The Witchfinder's Sister

by Beth Underdown

  †

  An hour passed, two, after I put the charm into the bowl of water. Then I heard broad accents, rough voices and shouting down below. My breathing came faster, and I hesitated only a moment before I began to yell, ran to the attic door and put my lips to the keyhole, shouting, ‘Up here!’

  It took some time before someone called through the wood, ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘I am the mistress of the house,’ I said. ‘I’ve been waiting – The door is stiff, you must force it.’

  There was more than one: I heard them having some conference among themselves. ‘Stand back, then, mistress,’ one called.

  I retreated a few steps, and the door burst open. One of the lads stepped forward, ran his hand over the shattered wood around the lock. The other two were looking at me, and their doubt was clear. I do not wonder, for though I was decently enough dressed, having put on Mother’s mourning gown, I had seen the reflection of my face in the bowl of water, my chapped lips and whiteness. But I did my best to smile, govern myself. ‘My thanks,’ I said, stepping forward, ‘but now, what is this commotion?’

  They were young men, in rough clothing, shoes that were all holes. They were clearly fresh off some boat. ‘They said to bring him back here,’ one said, gesturing back down the stairs. ‘We haven’t touched his purse.’

  I followed them down, and onto the landing, then saw what two of the lads behind held, slung in a piece of sailcloth. ‘Is he dead?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ said another. ‘He breathes.’

  ‘Well, then,’ I said. ‘Bring him in here.’

  I tried the door of Matthew’s chamber, and it was not locked. They laid him on the bed and rolled him off the cloth they had used to carry him, which was soaked through: his clothes and hair left dark patches where they touched the quilt. I removed my brother’s purse. Matthew twisted and, without opening his eyes, he coughed out some water, which surely came out redder than it had gone in.

  I went back into the passage, and half closed the door. The first of the lads was saying that he would not have seen anything, had he not cast a glance back over his shoulder. He and his friend had been going from Manningtree back to their ship where it was docked, having won a sum of money at cards, fair and square, from a hard-faced fellow at the Bell. The fellow, though, had not liked his loss, and the lad who spoke to me said he had been glancing behind them since leaving the tavern, to be sure they were not followed. They had passed the pond and were almost at the Thorn, but nevertheless he had taken one more look over his shoulder. There was only the same thin, ill-looking fellow behind them on the path, and he and his friend had laughed between themselves, at the thought of so puny a man being any threat to them.

  But before they could go on their way, my brother had come to the pond at the hopping bridge, and the shape of him did seem to shift and flicker, which made the lad squint, and tap his friend’s shoulder. For suddenly then he saw that there were not one but two by the pond, and the second figure had laid hold of the thin man and cast him down on the ground. Then the attacker did crouch, quick and spry, to where Matthew’s head was lying in the water, and appeared to the first lad’s sight to thrust downwards with all its might. And so both lads had shouted, run back along the path, at which the attacker left off and went away quick, back towards the town. ‘And for certain,’ the second lad said, ‘we would have given chase, except that this man was still lying with his head in the water. So we had to stop, and do what we could for him.’

  ‘For which I thank you,’ I replied.

  ‘We asked one of the women who mends the nets where to bring him,’ he went on.

  ‘Is this your husband, mistress?’ another asked doubtfully.

  ‘No,’ I replied. I opened the purse, but it contained only one or two of the smallest coins. ‘But can you tell me, sirs, what manner of man it was did this? Did you see him clear?’

  ‘I saw them clear enough,’ the first lad said. ‘As I see you now. But, mistress, it was no man that set upon him. I believe it was a woman. An old woman, but with a strength unnatural.’

  ‘A woman?’ I said.

  ‘Aye. And older than fifty, but –’

  ‘No,’ said the other, nudging the first. ‘No, she was young. She had yellow hair.’

  The first lad looked at his friend. ‘Are you blind?’ he said. ‘Her hair was grey.’

  In the end I cut them off in their dispute: it was clear that each feared I would not pay them, did their accounts not agree.

