The Manningtree Witches

by A. K. Blakemore

  “Not since before Christmastide.” She yawns. “He was garrisoned at Taunton, then.”

  “Where’s Taunton?”

  “How the Devil should I know? Out down west somewhere.”

  I ask if she did not think to follow him into the army, as some women do their husbands.

  She wrinkles her face in a sneer. “What? Join the baggage train with the whores and the bone-grubblers? I think not. Besides, have you heard how the King’s men are wont to treat with the wives?” Her eyes brighten: “Slit your nostrils and slash your cheeks with their dirks, then say, as I heard it, ‘A favour I do thy Godly husband—hereby freed from the bondage of lust.’” She laughs, briefly happy and cruel, and I think it a shame she was born a girl, and is therefore unable to ride to war and indulge her happy cruelty as fully as a boy might. She is perversely unruffled, with a few stray wisps of black hair peeking from the corner of her frayed cap. Plump, pretty Helen.

  “I would take a gash or three to my face sooner than be hung,” I reply, glumly, and look pointed into the wagon, where the older women sit slumped about on the thin carpet of straw. They have been lulled to sleep by the cart’s gentle rocking—all but my mother, it seems, who sits upright in the furthest corner, behind the driver’s box, her lips twitching.

  “No one’s going to hang,” Helen mutters, lifting her eyes to the deep blue evening sky. “No one’s going to hang me.”

  “They hang the Irish women,” the Beldam remarks, darkly. “The Gaels.”

  We turn our heads to look at her, Helen and I.

  “The Irish women in the baggage trains, who follow behind their husbands that fight on the King’s side. The Roundheads string them up quick enough.”

  “They’re Papists.” Helen shrugs.

  “And you, madam, are a witch.” My mother smiles, ruefully. “Which is much the same.”

  We fall silent, and listen to the rain sputtering out soft against the bonnet. As the sky clears and the wagon turns northward over the rise to the Colchester road, the setting sun paints Hopkins’ shadow stark against the canvas as he rides alongside—every detail, down to the gadflies troubling about his horse’s muzzle. Old Mother Clarke murmurs to herself through a fitful sleep.

  At dusk our short convoy stops just outside Dedham. We are given water to drink and bread to eat—the first sustenance I have had in the greater part of a day and night together. It is a sultry evening of the kind that often comes with the in-between days of spring: the grass a hard enamelled green in the low rays of sunshine, already a crust of young moon visible over the treetops. But it is hot in the wagon, and we all quite quickly become vindictive towards each other, so confined, sweating into our soiled gowns. It begins with Liz Godwin ruminating over her last bit of bread that she might escape our current predicament by claiming she needs to piss, then running down across the fields and into the wood, where she might slice off her bindings on “a sharp rock.” The Widow Leech scoffs that Godwin has read one too many pamphlets, whereat the Widow Moone expresses doubt that Godwin can read. Godwin insists, resentfully, that she can. My mother suggests that she would like to see Godwin attempt to enact her escape plan, and that she ought to try, given that we could all use a laugh. Godwin says we are become cruel, and Helen gasps in frustration that “sirrah, so has the world entire.” Liz Godwin then attempts to close the exchange by saying that perhaps we all ought to finish running our mouths for the evening, given that the reason we find ourselves in this situation in the first place is because some of us enjoy to speak—and be spoken of—more than is proper for Christian women. “Fie,” my mother snaps at that, “no need to peck around the point, Liz. Speak thy mind,” bristling all ironically in her stays. “Liz Godwin, with her husband and her airs, and the husband an air himself for the all good he’s done her. Where’s thy dear Thomas now, eh, Liz? Riding over from Manningtree to save us all, is he, a regular Bevis of Hampton?” Liz Godwin begins to cry then, and the rest of us glance around at one another, wall-eyed, none able to summon the energy that comforting her might require.

  A few minutes pass, and peace seems at last re-established, when Helen gets it in her head to poke the bear again. “At any rate,” she says, settling her shoulders back against the endboards and grinning, mighty pleased-seeming with herself, “it is Mother Clarke who has brought us here. If we are to be setting out blame.”

