The Manningtree Witches

by A. K. Blakemore

  The Devil is in the moist places of the forest, under fallen logs. He speaks to the centipedes and the toads, and they drag their soft bellies out over the rocks and mulch to lame the horse of a gentleman passing by on his way to Ipswich, or find a place to nestle warm between the parted thighs of some country lass, whereon she dreams of marriage to a Turk who uses his tongue down there. He spits rainbow. He slides a rainbow up inside you.

  “The power of creation, of course,” Hopkins says, smiling indulgently at John Stearne as the pair of them sit together by the fire, “rightly belongs only to God.”

  Can hate or desire or hunger heave islands from the sea, or speckle an empty sky full of stars? No. And yet they are as real as you or I, and no man might dispute it. And such is his power, gnawing at you like an empty belly until you’ll take any horrid thing in your mouth, stroking softly and expertly at the pink points of the breasts and secret parts until you beg to have the power inside, filling you up. The anger that billows when you look at the smiling face of one who has wronged you, making you want to take that face into your hands and tear it up like damp paper.

  Satiety. If we could ever meet it, perhaps we would know something close to peace. We chase it. This is the illusion he promiseth, an overflowing without end, a darkness that toucheth every part of you, every organ of you at once, to feel the roots stretching down down and away into the earth and into everything, through the green bones of dead men, their dreams shifting beneath your feet like an underground river.

  “This the malevolent inverse of the oneness promised to the virtuous at the white gates of Heaven. As moon is to sun, as woman is to man.” Hopkins says all this, and the men listen intently, their eyes glowing in the firelight, the shadows undulating on the parlour walls.

  5

  Boy

  GUNPOWDER TREASON DAY HAS PASSED, AND the painted pope is sizzling black-cheeked up on the village green. A bright but frigid morning, the line of the coast brindled with the purple of sea aster, brittle with salt. The town has woken with a hangover to the bracing bitterness of smoke in the air. The Stour is at its lowest ebb, and the sheen of the flats makes it difficult to tell where ground ends and water begins, out in the bay. By the quay wall, near Manningtree port, stands a strange company of women, bundled up in ragged coats and cheap fur muffs to keep away the cold.

  “Oh, I could do with a little snifter of something,” says the Beldam West, shivering in her coat. “Just to keep the cold off. A little cupful of something.”

  Margaret Moone clicks her tongue. “It’s not yet noon even, you slattern.”

  Principal among the assembled women by age is Old Mother Clarke, bent over her stick, and appearing to take a reptile enjoyment in the feeling of the sun on her face. Her ragged shawl is pulled back over her liver-spotted scalp. Principal by height is the Beldam West, knotty and vigorous, with a purloined cloak wrapping her shoulders. Beside the skin-and-bone Beldam, the Widow Moone looks especially soft, her white face beneath her lacy white cap just like a sugared bun in crinkly paper wrappings, her body straining at the cheap stuff of her dress. Then there is the Widow Leech, who looks as much like a leech as the Widow Moone resembles her own, astral namesake. The Widow Leech: having gone from maiden to Leech, it seems she is likely to die one. A busy, black-eyed little woman with a pinched mouth well attuned to the heat of local controversy. She finds it out and then on she latches, having three grown daughters who have left home, and thus little better to do than interfere in the lives of others. Completing the party is Liz Godwin, who is a slender, well-formed woman with the empty, docile eyes of a desirable horse. Liz Godwin is liberal in the disbursement of her chewing tobacco, which is fortunate, because she has no wit to share.

  The women speak of names. Babies’ names. All are themselves past breeding, but they are seasoned critics of their neighbours’ offerings.

  “Free-love, the Edwards have named their new one,” scoffs the Widow Leech. “Have you ever heard the like of it?”

  “Free-love sounds more of a girl’s name, if you ask me,” muses Godwin, who does not understand their jokes.

  “Doesn’t sound like any kind of name at all,” the Beldam West declares, definitively.

  “I have heard the like,” Margaret Moore reports. “And worse. Did you hear what the Cates up Bergholt way called their own little one? Continence,” she breathes, to the delight of all, “Continence Cate.”

