The Manningtree Witches

by A. K. Blakemore

  Of course. The world remains the world, and in the world there are answers required of me, even to foolish questions. I tell him I am well enough, but that the cold has held from winter longer than we had prayed it might.

  “Have the gaoler bring blankets,” he says, as if we would not have thought of it. Just like a man, my mother would say to that. Just like a man to suggest the most obvious thing in the world as though it might be revelation to a woman’s cottony mind. When it seems to me all the most obvious things in the world must be done by women, or else they wouldn’t get done.

  “We cannot afford to, sir. Our debt in victuals already runs to more than we could ever—”

  “I will pay,” he interrupts, scratching at his nostril. Even his kindness seems somehow vindictive. An ugly, expensive accessory. Still, blankets.

  “Thank you, sir,” I say. I gaze resolutely at—and shuffle—my dirty feet, and the feeling of his eyes on me seems somehow worse than the lice. I remember, then, when I first met him, that parched Sunday two summers ago. I remember how ashamed I felt of my muddy shoes and fraying stays. How frivolous, now, that feeling seems.

  Next, he asks if we are well fed.

  I shrug. What is this he is trying to have with me? A conversation, it seems. Very well. I ask if Parliament are victorious yet. The gaoler will not tell us. I do not think the gaoler rightly knows there is a war occurring.

  “The Covenanters have taken Newcastle, so soon we will have coal again,” he answers. “And Queen Mary is fled to France, with all her heretic retinue.”

  “And the King?”

  “They say he is determined to remain in England and crush the rebellion.”

  “For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft,” I say, and I cannot help but smile.

  “And stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry,” he continues, his voice hardening. I walked into that one. He asks if I have considered what we spoke of when last he came.

  “I have little else to do but consider it, sir,” I say. I intend, at first, to stop there, but find I cannot. “It seems to me that my position is an impossible one,” I continue. “If a man is accused of murder, let us say, but he can prove that he was at home and in his bed at the hour of the murder, would any Justice not conclude that it was impossible the man might have committed it?”

  The Witchfinder cocks his dark head, but does not answer.

  “But if a witch can be in two places at once, as you say, then I cannot prove my innocence by those same means. Nor, it seems to me, by any other. I can say again and again, a thousand times, sir, that I am not a witch, and have no traffic with the Devil nor his spirits, and it will account for nothing. But if I say once that I am, then it will account for everything.”

  I can tell by the way that he looks at me, then, that he has never heard a woman reason a thing out before. Certainly not a woman like me, anyway. And then he laughs. “You are a clever girl,” he says, and takes a step towards me. “Do you know why you are here? Why it is you, and not Prudence Hart, or Goody Miller, who is here?” He motions his arms towards the damp cellar walls.

  I step backward as he steps forward, and try as best I can to meet his look. “I am here because my mother is a woman of ill-report and loose tongue. And Prudence Hart and Goody Miller have husbands who might shield them against such slander.”

  “No,” he says, his voice soft. Sympathetic, even. “You are here because you stink of sin, Rebecca. Sin, hot and foul. The Devil has marked you hideously, and every man who sets his eyes on you sees it. How could anyone believe you to be anything but utterly defiled . . .” And then he lifts a hand as if to touch my cheek, and I draw back still further, and I say no, no.

  He clears his throat. He drops the hand. He tells me he visited with an old friend of ours. Mister John Edes. He parts his lips. He is about to ask one thing, but then at the last moment decides to ask another. “Do you love John Edes, Rebecca?”

  I intend not to answer, to remain silent. But instead I find myself saying, “I do not know. I thought I did, once.”

  “He is to testify at the assizes, Rebecca. He is to testify against you.”

  There is a strange squeezing at my chest. The trial—I had not properly considered it before. It will entail those whom I am alleged to have wronged appearing before me. Master Edes, now. Doubtless Prudence Hart, Richard Edwards, Priscilla Briggs. I will have to look into their faces, and hear myself explained, condemned. How I came to be here in the first place is not something I can properly untangle in my mind, who said or did what to whom. There is no neat exchange of action for consequence. I know that I suffer, and that suffering is attendant on sin, so I suppose I must have sinned. I sinned with Master Edes. Does Master Edes suffer, too? I hope so, which I suppose means that I never really loved him. That sweet rank smell is overpowering.

