The Manningtree Witches

by A. K. Blakemore

  “I saw nothing, sir,” I insist. “Much less conjured.”

  Hopkins takes a step towards me. “Is not your mother the Beldam West? She spoke a malediction upon Master Briggs as the child played by the quay. Her own companions told me so.”

  I make a noise indicating something between fear and mirth. He knows nothing of my spiritual infractions. It is my mother who is the focus of his interest. My mother, the Beldam Anne West, at the crux of all things, the middle of the creaking wheel, as ever. The larger body I grow upon, canker-like. “Mister Hopkins,” I say, finding my voice clear and firm. “Sir—if cross words on my mother’s part had any weight, then I would be riding an invisible horse of my own to Maldon and back.” I keep my arm across my breast.

  “Mother and daughter,” he says, hoarsely, still advancing, still narrowing the space between us, “all alone, in a house on the hillside.” His smile. “When women think alone, they think evil, it is said.”

  “If you think I have both the mind and the means to do harm, sir,” I say, “then perhaps you ought to be more careful of me. I wish to leave now.” As I say it I find that I am doing it. Before Hopkins can move to detain me again, I have pushed by him and out through the door. There is much commotion in the corridor, where the women, roused by Thomas’ mewling, stand pensively about—I streak past, hustling Goody Hart aside as I make for the staircase, the blood beating in my ears. I snatch up my shawl from the kitchen and hurtle through the door, leaving behind a stunned Helen Clarke and a basket of yellowing apples.

  The Examination of Helen Clarke taken before the said Justices, 1645

  This examinant confesseth, that about six weeks since, the Devil appeared to her in her house, in the likeness of a white Dog, and that she calleth that Familiar Elimanzer; and that this examinant hath often fed him with milk-pottage; and that the said Familiar spoke to this examinant audibly, and bade her deny Christ, and she should never want, which she did then assent unto, but doth altogether deny the killing of the daughter of the said Edward Parsley.

  12

  Mass

  HE REMOVES THE APPLES FROM THE BASKET carefully, one by one, inspecting each. There are six in total. Their stems are brittle, their flesh cool and very slightly yielding beneath the puckered, porous, icteric skins. He throws one experimentally on the fire and crouches low by the hearth to watch it burn. There is an odour, though barely detectable—sweet and acrid at once, like horse dung. The dermis slowly blisters then cracks, the juices sizzling out, and within minutes all that remains is a charred core with two scorched frills of leather, like the brow bones of a death’s head.

  The second he punctures with a long iron nail. There is a pleasing suck as he draws the nail out again, and then he holds the glistening metal up to the flame of a candle. He smells the juices on it. He touches it to his tongue, but the ferrous quality overpowers the apple’s sweetness, reminding him of the taste of blood. The third apple he slices in exact halves. Black pips settled in white meats, like little comical, owlish faces (he’s always seen faces in things—on grey river water, in flowers, in shadows). The fourth he leaves on the windowsill in his study, for observation. The fifth he buries in a shallow hole in the yard.

  The sixth he has pressed to his lips as he lounges on the settle before the fire that evening, when John Stearne asks, idly flipping the tacky pages of John Milton’s Animadversions back and forth: “And what news from the Briggses’, Matthew?”

  Matthew Hopkins sighs. “There was little change in the boy.”

  “Ah, well. At least the consistency of his symptoms ought to disprove suspicion he counterfeits.” Stearne scratches the side of his nose as he leafs through the pamphlet. John Stearne is a pale, watery-looking man in his middle thirties, hopeful and blundersome, seemingly a walking confutation of that age as the prime of anything. Swelling and leaking to fill the space his money bought him. Matthew finds that something in Stearne’s admittedly not-extraordinary appearance triggers an immediate repugnance. He is a bit like a bladder filled with milk, membranous and near whitely blond, quivering this way and that. But one cannot argue with his connections, of which he has made liberal use in helping Hopkins establish himself at Mistley. The Thorn Inn is set on the edge of a narrow bend in the road to Harwich, where the estuary deepens and widens. Freshly whitewashed, it is the cleanest-looking thing in miles, save for the swans that circle the Gamekeeper’s Pond. It stands empty tonight, there being few willing to leave their own home fires for the biting chill without. The gentlemen make use of the parlour at the back of the lower floor.

