Sycorax by J.B. Aspinall

Author:J.B. Aspinall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers
Published: 2006-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

I thought these last remarks of Trissie March perceptive within her limi tations and still find them interesting, since they point to the dichotomy which has constantly faced me in dealing with what is in effect a hybrid creature composed of the mortal Sukie Trothers and the Fiend Sycorax that infested her. You will have observed that in this chapter my intention to record faithfully and factually has been hindered here and there by compassion for Sukie Trothers and indignation at the brutish yokels of Beck Gap whose malice, cowardice and ignorance conspired to furnish a living Hell for the silly lass. This is error.

I need to continually remind my readers (and myself) that it is the story of the Fiend Sycorax that I am recording, without which the story of the peasant wench Sukie would have neither purpose nor interest. Once this is understood it also becomes clear that pity and compunction only serve the interests of Satan.

Throughout the period I am describing the Fiend Sycorax was resident in the shell of Sukie Trothers. The blows of Watkin only bothered the Fiend in so far as they threatened the health of the human body which it had chosen as a vehicle and somehow managed to preserve from the proper course of justice in Pickering. And Sycorax was working, while lurking and biding time. Sycorax was rendering the body it inhabited suitable for the Fiend’s next instar: rendering it into a hapless, pitiful, unmenacing victim that nobody would think worth bothering about or guarding against until it was too late.

It is sentimental weakness, or some failing even more congenial to Satan, if I and my readers feel pity for Sukie Trothers. If Sukie Dobson existed at all by the time of her marriage, it was in such close proximity to Sycorax that they were indistinguishable. If the girl Sukie had still been present as an independent awareness she would have welcomed any punishment, whether it was visited on her by the Holy Church or the fists and boots of Watkin, that might have embodied her true penitence, rid her of Sycorax and saved her from an eternity of Hell. The worst betrayal of Christ’s sacrifice that we commit and the greatest service we perform for Satan is when we are tender with the body at the expense of the soul. The folk of Beck Gap did well not to succour the witch. It might even be that Watkin was not the bestial creature I have presented but was reacting from an incoherent but nevertheless God-given impulse, out of commendable hatred of the Fiend he sensed inside his witless young wife.

Trissie had some sense of the possession of her sister but no grasp of principles, therefore her perceptions, though not unintelligent, were oblique and profitless:

‘I were round wi’ Sukie a lot of t’time after she ’ad babby, for I were capped wi’ babbies them days. And when she were nursing yon babby I’ll swear she were right as rain. She’d know

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