  Hopkins says my name. He bids me look at him. He asks me again to confess. Confess, or accept eternal damnation. “His Day of Judgement is near at hand, and on that day you may yet stand among the righteous, Rebecca. You may yet be saved.” He speaks with a solicitous urgency, his arm outstretched as though to usher my fragile self into an embrace, and I am almost tired enough to believe in him, and to want it. I can no longer stand alone—the Lord will uphold me. Matthew. It is for the good of my soul he speaks. And yet. The power to deny him remains to me. I feel faint. I say “Sir—” and I reach out to grasp the wall of the cellar, to support myself, but my fingers graze uselessly over smooth, cold stone. “Sir. I cannot confess to a sin I have never committed. If it means I will hang—so be it. The Minister will shrive me for what sins I have.” Bile burns my throat.

  “You look unwell,” he says, with gentlemanly concern.

  An understatement. It is the stench. The rot, I tell him. I ask him, What is it, that smell?

  “Ah—of course.” I hear only half, then, of what he says of an experiment. In many matters for you see continental authorities concur with our domestic experts on the virulence of image-magicks, the significance of the sorceress’ ministrations to her imp as outlined in the Magia Adamica—the flickering sound of his lantern passing behind me through the darkness. And they present other theories I have not yet had the opportunity to test—for instance—a movement in the dark, a rustling of cloth—a shrewd token by which a sorceress can be known is that she will cause a corpse to bleed by her touch.

  And though my mind reels, I intuit all at once that there is a cadaver in the room, hidden behind the door, and that Hopkins is now leaving through this door, and means to lock it behind himself. I turn on the spot, and in the last gasp of lamplight before the bolt slides home I see a flash of white, dead meat slumped in the corner, greasy tangled hair, and I fall to my knees and I cry out for him to have mercy, beating my fists against the door as he turns the key in the lock. I cry and I keep to crying, until the sliver of light from the corridor vanishes, and his footsteps quieten. Silence. Then I stop crying, because it will achieve nothing, and there is so little left in my body I ought to take care not to waste even my tears.

  I see what is happening. The rich boy thinks that if he cannot fright me, the dead might. And he is wrong. I had a dead little brother and sister both, whose downy heads, apple-size, I was made to kiss before they were buried still smelling of my mother’s inside. I wipe away my eyes on the collar of my shift, and chide myself for thinking that the Witchfinder might be moved by wailing. If he will not be moved, then neither will I. I press my back against the cold wall and reach out through the darkness towards my cell mate. I feel his dead hand in mine, cold and thin.

  I must sleep there, in that dank little storeroom, because I dream. I dream light again—light that slants down upon me, brilliant and in many variations of rose. I open my eyes to find myself sitting in a high-backed pew, with a vaulted ceiling above me. It is St Mary’s church. I feel at peace. There is a sweet, luxuriant smell, as of incense, in the air. I rise to my feet and walk the aisle.

  I see that the boarded windows have been
glazed again, and the sun streams through the opulent folds of saints’ red and purple robes. No—not saints. Witches. In the high window of the nave is Old Mother Clarke, her peg leg a pillar of flame emerging from her singed skirts, shears held aloft like a sword. She is flanked by my mother and Helen Clarke, both in gowns of brilliant crimson and wearing crowns of hemlock. My mother pours wine from a shining pitcher. Liz Godwin carries a wax manikin in her hand as a Bishop would his crozier. The Widows Moone and Leech carry a paring knife, a cleaver. They look down on me, gorgeous and beneficent, those thick-thighed angels. The sun-spots fall onto the stone floor through their bright frocks, making a flower bed of every corner.

  There is a voice from the front pew, a man’s voice. “Ah,” he says, “you have awoken, at last.”

