’Tis certain that Mr Cowper, preaching the Lord’s day immediately after in Pittenweem, took no notice of the murder, which at least makes him guilty of sinful silence.
— A Letter From a Gentleman of Fife to his Friend in Edinburgh, 1705
Looking at the pious faces of the congregation, the warm, shared smiles, the exchanged nods of peace and understanding, Sorcha wanted to scream. She wanted to rage at them, ask how they could sit there as if there wasn’t blood on their hands, in their hearts. How could they act as if nothing had happened? Was it really just a fortnight ago that many of these same people had taken part in the most brutal and bloody of murders?
She didn’t have to close her eyes to see Janet’s body. To recall the great weeping gashes, her broken limbs, shattered jaw, and her blood. So much blood. To remember the cart being driven back and forth over the door, crushing her even further. At least she’d been dead by then and couldn’t feel anything.
But Sorcha did. A mixture of impotent wrath and futile sorrow that bruised her very soul.
Ever since Janet died, sleep had evaded her as she tossed and turned, reliving that night, wondering what she could have done to prevent what happened. What any of them could have done. The rational part of her knew there was nothing. The townsfolk had behaved as if possessed, driven by an unnatural hunger. Like ravening beasts, they’d stalked their prey, wounding her over and over until she could defend herself no more. And yet, when that Sunday dawned, they’d shaken off their weariness, washed their clothes and hands and presented themselves at kirk as if naught had occurred. According to those who’d attended, the reverend made no mention of what had transpired, but delivered his sermon for all the world as if it was just another Sunday, not one that would be marked forever in their consciousness.
Sorcha hadn’t gone to the kirk that day nor the following Sunday. Neither had Nettie. But they’d been told to show their faces today lest rumours start. God forbid that should happen, thought Sorcha.
Sitting beside her, Nettie bunched her hands in her lap, her eyes staring straight ahead while people prayed, listened and responded with beatific smiles on their faces.
Sorcha was irrevocably changed. She’d gone to bed one person and woken up another. All her friends felt likewise. The billeted soldiers, who had not only borne witness to events but been physically hurt by them, described similar feelings. One of Sergeant Thatcher’s men had to have his shattered leg set by the Anster doctor; the following day he was carried to Edinburgh in a cart, along with a couple of other men who also had serious injuries, one a terrible knife wound. The sergeant said he doubted he’d see them again.
‘One can’t fight with a broken body or a broken spirit.’
Sorcha knew he was also thinking of Janet.
The sergeant’s words made her determined not to let that bloody night and the days that followed break her. Someone had to ensure justice was served; that Patrick Cowper and the bailies answered for what they’d done. As she discussed with Nettie, Beatrix, Nicolas, Sergeant Thatcher and Janet’s grieving relatives and friends in the aftermath, they’d done the worst thing they could have: nothing. Just as they’d done naught to staunch the growing rage towards Janet and passively endorsed whatever action the townsfolk chose to take.
Forgoing all promises only to write to Aidan about general goings-on and not alarm him, with Nettie’s help she set down everything that happened while it was still fresh in her mind. Not satisfied with that — after all, what could Aidan do from Bavaria? — she wrote to his former commanding officer as well, a Colonel Johns in Edinburgh. Knowing the disturbing contents might be dismissed if she signed it as a woman, she signed this one exactly as Aidan had those he’d written about events in Pittenweem: ‘A Gentleman of Fife’.
She entrusted the missive to the injured soldiers, knowing it would be delivered. In the meantime, she thought constantly about that dreadful night, equally appalled and saddened that the people of Pittenweem continued with their lives as if nothing had happened. With few exceptions, Janet’s name wasn’t mentioned. It was as if she never existed.
That Sunday after Janet was murdered, she and Nettie had waited until people had flocked to the kirk as usual and then walked down to the harbour, passing the Lawson house and the exact spot where the murder had taken place. The body was gone, the cobbles scrubbed. It was only when they arrived at the waterfront and saw the other fishwives, who’d also declined to go to kirk, that they learned from Jean Durkie that Janet’s corpse had been placed in a shallow grave on the western braes.
‘Just like Thomas’s,’ said Jean.
‘Not quite,’ corrected Sorcha. ‘Thomas was never buried.’
The next day, Monday, shops opened as usual. People bought goods, ordered milk and eggs from the farms, purchased fish from her and Nettie when they tramped through the lanes, blethered and gossiped. As the days went by, they fell sick, gave birth, laughed and wept. No one raised the matter of Janet Cornfoot: not with Sorcha, Nettie, Beatrix, Nicolas, Isobel, the Cornfoot family, nor with any of the fishwives. Sorcha didn’t know whether to be grateful or furious.
As it was, she just felt hollow. The town was a place she no longer knew.
A few days after Janet’s death, Nettie, Beatrix, Nicolas and Isobel gathered around the fireplace in Sorcha’s cottage, untouched quaichs of whisky in their hands. While it wasn’t the fishwives’ way to revisit tragedy, Nettie had determined this was different. Only Sorcha had borne witness to Janet’s final moments. In order to survive whatever lay ahead, whatever monster Janet’s death had unleashed, they needed to know the details. For Sorcha’s sake, for all their sakes, they had to speak of this.
‘Tell us, hen,’ said Nettie, reaching across and laying a reassuring hand on her leg. ‘Tell them what you saw.’
