Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

“Ah,” Lynley said in acknowledgement of the prints as he shook out his table napkin, “Lancashire’s celebrities. Dinner and the prospect of disputation. Did they or didn’t they? Were they or weren’t they?”

“More likely the prospect of loss of appetite,” St. James said. He poured a glass of fumé blanc for his friend.

“There’s truth in that, I suppose. Hanging half-witted girls and helpless old women on the strength of a single man’s apopleptic seizure does give one pause, doesn’t it? How can we eat, drink, and be merry when dying’s as close as the dining room wall?”

“Who are they exactly?” Deborah asked as Lynley took an appreciative sip of the wine and reached for one of the rolls which Josie Wragg had only moments before deposited on the table. “I know they’re the witches, but do you recognise them, Tommy?”

“Only because they’re in caricature. I doubt I’d know them if the artist had done a less Hogarthian job of it.” Lynley gestured with his butter knife. “You have the God-fearing magistrate and those he brought to justice. Demdike and Chattox — they’re the shrivelled ones, I should think. Then Alizon and Elizabeth Davies, the mother-daughter team. The others I’ve forgotten, save Alice Nutter. She’s the one who looks so decidedly out of place.”

“Frankly, I thought she looked like your aunt Augusta.”

Lynley paused in buttering a portion of roll. He gave the print of Alice Nutter a fair examination. “There’s something in that. They have the same nose.” He grinned. “I’ll have to think twice about dining at aunt’s next Christmas Eve. God knows what she’ll serve in disguise for wassail.”

“Is that what they did? Mix some sort of potion? Cast a spell on someone? Make it rain toads?”

“That last sounds vaguely Australian,” Lynley said. He looked the other prints over as he munched on his roll and sifted through his memory for the details. One of his papers at Oxford had touched upon the seventeenth-century hue and cry over witchcraft. He remembered the lecturer vividly — twenty-six years old and a strident feminist who was as beautiful a woman as he had ever seen and approximately as approachable as a feeding shark.

“We’d call it the domino effect today,” he said. “One of them burgled Malkin Tower, the home of one of the others, and then had the audacity to wear in public something she’d stolen. When she was brought before the magistrate, she defended herself by accusing the Malkin Tower family of witchcraft. The magistrate might have concluded that this was a ridiculous stab at deflecting culpability, but a few days later, Alizon Davies of that same tower cursed a man who within minutes was stricken with an apopleptic seizure. From that point on, the hunt for witches was on.”

“Successfully, it seems,” Deborah said, gazing at the prints herself.

“Quite. Women began confessing to all sorts of ludicrous misbehaviours once they were brought before the magistrate: having familiars in the form of cats, dogs, and bears; making clay dolls in the persons of their enemies and stabbing thorns into them; killing off cows; making milk go bad; ruining good ale—”

“Now there’s crime worthy of punishment,” St. James noted.

“Was there proof?” Deborah asked.

“If an old woman mumbling to her cat is proof. If a curse overheard by a villager is proof.”

“But then why did they confess? Why would anyone confess?”

“Social pressure. Fear. They were uneducated women brought before a magistrate from another class. They were taught to bow before their betters — if only metaphorically. What more effective way to do it than to agree with what their betters were suggesting?”

“Even though it meant their death?”

“Even though.”

“But they could have denied it. They could have kept silent.”

“Alice Nutter did. They hanged her anyway.”

Deborah frowned. “What an odd thing to celebrate with prints on the walls.”

“Tourism,” Lynley said. “Don’t people pay to see the Queen of Scots’ death mask?”

“Not to mention some of the grimmer spots in the Tower of London,” St. James said. “The Chapel Royal, Wakefi eld Tower.”

“Why bother with the Crown Jewels when you can see the chopping block?” Lynley added. “Crime doesn’t pay, but death brings them running to part with a few quid.”

“Is this irony from the man who’s made at least five pilgrimages to Bosworth Field on the twenty-second of August?” Deborah asked blithely. “An old cow pasture in the back of beyond where you drink from the well and swear to Richard’s ghost you would have fought for the Yorks?”

“That’s not death,” Lynley said with some dignity, lifting his glass to salute her. “That’s history, my girl. Someone’s got to be willing to set the record straight.”

The door that led to the kitchen swung open, and Josie Wragg presented them with their starters, muttering, “Smoked salmon here , pâté here , prawn cocktail here ,” as she set each item on the table, after which she hid both the tray and her hands behind her back. “Enough rolls?” She asked the question of everyone in general, but she made a poor job of surreptitiously examining Lynley.

“Fine,” St. James said.

“Get you more butter?”

“I don’t think so. Thanks.”

“Wine okay? Mr. Wragg’s got a cellarful if that’s gone off. Wine does that sometimes, you know. You got to be careful. If you don’t store it right, the cork gets all dried up and shrivelled and the air gets in and the wine turns salty. Or something.”

“The wine’s fine, Josie. We’re looking forward to the bordeaux as well.”

“Mr. Wragg, he’s a connoisseur of wine.” She pronounced it con-NOY-ser and bent to scratch her ankle, from which activity she looked up at Lynley. “You’re not here on holiday, are you?”

“Not exactly.”

She straightened up, reclasping the tray behind her. “That’s what I thought. Mum said you were a detective from London and I thought at first you’d come to tell her something about Paddy Lewis which she, of course, wouldn’t be likely to share with me for fear I’d spread it to Mr. Wragg which, of course, I would definitely not do even if it meant she was to run off with him — Paddy, that is — and leave me here with Mr. Wragg. I know what true love’s about, after all. But you’re not that

kind of detective, are you?”

“What kind is that?”

“You know. Like on the telly. Someone you hire.”

“A private detective? No.”

“I thought that’s what you were at first. Then I heard you talking on the phone just now. I wasn’t exactly eavesdropping. Only, your door was open a crack and I was taking fresh towels to the rooms and I happened to hear.” Her fingers scratched against the tray as she grasped it more tightly behind her before going on. “She’s my best friend’s mum, you see. She didn’t mean any harm. It’s like if someone is making preserves and they put in the wrong stuff and a bunch of people get ill. Say they buy the preserves at a church fête even. Strawberry or blackberry. Well, they might do that, huh? And then they take them home and spread them on their toast the next morning. Or on their scones at tea. Then they get sick. And everyone knows it was an accident. See?”

“Naturally. That could happen.”

“And that’s what happened here. Only it wasn’t a fête. And it wasn’t preserves.”

None of them replied. St. James was idly twirling his wineglass by the stem, Lynley had stopped tearing apart his roll, and Deborah was looking from the men to the girl, waiting for one of them to respond. When they didn’t, Josie went on.