The Manningtree Witches

by A. K. Blakemore

  They couldn’t bury Thomas Briggs, who was eaten up of a seeming fever in the second week of January. He was a small boy to begin with, and worn down by the end to little more than a switch—but nonetheless, there will be no grave deep enough until the earth is thawed. His body lies, slowly putrefying, in an outbuilding. On hearing this, the ragged Wright children break into the shed one night and dare one another, breathlessly, to touch it, to touch the boy the Devil and his handmaids carried off to Hell.

  1644

  And yet there are some of opinion, There lives in the world some, and of those some, a small party in England, that know more than they utter, and, either by Vision, or verbal Colloquie, have the knowledge of future events, yea, even from the blessed Angels.

  WILLIAM LILLY

  The Starry Messenger, 1647

  13

  Vagrancy

  PICTURE A CROOKED OLD WOMAN DRESSED IN rags, who labours through deep snow, alone. Now fray the hem of her gown and soak it in meltwater, cover her balding head with a thin shawl of worsted. She smells—you can smell her from an arm’s length away—of grease and chicken shit and mildew and embarrassment. The hair she has remaining, leave to matt and tangle into yellowing snarls and charm-knots. Choke the lucid blue of her eyes with a scum of cataract. Now hunch her over a walking stick, and set her to trudging. Slow. No—slower still than that. Perhaps a few crows rail at one another in the glassy hedgerows as she passes, but otherwise, all is silence. She is alone on the rolling fields of deep, unpromising white. Now empty out her belly. Now decide. Will you offer to help her? Do you even want to touch her?

  Old Mother Clarke is known, in part, for her chickens. She sings to them, old songs, sailors’ songs. At the start of winter she fetched them into the house, and it brought her joy to watch them picking diffidently around the novel bulk of the bed and the cauldron, oily and reptile-eyed. She paid no mind to the white streaks of excrement on the table legs, nor the stink of their moult. When the chickens began to die she could not bring herself to eat them, so she carried them out to the midden heap, so light in her hands, and the foxes received them gratefully. No one came to Old Mother Clarke’s for a week or more. Not one bright-eyed baby-full miss up from the town, nor any absent-minded granddam soliciting the help of Saint Peter and Saint Paul to find a missing keepsake ring or buried bracelet through the twist of sieve and shears. No Beldam West, no Margaret Moone, no Widow Leech. Not me, either. She supposes the roads up from town have become impassable. Or that she has been forgot. Or that she is perhaps already dead, and these fields of uncanny, unbroken white are the silent demesne of Limbo.

  I cannot imagine what might have occupied her, alone and hungry in her little hovel, those icebound weeks of deep winter. But now she is picking her way across Wormwood Hill. Perhaps she fancies she is the only one left alive across the whole sorry countryside. That she slept through the sounding of the trumpets, and that the angels, pulling everyone crumb-eyed from their beds and hauling them up to Heaven, happened to overlook her. Perhaps she daydreams that when she reaches the Millers’ farm she will find it standing empty, and in she will go, and there will be a steaming pork chop sitting unattended on the kitchen table.

  Take an old woman. Cut off her leg and empty her belly. Leave her to her neighbours’ mercy. Put in her mind the picture of a pork chop, good and juicy, with apple sauce and a mug of good beer. Feel her mouth moisten at the prospect.

  Rounding the top of the hill, Mother Clarke sees a thin ribbon of smoke unspooling from the Millers’ chimney. James Hockett, the farm boy, is trimming wood in the yard at the time of her arrival. Shading those eyes against the mid-morning sun, grievous bright, Hockett straightens his back to look at the crumpled shape advancing through the snow towards his master’s homestead. He sees the old woman carefully pick her way down the slope, open the gate, and proceed, hobbling, down the garden path that he cleared of snow that very morning. Before Mother Clarke can reach the door, Leah Miller—his mistress, a handsome woman of twenty-five, with a child a-dozing in her arms and another apparent in her puffing belly—opens it. Goody Miller regards Mother Clarke charily. So does the child, sucking her thumb against her mother’s breast. A lovely child with curly blonde hair—the kind one imagines when told a fabulous tale of the colonies, about the Red Men plucking a little girl from her bed in the night and stealing her away for their feathered king to eat.

