Sir Matthew Fell’s evidence against Mrs Mothersole is an odd thing to hang anyone on. He told the court he’d watched her three times from his window, at the full of the moon, up in the branches of the ash-tree beside his house, “clad only in her shift” and cutting twigs with “a peculiarly curved knife”. Each time she heard him coming, and each time all he found in the garden was a hare running towards the village. On the third night he went straight to her house and battered at her door for a quarter of an hour, and when she finally came out she was “very cross, and apparently very sleepy, as if just out of bed; and he had no good explanation to offer of his visit.” Anyone who knows the folklore reads the hare as Mrs Mothersole getting home first, and the story bears Sir Matthew out. In a courtroom, though, it’s a hare and a cross, sleepy woman, and the man who’d woken her had no reason to give for being there. That, with “much more of a less striking and unusual kind from other parishioners”, was enough. She was hanged a week after the trial at Bury St Edmunds, “with five or six more unhappy creatures”, a number nobody seems to have thought worth getting exact.

“The Ash-tree” is the fourth story in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, after the mezzotint that cost two guineas, and it starts somewhere unexpected, with the narrator wishing he owned a house. He writes about the small country houses of Eastern England with real affection: the grey paling of split oak, the meres with their reed-beds, a library where you might find “anything from a Psalter of the thirteenth century to a Shakespeare quarto”. He’s especially fond of a pillared portico stuck onto a red-brick Queen Anne house and faced with stucco to suit the Grecian taste. “I wish to have one of these houses, and enough money to keep it together and entertain my friends in it modestly.” Then he catches himself (“But this is a digression”) and introduces Castringham Hall in Suffolk, which he says still has its Italian portico and its square white block, “older inside than out”. The one feature that marked it out from a score of others is gone. Rosemary Pardoe’s notes on the story place Castringham in the same part of Suffolk as Livermere, the village where James spent much of his childhood at the Rectory, and the name Mothersole is on gravestones in the churchyard there.

James’s narrators don’t often editorialise, and this one stops the story to talk about witch-trials. He doubts anyone will soon be able to say how much solid reason, “if there was any”, lay behind the old fear of witches, or whether the confessions “were extorted by the mere cruelty of the witch-finders”. He calls Mrs Mothersole’s hanging an auto-da-fé, which isn’t a neutral word for a lawful execution. Then he swerves: “And the present narrative gives me pause. I cannot altogether sweep it away as mere invention.” I’ve read that a few times now and I’m still not sure which way it cuts. The story goes on to show she was more or less what the court said she was, and the narrator has already told us the courts were cruel. He lets both stand. She differed from “the ordinary run of village witches” only in being better off, several reputable farmers testified to her character, and on the scaffold, on a damp March morning on the hill outside Northgate, all she said was “There will be guests at the Hall,” more than once, in an undertone.

Sir Matthew isn’t a witch-finder, and James is careful to say so. His evidence “had not been very willingly given; he was not specially infected with the witch-finding mania”. He was “a man who liked to be on pleasant terms with those about him; but he saw a duty to be done in this business, and he had done it.” The Vicar, Mr Crome, applauded this, “as any reasonable man must have done”, and that last clause is the narrator’s, not Crome’s. Pardoe points out that Bury held no witch trial in 1690. The likeliest model is the trial of Amy Duny and Rose Cullender in the 1660s, where the judge admitted the most dubious testimony and both women were condemned to hang, and the judge was Sir Matthew Hale. I doubt James gave his witness the same first name by accident. Neither Sir Matthew needed to be a fanatic. Sam Reader at Reactor has the widow’s spirit “only balancing the books” after a system did what it was built to do, though he’s harder on Fell than James is, saying he had her executed “just for acting odd on his property and trespassing”. James’s version is worse. His Fell is reluctant and decent, and she was condemned mainly on his evidence all the same.

A few weeks later, under the May full moon, he and Crome take a turn on the gravel behind the house and Sir Matthew asks, “What is that that runs up and down the stem of the ash? It is never a squirrel?” Crome can’t make out its colour, but he’d swear, “though it sounded foolish”, that it had more than four legs. Next morning Sir Matthew isn’t down at six, as usual, or at seven or eight, and the servants break in to find him “dead and black”, with the window open. According to Crome’s notes, the two women who laid out the body touched his chest and their arms swelled so badly they couldn’t work for weeks. With “a small Magnifying Lens of Crystal” he and the physician from Bury find “a couple of small Punctures or Pricks”, and think of the poison ring of Pope Borgia. Then, as an experiment for posterity, he opens Sir Matthew’s bedside Bible three times at random and gets Cut it down, It shall never be inhabited and Her young ones also suck up blood. The following Sunday he preaches a funeral sermon titled “The Unsearchable Way; or, England’s Danger and the Malicious Dealings of Antichrist”, on the view held by most of the neighbourhood that the Squire was the victim of “a recrudescence of the Popish Plot.”