  “It is little matter if he does. One cannot counterfeit what does not exist,” Hopkins reasons. Stearne sets the pamphlet down for a moment and frowns, trying to trace the contours of Hopkins’ argument, which he knows must be sound, even if he does not fully understand it. Hopkins sighs, and expands: “Even if the boy merely apes bewitchment, it suggests two things: firstly, that something has instilled a great terror in him, to drive him to such extremity of behaviour. Secondly, that he has from somewhere gained knowledge of the forms by which bewitchment is made manifest. Corruption flourishes in this town, unseen and unchallenged. The innocent are always the first to see it. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings . . .”

  “Psalms, eight-four,” Stearne shoots back, with schoolboy superciliousness.

  “Eight-two.”

  Stearne flushes. “It is true,” he concedes, clearing his throat. “I can think of no obvious way a boy such as Briggs might come to learn of such things. Bewitchment, possessions . . . We have had no witches in these parts for, oh, a generation or more. Not since old Mary Clarke . . . There was the St Osyth affair, I suppose . . .”

  Hopkins looks at Stearne, piqued. “Clarke, you say? Any relation to the Briggses’ girl? Helen, I think it is?” In actuality, Hopkins is certain her name is Helen, because Hopkins doesn’t forget things. But there is no cause, yet, to put too fine a point on his suspicions. A frightened witch is apt to flee, or worse—provided she has the resources to.

  Stearne rubs his cheek and takes a gulp of wine. “No, no. She was Elizabeth Clarke’s mother, if you can believe a hoary old crone like that ever had one,” he chuckles. “I was just a boy at the time. We swam her in Mistley Pond, just over the way.” He gazes towards the rafters, nostalgically, before adding, “Helen is the Widow Leech’s eldest.”

  Hopkins nods, slowly, pressing the apple to his bearded cheek. “Leech. It is commonly thought that a tendency to the heresy of witchcraft is passed from mother to daughter, you see. There is near unanimity among all authorities on the matter. Whether because mother tempts daughter to join her in her devilish compact, or by some shared debility of the soul more severe than is usual in the weaker sex, that renders both vulnerable to his seducings . . .”

  “Well,” mutters Stearne, rising from his seat and pulling his cloak onto his back, because he has only so much patience for Hopkins’ arcane invectives, “’twould be easy enough to believe it of a queer old hag like Mother Clarke.” He reaches for his wide-brimmed hat. “It is late, Matthew. I had best be making my way back to the farm before Agnes begins to worry I have myself fallen into Sathan’s clutches.” He throws back his head with a chuckle and drains the last dregs of his wine, eyebrows elevated. “Mm. Thanks for the claret.”

  Hopkins waves a hand in distracted farewell and listens to Stearne’s staggering footsteps through the front of the inn, and away. After a short while, certain he is alone, he rises and goes to the armoire in the corner of the room. The top panel clicks open upon his private library: King James’ Daemonologie and the Malleus Maleficarum sit alongside the cracked spines of Del Rio’s Disquisitionum, Bodin and Rémy, the Tractatus de Hereticis. And, of course, an admirable selection of the neoterics: Perkins’ indispensable Discourse on the Damned Art of Witchcraft, Streete’s Astronomia Carolina, the Ephemerides. Beside these, countless well-thumbed booklets and tracts recounting the trials of the Devil’s handmaidens in Warboys, Berwick, Pendle and St
Osyth, Jutland, Copenhagen, Carrickfergus and beyond. He knows the women who writhe within those pages. Knows their names, their bodies that moulder in unmarked graves, or float as ash. Knows their methods, too. It is his own journal he eventually withdraws.

  The first snow of winter is falling outside the window. Big, lovely flakes that collapse under their own weight even as they splash against the panes, undersides illuminated by candlelight. It is a moonless night, and nothing else is visible, no beyond. Instinctively, he switches the apple in his hand for the one rested on the sill—a hemisphere stiff and cold from proximity to the glass.

  He returns to the settle with the apple and the bottle of claret. He undoes the top buttons of his doublet. The sixth apple, he eats.

