“She is gone,” I state, meaning my mother. “I mean. She is not—she is not here, sir.”
Hopkins pauses. An ember drips from the torch and dies on the wet stoop slab. When did it rain? I wonder. How long was I pressed waiting against the parlour wall? I look past Hopkins’ shoulder at the men’s weather-blasted faces, shining like dirty pennies in the firelight. I see Joshua Norman, who was fined once and put in the stocks for turning up drunk to church. I see, with a twist of disappointment, Yeoman Hobday, leaning on his hayfork. I see young Master Hockett, whom we all laughed at when he said that God could not send a dead man to Hell if he were buried in a scapular, no matter how he sinned in life. And of course, Mister Hopkins. His lip curls as he looks up into my face. I want to tear that smile right off him and hold it up to show the men who crowd around the gate. Look, I would say. Look—he is enjoying this. His smile would hang red in my tight fist like a gypsy’s silk and I would shout at the top of my voice, Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, because I also know my scripture, and lo, how the men would tremble then, and scatter off down the sides of the hill. Mister Hopkins, Witchfinder. His eyes are hidden in the shadow cast by the brim of his hat. He is just that smile, private and peculiar. I am shaking. As he moves to answer, I slap him hard across the face.
A gasp rises from the crowd and the militiamen jostle to hold them back. Hopkins lowers his head and rubs at his smarting cheek, a nerve jumping in his jaw. Hopkins takes a deep breath, then straightens up again. He is no longer smiling. “May I enter?” he asks, by which he means, I will enter now, and he pushes past me and into the parlour, followed by the Constable—who I realise is binding my hands before I have thought to protest—and two of the militia, who make to search the house. One begins by causing a great din when he pulls at the tablecloth, precipitating a massive clatter of pewter to the floor—I think he does it for no other reason than to play on my nerves, for I shudder most violently at the noise. It is strange seeing the house, my home, with a man in it. With men in it, bringing all their smashing and their shouts. They are everywhere. I realise that no man has crossed its threshold since my father died, that I have seen—and now four come all at once. I stagger backwards and Hopkins guides me to the bench.
“Where is the Beldam West?” he asks.
“The Red Lion,” I answer, unthinkingly. “Or else, that was where she meant to go.” I ask him if I am to be bound over. Hopkins does not answer. A ghastly howl chivs the general commotion of the search, and then a shout, then a nasty, bloody thud. I make to rise, but Hopkins pushes me back. The Constable cries triumphantly from the bedchamber that he has killed it quite dead, and re-enters the parlour panting, cudgel drawn, carrying a limp sack of bone and bloodied red fur in his free hand. “Beat the brains out, sir,” he says, swaggering at Hopkins, “most wonderful.”
He has Vinegar Tom hanging beat limpen in his fist. Or what was Vinegar Tom, and now is a mess of fur with holes and meat and blood, and blood coming out the holes. And I think how there is so little keeping anything alive, keeping the warmth inside and the force out. I put my hand over my mouth to deny the interlopers the satisfaction of my sob. The Constable passes the shaggy mess of fur over to Hopkins, who inspects it with a scowl. “Are there more?” he asks.
“None that I can see, sir,” the Constable answers, wiping his big hand on his trouser leg. “Some chickens out back, though,” he adds, hopefully.
“It is naught but a cat!” I find I have said—sobbed—at the Constable. “A cat, sirrah.”
Hopkins sighs. “Yes, a cat,” he repeats to the crestfallen Constable, handing him back his trophy by the gory scruff. “Throw it on the midden.”
Tom’s front leg twitches. Three drips of blood on the bare boards of the table. I cannot look at the caved-in head—I fight myself not to look at the caved-in head. I taste the bile rising in my throat like a cold finger, a branks, pressing on the root of my tongue, and my head is lightening. The next thing I feel is rain on the back of my neck, and the sway of a trotting horse beneath me. I lie draped across a stranger’s knees, my vision swims, and I feel I am being taken down, down the hill. Useless useless. I gulp bile again, upturned. Doers of damage, bodies of sin, I can see our cottage growing smaller, fizzing. It fades to a blurred, black shape in the distance, retreating, wreathed all about with torchlight, with dancing specks of fire.
