The Courthouse Witch and the Stubborn Judge

• Chapter 1 The Magistrate's Ledger
• Chapter 2 Whispers in the Gallery
• Chapter 3 The Cold Hearth of Assizes
• Chapter 4 An Herbalist in Chains
• Chapter 5 The Body at the Gallowgate
• Chapter 6 A Reluctant Alliance
• Chapter 7 Bound by the Assize
• Chapter 8 Tokens in the Dust
• Chapter 9 The Parchment with Seven Seals
• Chapter 10 Iron and Belladonna
• Chapter 11 Shadows in the Crypt
• Chapter 12 The Clerk's Omission
• Chapter 13 Testimony of the Raven
• Chapter 14 A Difference of Dogma
• Chapter 15 The Alchemist's Legacy
• Chapter 16 Midnight at the Gaol
• Chapter 17 The Poisoned Quill
• Chapter 18 A Thread of Crimson Silk
• Chapter 19 The Bailiff's Secret
• Chapter 20 False Oaths and Holy Water
• Chapter 21 The Scales Unbalanced
• Chapter 22 Into the Witch’s Wood
• Chapter 23 The Verdict of the Flames
• Chapter 24 The Final Deposition
• Chapter 25 Justice in the Dark
• Chapter 26 The Judge's Absolution

The ink in the stone well had frozen twice before noon, crusting over with a dirty gray skin that clung to the quill like lard.

Magistrate Matthew Thorpe did not swear at the ink, because swearing was an offense punishable by a fine of twelve pence, and Thorpe was a man who believed in the law down to the copper farthings. Instead, he dipped a heavy pewter bodkin into the hearth coals, held it steady until the tip glowed cherry-red, and plunged it into the well. The frost died with a sharp, ill-tempered hiss, releasing a pungent vapor of gall-oak and sour vinegar into the drafty corners of the chamber.

"The clerk is late," Thorpe remarked to the empty room.

The room, built of damp millstone grit that wept lime whenever the wind came out of the east, did not contradict him. Neither did the small stack of vellum records perched at his right elbow, each leaf shaved thin, pinned through the margin with an iron brad, and smelling faintly of dried mutton tallow. It was the seventeenth day of November in the year of our Lord 1620, and High Wyche was miserable.

High Wyche was always miserable in the month of the slaughtering of the swine, but this year the damp had settled into the stones like an ague. Outside the high, unglazed lancet window—shuttered now with greased pigskin that let through only a jaundiced, curdled sort of daylight—the market stalls were being packed away in silence. Men did not haggle loudly when their bread cost fourpence more than it had at Michaelmas, and when every ditch from here to the River Ouse held water the color of old pewter.

A boot scraped against the stair outside. It was a heavy tread, lacking the brisk, feather-footed vanity of the younger law clerks who came up from London with velvet slops and ink-stained fingers, fancying themselves little Bacons in the making. This tread belonged to Simon Finch, a man who had served three successive bailiffs, outlived two wives, and possessed a nose shaped remarkably like an unripe winter pear.

The oak door creaked inward, groaning against the damp saltpetre on the flags. Finch slipped inside, bearing a wooden trencher covered by a gray linen cloth that had seen better centuries.

"The mutton is gray, your Honor," Finch said without preamble, setting the trencher beside the ledger. "The cook says the sheep died of the rot before the butcher took his blade to it, but he boiled it with extra hyssop to kill the vapor."

"Then the cook may eat it himself," Thorpe replied, not looking up from his paper. He was busy ruling margins with a lead plummet, drawing lines so straight and hard they threatened to shear through the sheepskin. "Did Master Corve arrive from the Bishop’s Court?"

"He did not." Finch lingered, eyeing the covered dish with the gloomy hope of a terrier whose master has lost his appetite. "He sent his boy on an ambling mare. The boy says the Bishop’s clerk broke his collarbone tumbling from a cart near the Red Bull ditch. He says the road is mostly soup and horse-dung from here to the parish boundary, and no Christian man with an annuity would ride it for less than gold."

