Again, de Wolfe had to shake his head. ‘I fear that the sheriff is strongly on the side of the crusaders in this matter, for his own personal reasons. He also detests me, and if I tried to intervene it would merely harden his attitude towards them, just to spite me.’ He rumbled in his throat, a sign of his emotions. ‘I have every sympathy with your feelings, lady — but would advise you to keep yourself well out of the public eye at the present time, as there are many who would gleefully see you sucked into this tragic situation. Your reputation as a cunning woman marks you out too well for attention and I am surprised that you have not been accosted already!’
The hairy face stared at the ground as she leaned forward on her stick. ‘As I have said, I fear nothing for myself, but wish to do all I can to save those of my kind who will surely perish if this madness goes on. Is there nothing you can do, Crowner?’
There was a grating sound behind him and, turning guiltily, he saw that his front door had opened. Thankfully, it was only Mary, who stood there, frowning at the pair in the lane.
‘I will do what little I can, Lucy,’ he said. ‘I have already spoken to the archdeacon, who is wholly against this campaign of his fellow-canon. But others there support it, along with the sheriff and some of the merchants. It was the death of one of the guildmasters which started all this, as his widow stirred up the trouble in the first place.’
He moved away from the old woman and she bowed her head to him. ‘Thank you for listening, Crowner. It now seems that I will have to do what I can myself, though God knows it will be little enough.’
De Wolfe stared at her in alarm. ‘You be careful, now. I have told you to keep well out of sight until this blows over. Thank you for your warning concerning my friend at the Bush — but it is yourself who is in most danger at the moment!’
He nodded his head at her brusquely and loped away to his front step, where Mary was still standing with a disapproving look on her face.
As the heavy oak door closed with a squeal from its leather hinges, Lucy stood for a moment staring at it. ‘Now I know what I must do,’ she muttered to herself. ‘And may God protect me — or at least receive me into his arms!’
Later that morning, Lucy stumbled wearily up Fore Street, her arthritic joints protesting at the slope as she laboriously hauled herself along with the aid of her stick, which was almost as gnarled as herself. She had no need to jostle through the folk on the road or those who loitered around the shopfronts or the stalls. They stood aside and gave her forbidding appearance a wide berth, her lank grey locks falling in a tangle over the shoulders of her dirty cape and the red-rimmed eyes peering from the weird face with its profusion of coarse hair. She wore no cover-chief or head-rail, but a rag was tied around her forehead like a grubby coronet. Mothers pulled their children close to their skirts as she passed, especially as her mouth was set in a ferocious scowl.
Lucy was in crusading mood, angry and mortified at the persecution of the other cunning women who were being set upon just because they had the gift of healing and sooth-saying — a gift that had been tacitly accepted and welcomed by the poorer people since time out of mind. She felt compelled to do what she could for them, whatever the cost to herself — though she was largely uncaring as to her own fate, often feeling that the sooner her own miserable existence was ended the better. She was old — she could not remember how old. She was poor to the point of destitution and lived in utter squalor, often hungry and usually in pain. Even her own few herbs and potions could no longer keep at bay the ache in her hips and knees and the torment from her bowed back-bone.
Lucy had had a family once — even a husband half a lifetime ago, until he had been killed in the quarry where he toiled. That was before the hair had started to grow on her face, as her skin thickened and her eyes weeped. Almost destitute, she had eked out an existence — one could hardly call it a living — by selling her gifts of healing and the herbs she collected for half-pence. She squatted in the ramshackle hut on Exe Island, built from scraps with her own hands. Now she was tired and ready to go to God, in whom she believed fervently, in spite of her familiarity with the ancient wisdom. That was why it was so unfair, so evil that the other cunning women were being persecuted on the grounds that they were sacrilegious unbelievers and heretics, denying God, Christ and the Holy Spirit. In fact, they were all white witches, and blasphemous thoughts never crossed their minds.
Lucy rolled all these matters around inside her head as she stumped up the last stretch of Fore Street and reached the central crossing of Carfoix, where High Street continued straight ahead and North and Southgate Streets dipped away down on either side. It had been a busy junction for most of the last thousand years and today was still as active, with ox-carts, horsemen, porters, pack-men and barrow-men all jostling with pedestrians and the flocks of sheep and goats being herded by farmers and slaughtermen to the nearby killing grounds of the Shambles.
The old woman stopped near the corner to get her breath back, standing in front of a booth selling meat pasties, the other shoppers diverging around her like a mill-stream flowing around a post. The stall-holder stood frowning under his striped awning, waiting for the disreputable old hag to move away and stop scaring off his customers. When she failed to move on, he shouted rudely at her, but fell silent when she turned and fixed him with a stare from her inflamed eyes.
A few yards away, right on the corner of the crossing, a small empty cart stood idle, the shafts for the ox propped up while the carter took the beast away to water it. Lucy trudged across and with some difficulty, sat on the tailboard and with much grunting and panting, hoisted her legs up. Then she clawed her way to a standing position by grasping the side rails and moved to the front, where she found herself a couple of feet above the people thronging the junction of the roads. A few heads turned at this curious sight, but far more paid attention when the apparition began shouting in a voice than was surprisingly strong, coming from such a decrepit body.
‘Listen to me, people of Exeter! Listen to Lucy, who has helped many of you who were in trouble over the years … if you have any gratitude at all, listen to me now!’
A score of people stopped what they were doing and turned to stare at this old hag, bellowing from the back of a cart. Customers at the booths stopped feeling in their purses and even the stall-holders stood gaping at this weird old woman. Most of them knew who she was, even though in recent years she had rarely left her muddy island.
‘What the hell is Lucy ranting about?’ called a pie-man to the fish-seller in the next booth.
‘God knows, the old witch is off her head,’ he replied sourly. ‘She should be locked up, along with those other two down in the cathedral.’
The whiskered face under the ragged headband slowly scanned the upturned faces below her. ‘Shame on those who persecute those who cannot help themselves!’ she bellowed. ‘Why are so many of you turning against those whose only aim is to cure your ills, to solve your problems and to give you that help which you have sought from us for generations?’
It was quickly apparent that the division of opinion in the city was equally present in the crowd around the crossing at Carfoix. Some looked sheepish, others sympathetic at her words, remembering how cunning women had helped them find lost possessions, bring back errant husbands and given succour to their infants with loose bowels or a croupy cough. But a sizeable number, especially those who had been harangued by their parish priests the previous Sunday, glared angrily across Carfoix, and a few shouted at her and shook their fists.
Heated disputes began, both between the moderates and the sympathisers, but also among the more hawkish faction, who started to call for action against the hag.