In the summer of 1612, when the constables of Lancashire were riding out to Pendle Forest to take up old women on the word of a nine-year-old girl, Martha Greenhalgh was fifty years old and had spent three decades selling roots and simples to the parish of Clitheroe. It was a dangerous trade to be in that year. She took care to be seen at church, to hand out her remedies openly and to keep her still-room door unlocked, and she came through the assizes without a word said against her. She would have been the first to say that this was luck as much as caution, and the second to say that a woman who knew what was in her own garden had nothing to hide. That was Martha all over: she looked at a dangerous thing steadily and did not raise her voice.
She was born in Clitheroe in 1562, in the shadow of the little Norman keep on its limestone crag, in a country of wool farms, abbey lands and stone-walled moors. Her people are not named in the family record, and it is likely that they had little to leave behind. The town itself was small, a single long street of stone and thatch running down from the castle, with a market cross, a grammar school founded a few years earlier by the Crown, and a river, the Ribble, in the valley below. Whalley Abbey had been dissolved a generation before, and Sawley too, and their old fields were now let out to tenant farmers who ran sheep over the fells and cursed the weather. Winters were long and wet. Summers were short and green. Oatcake, buttermilk and mutton kept most households alive, and the poor made do with less.
Martha learned her craft from an old woman who lived on the edge of the town and who had, in her youth, been a servant at the abbey. It was said she had learned from the monks' infirmarer, and it was probably true. Under her care, Martha walked the moors and lanes collecting yarrow, comfrey, feverfew, wood betony, self-heal, elder flower and the small tough plants that grew between the limestone clints. She learned which were poison and which were physic, and which were both according to the dose; she learned to dry them under the eaves, to steep them in ale, to boil them down to syrups and to pound them into salves with mutton fat. She could set a dislocated finger, lance a boil, ease a difficult birth and bring down a child's fever with a cool cloth and a cup of willow bark. She could not cure the plague, and she said so, which was itself a sort of medicine for a town that had been sold cures by charlatans.
She was tall for a woman of her time, spare and brown, with a long jaw and grey eyes that took in a room before she spoke. By her twenties she had a reputation in Clitheroe and the villages around, and people came to the back door of her cottage with sick children and swollen joints. She charged little. Sometimes she was paid in eggs, cheese or peats, and sometimes not at all. It was in this way that she came to know Hugh Thwaites, who kept the tavern at the sign of the Swan near the market cross and who called on her one wet October to ask about his mother's dropsy.
Hugh was five years older, born in 1557, a broad, easy man with a laugh you could hear through two walls. The Swan was a low, smoky, cheerful place with a barrel of ale in the corner, a fire in the hearth, and benches worn by generations of drovers, pedlars and farmhands. It served as a news exchange for the whole district, and Hugh heard everything: who was selling sheep, who was in debt, who had seen strange lights on the moor. They were married in 1584, and Martha moved into the rooms above the tavern with her jars, her bundles of drying herbs and a small chest of books that no one else in the building could read. The still-room she set up in the back looked out on a walled garden where she grew the plants she could not find on the moors.
Their daughters came quickly. Margery Thwaites was born in 1585, and Avice Thwaites in 1586, so close together that they were raised almost as a pair, sharing a bed and, for years, a dress. The tavern was a hard place to raise children but a good one. They learned to wash pots and serve ale and to tell a friendly drunk from a dangerous one, and Martha taught them the herbs, both as a livelihood and as a kind of language. By the time they were ten, both could name forty plants by smell alone.
The Armada summer, with beacons lit along the coast, meant beacons on the fells for Martha too: Pendle Hill and the moors above Whalley were among the beacon points, and the tavern filled with the men who tended them, waiting in the dark for a signal that never came. Hugh served them ale and Martha sent up a basket of oatcake and a flask of honeyed cordial. She had a fair idea what else might be moving across those hills on a night when the whole country was watching the sea. The Faulkner ledger, the Red Ledger of Lancashire, had a hunter in the district, and in the course of that decade Martha came to know more about him than she let on. She supplied him with salves, with a tincture of wolfsbane she was careful to label, and with a good deal of quiet information.
For Martha was, in her way, part of the family's work, though she had no house and no craft and no claim to a place in the ledger. What she had was a knowledge of poisons and a habit of silence, and the Faulkner hunters valued both. The rivalry with the Proctors of Yorkshire was, for her, chiefly a matter of tavern talk: a wool factor from Halifax might grumble about the White Ledger's tally and a Clitheroe farmer would grumble back, and Martha would refill their cups and let them get on with it. She thought the whole quarrel a fine thing for men to keep busy with, and privately suspected the Guest had gone off somewhere warm and was laughing at both houses.
Hugh died in 1603, aged forty-six, in the same year the old queen died and the new king came south, and Martha was left with the tavern, the still-room and two daughters of seventeen and sixteen. She ran the Swan for a time with the help of a hired man, then let it to a tenant and moved to a smaller cottage on the castle side of the town. She lived through the Pendle trials of 1612 with her herbs and her head down. In the hard winter of 1616 she caught a cough that would not lift and died of it, aged fifty-four. Margery and Avice buried her, and her remedies were copied out by both and passed to their daughters. The Slayerverse records Martha Greenhalgh as one of the quiet hands behind the Red Ledger, and the healers of the Lancashire fells still use a syrup that she is said to have devised.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
