The Manningtree Witches

by A. K. Blakemore

  Returning to his chamber, he climbs into bed once more, and draws the gaudy drapes tight. He dreams of slender ankles and white necks. Of a girl peeling her skin off like a snake. It makes him hard. It makes him feel sick. These, his delicate firebrand-darlings—

  16

  Arrest

  THIS IS WHAT WOULD COME TO BE OUTWARDLY recognised as the beginning: Wormwood Hill, a late-March evening, and the sky over the estuary is full to bursting with annealed, blood-red cloud. The cows tumesce in the fields, waiting on a storm. A small party walks the hillside path. John Stearne is first, with his warrant and a set of manacles beneath his cloak. Matthew Hopkins, his assistant, follows, upright in his scholar’s black. Then the Constable, then Priscilla Briggs and her sister-in-law Abigail, slender bookends in high-necked gown and starched cap. Master Edes is still nowhere to be found, but the clerk’s absence is of no consequence—the events of the night to come will prove indelible in the memories of all who are to witness them.

  Stearne knocks at the door, and Mother Clarke answers, hesitantly. She has been returned to her cottage for mere days, and it hasn’t gone back to feeling like home yet. Rebecca made it too clean, too sparse of odour. Stearne raises his voice above the stertorous wind to deliver the news that by the authority of Parliament and the deputy lieutenant of the county of Essex, she is apprehended on suspicion of maleficium, and her person and property will be searched for evidence pertaining to such wrongdoing. Their torches, redundant against the sanguine wash of the sky, sputter and flare quite dramatically.

  “How many of you?” she is reported to have asked, narrowing her poorly eyes.

  Stearne tells her there are five, but more may follow.

  “And so it is,” comes her reply, and she hobbles back to allow them entry.

  And more do follow. In they come, and see a little old woman sitting in her smock and bound at the wrists, before the hearth. She watches as the men overturn her cot, her stewpot. They rifle through her linens and flour sacks. They sniff at bunched herbs and rusted hairpins. A greasy old candle end, bloated to anthropoid semblance, causes particular consternation. The midden heap is full of gnawed-up bones. The old woman is tired and the ropes chafe at the loose skin of her wrists. She is heard to repeatedly invoke the name William Bedingfield—a name none recognise. She offers to help the searchers, if only they might tell her what it is they seek. She asks if she might have her tobacco pipe, and is denied.

  Having turned the miserable abode inside out, the men leave. It is time now for Goody Briggs and Goody Hobbs, who know they must be brave, who know that they must put on the whole armour of God. They have been instructed well. They have been taught that they must neither look into the witch’s face, nor heed her remonstrances. The Devil, they know, is adept at beguiling; he can make his black eyes round and wet as those of a kitten caught out in the rain.

  This is how a witch is discovered. The suspect is laid out on her back. Her skirts are unlaced and her smock drawn up to cover her head. In Mother Clarke’s case, they are presented with a body pale, puckered and tiny beyond expectation—but the task at hand is nonetheless onerous: moles, blemishes, spots, styes, pimples, wrinkles, boils, corns, scabs, bruises, bites, sores, suppurations, cankers, ulcers, lesions. Each must be thoroughly inspected. There are always more, on every body, than you would expect. Each must be pricked with a needle. It is best to work methodically, starting at the top and moving slowly down. Mother Clarke’s blood is slow to run, but bleed she does, eventually, little constellations beading across sagging breasts and belly, Serpens and Ursa Minor of warm ruby. They handle her limbs with the impassive efficiency of midwives. They peer into her armpits and the shrivelled blue folds of her sex, unblushing. It must be considered a privilege, an act of trust. They are looking upon a woman’s body in a way that can properly be sanctioned only by God. They join hands and pray over her body as the scarlet buds on the wool of her smock. Because you did not serve the Lord your God with joyfulness and gladness of heart, because of the abundance of all things, therefore you shall serve your enemies whom the Lord will send against you, in hunger and thirst, in nakedness, and lacking everything. And he will put a yoke of iron on your neck until he has destroyed you. Awl meet flesh. Let nothing be hidden, and knowing flow. They say Mother Clarke had a mark at the crease of her thigh from which no blood could be drawn, red and swollen as though sucked upon. They say she was compliant, which means she felt nothing, because witches are made of wood, and that is why they float, and that is why it doesn’t matter if you strip them and stick them with pins. The crueller rumour is, she wept.

