The Witch Maker (26 page)

As jokes went, it really wasn't much of one, but Paniatowski still managed to respond to it with a weak grin as she ground the half-smoked cigarette under the toe of her shoe.

‘Now where should we stand?' Woodend pondered. ‘Just inside the Witchin' Post enclosure might be nice.'

They walked towards the roped-off corridor, and immediately found their way blocked by a second pair of stewards who looked as if they meant business.

‘You can't go down there,' one of them said aggressively.

‘Course I can, lad,' Woodend said easily. ‘I'm the Filth. I can go anywhere I want to.'

The man tensed. ‘This is a private affair.'

‘Doesn't look very private to me,' Woodend replied, glancing across at the visitors' enclosure, which was now packed almost beyond endurance.

‘They don't matter,' the man said contemptuously.

‘Don't they?'

‘No. They're nothin' but a mindless mob. This might as well be a circus, as far as they're concerned. They'll see what happens, but they won't understand what's
really
goin' on.'

‘An' do you think I will?' Woodend ask, interestedly.

‘It's possible,' the other man conceded.

‘An' that bothers you, does it?

‘No, but ...'

‘I mean, I really don't see why it should – unless, of course, you don't want me to understand the Witch Burnin' because you're
ashamed
of it.'

The steward's fists bunched. ‘We're not ashamed of it,' he said. ‘The only reason we go through all this is to
show
we're not ashamed.'

‘Well, then?'

The man unclenched his fists and stepped to one side. ‘Don't get too close to the Witching Post,' he warned.

‘Don't worry, we'll keep our distance,' Woodend assured him. ‘We've no desire to go the same way Meg Ramsden did.'

The Chief Inspector and his sergeant walked down the roped-off corridor. Dozens of sets of eyes from the visitors' enclosure followed their progress enviously, but they were scarcely aware of it.

Piles of faggots had been stacked around the base of the Witching Post. Now there was less of it visible, it should have looked shorter and less impressive, Woodend thought. But it didn't. If anything the faggots seemed to make it loom even more ominously, as they transformed it from a simple stone column into the centrepiece of agonizing death.

The Chief Inspector wondered why he had felt a driving compulsion to attend the Witch Burning.

He knew he would not enjoy it. He was not one of those men who rush to see traffic accidents – and if he had been born in an earlier time, he was sure he would not have shared the general enthusiasm for public executions.

Nor would being there help to advance his case in any way. He already had his murderer under lock and key, and further additional evidence which the site of the murder might once have provided had long since been trampled underfoot, because – as the Chief Constable had informed him only a couple of hours earlier – it would have been very bad press indeed to have cancelled the event.

So just what
was
it that had brought him there?

Perhaps it was the Witching Post itself. Perhaps, by merely gazing at it, he would be able to get into Pat Calhoun's mind and understand why the Irishman had chosen it as the spot on which to enact his own personal brand of justice.

An excited murmur spread through the crowd of visitors, then swelled until it was almost a loud roar.

The villagers were coming! these visitors told each other. The villagers were coming! It was all about to begin!

The villagers approached in a column which was three people wide and stretched back beyond the edge of the Green. There was no discernible pattern in their deployment. They were led by three old men, but behind them came two women and a child, then one man and two children. Yet there was nothing haphazard about it, either. They walked with the determination of a peasant crusade which had finally caught sight of Jerusalem. There was a glint in their eyes – even in the eyes of the kids – and a firmness in their bearing which said that nothing – not God Almighty Himself – would make them turn back now.

And they were dressed for the occasion, Woodend thought. Jesus, were they dressed for it!

They had abandoned their cheap chain-store jackets and off-the-peg frocks for the day. The men were wearing breeches and jerkins. The women wore long dark dresses, and had their hair tightly fixed under their white caps. Thus would their ancestors have been dressed when Scottish James ascended to the English throne.

The Chief Inspector studied the villagers closely, looking for an unintended flash of modernity. A zip fastener, perhaps. Or a recently manufactured hook. But he was not the least surprised when he found no such mistakes. These were careful people. This was their day, and they were determined to get things right.

But it was neither the villagers' clothes nor their sense of purpose which had really caught the spectators' attention. It was the fact that all of them – every man, woman and child – was carrying a pail.

And
pails
was what they were! Not modern buckets, made of galvanized iron or plastic. They were
wooden
pails, held together by iron hoops – pails the like of which it had not been possible to purchase in any shop for at least a hundred and fifty years.

Each pail was filled almost to the top with water. As the villagers walked, the water swilled back and forth, sometimes managing to slip over the edge of the pail and stain the grass as dark as if blood had recently been spilled there.

‘Do you know why they're bringing the water with them, sir?' Paniatowski asked.

‘Yes,' said Woodend, who had seen it all before, yet had somehow managed to forget just how primeval it was.

‘Then what
is
the reason?' Paniatowski said.

‘You'll soon see,' Woodend promised her.

T
he villagers filed solemnly into their enclosure. It was a tight squeeze, but this – like everything else due to happen that day – had been carefully planned, Woodend thought. Because now they were inside the enclosure, all pressed together, these people had ceased to be individuals at all, and had become instead a single mass which was far greater than all its parts.

An old farm cart with huge thick wheels appeared at the edge of the Green. It was pulled by a powerful shire horse, and in the back of it were three figures. The two men – Tom Dimdyke and his son, Wilf Dimdyke – were wearing the same rough, hand-spun clothes as the rest of the village men had donned for this special day. The woman – the effigy – had nothing in common with the village women who were awaiting her arrival. Meg wore a scarlet dress which hugged her figure, and her beautiful blonde hair – which had once belonged to Mary Dimdyke – cascaded freely over her shoulders.

Had she really been dressed like that when she met her end? Woodend wondered.

Yes, it was possible. It was
more
than possible.

