He Accused Me of Witchcraft, But His Only Penance Was My Body

The small brass bell above my door chimed a sound too clean for the sullied air of Cheapside. I did not look up. My focus was on the mortar, on the steady, circular grind of the pestle crushing dried yarrow into a fine, fragrant dust. The scent of it, sharp and green, was a small prayer against the street’s perpetual stench of refuse and humanity. Another soul seeking a poultice for a weeping sore, or a tincture for a cough that rattled the ribs. They came, they paid their pennies, they left.

But this silence was different. It was not the shuffling quiet of a humble patron. It was a weighted, deliberate stillness that made the fine hairs on my arms prickle. When I finally lifted my gaze, he stood there, a stark column of black wool against the muted browns and greens of my shop. He had pulled the door shut behind him, trapping the afternoon light and the world’s noise outside, leaving us in a sudden, intimate twilight.

He was the new priest. I had seen him from a distance, a severe figure whose youth was betrayed only by the sharp line of his jaw and the fervor that burned in his eyes. Up close, he was taller than I had imagined, and thinner, as if he had whittled himself down to nothing but bone and belief.

"You are the woman they call Isabell," he said. It was not a question. His voice was low and resonant, a church-stone sound that seemed to absorb the light in the room.

I gave a slow, single nod, my hand still resting on the pestle. "I am."

He took a step forward, his dark eyes sweeping over the hanging bundles of lavender and feverfew, the neatly labeled clay pots, the charts of moon phases and plant cycles pinned to the wall. His gaze was an indictment. "Master Albright’s son was near death two nights past. The sweating sickness had him. Today, he sits up and takes broth."

"God is merciful," I offered, my voice even.

A muscle tightened in his lean cheek. "Master Albright confesses he did not pray for God’s mercy. He came to you. He paid for a devil’s cure, and in his desperation, he damned his son’s soul and his own." The words were stones cast into a sinner. "He says you gave him a bottle of black liquid. He says you practiced sorcery."

I slid the pestle from the mortar and set it aside. The clink of marble on slate filled a moment that was otherwise silent. I met his stare, this man of God who saw heresy in my healing. His eyes were the grey of a winter sky, and in their depths, I saw a terrible, rigid certainty. But a certainty for what was unclear.

"It was an infusion of willow bark and elderflower," I said, my voice quiet but clear in the heavy silence. "It cools a fevered blood. There is no magic in it, Father. Only the earth."

"The earth is God’s," he countered, his voice dropping lower, more intense. "And you twist His creations to profane ends. You offer remedies that belong to Him alone, and you whisper incantations over them." He took another step, the space between us shrinking, changing the scent of my herbs so that it mixed with his aroma. "Confess your sin, woman. Confess what you are."

He moved past me then, his black cassock brushing against a hanging sheaf of dried rosemary, releasing its sharp, clean scent into the air. He ignored it. His long fingers traced one of my botanical charts, the elegant, spiraling symbols I used to denote root, leaf, and flower. I had devised the system myself, a private language between me and my work. To his eyes, it was a demonic script.

"What devil's grammar is this?" he murmured, his voice a low vibration of disgust. He ran a hand over a row of clay jars, his touch lingering on the one marked Belladonna. "The shade of night. A poisoner's tool."

"A single drop can ease a racing heart," I said, my own heart beginning to beat a frantic rhythm against my ribs. "The dose makes the poison, Father. Not the plant."

His gaze finally settled on my worktable, on the small, worn book bound in dark leather that lay beside my scales. It was where I pressed my thoughts, my loneliness, and the words that came to me in the quiet hours. He reached for it, his movements slow and deliberate, as if handling a venomous snake.

"And what is this? Your book of shadows? Your pacts and incantations?"

"It is nothing," I said, the words coming out sharper than I intended. "It is private."

He paid me no mind. He opened the book, the leather creaking in the charged quiet. His eyes, accustomed to reading scripture in dim light, scanned the page. I felt a cold dread wash over me, a violation more profound than his search of my herbs. He was touching my soul. He found a verse near the top of a page and drew a breath.

And then he spoke my words.

His voice was not the condemning lash I expected. It was deep, sonorous, and achingly beautiful, the voice of a man who could make psalms weep. It filled the small shop, wrapping around the hanging herbs and jars, giving my simple, secret lines a weight and a sorrow I had never intended, but had always felt.

"The shadow drinks the light from stone,
And in the dark, a seed is sown.
It does not pray for sun or sky,
But finds its strength in a silent cry."

