The Manningtree Witches

by A. K. Blakemore

  I want to tell him. I want to speak to him. I grope about in my brain for something like a beginning. “Many things trouble me, sir,” is the best I can manage.

  He nods, slowly. “Indeed. These are dark times, and readily we believe the Devil might walk abroad, sowing a corruption in our hearts that compounds our earthly miseries.”

  I have never heard him speak like this before, of the Devil. “Do you believe it?” I ask. “That the Devil truly does his work among us?”

  He smiles bitterly, his fingers clasping over the rim of his cup. “Believe it? I know it to be true.”

  “How?”

  “Because I am a man, like any other. Even our Lord Jesus Christ was subject to the Devil’s black coaxing. And by great fortitude alone did he resist.”

  I see something new in him then, sitting across from me at the table. Something scathed. His head is bent over the closed book as though in supplication. His mouth and nose are a young person’s, but there are deep lines on his brow, and his eyes are limned about with red. I remember that he has a day-life, an occupation, outside of our weekly audiences. A shipping clerk: long nights sat in front of dusty account books and pitiless columns of figures, the scratching of a lone quill by candlelight. Thinking of it makes me feel an unspeakable tenderness for him. I want to kiss the lids of his tired eyes, take his face in my hands and bring it to rest on my shoulder.

  “I think I have seen him,” I say, quietly. Why do I say it? I regret it as soon as I have. Master Edes looks up at me, his expression darkening. Perhaps it is the wine, for I seldom drink. Either he will believe me, and find me forever tainted by the association—or he will disbelieve me, and think me nothing but a silly maid who entertains herself with flights of infernal fantasy. Or perhaps there isn’t anything to believe in the first place, and all I am doing is thickening the tissue of deceit between our two hearts. What would I prefer? I grasp in the dark towards him.

  “I know you would not say such things in idleness, Rebecca,” he replies at last, after a long, tremulous silence.

  “Like a shadow, behind me. In the water,” I offer. An explanation that is not an explanation, and could not mean anything to him, but he seems to accept it. Accept it, or ignore it.

  He rises. “The days have grown so short,” he says. He begins to light the candles.

  And I say that I should be getting back to Lawford before Mother misses me—but I make no move to leave, because he sits down all of a sudden, and as I am reaching for my shawl he takes my right hand in his, and presses at my fingers. His palms feel soft and cool. He says my name again, then, says Rebecca, but in a strained, contentious sort of way, as though I have tried to interrupt him. “Rebecca,” he repeats, and I think how wonderful it is to hear one’s name said aloud, to know that a much-beloved mouth shaped itself to the saying of it. “I am saying that I know temptation, because I am a man.” His eyes, those damselfly-blues, are fixed intently on my face, where I feel the colour rising. I think I know what it is he is saying to me, but I dare not believe it, and much less dare return it in kind. I feel like an ear of corn is quivering dry in my throat, scratching at the sides of it. Master Edes’ bed is at my back, in the corner of the room, with the clean white counterpane.

  “Does the Bible not teach that women are worse afflicted by temptation, having weaker spirits than those of men?” I pipe, pointlessly, in the hope of filling the silence.

  Master Edes seems encouraged by this, and tightens his grasp of my hand. His lip curls. “Then perhaps we might both do well to remember,” he says, “that the Devil, that Old Deluder, works hardest where he feels himself to be most despised.” He turns my wobbling girlhand upwards in his lap, and traces his fingertips over the rough skin at the saddle of my thumb. Oh, God. My hands, rough-skinned, coarsened by lye and burning water and whisker-scars from hearth tending. Hands small and so, so crude against his long, eloquent fingers. I suppose the innkeeper does all of that for Master Edes, those daily chores. Or the innkeeper’s wife. Or the innkeeper’s girl. And then I feel a sudden and unjustified surge of proprietorship over Master Edes and his chamber both, and against whatever little slut of an innkeeper’s girl there might be. I feel I should say something, and so I say his name, “Master Edes,” and then I feel that bilious turn again. We are alone and he is touching me, and not in a manner to which I am used. Whether it is because it all feels so abrupt, or because my humours simmer still from the morning’s orchard-dream, I could not say—but something causes me to withdraw my hand and glance towards the chamber door, which we leave always ajar for propriety’s sake.

