The Manningtree Witches

by A. K. Blakemore

  It is bright and chill outside. A salt wind hits me full in the face, like the world wants me to know it has missed making me uncomfortable during the time the men took over. There are horses, saddled up and stomping, and Stearne lifts me into the pillion seat with an undignified wheeze, before climbing up behind. It is all too much to feel real—here I sit on top a horse and assailed by the wind, when any other morning I would be yet to squeeze the sleep from my eyes. On the estuary, white birds rise through the haze of dawn. I watch them over Stearne’s shoulder, watch them wheel and flock as he chucks the horse on to Manningtree at the head of our spare procession. There is a rosiness like a crust of sugar on the wet chimney stacks and the distant spire of St Mary’s. I remember April has nearly come—wide and wet April, the season of hare coursing. And my twentieth birthday, a bare week from now.

  We are soon at the town proper. The crowds of the preceding night are not dispersed, but prowl the roads wakeful and raggy from the immanence of Sathan, as though he might come tripping round the corner at any given moment, and could be scooped in a net like a butterfly (with a prize for the first man to do it). A whole desultory mess of townsfolk lines the High Street and throngs about the Market Cross, and the sun still barely risen. There are shouts and some tipsy whooping when we are spied approaching.

  A dockhand with a livid bruise on his right cheek breaks away from a group gathered at the bottom of South Street and falls into step alongside Stearne’s horse. “My brother,” he says, “my brother Joshua Turner, who was cast away at sea,” he calls, reaching out to pluck at the hem of my skirts. “Had the Devil a hand in his drowning? In God’s name, tell me!” He splashes sour wobble at his mouth from a jug in his hand.

  “Away, man,” shouts Stearne, and spurs the horse to a brisk trot, but Turner holds step, grabbing up a fistful of my petticoats. I kick at his wrist, but his grasp holds. “Joshua Turner,” he demands, “my brother! He was to be wed at midsummer!”

  “Turner, you say?” my mother hollers from the Constable’s horse behind. “That was my work!” She lets out a good barking laugh, and as she no doubt intended, the dockhand lets go of my skirts and reels on the spot. “My master bid me fetch his soul. It was I who raised the storm and called the sea to gulp his hoy, good lad. Pray a minister could hear to shrive him over the clapping of the thunder, else he burns in Hell!” This spontaneous confession raises gasps from the massed crowd and a howl from George Turner, who calls her the Devil’s whore and runs towards her, beer plashing over the stones. The Constable draws his pistol, and I see pale faces clustering at the windows, brought from their beds by the ruckus in the street, by George Turner’s anguished wailing.

  “Peace,” cries Stearne, pointlessly, “peace!” But his money and authority are forgot now.

  A window squeaks wide. “Murderess!” screeches the baker’s wife from her ledge, and who knows which of us she means—and the cries of witch, and she confesses, and suchlike grow, and of Exodus 22, so commendable in its clarity: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. More flock down from South Street, jeering and pointing at us, drawing their fingers slowly across their necks in cut-throat fashion, and my mother laughs and waves, blithe and near-queenly, until little Edward Wright scoops a handful of sodden muck from the gutter and dashes it at the Constable’s horse, and a cheer goes up as her cheek is spattered with slime. The horse rears and then the narrow street rings with a deafening crack, the Constable having hollered and discharged his pistol into the thinning mist. A cloud of smoke and the white stone of the Market Cross in the slant light of morning, then I am grabbed up from behind and bundled, unceremoniously, inside.

  We are lined on a bench in the upstairs parlour of the White Hart, shivering in our various states of underdress: Old Mother Clarke, who was brought here first, then Helen Clarke, Liz Godwin, myself, and last the Beldam West, proud and prickling. Our hands are bound in our laps. The crowd is gathering in the street outside, lively, baying. Hopkins and Stearne remonstrate with the Constable. The Constable insists that the rabble can be held off until the law arrives from Colchester.

  Hopkins is grim-faced. “Half the town quarrels in the street—and two more yet to be brought.”

  A glance is passed down our bench. “Two more,” Mother sighs. “Snatched Queen Mary herself away from a black mass, have they?” I try to shush her. Hopkins’ cold eyes flick towards us.

