Thisbe's final steps to the gallows- gaoler before her, husband behind- numbered just ten, she counted them, yet they felt like 100 steps, like she was walking uphill and her feet were bound by weights.
And so, she thought, this is how it ends, wading against the tide.
The tide was everything within her that raged against the system that would punish her for daring to try unconventional herbal medicine; the system that would destroy her for only wanting to find a cure for the malaise that was killing people on the plantation where she worked. Now she stood condemned to death for witchcraft and murder. She had committed neither of the two crimes, but after five months of torture, she wanted to die.
This is the story of Thisbe, but this is not where Thisbe begins.
Thisbe's life began many years earlier in a tiny, one-roomed hut on the edge of a vast plantation. As a little girl, Thisbe spent hours watching her grandmother, Agatha, sorting special grasses, pounding them to a pulp, sprinkling in seeds, adding alcohol, and making concoctions to heal the ailments workers suffered from on the plantation they had been attached to for generations. Local lore had it that there was no sickness that Agatha's remedies could not cure.
Thisbe's own mother had no love for Agatha's craft, but the little girl loved the scent of fresh grasses and essential oils. Before she was co-opted to work on the plantation, Thisbe ran errands for Agatha, searching for different bushes: fever grass, zebapique bush, chandelier grass, aloe plants, the roocoo bush, and noni fruit- all wild names the plantation overseer would never understand. It came as little surprise to anyone that when Thisbe came of age, she applied for a position as a nurse in the plantation hospital.
It was in this position that Thisbe met her husband, Maceo, who was brought in one day, delirious, skin burning with fever after collapsing out in the fields. Thisbe nursed Maceo back to health, cooling his brow with wet cloths, changing his sheets, and sneaking in her own concoctions of bitter bushes to cure the fever.
It was an unspoken law on the plantation that alternative medicine was never to be used. Herbal medicine wreaked of a time and place that Thisbe and the other workers were supposed to bottle up and forget, a distant land that stood on the edge of inherited memory like the silhouette of palm trees on the horizon at sunset.
But how could Thisbe forget Agatha's stories and songs, her grandmother's leathery skin and steady footsteps, the scent of sage and lavender and lemongrass? To forget this would be to forget herself, and so rather than forget, Thisbe, like many of the workers on the plantation, hid. After her grandmother passed away, she continued to secretly pound special grasses into herbs, mixed in with seeds and alcohol, to make the special medicines Agatha made.
Maceo, when he came to, proposed to marry the quiet nurse. They were granted permission, held a simple affair, and moved in together. That is the way it was done.
After their marriage, Maceo returned to work in the fields and Thisbe in the hospital. Their honeymoon period consisted of exhausted hugs and chaste kisses, before rising with the cock's crow when the dawn was still purple and the winds were still cold and the grass still wearing a heavy coat of dew, to exchange hurried intimacies before heading in separate directions to take up their duty at the start of the day. For Thisbe, this was paradise.
But then a plague came, and workers fell ill and died without explanation, and Thisbe found herself, in the hospital, surrounded by cupboards of conventional medicine, facing an invisible adversary that even her superior skills could not match. And this is where this story begins.
Workers were brought to the hospital with complaints of diarrhoea, nausea, and vomiting. Many recovered, but some went into shock and died within hours. Thisbe could not find a cure.
She paced the dirt floor of the hut she shared with Maceo at night, anguished, thinking, but she could find no solution other than to ease the passing of the ill workers who were too far gone. Soon the bug spread to the neighboring plantations, and there was talk of other workers falling ill and dying. Then one day, the plantation owner's daughter fell ill, and this is when everything came to a head.
The grieving relatives of the deceased workers needed someone to blame. They remembered Thisbe's unconventional medicines. They began to whisper. Maybe, they suggested, it could be poison. Some accused her outright. Whispers reached the ear of the plantation owner, and when one morning, the air was cut with the owner's wife's thin, feral shriek, screaming her daughter's name, Thisbe knew that her own days were numbered. And so she ran in a wild fright, hardly sparing a second to think of how guilty she would look fleeing.
