a melancholy Latin dirge. Then came the victims in the midst of a guard
of twelve armed men, and after these the nuns who were forced to be
present, while behind and about were all the folk for twenty miles
round, a crowd without number. They crossed the footbridge, where
stood the Ford Inn for which the Flounder had bargained as the price of
murder. They walked up the rise by the right of way, muddy now with the
autumn rains, and through the belt of trees where Thomas Bolle's secret
passage had its exit, and so came at last to the green in front of the
towering Abbey portal.

Here a dreadful sight awaited them, for on this green were planted three
fourteen-inch posts of new-felled oak six feet or more in height, such
as no fire would easily burn through, and around each of them a kind
of bower of faggots open to the front. Moreover, to the posts hung
new wagon chains, and near by stood the village blacksmith and his
apprentice, who carried a hand anvil and a sledge hammer for the cold
welding of those chains.

At a distance from these stakes the procession was halted. Then out from
the gate of the Abbey came the Abbot in his robes and mitre, preceded by
acolytes and followed by more monks. He advanced to where the condemned
women stood and halted, while a friar stepped forward and read their
sentence to them, of which, being in Latin or in crabbed, legal words,
they understood nothing at all. Then in sonorous tones he adjured them
for the sake of their sinful souls to make full confession of their
guilt, that they might receive pardon before they suffered in the flesh
for their hideous crime of sorcery.

To this invitation Cicely and Emlyn shook their heads, saying that being
innocent of any sorceries they had nothing to confess. But old Bridget
gave another answer. She declared in a high, screaming voice that she
was a witch, as her mother and grandmother had been before her. She
described, while the crowd listened with intense interest, how Emlyn
Stower had introduced her to the devil, who was clad in red hose and
looked like a black boy with a hump on his back and a tuft of red hair
hanging from his nose, also many unedifying details of her interviews
with this same fiend.

Asked what he said to her, she answered that he told her to bewitch the
Abbot of Blossholme because he was such a holy man that God had need
of him and he did too much good upon the earth. Also he prevented Emlyn
Stower and Cicely Foterell