  ‘Come down with me,’ I said, and I took them into the parlour, and gave them two silver plates. The first lad reached for them eagerly.

  ‘Though for certain, mistress,’ he said, as he turned them over, ‘I would know the woman again, were I to see her. Which I hope I never do.’ He restrained himself, just, from crossing himself, you could tell. He was close enough for me to smell the beer on his breath, but as I judged, he was not gone in drink. And they were both of them young, keen of sight.

  ‘You can divide these between you?’ I asked, and eagerly they agreed. As I let them out, I said, ‘Forgive me, one thing more – what is the date?’ When they told me, I had to make them repeat themselves.

  Once they were gone, I went up to Matthew. His eyes were open, and wandered the room: his hands were pale and shaking. He kept trying to speak between his snatched, bubbling breaths. He seemed to think I was Mary Phillips.

  ‘Peace,’ I said. ‘Do not try to talk.’

  I felt no pity for him. I was almost surprised to find it gone, to find the gap where it had been, from which I could watch him struggle for air, and feel nothing. I almost enjoyed it, for a minute or two, watching him shiver, though then he set up coughing, and that made me think of Father and his last months, watching him fight with his lungs each day, and lose, and lose.

  I thought of lighting a fire, but I did not. I thought of going for a doctor; though there was nothing to pay him with, I knew he would come on the strength of Matthew’s reputation and his standing in the town. But he would not come, if I did not call him. I think in some close part of myself, I had already decided.

  I saw my brother’s case of papers on the floor beside the bed. So I did not have to look at him, I opened it, and out fell a pile of household accounts, tradesmen’s bills. Among them I saw a letter from my brother Thomas. My breath caught, in the hope that he had written to admonish Matthew. I let myself read.

  My dear brother,

  You do tell me of your business in Suffolk as if it were unknown to me, but there are many here with family still in those parts, and I have heard from more than one quarter of your success with the finding and prosecution of witches in that county. I would be grateful if you could answer me further on some points in your last letter, and put me out of doubt over how long the witch should be watched at a time, and also write again explicitly about what the marks be and where they are located, and I promise you I will be close with the knowledge. I would be indebted if you did send me in addition more details of your own cases and whatever works on the subject you do recommend, I myself wishing to be instructed in every aspect of magistracy.

  With all my prayers for your own health, I sign myself

  Your loving brother,

  Thomas Hopkins

  Impossible to know whether Matthew had answered the letter. When I looked up from it, he seemed to be asleep. I sifted further into the case, and there they were. I had thought them lost, but I knew them instantly: the missing pages from Father’s daily book.

  Unwilling, my eyes passed over them. I can hardly believe I did desire such an unnatural woman, Father had written, for though she certainly enticed me, with glances and looks, when at last she drew me to approach her I thought her shy, for how she would turn her face away, how she would stiffen. But I see now that Bridget was never shy. It was all feigned. She was brazen.

  I turned the page. It is my fault, I read, my own fault that lust led me to keep her so long in my house, where she could menace my wife w
ith charms and spells, and lead her to try to destroy our little son. And: I see now I have grievously wronged my wife, and how delicate she is left since I sent that woman away. So it is my duty now to have patience with her, and to see there is never anything to trouble her again. I am fearful, for the physician has tried bleeding, has tried as many powders as there are powders. But I think now that her sickness is not in the body, but rather it is in the mind.

  I thrust the pages back into the case, and put it aside. Suddenly I had no appetite to read further, even after those months of curiosity. Suddenly I had no desire to know more of Father’s thoughts: what Matthew had known and suppressed all those long months.

  But the rustle of paper had roused Matthew, and his gaze was clearer than before. ‘What are you doing down here?’ he said. He twisted in the bed. ‘Where’s Mary?’

  Calmly, I said, ‘I’ll tell you. If you tell me where Bridget is.’

