The Manningtree Witches

by A. K. Blakemore

  I say that it wasn’t so bad, and that I liked the bit about feet.

  “I have washed—my—feet—” Judith says, in mimicry of Minister Long’s mourning drawl. “Now, how might I defile them?” And she claps her hands together and I laugh, with an Amen to that.

  Judith squints her eyes up narrow and leans in close. “I am not the only one who found it tiresome. Have you noticed”—and she here shoots a look at our mothers walking ahead—“how the Dames always come from service with faces like slapped arses?” And we are laughing between ourselves at that when Prudence Hart sinks into step beside us, with a smile part-sweet, part-wicked. She chirrups us a good morrow and knits her fingers below her swelling belly as though we might fail to notice it. She will be delivered when winter has set in, most likely—a risky business.

  “What ho, Goody Hart,” grins Judith, her foxy brows rising. “And look at you, stout as a Harwich seal.”

  Prudence laughs. “My Thomas says it quite becomes me.” She pats at her paunch. “’Tis a shame so many of the young men have gone off to do battle with the Antichrist. Now you shall have no one but the puddles to remind you of your plainness.”

  The rivalry of Prudence Hart and Judith Moone—neighbours and barely six months apart in age, who were raised up making cat’s cradle by the fire together—is now largely a matter of display, an exercise mildly diverting for themselves and for others. The origin of their enmity, if any existed at all, is now lost to the mist of the plenty years before the fighting started, when men ate beefsteak every night and effectively bridled their women’s conniptions (or thought that they did).

  “Oh,” says Judith, reaching over me to pat at Prudence’s arm, “worry not, Goody Hart. We know we can trust to thy friendship in that regard. ’Tis a shame,” she pouts, disingenuous, “’tis a shame the Holy warriors could find no use for thy dear Thomas. Tell me: was it his age as disqualified him from service? Or his blubber?”

  Prudence ejects another nasty laugh and hangs back, at last, smile pickling on her face, to wait for her own mother. Judith grins triumphantly. “The skirmish is mine, I think,” she says, chewing at her dirty thumbnail as though to reward herself. “That little arseworm,” she adds, with a thoughtful backwards look.

  Market Street is excitement of a sort, after the doldrums of the service. Judith and I go along quite happily in the sun, peering at the wagons unloading outside the ordinary and into the dirty windows of the mercer’s shop. It is hot. I feel the sweat prick beneath the frill of my cap. Ragged children play in the dust, and a few women, having families too large to count it a heresy to work on the Lord’s Day, make quiet effort towards the scrubbing of their stoops. The air is sour with the smack of horse-dung and sweet with the smells of cooking lard and onions, and suddenly Judith spins and nips at my cheeks with her fingertips, saying, Ah, ah—let me pinch some roses into your face, Beck! But when I realise why, my own embarrassment equips me with a deeper flush than all the pinching in the world might have, as I see that Master John Edes has emerged from the bakery and is approaching us, with the dark-haired stranger from the church in tow.

  Edes bows deep, and presses his hat back from his very good face. “Miss West, Miss Moone,” he beams, “a good morrow to you.”

  “Master Edes,” and we ourselves dip, dark skirts rippling, eyes dropping modest.

  “The Lord has blessed us with another fine day. It might still be midsummer.” Master Edes smiles, squinting up into the cloudless blue afternoon. The sun glints off the buckle on his hat, as if it cannot quite believe its luck in getting to touch him, and who can blame it.

  “It is too hot, to my mind,” Judith replies, disagreeably. I keep my own eyes lowered to the baking dirt, but I can see that Judith has raised hers square to the dark-haired stranger, curiosity overcoming modesty. I feel the film of sweat on my skin, the hair dribbling from my cap.

  “Well . . . God might favour us with a little rain. It would bring a pleasing freshness to the air,” Master Edes answers, diplomatically, scratching at his moustaches.

