Page 56 of The Battle of the Bookshops
A skinny, bespectacled man was sitting at the back of the coffee shop with Brynlee at his side. They both stood on seeing Charlie, and quickly the four of them were exchanging introductions. This was Robert, Brynlee told Jules, an assistant history lecturer at the University of Exeter.
Charlie—good to his word—volunteered to get the coffee and cake in, and after complicated discussions on which muffins and which nondairy milks might be available, he went off to join the queue, leaving Jules, Robert, and Brynlee to smile awkwardly at one another, none of them wanting to dive into the topic under discussion until Charlie returned.
“Right, so give it up,” invited Charlie, when they were all settled at last.
Robert took a deep breath and looked as if he had been born to respond to such an invitation. “Bridget Capelthorne is quite the character,” he ventured. “And she had a heck of a life, didn’t she?”
Charlie and Jules nodded at him, eager for more.
“So, as you may know,” Robert said, stirring sugar into his coffee, “witchcraft was declared a capital offense in 1563. In England, the witch trials were at their height from the mid-sixteenth century onward. It was a brutal period, and Exeter was a bit of an epicenter for it all, unfortunately, in addition to other parts of the country—I mean, Essex was bad, but Scotland? Sheesh!” He mock wiped his brow and then, catching Brynlee’s eye, collected himself. “Sorry, I digress. So,” he went on, “I don’t know whether Brynlee filled you in, but I’ve been writing a paper on the witch trials in Exeter during the seventeenth century. When Brynlee mentioned the name Bridget Capelthorne, it immediately rang a bell, and”—he smiled at the look of anticipation on Charlie’s and Jules’s faces—“I have a document. Two, actually.” He stopped and took a sip of coffee.
Charlie and Jules leaned forward in their seats.
“It’s exciting,” he went on, “but I’m afraid it’s everything you were probably suspecting. My first find was a confession, dated 1685, so, according to your research, Bridget would have been sixty-four years old at the time.”
A confession. Jules swallowed. That was bad.
“So... witchcraft, then?” hazarded Charlie.
Robert nodded. “I’m afraid so. The confession’s pretty remarkable,” he said. “I thought you might be interested to see it, so I’ve made you a transcript here.” He slipped a single piece of A4 paper out of a folder and passed it to Jules, who held it between herself and Charlie so they could both read together. “It doesn’t make for particularly pleasant reading, I’ll warn you,” he murmured, as they read.
Jules and Charlie were silent as they took it in. At one point, Jules let out a cry and clamped her hand over her mouth to silence herself.
Putting the paper down on the table, Jules and Charlie exchanged looks.
“Wow,” said Charlie. “Disturbing.”
Jules could barely speak for the lump in her throat. “This is just so shocking,” she said at last. “I mean, ‘visited by Satan’? Really?”
“And how ‘he did lie with her,’” contributed Charlie. “That’s a lot.”
“And the bit about how she was shaved so they could examine her for extra nipples—the ‘devil’s marks,’” Jules chipped in. “And how she’s ‘being suckled by imps’—what evenisthat? It’s actually kind of weirdly pornographic, in a way. As if it’s designed to be titillating, almost.” Jules shook her head in disbelief, and Charlie put a hand on her arm in solidarity. “I mean,you’veseen this kind of stuff before. Is it typical?” she asked Robert and Brynlee.
Robert nodded again. “Pretty much,” he admitted. “The wholehaving sex with the devil thing—I agree, it says more about her persecutors than her. There was this misogynist belief at the time that women were so much more likely to be in league with the devil than men because they were too weak to fight their sexual desires and so were more likely to be corrupted by him. My main source on all this,” he went on, “is an infamous fifteenth-century text calledMalleus Maleficarum—Hammer of Witches, in English—which is, quite frankly, one of the most nakedly misogynistic books ever written.”
“Charming,” murmured Jules, reading bits of the confession again and wincing. “But this stuff about her being caught communing with her familiars, though... A goat? A black cat? I take it we can guess what they mean by ‘communing,’ given the prurient overtones of all this?”
Brynlee and Robert nodded in tandem. “I’m afraid so,” Brynlee said.
“It’s all just—I don’t know—demented...” Jules went on.
“Ah, yes, interesting choice of words. So that’s the other bit of it,” said Brynlee, taking over from Robert but chewing her lip and looking at the other two uncertainly, as if she was wondering how to put something. “I hope you don’t mind, but Robert emailed me a copy of this a few days ago, plus I’ve seen other similar ones, of course. I have a theory over these witchcraft confessions.” She leaned forward. “I mean, the question is: Why are all these women—who can’t possibly beactuallyinvolved in all this weird stuff—openly admitting that they are?”
“Torture?” ventured Charlie, with an apologetic glance at Jules.
“Maybe,” Brynlee admitted, “but that doesn’t explain the strange ending in the grimoire,” she reminded him.
“True,” Charlie said slowly, looking thoughtful.
“So,” Brynlee went on, “typically, history shows us that it’s older, single women who are accused of witchcraft, and the so-calledconfessions elicited are frequently bizarre, as you can see from this,” she said, indicating the confession transcript now lying on the table between them. “No doubt there is some patriarchal and misogynist agenda in all that, but what is so exciting to me is there is almost equally strange stuff in the grimoire too, and that lends weight to a theory I was already developing. There she is, talking about how all these supernatural things have happened and sounding really disjointed and irrational, even though there aren’t interlocutors putting words in her mouth when she’s writing her own journal. So...” She paused, looking to the other three in turn to see if she still had them following her argument. “I think we can hypothesize that these women were singled out for attention by witch-hunters partly because theywereunconventional, for some reason.”
Charlie and Jules looked at each other, and then both nodded for Brynlee to continue.
“Okay, so,” she continued, “there was one source I found a couple of years ago that said a woman was denounced as a witch by members of her community because she went around talking aloud when there was no one there. Naturally it was interpreted that she was talking to her invisible familiars, but... the other interpretation to put on it—the obvious interpretation, in many ways—would be that she was mentally ill.”
“Ah,” said Jules, her puzzlement clearing. “So, it just literally sounds like these women have psychosis—but I’m not a psychiatrist,” she added hastily.
“Exactly, though,” said Brynlee triumphantly. “Perhaps itwasthat they were actually ‘demented.’”