Thorpe drew another line. The plummet squeaked. "A fall from a cart does not dissolve a court of quarter-sessions. We sit tomorrow. The sheriff has already summoned the grand jury from the outer wapentakes. Thirty-two freeholders, Finch. Thirty-two men who have left their winter rye unharrowed to come and sit on hard benches while we fine tinker-women for scolding and listen to the weavers lie about their yard-measures."

"There is more than weavers on the list this time, sir," said Finch softly.

Thorpe set the lead down. His hands were long, dry, and clean, with fingernails trimmed square and close to the quick. He had neither rings nor lace; his bands were plain lawn, stiffened with starch that had begun to yellow at the throat. He was forty-two years old, though a stranger looking into the deep furrows between his eyebrows might have judged him fifty. He looked like an instrument designed solely for the purpose of measuring cloth or weighing grain—useful, necessary, and entirely devoid of heat.

"The widow’s daughter?" Thorpe asked.

"Mistress Garrow," Finch corrected, his voice dropping into the lower register men used when speaking of the dead, the French pox, or the King's debts. "They took her at the boundary stone three miles out, near the willow-bottoms. Thomas Clout and five of the parish watch. They had ropes, your Honor. Clout had an iron pitchfork he’d heated in the smithy fire to keep her from blowing on him."

"Did she blow on him?"

"Clout says his dog took the staggers an hour later and died in the ditch," Finch reported with relish. "Foamed at the jaws, he said. Turned around three times to the sun-wise and dropped like a stone."

"The dog was fourteen years old and blind of the left eye," Thorpe said evenly. "I have seen it sleeping by the malt-house since the late Queen's time. It was overdue for a ditch."

"Aye, but it died after she looked at it, sir. That’s what Clout will swear on the Book. And he’s churchwarden this year, so his oath counts double against a woman with no kinsman to put up a five-pound bond."

Thorpe picked up his quill again. He blew upon the point, cleared a dried hair from the split with his thumbnail, and opened the great leather-bound volume that occupied the center of the desk: the High Wyche Session Book. It had brass corners, green ribbon markers eaten away by mice, and the arms of the county stamped in gilt that had long since tarnished to the hue of stagnant pond-water.

"Her name is Rachel," the magistrate said. "Rachel Garrow. Her mother was Margaret, who died in the gaol of the spotted fever before the late King died. The mother sold dried gentian and pennyroyal to the dairymaids. Some said she could tell if a heifer would cast its calf by smelling the milk."

"She had the mark," Finch muttered. "My aunt saw it when they stripped her for the searchers. A blue spot behind the ear, no bigger than a tare-seed, that didn't bleed when they pricked it with a brass bodkin."

"Your aunt is an old fool who cannot tell a flea-bite from the King's evil," Thorpe said, his voice flat and level as a pond. "And bodkins prove nothing except that the man holding them is clumsy. What did they find on the girl?"

Finch reached into the wide pocket of his frieze coat and produced a twist of greasy parchment tied with dried eel-skin. He laid it upon the corner of the ledger as though it might bite.

Thorpe did not shrink from it. He reached out with two fingers, untied the knotted skin, and spread the contents upon the bare wood.

There was no toad’s foot. There were no clippings of unbaptized infants' hair, nor wax images pierced with thorns, nor any of the dark frippery that filled the pamphlets printed at the sign of the Bible in Paul’s Churchyard.

There was only a handful of dried elderberries, shriveled and black as buckshot; three brass pins, bent double; an iron key with four notches filed into the pipe; and a small, smooth piece of bone that had been scraped clean and rubbed with fat until it shone like butter. It was not human; it was the knuckle-bone of a roebuck, such as boys used for the game of dibs.

"Clout says the key opens the churchyard gate," Finch whispered. "The one by the parson’s orchard that’s been padlocked since the great wind took the elm down."

"The parson lost that key three winters ago," Thorpe noted. He picked up the bone, turned it in his gray fingers, and set it down again. "My brother had two like it in his pocket when we were lads at school in Grantham. He used to win marbles with them from the apothecary’s sons."

"She’s twenty years old, your Honor. She has no cottage, no master, and she doesn't take the Sacrament at Michaelmas."

