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About the Author

Elizabeth Lee won the Curtis Brown Creative Marian Keyes Scholarship, and her work has been selected for the Womentoring Project and Penguin’s WriteNow Live. She lives in Warwickshire.

Praise for Cunning Women

Praise for Cunning Women

‘Elizabeth Lee’s debut novel is timely in its depiction of hysteria and persecution, and beautifully evokes a historical period poised between dark ignorance and long-overdue enlightenment.’

Observer

‘Witches and the dread they inspired are captured here with chilling deftness.’

Woman & Home

‘An impressive debut … anyone who roots for the underdog will fall for Sarah … beautifully relevant.’

Kate Mascarenhas, author of The Thief on the Winged Horse

‘Beautiful, tense (at points breathless!) historical fiction with meticulously researched description. I loved it.’

Kate Sawyer, author of The Stranding

‘Wonderfully original … devastating … and fabulously atmospheric too.’

Elodie Harper, author of The Wolf Den

‘The pleasure of the novel lies in the tension between the familiar story of patriarchal injustice and a more complex investigation of supernatural belief and disbelief …

A pleasure to read – with an undercurrent of genuine fear.’

Annie Garthwaite, author of Cecily

Dedication

For my mum, Sally

An Unfamiliar Pain

Lancashire, 1620

Annie sleeps curled up on the bed we share, wet thumb fallen from her mouth. I kneel, calling and shaking her. She frowns and mutters.

‘Wake up,’ I say.

She pushes me off and turns her back.

‘Get up. Time to search.’

Her eyes open and she sits forward, clutching my arm. ‘Has he come?’

‘We rang the bell, didn’t we? And the ash is untouched.’

She looks to see that the thin ring around the bed shows no trace of his hoof print.

‘I’m safe, then,’ she says, lying back down.

‘No.’ I pull her to her feet. Have to know she’s free for another day. Too late for me, I’m doomed to a future I cannot escape, but she may yet be saved. She’s so scrawny I could carry her with one hand. Ignoring her complaints, I drag her over to the weak light of the slit in the wall, standing in the narrow space between our mat and Mam’s, and begin the daily ritual. I pull the clothes over her head and she stands, naked and shivering, as I search every part of her skin.

I start with her side, where my mark lies, the rounded shape of his mouth berry-red. Her side is clear, white goose-pimpled skin stretched tight over jagged bone. I lift and turn her arms, spread her fingers to inspect the flesh between them, look behind her knees and on the underside of each foot. The flea bites she has picked are rough but the mark I pray I will never find would be flat and dark. A stain that no washing can remove, though God knows I have tried. As she bows her head I hold her hair and search the back of her neck.

She is not his yet.