Cora…All of north England knew her name. I ran away when I was nearly a woman, and for many weeks I still heard tales – of a red-skirted beauty in the border country. How she stopped the church clock by pointing at it, or shed feathers in pheasant season. This was her. I knew it. Lies, of course – who sheds feathers? But there is only ever gossip on the brighter, wilder lives.
Cora bewitched them – that is how they put it. She courted men with her beauty, and nature with her soul. And she courted her own death too, in the end – for the last tale I heard was how the wind caught her skirts on the gallows, and twirled her round and round.
She, also, was human-born. Her mother was no fish egg – she was a Godly woman, with rubies in her ears and a twisted hand. Cora was blamed, for that twisting – for her birth came in with a lightning strike which set fire to the house, and burnt her mother’s hand as she pushed the door to flee. An ill-luck child. Cora – who moved like a spider. Who did not crawl as bairns do, but scrambled – all legs and eyes. She scrambled in church, one Sunday, so that she scratched the pew with her fingernails and the mark was a cross downside-up. A sign! they all cried. Satan’s work! When the witch-hunting fever came to them, as it did, it was her mother they took to the ducking stool. You have fornicated, they told her, with Yon Fellow (for they feared saying his name, but didn’t fear murder, it seems). They said her hand like a hoof was His mark on her. Proof, they tutted, of your sin.
What hope did she have? Not even some. My grandmother, who was a God-serving woman all her days, was taken to a dread pool outside the town. Her husband tried to save her. He tried, but who can undo witch? So he stood and wept as they undressed her. He called out I love my wife when she was in her shift, and she called back and I love my husband, very much. And then they tied her thumbs to her big toes so that her chin touched her knees. Then they dropped her in. She floated three times. On the fourth time she went under, and that was her end.
Cora saw this. She watched it from the bridge with her witch’s eye.
Later, she would swear to me there is no Devil, only man’s devilish ways. All bad things, she hissed, are man-made…All of them! And I know she saw her mother when she said this, sinking down.
Afterwards, her father found an inn and never left.
As for Cora, they all hoped she might turn her face to the Lord and be saved by him. My mother? No. She had that lightning in her heart, I think, and it could not be stilled. She took to church falsely, smiled to hide her fire. She used the cross round her neck to crush flies and pop out apple seeds, and other casual deeds which had naught to do with God.
She ran from the town when she was old enough to run fast. Six or seven years old – no older.
This was her wandering time. These were the days and nights which made her the creature she was, in her heart – owl-wise, cat-sly. She prowled in the dark. She slept in lonesome places where no soul had been, for years – caves, forests. A dank waterwheel. She stood by the sea, and crouched in bogs, and she met other people on her wanderings – other hiding people. Witches. Rogues.
I learnt my herbs, she said, from those people. I picked them in those places.
So Cora learnt herbs, and she grew. She grew tall, and wide-hipped. She took her red skirt from a gooseberry bush it dried upon, as she came into Cumberland. Then she wore it to market for eggs and bread, where a woman said thief! ’Tis my skirt! So she moved on with no eggs, or bread. She lived as gypsies live – selling cures, and people’s future times. She did not always speak the truth, for bad futures did not pay well. I think her purse jingled. She could talk very well when she buttoned her wild tongue, and only used her other.
A troublesome piece.
So she was called at her birth and so called, too, once I was born. She was definitely that – troublesome. But was she made to be? By others? Maybe – for if you kick a dog for barking it will only bark more, in the end.
I’ve wondered if I take after her, that way. I know some would say so – troublesome hag. But I have saved trouble too, yes I have.
So I am English-born. You know that from my voice.
Thorneyburnbank. A long name, and a fitting one – for its burn had thorns to its southern side. There was also an elm wood, and a field so brackish that the cows were haunch-high when they fed on its clover. They did that in the spring – it was sweetest then. Their milk, too, was sweeter, and the village was happier for the sweet milk. More hats were raised in the street, at me.
Not many knew of our village. Most knew of Hexham, though – with it being near the wall that the Romans made. Hexham’s abbey had bells which rang from the south, and if the wind was also southern we would hear them. I remember it like that – the cows in the marsh, and the bells ringing. It’s a pretty sight, in my head.
But it was not always pretty. And Cora was not fooled by pretty, gentle things. She was tired of wandering, that’s all. How many years can a person walk and walk, and sleep on bare earth? She was tired by now. She’d thought to try Hexham for a wholesome life, since she’d dreamt of its name very clearly – but the gaol upset her, I think. Justice was a word she scowled at, and was black for. The gaol hissed it to her – or at least, man’s meaning of it, which was Jeddart’s justice, mostly. She’d seen plenty of that, in a dark pool. She looked for less people to live by, for less people can mean more sense.
A hearth. A proper sleeping place.
A den for her feral heart.
The border country had a wild and unbridled way of life. It was filled with unkind weather, and as many ghosts as there was rain in the sky. There were rains so heavy the burn came up and ate the bridge like a fish does a fly – rain on rain. That meant trouble for the bats, too – for there were some bats that liked the bridge for roosting, and hung upside-down from it. We put our pig in the cottage with us one early spring for the mud was too thick for even a pig. So three of us snored at night, and sat by the hearth, but not so close that we might smell pork roasting.
Winters could kill folk, there. They froze the earth so that all things in it – beasts, bushes – froze too. I knew the story of Old Man Bean. They only found his boots.
Reiving weather, Cora said. Oh yes.
Reiver, Mr Leslie. Ree-ver.
That was a whispered word. An old one, too. She knew it. She knew that in reiver there had been spoiled homes and outrageous foraging, and cattle stolen away into the northern woods. She’d heard these stories of olden days, but she’d seen it too – in her head, in the strange roamings when her eyes went wide. Their hats, she said, were shiny-shiny…She called them crook-hearted, and cruel.
Cora told me, as a bedtime tale, that these reivers had ridden on moonless nights, and damp autumn ones when the cattle were fat, and worth reiving. The air might have had thick, swirling mists in it, so they came forth like ghosts. They’d charged on to farmsteads with their bonnets and daggs, roaring for what they had no right to have – hens, coins, leather. They maimed as they chose and left homes burning, so that if the night began itself moonless it ended fiery, full of light.
I thought of them when I was small. I thought of how I might fight them if they came for our pig, or three scrag hens. I thought I might fight them with a flaming cloth tied to bones, or stones. I fell on this distraction – I liked it more than working hard. But one day Mother Mundy spied me burning turf as March-wardens did. She beckoned me. She was a grizzled old crone whose teeth were gone, save for a peg or two. She told me of a night in which she’d been young and fair, unknown to any man, but was made known to a reiver as the thatch burned above her. The town raised hue and cry, she said. She was left extremely hurt and mangled, but with her life. I was lucky she slurred – others were slew…Oxen gone and horses too. She said I was to keep her