The Fry Family’s Witchcraft

The Fry Family’s Witchcraft is a local tradition attributed chiefly to Calensa Fry and her granddaughter, Wynsum Fry. Its importance lies not in a settled proof of supernatural power but in the way its claims become consequential: cards seem to promise certainty about a missing woman, misfortunes acquire the shape of a curse, and a long family feud gives witchcraft a language for explaining fear and grievance. The novel holds supernatural and psychological explanations in tension, while showing that belief itself can influence what people do.

Tradition and Transmission

Calensa Fry raised Wynsum Fry and Jory Fry after their mother left them. Maris Hemsley, a retired historian and anthropologist whose research interests included folklore and pagan religions, learned from local people that Calensa was regarded as a dewitcher: someone consulted by those who believed they had been bewitched and who might remove another witch’s spell. Maris’s interest was initially scholarly. She hoped to make Calensa’s practice the subject of an academic study, approaching a living local tradition as material that could be documented and interpreted.

The tradition is presented as inherited as well as practiced. Maris came to see Wynsum as increasingly resembling her grandmother, and described Calensa as a person whose authority remained potent for her over many years. The family’s sense of the past also differs from an ordinary account of history: Maris says the Frys do not treat time as something that simply heals, but as something that can set old grievances in place. Witchcraft therefore belongs not only to private encounters with alleged spells but also to a family memory in which inherited conflict remains active.

Divination and the Search for Certainty

One of the clearest examples of the practice is the reading Calensa gives to Andrew Glasson, who is desperate to know whether his daughter, Jane Glasson, is alive. Jane had disappeared after leaving London for Cornwall; she had told her father she was taking the Tube to Paddington to catch a train, but she never arrived on the train he went to meet. The uncertainty devastated Jane’s mother, and Andrew eventually agreed to Blake’s suggestion that he consult a seer, though he expected to recognize a fraud.

In Calensa’s card-reading, Andrew shuffles an ordinary pack of playing cards, cuts it, and deals twelve cards face down. Calensa turns them over in a sequence he later cannot fully recall. All but one are red hearts or diamonds. She interprets red as life and tells him that Jane is alive. Andrew allows himself to believe her, while recognizing how powerfully the hope of an answer can make a person grasp at reassurance. The episode gives the cards a precise narrative function: they do not resolve Jane’s disappearance, but they give her father a reason, however uncertain, to imagine that she survives.

Maris Hemsley’s Encounter and Its Aftermath

Maris’s attempt to study Calensa becomes an encounter she cannot comfortably reduce to research. She invents a story that she is bewitched and has been experiencing inexplicable accidents, then persuades a farmer’s wife to introduce her to Calensa. During their first meeting, Calensa questions her about enemies and reads cards. Maris remembers little of the session and suspects there was more to it. At a later visit she secretly brings a tape recorder, but the recording contains only white noise. The gap between her intention to observe and her inability to recover or record what happened unsettles the confidence of the would-be researcher.

After these meetings, accidents of the kind Maris had invented as a pretext begin to happen to her in reality. She interprets the sequence as punishment for having approached Calensa under false pretences. Frightened, she burns the blank tapes and writes to confess that she had been gathering material for a book, adding that she is abandoning the project. The accidents then stop. Calensa later contacts her and offers to help with the research for a fee. Maris takes this as evidence that Calensa understood the deception and had made her point; the sequence does not, however, establish whether a spell caused the events or whether another explanation is possible.

Maris’s account complicates her own role as a rational investigator. Calensa initially tells her that she has no supernatural powers and that she uses psychological manipulation to maintain her reputation and business; she says that what happens to clients is self-induced. Maris suspects this may itself be a double bluff, especially because the accidents have already changed how she interprets the encounter. Later, Calensa hints that she possesses trade secrets but will reveal them only in return for a favor. She wants Maris to accuse Jack Harkness in print of responsibility for Jory’s death. Maris refuses: the accusation cannot be responsibly inserted into an academic study, and she has no basis for presenting it as established fact.

Curses, Conflict, and the Limits of Explanation

Calensa’s demand is bound to a feud between the Harkness and Fry families that Maris traces back generations. She says they stood on opposing sides in the Cornish rising of 1648. The old grievance is given a specific focus in Jory’s death: Calensa repeatedly claimed that Jack Harkness drowned her grandson in a rock pool on 1 August 1970, a date she associated with Lammas. This is Calensa’s accusation, not a confirmed account of what happened. Witchcraft and family history thus overlap as ways of preserving and giving force to a contested explanation of death.

Years later, Maris applies that framework to Don Challenor. After learning that he has met Wynsum, she concludes that Wynsum has caused his wrist trouble and gloomy thoughts to keep him in Mullion. Don rejects the supernatural explanation and attributes the problem to a strain. Maris counters with her own experience: when she returned to Exeter after encounters with Calensa, her fear and sense of vulnerability subsided; when she came back, they returned. She says that after confessing her deception, she stopped being accident-prone, and that she did not consider this coincidence. Her account is evidence of what she experienced and believed, not independent proof of how the events were caused.

The practice also becomes a tool in Don’s dealings with Gennady Zlenko. When Don sees Zlenko’s fear of ancient superstition, he decides to exploit it and claims that a way to neutralize a witch’s power requires a piece of clothing worn next to her skin. The scene shows witchcraft operating as social leverage even where its supernatural truth remains unverified: knowledge of a belief can be used to direct another person’s choices. Across the episodes, the tradition offers explanations, promises, threats, and tactics. Its narrative force comes from the uncertainty between magic and manipulation, and from the real consequences that follow when characters act as though the distinction has already been settled.