The last word faded, leaving a silence that was heavier than before. He had meant to expose me, to read my heresy aloud as proof of my sin. But something else had happened. In the resonant timbre of his voice, my private grief had been transformed into a hymn of despair. He recognized my solitude. I stood frozen, my breath caught in my throat, listening to the echo of my own heart spoken in the voice of my accuser.

He closed the book. The sound of the leather cover meeting the pages was soft. His long, pale fingers rested on the cover for a moment, a stark contrast to the dark, worn leather. He did not look at the book, but at me. The righteous fire in his gaze had been banked, leaving behind something grey and cold, like ash. The certainty was still there, but it was now laced with a profound and unsettling sorrow. It was the loneliness I knew so well, the kind that lived in the hollow of the ribs, a constant, quiet ache.

He pushed the book back toward me across the worn wood of the table. "This is a dangerous game you play, woman." His voice was low again, the beautiful resonance gone, replaced by a flat, hard tone. "You meddle with things that are not yours to command. The health of a man’s body is tied to the salvation of his soul. You cannot treat one without poisoning the other."

He moved toward the door, his black robes stirring the dust motes in the single shaft of light. He stopped with his hand on the iron latch, his back to me. For a moment, I thought he would leave it at that. But then he spoke again, his voice a low murmur that carried the weight of a prophecy.

"Burn your books. Forget these rhymes.
A woman’s prayer is not in chimes
of word and root, but bended knee.
There is no grace in sorcery."

The words hung in the air between us, a perfect, chilling echo of the cadence he had read from my own page. A verse of warning, crafted in the language of my own heart. I saw his shoulders tense, as if the shape of the words had surprised him as much as they had me. He seemed to recoil from his own speech, a flicker of confusion crossing his features before he mastered them. He pulled the door open without looking back, and the raw noise of the street flooded the sanctuary he had created.

Then he was gone. The bell gave a final, mocking chime.

I stood frozen in the sudden emptiness, my hand trembling as I reached out to touch the cover of my book. His threat was a hollow thing, a priest’s duty recited by rote. I had heard such words before. They were nothing. But the look in his eyes, and the unintentional poetry of his curse—that had undone me completely. It was not the fear of the pyre that left me shaking. It was the terrifying recognition that this man, this vessel of a faith that would see me condemned, had looked into the darkest, most secret part of my craft and spoken its language back to me. He was not my enemy. He was my echo. And I knew I could bewitch him.

The bell in St. Giles’s never stopped. It was a new, constant companion to the city’s breath, a frantic metal tongue speaking a single word: death. A week after the priest’s visit, the sweating sickness had fallen upon the parish like a shroud. It came on swift and brutal, a chill followed by a drenching, foul-smelling sweat that seemed to pull the life from a body in a matter of hours. The physicians fled. The church offered prayers and last rites, their remedies proving as useless as a whisper against a storm. Thomas’s God had turned a deaf ear to London. The ceaseless tolling of the bell was the only answer to the prayers of the people.

From my window, I watched the death-carts trundle past, their grim cargo barely concealed. I heard the wailing that seeped through thin walls and closed shutters. His warning to me, his poetic curse, felt like a distant, hollow thing now. There is no grace in sorcery. But there was no grace in watching children burn from within, either. There was no salvation in kneeling on cold stone while the world dissolved into fever and fear.

My work became a fever of its own. By day, I kept my door barred, turning away the few healthy souls brave enough to venture out. By night, my small workshop was aglow with the steady flame of a lamp. The air grew thick with the sharp, medicinal scents of boiled willow bark, yarrow, and meadowsweet. I worked with a frantic, desperate focus, my hands stained with herbs, my mind a sharp, clear instrument. I measured and crushed, steeped and strained, pouring the dark, potent liquids into small glass vials I had hoarded for years. This was my prayer, offered not to the heavens, but to the suffering flesh of my neighbors.

For each vial, I prepared a message. On scraps of torn parchment, I wrote in my neat, small script. Not incantations, not spells, but verses meant to anchor a soul adrift in the delirium of sickness. A reminder that the body was of the earth, and the earth endured.

When fever’s fire burns to bone,
The deepest root still holds its stone.
Drink deep of earth, and do not weep,
For life is held in slumber deep.

They were small acts of rebellion against the bells, against the priest’s condemning God. They were my verses, my craft, and an act of defiance against his warnings.

When the moon was a sliver and the fog from the river crept through the alleys to swallow all sound but the tolling bell, I would slip out. With a basket of vials tucked under my cloak, I moved like a ghost through the city. I crept to the doors marked with the crude chalk cross of the plague, my heart a frantic drum against my ribs. I would leave a single vial on the doorstep, the small scroll of parchment tied around its neck with a bit of twine. A silent offering. I never waited to see if it was taken. I only left my small hope in the darkness and vanished back into the shadows, the priest’s beautiful, damning voice a faint echo in my memory.

