The Manningtree Witches

by A. K. Blakemore

“In the water. In Judith Moone’s bedchamber, the washbasin.”

  “The Devil in water . . .” she mutters, her chin pressed to the crown of my head. “The Devil in water stands for evil deep in the heart.”

  I begin to whimper again, but Mother gives my shoulders another awkward squeeze. “Peace, Rabbit,” she tuts. “Not your heart, child. The Devil doth govern our world by God’s consent, it is true, but his mere image holds no special power. Who knows what king means, these days? Let alone Devil. Strange times. Much that seemed it would always be melts away under us from the fire of men’s hearts. Aye,” she sighs, “and women’s hearts, too. Your life will not be like mine. It will not be like the life of anyone who went before. I know that rightly enough. You will live to see I’m right. Tooth and nail, Beck. That’s all we need.”

  We embrace for quite some time there at the bedside, listening to the shudder of the fire. I think she is wrong, but I love her for it.

  14

  Warrant, Testimony

  THE NEXT MORNING STEARNE HAS HIS BOY saddle up his best horse—a fine bay mare named Cassandra—for the ride over to Bradfield Hall. I have never seen Bradfield Hall, but I have heard that the Baronet keeps white peacocks and that the house itself has no fewer than six chimneys.

  A fine vapoury sleet falls, melting the snow, and Stearne is soaked to the bone by the hour of his arrival. Cassandra trots down a wide drive of oak, through to the Baronet’s extensive stables. The horse is unsaddled and a liveried footman leads the rider through to the office of Sir Harbottle Grimston, 2nd Baronet, deputy lieutenant of Essex. Stearne must wait. His boots squeak wet on the polished marble. He sits, then stands again, then removes his hat. The second-richest man in Manningtree he may be, but he remains a simple rustic in the eyes of so lofty a personage as the Baronet, with his six chimneys and innumerable peacocks.

  While he waits, he inspects a dusty tapestry hanging by the door: a fox weaves his way through silver grasses pursued by a clutch of huntsmen in antique hose and doublets, and a flock of agitated ducks with gold-tipped wings bursts across the blue velvet sky. I like to imagine that Mister Stearne realises—just as the door to the Baronet’s office swings open, and he is ushered in—that he quite desperately needs to piss, and that he sits there rocking uncomfortably to and fro before the Baronet’s vast mahogany desk for the duration of their audience. But none witness Stearne’s meeting with the Baronet to tell of it. He leaves with a warrant for the arrest of Elizabeth Clarke, orders to search whatever property the vagrant woman has, and instructions to elicit, if possible, a confession of maleficium (before no fewer than two respectable witnesses, as Deuteronomy exhorts).

  I spent the day on my knees scraping rotten chicken shit off the flagstones of Mother Clarke’s cottage, in preparation for her return. I am alone. There are things I do not want to touch: a shrivelled, sour-smelling item like a prune studded with nails beneath her pillow, oily little vials of cloudy liquid. By mid-afternoon the sleet has stopped, and low grey clouds transude instead a filmy sunshine. On his way home, Mister Stearne must have ridden across the top of the village green, and from there looked out over the damp thatched roofs of Manningtree, and the mudflats beyond shimmering ever so prettily. In the distance, ships’ masts cluster round the smoky harbour of Felixstowe and the perpetual fires of the wrights’ yards. Melting snow drips from the gutters and sills all down South Street. Already, it seems, spring is sweeping winter briskly away, the sap is rising in the meadows.

  Allow me to conjecture. He is pleased with himself, pleased with the way his audience with the Baronet has transpired. He knows he has a busy week ahead, that there is much work to be done. Testimony to be collected and formalised, witnesses to be rallied. As Cassandra trots past the Red Lion, Stearne is seen to smile magnanimously at the simple folk gathered beneath the eaves with their tobacco pipes and mugs of beer, at the butcher’s boy scraping pink-tinted slush from the stoop of his master’s shop, at sweet little Prudence Hart tripping down the hill with her basket of cakes and a bellyful of baby. Their innocence is touching to him. They cannot hear the furry imps nibbling at their claws behind the plaster, cannot see the hexes blasting through the ether above their heads. But Mister Stearne of Manningtree can.