  There is a flurry of head-shakes and well-I-nevers and not-in-my-days. Then Anne Leech adds that there’s a girl as is called “Silence,” down in Thorpe, and she can only assume her parents sought to draw attention to her virtue by it, given the Devil gifted her a hare-lip.

  “So I should have named Becky,” the Beldam sighs.

  Margaret Moone declares Rebecca West a right little madam, and wonders that there is no man who seems ready to have her as a wife, considering that any man that did marry her would never hear a cross word in all the days of his life. Or any word at all, for that matter.

  “Oh, that’s what you think is it, Mag?” the Beldam counters, incredulous. “By God,” she whistles, “sweet is the face my Becky shows to the world, but the girl spits poison when she has a mind to.” Only Liz Godwin cringes at the casual blasphemy.

  Old Mother Clarke stirs, opening her cloudy eyes. “Aye,” she says, “and so it should be. There’s enough mules and moppets among the women of the world. If she has clout, and the good sense to keep it hidden, sounds to me like she is well ready to be wed.” She closes out her contribution with a short, cracking laugh.

  “At least she does as she’s bidden. My Judith,” begins Margaret, “not three nights hence, I tell her to fetch me a bundle of wood from the stack out in the yard. And there she’s sitting, doing no more than warming her corns by the fire and drinking my beer, and flatly, I will not, she says.” This elicits a murmur of communal displeasure. “And I says, It is best you had fetch it, girl”—Margaret stops here to check the little knot of women are paying her story sufficient attention—“or else. And she says back, Else what? Will you fetch a stick and beat me with it, Mother?”

  The other women crowd in towards the intimation of violence like it is a fire, but the Widow Moone is silent. “And did you,” the Beldam asks, impatiently, eventually, “fetch the stick, and whisk the little jade?”

  “No,” replies Widow Moone, with a shrug. “I put my shawl on and fetched the wood myself. Such is the widow’s lot.”

  Mother Clarke sighs. “A girl of that age,” she says, “just wants to see what power she might have. Break apart something in her hands and smile at it while she does. And a man won’t do. A man ain’t human, to a girl of twenty. He’s a bit of God. Or so she is taught. So he seems to her. A man has no blood to splash about in.”

  There is silence for a few moments as the women reflect on Mother Clarke’s argument, allow it to soak in. “Aye,” Leech sighs, “I have said it many a time before. There’s people, and then there’s men.”

  At that moment Misters Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne emerge from the dock office across the way, lovely furs frothing at their collars in the spry wind, and begin to pick their way along the road. They pass by the women with a reluctant tipping of their hats, like crows dipping their sharp heads to feast. Conversation is resumed once the men are out of earshot. “That Mister Hopkins has been up to Cambridge,” the Beldam notes, authoritatively.

  Liz Godwin narrows her eyes. “That isn’t so impressive,” she says. “My Thomas’s been up to Cambridge.” Thomas is her husband. There is barely a woman alive in Manningtree in the autumn of 1643 without a husband or son named Thomas.

  “I’m not talking about market day, you lack-wit,” the Beldam spits back at Liz. “There is a school in Cambridge. A school of philosophy. If your Thomas has been there he conducts himself with a remarkable humbleness.”

  “I thought Hopkins a lawyer,” sniffs Leech.

  “Those black moustaches,” mutters Margaret Moone. “I think he looks like
the Devil hisself.”

  Her remark ushers in an ominous lull to their conversation. The low tide has littered the flats with stinking knots of bladder wrack and kelp, a detritus of fraying rope and broken traps. Two boys—Thomas Briggs and Elias Frost—play at crabbing a short way off among the pools, barefoot, under the greedy watch of the gulls. The boys are skipping back and forth to a bucket set in the wet mud between them, ankles streaked with silt.

  “Master Thomas Briggs,” the Beldam calls, “why do you waste good bacon on those crabs, hey?”

  Briggs stops in his tracks and casts a hesitant look at the Beldam, winding in his crabbing line. He wipes his nose on his shirt sleeve, and says nothing.

  His silence irritates her. She calls out again: “Did you hear me, Master Briggs? Besides—is it not a little cold to be japing on the flats, this morn? You’ll catch a death of chill, my boy.”