  “What ho, Goody Miller.” Mother Clarke raises a palsied hand to shade her good eye.

  Goody Miller keeps most of the door between herself and her visitor. “Good morrow, Mother,” she says, without enthusiasm.

  “She’s getting to be a big one now, isn’t she?” Mother Clarke ventures, indicating the Lovely Child, who watches wide-eyed from her mother’s grasp, little able to distinguish this ancient caller from the lachrymose ghost of a bedtime story.

  Leah Miller allows herself a gracious smile. “Aye. She will turn four come spring. God willing.” God willing, because all sorts of horrible things are known to happen to Lovely Children.

  “May the Lord bless you and keep you both.” Silence. Mother Clarke stamps her peg leg as though to dislodge a stone. Hockett sees how she wobbles over her stick. “Might I ask—” She lowers her head, more from fatigue than in supplication. “See, I came to ask if I might trouble you for a little bread, and perhaps some butter.”

  Goody Miller’s mouth flattens. She peers over her shoulder into the house. “I do not know as we truly have any to spare, Bess. The children,” she adds, weakly, hoping this invocation will serve as explanation enough for her miserliness. And perhaps it is true. All over Essex, stores are running low. Nobody knows when they might next see sugar, or good bread. A strawberry would be coveted like a garnet-stone.

  Mother Clarke trembles and sniffs. She struggles just to remain upright—that much is obvious. “Anything—any bare thing you might find it within yourself to give, Mistress Miller. I have not a crust left, and no hope of getting into town. God bless thee. God bless thee,” she repeats, and repeats a third time, barely above the level of a whisper.

  Leah Miller touches her lips with another guilty, backwards look.

  Slowly, she shakes her head. “I am sorry, Bess. I cannot.”

  And that is it, poverty. A life slowly narrowing around you like the trick walls of a tomb. You have things and then the things fall to pieces, and then it begins to empty your body out as well, and your mind. No dreams, just hunger. A hole whose edges begin to fray, become undone. Elizabeth’s voice is hoarse. “Then . . . then might I at least warm myself by the fire, for a short while? I do not wish to cause thee any difficulty, Leah . . . I would be most grateful.”

  “Wait here.” Leah sighs, and closes the door.

  Love thy neighbour, God commands. But also, thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. Is Old Mother Clarke a witch? She is cunning, and the distinction between the two is imprecise at best. Poor Thomas Briggs, God rest his soul, doubtless bucks and reels through Leah Miller’s mind. A witch? So some say. Her mother was, most assuredly. And she certainly has the foul looks of one. For all her debility, there is a presence, a canniness, behind the tarnished eyes. She drags around a motley, elaborate odour, as though she had recently raised herself, Lazarus-like, half-rotted from the grave. At base, it just doesn’t seem wholesome, that a person should be that old and that poor, and yet persist in living. What could give her cause to cleave to so miserable a mortal situation, save the promise of eternal suffering thereafter?

  It is not Leah Miller who returns to the door, but her husband, Richard. His jowls wobble with indignation as he mounts the stoop. “Mother Clarke,” he declares at the shivering bundle of woman, “we have no victuals to spare for you, nor any other—and I will not stand to have my wife so importuned, in her delicate condition.” He plants a fist on his hip, impressed with himself. “I ask that you take your leave, or else I shall inform a Constable of these vagrant carriages.”

  As with many women of a certain age
, Mother Clarke knows no more effective tonic than indignation. She draws herself up on her stick. She explains her predicament slowly, as though to a child, and edges the stump of her peg leg out from beneath the hem of her skirts for pictorial emphasis: “Would you have me starve, master? I have no food, and no other hope of coming by any. Show a little kindness to a lame old woman.”

  “That,” Richard Miller replies, “is what the church dole-cupboard is for, mistress. Perhaps you would know that if you attended service.”

