Daughter of Satan by Jean Plaidy Page A

having taken on his ship a man who had a witch for a wife; and when a third attempt to reach Scotland was frustrated, there was no doubt in the minds of many that they were the victims of witchcraft.
    The witch-wife of the sailor was burned alive with many of her companions, and when the King of Scotland himself set out across the sea to fetch his bride to her new home, his ship was all but wrecked off the coast of Norway.
    Convinced that these tempestuous voyages, which had almost resulted in the death by drowning of himself and his Queen, had been the Devil’s work, the King had started an inquiry into the matter as soon as his marriage had been celebrated on Scottish soil. Many well-known witches were seized and under torture confessed to what they had done.
    They had baptized a cat, making mock of one of the holy ceremonies of the Church; and then they had stolen parts of the bodies of dead men, and these they had attached to the cat’s legs. With the cat they had gone to the end of Leith pier, from where they had thrown the cat into the sea.
    The cat had been a strong swimmer and had reached land in spite of its handicaps. The witches declared that this had told them that the new Queen would make port safely. The witches explained that the great Earl of Bothwell had been in communication with them; and it was rumoured that he attendedtheir Sabbats, dressed as the Devil, and that he put on the power of the Evil One with his accoutrements.
    The Scottish witches were strangled, and burned till there was nothing left of them but ashes.
    This had happened more than ten years ago, and now this King and his wife and family had gone to London.
    There were others besides witches to flout the authority of the State. The Puritans, Separatists and Brownists were now continually talked of. Tamar heard terrible stories of the ills these people suffered and had been suffering for years.
    Persecution was rife throughout the land; not the hideous bloody persecution which had caused the name of Queen Mary to be spoken with shuddering contempt; but persecution all the same. In Plymouth men had been seized, torn from their families and thrust into prison because they had failed to attend the established church and wished to worship God in their own way. The prisons of London and most other cities were full of such men; they were left to starve in the pits and little eases of those prisons; they were set upon with cudgels and beaten almost to death; some were hanged.
    Tamar, at fourteen, was budding into rare beauty, and although she was completely unlettered, her intelligence was fine and quick. She wished, therefore, to know of these matters of religion; and she was saddened because, being suspected of connexion with witches, she was hardly ever spoken to.
    She knew something of witchcraft, for she had been an eager pupil of Granny Lackwell, who still sat on her stool in the cottage; Granny was getting old now and at times she would sink into a stupor and so remain for hours at a time; she would talk incoherently of flying through the air on a broomstick, of her conversations with Toby, her familiar, and a man in black who, she professed, came to visit her. Tamar had never witnessed any of these visits, and she was inclined to believe that Granny Lackwell was not right in her head.
    Bartle was back from his sea voyage – a young man of twenty – tall and strong and very proud of a scar he bore on his cheek. His skin was tanned a light shade of brown which made his blue eyes quite startling. Tamar heard that he wassuch another as his father and that all the maidens of the town and the surrounding villages were ready to come when he beckoned. It was said that there would be many a child with the Cavill blue eyes roaming the streets and lanes in a year or two.
    Once Tamar met him on the Hoe. His lips curled in recognition as she ran past him.
    And now . . . Simon Carter the witch-pricker had come to Plymouth. Soberly dressed as