What I next know is that I am huddled beside a cabinet, my back against the wall with my head on my knees, breathing, breathing into my bunched apron. And he is not breathing. Mister Matthew Hopkins is not breathing. Look after yourself, Miss West. I can see his limp, bare feet before me, a little tuft of wiry black hair on the big toe. Still. Will never move again, his feet, his spurs that clink. There is thinking to be done, along with the breathing. Fleeing, too, certainly. Who was in the house and what was there to hear? My throat stings, web of scratches—Beat and claw the witch until I fetch blood of her. Stop. I am alone in the room. It was me, not Him. Do the needful thinking. There is no one to help.
First, I lean over the body and take the pillow from his face. I do not look at his face. It feels important I do not look at the face. There is blood on the underside of the pillow. I put the pillow back blood-down upon the bed, fluff it. Good girl. I will not be able to move him easily, to lift him back into the bed, to shape the body into a semblance of serenity, to make it look as though he passed in his sleep. No. It would take too long. Bible returned to the bedside, with a swift prayer of gratitude to Saint John. Take the key from the drawer, where he keeps it. Kept it. It is the only key, and it is now mine. Stand, killer. Quandary the first: Do I use the key to lock the door to Hopkins’ chamber from the outside? They would have to knock it down, pick the lock—it could buy me time until he is discovered. But immediately it would raise suspicion, for the door to be locked, and from the outside, and no answer coming from within. I decide I will not lock the door. Downstairs to his study, light on my stockinged feet, careful not to knock the wine glass still rolling by the settle, disturb the books stacked in the shadowy corners. I creep. The desk. He keeps his money there. I take his money, velvet purse of money, twelve pounds at least, no time to count, but I see at a glance there is enough and a bit more again than would pay for all of Richard Edwards’ damnable bewitched cattle. I take his book, steal an old riding cloak, lace my boots. Pray the hour is early enough that I will not be seen. Quandary the second: How will my own disappearance be accounted for, except by the assumption I had a hand in his death? There is an irony there, how I have made myself matter at the very time I would most wish not to. Perhaps, if I am lucky, they will think the Devil, having used me as the instrument of his vengeance, has finally made away with me. Perhaps, if I am lucky, Doctor Croke will prove himself as good a man as I hope him to be, and will stall on my behalf. And so it is I find myself trudging through the gloaming, empty streets of Manningtree, and see not a soul, and no soul sees me, praise be to God.
Past the White Hart, the quay wall, and then I follow the winding Stour. Lord, let this damned place forget me. Let it let me go. The sky lightens until I can see soft wrinkles of blue on the slow-flowing water, through tall reeds crowned with blonde, the cotton-stuff, where godwits and wild fowl and nesting geese make their secret conventicles. I must be careful where I put my feet, for the ground is marshy, soft in places. My body aches with tiredness, but I do not allow myself to feel it. My mind is glittering like a coin set on its side to spin. I see the dawn rise across the fields, behind the fat tower of Dedham church.
In the last hours of the moon, I find myself walking in the half-light of Dedham High Street, where the houses are larger, set back from the cobbled road, clothed prettily in ivy. The shops are yet to open, but I find a carter bound for Ipswich, who lets me sit up among the boxes. I do sit at first, restless and upright, my hands cramping around Hopkins’ velvet purse, but our swaying progress through the waterlogged fields soon lulls me to sleep. The carter takes no liberties, asks very few questions, and wakes me gently when we arrive. I am slumped on my left side and covered by the cloak, but he must see the scratches at my throat. He will not let me pay him, which I take as a good indication that I must look either very ill indeed, or very well indeed.
In the busy streets of Ipswich I am apart from all, men and women, listening for the word, the name, the Witchfinder— but I hear nothing. No hew and cry raised at my back. Vegetables and fruits and fresh-cut flowers soup their smells together in a sunny market square. Smiling faces. I picture the afternoon light—for it is now a very fine day—spilling through the window of Hopkins’ chamber to gild his limp undiscovered feet, and his sallow undiscovered cheeks. A tinsel in his hair. It makes me feel peaceful. Cocky, even, for at a rag and bone cart I buy a little scarlet jacket with a trim of black ribbon and trade my cap for a white lace kerchief worked with a design of rosemary sprigs (rosemary stands for remembrance). And I no longer look like Rebecca West, or do for the first time look like Rebecca West. But the name I give myself is Rebecca Waters.