  It is dark by the time the men re-enter. There is Elizabeth Clarke, now clothed again in her soiled things, sat at the end of her cot, rocking back and forth. Hopkins draws up a stool and sits opposite her. He asks, Do you keep imps, Mother Clarke?—moderate, matter of fact. Of any shape, bee butterfly polecat red cock cat white dog like unto a man in a suit of black. Do you keep imps? Have you ever kept imps? Do you know what an imp is?

  She rocks back and forth. She says she has a rabbit visit her, sometimes.

  And does this beast feed upon her? Feed upon her blood?

  She laughs at that and does not answer. She is confronted, of course, with the facts: she spoke a malediction upon one Mister Miller, and she threatened, too, that she would set her imps upon him. Marks have been found upon her body—teats by which the Devil has been given suck. Does she deny it? The tiny cottage is full of men dressed head to toe in black. She could not count them, and does not know all their names. Tall hats reaching practically to the rafters, candlelight dashing their shadows up the scrubbed plaster. She is hungry and tired. I do deny, she says, tongue thick and dry as the tread of a boot in her mouth, that ever I had traffic with the Devil or his demons in any form. And she asks, please sir, for a little water to drink, and they say that if it be water she wants there is a jug there, on the kitchen table, and Stearne and the Constable laugh as she moves to fetch it but cannot see to grasp the stem with her bound, bungling hands, and over goes the jug and over goes Old Mother Clarke, the water gurgling down to the flagstones.

  Hopkins’ mouth twitches. “Mother Clarke. Why would you threaten to set your imps upon Mister Miller, if no such imps exist? Where are they? Where are your familiars?”

  She laughs again—a desiccated sound—and begins to chew at her lips.

  Hopkins fans his hands in a gesture of apparent capitulation. If you will not answer, I will wait. And unlike Old Mother Clarke’s, Matthew Hopkins’ threats are not idle. He waits. They wait hours. They wait through a long, warm night. Whenever Mother Clarke comes to the edge of sleep, when her head lolls forward and her eyes flicker closed, then Hopkins will say, “Come now, Mother Clarke—when your imps arrive you must be ready to welcome them.” And then she is rudely hauled up from the bedstead by her elbows, and made to walk, to walk around the kitchen table, in circles, ever more delirious. Dawn comes, spreading dirty roses over the floor. Stearne dozes in the corner, by the chimney breast. Hopkins sits opposite Mother Clarke, his scrutiny unrelenting.

  She moistens her cracked lips. She asks him, does he not tire in his watching?

  Hopkins smiles. Hopkins quotes Psalms: “I will allow no sleep to my eyes or slumber to my eyelids, until I find a place for the Lord, a dwelling for the Mighty One of Jacob.”

  The pale light of morning crawls over the disarray wrought by the searchers, the smashed crockery and scattered cornhusks. Then it ripens to a mellow gold, and climbs the walls. The world is narrowed to that one bare chamber, and neither Mother Clarke nor Hopkins sleeps. There sits Hopkins, so eminently hateable, knitting his fingers over his chest and leaning back in his seat, with something of the air of an apprentice bricklayer idling in the sun after a long day’s labour. For his next trick: he begins to scrape his spur against the flagstones. The metal rasps and squeals. It seems to Mother Clarke to squeal on the very inside of her skull. Please, Sire, and with much puling and groaning, she presse
s her bound hands to her brow, shoulders hunched in abjection. He asks again for the names of her imps. You will tell me, Mother.

  She swears she has none, and has laid no curse upon the Millers.

  Has the Devil come to thee in the form of a man, then? And she laughs weakly, and she is hopeless, and she titters an “Aye, the Devil came as proper a Gentleman as any in England, and with a laced band.”

