The Witchfinder's Sister

by Beth Underdown

  ‘Come now, brother –’

  ‘My keys,’ he said.

  I lowered my voice. ‘Brother. Why don’t you come in? I’ll go and check outside – you warm yourself.’ I gestured to Grace. ‘Give me that light. Take the master into the parlour and get some wine for him, something strong if it can be found. And then you go and look him out a spare shirt. There are some upstairs.’ Matthew did not look as if he wanted to let go of my arm. I prised at his cold fingers. ‘I won’t be a minute, brother,’ I said. I felt myself pretending to be brave, though I didn’t know whether for him or for Grace, who was waiting, looking fearful and cold.

  He looked as if he would speak, but he allowed Grace to take his arm. When she had led him into the parlour I stepped outside, and shut the front door behind me. It was a moonless night, and I could hardly see black shapes from darker black, though I could make out a small light on the river or beyond it, and nearer at hand the thickness of the hedges. The wind from earlier had dropped. I could see nothing shining in the gravel. I felt my breath catch in my throat, and told myself it was only the deep cold and stillness, which do always make a feeling of waiting. I had been going to walk out as far as the gate, but suddenly I did not dare: quickly I turned back inside, feeling almost foolish at my relief when the door opened to my touch. I bolted it firmly behind me.

  I found my brother by the parlour fire. Grace had left him a shirt to warm, but he was shaking too much to unfasten the one he was wearing.

  ‘Matthew.’ I put his hands away from their fumbling. ‘Just let me do it,’ I said, and to my surprise, he let his arms drop and stood still, patient as a child.

  ‘Alice –’ he said. Grace dropped something in the kitchen and we both twitched. ‘Did you see anything?’

  I shook my head. Close up, his face was covered with standing sweat, like a horse gets, ridden hard in the cold.

  ‘My keys?’

  ‘I could not see them. I’ll look in the morning. I’ll find them then. But listen, brother. Where have you been?’

  ‘I’ve been at Bess Clarke’s.’ He closed his eyes. ‘Thank God you were here. I went to Richard Edwards’s house after. He asked me to tell him when we were stopping for the night. I thought to walk back to the Thorn, but then I did not like to – and I remembered Mary said you were here. But – it must have followed me.’ He closed his eyes.

  ‘What were you doing at Bess Clarke’s at this hour?’ I said. I wanted to say, ‘Stopping what for the night?’ but I did not dare.

  He opened his eyes. ‘The worst thing is, it made no sound. Not even breathing. You couldn’t even see any eyes …’ His breath began to come faster.

  I had got his shirt undone. ‘Brother. Let us speak of it tomorrow, then, eh? Let it be in the daylight.’ I signed for him to lift his arms; it made me think of the times I had helped him when we were children, and in his sleep he wet himself. When we were between servants, or the ones we had were deep sleepers, and Matthew’s dreaming cries woke Father, who would come to our chamber and frown over what Matthew had done, speak plainly to him about how his dreams were not real. I used to keep spare linen in our chamber, and I would always have to help Matthew with it, for his fingers were sometimes too cold to unknot the ties at the throat of his nightshift by the time Father went away.

  I went to hang Matthew’s damp shirt by the hearth, then turned to him with the fresh one. My brother’s body was not like Joseph’s. It was pale even in the firelight, almost hairless. The marks on his neck and forearms were pink still, a yellow-pink, not silvered, for they had never seen air or sun. I stepped to him with the dry shirt and pushed it over his head, feeling that I should not have looked. I heard Grace come in with the wine before I had got it done up properly; Matthew stared over my shoulder as I finished the last knot.

  ‘Forgive me,’ Grace said, behind me, and I turned, took the cups from her.

  ‘Brother, sit down and drink that,’ I said. Then, ‘Grace. You may find us two more blankets, and then you may go back to bed.’

  She looked awkward, her eyes directed around my knees. ‘Yes, mistress,’ she said.

  When I had Matthew settled in his chair, a blanket tucked around his lap, and another around his shoulders, I sat and drank my cup of wine. He placed his on the arm of his chair and let his head drop backwards, resting his skull on the chair’s hard back. I dug underneath myself, and passed him a small cushion.