The men who did not join the Witchfinder’s grim processional up the Lawford hill have gone out drinking in town to discuss it, instead. They crowd into the market ordinary, with its floor of trampled dirt and hay. They press three-deep along the narrow stretch of paving by the White Hart, where the sign swinging above their heads bears the image of a deer beguiled all about with gold chains. They wonder which of us can fly. They wonder which of us is Sathan’s favourite fuck. A good night for a barnyard cockfight—a better one for Manningtree’s two whores.
The Red Lion, crouched low at the corner of the village green, is packed to the smoky rafters. A little man in a grey biggin cap moves from table to table plying a solid trade in palm-sized fragments of painted glass in emerald and scarlet—painted glass he claims that Parliament’s men knocked from the windows of the grand cathedral down at Winchester, though he cannot explain how he came by it after. The men of Manningtree divide themselves to social degree by drinking hole as reliably as they do by church pew, and the Red Lion is home to the worst sort: a squalid, very illiterate mass with fewer teeth than fingers, for the most part. And so when a boy comes in to tell them the Witchfinder and his Godly men have taken me—“the West girl”—away, this news is welcomed with no great show of righteous triumph, but with a murmur of general bemusement. The sailors, smugglers, sowgelders, pedlars and ploughmen crowded at the bar have no special stake in this intrigue, but observe it with a mild, lateral interest, like Mennonites caught in a fist fight. Misfortune and suffering are, to them, too commonplace to warrant attribution either to a higher power or to an infernal one, the hunting of witches, like the hunting of anything else, a gentry diversion. “Come again when the girl’s hanging,” calls some cut-up from a corner stall, “that’ll be something we can all enjoy.”
I like to think that perhaps my mother’s blood, in that moment, thickened. She knew it was coming, doubtless—but perhaps she did not know how fast. There she stands, alone by the door to the wagon yard with a half-empty beer mug and her only child in the hands of the law, her resources suddenly reduced to whatever she thought to carry on her person when she bid me farewell and left the house earlier that evening, in the happy expectation of a few languid hours spent drinking. An Egyptian day. She finds, perhaps, having taken a fumbling inventory of her apron pockets, that these resources consist of no more than thimble, needle, cracked clay pipe and a few pennies. Doubtless, she wonders why I did not run. Likely she contemplates, for a moment, doing so herself. But she does not. Instead, she calls out, “Where did they take her, boy?”, and pushes her way to the front of the inn, where the messenger stands panting in his ragged trousers, cheeks bright after the long sprint from Lawford. The room falls silent as the redoubtable Beldam West stares it down.
“Well,” says Moses Stepkin, the pedlar, “if it ain’t the Queen of Hell herself!”
“The Prince of Air a mettlesome bedfellow, Nan?” leers another, thrusting his loins against the back of a chair.
“Fie, gentleman,” my mother barks, setting her feet apart and her hands on her hips. “You know well this Puritan folly is like to turn lawless. But what do you care? Shakerags and rascals, nothing left for the taking but your very lives, and even they would hardly be worth the bother.” Her invective is met with a dissolute cheer and the slop of rotgut on tabletops as mugs are raised and clinked together. “Now—” Anne shouts over the tumult. “Will it please a man to tell me where this so-called Witchfinder has taken my daughter?”
“To bed, if he has any sense,” haws John Banks, to renewed corporate hilarity,
God save us all from men when they are drunk together. My mother stamps her foot in frustration.
“Why not ask the man yourself?” calls a wily-eyed newcomer from the entryway, plucking off his hat and smoothing a hand through his hair. “Passed him on my way up the market street seeming bound for the green—Mister Hopkins, and the Constable’s men with him.” This mention of the Constabulary swiftly curbs the communal merriment. The smugglers and card sharps in their dark cloaks edge grumbling towards the back door; the glass-seller tips his wares out an open window into the hedgerow outside. Mother dips her chin to this information. “I thank you, sir,” she says, and, “I think I will do just that.” She draws back her shoulders and walks through the crowd and out into the street, prompting a flurry of activity as the Lion’s remaining patrons gather up hats and cloaks, in a state of high excitability, and file out to follow the Beldam down South Street. Towards her doom or Hopkins’, none can quite say what he expects or would prefer; but certainly it will be a thing worth seeing.
