The White Witch Read online

  The White Witch (eBook edition)

  Hendrickson Publishers Marketing, LLC

  P. O. Box 3473

  Peabody, Massachusetts 01961-3473

  eISBN 978-1-61970-865-5

  THE WHITE WITCH. Copyright © 1958 by Elizabeth Goudge. Copyright renewed 1986 by C. S. Gerard Kealey & Jessie Monroe.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Due to technical issues, this eBook may not contain all of the images or diagrams in the original print edition of the work. In addition, adapting the print edition to the eBook format may require some other layout and feature changes to be made.

  First eBook edition — February 2016

  Cover photo: David Callan / iStockphoto

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Publisher’s Note (2016)

  Song

  Part One

  Chapter 1: The Children and the Painter

  Chapter 2: Yoben and Madona

  Chapter 3: Margaret

  Chapter 4: For Parliament

  Chapter 5: The Breeching

  Chapter 6: Butterflies

  Chapter 7: The White Witch

  Chapter 8: The Unicorn

  Chapter 9: The Black Witch

  Chapter 10: Parson Hawthyn

  Chapter 11: Toothache

  Chapter 12: For the King

  Part Two

  Chapter 1: Prelude to Battle

  Chapter 2: Edgehill

  Chapter 3: The Royal Standard

  Chapter 4: Postman’s Horn

  Chapter 5: The Fair

  Chapter 6: The Great Trick

  Chapter 7: A Witch Hunt

  Chapter 8: Christmas Eve

  Chapter 9: Christmas Day

  Chapter 10: Candlemas

  Part Three

  Chapter 1: The King’s Evil

  Chapter 2: Chalgrove Field

  Chapter 3: The Face in the Water

  Chapter 4: The Sun and the Moon

  Chapter 5: A Fair City

  Chapter 6: A Fight in the Streets

  Chapter 7: The Tarot Cards

  Chapter 8: The Web of Love

  Chapter 9: The Birds Fly Home

  Chapter 10: Beauty and the Beast

  Books by Elizabeth Goudge from Hendrickson Publishers

  FOR

  Jessie Monroe

  Author’s Note

  It has been said that every book has many authors, and this is especially true when a story has a historical setting. The history book plays a large part in its making. I would also like to acknowledge my debt of gratitude to Charles Leland’s Gypsies, which provided me with several gypsy legends, and to Charles Williams’s novel The Greater Trumps, without which I should not have known of the existence of the gypsy Tarot cards. And I would like to apologize for the many mistakes I must have unwittingly made, for only the storyteller who is also a competent historian can give a story of this sort to the reader without a quaking of the knees. One conjecture of mine I know may be incorrect. I have made Oliver Cromwell capture the Royal Standard at Edgehill. It is not known who captured it, though it is a historical fact that Captain John Smith rescued it again.

  Publisher’s Note (2016)

  Elizabeth Goudge’s novels present us with many rich fictional worlds. The ways in which these stories are told give us insight into Elizabeth Goudge’s own life and the culture in which she wrote. The White Witch includes many passages that display oppressive attitudes in matters of race relations. We are sensitive to the fact that many Romani people still face discrimination today. We believe that offering this book to readers as Elizabeth Goudge wrote it allows us to see English literary culture in 1958 in a way that would be obscured were we to alter the text. Justice must be based on truth. We trust that readers will appreciate the chance to encounter history as Goudge imagined it for The White Witch and the voice of the novel in its original form.

  Song

  And can the physician make sick men well?

  And can the magician a fortune divine?

  Without lily, germander, and sops-in-wine?

  With sweet-briar

  And bon-fire

  And strawberry wire

  And columbine.

  Within and out, in and out, round as a ball

  With hither and thither, as straight as a line,

  With lily, germander, and sops-in-wine,

  With sweet-briar

  And bon-fire

  And strawberry wire

  And columbine.

  When Saturn did live, then lived no poor,

  The King and the beggar with roots did dine,

  With lily, germander, and sops-in-wine,

  With sweet-briar

  And bon-fire

  And strawberry wire

  And columbine.

