The Manningtree Witches

by A. K. Blakemore

  I put down my broom of rushes to take the Widow Clarke to table, a bowl of lukewarm pottage in front of her. “Well, a rabbit is no hare and you are no queen, madam,” I say, loud, so that I know she will mark me, “and you shan’t be dying today neither. Not by starvation, at least. Here, look.” I press a spoon into her vague fingers. “Pottage! And perhaps the Beldam will bring you some eggs later, as well.”

  She blinks at me a few times, sidelong and sad, then lowers her spoon to the pottage and takes a mouthful. “It’s cold,” she murmurs, grinding her grey corpsey gums.

  “You’re most welcome.” I dip to her in an ironical curtsey, and move to shake her sour bedlinens.

  “She’s a good woman, your mother,” Bess goes on mumbling, through a mouthful of pottage. A wet oat glisters at the corner of her wrinkled mouth.

  “So you say.”

  “She is,” Mother Clarke insists, a dripping spoonful held before her pursed lips. “Soft on the inside and hard without, like a crab. We first met when I was out on the field over yonder, at the spinney. I was picking up sticks for the fire, and there she was leaning at the fence post in her liver-spotted dress. She said she had watched me and knew of my poverty and my lameness, and pitied me for it. She said that she knew ways and means for me to live better.”

  “Might those ‘ways’ and ‘means’ go by the names Rebecca and West, perchance?” I ask, folding the counterpane. I look over my shoulder to flash a grin to the old woman, and find that her pale gaze is fixed on my back through the half-darkness and that a strange, smug look has come over her face. Old Mother Clarke may be rounding blindness, but in that moment it feels as if her cloudy eyes are boring through my very skin. Very strongly, then, I want to leave that tumbledown hovel.

  “Master John Edes, is it?” Elizabeth asks, her thin lip curling.

  And I am caught off guard and so reply my “What?” with an abruptitude that can only be suspect.

  “Master John Edes,” Mother Clarke repeats, patting at the pottage with the belly of her spoon. “The clerk. Word is you have taken quite a fancy to him.” She makes a dry, indulgent noise.

  I set the counterpane back and smooth it down with my hands, feeling the colour rise in my cheeks. White, pink. In this moment I find myself twisting inside, caught between a deep-held shame and a sort of resentment. Resentment that Bess Clarke, this flake, this cripple—whose only relation to my mother and me is geographic, whose only sympathetic features, helplessness and drowsiness, are those she shares with every baby or drunk—would look to know my innermost thoughts and desires. It is a feeling of invasion, except glossed with understanding of that invasion’s essential triviality, like when a gnat crawls into your tear duct to die of a May morning.

  And then there is the shame, because the old woman is not wrong, all told. I have indeed “taken a fancy” to the clerk, John Edes. I have had most passionate thoughts of his small blond moustaches, which curl up at the corners of his mouth and make him look like a happy tomcat. I have thought at length about what it would be like to kiss him there, where the whiskers meet his lips, and feel the roughness and the softness together. I have enjoyed the shapeliness of his large hands against the clean print of Matthew’s Gospel, enjoyed watching him moisten a finger to turn a page. And all these thoughts I have again now, all in a rush, prompted by the intimation of their existence and with Bess Clarke’s sclerotic gaze fixed on the back of my cap. So I say “What?” all over again, blushing and incredulous. And I call her a mad old bat.

  The Widow knows enough to know that I am lying, damn her, and simply bunches her shoulders, with a grin. Can she see me? Can she see me where I stand in my head, with Master John Edes loosening my imaginary stays with those nice big hands of his? I must leave, just in case.

  “Mother will be over later, no doubt,” I say all at once, and fix my cap, and seize up my basket, and blunder back out into the morning sunshine and the wholesome smells of wet grass and herds, smells that Old Mother Clarke might live among, but is certainly not of. Those good things, gold wheat and cattle, God’s things.

  As I go about my day, it becomes harder to keep faith in Old Bess Clarke’s ingenuity as a diviner, and easier to believe that my mother has been prattling off to her. When we sit down that evening in the little parlour to work, I am in a state of high dudgeon, for rumours, once begun, are wont to take on a life of their own.

