The Witchfinder's Sister

by Beth Underdown

  †

  That night, at about two in the morning, I gathered my things, and crept downstairs to the front door of the inn. As I drew back the bolts, a dog growled in its sleep from beside the big hearth. I took one step out of the door, my bag on my shoulder, and stood in the night air, listening. From a short distance away came low, harsh laughter; after a minute, a woman’s shriek swiftly cut off, though impossible to tell whether it was in play or earnest. My stomach made a sound, loud in the night air. I was hungry. I had grown to fear my brother enough, to hate what we were engaged in enough that I had thought to creep out. But I found now that I was afraid of that, too, of being without food and help, of being without a horse, and my foot as it was.

  I stood on the threshold for minutes together, feeling Suffolk spread out like a web all around me, a web of small lanes and smaller villages, and in all of them by now they knew my brother’s name, and few would have wished to make an enemy of him by helping me. I stood there until my foot began to ache with cold. Then I went inside, and shot home the bolts, and climbed back upstairs to my bed. I was not brave enough to take the step of leaving.

  I lay awake the rest of the night, shivering. I tried to pray, but the proper words deserted me. I thought of Papists, the idolatrous beads they have, and how comforting it must be to be able to pray with only a movement of the hand. I thought of my brother, the fear I had glimpsed in him. Suddenly I sensed that, all this time, while he had seemed so implacable and so certain, he had also been running from something.

  32

  The feeling when we rode into Brandeston the next day was different from how it had been in any other place. When we halted by the church, none came out to greet us: I saw a woman watching from the upper window of a house, but when she saw my eyes on her, she turned away. Soon some two or three men appeared, one a fellow who had a servant with him. He took Matthew into the minister’s house, leaving me to wait outside, near the horses where they stood in the heat, twitching their tails at flies.

  I had heard Matthew speaking to someone about the minister at Brandeston. I had assumed that the minister did suspect some woman, but I was wrong. For it was the minister himself that my brother had been called to examine. An old woman stopped in the road and regaled me with the whole business; she had seen me arrive with Matthew, and took me for his servant. Leaning on her stick, she told me that the minister was an old fellow, numbering the last of his years. He had been thick with the family who had the hall, she said, though they had long since gone to join the King at Oxford. Since then, the minister had been eaten up with lawsuits, and quarrelling with the godly portion of the town. The old woman called good riddance on him, before she shuffled away. But it was not all the town that hated him: that would become clear soon enough.

  The minister, being a man, his body was not examined. Rather he was walked, for longer and faster, more brutally, than any woman had been. I did not see but I heard it spoken of, for my chamber at the Brandeston inn was above the kitchens, and by lying flat on the boards I could hear the talk of the women working below. I heard one say that it was a sin and a shame, the state of the gaol at Bury, where there were women crouching in their own muck, the overcrowding was so bad, and no doubt there would be sickness and it would spread out into the town and beyond. I heard another say that she did not like Matthew’s face: his scars made her sick.

  Matthew came in late that night, and summoned me down to eat with him, though for once I had no appetite. He looked weary and frayed. It was roast meat the woman brought us, and I knew her voice: she was the one who had said she did not like Matthew’s face. The meat was dry, and I could not have said what kind it was. Matthew took some in his fingers and held it out to his dog. She ate a little, but when he held out to her another slice, she whined, turned away her nose and went under the table.

  It made me fearful, the woman’s expression when she had served us. The faces of most folk in Brandeston made me fearful, and I wished we could leave that night. I did not know what Matthew’s plan was for me, once we were back in Manningtree; after all that had been said and done, it was hard to think of living peaceably in his household, helping his wife. But even with that prospect, still I found myself eager to be gone from Brandeston. The town seemed equally weighted for and against the man my brother had come to examine.

  ‘I think you reach too far to go against a minister,’ I said.

  ‘They are but flesh and blood,’ Matthew said, frowning at his dog, and pushing his dish away. ‘They are not immune to error.’ I remembered how Bridget had said the same of Matthew, insisting that surely he could be stopped. But Matthew saying it, and of a minister, made me also think of Father, who, when we were children, had seemed barely made of flesh and blood – almost infallible in his holiness.

  Even when we were small, it had been clear how badly Matthew wanted to become a minister: the expression on his face gave it away, as Father stood at the door of his church in his simple surplice – marked out as different, perhaps, but in a manner that commanded respect. You could see Matthew hankering after Father’s position when he would listen patiently after the service to some woman, distracting the child at her skirts that she might finish her story and receive Father’s advice. It often did seem to me that Father’s principal job was the discovering and keeping of secrets, and perhaps that was what Matthew envied: to know the thoughts of others’ hearts. But he had been kept from a life as a minister, and set upon another path.

  ‘He may only be flesh and blood,’ I said, at last, ‘but I know our mother would have wished to see that office respected.’

  Matthew’s face changed, and roughly he stood up. His chair fell behind him, but he did not bend to retrieve it. It was as if he had not even heard it fall. ‘For God’s sake, Alice. What is that to me?’ he said. He spoke a word to his dog, but when she did not move he roused her roughly with his foot, and she followed him out of the door. I heard his feet on the stairs.

