Chapter 1 - Preacher's Passion
{Tell us a story!}
{Yeah -- we want to hear a story while we get ready to go another round!}
{Make it a funny story,'cos Jo gets all weepy and forgets who she's supposed to be doing if you tell sad ones...}
Most people have at least vaguely heard of the infamous Salem Witch Trials. Most people, generally, seem to have a vague impression that several witches were condemned and burnt.
As a matter of fact, almost certainly none of the condemned actually WERE witches (witches have always been pretty scarce on the ground even where they are wanted or even merely tolerated; anyone intelligent enough to master the Seven Magics and the Four Summonings that make up the requirements to be granted even the lowest witching degree, that of BW [Bachelor of Witchcraft, which certifies one a true witch, and here's the door, sorry we don't have any job openings on the faculty here at Trismegistus U, write if you get work, we hear there's a gingerbread house five counties over whose original owner was just roasted in her own oven by two smart-arse kids, good luck, bye! [Slam!]] is fully cognisant of the local vibrations, as it were, and has no trouble knowing exactly when she really ought to be going to visit Aunt Matilda, who's getting on in centuries and has that lovely hut just north of Bad Ass in Lancre in the Ramtops and doesn't get around as well as she used to, with the result that the local villagers arrive at her thatched cottage at quarter eight with torches, ropes, scythes, rakes and other more obscure agricultural implements and find themselves reading (if they can indeed read) a note on the door that says "Gonne to visitt mye Anty. Please milkke cowe everie daie and looke afterr the batts, Luv, Griselda thee Blacke".
{What did you just say?}
{Sorry, the management promises closer control will be kept over sentences in the future.}
{Quit interrupting, Roberta, or we'll never hear the story.}
No, most if not all of the women and men (eleven women, eight men) condemned for witchcraft at Salem in 1692 were innocent, and were, in fact, hanged, and not burnt. Charged, be it noticed, on the basis first of the hysterical ravings of apparently spiteful little girls, and then further tried and condemned on the basis of rather fantastic "evidence" produced, for the most part, by those who were to sit in judgement over them. Thus does humanity -- not really far advanced from his original killer ape days -- deal with those who differ from the pack in some way.
{Those interested in the real-life details of the Salem trials can find a day-to-day chronology of them an photos of the memorial dedicated in their memory in the tricentennial year after the trials online without much trouble, by the way}
{Who are you talking to?}
However, this is not a story about Salem, the Salem witch trials, nor the rather nasty vengeance some real witches have worked there from time to time in killer-ape vengeance frenzies of their own, but rather about the nearby town of Winston, Massachusetts.
You've never heard of Winston, Massachusetts? Not surprising. The townspeople of Winston decided that they wanted to hang some witches, too. Their town, however, differed from Salem in one important and (for them) unfortunate manner -- there really was a witch living there.
Unfortunately for the townspeople and to her own subsequent displeasure and discomfiture, Mistress Nicola Hawkworth had a bit of a cold in the head that left her foresight a bit cloudy and uncomfortable to use, so she had momentarily stopped using it about the time the village elders decided that they needed a witch trial to be thoroughly up to date.
{I must say, if that was all it took to be thoroughly up to date in Massachusetts in those days, it must have been a much more restful time and place to live than, say, Kansas City around the beginning of the Twentieth Century...}
{Huh?}
{'Oklahoma!', you dummy!}
{Huh?}
{Never mind. [[rolleyes]]}
And, so, when there was a knock on her door one pleasant evening, and she opened it, expecting to find any one of several young (or one or two not-so-young, but still virile) men from the village, come to improve both their evenings, she instead found most of the village with torches, ropes, scythes, etc. in hand; led by the father of the wife of one of her more regular not-so-young but still virile callers.
{In the interests of full disclosure, it is probably necessary to reveal that the not-so-young but still virile caller in question stood a few rows back in the mob, looking sheepish but still half-heartedly brandishing a left-handed Cornish hop-reaper's hook...}
{Wow. That's obscure all right!}
{Three-to-one it's so obscure 'cos she just made it up.}
{No bets and get your hand off there till the story's over, you pig!}
{Oink.}
Before she could spew anathema upon them, or even ask if they'd care to come in for tea (she had just worked out the bigger-inside-than-outside spell, and wouldn't mind seeing if she could, indeed, fit the entire population of the town into her small one-room cottage), Rector Titearse seized her and stuffed a gag in her mouth, as two others grabbed her hands and tied them to prevent any gestures. Another tried to catch her cat, on the theory that it must be her familiar and would bring demonic help if not stopped (correct in theory, but the cat wasn't her familiar) and got severely clawed and bitten about the hands, arms, neck, face, scalp and left ear before eighteen pounds of spitting snarling blood-covered black cat burst through the center of the mob like a well-hurled ball through a stand of ninepins.
In the aftermath of the cat's strike, things were a bit confused for a while, and it was only because the reverend and his two helpers held her so tightly that Mistress Nicola didn't escape. Somebody copped a couple of feels in the process, which she normally wouldn't have minded [sometimes she even enjoyed a little bondage though she preferred to be the one tying the knots] but this time she suspected that it was the Reverend Titearse, who was, after all, about fifty and wretched. She had always sympathised with his departed wife.
{Not that the Reverend's wife was dead, you understand, just departed years ago, leaving him with a baby daughter who grew up to just as rigidly anti-fun as he was, which is why HER husband, Goodman Hector Strongpencil, often dropped by Nicola's cottage of a summer evening when he was supposed to be at the tavern.}
"Ha, foul enchantress, we have you!" barked out the Reverend. People talked like that in those days, right out in public, instead of decently out of hearing in the back rooms of game stores.
Without further ado, she was dragged off to town and clapped into the town gaol. There she was confronted by the Reverend, her accuser, who was the Reverend's daughter, Goodwife Prunaprisma Titearse Strongpencil, and (still rather sheepishly and definitely keeping behind the others) Goodman Hector Strongpencil, at whom she couldn't really remain angry, as he was one of her more favored evening visitors.
As they stared at her, she glared back, almost scorching them with the fire of her huge luminous eyes, probably the most striking feature of her incredibly lovely face...
{"Hey! No fair gilding the lily!}
{Right -- we know just what those'huge luminous eyes' looked like...}