The Manningtree Witches

by A. K. Blakemore

  “These manikins were found in the home of Mistress Godwin,” he says. “In a scuttle.”

  So Mistress Godwin has been making images and sticking pins in them. Making images, sticking pins in them, then hiding them at the bottom of a coal scuttle. It is not the sort of thing for which an innocent explanation can be found, if Hopkins speaks true. I remain resolutely silent, now. My noises serve no purpose. I am just a dog yapping at the end of the rope. I look at the manikins again, with their scratchy wax faces, in their little suits of rag. You would think things used to do evil would have a greater smell of evil about them. Hopkins himself does.

  He takes a long, deep breath. “Look at me,” he orders.

  Dutifully, I raise my eyes. His voice is soft now, almost gentle, as he reaches out to take my hands in his own. The dark leather of his gloves feels soft and expensive. I realise I have never seen his hands uncovered. “Whatever sin weighs on you, Rebecca,” he says, “God will forgive, if you only give it name. I wish to help you, not harm you. You have been like unto Daniel in the den of the lion, your soul imperilled . . .”

  I find I am gulping back tears—of frustration, though who knows what Hopkins might think engenders them. “Whether my soul be imperilled or not, sir,” I say, “I cannot tell you what I do not know.”

  Hopkins inhales sharply through that beatific mask he has fixed over his face. His grasp of my hands tightens. “There are Witches who have offered their babes up to the Devil fresh from their bodies and still glistening with the mucus of their wombs,” he pants, “who consign their progeny to Hell ere they have so much as named them. Does he come to you, Rebecca? Does your mother bring him to your bedside?” His tongue twitches at the corner of his mouth. “Do you whore yourself to him?”

  There it is again—the excitement. The thrill nested secret in the black of his eye. I take my hands away and his gloved fingers close on the air. Perhaps, I think, remembering the man in black my mother spoke of, I ought to entertain the possibility that he is correct. I feel empty all of the time. The Devil’s claws might account for it: a once-long-ago scrape made at me, so the fiend might seed his malice there. I have sinful thoughts, always. I have done sinful things, now and then. I press the flat of my hand to my hot cheek, and realise my breath is held—

  “Anne West, your mother,” Hopkins continues, his voice constricted, “has confessed before witnesses to the conjuring of storms by the aid of the Devil. You are complicit in maleficium, Rebecca, unless”—his voice tapers to a mere sibilance, the better to insinuate itself into the cracks that begin to patulate on my aching skull—“unless you were compelled to it.”

  And there it is. The bargain is proffered, the terms are set out: my life, for my mother’s. He cannot put it any more clearly without compromising his Godly posturing. What Hopkins wants is the anguished testimony of a once-chaste maid forced to Sathan’s concubinage by her own nefarious mother—what magistrate would not take pity on the former? Or fail to condemn the latter?

  “I know nothing of the Devil,” I find myself saying, “nor of conjuring, nor familiars, sir.”

  His mouth twists petulantly. “Tell me, Rebecca—have you your maidenhead?”

  In one instant that breaks up to multiplicity as it courses along the channels of my mind before crumpling inward and collapsing back upon itself—picture a flock of starlings that twist in the sky, each bird a sensation—I feel it all again: the wet cotton clinging to my back, the heaviness of John Edes on top of me, the prickling of his beard a fire at my neck. I flush red—I can feel that as well, in the here and now, where I sit in a ruined chapel on an upturned crate and Hopkins’ eyes bore into my face. I should not have to tell him. Has he even the right to ask? I am forced to conclude, probably. My voice quivers as I perjure myself: “I am unmarried, sir, and have my virtue still.” Sin breedeth sin.

  Hopkins sniffs. Hopkins softens. He snaps his log book closed and returns Godwin’s dummies to his satchel. I will be taken back to the castle, to the wide grave of that cell. No more light. Now my return is imminent, I feel I would do anything to remain here, above ground, where people move their arms and look up at the stars whenever they are of a mind to. All reason dissolves in a black, welling despair. I could do it now, confess. It is so easy to say words, and words are all he wants from me, no more. He waits expectantly, one beat, three, and yet I have said nothing. Then he rises from his seat. “I am bound for Aldeburgh,” he tells me, lifting the storm lantern.

  “Aldeburgh,” I repeat, for no particular reason but to prolong my relative liberty.