She wasn't trying to escape, she just needed to think, to explain that she had broken the rules, yes, and she had used unconventional medicine when she should not, but that the bushes were just bushes, herbs.
She wanted to find a way to explain that her sole intent had always been to heal, not to murder anyone, that the workers who had fallen ill were already dying by the time she had seen them, and that she was terribly sorry to hear of his daughter. But Thisbe knew that a grieving man knew no reason, and so she fled straight to the old hut her grandmother, Agatha, once kept at the edge of the plantation, hoping to stay there until things calmed down a bit.
They found her a few hours later and took her to the gaol to be put to the question.
In prison, Thisbe was accused of necromancy, sorcery, divination, holding conversations with the devil, acts which ultimately resulted in murder via her charms and unnatural medicines.
She was kept by herself in a dark room for five months. She did not confess.
She was tortured. She did not confess.
She was made to witness a man's execution. She did not confess. Then the gaoler summoned Maceo.
Thisbe, he surmised, could not have committed her heinous crimes alone. Maceo was charged and tortured, and every morning, the gaoler told Thisbe of the instrument he intended to use to apply the question to her husband.
"He is your co-conspirator," he said. "The Devil may have kept your tongue, but we're confident Maceo will tell us what we need to know any day now."
But Maceo also did not confess. His wife, he insisted, was just a nurse who loved bush medicines. She could harm no one.
The gaoler grew impatient and determined that he would torture both Thisbe and Maceo together. Placing the couple several paces from each other in the jail yard, he had Maceo's ears removed.
Thisbe screamed. Her voice was thick with her husband's blood, tears forming rivulets as they streamed down her cheeks.
"Oh God, have mercy!" She cried.
"Do not call to your gods," the gaoler said contemptuously. "He cannot help you here."
Thisbe knew Maceo could die at the hands of the powerful men who held them and their lives in their hands, and so, she confessed.
"Please," she pleaded. "I did it. He has nothing to do with this. I spoke to the devil, I made the poisons. I killed them all."
"Oh ho," said the gaoler, voice oily with satisfaction.
And so, here we find ourselves, in this moment, following Thisbe's slow and unsteady footsteps as she counts ten steps- one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten- gaoler before her, husband behind as she approached her gallows. She was about to perform her final act in the closing scene of her life.
As the gaoler fixed the noose around Thisbe's neck, the group of powerful men who had witnessed her torture stood expectantly, waiting for her to rage and scream, to curse and beg. She was numb.
"Final words," the self-important gaoler hitched up his breeches.
Thisbe looked at Maceo, hands bound, on his knees, tears streaming down his cheeks. She thought to tell him she loved him, but he couldn't hear her now. He'd never hear again. And after he witnessed the scene that was about to unfold, she feared that he may never again see the world as a whole man.
Eventually, she spoke.
"This," she said wearily. "Is but a drink of water compared to what I have already suffered. Please spare Maceo, he did nothing wrong. For me, it is okay, my soul can bear this moment. When it is past, I shall be with God."
She closed her eyes as the rope tightened around her neck.
My friends, please consider participating in The Inkwell's weekly creative writing prompt. Here's the link. I was super excited to try.
For my piece, I thought to tell the story of Thisbe. In my country, Trinidad and Tobago, in the early 1800s, there was an old woman, Thisbe, who was a nurse on a plantation accused of murder. This was based on the conventional wisdom at the time. Though she confessed to the crime after she was tortured, it is debatable whether she was in fact guilty. Thisbe's trial and execution is historical fact, though a lot of it is obscured. My story, drawing upon this historical figure, is fiction. I trust that writers are given this leeway. Either way, I'm excited to participate and to bring at least this story inspired by Thisbe to life where otherwise it may be forgotten.
In keeping with the prompt, Footsteps, the story follows Thisbe's footsteps as a woman who enters the field of medicine, a field dominated by men, and who follows a family tradition of concocting herbal medicines which was frowned upon by wider society. And so, Thisbe, failing to find a cure for an unknown illness and known for her love of herbs, is accused of murder.
If you've made it this far, thank you for reading, and I'll appreciate your feedback! 馃槉