I guess another WHAT??? moment from that same time period is how little sense it seemed to make to single out Vicki. True, she was the strange stranger, but absolutely NONE of the tragedies that befell the Collinses benefited her in any way. It just seems odd that in spite of the furor over Vicki the witch, even after she was in jail, that no one looked around and said, "Hey, Angelique seems to have gotten a lot out of this this whole witch thing, at the least I would have thought people might suspect they were in league.
It seems obvious to us, who saw Angelique in action, but if I were reading this as a mystery without knowing who did it, I'd have my doubts.
Angelique's motivation for her witchcraft was her love for Barnabas. (No need to digress into the question of whether Angelique's feeling for Barnabas was in fact love; she thought it was love, and that's all that matters.) But a witch - a servant of the devil - would be assumed, especially by her 18th-century acquaintances, to be totally unconcerned with feelings of love. If you're looking for a witch, the motivations you're going to be looking for are fear, vengeance, power, and money.
Fear: I don't see where anybody would imagine that Angelique feared bad treatment by the Dupres family or the Collins.
Vengeance: The Dupres family believed that it had treated Angelique well - in fact, better than she might have expected, since her mother had a bad reputation. Barnabas was the only one who knew that Angelique had anything to avenge, but he was sort of clueless. If he had been capable of seeing what sort of person she was, he never would have slept with her in the first place. Additionally, he didn't believe in witches until he was faced with inescapable evidence.
Power and money: that's out. Joshua told Barnabas and Angelique that he would disinherit or disown or dis-something Barnabas if he married Angelique. At this point, any proper witch would call off the wedding and start looking for new, richer prey. But Angelique didn't. She was all set to ride off into the sunset with Barnabas.
[spoiler]It's funny to think how Naomi, by giving the Old House to Barnabas with the very best of intentions, set the scene for the whole bloodbath that followed. If Barnabas and Angelique had left, their marriage might have had a chance.[/spoiler]
Anyway, if a witch was looking for worldly gains, the obvious target was Jeremiah. We know he had money of his own, independent of Joshua; Joshua commented after Jeremiah's death that his estate was larger than they had known. (I wonder: who eventually got Jeremiah's money?) Jeremiah was unencumbered by a wife or fiancee, and we know that Angelique could make him fall in love; she certainly proved that.
We're living in an age when "The butler did it" is a cliche. It became that way because once upon a time nobody did think of the butler. Or the maid. Vicky, for all her cluelessness, was apparently the only one who noticed that Angelique was in love with Barnabas - and Vicky was from the 20th century.