  “Indeed,” he sighs. “Unchallenged, the Devil’s confederacy has proliferated further than I could have imagined. I beseech you, Rebecca,” he says, taking me by the shoulder as I rise from my seat, “to consider what I have said. To consider your soul. I will return when I am able.”

  The guardsmen lead me back to the castle, manacles creaking at my wrists again. They are frightened of me, their faces kept deep in their collars to evade my Evil Eye—but they need not bother themselves. The clouds have cleared at dawn’s approach, and I keep my gaze lifted to the fulsome morning stars like a thirsty man at a fount, all thoughts of Hell and Hopkins in those moments flensed by the bright distant light. I will spend tomorrow in the dark again.

  23

  Witchfinder

  MAY BECOMES JUNE BECOMES JULY, BUT HOW might anyone know? The rain is relentless, insistent, subsuming all in its cinereous element, beating out a death fugue on the rooftops and on the fields where men lie blown to pieces. It beats on the meadow in Huntingdon, where on a sodden afternoon the Witchfinder orders men to dig, eventually unearthing a mouldering effigy of straw, man-shaped: drawing the iron nail from the poppet’s trunk, Hopkins effects the miraculous recovery of a local landowner’s convulsive daughter, and three more witches are led away in chains. They meet a woman in Skeith who keeps a great fat bee that drinks blood from the tip of her thumb. Word spreads. Why was a spotted cat seen to jump in at your window? Why do your sweet-peas thrive so, battered by the storms? These questions matter, now. A parson’s wife in Rattlesden is found halfway out the dairy window when Hopkins’ party arrive, her ankles flailing in the air. Up go her skirts so that her fundament might be inspected for teats right then and there, by which she giveth the Devil suck. Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder General, is a name known. And women know to fear it, and know to hide their fear.

  The Justices and Guildsmen and Ministers are his most humble servants, they write. They want him. They send letters entreating him to come, to Shotley, Tattingstone, Witham—as far away as Northamptonshire. They offer money. Not so much that it might offend the sensibilities of a Puritan ascetic, but enough. Enough to make him rich-ish once his horse is shod and stabled, his mutton dressed, and a few shillings have been pressed into the prickers’ sticky hands. Enough and a little more again to make the long nights of watching and the bumpy rides down flooded country lanes worthwhile. But he’d do it for free, of course. He’d persist in God’s work if a whole army stood in his way. Fortunately, no one does. Or no one of consequence, at least.

  It is clear there is no time left for modesty, if the Devil’s muster is to be stymied. God’s warriors can ill afford to wait at a discreet distance while suspects kick and flail beneath the needles. Often, now, the suspects are resisting, and they must be held down for the pricking. Bodies. Women’s bodies, so many. Thin and fat, old and young, in all their fleshy actualness. The strange parts, the birthmarks, the dark spots on their necks, the warts and blebs, the breasts veined like fine blue cheese. He observes all this with a clinical detachment. None of it arouses him, which he also finds interesting. An aspect of the Devil’s unnatural power, he supposes. Or are the elect immune even to sins of the mind? He pictures reaching out a hand to touch a bared breast or the underside of a thigh, and in his mind he sees the flesh wrinkle at the barest graze of his fingertip and a thousand black spiders burst from that point of contact, flicking ichor from their hairy legs. Yes—th
ese are not women, but bags of spiders in women’s skin. Tissue filled with dark stuff. God. It is horrid. It is fascinating. He dreams of caves. He fasts frequently and severely. He dreams of Rebecca, gets hard again. It is not her body, it is something else. Her soul? She moves him. Why? Big eyes, like a woodland creature. He thinks of touching her shoulder, back in the chapel. He will save her; she is not like these. Get behind me, Sathan.