Nothing happens to the second Sir Matthew, which makes him the most sensible Fell in the story. He never sleeps in his father’s room, and for forty-five years nobody does except the odd visitor. His cattle keep dying, at a rate that rises slightly as time goes on (there’s a statistical account, the narrator says, in a letter to the Gentleman’s Magazine of 1772). He deals with it the way a farmer would. Having noticed that “nothing was ever attacked that spent the night indoors”, he shuts all his beasts in sheds at night and keeps no sheep in the park, and after that the “Castringham sickness” confines itself to wild birds and game. He never finds out what it is and doesn’t seem to need to. He dies in 1735 and the narrator can’t find “that anything particular marked his reign”, which in this family is an achievement.

His son Sir Richard is “a pestilent innovator”. He has been to Italy. He builds a great family pew out on the north side of the church, which means disturbing graves on “that unhallowed side”, Mrs Mothersole’s among them. Her coffin is sound and entirely empty, with “no trace whatever inside it of body, bones, or dust”, and he has it burnt. Then he masks the mellow red brick of the Hall with stucco and ashlar, plants some indifferent Roman marbles about, and puts up a copy of the Sibyl’s temple at Tivoli on the far bank of the mere. The narrator finds the result “less engaging”. It’s the house from the first page, though. The white stucco is Sir Richard’s, and the Italian portico almost certainly is too, so the house the narrator would like to own is the one the pestilent innovator made. He disapproves of it and wants it anyway, which is roughly where he stood on the witch-trials.

In 1754, after a bad night with a smoking chimney and something rattling at the window, Sir Richard decides he can’t sleep in his room again. He wants a western look-out, so the sun can’t wake him early, and the housekeeper, Mrs Chiddock, has to tell him the only room like that is Sir Matthew’s, the West Chamber. He flings open the casement and orders his bed moved in. Young William Crome, the old vicar’s grandson, happens to ride through that morning with a packet of his grandfather’s papers, and Sir Richard reads the Sortes and is amused. Cut it down is “one prudent piece of advice”, and he means to take it. He tries the family Bible himself, gets “Thou shalt seek me in the morning, and I shall not be,” and waves it away. “No more prophets for me!”

One of his guests is the Bishop of Kilmore, unusual among Irish bishops of his day for having actually lived in his see, who tells him on the terrace that none of his Irish flock would sleep in that room, since it’s the worst of luck to sleep near an ash. Sir Richard says the tree comes down tomorrow. Told that the nearest branches can’t reach his glass, he asks what, then, “scratched and rustled so” in the night and covered the dust on his sill “with lines and marks”. They settle on rats coming up through the ivy. “That was the Bishop’s idea, and Sir Richard jumped at it.”

Then the story drops into the present tense and puts us in the room. “And now we are in his bedroom, with the light out and the Squire in bed.” The night is warm, so the window is open. Sir Richard seems to be moving his head rapidly to and fro, and then, “so deceptive is the half-darkness”, to have several heads, “round and brownish”, moving “even as low as his chest”. Something drops off the bed “with a soft plump, like a kitten” and is out of the window, then another, then four. “Plump” is a word you’d use for a cushion being set down, and it’s the most frightening sound in the book.

Next morning, while the guests stand under the window trading theories about poisoners, Popish emissaries and infected air, a white tom-cat in the fork of the ash leans too far over the hollow in the trunk and falls in, and the noise it makes sends Lady Mary Hervey into a faint. A gardener goes up a ladder with a lantern, looks down the hole, and falls back in a dead faint, dropping the lantern inside, and the tree catches. It burns all day, and the men stand round it killing what comes out: spiders “the size of a man’s head”, “veinous and seared”, covered in greyish hair. When it’s done they find a hollow under the roots with two or three smothered spiders in it and, crouching against the side, the dried body of a woman with “some remains of black hair”, which the examiners judged “clearly dead for a period of fifty years”. It had been sixty-four since Northgate, and the examiners, like whoever couldn’t say whether five or six went up the hill with her, were content with a round number.

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