Winston's Witch Ch. 03

(New characters, new complications. Nikki - oops, "Nicola" - is a bit more than she's appeared to be so far, apparently.

(The "Widow"'s experiences were far too common at the time, and only a bit less so now. Having had more than one friend in The Life, i can attest that all too many "clients" would be quite willing to prosecute/persecute a whore if they met her outside of a bedroom; most of them would deny her three times before the cock came...)

That evening the gaoler showed in more of Nicola's accusers, the Widow Driven Snow Blanchett and her eighteen year old daughter, Diana. (It was, you may recall, a tradition among the Pilgrims and other religious types in that part of the country to give their children names -- allegorical or otherwise -- that would hopefully influence them in their future lives.)

"Do you intend to leave me alone with these two, Master Gaoler? I know not about Mistress Chastity, but I am quite certain that Widow Drifted Snow here would do me a mischief if given the chance..." his prisoner said to that official, ignoring the sniff the Widow Blanchett gave at the mocking twisting of her name.

"No, mum, I doesn't. After las' night, I be required to be present for any interviews you has wi' any o' town folk. I'll jus' take me chair over in this corner and sit; if any o' ye needs owt, just call." Not one of nature's mental giants, but a good fellow withal, and with great endurance. I mean, with the ability to endure much patiently.

Widow Blanchett stepped up to the bars, and snapped "Witch! Why do you trouble my daughter's dreams with your vile sendings?"

"I? Sendings to your daughter? I recall no such -- I've no reason to have done such, either. I mean, no-one has approached me with a request to do evil to you or your daughter.

"I must admit, though, that in your case, Snow, I would make an exception..."

"How dare you..."

"How dare I? Heh. Snow, I know your story before you drifted into Winston. I know the source of the 'inheritance' that you used to start up your store. Should I tell the townfolk?"

"You wouldn't..."

"Why not, Snow? I certainly have little if any to lose if it come to cutting up of characters. You, on the other hand, are in some danger. Some considerable danger. Someday, a great writer will remark '...the Colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady Are sisters under the skin...' but it will be years after even his time, if ever, before a woman whose fortune was made by... backbreaking labor... as yours was will be accepted into society if it's officially brought to people's attention..."

The Widow Blanchett's face was as white as her namesake. Her daughter glanced curiously back and forth between the two older women, trying to figure out just how the imprisoned witch had brought her mother to such terror without actually saying anything straight out.

Not that it mattered to her. She had been having Dreams that featured the witch, of late. Quite... Interesting... Dreams, though she was careful to not describe them too thoroughly to her mother or to the Reverend Titearse since the memorable switchings she had gotten for simply beginning to tell them the much less clear dreams she had had about the Squire's son.

"So, Mistress Diana," the witch was asking her, in a tone that seemed to cause a twitch in her insides at the same time that it somehow made an irony of her name. "Your mother says you've been having dreams from me?"

"Ummm... no, Mistress Nicola," she stammered, looking from the corner of her eye at her mother, who was still regarding the woman in the cell with shock and some fear. "More, errrr, about you..." she broke off in confusion, cheeks a bright read that spread down her neck, and, Nicola suspected, probably continued right fetchingly across the upper slopes of her small but upstanding teenaged boobies.

"Hmmm." the witch said, laying her hand on the door of her cell, which swung silently open at her touch, despite the large lock that was supposed to keep it closed.

Seeing this the gaoler started to heave himself to his feet with a "Here, now...". She raised one small hand and said "No worry, Master Gaoler; even if I can open the door, where or how would I go anywhere with such a stout guardian as yourself watching me and standing betwixt me and the door?"

Considering that, he nodded and subsided upon his chair.

"Step inside, Mistress Diana, and we will talk," she said. "No -- I don't think you will go anywhere or say anything for a while," she said, with a quick gesture of her hand toward Widow Blanchett, who had begun to turn as if to either follow her daughter and stop her or to flee the gaol and bring help. "You go over and sit comfortably on the gaoler's knee for a while. You don't mind, do you, Master Gaoler?"

