Not for Burning

"Why do they call me a witch?" asks the beautiful and bewildered accused in Playwright Christopher Fry's The Lady's Not for Burning. "I live alone . . . speak French to my poodle [and] have a peacock which, on Sundays dines with me indoors . . ."

Comely, black-haired Martha Minnen kept no peacocks, but she had other eccentricities. To her neighbors in the tiny village of Witgoor in the Kempen region of Flanders they smacked strongly of witchcraft. There were her cats, for instance. "It's just beyond belief," said one Witgoor villager, "the number of black cats you see around Martha's house at night." Then there were the sparrows. Why should a woman want to give a neighbor's children a nest of baby sparrows ?

As Maria Deckx (rhymes with hex) explained to a local judge two weeks ago: "I have always been nice to Mrs. Minnen, but I didn't want a lot of birds around my house. Your honor, what would you, as a judge, do with a bunch of sparrows?" Judge Albert Boone solemnly turned to his two colleagues on the bench and put the question to them, but they could only shrug their shoulders in answer.

If the Shoe Fits. Maria and her brother-in-law Victor Deckx were in court to answer Martha Minnen's charges that they had slandered her, but Maria refused to be intimidated. "I believed in witches," she declared to one & all, "and I still believe in witches. If the shoe fits, too bad."

As for Victor Deckx, he had listened politely enough when a white-robed monk came to the church recently to preach a mission against the ungodly superstitions present in Witgoor; but when it came time to pass the plate, Victor had pointedly ignored Martha Minnen's outstretched offering. Soon afterward Martha's children came home from school complaining that no one would play with a witch's kids. That was when Martha decided to sue.

When the trial began in the crenelated, moated courthouse of nearby Turnhout, Witgoor's constable was called to testify. He shuddered violently and protested that witchcraft was not a policeman's business. Then Judge Boone took a moment to clear his throat. In that moment the constable fled through the doorway to freedom. A court attendant hurried after him, but there was no sign of the fugitive. "Witchery," murmured the court spectators.

"What do you know about this affair?" the harassed judge asked another witness, Martha's own sister Emma. "The whole parish is full of it," she answered. "How did it begin?" asked the court. "Well," said Emma, "one day Maria had to feed her pigs and the 'witch' came near the pigs' fodder, so Maria threw the fodder into the toilet. Then the witch gave the sparrows to the children." "I deny everything, everything, everything," said Martha Minnen.

Time to Think. "In easy cases," explained a local specialist in the law, when the evidence was all in, "the judges render a decision immediately. In hard cases they have to have time to think. This has been a hard case."

Last week, after a week's thought, Turnhout's judges decided Martha Minnen was no witch. They awarded her, not the $200 damages she had demanded, but $80.

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