Hopkins’ eyes half-open in the half-dark. He tries to say something, but I can’t discern any words through the catch of blood in his throat. The blood spatters out his throat and over the breast of his housecoat as another fit of coughing racks his body. I haul him up by the shoulders so that he might breathe better, and dab the corner of my apron at the threads of reddish spittle coming from his mouth. He is very light in my arms. Mother Clarke was very light in my arms.
“What have you done?” Goody Briggs is standing in the doorway. She must have heard my scream. Her right hand—pink from the laundry pail—claps to her cheek.
“Nothing!” I shout back. Did she hear me speaking aloud to Him? “Nothing—” I say again, and I make a great effort to compose myself. “Mister Hopkins is gravely ill. The physick must be fetched at once. He cannot breathe, mistress . . .”
I tip Hopkins’ head back and hear him breathe at last, breathe the stale air. It seems to calm him. His hand loosens at my wrist, but his eyes remain wide and feverish and fixed on my face above his. Priscilla runs to find Samuel, leaving us alone. There I kneel by the settle, bent over Hopkins to hold him in that posture, where it seems he can breathe. He looks surprised. Maybe surprised that I am helping him—but I suppose death must be surprising as well, when it alights all of a sudden at your shoulder like a grim bird. I feel his body tremble in my arms, smooth his hair off his slickened brow. I suppose I should say some words of comfort to him, or sing a psalm, perhaps, but I find my mind is empty of all tenderness. I lower my mouth to his ear, and I ask him, as he once asked me, if he is a virgin. His eyes roll to my face as I pull away, and he wheezes, and I smile. “Because I am not,” I say. “Your Godly friend Master Edes saw to it. But then, I think you already knew. It must be vexing, I think—to deny oneself those earthly pleasures, thinking that privation common—and then to learn one’s fellows only pretend to it. But of course, God knows the truth in every man’s heart. The quality of his intention.” Cruel. But if I’m not now, I may never get to be.
His nostrils flare and another blood-glazed bubble swells at the corner of his mouth. I pat it away with my apron. I see his Discovery of Witches down by my feet at the side of the settle, the lovely new calfskin marred by a splash of port. “I shall read your little book,” I tell him. “I shall read it after you are dead. Are you afraid of Hell?” I ask, and feel his body shake below me, and hear the blood simmering in his gullet, and it is answer enough. I do feel something like tenderness then. Not for him, but for everyone else, all the other men and women. All the fright and confusion, the world piling its terror and abundant beauty up high on our broken backs. I do not forgive him, but I embrace him. I tell him that I do not think it is to Hell nor Heaven that we go, but nowhere—and nowhere is not so bad. I know because I have been there before.
Doctor Croke rinses his hands and pulls the counterpane up over Hopkins’ bared chest, moist and quivering in the reed-light. Hairless, I am surprised to learn. Hopkins’ mouth is cleared of the crusted blood. His breathing has eased—but it remains laboured, sawing.
“You are prepared to minister to him, Rebecca?” the physick asks. “It would be unwise for a whole multitude to be tramping in and out of the sick-room. Your master’s condition is catching. Strictly”—he shakes a finger in my face—“no visitors.” As if any left in Manningtree would choose to visit this boneyard. But I nod. The doctor must think me the most disposable member of the household, to confer this responsibility on me—and he is not wrong to. He snaps his little leather bag shut and stands, flicking out his coat-tails.
I follow him into the corridor and down to the empty common room. “Oh!” he ejects, lifting a dusty bottle from a half-empty shelf by the bar. “Claret. May I?” he asks, tipping the bottle back and forth in his hand with a boyish grin. So that rumour is true.
I shrug, which he takes as permission enough, and finds two glasses beneath the bar. “What must I do?” I ask him, as he dusts them gamely on his lacy cuff.