"Why no, not at all, missie, bless your heart. There's but the one chair here, and I've a strong knee that will easily support the Widow while you and her daughter talk in your cell..."

At that, Widow Blanchett stepped quietly to him and sat daintily upon his knee, teetering a bit in place.

"For Heaven's sake, woman -- lean back a bit; he's got his arm stretched out and 'twill do you as a chairback."

Reluctantly, the Widow leaned back a bit till her shoulders felt the support of the gaoler's massive right arm as it came down to the arm of the bench. Shifting a bit for more comfort, her hip came naturally to rest against his huge hand, but neither seemed to notice, so intent were they on the witch and the maiden in the cell.

"My, my, Diana," the witch murmured, with that same sardonic tone to her name that made her twitch and seemed to cause a warm feeling to start somewhere in her belly. "You've grown quite a bit since you mother took you and left the town where you folks lived last. Ah, but you were only four or five, then, and so you wouldn't recall." Her eyes seemed to take on a distant focus, and she continued, "She needed help in getting away unseen, didn't you, Snow?"

Involuntarily, Diana's eyes followed Nicola's as they turned to where her mother reclined on the gaoler's knee. Her mother's face had gone even whiter than before, save for patches of red on each cheekbone.

"So you staggered along in the snow, afraid you and little Diana were going to die out there, and you prayed to Anyone who would listen..."

=================================

The woman who would call herself the Widow Driven Snow Blanchett in the future in Winston tripped again on a root or branch buried under the snow, and fell to one knee, almost dropping her precious bundle. She was lost, and there were said to be wolves in these woods, but that was the least of her worries -- her daughter had become still in her arms, no longer querulously struggling and crying out for her crib and her favourite dollie. Now she was quiet, her eyes half-closed, and her skin had a frightening white transparency. So frightened by this was her mother that, if she thought that someone would take the child and care properly for her, she would willingly have turned about and returned to the place she had fled and given herself up to the scourge and the branding iron the strict Church Elders had proclaimed must be the fate of women such as she... but she knew that, as likely as not, little Diana would be cast aside to the almshouse and, when she was but a year or two older, put to work that would quickly break her sunny spirit and take her to an early grave.

And why?

Because of what she was, she who had borne the child.

"Bawd's daughter", the child would be, and her spirit would be broken on purpose, that she never follow the trade of her sinful mother.

Not that she had wanted to be that; not that she had wanted the men furtively coming to her door on the little hidden lane outside of the town. Not that she had wanted the sick way so many of them looked at her, as if she were less than human, nor the way some had treated her, lashing out at her if they were unable to function...

No, she had wanted to live happily with her husband and her daughter and see her daughter grow up and to grow old with her man and to eventually sleep by his side in the town cemetery. But the smallpox had not spared him. She and the babe hadn't been touched, but he had suffered and died.

And she was a woman alone, with no man to support or protect her, and no way to make a living for herself and the child. Her husband had been a woodcutter, and certainly she could not follow him in that trade. Had he been a farmer, she might have been able to keep a small plot going, to feed herself and her child and to trade a bit to others for what she could not grow herself. But their cabin lay not among cleared and broken farm land, but in the wood.

So she worried.

But she was a pretty woman, and a widow, who continued to live alone and gave no outward sign that she was worried, and some people drew the wrong conclusions.

And so, one day, one of the other women's drunken husband came to her, and said he could help her to buy some food, if only she would do a little something for him. Being not particularly sophisticated, she had not really understood what he meant, and he, in turn, being not very bright, had mistaken her incomprehension for coyness... with the result that she found herself thrown down upon the bed she had shared with her husband, sketchily disrobed, and fucked with enthusiasm if not skill or subtlety.

When he finished, as he was dressing, he had tossed her some coins with a mixture of disgust, contempt and superiority, saying "Here ye be, slut -- not a bad ride at all. I'll be back, and I'll tell me friends ye're willing." and left before she could say anything.