  On what was said after this, all agree. “A pox on you, Richard Miller,” is the first thing, by Old Mother Clarke. “A pox and piles on you.” She holds her head askance like a dirty bird, training her good right eye on him as though it were the sense of some cruel instrument. “And I wasn’t asking you, at any rate—I was asking your third wife,” she continues. “And she is very comely indeed—but dost thou not feel some ways cuckolded, sir? Married her too soon after she was widowed last for that lump under her laces to be thy own work, after all.”

  James Hockett stands by the woodpile with his splitting-axe in hand, and gulps down a laugh. Leah jostles out from behind her husband, a hand splayed over her swollen belly and her freckled cheeks turning deeply scarlet. “Why, you filthy mare!” she sneers. And there is a little of the Leah Miller of old back in her then—Leah Wright, of legendarily intransigent spirit and loose gold hair, who was said to trade kisses with river men for sweetened rum.

  “Oh, lay off, Goody Miller,” spits Mother Clarke. “I have no qualm with you. We all have mouths need feeding, after all. Mayhap if I had known the price of a morsel, I would have worn my Sunday gown.” She lifts the hem of her tattered dress and minces in a pantomime of seduction, her movements jerking and puppet-like. She grabs at her withered left breast, with a sneer.

  Hockett and the Millers watch her menacing little jig with increasing revulsion. There is indeed something devilish about it, something uncanny, in the way she twists her body into a parody of allure, like a goat with a girl’s slender ankles dancing in the margins of a grimoire. Now Leah lets out a sob and draws back into the house, disturbed. Yeoman Miller remains firm at the threshold, and slowly shakes his head. “I see,” he says. “You would come into my home to warm yourself by my fire, and to what accursed end? Secrete away a lock of my wife’s hair for use in a poppet? Send one of your imps behind the skirting board to nip at us in the night, feast upon our blood? I am not ignorant of witches’ methods. God above,” he sighs, placing a meaty hand over his heart, “I wish I was. But no man has the luxury of innocence, in these dark times.”

  “My imps,” laughs Old Mother Clarke, “my imps need no doors, sir. They go where I tell them. Through any crack, be it narrow as a nun’s or wide as your wife’s.”

  Miller swallows an incensed breath of winter air. Before Hockett can decide if he ought to help or hinder his master in driving away this vulgar interloper—and how he might best effect either—Miller grabs up his cane and stamps down from the threshold towards the reeling Mother Clarke. He draws the club up over his head. The old woman moves backwards with a catlike yowl and falls, a crumpled heap in the snow.

  This is how Master Hockett told it to my mother, when he appeared breathless at our doorstep and bid us come out to the Millers as fast as we could, for there had been a terrible accident. The trip is an hour-round, and a moonless night is closing in fast behind us by the time it is completed, half-carrying half-hauling Mother Clarke and her wooden leg. The Millers had left her there, lying in the snow, like an animal. Then there is the wrangling over whose cot she is to be put in, which, in the end, is mine, of course. I express my displeasure at this arrangement, given that the old woman smells worse than a brace of polecats, but Mother says simply that it’s the lice I ought to be worrying about, and bids me get the fire up to warm her.

  We strip off the invalid’s sodden, filthy clothes, and I take them out to the yard for burning. Vinegar Tom strides imperiously between parlour and bedchamber, overseeing the whole affair as though it is most vexatious to him. Very like a man, only lovable. Soon the fire is up. Mother takes Liz Clarke’s limp, dirty hands between her own, and rubs them vigorously, left then right. She tries to spoon a little watery pottage into her slack, unresponsive mouth. And I watch all this from the doorway and wonder at my mother, and how tenderly she cares for our neighbour, that flake, that practical nothing, a near-friendless outcast. It will seem absurd, but I think of Mary Magdalene, then—Mary Magdalene drying our Lord Jesus Christ’s feet in her beautiful hair. And for a moment it feels very clear to me. It all makes sense. God does, I mean. Not so much as the self-satisfied brute that Minister Long is wont to expound upon, but as what they call the Spirit: the warmth rubbed into the rigid hands of an invalid, the kissing away of tears, the alms, and all of that. Mother Clarke’s rasping breaths smooth and swell. A flush soon enlivens her furrowed cheeks. She returns from that point of crisis, the moribund crossroads, and simply sleeps, warm and fitful.

