The Girl Who Pointed

They no longer speak my name aloud in the village, not in the way they once did when the court echoed with my words, when they said I was brave and pure, a child with the clarity of angels. Back then, it rang: "Jennet Device, stand forward. Tell the truth, for the Lord watches and the guilty must not escape judgment." And so I stood. I was nine years old. I stood, I spoke, and I told them everything they wanted to hear. God forgive me, I gave them exactly that.

They said I was brave, a girl bold enough to speak truth against her own blood, the one who cracked open a nest of witches and exposed their sin to the light. But that’s not what I remember. Not really. What I remember is the hunger that gnawed like rats inside me, constant and cruel. I remember waking in the dark of early mornings with the cold pressed against my skin and my stomach a hollow drum. I remember the sharp sting of my mother’s hand across my wrist when I reached for food too soon. I remember Margaret's bitter muttering, James's loud, foolish defiance, and the way the villagers looked at us all, with the same curled lips they used for dung or rotten meat.

We were never clean enough, never pious enough, never quiet enough. To them, we were already witches. Poor, unwashed, unschooled, and unloved by any but ourselves. My mother sold herbs and roots, yes, and knew things about poultices and charms that frightened the priest. But it was not magic. It was survival. We had nothing else.

It was in the spring of 1612 that the fear became something harder, something that stalked the fields and whispered at thresholds. They said Alizon cursed a peddler, that he fell sick, that the old bloodlines of Demdike and Chattox were running wild. The magistrates came with their boots and questions, with their books and blank faces. They asked about the dead cow, the stillborn child, the sour milk. They asked about gatherings in the woods and charms whispered at dawn. They were not searching for truth. They were searching for someone to blame.

And then they came for us.

They took my mother, my brother, my sister. They were dragged to Lancaster Castle, to cells deep in stone and rot. I was left behind at first, too small, too overlooked. Then came Roger Nowell, a justice with soft hands and clever eyes. He gave me sugar-cakes and spoke gently, called me a clever girl, God-fearing and good. He told me I could save souls if I only spoke what I knew. He told me God loved those who told the truth.

But whose truth was it?

I understood, even then. I understood what he needed. So I told him that I had seen my mother speak to a black dog named Ball, and that the dog spoke back. I said she summoned it with blood and bone, that she used it to hurt people who wronged her. I said Margaret laughed when the neighbor's child took ill. I said James boasted that he could stop a man’s heart with a glance. I gave them everything. And they thanked me.

They praised me, these men who had never looked at me twice before. I was transformed in their eyes, no longer just the filthy daughter of a suspected witch, but a witness, a child prophet, a tool of divine justice. For the first time in my life, I was warm and fed and seen. I was useful.

But I see her eyes still, my mother’s eyes, dark as earth and filled not with fear but with something harder: betrayal, perhaps, or understanding. She never shouted, never begged. She simply stared at me in that courtroom, and her silence struck deeper than any scream. Margaret cried, James thrashed like a netted fish, but Mother stood quiet, mouth tight, gaze fixed. Even as they read the sentence. Even as the rope was measured.

I was nine years old, and my words sent them to the gallows.

The crowd cheered that day. Ten witches dead. Ten souls purified from the world. But that’s not what I saw. I saw my family, my home undone. I saw hands that had once held me now bound and dragged away. I saw love turned into ash.

No one asked me afterwards if I was well. No one wondered what it cost a child to become the tool of men. I faded into the margins. The girl who once told the truth. No longer needed. No longer fed.

Years passed. I grew tall, grew quiet. I married once, poorly. He drank. I left. I changed my name and tried to lose myself in places where the name Device had never been heard. But the past clings to you like soot. It settles deep.

When they came again, it was with a different purpose. A new panic, a new hunger for witches. And this time, they remembered. This time, they pointed at me. Not as a witness, but as a suspect. My words once condemned others; now, my name condemned me. No sweetmeats now. No soft voices. Only questions, threats, the stink of old cells, and the knowledge that history had no place for little girls who grew up.

They locked me in the same castle where my mother died. They told me to confess.

And I did not. I could not. For what I once did in ignorance, I could not now do with full sight.

In this damp place, I have had time to remember everything. I think of truth often. How it was promised to be light, but became instead a weapon. I think of the silence between my mother and me, and how it screamed louder than anything I have ever known.

They called it justice. They wrote it as righteousness. But I remember poverty, and hunger, and fear. I remember the lies they needed and the child they shaped to speak them.

They say I was the beginning of the end. That the child who stood in the courtroom broke open the darkness. But I was only ever a girl. Alone. Afraid. Desperate to be seen.

And now, years later, I am what remains. The echo. The afterword. The page they never thought anyone would read.

If I could go back, I would not speak. I would hold my tongue and my mother’s hand and stare the men down until their hunger found someone else. But there is no going back.

Only remembering.

Only writing what was never meant to survive.

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Jennet Device was a real girl who testified at the Pendle Witch Trials in 1612, leading to the execution of ten people, including her mother, brother, and sister. Her later fate is unknown, though some believe she was accused of witchcraft herself years later. This fictionalized account imagines her adult voice — haunted, honest, and long erased from the simplified version of events still told today.