Notes: A (very late) entry for a discord female characters week. The Anne Sexton poem was suggested as part of the event, and "Her Kind" was indeed the title of the whole event. I looked into it more and I totally see where it was coming from, but I admit at first it all... stirred up some uncomfortable feelings in me, tbh, some of which have made their way in here. Must the lives and loves of women always be secret, star-crossed, cold, othered, hard-fought? May we never just be?

I have very much enjoyed working on nyo!Eng's character more with this, plotless though it is. The idea of her as bookish alchemist/magician type was inspired quite a lot by a lovely fanart by tienchi on tumblr.

I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

–Anne Sexton

England was in her kitchen, not shouting at the radio. She shouted at the radio on a average at least once a week, usually during Any Questions, almost always if she happened to have Any Answers on, because there's nothing like a phone-in to make a nation despair in her citizenry. Sometimes she shouted because she'd pushed a wrong button on her fancy digital radio from ten years ago and had Radio 2 on by mistake.

Now it was past nine on a Thursday evening and the repeat of In Our Time and England wasn't shouting. Instead she was hovering with a teaspoon upturned over the cast iron skillet, wondering if she wanted to switch off and find something on iplayer radio for the good of her health. This week's topic was a familiar one and she had that warning feeling you get when other people are about to crack open a specialist interest of yours and, you fear, probably make a mess of it. They were discussing witches and witchcraft, with particular reference to post-Reformation Europe, and England wasn't sure how she felt about that.

For one thing it made her sad.

Mustard seeds hopped and jumped in the pan and she turned her attention back to the cooking, deciding to give the radio programme a try at any rate.

England had never been burned for a witch, nor tried for witchcraft. The simple reason was that while all that was going on – and the fact that it was was Going On actually substantially less, excepting that Hopkins business, on the whole than in certain pockets on the continent is something there was absolutely no profit in her boasting of – while all that was going on, she had been respectably closeted with her embroidery and her alchemical experiments, and they never did burn her books either. She had been fortunate enough, which is to say, literally, rich enough to have been an eccentric, rather than a madwoman. During that time, anyway, the common people could be burned for reading the wrong kind of Bible, but at least with the advent of Elizabeth they left well to do ladies alone in their private chapels.

She had only observed from a distance. She was very careful to be sure that she was not saying she was above that sort of life, with her formal learning, academic, a traditionally male style. That wasn't it at all. But honestly it wasn't her kind of thing. Herbs and murmured words, and good grief looking after babies all the time, being involved in the community and people's personal problems, like some kind of-some kind of general practitioner!

In modern times England found herself once more awkwardly out of step with the expressed majority view of her citizens on a couple of issues. One was politics, if you took things by the numbers - apparently her metapsychological makeup did not. And another was superstition. If she was agnostic about religion, she was downright scornful of the superstitions many people still paid heed to. Oh, to be sure, she saw unicorns and chatty goblins and fairies and that sort of thing, though less and less and only in certain places these days. But that was all perfectly explicable: they were just real.

There was nothing unnatural about the supernatural. Try to comprehend marvels on any level of understanding. Quantum physics could probably explain her unicorns, and perfectly ordinary physics will tell you that on a clear night you can see for millennia.

There was nothing "outside nature", if you put it like that. People never used to perceive such a division. Nor between the every-day and the holy. For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry. For he is the servant of the Living God, Christopher Smart had written, at the start of a rhapsodic paean to said feline, although hadn't they locked him up in an asylum at the time of writing those lines...?

On the radio they were covering the background, talking about the "cunning folk" who lived among villagers and claimed a kind of good magic. There was nothing outside nature about this either-as England remembered it, back when she had lived in village and not a castle, one of the cunning folk she knew had been a blacksmith the rest of the time, speaking blessings over livestock in odd moments. And everyone knew about it: there was nothing hidden or shameful or darkly glamourous, mysterious or feminine about standing out there in a herd of sheep.

England gave the softening onions in the pan a stir and measured out two teaspoons of curry powder.