  John and Matthew. I suppose they think themselves like the Apostles, putting on all of God’s armour, raising high their swords of flame. I have only my wits as armour, and in place of sword, the bundle of rushes that serves Mother Clarke for a broom.

  The men walk about town together in a little company, and with a sense of purpose—a purpose everyone knows. They are inquisitors. Hopkins leads, tall and Bible-black, his spurs click clicking on the rain-chilled cobbles. Next the portly Mister Stearne, wearing his fine-furred riding cloak and his wide grin of money. A few paces behind them walks my dear, sweet John Edes, his hat pulled low over his eyes, a battered leather portfolio of loose-leaf papers held tight under his arm. There are some addresses at which they know to call. Certain individuals they summon through the Wright lad, who would labour up and down Sinai itself for a glittering penny. Still more, hearing of the gentlemen’s righteous undertaking, volunteer themselves for interview, cautious or defiant, pious or vengeful—it makes very little difference to Hopkins. All can agree—things haven’t been right for a while. Our conjoint misfortune has been too rigorous, runs the tattle. Our newborns are sickly, our pies raw in the middle, cats scream in the alleys all night long and the butter will not turn. The world froze over, and now rots from within.

  They begin to call Hopkins “Witchfinder.” The ragged little children chase after him in the street as a dare, or prance over the mud in the wake of his determination, singing of Old Mother Goose and her fine gander. Some say he carries a book about his person in which are written the names of all Sathan’s servants the world over, and that either the book must be very large or the writing in it very small and cramped. This is, of course, untrue. He holds all our names in his head, and has no need of such banal memoranda.

  Master Edes—a true professional—is, they say, methodical in his record-keeping. At the Thorn, or at a meagre kitchen table, or even on the carpenter’s workbench, he spreads open the portfolio, lights a candle stub, slices a fresh quill, and arranges pounce pot and ink well. I wonder if the ritual of it soothes his unease? I wonder if he feels any? In crisp hand, he dates and titles a fresh leaf for each separate visit: March 1. 1644, March 2. 1644, March 3. 1644. The Testimony of _________. Whereas Hopkins’ method is apparently inconsistent, and consistently mystifying. Of course, sometimes he need not employ method at all; some know what it is they must say, what names they ought to mention, and what compelling detail they might provide. Others must be prompted or cajoled like children before the grace—have their mouths opened for them, the black ribbon carefully unspooled from their tongues. Be told, in so many words, what it is that has happened to them. Some require assurances that they will be protected from further harm befalling them. Others seem to desire it, because anything is better than being overlooked, even by the Devil himself. I hear of two who wept. I can guess the ones who raged and blustered and banged their fists against the table, causing Master Edes to besmirch his perfect shorthand with a jump in his seat. Some, I imagine, were embarrassed by the oddity of what they had to tell. Some, I suppose, made it up word for word as they went along. I think of the maids. The maids, like me. The maids who perhaps knew me. The maids with their white sickness and dainty lace collars. How might I have behaved, confronted with the diligent attentions of three men, two of them young and unmarried? Blush and giggle, or else fall into embarrassed silence? We never want to say what has happened to our bodies, to describe what thing it was that sat on our breasts, or what we felt stroke at our bellies. I imagine it was hard to bring answers forth from the girls. I imagine that they did not want the men to notice they had bodies at all. Or else they wanted it too much, tugging on their stays and smearing jam on their cheeks to serve as rouge. You would not think it to look at us, so
alike in outward semblance, but there are many different sorts of girl, many different thoughts beneath our little starched caps of perfect white.

  Minister Long is one of the first volunteers. I picture him trembling on the parsonage settle, beneath a sampler stitched by his predecessor’s rheumy-eyed wife. The Minister tells of how, a little over a year ago, he was riding back from Colchester. He had a copy of Sandys’ new Metamorphoses in his left breast pocket (this detail embarrasses him, for the frontispiece depicts two bare-breasted goddesses, but Hopkins assures the jittery young Minister that he is likewise an admirer of the pagan poet, though he would not ordinarily boast of it).