Doctor Croke shrugs, pouring the wine. “The consumption is very advanced . . .” He sighs, tapping his fingers on the neck of the bottle. “There is really very little that can be done. Unless you have a king handy to administer the touch? Although if you did I might suggest selling him to Parliament, instead,” he chuckles, taking a sip of wine. “We could split the lucre.” His teeth are small and brown like acorns. I stare blankly at the physick, until he gets bored and concedes to my wish that I be taken seriously. “Very well,” he says. “Warm wine thrice daily. A good fire. Keep his mouth clear of blood. And pray, I suppose. He might have anything from mere days, to, well . . . God’s power is great, his mercy infinite.”
I sit down at a table and he sets a glass before me. He returns to leaning against the bar. I fold my hands in my lap, and feel the Doctor considering me. He takes a sip of wine. “Have you any kin remaining, in the country hereabouts?” he asks, carefully.
I shake my head.
“I see.” He tips his glass back and forth in his hand, thoughtfully. “Your position is . . . well. You may wish to consider what alternatives might be available to you in the way of, ah, employment. In the event that your master—in the event that your master is to . . .”
“Die,” I offer.
He nods, with a simpering smile.
“I do not think there is any other in Manningtree who would take me on, given that I have—that I am a—”
“Witch,” he offers, in his turn.
I nod. I was going say felon, but why bother. “And I have no money to speak of with which to leave. So . . .” I take sip of wine. It is woody and bitter in my mouth, a little flensing to the tongue.
Doctor Croke rubs the side of his nose and arranges the front of his doublet. “That is unless you were to, ah—” He stands straight, clearing his throat. “Unless you were to marry, Miss West?”
“I think a reputation for sorcery might preclude happy matrimony much as it does gainful employment, sir.”
“You could marry me, Miss West.”
I struggle to swallow my wine. Just how much has he had to drink? Doctor Croke, with his horse-piss smell and his little leather bag and his coat of dark purple with the crimson trim (which Mister Hopkins might be able to carry, but the Doctor decidedly cannot). I raise my eyes to his face, and see that he is wholly serious, even keen. I take him in. Round-bellied and hale. In his late fifties, perhaps. He has kindly eyes, which I like. A thatch of white hair over a red face. A witch and a recusant—stranger things have happened, doubtless. They have happened to me, in fact.
He takes another gulp of wine and begins to speak again, words dribbing all in a great heap at my shy turned-in feet: Of course I am old enough to be thy father after my Margaret died you see God never blessed us with children but of course the marriage bed I would not expect you to unless but you are still a young woman of course I would not expect unless you wanted you might after all want but I am comfortably off fine house of great moral rectitude my faith is not I know people say that but I am not my work means I am—until I raise my hand to stop him. I tell him that, respectfully, I must decline. Why do I decline? I can think of no reason more compelling for me to deny him than that I do not want to marry him. And this will have to suffice because I have done it now. There—flap—one future eaten up like a moth drowsed too close to flame.
“Oh,” he murmurs, and slumps back against the bar, scratching a finger under the brim of his hat. He does not look so very crestfallen, I think.
“But perhaps—Goody Briggs would like to, sir?” I offer. “Now that she is widowed.”
He peers up at me and purses his lips. “Goody Briggs? Hm.” He gulps down the rest of his claret and begins to move towards the door to the stable yard. “Goody Briggs. A hard hand, that woman has been dealt. A hard hand.” He repeats this quite a few times—a hard hand—as though the only way he might possibly justify his desire to marry again is that it would serve the community to remove some ill-starred destitute from the par
ish dole rolls. But I think he ought to, if it pleases him. It surprises me to find that I wish Goody Briggs no ill whatsoever.
I open the door for him, and dip my head. “Have you any other calls to make tonight?” I enquire.
“Goody Briggs,” he repeats, stroking his thin beard.
I nod again.
“No, no other calls.” He wanders distractedly across the yard to where his little piebald pony is stabled. “Why?” he chuckles, narrowing his eyes at me across the court, playful-like. “Not planning to throw any little charms out on the night, I hope?” He wiggles his fingers. I think he is quite drunk.
I smile, despite myself. “No, sir.”
“Good, very good,” he hiccups, climbing shakily onto the pony and balancing his case in his lap. “You take care of yourself, now, Miss West,” he says, grabbing hold of the reins and looking blearily towards where I stand in the doorway.