"The latter is an offense under the statute of the third year of his present Majesty," Thorpe said. "It costs one shilling for every Sunday’s absence, to be levied by the churchwardens upon her goods and chattels. Since she has neither goods nor chattels, the law provides she be set in the stocks for the space of four hours, or until she find sureties for her good behavior. It does not provide that Thomas Clout may burn her with a pitchfork."

He picked up the bodkin again, dipping it into the charcoal ink to make the entry.

Rachel Garrow, spinster. Committed by the information of T. Clout, yeoman, upon suspicion of—

The pen paused. A drop of dark liquid trembled on the nib, fell, and spread into a black blot upon the calfskin.

Thorpe stared at the blot. He hated blots. His ledger was a monument to order in a shire where men moved boundary-stones in the dark, watered their ale, and let their ditches choke with alder-scrub until the king's highway became a swamp. Every line was straight; every crime had its statutory chapter and section noted in the margin; every penalty was measured out in groats and pence with the cold indifference of an apothecary’s scale.

"There is another matter," Finch said. He shifted his weight from one gouty heel to the other.

"The sheep-stealers from the high moss?"

"No, sir. Master Masterson."

Thorpe looked up sharply. "The bailiff?"

"His boy found him an hour before the Angelus. In the small counting-room beneath the council-house. The door was bolted on the inside, your Honor. They had to take an iron crow to the hinges to get in."

"He has had an apoplexy," Thorpe said, though his hand remained motionless above the ruined parchment. "Masterson was fifty-eight years of age, he drank two quarts of small beer before breakfast, and his neck was as thick as an ox's brisket. I warned him against the salted herrings three weeks ago."

"It wasn't an apoplexy," Finch said. His voice was no longer eager; it had gone dry and thin, like parchment left in the sun. "His eyes were open, sir. He was sitting at his high desk with his quill in his hand, just like you are now. And his tongue—"

"Well?"

"His tongue was black, sir. Black as an old kettle, and swollen so thick he couldn't have pulled his jaws together if you’d struck him with a mallet. And on the table, right before him, there wasn't no gold nor no silver, though the Michaelmas rents were collected on Tuesday. There was only water."

"Water?"

"A bowl of it. Clear water from the town well, sitting in his mother’s silver porringer. And floating right in the middle of it, sir, was a dead wren with its throat cut."

Thorpe set the quill down with great deliberation. He took up the small wooden sand-box, poured a fine shower of gray grit over the blot he had made, and waited while the dust drank up the ink.

"Masterson was a collector of the King's subsidies," Thorpe said slowly. "He had forty-eight pounds of the loan-money in his iron chest. Did they look in the chest?"

"The chest was locked," Finch replied. "The key was on his chain, tucked into his doublet next to his heart. But when they turned the key, the chest was as empty as an overturned crock. Not a groat. Not a scrap of receipt-paper. Nothing but three dried bay leaves and a handful of coarse salt."

The wind struck the greased pigskin in the window, making it drum like an unstrung tabor. Down in the courtyard below, someone began to shout—a high, ragged noise that was cut short by the wet thud of a halberd-butt striking the cobbles.

Thorpe stood up. He was taller than most men in the wapentake, though his shoulders had taken on the slight curve of a man who spent ten hours a day leaning over small writing. He smoothed his dark woollen coat, picked up his flat beaver hat from the peg behind the door, and tucked the small piece of roebuck bone into his waistcoat pocket.

"Where is she now?" he asked.

"In the cellar under the gatehouse," said Finch. "Clout wanted to put her in the cage on the bridge, but the parson said the water underneath would give her power. He said witches can’t abide dry limestone, so they threw her down among the salt-barrels."

"The parson is an ass," Thorpe said, adjusting his brim. "The salt belongs to the town corporation, and if the barrels are breached, the herring-curing will be spoiled before the frost sets in. Come, Finch. Let us go and see Master Masterson’s tongue."

They went down the narrow spiral of the stairs, their boots ringing on the steps where forty generations of bailiffs, thieves, and constables had worn the gritstone into smooth, greasy hollows.

The air in the lower hall was thick with the reek of wet frieze, stale ale, and the sharp, ammonia bite of the town watch, who had crowded into the warmth near the iron brazier. There were eight of them, armed with rusty bills and ash-staves, their faces gray with lack of sleep and pale with that particular, hollow-eyed dread that takes hold of country folk when an important man dies without a priest to hold his hand.

