The Manningtree Witches

by A. K. Blakemore

  Where, possibly, might we begin? It is Master Edes who speaks first, fast and grim: “Mister Stearne has secured an arrest warrant for Mother Clarke,” he says. “And he gathers evidence against your mother, and Margaret Moone, and—”

  “Judith?”

  “Judith Moone is at the Thorn. Seemingly she is bewitched.”

  Judith, bewitched? I stare blankly at him, feeling the cold rain slide down under my cloak. He begins his story. He explains how earlier that evening Hopkins, Stearne and himself were gathered by the fire in the Thorn Inn to collate that day’s testimony, when there comes an unexpected and timorous knock on the door. It is Judith Moone—or, as Stearne called her, “that little redhead with the scabby mouth.” At the door, she declares to an astonished Hopkins, “I have come to tell thee of the sins of Margaret Moone, my mother, which are many, and very grave.”

  Judith is shown into the parlour, where Edes sits massaging his ink-stained hand. Hopkins bids her take a seat by the hearth, and Edes notices that she is clutching at her sleeve most anxiously (because she had not thought so far ahead, and realised then she would have to extemporise, I think, bitterly). The three men cluster opposite her, at the other end of Hopkins’ study. Hopkins motions for Edes to turn a fresh leaf, and for Judith to begin her story.

  Judith tells them how some months ago her mother bid her to go and fetch wood from the yard, but as it was the time of her bleeding, and as she was racked with great pain (Master Edes flushes as he relates her testimony), she said that she would not. “My mother threatened me then,” Judith claims. “She said I had as best go fetch the wood or . . . or something very terrible would befall me.”

  Hopkins asks, did Margaret Moone speak more precisely to the nature of this terrible evil? And Judith says, she did not. But the next night as she lay in bed she felt something clambering about on her legs. Groping for the candle, she searched through the bed covers—but could find nothing there. Hopkins blinks. Master Edes could tell that he was disappointed (expecting the crimson burst of infernal flowers, he has received only a damp squib).

  But there is more, Judith insists. Margaret Moone utters profanities, and often speaks of matters so lascivious that Judith dare not, for modesty’s sake, repeat her words. Margaret asks for the Devil to take so-and-so, or the Devil to dog the steps of him or her. She keeps an imp! Hopkins leaps to attention at this. Edes underlines the word twice—. Can Judith describe this imp?

  It is small and grey and “very like a mouse,” she says. But it is not a mouse? The girl shrugs.

  “Does the imp have a name?” he next enquires.

  Judith scratches at the corner of her mouth. “Jack,” she answers.

  And what of her coven? Hopkins proceeds to ask all manner of questions concerning the Widow Moone’s presumed confederacy with Mother Clarke and the Beldam West. To Judith’s knowing, have the three women ever met at strange hours, perhaps in a meadow, or the wood? Judith says, unhelpfully, that she cannot rightly remember any such meetings being spoken of.

  At this point in the relation of the evening’s strange events, Master Edes lowers his voice and gazes stolidly down at his feet, as though embarrassed. I take a small step closer to hear him explain that Hopkins then asks Judith if her mother bears any witch-marks, or teats, perhaps about her secret parts. Judith pulls a face, and says—Edes’ cheeks are crimson as he tells me this—“I have not seen her secret parts, sirrah, since I came from them. But if you would care to look for yourselves . . .” And then she laughs, and they all see a strange and wicked brightness come into her eyes. Throwing her head back and slipping her narrow hips forward, she begins to hitch her skirts up over her thighs, baring her naked calves, and laughing ceaselessly. Master Edes averts his eyes from that strange, sordid spectacle. Hopkins, however, moves to admonish her, and reaches out an arm to take hold of the girl’s quivering shoulder—at which point she throws her chair out behind her with a terrible bawl and falls across the hearthrug onto her back, tearing at her bodice and cap.

  Mister Hopkins cries that the girl is possessed, and presses down upon her shoulders while Stearne endeavours to take control of her flailing legs. “As we draw near the truth, the Devil stops her tongue!” Hopkins cries. Edes is ordered to fetch the Minister at once.

