The Manningtree Witches

by A. K. Blakemore

  “They say Mister Hopkins interceded, all gentlemanly carriage,” Judith sniffs, after a short silence. “I think I would have liked to have seen that. The Grand Beldam facing down the Cambridge Puritan.”

  I wait the course of one of Widow Moone’s snores, two of them, knitting my hands over my breast. And then I ask it, voice whisked aery with a false indifference. “Was Master Edes there, know you?”

  “Devil take John Edes, woman,” says Judith, dropping back to the bed with a huff of exasperation. “Do you never think of anything else?”

  I consider the question for a moment, drawing the blanket up to my chin. “Not really, no,” I sigh, with only a little shame.

  “All right then.” Judith’s mouth sets into a thin, determined line as she clambers over me and rises up out of bed, fetching her shawl and fussing about to light a candle.

  “What are you plotting?” I ask.

  “Back in two shakes,” she says, and her tongue wets her lips and a bit of wickedness wets her eyes, God love her.

  I settle on my side and follow the sound of Judith’s footsteps around the house. Down the stairs, patting across the flagstones, the squeal of the pantry door. Soon she reappears, a cabbage on her hip, triumphant as Salome with the Baptist’s dripping head. With mock reverence, Judith sets the cabbage down on the boards before the fire, along with a stick of charcoal and a wad of crumpled paper. “There,” she says, returning to the bedside and throwing the covers off me, “come on now!”

  The night is cold. I whine as Judith wrangles me from beneath the blankets, hauls me up by the sleeves of my smock, and sets me scowling before the paper and the cabbage. “We shall warm thee with lustful thoughts soon enough,” she grins. “Now. Take up the charcoal in one hand and put the other there, upon the cabbage.”

  I do as I am bidden.

  “Now,” Judith says, “I shall blindfold you. Feel your hand about the cabbage, there. Set down the image of it on the paper.” Her breath is warm on the back of my ear, and stale and beery. A shawl is placed before my eyes and tightened and fastened there. I know what game she is proposing. It is just on the edge of what might be permitted. A superstitious business.

  “If your mother learns of this . . . some would call it divination,” I mutter, and yet excitement clings to my protestation like a burr on floss, I cannot help it. Judith can hear this excitement, and she laughs.

  “And they would be oafs,” she says, patting at my shoulder. “It is not divination. It is a cabbage.”

  The glow of the candle leaks through the shawl. I feel the cabbage beneath my fingers, cool and fibrous and ridged and veined and carven. I press my tongue against the roof of my mouth, think of sap-flood, bitter on each bite. My fingertips move across the upper curves, which feel like a brow furrowed in thought or creased in the effort of concentration, to find the cabbage’s centre, which holds the point of a ring-finger like a pursed pair of lips, a raw green kiss. Then the dimples and frills follow outwards in a circular motion, the leaves sometimes clinging reticent to each other, sometimes yielding, moist beneath each wing. Here, an overhanging rimple is the corner of a bearded mouth. Above, a tissue of veins like the blue lacework of an upturned wrist, a temple. I draw what I feel—until I also feel Judith’s breath on the nape of my neck, and shove the blindfold up and off my eyes, unaware of how much time has passed, unnerved by my own raptness. Charm-drunk.

  Down with the charcoal pen, away with the cabbage. It looks so innocent, now, sitting at the edge of the hearthrug, so banal, so inoffensive. I feel something that is like the cool, flat side of a blade pressing between my legs, and I laugh, and the room is cold but my cheeks are hot. One of those queer, out-of-the-ordinary moments you catch falling into your life like a flake of fire.

  Judith shuffles forward on her haunches to snatch up the smudgy drawing. “Now then,” she says, officiously, “let’s see.”

  She holds the sketch up to the embers and yellow light floods the paper, and dark lines and powdery smears seem flushed, almost, with the silent motion of fire. Judith begins to attribute a succession of winsome qualities to the drawing—strong arms to hold me with, good white teeth, etc.—but I can’t see it, can’t see any of the things she sees there. What I do see is like an armful of laughing bones. I see, perhaps, the semblance of a red spot leopard-eye, a roiling hole that swallows and swallows itself, like the glint of light on the water at the bottom of a well by which one knows the depth of what might otherwise be thought a darkness infinite, but is not comforted thereby. This is the moment that I realise my life will never again be an ordinary one. Something is begun, and I am tangled in it.

