The Sending by Geoffrey Household

did.’
    â€˜Call Mistress Rita Vernon.… Mistress Vernon, tell us whether upon the fourteenth June last you did not witness this abomination!’
    â€˜I did indeed witness it, good sirs.’
    â€˜Damn it, Rita! Just because I once let Meg lick up the blood where she had scratched me with her claws!’
    â€˜Silence in Court! Guilty or Not Guilty?’
    â€˜Well, on a technicality…’
    â€˜The third charge is that you, Hollaston, did receive visits from the Devil and swore to be his servant. Dare you say you are not guilty?’
    â€˜If counsel is referring to Robin’s chasuble of animal skin and tail, or to his appearance as the Man in Black when dressed as any other priest for visiting his parishioners, I deny having received any such visits and know nothing of the organisation and practice of the religion. I confess to have been visited by an incorporeal devil, but against my will.’
    â€˜Most damnable! And there is yet a fourth charge which he cannot answer, for examination showeth that he beareth upon his upper arm the mark by which the devil claimed him as his own. How now, Hollaston? What say you to his Lordship?’
    â€˜My Lord, I have indeed been initiated by a mark, but see no more harm in it than circumcision or scarring of the face. I confess to the formality of an exchange of blood with the local representative of the Divine. His conception of sin, my Lord, was much the same as yours, plus a few extras. The scar upon my upper arm is permanent because herb juice was rubbed into the cut to keep it suppurating. And how the hell did you know, Rita?’
    â€˜Because Ginny told me. Silence in Court! Not only does the prisoner confess to abominable practices, but would persuade us that they resemble those of Holy Church. Let him to be taken out and hanged by the neck until he is dead!’
    Well, it must be fun to be alive to past and present, and a beautiful woman with it. But now she took the wrappings off the parcel.
    â€˜Will you admit, Alfgif, that you could be taken for a sorcerer?’
    â€˜Not unless you would call Paddy Gadsden a sorcerer, which he certainly wasn’t.’
    â€˜Your von Pluwig thought he was.’
    I said that was putting it far too romantically. Paddy’s receptors interacting with nature were more sensitive than mine, but that did not make him a sorcerer. And who in the world, apart from a few of the more superstitious, could possibly think that I was?
    â€˜Somebody who in fact can use the powers you only experiment with. Somebody like your tiger brother brought up to date, so that your horrible sending wasn’t a freak like Gargary’s rabbit warren but a quite deliberate attempt on you.’
    I had to agree that at least it was possible, since I was not invulnerable like sceptical urban man, but receptive as a tribesman whom the witch doctor can influence to die.
    â€˜I have no enemies so far as I know.’
    â€˜Then find him, her or it,’ she said.
    Absurd! Am I blacklisted because I haven’t joined the union? A joke when I put it that way. Yet tiger brother did not approve of competition. He would not admit that he had anything to do with accidents, but they happened—just as to that harmless chap boring me with his chatter about abstract art. Concentrated venom could at least distract his thoughts to the point of tripping over himself. And is there any more deadly method of distraction than to make the mind consume itself, obsessed with terror?
    What alarms me in the witch trials is that the judges—one can’t answer for the juries—were able men experienced in distinguishing truth from falsehood and misrepresentation. Acquittals, light sentences and pardons were frequent. Accusations plainly deriving from malice or superstitious illiterates were thrown out. So what is one to make of the death sentences?
    Leave out Satan and his imps, and the evidence is as straightforward as in