  In the first pew before the altar sit Judith Moone, the Cavalier from my first night at the castle, in his jacket tipped with silver lace, poor Vinegar Tom, and the Devil himself. They make a jolly-looking sort of a party. It is the Devil who bids me good day, and I find myself returning his greeting with a smile and a dip of the head. It feels the correct thing to do. I say to the Devil, “This is the very last place I expected to see you,” and he laughs.

  I look to the others. Judith appears just as she did when I saw her last, in white smock and cap trimmed with ribbon, short-chinned and grinny. Vinegar Tom looks in very fine health indeed, smoking a long bone pipe—he dips his furred chin to me in generous greeting. He is the size of a man now, and wears a handsome waistcoat of bottle-green velvet. Lastly there is the Cavalier, his face pale and his long hair hanging ragged and unkempt about his shoulders. In his lap sits a white rabbit with red eyes, small and bright as coral beads.

  “Are you dead?” I ask them. Then, “Am I dead?” It seems a distinct possibility.

  “Certainly not—and mind your manners,” Judith laughs.

  “I am,” says Vinegar Tom, his ringed tail flicking in his lap.

  “And I, alas,” replies the Cavalier, with a lackadaisical smile.

  “To be as alive as I am would kill any man,” says the Devil. “Or woman.” He winks.

  “I suppose I will need to choose what I will be, soon enough,” I sigh.

  “It is already chosen,” says the Devil. “There is no shame in enjoying one’s own company.”

  “But I do not know what to tell them, what to say,” I protest.

  “Just scream,” says the Devil.

  I do not think his advice very helpful, but I lower my head in deference, nonetheless—he is the Devil, after all, and some respect is due. The Cavalier scratches at the rabbit’s ears with his thumb.

  “I have seen that rabbit before,” I say.

  The Cavalier nods. “You have,” he says. “And next time you see him, it will be the time to do it. And then you will be led back to yourself. Do not be afraid, nor ashamed. Now go.”

  I turn to walk back down the aisle, towards the heavy doors. I think it is what I am meant to do. I pause, and turn to call over my shoulder: “There is no Hell after all, sir, is there? Or is this it?”

  The Devil smiles indulgently. He is lemon-scented. “I know this will sound strange coming from me,” he says, “but there are some things it is better not to know. That is Eve’s lesson. Regardless, Miss West. You have places to be.” And with that, he flaps his hand, and I find myself knocked from my feet and blown down the aisle by a great warm gust, my hair torn loose from my cap and swirling all about me. The doors of St Mary’s groan open, and out I fly into a blinding brightness, elated in my heart, light as a spark, though I could not begin to explain why.

  I wake to the squeal of key in lock. It is the gaoler, come to collect me, because I am alive. I rise, cold and aching, because I am alive, and allow him to fix the manacles back on my wrists. In the light of the turnkey’s lamp I can see the face of my night’s companion, and what I already suspected is confirmed: it was the Cavalier I slept beside, though he now looks like nothing so much as the sort of creature sometimes found frozen to death beneath a hayrick, his bloated face half-obscured by matted hair. A turquoise still sparkles on the cadaver’s stiff, blackened finger. I see the gaoler notice it, too, and wonder how much he will sell it for. It probably belonged to a woman, once. His sweetheart, perhaps. Cadaver, I notice, is a very pretty sort of word.

  I am led down corridor on corridor, then another corridor, the enforced briskness of the walk soon restoring the feeling to my heavy legs. We pass narrow windows and the pale red of dawn is coming in strings of fire across the old stone of the walls, it is touching my skin as I pass by. The kind of morning light that carries within it the qualities of heat and frost both. Spring will come soon—and then summer, and the summer assizes. I am alive.

  They are sleeping in an animal pile, a tangle of slack undifferentiated limbs, and in the moment it takes my eyes to grow used again to the utter dark of the cell, I wonder if I could do it: if I could damn them all to save myself, to walk out into the beautiful blue-gold promise of the morning. The first face I discern through the murk is my mother’s. She is awake, and she is looking at me where I stand at the cell door. Slowly, she disentangles herself from the others and rises to her feet, coming to embrace me and—yes—pet my cheek, and press my face into her shoulder. “Oh, Beck,” she murmurs, “oh, Rabbit. I was afraid they had taken you away for good.” And I believe she truly did think me gone for good, and truly was afraid. Better late, as they say, than never. She moves back to look me over, but of course cannot see an inch of me—not bruise nor bone—for the darkness of the cell. “Beck?”