  He wakes to find a huge tree has grown in the corner of the chamber, and the far wall crumbles around its gnarled roots, allowing the violet light of moon and stars to flood the Turkey rug. All is silent but for the drip of melting snow from the smashed rafters. The fire has long since burnt out. Hopkins rises from the settle, numb-foot and dishevelled. The tree is huge, with thick, scored bark, and wreathed about with ivy, like painted-on smoke. He looks up into the darkness of the canopy. Fitting his fingers to a knot in the bark, he begins to climb, up through the broken thatch and into a night sky replete with a sepulchritude of stars. From his seat high in the crown of the tree, he looks down on the black fens and pasturelands of Essex stretching off to the horizon like a damask lain over England’s bent back.

  Then the witches come. They land one by one and throw off their cloaks, their naked bodies silvered by moonlight. Some are young, some old, some fair, some dark, some fat, some thin, all beautiful, all horrible. Some fly, some ride in across the fields on peculiar, lumbering beasts, which he sees, when he looks more closely, are men—men bent double on their hands and knees with their faces stuffed into bridles.

  A great feast has been prepared, with a five-bird roast and a twelve-bird roast, steaming red breads and silverware overburdened with sweetmeats and cherries and blue grapes. There are pineapples, dishes of fine sugar-like powders and bonbons iced with dark insignia, and three fat suckling pigs with shrunken human heads in their mouths where the apples ought to be. The centrepiece of this sulphurous spread is the whole, vexed head of a black hog, crowned with candied grasshoppers that have been cleverly positioned into attitudes of flight. Tiny human ears are strewn about the table like rose-petals.

  Old Elizabeth Clarke is the first to take her seat, at the head of the table, so frail she appears almost iridescent, supporting herself with a staff of polished bone. Invoking the Prince of Air, she raises with both hands a huge goblet of dark liquor. She drinks, and it is blood that spills from the corners of her mouth and runs in red rivulets down her pendulous breasts. Her sisters join her in the unholy sacrament, white arms raised to the night.

  But where is their host? Soon all manner of vermin creep from the hollows and hedgerows and slither through the wet grass to join them, impudent in their nastiness. An adder cools his belly in a shallow dish of rose-water. Four little rabbits gather in the soft lap of Rebecca West, and she fondles them sweetly as she dines. A fat brown centipede wraps its armoured body about the wrinkled throat of Elizabeth Clarke, as a seed-pearl choker might sit on the neck of a lady. The horror rises in him, but he cannot look away. Must not look away. Now they pass around a book, each pricking her finger and writing her name. Old Mother Clarke raises her voice to the sky, and says that any there who breaks their Compact, sealed in blood, and reveals what has passed there that night will be torn apart with pincers and scattered in a great furnace. She asks each who has gathered there what the Devil has promised them. The answers are cried out in response, one after the other: a scarlet gown, a songbird, a husband, years of peace and plenty, for misfortune to befall all those who have wronged me.

  He moves among them, then, and they flock to him, and fall down on their knees, the ground alive with a mass of insects and small beasts, spiders, weevils, roaches, earthworms, moths, so that it looks like bubbling tar where he parts the folds of his black cassock and plants his cloven hoof, and they bend to kiss his cloven hoof and fawn over him. He reaches out his dark hand and each long finger bulges with jewelled rings, and he touches each woman upon the crown of the head, as though delivering a blessing, or else fondles their breasts. But then he straightens, something catching his notice, and turns his face to peer up into the branches where Hopkins hides, his eyes like two black pips in white meat. Hopkins feels his grasp loosen, then he falls—

  His mouth is very dry when he wakes, and a drubbing pain gathers at his temples. The sunbeams bouncing in through the parlour window feel like hot spindles to his eyes, and slice right through the soft, compromised meat of his head. Groaning, he looks about himself. By the edge of the settle, the empty bottle of claret (he thinks it was actually the third) and an apple, the flesh browning around his bite-mark.

  Shakily, he rises and goes to the window. The fields are covered over with immaculate, unbroken whiteness, and the sky is utterly empty above the line of trees. Without stopping to find his coat, he runs out to the field. But he can see no evidence of the unholy ceremony. Nothing more than the slender tracks of a fox leading up over the hill. There he is, shivering and bareheaded, his breath a vapour before his uncombed beard. The snow outspreads all comprehension, annihilates all thought, so bright it makes a purblind of him. He prostrates himself in the caustic whiteness, and there, most ardently, he prays.