  I thought, This can only help my cause tomorrow. He’ll feel foolish, not only about this business but about carrying on in such a fashion over Bridget. He’ll come with me to her house, and we’ll talk it through. Nip it all in the bud, and I can tell him about the child, too.

  Then I remembered. ‘Oh. Where is your dog?’ I said. ‘I’ll get her some water, before we put out the light.’

  Matthew frowned. ‘I left her at home. She was limping this morning. A splinter in her pad, perhaps.’ His hand moved on the arm of the chair as he looked at me. ‘What is it? Why?’

  I had gone cold for I had felt something, I was certain. When I had opened the front door for Matthew, it had pushed past my legs. It was hard to keep my eyes from leaping to the corners of the room and the shadows there, but I governed myself, thinking, I am imagining things, I am tired. I must not alarm him. ‘Nothing,’ I said, but when he leaned over to put out the light, I touched his arm. ‘Why don’t we leave it?’ I said.

  I drew my chair up close to Matthew’s, trying not to look into the shadows, to dismiss what I thought I had felt. Trying not to think of what I might have let into the house, besides my brother.

  To help my courage, I began to hum, and as I did I let Matthew drop his head bit by bit onto my shoulder, to hear the music coming through the bone. As he slackened into sleep, I left off my humming, for I could feel the tremble and catch in my voice. I told myself it was only that I had got cold outside. But I was astonished that I did not wake my brother, with the way the very core of me was shaking.

  9

  I have told you how the boys in Wenham did disdain my brother Matthew when we were little children, for his scars, for his fastidiousness, because he could not run for long. What I have not told you is that when I was twelve years old, all that changed: something happened, which won him their respect.

  It was an afternoon when I had been sitting with Mother, as Father had begun to ask me to do; he had sent Matthew out, to get some fresh air and stretch his legs. It was cold, and February, and it was dark before he was missed. Father looked and shouted around the church first before rousing a couple of the stouter men who lived near us, who each roused a couple more. All of them brought out their dogs, and their sons ran along too, more gawping than helping as the fathers thrashed and yelled in the woods, while I stayed at the house, and tried to keep Mother calm.

  When he heard Father calling the first time, Matthew had shouted from the bottom of the fresh-dug grave, but the earth had swallowed the sound. It was someone’s dog that found him in the end, when they went over the churchyard again and the animal panted and strained towards the great hole with the mounded earth beside. When the searchers all peered over the edge with lights, there was Matthew, blinking up at them, smear-faced but calm. Ropes were brought and they got him out – no small task, as he had turned his ankle – and for the rest of that week I made him sit by the fire. There had been a quantity of water in the hole, and there was the suspicion of a cough, but it surprised me that, though his ankle pained him, he did not seem distressed.

  The next week, the village lads were eager to crowd around him, to hear what it had been like. With each of their retellings it was not the dog but a different one among them who had found him. Were you not frightened, they asked Matthew, when you fell in the grave? ‘But it wasn’t a grave,’ I heard my brother reply. ‘It was only a hole.’

  I knew then that Matthew had finally taken to heart Father’s words, on the nights when he dreamed and cried out and Father came in to explain patiently how this thing he was afraid of,
this horror, it was just a shadow on the wall, or the sound of a tree branch tapping on the window. I saw Matthew’s pride in being able to amaze the Wenham boys simply by shrugging, and calling the grave a mere hole in the ground. But those boys had not seen what I had seen, his many nights of waking and weeping. They did not see how it was the thinnest of tricks: if a thing frightens you, to call it something else. They did not see that to classify a thing away from fearfulness rather shows fear, than any lack of it.

  †

  I cannot now think of the grave day without thinking, therefore, of the notes my brother must have taken, soon after that night of Bess Clarke’s watching. After he had come running to Mother’s house, after his brief loss of courage there in the dark. The notes have stuck in my memory, since the day I finally seized my chance to read them, for their cold calmness. How Matthew described Bess Clarke in the briefest terms: old, widow, lame of one leg. How he did not call her by her name, but rather only ‘the accused’.