I also buy some oysters and cherries and a pot of beer and find a seat at the bank of the river, where I make a tidy feast of it. Two passing women carrying baskets look at me quite strangely when I find myself laughing aloud, thinking how I threw a Bible at him. It was an accident, really. I could remember it as an accident, if I chose. As Master Edes chose to remember me.
34
London
FROM IPSWICH ANOTHER CART, AND THIS THE eighty-and-some-spare miles to London, where I think it unwise to linger. But I do see Saint Paul’s, which I think very dirty and grey, with vagrants sleeping heaped in the passages, and I do stand upon the bridge, London Bridge, where I watch the boatmen try to shoot under at high tide like caddisflies on a stream, seeming to make a sport of it, which appears to me most perilous and unwise. Mind, it seems unwise they have only one bridge for all of these people. I see many poor men and many rich men but am frightened of neither, for in my small years I have already been held in a gaol with nothing but the slip on my back and lied most perniciously to the Earl of Warwick, which must make me a woman of the world, all told.
I gather up snatches of conversation, apprentices’ grievances (and there are many, apprentices and grievances for them to hold) or preachers’ kindling or the trollop-talk of whatever young buck in a marvellous lemon-yellow coat might pass me on the street, but never once do I hear news of home, or of the Witchfinder. The talk is of Cromwell and Pym and Colonel Rainsborough, and many other names that I feel ought to be familiar to me, Rebecca Waters, woman of the world and Citizen of the New Republic. I feel, for the first time, the enchantment of money. With eleven pounds weighty as a pig’s heart at my hip, anything I want can be mine, and is: candied apples; mauve ribbon and a handful of small silk daisies I want to sew on a bonnet I do not own; a little book of poems I buy from the stalls at Saint Paul’s for nothing other than the beauty of its marbled end-papers. Really “freedom” means “money,” and if anyone tells you otherwise it’s a good bet they’ve plenty of both already.
Then south of the river. The ships moored at Deptford are bigger than any I have seen before, painted in black and gilded at the ribs and points, pennants shivering just half visible through the thickness of tar smoke and wrights’ fires and God knows what other harbour bubble. Dog-meat. Kickshaws. Their front parts loom thrilling up over me, over the dock, like the great bellies of dragons, crusted with barnacles and cornice-work and beautiful women with long blue hair, and I love each and every one—the Diamond, the Antelope, the Laurel—entire, from crow’s nest to keel. I press through the throng unheeded and hear many tongues spoken, French and Dutch and others I could not name if you held my feet over a fire.
Onto one great galleon men in chains are being led. I stop to watch, because I know that there are men brought from Africa to the New World as slaves, but these men look no different from those in Essex or London or those that might be found anywhere else in England, for all I know, except dirtier (though not by much). Long hair hangs ragged about their shoulders and they are half-dressed, some in shirts of good cloth, though stained and ripped. Two men smoking their pipes under the eaves of a storehouse must see me looking, for one says, laughingly, Chevalier—king-men, king-men—and his fellow laughs more when I flinch and move away from them. He tells me they are soldiers from the King’s army, and our Parliam
ent sends them to the sugar plantations in Barbados, sells them. He laughs again, showing me his tiny yellow teeth, like a dog’s. I feel somehow dubious then, as though I have seen something that I ought not to have, dog-teeth and chained men both; but it is happening there quite openly at the busy dock, and people are sparing no more than a second glance for that sad processional. In some way I am glad to see it, for it strengthens my resolve to leave England as soon as I might, England where Christian men sell other Christian men to other Christian men.
I do not know what a sober captain or an honest fare might look like, so I find myself following the Puritan folk about the harbour, reasoning that they probably have a shrewd nose for both. There are many of them, in that familiar drab costume: anxious, austere husbands dragging wives dragging sons and daughters through the gaily-hued crowd, luggage boxes squeezed under their arms, overburdened with cauldrons and spinning wheels, bound for Boston, Maine, Virginia, Massachusetts Bay—a new New Jerusalem, that one that was so recently declared in London having already failed to meet their Godly expectations. There are so many ships, after all, that one must surely be bound for Paradise. “Rockport” seems an unlikely name for Paradise to go by, but that is the destination I eventually settle upon, for no other reason than that I admire its honesty. I know what a rock is, I know what a port is; there can be no surprises in a Rockport. Even fewer, for Rockport is in “Essex County.” For a moment, lining at the gangplank, I envision my arrival, eight weeks hence, at Manningtree’s strange double, every detail arranged identical across the ocean by God’s own meticulous hand; the same rusted bell in the port; the same dirty swans circling the bay; the same sagging rooftops and chimney stacks. But it was not God that named that part of the New World “Essex County”; it was man. Or men. Trying to make it feel like home, I suppose, except it is the Agawam who are putting torch to storehouse and stable, instead of one’s brother Christians.