They do not have far to go. The rain is falling heavier now—big plashing sheets of the stuff. My mother stands at the throat of South Street, atop the hill, as Hopkins and his Godly assemblage round the corner at the bottom and begin their climb towards the Red Lion, torches seething against the downpour. At their head rides the Witchfinder.
“Matthew Hopkins!” My mother shouts the name down the street.
The Witchfinder’s party halts in its tracks at the bottom of the hill. There is murmuring, until Hopkins raises a hand for silence.
“I will speak with thee, Matthew Hopkins!”
Some bare twenty yards of muddy road separate the formidable Beldam from the Witchfinder. At the top of South Street a motley collection of the Red Lion’s rustics and delinquents elbow into position behind her, fidgety and watchful. At the bottom, on Hopkins’ side, the chary Puritans stand firm, muttering prayers and brandishing their hayforks. With a sidelong look at Stearne, Hopkins chucks to his horse and trots out—God’s righteous General—to meet his quarry. He draws up before her with an ironical tip of his sodden hat. He addresses her, Mistress Anne West, and speaks then the solemn words of binding over. By the authority of Parliament and the deputy lieutenant of the county of Essex, I apprehend thee, etc.
She snorts, undaunted. “Hopkins. Where hast thou brought my daughter to?”
“To the Thorn, madam,” he answers. “Pending further investigation of Mistress Elizabeth Clarke and yourself—known to be notorious wantons, and termagants, and feared to be servants of the Devil himself.” A hoot rises from the crowd gathered outside the inn.
“Matthew Hopkins, I will have my daughter back.”
“Madam, she is the daughter of God,” he laughs, the rain dripping from the brim of his hat. “Matthew saith, call none on earth your father; for One is your father, He who is in Heaven.”
“Aye,” Mother spits, “and she hath done no wrong in his eyes, and was raised up Godly enough. You have no power to keep her.”
Hopkins arches a brow and glances pointedly over his shoulder at the ranked Puritan men in their sodden black cloaks, the militia propped nervous at their pikes. He needs make no answer more than this look, because he knows already what most women come to learn: the men will not save you.
The Beldam’s canny eyes dart about. She softens her voice. “We are but poor women, Mister Hopkins, yea,” she begins, “but in our poverty God has bestowed on us a spiritual lucre—”
“Then perhaps these sad events might teach thee ways and means to live better, madam,” Hopkins interjects, watching her face closely.
They are words my mother recognises, surely. “Bess Clarke.”
Hopkins enjoys watching this understanding move over her face, the knowing close in around her. “Mistress Clarke has confessed, madam,” he continues, “to the most hateful crime of maleficium—and named thee her confederate.”
“She lies,” my mother answers, not missing a beat. The men who crowd behind her have fallen silent now, sensing that higher stakes ride on the outcome of this confrontation than they had thought. We all like to have a lark or three, but no one actually wishes to see a woman hung, her skirts soaking with piss and throat’s blood froth on sackcloth. It is a horrible thing. Not amusing any more. Or do they? It is a curious thing in human nature—even in such weighty matters as death and life, most seem to find themselves concurring with whoever spoke last. The Witchfinder and his bright armoury of smiles, my mother wet to the bone and visibly shaking, for all her fierceness—some of the observers on each side begin, reluctantly, to peel away from the crowd and head homeward over the green, thinking it begins to look a bad business. Others mutter among themselves, angrily. To think, perhaps, that the women, the termagants, may have been hard done by. The likes of Clarke, West and Moone have, after all, been clung to the ragged verge of Manningtree for many years now—who is this upstart Suffolk Puritan to trouble the town’s hard-won peace, tenuous as it may be? The big war is bad enough. We need concoct no little-brother-war of our own.
“Aye, the Old Mother lies,” one of the men is heard to mumble.
Hopkins lifts his head and passes a gaze over the assembled, their faces blurry and indistinct in the pummelling rain. “If you are innocent of any wrongdoing, as you say, madam, then you have nothing to fear in accompanying us. It is only our reverence for thy”—he churns his slender, gloved hand in the air here, as if searching for the correct word —“thy most tender femininity”—it is the Puritans’ turn to laugh, now—“that has given us cause to demur from seizing thee by force.” There is a flint edge to his voice.
