Page 44 of The Battle of the Bookshops
“He was in East Anglia, though,” said Charlie. “Although he did travel around a bit, I don’t remember anything about him coming all the way down to Devon.”
“But the dates are about right, aren’t they?” asked Jules. “A bit early maybe?”
Charlie nodded. “That said, he sparked quite the anti-witch movement, and that carried on after his death, so witch trials could absolutely have still been a thing in Devon later in the century.”
“You seem mightily well informed about it all,” said Flo, clearly impressed.
“I took a brief, nerdy interest when I was a kid,” admitted Charlie, sounding mildly embarrassed. “It was the whole witchy, werewolf-y, vampire-y schtick. It was huge at the time, in my defense, plus—can you guess?—I took the Stephenie Meyer Twilight franchise über-seriously. I was kind of a geek.”
“Cool,” said Jules. “I’m impressed at the breadth and depth of your nerdiness. I didn’t get much beyond books about ponies and boarding schools myself.” She thought for a moment. “So, yeah, let me talk to the vicar about where we can find some old records, and we can go from there.”
The easiest way for Jules to strike up a conversation with the vicar about the parish records was to accompany Flo to church the following Sunday, which meant regretfully blowing off Roman on their usual Sunday morning coffee. Given her long absence from all things holy, Jules didn’t know whether to be impressed or embarrassed when the vicar—the Reverend Martin Reeves—greeted her by name. He was an amiable man in his mid-forties, with a sweet, motherly-looking wife and three adolescent boys who all looked remarkably like him, except for the beard.
It was Pentecost, and inside the little stone church on the hill, the local schoolchildren had stuck their artwork—collages of doves—all around the walls. The June sunshine was slanting through the stained-glass windows, painting multicolored abstracts onto the stone floors, but there was a chill in the little church that made Jules think of the Montbeau crypt outside. She was glad when the small congregation straggled back out into the warmth of the sun’s rays, most carrying cups and saucers of weak tea from the bubbling urn at the back of the church.
Outside, blustery winds blew cotton-wool clouds rapidly across the sky, plunging the scene from bright to dull and back again, threatening showers.
Jules, awkwardly juggling her cup, saucer, and lone chocolate biscuit, sidled her way over to the vicar and stood unobtrusively by his side while he gave full weight and attention to his discussions of the Sunday school treasure hunt to be held the following week.
“So, Julia,” he said at last, turning to her with a broad smile. “To what do we owe the pleasure?”
“Is it so obvious?” she answered, having the grace to blush just a little.
“We find our young people drift away and then pop up again when they want something—like to have the banns read?” he finished with a questioning raise of the eyebrows.
“Godno,” Jules exclaimed, “I mean goodness no, definitely not that,” she added firmly, before briefly explaining what she was after.
“Fascinating!” he exclaimed. “So, our parish records date from 1538, which is encouragingly far back enough for your dates, but I’m afraid I am going to have to disappoint you if you hope to make a breakthrough today. Saint Thomas’s parish record books have been stored at the county council office in Exeter for many years now. I believe they have everything on microfiche, becauseI know they don’t let many people near the original records these days.”
“Isn’t it amazing births and deaths were recorded so long ago,” marveled Jules politely.
“Oh, they weren’t,” Martin corrected her. “I’m talking about baptisms, marriages, and burials, I’m afraid—nearly the same but not quite; there weren’t many people who escaped being recorded doing at least one of the three. I think it wasn’t until a while after the period you are interested in that actual births and deaths were formally recorded, but the people at the records office will help you with all that.”
“That’s all brilliant, thank you,” said Jules, a little disappointed that there was nothing she could do that day, especially having therefore unnecessarily sat through an hour-long church service.
“If this lady of yours really was local to Portneath, I would expect her to be buried in this churchyard, though,” Martin went on.
Jules’s eyes lit up.
“There are graves here dating back to the fourteen hundreds,” he explained. “That’s the older end.”
He pointed unnecessarily. It was clear where the original graveyard had begun, on the west side of the church where gravestones were in loose rows, tipped drunkenly this way and that, under the shade of two ancient yews that stood sentry either side of the path. In the far corner, waist-high cow parsley frothed daintily. Some smaller, even more ancient-looking gravestones had clearly been moved at some point, the ground repurposed for fresh graves when space ran short, Jules imagined. These stones were propped in a row against the stone wall at the perimeter of the graveyard to the north.
“The inscriptions are very worn on most of those,” Martin admitted, following Jules’s gaze. “And then, of course, you’ve got the Capelthorne crypt on the south side, but I’m pretty sure the oldestinscription on that is around the early eighteen hundreds—after this Biddy Capelthorne’s time, by the sounds of it?”
“Yes, we think so,” agreed Jules. “Judging by what wedoknow, her death will have been around 1685 or so. And so, her body will definitely have been buried here?”
“If she lived in Portneath, yes,” Martin confirmed. “Unless she was a murderer,” he added with a laugh. “If you were a ‘bad lot’ you were hanged and buried at the crossroads.” He smiled broadly as if the very thought were a delight. “That would keep you out of the parish burial records too, of course.”
Then he caught Jules’s horrified expression. “I’m sure she wasn’t,” he added. “I suppose I’ve got a fascination with bad people,” he admitted, shamefaced. “Evil can be compelling, can’t it?”
“Which crossroads? Any?” Jules asked, with an involuntary shudder. Why could she feel a chill at the back of her neck? Surely, it was just from standing there in the full force of the blustery wind.
“Every community had its own ‘crossroads of doom,’” Martin explained. “And I don’t know for sure where ours is, but I reckon it’s pretty relevant that there’s a Hangman’s Lane at that crossroads just outside Portneath on the Middlemass road,” said Martin distractedly. He was waving an acknowledgment in the direction of someone he could see over Jules’s shoulder, his attention already on the next conversation.
Jules sent Flo home to get out of the cold and spent a short while studying what looked like the oldest gravestones before retreating to the flat to warm up. She had had no luck, although she did see a couple of old Capelthorne graves, in addition to the posh Capelthorne crypt, with its polished marble and carved angels at the corners.
“Also,” she said to Flo as they had a late lunch, “we don’t really know whether her Christian name was really Biddy—Bridget—orwhether she was just called that because she was a spinster and an older woman.”