  Edes springs to his feet and asks if he ought to bring Doctor Croke with him as well, but Hopkins insists a physick will not be necessary—he does, however, bid him to make haste and fetch a Godly woman, too, perhaps Goody Briggs or Mary Parsley, for to search the girl for witch-marks. And while he instructs Master Edes in all this, Judith twists and howls on the floor between them, her face glistening and contorted. “God! Deliver me!” she screeches. “Deliver me from evil! He fills my mouth with his—all up with his . . .” And she begins to choke and gurgle obscenely. The Devil is there in the room with them, and Hopkins could not look more pleased at finally having drawn the man himself down from the gossamer barricades.

  Master Edes describes how he watched Hopkins bear down upon the trembling maid, beads of sweat prickling on his brow, and was filled with an unaccountable horror. Hopkins was correct. There was a presence in that room, unnameable and undeniable and full of wickedness, a shadow crouched somewhere above, with forked tongue unfurled. Hopkins stood, then, and peered about the study still and poised, like a scent hound readying himself to flush a rabbit out. “I know you are come,” he said, appearing to address thin air. “I know you are come,” he repeated, louder, to compete with Judith’s pitiful whimpering, “and I shall cast you back into the abyss. For yea, he would raise his throne above the stars of God, and make himself like the Most High!” Then he fell to his knees beside Judith, and took hold of her shoulders and thrust her back hard against the floor, shaking her. “But you are brought down to the realm of the dead, to the depths of the pit! Begone, false prophet! Begone!” he shouted, and Judith quivered and retched in his arms, as though a charge passed through her body. And Master Edes fled, then, with Judith’s infernal wailing ringing in his ears, and the brightness of the fire burnt violet in his eyes. He ran—not southwards towards the parsonage as Hopkins had bid him, but towards Manningtree. He passed the Briggses’ now-empty house, the garden snarled with weeds, and the Parsleys’ cottage by the water, and the Wormwood Hill path. He ran here. He ran to me.

  All this he relates with the look of a man haunted, starting at every benign forest sound, and struggling to meet my gaze across the muddy glade. When he is done he takes a deep, rattling breath, and appears to brace himself, as though preparing to meet a blow. But I laugh. I cannot help it. I laugh, loud and full, and stamp my patten into the muddy ground. Of course. That is what I should have done. That is how I might have protected myself. Clever Judith felt what way the wind was blowing. I wonder—would it be too late for me to do the same? Turn up at Hopkins’ door and throw myself upon his mercy, the Devil’s wounded dupe? Master Edes peers at me, confused. “Do not worry,” he reassures, uselessly, “Judith is . . . is quite well.”

  “Oh, I’ll bet she is.”

  His lower lip quivers. I see that he had a notion of how this would all go. He presumed that I would think him heroic, for shucking the bonds of his complicity with Hopkins. He presumed that I would be grateful to him, for bringing me this warning. And now I am none of these things and he is left standing alone on the arid spire of his expectation. “Rebecca . . .” he mutters, helplessly.

  “She feigns, you realise? She feigns it to save herself and damn her mother.”

  “I—” Master Edes narrows his eyes and tweaks at the corner of his wet moustache. “The thought had entered my mind. I did not wish to impugn your friend—”

  I let out another hollow laugh. “Oh, I know very well she is a liar. And an actress. I just feel a fool for not thinking of it first.” I begin to pace back and forth across the clearing, pressing my hand to my brow. The candle fizzes close to my bowed face.

  “Perhaps—” Edes ventures. “Perhaps it would be best if you leave. For
the time being, at least. Until their fervour cools. There will be tradesmen bound for Colchester—you could—”

  “Colchester?” I interrupt, incredulous. “I think it might take more than ten miles to deter Mister Hopkins. He has the wind of angels’ wings at his back, after all. When will they come?”

  The deputy lieutenant’s warrant for Mother Clarke will be fulfilled tomorrow, he explains. They will go to search her little house on Wormwood Hill, and there apprehend her.

  I steel myself. I stop in my tracks. “Why is it you help me?” I ask him. Though I think by now I know very well why he is here, I decide I will no longer allow him the privilege of silence in this matter. He must speak it.

  He wets his lips. “Because whatever dark connivances may be at work—I know you are innocent of them. Or—or drawn into them unwittingly, or against your will, perhaps, by your mother,” he says, his voice fervent. And then he moves towards me and takes hold of my arm, and our faces can be no more than a palm’s-length apart when the candle fizzes out, extinguished by the rain, and I lose his eyes to the moonshadow cast by the brim of his hat. “I am a Godly man, Rebecca,” he says, his voice hoarse, his grasp of me tight.

