7. ON EDUCATING GIRLS

A decade on and... another witch...

When you set your stall out to look ten years into the future it seems that you’re gazing down a long corridor made of time. Ten years, you think, must be akin to a kind of dwarf eternity. It’s ages. That’s why it’s called ten years.

And then it happens, and it passes.

But for Janie Cobweb it wasn’t just ten years that seemed to flash past in the languorous type of flash that time can use. It was almost twelve years, and she had grown from being a baby into being a gorgeous and intelligent creature with bright shining eyes, long hair, and an evil heart.

And in that time one century had given way to another and nothing much happened in Amblesole to mark it. True, far away some bled to death in the Fourth Crusade and nearer to home the Normans lost control of France with yet more blood and gore being involved. But Janie Cobweb didn’t live in France or any part of the disputed Holy Lands, she lived in England, and to be more exact, in Amblesole, a village that had come at the beginning of that decade to the happy conclusion by its inhabitants that burning people was no way to solve the witch problem.

At the age of almost but not quite twelve some girls are still very much children whilst others are just about women, and Janie was one of the latter. In fact, she was so close to being a woman that relative strangers often accused her of being her own mother, which annoyed her, and asked her how many ankle-biters she had. This made her spit and utter obscenities, most of which went unheard or were really badly interpreted into nice things.

By this time a strange metamorphosis had reconverted her village home and it was no longer a stone castle but a wattle and daub shack, or cottage as they liked to call it. Instead of boasting an upper storey it had but the one and instead of there being a suite of rooms, again there was only one. Just like everyone else she had to share the space with everything that had a pulse, so it was just as well they didn’t keep any pets.

It was also just as well that Jed had taken himself off the scene. He’d done that before she was two and was showing so many signs of independence that he concluded that he was redundant. If truth were to be told he would never have been much good anyway. He had been tasked (and this might come as a shock to some of you) to make sure that the evil child survived and when it was perfectly clear to him that she would survive better on her own than if he was in the home where she tempted him several times a day to batter her, he left.

He went on what he euphemistically called a World Tour, which meant he tramped around the neighbouring villages until he chanced upon a widow who had needs, and settled with her, performing once a month on the village green and receiving applause aplenty for the brilliance of his lyrics, which hadn’t as yet progressed beyond the hey-nonny-nonny stage of musicality. But he was happy, and so was the widow, so all was well.

And he was off the scene.

When she was passing seven Janie gave her favourite doll to the girl next door because she had outgrown dolls. Dolls were for little children, not for a bright seven year-old, and the girl next door (who was eight|) accepted it with glee. It was a wooden affair, had excuses for limbs and even managed to wear a twelfth century dress. The spooky thing, though, was it had hair.

Hair that grew.

Hair that needed cutting every so often. So the girl next door was delighted, and proceeded to cut that hair very often indeed.

Then, when she was approaching twelve years of age the events of eleven years earlier had an echo in the village.

The Priest, (not the old one who had been lynched for groping a choirboy but a new one who fancied women) announced that he was going to start educating the local lads in all things Latin. He didn’t bother mentioning the girls because it was widely considered that female brains simply weren’t up to it and would be best employed as part of drudgery, and to most people that was perfectly okay because, sad to say, they believed it to be true. Put more than a scrubbing brush in the way of a female, they thought, and anything might occur and the world might come to a premature end.

The Priest, let it be said at the outset, was a devoted believer in his god. He believed every word of his (Latin) texts, and he could quote verse after verse with deadly accuracy and until tears formed in his eyes at the sad bits. So it was only natural that he should want to spend his empty hours between prayers and services doing something to please that deity. And educating the youth of the village seemed the wisest thing for him to do.

His main problem was that nobody, not the lads and certainly not their parents, wanted him to pass his matins or vespers or anything in between on to their offspring. They were happy the way things were. They were happy to go to church whenever called to do so, kneel at the appropriate time even though parts of the floor were heavily splintered and mutter amen when it seemed to be called for. They did not want the main slaves of the field to be educated (back then people had sons largely to be their agricultural slaves and it allegedly had very little to do with sex months before they were born).

So the Priest, being both enlightened and understanding, decided the time had come for him to produce his lessons on paper or any similar material that came to hand. He wrote down the biblical stories in the tongue of the peasants and handed them out as reading material in lieu of attendance at his actual lessons. And they were gloriously written with exciting bits and tragic bits and even loving bits. He put all of his intellect into his offerings. And all of his love and care and belief.

Which made people suspicious.

That was all right, of course, until somebody asked him why he was doing it.

“I believe it is the duty of every literate man to spread the joys of literacy,” was his, to them, nonsensical reply. I mean, literate? Literacy? What were they?

Then somebody remembered the last incumbent in his office and his fondness for lads.

“You’re not fiddling with them, are you?” he asked, “like the last Priest?”

“What do you take me for?” he almost exploded, “I am a man of God and any accusation along those lines is heresy, and anyway I prefer girls and there aren’t any of those in my classes.”

This got the tongues of the idle wagging, and one thing added to another like nothing being added to nothing producing a great big something, and confessions had been overheard by someone’s blind and deaf uncle and before you could possibly know what was happening the cry went up…

“HE’S NO PRIEST, HE’S A WITCH AND HE’S POISONING OUR KIDS!”

Then someone remembered one of his many sermons. They remembered the bit about not suffering a witch to live. He’d said it often enough because Amblesole, like many villages in those days, had a small army of wise women who could use a strange kind of wisdom and divine which plants might cure a headache and which were good in abortions. And he didn’t trust them because he looked on their medicines as dangerous because they worked whilst his prayers didn’t seem to. He thought their knowledge was funnelled to them by forces of true evil, dark forces that had their headquarters with Satan in Hell.

“Thou shall not suffer a witch to live!” someone said, quoting him verbatim.

It had only been a decade or thereabouts since the Cobweb so-called witch had been burnt at the stake, and here once again was a certain and most definite witch, a man at that, a priest even, and he was trying to seduce the youth of the village by his fancy little pamphlets and lies.

“No need to seek out the Witchfinder,” said a voice, a clear and female voice, “Let’s do it! Let’s burn the swine!”

It was Janie Cobweb, and she was filled with glee.

© Peter Rogerson 14.11.17