Mary Jane Married: Tales of a Village Inn

by George R. Sims

Of course, when I first heard the story, I said, “What nonsense!” and I couldn’t understand how people living in a Christian country could believe in such rubbish; but there is no mistake about it that this very black cat, after the funeral, was seen in Dame Trueman’s house, and it followed her about like a dog, and nobody had ever seen it in the village before the night that it jumped on the poor man’s lap at the alehouse.

After that the old lady got quite the reputation of being a witch, and very curious stories were told about her, and the things that went on in her cottage. She was always very clever with herbs and old women’s remedies, as they are called, and she had, according to the ignorant people, wonderful charms for curing sore eyes, and wounds, and other things; and once when a man working on a farm had put his wrist out, he went to her, and she caught hold of his hand and muttered a charm, and pulled it and put it in its place again.

All these things made the old woman looked up to with a good deal of fear by the ignorant people. Nobody liked her; but they were all a bit afraid of her. And it was said that if anybody offended her she could put them under a spell, and bring misfortune upon them.

There was a boy in the village, a mischievous young imp, named Joe Daniels. His mother did washing, and he used to go round with an old perambulator and fetch it and also take it home. One day that he was wheeling his perambulator along with a bundle of linen on it, he met Old Dame Trueman coming down the lane, and after she had passed him he said to another boy that was with him, “Do you know she’s an old witch, and rides through the air on a broomstick? My mother says she ought to be burned alive, if she had her deserts.”

Dame Trueman, who was hobbling along, being a little lame with one leg, heard the boy, and she turned round and said, “Your mother says that, does she?—let her beware!” Then she made an awful grimace at the boy, and shook her stick at him. He declared that fire came out of her eyes, and that he felt an awful sensation go all over his body. When he got home he told his mother what had happened, and she was in a terrible state, and said she would be ruined, as the old witch would be sure to put a spell on her now. She was in such a state that she went off to the clergyman and asked him what she could do to guard against the spells. He lectured her, which was quite right, and told her it was very wicked to believe in such things as witches, as there weren’t any. But it certainly was a fact that, from that day, nothing went right with Mrs. Daniels. She had the best linen, belonging to the richest family she washed for, stolen out of her drying-ground two days after; and her boy Joe, that the witch had shaken her stick at, was run over by a horse and cart the next time he took the washing home, and had his leg broken; and, to crown everything, it got about that she had taken washing of a family that had come down from London with the scarlet fever, and after that nobody would send her any washing at all; and, having been security for her married daughter’s husband, and signed a bill of sale on her things, everything was seized one day, and the poor woman took on so about it that she died not long afterwards; and little Joe was sent away to a training-ship to be made a sailor, and the first time he went to sea he fell down off the top of the mast into the water and was drowned.

This is one of the stories that I was told in our bar-parlour one night that we were talking about charms and things, and it brought up about old Dame Trueman. I said that all these things might have happened. I found out afterwards that they did—but that didn’t prove that the old woman was a witch, or that her “charms” were anything more than ordinary remedies.

Our new clergyman, poor Mr. Wilkins’s “young whipper-snapper,” was awfully wild when he found that a lot of his parishioners believed in witches and spells, and he made it his business to investigate a lot of things that were being said about the old woman. He found out that she was telling fortunes by cards on the quiet, and selling a lot of foolish young women charms to make them get fallen in love with, and all that sort of nonsense; so he went straight up to the dilapidated old cottage where the old Dame lived, and he told her that if he heard any more of it he would have her up before the magistrate, and she would be sent to prison.

Of course she pitched him a nice tale, and tried to make out that it wasn’t true; but that she was a poor, lone widow woman, and that these stories were circulated by her enemies to do her harm.

Graves, the farrier, said, when he heard that the young clergyman had been threatening the Dame, that something was sure to happen to him—that nobody ever crossed “the old witch’s” path without coming to grief.

I laughed at the time, and told Graves that a great strong fellow, like he was, ought to be ashamed of himself for having such silly, childish ideas; but it was a very remarkable thing that, the week after, the young clergyman was riding past the Dame’s door, when her black cat dashed suddenly across the road, and so terrified the clergyman’s horse that it bolted and ran into a tree, and fell, and flung the young clergyman off on to his head, and he was confined to his bed for six weeks in consequence.