  “The Baronet,” Stearne interjects, patting at his glistening upper lip, “the Baronet will not brook this. They are riding in even from the villages . . . Misrule. Utter . . .” He trails off and peers out of the window, with a whimper of desperation. If the tendentious Baronet himself were to describe Stearne’s situation, he might say the man was caught between Scylla and Charybdis: to keep the Baronet’s favour, John Stearne pretends to greater influence over the townsfolk than he actually possesses, and thereby puts himself in danger of losing that favour when the townsfolk do something the Baronet does not like, that Stearne could not have stopped them doing even if he had tried. What does the loss of favour mean to him, with his big house, his fine apparel, one of Manningtree’s two looking glasses? The loss of favour does not mean death. No, nothing even close to it. And still he sweats like a pig.

  The clamour grows as a band of militia approach—Widows Leech and Moone in tow. The women are squeezed through the morass under a slop of shouted curses and rotting produce before they are brought, shaking, to join us. A curl of lettuce quivers in Margaret Moone’s expansive bosom. Their faces are puckered and pale beneath their shawls.

  “Hello, Mother,” Helen sighs.

  The Widow Leech sighs and shakes her head, with some Oh Jesus wept, oh Helen, and so on, and we all slide down the bench to make room.

  “I cannot speak as to the others, but I am no more a witch than thou art, sir,” Liz Godwin blurts suddenly at Hopkins’ back.

  “God in Heaven,” mutters Leech, “save your breath, Liz—and the rest of us aches in the head.”

  In come Mary Parsley, Priscilla Briggs and Abigail Hobbs—now seasoned witch-prickers all—their hands primly knitted before blood-speckled aprons. Anne Leech and Margaret Moone both bear marks, Mary soberly informs Hopkins—the Widow Leech as many as three teats about her secret parts—“and they are not piles, sir,” Goody Parsley adds, earnestly, “for I know well what those look like, having been troubled by them myself.” Hopkins clears his throat and thanks the good women for their service, extending God’s own gratitude, too, as garnish. Then they leave, to lay their bodies down at last in their cold, spotless beds. Helen manages a laugh. My head aches and there is a gnawing in my belly, as I have not eaten a scrap nor taken any water since the night before, and it must now be nearing noon.

  Margaret Moone settles and peers down across the bench. “What is this happening?” she hisses. “Where’s my Judith?”

  I tell her in a whisper that Judith is bewitched, supposedly.

  “Oh, is she now?” Margaret sits back with a whistling sigh. “That little slut.” Then she starts and sits up again, rounding on me. “I wish very much you had not told me,” she says, panicky-voiced.

  I tell the saucy creature that I only told as she asked me, and Margaret begins, frantically, to explain that now she is the one who will be supposed to have done it, the bewitching, “because how else would I know of it unless I had done it? Unless I am to feign surprise when they tell me,” she continues, twitching her bound hands in her lap, “but I cannot dissemble—oh, mercy . . .” and so on. Her face trembles most pitiably.

  My mother rolls her eyes and says it matters little what any of us did or did not, and says we ought to keep our heads and hold our tongues. And I, being sick to my stomach of my mother and her great act of knowing best, tell her to shut up, and tell her that all she has done so far is to make everything worse for all of us, with her talk of the clapping of the Devil’s thunder, and that, indeed, the crowd would have strung us up then and there, were it not—

  And just as I am hitting m
y stride we are all scared out of our skins by Hopkins slamming his pistol down hard on the table, and shouting that he will have silence. I oblige. Never before have I seen Hopkins forfeit his composure. His slender body twitches with threat, like a whip in the hand of God. Stearne squints dubiously at his companion. We may have fallen silent, but the crowd without have not. Singular cries and complaints stick sharp out from the generalised din: cozenage, Pope, prodigies. Even the racket of a summer fair or barn fire might not rise to rival it.

  Mister Hopkins takes a fortifying breath, and adjusts his hat and doublet. “I will go and speak to them, Stearne,” he says, a strange light coming into his eyes. “As the Lord calmed the storm on the Sea of Galilee—and the disciples were filled with great awe, and said to one another, Who is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him? Keep them—” And here he waves a hand towards us. “Keep them silent.”

  Stearne moves to grasp Hopkins’ arm, saying, “Matthew, are you sure it is wise to—”

  But Hopkins is already gone.