  But he would say only, ‘She’s gone,’ and when I pressed him further – said, ‘Then where is Rebecca?’ – he would only repeat himself: ‘She’s gone.’ Then he set up coughing, and water came out, pink water that ran down and stained the front of his shirt, and he said, ‘Alice,’ and I could not help but take his hand where it was groping as he fought for breath. But as I took his hand, the cough subsided, and his grip tightened, then tightened again. I knew there would never be another chance.

  I took hold of a pillow. He thrashed, and we rolled, and I was pressing, pressing, and he was kicking. Then he went slack.

  For minutes, I kept the pillow pressed over his face. I felt everything very far away, like a pale light under a glass. When I took the pillow off, I brought my hand to my mouth, for his eyes were open, and it took me a moment to breathe again. When I could, I covered my brother’s face, and went away, into a different room.

  It was a sin, the worst sin. But to say the truth, I would do the same again.

  44

  Summer, this year of our Lord 1648

  We cannot help but give weight to last words, to endings, as though they carry some greater truth than all the other words a person has spoken and written since they learned to write, learned to speak. And now that I am getting to the last of this account, indeed running out of time to write it, therefore I will try, I will do my best to come to some pith of truth in this last of what I say.

  The number of women my brother Matthew killed, as far as I can reckon it, is one hundred and six. He accomplished it in two of our short English summers, and the months between. One hundred and six women, through Essex, Suffolk and beyond: that much is certain.

  But though I know that much, and much else of Matthew, still I cannot quite capture him, just as how when we were children and learning to draw, he would move before you were finished; he would turn his face away. In the end, he was not one thing but many, and though I want to tell the truth about him now I want to make him more than a shadow on the wall used to scare children. I want to make him more than that and also less: I want to show him as a man who chose to call himself a witchfinder, who deserved every inch of pain that found him, and also the sad wreck of a small boy. For he was both those things, and none could know it better than the sister who watched him grow.

  What you would like to hear, I think now, is that Matthew was evil, that he was a monster: but it is not as simple as that; it cannot be. For certain he contained evil, as I do, as you do. In many respects we were similar, my brother and I, with our shared facility for taking words and changing their order to get the effect we want. Believe me, I think on our similarities; but I think, too, on how differently we chose. For it is a choice, I think, to close the heart, just as it is a choice to open it. It is a choice to look at what distresses you, and a choice to shut your eyes. It is a choice to hold tight your pain, or else to let it slip your grasp, set it free to make its mark upon the world. But I cannot, despite everything, I cannot wish that Bridget had left my brother to burn, on that winter’s night, so many years ago. With Matthew, for certain it all goes back to birth, but not, I pray not, to a baby born of the devil. Not to a baby born with bad deeds sealed already in his heart.

  Whatever my prayers, I can never be certain, and there is much about my months with my brother that I cannot explain. Even still I think of the strange marks in the strawberry bed, and of the flattened field of corn. For certain, evil does touch our mortal lives from time to time, but not, I am given now to think, in such a way as can be explained. Not, perhaps, in such a way as it is possible to know who to blame.

  I sit here, in the upper room of my old landlady’s house, and find I have much to thank God for. I am whole in body, and, I trust, in mind. I have my freedom. And yet despite these blessings I have been finding it hard to pray. I try with the simplest prayer, the Lord’s Prayer, the one we are supposed not to neglect. Which asks only a little food, a little forgiveness. Things that should be simple, although they do not feel simple now. Still, I pray to God to forgive me my trespasses, as I forgive those that have trespassed against me. And perhaps those nameless trespasses have been yet another reason to set my story down: in order to forgive, I have to know what has been done to me. Surely, in order to be forgiven, I have to know exactly what it is that I have done.

  My old landlady’s nephew and his wife keep this house now, and they have given me the rooms I had with Joseph, and they have let me stay on for nothing. He is a printer, the nephew, and though the press where he works is not a sober one, though it does print all sorts of ruffian marvels, still it is to him that I intend to leave these pages in payment of what I owe, and that this tale might be printed, and known.

