Maris Hemsley

Maris Hemsley is a retired historian and anthropologist whose academic interest in folklore draws her into the living history of the Fry family’s witchcraft. Her experiences with Calensa Fry leave her caught between rational explanation and events she cannot comfortably dismiss; later, she recognizes a similar pattern in Wynsum Fry’s influence over Don Challenor.

Identity and Background

Maris is around seventy, tall and thin, with grey hair and keen eyes. She carries herself briskly, speaking and moving as if intent on fitting as much thought and activity as possible into each day. Retired from Exeter University, she is both a historian and an anthropologist, with particular interests in folklore and pagan religions. Her small whitewashed cottage, tucked back from the cliff above Polurrian Cove, is crowded with books and shared with Dandy, an enthusiastically friendly Sealyham terrier.

She first bought the cottage as a weekend place in the late 1970s, travelling down from Exeter. There, she began hearing stories about local people—mostly farming families—seeking help from Calensa Fry. They went to her with illnesses, miscarriages, money problems, sickness among their animals, and blight on crops: troubles they might otherwise have taken to a doctor, accountant, or vet. Maris became fascinated by the survival of Calensa’s reputation and practice in the twentieth century, and saw the subject as the basis for a serious academic study.

Research and Encounters with Calensa Fry

Maris’s research moved beyond collecting local stories. She arranged to meet Calensa by inventing a claim that she was bewitched and suffering a series of inexplicable accidents. A local farmer’s wife introduced them. Calensa asked about Maris’s enemies and read her cards, though Maris could later recall little of the session and suspected there had been more to it. When Maris returned with a tape recorder concealed in her handbag, she again came away with few memories of what had happened; the recording held only white noise.

After these meetings, accidents of the very kind Maris had invented as her pretext began to occur. Her car brakes failed; a heavy book fell from a high shelf and knocked her out; and she slipped from the harbour wall at Mullion Cove into the sea, where an angler rescued her. Maris described herself as rational, but could not reconcile the pattern with an easy dismissal. She felt that her susceptibility receded when she returned to Exeter, only to return when she came back to the area. After she admitted to Calensa that she had tried to deceive her, the accidents stopped. Maris did not believe this was coincidence, even while recognizing how absurd the explanation might sound to a rational mind.

That conflict informs her account of Calensa. At first, Calensa denied having supernatural powers, saying that she used a little psychological manipulation to maintain her reputation and livelihood, and that people’s experiences were self-induced. Maris understood this as a possible double bluff: a challenge to dismiss the practice as nonsense despite the events she herself had experienced. After several unproductive meetings, Calensa suggested that she possessed revealing trade secrets, but would disclose them only in return for a favor.

The Fry–Harkness Feud and Jory Fry’s Death

Calensa wanted Maris to accuse Jack Harkness in print of responsibility for her grandson Jory Fry’s death. Maris refused: she could not fit an unsupported murder theory into an academic study of witchcraft. Calensa, Maris recalled, seemed not to understand the limits of that kind of writing. Her demand revealed how the local history of witchcraft was bound up with an older family grievance. Calensa said the Frys and Harknesses had been on opposing sides in the Cornish rising of 1648; for the Frys, Maris observed, old resentments did not so much heal as congeal.

Maris regularly visited Calensa at Tredarvas Farm, then in ruins. Calensa never came to Maris’s cottage. Their meetings took place in the kitchen of the house where Calensa had lived with her husband, a cousin who had since died. The family had left the land but stayed in the house for a time; Maris never saw farther inside it than that kitchen. There, Calensa repeatedly insisted that Harkness had drowned Jory by holding him face down in the rock pool where he was found. Jory had died early on 1 August 1970, a date Maris remembered because Calensa returned to it often. Calensa also attached significance to Lammas, though Maris did not understand why.

The allegation rested on no evidence beyond Wynsum, sent to look for Jory when he failed to appear for breakfast, seeing Harkness cycling away uphill toward Mullion as she approached the cove. Maris’s account therefore preserves the accusation and its force within the family feud without establishing it as fact. Her research exposes how a remembered sighting, repeated over time, could sustain certainty even where corroboration was absent.

Jane Glasson and the Card Reading

Maris’s knowledge of the Fry practice later connects her to Andrew Glasson’s search for his missing daughter, Jane. After Blake had spoken with him about Jane, Blake suggested that Andrew consult a seer. Andrew agreed because he wanted certainty about whether his daughter was alive, though he expected to recognize a charlatan. The woman he met was Wynsum Fry, not Maris; Maris’s own research into the family provides the context for understanding why such a consultation mattered to him.

Wynsum had Andrew shuffle an ordinary pack of playing cards, cut it, and deal twelve cards face down. She turned them over in a sequence he could no longer clearly recall. All but one were red—hearts or diamonds—and Wynsum treated this as a favorable sign: red meant life, so Jane was alive. Andrew admitted that, at the time, he let himself be convinced. His response arose from the strain of uncertainty after Jane disappeared in June 1996. She had finished her second year at Cambridge, travelled to London with a friend, and parted from her at King’s Cross station, intending to take the Tube to Paddington for a train to Cornwall. Andrew drove to Camborne to meet her, but she was not on the train; no one he knew had seen her for the next twenty-two years. The card reading could not resolve her disappearance, but Maris’s research helps explain how the Fry family’s authority could offer a form of hope to people desperate for an answer.

Her Reading of Wynsum Fry

When Blake brings Don to meet Maris, her earlier experience with Calensa shapes her response to Don’s wrist pain and his difficulty leaving Mullion. She tells him that Wynsum has caused the problem as a way of keeping him where she wants him. Don rejects this as an ordinary strain, while Blake points out that he is also having gloomy thoughts. Maris’s certainty draws on her own remembered cycle of accidents, relief away from Calensa, and renewed distress on returning.

For Maris, Wynsum’s resemblance to her grandmother is not just a matter of family reputation: she sees a continuity of influence that she once experienced firsthand. Her history gives her claim weight, but it does not turn her interpretation into independently confirmed fact. The account leaves the tension intact between psychological manipulation, belief, and effects that remain difficult for the characters to explain. Maris’s role is to carry local memory into the present—not as a neutral archive, but as a witness whose scholarship and experience have made her both skeptical and susceptible.