24

Kendra spun toward campus security again.  As she marched away, she heard Matt laugh softly behind her.  Her lab had better be locked and in order when she got back to it, or she’d sic Officer Powell on Matt.  She remembered Powell’s nervous unease.  Maybe he had a tougher friend.

Officer Powell was not on duty.  The officers on the day shift were not as willing to respond to either a damsel in distress or an angry PhD candidate with vague suspicions of abstract crimes.

“Listen,” the woman at the security desk told her, “if someone actually does threaten you, come back and we’ll see what we can--”

Kendra left before the woman had finished. 

“You have a nice day too!” the woman call after her sarcastically.

She supposed she deserved that.  Rudeness begets more rudeness.  She strode across campus toward her lab, determined to go ahead with the jump.  So what if American Missile spied on her again…or had they never stopped?  She should be safe.  She did all her work in her lab, with counter-surveillance in place.  Yeah, but I landed in the middle of The Commons on my last return jump.  Kendra shoved her misgivings aside.

The door to her lab was safely locked when she reached it, and everything inside seemed just as she’d left it.  She checked her equation and every setting one more time, changed into her costume, then put her hair up in the bun she’d practiced all week.  She slid a long leather thong through the loop of the key fob, and tied the ends together around her neck.  Finally she hit the button.

A place that she hoped was Huntingdon, England, April 5, 1593 sprang up around her.  Mud again, and smells, but not as bad as the inn had been.  She near the edge of a crowd in a courtyard—so far, so good.  Quickly Kendra tucked the fob under her blouse, then checked nervously around her to see what the other women wore.  Her costume seemed close enough, but it was too clean.  She was sure that wouldn’t last, but hid herself in the densest part of the crowd where her clean clothes would stand out less.

She looked up.  One of the four guards by the entrance to the building, each of whom wore a metal helmet and was armed with a huge ax--a halberd?--watched her.  Kendra wormed her way further into the crowd to escape his notice.  She made sure to look where everyone else looked after that--half at the huge arched doorway, and half at the gallows on the far side of the courtyard.

“Can you see ‘em?” a voice asked next to her.

Kendra shook her head.  The woman who had asked the question grinned excitedly.  Her breath stank horribly, and the few teeth she had left were rotted.  Kendra moved her head sharply away from the smell and collided with something soft behind her.

“Ow!  Watch your head, lass!” growled a male voice behind her.

“Sorry,” Kendra turned as much as she could to apologize, but only got a glimpse of dark curly sideburn and an ear.  Bad breath woman squinted at her, suspicious.  Kendra figured her apology had been entirely too modern, and clamped her mouth shut.

“Look!” shouted a young voice.  Bad breath woman promptly forgot Kendra, who saw a thin arm ahead of her point above the crowd toward the second story of the building.  A voice nearby crowed, “The judge!” 

“Has he come to read the verdict?” another shouted.

“The judge!”

From the window above the crowd, a man clad in a black robe, with gray hair cut just below his ears gestured for quiet.  When at last the crowd complied, he declared sternly, “Let he who knows of any mitigating evidence for, or strength of character in Alice Samuels speak now!”

No one spoke.  The crowd muttered.  The judge waved for silence twice more, asking each time for any reason to reduce the sentence of first Agnes and then John Samuels.  No one spoke in their defense.

The judge put on a sort of square cap. 

“Death, death!” the mob howled.

“This court has found the accused guilty of witchcraft, such practices having brought about the death of Lady Cromwell.  They have been fairly sentenced to death--”

The crowd roared again.  Kendra felt a suffocating dread swell in her chest and throat.  How could the people around her be happy about the death of three of their neighbors, or three of anybody’s neighbors?

When at last the mob quieted, a process that required the guards to knock a few heads, the judge spoke again.  “The convicts Alice, Agnes, and John Samuels,” he seemed in a hurry to be done and away from the swarming multitude below him, “will hang forthwith from the neck until dead.”

The crowd yelled and cheered.  Kendra was swept forward and to the right, closer to the gallows.  Long minutes of shuffling and jostling followed.  Kendra thought she might faint from breathlessness and the fumes that rolled off the seldom-washed people of Huntingdon.  She tried to force her way back out of the crowd, and found that she could not move in any direction, but only with the heave and sway of the mob.

Another roar went up.  Kendra saw the tops of two tight rows of halberds move across the courtyard.  She guessed that a phalanx of guards marched the convicts to the gallows.  The crowd became oddly quiet, and she heard the murmur of a woman’s voice, then a man’s.  She could not make out the words.  Another woman’s voice sobbed, and then she saw them--the Samuel family--swinging from the gallows.  John Samuel’s neck broke at once.  He was still.  Agnes and Alice kicked and turned for long minutes.  Kendra’s face was wet with tears.  She thought she might vomit.  The crowd cheered and shouted until at last the two women were still.

 Finally the pressure of the crowd lessened.  Kendra staggered into the woman next to her.  The woman steadied her and asked, “Have you never seed a hangin’ afore?”

Kendra shook her head.

“You are not…were not a friend of Alice or Agnes were you?”

Kendra shook her head again, and pulled away from the woman.

People moved away from Kendra as she left the courtyard.  Her mood was in complete opposition to the crowd’s celebratory outbursts.  By the time she reached the road, a few people pointed after her.

Great.  Kendra put her hand to her chest to be sure the key fob was still there.  Why had she come?  To see if the witches of Warboys were vampires--oh yeah. 

“They weren’t,” she whispered.