Chapter Sixty-Nine
So Mote It Be
Manningtree, England
Matthew Hopkins sputtered on a choked gasp that wrenched him from his sleep. A cough wracked through him, his body convulsing.
He swallowed to soothe the ache in his throat and lay back upon a pile of feather pillows, a veritable cloud of luxury.
While he hated being relegated to his home in Manningtree, he was grateful for his own bed in his state of illness. He did
miss the travel though, the way those provincial towns welcomed him like a king.
An old bitterness resurfaced.
No one needed witch hunters anymore, deeming the task not only unnecessary, but barbaric. The injustice of how readily he’d
been discarded eroded his soul like a canker.
They’d even accused him of witchcraft!
The accusation was preposterous.
No one wanted to hire a witch hunter suspected of being a witch.
He’d almost been made to perform the swimming test. The fools.
After such defamation, he was run out of any town he approached. Wrongly persecuted.
Horrendously unfair.
At least, even if he could no longer hunt down witches, others might do so in his stead. His publication of A Discovery of Witches had been successful and would spread word of the existence of their evil.
The income from the book had been a much-needed reprieve after the coin coming in from witch hunting had gone dry. Oh, and
it had been lucrative.
A tickle stirred in the back of his pharynx.
Yes, quite lucrative indeed.
He cleared his throat.
Imagine what he might have made if he’d been allowed to continue.
A cough seized him, sending him into a violent fit that left him bent in half. Shaking, he leaned back on his pillows and
wiped the sweat from his brow.
The breath wheezed and rattled in his lungs.
A woman’s face rose in his mind’s eye.
Sybil Brantham.
The handsome widow from Bury St. Edmunds. The one who later wed the vicar who had brought down the witch hunts with his outlandish
sermons.
Her escape from the clutches of death had cost Matthew twenty shillings.
He dragged in a hard gasp, but the air felt too heavy, too thick to breathe. As if something were squeezing around his neck.
Another face filled his mind, the young woman who had been hanged. Her name alluded him, but her comely appearance was there, glowing with youth and beauty.
His lungs sucked against themselves, robbed of air. Desperate for it.
A choked sound came from his gullet, wet and inhumane.
His fingers skimmed the Flemish lace at his throat as he fought to loosen the strings that tied his nightshirt closed.
Panic fluttered at his awareness.
Breathe.
He needed to breathe.
Another face came into his mind. The hideous old hag he’d tossed into the River Lark. The one absolved of witchcraft when
she drowned. Another loss of twenty shillings.
The pressure in his chest was unbearable. What the Devil was cutting off his air?
He clawed at his neck.
More faces. The old vicar who had been hanged the same day as the pretty young woman. And the man and wife. Then came the
others in a flurry, every face, every life, the force around his throat squeezing tighter and tighter and tighter.
He clutched at the bedding, fingers raking over the fine Rennes linen sheets.
Those he’d killed poured through him as the life drained from his body.
Most were old. Poor. Vulnerable. Nearly all were women.
Twenty shillings in his pocket for each.
He was found the following morning by his maid, eyes bulging, tongue swollen and thrust between blue lips. Like the victims
he’d condemned to be hanged.
A couple hundred furlongs away, in the town of Bury St. Edmunds, a similar discovery would be made.
Robert Walsingham lay prone in his prison cell, a hand clasped round his throat, his eyes squeezed out from their lids, a fattened tongue oozing between his lips.
Perhaps he might have been glad for his own death. The last two years of living had been difficult.
The honor of magistrate had been stripped from him, the people exercising their own rights under oyer and terminer in their
outrage. Without the assizes, anarchy swung in all directions.
He’d been thrown into the stocks first. In that moment, everything he’d become—strong, authoritative, in charge—had been tossed
away, and he’d once more been reduced to that scrawny child the other boys kicked around, the one the girls ridiculed, the
one who brought his father such shame.
After, he was sent to prison and had moldered there since.
In the final few moments of life, Robert was forced to accept he’d never be a powerful man again.
Faces trailed through his mind’s eye. The eighteen women and men he’d seen hanged that day, and the countless women he’d hurt
with his words, with his hands, with his unmitigated gall to violate them.
As each face pressed into his brain, the air became harder to breathe. Too thick. Until, at long last, the stream of faces
dwindled, and the life slipped from his body.
On an entirely different continent, Sybil woke in the middle of the night to a sense of peace. Her connection to the earth
had faded after the mark on her arm disappeared. But in that blissful moment, she was bathed in the beauty of the earth, the
soft, breathy sigh of an enchantment that had run its course to completion.
Sybil closed her eyes, savoring the embrace of that power. And the relief that the men who had harmed and killed so many would
never do so again.
Her husband stirred beside her. John reached for her, drawing her against the familiar comfort of his warmth.
She closed her eyes and savored the tranquility in her body and soul.
They had begun their life in the New World, in a place called Maryland, where they could begin again.
There was peace in knowing that their girls would remain safe.
Not only Jacinda, born of her and John’s love so long ago, but also the girl who Sybil had helped escape from prison. Little
Maggie, who learned to speak again after all she had endured, a mother who was slain before her eyes, the unjust arrest under
the accusation of witchcraft in her mother’s place. The New World suited her, winning shy smiles from time to time, and a
tentative curiosity that seemed to grow with each passing day.
The New World suited them all, a chance to start over. To live again.
And they would cherish every moment.