  My mother sits back in her chair by the bedside, rubbing at her tired eyes. I draw up a stool and join her there. Something must be said, though I have no idea as to how to go about saying it sensibly. “They think she is a witch,” I say, in the end. “And that you are a witch, and that I am one, too, I suppose. Hopkins and the other Godly folk.”

  Mother smiles tiredly and draws the cap off her greying hair. “Witch,” she mutters, dismissively. “You pay too much mind to gossip, Rabbit. Witch is just their nasty word for anyone who makes things happen, who moves the story along. A man like Hopkins, or like that dolt Richard Miller, will pray every day that God might strike his rivals down, or that a pretty young thing might look his way. And should it happen, he counts it a miracle, a marvel—proof of his standing among the righteous. All a supposed witch does, it seems to me, is everyone the courtesy of saying those prayers out loud, and in company.”

  “The witch says her prayers, and it is the Devil as answers them.”

  “And if the Devil is truly so affable to a poor old wretch like old Bess Clarke then perhaps he is worthy of worship indeed.”

  I know I need to make her understand. But she is testy, unpredictable. If I told her of the incident with Hopkins, what would she do? No doubt it would further imperil us. Because it is us. We are bound by name and fortune and blood, and there is nothing else. I reach across to grasp at her wrist. I remind her it is a crime. A hanging crime. Maleficium. Already there is one dead body, and it is never very difficult to find more.

  “Peace, Becky,” she huffs. “It isn’t like it used to be, back in the Queen’s day. They cannot bind thumbs and toes to swim you in the Mistley Pond. Cannot hang you wrongways up by the ankles, any of that. If they start knocking off every poor sod who’s ever chafed a Puritan, half of Essex’ll be treading wind by midsummer. Believe me. I have been through all of this before.” She nods inwardly, once, twice. Rubs her calloused thumbs together in her lap. “No. Jurymen want proofs. Proofs, or a confession. And in our case, they shall find neither. Will they, Becky?” She looks at me.

  I am silent by the bedside.

  “Will they, Becky?” she asks, again, her brows knitting.

  Tears of frustration suddenly burst up out my eyes like the waters of a flood-swoll brook, and I lower my head to my apron so she cannot see, and say that I simply do not understand why it is that we must be the kind of people that folk rumour to be witches. Pressing my face down into my skirts, thick with darkness and damp smells from our labour through the snow, feels good and protective, like burrowing must to a beast. The tears are hot on my cheeks. And then, I feel a hesitant hand on the small of my back. Mother pats me, haltingly. “And you would rather we were what kind of people, hey?” she tuts, with gentle reproof. “Rather I was the kind of mother that would marry you off to a Yeoman Miller as soon as you had learned to wipe you own arse?”

  “No,” I protest, meekly, “but Master Edes . . .” And saying his name, I feel unworthy of it, and I am choked up by tears a
gain.

  “There now. Quit your squalling,” sighs Mother, drawing me into a wary sort of embrace. “Poor girl. You’re just a little cunt-struck, is all. Or whatever a maid be that is like to cunt-struck.”

  I laugh a little at that, despite myself, and then I say, “I don’t want to die, Mother.” And upon saying it realise that it is what I am afraid of—dying. And so the weeping.

  Mother rolls her tired eyes. “Well tough,” she blusters. “Because everyone does, sooner or later. And your time will come—far from here, and many years hence. Believe me, I know these things.”

  And I think of my mother then, and her own peculiarities. Her reckless taste for surviving, that makes her like an animal, wild and unknowable. Her pride, of which she has so much, and which she wants to pass on to me, as other women give their daughters fine linen and pearl earrings. She wants to give me pride but I will not take it, because I have seen how desperately she has had to fight to keep it. But a knack for surviving—that is a more promising inheritance. And if we are to survive, we will only survive together. So I breathe in slowly, and then say all at once, “I told Master Edes I saw the Devil.”

  I feel her arms stiffen around me. She says nothing for a short while, and I listen to Bess Clarke’s slow, wheezing breaths. One, two of them. “Where?”