  Before I left Manningtree, I made a good fire in the hearth of Matthew’s chamber. But I rescued some few things; a few statements and a few lists. I have slipped them between the pages of this book to keep them flat, and that they might be printed along with my own words. I would have kept more, but I feared that to publish all his notes would only preserve my brother’s methods, encourage those who would repeat his horrors. So I kept only a few scraps, to show the truth of what I have told, and the rest I burned. I watched the fire consume Father’s daily books, the covers charring and shrinking. White choking ash almost smothered the blaze, as I added more paper in fistfuls.

  I remember one crumpled sheet escaping the flames. I picked it up, saw that it was an inventory of Bess Clarke’s goods: every pot and kettle, every spoon and sad blanket. It had been made so that her belongings could be packed and taken for selling in another place. Perhaps they wouldn’t have fetched as much in Manningtree because of who had owned them. Perhaps they would have fetched more. A kettle that the devil might have drunk from; a pillow on which he might have laid his cold and heavy hand.

  Despite my caution with my brother’s papers, still I am in some respects reluctant to allow this account to be printed. I fear that it will be read only by those who live to peer at a scandal, who would pay a penny to look behind a curtain at a fair. I must hope not, for what would that make me? I do not wish to be a pedlar of thrills and murders, a displayer of freaks. I wrote this to be a history, and though it is not so learned as the great histories men write, I hope it sheds as much light on what has passed. I hope it sheds more.

  †

  I stayed in Manningtree only long enough to see Matthew buried, quietly and without ceremony. The minister and the gravediggers were the only ones who saw him lowered, for I kept away, and Mary Phillips did not show her face; the minister told me that she had gone back to her kin, once my brother could not afford to pay her. It turned me cold to think that, had I not been freed, Matthew might have left me in the dark to starve.

  I was keen to be gone from Manningtree; though I went, of course, to Bridget’s house to look for any sign of her, only to be met by the new tenant there, clutching a letter for me. As she put it into my hand I thought of my first day back from London, going to Bridget’s old place, and for a moment it was as though time had stood still.

  But time had not s
tood still. While I had been locked away, the minister had married Ruth Edwards; he informed me of it himself, in a careful, hesitant voice. But that was a small blow, in comparison with how I failed to discover any news of Bridget, or of Rebecca West. They had not been seen, after the Manningtree hangings, two years since. And since they were no one’s mother, no one’s sister or daughter or wife, no great enquiry had been made after them. No ditches had been searched, no ponds dragged. It was as though they had been allowed simply to melt away, into the air. I like to think that Bridget found Rebecca, after that day in the yard, and that they escaped together; though I know if they had, I would be like to have heard from them by now. What I cling to, with my last bit of hope, is the state of the post, how it is thrown into disorder still with the war dragging on. I cling to the chance that I might have missed a letter from them, full of good news.

  The letter waiting for me at Bridget’s house was from Grace. It tells me she is safe and well in Massachusetts. When Mary Phillips put her out on the road she had got back safe to Cambridge, and been put in the way of a friend of her mother’s brother, who had six children, of ages between four and fourteen. Their mother was dead, and he had it in his mind to go to America. It is a difficult voyage, she writes, but if you take it, then on the other side there is the chance to step cleanly from the boat. That is what this place offers, she writes. A new beginning, and your way to make.

  Grace herself – I could feel her reluctance to mention it – she herself is looking for a servant. She is not settled too near my brother Thomas in the city of Boston. Rather, Grace has gone to a small, simple, hard-working place; and even if in the end I change my mind and move on, I think I could do worse than begin in her household, as my old servant’s servant. Though I do not deny that it will pain me to leave this last familiar place. The memories it holds. For every morning since coming back here, before I open my eyes, I feel Joseph lean down to kiss their lids, as he did that last morning, even after our quarrel the night before. And again I allow him into my arms, sleepy, too stubborn to quite forgive him just yet, too stubborn to admit I am awake.