Lois the Witch
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Lois the Witch
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell was born in London in 1810, but she spent her formative years in Cheshire, Stratford-upon-Avon and the north of England. In 1832 she married the Reverend William Gaskell, who became well known as the minister of the Unitarian Chapel in Cross Street, Manchester. For the first sixteen years of her marriage, she combined the activities of motherhood, and the management of a busy household, with parish work in an area notorious for its poverty and appalling living conditions. She also travelled and started to write. Mary Barton, her first full-length fiction, published in 1848 and set in industrial Manchester, was an instant success. Two years later she began writing for Dickens’s magazine, Household Words, to which she contributed fiction for the next thirteen years, her most notable work being another novel of Manchester industrial life, North and South (1855). In 1850 she met Charlotte Brontë, who became a close friend until the latter’s death in 1855. Soon after this, Gaskell was chosen by Patrick Brontë to write The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), a carefully researched and sympathetic account of this great Victorian novelist. Gaskell’s situation as a minister’s wife and as a successful writer gave her a wide circle of friends, both from the professional world of Manchester and the larger literary world. She was a committed and uncompromising artist, as Dickens discovered when, as editor of Household Words, he unsuccessfully tried to impose his views on her. She proved that she was not to be bullied, even by a man of such genius as he. Her later works, Sylvia’s Lovers (1863), Cousin Phillis (1864) and Wives and Daughters (1866), are usually considered to be her finest, revealing developments in narrative technique and subtleties of character portrayal. Gaskell died suddenly in November 1865 at Alton, Hampshire, in the house that she had bought with her literary earnings.
ELIZABETH GASKELL
Lois the Witch
and Other Stories
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Published by the Penguin Group
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Published as a Penguin Red Classic 2008
1
All rights reserved
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
978-0-14-192861-6
Contents
The Poor Clare
The Doom of the Griffiths
Lois the Witch
The Crooked Branch
The Poor Clare
CHAPTER I
December 12th, 1747. —My life has been strangely bound up with extraordinary incidents, some of which occurred before I had any connection with the principal actors in them, or indeed, before I even knew of their existence. I suppose, most old men are, like me, more given to looking back upon their own career with a kind of fond interest and affectionate remembrance, than to watching the events – though these may have far more interest for the multitude – immediately passing before their eyes. If this should be the case with the generality of old people, how much more so with me!… If I am to enter upon that strange story connected with poor Lucy, I must begin a long way back. I myself only came to the knowledge of her family history after I knew her; but, to make the tale clear to any one else, I must arrange events in the order in which they occurred – not that in which I became acquainted with them.
There is a great old hall in the north-east of Lancashire, in a part they called the Trough of Bolland, adjoining that other district named Craven. Starkey Manor-house is rather like a number of rooms clustered round a grey, massive, old keep than a regularly built hall. Indeed, I suppose that the house only consisted of a great tower in the centre, in the days when the Scots made their raids terrible as far south as this; and that after the Stuarts came in, and there was a little more security of property in those parts, the Starkeys of that time added the lower building, which runs, two stories high, all round the base of the keep. There has been a grand garden laid out in my days, on the southern slope near the house; but when I first knew the place, the kitchen-garden at the farm was the only piece of cultivated ground belonging to it. The deer used to come within sight of the drawing-room windows, and might have browsed quite close up to the house if they had not been too wild and shy. Starkey Manor-house itself stood on a projection or peninsula of high land, jutting out from the abrupt hills that form the sides of the Trough of Bolland. These hills were rocky and bleak enough towards their summit; lower down they were clothed with tangled copsewood and green depths of fern, out of which a grey giant of an ancient forest-tree would tower here and there, throwing up its ghastly white branches, as if in imprecation, to the sky. These trees, they told me, were the remnants of that forest which existed in the days of the Heptarchy, and were even then noted as landmarks. No wonder that their upper and more exposed branches were leafless, and that the dead bark had peeled away, from sapless old age.
Not far from the house there were a few cottages, apparently of the same date as the keep; probably built for some retainers of the family, who sought shelter – they and their families and their small flocks and herds – at the hands of their feudal lord. Some of them had pretty much fallen to decay. They were built in a strange fashion. Strong beams had been sunk firm in the ground at the requisite distance, and their other ends had been fastened together, two and two, so as to form the shape of one of those rounded waggon-headed gipsy-tents, only very much larger. The spaces between were filled with mud, stones, osiers, rubbish, mortar – anything to keep out the weather. The fires were made in the centre of these rude dwellings, a hole in the roof forming the only chimney.
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