  A man in his shirtsleeves lying face down in the snow was a very queer thing for William Calfhill to see as he walked his lurcher in the next-door field, and it is no wonder he tattled to half the town regarding his new neighbour’s quite unaccountable behaviour.

  WINTER LAYS DOWN HARD FROSTS, VITRIFYING the roads and the rooftops, enforcing seclusion and imposing fasts. Pigs freeze to death in their pens. News slows to a trickle. Letters go astray and are intercepted, the heart’s-blood missives of young lovers and the sober bulletins of generals alike. The rumour is that both armies are quartered away for Christmastide, but no definitive word on this subject arrives. An army is a very large thing to lose; losing two begins to look like carelessness. While marching orders and tactical directives deliquesce on the brumal winds, the pyrotechnics of imminent apocalypse shimmer just as rosily on the ice-bound horizon as they ever did. In Ipswich, a sorceress is seen shrieking down the Orwell on a pole, wielding lightning bolts. In Brentford the divided pieces of a woman abused to death are found.

  In Manningtree itself there have been most strange and inexplicable happenings that could be accounted for only by infernal malice. William Rawbood, the brewer, tells of a most perplexing incident—his wife, the new Mistress Rawbood, was sat in the kitchen one cold Sunday morning, just before they were to leave for church. All of a sudden, she found her skirts all full of lice—“so many you could have swept them from her clothes with a stick.” This is stranger still, for Mistress Rawbood is a most cleanly woman, and broadly agreed to be of sound mind. Catching one of these horrid creatures under a glass, Rawbood found it was unlike any louse with which he had heretofore had the displeasure to find himself acquainted, long and lean as a lady’s little finger.

  Filial relations, too, are strained. Confined to the home by inclement weather, sister turns against sister, brother against brother, maid against mistress and husband against wife. Thighs are pinched raw beneath dining tables, dumplings pilfered from plates, noses thumbed during the grace, account books defaced by cack-handed toddlers. The same grey dress laid out on the bed, the same grey fog rolling in off the Stour, the same wooden crucifix on whitewashed plaster. Eventually you want to prise a nail out and turn it upside down, just to have something a little different to look at. You know what they say about the Devil and idle hands.

  The day itself passes without gaiety—the word Christmas being shod as it is with that most Popish of lexemes, Mass, most of the town’s Godly populace think it best to pretend it had escaped
their notice. St Mary’s stands closed, and the shops are opened (though there is little left for them to sell). A week or so later, on a frostbitten Twelfth Night, news comes in the form of a local agitator ridden up from Weeley, who stands at the Market Cross brandishing a sodden copy of the Mercurius Civicus and yelling something about Cheshire to a crowd of bemused onlookers. At Barthomley in Cheshire, he says, the King’s Men, under the command of Lord John Byron, had found a party of Parliamentarians—twelve, or closer to twenty, or closer to one-hundred-and-twenty, depending on whom you ask, and good Puritans all—holed up in a church. The Cavaliers set a fire to draw them out. The men stumbled, choked and singed, into the frosty brightness of Christmas Eve, whereat they found themselves viciously set upon by Lord Byron’s men. They were stripped naked, beaten, each punctured one thousand times and in one thousand parts on his body by the King’s bright swords.

  To men and boys who are hungry and cloyed by boredom, the news is welcomed, after a fashion, as cause to renew the looting that had broken out in fits and starts across the Stour Valley all that preceding year. There being very few confirmed recusants left within convenient riding distance, a mere suspicion of Popish sympathies becomes sufficient prerequisite for their attention: even the benign Doctor Croke wakes to a brick through the window of his study and three jars of pickled cabbage missing from his storehouse.

  Grand houses are ransacked and cobwebbed oil portraits piled in the manicured gardens for burning, painted faces bearing gracious witness to their persecution from above antique ruffs of starched lace. The boys return home with their breeches sodden and sticky to the knee with good port from flooded wine cellars, looking for all the world as though they’ve been wading through blood. One lad rides his mare at a gallop down South Street, a tattered dress of yellow silk tied to his saddle, shouting “Death to Queen Mary and Hell for the Bishops!” And some applaud them, and some say they are little better than Levellers, to do such things. And those that still have fine jewellery or good plate go out into their gardens at night and bury it in the hard ground as best they can. There is the off chance, after all, that the cataclysm might be a few years in coming yet.