The Manningtree Witches

by A. K. Blakemore

  He kept the promise made to me in Colchester, that I would be taken care of. He brought me to the Thorn to work as housegirl, but it was a long time until I could remember how to be useful again. I languished for many months in my little upstairs room with the curtains drawn tight around so that there was nothing but darkness, and imagined myself back in the gaol, with the bodies of the others—my mother, my friends—warm around me, beneath me. I would screw my eyes shut and hope that when I opened them again I would see tallow-light and chains, Helen Clarke picking at the sore that grew above her lip. But it was no use. The feather bed was too soft. In those first weeks Mister Hopkins would sometimes come into the room and draw a chair up to my bedside, where he would sit and read scripture aloud, but he never dared part the curtains to look in on me. His words would lumber solemn through the hangings and flop with impertinent majesty onto my waking dreams of cells and lice and empty, griping bellies. He would read from the Book of Job, from Genesis. Daniel in the den of the lions, of course. My God hath sent his angel, and hath shut the lions’ mouths. It was there I did the needful dying. And then very slowly, I climbed upright again.

  I had to learn all over how to be. I had to learn what Manningtree was for me, now that the constant points of light by which I had plotted my life had shifted, or else been snuffed out. My mother dead. Master John Edes gone away and joined, they said, the New Model. I could not picture him in one of those red coats the New Model men wear, for red would not be his colour. I could imagine him killing a man well enough, though, or being killed by one. The latter thought pleased me, in fact, and I was no longer surprised by my own vindictiveness. Judith Moone had vanished from the town about the time of our arrest—slipped away, no doubt, in fear for her life. See how everyone knew it best to be a coward, but me? Perhaps I am, in the end, my mother’s daughter. Hopkins’ household consisted of Goody Briggs—now Widow Briggs—whom he had taken on as housekeeper (and who had strong reason to resent me), and a boy and girl named Samuel Tapp and Verity Cate. All felt me worse than an imposition—they felt me a poison. An adder brought to their home by our master’s misplaced tenderness. Still, they were at least frightened of me, meaning their hatred was expressed through looks and wagging tongues, and gossip had already done the worst to me that it might to any woman. I no longer cared a groat for wagging tongues.

  Hopkins himself came and went. It worked like this: he would receive a letter from the citizens of some little town or hamlet beset by misery without seeming pattern nor remedy; he would read to me from the letters, sighing and shaking his head over the cruel subjections visited by the Devil on the innocent all over England (as if there be any such creature as an innocent Englishman). Such obscene pictures. Children retching out awls and heavy petting in the streets, slender men seen dancing on the rooftops by the light of a full moon. The town would levy a tax by which to provide for his keep, if he would visit. Please come forthwith, Mister Hopkins. Please come and tell us what to do, and who to blame. Our butter has turned stubborn, will not churn. And Hopkins would fetch Mister Stearne and the Widow Briggs and off they would ride. A celebrated man, a warrior of God. Something like a prophet, I suppose, of the New Jerusalem said to gleam beyond the cold mist of tomorrow morning. A good, clean country of good clean folk where psalms might be heard sung at every hearth, and every woman would be kept to her right place, beneath a man, one flesh. Tomorrow it would come—then the next day. Then the next.

  When he was gone, these were the periods of my relative contentment. I read very much. Probably I was not meant to. Hopkins was a Godly man, but there was nothing Godly about his library. There in his study I would set down my dusting rag and find myself floating in some strange corner of the heavens, with a wise stranger as my guide. I learnt of the Doctor Dee, who by means of a polished stone and ancient alphabet had effected conversation with God’s own angels. I learned of that extraordinary prodigy, the three blazing suns, that had appeared in the sky over London on the nineteenth day of November 1644, which was the birthday of His Majesty King Charles, and which the astrologer Mister Lilly thought to bode extremely ill for our benighted sovereign. I learnt that long ago there had been many Gods, and maiden-Gods and woman-Gods, too, and some Gods that were horned, and that these Gods would put on all manner of disguise to walk among the simple folk of that time, and even have children by them. I know these tales are thought by most to be no more than pretty heretic superstition, but they do not seem to me very different from our own talk that puts the Devil at a widow’s door, leery in a pedlar’s coat. In short, I learned that the world is full of wonders. I cannot pretend I understand very much of them.