Sorcha had been prepared to share everything with her friends, longing for the release of speaking the truth and the comfort of their understanding. Looking at the four anxious faces she loved, she knew she could not. It would not be fair. She was strong. She could bear this. What choice did she have?
Instead, she chose a different tack.
She recounted Janet’s last moments. How brave she was, how defiant. How even when she knew the intentions of those who hunted her, that they would stop at nothing until she was dead, she refused to bow to fear, to the terror and chaos they tried to create.
‘You know what her last words were?’
As she spoke, the women wept. Great tears streaked their cheeks. Beatrix had her arm around Isobel. Nicolas clung to Nettie.
‘Keep going, hen,’ said Nettie huskily when Sorcha hesitated. She too was finding it difficult to speak.
‘She said, “Live for me”.’
Nettie sucked in her breath. The weeping stilled. There was silence.
‘Then that’s what we must do,’ said Nettie finally, reaching first for Sorcha’s hand, then Beatrix’s, Isobel’s and Nicolas’s, bringing them together in the centre of their tight circle. One by one, the women nodded.
After that, they never raised the matter again. When they saw each other over the following days, and when Sorcha and Nettie would stumble home exhausted each night after working at the harbour and selling fish upon the streets, they would ask about each other’s families. They’d discuss the catch, the cold, which ships had returned and where the rest were. The condition of the boats and the harbour. Every time, the women would ask after Aidan. Sorcha had told them she’d written to him. She also admitted to writing to his colonel in Edinburgh about Janet’s death, but thus far she’d had no response.
By tacit agreement, what no one shared was how hard it was becoming for them; how they were terrified that what happened to Janet might yet befall them; that the lunacy that had infected the Weem that night would reignite. More and more shopkeepers were refusing to serve them, more and more townsfolk turned their backs when they arrived on their stoops with fish, or simply strolled past on the streets. Dark mutterings followed them once more, dark mutterings and a sprinkling of abuse.
With each passing hour, it was getting worse.
Every night, Sorcha would lie under the covers and stare at the ceiling, uncaring of the shapes above. They no longer had the ability to transport her to other places and times. Instead, she’d wait for dawn to arrive.
Looking around the kirk now, two weeks since Janet’s passing, Sorcha wondered if the people here slept at night. Or did they, like her, find shutting their eyes meant reliving what had happened? How did the women feel, knowing their husbands, brothers and sons had lynched, beaten and stomped on an old woman? Dragged her through the streets, kicked, punched and brutalised her? She shuddered at the thought of any one of them lying beside her, sharing a pillow, touching her.
How could they behave as if they were as pious and deserving of the Lord’s grace as a saint? Perhaps that was the only way they could deal with it — by pretending it never happened. That way, the stain of remembrance didn’t have to be cleansed; that way, they could retreat into the solace of sleep.
Barely able to look at the man delivering the sermon, she wondered how he could stand before them, speaking of justice on the one hand but also warning what happened when malfeasance was allowed to flourish on the other, and how it took the strongest of souls, the most just and brave of men and their women to resist the devil. Sorcha marvelled that he didn’t collapse under the weight of his hypocrisy.
Strangers were seated among the congregation — incomers from the north and the borderlands; some from the city. They’d come to view the witches, watch events unfold. What did they make of what happened? She glanced at them now, in their different clothes, with their odd manners, some with accents so thick they were hard to understand. Why were they still here? Was it because they hoped for more entertainment? She knew the reverend and bailies prayed they’d stay, encouraged them to linger and spend their coin. Already, work had recommenced on the pier and even the harbour wall. The town couldn’t afford to have these people leave. But why did they not speak out against what they saw? In her mind, by their silence they were as complicit as the bailies.
Yet, was she any better? Were any of Janet’s friends or family? They sat there among them, mute. Too scared to challenge the reverend lest they were named witches. That was all it took. The bestowing of a label and all the connotations that came with it. Fishwife, people could accept, albeit begrudgingly. But witch, that was the name for an outsider in every way, an un-woman not worthy of God’s protection or grace. A witch brought ill with her and infected a community. It was a name to be feared. By the bestower and those branded with it. That’s what Janet’s death had taught her — taught them all. To be called a witch was to be reborn. Anything done in the past was obscured by the new identity. Forget the fact the witch was a mother, daughter, sister, neighbour, lover, grandmother, healer, fishwife… A witch was a canker on the body of the community that must be excised.
The name turned a person from a child of God into a devil-made creature, fair game for hunters like the reverend and those who took pleasure from such sport.
Sorcha had no desire to play their deadly game.
‘Live for me.’ Those were Janet’s last words, her final wish. ‘Live for me.’
Sorcha made up her mind there and then that she would do whatever that took. Even if it meant singing and praying alongside murderers who used God as a shield to protect their crimes and justify their cruelty.
As she was thinking that, she caught the eye of first Nettie, then, seated two rows over, Beatrix, Mr Brown, Nicolas, Isobel and Isobel’s father. It was important she remember there were also those who saw through the mask of righteousness, saw the town and the reverend for what and who they were — people caught in a spell that, if she had any influence, would soon be broken. She would cleave to those she trusted and keep working to ensure Janet’s memory — and that of Thomas Brown — lived on.
Someone had to.
Live for me. If that meant pretending to be aligned with the reverend and his supporters for now, so be it.
During the last hymn, Sorcha, Nettie and a few brave others left before the reverend had a chance to step down from the pulpit. They might attend for the sermon, show themselves to be members of the kirk, but be damned if they would shake the murdering bastard’s hand.