Chapter 24
Charlie regarded Jules anxiously. He had never seen his new friend so down. And watching Flo, usually so upbeat, was worrying
him too. Both women were drifting around the shop like ghosts, settling to nothing and unable to concentrate on the simplest
tasks. Charlie even had to take over the tea making that morning as Jules, staring into space, was just about to pour hot
water into mugs that contained a tea bag and a spoonful of instant coffee. Also, Jules was usually fussing over Merlin and his coquettish attempts to gain her attention,
but today she seemed oblivious, despite his squirming engagingly on the patch of sunlight in his favorite spot.
“So, who’s coming with me to see Brynlee and her mate later?” said Charlie briskly, handing out the mugs. “She’s got news,
remember? About the grimoire?” He rubbed his hands together. “Plus, I think I’ve got a buyer in town for that Thackeray second
edition, another antiquarian bookseller from Exeter who’s scouting on behalf of a client. Might as well save the courier charges
and meet face-to-face. It’s all contacts, right?”
“Darling, you are so kind to do all this,” said Flo, gathering herself together with visible effort. “We must pay your expenses
and give you something for your time.”
“Are you kidding?” Charlie replied. “I’m loving this stuff. Our Bridget Capelthorne was a seventeenth-century arse-kicking feminist, and I can’t wait to hear more.”
“Yes, she’s certainly a woman after my own heart,” said Jules, trying as hard as Flo was to overcome the despair that was
making her feel as if her heart weighed a ton.
“So... you in?” prompted Charlie.
“Yeah, sure,” said Jules, without energy. “I might as well come. Aunt Flo, are you okay opening the shop?”
“I think I’ll just keep the ‘Closed’ sign up today,” said Flo with a sigh, managing to raise a thin smile. “I’m feeling rather
weary.”
On the train, Jules filled Charlie in on the reason for her and Flo’s despair. Just the lease catastrophe—she wasn’t strong
enough to share the post-nuclear mess that was her love life quite yet.
“Wow, man, that is bad ,” Charlie observed when Jules finished. “And you and Roman?” he added perceptively.
Jules just shook her head, lips pressed together. She would not cry, she told herself. “It is what it is,” she said repressively. “It was doomed from the outset, really. We should have
known. Anyhow, going back to the business, we just need to decide when to close the shop. The lease ends on New Year’s Eve,
but we’ll need to close before then. It would make sense to flog as much stock as possible in the lead-up to Christmas, to
see if we can scrape together some sort of nest egg for Aunt Flo. I don’t think she’s got a lot in the way of savings.”
“I’ll really push on, selling off the antiquarian stuff,” said Charlie. “I’m uploading it all with a minimum acceptable price
so far, like we agreed, but I can put them on with no reserve at all? To clear the stock quicker?”
“That would be helpful,” Jules told him, nodding.
“And hey, who knows?” said Charlie. “The grimoire might be worth something?”
“Is there any chance?” asked Jules, refusing to allow herself an atom of hope. Thwarted expectations were just too painful.
“You know more about this stuff than anyone else I know.”
“Which isn’t saying much,” joked Charlie. “But, yeah, it’s an interesting piece. Value-wise, probably not too much,” he admitted.
“It would be different if the provenance was distinguished in some way, like—oh, I don’t know—like if it had been autographed
by Matthew Hopkins or someone.”
“The witchfinder general?” asked Jules.
Charlie nodded. “I mean, it definitely wasn’t. He never even came to Devon, so...”
“You said Brynlee sounded excited, though, so who knows?” said Jules dully as the train pulled into Exeter station.
It was raining relentlessly by the time Charlie and Jules got to Exeter, and the weather perfectly echoed Jules’s mood. The
wind whistled down the narrow street and whipped them across the face with leaves fallen from the beech trees in the square.
A bus trundled along the rain-slicked road, spraying muddy water across their legs as it passed. It was hard to believe autumn
was here already. Could it really have been seven months since she left London? It felt like a fortnight, although life had
changed so dramatically—the future had promised so much—and now here she was, in the rain.
On the other hand, she told herself bracingly, she was here with lovely Charlie—a new and unexpected friendship—on an exciting
quest together. She needed to expect less from life, that was the key—as Aunt Flo so often said, she needed to “make do.”
Slipping her arm through Charlie’s, she gave him a warm smile as he turned in surprise. “Thanks for this,” she told him. “You’re
a star.”
“Mate, you are so welcome,” Charlie replied amiably. “Now, don’t forget, the cake’s on me today, so don’t hold back.”