  Beneath my skirts, my stocking sags loose around my left knee. Intently I look at the uneven lacing of my bodice, the stomacher a little askew, and feel more shame. I wish I might own myself, as Judith does. Judith the hoyden girl with the crusted pimples at the corners of her lips and her short chin raised in small rebellion eight times a day. I feel her standing there, stiff as a bramble, solid as a rampike, thoroughly committed to the project of casual moral delinquency. I envy her and could kiss her both.

  “Miss West?” Master Edes repeats.

  I realise I have been wound too tight about myself to be listening to a word that has been said, and am reluctantly forced to acknowledge that yes, Miss West is myself, with another surreptitious bend at the waist and an “I—my apologies, sir.”

  He smiles—hallelujah. “Your lesson,” he says. “On Thursday?”

  “Yes. I shall come ’round noon, sir.”

  “It is well.”

  I lift my eyes then to the smiling Master Edes in a manner that could be—and that I know will be, by the dawdling Market Street goodwives who are pinning out their laundry and half spying on this fortuitous meeting—spoken of as coquettish. I meet with John Edes once weekly in his quarters above the White Hart, for the learning of my letters. I think in times more ordinary, or company more thoroughly Godly, such an arrangement would no doubt be considered scandalous. But as it is Manningtree and the Year of Our Lord 1643—in which many educated men have it that civil society might be completely overturned very soon indeed—people do more or less whatever it is they wish, provided they can stand to be the subject of all the town’s gossip the next day. So I learn from Master Edes what a girl like me might ordinarily glean from her own father—to read the gospel and understand its lessons, to sign my name, to perform basic arithmetic of the kind useful for the management of a household, and for knowing when I am being welched on. I am a quick study and already know how to do these things, and more. But I am not yet ready to abandon Master Edes’ gentle sciolism, the two hours of the week when I sound out syllables with that marvellous face bent low beside mine. Cal-um-ny. For-bear-ance.

  “Allow me to introduce Mister Matthew Hopkins,” Edes continues, gesturing sidelong at his companion, who tips his hat indifferently.

  “Oh!” Judith exclaims. “You are the gentleman from Suffolk as has taken the lease on the Thorn.”

  Mister Hopkins shifts uneasily under Judith’s gaze, evidently discomposed by his reputation’s newfound independence from his person. “I—” he says. That is all he says, with a needy sidelong look at Master Edes. He dabs at his temple with a kerchief crumpled in his left hand.

  Edes laughs. “News travels fast in Manningtree, Matthew. Too many women,” he says, “too short on employment.”

  “Indeed,” Hopkins replies.

  “Sirrah,” Judith interjects. “Men coming is rarer and more welcome news than men leaving.”

  “Ah.” Hopkins presses his fingertips to his mouth. His eyes, shadowed by the wide brim of his hat, are fixed somewhat above our heads. “Alas,” he continues, lackadaisically, “my poor health prevents me from joining the cause of the righteous. But it brings me joy at last to be among such . . . God-fearing people.” He sounds less than convinced, staring off into the blue skies over the butcher’s shop. I think he looks like nothing has ever brought him joy in his life. He presses his lacy kerchief to his temple as though it might whisper to him instructions for the congenial navigation of our meeting. I feel a peculiar sympathy—he looks like I must, this Mister Hopkins, not knowing where to put himself, or what to do with all this cumbersome existing.

  “Mister Hopkins,” Edes interjects, by way of explanation, “is not long from Cambridge.”

  Matthew Hopkins, the Gentleman and Cambridge scholar. Carefully, I take the measure of him. He is young enough, and handsome. Handsome in that way that might prompt women to say he’d be handsome, if—, dark and with a grace that seems n
ear-womanish. A neatly combed moustache and a thin, skittish mouth. His apparel is as fine as one is likely to see in Manningtree, and bespeaks a restrained good taste: high boots polished to a gleam, hair in ringlets almost to his chest. But there is something about him slant and insubstantial, as though all the dramatic outfitting houses none of the usual human meat. Black boots, black gloves, black doublet, black cloak, black ringlets and then a white face floating lost in the midst of this funereal confection. Over his shoulder, I see my mother waiting at the turning to the market square, her hands planted on her hips and her face puckered in a look of suspicion.

