Wynsum Fry’s encounter with Don

Wynsum Fry’s encounter with Don Challenor at the Blue Anchor is a small, charged meeting that draws Don into the Fry family’s claims about witchcraft. Fry offers to read his cards, but he declines; the more consequential contact is their two-handed handshake, after which Don develops wrist pain. The episode leaves its cause unresolved, balancing physical coincidence against Maris Hemsley’s account of a family practice that can bind belief, fear, and conduct together.

The Meeting at the Blue Anchor

After speaking with Amos French, Don retreats to the Blue Anchor’s rear bar and tries to settle over a pint. From the front bar he hears someone ask for Wynsum. Recognizing the name as unusual, he looks up and sees Fry. Her appearance is described as plain and shabby, but her direct gaze unsettles him before they have properly spoken. The scene makes recognition itself feel consequential: Don suspects who she is, and immediately wishes he had not drawn her attention.

Fry comes into the rear bar and asks whether she knows him. Don denies that they have met. She gives her name, places her cider on his table, and offers her hand. He hesitates, then accepts; as they shake, she places her other hand over his. The contact is brief, but Don experiences it as unexpectedly intimate and disturbing. Fry presses him about whether they have met, then remarks that she is not someone to lie to. Her suggestion that meeting and knowing are different things leaves the encounter suspended between ordinary introduction and implied prior connection.

The Reading He Refuses

Fry tells Don that people doubt her until they see what she can do. She takes a pack of ordinary playing cards from an inside coat pocket. Two rubber bands, one black and one red, hold the pack together; she removes them, loops them around her wrist, and sets the cards on the table. She offers to read them for free, explaining that people pay her for the service. The specific offer is to have Don shuffle, split, and deal twelve cards, which she would then interpret.

Don refuses more than once. Fry gives him an expression of disappointment and offers him a final opportunity, but he remains firm. He does not submit to the reading, and she puts the cards away, winding the bands around the pack again. The refusal matters because the encounter does not proceed as a demonstration that could settle Don’s doubts. Instead, its effect lies in the tension between his stated skepticism and the unease he carries away. As he leaves, Fry warns him to be careful. He tells himself not to be taken in, but the warning persists after he reaches the street.

The Handshake and Maris’s Interpretation

Later, Blake reports that Don’s right wrist has been troubling him since roughly an hour after his meeting with Fry. When Maris asks whether Fry touched him, Don confirms that they shook hands. She asks him to demonstrate, first taking his right hand lightly and then placing her left hand over it in the same arrangement Fry used. Even a small amount of pressure makes Don react, confirming that the discomfort is present; it does not, by itself, establish its cause.

Maris interprets the timing as evidence that Fry has acted on Don. In her view, the wrist pain and Don’s gloomy thoughts are part of a way of keeping him in Mullion, where Fry wants him. Don rejects this explanation and says he strained his wrist. The scene therefore keeps two explanations in play: an ordinary injury and a supernatural or psychological influence. The narration supplies a sequence of touch, pain, and interpretation, but Don’s response shows that the event does not convert him into a believer.

Maris’s interpretation draws on her own earlier dealings with Fry’s grandmother, Calensa Fry. She recalls that after encounters with Calensa she became accident-prone and fearful when she returned to Exeter; when she was away, those feelings seemed absurd, but they returned when she came back. Maris says that confessing to Calensa that she had tried to deceive her was followed by an end to the accidents. She does not treat the experience as proof in a way that removes all uncertainty: she recognizes the rational explanation as difficult to reconcile with what she experienced, and says she did not believe the change was coincidence. Her account supplies a family precedent for reading Don’s symptoms as a response to contact, while leaving the mechanism unsettled.

The Fry Family’s Longer Shadow

Maris’s memories also place Fry’s approach within a feud between the Harkness and Fry families. Calensa wanted Maris to accuse Jack Harkness in print of responsibility for her grandson Jory Fry’s death. Maris refused: the allegation that Harkness had drowned Jory could not properly be inserted into her academic study of witchcraft. Calensa connected the feud to opposing sides in the Cornish rising of 1648 and spoke often of Jory’s drowning on 1 August 1970, a date that coincided with Lammas. Maris’s account establishes the history behind the family’s suspicion, but it does not verify Calensa’s accusation against Harkness.

The meeting also anticipates how Don later turns the language of witchcraft into a practical means of influence. When he sees Gennady Zlenko frightened by superstition, Don tells him that another witch had explained how to neutralize a woman’s power: obtain a piece of clothing she had worn next to her skin. This later tactic echoes Fry’s earlier suggestion that an unseen bond can exist between people who have met and those who know one another. Don’s encounter with Fry thus becomes more than a strange interruption at a pub: it introduces a form of belief that he first resists, then invokes himself when he needs to affect someone else’s behavior.