A mirror for witches

by Esther Forbes

2

How Doll became a Servant to the Servant of Hell.

This fiend—this caco-demon—came to her again and yet again. But after his first visit there was a pause and it seemed likely that he might not come again. She thought daily to get his summons, either to Black Sabbath or to class of more instruction. Would he bid her mount a broom and fly to him? Against this emergency she went to Dame Cosset’s, a broom-maker, and paid sixpence ha’penny for a new red broom that she might appear handsomely mounted before her lord. This broom she hid in her chamber. Likewise she hid rushes and clay for the devising of poppets, and glass, knives, pins, and needles, for the working of her master’s will.

On the eighth night from the time of the Thumb fire, she heard close by the house the hooting of an owl—which she knew was no owl. And Hannah, too, recognized the falsity of that cry, for she started up, saying that Indians were about. That was at eight o’clock. At nine they heard again the crying of an owl, and the dog at the barn began to howl dismally. Hannah swore that it was the bonded boys playing tricks. By ten again the hooting of the owl, but Hannah slept. Doll Bilby got to her room, and, taking clothes and a pillow, made a dummy of herself which she thrust into the bed, thus to deceive Hannah if the woman should look about for her. Grasping her red broom, but not essaying to mount it, she ran joyously from the house, anxious to meet her god or the accredited messenger of that god.

She came out of the house and found the moon to be rising and the night to be of a dainty, delicate, springtime beauty. Birches twinkled in the moonlight; their slender trunks seemed to be the white limbs of nymphs. The grasses that her broom brushed were sweet with flowers. She ran up and down the pastures, along the fences, over the fields. She ran until she was like to drop, and then found him where hereafter she always was to find him—in an opening in birch woods, enthroned upon a tussock. In the flowery pasture land this spot which he had selected for himself was a darling fairy bower. The exact spot is known to this day, for Doll, on seeing the fiend, threw her red broom into the birch trees, thus marking the spot, for she never took it back with her. Five years later boys found it and, on being taken to Dame Cosset, the woman said yes, it was one of her own brooms, and indeed the very one she had once sold to wicked Bilby for sixpence ha’penny. It is noticeable to this day that cattle will not graze there, and that dogs coursing for rabbits will stop frozen at this place and howl; yet so inferior is the good sense and righteousness of man to that of beasts, it has become a common tryst for lovers, who, in each other’s arms, repeat with foolish laughter (and yet, it may be hoped, with some sensible fear) the story of how Bilby’s wicked Doll there met and loved a demon. Then they will go by moonlight to the cellar hole of the Bilby house, and pick a little of the yellow broom which country people call witch’s blood.

The demon Prince permitted the witch to kneel to him and let her kiss his feet (which were not cloven). She noticed how cold to touch he was—like the fiends and devils in old tales. But the big hands he put upon her head (she reverently kneeling) were warm as any man’s, and this heartened her. So he welcomed her ‘Fellowship Christian in.’ Then he seated himself and permitted her to sit. At first the talk was of great dignity, but soon it was much like that of one gossip to another. He told her how his work had prospered him in Salem, in Boston, and now in Hartford. And how another fiend (but this one in shape of woman) worked in New York among the silly Dutch, as far north as Albany, and yet another (this fiend in the shape of a great tawny dog) in Virginia and the Carolinas. ‘Ah,’ cried Doll, ‘how thankful I, or rather all of us witches roundabout the Bay Colony should be that you have deigned to appear to us in the shape of a true proper man.’ The fiend laughed horribly, saying there had been much complaining among the wizards and the warlocks because he was but a man—not a wild free wanton wench like she of the Dutch country.

Then he asked her if she could come with ease to him on such nights as he should call her, and she answered yes, she could come to him, but she must always wait her foster mother’s sleeping and then leave secretly by her own window. She begged him to cry no more as hooting owl, for this aroused suspicion—the woman guessing it to be a man’s voice. At this he seemed angry, and said the cries she had heard were in truth no man’s cries, for he had bade an owl to go about the house and hoot. He explained to her that, as man may not laugh convincingly upon command, neither may owl hoot. Still, for such clumsiness the owl must die. So they argued for a while, Doll pleading with him to spare the unfortunate owl, and in the end, going back on her early statements, she said the cry had not sounded like a man, but exactly like an owl, and that the creature had hooted amazing well. He agreed, therefore, to spare the owl and to send him often to call her out.

She was rejoiced and humbled to think that he, so great and busy a fiend, would find time to send for her again and again, and she confessed to him the unendurable loneliness, desolation, and despair of her life—especially since her foster father had died; how even Titus, who had once professed to love her, now fled in terror from her glance, fearing her witchcraft; how Mrs. Hannah dreaded her so she would not leave a combing of hair nor a paring of nail about the house, and also how this woman had butchered Gideon and her other creatures.

As she talked the fiend came close to her, soothing her with his hands upon her body. Then she suddenly stopped her rehearsal of sorrow, and for a moment she went in deathly fear, for she guessed what the fiend intended. Still, such was her wickedness, she also felt uplifted and glorified, and in the end, it were these feelings that conquered in her, for she entirely forgot or set aside Christian fears and Christian modesty. The fiend kissed her and told her to be of good heart, for of all the many witches he had met in his recent travels through New England, it was she he most fancied and she should be his paramour. So she consented, and thus came to be the servant of the servant of Hell.