The Manningtree Witches

by A. K. Blakemore

  The rumours begin sober and discriminating, traceable to those with immediate knowledge of the occult affair. Then more arrive at the Briggs’ modest manor, which stands a way back from the road between Mistley and Manningtree in a little garden, dripping and denuded by winter.

  I see visitors going in, gentlemen and goodwives. They carry cakes, pigeon pies and bowls of stewed pear, black pudding and sticky figs. This bounty surely does Goody Briggs no good, as she is committed to fasting in penance for whatever transgression has caused God to forsake her household. But the relative extravagance or miserliness of each gift gives us something else to gossip over, at least. Grist for Manningtree’s brute mill, reputation. I can picture it: the women sitting about Goody Briggs in the parlour, praying most earnestly for the recovery of her Thomas, or else singing tuneless psalms (“Why standest thou so far off, Our Lord?” is a reported favourite). Most men will summon only enough courage to peer gravely around the door to the afflicted boy’s room, I suspect—but perhaps the braver venture in to stand by the bedside, to speak merciful words of scripture over the bewitched, and shake their heads in despair at the ungodliness of it all—Thomas himself fixing a black, discomfiting gaze over the counterpane on whosoever dares to visit him.

  At first the visitors come one by one, but soon their visits overlap, and something of a moribund carnival atmosphere begins to take hold of the lower storey of the Briggs household: there stands the Yeoman Hobday and his wife, rigid and wholesome-looking, who have brought with them a whole trout, filleted and ready for poaching (respectable enough now, but we all know about the time Goody Hobday found out her husband had been at the girl who came to do the milking, and threw his treasured miniature of his mother into the pig slops as revenge while he was away at Ipswich). Here, Minister Long helps himself to his third of Mary Parsley’s oatcakes and admires the scheme of pears on her collar, politely astonished to hear the wonderful broidery is her own work, though her hands be dropsical (they are not, in point of fact, her own work—they are mine). Mister Hopkins glowers over his book by the kitchen hearth. Richard Edwards shepherds young Prudence Hart out to the kitchen garden, his hand hovering disagreeably close to her bum roll. I hear people speak of visiting the Briggs’ across the way much as they would if it were a May dance (though a visit to the bedside of a languishing child is a pastime far more agreeable to the Puritan sensibility than any such heathen spring frolic). Soon, those of us who have not visited become conspicuous by our prolonged absence.

  An air of desperation clings. A sense that appearances must, now more than ever, be kept up. Small talk is made over the raucous crashing from the upper storeys. Priscilla Briggs appears to have aged so dramatically that it could almost count for a bewitchment in itself (or so I hear a cluster of women, thick-cloaked against the cold, muttering by the Market Cross). Her cheeks are said to be hollowed and colourless, her eyes, they say, boggle half out her pinched head. One afternoon, Goody Edwards sees her gold wedding band slip from her attenuated finger and roll right across the hearthrug, which all agree—once Priscilla has vacated the parlour to check on Thomas—can only be a portent exceedingly ill. “She scarce seemed to notice,” reports Mary Parsley, who witnessed the event, to Robert Taylor, the victualler, who did not: “. . . just left it lying there on the floor. The Devil is in that house, and no mistake.”

  If the Devil has made a bed up at the Briggses’, his stratagems seem to me tediously shopworn, and his sallies into the open very arbitrary indeed. Gone to the garden to make water just after nightfall, Mister Stearne swears blind he saw a creature very like a winged monkey amusing himself in the undergrowth. A postman is thrown from his horse as he passes the gatepost. Michael Wright, the scullion lad, develops an unsightly rash, which he aims to hide by growing a spare (and even more unsightly) beard. Every morning, some say, Goody Briggs finds a pin driven shallow into the soft flesh of Thomas’ scalp, just behind the left ear. Some believe it. Most do not.

  I suppose I want something like this to happen to me: I want to see an imp streaking red across the damp lawn. To find myself lamed. I want something to happen that might prove I am still counted on God’s side. So this is why, on the first morning of December, I find myself at the Briggses’ kitchen door with a basket of apples—which are yellow and past their best—and my heart in my mouth, thinking, Devil, hurt me. Devil, show me you hate me, for that I stand among the chosen.

