The Witch Judge thundered at her. “Woman! it is not what we want. You are to speak the truth. Truth-speaking is what we want.”
Mother Spuraway’s head nodded, her eyes fallen now from the cobweb to the judge’s robe. “Yes, sirs—yes, sirs. You shall have what you want. Oh, yes, sirs!”
“She asserts,” said the counsel for the Crown, “that she tells the truth.—You were used to going to sabbats with this man?”
“Yes, sirs,—sabbats, sabbats, sabbats, sabbats—”
“Give her wine,” said the Witch Judge. “She is old. Let her rally herself. Give her wine.”
A gaoler set a cup to her lips and she drank. “Now,” said the Crown, “tell us of these sabbats—circumstantially.”
Mother Spuraway, revived by the wine, looked from floor to roof and roof to floor and at the commission and the Witch Judge and the bishop, and at the motes in a broken shaft of light. “We danced about the burned cot—all taking hands—so! Sometimes of dark nights we went widdershins around Hawthorn Church—sometimes it was around the fairy oak at the Oak Grange. Sometimes we danced and sometimes we flew. We rode in the air. I had an oaken horse—and Grace had an elmen horse and Dorothy had a willow horse, and Elspeth No-Wit had a beechen horse, and Marget Primrose had a horse of yew—”
There was a movement among the commission. “Marget Primrose,” exclaimed Squire Carthew, “died years ago!”
“She came back. Marget had a yew horse—and I had an oaken horse—and there were other horses, but I never learned their names. And there were green men—”
“Was this man in green?”