The Riverwoman’s Dragon

Author’s Note

For many years Joyce Gibb, a friend with a keen eye for character and continuity, worked closely with me as I wrote the first drafts of my books. She died after a long stretch of declining health on Christmas Eve 2019. A few months earlier I told her that the next Owen Archer would be the book she requested time and again, a Magda tale, one in which the Riverwoman played a central role, one in which I would delve more deeply into her past, her origins. I regret that I waited so long that she read only a very early draft of the first chapter. I dedicate this book to her.

In the first months of 2020, as the world became aware of a new, dangerous, highly contagious virus, I panicked. I had set the book in the midst of a recurrence of the bubonic plague. Now I would have the discomfort of writing about a frightening pandemic in the midst of one. My first instinct was to change the setting. But the atmosphere played to my purpose, a time of raw fear that stirred superstitions and fears of hellfire, a perfect backdrop for the people’s ambivalence about Magda Digby, a woman who seemed a mythical being, not a Christian, a woman they sometimes feared yet relied on for her skills as a healer and midwife. So I stayed the course. As it turns out, the writing gave me an outlet for my own anxieties, and being in Magda Digby’s head and heart provided comfort in an unsettling year.

Who is Magda Digby? She has been a part of this series from the beginning, first manifesting in a brief scene in a graveyard in The Apothecary Rose, a character stepping out of the pages of medieval romance to mourn the death of her son. In later drafts her role grew as I realized her potential. She was the archetypal elderly woman living on the edge of a village/town/city/wood, a healer, a wise woman, with a mystical aura, ever an enigma. A counterpoint to the pragmatic Owen Archer. Mystical or other-worldly elements were unexceptional in medieval romances, a mix of Christian and old folk beliefs. Richard Firth Green’s fascinating and highly readable Elf Queens and Holy Friars: Fairy Beliefs and the Medieval Church (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) discusses this at length, with wonderful examples. By the late fourteenth century fairies were increasingly demonized by clerics, which saddens me. Imaginations open to mystery seem far healthier than those cramped by clerics with ink-stained fingers desperate to demonize all but Church doctrine. No wonder Magda Digby had no time for them. As you see, although she began as an archetype, Magda quickly deepened into a unique individual.

Is she a witch? What is meant when labeling someone ‘witch’, not in the sense of name-calling, but when claiming that someone practices ‘witchcraft’, depends on when and where it occurs, and who is doing the labeling. So what was going on with the idea of a witch in Magda’s time? In England in the late fourteenth century neither the concept of witches nor the burning of witches was yet well formed. The precursor in the Church was the accusation of heresy. But how had the country women with a deep knowledge of healing herbs, roots, barks, fruits, long accepted as important for the health of the community, come to be considered heretics? What was contrary to Church doctrine about plant lore? Abbeys boasted extensive herb gardens. Was it because the occasional charm was included? How did that differ from the birth girdles or saints’ relics people sought for protection during childbirth or illness, or the holy water priests sprinkled on fields to bless the crops? And who would their accusers be? As a crime writer one of my first questions was, who benefited from the downfall of these women? Certainly not the community who depended on them. Perhaps particular members of that community who had no need of them? One group came to mind: the members of religious communities with their own infirmaries (and medicinal gardens). But why did they care?

I consulted one of my favorite trustworthy sources, Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane’s A History of Medieval Heresy and Inquisition (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2011), and found chapter 6, ‘Medieval Magic, Demonology, and Witchcraft’, to be particularly helpful. I was grateful to find her simple definition of magical practice: ‘the exercise of a preternatural control over nature by human beings, with the assistance of forces more powerful than they’ (185). Right away I saw the key issue – ‘forces more powerful than they’. It’s interesting that she adds that ‘for the historian, magic is particularly tricky to study because (like heresy) it is more concept than reality, and because our sources are (like those on heresy) so often written by authors hostile to their topic’ (186). And she quickly gets to the meat of the issue, that clerical theorists became increasingly worried about how prevalent and accessible all this was as all levels of society, from the healer to the priest to the court astrologer, used a mix of charms, blessings, herbal remedies, signs, and sky for all sorts of situations. They believed that although a monk might be trusted to be using all of this with God’s blessing, an illiterate woman living in the woods might be highly susceptible to evil forces. What was important was not so much what a person did, but who they were. Clerical thinkers delved into esoteric books of magic, alchemy, and astrology, and it was these who attached the concept of demonology to the work of folk healers. What strikes me as absurd about this is that they were the ones flirting with ‘secret’ books, not the midwives and other female healers, who did not have access to libraries housing such items – not to mention being far too busy to spend their days bent over books, and often illiterate. I’m oversimplifying, but for my purposes this helped me think through how the very people who had depended on the character Magda Digby, the Riverwoman, for healing might be persuaded to turn on her in a time of pestilence if they were convinced by someone in whom they placed some authority that her healing skills came to her from infernal sources and God would punish them for seeking her aid.

It would be more than a century before the concept of a witch was fully explicated in the Malleus maleficarum (or The Hammer of Witches, written in 1486). Some might call Magda a witch, but more likely they would consider her a pagan or a heretic, and a danger to their souls.

What do I think? Magda might as easily be described as having some fairy blood as being a witch. She has little patience with charms and spells, and is far more caring and compassionate than many baptized in the Church. If you were to ask her who or what she is, she would smile at the question. She is as you see her. Her calling is to heal.

And yet there is the dragon, her indifference to religion, the air of mystery. Let’s leave it there.