  The Minister tells how he passed a dog on the other side of the road, at the turning overhung by the old oak. A big dog like a deerhound, with dark fur. The dog trotted on by, seeming to pay no mind to the Minister and his horse. “As if the beast had pressing business of his own up in Colchester,” Long chuckles, nervously wetting his lips. He relates how a peculiar feeling came over him then. The skin prickled at the back of his neck. Seeing that no master followed after the hound, the Minister drew his reins and went to call to it, whereupon he saw that the great dog had paused at the turning and was regarding him over a matted shoulder. He saw also that its eyes were not like a dog’s eyes, nor like the eyes of any other animal. He says how those eyes, formerly so docile, now seemed to flame red and drip black all at once, set in a long face like a frayed rag. His horse—a very sweet and placid mare—started from the spot. The Minister was thrown to a verge not half a mile from that inauspicious turning. He must have fainted, for a time, and surely that hellhound would have come to rip his gut hot from his belly, was the power of God not greater than that of the Devil. His horse, however, pined and wasted to death within the month.

  Robert Taylor, the victualler. Above his shop on Market Street, where the good sourness of onions masks the smell of muck running in the rutted road outside, he tells them his story. Taylor is a stout, weather-bitten man, and I picture him relating it with a certain degree of scepticism, one beetle brow upraised throughout. His tale concerns Liz Godwin—a new name, but not an entirely unexpected one. Taylor tells of how Godwin came to his shop a few weeks ago, asking if she might be trusted for a half pound of butter. Not in the habit of extending credit to the meaner sort of Manningtree folk, Taylor denied her. “So off she goes,” he says, chewing his lip, “muttering and mumbling all peculiar.” A short while later she returned with money, and so he cut her the butter after all and thought no more of it. That night as he knelt down at his bedside to pray, he was disturbed by a noise from the shop below. “A tumult—a strange . . .” Frowning, he slaps the palm of his calloused hand against the table, demonstratively, rattling Master Edes’ ink well. “A shaking, in the walls.”

  Out he went in his nightshirt, lantern in hand, and followed the noise round to the stables, where he found his old mule in a most excitable state. In a seeming frenzy, she bucked and threw herself against the walls of her box, again and again, so hard her fur was stippled over with blood. She could not be calmed, and Taylor knew not what could have affrighted her. So he called a farrier, and then a second farrier, and both said there was nothing else that could be done but restrain her and hope the distemper would pass. So that is what they did. But all night long she whined at the halter and rolled her desperate eyes, as though assailed by some invisible swarm, as though white-hot sparks burned holes in her greying hide. Taylor says he had never seen the like of it, leastwise not in a mule, “except,” he gulps, his eyes moistening—

  “Except you have,” Hopkins interpolates, delicately. “Master Briggs. God rest him.”

  Taylor nods, slowly. The seams of his eyes glisten with moisture. “I have heard much sermonising in my years, gentlemen,” he sighs. “Many presbyters with their talk of sinners afire forever in Hell. But I never did—I never could see . . .” He wipes his running nose on his shirtsleeve, clears his throat. “She was a good old thing.”

  The Minister has lost a horse and the victualler a mule—but the Yeoman Richard Edwards, not to be outdone in anything, lays claim to a virtual shambles. Stroking at his fine whiskers, he tells of driving his herd through to pasture on Wormwood Hill one bright Sunday afternoon, hard by the hovel of Old Mother Clarke. All of a sudden, a white heifer keeled as though lame and promptly expired, her eyes rolling back into her blunt skull. On the following Wednesday, at that very same spot and that very same hour, a black also met her end. And another, and another, each as if struck by invisible lightning. He had them opened up, these cows—set the farmhands to comb every inch of steaming viscera—but no pustule nor poison could be discovered that might have caused their abrupt demise. He could find no explanation for this mysterious—and costly—plague, at least not until now. He is a Godly man, and a righteous one, the father of four healthy sons. The Lord has seen fit to shower him with all manner of blessing. Why would he turn heel and look to curse him now? He feels himself to be interfered with, and it is embarrassing for a man of his quality to feel interfered with.

  Master Edes perhaps feels a twinge of dubiety as regards Richard Edwards. “The way he tells it”—he leans across to mutter at Stearne—“you might think Old Mother Clarke was crouched at her kitchen window with a musket.”