  And what is Mister John Stearne doing? Whatever Hopkins tells him to. He’s the soft power in their partnership, the one who warms the magistrates and brings the provincial constables to heel, who serves a sop of jocularity with Hopkins’ caustic wash. He drinks the good port pressed into their hands by the bottleful by grateful, Godly townsmen. He buys a slashed-sleeve jacket lined with chartreuse silk. It belonged to a dead man, but what does that matter? He may be the least-cursed man in all of England, near-pneumatic, irascibly perky, practically coin-operated. At the inn in Yarmouth he is deep in his cups, and won’t shut up about Agnes, his dear Agnes, the sweetest creature in all God’s creation, I swear it, whom he loves twice as much now as he did when he married her. Hopkins knows his Proverbs very well—wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging: and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise. Hopkins also thinks, quite ungenerously, I hope you are being cuckolded. I hope your sweet Agnes is inviting the baker’s boy into your marriage bed as we speak, John Stearne. Then his own cruelty frightens him, and he worries the Devil’s taint has spread to him like a pox from witch-flesh, though he touched it only with his eyes. He fasts again, for three days this time, taking only bread and water.

  Thirty-six women, then thirty-seven women—and two men, as well—fill the town jails. Almost all of them are poor. Some are vagrants, reduced to sucking milk raw from the teats of cows put out to pasture unattended. Food—its lack, its necessity—the prevailing preoccupation. For England is now gripped by famine. The fields go unplanted because the planters are soldiers now, and what harvest there might have been rots in the fields. The wheat is freckled blue with ergot, and makes men mad, makes them see things—in the sky, in their wives’ eyes. The soldiers who were planters drive away the herds and plunder cellars out of spite, or for shits and giggles. Baptise horses. Rape. Children are whipped for feeding cheese to dogs, then for feeding the dogs anything at all, and then for refusing to eat the dogs themselves, when there is nothing else left to make a meal of. Imps are sent to steal pork-crackling and cakes cooling on windowsills. No one is quite sure when it happened, but a threshold has been crossed. Strain your ear to the roll of summer thunder, and hear a door swinging closed behind. It is an upside-down time. If the herring and trout were to rise from the waterways and take flight like birds it would surprise no one, for surely God’s Day of Judgement is near at hand, and in that time hail and fire will be mingled with blood, and locusts will fall upon the fields in breastplates of iron and with the faces of men.

  The Witchfinder General is not the only son of East Anglia who rides the ensorcelled wind into the annals of history in this year of 1644. The hero of Marston Moor is the Earl of Manchester’s Lieutenant General, one Oliver Cromwell. He is well beloved by women because he is known to love his own mother well. Like Hopkins, he says he went to Cambridge (unlike Hopkins, he is telling the truth). Like Hopkins, he would be handsome, if. His deep-set eyes gaze up from shrivelled broadsides across the country. A good face he has, sturdy and sober-looking, if lacking in refinement. Plangent, stoical, a holy mount of nose. Puts you in mind of Proverbs: counsel in the heart of man is like deep water, etc. And where else do we hang our hopes? The Medici Queen is fled to France, and that is something. The Godly folk of London strip themselves of lucre to offer up to Parliament, carts full of pewter plate and bushels of good cloth pulled past the crystal husk of Whitehall. Burn and salt the earth, for He cometh; raze all this unholy Albion. It is madness, delightless and hot.

  By September Hopkins and Stearne, our two holy itinerants, are in Sudbury, Suffolk, where a local witch has sent her dog-familiar to rock the crib of her neighbour’s newborn son with such wicked enthusiasm that the babe fell out on the flagstones and broke his neck, among other sundry mischiefs. The gobber-toothed old dame in question freely admits to being given the sandy dog by a gentleman in a fine black suit with silk points, who told her, quite brazenly, to name the beast Sathan. The prickers can draw no blood from a mark by the woman’s left armpit, and gamely she utters maledictions and curses upon everyone in the room as she is needled and walked before the hearth. All in all, an easy twenty shillings. And yet Hopkins seems inexplicably melancholic as he sits down to dinner with Stearne that evening.

  He stabs his fork at a hunk of brawn. Their conversation is limping, sporadic—but turns, eventually, to the Manningtree women, who languish in gaol at Colchester. “It will all be for naught,” Hopkins says, “if the Manningtree women be not convicted. The whole enterprise.” He cringes involuntarily at the word enterprise. The wrong word, conjuring images of receipt notes and scales and accounting books. And yet the word that sprang first to his mind.

  Stearne has no doubt they will be convicted. He counts the arguments out on his fingers: two confessions, Godwin’s manikins and enough extraordinary swellings upon their bodies to cook a pie of. “Besides,” he adds, with a mercurial grin, “half the Godly folk in town have grievance against them, and will happily testify.”

  Hopkins swirls a nub of gristle around in his gravy, and grunts that he will not have himself made an instrument for the vengeance of a vexatious fishwife.

