6. DAWN IN AMBERSOLE

The morning after the witch burning, everyone is uncharacteristically quiet...

After the night was over came the dawn. It had to, because that’s the way of things.

The air was filled with the acrid remnants of smoke and the still almost appetising aroma of roast Witch. The crowds had dissipated, some to their local homes and others to their separate villages several miles away. They were all weary. It had, after all, been a long night, the longest for a very long time.

That dawn brought with it a strange, almost unearthly, silence. Nobody ventured out of their cottages even though the Priest was going berserk because not a single worshipper had appeared in his church for matins and he was very, very cross.

He had got up especially for this service even though he was as weary as everyone else, and so he expected the entire population of Ambersole to do the same. (Ambersole was the particular village where a particular Cobweb family lived and was so-called because someone a couple of centuries earlier had found a chunk of yellow stone in the ground as he had dug a fresh grave in the graveyard by the church)

But the Priest had forced himself to waken at his usual hour, much to the annoyance of his boyfriend who blearily demanded an extra hour or two in bed and was chastised with the birch for his insolence, then, when he wept bitter years, kissed better. That priest could be so forgiving even though neglect by his congregation aroused his more berserk muscles.

So dawn had well passed and the village had yet to yawn.

Then, and there was nobody alert enough to be shocked, in the rare and unnatural silence that marred the first few hours of the day that followed a particularly nasty burning, a door opened.

It opened with a creak and a spine tingling squeak, but it opened wide, pushed from within.

“Good morning, world,” said a little voice, and the year-old grotesquely tiny figure of Janie Cobweb, her hair flowing long in the gentle breeze of a new day and evidence of red colouring on her lips left over from the previous evening and a meeting with a quill with a supply of red ink applied for cosmetic purposes, stepped out and inhaled the day.

Nobody answered, but then there was nobody who wasn’t totally ashamed of themselves. Last night they had attended the burning of a witch and even now with the light of a new day they all knew to the last man and woman amongst them that it had been a false accusation and a very false burning. And that, they each concluded in their fair minds, was an abomination not to be thought of in the light of day, so they slept on.

“Come on, world, good morning!” shouted Janie Cobweb in her shrillest voice. But it was nowhere shrill enough. It might have penetrated dreams, it might have found its way into nightmares, it may even have woken the odd soul up, but it was totally ignored.

Unless, that is, you count the Priest who was still berserk.

That Priest decided that enough was very much enough. He needed worshippers and their tithes and gifts in much the same way as the baby Janie Cobweb now realised she needed a teat to suck on. So, as Janie greeted the world with a cheery good morning for the third time, the Priest stomped out of his church and marched with the reddest of red faces, as crimson as little Janie’s lips, towards the sound of a human voice, that of the infant Cobweb.

And he stood in front of the pretty little mite and scowled.

“It was your fault, the Lord help you,” he growled.

“We don’t mention that name in this house,” replied the infant, “we have nothing to do with him. Not here. Not in this house.”

“The Cobweb woman...” began the Priest, but the child interrupted him.

“My mummy,” she interjected.

“Your mummy, yes, her, the Cobweb woman...”

“With the nice milky teats...”

“If you say so. But it was your fault that she was burned. It was you who betrayed her. It was you who denounced the poor Christian soul...”

“We don’t mention that kind of soul, not in this house,” whispered Janie Cobweb in the kind of voice that sent shivers down the Priest’s spine and made him take a good step and a half backwards.

“It was you who...” continued the Priest, and then he seemed to be lost for words, so the infant Janie provided some for him.

“It was me who told the silly fat Witchfinder that she was a witch,” she said, “because I wanted a nice warm bonfire to warm my tootsies by, and I knew that if she was a real genuine witch she would get out of trouble easy peasy. Witches do, don’t they? They use magic and if a fire burns them they escape? It’s well known, isn’t it?”

“Maybe,” mooted the Priest.

“So I thought she would do just that and make a theatrical get-away. I thought she’d get famous because she escaped the Burning Field in a flash of light and the roar of thunder. And then daddy would get all the more famous by writing an ode in honour of her feat. But she didn’t get away. She burned. And so did her teats, and I want to suckle because I’m hungry.”

“You should have thought about that before you told lies, then!” snapped the Priest. “You are, it seems, the most evil of babies. Why, the very fact that you can talk so offensively is evidence that you are in league with evil forces… maybe it is you who are the witch and therefore you who ought to have been bound to the stake and incinerated and not your poor dear mother who, incidentally, hasn’t paid her tithes yet this month. What do you say to that, eh?”

For the first time in her twelve months of life Janie Cobweb seemed to be at a loss when it came to replying. But she held the Priest’s eyes firmly with her own, seeming to bore through his and into his brain until he had to look away. He had met his match, he knew that, and his match was a mewling baby at a loss without a teat to suck upon.

“If I am a witch I charge you to burn me,” she said at length, a challenge that may well have been one too far but for the sudden arrival through the door that she had left open of Jed Cobweb.

“You didn’t come to me last night,” hissed the Priest when he saw him, “and I waited in my biggest and best codpiece.”

“I had better things to do!” snapped Jed. “Now then, child, into the house with you. Before you do what your mother did and let your mouth condemn you!”

Then, when Janie had uncharacteristically obeyed him and taken herself back into the castle-house of the Cobwebs, Jed turned to the Priest with a scowl on his face.

“You’d best keep your nose out of things that don’t concern you,” he snarled, “or there are some who might start wondering where your lover-boys go when you have lost interest in them. They might question the little row of mounds in the churchyard, close enough to the graves to almost be of them. And they might start to ask who lies within them, keeping the daisy roots warm through the long winter nights...”

“You … you … you...” grated the Priest, but as he turned to go Jed noticed how he seemed to blush sunset-red in the gradually lightening day.

“I’ve hit a raw nerve there, then. We’ll have to see, sooner or later,” he muttered to the vanishing back of the holy man, “but until we do I think there’s a poem I might write about the sorrowful tears of a mother when the flames reach out to her...”

“And the devil incarnate and his pretty odes, the fiend who might have saved her...” added the small and spiteful voice of Janie Cobweb knowingly from inside the house.

© Peter Rogerson 13.11.17