In the year 1217 identical twin girls named Amalie and Hettie (Henriette) were born into a Jewish family, who had converted to Christianity in a large town in Flanders. 

Like all identical twins the girls were very close.  They tended to keep to themselves rather than play with the other children.  As a result of this the other children taunted them and spread stories that after awhile people began to believe.   Perhaps these stories about them being the "Devil's Children" were fuelled by the fact that whenever they spoke to other people one would start the sentence and the other would finish it. Added to this was their ability to foresee the future.   When they were little they would blurt out things that were going to happen to people and more often than not, these things did happen.  As they grew up they kept their foreknowledge to themselves.  However, the damage was done and their reputation grew.

Their parents had turned their backs on their Jewish heritage and had wholeheartedly embraced the Christian faith.  They lived in fear of their heritage becoming known as it was common for Jewish families to be mercilessly persecuted.   Add to this the stories about the twins and you can see the fear of the parents growing.

The solution was to send Amalie and Hettie into the country to live with their maternal Grandparents until the talk died down and suitable marriages in far off places could be arranged.  The twins were nearly 10 years old when they arrived at their Grandparents home in a little village in the country where their Grandfather made shoes and other leather goods and their Grandmother took in mending from the more wealthy people in the area.

Their was more to Grandfather's shop than met the eye.  Grandfather was a practicing Jewish scholar who pretended to be a practicing Christian.  Where his daughter and her husband were sincere in their conversion to Christianity, Grandfather and Grandmother were not.  Grandfather used to hold secret meetings in the backroom of his shop with other Jewish scholars from around the area and while no women and certainly no children were allowed to these meetings no one ever noticed the girls creep in, crawling along the floor and hiding under the long workbench, behind the curtain.   Here they learned many things about God that sang to their souls. Amalie in particular soaked up all that she could from these overheard discussions.

Grandfather and Grandmother quickly realised what special girls they had in their care and set about nurturing their gift of foreknowledge.  Also Grandmother taught them about the healing herbs and the girls discovered that very often they healed sick animals by stroking them and seeing God's light enter into them, making them whole.

Meanwhile, the twins parents cloth shop flourished and they moved into a big house in one of the better parts of their town and insinuated themselves into middle class society.  It seemed that all was forgotten about the strange ways of the twins as their parents began weaving stories about their great beauty and how their health had improved since living in the country, this being the reason for sending them away in the first place, they maintained.

When the girls were 17 years old marriages were arranged for each of them to young men from families related to one of the families that their parents were now in business partnership with.

One day a letter arrived, bringing the news to the girls and their Grandparents that these arrangements had been made.  With the letter came a large sum of money that was to be used to outfit the girls in suitable attire to their rank in society and to cover all expenses incurred in their travelling back to their parents home in safety.  Their mother was very worried that the girls would appear too countrified and sent precise instructions to her mother about the clothes she was to make for them.  It was expected that the girls would be ready to travel in six months from the receipt of the letter.

Amalie and Hettie were faced with the prospect of separation as the marriages arranged for them would take them to places far away from each other.

Could they look into their own future to see what lay ahead for them?  No, they were far too upset at the very thought of separation to even think to try to see into the future.  Perhaps if they had they may not have made the daring and reckless decision they made.  They decided to steal the money that was sent to their Grandparents and run far away to another country.  They did not know where but they had heard that the country to the South was lovely to live in and so decided to head South and to travel until they found a place that felt right to them.   They gave no thought as to how they would support themselves.

They laid their plans well and in less than three weeks after the letter arrived from their parents they had stolen the money and slipped away in the night.  They knew they would have to travel as far as they could before morning and they were missed.  It was a good thing that they knew the forest very well from gathering herbs but it was soon apparent that they would not get very far on foot before they were tracked down.

Hettie had an idea.  In the next village was a stable hand who was always making suggestive remarks to her whenever she went to that village with her Grandfather.  She decided to give him the surprise of his life and give him what he wanted that night and while he was so engaged Amalie could steal one of the horses from the stable.  Amalie was horrified.  Not at the stealing part of the plan but the other part.  She was the prim and proper twin and was often shocked by some of the things that Hettie spoke about.

However, she was also very practical and she could see that to succeed in their escape they needed a horse.  She reluctantly agreed to the plan which Hettie carried out with far too much pleasure for Amalie's liking.

Now that they had a horse they made good headway and somehow they managed to evade capture.  They even wondered if perhaps no one came after them to bring them back.

Eventually they came to a little village near a forest in the South of France.  They made themselves a shelter in the forest and nearly starved to death until, in desperation they went into the village to sell the horse.   The village Blacksmith and his wife took pity on them and took them in, in return for work until such time as they could find gainful employment.  They could sew as well as their Grandmother and so it was suggested that they go to the nearby Castle to seek work as seamstresses.  This they did and worked there for nearly two years until they could stand the lecherous advances of the son of the Lord of the Castle no longer.

By this time they knew the forest well as they kept up their healing with herbs and touch.  They were now sought after for healing and when they took over the abandoned woodcutter's hut in the forest a continuous stream of people came to their door for healing.

No one from the castle ever came to their door looking for them and so they assumed that the young Lord never noticed that they were gone.

The years rolled by pleasantly enough.  Amalie and Hettie grew very close to Mother Earth and soon learned her healing ways.  The people in the surrounding villages kept them in food and clothing as payment for the potions and cures they received.  No matter what time of the day or night Amalie or Hettie or both of them would come to the aid of those in need.  They were very careful not to speak of future events but would find ways to give timely warnings whenever possible.

Every now and then the local Priest would talk against them because they did not attend church.  They found God in the forest, was the only answer they ever gave to him or anyone else who questioned their non attendance at church.