  We hear the crowd fall hush as the dark figure of the Witchfinder emerges from the inn. An attentive silence, a soliciting silence. Those at the back of the ten-deep crowd, those from the neighbouring towns and villages, crane to get a better look at this champion of God. Is he as they expect? I wonder. Younger, probably, at twenty-five. Brittle and drawn as a scholar, his hair hanging black and uncombed around his shoulders. His long, rigid figure, held with cultivated grace, suggests a near-arachnoid watchfulness. He looks as though his heart has been many times broken. As if, beneath his black velvets, it quietly breaks at that very moment. Here is Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder General, with the hard soul of a warrior and the famished cheeks of a saint.

  A nervy woman standing at the front of the crowd reaches over the linked arms of the militiamen who stand guard at the doorway to pluck at the lace of Hopkins’ sleeve. “They say,” she gulps, voice shaking, “that the witches held a mass in the wood . . .”

  Slowly he turns to look at her, and reaches out to take her hand in his, imitatio Christi. “Fear not, Goodwife,” he says, “their cozenage has ended.”

  As he speaks the dam breaks to an inundation of remonstrance, gossip, query and simple terror. One woman crows that there are no soldiers, and Essex is left unprotected.

  “Aye,” her neighbour pipes, “and if London falls to the King—”

  “You don’t want the soldiers here, love—believe me,” haws a pungent shipwright, in response.

  Another agitator insists that the Papists are landing ships at Harwich every night, sent over by Queen Mary. He has witnessed it, in fact. “My dear neighbours—” Hopkins begins, but his words are lost in the general fulmination. The crowd teeth and bicker and press up against one another, a brindling mass of rags and pox and fear, their grain blue with mould, their cattle keeling in the fields, their small worlds wrung out of shape by the red hands of war and hunger. “My good people—” he tries again, but finds himself now beset by a coughing fit. The taste of blood. He presses a kerchief to his lips, and the linen comes away scarlet-flecked. He sees the scarlet flecks. Swiftly he presses the rag into his palm, and closes his fist around it, hides it. But not swiftly enough. How many see? Enough that I later come to learn of it. Those nearest to him, at the front—the woman who touched at his sleeve—fall silent, aghast. By the blood of the lamb. Brown apples. Swallowing down a mouthful of imbrued spittle, he wipes his lips on the cuff of his sleeve. At last he speaks, hoarse and wet-eyed. “My good neighbours,” he hails them, again, “for surer than e’er before, I know ye to be righteous. They say where God has his proper church, there the Devil will build his chapel. My name is Matthew Hopkins.” A thrill runs through the crowd, a murmur, a swell specked with the dismal-itch of that new and baleful appellation—Witchfinder, Witchfinder. Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder.

  “Aye,” he continues, finding his strength again, his mouth curling into that unassuming smile, his words driving up through the brank of red phlegm in his throat. “Witchfinder, some call me. But I know naught but God’s word, see naught but that which He chooses to reveal unto me. Seven women we apprehended this night,” he continues, gesturing expansively towards the inn behind him—expansively, and unwisely, for the crowd become riled again and his voice is drowned. Now comes a cry of Hang the witches, and a stone that clatters against the inn’s whitewashed fascia—The Devil will be driven from here!—and another. The crowd surges again, the militia straining to push them back with their pole arms, swearing and spitting; Christ is arisen in them indeed, like a boiling milk that threatens to spill from the pail.

  “My good men!” cries Hopkins, desperate now. “Be not afraid, for the Lord giveth strength to his people, the Lord blesseth his people, his elect, with peace! These women are to be tried in accordance with the laws of our land. For do they not disdain us as lusty rebels, Godly folk that we are? And lovers of anarchy? They say we are but a company of cobblers and butchers and shop-men who frolic in and make sport in misrule! It is not so! Our new and hallowed nation will be a—” Hopkins’ efforts to quiet the crowd are vain, and he retreats, wide-eyed, towards the inn.