  Robin Goodfellow; His Pranks and Merry Jests.

  1628.

  Part One

  Chapter 1: The Children and the Painter

  Two children stood gazing at the world over their garden gate. They were just tall enough to rest their chins on top of it but Jenny, being half a head shorter than Will, had to stand on tiptoe. Behind them the small manor house where they lived, built of ship’s timbers and warm red brick, glowed in the September sunshine, and the garden was on fire with autumn damask roses and marigolds. They could hear the bees humming over the clove gilliflowers under the parlor window, and the soft whirr of their mother’s spinning wheel; for Margaret, their mother, sat just inside the open window with Maria the dog asleep in a pool of sunshine at her feet. Her children were aware of her gentle eyes upon them, and her anxious love. And Will resented it. Jenny, incapable of resentment, nevertheless thought it a pity that love must be anxious, for anxiety was such an imprisoning thing.

  It was many days now since she and Will had been allowed outside the garden gate by themselves; and their father had told them that this war was being fought for the liberties of the people. Will kicked the gate, not caring that he stubbed his toe, and Jenny said, “Hush, Will!” for she knew that the angry sound of his shoe against the wood had hurt their mother. The whirr of the spinning wheel had checked for a moment and she heard Margaret catch her breath. The width of the grass plot, with the medlar tree in the middle of it, was between them, but she did hear the small sound, just as she had heard Will sobbing on the day when he had gone bird’s nesting alone and had fallen out of a tree and hurt himself. She had this gift of hearing, not with the ears of her body, but hearing, and between Margaret, herself and Will the bond was closer even than is usual between a mother and her twin children who had never left her even for a night. Jenny knew that her mother loved Will more than she loved herself, but this she thought right and natural, for Will was the son and heir.

  There was really no reason why the children should be shut in the garden but Margaret was always at the mercy of Biddy’s tales. Biddy, their cook, was a very virtuous old woman, but like so many good women she was ogre-minded. She was seventy and had been good for so long that she suffered now from a natural ennui. Ogre collecting relieved the ennui and also gave her considerable power over her mistress and the children, who shivered in delicious terror whenever Biddy came home from market with a fresh crop of stories. She was a marvelous raconteur and though her descriptions of local hangings and witch hunts were nowadays at second hand, for she did not at seventy get about quite as much as she had done, they remained those of an eye witness.

  But just lately the supply of murderers, thieves and witches in the neighborhood had been running a little short and Biddy regarded the war as a godsend. Not only was it a nice change, with the perpetual comings and goings of the Squire and his friends, and the militia drilling on the common and five dead in the first week while they were trying to get their eye trained on the target, but it had provided her with a whole new crop of ogres of a most distinguished type, a pleasing change from the gypsies and tinkers of prewar days. The Bloody Tyrant and Rupert the Robber were familiar figures now to the children and their mother. Their ghastly appearance was known to them in intimate detail, even down to the twitch in the Robber’s left eyelid and the Bloody Tyrant’s wet red lips. They knew their habits too, from the boiling down of disobedient little children into soup to the disemboweling of captured prisoners. . . . And they might be here at any moment now, for the war was three weeks old. . . . Margaret and the children took pinches of salt with Biddy’s tales, as they had always done, but Margaret found that in time of war salt has a habit of losing its savor.

  And so she had confined her children to the garden, though no danger threatened them except from their own militia; and the militia had shelved the war for the moment to go harvesting. In the country at large, little was happening as yet apart from local skirmishes, and in the Chiltern country nothing at all, for here the division was not so much between Royalists and Parliament men as between Parliament men and those whose politics consisted of a passionate desire to be let alone to live their lives in peace. Margaret wished with all her heart and soul that her husband belonged to this latter party. But Robert Haslewood rode with John Ham
pden and Margaret’s heart was laid open to Biddy’s tales.

  The children gazed at the common beyond the garden gate. The peachy smell of gorse came to them, and the tussocks of heather were coloring fast under the hot sun. A lark was singing in the cloudless sky and the heat mist was blue over the beech wood that filled the valley to the left. In the hot stillness they could hear the jays calling in the wood, and the drumming of a yaffingale. One might see him if one were there, and the squirrels too.

