Free Daughters of the Witching Hill by Mary Sharratt Page A

say another word. I'd no choice now but to train her proper. Teach her everything Tibb had taught me.
    So there we were, two women living in a tower, without father, husband, brother, or son to rein us in. Daughters of the witching hill, we turned to magic. Consorted with imps and spirits. We came into our powers, and they grew and grew till folk could not ignore the glimmer in Liza's wayward eyes, the fire that burned inside us both. The magic that ran in our blood.

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    S OMETIMES FOLK MADE MUCH of Liza and me for our charms and our blessings. Other times they shunned or even feared us. But most of all, they had need of us.
    The corn crop failed in 1587. That winter one in twenty of us in Pendle Forest died of the hunger and clemming, and if it wasn't for the work we did, Liza and I would have likely perished, too. My Liza and I hauled our bone-thin selves from cottage to farm where we did our best to mend ailing cattle and children, and all that labour in exchange for a bit of oatcake or blue milk, maybe an egg or two. Few could afford to pay more.
    Sometimes I think the only thing that sustained us were the gifts left in secret outside our door. Mutton pie, barley cake, cellar apples, curds and whey. Liza believed such bounty was the gift of Tibb and Ball, but I suspected Alice Nutter as our saviour. Thanks to my herbs, she was the mother of two healthy sons and, bless her, she'd not forgotten her debt to me.
    Ever since Mistress Alice first became pregnant, she and her husband had taken to going to our New Church in Goldshaw, a much shorter ride for her than the grander church in Whalley where Roger Nowell went. Though Richard and Alice Nutter were landed gentry who kept the old faith, they were as bound as I was to show their faces in church of a Sunday and at least pretend to accept the new religion.
    When Mistress Alice and I saw each other on the Sabbath, we'd trade our secret smiles, even in that famine year, and she'd invite me to come ruffle the hair of her little boys, pretty as girls in their gowns, for they were too young to be breeched. Her husband looked on, as though puzzled that his young wife should be drawn to someone lowly as myself, but he seemed well proud of her benevolence toward the poor.
    Of a Sunday I was always on the look-out for Anne, to see how she fared. Thin as the rest of us, my friend was. Though she greeted me hearty as ever before, I could tell something more than plain hunger troubled her. When I cornered her for a private natter, she told me she was worried about Betty, her eldest daughter.
    "She can't find steady work." Anne ducked her head out of the stinging wind as we huddled in the churchyard. "She's a strapping girl of twenty-five and she has no prospects."

    Times were so dire that folk in the forest began to steal from one another—the needy robbing the desperate. Broke my heart, it did, to hear of some widow coming home to find her peck of oats gone, the only food she had. Before long, people were at our door begging Liza and me to cast spells to reveal the names of the thieves.
    I'd known Kate Hewitt since before Liza and Kit were born. She was married to a cloth dealer down in Colne. We called her Mouldheels on account of all the spinning she did—the wooden pattens she wore were black and greasy from working the treadle. One day she and her good man returned home from visiting relations to find they'd been robbed: her spinning wheel, a pile of woven cloth, and their one pewter plate missing. The Hewitts promised me and Liza enough wool for new cloaks if we could uncover the culprit.
    Upon the dark of the moon, Liza and I trundled down to Colne with our wire sieve. Jack Hewitt provided a big pair of wool-cutting shears. Our Kate Mouldheels lit a single tallow candle and bolted the shutters. What Liza and I were about to do was unlawful in the eyes of the Constable, diabolical in the eyes of the Curate—conjuring spirits to learn the name of the thief.
    The rite of the