“Peace, good Bridget,” she said as they passed, “being innocent, what have you to fear?”

“The fire, the fire!” cried the poor creature.  “I dread the fire.”

Then they were led to their place in the procession and saw no more of Bridget for a while, although they could not escape the sound of her lamentations behind them.

It was a great procession.  First went the monks and choristers, singing a melancholy Latin dirge.  Then came the victims in the midst of a guard of twelve armed men, and after these the nuns who were forced to be present, while behind and about were all the folk for twenty miles round, a crowd without number.  They crossed the footbridge, where stood the Ford Inn for which the Flounder had bargained as the price of murder.  They walked up the rise by the right of way, muddy now with the autumn rains, and through the belt of trees where Thomas Bolle’s secret passage had its exit, and so came at last to the green in front of the towering Abbey portal.

Here a dreadful sight awaited them, for on this green were planted three fourteen-inch posts of new-felled oak six feet or more in height, such as no fire would easily burn through, and around each of them a kind of bower of faggots open to the front.  Moreover, to the posts hung new wagon chains, and near by stood the village blacksmith and his apprentice, who carried a hand anvil and a sledge hammer for the cold welding of those chains.

At a distance from these stakes the procession was halted.  Then out from the gate of the Abbey came the Abbot in his robes and mitre, preceded by acolytes and followed by more monks.  He advanced to where the condemned women stood and halted, while a friar stepped forward and read their sentence to them, of which, being in Latin or in crabbed, legal words, they understood nothing at all.  Then in sonorous tones he adjured them for the sake of their sinful souls to make full confession of their guilt, that they might receive pardon before they suffered in the flesh for their hideous crime of sorcery.

To this invitation Cicely and Emlyn shook their heads, saying that being innocent of any sorceries they had nothing to confess.  But old Bridget gave another answer.  She declared in a high, screaming voice that she was a witch, as her mother and grandmother had been before her.  She described, while the crowd listened with intense interest, how Emlyn Stower had introduced her to the devil, who was clad in red hose and looked like a black boy with a hump on his back and a tuft of red hair hanging from his nose, also many unedifying details of her interviews with this same fiend.