We talk until the goodwife in the neighbouring bunk rolls on her side and huffs at us to cease our prattle so that she might sleep. Judith mutters out of the corner of her mouth that our wearied interlocutor is a curd-faced old bag, but nonetheless leans across to bid me good night, presses a kiss to my brow, then turns away to face the timbers. Above the blanket, I can see the little bones of her spine pressing against her freckled skin. I count the freckles, one two thirteen twenty, over and over by the low light, but find I cannot sleep. Instead, I observe the queer listing movements of the lantern that casts light over the cabin, listen to the soft snoring of my fellow passengers, and wonder how deep the water is beneath my back and what strange creatures swim in it. And that last thought is a sure way to frighten oneself aboard a ship, buried in all the sea’s great yearning and shuddering, which it is written shall one day engender the end of this very sad world, gulp all men and women down to salt. We must still be close to England’s coast, and yet my mind makes fathom on fathom of darkness to sink through, darkness where serpents weave their bodies together, and at the bottom of it all the human bones that ever were lying strewn about, and with no thought at all for what body they once belonged to, or what doctrine it held. Carefully, so as not to wake Judith, I come out from under the blankets and drop to the cabin floor. I fetch my cloak and pick my way towards the ladder, through the sleeping passengers and their scattered luggage. Frying pans and three-string guitars and spindles, the sad inventory of the lost.
Up on the deck I am doused in cold, clean air, and the sea seems a good thing again. A near-full moon hangs high over the shuddering water, and stars so thick they are a white pith around it. The Atlantic—the Great Sea. I have not been there long, standing by the starboard rail, when Captain Scanlan arrives at my elbow, dipping his hat. “A calm night,” he says, like a father gazing proud at a sleeping babe, almost, “let us pray it continues.”
“I think I ought rather to pray yourself and your sailors are able to win us through if it does not, Captain Scanlan, sir,” I reply.
He laughs at that, Scottishly. “Have you ever sailed before, Miss . . .?”
“Waters,” I tell him, after a longer pause for thought than I would like. “No, I have not.”
He nods and looks out over the short waves. “Aye. Then I shall endeavour to ensure you fall in love with it, Miss Waters. There is nothing else in all the world that is the like of it.”
Nothing else in all the world that is the like of it? Please. Those are words he has practised many times, and to many maids before me. “And what? Become a sailor, in the New World?” I sally. I realise I am playing the coquette. Rebecca Waters is an unpredictable character indeed.
“Why not? All things are possible in the New World, Miss Waters. And you have the name for it. A sailor, a whaler, or perhaps”—he turns to look at me with a greedy grin, and there is a flash of gold in his mouth, a gold tooth—“or perhaps a sailor’s wife?”
I feel a strange wringing feeling in my guts, because that was what my mother was. A sailor’s wife—although I never thought of her that way, never asked how and where it was that she met my father, her husband, God rest him. I look at Captain Scanlan, handsome and weathered with his thick neck and his gold tooth and his merry soul, and think, Yes, I see. Did it go something like this? I hold my cloak tight at my throat and smile over my hand, and say: “I thought sailors were meant to be married to the sea?” And I could picture my mother saying it, too. Apple never rots far from the tree. That’s another thing they say. Hag-tree.
He laughs again. He is a laughing man, which is better than a smiling man, I think. “Aye, they do say that. A sailor’s mistress, then?”
I click my tongue. “I think I might do better, sir.”
He smiles and lowers his head so that his smile, glittering tooth and all, is visible below his hat’s tilted brim—a gesture tenderly choreographed. The wisp of hair that licks at his beard in the seawind, a felicitous addition. “I expect you will, Miss Waters,” he says, and bids me good night, striding back towards the forecastle. He whistles as he goes, which is just as well, because whether smiling or laughing, I cannot abide a man who whistles.
I stand there with the moon and the pithy stars a while longer, soothed by the gentle sway of the boat and the look of the waves’ naked backs as they catch the night-glow, then release it, then swell up again, bucking and foaming, seeming to have fun in the moonlit dark, to enjoy themselves, to humour our tiny ship with mercy. At last I turn to head below, and catch sight of a shape in the prow; a dark shape, a man in black, wearing a long coat like a presbyter and a high-crowned hat. He turns his head. He smiles at me over his shoulder. There is a wind in his long black coat, and the same wind is in my hair, the wind of many seas, it feels like. So I loose my hair, I loose it for him. And I find I am no longer looking at the man in black, but looking back at myself, death-dealer, her white cap balled in her fist, hair blown like a rose in the wind of many seas.
