetched.

"What is it?" Miss Campbell was beside us, assistant
librarian, intent on social justice for the disadvantaged.

"This lad is showing me your technologistics,
communication-wise. Miss Campbell." I said it in one breath.

She dithered, righteous anger foiled by jargon. ''Well, if—''

"Here, mate." The computer wizard handed me a printout.
I said ta. He slouched off to be bored again.

The nearest tome on Hopkins was in St. Edmundsbury. I'd no motor,
so it would be bus. I made do with various dictionaries, got the names, deeds,
trial details. Reference libraries have been turned into Local Studies Resource
Centers. The baffled serving the baffled. Children on school projects take a
folder, copy it out for teacher, and move on to their next feat of intellect. I
made the bus home, but had to walk from the village outskirts because some nerk
insisted on the correct fare.

Luna's origin wasn't local. Bless her. I warmed to the woman, my
one trusty ally. I had a few scribbled notes on the ghoulish doings of yore. I
brewed up, sat out in a cold rising wind, chucked the birds some cheese, and
reflected on what I now knew.

Once upon a time, our fair land was going about its humdrum
business. Good Queen Bess had faded from memory. Came James, a spectacular
anti-witch nut. Thanks to him, anti-witch mania was burgeoned.

Piecemeal bits garnered in the non-library worried me worse as I
began to read my scrawl. There's a lot of balderdash talk about witches
nowadays. People think of them, if at all, as cranks having a bit of spare
nooky in the woods at summer solstices, or encouraging Mother Earth to produce
leaves.

Except there's more.

Like, seventeen people were burnt at St. Osyths, near here, in
1676. As late as 1863, a poor elderly French bloke was dragged from his home in
Castle Hedingham, ducked to see if he was a wizard, and died from the
experience. King George II had some sense, thank God, and repealed our ancient
witchcraft laws in 1736. Isolated incidents occurred, though. Like the burning of
poor Bridget Cleary at Balty-vadhen in Tipperary in 1895 by her husband and his
five mates. Fine, okay, it's history. But read it, suddenly it edges close.
Suddenly it's not so long ago. And suddenly the evenings draw in.

The terrible feeling comes that the people who did those horrible
frightening things were
here
, on this
very ground. They
lived
here. This
village, that seaport. They walked our streets, maybe drank from the very bowl
you see in the antique shop. Get the point? They laughed and joked
here
. Then they burnt, hanged,
imprisoned, jailed, drowned the innocent. In the name of holiness.

And nobody did this dreadfulness like the ghastly Witch-Finder
General.

His dad was a Puritan minister of Wenham. Matthew Hopkins became
an Ipswich lawyer, chiseling contentedly at whatever could be chiseled. It was
back around the Great Civil War (Cromwell versus Charlie I, on whether Divine Right
of Kingship should rule instead of Parliament. People won, making us the modern
world's first ever republic).

Lawyer Hopkins suddenly went ape. Off his own bat he decided he
was gifted. His gifts lay in a particular direction.

Abruptly, he began to "find'' witches. He started with a mere
handful, at Manningtree, where he lived. Soon, witches were here, there,
everywhere. Politicians use the same trick. You know the ploy: There's a
witch/treason/conspiracy/plot/whatever. The cry goes up. Good heavens! All will
be lost if everybody doesn't support the prosecutors! And all that jazz. Don't
mock the Puritans of Salem, New England, of 1692. Or the people in Scotland who
burnt thousands. James I, a loon of sorts, even prosecuted a whole assize for
acquitting some poor soul. Or the witch-persecutors of Pennsylvania. Of Kalisk
in Poland. You don't need to look far even today. Especially today.

Lawyer Hopkins appointed himself the Witch-Finder General. And
rode out on his anti-witch crusade. He demanded twenty silver shillings a time,
a whole pound. (Get it? The more witches he spotted, the richer he got.) This
odious reptile rampaged through East Anglia, intoxicated with the power of life
or death—and, terribly, it was always death. Exulting, the maniac invented a
modification of an ancient "test" for "finding" witches. It
went:

First identify your witch (that is, pick anybody). Bind her/him.
Lob her into a pond. If she floats, why, she's guilty—for the Lord's pure water
has rejected her. So she must be hanged. If she sinks, why, she's innocent. You
see the problem. Either way, you're dead.

The evil spread through East Anglia like wildfire. Norfolk,
Suffolk, and Essex. The horror scourged hamlets, villages, towns, cities, and
finally whole counties. Bedfordshire, Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, all suffered.
Folk lived in fright. Some women, knowing their innocence, actually volunteered
to come to trial to get it over with. And, Hopkins blithely reported, were
hanged for their pains. The witch hunts went on. And on. Anything was a sign of
being a witch—a neighbor's roses wilting, a friend catching a cold, some skin
blemish. It was wholesale utter madness. One elderly one-legged Manningtree
woman was brought to trial for having a cat she called pet names. She was
"swum"—that is, tied up and ducked, Hopkins's famous test. She failed
to drown. So she was hanged.

Her name was Elizabeth Clark, God rest her.