(India in her kitchen one day, and England had pleaded, come on can't you just write it down - how much exactly, none of this It Depends business... India casting her a despairing look, You stomp around in my country for how long and you don't even know how to make the dal?)

Fair comment. But it was also strange perhaps how she, England, loved chemistry-chrimistrie from forever ago, loved experimenting and tinkering with the properties of matter - but not cooking. She was trying these days but it was uphill work. Privileged upbringing again, perhaps. Or was it that, later, when she could have learnt, it felt like too typically women's work? Certainly she had been too proud. Too proud to fail, though, of course, fail she had.

The radio conscientiously pointed out that twenty to twenty five percent of condemned witches were men.

And yet! It's hardly the image that came down to us. Old woman riding a broomstick, bad hair and worse teeth, cackling something terrible and cursing the neighbours, dancing naked at 2am with the devil: women's work.

(France laughing, You could never have been a witch Angleterre - someone as buttoned-up as you! Excuse-me-I-was-a-pirate - England's stock reply to many things these days - comes quickly, I could be as wild as anyone! Ah, but your pirates had rules. The point unspoken is: She never looked old either, and that was more important than the modern aesthetic has it. A grandmother, a widow, a surplus woman: earning her keep by looking after the children, but terribly liable to be blamed should anything happen to them... France hadn't been in the mood for serious conversation that day: the conclusive piece of evidence was, apparently, that England's hair was stick-straight and couldn't hold a wave, let alone swirl dramatically about her face at a window on a moonlit night...)

Cooking. Hair. Of all the strange signifiers.

As she knew they would, the panel on the radio bring up the Malleus Maleficarum. That damned text, The Hammer of Witches, with its facile appeals to scholarly authority and its weird obsession with penises at every turn, that book and its spawn had been attempting the authors' own vile perversion of alchemy. Changing the nature of things. Making women into not-quite-human creatures. Thence came the picture of a witch.

And yes England was ambivalent about her own womanhood, passionately, angrily so, and alright in the past she'd tried to cast it off, to say like her Gloriana, "I may have the body of a weak and feeble woman BUT–"…But by now there was one thing she was sure of and that was that you didn't let them get away with it. You didn't take what you were given, such names to yourself. You said "I am human, I am a woman AND." And if it's religious sensibility they wanted, then you told them: there's no devil in me, you said rather in the image of God I AM. (She was quite proud of that bit of phrase making–it was worthy of France or Poland, only possibly too pious for one and too blasphemous for the other.)

But she had every sympathy in the world for the ones who couldn't say any such thing, or the times they wouldn't. Because of course people call themselves mad and monsters when they're under torture…

France gloried in womanhood, when she chose to. And she used long words and complicated philosophical arguments, and she laughed and always seemed to untouchable, so secure in herself. (It was something to do with being so tall, England thought peevishly, and having such nice hair. Piles of gorgeous chestnut waves. No one with hair like that or who was so commanding of attention and looked as well in ball gown as an opera cloak could ever be underconfident. This wasn't fair and England knew it: but you have to make exceptions for France, your best frenemy.)

And as for Poland, with her uneasy fascination with costume and disguise... She at least shared with England that anger, Don't look at me as this, don't think of me that way, why must I be what you say I am? That anger, combined with some kind of religious feeling England did not share or understand - how after all this could she find comfort there? - but was nevertheless glowingly attractive sometimes, like a hearth fire. Poland, as far as England could tell, had come to if not like then to decisively accept her own womanhood through loving it first in other women. She wore her hair short and neat these days.

Again, the hair! England thought, giving the lentils a vicious stab with a wooden spoon. But it was such a theme! Throughout history, a signifier, a label.

(And then there was Germany, with her near-shorn locks, who apparently found such freedom and ease there, as well as reclaiming a symbol of shame.)

...England's hair was long, straight as sticks-mainly because she couldn't be bothered to do anything with it.