  And Master Edes sees me look towards the door and withdraws his own hands, raising them, open in apology. “Forgive me, Rebecca,” he sighs. “You are troubled. I sought only to offer succour. But perhaps it is not my place.”

  I know this to be a lie, but it sounds true enough to loosen the knot of nerves in my chest, and I am grateful for it. I watch him finish his port, then rise and refill his cup, and I do not know how to begin to explain what it is I want from him. It is strange, how you can want something terribly—like a man, or to die—and at the same time be frightened to the dipping point of the heart by it. Really, I think, as I watch him linger by the hearth with his head bowed, I know so little about him, and nothing he does not wish me to know. I would like to know a secret about him. Perhaps the best thing of all would be to be a secret about him. A precious torment. An unforgettable shame.

  I stand, and the bells of St Mary’s sound from somewhere between cloud and mud-clagged street outside, calling the devout to Evening Service, and quelling my voluptuary daring. Instead of moving to where he stands by the fire and pressing my tongue to the pulse of life on his soap-sweet throat, as I would like to, I stand stupidly by the table, and say, “How fares Mister Hopkins at the Thorn?” with forced politeness and much too loudly.

  Edes looks up at me, surprised. “Mister Hopkins? Well. Business is . . . slow, now, of course. Now that the weather has turned. Rebecca—” He looks away from the fire and up into my face, again, his tone quietly scrupulous. “I think it would be best—that is, I think you have the good sense, to not speak of . . . of what we have spoken of here today to any other.”

  The Devil and his temptations, or the business with the handholding? I think it best not to ask, and so I nod, obediently, and draw my shawl on around my shoulders. As I gather my things up to leave—my basket, cloak, ragged woollen gloves—a sense of desolation seems to creep on me. I take surreptitious looks at him standing over the fire, apparently deep in thought. We have somehow blundered about each other, the thread missing the needle’s narrow eye. Thread and needle, well. But too late. “Good night, Master Edes,” I say, standing at the doorway, and, “God keep you. John.”

  He nods, but makes no answer. I close the door behind.

  Outside, Market Street is little more than a reservoir of churned black mud. A drizzle falls light, of the eyelash-clinging kind. There are scarce any abroad in the gloomy street, and the only sound besides the evening bells is the yapping laughter of the three Wright children, thin and poorly dressed. They berate and jostle at a fat black hog who has nosed his way through the neighbour’s crumbling sty wall and into Goody Wright’s shed, as hogs have a way of doing, because they are clever and frightened of nothing. Goody Wright herself, languid in despair, watches her broodlings’ ineffectual assault from the stoop, the hog happily munching through her stacked winter provisions. How simple, the life of beasts, who were not made in the image of God. What they see and want, they move to take, happy as can be.

  As I begin the long walk home, the closing parts of Gouge’s catechism unspool in my mind. In the end of the world the son of man shall send forth his Angels, and they shall gather out of his Kingdom all things that offend, and them that do iniquity, and they shall be cast into the furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.

  8

  Fire

  IN THE WINTER I AM SOMETIMES GLAD TO RETUR
N home, though my mother be there. Glad of the fire and the bubbling stew, when they are there, glad of the sack of onions in their crackling yellow skins, the tonic fragrance of thyme drying at the doorposts. Small part of the world to loose myself in, where no one who matters will see. But tonight my mother is deep in one of her philosophical episodes, and limply melancholy, and prone to nip at my edges. She moons about the table wrapped in a greying shawl, her hair tangled, distemper writ in the deep lines of her face as she bends over the pot on the hearth. Up she peers when I come in and set to scraping the mud from my clogs. She asks me if I am hungry. Tells me she got a shoulder of mutton on credit.

  I lie to her that I ate at the Moones’. I add that she shouldn’t be getting anything on credit, either, given that winter will be lean and spring is likely to be more so, what with war being what it is (though far away for now, at least, a halter at the neck of the country).

  She watches me, clutching a ladle in one thin hand, the other clasped at the edge of her dirty sleeve. “And where is it you have come from so late, miss?”