At the sight of the magistrate, they parted like sheep before a sheep-dog, shuffling their feet and pulling their greasy caps.

"Your Honor," said Thomas Clout. He was a great, raw-boned man with a beard the color of dried hay and a squint that made him look as though he were always peering through a keyhole. He held his billhead low, the iron stained with something dark that looked like ditch-mud but might not have been. "We’ve got her. She’s below. She tried to cast an eye on young Hob when we took her by the hedge, but I had a bit of rowan-tree tucked into my band, praise be to God, and it broke the stroke."

"Did it?" Thorpe stopped, his cold gray eyes fixing upon the churchwarden's face until the man shifted his grip on the wood. "Then you have saved Hob a shilling's worth of doctoring. But you have left your cart in the middle of the bridge, Clout, and the malt-wagon from Low Wyche cannot pass. Go and move it before the horses freeze to the timbers."

"Sir—the bailiff—"

"The bailiff is dead, which means he is beyond your assistance and mine," Thorpe said. "The King's highway, however, remains under my jurisdiction. Clear the bridge."

He did not wait to see the order obeyed. He walked out into the lane, Finch trailing behind him like a dingy shadow, his gray coat flapping against his stockings in the raw, salt-scented wind that came blowing over the marsh from the sea.

The public gallery of the High Wyche courthouse was built of green timber forty years earlier, and forty years of wet river-fog had warped the boards into shapes that groaned under the weight of even a modest sins-and-trespasses crowd. Today, the gallery did not merely groan; it creaked like an overloaded timber-hoy running aground in the shoals.

Word had traveled through the lanes faster than the drizzle that slicked the cobbles. Long before Thorpe reached the low, pointed arch of the council-house undercroft, the market folk had abandoned their stalls. The fish-wives had left their cod-tubs covered with dripping burlap; the tanners smelled faintly of sour mash and stale brine; and half a dozen weavers from the alleys behind St. Jude’s had crowded onto the upper benches, their aprons still dusted with blue woad and sheep-oil. They sat shoulder to shoulder, their breath rising toward the unplaned rafters in pale, tremulous plumes that smelled of small ale, onions, and cheap tallow candles.

Every man and woman among them was whispering.

It was not the loud, brawling murmur that usually accompanied a sheep-stealer’s trial or the jolly scuffle of a scold being sentenced to the ducking-stool. It was a dry, rustling noise, like rats dragging dry husks beneath a barn floor.

"They say his teeth fell out like dried corn into his hand," whispered an old crone whose woollen kerchief was pinned with a rusty nail. She was perched above the jury box, leaning so far over the rail that her fringe threatened to brush the bald crown of the parish clerk below. "Old Goody Garrow gave him the black bile three winters back when he took her brass skillet for the poor-cess. She told him the salt-fish would stick in his craw, and now the girl’s finished the thread."

"’Twasn't dry corn," hissed a journeyman butcher beside her, wiping grease from his thumb onto his thigh. "My lad saw the undertaker’s men carrying the linen through the yard. They couldn't get his jaw shut on the penny. He was bit clean through his own cheek, and there was a yellow toad sitting on his neck as fat as a pullet. It skipped straight down the privy drain when the watch broke the bar."

"God preserve the King and the three estates," murmured a fuller in the corner, crossing himself hastily before remembering that the King’s justices frowned on such popish gestures, then converting the motion into a vigorous scratching of his chin. "Master Masterson had forty pound in gold angels for the river-wall. If the Devil’s taken the gold and the bailiff together, who’s to pay the ditchers come Candlemas?"

The gallery’s hum cut out with the suddenness of a snapped bowstring when the low door beside the dais clicked.

Magistrate Thorpe entered not with a flourish of scarlet robes—provincial sessions warranted no such vanity—but with the quiet, dusty deliberation of an accountant entering his ledger-house. He took off his beaver hat, hung it upon the wooden peg behind the high-backed bench, and laid his gloved hands upon the rail. Behind him came Finch, carrying a fresh stone ink-bottle, three quill barrels that had been soaked in oil to keep them from splitting in the frost, and a bundle of clean toweling for the ink-blots.

