Are you a witch or are you a fairy, Or are you the wife of Michael Cleary?
It's March 1895 and Ireland is calmer and more hopeful than it has been for many years. The young GAA is up on its feet and the infant Gaelic League is thriving. A Land Bill is finally in sight, Home Rule remains a hot topic and fashionable society is salivating over Oscar Wilde's upcoming libel action against the Marquess of Queensberry.
In south Tipperary, Bridget Cleary, a young, working-class woman, catches a cold. Within weeks, this child of Ballyvadlea, a village of 31 souls and nine houses, will share the international headlines with a disgraced Oscar Wilde, an upper-class Irishman and avowed advocate of Home Rule.
Both cases will be lumped together as evidence of the mental degradation and savagery of the Irish, planks in the case being erected against Home Rule, against agrarian reform and much else besides. As Sir Edward Carson destroys Wilde in a London courtroom, papers as far-flung as the New York Times will be reporting that an Irishwoman called Bridget Cleary has been "slowly roasted to death because she was, in her relatives' belief, bewitched".
She was 26 when she hit the headlines. The daughter of a landless labourer, Patrick Boland, she had grown into a stylish, good-looking woman with her own successful dressmaking business, keeping hens on the side. In clothing and demeanour she set herself apart, eschewing the shawls and scarves of the typical countrywoman for gold earrings and hats adorned with a feather or two and affecting "a certain superiority" towards others in the eyes of the locals.
She was only 18 when she married Michael Cleary, an outsider from Killenaule, eight miles away. Aged 27, he must have seemed a good match, with a taste for three-piece tweed suits, an ability to read and write and a lucrative cooperage trade.
They were childless, eight years into the marriage, sharing a "modern", slate-roofed cottage with her father, Dotey the cat and Badger the dog, when she fell ill after walking the mile or two in bitter cold on egg business to her father's cousin, Jack Dunne.
Dunne, a toothless 55-year-old with a severe limp, was a man being left stranded by time. As a seanchai, knowledgeable about fairy tradition, charms, spells and incantations, he was used to commanding respect. Now, although the Irish Revival was at its height, and a stream of new books on fairies was appearing to satisfy a readership reacting against industrialisation and urbanisation, science was rapidly gaining the upper hand. An entire culture was being dismissed as subversive mumbo-jumbo and the seanchai were being steadily isolated and marginalised.
But not entirely. The idea of the changeling - in which the fairies abducted a happy, healthy human and replaced him or her with a withered, sickly, evil-tempered old fairy in the same image - had some life in it still. Herbal medicines and ordeals by fire were said to be ways of banishing such changelings. In her new book on the episode, The Burning of Bridget Cleary, Angela Bourke quotes one account of a Kerryman who roasted his child to death. Not long before, less than 15 miles from Ballvadlea, two old women had placed a three-year-old, who hadn't the use of his limbs, on a red-hot shovel in the belief that he was a changeling. Jack Dunne and his culture still had some authority around Ballyvadlea.
At Bridget Cleary's bedside, his weak-sighted eyes took in her dishevelled state: "That is not Bridgie Boland!" he pronounced. The woman in the bed was a fairy, he declared, adding that one of her legs was longer than the other - a sign that she had indeed been "away with the fairies".
By Saturday, March 9th, Bridget felt worse. Whether she was a fairy or not, her husband and father wanted a university-trained doctor. But it took three eight-mile round trips between them on foot to Fethard, a five-day wait and an official complaint by Michael Cleary before Dr Crean - a wellknown drunk - deigned to visit.
He would tell the inquest that, on March 13th, he found her suffering "simply from nervous excitement and slight bronchitis". A century later, locals would maintain to Angela Bourke that Bridget had been attending him for TB.
That Wednesday, Bridget seemed distressed as well as ill. She had marital problems and confided in Mary Kennedy, her father's sister: "He's making a fairy of me now, and an emergency [accusing her of being a fairy changeling] . . . He thought to burn me about three months ago . . ."
"Making a fairy" of her implied that Michael was isolating her. The mention of a previous incident suggested that this was nothing new. There were rumours that Bridget had a lover, possibly the 24-year-old married man, William Simpson. Simpson, smart and dapper, was an "emergency-man" or property defence protector for big landowners - a deeply unpopular breed subject to constant attack and local boycott, compounded in Simpson's case by his occupation of a farm from which a local family had been evicted. Bridget was wont to do the shopping when locals refused to serve him. Simpson wasn't the only suspect. At the trial, Cleary would be quoted as saying that "she used to be meeting an egg-man on the low road".
Yet, her husband seemed devoted. On the Wednesday, before heading for Fethard, he had sent for the priest, though when Father Con Ryan arrived, he stayed for just 20 minutes, and by giving her the last rites, appeared to be giving her up for dead.
Michael, meanwhile, had returned from Fethard, not only with the prescription medicine but with herbs acquired from a Fethard woman. He had crossed into Jack Dunne's territory and Dunne seized his chance to retrieve lost ground: "It is not today you have a right to get anything for her; it is not in Fethard you had a right to be for a doctor. Three days ago you had a right to be beyond with Ganey (a herb- or fairy-doctor). It is not your wife in there. You will have enough to do to bring her back. This is the eighth day, and you had a right to have gone to Ganey on the fifth day." Dunne's diagnosis was clear.
At first light on Thursday morning, Michael Cleary set off to Denis Ganey's for the herbs. That evening, he was showing signs of strain. He was exhausted, had had a row with the doctor, the priest was refusing to come again, Bridget was still sick and, to cap it all, word came that his father had just died over in Killenaule. As the house filled up with people, he heated up the herbs with "new milk" (the first milk given by a cow after calving) as directed.
By the time William and Minnie Simpson arrived, the men inside were forcing the third dose of herbal mixture into Bridget. She already had a slight burn-mark on her forehead from a hot poker brandished by Jack Dunne. Four grown men were pinning her down, bellowing "Take it, you old bitch, or I'll kill you!" Cleary asked her repeatedly was she "Bridget Cleary or Bridget Boland, wife of Michael Cleary, in the name of God", but her answers, it seems, were neither loud nor strong enough. "Make down a good fire and we will make her answer," said Jack Dunne.
Then Cleary drenched her several times with urine and after the third dose of herbs, with Bridget "screaming terribly", she was shaken back and forth while they shouted: "Away with you; come home, Bridget Boland, in the name of God!"
Eventually, she was borne to where a low fire was burning and held above the bars of the grate. They asked her again: "Are you the daughter of Patrick Boland, wife of Michael Cleary? Answer in the name of God". "I am, Dada," she said to her father. After about 10 minutes they carried her back to bed. The midnight deadline passed - the time, by which, according to fairy lore, questions had to be answered.