The prisoners had their appointed space. At times they were all brought together here; at times the greater number were withdrawn, leaving one or two to be examined separately or together. The heat and the light struck against them, and the waves of sound; from one side came the booming of the judge’s voice or the dry shrilling of the king’s lawyer; from the other the whisper of the crowd that meant to have witch blood. There were Aderhold, the youth to whom he had given books, the boy of sixteen, old Dorothy’s nephew, Dorothy herself, a halfwitted woman from a hut between the Grange and the North-End Farm, Grace Maybank, Mother Spuraway, and Joan Heron—eight in all.
Mother Spuraway—Now torture was not allowed in England, though on the Continent and in Scotland it flared in witch trials to its fullest height. Mother Spuraway, therefore, had not been tortured—no more than Aderhold, no more than Joan, no more than others. But it was allowable, where confession did not come easily, to hasten it with fasting from bread, water, and sleep—all these being withholdings, not inflictings. There might be, too, insistent, long-continued questionings and threats and a multitude of small gins and snares. Mother Spuraway had been long weeks in gaol, and she was old and her faculties, once good, were perhaps not now hard to break down. At any rate, she had a ghastly look and a broken. Since she trembled so that she could not stand, they put her into a chair.
“Now answer strictly the questions asked you, if you have any hope of mercy!”
Mother Spuraway put her two trembling hands to her head. “Mercy? Yes, sirs, that is what I want. Mercy.”
“Very well, then! Look on this man and tell us what you know of him.”
The clerks’ pens began to scratch.
Mother Spuraway’s gaze was so wandering that while it came across Aderhold, it went on at once to a cobweb above the judge’s chair. “He is the Devil,” she said.
“You mean the Devil’s servant.”
“Yes—oh, yes! Devil’s servant. I mean just what Your Honours want.”