The Daylight Gate - Jeanette Winterson

It's about the Pendle Witches hanged in 1612. I picked it for the author not the topic, witch stories, whether in Salem, Lancashire or Bideford in Devon where Mary Trembles and Susannah Edwards  were the last two English witches hanged have a miserable inevitability. Misogyny, superstition, the rabble and the powers that be ganging up on impoverished women who sometimes believe the hocus pocus because it affords them a little power; execution.

A well written tale with believable orgies where shagging and the Dark Gentlemen couple up. Some accurate seeming history is worked in. There is government espionage, the witch hunt takes place 7 years after the Gunpowder Plot and Christopher Southwell, one of the conspirators is on the run. 'Witchery, popery, popery, witchery' is the cry of the dull witted lawyer who tries to catch him; the legitimised confusion between the Catholic Mass and the Black Mass in a now Protestant England. Alice Nutter, a rich and powerful lady with a dodgy past and an unnaturally young face due to her 'magik' with mercury hides Southwell and hangs. Shakespeare puts in a guest appearance; he knew everyone and Jeanette is strong on plot.

The witness whose evidence hangs the witches is the abused starved nine year old child of the coven, ever surviving by a thread. Her name is Jennet. The author's deliberate choice.