The Witchfinder's Sister

by Beth Underdown

  The air in the room grew thick; the woman had not, I think, washed that week. She began to weep while Mary examined her, and I crouched to hold her hands, to keep her upright, though her palms were slippery with sweat. As if she sensed my sympathy, she would not leave off insisting that she had never had any imp, as if my believing her would make her free to go.

  Mary soon found what she was looking for, but before she would let Margaret stand up and get dressed, Mary made me look and see how to apply the tip of a long, blunt needle to any likely tag of flesh, to find the patch of numbness which was proof. She talked me through it, pointing and jabbing without ceremony, heedless of the woman’s weeping and the blood that was starting from the places she had pricked, adding to the damage that time and childbirth had done. Seeing my grey face, Mary snorted. ‘I’d have thought you’d be accustomed. You were a midwife, weren’t you? What did you think you were here for, child?’

  We left Margaret Legat to settle her clothing, went through to the other room, and Mary reported to my brother what we had found. He made notes, and I used his distraction to step outside to wash my hands. My heart was beating too fast. I could see no pump, so I made do with the horse trough by the church. I remember the water was clear and good, and I saw a tadpole move in the deeps of it, but then I had scarcely time to grasp the cold stone rim before I dropped to my knees, and threw up into the water.

  I threw up once and then again, until what came was bitter and thin, and then I sat down on the edge of the horse trough and wept, as if I would never stop, the folk of the village going about their business as though they did not see me, and only little children turning to stare. I had sat there half an hour when I began to feel the throbbing pain in my foot.

  I was excused Margaret Legat’s watching, though in the parlour of the inn that night I overheard Mary Phillips telling someone the woman had confessed: she had never knowingly kept an imp, she had said, but there had been a thing that did live beside her, like a child, though she never saw it or heard it speak. That was enough, and before we turned in for bed I heard Matthew making arrangements among the men to have her taken to the gaol at Bury St Edmunds.

  The next morning I got up early to see Margaret Legat being taken: though it meant nothing, I felt it was the only thing I could do for her. It was a cold morning, with a heavy dew. Several women from the village had also come out of their houses to see. I remember Margaret Legat had packed a small cloth bag of things, and it touched me that she thought she would be able to keep them. There was some delay with the cart, and while the men conferred among themselves, the woman saw her neighbour come out onto her front step, pulling a shawl around herself.

  ‘Nance,’ Margaret Legat said, pulling a Bible out from her bag. ‘Nance, I must give this back to you.’

  But the neighbour lowered her eyes; she turned away inside, and shut her door. I felt my brother draw level with me, where I stood near the cart, though he did not speak. I still remember the sight of Margaret Legat’s stooped back as she stood, just looking at that closed door, before she went to lay the Bible on the step. The men let her do it, before they pushed her up into the cart.

  As it pulled away, I could not help but turn to Matthew. ‘Brother, why must you go on with this?’ I said. ‘What have you to prove? You’re getting married, Matthew. Why not go home, and give that your attention?’

  He did not answer immediately, but stayed watching the cart as it drew away down the lane.

  ‘You do not think, do you,’ I tried, ‘that this is what our mother would have wanted for you?’

  At that, his head snapped round. ‘Mother’s dead,’ he said. ‘So it little matters what she would have wanted.’

  He marched away indoors, and after a moment I, too, turned back towards the inn, my left foot dragging behind me.

  That same morning was the one Mary Phillips left to return to Manningtree. It is odd to think of now but, not wishing to be left alone with Matthew, I was almost sorry to see her go. Before she mounted her horse, she pressed something into my palm. ‘You will have need of this,’ she said. I opened my hand, and looked at the blunt needle, the length of my thumb, its dull silver sheen.

  When we dined later, Matthew was civil with me, as if nothing had passed between us; he enquired how I had slept, and passed me the bread. It was dry, and stuck in my throat, and I felt my brother watch me chewing. I tried to keep my face blank, but I could not tell whether I was successful. Though on the surface everything was the same, underneath everything was different. He had crossed a line, the way he had hurt me, the way he had spoken of Mother: suddenly, I felt as if I had never known my brother at all.

