At that time, there is said to have lived in the village, which is called Berkeley, a certain woman of evil life, a glutton and a wanton, pursuing her wickedness and practicing the black arts even in her old age, persisting in her whoredoms until the hour of her death. On a day as she sat at meat, her pet crow began to chatter something or the other, whereupon the knife fell from her hand, and her face grew ghastly white …
From The Geography of Witchcraft, by Montague Summers.
As you might guess, it ends badly for the Berkeley witch. She confesses all her crimes, and begs that, when she dies, she be laid to rest in such a way that the Devil cannot claim her. She bids her friends to sew the corpse up in the hide of a stag, and place her in a stone coffin, binding it with heavy bands of iron. Fifty psalms are to be said each night, and fifty masses each morning. So long as this is done for three nights, from that point forward she is safe.
The first night, throughout the chanting, demons wail and scream outside the church. On the second night, the fiends burst open the church door, but are kept at bay by prayer. One the final night a powerful tempest shakes the building to its foundations, and the Devil himself bids the witch to arise and come with him. She pleads, from the coffin, that she cannot; those iron bands hold firm. The Devil responds by breaking the bands as though they were paper, ripping open the stone coffin, tearing up the hide and demanding again that she rise. Stark naked and terrified, she does. The Devil leads her outside, where a coal black horse awaits, and the two of them ride off to Hell, her shrieks of fear the last thing the holy folk at prayer hear.
This is a very old tale, and appears in many places. William of Malmesbury cites it in his Gesta Regnum (1125), and it appears in the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493) and the 13th century Flores Historiarum. However it is best known thanks to the poet laureate Robert Southey, who uses the story as the basis for his ballad The Witch of Berkeley (1799).
Southey, poet laureate for thirty years until his death in 1843 at the age of 68, is one of the lesser known poets laureate, in part because he had to compete with the likes of Byron, Shelley, Coleridge and Wordsworth. It didn't help that he was the second choice for the job; Walter Scott turned it down. You know his work even if you don't think you do: he wrote Goldilocks and the Three Bears. He began as a radical, supporting the French Revolution, and age mellowed him, till he was embraced by the Tory establishment. He very briefly stood as MP for the pocket borough of Downton, as one of his political friends advanced him to the position, but he begged off, pleading he didn't have the money or the ambition to be a politician. He was very much against what he called the Satanic School of poetry, the sort championed by Byron and Shelley.
Possibly the most scathing assessment of him is this: "He wooed Liberty as a youthful lover, but it was perhaps more as a mistress than a bride; and he has since wedded an elderly and not very reputable lady, called Legitimacy."
The Ballad appears first in Tales of Wonder, a collection compiled by Matthew 'Monk; Lewis, most famous for his own work of gothic horror, The Monk. It's been republished many times since then, in many different formats.
Which brings me to:
The Seeker
Patrick Quinlan is an enthusiastic collector and amateur historian, obsessed with the works of Robert Southey, and The Ballad in particular. He thinks it is the great unsung masterpiece of the 19th century, easily better than any of the trash put out by Byron or Shelley. The Bookhounds know him as an easy mark for anything to do with The Ballad, whether it's a new Czech translation or a reproduction of the woodcuts from the original. Quinlan doesn't have a lot of money to spend - he's an unpublished poet, and a crime novelist under the pen name Edgar Dawson. Still, if presented with something tempting, he'll scrape together the cash somehow.
Arabesque: Quinlan thinks he and Southey are kindred spirits, brothers separated by time, and wants somehow to open a connection with his literary hero. He dresses like Southey, behaves like Southey, would eat the same foods and live in the same house, if he could. That's why he champions the forgotten laureate; a slight against Southey is a slight against Quinlan.
Technicolor: Quinlan believes in witchcraft and wants to emulate, not Southey, but the Witch. After all, she had a good life right up to the end. Quinlan hasn't a prayer of getting anywhere near the Nuremberg Chronicle, but he keeps studying and searching, hoping to find a clue to the real Satanic heart of the story.
Sordid: Quinlan, at heart, is a cruel, petty man, who sees himself as an avenger. The Devil in the story, to him, is righteous punishment visited on a deserving old hag. He'd never put any of his plans into action, but he often amuses himself with the thought that, one day, like the Devil, he'll astound the world with his swift acts of vengeance.
The Bookhounds know Quinlan as a bit of a pest, but a reliable spender. All that changes one day, when he starts going around with a crow on his shoulder. Eccentric, certainly, but the bird seems to have inspired him with new confidence - and he has more money than he ever did before. Perhaps his alter ego Edgar Dawson's made a few sales - but can that really explain the kind of money he's been throwing around?
What's more, his latest obsession is a rumor that there's an original Monk Lewis out there with an erratum, an extra woodcut in the Ballad. It's mentioned in the more obscure bibliographies, but nobody's seen it for many years. Quinlan is convinced it exists and is held in a private collection, possibly in the town of Downton, which Quinlan is convinced Southey visited after his short-lived and unexpected election victory.
The Bookhounds may be tempted to brush all this off as a collector's fantasy, but Quinlan has an uncompromising look in his eye, and his money is good. Moreover that black crow on his shoulder is positively uncanny, and seems to have human intelligence - think Rat Thing, in avian form. Where did it come from? Why does Quinlan treat it like a king? What will it do, if it doesn't get its way?
[Note: the town of Downton is in Wiltshire, and Downton Abbey is in Yorkshire. Still … that book's got to be held somewhere, and Downton Abbey does have a rather splendid library …]
Enjoy!
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