  “Rebecca?”

  Judith’s voice draws me back to the room, where she holds up the drawing before the flame. I tell her to throw it on the grate, overtaken by a sudden chill. I feel like something is there in the chamber with us, or very near to the room—as though something lingers just beneath the lip of the tiny window, brushing at the glass with long fingers. Judith does as I say, and we watch as the drowsy cinders flare and eat the quivering paper up.

  “Divination, indeed,” Judith says, clicking her tongue. “You would think heresy would be useful, at least.”

  I look down at my hands clasped over my knees and see that they are blackened with coal dust. I rise, and go to the washstand. I pour the water from the jug, and it is good and icy cold. I slide my hands into the basin, draw them out, wipe them on my smock, and there I see it—my own bowed head and the curve of my neck reflected, and another, darker shape besides. Like a hand, a hand reaching for my throat. There is a metallic taste in my mouth, now, like the taste of blood.

  I must flinch, for Judith looks, a crease forming on her brow. “Becky?”

  I tell her it is nothing, and that I’m only weary. I press the backs of my wet hands to my cheeks.

  “I didn’t mean to frighten you, Beck,” Judith says, carefully. She is worried I will tell. Where did she learn it? Mother Clarke, most likely. Seems very much like one of her kitchen spellings. But what would Judith need from a cunning woman? She has no sweetheart to chant over.

  “Don’t fret over it,” I tell her, and get back into bed, and roll on my side, and press the musty sheets to my mouth. She watches me for a short time, piqued, but eventually follows, blowing out the candle and drawing the coverlet up over us.

  I lie awake for a long time in the darkness, and I consider what it is I have seen, or think I have seen—and what the practical difference between seeing something and thinking you have seen something really is. I am not superstitious—I am useful. I have taught myself to watch and listen. I have seen enough suffering in my life to know that the diseased mind is prone to invent all manner of phantoms that might hover over a person. Better to blame a sprite or a puck for the souring of the milk or the tangles in the horse’s mane than to concede that one’s own slovenly habits may have contributed to the situation. I think it is a vanity, in fact: all these Jezebels who think their beauty so great it might attract even the Devil’s notice, fabulating courts-full of demons to suck on their pretty tits, and all because their husbands never raise eyes from their beer mugs to look at them. No. Do not fancy yourself a witch. Do not fancy yourself at all. A little pain and next to nothing of joy, wet stockings and cold beds, but your body works, Rebecca, your eyes are sharp, a man will have you in time, or will not, at least, say no—

  I dream that night, curled beside Judith. A lance of sunlight clatters down into this dream. My smock melts from my body beneath the rays.

  I lie in a glade. Alone, beside a mirror-like pool. The pool is fringed with rushes and minuscule flowers of blue and white, and there are willow trees that bend to soak their bladed leaves in the water. It is such a beautiful place, and I feel contented there, although I am naked. That I find myself naked, in this dream, only compounds my joy: I am in my prone body but also seeming to look down upon it from above, as though I am both body and sun, and find myself pleased by my own body, sleek and narrow a
nd pink like the inner parts of a shell, and just as pleased to be the sun and have so pretty a garden and girl to look upon. The heat pools on my skin.

  A rasping sound comes from somewhere nearby. I lift myself to look out over the pool towards this strange sound. Beyond the water there is an orchard, lush and dense, dissolving at last into the shimmer of pale heat. On the far bank of the pool stands Margaret Moone. She wears a white gown. She lifts her arm to reach for an apple that quivers on a low branch above her head. She is laughing. Her fingertips brush careless at the fruit’s tight red skin. Up, up, a wonderful stretch, and then she jumps. Slowly, she sails through the air, like a bubble rising through oil, her toes pointed. In the joy of this majestic flight she seems to quite forget the apple, and cuts a way through the air with her arms. Her cap falls from her head as she flies, as though torn off by a gust, but there is no wind—the branches of the fruit trees are still—and her yellow hair streams out behind her. Then, gently, she descends, and where she lands the grass dimples beneath the touch of her feet, like a muslin stretched out over a pudding. A strange, soft garden. She bounces again, and again, each arc is accompanied by the rasping sound. She looks like she is laughing, merrily and ceaselessly, but that laughter I cannot hear. Nonetheless, to watch her sail so regally, so jubilantly, through the warm air of this dream-orchard fills my dream-heart with joy, and so I begin to laugh as well, and fall back against the grass, which leaks its heady odour all around.

