Daughters of the Witching Hill by Mary Sharratt Read Free Book Online Page B

brewed the lungwort for him?"
    "Aye." She looked me over, her eyes strange. "Tell me, Mam. Did you have the powers always? Or did they come to you all sudden-like?"
    I stared up at the thatch and told her I needed my rest, but she wouldn't stop pestering me.
    "You've always sown them herbs," she said. "If we'd nowt else, there were them weeds of yours."
    "And a good thing for you," I said, thinking of the tansy.
    "But when you blessed Matty Holden, you'd no wort with you. Could you not teach me, Mam?"
    "It's not something you want to be meddling with. Look at the state it's left me in."
    "Teach me the charms, Mam, please! I've a good memory."
    "Child, there's more to it than just words."
    "Folk think my squint is enough to curdle butter," Liza said. "If my eyes can curse, sure I could bless if I set my mind to it."
    The notion had lodged itself in my daughter's skull, and there was nowt more I could say.

    When I was well enough to show my face in the New Church again, I was stood at the back with the other poor folk, whilst the yeomen and gentry sat in their pews. I tried to put on a good face, keep my thoughts on the hymns and scriptures, ignore how the Curate stared at me, how everyone looked my way. Word had certainly gone round.
    My old friend Anne Whittle couldn't take her eyes off me. Of all the people in that church, she knew me best, for we'd been best friends during our girlhood, always sharing the other's company back in the days of the processions, our loose-flowing hair crowned with the garlands we'd woven for each other. Such a beauty my Anne had been with her green eyes and her tresses the colour of flax. In secret I used to fancy that she was some highborn lady left by mistake in a labourer's cottage. Full of herself even as a little lass. Burst her spleen if any dared to belittle her. Her temper was fierce enough to make a grown man whimper. Anne forged her own way in life. If one door was locked to her, she'd find another, ever resourceful, never one to give up when she had her mind set on something.
    Catching her eye, I smiled. Her hair, like mine, was grey now, yet her eyes were as keen as they'd ever been. Like me, she'd been luckless in marriage, at least in the beginning. Wed her sweetheart, she had, the best-looking man in Pendle, so she swore, only he'd a wandering eye, and a few years down the line, after her girl Betty was born and the son who didn't live, our Anne found her good man lying in a haystack with Meg Pearson. So what did my friend do but sneak up with a bucket of cold ditchwater and drench them both. In a voice loud enough to be heard from Trawden to Clitheroe, she told her husband that he could have his trollop, for he'd not be welcome in their marriage bed ever again.
    When he died not long afterward, Anne shocked everyone by taking another husband, ten years younger than herself. Though folk had surmised she was too old for bearing by then, she birthed her youngest girl, Anne, a golden-haired child pretty as her mother had been in her youth. Now that my friend's second husband was dead, people had taken to calling her Chattox, her maiden name having been Chadwick, in order to tell her apart from little Annie, her daughter.
    Anne had stood by me in my hour of deepest humiliation, when, twenty-two years ago, the Constable pilloried me for adultery. Pregnant with Kit, the pedlar's bastard, I shrank inside myself, my head and hands locked into the stocks, my face blackened from the sheep dung the crowd lobbed at me. Not caring what anybody thought, my Anne barged her way through the throng to take her place before me. Though I trembled and sobbed, full sorry for myself, she chatted with me as though we were market wives sat over cups of strong October ale.
    "My first husband was an adulterer, as you well know," she'd told me, her face so close to mine that our noses touched, never mind that I was spattered with filth. "Nobody put him in the stocks, but when I threw that cold bucket on him,