  “Master John Edes’,” I say, shortly, in such a manner as I hope suggests I will brook no further enquiry at this time, thawing my feet by the fire.

  “Did you see Margaret?” she asks.

  “Mother Moone’s hard to miss,” I reply, and am pleased with the witticism, though all Mother does is click her tongue and return her attention to the simmering stew, muttering that I am being unkind. There is no conviction in her movements, her words, or even her chidings—she progresses about the kitchen like a wet ghost fated to re-enact the routines of a mortal life tragically curtailed, and by the Devil, it riles me. Sitting by the fire, I go through all the outrageous things I might now say to her that would scarce raise a grimace on her torpor-stricken face. It is like she is barely there. I think I am in love with John Edes, I could say, for instance, and I would eat his beard trimmings if he asked it of me. Or else I think I saw the Devil last night in Judith Moone’s washbasin. But instead I say only, “Where has my knitting got to?”, and untie my sodden cap.

  Mother passes me my knitting and says, lackadaisically, that she thinks we ought not to light the parlour fire for a while. It is only me that tends the parlour fire, and I have not lit it in weeks—but I haven’t the energy to challenge her. “One fire will be quite enough,” I sigh, unwinding my wool. Vinegar Tom slides out from beneath the bench with a big, carnal yawn. He seats himself by the door, ears attuning twitchy to the sounds of the night just-born and squalling beyond the timbers. Of all my mother’s moods, it is this, this sullen abdication of personality, that I hate most. It occasions greater loathing in me than having all the sack jugs in the Tendring Hundred hurled at my head. It feels like a betrayal.

  Outside the clouds sweep their heavy skirts of wind along the Stour, and the chimney whines over the clicking of my needles. Mother sits opposite me, silent and frog-eyed, picking at the loose skin of her neck with idle fingertips. She chews her cheek. And then she begins to talk. She talks very quietly, as though for the benefit of no one but herself. “It wasn’t long after you were born,” she begins. “Your father, God rest, was off and away—in Holland, I think it was. And I was sat by the fire there, dandling you on my knee. Such a pretty babe you were. All that hair, soft as down. You won’t believe . . .” Her voice folds up in a sad, faraway sort of smile. “A night very like this, with a foul blast sucking in the chimney,” she adds, her smile fading as her eyes roll towards the wailing hearth, “there came a man in black. The man in black came and stood there—” She raises a finger and points just before the hearth, to a spot at the edge of the knot-rug. “A man in black with a high-crowned hat. I was alone one moment, and the next . . .”

  I fall still and look up at her. I can tell she sees the man there now, her bloodshot eyes tracking the progress of some obscure visitant around the room, as a cat’s might follow the flakes of dander dancing on a summer updraft. “They do not tell you, before you whelp,” she says, quietly, her eyes still fixed on nothing, “that one moment you are alone, and the next . . . you are still alone. You think, when you are young, that a child is like to a sailor’s knot, or a hairpin—except you push it out rather than in.” She smiles ruefully. “That the child will come and hold everything together, everything in place at last. But it don’t. I mean”—she looks at me, at last—“you didn’t.”

  What am I meant to say to that? I listen, needles poised still in my hands.

  “And there the man in black stands,” she continues, “in a long coat like a presbyter wears, and I sit still and quite dumbfounded. He says I would do well—you would do well, Anne West, I remember it, exactly that—to throw thy babe in the fire. Right then and there. So I kiss your plump little cheeks and I put you down there on the hearthstone, before I can think to know what it is that I am doing . . . and the man in black is gone. Gone as soon as it is done.”

  I listen. I remember a tale of a young wife from Maine, New England, that was passed along the back pews of St Mary’s a year or two hence. It sounded the way many stories that reach the parlours of Essex from the haunted pines of the New World do: our own domestic fancies dropping like a flock of grubby black pigeons on the barest scattering of truth. The girl, they said, was very young, and a simpleton, too. She found herself so transported and affrighted by the sermons of a local preacher that she resolved to throw her newborn babe down the well, and in broad daylight. Charged with killing the child, the Maine woman had said that as she was damned, and as she knew the babe was damned, too, there was little point in indulging either of them with such flummeries as earthly life. Had she not cleverly circumvented the cruelties inherent in God’s plan, while bringing about a conclusion that would no doubt satisfy Him, and all with great expediency? All that remained was for the Justices to complete the job, which the simple Maine girl begged they would with all haste. Duly they did. The girl was hung before the meeting-house, in a clearing amid the spruce, and her sad tale became a moral tract in a grubby pamphlet bought at the yard of St Paul’s in London and read aloud to a thrill of Essex virgins by a travelling messenger. A lesson against presumption.