  To call either my mother or myself a “seamstress” would be excessive—but I have a quick hand and a light touch with the needle, and a good eye for the tiny sprigs and scrolls that might prettily ornament the flat collars of white holland now in fashion, or the ribboned babies’ caps. My mother’s mending is capable, though rough: but none who have seen her down by the fleet, at the part we call the Judas Gap for its deep and secret swelling in the winter months, dress bound up around her hips and bodice loosened, lustily flogging a creamy froth of lacy underskirt against the rocks like a cat o’ nine tails against the back of a New England scold, could deny that laundry is her true calling. She’d probably do the whole town’s washing for no more than a pat on the head, she enjoys it so much, is one thing I have heard a woman say of my mother. That rock over there knows how I feel when George comes back late from the Lion, is another. Work has been slower of late than it ever was—the goodwives of Manningtree find they have more time on their hands for the comparative frivolity of needlework, with so many husbands and sons and brothers taken off of them by the Eastern Association—but we find ways to make ends meet. Though barely, some weeks.

  So we sit down to our work in the little parlour, as it ever was, the door open ajar on a cloudless night in some futile hope of a draught, and I sulk.

  Somewhere close at hand, an owl pipes at the thick summer stars.

  “Finally,” Mother rumbles, biting off a thread and waving her needle towards the door. “A little conversation.”

  I keep my gaze in my lap, where the branch of a fruit tree is taking shape on the sleeve of Mr Redmond’s undershirt, and make a hm or yes or some lumpen sound.

  “My daughter,” she sighs. “Mute as a manikin in her brown study. It is very well indeed I have the birds to keep me company.”

  I feel my humours rise and tangle like stockings in a laundry pail. I raise my head to look at her, certainly goggle-eyed, hopefully defiant. “And what might we possibly have,” I ask, pricking in a tight stick of forget-me-not-blue with each word, “to talk about, pray tell, Mother?”

  And then. And then she says—with a glister of insinuation in her eyes—“All that time you have been spending at the good Master Edes’, I would have hoped to find thee a woman of learning by now. A regular slanderer.”

  I cast down my embroidery and give her my fiercest look. “Salonnière, Mother, is what they call Queen Mary, and is the word you will be wanting here,” I say. “Slanderer means something else entirely. And John Edes—now, there’s a topic. Tell me, exactly, what it is you’ve been wagging your tongue over to old Bess Clarke, regarding Master Edes and myself?”

  Mother is a piece of work. You can see the choice deceptions jostling in her eyes like trout under the bright top of a stream. First, she raises a hand to her stomacher and parts her lips with a false, persecuted look. “My honour,” she says, all well-I-never-thought-I-would-see-the-day-such-words-would-pass-your-lips, voice and face wheedling and wounded respectively, and then she thinks to change tack and both voice and face harden immediately. “As if I have nothing better to do than prattle over John Edes,” she snaps. “A man like that,” she slips her tongue to the corner of her mouth, moistening a thread, “a man like that’d stick his Thing up a haddock if a Bishop told him not to.”

  “Mother!” My cheeks burn. And my loins flip.

  “It’s true,” she sniffs. “What is John Edes to me? I know a coward when I see one, bending and genuflecting hisself to any fat old arse with a fat old purse. A regular hill-digger.”

  I feel a great smoke of wrath rise in me then, a hatefulness. I
resent that I am allowed to have nothing of my own, nothing that doesn’t bear the grub prints of her opinion. “Shame,” I mutter through my teeth. “You know not the first thing concerning—”

  “Mind thyself, girl,” she interrupts, wagging her finger in a warning way and fixing me with her eyes, “I know cowards, and I know men. And there’s many say once you know the former you know the latter just as well.”

  “Aye,” I say, with a private smile and without real consideration, passing my needle back through the fruit tree branch, “and enough of them have known thee, too, so they say.”

  Too far. Vinegar Tom yowls and spits as the candlestick crashes across the parlour, spraying sparks. I upend my chair as I take to heel, flying up and out through the open door just as she grabs at the heavy jug, which bursts against the lintel just behind me, bursts with a terrible noise.