The Captain of this ship, the Myrmidon, is a handsome Scot called Scanlan, with a ruddy face and eyes of a very bright elemental blue, as though they became that way through too long spent staring at sea and sky. He looks twice at my red jacket and laughs, which makes me shy of myself, and takes four pounds fare and board, which frightens me, being likely more than my mother’s whole house and all within it might have fetched, back in Manningtree. But I pay it. He says if anyone gives me bother to come to him directly, and bows deep like a gentleman, which is the surest sign he is not one.
There is much bother and activity as the ship glides from the port and out onto the Thames. Deptford becomes a muddled thread of colour and smoke across the water, and the westerly light falls on the palace at Greenwich, making the stone glow like a chip off an angel’s leg. Then the green hills of Kent rolling southward into the dusk, and the world of the dead, England, beneath. The deck empties as the evening light dwindles. The Puritans go below to find their bunks, but I stay above to feel the wind and watch the water widen, the banks thin, the gulls argue in the cloud, and say goodbye goodbye I will not miss you. There is another woman standing alone by the prow, who seems to be saying her own inside goodbyes. She is short and slight, wearing a jacket of grey wool. Her red hair is uncovered and arranged into an artful burst of coils in front of her ears. Red hair—and then I see that this woman is Judith, Judith Moone, the upturn of her sharp nose against the haze of the evening sky as known to me as Proverbs. I think it cannot be, but nonetheless I call her name, immediately, unthinkingly. She turns and looks me full in the face, her eyes widen, and then she turns again, hitches her skirts up, and walks off welcher-quick towards the prow. So I call her name again and follow after. This continues for quite some time, Judith dashing about the deck with myself in hot pursuit and half the sailors watching bemused, until at last I throw up my arms and call out to ask where it is she thinks that she might go—with our being on a boat, of all things—that I cannot follow. She stops, spins on the spot and narrows her eyes. She hustles over and grabs my arm, drawing me to the taffrail: “I thought you were dead,” she tells me. To which I dip in an ironical curtsey and say it is a mighty pleasure to see her, too.
She softens and releases my arm, sweeping her eyes up and down over me. “Sorry,” she says, grudgingly. “But what—I cannot—how is it that you are here?” And I can tell she truly did think me dead, and that a part of her still does, so staggered she seems by my sudden appearance.
I sweep my eyes, too. Her apparel is poor and sad, made sadder by the flourishes of gaiety: a lilac kerchief around her grimy neck, two circles of rouge on her cheeks, green stockings sagging at her ankles. It has been four years since we last saw one another—four years since she left Manningtree. I do not think those years have been very kind to her. Maybe not so downright spiteful as they were to me, but. Suffering is suffering. “I left Manningtree,” is all I can think to say. “A week.”
“The others?” she asks, her big eyes suddenly wet, shifting side to side. She raises a hand to tug at her kerchief. The others, by which she means her mother. She knows what she did, but not what came of it. Telling her will have to be revenge enough, I suppose.
I shake my head, which she understands to mean, dead. “Well,” I add, with a weak smile, “apart from Helen. I do not know what became of her. But we have not been below, yet, so perhaps—”
It is a bad joke. One ought probably not to make any sort of joke to a person who has just learned they are an orphan. Judith looks suddenly sick, and turns away from me to place her hands on the rail, head slumped. Hesitantly, I lay my fingers on top of hers. She does not withdraw, and we stand for a while in silence like that. The wind snaps about the rigging. “I thought,” she sighs, eventually, rubbing at her eyes with the corner of her kerchief. “I heard four were hung in Manningtree, but not the names. I had a man read me the news-sheets. There were no names. I knew, anyway. You know”—she rests the point of her chin on her hand and looks over the water—“I didn’t realise how funny mother was, until I was in the company of men. They were funny. Whether they meant to be or not. We had laughter, if shit all else. But that is no small thing.”
