The Wise Woman by Philippa Gregory Read Free Book Online

trudge there and back on the slippery riverside track or the exposed high road. Alys missed the well-cooked rich food of the nunnery and became paler and thinner. Her face grew gaunt and strained. When she went into Bowes one day a child shied a stone at the back of her gown and as she turned and cursed him he howled with fright at the blank, mad anger of her eyes.
    With the cold weather came sickness. Every day another person came to tap on Morach’s door and ask her or Alys for a spell or a draught or a favor to keep away the flux or chills or fevers. There were four childbirths in Bowes and Alys went with Morach and dragged bloody, undersized babies screaming into the world.
    “You have the hands for it,” Morach said, looking at Alys’s slim long fingers. “And you practiced on half a dozen paupers’ babies at that nunnery of yours. You can do all the childbirths. You have the skills and I’m getting too old to go out at midnight.”
    Alys looked at her with silent hatred. Childbirth was the most dangerous task for a wise woman. Too much could go wrong, there were two lives at risk, people wanted both the mother and the child to survive and blamed the midwife for sickness and death. Morach feared failure, feared the hatred of the village. It was safer for her to send Alys alone.
    The village was nervous, suspicious. A wise woman had been taken up at Boldron, not four miles away, taken and charged with plaguing her neighbor’s cattle. The evidence against her was dramatic. Neighbors swore they had seen her running down the river, her feet moving swiftly over the water but dry-shod. Someone had seen her whispering into the ear of a horse, and the horse had gone lame. A woman said that they had jostled each other for a flitch of bacon at Castleton market and that ever since her arm had ached and she feared it would rot and fall off. A man swore that he had ridden the wise woman down in the fog on Boldron Lane and she had cursed him and at once his horse shied and he had fallen. A little boy from the village attested that he had seen her flying and talking with the doves at the manor dovecot. All the country had evidence against her, the trial took days.
    “It’s all nonsense,” Alys said, coming back from Bowes with the news. “Chances are that could happen to anyone, a little child’s bad dream. It’s as if they had gone mad. They are listening to everything. Anyone can say anything against her.”
    Morach looked grim. “It’s a bad fashion,” she said, surly. Alys dumped a sack of goods on the floor beside the fire and threw three fatty rashers of bacon into the broth bubbling in the three-legged pot. “A bad fashion,” Morach said again. “I’ve seen it come through before, like a plague. Sometimes this time of year, sometimes midsummer. Whenever people are restless and idle and spiteful.”
    Alys looked at her fearfully. “Why do they do it?” she asked.
    “Sport,” Morach said. “It’s a dull time of year, autumn. And this Sepreubo is wickedly cold. People sit around fires and tell stories to frighten themselves. There’s colds and agues that nothing can cure. There’s winter and starvation around the corner. They need someone to blame. And they like to mass together, to shout and name names. They’re an animal then, an animal with a hundred mouths and a hundred beating hearts and no thought at all. Just appetites.”
    “What will they do to her?” Alys asked.
    Morach spat accurately into the fire. “They’ve started already,” she said. “They’ve searched her for marks that she has been suckling the devil and they’ve burned the marks off with a poker. If the wounds show pus, that proves witchcraft. They’ll strap her hands and legs and throw her in the River Greta. If she comes up alive—that’s witchcraft. They might make her put her hand in the blacksmith’s fire and swear her innocence. They might tie her out on the moor all night to see if the devil rescues her. They’ll