CHAPTER 7

I’d assumed that The Witch of Edmonton was one of those unwieldy mashups of melodrama, potted history, and woefully outdated comedy that littered the early-seventeenth-century stage. I was surprised to find that Elizabeth Sawyer had been a real person, a woman accused of witchcraft in what is now part of North London. Her neighbor Agnes had owned a sow that died after eating a piece of Elizabeth’s soap. Agnes accused Elizabeth of cursing the sow with “a washing-beetle,” whatever that was. When Agnes died four days later, Elizabeth was blamed for that, too. More neighbors jumped in to blame Elizabeth for other things, until their suspicions of witchcraft were confirmed—they set her house on fire and Elizabeth arrived barely in time to put out the flames.

And to finde out who should bee the author of this mischiefe, an old ridiculous custome was vsed, which was to plucke the Thatch of her house, and to burne it, and it being so burnd, the author of such mischiefe should presently then come…

“It’s like Monty Python and the Holy Grail!” I’d exclaimed to Stevie the next day on a video call. Witches were totally in Stevie’s wheelhouse, along with psychotropic herbs, Victorian toy theaters, obscure Eastern European horror films, and social media accounts belonging to dead Hollywood starlets. “They found her guilty of witchcraft in 1621 and executed her, it doesn’t say how.”

“Burned at the stake, probably.” Stevie sucked at his vape pen. “More of an audience. Keep going.”

“So then this minister, Henry Goodcole, wrote a pamphlet about Elizabeth’s story, as a warning for other witches.”

“Right! Because otherwise, they would all be lining up to get burned at the stake.”

“Yeah. Also, he added the Devil and a black dog.”

“That’s definitely gonna bring them out of the woodwork. I hope it was a talking dog?”

“You know it,” I said, and Stevie clapped in delight. “So, after Elizabeth was killed, they write this play about her. Like we have true crime series now? Back then, there were broadsheets and murder ballads about all kinds of shit. Men murdering their wives and children, stories about witches. Who were mostly women accused of seducing someone else’s husband, or—”

“Or causing a farmer’s cows to go dry, or some other random shit,” Stevie broke in. “Remember, I’ve seen Witchfinder General seven times. The M.O. is always to find an unmarried woman, blame her, and execute her.”

“Bingo. Anyway, this play must’ve been a big success—Elizabeth Sawyer died in 1621, the play was produced two years after that, and eventually published in 1658, like thirty years later. No one ever went broke showing blood and guts and sex. Four hundred years later, we’re still listening to podcasts about the same kinds of stuff.”

I shook the script pages in front of my laptop screen so Stevie could see them. “Plus, it has a really catchy title,” I added, taking a deep breath before I read it aloud.

“The Witch of Edmonton: A known True Story. Composed into a Tragi-Comedy by divers well esteemed Poets, William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, John Ford, &c. Acted by the Prince’s Servants, often at the CockPit in Drury-Lane, once at Court, with singular Applause.”

“Hmmm. ‘Singular applause.’” Stevie tapped a finger against his chin. “That suggests a very small audience, Holly. No wonder we haven’t heard about this play before.”

“Eileen Atkins played Elizabeth in 2014, for the Royal Shakespeare Company,” I offered. “She got great reviews. The play, not so much.”

“Was the performance recorded?” I shook my head, and Stevie’s face fell. “Bummer. So why are you so excited about this, Holly?”

I stared at the screen while Stevie took another hit of CBD. “I like witches,” I said at last, and Stevie gave me a thumbs-up. “And there’s this weird erotic tension between Elizabeth and Tomasin.”

“He’s the dog?”

“Yeah. Actually, he’s the Devil, but he takes on the form of the black dog. He promises to do Elizabeth’s bidding, take down her enemies and make her rich, et cetera, et cetera. But of course he betrays her and—”

“And she gets burned to a crisp! Holly, are you thinking of adapting this? I have to ask: what are the stakes?”

He cackled at his own joke, which I ignored. “Look, I’m just gonna take some more notes, okay, Stevie? I’ll talk to you later.”

But it did seem to me there was an opportunity here: what if I turned the story inside out and made Elizabeth triumphant? She and Tomasin could destroy their enemies and bring the other, barely sketched female characters into their fold. The real Elizabeth had died a horrible death centuries before: maybe I could give her a second life.

I’d spent nearly the next three years on the project, updating Elizabeth’s story, braiding in contemporary details and events. The well of misogyny never runs dry. When lockdown ended, I’d had Stevie and a few other theater friends read it aloud, again and again in my apartment.

That was when Nisa had begun to add her voice, too. She was enthralled with the Child Ballads, the classic collection of ancient songs she loved as if they were all her own, especially the more gruesome murder ballads. Hearing us read my play, she’d convinced me that they’d be the perfect musical accompaniment.

“It’s the same source material, really,” she’d said, after we’d listened to yet another version of “Matty Groves.”

“Too bad no one wrote a song about Elizabeth. Then we could work that in, too.”

“I’ll write her song! All those other murder ballads are in the public domain, I can just tweak them for the play.”

I bit my tongue, noting that she’d said “the play” rather than “your play.” But Nisa was right: they were perfect for Elizabeth’s story. Which I had begun to think of as my story, and not just in the sense that I’d modernized it. Like me, Elizabeth Sawyer had been unfairly condemned by others. Like me, she was an older woman—I was barely forty, but in Elizabeth’s time the average life expectancy was only forty-two. The fictional Elizabeth had made a pact with the Devil to secure her success, but I didn’t need to go that far.

Instead, after several years of obsessive writing and revision on the work I now called Witching Night, I used it to apply for arts grants. There are never enough of those, especially for little-known playwrights, but that summer, something had clicked. I’d received a grant for ten thousand dollars. I cried reading the email. Not just for me, but for Elizabeth, too—who had come back to rescue me from the life I hadn’t been meant to live.

After years of being in creative free fall, I had finally landed in a space where I might bring my vision, and Elizabeth Sawyer, back to life.