So she didn't feel anything much about her womanhood (did you ever say or see a word so many times it starts to lose all shape and sense of meaning?) but what she reckoned was something like this:

She had never, of course, been a citizen of a country, much less one living abroad, but perhaps it was something like that. It wasn't something you had to feel on a daily basis - except, unfortunately, when other people called attention to it, usually in a negative way. But it was there if you wanted it. A heritage, a history that you could get in touch with, or not.

And humans had a strong sense of "no one is allowed to criticise our terrible country except us", and that was similar too. You might hate being called a girl, but they do not get to tell you you can't be a woman.

(She felt that first part keenly. It was an instinctive, visceral revulsion from being grouped as a girl, even being named a woman by men. Being one of them, however softly it was phrased - in fact that was worse. The delicacy natural to your sex. Something indefinably feminine. One of your kind. Women like this sort of thing, don't they? A straight insult she could take as a badge of honour, but she bridled at these words. Bridled-from the equestrian. The skittish motion of a mighty powerful creature in the hands of, under the command of, a rider. She felt all that, and she told herself: rot. Apply cold hard logic, and the most agape-transcendent andimmanent love of the patriarchal God of Abraham and that difficult fellow Paul, and say Yes I Am. Near precisely because she found herself awkward and intimidated around other women half the time - and condescendingly pitying and protective the other half - she said, these are just feelings too. I will be one of them.)

The radio programme was wrapping up soon now and she heard: Witchcraft from the start never meant one thing: it was a vehicle for thrashing out all sorts of social issues. And heaven knew that was true. Throughout the 1600s how many had died because of the bloody weather they were supposed to have caused? Any hardship or tension between neighbours might now be expressed as an accusation of witchcraft. Something to burn. A way to explain what was happening, and to do something about it! And wasn't that such a very human instinct? The instinct to science and politics as well as religious impulse?

Yes, it made her sad.

But what made her rage was the afterlife of the witch accusations. The stories. Even the proudly claimed or reclaimed narratives. Why were they like that? Why had a woman to be a villain to be free? Or why had she to be miserable, misunderstood, on the rack?

It isn't new - and should not they tell their truth? France, always the devil's advocate, had asked her gently, and of course they should. But that wasn't all that was going on. They were not only their own biographers. And once these things are written, over and again, we see ourselves only through a distorted glass, and describe ourselves in those terms. Mad women in literature. The attitude to them. The attitude to witches.

Tell me good wife, in exactly what form did Satan come to you? How specifically did he penetrate you?

Voyeuristic and foul.

Defend yourself-tell us about your sex life.

And then they asked: who else was there?

Defend yourself-give us other women.

What had any of that to do with anything? Anything sacred, secular or supernatural, in this world or the next? With soothing for a sick child, with the voice of a shepherd to their sheep, with God, with unicorns, with cats or angels, with weather systems? It was only layers of make-believe, from persecutor and persecuted.

They'd never had her that way: pricked with needles, starved for sleep, simulated drowning. But even so still she felt the pull. She had every sympathy in the world for women who cast themselves out cut themselves off from what was after all only some created category. Who othered themselves. Who declared out of their pain YES, I dance with the devil, I ride his icy cock, I curse you I hate you I corrupt your young men and I kill my own children- It was what you said in the torturer's cell.

Notes:

In Our Time: Witchcraft - you can listen to the episode England listens to on BBC iplayer radio or podcast. A lot of the specifics actually come from here, it seemed my background knowledge was actually patchier than I thought.

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry. - read this, it's beautiful and life-affirming

"Something to Burn" is a song from Carol Churchill's play Vinegar Tom

This is... kinda rough I guess, and angry, but I do enjoy writing angry characters... :) I maybe should say that stream of consciousness though it is, this isn't quite my voice just because of that... nyo!england is not me. (..nyo!poland is :p)

If you read/liked this I'd love your feedback! c: I'm afraid I'm not very active here on fanfiction dot net anymore, but I'm currently trying to get caught up crossposting things for people here! also catch me on the ao3 and tumblr: still-intrepid