  I make my apologies to the two gentlemen and explain that my mother waits on me. Both Hopkins and Edes follow my eyes and look to where she stands, all sunburned, by the white Market Cross. John Edes tips his hat to her. No reciprocal gesture of politesse is forthcoming from my mother.

  “And mine,” adds Judith, with a sighing look towards the Widow Moone, who taps her foot by the grocer’s. “Farewell, and good fortune at the Thorn!” she adds, with a brazen smile at Hopkins.

  Mother walks ahead of me up the Lawford hill, her strides long and purposeful. We climb and the sticky, layered smells of the town are replaced by the freshness of the meadows and a trembling breeze. On my right side are the fields stretching amply to the blue of the horizon, to Kent and the sea and beyond, knotted over with herds. On my left, the thatched roofs of the town are bathed in the yellow angel-light of the early evening, and the smokes rise from Felixstowe. It would be a pleasant walk, I think, to take of an afternoon with someone you loved.

  “So,” says Mother, peering back over her shoulder, “will you tell me, then, who Master Edes’ friend was, with whom Judith and yourself were conversing so cosily?” There is a note of abjection in her voice because I know something that she does not, and she hates it, and now she must pretend she has no real interest and merely enquires out of politeness.

  “Mister Matthew Hopkins,” I say to oblige her. “Him who took the lease on the Thorn.”

  “Fellow looks like a milksop. All that sable get-up.”

  “Certainly don’t look like any innkeeper that I’ve ever seen.” I whisk my walking stick in a plot of long grass by the curving path, causing a cloud of gadflies to rise madly heavenward.

  “Aye, and how many innkeepers would that be, Becky?” Mother chortles, and looks over her shoulder to see that I am suitably chastened by this reminder of the narrowness of my existence. “Changeling girl,” she sighs. “Perhaps it would do you some good to get in your cups some. Put a little colour in thy cheeks, hey?” And then she stops and she turns towards me, and she raises a roughened hand to the side of my face, a queer expression in her eyes. I flinch—but it seems she means only to touch with tenderness. “You’re all that remains to me now, Becky,” she says, quiet.

  In this light, and with the wind stirring at a tendril of hair that has fallen from her cap, I think there is a certain ruined handsomeness to her after all. Tall as nightmares in her frilled Sunday frock. I cannot think of what to say, so I say only, “I do not want to be all that remains to you,” and push her hand away and move past her to carry on up the hill path, whacking my stick side to side.

  “It is to your benefit I work, Beck,” Mother calls after me. “Lord knows, no one else does! I see you, girl! I tilled what you grew in!”

  But I walk, and I keep to walking, and eventually her whickering is lost to the breeze. I walk on past our front yard where the chickens scratch at themselves, past the gate rotting off its hinges. I walk past the long-empty house that stands across the path from our own, the old sty collapsing against the west wall. I walk over the hill and then down the other side, and the sunset flares hard like a jewel against my face. Alone now, I think, my God. The indignity of it all. The hopelessness. I could cry, because nothing has ever really begun, and nothing is ever likely to. My Sunday stays are tight, and stopping by the fence at the bottom of the Hobdays’ low field I loose them, and breathe the sour-sweet smell of cows, and see someone has carved a cross into the post there.

  I am poor. But what is worse, I am poor and peculiar. In the Hobdays’ field there are patches of lusher grass in the parched field, thriving where the cows have dropped their guts, and this takes me to thinking of the dead, as I lean up against the fence post, loosening my stays. The dead, who are under the ground, poor and peculiar and otherwise. And that gets me to thinking of my father, whom I do not think of often, and whom we find no time in our days to honour. Would things have been better if he were still here, still alive? Probably not. He was a scoundrel and a drunk, as far as I remember and rumour suggests. We would still be poor—and perhaps poorer still—with a wastrel of no account sleeping through church and falling asleep by the fire with his hand down his breeches. Poor, yes. But man, wife and child—father, mother and daughter—as a situation, it is inarguably less peculiar.

  My mother is right. She does see me. How could she not, it being that we work, sleep, wake and piss together, side by side, stifling? We are like two trees that have grown entangled in the denseness of the wood and find their roots interlocked, ripping at each other’s branches in the wind. And I can see no other way out. No way out but him.