  There are two butterflies dancing against the relentless sun. They are huge and black, and come to rest on my belly, where the movements of their tiny feet tickle at me. I watch them. Their thin, compact bodies seem to labour unduly beneath the weight of those extravagant wings, black but painted in places with transparencies of purple and deep burgundy. Bashful, sightless eyes of lilac powder at the tip of each great fluttering pinion. How beautiful they are, I think. How difficult they make their beauty look. They flicker their wings open and closed, sunning themselves, and move to nestle in the dark curls of hair just above my loins. There they pause, attentive, as though my secret parts were a flower of rare sweetness.

  Tiny shudders move all over my skin. Shocking, pure feelings of a rain falling all over me as the butterflies jostle between my thighs with their caressing flickers. There is a third butterfly, and this falls on my breast, and then—then—the front of my body cools, thrown abruptly under shadow. I open my eyes and there are no more butterflies. I open my eyes and I am looking up into the face of Mister Matthew Hopkins.

  He says nothing. He puts his gloved hand on my body and the feeling of pleasure surges again, and it is shameful, and my happiness in the orchard is horribly spoiled. I grasp at his wrist as he touches my hip and I tell him we cannot, and look to the far bank, where Margaret Moone is reaching the high point of another lazy flight through the darkening sky above the crowns of the apple trees. He follows my look. “Ah,” he says. “We need not concern ourselves with her.” And he is right, because Margaret Moone stops mid-air and sheds her legs and arms like a moult, and rounds out into a cold hard rock, a true moon at last.

  And then he puts his arm firmly about my waist, and he drops his mouth to my throat and kisses me hungrily there. I warm, I relent, my eyes begin to close. The last thing I see is the mirror-like water of the pool, and the boughs reflected within it. And I see there is a noose hanging empty from the low branches of one silver, upturned tree.

  When I wake my mouth is sour with sleep, and it aches, as though bitten. Judith’s weasel eyes are fixed upon my face over her crumpled handful of blanket. Morning chill in the little chamber, a little periwinkle-coloured slice of sky. “Do I dare ask what it is you dreamed?” she asks.

  I tell her she may but I’ll be damned before I tell it.

  “An answer which suggests you are already,” she says.

  Her lips twist at the corner of the coverlet, and we fall to giggling.

  7

  Catechism

  THE CATECHISM. “GOD IS A SPIRIT. GOD’S INFINITE perfection is implied in these and suchlike phrases: I am that I am. I am the beginning and the ending . . .” My fingers are knitted in my lap, demurely. Skirts and stockings, but below, legs and loins. What is next? “God is light, and in him is no darkness.” No darkness—none. One can hardly imagine.

  I sit across from Master Edes. He nods encouragement at me. I like to think he is proud. “And—how many Gods are there?” he asks.

  “Only one—but distinguished into three persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. There is none other God but one. Teach all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”

  John Edes wets his thumb at the corner of his mouth and turns the page. A Short Catechism, containing the fundamental Principles of Christian Religion, by Doctor William Gouge: there is a frontispiece depicting Doctor Gouge himself, the celebrated minister, with his hair cropped close in the Roundhead style, and one eye rather bigger than the other. When Master Edes first showed me it, I said that the Doctor looked a little like the Widow Leech, “meaning no disrespect to the venerable preacher”—and that made him laugh, his cheeks flushed very adorably. Everything that passes between us I commit carefully to memory, like a child pressing violets between the pages of a prayerbook.

  “Good, very good, Miss West,” he says. “And—furthermore—how is God made known unto us?”