  Stearne shrugs, not much caring what he is, provided it is not hungry. “What does it matter, when the end is the same?” he asks. “The malefactors are removed and the good, God-fearing folk—”

  “Are free of the Devil’s predations,” Hopkins sighs. “For the time being.” This is how they talk—like they are heroes. Perhaps one of them believes it.

  Stearne smiles. “Our duty done.”

  Hopkins slumps back into his seat, with a weary look. “The Prince of Air is cunning indeed,” he breathes, rubbing at his eyelids. “In the smallest motes of inconsequence he frames havoc . . . from paltry stones builds his hateful palace. The girl,” he says, “Rebecca West.”

  “Trough-eyed little thing with the nice . . .?” Stearne’s fork clatters to the edge of his plate as he makes a squeezy-squeezy motion with his hands.

  Hopkins ignores him. “I must secure her confession.”

  Stearne sits back as well, picking at his tombstone teeth with a dirk. “A confession—a display of contrition—would recommend her to the Justices,” he says, between stabs. “But her mother . . .”

  “Now the brother shall betray the brother to death, and the father the son; and children shall rise up against their parents, and shall cause them to be put to death. So saith Mark.” Hopkins knits his fingers in an attitude of prayer.

  Stearne jests, chuckling, that the Lord himself can scarcely know the Gospels as well as the Witchfinder. Hopkins stares holes into his blasphemous associate’s head. Time to change the subject. Master Edes—have they had any luck in tracking down their erstwhile secretary? Stearne rummages in his jacket pocket for pipe and tobacco pouch. Agnes has heard word from Bicks, the innkeeper, that Master Edes sent for his possessions.

  Hopkins blinks and waits for further explication. Working with Mister Stearne is often an excruciating affair. “And where,” he eventually asks, “did Master Edes ask that they be sent?”

  “Oh,” belches Stearne, “Harwich.”

  Hopkins allows his hands to fall to the tabletop, his taut mouth relaxing into a smile. “I see. Thank you, Stearne.” He drums his thumb against the tabletop and peers out of the window at the leaden night. “Master Edes gave her lessons, you know,” he adds. “The West girl.”

  “I should like to give her lessons,” says Stearne.

  His clay pipe scuds across the floorboards as he falls from his seat and onto his side from the force of the blow. Then the toe of Hopkins’ boot collides w
ith the hard cartilage of his throat, and he brings his arms down over his head with a whimper. Through the hard rasp of blood in his eardrums he can hear Hopkins, hear him saying Sinful, thou degenerate, thou slime, neckless fat— and Hopkins kicks him again hard, in the belly, and blood spackles the backs of Stearne’s teeth and he tastes bile and brawn in his mouth, the black beating like a rope tightening around the throat—Mercy, Matthew, mercy—

  And it stops. Stearne, arms still clenched down protectively over his head, spits blood on the dusty boards and on the sleeve of his jacket (the new one, lined with chartreuse silk). He blinks up at Hopkins with a look of astonishment, as though he is only just now understanding his body’s capacity for pain.

  Hopkins stands over him, long and dark, shuddering with the vehemence of his own anger. His pupils have contracted into spots on the whites of his popping eyes. Good, he thinks. Good. Feel it. Be wounded at last. He breathes, slowly composing himself. He reminds Stearne that he is a married man. He reminds him that they are God’s warriors. All this he says reluctantly, resentfully, like a wronged child making an appeal to a hated father’s authority. He knows he still needs Stearne and his mercury-manners. He knows their association cannot be broken yet.

  But there is something inside of Hopkins. He feels it, the Devil’s hand tightening around the stem of his brain, the Devil’s fists beating at the inside of his ribs. He imagines his extremities—his toes and fingertips—turning black as though frostbitten, or leprous. If he was scratched, smoke would come screaming from his flesh, or thorns, or horns. It is an intolerable feeling. He wants to throw himself on a pike. He wants to fuck something to death, probably the world. He saw the Devil once, cloven feet trampling the bluebirds on his mother’s Turkey rug—how could it all be so wrong—

  The innkeeper’s wife appears at the doorway, roused by the noise, and claps a hand over her mouth. Without apology or explanation, the Witchfinder grabs up his hat and cloak, pushes past her, and flees.