MULTIPLICATION is vexation,
Division is as bad;
The Rule of Three doth puzzle me,
And Practice drives me mad.
-The Nursery Rhyme Book, by Unknown
There once was a witch that lived with her young daughter in an old victorian house at the end of a lane in a small town. The house had good bones despite the fact that it was built over 100 years ago, but the witch couldn’t handle the upkeep by herself anymore so it looked worn down with overgrown shrubs and peeling paint. Her husband had died when their daughter was just a toddler and she had been just making it by doing small favors for the people in town. She would help the men and women with small ailments and sickness but would also help with nosy neighbors and other disagreements between people in town but she would never do anything negative, no matter how much money someone offered to pay her, because of the Witches Rede. The Witches Rede is “The Rule of Three” which means that you do not harm anyone and that whatever you do with witchcraft will come back to you three fold.
The witch’s daughter had finally reached the age where her mother was ready to begin teaching her the craft. Her mother tried to teach her about the plants and herbs that would help her in her spell work such as how to reproduce the plants she would need with seeds and how to separate the plants. But the girl was an impatient child and became easily annoyed by her mother’s slow and precise teachings. Her mother held teaching lessons every day, but the girl never wanted to practice on her own. Most of all though, the girl didn’t want to follow the Witches Rede. She thought it was silly and outdated.
(Cooking Witches: Wikimedia Commons)
The witch’s daughter had finally reached the point where she could do spell work on her own and decided to make her first a spell to stop the girls from teasing her at school. She set out to make a spell that just made them leave her alone, but after some thinking she really wanted to make them pay. After gathering everything she needed, she began working a spell to make them all sick. The next week at school the girls started getting sick one by one. The witch’s daughter was quite proud of herself and had two peaceful weeks of school without the girls there to bother her. But on the day that all the girls came back to school, she starting falling ill herself. The witch tried different spells and healing ointments but her daughter only kept getting worse. She took her to many doctors, but they said they could not find anything wrong with her. After two weeks, the witch’s daughter died.
Author's Note. This story is based on the nursery rhyme "Multiplication is Vexation" which is retold at the beginning of the story. You can find the rhyme in The Nursery Rhyme Book, edited by Andrew Lang (1897). As I was scrolling through the book, I noticed the phrase ‘rule of three’ and immediately thought about the Witches Rede. I then started to figure out a way to work in the rest of the nursery rhyme by playing with the non-mathematical definitions of the words ‘multiplication’ and ‘division’.