The room was thick with the sweet, cloying odor of decay. Thomas knelt by the pallet, the rough wool of his cassock scratching his knees through the thin fabric. The woman on the bed was little more than a specter, her skin slick with the unending sweat, her breath a shallow, rattling thing. He had been with her for an hour, murmuring the Latin rites for the dying, his voice a low drone against the relentless clang of the bells outside. His words felt hollow, useless stones thrown against a tide of sickness. God was silent. Only the bell answered.

The woman’s husband, a stooped man with eyes hollowed out by grief and sleeplessness, pressed something small and cool into his hand. "A moment ago," the man whispered, his voice raw. "On the step. Someone left it."

Thomas looked down. It was a small glass vial filled with a dark liquid. Tied to its neck with a piece of rough twine was a tiny scroll of parchment. He felt a familiar surge of irritation. Peasant superstition. A useless charm against the wrath of God. He was about to set it aside, to gently admonish the man for placing his hope in such trifles, but his fingers brushed against the parchment. It was the same worn, fibrous texture as the pages of her book.

He pulled at the twine with his thumb, his movements slow. The scroll uncurled in his palm. The script was small, precise, and utterly familiar. A jolt went through him, a memory of her shop, of the scent of rosemary and damp earth. He held the parchment closer to the flickering candlelight.

When fever’s fire burns to bone,
The deepest root still holds its stone.
Drink deep of earth, and do not weep,
For life is held in slumber deep.

The rhythm was unmistakable. It was the same quiet, defiant cadence he had read aloud, the same voice that spoke of strength found not in prayer, but in the dirt. It was her. The witch. While he was on his knees offering platitudes to the dying, she was moving through the darkness, leaving her poison—her medicine—on their doorsteps.

He looked from the elegant script to the vial of dark liquid. He thought of the merchant’s child, recovered. He thought of the whispers of other miraculous survivals in the parish, stories he had dismissed as desperate rumor. His prayers filled the air with empty sound. Her verses offered a tangible thing: a liquid in a vial, a promise of the earth’s resilience. A cold shame washed over him, so forcful it felt like a physical sickness. She was doing his work. She, the heretic, the sinner, was tending to his flock with a faith more practical and potent than his own.

The verse was not just for the sick. He knew it with a certainty that chilled him to his core. It was a message sent across the dying city, a secret correspondence meant only for him. Drink deep of earth, and do not weep. It was a challenge. A rebuke. An invitation into her world of root and stone, a world that was saving lives while his world of scripture and sacrament failed. He closed his hand around the vial, the cool glass a solid, real thing against his skin. The bell tolled, and for the first time, it sounded like a summons.

He found me by the river. I had gone there to escape the bells, but their sound carried even here, muted by the thick, grey fog that rolled off the water, blurring the line between river and shore. The air was cold and wet, smelling of mud and decay. I was kneeling, my fingers numb as I dug for the pale roots near the bank, when a shape resolved itself from the mist. It was him.

My first instinct was to run. He was out of his territory, a black-robed predator strayed from its stone den. My basket of herbs felt like an indictment at my side. I rose slowly, my back stiff, my hand clutching the small trowel I’d been using, its sharp edge a pathetic weapon. He stopped a few feet away, close enough that I could see the exhaustion etched around his eyes, the grime on the hem of his cassock. He looked as if he had been walking through the filth of the city for days. He was not a priest delivering a verdict; he was a man drowning.

He did not look at the basket, or the roots in my hand. His eyes, dark and haunted, were fixed on my face. The silence stretched, thick with the damp air and all the things we had left unsaid. The clang of the distant bell was the only sound. I expected the accusation, the condemnation, the righteous fire.

His voice came out low and broken, stripped of all its priestly resonance. It was the voice of a man confessing in the dark, not to God, but to me.

"The bell tolls out a hollow sound,
For souls God left within the ground.
I speak His word, I plead His grace,
And see His absence on each face.
What prayer can halt the final breath,
When Heaven’s king is lord of death?"

The words were a blade, not turned on me, but on himself. On his God. It was a verse of pure, undiluted despair, a heresy more profound than any I had ever dared to write. The rhythm was perfect and dark. He had taken our shared language and steeped it in his own private hell.