  30

  The next weeks were like one of those nightmares, the ones from which you cannot wake. I searched women gently, and reported as little as I could to Matthew. But those women who drew a discontented crowd, hungry for what proofs had been found against them, there was little I could do for those ones. Each had a different tale, fit to break your heart, but what they had in common was loneliness, and too many nights spent listening; loose flesh where they had given birth or gained weight in other, better summers. What they had in common was fear.

  We moved up through Suffolk from village to village, Matthew writing ahead to seek information and a welcome in each new place. The back of my neck burned and peeled and burned again. Often I thought of leaving, of sitting in the road and refusing to move. But in the end I thought it better to stay, and attempt to work against my brother for, as I tried to gather my courage back, I saw I was well placed to do it, without him even realizing that it was being done. Though my foot pained me so that I had to bite my lips together as I rode, I could not bear the thought of what would happen if Matthew were to replace me with some other woman, who had less gentle hands than my own; someone with less compunction, who would make liberal use of the blunt needle.

  Those women Matthew made me search, I used our time alone to counsel them on what to say to him, on what questions they might expect him to ask, and how to keep a respectful and frightened countenance. I let them freshen themselves with water, and when my rare chances came to steal them I slipped the women small coins, that they might persuade a gaoler to fetch them a clean shift to keep for their trial, and look decent when they came to the dock. Some of them I catechized, and made them repeat their prayers, correcting them gently on how bread came before forgiveness.

  But it took its toll on me. Quickly the mornings and evenings of travel became my only respite. More than once we turned down the wrong lane and found ourselves where the way ended at some low farm, where dogs would come out but no people. I was grateful for the time it took to retrace our steps, for the further minutes it would spare the women where we were going, and the further minutes it would spare me. For I began to see, as the days passed, that with whatever small good I was attempting, I was doing twice as much evil. So it was that each day I rode miserably behind Matthew, watching flies land on my horse’s hot ears, trying to ignore the unpleasant slush of blood in my foot. I stopped looking about me, so that much of what I remember now of our route is reduced to the head of my horse nodding in front of me. Sunlight, and loose white seeds in the still air.

  †

  It felt peculiar to come to Framlingham, for Father had spoken of the place sometimes, having inherited a plot of land there at the back of the castle, and long leased it to a man who kept ducks and geese. As the innkeeper showed us our rooms, I noted how coldly he looked on my brother: it gave me a plan. Turning matters over in my mind, I walked out from the inn, saw the ditch of the castle filled with rubbish, churned to mud where folk were keeping pigs, and the weeds waist-high within the castle walls. I remember thinking, I wish Father were here to counsel me now. For whatever the mysterious remorse in his daily book was for, I knew it would be only some minor sin, compared to what my brother was embarked upon.

  The first woman the constable set us to watch at Framlingham was Margaret Wyard, who told us that the devil h
imself had come to her, first like a calf and later like a man with yellow hair. Her face took on an unpleasant interior expression as she told us how the devil had sent her seven imps for her five teats, so when they came to suck they had to fight, like piglets with a sow. She was a heavy woman, Margaret Wyard, of middle years. No one could recall that she had ever been married, and she breathed through her mouth.

  The twelfth woman we examined at Framlingham was Ellen Driver, who lived in one room with her six hens, and confessed that she had married the devil, the year the Queen Elizabeth had died.

  ‘What’s that, then, forty years?’ said the constable, when we went back to his house to make our report. He laughed at his own joke. ‘You’d think matters would have grown stale by now.’

  But Matthew did not smile back: he only gave a curt nod, and presented his bill. He was just the same with the women: impassive. Whether they were broken or spirited, he treated them the same. The hard days on the road, and the long watchings, they seemed scarcely to touch him. He kept his shirts and collars clean, his questions sparse and to the point, and he noted all answers carefully. I saw how he used the pause as he made his notes to create a silence into which apprehension would pour, and many women would say more than they meant to, and so unmake themselves.