  Innocent, he thinks me, of whatever dark connivances may be at work. I laugh again, I cannot help it. I know it is a nettling, delirious laugh. He takes hold of my waist, and I feel my legs weaken beneath me. And I am angry then, quite suddenly, like a cornered thing, thinking, how dare he, how dare he. “Am I?” I find myself asking. “Innocent, indeed? Because I do not feel it, sir. I say my catechism and sing the psalms and I feel nothing, no grace. Cold and dry as stone inside. And perhaps that is what the Devil is, really. Not your lion, not your Frenchman in a tall hat—a nothing. So what do you feel, John? Godly man that you are?”

  I am shaking in his arms and near to weeping, and it is at that moment he chooses to kiss me, his beard cold and wet and all the blood rushing to pullulate at the surface of my skin, and when we part we are both shaking. I cannot see him but feel him, his heart beating against the worsted of his doublet, and then against the thin stuff of my nightgown, and through the smooth cold glass of rain. The candle stub slips from my hand as that hand finds a way to the sliver of skin at his throat, where I feel his pulse, warm and quivering, soap-sweet. How strange it feels to be so close to another’s real animal of a body, the hum of their blood. I gulp. I tell him I want someone to tell me how it feels, that I need to feel how it might feel to be loved, to be loved by God.

  And of course we fall, then, to the forest floor. I feel my patten slip from my foot as he moves on top of me, fumbling with his belt, his knuckles grinding against my hip, and there—there it is inside, a curious feeling, a sting at first, but pleasant enough after a fashion: a kind of precious agony. I close my eyes so that I might better commit the feeling of it to memory. A heat at the bottom of the belly, an all-you-are gathered together and tied together with a velvet bow. He thrusts back and forth, breathing onto my neck. I am being deflowered, I think, to make it real. I am no longer a maid. I am sinning. I am sinning, quite decisively. I am fornicating with Master John Edes, the clerk. I find myself admiring the dainty filigree of the interlocking treetops. The mud is cold and gritty between my toes. Thrust, thrust. I wonder if he has done this before. I want to ask him if he has done this before, in some other forest on some other wet, climactic night? Would a yes wound me? Probably. Are these irregular thrusting motions practised? Do they show evidence of experience? I cannot tell. How and where is it that men learn these things, anyway? Or is it an inborn knowledge? I try very hard to remain present in the moment, to savour his vigour and weight as it nudges at the edges of my terror, as it fills me up. I wish freely to embrace the deliciousness of sin. To sin with abandon is, after all, the only prerogative of the damned. An image comes into my mind of a baby, falling to the bottom of a well, where it melts like a cube of sugar, and of a slender body swinging at a gallows amid the lush New England spruce. I am not right. You see for yourselves how I am not right. Devil leer over me. I was born to be this way, it is inheritance, take your pleasure sir and grind me down to nothing. Stop.

  I try to occupy my mind with thoughts of Master John Edes, of Master Edes only: John Edes laughing, a wave of his hair caught in the brisk estuary wind, John Edes happy and neighbourly, kneeling down to work in Goody Wright’s garden. The back of John Edes’ neck pink with sunburn. John Edes in his settle, bathed in the mellow light of noon, turning a page of The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven. But it is no good. He moans and moves in that jerking way once, twice more, and then is spent, I suppose, and shifts, and is still. I notice my breasts are bared, and his cheek rests rough and wet between them. I feel it for the first time, the cling of the slick dirt on the backs of my thighs, the tangle of my nightdress wet beneath us. I try to clear my mind of everything but the sensation of his immediacy, but feel instead the chill progress of a raindrop along the curve of my neck to the hollow of my throat. It will not do. Lowering my hand, I touch at the tippet of his ear through his sodden hair. “John,” I say, though I have no notion of why, “I love you.”