  Good, Hopkins says, softly. Good, intently. And will she name her imps for him now? Will she hell. With a dry sob the little old woman bends in on herself, scratching at her scalp and tugging at her scant white hair. The sight is pitiful. Hopkins begins to scrape the spur again.

  The Briggs sisters bring a light repast for God’s intrepid inquisitors (bread, cheese, beer). Mother Clarke is dragged, debilitated, between Stearne and the Constable in a last circuit of the kitchen table, her horny foot blistered raw now, swollen and bleeding where it trails over the mucky stones. Oh, her swimming head, floating like a puff of thistledown between thrown shadows and half-seen visitations, the gloss of mira crowding at the dead edges of her vision. If someone would just touch her, lovingly (she once had sons). She feels a deep pinch at the back of her neck, and thinks she sits on the cot again. Words ripple into her mind arbitrary and uninvited, like eel or gunpowder. She remembers her mother, too—they tied her thumbs and toes and wound a rope around and under, waded her out to the pale green rushes, goodbye. She looks down at her own hands, shrivelled and thin, which rest on her belly, and her belly under a smock all spotted with blood, which shocks her. She cannot remember how it was she became so bloodied. “Where,” she asks, quiet and startled, “did all this muck come from?”

  Hopkins leans eagerly forward in his seat. By now he has been two days without sleep, and it must have begun to show in his appearance—eyes blotched with shadow, hair greasy and tousled. But powerfully attentive to the task at hand. “Tell me, Elizabeth Clarke,” he asks, “what are the names of thy imps?” Oh, he enjoys asking it. He loves to ask it. He could ask it every hour on the hour ’til Shrovetide or longer. So says the oblique smile, the finger hooked nonchalant in his pistol-strap.

  Mother Clarke is looking down at her bound hands. Her head is held aloft at a cramp-angle, as though she is about to vomit. “William was my husband’s name,” she says, at last, opening and closing her hands in her lap. “Forgive me. I am as poor as Job.” She has been doing this for a while now. Speaking nonsense, her consciousness worn threadbare, flickering between the present and an apparently preferable past. The Constable, just outside, says to Stearne that surely, if Sathan counted the old hag his menial, he would have interceded by now?

  “Your imps, madam?” Hopkins asks again.

  Stearne sighs. “Matthew,” he mutters, moving forward, “this is fruitless—”

  At that moment Old Mother Clarke, rocking on the spot, was said to let out a long, keening whistle. There were ten witnesses. What can be said? First a dog, or a thing like one, which was plump and white with sandy spots was said to come, and this called Jarmara. Then a second just-about-hound-shaped thing, thin with long legs, and called Pyewackett. All are doubtless a-shudder at the infernal hideousness of these strange appellations, these names which are surely beyond mortal invention. She says a black imp will come next, and come for Mister Stearne, who grabs up a pistol from his belt and wheels on the spot to confront this invisible assailant. Nothing more comes, and all that came before is gone, yet Priscilla Briggs seizes up her skirts and leaps onto a stool, while her sister-in-law Abigail clutches shrieking at her waist. There are several as would confirm every particular of this story, and of the imps that were called Pyewackett and Jarmara. And they said also that Mother Clarke did tell them that herself and my mother kept many more imps besides these two, so one can only think that the innumerable horrible things must verily have fought for a suck on her witch-mark like piglets round the belly of a sow. And in the midst of all this tumult comes a confession from Mother Clarke, though it is no longer needed, so many having seen her execrable pets.

  Matthew Hopkins calls for peace, and seizes the old woman up by her bound wrists, and demands to know if she conspired with the Beldam Anne West, and if she knows said Anne West to be likewise a servant of the Devil?

  “Anne West,” she repeats, as though it is a name she knew in a different life. “She said she pitied me my poverty, my deformity. She said she knew ways and means by which I might live better.” This is all she says of the Beldam, but it will suffice. All argument is moot, irons clapped on. First witch, fire-seed. They take her out into a gusty night. The clouds are once more flush in the setting sun, bruisy and doomfull of rain. She crosses the threshold for the last time in chains.

