Said She Went as a Cat

In 1682, a child told a lie on the Quay at Bideford. Three women hanged.

Nat Kellow runs the bar at the Cockle and Chain on the Quay, and she moderates the town's biggest online group from her phone between pints. She likes being the one who knows. She walks home at twenty past midnight, along the river and up the hill to the flat where her nan's old sampler hangs in the hall. She has never really read it.

Then, one hot July night, there is a girl on the old steps down to the water. Barefoot, about ten, a cat beside her. She never said it, the girl says. When Nat looks again, the steps are empty. On her phone, under the post she was reading, a comment from an account with no picture: she never said it. When she refreshes, it's gone.

In the summer of 1682, ten-year-old Damaris Hookway carried water to a woman locked in the chapel at the bridge end, and heard almost nothing. That evening the Quay children asked her what the witch had said. She told me she went as a cat.

Nat knows about lies that grow. Nearly two years ago, at fourteen minutes past eleven one night, she saw a post that ruined a woman's life, and she left it up. Since then she has told everyone she never saw it till the morning. Now the town is getting ready to mark 345 years since the Bideford witches, and the girl on the steps is waiting for somebody to say it.

A quiet, haunting novel of guilt, faith, belonging and the stories a town tells about its women, from the author of Waiting Time, Proving and Night Shift.