  Briggs remains still and silent, jutting his lower lip in a truculent manner. The other boy has paused to watch the exchange unfold now, too. The Widow Moone screws her pink face up to gaze across the luminised mud at the shy youths. “Answer the Beldam, Thomas Briggs,” she says. “And where be thy mother?”

  Thomas Briggs lifts his head defiantly, and shouts back: “My mother says I am not to speak with thee, nor any of thy like!”

  With near-supernatural alacrity, before her companions’ gasps of disapproval at the child’s audacity are even half-spent, the Beldam leaps over the quay wall and bounds onto the mucky flats, leather sailor’s jacket flapping in the wind behind her like the wings of a great bat. Thomas Briggs and his companion make to bolt, but it is too late, and Master Briggs yelps and wriggles as the Beldam seizes him by the ear and begins to pull him back towards the bank, calling him a disrespectful little whelp, an uppity lad, and all manner of thing. The tugging and jostling continue as Briggs’ young companion escapes unpursued into the town, forgetting his little boots at the foreshore.

  The Beldam hauls the boy over to the bank. Thomas grabs at the Beldam’s cap, tugging it half off her grizzled head before he tumbles and falls, with a smack, on the rough stone of the walkway. He is bawling now, all audacity forgotten, as she seizes him by the shoulders and sets him back on his feet, chin scraped and bloodied. She gives him a hard shake: “Shame! A crying shame,” she chides him. “What might thy father think, if he heard thee address thy elders so saucily?”

  This mention of the Yeoman Briggs—late of the Eastern Association—is unwise, prompting, as it does, renewed wails from young Thomas. The Beldam draws her hand back to strike the child, and the other women, stilled by shock until now, move to intercede. “Now, Nan,” breathes Margaret Moone, grabbing her back by her shoulders, “that’s quite enough.” And not before time, for Priscilla Briggs—mother to Thomas—now stands at the end of Market Street, a basket of cakes fallen from her grasp and slopping in the mud as she points a trembling, accusatory finger at the five malefactors gathered by the riverbank. She lets out a shriek, then rushes towards the commotion.

  The women stand back as Priscilla Briggs kneels to clasp her shaking son in her arms, then turns her livid face up towards the Beldam West. “Wench!” she cries. “Laying thy hands on him—a boy of eleven!” And she locks one arm around her son’s shoulders and waves the other at the Beldam in a sort of erratic threat.

  For a fleeting moment, the Beldam looks nervous. She did not mean for this to happen, and it is doubtless embarrassing for all concerned. She hides her nervousness with a laugh, looking down at Goody Briggs’ tear-streaked face. The laugh is anarchic and comes from deep in her throat. Raising her hands in submission, she tells Goody Briggs that they have striplings much Thomas’ junior loading dragons up North, so she would hope the lad could stand a little honest chiding for his sins. “But if you look to raise up a saucy rascal, Goody Briggs,” she sallies, planting her hands on her hips, “then I shall interfere no further.”

  Others have come now, drawn by the racket of women, Leechlike: a few dockhands who stand dumbfounded on the pier, chewing their clay pipes, the baker at the doorway wiping down his floury hands on his apron. Misters Hopkins and Stearne.

  “See to it you do not!” Goody Briggs cries, climbing back up to her feet. “Slattern!” she adds, again, for good measure.

  Hopkins strides forward at this juncture, flicking back his cloak and offering Priscilla his arm, a true underworld gallant. “Madam,” he murmurs to Priscilla, softly, like he is soothing a spooked horse. “Goodwife.”

  Rather than take the offered arm, Priscilla Briggs seizes at his shoulder and throws herself tearfully into his dark curls. “Naughty women,” she sobs into his velvets, “they’re all naughty women.” Thomas Briggs watches red-eyed and mouth agape, all injury apparently quite forgotten. Hopkins, gracefully discomfited, offers Priscilla a perfunctory pat between the shoulders.

  Now Mister Stearne clears his throat and blinks his watery eyes against the frigid wind. “May I enquire, my good ladies,” he begins, “what has occurred here, to raise such tumult?”