In that moment, the priest vanished. The black robes, the cross he wore, the entire edifice of his faith crumbled away, and all that was left was Thomas. A man tearing himself apart with doubt. A poet whose verses were as secret and as damning as my own. The profound, aching loneliness I had first seen in his eyes was now naked and exposed in the twilight. He was not my judge. He was my reflection in a shattered piece of glass.

I did not speak. There were no words for what passed between us. I only gave a slow, small nod. It was an answer. An acceptance. His shoulders slumped in relief, a barely perceptible shift, but I saw it. The tension that held him so rigidly in place seemed to bleed out of him into the fog. For the first time since he had walked into my life, we were not witch and priest. We were merely two souls, standing on the edge of a dying world, speaking the only language that made any sense of it.

The meeting by the river broke something open between us, a fragile truce in a war I had not known we were fighting. But the city had no time for such delicate things. The sweating sickness did not care for poetry or shared glances in the fog. It was a beast of appetite, and it continued to feast.

A week later, the beast came for him.

It began as a shiver he could not quell, a deep, internal cold that the thick wool of his cassock could not touch. He had felt it creeping in for days, a weariness in his bones, a dull ache behind his eyes. He had ignored it, attributing it to sleepless nights and the endless litany of last rites. But then came the heat, a dry, consuming fire that started in his chest and spread through his limbs, making his skin prickle and his thoughts swim. He knew the signs. He had held the hands of dozens as they passed through this same gate of fire.

He had dragged himself to the church, seeking solace or perhaps a miracle in the house of his God. The vast, vaulted space of the nave, usually a comfort, felt like a tomb. The air was heavy with the scent of old stone, incense, and the faint, lingering smell of death that clung to the parish like a shroud. He knelt before the high altar, the stone floor a shock of cold against his burning knees. He tried to pray, to form the familiar Latin words that had been his shield and his sword for his entire adult life.

Pater Noster, qui es in caelis…

The words were ash in his mouth. His mind, unbound by fever, offered a different verse, in a different language. When fever’s fire burns to bone… Her voice, her words, a quiet heresy in the sacred silence. He pressed his forehead to the cold stone, a groan tearing from his throat. The stone offered no relief. God offered no relief. There was only the fire inside him and the memory of a woman who spoke of roots and earth.

His strength gave out in a sudden, complete surrender. The world tilted, the stained-glass windows blurring into a kaleidoscope of bleeding color. He pitched forward, his body striking the flagstones with a heavy, graceless thud. The sound echoed in the cavernous space. For a moment, there was only the piercing pain in his shoulder and the ice of the floor against his cheek.

Darkness pulled at the edges of his vision, but through the fever’s fog, a single, sharp thought cut through. He was dying. Here, at the foot of the altar, his God was letting him die. And he did not want to.

With an effort that felt monumental, he pushed himself up onto one elbow. His breath came in ragged gasps. He saw Leo, his young altar boy, hovering in the doorway of the sacristy, his face pale with fear.

“Leo,” Thomas managed, his voice a dry crackle. The boy scurried forward.

“Father? Are you ill?”

Thomas shook his head, a gesture that sent a fresh wave of dizziness over him. There was no time. He fumbled inside his cassock, his fingers finding nothing. No parchment, no ink. Only words. He grabbed the boy’s thin wrist, his grip surprisingly strong. “Listen to me. You must find the herbalist. The woman in the lane by the old tannery.”

Leo’s eyes widened. “The witch, Father?”

“Her name is Isabell,” Thomas corrected, the name a prayer on his lips. “You must give her a message. From me. Tell her… tell her the deepest root must hold its stone. Now.” He pushed the boy away, his strength gone. “Go. Now.”

He collapsed back onto the floor as the boy fled, his small footsteps echoing away into the encroaching night. Thomas closed his eyes, surrendering to the fire. He had renounced his God and placed his faith, his very life, in the hands of a witch. He was a heretic. And as the delirium took him, he found he did not care.

The boy, Leo, met me at a small, unassuming door at the back of the church, his face a pale moon in the oppressive dark. He looked at me as if I were a demon summoned from the pit, his hand trembling as he ushered me inside and pointed down a cold stone corridor before scurrying away into the shadows. Every footstep echoed. This place was built for prayer and judgment, its very air thick with a sanctity I was profaning with each breath. I was a disease entering a pure body, a weed in a hallowed garden.

His room was at the end of the hall. It was as spare and unforgiving as the man himself. A narrow bed, a wooden crucifix on the wall, a small table with a washbasin and a single, guttering candle. The chill of the stone seeped through the soles of my boots. There was no comfort here, only denial.