  Will lifted his chin from the top of the gate and pushed it forward in a truculent manner. “Tomorrow,” he said, “I shall go into the wood.”

  “Mother won’t let you go,” said Jenny.

  “Tomorrow Mother has no more authority over me,” said Will. “Tomorrow I shall be breeched and next week I shall go to school.”

  He looked down with loathing and scorn at the childish coat he wore, skirted like a woman’s. His breeching had been postponed far too long because through the months of preparation for war his father had been so anxiously occupied, and away from home so much, that even the breeching of a son and heir had hardly seemed important. But tomorrow Robert Haslewood was coming home, bringing with him a little sword from London. And tomorrow the tailor would bring Will’s doublet and breeches, made to measure a little on the large side. And the barber would come too, to cut off his curls, and healths would be drunk all round and Will would be a man.

  Behind them in the house they heard the opening of the parlor door and the soft voice of little Bess the stillroom maid saying “Madam, madam, the rose jelly is coming to the boil!” The whirr of the spinning wheel ceased and Margaret rose hurriedly, for Bess was not yet competent with the jellies and preserves. They heard the rustle of her dress and the crackle of Bess’s starched apron, and Jenny could hear the gentle, lovable clicking sound of Maria’s nails on the polished floor as she padded after her mistress. There was a soft flurry of exit and the closing of the parlor door. The children looked at each other. Their mother’s eyes were no longer upon them and her anxiety was now centered on the rose jelly. A sense of release came to them, and a deep welling up of life.

  Holding onto the gate Will suddenly pulled up his knees and shot out his behind, delighting in the rending sound that announced the bursting of gathers. Returning his feet to the ground again he wiped his dirty, earthy fingers all over the fair curls that would be cropped tomorrow, finishing them off on the white collar round his neck. Then he spat at a passing bumblebee and missed it by only an inch. Tomorrow he would be a man and would not miss.

  “I shall have a sword tomorrow,” he told Jenny. “And I shall go into the wood now.”

  “You said you were going tomorrow,” said Jenny.

  “I shall go now,” said Will.

  He glanced over his shoulder but the windows were blank. He unlatched the gate and slipped through.

  “Me too,” pleaded Jenny. “It won’t hurt Mother for she won’t know. We’ll be back before the jelly’s done. Me too, Will.”

  “You’re only a girl,” he retorted. “You’ll never be breeched.”

  Nothing stings so sharply as the truth. From the hampering abundance of petticoat around Jenny’s thin legs there was no release to be looked for in this world, and judging by the pictures of angels in the family Bible, not in the next either. A lump came in Jenny’s throat but she did not argue with her brother, for Margaret had taught her by example that in humility and gentleness lie a woman’s best hope of frustrating the selfish stubbornness of men. She turned away from the gate and walked slowly toward the house. Her gait cried aloud to Will that soon she would have lost her playmate and would be alone. The pain that was already in her heart stirred sharply in his.

  “Come on then,” he said roughly. “Better come with me than go sniveling indoors to Mother.”

  Jenny never sniveled, but again she did not argue. She slipped quickly through the gate and shut it softly. They ran along the rough road that crossed the common until it dipped down into the wood, then left it and ran in among the great beeches where no one could see them. Then they walked slowly, swishing delightedly through the beechmast and savoring the great moment. Will took his sister’s hand now, with that air of protectiveness that was always his when he needed the comfort of her stouter heart. It was always a little eerie in the wood; and nowadays one could fancy Biddy’s ogres lurking behind the trees.

