Page 49 of A Time of Witches

If it even still existed.

She hoped it did not.

A tall sandstone brick manor house at the end of Skinner Street caught her attention.

Moyse’s Hall.

An older gentleman with a thick head of white hair spoke to a group outside the museum. His blue vest indicated he was one of the Bury St. Edmunds tour guides, which she’d noticed when picking up a town map.

“If you’re looking for history, it doesn’t get much older than this.” He nodded up at the building. “Moyse’s Hall is almost nine hundred years old.”

Lilith gazed up at the building with renewed appreciation. Nine hundred years was such a wealth of history. The sum of countless lives, layered upon one another like sediment. The births and burials, love affairs and celebrations, nights swollen with worry that felt so important at the time—all moments bright with life now reduced to the embers of time.

The tour group funneled inside. Lilith stepped forward to join them when the door slammed in her face.

She jerked back with a start and pushed inside.

The museum employee blinked at her, as if in surprise. “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there.”

A chill tingled over her skin.

You will cease to exist.

The warning rose unbidden in her mind.

She was being paranoid. It was just an accident.

Still, Lilith’s hand trembled as she accepted a glossy brochure of recent exhibits and beelined toward the witch trials.

Chipped clay pots mottled with age were displayed in glass cases, charms once used to discourage witches from entering one’s home. There were more artifacts on display, including an armoire with deep burns and daisy-shaped carvings, also meant to keep witches away.

There was an irony to the fact that every charm on display was used not by witches, but to repel them.

Another glass case prominently displayed the pamphlet of a trial dating back to 1664. Lilith hesitated, running her fingertips over her birthmark.

It remained cool and unfeeling under her touch.

No, that wasn’t what she needed.

A digital archive drew her over. She scrolled through the options, stopping instinctively on a trial set during 1645.

The year nudged at something in her mind.

Yes. This.

The largest execution of witches in England, where eighteen victims were convicted of witchcraft and hung, with an additional one who had been burned alive.

The hair stood on Lilith’s arms.

The names were listed—so many Annes and Marys and Margarets.

Almost all were women, convicted by men. Lilith recalled the line she’d once read in The Scarlet Letter by a male character casting his judgment on Hester Prynne. “Is there no virtue in woman, save what springs from a wholesome fear of the gallows?”

Likely the jury of men who condemned these women ascribed to the same thought.

There was one final name, the victim who had been burned alive.

Sybil Brantham.