  But I did have some success in thwarting Matthew, and as we went on through Suffolk I tried to remember our last afternoon at Framlingham, when I had taken the stern innkeeper aside to mention the villages I had heard from Matthew we were making for: Great Glemham and Sweffling; Stradbroke, Wingfield, Fressingfield. And sure enough, when we reached those places, many of the women we had been called to examine had mysteriously gone to visit their relatives in other parts – even those who were known to have no relatives living.

  As we tracked our way north, never resting, I kept working against my brother in small ways, scarcely detectable, and I do not think he guessed it, for I remained biddable and asked no questions, was no different from any woman servant he might have hired, except that I read his moods, knew his small wants before he knew them himself, and smoothed the way with arrivals and departures that he might not grow discontented, that he might stay in his thoughts and notice me the less. If he was suspicious of my sudden tractability, he did not show it. At all times, he kept his brown leather case at his elbow, but my curiosity had dulled as to what might be inside it, about the mystery of the missing pages of Father’s daily book. The further we travelled, the duller my senses had become; even the pain in my foot sank to a low, sickening ache that kept me awake in the night, and all I could think about, all that seemed to matter, was finding small ways to thwart my brother.

  At Rushmere, we were called to examine one Susanna Smith. The verger met us by the church, and took us to the house where they were keeping her. She was of middle age, with a husband living, but he had not been to see her in weeks. They had cut her hair short, to prevent her working it into knots. ‘She has been like this six months or more. What I mean is, it would be expedient,’ the verger said, ‘it might ease matters somewhat, if she could be removed to the gaol.’

  The nurse sitting with Susanna Smith in a low upper room told us that the woman had been a good mother, until the fit that needed four grown men to restrain her. She had been tied after that, and the nurse set to watch her. I suppose it was an expense on the parish, paying for the nurse, and then they had heard of Matthew.

  ‘She told me the devil came to her as a red-coated dog, and spoke to her of killing her children,’ the nurse said doubtfully. ‘Then the day after, though I had asked the minister to come and talk with her, her throat had swelled so she could not speak – from the finger-marks, I did judge that she had been plucking at it herself.’

  The nurse showed us the knife they had found in her clothes, rusty and blunt; somehow it was worse to think of a person doing themselves harm with it than it was to think of them using one that was clean and sharp.

  It made me think of the fellow in London, the one who had told fortunes, made that noise like logs spitting. Folk would give him coins sometimes; at others he would disappear for a day or two, labouring. But even the worst work for women – even scrubbing floors, washing corpses – you must trust the one who does it. Women’s work is done in homes, in private, where men keep their children and their wives. How much harder, then, I saw, for a woman to find work, if she was not right in her mind.

  After speaking to the nurse who watched Susanna Smith in the daytime, Matthew came back later to talk to the one who watched her at nights.

  ‘We called a physician out, once. He said it was a brain-sickness,’ the night nurse told him. ‘But I do not believe in brain sickness. She is entirely the devil’s creature.’

  The next morning, Matthew asked Susanna Smith his questions, ignoring her wary, hateful look. Some of her speech displayed a confusion about what was real and what was dreamed, a confusion which made me think of Mother. But Matthew seemed untroubled as he noted her answers down. I had to shift my weight onto my good foot to be able to stand for so long, and I winced as I did so. There was a powerful smell from Susanna Smith’s hair, and I noticed the thick yellow skin on the soles of her feet, as she sat with her back against the wall and stared at us, stared at Matthew, and myself standing behind him. Suddenly I saw that, to her, we were exactly the same.

