Pricking a Witch by Emma Wells
I swim in murkily sage waters. I have done so, enduring inexplicably in sea, and above land, for centuries: multitudinous macabre ribbons. It is the willpower of my longing to be smudged clear, erased away as chalk markings upon a teacher’s blackboard.
Yet, I persist.
For what feels like unfathomable stretches of time—from one plodding monarchal reign—to the next: be they kings, or queens, upon blood-velvet thrones, my essence pulses, puce and troubled. Incongruous, I irritably exist. Intangibly fierce. Fighting as a newborn for blessed breath and free passage, after being ripped from the woven tapestry of a womb, by sturdy, midwifery hands, in the crux of time. Death lingering her pale face all too closely, looming outside sightless eyelids of freshly kissed life.
Similarly, my spirit endures.
It endures, disregarding a steeled desire to snuff my life force out, obliterating any smidgens of simpering, strangled light. Oblivion is not my fended fate, as I strive within these swirling, stagnant backwaters. A cauldron of my own creation, or of theirs: my Scottish persecutors.
Men: religious, well-reputed and highly praised men, bearing virginally crisp, dove-white collars of the Christian church—they, were my gaolers. Ordained, seemingly, by their own twisted visions of morality, as judicators of blighted fates. The great deciders of God’s mortal world as to who is worthy enough to live: often implementing perverted courses of so-called justice. We’d confess to anything—spilling secrets as blood soaking profusely into sawdust floors of butcheries, brandishing hanging swine, upon sharpened hooks, with cleanly-slashed throats. False confessions drained from us, in much the same way.
Often covert executions were performed in unknown knolls near the Scottish coast, or, in my individual case, totally overt: fully open to the public’s knowledge and their due reckoning, albeit a slighted, biased one. My death was met by burning me upon a pyre, unshielded from the multiple outcries of blame—perhaps that’s why my spirit stirs so, whipping itself into whirled frenzies that cannot, nor ever will, succumb to quietude—or its relative calm. For, I was innocent.
I was branded a witch. Stamped fast. Hard. Judged. Perniciously persecuted as King Lear by his serpent daughters.
It was during the year of 1603 that I met my grisly, barbarous fate. James I’s iconic Daemonologie had recently been published. Therefore, as with the sturdy prediction that cause will undoubtedly lead to effect, mass hysteria outpoured. Blatantly irrational fright surrounded women healers of my kind, substantially more-so than ever before. His words bubbled to full fruition within the swirling cauldron waters that was Scotland, and that of England, where thousands of women were mercilessly murdered for no true crimes.
I admit that some medicinal witchcraft was at work but no devilry – none of any form ever graced my door or was performed within the confines of its oaken blindness. Of devilish deeds, my soul is white as a fallen dove’s feather.
Regardless, I’m perpetually persecuted. Trapped in brackish waters.
It was after the threatened shipwreck on James’ way to claim his Danish bride that fear or witches fully sunk the gnarled blade into our exposed flesh. Surprisingly, for Anne of Denmark, he braved the waves in 1589. Towering white peaks were so overwhelming that the ship turned back, leaving the marital mission incomplete as a missing jigsaw piece.Proving to be the final straw that broke the camel’s back, snapping into irreparable splinters. Convincing himself that witches had created such a storm to kill him – that I, Agnes Sampson, was steering the helm of it, his response was quick. Harshly so. Notably, a large number of highly skilled midwives and village healers were put on mock trials – Gellie Duncan, a kind and good friend of mine, perhaps the most discussed in modern times, a truly gifted healer. The accusations plucked savagely at the very roots of our natural identity: Gellie, me and all women falsely accused of allowing The Devil to suck blood from our abnormal teats. What utter baloney!
How ever did he conjure that I was at liberty to create such liquid madness? I was a midwife: my hands were mostly plunged into bloody tangles, and oftentimes around the throats of stillborn babes, that pierced silently from the womb. I had no inclination to inflict pain. Why would a woman that has saved countless lives of blue-lipped babes and mothers on the cusp of the icy afterlife, seek to wilfully kill? It goes against nature: the essence of what I believed… and had toiled, hard for.
My instinct was to cure, protect in the hope of prolonging life – not to deaden it as he did with his misplaced sense of justice.
