The discovery of Thomas Woolgar’s manuscript gives Gerry Fenn a material link between the disturbances around St. Joseph’s Church and a crisis nearly five centuries earlier. In an old church chest, Fenn finds three Latin volumes dated 1556, 1557, and 1558, together with undated leaves in a different, less controlled hand. Monsignor Delgard translates the papers, identifying their author as Woolgar and uncovering an account of religious authority, concealed guilt, and the persecution of Sister Einor. The chronicle offers a possible history behind Alice Pagett’s present-day significance, but its own troubled voice—and Fenn’s resistance to supernatural explanations—keeps that history uncertain.

Finding the papers

Fenn opens the chest while searching a church on the Stapley estate. Before reaching the manuscripts, he sorts through faded vestments, old papers, mass books, and account books, including one for St. Peter’s dated 1697. These materials establish the chest as a repository of parish records, but they do not answer the historical question he has brought with him. The three vellum-covered volumes do: each is roughly twelve by eight inches, and their dates run consecutively from 1556. Their carefully formed Latin script is badly faded. Loose leaves fall from the back of the third volume; they are also in Latin, but their handwriting is noticeably more erratic than that of the dated books.

Fenn gathers the volumes and loose pages into his holdall as the storm worsens. The church doors rattle, the roof groans, and he becomes increasingly eager to leave. He returns the other books, papers, and vestments to the chest rather than continue searching. The discovery therefore has a hurried, incomplete quality: the important documents are removed, but Fenn has no time or composure to examine the rest of the archive. His apprehension in the church also makes the find part of a wider pattern of unease rather than a calm historical investigation.

Delgard’s translation

Monsignor Delgard studies the faded leaves under ultraviolet light, consulting a large reference book and writing notes as he works through the Latin. He is exhausted by the task, but what he reads disturbs him enough to leave him wanting to pray for strength and for the soul of the long-dead writer. His reading connects the papers to a sixteenth-century cleric who, in Delgard’s interpretation, understood something of psychic forces while participating in the religious misconceptions of his age. The documents thus appear to offer more than a record of local history: they suggest a chain of events that might illuminate the present.

Delgard’s emerging explanation centers on Sister Einor, whom the people of her time treated as a witch. He reads the chronicle as evidence that she was something more than the category her persecutors imposed on her, and that the force of her mind may have outlasted her death. In his theory, religious fervor supplies psychic energy, while the circumstances of Alice Pagett’s conception in the same field where Einor was killed make Alice central to a possible later return. Delgard considers whether Alice’s disability and subsequent recovery, as well as the apparent cures of others, could have been psychically induced. He also weighs possession against reincarnation, without resolving either possibility. These are Delgard’s interpretations of the papers, not facts established independently by the discovery.

Woolgar’s confession and the persecution of Einor

Fenn later wakes in Delgard’s house and finds the priest’s translations and notes on a desk. Delgard has gone, leaving his written work behind. The notes describe the original as difficult to read, inconsistent in places, and possibly shaped by its author’s disturbed state; Delgard warns that parts of the translation rely on interpretation. Fenn reads on, and the documents’ personal account changes the find from an anonymous archive into a confession.

The chronicle identifies Woolgar as a priest serving St. Joseph’s Church in Banfield and later St. Peter’s Church at Stapley, and as the son of Sir Henry Woolgar. He writes of his relationship with Einor and acknowledges his own responsibility rather than presenting himself as wholly blameless. His account implicates both of them in the deaths of three children. It also describes the Prioress’s suspicions, Woolgar’s denunciation of Einor as a witch and heretic, and the anger that spread among villagers who had trusted her. The account presents Woolgar as helping turn that anger toward Einor, while also recording his fear and guilt about what followed.

Woolgar recounts Einor’s killing by the villagers and the curse she pronounced on those present. He later describes being treated as mentally ill and removed from Banfield to serve at St. Peter’s on his father’s estate. His father arranges for the parish chest to be transferred there, apparently hoping to secure the Banfield records and protect the family’s standing. Woolgar says the account of his own guilt was not among the material his father sought, and that he hid the chronicle for someone in the future to find. The manuscript’s passage from the Banfield parish archive into concealment explains how the loose leaves survived to be discovered by Fenn.

Historical evidence and present-day uncertainty

The manuscript’s importance lies partly in the collision between its claims and the people now reading them. Delgard sees a possible connection between Einor’s death, Alice’s origin, and the forces surrounding the recent events. Fenn, having already witnessed an apparition at St. Peter’s, is shaken by the account but cannot simply accept its supernatural explanation. He considers whether Woolgar’s writing is the testimony of a madman, while recognizing that his own experience makes easy dismissal difficult. The papers provide a sequence of historical claims and a named author; they do not independently settle whether the visions and curse happened as Woolgar describes them.

That uncertainty is built into the documents themselves. Woolgar writes as a guilty participant seeking to warn a later reader, yet his account also shows how he shifts blame toward Einor and invokes the beliefs of his religious community. The surviving narrative records not only the accusation of witchcraft but the mechanisms that made it persuasive: local trust in Einor, the deaths of children, the authority of the Church, and the villagers’ collective anger. Fenn and Delgard inherit this compromised testimony alongside its warning. The discovery consequently serves both as a revelation about the past and as an unresolved test of how far that past can explain Alice Pagett and the present-day disturbances.