Lyke Wake ('Permission' entry)

[templeremus]

Title: Lyke Wake

Word Count: 880

Genre: Character Study, Aftermath

Rating: PG-13 for mentions of death, sickness and general hardship

Characters: Willa (The Witchfinders)

Summary: After laying her grandmother to rest a second time, Willa sets out for a new village. Fear follows her. Spoilers for Series 11, episode 8.

It was the wrong season to be leaving home.

The path out of Bilehurst Cragg was slippery with rain, and there was nothing to eat on the bushes. For the first two days Willa saw nobody, and after that she kept her eyes down, focusing her energies on the stretch of hill ahead. On the sixth evening she came to a sheiling, which reeked of the livestock that must have grazed there in summer but which was at least dry enough for a full night's rest. By this time she had passed near several dwellings, but had turned away from them all. Fear had driven her on, like an animal snapping at her heels. It still growled at her as she descended into the next village; she wasn't sure it would ever leave. She forced herself to think of the Doctor, and of the way her face had changed when she, Willa, had voiced her intent: Find a new home. Take Granny's potions and be a healer. Somehow saying it aloud had made it real, something vivid enough to counter the waking horror of the last few months.

"Be a doctor," Willa murmured, and quickened her pace.

---

At the farthest end of the village there was a dwelling - it was too generous to call it a hut - that had acted as somewhere to leave the sick in times of plague. Willa erected a wooden fence around it, paying for the timber with the last of the money that her grandmother had hidden above the lintel in their old house. Over the next few months she survived through barter: four live chickens for a day spent clearing ditches, a bowl of soup for a night of holding a dying man's hand. The winter stretched on and kept people indoors, so she walked from house to house to offer herself up. She was weary, and her back ached so that those who saw her approaching from a distance thought she was an old woman. Still she left her grandmother's bottles in the plague-dwelling, hidden in an alcove that she had made with leftover timber. People needed to trust in the honesty of her intent before they would trust in her medicines. If they turned against her, she would not have the strength to begin again elsewhere.

Change came like the beginning of spring: subtly, at first, at least to people who weren't looking for it. Animals became harder to keep inside. The woman whose husband Willa had tended gave her his old jacket, too big to wear but thick enough for sleeping on. As the mornings lifted she took to exploring the nearby hillsides in detail: feeling out roots with hands and feet, noting the various trees. When the time was right she would gather ingredients for next year's syrups and poultices. Her grandmother had taught her which parts of certain roots could be ground up and stored: the bark that relieved fever and the mushrooms that, if stewed, made an invalids' broth.

Back in her hovel, Willa banged nails into the alcove wall from which herbs could be strung to dry. While she was there she couldn't resist touching the bottles, familiar clean outlines that were quite unlike anything else she owned, or hoped one day to own again. There were many things of Granny's that she missed, and with an intensity that occasionally disarmed her, but she was proud to have saved these at least. They were valuable in a way that had nothing to do with sentiment, and her grandmother - generous but stubborn too, her fingers indelibly stained through years of picking and preserving - would have recognised that.

It was the dead thump of the fence being opened up that made her swing round. A little way from the door a young man was peering in at her, a swaddled bundle - sibling or offspring, she couldn't tell which - cradled against him. The infant was crying, each breath a panicked high-pitched whine that was almost animal in tone. Acting on instinct, Willa made for the threshold. She beckoned to the young man and he came nearer: still hesitant, as if she were an ordinary girl and he the timid suitor, begging her permission to advance. As soon as he was close enough, she caught the smell of scorched cloth. The child must have been toddling and fallen into the hearth. The skin on the man's hands was an angry red, and the child's unswaddled arms were twisted out of their natural shape, rigid with pain and terror.

To hold hot iron in their hands, and by not burning to be tried. Willa couldn't remember where those words came from. They bubbled up from within and sank like a lead weight to the bottom of her stomach. Fear, that ever-watchful animal, was turning circles inside her, but she made herself keep still. A over-hasty move now could transform that fear into a contagion, spread at the lightest touch. Nobody would be safe then.
 

The child started upon another wail, higher and more desperate than the last. The sound cut through all Willa's defences, through her deep-rooted caution and the grief that cocooned her from the suffering of others. She swept the bottles from their hiding place, and fell at once to work.

 

Comments

[romanajo123]

This is lovely. Atmospheric and nice imagery.

[templeremus]

Thank you. I felt that this episode was really good on atmosphere, particularly during the trial and ducking scenes. Stark landscapes and clever casting to fit with the overall period feel - and great use of close-ups during the most intense bits.