  For most in Manningtree the loss of a healthy steer or a good milker ranks among the greater calamities. The loss of a child, especially a girl child, is a more minor misfortune. Of course there is weeping, and fasting, too. But people do not speak of it openly, because it happens all the time, and because God wills it. There can be scarce a house the whole town over that lacks the little unsanctified spot nestled beneath the bramble-patch, a name or three struck over on the inside cover of the family prayerbook. But this time is notable for there being so few healthy babes born in Manningtree, and still fewer living to be weaned from the breast. I suppose Hopkins, Stearne and Edes visit with midwives and wet-nurses, hearing stories of mysterious fevers and limbs contorted in cradles. As though the Angel of Death had passed over unbidden in the night, as happened long ago in Egypt. The thing that came out of the mother with three lolling, dead legs sprouting from each hip. The big-eyed boy found cold in his cot. The toddler who lost her footing at the creek. Doubtless they saw much women’s weeping. I wonder if they found it unseemly? I wonder if Hopkins, ever composed and gracious, offered to pray with them—if he took their hands in his and knelt, and said, “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the Kingdom of Heaven,” or else, “In my father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?”

  And if, once their prayer was done, he would ask the downcast woman where her babe died, and who she knows liveth close by, and who hath taken the babe to nurse, and had laid a hand on it and called it a pretty child, touched the cheek? And which answer he received—West, Moone, Godwin, Clarke, Leech?

  15

  Fornication

  I AM ALONE IN THE HOUSE WHEN I HEAR A knock at the door. This can only mean trouble, as it is near to midnight, and if it were my mother returning from the inn she would bray at me through the window to open the door sooner than do anything so genteel as knock on it. So I take up the iron poker from the hearth and open the door up the barest crack. There, panting at the threshold, stands Master John Edes, his collar drawn up high over his face and the brim of his hat glittery with raindrops. His eyes move from my head—which, blushingly, I remember is bare—to the poker in my hand. “I came alone,” he blurts. “Fear not, Miss West.”

  Aye, I think, but why did you come? I have not seen Master Edes in nearly two weeks. In truth, I have kept well away, for where Edes is, is Hopkins, too. I open the door a little wider and look out. There is a rare clarity to the damp air—the moon peers from behind a plume of cloud. In one direction, an evening rain velvets the estuary and the distant rooftops of the silent town. In the other, the open country and wide, wet unsown fields where the pipis
trelles make their nightly sport. He came alone, all right. I settle my eyes back on his face. Now, I am circumspect enough to have wondered, before, if my attachment to Master Edes—my overwhelming faith in his personal beauty—is genuine, or the result of a severely curtailed set of expectations: my idle fancy stretching her aery hand for the lowest-hanging fruit, and buffing it up to shine. But there he stands with his hand hooked into his belt, chest heaving as he catches his breath, blue eyes tilted upward into my face, and I feel thoroughly vindicated in my adherence to the credo of Edes. I also feel a soft twisting sensation between my thighs. I have said nothing yet. What to do? What am I doing? Hurriedly I grab my cap and shawl up from the bench and arrange myself beneath them as best as I can. “The Beldam’s out at the Red Lion,” I explain, and prop the poker down by the lintel.

  “I came to see you,” Edes replies, wholly missing my meaning, God bless him. But as I step out into the drizzle I see that his face is grave, and pale. And I realise—something has happened. Not a usual thing. This is the look of a man who has broken faith.

  “You have come from the Thorn?” I ask. “Hopkins?”

  He nods, significantly.

  So, well. Our time is limited. I bid him wait and snap the door shut, finding a cloak and a candle stub, then move back out again, shielding the dim light with a shaking hand. “Does he know you have come?” I ask, shoving my stockinged feet into my pattens. I take another look down to the distant glitter of the Stour, the huddle of rooftops and chimneys stacked at the estuary’s hip.

  “No,” he says. “But I shall soon be missed. He sent me to fetch the Minister . . .”

  “Come.” I take hold of his arm and lead him around the back of the house and up the narrow hill path, the thump of my clogs muffled as the trampled dirt of the yard gives way to the mulch of the wood. I do not know what it is that I am doing—almost. It feels automatic, instinctual, like a cat crawling under the bed on its belly when a stranger calls. In the house I feel bad, exposed, I need to go somewhere I am able to think. I need to go somewhere something can happen, if I feel I need it to. There are trees. They close in over our heads, releasing a silver music of drips when our passage disturbs the lower branches. Eventually we reach a clearing, and I stop, and Master Edes stops a yard or so behind me. He is finally recovered from his sprint, wan in the candle’s tiny light.