Thorpe did not look up at the gallery. He knew who was there without lifting his eyes. There would be six members of the town council who owed money to Masterson’s estate; three maltsters who hoped the bailiff’s accounts would be burned before the audit; and eighty-odd idle bodies who wished to see someone whipped, hanged, or at least terrified into tears before the midday bell.

Instead of taking his seat upon the carved oak chair with the county arms, Thorpe remained standing. He looked down into the well of the court.

The council-house had not been built for the dead. It had been built two centuries before for the storing of wool-bales and the measuring of grain-measures, and the cold floor was still paved with river-pebbles set in lime. In the center of the floor, between the clerk’s table and the bar where prisoners stood to plead their clergy or their necks, a trestle table had been cleared of its usual burden of dry measures and sample-sheaves.

Upon the trestle lay a long, lumpy shape under a gray horse-cloth.

At the head of the table stood Master Nicholas Povey, the town surgeon. Povey was a small, bustling man whose cuffs were always turned back three inches to reveal forearms covered in reddish fur like a squirrel’s. He had a pair of iron shears tucked into his girdle and smelled powerfully of camphor and dry cloves, which he chewed incessantly to ward off the corrupt air of the lower wards.

"Is the coroner coming from Newark?" Thorpe asked. His voice was not loud, but it had that dry, flat clarity that carried through the damp room, cutting through the whispering above like an iron coulter through bog-turf.

"The Newark coroner sent word he has the stone, your Honor," Finch supplied from the clerk's desk, where he was trimming a pen with a horn-handled knife. "He says he cannot sit a gelding without bleeding into his breeches. He sends his deputation under the seal of the shire to your Honor to take the view."

Thorpe’s mouth hardened by a fraction of an inch. A deputation meant two things: three extra folios of Latin depositions to be copied in duplicate, and no fee from the county chest because he was already an acting justice within the wapentake.

"Very well," Thorpe said. He descended the three shallow steps from the bench, his shoes making a hollow, clock-like strike upon the flags. He approached the trestle. "Uncover him, Master Povey."

The surgeon glanced up at the gallery, where eighty necks craned forward simultaneously, making the timber railing groan a warning. With a practiced twist of his wrist, Povey caught the corner of the horse-cloth and peeled it back to the waist.

The dead bailiff did not look like an instrument of the King’s majesty. He looked like an enormous, discarded sack of suet that had been dropped from a hay-wain into a blacksmith’s tub.

His face was not pale with the decent, waxy gray of men who had died of the quinsy or the bloody flux. It was a mottled, purplish black, the color of an overripe damson plum that had lain in the grass until the wasps had finished with it. His tongue, as Finch had reported, was indeed thrust between his teeth—thick, dark, and dry as a salt neat's tongue hung in a chimney. His hands were curled into rigid, claw-like fists, the nails driven so deep into his own palms that the skin had broken, though no blood had run from the cuts.

"He died hard," Thorpe observed. His eyes moved methodically from the swollen earlobes to the gray stubble on the chin, noting everything, recording it upon the gray slate of his memory. "What is this mark upon the neck?"

Povey leaned over, his spectacles—held together at the bridge by a twist of copper wire—slipping down his sweaty nose. He touched the skin below the bailiff’s left jaw with a horn spatula.

"A lividity, your Honor. Or a stroke from an invisible hand. Thomas Clout says—"

"I did not ask what Thomas Clout says," Thorpe interrupted coldly. "Thomas Clout cannot distinguish between a glandered horse and a bishop. Is the windpipe crushed? Was there a cord?"

"No cord, sir," Povey replied, though he lowered his voice so the gallery would not lose the thrill of mystery. "The skin is whole. Not a bruise upon the throat such as an apprentice might make with an apron-string. Yet the breath was choked out of him as clean as if he’d been thrown into thirty fathoms of salt water. Look at the eyes, your Honor."

Thorpe leaned down. The dead eyes were wide, the pupils dilated until they had swallowed nearly the whole of the gray iris, reflecting the dim daylight from the lancet windows like two bits of dirty horn. There was no peace in them; there was only a hard, furious terror.