“I will, sir.” I dip in another curtsey.
“I mean it,” he says, now kicking the pony on. “Look after yourself, Miss West.”
I stand at the door and watch as the pony’s white rump and swishing tail disappear beyond the wagon yard and into the shadow and I think, it cannot be true what people say about Papists. Doctor Croke is a bad physick, but he is a good man. Good enough, at least. I take a deep, grateful breath of the cold night air before bolting the door and heading back inside. I find the greater part of the bottle of claret in the common room. It cannot be far from midnight. The inn sleeps. Yet how queerly alive I am.
I take the wine and return to my kitchen stoop, wrapped in a shawl. The wine must already be shambling about with my head, because I think, almost aloud, good kitchen stoop, good friend kitchen stoop as I sit down, setting a candle at my elbow. I sit there for a long while, and I drink. Myriad moths and longlegs flit about my small light. I watch them, brown and gold, like dirt brought alive. And that is when I see it—the white rabbit, just a flash of it, with the coral-bead eyes, the knife ears. His leg bends just within the glow of my candle before he sees me, and scutters away across the yard. Bead eyes and knife ears. I slide on my pattens and move to follow him.
I am halfway up the hill behind the Thorn before I think to wonder what it is that I am doing. The dew splashes cold on my ankles and up and up I climb, the bottle bouncing against my leg. When I reach the crest of the hill I stop and turn on the spot. Darkness, no moon-of-rabbit but real moon, huge and shot through with spears of cloud like a sacred heart. I can see all of Mistley behind me, and Manningtree, too, huddled at the waist of the river. Little bracelet of lights flickering on the water. The sounds rise to meet me: the clop of an axe on a log in a dark yard; a child laughing; dog bark, dog bark two, in answer. The fires of the shipyards, the smell of love. How terrible, how beautiful, all these people dreaming in their beds and fucking there as well, and marrying and dying and hanging their washing out to dry. There were towns like this—and larger—all over England, sacked and burnt to ashes now. Washerwomen. Books. I think to myself, I am drunk. I remember what I have left to do, what has been left for me to do.
33
Felon
I STAND AT THE END OF MY MASTER’S BED, AND consider his sleeping face. Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder General. Matthew. I wonder if he had—or has—brothers and sisters. If he had brothers, were they, too, named for Apostles? Witchfinder is as it sounds, I suppose because there is no need to add further complication to an already complicated matter by the use of troublesome terminology. A Witchfinder, he who finds witches. Note, that is all he claims to do—find them. What happens to those witches once they have been found is someone else’s responsibility, this name seems to intimate. The General appellation was added I know not when and by I know not whom. Probably by Hopkins himself, like a dyed plume to a hat. General as in common, and being appropriate to all things? Or General as in a warrior, one who leads men? I could not say. I have never thought to ask.
The spring of my sixteenth year, the Glascocks’ outhouse burned down. A rain-shower quenched the flames overnight, but I remember the look of it the next morning, the thatch bent in on the softened, steaming beams. That is what Hopkins’ face reminds me of now, his handsome-if features mollied and diminished as though the bone itself has poached beneath his feverish skin. I take his face apart in my mind. I itemise. His beard has grown long, and gives him a wolfish look—a sick wolfish look, the look of some poor whining thing that has eaten aconite. His eyes roll and twitch beneath the lids. He has long, thick eyelashes, like a boy-child’s. I had never noticed them before. His black hair sprawls about on the pillow.
Then his body. His chest, hairless and convex, quivers under the quilt like the dry skin of a drum. His hands, thin and delicate, are folded over his bosom on the counterpane, each finger ending with a long, broken nail. There is blood under those long, broken fingernails. His blood. I think, should I clip his nails, and file them? Should I make him look presentable for what is to come? His mouth is open. His breath—the rasping. The bed-drapes are of purple damask. The sleep of the rich comes so beautifully wrapped.
He opens his eyes a crack. “Rebecca?” he says (or a sound like Rebecca).
“It is I.”
He asks, has the doctor left. It hurts to hear him try to speak.