  A GOOD DAY FOR JOHN BANKS. HE SOLD HIS old grey mare, that morning, to a cooper down from Ipswich, though not without shaving a few years off of her. Then he went to the Red Lion and promptly drank away a tenth of her price in cider, which he must remember to adjust for when telling the abstemious Goody Banks what the beast fetched. He lopes hazy up the Lawford hill towards farm and homestead, scratching at the seat of his britches and feeling everything to be intensely beautiful. A fulsome belch allows him to taste the mingled sharpness of apples and bile on his palate, a contrary flavour he finds perversely pleasant. The moon and stars shimmer colloidally above as he stops by a fence post to piss, a short way from the Beldam West’s.

  A shout and a smash move him from his drunken reverie. In his haste to stuff himself into his trousers he trips backwards over his own walking stick, fumbling with the buttons of his fly. Some spectral thing in white streaks down the path in front of him, the path from the Wests’ cottage, making a terrible noise of sobbing and hewing and ghostly pitter-pat, before it slips away into the darkness of the wood that fringes the top of town. He will tell his wife about this later, when he climbs into bed. She will be less convinced of the phantom’s post-mortem provenance. Friday night, after all, is when the Devil hosts his Mass.

  Soon John Banks tells his story to others, and so does Goody Banks. Naturally, it grows in the telling, beginning with a warp at the level of the hour. Soon a lake spools from its right place, and a specious dawn peers over the horizon of his fiction, paring tender moonlight away. Soon the one white thing he saw has become four black, and “seeing,” for that matter, has become “wrestling as Jacob did the angel.” His own part expands, and takes on the dimensions of heroism. The Beldam West’s solidifies, leaning sultry in a doorway, stripped to her underthings. Whispering—forespeaking—a scar-like cloud on her brow. It is a much better story that way, and Lord knows John Banks has little else to recommend his company.

  The testimony of Sir Thomas Bowes, Knight, which he spake upon the Bench, concerning the aforesaid Anne West, she being then at the Bar upon her trial, 1645

  That a very honest man of Manningtree, whom he knew would not speak an untruth, affirmed unto him, that very early one morning as he passed by the said Anne West’s door, about four o’clock, it being a moonlight night, and perceiving her door to be open so early in the morning, looked into the house, and presently there came three or four little things in the shape of black rabbits, leaping and skipping about him, who having a good stick in his hand, struck at them, thinking to kill them, but could not, but at last caught one of them in his hand, and holding it by the body of it, he beat the head of it against his stick, intending to beat out the brains of it; but when he could not kill it that way, he took the body of it in one hand, and the head of it in another, and endeavoured to wring off the head; and as he wrung and stretched the neck of it, it came out between his hands like a lock of wool; yet he would not give over his intended purpose, but knowing of a spring not far off, he went to drown it; but still as he went he fell down, and could not go but down he fell again, so that he at last crept upon his hands and knees till he came at the water, and holding it fast in his hand, he put his hand down into the water up to his elbow, and held it under water a good space, till he conceived it was drowned, and then letting go his hand, it sprung out of the water up into the air, and so vanished away: and then coming back to the said Anne West’s door, he saw her standing there in her smock, and asked her why she did set her Imps to molest and trouble him? To whom she made answer, that they were not sent to trouble him, but were sent out as Scouts upon another design.

  3

  Maiden

  ON SUNDAYS WE GO TO CHURCH, MY MOTHER and I, along with the rest of them. Them being the town. The high windows of painted glass in St Mary’s Church, Mistley, were smashed last Christmastide, then glazed again by Lent, then smashed again by Mayday, like the whole town was engaged in some mad dance of window-smashing and patching in the place of clapping and leaping. And now they stand boarded. At the nave was Caritas, with her lovely sky-blue wings, and a blindfolded Justice, and also Gabriel with his jewelled sword and a little lamb on his yellow sandals. They say Minister Long will not seek to restore this divine retinue again, reasoning that if the community will not consent to windows that reflect the glory of the Heavenly Kingdom, then the bare, hard boards that stand in stead of painted glass might serve as an ironical tribute to the dedicated Puritan asceticism of his congregation. Yet regardless of his ironical disposition, I think the Minister must dislike that even now, on a stifling late-summer morning, he must perform his service in the flickering glow of candlelight and what little sunshine leaks in between the slats. Public opinion is mixed. Some abhor Romish images, some just like to look at coloured glass. Some do both and prefer not to discuss the matter at all.