  And Old Mother Clarke, far away on the faded meadow of her wits, smiles a vacant smile to hear her own name spoken. “I told him,” she says, “that we could go down to see the ships.”

  And Helen, riled, throws her bound hands up with a “Lor!” And cracked now too, is she?” Then my mother calls Helen a cross-grain slut and tells her to hold her tongue, and Liz Godwin continues to wail over the top of all of this, and Margaret Moone hisses for peace and asks what good quarrelling will do us now.

  “Mistress Moone is quite correct,” says Mister Hopkins, who has ridden unnoticed to the rear of the wagon and parted the canvas with a gloved hand to watch this skirmish unfold within its confines. A kerchief covers his mouth. We all fall silent as you please, and he gazes down at us with an obscure curiosity as though we were specimens of something pinned to a baize. He lowers his kerchief, and there is his infuriating smile. “Why not turn your evidently restless energies to prayer?” he suggests, and the suggestion is somehow a taunt. “Entreat God for the deliverance of your souls, rather than”—here his eyes flick to Liz Godwin—“plotting to effect bodily deliverance by your own . . . misguided enterprise.” His horse huffs and swings her tail and we all stare down into our laps, like children caught in a lie.

  “I did not mean it, sir,” Liz says, quietly, drawing her knees up to her chin. “It was idle talk.”

  “Good,” Hopkins replies, and assures us that for all our earthly suffering might bring us closer to God, it would bring him no pleasure to have any of us whipped. He drops the curtain and trots his horse away again, his shadow heavy on the lambent canvas, to summon back the militiamen and driver. We sit in silence as the horses are hitched, and soon the processional moves on, away from the setting sun. “They will be dismayed,” Mother Clarke mutters, quietly, rubbing a gnarled finger down her nose. “Pangs and agony will seize them, and they will be anguished like a woman in labour. They will look aghast at one another; their faces will be aflame.”

  And Liz Godwin primly declares that as she recognises the aforesaid as a passage from Isaiah, she hopes all question of her being a simple and illiterate person might be put to bed.

  20

  Colchester

  COLCHESTER IS SMELLED BEFORE IT IS SEEN. Sewage and smoke and the bitter, underworld odours of gunpowder and churned black dirt on the humid evening air. I have never before seen a city. I draw back the canvas and peer out into the night. The wagon moves along a road in the midst of a wide scrubland, scored around with deep trenches and earthworks, big fences of sharp stakes jutting half-visible into the dark sky like the teeth of a thin-mouthed monster. I feel Helen jostle in beside me at the endboard. She seems, thank God, at last lost for words. These are what are called fortifications, which I have read of before but not seen, and I think that Jonah himself cannot have had a more terrible view than this, even as he slid down the gullet of the whale.

  We must reach the gates, for behind us comes the demand for papers, the requisite underfed cry from the wayward watch-boy of Parliament, or King? We twitch, we draw our ragged shawls about ourselves as best we can, as the gatekeeper tugs up the canvases to inspect the wagon’s human freight. His face is mottled like a collop in the light of his upraised storm lantern. “Well,” the guard laughs, peering through the gloom at the white shapes of us, “they don’t look like much, but they certainly smells like a lot.” And though half of us have in the last day been spread down naked and had near-strangers press pins into our bodies, this feels like the greater humiliation: that this stranger, this Colchester man, should be given licence to look on us, to count us off, to say how he finds us al
l smelling.

  “Their malice may be concealed by deception, but their wickedness will be exposed in the assembly of the righteous,” Hopkins says, quoting Proverbs mirthlessly from atop his horse, and I hate him very deeply for it.

  “Aye, I suppose it will,” the watchman says, jovial.

  Then Hopkins says some other brief, official things.