  Will at eight years old was a plump little boy, stocky and strong, dirty and disheveled of wicked intent but not responsible for the gaps in his teeth and the number of freckles across the bridge of his nose. Jenny had shed her first teeth very tidily at an early age and her new ones were all in place, pearly and well spaced. She was an orderly child. The white apron she wore over her long full-skirted blue dress was spotless, and so was her white cap. Her horn-book hung demurely from her waist. She was smaller than her brother and not at all like him, for her thin little face was pale and her hair dark, cut in a fringe across her forehead, fell in soft ringlets on her shoulders. She had about her a delicate air of remoteness, like a shy bird that has touched down for a moment only in a strange land, but it was misleading. She was not as delicate as she looked and morally she was fast growing into one of those competent women who are in control of their circumstances. She held Will’s hand firmly and soon it ceased to tremble in hers.

  When he no longer felt afraid Jenny’s delight in the wood took hold of him. Her moods frequently took hold of him, for they were still very much one child. Reaching for air and light the beech trees had grown very tall. One’s eyes traveled up and up the immense height of the silver trunks, past the various platforms of green leaves to where the blue of the upper air showed through them. The final platforms were so high that the blue of the blue-green pattern seemed no further away in space than the green; but one tree had decided to be content with a lowly position, had grown only a short height on a slender silver stem and then spread out her arms and wings like a dancing fairy. Below on the floor of the wood the colors showed jewel-bright above the warm russet of the beechmast. The cushions of moss about the roots of the trees were emerald and there were clumps of small bright purple toadstools, and others rose-colored on top and quilted white satin underneath. The children stood still, watching. In the bole of another tree a round hole had been nibbled larger by small teeth to make the entrance to a squirrel’s nest and was smoothly polished by the rub of fur. They saw a couple of squirrels and the yaffingale. The muted autumn music of a deep wood, hidden within its distances, seemed to flow out to them, as they listened, like water from a hidden spring: the rustlings and stirrings of small creatures, the wind that was in the upper air only and stirred merely the highest patterns of the leaves, the conversational flutings of the birds, the strange sigh that passed now and then through the wood, as though it grieved for the passing of summer. All the sounds came together and grieved them also, but quietly, for summer comes again.

  “It makes my ears feel clean,” said Jenny, and Will nodded. His own ears had the same rinsed feeling but he was inarticulate and would not have been able to find the words to say what he felt. But he had imagination and suddenly it leaped into life. If words to describe what he saw or felt did not come as easily to him as they did to Jenny, his sense of drama could always take hold of a scene or situation and dispose it imaginatively about himself. This he could do with a great sense of his own kingliness at the center of his world. With an airy leap, surprising in one so sturdy, he landed under the dancing beech tree and held out his arms beneath hers, laughter sparkling all over his freckled face. Then he girdled the trunk three times at breakneck speed, calling out to Jenny, “Who am I, Jenny? Who am I?”

  She had no doubt as to who he was, for Cousin Froniga had just been reading them A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  “ ‘Sweet Puck’!” she cried, “ ‘Are not you he?’ ”

  “Come on!” he called to her, leaping off down the slope of the wood. “ ‘Over hill, over dale, Through bush, through brier, Over park, over pale. . . .’ ”

  His voice died away and Jenny gathered up her skirts and ran after him, her hornbook swinging madly and her cap on the back of her head. The beech leaves crunched gloriously under their feet and the jays began calling again in the depth of the wood. They were coming to the bottom of the slope and through the thinning trees they could see the fields of standing corn and the pastures where the sheep were feeding, the long azure distance to the east, and to the west the tall hill blazing with gorse and crowned with thickets of hawthorn that were already glowing crimson against the blue of the sky. They ran faster and faster, Jenny overtaking Will, and because they had not been in the wood for so long they forgot about the treacherous dip in the ground, like a deep ditch, that hid itself beneath the drifted beech leaves. Jenny fell first, catching her foot in her troublesome petticoats and pitching headlong. Will, running so fast that he could not stop, tripped in some brambles and went head over heels after her, yelling with dismay. There was an answering shout from somewhere above them in the wood and both, as they fell, were aware of the man leaping down upon them, the terrible man dressed in black velvet, with dreadful gleaming eyes and cruel red lips. They saw the forked black beard and the tongue just moistening the lips as he sprang. He was just as Biddy had described him. Half dead with terror, upside down among the beech leaves, they shut their eyes and waited for death, for it was the Bloody Tyrant.