For shame that someone might think that she had somehow led him on, she never mentioned it to anyone else, believing that if she simply went on as always, nothing more would come of it. After a struggle with herself, she kept the money he had tossed her, and used it to buy staple foods. And she tried to think no more of it.

Until the night when the same man, drunk again, came with one of his equally loutish friends, and they thrust their way into her home and had at her. Knowing this time what they had in mind, she protested from the start, but they were more amused and stimulated by her futile resistance than they were dissuaded, and she was again fucked by both of them. As they left, they promised to return, and claimed that, even if she did try to bring charges against them this time, her failure to do so the first time would look as if she had been willing, and that she was, indeed, a whore.

But they did leave some money again; a bit more than the previous time.

So she bought things that she needed. She never spoke of the events, but there was gossip among the less-respectable men of the community, and then among the more-respectable men, and then someone mentioned something to his wife, and soon she was the town whore in name, if not in fact, and other men -- some of them nominally well-respected town elders - began to appear at her door in the hours of darkness, assuming that they would be accommodated. If she tried to resist, she was threatened with public censure and punishment. But, if she acquiesced, no official notice would be taken, and she would be allowed to live on in her little house... and she would be paid at least a little.

It did not take long before she began to think of herself as a whore, albeit an unwilling one, and to despise herself for being such a poor thing and for being so ready to conspire at immorality to get a little peace and a little money. She became more skilled in the arts of pleasing men -- and of avoiding violence when some man, unable to perform, blamed her for his lack... but the more she knew of how to bring them pleasure, the more she despised them. And if she despised the men who came to her cabin to use her body but would not meet her eyes on the street, she felt nothing but hatred for the "good" women who knew her plight and whispered among themselves that she was a slut and a whore and that she led their men astray. Especially she hated the women who, she knew, refused to fulfill what they considered their husband's "perverted" ideas, causing the men to bring those desires to her.

But the money fed her and her child, and she knew herbs that would prevent pregnancy, and she did not catch any whore's diseases, so she kept on surviving in that way... until one of the town's women denounced her publicly. Certainly, everyone in town, just about, knew what was going on (or thought they did) and many believed that her new profession was of her own choosing, but, until an official charge was lodged, everyone looked the other way.

Goodwife Prudence Bourke was a humorless, pinched-faced "good" woman, who had not willingly opened her legs to her husband since the birth of their second child, who found the concept of any type of sexual activity for any reason except the conception of children revolting. After a particularly unsatisfying session of pumping at her dry and unresponsive loins, her husband had unwisely said "Ye're useless, woman. I'm gone to whore's cabin for summat better than yon, even if I do have to pay for't."

Humiliated by this slight, Prudence went to the Magistrate, and filed a formal complaint that the widow who lived on the verge of the wood was a whore and was leading the men of the village into debauchery and immoral ways. The Magistrate, who visited her cabin two or three times a month, expressed shock at the thought that such a Scarlet Woman could ply her trade so unknown to the populace.

Summoning a pair of beadles, both of whom occasionally strolled out into the woods in search of adventure, the Magistrate organised a raid on her cabin and her arrest and punishment for plying her immoral trade in their fine, upstanding Christian village.

But one of the younger men who sometimes visited her heard about the plan, and managed to warn her. Stopping only to grab a few supplies and her baby, she fled into the woods, just as it began to snow.

At first, she had been glad of the snow, which covered her tracks, but she began to realise that this was going to be a heavy fall, and that she might well die in this storm.

Now, some time later, she was sure of it. She had fallen again, clutching her precious bundle to her, and felt as if she could not rise again. For the moment, she was content to lie there, huddled around her child, hoping that her body's warmth would suffice to preserve the child till someone might find them and rescue her babe, at least.

Suddenly, so out of place in the circumstance, a quiet voice spoke to her. "Would you save the life of your child, woman?" it asked.

"Yes! Of course! I would do anything!"

"'Anything?' Think before you promise so much to one who might not intend well..." She seemed to hear the voice inside her own head, rather than with her ears.

"Who are you? Where are you?"

"You might call me a messenger. I come from one of great power, who has watched you, and felt your troubles, and wishes to aid you."