  In the past weeks my thoughts have been much occupied by that uncanny sequence of events begun, I fear, by my own wantonness, and concluding—or so I must hope—here: with a sick child and a grieving mother. I shift foot to foot at the Briggses’ front steps, feeling I am to blame for this. Not in the sense that I did it nor willed it done, but in the sense that I heaped my own sins upon the invisible agglomeration shedding its rot over all of us, manure for the Devil’s dark flowers. Rabbit by the door, blindfold and cabbage, shadow on the water, dream of the orchard, baby in the fire, it cannot mean nothing. These are torrid threads in some ingenious design I lack the circumspection or wit to fully comprehend. Of course, I believe in the Devil. I know myself to be thoroughly beneath his notice. Had thought myself so. But then. But then. He can, after all, be in more than two places, even more than ten places. What is to stop him standing right behind me, there on that doorstep—or at Judith Moone’s washstand—even as he whispers sweet fiendishnesses into the fragrant hair of the Duke of Cumberland, half the country away, as they say that he does?

  But perhaps it pleases me, a little. There is a change in me that has been noticed, and found all at a loss to explain. My mother has commented, eyes narrowed suspiciously, that I look very well indeed. Perhaps it is my winter gown of russet wool setting off the colour in my cheeks. This dress is a hair too short, and last year its scantiness shamed me. But now I stride happily through town in it, threatening to disclose a flash of slender ankle with every foot-trot, and thinking baker or chandler or smith or whomsoever I happen to pass might be very lucky indeed to see a little slice of my white stocking. I touch my neck as I unwind my hair from my cap of an evening, and I feel it to be swan-like. I feel graceful as wingtips, as a woman loved by Satan. But to be loved by God is better, because then your feelings do not matter. To be loved by God is to have your feelings blasted away by love. So ugly men—the kind who look as though they have been shaped to no other kind of love but God’s—write in their books. These are my thoughts. I want everything, deserve nothing.

  So I stand by the Briggses’ back door, clutching tight at the handle of my basket, my breath rising in little puffs before my mouth. If it truly is bewitchment that has befallen Master Briggs, I am resolved to see it for myself. The neat face of the Briggses’ manor—all good red brick and firm bleached beams—is cowing. They have an upstairs. Eight rooms at least, likely more. I count off the windows as I rap at the door, having reached ten by the time Helen Clarke arrives to admit me, in soiled apron and headwrap, black curls bouncing loose at her ears. The look she gives me as I stand there at the entryway is long, hard and reluctant—a look I do not understand, for the two of us are usually friendly enough. (Helen is the Widow Leech’s youngest, and our mutual ignominy thereby assured. But I am prettier than her, I suppose, even with my pox-scars, which is always bound to raise some enmity between two girls who can’t spare a shilling for ribbon nor rouge to remedy their homely presentations.)

  “Helen,” I say, and smiling, dip my head. “I thought I might come to see Goody Briggs, give her my good wishes, and those of my mother.” I have practised this line in my head the whole journey over, and still it comes out wrong. She stands back with a grunt and motions me into the kitchen. A fire burns in the big grate. Copper pans and deep pewter dishes and stoups and porringers in huge number shimmer on the sideboard. A little money can buy so much beauty. I hear voices, three or four perhaps, in the parlour beyond.

  “Better you had not,” says Helen, gruffly, taking my basket to inspect the apples. Helen Clarke is not fair in the w
ay most girls might want to be, but she is soft and smooth-looking and pleasingly coarse, in that way that there seems to be a lot of her that wants a mouth putting on it. Aside from her dark hair, she is not much her mother’s daughter—though she has inherited the Widow Leech’s meddlesome tendencies, along with a line of fine hair over her upper lip.

  I stamp my feet to warm myself up. “And why had I better not?”

  She puts the basket down and fixes me with a challenging look. “Who are we,” she hisses, jabbing a finger at her bosom, “and who are they?” She points at the parlour door.

  I laugh. It is a silly, mincing laugh. “I haven’t the pleasure of knowing yet.”