"And the vessel?" Thorpe asked.

Povey turned to the small side-table, where an object had been placed upon a clean napkin. It was an ordinary silver porringer with two scrolled handles, the sort of plate a substantial burgess might receive from his godparents at his christening. The bowl was three-quarters full of clear, still water.

Floating upon the surface was a common wren. Its tiny, russet feathers were matted and greasy, and its head hung backward at an impossible angle, exposing a thin, red slit across the throat that looked as neat as if it had been made by an apothecary's lancet.

Thorpe did not touch the silver. He bent his head, smelling the water.

"Rain-water," he said. "Not well-water. It smells of the thatch."

"It is an old work, sir," whispered Povey, his eyes darting toward the gallery. "The wren is the King of Birds in the old rhymes. To slit its pipe and set it swimming in silver... that’s the clavis mortis. The key of the marrow. My grandmother used to say if an old woman names you to a bird and drowns it in salt or clear water before the moon turns, your liver shrivels like a roasted turnip."

"Your grandmother spent fifty years selling dried sage and gin to weavers, Master Povey. Her knowledge of natural philosophy was likely limited by her inventory." Thorpe straightened his back. "Where is the bird’s blood? If its throat was cut over the bowl, the water would be red."

The surgeon blinked through his wired spectacles. "Why... I had not looked for that, your Honor."

"The water is clear," Thorpe noted, pointing with his gloved finger. "There is not a trace of gore in the porringer, nor upon the rim. The bird was slaughtered elsewhere, its feathers dried, and then placed into the basin after the blood had ceased to flow. That is not sorcery, Master Povey. That is an arrangement."

A voice from the gallery above broke the hush. It was not a whisper; it was the shrill, dry croak of old Mother Clout, Thomas Clout’s widowed sister, who had not missed an execution since the Spanish Armada.

"The witch done it!" she shrieked, leaning over the timber rail until her sleeves fluttered like crow's wings. "She done it with the bone she took from the grave! Masterson wouldn't give her mother the parish allowance, and she cursed him by the seven wells! Let the water run cold on him, she said! We heard her by the mill-race!"

A murmur of agreement ran through the benches. Men stamped their heavy clogs upon the oak floor, setting up a dull, rhythmic thud that vibrated through the stone pillars.

"Aye! Bring her out!"

"Let’s see if she can look upon the corpse without bleeding!"

"To the horse-pond with her! If she floats, she’s the Devil’s! If she sinks, we’ll bury her in the churchyard!"

Thorpe did not shout. He reached out his right hand, took up the heavy iron tipstaff that lay upon the clerk's table—a foot-long rod of solid iron surmounted by a brass crown—and struck the oak rail with a single, sharp blow.

The sound was like a pistol shot in the enclosed room. The plaster in the ceiling shivered, dropping a fine white shower of dust onto the hats of the grand jurymen below.

The gallery fell silent.

"This is not a market-cross," Thorpe said, his voice flat, steady, and chillingly devoid of anger. "This is the King’s Court of General Quarter Sessions of the Peace. If any man, woman, or apprentice speaks again without being called upon by the crier, I shall commit them to the common gaol for forty-eight hours for contempt of the King’s authority, without bail or mainprise. And as the gaol is currently occupied by four cases of smallpox and several dead rats, you will find the accommodations less airy than this room."

He paused, his eyes sweeping the gallery. Not a man moved. Even the old crone drew her head back behind the uprights, her lips moving in a soundless curse that she was careful not to aim at the magistrate.

Thorpe turned back to the bailiff's body. He lifted the dead man’s right hand.

The fingers were stiff with the onset of the rigor, cold as river clay. Under the fingernails was not ditch-mud, nor the soot of a hearth, but a faint, yellowish powder that adhered to the skin like pollen. Thorpe leaned closer, his brow furrowing. He touched his own forefinger to the dead thumb, lifted a grain of the yellow dust, and brought it to his nose.

It smelled neither of brimstone nor the grave. It had the dry, bitter scent of sulfur, mixed with the greasy tang of sheep-tallow and something else—something sharp and herbal, like bruised fennel.