  Liz Godwin is relieved that somebody has finally posed a question she feels she can answer, and so she does answer, and her answer runs something like this: “Well, Sire. The Beldam West asked as to why the Master Briggs was wasting good bacon on the crabs—for see, sir, he was crab-fishing—and said that he would catch his death of chill”—Hopkins perks his brow at that—“but the Master Briggs made no reply. So she asked again, and then Master Briggs says, sir, cocky as you please, that his mother had instructed him he is not to speak with the Beldam West nor any of her like. Those were his words, sir. Though what he meant by them I can scarce tell, for young Rebecca is not among our company, and—”

  Hopkins raises his hand for silence. The Beldam’s face is pinched as though she still suppresses laughter, her cap askew. Then Godwin gulps once, and peevishly summarises: “. . . so she caught at him by the ear’ole, the Beldam West. Then the young Sir took a tumble and scraped his chin up. And then Goody Briggs arrived.”

  Glances are exchanged and measures taken throughout the taut assemblage as silence falls, punctured only by the hiccupping sobs of Goody Briggs.

  “Well,” says Hopkins. “I am a single man, and as such it ill behooves me to make recommendation with regard to the most sacred feminine duties that pertain to the raising of children. But as a humble servant of God, and as your neighbour, perhaps I well might remind you all of the virtues of modesty, obedience, cleanliness”—here, his eyes drop to the Beldam’s mud-spattered skirts. Her eyes are downcast, but her lip trembles with private mirth. Margaret Moone and Widow Leech, as well, have their lips screwed down tight over giggling—“and continence, that—”

  Widow Leech is the first to crack, clapping her hand over her mouth too late to stifle a fulsome cackle. Then Widow Moone, then the Beldam, then even wheezing Mother Clarke fall to laughing.

  “—that might make you exempla to all the daughters of our town . . .” Hopkins’ brow darkens as his exhortation concludes unheeded. He folds his arm about Goody Briggs. “Come, Goodwife,” he sighs. “Let us sit you down at the inn.”

  Misters Hopkins and Stearne go to the White Hart, with Goody Briggs and little Thomas in tow. The women stand and laugh for a long time by the quay wall. Then they go home, and make supper, and comb out their hair, and forget continence, and their laughter. But Hopkins does not.

  6

  Divination

  WE LIE SIDE BY SIDE IN OUR SMOCKS ON JUDITH’S bed.

  “Listen to her in there.” Judith peers towards the closed door, behind which the Widow Moone sleeps in the adjoining chamber. “Listen to that.”

  We listen to Widow Moone’s snoring. She inhales majestically, hugely, and then there is a pause of two, three, or even four heartbeats before an equally sumptuous exhalation follows. “Threescore times a night I convince myself Madam’s finally croaked it,” Judith sighs, bereft. “But nay.”

  The fire has burnt down to a mess of glowing embers, and there is a fine-spun
frost at the windowpane. “What would you do, if she did?” I ask her. “Croak it, as you say.”

  Judith bites her lip, thoughtful. “Bind my breast and become a sailor,” she answers.

  I give her a look.

  “Ah, I know not,” she says, with a prone shrug, gazing up at the cracked plaster of the ceiling. “Go into service, maybe. In Colchester, or Ipswich. Somewhere with a halfway decent haberdasher’s shop. Somewhere they sell proper blues. Would a true cobalt not become me, with my colouring?”

  “You’d not last a week in service,” I tell her, correctly. “Not got the temperament for it. Pretty red hair though, which is probably preferable.” I reach my hand out across the pillow to touch her pretty red hair, which is fine and soft. I tell her again of my time bound out as a servant in Rivenhall, and how my master would beat me with a walnut cane when he came home drunk and found some petty thing I had done that was not to his liking. Judith smiles. She enjoys outrageous tales. The more bloodthirsty the better. As girls, we would sit up late with her father’s old Acts and Monuments, marvelling over the pierced flesh of martyrs, our breath warm and shallow.

  Judith turns her head to look at me. “And have relations with the Old Beldam West improved,” she asks, “while we’re on the subject of beatings?”

  “Why do you think I’m spending the night here?”

  She shows her small teeth in a grin, face wan in the firelight. “On account of my pretty red hair?”

  “Don’t be lascivious.”

  “Oh!” Judith suddenly exclaims, propping herself on her elbows. “Did you hear of the falling-out at the quay, morning after bonfire? With Master Briggs and your mother?”

  “How could I not? The whole town is ablaze with it. Naughty women.”