The captured women have endured a night of punishments, Master Kent reports in a sunken whisper. I have to turn my head to catch his words, although his words are almost beyond bearing. Last evening, before my neighbors even thought of marching mildly on the manor house, Kitty Gosse had already confessed to what Master Jordan has decided will best serve his purposes.

“I have the sense my cousin is taking pleasure from sowing these anxieties, in the same way we take pleasure in the sowing of our seed,” says Master Kent. “I fear his harvesting. I think he means to shear us all, then turn us into mutton.”

My master cannot claim to be a witness to the shearing, though. He was required to go back to his room and rest himself, until called. “They had that smaller fellow”—Master Jordan’s groom, I suppose—“lean against my door, in case I counted it my duty to step out, and try to be a hindrance,” he says. “What could I do, except stay toothless in my room?” But floorboards leak and timber carries sound; he heard the crashes and the cries from the gallery above all too clearly. The one word witchery has licensed the Jordan sidemen to do precisely what they want. Evidently, Kitty Gosse took less persuading than Anne Rogers, but then, once the inquisitors had discovered on her naked body her warts and lumps and judged them perfect teats on which the devil readily might suck, she was exposed to fiercer questioning. Besides, she is in her own way, as I well know, the more attractive of the two and, therefore, will have suffered more in their efficient custody. Their master must have promised a free hand in their tormenting if they produced the witchery he wanted, and the name. They will have asked, Was Anne Rogers also an enchantress? And was the little girl some kind of flowered sacrifice, some sort of offering, perhaps, or was she also being nurtured as a country hag?

My master is reluctant to say much more about what his ears have heard. He is ashamed, I think, to have proved so powerless — and under his own roof too. But I already understand enough about these sidemen to suppose how their evening might have advanced. They were not quick-witted, that’s for sure, but they would have been fired up by one another and by the stirring circumstance of being entirely in charge for once. They were far from their own wives and mothers. And they were far from a restraining word. And there were no witnesses that counted. No matter what they did last evening, they could claim they did it only at their master’s bidding. They were provoked by him. So Kitty Gosse will have done her best but very soon would have understood that there would be no respite until she told them what they said she must — although, of course, these men might very well prefer her not to offer a confession too soon because then they’d have to finish with their torments, they’d have to put an end to taking turns before they were entirely satisfied.

From what Master Kent is saying, I can presume that Kitty Gosse will have identified herself, as they required, to save herself. She might have done no more than nod almost imperceptibly when they mentioned Anne’s and Lizzie’s names again. Certainly, she had the spirit, the master says, to give her word that neither she, nor her friend, nor the child were ringleaders in any way, but only—“Only what?” a side-man said. Well, only foolish followers. “Who, then?” Kitty, joined by Anne Rogers by now, and too bruised and exhausted to do anything but cooperate, screamed out half a dozen names. My master, his head tipped toward the ceiling planks, heard every one of them. “I think she picked on women who were not her cousins and were not Rogerses either, or who had never been especial friends to her,” he says. And then a moment later, she began to list the men.

I am surprised to hear that neighbor Carr is included in the lengthy cast, though I am not. I surely would have been an easy pick — the outsider without the faintest trace of blond. Perhaps I fool myself, but it is tempting to imagine she’s protected me. If she’s ever free again, she will not want to go without an old friend in her bed. But Master Jordan’s sidemen were not satisfied by this. These village names were not of any interest. They hadn’t even called on Mr. Baynham to bring his ink and write them down. “So were these also ‘only foolish followers’?” they asked. Both women answered yes, at once, seeing there a chance to redeem a little reputation for their men and friends. Then who did they consider most responsible? By now they had run out of names. Who was there left to take the blame? “The gentleman,” said Anne Rogers.

“Which gentleman?”

“The gentleman …” Master Kent heard her pause. One of the sidemen laughed, he says; she must have mimicked Mr. Quill’s uneasy walk, crunching up her shoulders, possibly. “This gentleman.” She didn’t need to volunteer his name.

Now it was a pleasure for the men to tidy up and step downstairs where Master Jordan and his steward were smoking their long pipes. After fierce and tiring questioning, they reported in bragging voices loud enough for Master Kent to overhear, they had laid bare a covenly intrigue. Once Lizzie Carr was brought wet-cheeked into the room after having been tied all afternoon, and promised that she might keep her green sash if she could prove herself a wise and honest little girl, it was easy to find corroboration of what the women had alleged. Not that Master Jordan needed much corroboration. However, he was a lawful, tidy man who by nature wanted to seem thorough. It was just as he had expected. This grinning Mr. Earle — was that the fellow’s genuine name? Was he the erl-king of some kind? — had always clearly been a busy devotee of the arts, to which the black arts were akin. Lizzie Carr confessed she had been frightened by the man. He was the one who had “made me Queen, and tried to put his hand on me.” Dark practices, indeed. Besides, hadn’t the man admitted only yesterday that he’d been struck by lightning or some such wizardry?

“He said the heavens opened up for him, I think,” agreed Mr. Baynham, “and a tongue of light gave him the body of an old gnarled tree. He is deformed thereby. By alchemy. Something about the devil and an old cracked jar.”

“Collect him, then, and bring him here.”

Mr. Quill was not found in his room, of course. By that time he had already slipped away to throw his arm around the shoulder on the pillory, and then given chase to Mistress Beldam through the night. But there were objects in his room which only deepened his complicity: pestles, grinding blocks and bowls too small for kitchen work, together with powders, paints and grounds which, if separated from his parchments and his brushes, could not seem anything but menacing. There was a fiddle, Satan’s instrument. There was a Natural History of plants, handwritten with his recipes for making potions and procuring spells, and with suspicious vegetation pressed between its leaves. And there were wordless charts too colorful and incautious to be the kind of maps a landowner might need. No, Mr. Baynham had never seen such reckless maps before, although he had experience in such matters. He would expect some helpful keys and labels. These were more like incantations shaped by paint.

So it was that my neighbors arrived too late last night with their doffed caps to ask for the release of their two women and their girl: the captives had already spilled the cats out of their bags and were tied by their wrists and ankles to the heavy newels on the upper landing of the stairs. The three sidemen, looking both excited and shamefaced, were waiting with their cudgels in the lower hall for the sorcerer’s return. The steward was sent out to brush aside the villagers. “I know I should have answered them myself,” says Master Kent, “but I was still confined behind my door. I could have shouted, I suppose …” For Mr. Baynham, though, it didn’t matter who my neighbors named. His master already had the name he wanted most. He’d use the others if he needed to. Besides much of what they said supported what the sidemen had discovered. The Chart-Maker — a sinister title, wasn’t it? — was the Trouble-Maker too. And, in addition, it seemed he was, according to the local word, the one behind the theft of the velvet shawl belonging to Master Kent’s dead wife. And he was, as well, connected in some way — related, possibly — to the vagabond woman, who was evidently loose about the place, and her kinsman on the pillory, who was evidently not. The bloody killing of the mare began to make a little sense to them now. It was part of some dark ritual. No, matters were indeed “in hand.” And this was where the steward told my neighbors, “I’ll repeat you to the master, word for word.”