  St Mary’s is a small church, but serves Mistley and Manningtree both, in a single congregation. From his pulpit, the Minister sees serried rows of faces, arranged along the pews in more or less accurate embodiment of our general significance as ordained by God. Left of the aisle the women sit, heads covered with starched caps, and right of the aisle are the men (those that remain), sombre in their wide-brimmed hats. In the front pews, the faces of the substantial folk are pale and still. Faces as scrimshaw, fine silks sleek and dark as a Spaniard’s dog. The Godly men like to take notes through the sermons, scratching down queries and points of contention to raise with the Minister once his preaching is done. As his eye moves further back from the pulpit, the faces of the men and women it lights on seem to crumble, showing the marks of hard weather, poor victuals, and accustomed brawl; the caps become ragged shawls, the gowns thin stuff of French green or a faded sand colour, with deep-baked stains. There, from the poor folk in the back pews, come whispers and surreptitious tittering at the salacious parts, the circumcisions and the whores and all of that, and occasionally projectiles—walnuts or thimbles thrown by sticky-faced children, who are naturally sceptical and will not be made to sit still for nigh on two hours of homily.

  My mother and I sit at the back, on the left side, in the last pew but one. Here and there I see a ribbon of emerald satin, or a seditious scarlet trim, curling from between the tightly pinned plaits of a Prudence or Rachel or Esther, and down over a bare white neck like a rivule of blood. It is close and hot inside the church, and the women fan themselves with their handkerchiefs, churning up bemingled emanations of rosewater perfume, womb-clot, sweat and cinders. Above all is the round face of Minister Long, who is but very recently installed at St Mary’s, having been sent from London to replace Minister Caldwell, whom the ague took, suggesting he was not as favoured by God as he would have had us think. Minister Long is quite young, and I think he has difficulty obscuring his feelings from people in the way that a man—and especially a minister—ought. Sometimes his pale eyes flick hopelessly up from his lectern to the wriggling Puritan quills, and he wipes his sweaty upper lip on his sleeve, wondering what fresh spiritual controversy they might frame from his mild sermonising. I think “Long” an unfortunate name for a Minister. The joke suggests itself.

&nbs
p; In the last pew but one from the door, I am poorly placed for a view of Master Edes, but I know where he is: two rows ahead on the men’s side, between the Yeoman John Stearne—his sometime employer—and a dark-haired gentleman whom I do not recognise, and who might therefore be our newcomer, Mister Hopkins. I see him turn to talk hush-hush to the dark-haired man while Minister Long expounds upon Elijah and the pagan king, and enjoy the slope of his nose in profile. Mister Hopkins, if that is who he is, also has a nose—sharp, unbroken, flared and red at the nostrils, which he dabs at with a laced kerchief.

  When the sermon is done we step out from the dim church into the September sunshine all blinking and fluffing, like newly hatched chicks. Greetings and how-ye-dos and Lord’s blessings—the blessings of God upon you good Sirs—are exchanged all round, routine and accustomed as the creaking of an old step. The Godly men will linger in the churchyard all afternoon discussing the finer points of Minister Long’s homily, and the Godly women will sail between the graves like funeral barges so that we might all get a better look at the fine Flanders lace of their underskirts. But most of us have better things to do.

  The road back into Manningtree has baked dry in the heat, and a fine brown dust hovers about the languid processional of townspeople as we make our way down the incline. The Stour at high tide is a wrinkling blue over the bankside line of scrub and sea thrift. It is a windless day, and the church bells can be heard from as far away as Felixstowe, sounding across the waters of the bay. Mother, very tall and robust in her tight-laced church frock of murray worsted, walks up ahead in the company of Liz Godwin and the widows Anne Leech and Margaret Moone. I hang back with Margaret Moone’s eldest daughter, Judith.

  Judith is a sluttish, pale girl, two years my junior and a good part imp, I think. Her mouth is a startling red spotted all about with pimples, causing her to appear always as though she has just come from a messy repast of blackberries. Judith’s livid mouth is a thoughtful, explanatory flourish in the Lord’s design—like the yellow bands of a hornet—for she is very free with words indeed. I am pleased our mothers’ affinity has made a friendship between us, for I do not think I would have the fortitude to withstand her bad side. We are walking arm in arm down the long hot road towards town, when Judith throws back her head and declares, “Lor’,” lightly blaspheming, “Lor’, I was so bored I could have eaten a baby. The Edwards’ new one, perhaps. He is a very fat little thing.”