  He jerks away from my touch, like a man waking from a nightmare. I cannot see his face in the dark—just his still shape in outline, his breath rising as a vapour. My eyes on the nothing of him and his on the nothing that is me. Something rattles in the treetops, then, and he climbs hurriedly to his feet, his hand on his belt again. Without a word, he pulls his cloak tight around his shoulders and stumbles off in the direction of town, in such haste that he forgets his hat. I turn my head to look at it, moonshine tracing the swell of the crown. I turn it over in my hands. I hold it over my face and breathe the smell of his hair mingled with the warm must of bruised leather. For a little while I hold it experimentally over my heart—then I think, no, and toss it away into the dark. And there I lie in the mud alone, prone and splayed and of a mood unaccountably tranquil, until the cloud thins and I see the moon above, resting like a silver dish against the canopy. All is peaceful, and all is gently spangled—as I might have wished for it to be. I think I would quite like to sink down into the mud and feel it close over my face, tender-black and suffocating. It is done. It has passed, and I lack the energy to give it signification. I stand up, and peel the despoiled stockings from the gooseflesh of my calves, and am surprised to realise that I weep—a hot tear splashes down on my bare knee. Stop. I brace my shoulders against the bole of a tree. “Do you hear me?” I ask aloud of the darkness, the grave trees—and none make reply. “They say when the Devil is called, he comes. Well, a fine mess you have got me in, sir. I hope it amuses you. A pauper, a witch, and now a whore.”

  A breeze urges the boughs to a petty, answering laughter.

  MISTER HOPKINS FINDS HIMSELF UNABLE TO sleep, after the thrill of his encounter with the Prince of Hell. He tosses and turns in his big feather bed, the heavy hangings seeming to billow and pitch with spirit-gusts. The whereabouts of Master Edes is likewise of some concern. The clerk never returned to the Thorn, and it seems peril is attendant on a Godly man’s every footstep, these days. After a few fitful hours of semi-consciousness, Hopkins finds himself wired and taut on South Street, bathed in the first gelid light of the day. The incipient sunshine shucks the mist off the bay as he makes his way into Manningtree, with little notion of where it is he is going, or why.

  Providence and intuition lead him up the hill to Lawford. He knows the Wests’ cottage on sight, having had it described to him: a meagre, low little building of sun-washed red stone, with a sloping roof and wild gorse breaking up through the foundation, a rose-hip bush shading the kitchen window. He hangs back across the road, half-hidden behind a neighbour’s abandoned sty. He supposes this is where the pig lived—the pig John Edes told him of all those months ago. The pig the Beldam West sliced across the wattles. He watches the cottage, and imagines Rebecca West sleeping within. At first in the ordinary manner, tucked beneath a counterpane, her breathing slow and soft. Then, suspended mysteriously from the
rafters in the manner of the bat. Finally, he imagines her sleeping tucked in the dark crook of the Devil’s own armpit, her pretty pocked face buried tick-like in his coarse black fur, her arms wrapped about his neck. Hopkins waits, but no smoke curls from the chimney. The little windows remain shuttered. Confident he goes unobserved, Hopkins picks his way across the dirt road and through the Wests’ yard, round to the back of the house.

  A cock’s crow splices through the silence of the morning, and he presses his back against the outside wall with a sharp intake of breath—but all remains still, save for the shimmering of the bluebottles that swarm from a daub of chicken shit as his long shadow passes over their backs. There, he notices footprints—two sets of footprints, leading into the wooded patch at the yard’s end. Naturally, he follows them. Inevitably, they lead him to the clearing.

  The first thing he finds is a burnt-down candle stub, sticking up out of the churned mud like a loose tooth. This he picks up, inspects, and puts into his pocket. Next, he notices a lumpy, brown shape that he takes at first to be the body of an animal. Moving closer, he sees it is not an animal, but a hat. He lifts it and wipes it down with the corner of his cloak. The square brass buckle on the band identifies this hat at once as belonging to Master John Edes. He has a feeling, a feeling as of someone gathering his entrails up in a clenched fist. He turns it over. It is the hat that Master Edes wore the preceding night, there can be no doubt. Hopkins surveys the mulchy forest floor, breathes deep the petrichor smell, and finds his eye caught by a point at the base of a nearby sycamore, where the misty sunshine catches on a pale thing wound shimmering about the thick tree roots. Not thing—things. A pair of wet stockings. He unwinds one in his hands, translucent and crisp with dried mud like the filmy discard of an adder. They could be anyone’s—but they are not anyone’s. They are Rebecca West’s. He tucks the hat and stockings away beneath his cloak. He leaves. Stockings. He can conjecture what occurred there, in the wood, quite well. Its full hideousness hatches slow and chimera-like—a wriggling beast half-Edes, half-West—in his mind, as he tramps back through the waking town, ignoring every friendly good morrow that is called to him. He goes back to the Thorn, where the bewitched Judith Moone languishes in an upstairs guest room. He hopes Stearne remembered to lock the back door.