Meg had been vain enough to have her portrait painted by an artist who had travelled all the way from York to do it. Wasn't it likely, then, that she had owned a dress such as the one her effigy was dressed in that day? And though she would not have been wearing such a fabulous garment when the village had tried her for witchcraft, Woodend could well imagine her husband – the Harry Dimdyke now long dead – forcing her to put it on for her execution. Because it was not what Meg
was
that had been important. It was what the village had wanted her to be –
needed
her to be, if it was to have a reason to take her life.

As the crude farm cart trundled its way across the village green – rattling her bones, bruising her soft, pale skin – Meg Ramsden could still not
quite
believe what had occurred.

She had the power, she told herself. She
owned
this village, just as she owned the people who scratched out a miserable existence from the poor land which surrounded it. This nightmare could, therefore, be no more than that. It was a troubled sleep brought about by eating too many green apples – and soon the bad dream would end.

But it did not end. The cart continued to trundle towards the ominous stone pillar.

She could see the freshly dug earth – dark and wet. She could see the heaps of faggots, neatly tied together, and stacked against the post. And she could see the people, their faces twisted into masks which reflected their hatred, fear – and now – their triumph.

She heard someone speak to the driver of the cart – and though the words were not ones she had ever thought to hear herself utter, though the tone was so new to her that it was almost as if some wandering spirit had taken over her body – she recognized that speaker as herself.

‘Do not thee let this thing come to pass, Harold,' she pleaded. ‘Thee and I have been to church together. We have trod the same path.'

‘Thee hast trodden no path but thine own,' Harold Dimdyke told her sternly.

‘I have not—'

‘It is pointless to deny it now. Thee hast trod no path but thine own. Aye, and walked over the bodies of purer souls on thy route.' Harold paused for a moment. ‘Yet, for what thee once were to me, I will show thee a mercy thou hast never shown to others.'

Meg felt the light of hope ignite inside her. ‘Thee will help me to escape?' she asked.

‘Nay, not that. I could not do it, even if I willed such a thing. It is the wish of the village that thee go the stake – and that will is not to be denied.'

‘Then how can'st thou talk of mercy?' Meg demanded. ‘What manner of mercy is it that will let thee stand and watch as I am consumed by the hot flames of hell? What manner of mercy? Tell me! I must know!'

‘When thou is touched by it, then wilt thou know it,' Harold Dimdyke told her.

The cart reached the Witching Post, and Tom, who was holding the reins, brought it to a halt. Wilf produced a broad wooden board from the back of the cart, then laid it across the faggots, so that one end was touching the ground and the other resting against the Witching Post. That done, he returned to the cart, and he and his father lifted the Witch off it.

From the way they were handling her it seemed as if she weighed as much as a real woman, Woodend observed.

And maybe she did. Maybe they had taken as much care over this detail as they had taken over all the others.

Midway between the cart and the ground, the Witch slipped from their hands and fell heavily. The visitors, who had not been expecting this, let out a roar of surprise.

But it was not clumsiness which had caused Tom and Wilf to drop her, Woodend thought. It had happened because it was
intended
to happen – because Meg Ramsden had fallen at this point, and so her effigy must fall too.

And he was prepared to bet that at the moment she hit the ground one of her carefully constructed wooden ribs had broken, in just the place where Meg's rib had broken over three hundred and fifty years earlier.

Carrying the effigy between them, the two men mounted the board.

Woodend examined the carved mask the dummy was wearing. It was hideous, he thought – a gross distortion of Meg's true appearance.

But it was no mistake!

No failed attempt to recreate life by the hands of a clumsy amateur!

Wilf Dimdyke was a skilled craftsman, and had been training hard for this one task for the whole of his young life. And while visitors to the museum might see a beautiful woman when they looked at the portrait of Meg, this mask – this grotesque, evil, leering face – was a perfect representation of what the villagers saw in that same picture.

The two men and the dummy had reached the top of the board. Tom took the Witch's arms and held them behind the post, while Wilf reached over and fastened them securely with a piece of twine. That done, the younger man bent down and tied the ankles to the post.

The blonde hair caught the breeze, and moved slightly. It would be beautiful hair wherever it was hanging, Woodend thought. But to do it full justice it should be on the head of a living girl with a hopeful future to look forward to – not attached to the carved skull of a dummy which symbolized only the hatreds of the past.

She was in pain. Incredible pain.

Some came from her body – the pain from the broken rib she had suffered when she had fallen from the cart in front of the post; the pain from the bonds which tied her wrists and ankles to the stone.

Some came from her mind. She could picture the fire slowly slithering up her legs like a hungry serpent. She could imagine the agony as it reached her midsection and consumed her barren womb.

And now, too, there was the spiritual pain. She knew that she was not guilty as charged, but that was not to say she would die innocent. She wondered if there really was a god, and – if He existed – He would cast her into the eternal fire, which would make the agony she was now to endure seem as nothing.

New actors appeared on the scene – two men who carried between them a metal brazier filled with glowing coals. Tom backed carefully down the board, took the unlit brand which one of the men offered him, and held the end of it over the brazier. It caught fire immediately, and he lifted it clear, so all those present could see the bright red flame.

‘Now you'll see why they're carryin' the pails,' Woodend whispered to Paniatowski.

But
why
was he whispering? he asked himself. Was he falling under the spell of this spectacle? Was he becoming as susceptible to its influence as the villagers themselves?

Tom Dimdyke strode to the edge of the villagers' enclosure and stopped directly in front of Alf Raby. The last time he had seen the village shopkeeper, Woodend recalled, the man had been a complete wreck, with a slack jaw, watery eyes and trembling hands. Now, dressed in breeches and jerkin, rather than worn woollen cardigan, he seemed to have regained a little of the dignity he might once have had.