Thomas Woolgar and Einor's relationship

Thomas Woolgar and Einor’s relationship is a secret bond of desire, influence, and shared wrongdoing that ends in betrayal and, in Woolgar’s account, a haunting that neither death nor distance can sever. His chronicle depicts him as both Einor’s willing accomplice and a man who tries to explain his actions as the result of her power; that tension makes their relationship central to the manuscript’s uncertain account of guilt, responsibility, and supernatural vengeance.

Attraction and Dependence

Woolgar writes that his fascination began when Einor was serving as a religious sister at the church in Banfield. She performed her duties well, but her attention and manner made her seem unlike the other women he knew. He describes their shared prayer and her devotion to the Virgin Mary alongside his growing belief that she possessed unusual knowledge and influence. At first, he says, he saw innocence rather than danger.

When Woolgar became seriously ill, Einor’s superior sent her to care for him. Her attention eased his suffering, while the feverish episode, in his later telling, awakened a desire that had already been growing. He suspects that her remedies may have intensified his feelings, but presents this as a possibility rather than an established fact. His account of the relationship’s beginning thus joins ordinary care to his subsequent claim that Einor gained influence over his will.

Einor’s healing work also helped shape Woolgar’s fascination. She treated villagers with remedies and used images as part of her cures, practices Woolgar considered religiously questionable but found compelling. He records her explanation that faith, rather than the objects themselves, brought about healing. The contradiction between her public image as a devout healer and Woolgar’s private experience of her became one of the defining pressures of their relationship.

A Secret Partnership and Shared Guilt

Woolgar describes their intimacy as a prolonged and increasingly consuming relationship that violated his religious commitments. He portrays himself as unable to resist Einor, but his chronicle also acknowledges that he desired her and participated willingly. He reports that she spoke to him about forces beyond ordinary human perception and rejected his assumption that the Devil was the source of power. In his account, she instead connected power to human will, while presenting magic as the use of practical means such as remedies and poisons. These conversations deepened his fascination and fear without clarifying whether his later explanations are reliable.

The manuscript associates their relationship with a widening pattern of wrongdoing. Woolgar says that Einor sought a position of authority as Prioress and wanted his father’s influence with the Church to assist her ambition. He also confesses that he and Einor were responsible for the deaths of three children. He describes his own role in suppressing their cries and later admits that the children’s disappearance had helped expose the danger surrounding them. His confession makes it impossible to treat him only as a victim of Einor’s influence, even as he repeatedly tries to cast himself in that role.

Their bond also involved other members of the religious community. Woolgar writes that Einor’s attention turned to two novices: one, Rosemund, entered into a relationship with her willingly, while the other later died by suicide after confessing to the Prioress. The disclosure prompted the Prioress to confront Woolgar. He admitted his sexual relationship with Einor but withheld other parts of the truth, including his involvement in the children’s deaths. His partial confession protected him even as it helped set the process against Einor in motion.

Betrayal and the Village’s Violence

The Prioress and Woolgar agreed to denounce Einor as a witch and heretic. Woolgar’s chronicle presents this decision as a mixture of fear, self-preservation, religious condemnation, and a desire for revenge. He knew the accusation could expose his own conduct, and he accepted an explanation that made Einor’s supposed influence responsible for his moral collapse. He then returned to Banfield and spread the accusations among members of the congregation.

The resulting mob seized Einor at the church, where she was with Rosemund. Woolgar records that Einor recognized him as her betrayer and accused him of sharing in their wrongdoing. He denied her charge to the crowd and encouraged the villagers to look for a supposed Devil’s Mark. His account makes his participation in her persecution explicit: he helped direct the crowd’s attention toward the sign, though he also says that his later pleas to end the violence went unheard. The chronicle does not absolve him; it shows him moving from intimate partner to accuser while attempting to preserve a version of events in which Einor alone embodied evil.

As Einor was executed, Woolgar says, she cursed those present and their descendants. He describes a storm, trembling ground, and a collapse into terror as consequences of her death, while later reporting that others explained the disturbance as a thunderstorm and did not confirm his visions. The disparity between his supernatural account and the villagers’ restrained version leaves open whether he witnessed an external event, experienced a traumatic breakdown, or combined both in memory. Within the relationship, however, the curse gives betrayal a lasting consequence: Woolgar believes that Einor’s anger continues beyond her death.

Separation, Haunting, and the Hidden Chronicle

After the execution, Woolgar fled to the crypt and remained hidden for three days. His father and the Bishop later removed him from the Banfield parish and placed him in service at a church on his father’s estate near Barham. The separation ended their living partnership, but Woolgar’s chronicle insists that it did not end his attachment. He says that Einor continued to appear to him and that, despite his fear of her, his desire remained. His repeated descriptions of wanting both to escape and to return to her make his account of liberation deeply uncertain.

Woolgar’s father transferred the old parish chest along with church items when Woolgar was moved. Woolgar believed his father had searched its records for material that might disgrace the family, but says that his own account of Einor was concealed elsewhere for a future reader. The chronicle therefore becomes the surviving record of a relationship Woolgar could neither confess fully to the authorities nor finally leave behind.

At the manuscript’s end, Woolgar writes that Einor has reached him again and that his continuing desire binds them. The text closes with his warning to whoever finds the document and his hope that writing may provide some redemption. The relationship’s final state remains deliberately double: it may be the return of a vengeful spirit, the consequence of Woolgar’s guilt and mental illness, or both within the story’s unresolved supernatural frame. What is certain in his own testimony is that he has not achieved emotional separation. He records Einor as both the object of persistent desire and the figure through whom he confronts his responsibility for betrayal and violence.