"Aid me?"

"Yes. My Mistress -- you might as well call her my Goddess -- watches over women, as much as She may, in this age when most of the old Gods and Goddesses are denied. She would help you in your suffering, save you and your child, and bring you to a safe place of refuge. Ah, but where are my manners? You are wet and cold!"

Suddenly, though the snow still swirled heavily in the dark clearing in the woods, it was not falling upon her, nor around her closely; and she felt a slow return of warmth to her hands and feet and her wet clothes and shoes were dry and comfortable. She clutched her baby more closely to her, and looked around, for a sight of the Person who was speaking to her. But she was alone.

"Where are you? Show yourself, please..." she managed to stammer.

"If you wish it -- but this is not truly Myself; while I am a messenger, I am also an actual aspect of my Goddess."

A faint glow appeared before her, and began to expand and grow brighter. As it stretched and began to assume an almost human form, it became so bright that she was forced first to look away, and then even to shade her eyes with a hand... And then, with an almost musical tone, the light winked out, and a normal, cheerful voice said "Turn to me, and see me, my dear!"

Turning, she was shocked and awed by the Person she confronted. At least seven feet in height, She had long, curling, wavy auburn hair that fell past Her waist. Her eyes were green -- a true green, almost a grass-green, and Her cheeks were dusted with freckles. She had a cheerful expression -- mischievous, the widow would have said if they had met under other circumstances.

Her shoulders and hips were broad, Her legs long and strong, and Her bosom was high and full. And obviously naturally well-formed without artifice; She wore not a stitch of clothing.

She burst out with a rippling, bubbling laugh that went well with the mischievous gleam in Her eye.

"I find that clothing so often obscures or masks intentions and meanings," She cheerfully said. "And, beside, I like to startle those I would claim as My own and see their reactions."

She stepped forward, reaching out and placing one long slender hand on the widow's shoulder.

"I can save your life; more importantly, I can save the life of your daughter." She was suddenly deadly serious; the widow didn't doubt that for a moment. "There is a price; not, I think, an onerous one -- from this day forth, if I save you, you are sealed to Me and not to the died-and-risen God to whom your parents gave you in baptism."

"But, if I worship one who is not the One True God, will I not be condemned to Hellfire?"

"No, not at all... If you remained sealed to Him, and somehow survived this night, and did evil in your future life, then, yes, you would do well to fear His Hell. But His Hell is only for those who are tied to Him; in His scheme of things, you and your child were to die tonight. At such times, I can step in, with some small part of My ancient power, and I can offer you life; a new life, that begins here and now -- one in which you are Mine and serve Me."

"Serve You? What evils might You ask of me?"

"No evils, no ill-doing, no harm to any. You would live in your world -- you need not even worship Me -- in fact, you may continue to attend the worship of your died-and-risen God so that those around you will not suspect. He's actually not nearly so stuffy as your preachers make him out, you know -- He likes a good joke as well as any..."

"So, how will I serve You?"

"You need not worry about that; the only service I ask is that your daughter also be sealed to My service, that she may serve as My champion in your patriarchal Man's World, when she is grown. And, before you ask, she will be asked to do no evil, either."

"Then I accept."

"Then come to Me," said the Messenger, opening her arms widely.

Somehow, the dark snowy woods around them had vanished; they stood now in the middle of a flowery meadow that extended as far as the eye could see, under warm, even sunshine. Not a cloud marred the deep blue sky; a faint, warm breeze blew pleasantly, bringing the scents of thousands of flowers. Bees buzzed dreamily and birds called from time to time.

She was so dazzled that she was about to step to the Messenger, but she suddenly realised... "My baby? Where is my child?"

"She is well; another Messenger watches her and will tend to her slightest need. Now come to me, and we will seal your bargain with the Goddess."

Almost as in a daze, she stepped forward to the Messenger; she was startled but somehow not concerned to find herself suddenly as nude as the Messenger. It seemed natural in this place, some primordial place outside the world. Likewise, it seemed natural to accept the embrace of another woman, and to embrace Her in return.