Alice Nutter

Alice Nutter rode out from the Rough Lee.

She took her pony up towards the slopes of Pendle Hill where she could look back at her house in the beginning-sun.

It was a handsome house; stone-built, oak-lined, lime trees trained to make an avenue to the door. Hornbeam hedges surrounded the house itself, and opened in wide useful squares towards her stables, poultry pens, pike pond and kennels.

Here was wealth. Her wealth. And she had not been born to it nor had she inherited it. Her fortune had come through the invention of a dye; a magenta that held fast in water and that had a curious dark depth to it – like looking into a mirror made of mercury. The Queen had ordered vats of the stuff and Alice had worked for a long time in London, with her own dye-house and warehouse.

Her knowledge of plants and their dyes, her instinctive chemistry, had recommended her to the Queen’s astrologer and mathematician, John Dee. Alice had worked with him in his laboratory at Mortlake, where he used the lunar calendar of thirteen months. He believed he had succeeded in making a tiny phial of the Elixir of Life. Alice did not believe it. In any case, it had not saved the Queen or John Dee. They were both dead now.

Elizabeth had left no heir. In 1603 the English Crown had passed to James the Sixth of Scotland – now James the First of England too; a Protestant, a devout man, a man who wanted no dyes or fancy stuffs. A man who had two passions: to rid his new-crowned kingdom of popery and witchcraft.

Perhaps you could not blame him. In 1589, bringing his bride home to Scotland from Denmark, a storm had nearly drowned him. It was witchcraft, he knew it, and he had the witches tried and burned at Berwick, attending the sessions himself.

In 1605, Guy Fawkes had tried to blow him up by stacking enough gunpowder under the House of Parliament to detonate half of London . . . And every conspirator a Catholic.

The Witch Plot and the Gunpowder Plot.

But every good Catholic would see a witch tortured on the rack until her shoulders dislocated their sockets and her legs broke at the ankle and hip.

And what witch would save a Jesuit from the knife that would first castrate him, and then disembowel him, still alive?

James was fortunate that his enemies were enemies.

But Alice wondered how safe was any safety that depended on hatred?

Alice whistled. A falcon flew. One circle. One swoop. The powerful bird landed square on Alice’s outstretched arm. Her long leather riding gloves were not the kind a woman wore – hers were double-stitched and heavy. Hers were scarred with the landings of the bird. As he landed she fed him a dead mouse from her pocket.

Alice was riding astride. She would not do this to attend church in Whalley or to call on her neighbour, the Magistrate Roger Nowell, or to visit the sick or to go about her business in the parish. Then she rode side-saddle and wore a magenta riding habit on top of her copper mare.

She looked beautiful. She was beautiful, even though she was – how old? Nobody knew how old. Old enough to be soon dead, and if not soon dead, then as lined and wrinkled as the milk-and-water well-behaved wives of religious husbands with their hidden mistresses. And if not that, then as toothless and foul as the hags and beldames who could afford no horses but rode broomsticks . . . some said.

This was Lancashire. This was Pendle. This was witch country.