  When Hopkins was gone we would do our work, have our simple meals of pottage at the kitchen table and retire early to bed, where I would lie in the dark and listen for the hooves of the big black horse that bore a Witchfinder, stepping in cold and excitable from a long journey, calling me from my chamber to unlace his boots and listen as he told me of the old man who sank fishing boats by a clap of his hand, or the woman who was driven to the Devil’s work because the fiend told her he had the souls of her three departed children, and would shred them like flax if she did not give herself over, body and soul, to Hell. I saw he took almost a housewife’s pleasure in it: he loved the mess. He liked to be presented with a filth, a tangle, a nasty something to sweep up. Aldeburgh, Ipswich, Northampton—he would cut away the rot, give them a good drubbing, leave them looking after him as he rode away, with faces clean and gleaming like children ready for morning school. Our father, who art in Mistley.

  When he was at the Thorn he took great pleasure in my obedience. I would join him in fasts—three days, four days, a week with nothing but cheat bread and water, perhaps a little warm milk. If he came in from town with his greyhound (newly acquired—Mister Stearne called it “a gentry affectation”) to find me scrubbing the scullery floor, he would seem surprised to see me there, sometimes, and all of a sudden declare that I must go to my chamber and make hearty supplication to God for forgiveness of my many mortal sins. Lock the door behind me. What I ate, what I wore, was his, and was therefore—it occurred to me one day as I crossed the garden to empty the slop-pail—bought by blood. He did not like me going into town or even walking up by the woods, where I could see the trees changing through their many fantastic reds and yellows from the window of my second-floor chamber. I could feel his uncertainty around me. The indeterminacy of his intention. Something between pet-witch and prisoner-witch, held in the house on the dark, rain-swept cleft. In some ways he had as good as wed me to him. And I did hear by way of Verity Cate that some of Manningtree’s more romantical souls suspected it was his intention to formalise our strange union; that having delivered me from the lion’s den he would offer me a husband’s protection, ere long. This was the wholesome version, no doubt. I can hear the unwholesome, in the voice of a Moses Stepkin or a Richard Edwards: There’s no saucier bedfellow than one who the Devil’s tasted. Just ask our Matthew. I could be his little taste of red milk. I see it in his eyes and around his mouth, when I bring him his port or sit down to do my darning while he reads the gospel aloud to me. Sometimes I wished he would, if only because it would make everything easier. The whore, after all, has her throne.

  A year of this, a year and a half, and the world had changed beneath him and he took no note of it, his eyes being fixed so resolutely upon the heavens. It began at Bury St Edmunds, where he had gone to rout a coving of supposed witches. There a preacher spoke out against him, they said, and he had to leave very soon after he had arrived, on account of this souring of local feeling. Another town that had had their own Minister led away for conjuring began to gripe that it was not right, what had happened, and that surely the Witchfinder had been mistaken, and had himself been led astray by the Devil. This, you see, is part of the service a Witchfinder provides—when a town calls him it has already decided who it wants gone. But if they change their minds after the fact, then they have the Witchfinder handy to
blame for it. Every prophet ends up a pariah.

  There were learned men in London, too, who spoke and wrote of the Witchfinder General, as he was known. One said that Mister Hopkins and others like him are wont to inflame the base superstition of the country folk, who hold the power of the Witchfinders—for he had many imitators—in greater faith than that of Christ or God or the gospel preached. Others said that Hopkins’ special innovations, the walking and pricking, were close enough to unlawful tortures that they ought not to be condoned, and that the whole blood-soaked affair had begun to look quite French. Or worse, Spanish. And then at the Norfolk assizes these learned men delivered their queries to the judges who were to preside over the trial of several women Hopkins had had a hand in indicting. The women were pardoned. The women were freed. A very public humiliation. And so, ordained by God or no, he quit the work of witchfinding summarily. He gave it all up before the wind could properly change, and came back to Mistley with one last fat purse of silver to be Matthew Hopkins, country squire. He is rich enough to live well, but a man like Hopkins does not know how to live well. Or even, really, how to live.