  Helen’s exacting gaze pares my false jocularity away. “Lor’,” she says, exhaling through her nose, “never let it be said the West women want for audacity. There have been mutterings,” she herself mutters, “of the kind that give rise to accusations. That Mister Hopkins has been round very often indeed.” She shudders. “He is like a handful of snow down the back of your dress, do you not think? The way he looks at people—”

  She pauses as the door to the parlour swings to. There stands John Edes, in a fetching narrow-waisted doublet of dark blue, fastening his cloak at his throat. I like these rare moments when I have seen him before he properly sees me—artless and natural as some baby animal he looks, frowning down at the fiddly clasp. He glances up, and does see me, rallying from his momentary surprise to bow. “Miss West,” he says, gracious in confusion.

  “Master Edes. A surprise to see—” No. Don’t say that, Rebecca. You are no London coquette. Start again. “Master Edes. I thought I would come to see Goody Briggs, to give her my good wishes, and those of my mother. And—apples,” I repeat, feeling the colour rise in my cheeks as Helen peers between us with a slanting grin, and turns away to tend to the fire.

  “Ah. And I am—I am certain she will welcome the kindness.” He smiles, weakly. “I hope you will excuse me. I was just . . .” He gestures vaguely at the door by which I entered. I dip to curtsey, but he has already left the kitchen, without so much as a God bless. A person might think Master Edes wished to avoid my company. In fact, I know already that that is all I will think, for two hours at least, when I head to bed in the evening, and that my sleep shall doubtless suffer thereby. And I wonder if there is any kind of intimacy with another person that isn’t also an indignity, and if some people enjoy this, or if everyone just pretends to.

  Through the open door to the parlour I see a pair of folded legs in a seat before the hearth. Legs in high boots of black leather with spurs at the heel, spurs glinting where they catch the firelight. Mister Hopkins’ boots. So. Edes came with Hopkins.

  “Time to meet your maker, then, as they say.” Helen smirks by my elbow, following my gaze. She slaps a ball of dough down on the table and begins, truculently, to knead.

  I take a deep breath and straighten my apron. I ask Helen how I look.

  She glances up from her work with a sneer. “What do you care? Your sweetheart has just departed.” And she is quite right. What do I care? Nonetheless, I stand there smiling expectantly until she rolls her eyes, and says, “Well enough, I suppose. Now, get thee.”

  I enter the parlour with my eyes lowered in a deferential manner, and because that is how I spend most of my life in public I can identify everyone in the room by what they are wearing from the waist down. On a low bench at the far wall, in heavy black skirts, sit Prudence Hart (hands, as ever, curled protectively around her swollen belly), Priscilla Briggs and Mary Parsley, a mournful triptych. In a high-backed chair by the fire is Mister Hopkins, his gloved hands steepled in his lap. By the door stand Minister Long and Richard Edwards, who always carries a sword despite all knowing he has never done so much as wring a hen’s neck for himself. And they all fall silent as I enter.

  I dip, my hands folded at my back, and address myself to Goody Briggs’ velvets. “Good day and God bless you. I came to pay my respects, Goody Briggs. My mother and I pray most fervently for Thomas’ recovery. I—also I brought some apples. I—Helen sees to them.”

  Before Goody Briggs can answer, a querulous shout comes muffled from upstairs, and then a flurry of footsteps, appended by a bang. “O ho!” cries the Minister, cheery as a child listening to a storm unfold over the bay. “That was a big one!”

  His excitement is not infectious. The women lift their heads to squint uneasily up at the beams, but Thomas’ occult ambulation seems to draw to a temporary conclusion.

  “Is he under watch, mistress?” Hopkins asks.

  “Yes, sir,” Goody Briggs replies. “Doctor Croke attends on him.”

  When I raise my head I find that Priscilla Briggs’ excitable eyes are fixed determinedly upon me. I try to smile, but produce what is probably more of a grimace. Mary Parsley reaches across her lap to take Priscilla’s hand. Like any peculiar girl, I am well attuned to women’s conspiratorial mischiefs: the double-edged laughs, the spider dropped in the ribboned slipper, the implacable nasties we drive into one another like pins into wax poppets. I know that women have a certain look about them when they have recently been speaking of you, just as men have a certain look to them when they have recently been thinking of you unclothed. And Priscilla, Mary and Prudence have been speaking of me. Prudence Hart leans over to whisper something in old Mary Parsley’s ear.