  “Seven for the castle!” the watchman calls. I hear the gate creak open. Here, too, rumour has preceded the Witchfinder. The militiamen must ride ahead to clear a path for the wagon through a high street thick with the refugees of the Essex countryside, burned or starved or in other ways driven from their homes, gaunt faces and hands upraised to the Godly gentleman in his velvets of immaculate black. I keep my eye to the crack in the canvas, because I must know what a city looks like. It looks like cripples shuffling along the streets with begging-bowls and signs hanging round their necks that read PLEASE I AM HUNGRY GOD BLESS, while other men hardly less poor preach outside the inns and meeting-houses to knots of solemn onlookers, against walls peeling with postings for bear-baiting and piss-prophet empirics. It is a vagrant who keeps a lousy, half-bald little monkey upon a leash, dancing to the keening noise of a reed flute. It is a lot to look at, but very much more to smell: the vinegar of sweating horses, woodsmoke and hammers, the piss and beer and malady, feast of herring and open sores. Seeing the wagon with its escort of soldiers, a streetside divine shouts out, “The wages of sin is death!”, and the contents of a ripe privy pail are plashed against the canvas. A woman bent in the stocks, grey hair hardening around a deep red bloodied gash. A city, it appears, is like a famine, and also a pleasure. And there are other women, women I think may be whores, their gowns of dirty bright taffeta cut halfway down their breasts, their hair arranged in sticky piles of ringlet and trim. Some of them look so beautiful, leaning from upper-storey windows with their rouged cheeks and men’s arms around their waists, and I wonder that their lives can be so full of sin and yet they do not seem to suffer for it, as I do. Then I wish to be them, though that is a sin in itself.

  And then it is gone, all gone. A heavy iron grille drops between myself and the world and sin that will continue, I suppose, to happen, and was happening before, though I did not know of it.

  The wagon squeezes across a bridge over a fetid waterway and into a second deeper maw, this belonging to the castle. I lean right out through the canvas and over the endboard to see the full height of these towering walls. It is doubtless the biggest thing that I have ever seen, the battlements seeming lost as high as the pitchy cloud, and crows flapping speck-like round the higher gullies. We are unloaded in some kind of gatehouse, and Mister Hopkins stands attendant as the gaoler exchanges the ropes that bind our wrists for heavy iron manacles. At first it is a relief, to be able to roll my shoulders and move my hands again. But before very long, the iron chain grows heavy, a whole fat baby’s-weight on the arms, and we are sent single file down twisting corridors, a staggering retinue in rags, and there is that aimless manhood smell again—top notes of gunpowder and steaming leather—for the upper levels of the castle house a garrison of parliament soldiers.

  We come to a long passage lined with cells. The prisoners know the gaoler’s heavy tread as wicked children know their mother’s. He moves down the narrow corridor like dawn, and they stir, they make their suffering known. These are the sounds: shouts, banging, weeping, belly-laughter, all blent in to one long animal whine, an opulence of pain and want. And the smell is worse, too, of leavings and slime, bread left to go bad. It makes me think of the Bible, and what the Bible says of Hell, and I think that this cannot be what God intended when he decreed it all—that men would take the most memorable parts, the juiciest bits, and use them as a playbook, by which to make their earthly world be full of tiny hells under roofs of thatch and slate, over which they claim they have dominion, in which they shut each other up. But of course, he is God—he must have known exactly what men would do, and not cared, or else figured it into his arrangements.

  The man in the last cell is notable for his silence. I look between the bars as I pass, last of our miserable line, and see a gaunt man propped on a narrow cot. At sight I know this man to be what they call a Cavalier, one of the King’s men, and wonder how it was he was captured here, in a parliament city. It cannot have been long ago, since he still has his clothes—a high-crowned hat, and a coat of deep blue velvet with a rip at the shoulder and a silver of lace at the cuffs, and this draped across his legs like a blanket. His dirty hair is worn long. He catches my gaze through the bars, cocks his head and grins. “Oh,” he says, in a voice like a purr, “I hear you have been very wicked girls.”

  21

  Gaol

  WE ARE LOCKED ALL TOGETHER IN TWO DANK, windowless chambers in the bowels of the castle. Windowless, in this instance, does not mean possessing a narrow skylight through which a shaft of early-morning sun or a peal of birdsong might trip, sweet and aliment, though faraway; it does not mean having a mere barred cavity that admits the gales and spitting April showers; it does not mean furnished with a rough aperture overlooking a bare, featureless courtyard in which the daisies, rolling their pale yellow eyes up from between the broken flagstones, might become allegory for fragile hope in adversity; it means windowless. Two windowless chambers, about twenty yards by twenty yards, floors of rough board covered over with straw, two pails for our muck. We must burn candles all day to have any light at all, and these at a cost of two pence for each stump of tallow—a debt that is dutifully recorded in the gaoler’s log book to be paid upon release. Or by our reluctant relatives, if these exist, upon our death.