"Finch," Thorpe said quietly.

"Sir?"

"Did you search the counting-room yourself?"

"I was there with the watch, your Honor," Finch said, coming down the steps with his ink-horn dangling from his finger. "We found the door barred with the great oak bar. The window has four iron grates, each as thick as my thumb, set into the gritstone with lead. A stoat couldn't have squeezed through them without scraping its ribs."

"And the floor?"

"Flagstones, sir. Six inches thick, laid over dry lime. No cellar under that part of the undercroft; it sits right on the rock of the hill."

"Then Master Masterson sat alone in a stone box," Thorpe said, "with his door barred from the inside, his grates whole, and forty-eight pounds of the King's taxes in his iron chest. He had time to take his mother's porringer, fill it with rain-water from some source not yet determined, float a dead songbird upon it, lock his money-box, empty it into the air, and then die of a fit that turned his tongue the color of a winter boot."

Thorpe wiped his dusty finger on the gray cloth.

"It is a remarkably busy afternoon for a man who was allegedly struck dead by an old woman's glance three miles away in the willow-bottoms."

"Sir," Finch muttered, his face pale, "the people will have it that it's witchcraft. If you tell them it's a theft, they'll say you're screening the Devil to save the parish the cost of a burning. Parson Hall has already prepared his sermon for Sunday. He’s taking his text from the Book of Samuel: Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft. He told the churchwardens that the black dog seen by the tithe-barn was the very same spirit that gave Margaret Garrow her milk-charms."

"Parson Hall may preach on whatever text suits his digestion," Thorpe said, adjusting his plain lawn bands. "The King's law does not run on texts from Samuel; it runs on the statutes of the realm and the evidence of twelve men upon their oaths. We cannot hang a woman for having an old bone in her pocket when the money was taken by a person who possessed the key to the counting-house."

"The key was in the bailiff's pocket, sir," Finch reminded him. "I saw Clout take it off the chain. The iron was so cold it had stuck to the linen of his doublet."

Thorpe did not answer immediately. He looked at the porringer again.

There was something else in the water—something he had not noticed from the bench. Settled at the very bottom of the silver bowl, beneath the floating wren, were three small, shiny objects. They were not pebbles. They were gray, rounded pellets of lead, such as were cast for fowling-pieces, each one notched with a cross-cut across the top to make the metal spread when it struck flesh.

"Master Povey."

"Sir?"

"Did Masterson keep a fowling-piece?"

"Never in his life, your Honor," the surgeon said, shaking his head until his wired glasses rattled. "He was terrified of gunpowder ever since the plot at Westminster. He wouldn't allow so much as a squib to be let off in the yard on the fifth of November. He said it was an invention of the Jesuits to deafen honest men."

"Then someone has been generous with their ammunition," Thorpe murmured.

He turned toward the low door that led down into the gatehouse cellar. The air coming up through the cracks in the oak floor was growing colder, carrying with it the damp, saline stink of the salt-herring casks and the sour smell of wet earth.

"Finch."

"Your Honor?"

"Fetch the keys to the under-gaol."

A collective intake of breath came from the gallery. The whispers, which had died down under the magistrate's threat of the iron rod, broke out again with redoubled fury.

"He's going to see her!"

"He'll be bewitched before the Angelus!"

"Look at his bands—they're crooked! She's working on him already!"

Thorpe ignored them as completely as if they had been the cawing of daws in the churchyard elms. He waited until Finch had produced the great ring of iron keys from the drawer of the clerk's table—keys so heavy and black they looked like tools for a siege-engine—and then walked toward the iron-studded door behind the jury benches.

"Your Honor," Finch stammered, his pear-shaped nose twitching with genuine distress. "Thomas Clout says she has her familiar in her apron. He says he heard it whistling like a plover while they were putting the irons on her ankles."

"If it is a plover," Thorpe said, reaching for the door-latch, "it will find very little to feed on in the salt-cellar. And if it is the Devil, Finch, he will have to wait until I have finished the preliminary examination. The King's business comes first."

He thrust the key into the heavy lock. The bolt slid back with a dry, iron shriek that silenced the gallery once more, and Matthew Thorpe stepped down into the dark.