Cunning Man

by Carys Crossen

Manchester, 1860

The tenements in Angel Meadow, cramped and filthy, blocked out the sky for the unfortunates who resided in them. Not that it was much of a loss on this particular day. Dark grey clouds crowded above the city, hurling down rain in hard rods. The refuse in the streets swirled and mingled with the water till it was thick as treacle and flowed sluggishly through doorways and cellar hatches.

Rawlings the cunning man trudged through the ankle-high waste resignedly. Unlike many in Angel Meadow, he at least wore sturdy boots that could be cleaned. He peered up at the huddled houses, and longed for his cottage back in Alderley, near the Edge. Whitewashed walls, slate tiles, tucked under a blanket of ivy …

A whistle jabbed at his ears. Up ahead, a skinny man, raggedy and poorly shod, was waiting for him.

“Wizard Rawlings?” he asked. Rawlings nodded. 

“I’m Jacob Murray,” the man continued. “It’s my family as sent for you, when they heard you was in town. If you’ll come along with me …”

Rawlings followed the man willingly enough. Even if Murray meant to lure him into some trap and then rob him, he’d be out of the wet. The rain in Manchester was different from that of Alderley, far out in the countryside. Colder. More unfeeling. Futile, with no plants or trees to nourish.

Murray led him to one of the cramped houses, the sagging door open despite the wet and the slurry in the street. They stepped right into a crowded room, eleven or twelve people already in a space that would have been snug with eight. The stench was palpable. The only light was the reddish glow cast by a small, smoky fire in a rough-hewn fireplace. 

The assembled men, women, and children all fell silent as Murray and Rawlings entered. Rawlings glanced round, did not see what he was searching for.

“Where is he?” he demanded. A woman, face scored by poverty and worry and illness and hunger, gestured at a tattered curtain strung across a corner of the room. Rawlings stepped over, nudging a boy and a girl aside, and drew it aside.

A man lay curled up like a dog on a pile of rags. His eyelids were open, but the orbs were sightless, blank as fresh-laid eggs. He was trembling, and his lips moved unceasingly, muttering some nonsense. 

“How long?” Rawlings asked everyone and no-one.

“Two days now, he’s been like this,” said the woman who gestured. “Three nights ago, he comes home, pale as flour, and says he was cursed …”

“Cursed?” Rawlings enquired, the inflection turning it into a question. He’d seen plenty of curses in his time—or rather, he’d seen the effects. This was almost certainly the result of a curse, a nasty one, but the more details he could gather the better. Curses that sprang up in the slums differed from those in Alderley. Curses out in the countryside often took aim at animals or crops. In the city, it was people themselves who were the victims of a witch’s wrath.

“By Maggie Grimshaw!” piped up one of the children, a scrawny boy of about ten. The gleam in his eye suggested the whole nasty business was a source of excitement rather than fear. “She’s a witch, everyone says she is—”

“Saying don’t make it so,” Rawlings interrupted sharply. He’d seen too many innocent women accused of witchcraft by vengeful folk who ought to have had better things to do with their time. True witches were too cunning to get caught—or at least too vicious to be held to account.

The lad subsided, though his jaw was set in mutiny.

“Aren’t you a witch, though?” asked a tiny girl, a couple of years younger than the boy. She might have been a pretty thing in different circumstances. Her eyes were bright and the hair straggling from under a filthy cap was a rich chestnut.

“No,” Rawlings answered, not unkindly. “I’m a cunning man. I guard against witchcraft, and all its ills. I break curses, I don’t cast them. Now then, someone tell me about this curse—and this man lying here.”

“We aren’t sure what it is exactly,” said Jacob Murray. “But we know who cast it. That’s Ben, my younger brother. He were fool enough to get tangled up with Maggie Grimshaw. She’s a likely lass, black hair and lips as red as Maria Martin’s blood, but she’s a nasty bit of work. Devil of a temper, and she’s a witch. Oh, she denies it—most of the time—but everyone knows it. There’s more than one man been struck down by her and her witchcraft. Poor Georgie Kennedy died after she—”

“Tell me about what happened to Ben,” Rawlings interrupted.

“He saw sense and told her he wanted nowt more to do wi’ her,” says another woman with a spark of life in her eyes, looping her arm through Jacob’s. “She dint take that wi’ a good grace. She were screaming in the street, saying he’d be dead before the week were out, she’d see him in hell. That were three nights ago. Morning after she cursed him, he had pains in his stomach, and by night he couldn’t walk. Been like that ever since. It’s as much as we can do to get some beer down ‘im.”

“Hmm,” said Rawlings. He leant over Ben and examined him more closely, tilting his head so he could listen to Ben’s feverish mutterings.