  ‘They are but flesh and blood,’ Matthew had said; I thought of those words that night, and of Father’s daily book, the remorse that soaked between its lines. I thought of the minister at Manningtree, how gently he had spoken of there being more than one way out. Lying there in the inn at Brandeston, I almost wished I had turned to him, said, ‘Very well, then. Save me.’

  33

  The next morning I woke to shouting and slamming of doors. I got up quickly and dressed myself. I paused a moment, listening, then pushed my things into my bag, just to be ready. I half thought there must have been some further news of the war, some alarm or rumour of men approaching. I went out onto the landing in time to see Matthew disappearing out of the front door. He left it to swing open in the breeze, and a woman appeared to close and fasten it; the woman from the night before, the one who had said she did not like his face. As if she felt my eyes on her from the top of the stairs, she turned.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I said, still stupid from sleep.

  It was the first time, to my knowledge, that she had looked straight at me in the hours we had been at the inn. She stared up at me from the bottom of the stairs, and her face was twisted with dislike.

  ‘His dog’s dead,’ she said. And then, ‘I’d get down if I were you. He’s bringing your horses round.’ She tucked her hands into her sleeves. ‘I wish you speed,’ she said, and went away.

  Outside, I found Matthew handling the tack himself. There was no sign of a boy to do it.

  ‘Brother?’ I said. ‘What –?’

  But all he said was, ‘Here, hold this,’ and he yanked the girth strap under my horse and pushed it into my hand. While I held the strap in place, I saw some men outside the inn. They did not look friendly. As Matthew led my horse to the mounting block and I pulled myself up, they stood clustered around the inn door. None of them spoke, but when we turned our horses out of the yard, I saw something strike Matthew, and a small stone skittered away. Matthew flinched, but he did not turn back, only spoke a word to his horse and we
picked up speed. When we were almost out of earshot, though, I heard one shout, ‘Fucking stay gone!’

  We rode in silence, my brother keeping up a pace. I wondered whether they would bury Matthew’s dog. I thought of the dry, grey meat the woman had brought the night before. I thought of asking Matthew about it, telling him I was sorry, but he rode so fast that I knew it would be easy to anger him. I doubt he even saw the villages and fields we were passing. Usually he would turn occasionally to see that I was following and, I think, to check the road behind. But today he did not. I wondered if he was weeping.

  We did not see the soldiers until we were almost upon them. It was a mile or so south of Wickham Market, and they were just off the road, sitting at the mouth of one of the clay pits that were common thereabouts. Some clay-cutters were further off, stacking their cut bricks with a wary eye, and several stood still to watch as one of the officers stepped into the road and hailed us, some of his companions getting to their feet, brushing themselves down and straightening their coats.

  Four of the soldiers had guns, and they were all I could look at, the smoothness and weight of them as the men let them hang carelessly by their sides.

  ‘Your papers?’ the officer said, and Matthew passed him the safe-conduct letter he had from Harbottle Grimston.

  ‘You are out of this gentleman’s jurisdiction,’ the officer remarked.

  ‘We have only been where we were sent for,’ Matthew replied.

  ‘And where is that now?’ said the officer, looking at me.

  ‘We are going back to Manningtree,’ Matthew said, his voice sharp.

  I thought, Brother, be pleasant to him. But surely they would not harm us, not with the clay men there to see. The soldiers were all peering to get a look at my face. I shrank back into my raised hood.

  The officer was staring at my brother with dislike, and I wondered if he had heard our name, knew of our business. He folded the letter crisply and handed it back to Matthew. Then he made a movement with his hand, and one of the other men took hold of my bridle and Matthew’s.

  ‘Come down,’ the officer said.

  ‘What for?’ said Matthew. But I saw the man’s face, and climbed painfully out of my saddle.

  ‘This is your servant?’ said the officer.

  ‘No. This lady is my sister.’

  I saw that while one man held the bridles, another was unfastening the saddle bags from our horses.

  ‘What do you mean by this?’ said Matthew. ‘Who is your commander?’

  The soldier who had unfastened the bags dropped them in the dirt of the road, and I scrabbled to gather them. ‘Let me help you, sweetheart,’ another said, and as he passed me the bag, he took the chance to put his hand on me.

  ‘Leave off that,’ his officer told him, and the man backed away. I turned, shouldering the bags, and began to walk on down the road. ‘All surplus horses are forfeit to the army,’ I heard the officer say.

  ‘But these are not surplus.’

  I glanced back to see Matthew trying to take hold of one of the bridles. The officer gave a word in the ear of one of his men: while Matthew was arguing further with the man holding the horse, another crept near with a bucket of something, and threw it over him. For a moment Matthew stood stock-still.

  I turned away again, and walked on, biting my lip with pain, moving slowly with my injured foot, though I knew, if matters turned sour, they would catch me quick enough. But in another minute Matthew overtook me, soaked to the skin. I wondered whether it had been only water in the bucket.

