BY ALICE NEWITT Alice Newitt lives in Leicestershire and works for a university careers service. A Physics graduate, she finds great inspiration in the natural world and is currently working on a novel inspired by her love of the Earth sciences. She tries to enter a writing competition every month.Drop here
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It was on St Swithin’s day that I first came to visit the witch. Outside the weather was fine, and so it followed that the next forty days would be fine too, but still the fire in the hearth roared. There was nothing in the pot besides water. ‘You brought it?’ asked a voice. ‘Yes,’ I said, turning to see the owner of the voice appear beside me. It was a woman, worn and weathered, but I could sense a force burning within her. She was the witch, of course.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘Add it to the pot then.’
I threw the laurel branches that I had been holding into the bubbling water.
‘How does it work?’ I asked, looking down at the blanching leaves.
‘When we have all of the ingredients, then we will see.’
‘What if we are too late?’ I asked, but the witch had already gone. I looked back into the pot. Come back in the autumn, the flames said to me.
That summer, our Molly went to town and came back with a sickness. She lasted two weeks before she died, and then, with Sarah married, I was the only one left. I spent two months out on the fields, and then once the last of the harvest was in, I rode to Castlebreak on the horse that Henry had left me.
I found the witch outside, trying to dig a hole with a stick.
‘I could bring you a spade,’ I suggested after I’d dismounted.
She glanced up at me and then looked back down at her hole. I opened up my bags.
‘Here - I brought the barley,’ I said, showing her.
‘Well,’ she said.
‘I could help you with your garden,’ I said. ‘I am stronger than I look.’
She walked straight past me and into the cottage. I followed her inside.
She and I sat side by side, watching the broth bubble.
‘Did anybody ever tell you about Udd the Deepminded?’ she asked me. I shook my head and then, to my surprise, she began to tell the story. Her register grew darker and richer, and her words were laden with meaning. It was warm, there in that little room by the hearth, and it was hard to believe that what she was recounting wasn’t somebody else’s memory but her own.
‘My problems must seem small to you,’ I said, when she was done and I was occupied cleaning an old wound on her leg. ‘How long have