Sick and crazy, the witch hunts stormed on in the name of God.
Even reeling from the carnage of civil war the nation was appalled by the
murderous progress of the Witch-Finder. But everybody did nothing. Just like
you and me would have done. Like we do today. Everybody kept quiet—and watched
their innocent friends and relatives tortured, drowned, hanged. Not even the
clergy were spared. One poor old octogenarian. Reverend Lowes of Brandeston,
Suffolk, was kept awake for over a week by running him about. His parishioners
did nothing. The witch-seekers bound him, threw him in Framlingham Castle moat.
He floated, so was condemned to be hanged. The poor old cleric begged for a
burial service. The laughing Witch-Finder forbade it. The parishioners—you,
me—did nothing. The old priest shakily read his own funeral service. And was
hanged. His friends, neighbors, parishioners watched. And d.n. He'd been their
vicar for fifty years. Of course, the Witch-Finder was a holy Puritan who would
make money from the judicial murder. Sound familiar? Piety is lucrative,
properly applied.

The reason I was so distressed was something I knew in my heart of
hearts. Had I been there in 1646, I too would have stayed silent.

And d.n. Like now. Like you.

But even crazed blood lust ends, thank God. It came to pass that
one man in the kingdom suddenly thought. What the hell is going on? To John
Gaule, of Great Staughton Village, it seemed absurd for a so-say civilized
nation to be torturing itself on the whim of a madman.
And, unbelievably, he stood up and said so!
One frightening,
ghastly day, this brave cleric actually strode to the pulpit—it's still
there—and preached against the Witch-Finder General himself. He even had the
nerve to publish his conviction that the real witches were the witch-hunters
themselves. And then walked home from his appalled congregation and waited,
trembling but firm in spirit, for the heavens to cave in.

Great Staughton held its breath, stunned. All Huntingdonshire—home
of Oliver Cromwell the arch-Puritan himself, remember, whose Roundheads clanked
on every skyline—waited for the Witch-Finder's vengeful team to ride into town.

And waited.

They didn't come
. They bottled out.
Chicken.

So let's hear it for brave John Gaule of Great Staughton. Drink to
his eternal memory. What makes a wimp suddenly heroic? God alone knows. I
don't. Because all his life John Gaule had been wet, a drip. He'd fawned and
groveled, bowed and scraped. Until that fateful day when he became a lion.
Light a candle to his courage. He deserves it.

The Witch-Finder General complained—but he never came.

And suddenly everybody halted, looked at each other. The
witch-finding stuttered. It was the Emperor's New Clothes. People read the
vicar's rebuke and were ashamed. Then they smarted, felt cheated. Then furious.
With whom? Why, with the Witch-Finder General! They invented a legend. It goes
that, on an angry day, they rushed to where he was staying, dragged him out and
lobbed him into a pond in savage mimicry of his own witch-finding test. He
floated, so they hanged him from the gibbet.

History is more mundane. After John Gaule's denunciation. East
Anglia simply calmed down. The Witch-Finder died in his bed in 1647, of
tuberculosis.

He was a local bloke. Wenham's but a stone's throw from here. On
the bench alongside him sat two somber figures, Edmund Calamy and Sergeant John
Godbolt. Famous names, when you bother to remember. They had a grim sergeant,
one Fairclough, to play the heavy. I'm sorry it's such a horrible tale. It's
the worse for being true. Mistley-cum-Manningtree knows that. Theirs is the
unenviable distinction of having the Witch-Finder General sleeping soundly—or
maybe not so soundly—in their churchyard.

No names I'd managed to find in the non-library matched any of
Luna's family names. I was still sitting on my half-finished wall when Luna
arrived in a snarly two-tone Ford. She approached across the grass in
trepidation. I watched her.

I must have been something of a tribulation. She must be at the
end of her tether. She stood in front of me. A worried woman. My one ally,
whose patience nearly equaled mine.

"Hiyer, pal," I said at last. "Friends?"

She gave a radiant smile. "Oh, Lovejoy! You're better!"

"I haven't been poorly," I said, narked. "Come
inside."

She put her arm through mine. "Antiques at last?"

"Lots, love. Lots and lots." I meant enough to make a
huge scam, the sort East Anglia doesn't have.

The answer phone, a real nuisance, had a message.

"This is Mayor Carstairs, Lovejoy. I want to know what's
going on. This degree of interaction—"

There's an off switch, works a treat. "He's got nothing
better to do, love?"

"It's only the motor," she said, quite cheerfully.
"Oliver wanted me to use the one you don't like anymore. I borrowed this
from Oliver's cousin Emily.”

“Tell Emily ta, love. She pretty?" "No," she said
evenly. "Hideous, nasty." "Pity. We're going to need help with
the forgery." Luna turned, kettle in her hand. "Did you say
forgery?" "Eh? No. I said copying. An antique, for a friend." In
silence we sat and listened to the news. One Joseph Godbolt had been found
dead, possibly some days, in a reed cutter's hut in a marshy area off the river
Deben. His death was being investigated. The police suspected foul play, had
set up an Incident Room in a local tavern.

I held up a warning finger as Luna, instantly thrilled, drew
breath to exclaim at the extraordinary coincidence that Godbolt was the very
name . . .

"Don't," I said. She didn't. And I started convincing
her that forgery was nearly, but not quite, the same as faking or copying or
simulating. Words are great, aren't they? Prove anything, used right.

Fourteen

“Strip off, Lovejoy, or I’ll bring Geronimo.”

The threat did it. I felt a right duckegg. It must be great to
take your clothes off and not feel daft. We look misshapen, a down's joke.
Women look exquisite, tailored by an expert. I didn't look at the mirror.

"Not underpants and socks. Veil?" No, maybe socks. Men's
socks look the last laugh.

She tutted. "Lovejoy, get
on
.
You’ve paid for an hour. Prospective fortune, para-psycho analysis, massage. So
far you've wasted ten minutes. I can't oil you with your clothes on."