“She’s cursed me, she’s killed me, she’s cursed me, she’s killed me …” Ben was muttering, over and over. Rawlings sighed. Dispelling curses was always much more difficult if the victim had given up hope of recovery. People prepared to fight always flung off curses quicker. 

“Enough of that, lad,” he said loudly. “We’ll end this and end it today.” He turned to Jacob, and the woman who was presumably his wife. “Get him sat up and make him pay attention. I can cure this, but I’ll need him to realize it. Has anyone tried anything to break this curse?”

“We tried to get blood from Maggie,” said a lanky youth folded over in a corner. “Drawing blood from above the breath ‘ud do it, our neighbour said. But Maggie’s keeping to herself. She don’t want to be found ‘cause she knows what’ll follow.”

Rawlings nodded. Getting blood from a witch, preferably drawn from the face above the nostrils, was a timeworn but effective method of neutralising a witch’s power. If this Maggie had had the sense to go into hiding from the vengeful Murray family, he’d have to try something else. 

“Is there a blacksmith nearby?” he asked Jacob Murray. The man snorted, sounding rather like a horse himself.

“Not in Angel Meadow,” he scoffed. Rawlings turned rat-shrewd eyes on the man, and Murray gulped, seeming almost to shrink in size. 

“No call for horses, round here,” he continued, rather more respectfully. “But there’s the foundry and plenty of factories.”

“It’s iron nails I’m after,” Rawlings grunted. “Virgin ones. Never used. As many as you can lay hands on. And a hammer, or summat to drive ‘em in with. And whatever you do, don’t let ‘em drop on the floor.”

“I can get some,” said Mrs. Murray, a ghost of smile gracing her face, revealing she was only missing six teeth. “I’m friends wi’ a woman in the next street, her husband works at the iron foundry in Shudehill. He’ll have a few nails handy.”

“Will he give ‘em to you?” Jacob asked, skeptical. Mrs Murray’s smile widened.

“She will. I’m the one as kept the peelers from finding her brother when they was after ‘im for thieving,” she answered casually, grabbing a grimy shawl from the back of a spindly chair. “Do what you can for ‘im in the meantime, Wizard Rawlings.”

Accordingly, after some coaxing and a little bullying, Ben Murray was plonked on a chair by the smoky fire, shivering and grizzling. Rawlings stood over him, regarding him with the detached gaze of experience.

“Listen to me lad, and listen well,” he said. “I’m a cunning man. I’ve seen curses like the one on you afore now, and I’ve ended them all. I’ll end this one, and you’ll be fine. I’ll stay with you till it’s all over.”

Rawlings sighed as he promised this, for he was eager to return to the cold pure air and green and growing things of Alderley. But despite all that had changed since the factories thrust sooty chimneys into the sky and people scurried into the city in search of work, like rats following the Pied Piper, despite the fact that witchcraft was as likely to be found in the big towns as the tiny hamlets, despite the fact that the authorities dismissed witchcraft as superstitious nonsense and the cunning folk as charlatans, some parts of his trade, his vocation, hadn’t changed and never would while Rawlings had a still-beating heart.

“She’s cursed me,” Ben Murray groaned. “I see her at night, looming over me. She wants to choke me—”

“Don’t matter what she wants, it ain’t happening,” interrupted Rawlings, such conviction in his tone that Ben fell silent. “She might have cursed you, lad, but I’m here now, and I’ve never been got the best of by a witch yet. I know how to deal with this, so stop fretting and listen.”

Ben looked sullen but didn’t demur. Rawlings turned to face the assembled people in the little room.

“Where does this Maggie Grimshaw usually live?” he asked. “Flophouse, boarding house, a rented room?”

“She hangs around a few places,” said Jacob Murray. “Latest one is a room above the Collier’s Arms.”

“We’ll start there,” Rawlings nodded, as Mrs Murray came hurrying back in, nails in hand. “We’ll drive these nails into Maggie Grimshaw’s doors, and the iron will make her lose her power when she crosses the threshold. Never known it to fail. Now, come on Ben. You’ll be driving ‘em in.”

Ben was most unwilling to leave the room and head for Maggie’s quarters, fearing she might place an even worse curse on him or just punch him, and at last Rawlings and Jacob Murray got him bodily by the arms and dragged him outside. The rain was still hurling itself down, cold and stabbing. Luckily, the Collier’s Arms was nearby. 

The small pub, despite it only being mid-afternoon, was crammed full of drinkers, and they almost had to fight their way upstairs. The landlord, when Maggie Grimshaw’s name was mentioned, had gone pale and made to throw them out. But Jacob had leapt into the breach, explaining that Rawlings was a cunning man and here to put an end to Maggie’s power, at which they were swiftly directed upstairs and promised a free pint if they were successful. 