  “I thought,” I say, trying to stop my voice from shaking, “I thought that I might see Master Briggs? I should like . . . I should like to convey my good wishes to him directly.” I bite my lip.

  “I shall not have—” Priscilla blurts, and I know she intended for her next words to be you going near him, but a censorious squeeze of her hand from Mary Parsley reminds the Goody Briggs of the requirements of propriety. Priscilla recomposes herself, straightening her back in her stays. “I mean to say—Thomas is resting, at present. I think it would not be—”

  “I will accompany Miss West to his chamber,” Hopkins interrupts, rising from his seat by the fire.

  Goody Briggs glances between Hopkins and myself, her mouth frozen in a tight O of surprise. I can tell that she would very much like to protest, but she will not—cannot—enter into open contention with a man. Besides, Hopkins is not just a man. He is that man, now, with his Cambridge education and his continental mores. They say he speaks French. His whole manner intimates a secret knowledge of the scheme of things. A sudden image comes into my mind of Mister Hopkins lifting his high-crowned hat to reveal an intricate mechanical replica of the world entire in miniature, as the inner workings of a clock, replete with a fur of cloud scudding over the midget oceans, like rot on a peach. Hopkins says it, and it is so.

  Their five pairs of eyes are all fixed on Hopkins as he walks across the parlour towards me, his spurs scraping on the flagstones, and waves me towards the stairs. “Please, Miss West,” he says, with a cold smile, “follow me.”

  Thomas Briggs’ chamber is meagrely lit by reed, and wretched with a midden-stink. A sampler hangs above the bed: “THE FEAR OF THE LORD IS A FOUNTAIN OF LIFE.” Doctor Croke sits in a low chair by the fire, apparently asleep, but Thomas lifts his head from the pillow at the sound of our approach, his eyes wet. “Oh,” he says, quietly. “You have brought one.”

  One what. One what? I regret my curiosity very quickly indeed as I feel Hopkins place a firm hand on my shoulder, pressing me to the threshold. “Know you this maid, Thomas?” he asks.

  “Yes,” he replies. “Her father died at sea.” His mouth twitches into something like a smile, as though his spirit is perhaps momentarily enlivened by the thought of nautical jeopardy. So there is still a little boy somewhere in there.

  “And after that?” Hopkins continues, his fingers tightening on my upper arm.

  I begin to tell Thomas that I have come to wish him swift recovery from his present indisposition, but the boy seems discomposed. He begins to whine, and slam his sticky head back into the pillows most violently as I speak. His thin arms rise up, shaking, and wave about in the
air, as though he is attempting to wrestle some invisible aggressor away from his heaving chest. “Make her stop!” he croaks. “It hurts me!”

  I try to step back, but Hopkins’ gloved hand twists at my shoulder and holds me firm. “Tell me what you see, Thomas. What is it that assails you?”

  Whatever it is seems to vex Thomas so wonderfully that he can barely form words, his arms spasming back and forth through the air, his face bloodless. “It—it sits on me,” he wheezes. “Like a shadow. A dark thing!”

  “Good God!” Doctor Croke is finally woken by the boy’s wailing, and leaps to the bedside. Before I can know what is happening, Hopkins has wrenched me back from the threshold by my arm and into the next room, slamming the door closed behind us. I am frightened. As soon as he releases me, I back as far away from him as I am able, and peer about—a bench, a broken spinning wheel, an empty bookcase. Hopkins stands with his shoulder pressed to the door, a dark, gloating look on his face. My shoulder burns where he held it. I touch the place where there will be a bruise.

  “How did you do it?” he asks. He is smiling.

  “Do what, sir?”

  “The Incubus,” he replies, simply.

  I tell him I cannot begin to know what an Incubus is, sir, much less summon one. There is a tarnished candlestick on the bookcase, by the window—if I could just get to it— Then you would what, Rebecca? Beat him about the head with it?

  “An Incubus is a demon, Miss West,” Hopkins breathes, moistening his lips. “A demon conjured from Hell, to serve a witch, by the power of her compact with the Devil.” Hopkins is excited. Excited in the way men get when they read about wars or Turkish dancing girls. His pupils have grown wide and a single black ringlet clings to the corner of his wet mouth. A little sunlight must break through the cloud and fall through the window at my back, because my shadow slides across the dusty boards, touches his boots.