It was during this time that the Pope of the time instigated the Holy Inquisition to rid the Christian world of heresy.   The local Priest took great delight in reading the official announcement of this great new office of the Church to all he came across.  When Amalie and Hettie heard the announcement they both felt a cold hand clasp their hearts while seeing flames before the screens of their minds.  Of course it is always hardest to see into your own future.  It is so hard to be objective when it involves yourself.  Both Amalie and Hettie immediately assumed that they were seeing  a general vision of the future where there would be an increase in persecutions and burnings of heretics.  It never occurred to them that they could be classed as heretics.

Meanwhile there was a man in the district who owned a large portion of land and made a good living from this land.  The village people looked upon him as better than themselves and of course he agreed with that opinion.  His wife died and he felt that it was beneath his dignity to marry one of the village women.   He had a distant relative with whom he had spent some time in his youth.  This man now lived in the large town in Flanders that Amalie and Hettie had originally come from. He informed the local Priest that he was journeying to see this relative and would be gone for about a year, leaving his son in charge of his farm. No one took much notice of this news when the Priest told them about it, least of all Amalie and Hettie as the Priest did not mention where the man was going.

In little more than a year the man was back with a new wife.   Magdalene was a middle aged, childless, widow who fancied herself as a healer.   She was also a very religious woman and very quickly became friendly with the local Priest.  Very soon the Priest was telling the villagers that they now had a good Christian woman with the healing gift in their midst.

As much as she meant well she did not have the natural skill of healing or the kindness of heart that Amalie and Hettie had and so the people quickly reverted to calling upon them in their time of need.  Magdalene at first thought that if she became friendly with Amalie and Hettie then the villagers would see her in the same light as them.  Over the next few months the three women spent a lot of time together and Amalie confided a great deal of their history to Magdalene who was very vague about her own past.  Many times Hettie warned Amalie not to be so free with information about them to Magdalene but Amalie just told her to stop being silly and that Magdalene was their friend and could be trusted.  Amalie would have been wise to have listened to her sister.

Magdalene did not become popular as a healer with the village people as she hoped and so she thought that if Amalie and Hettie were not in the picture anymore then she would be the only one they could turn to for healing.  It would be easy enough to write to her sister in the town in Flanders to get all the information she needed on the family of Amalie and Hettie.  Identical twins who survive into childhood was a rarity and she remembered the rumours of identical twins who were the devil's children that were going around at the time when Amalie and Hettie would have been the right age to be those twins. She sent to her sister all of the information she had gleaned from her conversations with Amalie and hoped that there would be something that she could use to drive the twins from the district.  At this point she had nothing more dreadful in mind.

The information that her sister sent her was more than she had hoped for.  The identical twins in question were indeed named Amalie and Hettie and had been sent into the country when they were ten years old.  There was some scandal a few years later that was hushed up and the sister did not have the details.   Of course Magdalene knew what it was.  The most important information in the letter was the surprising details of the fate of the parents of the twins.  It was discovered that they were of Jewish heritage and for this they were driven from the town and their house burned to the ground.

In Magdalene's mind Jews were heretics and it didn't matter if they had converted or not.  To her way of thinking no Jew ever sincerely converted to Christianity and just look a Amalie and Hettie.  They did not attend Church.   To her this meant that they were heretics and she felt it her Christian duty to put the matter before the local Priest. 

Now, the local Priest had been excited about the new office of the Inquisition and was ever on the lookout for evidence of heresy.  He had always suspected the twins but the villagers were so protective of them that he didn't dare do anything.  However, now he had an ally in this and so he eagerly perused the evidence that Magdalene had procured.  The next step was to put it before the local Lord as the Priest did not want to do anything to displease him.

The local Lord was the young Lord who had tried unsuccessfully to seduce both Amalie and Hettie many years ago and so when the evidence was put before him he saw his chance at revenge.  The twins thought that because he did nothing when they left his father's service that he hadn't noticed that they had gone.   He had noticed and took it as a personal insult that he had been nursing all these years. "Bring in the Inquisitors", he ordered.

Thus the peaceful life of service to others ended for Amalie and Hettie.  They were quickly incarcerated in the dungeon of the Castle to await the Inquisitor.  The young Lord took advantage of the fact that they were interred in his dungeon and repeatedly raped them both.  The conditions they were held in were appalling with rats, filth and barely enough food to stay alive.

When the Inquisitor arrived he wanted to know why the twins had been treated so badly when the Inquisition had yet to begin.  He soon realised that it would be in the best interests of his safety to ignore the situation in which he found them and to start his inquiry immediately.

Through all that they had so far suffered they maintained their courage of spirit. No matter what the torture applied to exact confessions of heresy they maintained their innocence. The Court of Inquiry of the Office of the Inquisition found them guilty of heresy based on the information Magdalene was able to procure about their Jewish heritage and the rumours about them in childhood as well as their non attendance at the local Church.  All of the successful healing they had done in the village in the time they were there was attributed to the Devil.   Many of the villagers came forward to defend them but quickly felt the hot breath of the Inquisition and backed down before they too were accused.  Their sentence was death by burning alive.

The day of execution arrived and Amalie and Hettie were tied to the stake back to back.  As the flames engulfed them Amalie's last thoughts were that the pain of the fire was a blessed relief compared to the pain and humiliation of the torture and rape she had been subjected to as well as the pain of the guilt she felt at having ignored Hettie's warnings and caused her beloved sister so much pain and horror. The twins were thirty-four years old.

Magdalene may have been successful in getting rid of her rivals but she never succeeded in winning the love and respect of the village people.   They suffered their illnesses instead of consulting her.