  Hopkins takes Mother Clarke gently by the elbow, then, and she looks up at him with her empty grey eyes, and says, “James, it is too cold to go down to the river tonight. We can see the boats tomorrow morning, after church, if you are a good and Godly boy and listen well.”

  Then passes a moment of strange and miraculous tenderness that is spoken of for weeks, and makes a place for Hopkins in the heart of every Puritan mawk. Hopkins lowers his head to meet Mother Clarke’s gaze and takes a gentle hold of her shoulders. He says, they say, this: “I pray God will forgive you, Elizabeth Clarke. Your body has known much suffering in this life, and I pray that you will recant, and cast your sins away, so that your soul might be spared the torments of the next.” He takes her wrinkled cheeks in his gloved hands, all gentleness. Stearne and the Constable watch in silent bafflement. “Even now,” Hopkins whispers, “God reaches out to you, full of mercy, and full of love. John saith, if we confess our sins, the Lord is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” And then he presses a decorous kiss to the old woman’s brow. Quo modo deum.

  Mother Clarke looks uncomprehendingly up into his face. There can be no malice left glinting behind the lacteal scum of her eyes. Is there even life? She asks, rocking on the spot where she stands, if she will now be permitted to sleep.

  Hopkins smiles. He tells her she is to ride into town with Mister Stearne, and then she may sleep for as long as she might wish.

  17

  Coven

  OF COURSE, FLEEING SEEMS THE WISEST THING to do, once you no longer can. But then again, where would I go? I hear them coming up the hill. They are a small rumbling troop now. Their number has swollen since Mister John Stearne rode triumphant into town, erect in the saddle, with Old Mother Clarke trembling at the pillion seat behind him, her hands tied. A witch divested of her power. The men have come out from their houses to follow Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder, who rides ahead of the crowd like some ghoulish herald, his torch held high over his head. Some of the men wield pikes or swords, or else lathes and axes seized up from woodpiles. They do not know what it is they might do with them—they just felt the need to be suitably accessorised. They have come to watch, to see. Come to see what? A woman clatter up to the sunset on leathery wings? A black dog twisting at the end of a rope?

  The noise of them grows louder, and I think I would see them, too—a spackle of fire-lights wending ant-like up the shoulder of Lawford hill—if I would, if I could, move to the window. But I cannot. I am too frightened. I stand in the dark with my back pressed tightly against the cool plaster of the parlour wall. I can feel every organ in my body. Then a red flush fills the window and I hear the hum of maybe a dozen voices, the yelp of an excitable hound. They have reached the garden fence. I imagine the Constable and his militiamen pressing the throng back from Mister Hopkins at the gate. Reverently they comply, falling into a hush of anticipation—as if what lies beyond the little garden gate is not our muddy walkway, our chicken coop, our unplanted flowerbeds choked with charlock, but Nebuchadnezzar’s Furnace itself, a conflagration none but the Witchfinder might emerge from unscathed. There is a collective gasp as he clicks the gate open. A deep bray of admiration as he walks, alone and fearless with his black cloak billowing behind him, up the
Devil’s garden path.

  And then reality comes face to face with my frightened fancy at the point his gloved fist knocks once, twice at the kitchen door, and I must decide what it is I am to do. Not later, when I have had time to think about it, but now. Each possibility and its possible consequences spread many-branching out before me. Might I wriggle out a back window and make for the wood? But they will have—they do have, I can hear them—hounds. Just answer the door? The door. There is a thin thread of flame quivering beneath the door. Just answer it. Fine. Or stay here leg-locked like an oaf until they batter it down. A shadow moves across the window. Someone is peering in. Slow, slow and shaking, I find it in myself to move. It feels good to move. I want the outside air, suddenly. In fact I thirst for it. I have not left the house since Mother Clarke’s arrest.

  I open the door. The air is cool and good, then warm on my right cheek, for Mister Hopkins stands at the threshold, just as Master Edes did four days ago, holding a torch. “By the authority of Parliament,” he declares, “and the deputy lieutenant of the county of Essex—”