  When I looked back and saw no one following, I began to shake, and the trembling persisted as we walked the miles on to Ipswich. Matthew kept ahead, not waiting for me, not taking any of the bags. He carried no gun, and I thought how it could have gone otherwise, and for a moment I almost wished that it had, that they had taken him into the woods and made him cry out. I almost wished it, but not quite, for the similar fate it would have meant for me.

  As we drew further from the soldiers, I dreaded what we were going back to. When my brother’s work had confined itself to Manningtree and then to the Tendring Hundred, I had thought it was the good opinion of our neighbours that he craved. But those weeks we had ranged far from Manningtree, I had come to see how it was not their approval driving him, or not only. What was driving him lay deeper.

  I thought of the missing pages from Father’s daily book, and the remorse in what had remained: how Bridget’s voice had tightened when I mentioned a dalliance. I thought of the night of Matthew’s birth, what he had suffered. Likely enough, I would never know the truth. Likely enough the missing pages were burned long ago. But whatever was the case, something had lit a fire under Matthew, and though I had hampered his course, in truth my success had been small. Now the trials were coming, the reckoning and measure of all his carefully laid effort, and they were drawing Matthew back, and me with him.

  34

  That night in the Lion at Ipswich, for the first time since our childhood Matthew shared my room. I think he guessed that the further south we went, the greater the chance of me slipping away from him. Before we retired he locked the door, with a great noisy bolt that rasped and scraped, so all I could do that night was lie on my pallet staring into the rafters, aware of him in the bed on the other side of the room, muttering in his sleep as he had when we were children.

  I had heard him earlier arranging borrowed horses for us, and so the next day, I thought, we would be back in Manningtree, and sooner than we had reckoned to be. But the following morning I had to pull up short when Matthew turned his horse off the great road south and towards Wenham. He had business there, he called over his shoulder. Only a paper that wanted signing, for the sale of the last portion of Father’s land: it could not have been urgent, but I think he was ashamed to arrive home so early, and to need to say why. And so I came, that day in July, to ride into the place I was born.

  It was as I remembered it, the way the road swung round left at the corner farm, the bad pothole that always washed itself out at that place. The same chickens scratched in the dust, and faces I knew, or almost knew, looked out from their doorways as we passed. The same two hollies stood guard at the churchyard gate; I can still recall the gloss of them, and the dark mass of yews behind. We halted our horses in the road outside our old home. The years rolled back, and it was almost as if at any moment Mother would come out of the house, or Father, and be perplexed by our great limbs, our lined faces.

  But Matthew swung his feet to the ground, handed me his bridle and strode straight to the front door. He knocked, and a woman came, a servant, and behind her a little fair-haired boy still in his smocks, who stood watching us and chewing his fist. I did not hear what was said, but the servant seemed uncertain. She went away, leaving the door a few inches open, and a minute later a man appeared from the side of the house. He carried a trowel and a stout bucket, and these he set down to dust his hands, before he held one out to my brother. The man was wearing only a coarse shirt and breeches, a handkerchief tied to keep the sun off his neck, but I knew from his bearing, from the way that he put a hand on the little boy’s head when the child ran back outside to lean on his leg, that this was the man who had taken up my father’s position as minister at Wenham.

  The minister shook hands solemnly with Matthew, and after a few more moments’ exchange, my brother came back towards the gate. ‘He says his wife has gone to visit her sister,’ Matthew said. ‘But you may sit in his parlour and wait for me, and he will give you something to drink. I shall be half an hour,’ he said, gesturing with the slim roll of papers he held in his left hand. Then he left me, trudging away up the road towards Little Wenham, determined and brisk. I had to accept the minister’s help in steadying the horses while I got down.

  ‘I am William Cardinal,’ he said, with a correct little bow, and I introduced myself in return. ‘Let us water your horses,’ he said, then allowed me first around the side of the house to where the old trough still stood, and an ir
on ring for hitching. When the horses were tied, he suggested that, it being a fine day, I might like to wait for my brother in the garden. As I followed him round, I saw that the roses were mostly gone, and the great elm that Matthew had used to climb was now only a stump by the back wall.

  The minister showed me to the old bench in the herb garden, where Mother had liked to sit when she wished to recover her spirits. He talked with me for a few minutes, pleasantly, blandly enough, but from the way he asked about the progress of our journey, and whether it had met with success, I guessed he knew very well what we had been about. As I answered him, it came to me with a cold jolt that, though our pressing on had meant a reprieve for Shottisham, Alderton, Ramsholt, those places thereabouts, it might mean something else for Wenham. There was no reason to imagine our old home would be exempt from Matthew’s attention: rather, I thought, he is more likely, having a day or two in hand, to wish to purge the place and leave it, as he would think, clean.

  ‘I dare say you have heard,’ I said, when there was an opening, ‘what my brother’s business has been.’

  William Cardinal had picked a long sprig of rosemary and was crushing the tip between finger and thumb. ‘It has reached my ears,’ he said shortly.

  I cleared my throat. I saw the old apple tree had a heavy crop coming that year, the small hard apples hanging in fists. I pointed to them. ‘We could never decide whether that tree was cooking or eating or cider,’ I said. ‘The fruit turns out so red, but so sour.’