Daughters of the Witching Hill by Mary Sharratt

John. She's no witch."
    "I'm not daft," he said. "Anybody can see how her lips move. But no sound comes out. You never know what she could be saying."
    "Perhaps it's none of your concern," I told him.
    "You should have a care round her, Mother Demdike." John's solemn eyes met mine. "She was right vexed with you. God forbid you should come to harm."
    I struggled to keep my patience with the lad. "Why would Anne want to harm me? She and I have been friends longer than you've been alive."
    He answered without a moment's hesitation. "Because you gave her cause for offence. You begged her pardon, didn't you?"
    "It was well daft of you, making such a scene in the churchyard for the whole parish to hear," Liza pointed out. "There will be all kinds of talk now."
    "I should have held my tongue till I was alone with her," I said, giving her and John their due. "But there's no bad blood between Anne and me, so put that out of your head, both of you. And she's nowt to do with your twisted ankle, our John."
    "Anne Whittle has no powers to speak of," Liza said, easing John's boot over his foot and ankle, now bound with the linen torn from her smock. "But
I
have them. And everyone in these parts knows that my mam is the mightiest charmer in Pendle. You're not afraid of
us,
love, are you?"
    "Cunning craft is well different from witchcraft," he said. "Every fool knows that."

    The year had turned. April, it was, the eve before Liza and John's wedding. Out of Malkin Tower I stole. Our luck was changing, so I prayed, from woe to weal. Everything I passed on my way seemed to promise a good season ahead. Twilight washed the blooming blackthorn, broom flowered brilliant gold, and primroses sprang from the moist earth. Ducking through a gap in the hedge, I headed out across the green meadows. Mare's tail clouds whipped across the fading sky where the new crescent moon sailed high. As I neared the beck, the sun sank behind Blacko Hill.
    Daylight gate was that space betwixt and between, neither day nor yet night, when I could see the invisible. As the music of the running beck filled my ears, I called out to Tibb and then he was stood before me, his one foot in the beck and the other upon the clay shore. In the gloaming his eyes shone like two stars.
    "I've a boon to ask of you," I told him when he took my hand. "Let there be no strife at Liza's wedding."
    John Device, despite my every attempt to reason with him, harboured an unholy dread of Anne, and Liza would rather keep the peace than see him ill at ease. If it had been up to the two of them, Anne and her daughters would have been banished from the celebration. But what a stir that would have caused—shunning an old family friend on such an occasion! If you want good luck on your wedding day, I'd told Liza and John, you must show hospitality to everybody and let none be turned away. So at last they'd agreed that there was no neighbourly way to exclude her, but Liza had taken me aside and begged me to at least keep Anne away from John tomorrow. Her request had left me feeling like Judas.
    There was no need to explain this to Tibb, who gazed at me steady, already divining my thoughts.
    "Sometimes there's no easy way," he said. "Torn between the one thing and the other. You must know in your own heart where truth and justice lie."
    Though I'd warned Anne that some were surmising the worst when they saw her talking to herself, I'd never dredged up the nerve to tell her that my daughter's own bridegroom thought she might be a witch.
    "Can you not turn John's mind to others things?" I asked Tibb. "Just for a while at least. Once he's married, he'll have more important concerns, so I hope."
    "John's a good man," said Tibb. "I can't make him a different man from the one he is."
    White moths flitted round my head. The beck flowed, a fox barked, and nightbirds sang a lullaby to creation. Such a lovely night, brimming with good omens. I allowed my heart to fill with hope. My daughter would wed a loving