I picture my mother’s face, fierce and carved out in the flickering torchlight. She trembles. Her chin lowers, and she tells him, God will judge us all, Hopkins. Numb-boned and broken in the rain, she offers out her wrists, at last, for binding. God will judge us all. “And you,” she says, looking up into the Witchfinder’s shaded face, “will taste blood.”
“Amen,” he answers, with a smile, and turns his horse about, leaving the Beldam West to be hauled behind by the militiamen.
18
Iconoclasm
I WAKE FULLY CLOTHED IN A STRANGE, HARD bed. I know this is the Thorn. That whitewashed, unjolly bone wedged in the throat of the estuary. I am held somewhere on the upper storeys. The door to the chamber has been locked without; this much I established the preceding night, in a state of high panic. It is morning now. Carefully, I listen to the croon of the floorboards below, the deep of men’s voices, the wheeze of a staircase. There is an art to understanding the language of a house, and ordinarily I am an adept—but the Thorn is wholly unknown to me. Who is to say if this scrape or that snarling noise be a woman held in the adjoining room, or merely a rat nesting in the wall? What is to be done with me?
Somewhere outside, a cock’s crow portends a watery dawn. I rise and go to the window, where I can see the sun casting a pristine glitter on a slice of the bay. It looks to have rained all night, and the empty cobbled street shines with a latticework of reflected sky. A rider in black trots from the wagon yard below, due west, his face turned away from me. I look around the room. A candlestick, an empty dresser, a washstand, thin curtains of starched yellow net. The door opens. John Stearne’s pale face appears there at the crack. He clears his throat. There is a riding cloak folded over his arm. “Miss West?”
I make no answer.
“An—a—a rider has been dispatched to Colchester,” he continues. “We are to take you to the White Hart, and there await the militia.” The Hart—Master Edes. I feel my belly jolt, but not in the agreeable way of old.
I look down at my stockinged feet. “I have no shoes, sir,” I say.
“We are to ride,” he says, roundly dismissing shoes in concept. He is cheered, I think, by my seeming docility—probably he thought I would fly hissing for his eyes like a cat. In Stearne comes and begins to bind my hands again, humming to himself a sprightly Roundhead ballad. I hear a peal of laughter—rueful, a woman�
��s—from a nearby room. So there are others held here, too. He fastens the cloak at my throat. It is too big and stale with tobacco smoke. He pushes me out the door and into another black-cloaked figure. I raise my eyes to find myself face to face with my mother. Her own eyes are weary and bloodshot, her head and shoulders uncovered and bent, and she whispers Becky, with a dubious sort of relief, because here I am, and alive. But also—here I am. I think we move to clasp each other, then, but with our hands bound we are able to effect only a mere fleeting sort of collision before Mister Stearne and the Constable pull us apart again.
“Well, isn’t this nice,” says Helen Clarke, from the stairwell. She looks to have been seized from her own bed while still in rumpled smock. Her hands are bound, a dark scowl fixed on her face, and the hand of a militiaman on the back of her neck.
I am about to ask her when she was brought here, but Stearne gives me a little shove towards the stairs, and our sad party is pressed down towards the common room, where yet more men sit folded at the bar and smoking clay pipes in the high-backed chairs, pistols and swords in their laps—Hobday, Hockett, Edwards, Norman, Wright, even the Minister. A whole swarm of Puritans, come to see the thing through, tired and pleased with themselves. No Master Edes here. Curiously, no Matthew Hopkins neither.
“They have Bess Clarke as well,” Helen calls back over her shoulder as they hustle her towards the door. “I saw. This is all her doing, you know. Her mouthing off,” she laughs, bitter and derisive. “Just watch. I shall choke that old ’agtail with my bare hands.”
“Why not let these kindly gentlemen do it for you,” my mother mutters, leering sidelong at the assemblage. A few of the more courageous return her gaze with solemn curiosity, fingering the pistols arranged across their knees; but most keep their eyes averted from the Devil’s ’eft-hand brides, from either guilt or superstition. A witch can, after all, curse by looks alone.
The Manningtree Witches Page 14