  31

  When I had almost grown used to my strained, careful days alone with him, a letter pursued Matthew on our course up-country, telling him that the date was set for the Essex trials. And so it was at Rushmere that Matthew decided we would turn our horses and head back towards Manningtree. I was riding with my left foot hanging free of the stirrup. It had swollen badly. In mounting, as I had put my weight on it, it would almost give under me, but by then I scarcely felt the pain in it or in my hands, which were covered in blisters that swam with water from gripping the reins.

  Though the Thorn was no home to me, I confess I was relieved to be returning, that an end was in sight. But it turned out that Matthew had promised to look in at one or two places as we made the journey back.

  We came off the road south at the turn for Halesworth. I knew, for he had left it open on the breakfast table, that Matthew had received a note from that place about a woman sending imps to spoil a cornfield. Matthew took us to Halesworth the long way round, that he might pass by the field and see the damage for himself. Compared to other accusations I had heard, the cornfield sounded almost a dull business: so I was hardly paying attention, as we began to catch sight of the field in snatches, between the trees.

  It had been a long time since the night of Bess Clarke’s watching, since I had seen the marks in the soil of the strawberry bed. I had forgotten how suddenly the hairs on your neck can rise.

  Matthew pulled up his horse, and I got down, too. It was not like anything I had ever seen. The whole field was flattened perfectly, as if a giant hand had pressed it down gently in the night. I knew at a glance there was no point in crouching to search for footmarks. I would still swear it, even now: that field had not been trampled by men or beasts. I looked at Matthew. His face was impassive, and I tried to keep my own as blank as it had been while listening to old women talking about the devil speaking to them from hedgerows. But this was not the same. To gaze out over that field, the half-fattened heads of corn rotting on the ground, was to be touched by strangeness, by something beyond understanding. I knew I was in the presence of something evil.

  We rode back towards Halesworth, to the house of Mary Everard, who was accused of sending the imps that had done the damage we had seen. I sat by while Matthew questioned her, trying not to be fearful. I had to speak to myself sternly: I could not know how that field had been flattened, but for certain if there was evil in that room, it would be my chair it crouched behind, if I chose to believe that the poor, shaken woman before me could have brought about that wrong.

  But I think Matthew guessed I had been afraid, for that evening, when I sat watching him eat the supper he had
ordered for himself, carefully chewing his crusts of bread, he said, ‘I should think, sister, that what you have seen today was proof enough even for you. You, who seem to think all these wretches so innocent.’ He locked his eyes with mine; I forced myself to look away.

  ‘I saw a thing I cannot explain,’ I said, ‘though no proof it had aught to do with any human hand.’

  Matthew was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘I know you saw something the night I came to Mother’s house, the night you let me in. You won’t say what, but I know you did.’ I did not answer, but saw him swallow, his pale throat bobbing up and down, and at once I realized he was not angry but that he, too, was afraid.

  That night he spent longer than usual writing in his ledger. I had caught glimpses of it before, over his shoulder, and I knew that against a woman’s name he would sometimes write ‘old’, sometimes ‘young’; sometimes he would write ‘poor’ or ‘widowed’, ‘children’ or ‘no children’, before the details of a woman’s confession. I know now that he would also write how many imps she had and what their names were, the dates on which they came to her and in what circumstances, what harms she employed them to do. But he did not mention in his ledger how young a young woman was or how old an old, the state of her health or her wits. My brother was afraid, and to manage his fear, just as he had once declared a grave to be no more than a hole in the ground, he classified each woman: rubbed out her individual features that she might no longer be a threat.

  I did not see his ledger up close that evening, but I glimpsed scraps of what he wrote, those neat rows, and I remembered the frenzied mood in Manningtree that had marked our departure. How much easier it would be, I thought, for Matthew to convince others of the guilt of the women whose trials he had arranged, having reduced them already to columns, to entries in a log. How much more vulnerable they would be, with their own particular tragedies stripped from them. I understood most fully now, the horror of what my brother was doing; the horror that Grace had been unable to describe. How mundane it was, and so how terrible. And doubt crept in that reason would win, that the women would be acquitted. Suddenly I feared I had been part of something that could have nothing but the reddest of ends.