A skinny, bespectacled man was sitting at the back of the coffee shop with Brynlee at his side. They both stood on seeing
Charlie, and quickly the four of them were exchanging introductions. This was Robert, Brynlee told Jules, an assistant history
lecturer at the University of Exeter.
Charlie—good to his word—volunteered to get the coffee and cake in, and after complicated discussions on which muffins and
which nondairy milks might be available, he went off to join the queue, leaving Jules, Robert, and Brynlee to smile awkwardly
at one another, none of them wanting to dive into the topic under discussion until Charlie returned.
“Right, so give it up,” invited Charlie, when they were all settled at last.
Robert took a deep breath and looked as if he had been born to respond to such an invitation. “Bridget Capelthorne is quite
the character,” he ventured. “And she had a heck of a life, didn’t she?”
Charlie and Jules nodded at him, eager for more.
“So, as you may know,” Robert said, stirring sugar into his coffee, “witchcraft was declared a capital offense in 1563. In
England, the witch trials were at their height from the mid-sixteenth century onward. It was a brutal period, and Exeter was
a bit of an epicenter for it all, unfortunately, in addition to other parts of the country—I mean, Essex was bad, but Scotland?
Sheesh!” He mock wiped his brow and then, catching Brynlee’s eye, collected himself. “Sorry, I digress. So,” he went on, “I
don’t know whether Brynlee filled you in, but I’ve been writing a paper on the witch trials in Exeter during the seventeenth
century. When Brynlee mentioned the name Bridget Capelthorne, it immediately rang a bell, and”—he smiled at the look of anticipation
on Charlie’s and Jules’s faces—“I have a document. Two, actually.” He stopped and took a sip of coffee.
Charlie and Jules leaned forward in their seats.
“It’s exciting,” he went on, “but I’m afraid it’s everything you were probably suspecting. My first find was a confession,
dated 1685, so, according to your research, Bridget would have been sixty-four years old at the time.”
A confession. Jules swallowed. That was bad.
“So... witchcraft, then?” hazarded Charlie.
Robert nodded. “I’m afraid so. The confession’s pretty remarkable,” he said. “I thought you might be interested to see it,
so I’ve made you a transcript here.” He slipped a single piece of A4 paper out of a folder and passed it to Jules, who held
it between herself and Charlie so they could both read together. “It doesn’t make for particularly pleasant reading, I’ll
warn you,” he murmured, as they read.
Jules and Charlie were silent as they took it in. At one point, Jules let out a cry and clamped her hand over her mouth to
silence herself.
Putting the paper down on the table, Jules and Charlie exchanged looks.
“Wow,” said Charlie. “Disturbing.”
Jules could barely speak for the lump in her throat. “This is just so shocking,” she said at last. “I mean, ‘visited by Satan’?
Really?”
“And how ‘he did lie with her,’” contributed Charlie. “That’s a lot.”
“And the bit about how she was shaved so they could examine her for extra nipples—the ‘devil’s marks,’” Jules chipped in.
“And how she’s ‘being suckled by imps’—what even is that? It’s actually kind of weirdly pornographic, in a way. As if it’s designed to be titillating, almost.” Jules shook her
head in disbelief, and Charlie put a hand on her arm in solidarity. “I mean, you’ve seen this kind of stuff before. Is it typical?” she asked Robert and Brynlee.
Robert nodded again. “Pretty much,” he admitted.
“The whole having sex with the devil thing—I agree, it says more about her persecutors than her. There was this misogynist belief at the time that women were so much more likely to be in league with the devil than men because they were too weak to fight their sexual desires and so were more likely to be corrupted by him. My main source on all this,” he went on, “is an infamous fifteenth-century text called Malleus Maleficarum — Hammer of Witches , in English—which is, quite frankly, one of the most nakedly misogynistic books ever written.”
“Charming,” murmured Jules, reading bits of the confession again and wincing. “But this stuff about her being caught communing
with her familiars, though... A goat? A black cat? I take it we can guess what they mean by ‘communing,’ given the prurient
overtones of all this?”
Brynlee and Robert nodded in tandem. “I’m afraid so,” Brynlee said.
“It’s all just—I don’t know—demented...” Jules went on.
“Ah, yes, interesting choice of words. So that’s the other bit of it,” said Brynlee, taking over from Robert but chewing her
lip and looking at the other two uncertainly, as if she was wondering how to put something. “I hope you don’t mind, but Robert
emailed me a copy of this a few days ago, plus I’ve seen other similar ones, of course. I have a theory over these witchcraft