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You really got to rely on those ninepences. And so times had been a bit hard before Shadwell had gone on the payrolls of Heaven and Hell.
Newt’s pay was one old shilling per year.29
In return for this, he was charged to keep “glimmer, firelock, firebox, tinderbox or igniferous matches” about his person at all times, although Shadwell indicated that a Ronson gas lighter would do very well. Shadwell had accepted the invention of the patent cigarette lighter in the same way that conventional soldiers welcomed the repeating rifle.
The way Newt looked at it, it was like being in one of those organizations like the Sealed Knot or those people who kept on refighting the American Civil War. It got you out at weekends, and meant that you were keeping alive fine old traditions that had made Western civilization what it was today.
AN HOUR AFTER LEAVING the headquarters, Newt pulled into a layby and rummaged in the box on the passenger seat.
Then he opened the car window, using a pair of pliers for the purpose since the handle had long since fallen off.
The packet of firelighters was sent winging over the hedge. A moment later the thumbscrew followed it.
He debated about the rest of the stuff, and then put it back in the box. The pin was Witchfinder military issue, with a good ebony knob on the end like a ladies’ hat pin.
He knew what it was for. He’d done
quite a lot of reading. Shadwell had piled him up with pamphlets at their first meeting, but the Army had also accumulated various books and documents which, Newt suspected, would be worth a fortune if they ever hit the market.
The pin was to jab into suspects. If there was a spot on their body where they didn’t feel anything, they were a witch. Simple. Some of the fraudulent Witchfinders had used special retracting pins, but this one was honest, solid steel. He wouldn’t be able to look old Shadwell in the face if he threw away the pin. Besides, it was probably bad luck.
He started the engine and resumed his journey.
Newt’s car was a Wasabi. He called it Dick Turpin, in the hope that one day someone would ask him why.
It would be a very accurate historian who could pinpoint the precise day when the Japanese changed from being fiendish automatons who copied everything from the West, to becoming skilled and cunning engineers who would leave the West standing. But the Wasabi had been designed on that one confused day, and combined the traditional bad points of most Western cars with a host of innovative disasters the avoidance of which had made firms like Honda and Toyota what they were today.
Newt had never actually seen another one on the road, despite his best efforts. For years, and without much conviction, he’d enthused to his friends about its economy and efficiency in the desperate hope that one of them might buy one, because misery loves company.
In vain did he point out its 823cc engine, its three-speed gearbox, its incredible safety devices like the balloons which inflated on dangerous occasions such as when you were doing 45 mph on a straight dry road but were about to crash because a huge safety balloon had just obscured the view. He’d also wax slightly lyrical about the Korean-made radio, which picked up Radio Pyongyang incredibly well, and the simulated electronic voice which warned you about not wearing a seatbelt even when you were; it had been programmed by someone who not only didn’t understand English, but didn’t understand Japanese either. It was state of the art, he said.
The art in this case was probably pottery.
His friends nodded and agreed and privately decided that if ever it came to buying a Wasabi or walking, they’d invest in a pair of shoes; it came to the same thing anyway, since one reason for the Wasabi’s incredible m.p.g. was that fact that it spent a lot of time waiting in garages while crankshafts and things were in the post from the world’s only surviving Wasabi agent in Nigirizushi, Japan.
In that vague, zen-like trance in which most people drive, Newt found himself wondering exactly how you used the pin. Did you say, “I’ve got a pin, and I’m not afraid to use it”? Have Pin, Will Travel … The Pinslinger … The Man with the Golden Pin … The Pins of Navarone …
It might have interested Newt to know that, of the thirty-nine thousand women tested with the pin during the centuries of witch-hunting, twenty-nine thousand said “ouch,” nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine didn’t feel anything because of the use of the aforesaid retractable pins, and one witch declared that it had miraculously cleared up the arthritis in her leg.
Her name was Agnes Nutter.
She was the Witchfinder Army’s great failure.
ONE OF THE EARLY ENTRIES in The Nice and Accurate Prophecies concerned Agnes Nutter’s own death.
The English, by and large, being a crass and indolent race, were not as keen on burning women as other countries in Europe. In Germany the bonfires were built and burned with regular Teutonic thoroughness. Even the pious Scots, locked throughout history in a long-drawn-out battle with their arch-enemies the Scots, managed a few burnings to while away the long winter evenings. But the English never seemed to have the heart for it.
One reason for this may have to do with the manner of Agnes Nutter’s death, which more or less marked the end of the serious witch-hunting craze in England. A howling mob, reduced to utter fury by her habit of going around being intelligent and curing people, arrived at her house one April evening to find her sitting with her coat on, waiting for them.
“Ye’re tardie,” she said to them. “I shoulde have beene aflame ten minutes since.”
Then she got up and hobbled slowly through the suddenly silent crowd, out of the cottage, and to the bonfire that had been hastily thrown together on the village green. Legend says that she climbed awkwardly onto the pyre and thrust her arms around the stake behind her.
“Tye yt well,” she said to the astonished witchfinder. And then, as the villagers sidled toward the pyre, she raised her handsome head in the firelight and said, “Gather ye ryte close, goode people. Come close untyl the fire near scorch ye, for I charge ye that alle must see how thee last true wytch in England dies. For wytch I am, for soe I am judgéd, yette I knoe not what my true Cryme may be. And therefore let myne deathe be a messuage to the worlde. Gather ye ryte close, I saye, and marke well the fate of alle who meddle with suche as theye do notte understande.”
And, apparently, she smiled and looked up at the sky over the village and added, “That goes for you as welle, yowe daft old foole.”
And after that strange blasphemy she said no more. She let them gag her, and stood imperiously as the torches were put to the dry wood.