  He is restless, resentful. He is twenty-six years old, and has nobody to love him. There is also the matter of his health. He is prone to violent coughing fits. He wheezes. Perhaps he has spent too long in the fetid air of county jail cells and cunning women’s nasty hovels; perhaps the curses laid upon him by old widows all over Essex have finally accreted into a blackness that rests on his chest and chokes the life out; or perhaps it is no more than the ague, which creeps in with the wetland fog. But Mister Hopkins’ constitution is failing. He shuts himself up in his study with the tobacco pipe the physick recommended as remedy for his weakened lungs. He writes.

  Which brings us to this afternoon in August.

  31

  The Book

  I SIT AT THE BACK-DOOR STOOP. FROM HERE I can look up out over the hills, the blue sky, striped with the last tender veins of fading day. It is a little cold, but a fire blazes in the kitchen, warming my back, and it is pleasant to sit there. I have wrung the neck of a chicken for Mister Hopkins’ supper. Now I pluck. Rough handfuls of white feathers. Peace. I listen to the birds trilling sweet and sad out in the yard, as though in mourning for the fat hen in my lap. The master’s bitch lolls by the fence, sniffing the first acerbs of winter in the air. I sniff winter in the air as well, and think it will be a long one and a dull one, trapped here at the Thorn, and without even the jollity of Christmastide to leaven the dark season, given that my master is Puritan and Puritans think it blasphemy to throw birthday parties for Our Lord Jesus Christ. But far be it from me to complain of boredom.

  I know someone has come into the kitchen because the dog turns to peer at the open door where I sit. It is Mister Hopkins that calls my name. He stands by the kitchen table, Lazarene in his housecoat and damask headwrap, dark circles under his eyes. With one hand, he squeezes a stained handkerchief—I find these handkerchiefs scattered everywhere in the house as I go about my work, red and white and lace-trimmed, like savaged brides. In the other he holds a book. “Rebecca,” he says, “I have something to show you.”

  As I move to set aside my work and rinse my hands clean in the bucket, he comes to where I sit at the open door. “It is a fine evening,” he observes, looking out over the haze on the fields, his voice quiet and touched with wist. A sigh rattles in his throat.

  Because he is so close to me, I fall still with the chicken sodden in my lap, and say nothing. He brings his fingertips to rest on the nape of my neck, just below my cap, and they twine about the short locks below where my hair is tied. I feel them there, cool and unaccustomed and affectionate. Him. He probably calls the sky the firmament. The fingers creep round to rest on my shoulder, and then my cheek, and he compels me to rest my head against the side of his leg. This—this is certainly a moment. Anyone who saw us would think it a tender one. “Perhaps we might take the air after supper?” he suggests. “A walk by the water? I think it would do me good.”

  This is entirely unheard of. “If you wish, Mister Hopkins,” I say.

  “Good,” he replies, and releases his hold on me then. “Come here.”

  Swiftly, I rinse my hands and shake the dander from my apron and follow him to the table.

  “It was delivered from the printers down in London today,” he says. “I thought you would like to see it.” A slim volume neatly bound in black calfskin. He moistens his thumb and flicks this open to the title page—The Discovery of Witches: In Answer to severall queries, lately Delivered to the Judges of Assize for the County of Norfolk. And now published by Matthew Hopkins, Witch-finder, for the Benefit of the whole Kingdom (and beneath, Exodus 22:18: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live). What lies before me is no less than his personal vindication. I understand then that he feels his climacteric to have passed. He believes he will soon die. I feel him looking at me. I see him smile. God’s elect are wont to welcome death with rejoicing. “And it all began with thee, Rebecca,” he says. “It all began”—and here he turns the title page over and brings his thin finger to the frontispiece—“here.”

