Chapter Sixty-Four
Sybil
“Wait.”
A woman’s voice lifted on the wind, carrying over the crowd, high and clear.
Sybil followed the magistrate’s gaze as Kat strode over Thingoe Hill, a dark-haired woman behind her.
Anne?
Sybil’s heart seized as she regarded her maid. Why was she here?
Kat braced herself against the savage gusts, her red hair blowing back from her fierce expression, black skirts snapping behind
her. She looked like wrath itself come to exact vengeance. “Ye have committed a great sin, Robert Walsingham.”
“The magistrate is not on trial,” Matthew Hopkins said in a bored drawl.
The guards moved forward, but he lifted a single hand to stop them. The crowd loved a spectacle. No doubt Kat would use that to her advantage as readily as Hopkins and Walsingham.
Sybil shifted her feet on the uneven logs, tamping down the hope that dared flicker to life.
“Walsingham ought to be on trial,” Kat snapped. “It is his fault Sybil Brantham is on this pyre.”
“This woman is a witch, and her death comes at no one’s fault, save her own.” Hopkins swept his hand at Kat in a dismissive
gesture. “Enough of this. Let us proceed.”
“You cannot.” This time Anne spoke, screaming into the wind, her dark locks wildly blowing about her.
Kat nudged her forward.
The guards moved tentatively as well.
Anne staggered closer and looked first to Sybil, then out at the crowd. “She is innocent. If anyone is to be killed this day…
it is me.”
“No,” Sybil whispered. Already there had been too much death.
The guards stopped as much from Kat’s warning glare as Anne’s startling admission.
The crowd, equally baffled at this unusual development, looked between Anne and the magistrate.
“Mine own hands made the poppet I claimed was created by Sybil Brantham,” Anne cried. “I signed my name to a confession I
did not speak. I didn’t even know what the confession claimed.” She shook her head, her doe-brown eyes catching Sybil’s from
across the expanse of the field. “I didn’t know.”
The desperation in the young woman’s gaze pulled at a deep place within Sybil.
“Why would you sign a confession you did not speak?” Hopkins asked, frowning.
Anne hesitated, scrunching her eyes shut.
Kat’s lips moved, but Sybil could not make out what was said.
“I’m with child.” Anne cradled her belly with the palm of her hand. “The magistrate is the father, though he refused to help
me unless I denounced Mrs. Brantham.”
“This is a lie,” the magistrate snarled. “A distraction to save her mistress.”
“We all know how ye are, Walsingham,” Kat said, her tone a singsong taunt. “Women lock their doors when ye’re nearby. Husbands
make a show of being home, shouting and carrying on so ye’ll hear their voices and leave their womenfolk be.” She spun around
to the crowd. “Are ye not afraid of Walsingham?”
Silence met her demand. But a few faces tucked downward, hiding from speculation.
The magistrate scoffed. “I had this chit as a lover, it is true. She was desperate to climb into my bed in the hopes of grasping
a rung higher in life.”
“You said you loved me, and now…” Anne balled her apron in her hands, cheeks a brilliant stain of red. “Now I know you used
me to punish Mrs. Brantham for refusing to marry you.”
Sybil’s heart squeezed in empathy for the young woman. Poor Anne, who had spent her entire life caring for others, who was
so desperate to finally be cared for herself.
“Enough,” Hopkins hollered. “Mrs. Brantham has been declared guilty of witchcraft and will die this day.”
Sybil closed her eyes against the pain of his words, the inevitability of her death.
“No.” Anne shook her head. “I stood idly by as she was taken for crimes she did not commit. I stood idly by when I heard she
was starved and tormented in prison. I will not stand by now as she is condemned to die. She is no witch, and she did not kill her husband. He died of the plague, same as many of yours.”
“Henry Brantham died so that many of yer kin could still be alive today.” Kat added as she faced the crowd, her expression
solemn. “How many of ye had family return from the pesthouse because of Mrs. Brantham’s care? How many of the family ye lost
had words of comfort from her after ye abandoned them in yer fear, leaving them to die alone?”
One woman in the front cast a glance at Sybil, her eyes gleaming with sympathy. With shame.
“Probably a similar number to the men and women who Edith fed and tended to.” Kat’s voice broke. “The innocent woman ye tried
to float in the river. The one ye declared after her death what a shame it was to lose so good a soul. What a shame.”