“Yes,” I say. “I have warmed a little wine for you, sir.” I move to his bedside and he turns his head towards me. I try to help him sit up, but he shakes his head, no.
“Doctor Croke instructed me to—”
He interrupts with a wheeze. “It matters not,” he manages, eventually.
“Come now, Mister Hopkins,” I say, gently, and feel it to be obscene that I am chivvying him like a mother, even as I fluff his pillows and draw him up upon them, even as I splash a little of the warm wine over his lips. “Doctor Croke has said your condition may very well improve, if you will only consent to rest,” I burble, like a happy idiot, “and he reminds me—the power of God is great.”
Hopkins swallows down the wine and forms words, both with difficulty. “Doctor Croke is an imbecile.”
“Aye, he must be, because he asked me to marry him.” Probably the wine has loosened my tongue, but it is too outlandish, too amusing a thing to sit upon.
Hopkins rolls his bloodshot eyes towards me in an attempt at an expression.
I laugh. “I denied him.”
He watches me curiously as I raise the glass to my own lips, then grunts and settles his head back against the pillows. “Perhaps,” he mutters, the wine-fumes seeming to have loosened the snarls in his throat, “he is . . . he is correct. It might be—merely the chill on the air. The chill of the lengthening nights.”
“It may well be so.”
“Read to me,” he coughs. “John. The Gospel of John.”
A Bible rests by his bedside, the spine worn and cracked. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He listens, silent but for his hacking breath, until I reach verse twenty-nine, when the Lord Jesus comes to John, and John bids him Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world, and there I stop. Hopkins turns to look at me. His eyes are wet. He reaches out his hand to clasp mine, our fingers entwining against the open book.
“I have never . . . properly thanked you, Rebecca,” he says. “For your part in helping me to—to drive out the darkness.” His colourless lips curl in a smile almost fond. He means this. It comes from his heart, wherever that hard facility might be. “Your truth spoken like a bright bolt from Heaven. You gave me my sword, my armour.” His fingers twitch against mine.
“I lied,” I say. “And you knew it.”
He is still. He lets out a rattling sigh. “For the greater good,” he says. “The will of God . . .” He trails off. Even he is tired of the will of God, that everyman’s sop. We cannot all know it. We cannot all have it. We cannot continue to pluck the limbs off one another until we finally decide who does.
I feel my teeth set hard against each other in my mouth. “You m
ade me a sinner.”
He rolls his bloodshot eyes and turns his head away. “You made yourself a sinner.”
I shake my head. My voice is shaking. “But that is not your doctrine. Your doctrine is that we can make of ourselves nothing. There are damned and saved, and the saved climb over the bodies of the damned to reach Heaven. Do you believe it? Do you see yourself”—my voice is full of rage, it surprises me—“shining?”
“The world is stained,” he mutters. “Black with the filth of sin. Filth like—”
“Like me?” I laugh. “Aye, and the filth you like to play in. Like to get just close enough to smell. Like to touch then wash your hands of—” And it is a thing a child would do, but I do it—I pull my hand away from his and slam the heavy Bible shut on his thin fingers, and he lets out a cry. I think he realises then, because he tries to push the covers away and to stumble up out of the bed. He is frightened, for it follows that if the saved are beyond reproach, then the damned have nothing to lose, and he knows it—and I throw it, I throw the Bible because it is in my hands and it is heavy and it hits him square between the shoulder blades as he rises wobbling to his feet. He falls forward and against the wall, slithers to the floor, the counterpane wrapped about his legs, sticking to the sweat of his sickness. I am upon him then, a black horned feeling then quickly white hot, white, thought and intent very clear like a black horse standing in a field of gold, I picture it, and it makes me steadfast—a black horse in a field of gold. He scratches at my throat and breasts and hands, and my hands have something else in them, a pillow, and I put it over his face and feel him struggle, he struggles and thrashes between me, between us—my thighs—a thin and slackening body, life a slit of light swallowed by the cloud. He is so weak now, like a baby, and dying. I am strong. I am also drunk. And that helps. And it stops. He stops moving.
The Manningtree Witches Page 24