A man? All right then. I glance around the deck. “You travel alone?” I ask.
She nods, she sniffs. She smiles slant at me. “Aye. And a little further than Ipswich.” Side by side on her bed in our smocks, white smocks.
I edge in a little closer, so that we might not be heard. “Where did you go?”
“London. I was at the playhouses. In the chorus. I wore a crown of flowers in Timon,” she says, with a fleeting smug cant of her smudged chin, “and then Parliament closed the playhouses.” And then she was something else, I glean. She straightens and draws her threadbare shawl tighter around her shoulders, for the wind is biting out on the opening water. “You are not angry with me?”
“No.” I think for a moment. “I was angry I did not think to do what you did first.”
“Your neck . . .” she says, and reaches out to touch my throat, and the scratches there.
My own hand leaps to bat her fingers away and rearrange my neck-tie. “Your face,” I say back.
She grins broadly. “Look at us. Being uncivil to one another—but on a big old ship.”
“If they could see us now . . .”
Judith loops her arm through mine and we promenade towards the forecastle, gulls wheeling above our empty old heads, and I am glad to have found a friend again. Especially one with whom I might laugh at death, which tried to close in around us, and very nearly managed.
35
The Devil
JUDITH AND I SHARE A BUNK IN THE HOLD below, and I am even more glad of her, because it is deathly cold and we are permitted no fire bigger than a lantern-light. It is also frightening—or uncanny, at the very least, the air close with the smells and the whispering of strangers, the timbers heaving and straining all about. The sort of thing one ought to become accustomed to. We lie face to face and speak quietly of the things we did—and the things that were done to us.
&n
bsp; Judith did not stay long at the Thorn. The very next night after her arrival, with the town thrown into tumult by Old Mother Clarke’s arrest, she stuffed a pair of Hopkins’ silver candlesticks beneath her dress and slipped out the back door, which he had neglected to lock (perhaps not yet fully appreciating the banal cunning of the impecunious country maid). She cut across the Vale of Dedham, much as I had, and made it as far as Sudbury sleeping in hedgerows, before she found a carter who would take her to Brentford, and then another who would take her from there to London—or to Poplar, at least. Every carter in the fens must have a panicked maid lolling atop his freight these days.
She tells me she found work as a domestic in the lodgings of one Dame Pearson, work she was precisely as ill-suited to as I had predicted. She tells me she drank too much—or too strong, at least. She tells me of her short and unhappy marriage to a Godly brewer named Dalton, who liked to impose frequent and severe fasts upon their household, needing no more excuse than the immanence of a Sunday. He eventually decided, instead, upon an altogether quicker route to God’s right hand, flinging himself from a bridge one night and leaving her penniless. She tells me of the baby they had, a boy, and how it died. She tells me of the playhouses and the brothels and the places which were both by turns, where Earls consorted with pickpockets and the sailors drank a strange cordial, like milk with black seeds, which made their eyes as big as their ideas. She tells me of visiting the palace at Whitehall, where the glass domes stand broken open to the rain, and seeing the King’s own nightshirts there, which were very fine. She did not see a camel, for all the beasts that were kept there had long since died, but she did see a drawing that was made of one.
So now she is Judith Dalton, and I am Rebecca Waters, and I do not know what I ought to tell her back. I tell her of how they came to take me from our house on Lawford hill, where the rosehip grew by the kitchen window, and of how proud the Constable was that he had killed our cat. I tell her there is no longer a market cross at Market Cross, just a nub of pale stone, so I suppose they will call it Market Nub now. I tell her that the windows at St Mary’s remain boarded up. I tell her that Prudence Hart miscarried her baby, which she is much cheered by. I tell her of John Edes. I tell her what we did in the wood, I tell her how he ran away and left me, I tell her how he is a soldier in the New Model now. (“Good,” she says. “I hope Prince Rupert’s Boy eats his prig face right off then shits it out in a ditch.”) I tell her of Hopkins. I tell her he is dead—I do not tell her how. I do not tell her I saw the Devil. I tell her that the Widow Moone, her mother, spoke often of her, and kindly, because lying comes easily to me now, and as lies go I do not feel it to be an especially sinful one.
The Manningtree Witches Page 25
