And soon as Jasper had cast her off, Widow Ashby’s Sabrina took to her bed and there she meant to stay, so she said, the rest of her life. Or—until she got a sign that would give her heart ease. Sabrina Ashby didn’t mince her words either. “I don’t care what the sign may be,” she said it right out, before Granny Withers. That toothless creature cackled and replied, “I’m satisfied you’re knocking center.”
Indeed Sabrina was telling the truth. She meant every word of it. The jilted girl did not go to the wedding. She didn’t need to, as far as that was concerned, for old Granny Withers came hobbling over the mountain fast as her crooked old legs would carry her, and it in the dead of winter, mind you, to tell Widow Ashby’s Sabrina all that had happened. How lovely fair the bride looked beside her handsome bridegroom! “Eh law, they were a doughty couple, Jasper and Talithie,” Granny Withers mouthed the words. She lifted a bony finger, “Yet, mark my words, ill luck awaits the two. When the bat flew into the house and dipped low over the fair bride’s head, she trembled like she had the agger—and—”
“The bat flew over her head?” Sabrina interrupted, eyes glistening. “A bat—it’s blind—stone blind!” the jilted girl echoed gleefully. “There’s a sign for you, Mistress Jasper Tipton, to conjure with!” She let out a screech and then a weird laugh that echoed through Crockett’s Hollow. She cast off the coverlid and in one bound was in the middle of the floor, though she had lain long weeks pining away. She clapped her hands high overhead like she was shouting at meeting. Sabrina laughed again and again, holding her sides.
Granny Withers thought the girl bewitched. So did Widow Ashby and when the two tried to put a clabber poultice on her head and sop her wrists in it, the jilted Sabrina thrust them aside with pure main strength. That was the night of the wedding.
The days went by. Jasper and Talithie were happy and content everyone knew.
Old Granny Withers in her dilapidated hut up the cove watched and carried tales to Sabrina. The forsaken girl listened as the old midwife told how she had seen the two with arms about each other sitting in the doorway in the evening many a time when their work was done. Or how she had found them in loving embrace when by chance she happened to pass along the far end of their corn patch. “Under the big tree, mind you!” Granny Withers scandalized beyond further speech clapped hand to mouth, rolled her eyes in dismay. “Just so plum lustful over each other they can’t bide till night time. The marriage bed is the fitten place for such as that.”
When the forsaken Sabrina heard such things she burned with envy and jealousy. Secretly she tried to conjure the pair, to no avail. That had been by wishing them ill. She meant to try again. One day she went far into the woods and caught a toad. She put it in a bottle. “There you are, Mistress Talithie Tipton. I’ve named the toad for you!” she gloated as she made fast the stopper. “You’ll perish there. That’s what you’ll do. Didn’t old Granny Withers tell me how she worked such conjure on a false true love in her young day? He died within twelve month. Slipped off a high cliff!” Stealthily, in the dusk, Sabrina made her way through the brush to a lonely spot far up the hollow where the big rock hung. There she put the bottle far back under a slab of stone.
She waited eagerly to hear some word of the wedded couple.
One day, a few months later, old Granny Withers came hobbling again over the mountain. “Jasper’s woman is heavy with child,” the toothless midwife grinned, moistening her wrinkled lips with the tip of her tongue. “He’s done axed me to tend her.”
Not even to Granny Withers did Sabrina tell of the toad in the bottle. “If you ever tell to a living soul what you’ve done, that breaks the conjure,” the old midwife had warned long ago. So Sabrina kept a still tongue and bided her time. Nor did she have long to wait.