Page 139 of A Time of Witches

A woman’s face rose in his mind’s eye.

Sybil Brantham.

The handsome widow from Bury St. Edmunds. The one who later wed the vicar who had brought down the witch hunts with his outlandish sermons.

Her escape from the clutches of death had cost Matthew twenty shillings.

He dragged in a hard gasp, but the air felt too heavy, too thick to breathe. As if something were squeezing around his neck.

Another face filled his mind, the young woman who had been hanged. Her name alluded him, but her comely appearance was there, glowing with youth and beauty.

His lungs sucked against themselves, robbed of air. Desperate for it.

A choked sound came from his gullet, wet and inhumane.

His fingers skimmed the Flemish lace at his throat as he fought to loosen the strings that tied his nightshirt closed.

Panic fluttered at his awareness.

Breathe.

He needed to breathe.

Another face came into his mind. The hideous old hag he’d tossed into the River Lark. The one absolved of witchcraft when she drowned. Another loss of twenty shillings.

The pressure in his chest was unbearable. What the Devil was cutting off his air?

He clawed at his neck.

More faces. The old vicar who had been hanged the same day as the pretty young woman. And the man and wife. Then came the others in a flurry, every face, every life, the force around his throat squeezing tighter and tighter and tighter.

He clutched at the bedding, fingers raking over the fine Rennes linen sheets.

Those he’d killed poured through him as the life drained from his body.

Most were old. Poor. Vulnerable. Nearly all were women.

Twenty shillings in his pocket for each.

He was found the following morning by his maid, eyes bulging, tongue swollen and thrust between blue lips. Like the victims he’d condemned to be hanged.

A couple hundred furlongs away, in the town of Bury St. Edmunds, a similar discovery would be made.

Robert Walsingham lay prone in his prison cell, a hand clasped round his throat, his eyes squeezed out from their lids, a fattened tongue oozing between his lips.

Perhaps he might have been glad for his own death. The last two years of living had been difficult.

The honor of magistrate had been stripped from him, the people exercising their own rights under oyer and terminer in their outrage. Without the assizes, anarchy swung in all directions.

He’d been thrown into the stocks first. In that moment, everything he’d become—strong, authoritative, in charge—had been tossed away, and he’d once more been reduced to that scrawny child the other boys kicked around, the one the girls ridiculed, the one who brought his father such shame.

After, he was sent to prison and had moldered there since.

In the final few moments of life, Robert was forced to accept he’d never be a powerful man again.

Faces trailed through his mind’s eye. The eighteen women and men he’d seen hanged that day, and the countless women he’d hurt with his words, with his hands, with his unmitigated gall to violate them.

As each face pressed into his brain, the air became harder to breathe. Too thick. Until, at long last, the stream of faces dwindled, and the life slipped from his body.