  There is nothing to indicate what time of day or night it is, in these chambers, except for the muffled rhythms of the castle above. Our bodies lose their unique character in the perpetual gloaming, and in my eyes a Rebecca becomes a Helen becomes an Anne becomes an Elizabeth becomes a Margaret, stained rags and tattered cap, the specificity of a shape of a leg, or the sharpness of a collarbone jutting from the disordered neckline of a nightgown, lost. We sleep heaped atop one another. Our bodies twitch in our sleep as though already strung from the gallows. Mother is quiet. Mother is, cruelly, sober. The gaoler comes once in what must be the morning, to empty the stinking slop bucket, and once again at an indeterminate later hour to bring stale bean bread and water. It is by his visits that we tally the length, in days, of our captivity. In the first weeks the miserable prison victuals give us gripe in the guts, and our cells are choked with the hot stench of run-off and worms. Animals know greater dignity. Animals have scraps of meat, bones to chew. Three days and my teeth want so badly a thing worth biting at.

  The gaoler himself is a man with a shining bald pate and long, fantastic whiskers. He is named Edmund Ferriter. He has a reputation for extorting most of his charges with a rare and almost endearing brio, but he is frightened of us, the Manningtree Witches. At least at first. Down the rickety staircase from the upper storeys and into our cells he shuffles, quickly as he can on those bandy legs (the legacy, I think, of childhood rickets) to haul away our slop bucket or deliver lights, with the Lord’s Prayer trembling constant on his lips as talisman against our underworld power. Like an animal, however—let us say, a magpie that slowly becomes accustomed to the presence of a sleeping dog—his confidence soon grows, and he begins to hang back at the threshold of the cell, and pick curious circles about us, asking if we might show him some of the Devil’s proper cunning, show, show magicks (or else Helen a little more of her lovely ankles). Helen obliges, a wanton smile and a flash of calf. Her manacles are duly removed. Her mother’s, too, in exchange for a few kindly looks, a little fondling of his long black moustaches.

  A week passes, then ten days, then another few days, and it has been two weeks, and then our system fails us because Master Ferriter the Turnkey is visiting more often to make eyes at Helen, and because, having nothing else to quarrel over, we naturally settle upon the day of the year as a point ripe for contention. My mother will
insist it is Mayday, at most—the Widow Moone thinks it closer to Midsummer. This is what passes us for sport.

  We have other games, as well. We pick the lice off one another and feed them carefully into our precious candle-tongues, watch them pop and shrivel. We make a competition of our tender reminiscences of the sky, lying prone in our bed of straw with our itchy heads pressed close together, staring up at the dripping roof of the cell. Old Mother Clarke begins, saying how she remembers one high gold summer morning all mottled with tiny clouds, like the angels had bickered through the night and torn off handfuls of one another’s wings, and these came to settle in the sky as though against a glass (Mother Clarke is too helpless now to hate, though Helen tries very hard to, and will not play the sky-game). I remember how I saw the seabirds rising massed through fog on the pale green water, so perfect it looked painted. Widow Leech remembers a night when the fumes beneath the moon appeared to arrange themselves into a perfect fleur-de-lis, and this she took to be a very ill portent of Popish supremacy.

  Once a fortnight has passed, I begin to see these dungeons are not rightly like Hell at all. Suffering here is not like a burning lake of sulphur—nothing so absolute. It is a slow and vexatious accretion of a matter at the nostrils and behind the ears and in the tear ducts. It is itching and smelling like a vagrant’s mutt. There are a whole host of creatures, mice and lice and rats and the rats’ fleas, all gathering at the thin boundaries of the flesh. I wonder what I look like to the intrepid harvest mite, with his six red hungry legs, nosing through the crusted dirt of the Via Solis to find a soft pouch of blood at the base of my forefinger? I watch him, almost fondly, like he is a pet. Little Red. It is ours no longer—our skin, our blood. There is no keeping it clean, there is no keeping it with modesty, there is no using of the body in a proper way.