Afterword
John Stearne and Matthew Hopkins—the self-appointed Witchfinder General—were active across East Anglia and the Home Counties of England in the middle years of the 1640s, during which time they are estimated to have had a hand in the execution for witchcraft of anything from one hundred to three hundred women and men (Stearne, in his Confirmation and Discovery of Witchcraft, first published in 1648, puts the number at two hundred). The so-called Witch Craze of the English Civil War was an apparently unprecedented period of persecution, which historians have accounted for by citing myriad social, religious, economic and local factors: the vacuum of authority and the widespread famine engendered by the war (which also interfered with normal legal procedure); virulent anti-Catholicism; growing Puritan radicalism in the south of England; the growth of the merchant class and shifting attitudes towards poverty and vagrancy (belief in a providential God rather sours one’s opinion of a needy neighbour—there is no such thing as hard luck, just the Lord’s ire). The impact of Hopkins’ own personal charisma and undoubted animus against witches is, in this fraught context, hard to properly judge, as are his true motives.
Matthew Hopkins, a Minister’s son from Greater Wenham, Suffolk, was born around 1620 and died in Mistley in 1647, apparently of tuberculosis. Conflicting contemporaneous accounts of who he was and where he came from combine with later conjecture and Gothic mystification to create an impression of a man who seems at best to have been a serial bullshitter, at worst a compulsive liar. Certainly, he died very young. He may have been a craven opportunist and arch manipulator; or he may sincerely have believed in his cause, subscribing to the Puritan dogma of damnation and Biblical literalism that demanded the extirpation of witches. We will never know. But I had fun weighing the possibilities. I hope readers will, as well—but my real interest was in the persecuted, not the persecutor. The accounts of the Essex witches’ trials offer an invaluable—and deeply moving, I think—insight into the fears, hopes, desires and insecurities of the women who scratched out their existence on the very edges of society, and who have otherwise gone voiceless, or else been muted by victimhood. I hope I have done justice to their character, humour and pride, which radiates from the records of their lives and deaths even after four hundred years.
All trial scenes were excerpted from contemporaneous accounts of the Manningtree witches’ arraignment and Rebecca West’s confession, first published in 1645, and easily accessed online. These I transcribed to modern English, and sometimes edited for brevity. Timelines have been condensed, some characters have been relocated (the Moones actually lived in Thorpe-le-Soken, not Manningtree) or had their roles expanded (John Edes, Priscilla Briggs, Prudence Hart, Minister Long), and some are wholly invented (Thomas Briggs, Leah Miller, Doctor Croke). But I have endeavoured to remain as close as I could to the facts, as they have been presented to us, in doubtless sensationalised form, of the life of Rebecca West, described to us only as “a young maid, daughter to Anne West,” and of her direct associates, who�
��with the exception of Elizabeth Clarke, who died in Chelmsford—were executed in Manningtree in 1645. Rebecca disappears from the record around this time.
Witch-hunts—which involved the brutal torture and execution of thousands of women and men in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—are not a relic of the past in many parts of the world. We exported them. In recent years, alleged witches have been murdered by the Islamic State, as well as in Tanzania, in India, and in other countries dealing with the brutal legacy of colonialism. I would recommend the work of Silvia Federici to anyone seeking to learn more about the witch-hunt as an ongoing social and economic phenomenon. I am also indebted to the work of historians including Keith Thomas, James Sharpe, Diane Purkiss, Malcolm Gaskill and Stacy Schiff.
Acknowledgements
First and largest thanks to my agent, Zoe Ross, and her assistant Olivia Davies (so many proofs), and my editor at Granta, Ka Bradley, whose insight was so instrumental in shaping this story. This manuscript was undergoing its final stages of editing and production during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 (and 2021), and I am deeply grateful to everyone at Catapult for their work in bringing the book to publication in the United States: Jonathan Lee, Kendall Storey, Wah-Ming Chang, Sarah Jean Grimm, Alicia Kroell, Megan Fishmann, Alisha Gorder, Rachel Fershleiser and Janet Renard. Jo Walker, for this beautiful cover (on behalf of both myself and the Instagirls).
I was able to complete this book because I had reached for the first time in my adult life a position of relative financial security (something that is becoming harder and harder for young people to do). I am grateful to the UK’s Society of Authors for a small work-in-progress grant I received, and to the Ledbury Poetry Festival for the Forte Prize for Best Second Collection (awarded for my poetry collection Fondue), which, at the risk of sounding trite, changed everything for me. Thanks also to Luke Constable and Michael Williams for the unglamorous but indispensable bestowal of corporate latitude.
Thank you to all the booksellers and reviewers who made a locked-down debut launch such an affirming and exciting experience irrespective of circumstances, and to the postal workers and warehouse staff who put it in readers’ hands.
Finally, to my long-suffering Virgo, Edward Caddy. My grandmother Sheila Blakemore and my father, Paul Blakemore (my first and best reader, honorary Manningtree Witch).
© Sophie Davidson
A. K. BLAKEMORE is the author of two collections of poetry: Humbert Summer and Fondue. She has also translated the work of Sichuanese poet Yu Yoyo. Her poetry and prose writing have been widely published and anthologized, appearing in the London Review of Books, Poetry, The Poetry Review, and The White Review, among other publications.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2021 by A. K. Blakemore
First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Granta Books
First published in the United States in 2021 by Catapult
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-1-64622-064-9
Jacket design by Jo Walker
Book design by Wah-Ming Chang
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020948520
The Manningtree Witches Page 26