  He noted at first that they had walked her a little, up and down the small parlour. Then they placed her on a stool, the accused, legs drawn up painfully so that she might be watched in case any of her imps came near her skirts to be fed. They alternated the sitting with the walking, not for any ease or comfort but in whatever manner would most weary her. Neither sleep nor food was permitted, while they waited for her supposed imps to come.

  My brother noted the smell in the accused’s house; how he pressed his kerchief to his nose the whole time. After the walking, they had kept her sitting for three hours, and then some of the women had taken her to use the chamber pot, but when they brought her back she had seemed in pain. She had begun then to laugh a horrible bold laugh and my brother had known from the suddenness of the change that the devil had come upon her.

  Between the laughing she would call out, ‘Holt, Ho-olt’, like that, as you would call to a toddling child. But nothing came, nothing. Then she called out again, in a strange dry voice, ‘Jermarah!’ And a thing bolted down the stairs, through the room and out into the kitchen. Some there thought it was a stag, but Matthew noted that it was certainly a greyhound, but of great size. Yet when someone went in with a light, there was nothing in the kitchen to be seen.

  It was decided then that the women should go home, so one of the other men took them. When they had gone, Bess Clarke brought out something from under her wraps. ‘This here is Elimauzer,’ she said. ‘He was out on an errand for me when you came before.’

  But one of the men said, ‘Come, madam, enough of this silliness. That is a rabbit.’

  At which she smiled. ‘It may look like one,’ she said, ‘but if I gave the word he would squeeze himself down your throat and lay a feast of toads in your belly.’

  When ten o’clock passed, Matthew noted that the accused became sleepy, so she was walked again, up and down, up and down, between two of the other men. They began to ask her more questions: you could ask her any question then and she would answer. One of them said, ‘How long have you been lying with the devil?’ And she said, ‘Oh, six years, seven. When he comes he will not wait. He presses my hand and says, “Bess, I must lie with you.” ’ She said, ‘I killed Richard Edwards’s pigs. The devil pestered me into it.’ She said, ‘He wouldn’t leave me alone.’

  But Matthew noted that the accused would not admit any of the murders they put to her. Two more women from Lawford, a clothier’s child: she did deny them all. Denied them, and said she did not know what had done for them, but Anne West, that one, she would know. Then one of the men said, ‘What about my brother, when his ship broke up, and only a mile off Harwich? Was that Anne West, too?’

  And she said, ‘It was, it was her.’

  I still think now of Bess Clarke’s addled face, her small intelligence. She would have been broken with tiredness, that night; shitting herself with fear. She would have been trying to work out what they wanted, those men, what would make them go away. To work out the mix of truth and show that would leave her alive and them satisfied. A name would have suggested itself, one which was a fit. One with whom she had few dealings; not an enemy, but not a friend either.

  I wonder now if she was angry at being brought to the end of her courage. Perhaps she simply did not like Matthew’s face. For as the men were making ready to leave, she called out, ‘Master Hopkins – do not fear. I have asked one of my children to see you safely home.’

  When I came across my brother’s notes of that night, and saw his bland formality as he spoke of Bess Clarke, I knew it at once for fear. That night on the doorstep, unmade by panic, that was the true feeling that hid beneath his calm procedure, his chilling attention to detail. He suppressed it most perfectly, but still it was there: a child’s fear. For I am certain that, despite his proficiency, my brother still believes in the devil as a present fact, as you or I might believe in the moon in the sky.

  When Matthew was seven, I remember, he came indoors from a dimming November day and said he had spoken with the devil. Father, humouring him for once, asked, ‘What did the devil say?’

  And Matthew answered, ‘He asked where we keep the axe for the logs. He asked if there is a screen on the kitchen fire.’

  Father looked at Mother. ‘You mustn’t be fibbing like that,’ Father said. Mother had hidden her mouth behind her hand. ‘Talk about something else,’ Father said, ‘or don’t talk at all.’

  Later, in the chamber we still shared, I hissed across from under my covers to ask how he had known it was the devil. Did it have horns?