Rawlings wondered what Maggie had threatened the landlord with. He highly doubted Maggie was a true witch. A witch needed training and initiation and practice, none of which tantrum-throwing Maggie Grimshaw possessed as far as he knew. But magic had a life of its own, and a nasty-tempered amateur could curse as easily as the most experienced witch.

The three men crept up the filthy stairs, going quietly at Rawlings’s insistence. He didn’t want Maggie alerted to their presence if she was in the room. They found her door, and Rawlings took the nails from his pockets. He held one against the door, and since they had no hammer, Jacob took the clog off his foot, ready to hammer it in. But Rawlings shook his head.

“Ben is to do it,” he whispered. Jacob handed the clog to Ben, who, trembling in every limb, began to tap away at the nail. He struck timidly at first, but then with more confidence as it sank into the rotted wood. Rawlings held up another nail, and Ben hammered that in as well.

They had just begun on the third nail when the door was flung open. A woman stood there, a woman composed of contradictions. Her dress was dirty and ragged, but she carried herself like a countess, head held high. She was a beauty, with dark curling hair and flashing eyes, but her face was so contorted with rage she seemed ugly.

“You!” she spat at all three of them, and then lunged for Ben.

Ben shrieked. Rawlings, not at all discomposed, seized hold of him and stepped backwards, dragging the cursed man with him. Maggie Grimshaw—for it must be her—went careering onto the landing. She skidded forward towards the stairs, and for a perilous moment teetered right on the edge of the top step. 

Rawlings sucked in a deep breath despite the foul air. But she managed to right herself, and spun round to confront them.

Well, she tried. Her heel got caught in the ragged hem of her dress, and when Maggie turned, her foot was pulled from under her. She sat down hard on the stairs, her backside skidded off the top step and thump, thump, thump, down she went. She bumped all the way down the staircase, yelling more in outrage than pain, finishing off with a crash and a final shriek of fury at the bottom.

A coarse chorus of laughter sounded from the pub. On the landing, the three men stared incredulously for a moment, before Ben and Jacob burst into raucous guffaws. Rawlings shook his head and chuckled.

“Oh, Wizard Rawlings!” gasped Ben as soon as he could speak. “You’ve done it! You’ve broken her power!” He grasped hold of Rawlings’s hand and wrung it, Jacob doing likewise with the other. “She can’t hurt me now! Thank you, thank you! Jake, there’s a shilling in my pocket. He can have it!”

It took quite some time to leave the pub. After Rawlings had fended off the Murray brothers, they’d gone downstairs and found themselves the heroes of the hour. The landlord and patrons had divined that Maggie’s power was broken from her undignified descent, and had chased her out, laughing and slinging dregs of beer at her. The landlord insisted on them all having a pint, and the story had to be told at least five times, growing wilder with each retelling. Still, Rawlings got given plenty of pennies and ha’pennies for his efforts.

At last, Rawlings managed to make his farewells and head outside into the filthy streets. It had stopped raining, thank all that was godly. Time to head to the train station and get a third-class ticket to Alderley and Chorley.

Maggie Grimshaw loomed out of a particularly dark and crooked ginnel. Her finger was already pointed at him.

“A curse on you!” she snarled. “A curse on the eyes you see with, a curse on—”

“Oh, give over, lass,” Rawlings interrupted wearily. “I’ve taken your power from you with those iron nails. You can’t hurt me. There’s nowt to you but nastiness now.”

Maggie lowered her arm, defeated by Rawlings’s matter-of-factness.

“You’ve ruined me! They say I’m a witch,” she growled. “Everyone. Everyone says. Why shouldn’t I be one? I’ve me living to earn, and you’ve spoilt it.”

“Earn it after some other fashion, then,” sighed Rawlings. “There’s enough hurt in the world without you adding to it. Go on now, lass.”

Maggie glared at him, but she was beaten. She turned and shuffled away. Rawlings wondered where she was heading. Nowhere good, not round here, that was for certain.

He sighed, turned up his coat collar and began his journey back to Alderley and the Edge, back to greenness and quietness and freshness, where all these sordid streets and their doings would be no more than a grime-smeared memory.

About the author

Carys Crossen has been writing stories since she was nine years old and shows no signs of stopping. Her fiction has been published by Dear Damsels, FlashBack Fiction, Honey and Lime Lit, Fudoki Magazine and others, and her monograph "The Nature of the Beast" is published by University of Wales Press. She lives in Manchester, UK with her husband and their beautiful, contrary cat. 

About the illustration

The illustration is "A Scene in St. Giles" by Thomas Beames, a scene from The Rookeries of London: Past, Present, and Perspective, 1852. In the collection of The British Library, London, UK. In the public domain.