La Lune - The Moon
Representing the influence of a strong woman, often a mother. As constant as the tides and phases of the moon, the mother, la lune is stability and certainty.
Childermass Eve [1], snow pricks the rutted black earth and is consumed by it. Joan lies curled by the reeking remains a fire in the pitiful hearth. Alone until so very recently, she does not move, only drinks in the sparse heat and sends it into the tiny shivering body that she clasps to her breast.
Whores get pregnant. That is no secret and no surprise. But Joan knows the herbs, the purgatives. Eye-bright and Sour Ramsey and she took them before and felt the life ebb from her with relief. This time she did not take them and she is not sure why, but the red, squirming boy in her arms is the result. The little hovel is silent and the night barely whispers outside. This is why she hears them coming.
Black Joan, they call her. They call her whore too, and witch [2]. That always makes her laugh. The men who openly spit at her in the street are usually the ones who find their way to her bed. And the women who glour and whisper and make signs against evil as she passes are always the ones to come to her when there is no one else to help them. Purgatives for those who do not want children. Life-givers to those who do. Wards against evil and curses for neighbours. Every shade of life passes through Joan's door and every bit of it makes her laugh. Perhaps this is why they come for her now. Because she knows all their secrets and all she does is laugh.
The ground is frost-hard and their boots make no sound. But the clouding, angry huffs of their breath and the flickering crack of their torches is all Joan needs to hear. She draws herself further into the hearth corner as the mob reaches her hovel. She whispers to the fire to go to sleep and they pound on her door. She entrusts her baby boy to keep still and silent as they come crashing in.
But all they find is shadow, though they search and thrust their torches into every corner. Just over by the hearth, there is a darkness which their fire doesn't touch. In time they give up and trudge silently back to their own homes, sure that they have routed the witch. And all the time the wee baby stayed calm and quiet. She calls him John. Whether after herself or The King, she is not sure. And she calls him Childermass, the one baby boy that survived Men's jealously and ire.
The next day Joan and her baby are gone. Away, South and East. And into the next Riding.
[1] The Childermass, or The Feast of the Holy Innocents, falls on the 28th of December and commemorates the massacre of boy children under the age of two instigated by King Herod shortly after the birth of Christ. As the Bible describes, in Matthew 2:18, King Herod ordered the death of the Innocents because he was afraid of the prophecy that the son of God would be born and become the greatest king on earth. England's oldest recorded carol, The Coventry Carol, tells the story of the Childermass.
[2] Unlike the vagabonding magicians (who were with few exceptions male and were tolerated in the main), women without means or station who kept the old knowledge and the old ways were called witches and were objects of fear and awe. In 1682, Temperance Lloyd, Mary Trembles, and Susanna Edwards were the last women in England to be executed as witches. The practice continued, however, in many parts of Europe at the time the events described above occurred.