Page 43 of The Battle of the Bookshops
“What’s for supper?” she asked, linking arms with Flo and gently leading her away to the flat upstairs. Flo would work all night if Jules let her.
Chapter 18
“So, weird, eh?” Charlie said.
Charlie, Jules, and Flo were gathered in the back office, grabbing lunch—tea and toasted cheese sandwiches—in between serving customers. Jules had passed Charlie’s transcript of the grimoire over to Flo to read, but it had taken ages for her to get around to it, the shop was keeping her so busy. At last, she had finished it the previous evening, and now they were comparing notes.
“‘Weird’ is exactly the word,” said Flo, nodding at Charlie. “I mean, the recipes are fascinating, but it’s the ending. She appears to disintegrate—those strange bits where she’s casting hexes on all and sundry, thinking she’s bewitched, that evil spirits are surrounding her... poisoning her food... She was delusional, for sure. I mean, wasn’t she?” Flo asked, her head to one side.
“You think she was ill?” asked Charlie.
“Well, I don’t think she wasactuallybewitched, if that’s what you’re asking,” said Flo, rather more sharply than usual.
“It’s heartbreaking watching this poor woman fall apart,” said Jules, a sheen of tears glazing her eyes and surprising her. She blinked rapidly. It was ridiculous crying in sympathy for a woman who had—regardless of what had finally happened to her—definitelydied more than three hundred years earlier. “And it ends so suddenly,” she mused. “I mean, I’ve been thinking that’s when she died and—you know what?—maybe that strange mental state was part of her final illness.”
“Makes sense,” said Charlie.
“Or,” Jules speculated, “maybe she was killed. Maybe they reallywereout to get her.”
Silence fell. They all chewed thoughtfully.
“We could try and find out what happened,” Jules went on.
“How?” asked Flo.
“I don’t know, but there are sources. Parish records, for example,” said Jules. “I could ask the vicar up at Saint Thomas’s on the hill. I was going to go and speak to him anyway, to ask if her grave was in the churchyard there.”
“I don’t somehow get the impression our Biddy Capelthorne was much of a churchgoer,” said Flo.
“Doesn’t need to be, necessarily,” Jules asserted. “The church records should cover everyone. It was one of the Church’s jobs at the time to collect basic data for the Crown. I mean, no one else was doing it. That’s the one useful thing my history A level has ever taught me. So, let’s think... what do we know? We know she was alive during the seventeenth century and, assuming an average lifespan at the time, was around sixty.”
“If that,” said Charlie.
Jules nodded. “I know, it’s tricky, but we’ve got to start withsomeassumptions. The last dated entry in the book is 1685, so, if that’s roughly when she died, she would likely have been born around or after 1620. And we think she was living in Portneath, possibly in this very building. We could look for a birth record? A marriage, maybe? A record of the death for sure.”
“That second one doesn’t look likely,” said Charlie. “She didn’t seem the marrying type.”
“Sensible woman,” muttered Flo and Jules in tandem.
Charlie gave them both a comically sideways look. “Aren’tyouboth the hopeless romantics.” He chuckled, popping in the last mouthful of cheese toastie and wiping his greasy fingers on a piece of kitchen towel.
“The death records are the place to start,” Jules went on, handing Charlie her plate for the washing up. “1685 onward. It shouldn’t take long, unless there are hundreds... I mean, like, was there an outbreak of plague around that time? Could it have been something like the black death that killed her? I don’t suppose a symptom of the black death was thinking your neighbors were bewitching you, was it?”
“I think it finished people off quite quickly,” suggested Charlie. “So maybe not the plague, but... you know whatwashappening around those dates?”
The two women looked blank.
“So, how about witch hunts, maybe?” Charlie ventured.
“Ooh, the witch trials!” said Flo. “Nowthatwould be amazing. Wasn’t there someone called the witch-hunter general or something around that time?”
“The witchfinder general, Matthew Hopkins,” said Charlie. “He was only really active for a couple of years. I think he died young in the mid-seventeenth century—sixteen forty-something—thereabouts.”
“Gosh, two years, that’s such a short time,” commented Flo. “How washethe expert?”
“Self-declared,” admitted Charlie with a smile. “He didn’t lack self-confidence. He wrote a really famous book about how to carry out a witch hunt calledThe Discovery of Witches,” Charlie went on. “In antiquarian book terms, it’s basically the Ark of the Covenant, so copies of it are pretty much priceless.” Charlie’s eyes lit up at the thought of discovering a copy.
“Well, he certainly made his mark,” pondered Jules. “I know nothing about witches and evenI’vevaguely heard of him.”