  “It is no wonder the Prince of Hell hath come to work his darkness here, where no saints nor roods remain to fright him away!” shrieks some poor wretch at the rear of the throng, and these Laudian sentiments prompt a ruction of howls and execrations. Death to the bishops and thou shalt not make unto thee any graven images. Word elaborates to blow, then kick, then brawl, and the goodwives scatter in all directions, shrieking like geese, or else tear up fistfuls of their sisters’ hair and beat their little hands against the cloaked backs of whichever bystander they can reach. Black and red and rumbling, riled halfway to rebellion, and if the Devil himself did walk abroad among them none would be any the wiser, so preoccupied are they. One of the Bergholt men—a huge brute bursting from his ragged doublet—has carried a sledgehammer over. He raises it to the forget-me-not sky and brings it down on the mossy stone of the old Market Cross (which had stood there, some said, since the Confessor’s day).

  We sit and listen to the riot unfolding in the street below, there being nothing else we can do. We watch Stearne watching at the window. We try to read the twitching movements of his face as a sailor reads the infinitesimal shudders of a compass point, and thereby assess the likelihood of our being torn limb from limb in the burnished sunshine of this late-March afternoon, while the baby birds trill brightly from the thatch. All is unmade, just like that. His kingdom come.

  19

  Suspects

  THE DAY WEARS ON. THE CROWD THINS AND its rage becomes diffuse. Some begin to limp ale-drunk back across the fenland to their own villages. Some retire to the Red Lion to fill themselves with meat pie. Others go with the rooters to the churchyard of St Mary’s, to watch as the faces of angels are scratched from the headstones. By the time the wagon arrives at sundown to take us on to Colchester, shame, exhaustion and a fleeting spring downpour have conspired to clear the streets, and Mister Stearne leads us unassailed, hobbling barefoot, out into the dusk. Where the Market Cross stood, there is now nothing more than a blunt horse-tooth stub, the mud strewn all about with whitish chips of rock. Our hands remain bound, our clothes dirty, and our faces sour beneath our caps. All of us are hungry, but only Liz Godwin is foolish enough to say so, whining to the waiting Hopkins that we have had nothing to eat all day as a militiaman hands her up onto the wagon. You are hungry. So what, I think, ungenerously. All England is hungry.

  Hopkins ignores Liz Godwin. Hopkins seems to ignore everything. He stares off into the nullness of the blue-grey sky, upright in the saddle, and there is no exultance in his face as we are led away. I think perhaps he feels guilty, for we must make a sorry sight, Moone, Leech, Clarke and Mother and me, in our varying states of undress and incapacity and unwholesomeness. But no, it is not that. It is because, I think, this is not an end but a beginning. Binding our hands will not close the matter, and neither will shutting us away in
a cell. No. The cat is out the bag, as they say. The cat, in fact, bounds hysterically off between the clouds and out across the county, where the warm unplanted fields wait for thunder. I wonder if he feels foolish, having made so much work for himself. Probably he feels foolish because he is dying. Is there any endeavour that does not seem exceeding trivial to a man faced with evidence of his mortality so vivid as red blood from his own body in a white kerchief? We all saw it, hanging from his pocket as he remonstrated with Stearne and the Constable. We all heard the coughing, the gasp, beneath the open casement. Blood. Your own blood is meant to stay inside you. This is something every Christian agrees upon, Papist or Puritan. As far as I know.

  I am the last to mount the wagon. Hopkins looks towards me as I haul myself up onto the bed. “You have much work ahead of you, sir,” I say.

  “God grant me fortitude,” he replies, quietly, and turns his horse about.

  The wain draws out of Manningtree, and Helen and I rest our chins side by side on the endboard and peer out from between the flaps to watch the town diminish in the last gasps of evening sunshine, until the rooftops are little more than brassy flecks at the hip of the Stour. “What a kelterheap,” Helen sighs, scratching her chin. I feel her black eyes shifting sidewards to my face, and I stare resolutely out over the horizon, feeling in no mood for tattle. But my feelings count for naught. “Pining for your dear love already, are you?” she says.

  “What? No.” But I am. I am thinking of how he did not come. How John Edes was nowhere to be seen. How we lay together, and I told him that I loved him, and then he left. Left me at the mercy of Hopkins and Stearne. Left me to die, for aught he must know. I turn to peer at Helen. She is some years my senior, a worldly girl. Or as worldly as they come in Manningtree. I could ask her what it means that he did that, and if she thinks he will come back. But I do not, of course. Instead, I ask Helen if she has had word from her husband, Thomas, who fights for Parliament. Within the question is another: And will you send word now? And will he come back, and put reason between death and ourselves?