"What manner was it?"

"I shall come there, Sir Robert. The matter before us is this: Was there some Devil's work done on Sarah Hodge – as now some of those parishioners outside maintain – or was there none at all?"

I looked at Sackpole. I saw that the clergyman was uneasy and would not hold my glance. Clearly, he was preparing himself to ask of me something mortally not to my liking, in all probability the examination of the corpse of the dead girl. I opened my mouth to pre-empt this request by telling Sackpole that the last post mortem examination I had witnessed had been upon a bull toad in the King's laboratory and that I was no longer able to interpret correctly the imprimatura left by death upon the human body, but Sackpole went imperiously on: "The matter is a difficult one," he said, "and…"

I held up my hand at this point and requested that the Vicar go no further with his tale until he had contradicted my assumption that I was being asked to make a medical judgement upon a corpse. Somewhat to my surprise, he informed me that the body of Sarah Hodge would remain undisturbed in the ground. He then, in a manner altogether nervous and afraid (somewhat confounding my view of him as a man of impenetrable conceit) told me the following story.

An old widow woman, known to all as Wise Nell, had for many years acted as midwife to the parish. She was also a healer and primitive apothecary, cultivating her own physic garden and said to have some power of healing in her hands, this power coming to her through her faith in God, or so she claimed. For some months now, Wise Nell had not been seen at church. She protested that a rheumatism in her knees prevented her from walking there. But the people of Bidnold began to notice a change in her demeanour (where, before she had been quiet and calm, she now seemed agitated) and in her hands, particularly in the feel of her hands! The skin had become hardened and calloused; the pressure of her palms now brought to the head or limbs of the sufferers a moment's icy chill. And the whispers began to be heard: Wise Nell is wise no longer, her love of God has been replaced by love of the Devil, the power in her hard, cold hands is the power of Satan…

"You must know," said Sackpole at this point, "what infinite terror is felt by a God-fearing people at the idea of witchcraft. And it is to the clergy that men come with all the tales of devilry, saying so-and-so is a veritable witch and such-and-such is the proof and now there must be a burning or a drowning or I know not what terrible persecution to be played out. And yet the entire matter, to my mind, is one of great difficulty and complexity for proof of innocence and proof of guilt may both be manufactured, and I have come to believe that in most of these cases only God sees to the heart of the thing. For this reason, I hoped never to hear the word 'witchcraft' uttered against any in Bidnold. And I will not deny it, I am afraid of what may follow."

Sackpole took from his sleeve a somewhat grimy handkerchief and blew his nose. Still ignorant of what my own part was to be in this story, I waited for him to prise from his nostrils two small fillets of hardened mucus, and then asked him to continue.

"Well," he said, "we come now to the matter of Sarah Hodge. She was, as I have told you, a young girl with all her life before her and yet, it seems, had fallen into a dull melancholy, occasioned, some say, by that she had cut off her hair – of a rich chestnut brown colour – to sell for a few shillings to a wig-maker. I cannot say, Sir Robert, whether a young woman might so mourn the loss of her hair that she could weep for it for two months or more, but weep she did and would not eat and grew thin and weak and declared a loathing for all things."

"Her parents are poor cottars and ignorant and had no knowledge of how to help her, but yet in the end sent her to Wise Nell, begging the old woman to do anything she could to revive in her some joy."

"I am told Sarah Hodge was three hours with Nell. She was given a potion to drink which, she was told, contained the blood of swallows, birds of summer and symbols of man's ease."

"When she came out from Nell's cottage, her cheeks were flushed, I understand, and her body most hot all over. She felt well, she said, with the blood of the birds inside her and wanted to dance. So her brothers, glad to see her happy again in spite of her shorn head, took up some tambourines and a pipe and played a tune for Sarah and she lifted up her skirts and began to hop about and kick her feet and would not stop for half an hour or more, her face growing more and more hot until the cheeks were a dark wine-red and still she danced on, tearing open her bodice and showing her breasts that were flushed like her face, on and on until suddenly she bent over and out of her mouth came a fountain of black vomit and she fell down and began to rave that she had drunk poison from a nipple in the Devil's own neck, and within some twenty minutes she was dead."

There was a hard bench in the vestry. I sat down upon it. I had not expected to be listening to talk of black vomit and Devil's nipples on my birthday.

"It now seems," Sackpole said, "that, among the other changes in the person of Wise Nell, the village folk have noticed the appearance, on her neck, of a brownish spot she claimed to be a wart, but which has grown in size, the skin around it becoming puckered and discoloured, so that it now resembles in every way a dug or teat. And you know, Sir Robert, that such an outrage to nature is commonly held to be sure and certain sign of the presence of Satan within the soul. And this is why – to calm the people's anger and gain for myself both time and knowledge in the matter – I sent for you. What I am asking of you is that you go with me to the cottage of Wise Nell and there conduct an examination of this thing upon her neck and tell me, to the best of your knowledge, which I hear from Mistress Storey and indeed from Lady Bathurst is considerable, whether it be a proper nipple or merely some other growth such as a wart or a cyst."

I paused a moment before replying. Then I said: "And if I find this thing to be what you believe it to be, what will happen to Wise Nell?"

"As I informed you, we do not expect you to be the sole arbiter in the case, but only to give one medical opinion, after which the woman will be examined by others."

"Such as Doctor Murdoch?"

"Except that he has not been seen since the death of Sarah Hodge."

"By whom, then?"

"We shall send to other villages for their medical men."

"And if they find 'proof of the Devil?"

Sackpole drew his fingers across his lips.

"I do not favour persecutions. Yet I cannot be seen to harbour the Devil in my parish."

"She will be killed."

"Or driven away. I shall try to see to it that she is driven away."

It is now the twenty-eighth of January. A cold, sunless morning. I grew too tired last night to finish the story of what happened upon my birthday, but I shall continue here. I am older by one day and wiser, I fear, by a good deal. For I have had a glimpse into my future.

Though I would have preferred to return home to do a little painting and supervise the arrangements for my supper party, I had no choice but to accompany the Reverend Sackpole to the low, thatched dwelling where this unfortunate Wise Nell leads a most strange crepuscular life, so dark is her house, so low its ceilings and small its windows. I am not tall, but I could barely stand up straight in her little parlour. So this, I thought, is one among many persecutions endured by the poor: they are persecuted by their own rooms.

Though Sackpole announced our arrival in a voice of good cheer (does an executioner employ such a jovial tone when he asks a condemned person to lay his head upon the block?) I could see by the glimmer of a single rushlight that Nell, seated upon a rocking chair with her arms folded round her body, was most horribly afraid of what was about to happen. Her eyes, which appeared to me vast and bulging, like the eyes of a bulldog, stared pleadingly at the Vicar and she began to mumble that she was servant to no one but God and the King and that she knew of no reason why Sarah Hodge should have died. There was a foul smell in the room, as of a rich fart. I was considering what this might be – whether the smell of swallow corpses and the like to be used in Nell's medical remedies, the smell of a poor meal of tripe left in the air too long, or the smell of fear itself which I know to be an actual phenomenon occasioned by the malfunction or over-function of certain glands.