  ‘He had no smell,’ Matthew replied, quite plainly and with no trace of deceit. ‘He was like a man, but he smelt of nothing.’

  10

  When I woke in my chair, the one beside me was already empty, set back in its proper place, the blankets folded and draped over the arm. My limbs felt squashed and sore and grubby, and the grate was cold. I was chilled right through, my own blanket having slipped to the floor. All the corners of the parlour that had lain in shadow were full of plain daylight, and straight away I felt ashamed of myself, of the nonsense I had imagined, as I tried to neaten my clothes.

  I found Matthew in the kitchen, and Grace serving him what I had not eaten of our poor supper. She clattered the dishes, her arms red with cold below her rolled-up sleeves, and avoided my eye. Matthew looked impatient.

  ‘Good morning, brother,’ I said. ‘I hope you slept.’

  He cleared his throat. ‘It hardly matters. I am accustomed to very little.’

  I smiled. ‘I think we were jumping at shadows, brother.’

  ‘I am sorry if you did suffer any alarm,’ he said, but he would not meet my eyes.

  Grace stood waiting with my beer. I took the cup from her, but she did not move. I said, ‘Thank you, Grace,’ and then she went out of the room. ‘What passed at Bess Clarke’s house?’ I said, making my voice firm.

  ‘It’s not a business fit for your ears, sister.’

  Lightly, then, I said, ‘Well. Perhaps we can speak later. For certain we had better get back, once I have drunk this.’

  ‘You go,’ he said. ‘I must see Grimston. His agent is ill. I have said I will help him with the quarter rents.’

  ‘Now, brother,’ I said, ‘listen. You had a fright last night. You had a shock, undoubtedly. But I beg you, think of it. What in truth did happen? What did you actually see?’ I went on, carefully: ‘Be certain that Grimston and the others are not fixing on Bess Clarke, that you are not fixing on her, simply because she lives alone, or uses ill speech, or happens to need more charity than she is offered. It would not become you to have a hand in bullying old women, however bad they may be as tenants.’

  I moved closer, to pick off the bits of lint from his coat where it had been cast over a chair through the night. But Matthew stepped away from me, and brushed himself down unsteadily. Brought up short by his coldness, I saw how pale, how sweaty he still was.

  ‘I am surprised that you would ask me about this,’ he said. ‘You must know it is none of your
business.’ He hesitated, but then he went on: ‘It was convenient to me that you were here, on this occasion, Alice. I cannot deny that last night I was tired, and I was glad to find you here.’ He held my eyes for a long moment, and then he said, ‘But you know I cannot approve of you ranging about, not coming home at night.’

  I blushed. ‘I wasn’t ranging about,’ I said.

  He turned away, gathering his papers, patting his pockets. I was at a loss.

  ‘Well. I’ll go out for your keys,’ I said.

  He thanked me, his voice absent; the way you thank a servant.

  I unlatched the front door, and on the threshold I stood still, breathing the crisp air. I thought, He is only ashamed. Not for what he thinks he has seen, but for showing his fear to me, to Grace. That is all it is. I ought to be ashamed, too.

  The morning was fine, with a soft frost. Each dead leaf on the hedge, each blade of grass, was made bright by it. A boy passed the front gate, leading a mule, and took off his hat to me. Uneasy, I scuffed out over the gravel, casting my eyes about. Beside the gatepost, my brother’s keys lay neatly between the silvered leaves of a dandelion, almost as if they had been carefully tucked there. They were so cold that I held them between finger and thumb, as I turned back to the house, hoping they might soften his mood.

  It was only then that I noticed the old strawberry beds beside the front door: where the frozen soil was all pressed down, packed tight, as if something large and warm had lain there, crouched in the dark, waiting. I stopped, unable to credit what I saw. But then I heard a noise inside the house, Matthew shouting up for Grace to come down, and without stopping to think I walked very fast through the side gate to the yard to find a rake. By the time Matthew came out, everything was as it should have been, the rake leaning against the wall. As he stopped on the steps, I could not tell whether he glanced at the strawberry bed.