  4

  A Discourse

  MATTHEW HOPKINS WATCHES THE GIRLS TRIP away, then the two white caps of the Wests bobbing up the hill in the distance. He asks if the girl is simple-minded. “The dark one,” he clarifies. She has a weird look to her, he thinks, as though she’d be more comfortable up in the sky, perched on a ragged limb of cloud, than in a provincial church pew. Eyes wide-set and all the colour of pupil.

  “Rebecca? No,” replies Master Edes. “Timid, I suppose. Her mother, mind . . .” Edes chuckles as the two men continue up the street towards the Market Cross. “The Beldam West is a formidable old scold. She did time in gaol, some years ago, for killing a neighbour’s pig.”

  “A pig, sir?” Hopkins blinks at his companion, mouth set in a firm line beneath his black moustache. “Mercy. How?”

  “I am not right sure—this was before I came up from London. Some genteel scrap in the front yard, and in the middle of it all the Beldam West marches into her house, comes back out with a butcher’s blade, and slices the poor hog right across the wattles before anyone can think to stop her. And the pig wasn’t even the primary point of contention.”

  Edes laughs, but Hopkins remains mirthless. “Women,” he exhales, weary.

  “A woman? Lilith, more like. No . . . If you have come by Manningtree looking for a wife, your search may be long indeed, sir.”

  “Not a wife,” Hopkins replies, cryptically.

  Parliament secures a victory over the King in Berkshire against long odds, prompting a confused atmosphere of dog-days carnival across the villages and hamlets of Essex, the men drinking and firing their muskets off into the lilac dusk, for God’s judgement is surely passed upon the unrighteous. They massage the spare accounts of the battle to increasingly extravagant divinity, and soon the Archangel Michael is manifesting over the field of engagement, and white horses gallop through their fuddled cider dreams. September becomes October becomes November. The harvest is brought in as the languid summer finally exhausts itself, and a painted effigy of the Pope is set to blaze on the village green.

  Matthew Hopkins reopens the Thorn Inn with little ceremony. As the year turns, his taste for dismal costuming provokes less astonishment, and even begins to make a sort of sense. While others rush about their outdoor business as quickly as they might through the autumn drizzle in an effort to repair to the comfort of their hearths, Matthew Hopkins struts about the town like a dour long-legged crow, with John Edes and John Stearne and the most learned company he is able to find in so backwards a place as Manningtree, all the Nehemiahs, too, happy as a Puritan might be. Some call him a backward man, a coaltit. Others admire him—no family to speak of, but plenty of money, it seems.

  Matthew Hopkins rides his horse through a field at dawn and notices a bl
ack feather lying in the grass, glossy and ideal. Matthew Hopkins hosts. Matthew Hopkins expounds. Matthew Hopkins discourses, the town’s foremost autodidacts groping for every morsel of his exultant theology.

  “For he is, of course, a Prince of Air,” says Hopkins, lifting the edge of his riding cloak in such a way that his learned companions might better appreciate the broidery of the hem, the sleekness of the sable. And it makes sense to them then, when he puts it like that, how the Devil might thicken like butter and slide under the pantry door to cover a man all over. A man, or a woman.

  They can imagine the Devil there, some great thing in the sky, or as a mist rolling in off the river, gathering the smoke of scullery fires to himself. For later use. Or as the miasma that hovers over the marshes and flats, bringing the ague. A dark head crowned in slender red leaves of narrowdock, a moth with mouths both front and back. Cavorting in the autumn clouds that are like strips of flayed skin. The Devil minces and the Devil dances. He dances like a girl might, slender-hipped, hair falling wild around her shoulders. Inflamed. Now the nights grow longer, he might go from door to door of an evening in the guise of a swarthy pedlar, opening his coat to the wide-eyed goodwives and maids, and where there ought to be bobbins of silk ribbon and little pearl buttons, he shows to them his merchandise of sootkin and smooth-newt: this one here’s Prickeare, and this one Prettyman. And all the while a grey cat watches from the strawberry patch.