Doll helped with the sorting.
Doll thought to herself, ‘Be my friend, Goody Greene; confess you are a witch, show me your familiar, and we will work magic together, for I cannot bear to be so lonely.’ The woman set a pot on the fire to make a gruel for dinner. She put three handfuls of maize into the pot. Doll asked her, ‘Does the goodman come back for dinner?’ ‘No,’ said Greene, ‘I put in the extra handful by mistake.’ This was very strange, thought Doll, but in her mind made note of the fact that a familiar will condescend to eat maize gruel like a poor man. It distressed Doll that the woman would not trust her and produce her familiar.
The woman squatted before the pot, Doll knelt beside her, and, because she was sick with bitter loneliness, she pressed her face against the woman’s sleeve and said, ‘You are the only mother I have ever had since I was a tiny child, and I, Goody Greene, I am the only child you ever had.’ The woman let the wooden spoon slip from her fingers so that it was lost in the gruel, and Doll, who jumped up to fetch her another one, saw from the corner of her eye that she glanced at the bed. ‘Ah,’ thought Doll, ‘perhaps she has made herself a popinjay from broom or rags or scarecrow, and calls this thing “son.” Perhaps that is what she has about her in this room—and in the bed most likely.’
As they ate their dinner (of which there was far too much for the two women), Doll asked Greene to tell her again some of those old stories by which she had enchanted her as a child. Greene told her of the unfortunate earl’s daughter, who consented to a boat ride with a handsome stranger-man. (The masts were of gold, but did not bend before the wind. The sails were of taffety, and did not fill with the breeze.) They sailed three leagues and then she spied his cloven hoof and wept most bitterly, knowing it was no man but a devil with whom she must cope.
Greene told her other ungodly stories from an ungodly antiquity. Doll questioned her at every turn. She must know how each magic trick was worked; she must hear how it was Fair Jennifer of Bageley Wood called her demon to her. Greene told her the true story of how a lycanthropic man, believing himself to be a wolf, killed fifteen in the Midlands before the soldiers got him. She told her of Queen Mab and her tiny tinsel court. At last Doll got to her feet to go. She heard the bed creak, and saw a moving lump bulge out the drawn curtains. But the familiar did not make itself manifest. As Greene stared at the hearth, Doll slyly drew the red and yellow feather from her bosom and, brushing by the bed, she slipped the feather within. Calling a hasty good-bye, she left abruptly, and began to run, for she (in spite of hopes) half feared a great, scaly, black fiend would leap from the bed and on the instant shoulder her, and march off down to Hell.
4
Doll finds an Imp in a cellar. It proves unfriendly to her.
On the next day Doll returned to the marsh hut. Again she found Goody Greene seemingly alone, yet the one room was mysteriously filled with a Presence. That day Greene was making teas, infusions, etc. She had four pots on the coals, and was much confined, in her thoughts and in her words, by watching them.
Beside the hut was a cold-cellar dug into the ground, and in this Greene stored her herbs, her drugs, fats, oils, bottles, pans—all the matter for her trade. She wanted organy, dittany, and galingale root. Doll ran quickly to the cellar. She knew where these things were laid.
She opened the door, which was in the shape of a bulkhead, and ran down the short flight of stairs. Here she had played in childhood, and the strong odours of herbs, roots, and meat oils were fragrant to her. So she paused a moment, sniffing about. There was a rattle on a dark shelf behind a clay crock, and a snake skin shook. She thought she had left the familiar behind her in the good woman’s bed, yet she cried out in her horror, calling by mistake to the true God—not to the Satan she had sworn to serve; for there, peeking about the clay crock, was a ball of tawny fur and from out the fur glared a little man’s face. His features were like an Ethiop’s, and his head no bigger than an orange. She noticed, even in the brief moment she paused to look at him, that hands and even nails were perfect. Behind dangled a long ringed tail—a pretty tail of black and dun.