Some days, I was sought after day and night within Scottish villages – not sleeping for long strings of time as tangled placentas. Where was the motive to deprive him of his new bride? My mind was set on bearing babies forth, endeavouring to save pallid mothers from the afterlife. I had no interest or malicious drive towards my Scottish brethren.
I knew very little of him then, although my knowledge is much grown: now.
So many like-minded women, talented and astute women, fell barbarically at his misguided hands.
Congealed blood splattered my curling face where my ghostly gaoler had eaten away at the flesh of my tongue with a four-pronged fork. Through hazily smeared vision, I truly thought The Devil had summoned me to his fire-flame lair, beneath the earth himself. He stood there, James I, king of kings, brandishing the fork of The Devil with an irksome smile cast into his thwarted face: a look of enjoyment, never pity, not even a mere crumb of it, was ever present in those endless held minutes spent with him, thrown into the abyss of my cell.
When my head lolled forward in abject misery, which it oftentimes did, trying to find solace in the coarseness of the cell’s brick wall, my hateful gaoler would rouse, and spear me, repeatedly, with a pricking stick, handed to him for his own protection of me. This process, widespread in its ludicrous nature, was known as Pricking a Witch. If we bled, then we were women, if not, then we were witches and creatures of the supernatural, more serpent than womankind. I bled, for he twisted the spark point deep within my flesh, turning its barbs, in rhythmic timing with his harrowing laughter at my distress. In the sunless cell, it was hard to even discern the bars of the cell door, so not easy to be sure that blood did not flow. Each time, although my limbs were drenched in red-rage rebellion of my draining blood, he only remarked “A witch, as sure as dawn itself!”
As I withstood, he then took to implementing other methods: applying…a Scold’s Bridle to my mouth, preventing me from speech. This appeared somewhat incongruous with his previous method of forcing a confession through pain and blood loss. I could still spot pink curdled flesh, integral parts of me that had fallen through my gaoler’s previous attempts, as he attached the mask, weighed heavier with pounds of patriarchy, securing its cage-like structure. I cast my eyes, shamed, to the floor in dejection.
What point was there to fight or protest?
Nearing death itself and her moss-coated embrace, I cared little for my tilted life any longer. “Agnes” had been obliterated from my consciousness and memory. All that existed was a shadow of the midwife I had been for five decades of my weary life.
He visited me before my untimely death – just once. Once was more than enough. Having braved the torments of my gaoler for endless days where I was shackled to the cold face of a prison wall in order to prevent me from sleeping, James I goaded himself to be brave enough to judge my face, wanting to impress upon me his power as part of the divine rights of kings.
Ha!
I wasn’t at my peak, as you can imagine.
This fateful morning, before the planned execution, that was deemed an appropriate punishment for bearing forth so many babes from the womb, James I himself, darkened my cell doorway. Cutting off all discernible light, even though morning, as much as I could struggle to discern, he approached my shackled, dissolving self.
“I wanted to see your ugly face before we condemn you to the league of The Devil, equivocator,” he stated pompously, although his voice was laced with equal fear and curiosity.
As I intrepidly turned my face from the wall, he studied me all too closely, before spitting. “I hear you have confessed, Agnes. God has decided your fate. You will burn at noon as deemed proper by my counsel of learned men of the cloth,” he breathed, angry yet also fascinated by my degraded state – a witch, a self-confessed one.
Shaking my head vigorously, summoning my gaoler to release me of the bridle, I intimated to a further confession.
Spittle fell from his cruel lip as he neared ever closer to me. After spitting blood from my mouth, and endeavouring to overpower the pain to speak, he eyed me as a hungry falcon, baying for more blood spill.
“God sees and knows all,” I stammered. Clumsy yet assured, eyeing him directly as my adversary.
“So you repent, Agnes, and ask for God’s reverent forgiveness in your final hours. This is a wise decision,” he claimed proudly.
“She will see to it that your soul is punished, James. I, also, will be there waiting for you in the afterlife, and your devil-horned gaoler, that is paid too handsomely to perform your malevolent bidding, he too, will pay.
Stunned, he shuffled backwards to the release of the open cell door, clutching his face in fear as if my words had physically struck him like lightning bolts.
Now, my spirit courses at liberty, up and down the Scottish Highlands and scenic coastal paths. I am an unseen bird, airy and weightless, as his soul spins in sorcery, wracked by eternal damnation for his irreparable sins, chained for all eternity to hellish, murky waters whilst I soar amidst cloudless skies.