  My mother continues. “The embers were very hot, and soon enough you were squalling, and wriggling like a worm on a hook, there at the hearthstone. I watched, and I felt very heavy of a sudden, and knew there was nothing I could do even if I had wanted to. And your hair, all that black hair you had, was singeing. My legs were bound together tight. And then”—she smiles—“there’s a knock at the door. In comes Widow Leech—excepting she was no widow then—takes one look about the parlour and seizes you up and away from the fire, shrieking.”

  Vinegar Tom interrupts with an unseemly mewl, galvanised by all this talk of infanticide to resume his own tyranny over the local vermin, and therefore wishing to be let out into the yard. Mother rises from her seat at the kitchen table and opens up the door for him. Out Tom slips and in comes the wind. The candle flame gutters. I start up my knitting again. The violence of my mother’s tale—the burning baby, the baby who is me—moves me not. Blistering skin on fat little arms. No. There is nothing in me for it. Still. I think of it, the man in black, the girl in Maine, the babies on the fire and plashing down the well. There is a pattern to it, like with knitting, a language of it, and it is women’s, and held secret and grey-pink as guts.

  “Leech gave me a sound slap, then grabbed up my hands,” Mother goes on, shutting the door tight and taking up her seat, “and together we prayed.” She is silent for a while, and then adds, “—and I never saw the man in black again.”

  “A man in black,” I repeat. It sounds like I am mocking her, I think. I hope it sounds like I am mocking her, and her man in black.

  She looks at me askance. “You think it was the Devil.”

  I shrug. “It was God that came to Abraham and bid him to slay his son.”

  “God—the Devil. How is a silly woman who signs her name with a cross meant to tell the difference, their methods being
so alike?” She sighs. “Nothing more than my own fancy, maybe.”

  I tell her to leave off, anyhow, or she’ll never think of anything else, which would not do, seeing as we’ve mutton on the boil that needs paying for. And she says back that she bought it off Rivett, who is a drunk and will quite forget the extension of credit. And she calls me Rabbit, and tells me that if there is one thing that she, my old mother, can teach me, it’s to only take credit off men with red-webbed noses. She musters a wink.

  I say, “The eleventh commandment,” and smile, so that she might think we have shared something between us.

  The mutton is good, and lasts us the best part of a week, during which my mother and I find nothing very great to fall out over.

  9

  Maleficium

  IT IS SATURDAY NIGHT. THOMAS BRIGGS IS stripped and deposited peremptorily in a tin bath filled with a half-inch of lukewarm water before the parlour fire. He gathers his skinny legs to his chest and sits there pouting at his knees. Priscilla Briggs, his mother, is secretly pleased by the incipient masculinity evinced by his intransigence in the face of ablution—but not so pleased she will allow him to attend church with rinds of estuary mud beneath his fingernails.

  Goody Briggs herself heads upstairs to lay out her best church gown of black stuff and collar of powdered lace for tomorrow’s service. She instructs Helen, the housemaid, to air her coat. Then she warms a cup of milk with which to see young Thomas off wholesome to bed.

  “And I hope you have remembered behind your ears, this time. Cleanliness is—” But stop. She pushes open the parlour door to the sight of the tin bath upended, and Thomas sprawled face-down on the flagstones, arms stiff and outspread like a corn dolly’s, fitting and twitching.

  Together, Helen and Priscilla carry the boy upstairs to his bedchamber while he hisses and kicks at them both, as wretched as a fox caught in a trap, his eyes rolling back into his head. O God, my boy, my Thomas. Priscilla gasps frantically over bed and boy, pushing his hair away from his damp face and trying to suppress his wild thrashing.