  My hands, clasped in hers, are trembling.

  “Where did he take you?” she asks, meaning the turnkey. “Was harm done?”

  I shake my head. What can I say?

  She takes me to the corner of the cell, where we huddle together around the meagre light of a candle stub. The others sigh and stir on their mean bed of straw, but do not wake. She asks again where I was taken, stroking at my hair. I tell her to a cellar, somewhere below. The cadaver and the dream I keep for myself.

  “With Hopkins?” she asks.

  I nod.

  “And he urged you to confess?”

  I nod again. She looks at me, expectantly, and I see that she thinks I already have. I bubble with resentment at her presumption. “He did,” I say—“and I will not,” I lie.

  She grabs at my shoulders then, and looks into my eyes, and tells me not to be a tender imbecile. “Do it,” she hisses. “And do it now, before they wake.”

  I say that I will not, and remind her that she is innocent of that of which she is accused and that she ought to cleave to this innocence. She spits on this—quiet literally, spits onto the floor—and fixes me with a glare, and asks can I not see that there is far greater dignity in being villain than victim?

  And I ask her, “What of my dignity, Mother?” I remind her she asks me to lie, which is a great sin.

  “Chickenshit,” she says. “You are too young to be much concerned with dignity, my girl. Dignity is an old woman’s game. What of your life?” She grabs up my hand and squeezes it tightly, and gives me a nod. Everything is happening too fast for this to be a moment of very great acknowledged tenderness between us, but it is all we will have. I squeeze back.

  I lean towards her. The nightsweat of her neck sticky on my brow. “I would know, Mother,” I ask, “how Bess Clarke came to lose her leg?”

  She blinks at me uncomprehendingly, and then she does comprehend—that I will not have another chance to ask, and if I do not, then there will be none who know how Bess Clarke came to lose her leg. “Dog ate it,” says Mother. She grins, and grabs at the back of my neck and pulls me in to kiss my brow fiercely. “I wish I knew to tell you, Beck,” she says. Then, “Do it. Do it now, girl.”

  So I do. It happens just as the Devil said it would—I begin to scream. The gaoler’s boy rushes down to find me clawing desperately at the door of the cell, so hard that two of my nails break from their beds. I thrash and wail on
the dirty floor (to effect a frenzy is surprisingly easy, once one has begun—you are carried forward on your own crazed momentum, like a pig on fire rolling down a hill). I tell the gaoler’s boy that he must fetch his master at once, for I can no longer bear to be among Sathan’s own brides, whose very dormant sighs at that moment choke me, set me all aflame, and that if he will not take me from this accursed cell he shall find me a dead woman by noon. I demand to be taken to Hopkins—to the Witchfinder—at once. And all the while Mother sits in the corner of the cell where the slender glow of his candle will not reach, and cackles like a mad woman (which she may well be). She did not think to say it, but I know that she loves me, and that she would see me flourish.

  The others begin to stir from their sleep and gaze bleary-eyed around, confused by the tumult. Only Helen Clarke realises what is happening as it happens, and as the gaoler and his boy hook their arms around me and move to haul me up out of the cell, she spits at my blistered feet and says I shall burn in Hell if I think to break faith with them, which is the very least that I deserve.

  26

  Confession

  I CAN TELL THAT HE IS FRIGHTENED OF ME NOW that I am obeying him. He was not before. Is it because he thinks I have chosen to obey him? That every curtsey, every yes, Mister Hopkins, puts him in mind of the young woman’s heart as a slanting wild red place, inhospitable to reason? Men like to keep women under their power by force. A clever woman can help a man to forget what he is, and both of them are the better for it. Unless he wakes of a sudden one morning in a cold sweat and remembers, the truth of himself sinking in and spreading its damage outwards like a bullet. No. I would rather be a woman. We understand our abjection before God, because we understand our abjection before man. And we get to laugh behind their backs.