A man in the crowd covered his face with his hands while another woman looked away.
Kat pointed at Sybil. “And ye stand here now, before a woman who gave coin to the poor when the rich held their purse strings,
a woman whose husband caught the very plague she tried to save yer loved ones from, a woman who has offered the services of
her mother’s healing when the lot of ye can’t afford a physician’s care. She never intended to take on her mam’s work, but
ye had need, and she was there, not charging even a tuppence for her efforts.”
There was an uneasy shift among the mob.
Sybil would never have used her efforts with the townsfolk against their conscience, but Kat had no qualms with wielding Sybil’s
past deeds.
Kat put her hands on her hips. “And what will ye say when ye’ve a babe with a fever and ye cannot afford care?
Or when there is naught enough coin for extra food stores when this war leaves us starving?
Or when ye’ve got chilblains in the winter, or a backache at harvest?
Ye’ll think back to this moment and do ye know what ye’ll say?
” She looked pointedly at the mob. “Ye’ll say, ‘What a shame.’”
A young woman cradled her round belly, her face stricken.
“And when the magistrate finds a woman whose man is not there…” Kat prodded a tooth with her tongue. “Ach, what a shame.”
A beautiful woman cast an anxious glance at the magistrate and crossed her arms over her chest, shrinking into herself.
No doubt she too knew the stink of ambergris and musk.
“This is ridiculous.” Hopkins banged his hand on the railing. “Guards.”
The guards remained where they were. The one with the scarred eyebrow, who had only days before taunted Sybil in her cell
now looked directly at her, as if truly seeing her for the first time. “We sent my mam to the pesthouse, thinking she was
not long for this world. She returned a sennight later. I hadn’t realized…all this time, it was on account of Mrs. Brantham.”
“My boy had a fever,” a woman at the front of the mob said. “She made a tonic, and he recovered.”
A murmur began among the throngs of people, snatches of their words caught from where Sybil remained with her hands painfully
bound behind her.
Plague victims spared and consoled, babies born, comforts delivered to the elderly and the injured. Through it all, several
women continued to glare at the magistrate, equal parts fear and hatred.
“But she’s a witch,” someone cried. “Burn her!”
“It is not her who must be stopped, but the magistrate.” A woman’s voice came from the crowd, harsh with desperation.
Hopkins lifted a brow.
“Save Mrs. Brantham,” another woman cried.
Sybil’s breath caught. Hope flickered anew. Hope and gratitude for the people who had not forgotten her in her time of need.
“Kill the magistrate,” a woman cried. “Kill him for what he’s done to us.”
The violence of the cry summoned the bloodlust of the crowd. Gone was the uncertainty that had left them shifting their weight
from foot to foot. Their faces were florid with outrage, their voices sharp with judgment.
With the need for vengeance.
“Guards,” Hopkins shouted above the din.
The younger guard who had allowed the little girl to flee that fateful night put his hands out, blocking the other guards
from coming forward. “My sister said ye touched her.” He stared at the magistrate, his eyes blazing with hate. “I didn’t believe
her at the time…” He tucked his right fist into his left, popping the bones there, then he turned to the mob. “Kill the magistrate!”
The answering cry was deafening. “Kill him!”
Robert Walsingham looked out at the wrath calling for his blood and roared at them like a beast, spittle stretching between
his teeth like cobwebs. Then he turned toward the pyre and flung the torch upon it with all the force of his rage—one final
act of control before he lost it to the mob.
The tinder caught at once, despite the spit of rain earlier. Sybil jerked from the heat, held by the stake at her back.
The magistrate did not stay to witness his handiwork but dashed round the pyre to the open field leading to town. A coward
with his back to those whom he had wronged. Those who now wanted revenge and gave chase.
Sybil stared at the pulse of light beneath the logs. Fire glowed in its depths, fanned to life by the sweep of wind. Flames erupted all around her and smoke clogged the air, filling her lungs, her nose, her mouth. She coughed, bringing a lungful of the polluted air even deeper.
A tongue of fire licked at the hem of her shift, flicking over her skin with intense pain.
For all Kat’s efforts and the grief of Anne’s admission, Sybil would still die.