Thomas was a pyre on the stark cot. He had thrown off his blankets, and his body was sheathed in a film of sweat that gleamed in the candlelight. He was clad only in a thin linen undershirt, soaked through and clinging to the hard planes of his chest and stomach. He thrashed, his head moving back and forth on the pillow, his lips cracked and dry. Mumbled fragments of Latin and something else—poetry, I thought—spilled from him, a delirious, broken prayer.

I set my satchel on the floor and went to work. There was no room for fear or hesitation now. I was not a witch in a priest’s rooms; I was a healer, and he was my patient. I uncorked a vial of dark, viscous feverfew tincture, the bitter scent cutting through the stale air.

Getting it into him was a battle. I had to straddle his legs, pinning his restless body with my own weight, my skirts pooling around his hips. I cradled the back of his neck with one hand, his skin blazing against my palm. His head lolled back, exposing the strong column of his throat, the frantic pulse beating just beneath the skin. With my other hand, I prized his lips apart and tilted the vial, letting the potent liquid trickle into his mouth. He choked, a raw sound of protest, but I held him steady until he swallowed.

His eyes, when they opened, were unfocused, glazed with fever. They stared right through me. "Isabell," he breathed, the name a raw, broken thing. Not an accusation. A plea.

My own breath caught. I moved off him, my heart hammering against my ribs from the proximity. I dipped a cloth in the basin of cool water and began to wash his face, his neck, his chest. I pushed the wet linen shirt up, exposing the taut skin of his abdomen. My fingers brushed against the rigid muscles there as I worked, wiping away the sweat, trying to cool the fire that consumed him. The lines were gone. He was not Father Thomas, God’s stern soldier. He was a man, burning in his bed, and I was the only one who could bring him back from the brink. The intimacy of the act was a brand, searing away the priest and the witch, leaving only a man and a woman in a dark room, surrounded by a faith that had forsaken them both.

For hours, I worked in the flickering candlelight, a silent battle against the fire in his blood. I forced more of the bitter brew between his lips, bathed his heated skin, and listened as the fever tore through the layers of his piety, exposing the raw man beneath. Latin prayers bled into frantic, poetic verses of shadow and bone, his mind a tempest of faith and doubt.

Then, in the deepest hour of the night, a stillness fell. The violent shivering that had wracked his frame ceased. The inferno beneath his skin cooled to a smoldering heat. His breathing, once a ragged, painful gasp, deepened into something slow and even. The fever had broken.

He lay quiet for a long time, his eyes closed. I thought he had fallen into a true sleep. I wrung out the cloth one last time and reached to place it on his forehead. His eyes opened. They were clear. The delirious glaze was gone, replaced by a lucidity that was more unnerving than the fever. He was looking at me. Seeing me.

“My God is silent,” he said, his voice a low, gravelly thing, scraped raw by the sickness. “He builds his houses of stone and fills them with echoes. I stand at the altar and I pray… and only my own words come back to me.”

His gaze was unflinching, a confession in itself. He did not look away, did not hide behind scripture or shame.

“The loneliness… it is a physical thing. A cell inside my own ribs.” He took a slow, deliberate breath. “So I write. Verses of doubt. Verses of rage. Verses of… you.”

The admission hung in the cold air of the rectory, a heresy more profound than any accusation of witchcraft. He was not just a poet; his poetry was his sin, his secret penance, and I was at the heart of it.

Before I could process the words, his hand shot out and clamped around my wrist. The strength in his grip was startling, a desperate, wiry power I had not expected. With a single, fluid motion, he pulled me down. My body fell against his, my hands landing on the hard wall of his chest. His other hand came up, fingers tangling in the hair at the nape of my neck, tilting my head. His face was inches from mine. I could see the dark stubble on his jaw, the exhaustion etched around his eyes, the absolute surrender in their depths.

And then his mouth was on mine.

It was not a gentle kiss. It was a desperate, starving thing. His lips were dry and hot, pressing against mine with a force that spoke of weeks of denial, of a soul tearing itself apart. He made a low sound in his throat, a groan of pure, agonized relief, and his tongue pushed past my lips, seeking mine. The taste of him was fever and bitter herbs and a deep, male hunger. I did not resist. I couldn't. My own longing rose to meet his, a flood I had kept dammed for so long. My fingers curled, gripping the thin, damp linen of his shirt as I kissed him back. He shifted, pulling me more fully against him, my leg sliding between his on the narrow cot. I could feel the heat of his body, the solid muscle beneath the sweat-dampened cloth, the frantic beat of his heart against my own. This was a sacrament of flesh, a communion performed in the shadow of the cross on his wall, and it felt more sacred than any prayer I had ever heard.