  I repeat the words of the catechism, feeling myself to be a dirty, impious girl. It is early afternoon. The bright bell-like morning has been muffled over by grey cloud that the sun breaks through only in fitful winces. I like Edes’ modest accommodations above the White Hart. I like to see how a man lives, how men might live, without women. I feel more reverence when I enter there, and find myself among John Edes’ simple and beautiful and unadorned possessions, than I do when I cross the threshold of St Mary’s. Here there is a holy emptiness, a wonderful austerity. It is so different from the poky disorder of my own home, where Vinegar Tom drags around his ragged blanket and scratches at his sores with mysterious determination, where mother’s bundled herbs hang drying from the crossbeams and shed their intricate little burrs. When I picture Heaven in my mind, what I see is something like this: Edes’ table of unvarnished hardwood boards, the sunlight finding not a single crumb to glare at, his clean shirt spread before the fire to dry, the blue glazed jug in his washing stand. Even the smells of bacon grease and tobacco smoke drifting up from the inn below are those good and wholesome, fat baby sort of smells. Late at night, when I am alone in my bed, I imagine Master Edes in this lovely clean place, in his lovely clean shirt, reading. Perhaps the Sayings of John Dodd.

  I reach the twenty-third proposition. This is: “I was shaken in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive.” Some nasty thing previously a-doze within me stirs, rears its black nose. I feel my hands squeeze into fists against my skirts.

  “Shape,” Edes interjects.

  I look up, and our eyes meet across the dog-eared pages of the catechism book. He wets his lips. “Shapen in iniquity.” He clears his throat. “How is the heinousness thereof discerned?”

  “By three things. First—that it is the seed of all sin. Secondly, that it hath defiled the whole man. Thirdly, that it never ceaseth to provoke man to sin, as long as he liveth.” It has not yet been a day since I humoured Judith in her foolish game. I dreamed my lewd dream that very morning. And now I sit here and I speak of sin and defilement. Digging my nails into my palms, I feel suddenly that I ought to stand up, as though something execrable is leaking from my body and pooling beneath my skirts, around my seat. I do stand, as though compelled, and press a shaking hand to my brow. Master Edes looks up from the book.

  “Rebecca—are you quite well?”

  I do not know. Something has struck me with a purer terror than any phantom talon in a washbasin. My heart flutters and thuds. I realise in that moment that to be loved by him, or by any man worth loving, would be quite impossible. More than anything in the world I woul
d have him see me, and know me. But if he saw me and knew me truly, he would despise me, despise what it is I hold inside me. I wonder if this is what all women eventually come to know—a choice each comes to make between obscuring her true self in exchange for the false regard of a good man, or allowing herself the freedom to be as she truly is and settling for a brute who couldn’t care less if she is as broken, as coarse, as hopeless as he. Or is it only me? Am I, somehow, wrong? Perhaps other women glide unsoiled through their lives in magnificent simplicity, an inch above the claggy mud, unassailed by crude distraction or unholy impulse. All of this I think, and I am terrified, terrified both for and of myself. “Oh,” I say. Just oh.

  “You are pale as death,” Master Edes says. “Here. Here, sit down.” He stands and gently takes hold of my shoulders, pressing me back down into my seat. Yes. I am desperate for him to tell me what to do, to instruct me. Shaken by iniquity.

  I might be enjoying this, were I not so discomposed.

  “Here. Have a little wine,” says Edes. He fetches a bottle of port and pours us both a cup, pushes one into my shaking hand. Unthinking, I take a gulp, and it is warm and fortifying in my mouth. I take another, and Master Edes smiles with obvious relief, resuming his seat. “There now,” he says, cajoling. “Drown the distemper down.”

  I thank him for his kindness, but he waves his hand dismissively and snaps the catechism shut, taking a gulp of port. He pinches his sandy moustaches between thumb and forefinger, and his eyes settle at last upon my face. “It may not be my place to ask,” he proceeds, nonetheless, to ask, “or within my ability to render assistance, but”—he fumbles around with his words—“does something trouble you, Rebecca?”

  His face is open and earnest as he peers into mine. A high, freckled brow and tired, grey-blue eyes. His teeth are a little large, perhaps, objectively. But I like that. I like the liony flash of them when he throws back his head to laugh, which he does quite often, for a Godly man. It reminds me of the tale of old King David dancing in the temple, lost in rapture.