  There is an engraving, and pictured in it are Old Bess Clarke and my mother, two hooded women sitting hunched in their chairs. Around them dance all manner of strange beasts: a black rabbit, a white thing half-cow-half-hound with a long curling tail, a horrid dog creature with the face of a baby. And the women speak, and gesture. Bess Clarke and my mother sit and name these beasts. They name them Newes, Holt, Grizzel, Greedigut, Peck in the Crown, Jarmara, Sacke and Sugar, Vinegar Tom. He has taken Vinegar Tom’s name. And in the centre of it all, with a countenance graven in a look of tired and steadfast nobility, stands the Witchfinder, in his tall black hat and keen spurs, unmistakable, one hand pressed to his breast in a gesture of horror braced to unflagging resolve. I do not know what to say. The vanity of it is almost amusing—that he must have told whatever artist sat and carved the block that made this picture, somewhere in a cellar shop in London, how he ought to be dressed in it. I wear a tall black hat, he would have written, or said. Boots above the knee. My hair curls. I look between the Witchfinder General there on the page and the thin, lackadaisical man swaying at the table beside me in his dirty gown, a tideline of blood on his lips. I do not know what he wants from me. The wise thing would be to say what he wants me to, but for the first time in a year I do not know what that thing might be. Sentimental? So I say, “I had a dream once that you kissed me upon my neck.”

  He looks at me, curiously, and I am glad I said it, because now the shoe is on the other foot, and it is him who knows not what to say. He moistens his mouth. “Really,” he replies, a word that can be spoken in both reproof and curiosity, and if said in a certain voice commits the speaker to neither sentiment. The fire crackles in the grate as we stand there at the table, face to face. The dog comes in to whine and nose at the hem of her master’s housecoat. A spayed hound kept in the house drives away ghosts, they say.

  I look at the engraving again. A black rabbit in the corner, Sacke and Sugar. “Rabbit is what my mother would call me, sometimes,” I tell him. I do not know why I tell him it. He has a way, I think—or a way with me. Broken knows broken. And to who else am I to tell myself?

  “Your mother was damned, and you would do well to forget her.” He closes the book.

  “Is yours dead, too?” I ask.

  He peers across at me, as if I am myself a haunting. “No,” he says, slowly. But then he says, “She was a very virtuous woman. Dutch.” Was. And that is all I will have of him, for he orders me back to my work, and snatches up the book before turning to sway down the hall, towards his study.

  I finish plucking the chicken, scrub, stuff, tie the legs with string. Then I sit back down at the stoop to enjoy watching the day perish, in my quiet way, and the dog comes to rest her muzzle across my knees. Yes, I mutter to her, softly. Yes, you poor thing. Your master is dying, and you will be alone in the world. Her eyes are watery and sad. But then, the
y always were. Poor hounds, of countenance forever tragical. And Hopkins never gave her a name. His bitch. My bitch, is all he calls her.

  32

  Consumption

  AT BRIGGS’ BIDDING, I KNOCK AT THE DOOR OF Mister Hopkins’ study. There is no answer. I call his name. Still nothing. But as my mother would say, a man is never so old he won’t sulk given the chance. “Supper, sir,” I say. I knock again. Still no answer. I try the handle, cautious. The door is unlocked.

  The grey evening light comes in low at the window, and no fire burns in the hearth—all is shady, shapes of things like bone in deep water: the desk, the mantel, the books piled about on the carpet, and a pale figure recumbent on the settle, a man (or so he seems now), his palms upturned on either side. Silence but for the feeble cooing of the pigeons that have nested in the chimney breast. Again I say his name. He is inert, head tipped back, floating on the stagnant gloom. “Mister Hopkins? Matthew?” He remains motionless.

  A dark stain glistens across the front of his nightshirt. I nearly cry out, because it looks like blood. I find myself on my knees beside the settle grasping at his shoulders. I feel a wetness soaking through my skirts at the knees. I can smell it, too—not blood, but wine. A bottle rolls down by the side of the settle and clinks against a drained glass. It must have slipped from his grasp. A dark pool of it smothers the roses at the hem of the Turkey rug. Is he dead? A curious thing, to find a man dead. Cadaver, that pretty word again. I take the bottle and move to stand when I hear something, a scrabbling noise, coming from somewhere in the room, and see it from the corner of my eye, see Him again—a flash, grim and a little golden, like jewels stuffed quick in the thief’s pocket, a hot breath on the side of my neck. Aloud I hear myself say, “Thank you,” then, “I did not think you would—” and then I do scream; I scream very loudly as a sticky hand closes tight about my wrist.