She kicked a twig. ‘At least I’d be with my mother.’
‘But that is why you are here – to keep you separate from her, and the others you will betray. To keep you safe from them.’
‘You think so?’ she said. She seemed interested in the thought.
‘That, or to make sure you do not go wandering.’
‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘Though your brother knows I have little enough money to wander anywhere.’ She stopped, to gaze out over the estuary. ‘I think in truth I am here so that the good folk of Manningtree cannot come where I live and torch me in my bed.’
She turned, and at the shock on my face her own drew inwards again, and she walked on, kicking things on the ground now and then, sticks and pebbles, and I followed a few feet behind her, governing myself to bear patiently with what I thought of as her dramatics, and not to point out that she would ruin her boots.
†
But I started to think that Rebecca might not have been wrong about the pure hatred that was abroad for any woman with a whisper against her name. For rumours, fragments of rumours of what my brother was about, began to come back from throughout the hundred, and I gleaned them where I could: from the overheard talk of the scullery maids, or where I stood with Mary and Rebecca at the back of the church.
That was where I heard of Susan Cocke from St Osyth, to whom the devil had come out of a hedgerow and promised that he would provide for her, promised her vengeance on her enemies, and that he would share her bed. I heard of others who confessed that they had only lain with the devil in reluctance, when their own beds had grown lonely.
I heard of Sarah Sparrow and Mary Greenliefe, who at one time had shared a house and a bed with their daughters, each fourteen, and more than once something had bitten the girls and bothered them around their legs under the blankets, and Sarah said it was Mary’s doing, that she had brought something upon them, that she never would have lived with such a woman, would never have been forced to it, if she had been fortunate enough to have a son.
Bridget still did not show her face at service. But though I had thought my brother’s business prompted by his suspicions of Bridget, certainly now it seemed to be little to do with her. What he was doing seemed larger and less discriminate.
As April turned to May, Mary Phillips began to go out some days to the nearer villages of the hundred. My brother needed more assistance, it seemed; I heard the scullery maids talking of it. But Mary never told me when she was going – and she was never gone overnight, always back to lock up at the usual time. I thought plenty about Father’s daily book, which I had still had no chance to replace. I wished I could return it, and search for the missing pages, for I could not shake the feeling that it was among them I would find the root of what my brother was doing. But Mary kept the key to Matthew’s chamber always with her, and there was no other.
As the days passed, I knew I could leave the work at Mother’s house no longer, and I felt in any case that being there, where I had lived with Matthew, might take me nearer the heart somehow of what he wanted: nearer the heart of how to stop him. So I went, taking Rebecca with me, carrying a crate between us for the clothes that needed packing. It bumped my leg as we walked, though I took care not to hurt my belly. When we reached Mother’s house, I set Rebecca to scrubbing the kitchen floor while I took the crate upstairs.
First I unlocked my own chamber, but there was little there. Mother must have given away the few outgrown things I had left behind. Next I went into Matthew’s chamber. But if I had thought to find any clue there, I was disappointed. I did as he had directed, packing most of the contents of the room for giving away or burning. His old books I saved from their shelves, but I threw into a sack the row of a dozen conkers, prized once, now turned wizened beyond hardness. Old shirts, small shoes: I sifted it all carefully but found none of the hints I had been hoping for of what lay in my brother’s adult heart; what the secret was, to influencing him.
Giving up, I went into Mother’s room, where I brought out her gowns from the cupboard one by one, and folded them into the crate. Most could not be altered for me: I had a good five inches of height on Mother, and few contained so much at the hem. Mother had been more Rebecca West’s size, I thought. I took out her sewing box, and set it on the bed, thinking of when last she must have used it, the day before she died. A new mattress had been brought, since my last visit: as I set the sewing box down a feather escaped from it, and lofted upwards in the draught.
Downstairs, I called Rebecca from her scrubbing, and made her wash her hands properly. ‘I’ve found something that might fit you,’ I said. I opened the crate and pulled out a green gown, holding it up between finger and thumb. She didn’t thank me, only looked at the smooth cloth. ‘Well. We should try it on you,’ I said. ‘Grace said you’ll need something better for when you give your testimony.’
Obediently she followed me into the parlour, and I turned away while she got out of Mary Phillips’s gown and into the green one. I turned back. The fit was good. ‘If you stand still,’ I said, ‘I’ll pin the hem.’ I plumped a cushion on the floor and knelt. ‘Stand straight, on both feet.’
I began the work of pinning up the hem, leaning back on my heels to judge the effect. It felt odd, to be crouching at her feet. Once, I would have feared she would step on my fingers, but now there was a peaceable quiet between us, until she said, ‘Bridget, when she came to see us in the gaol in Colchester, she told me your husband died.’
‘Yes.’ I had jabbed the pin I was holding through the fabric and into my finger. Narrowly, I kept from cursing.
‘She was always kind to me, Bridget,’ Rebecca said. A spot of blood had got on her hem. I stuck the finger into my mouth. Then she said, ‘Your brother told me the trials will be in Chelmsford.’
‘They would be, being assizes.’
‘That’s where they had my little son taken, to Chelmsford. That’s where the couple live, who have him.’
I stopped pinning. ‘I never knew you had a child.’
Her voice was trying for steadiness, failing. ‘I had left Bridget’s house by then. We needed money, and there were easier ways to get it than Bridget preferred me to use while I was under her roof. I didn’t even keep him till he was weaned. She found the people to take him.’
I stood up, dusting my hands. ‘I’m sure he is loved there.’
‘I know. I know,’ she said. ‘But if I could only have a sight of him. Last night I dreamed that the couple who had him brought him to the courtroom, and held him up over the heads of the crowd for me to see. In the dream he was a baby, whereas in truth he would be rising three years old now.’
‘Whose was he,’ I said, ‘your child?’
She laughed bitterly. ‘Thomas Hart’s. Who else? He was just like him, too. I always thought that was nonsense, until I had one of my own, but then it was like looking into Thomas Hart’s own eyes. Except that I loved them.’ Her eyes were full. ‘He’ll be better off, my little lad, not knowing his father.’ She met my gaze. ‘Your husband and I, we talked of our fathers, sometimes, when I lived in Bridget’s house. Since neither of us knew them.’ She placed her hands on the back of one of the draped chairs, smoothing the dust-cloth. ‘It was daft, but we used to say, “Imagine if they came back, their fortunes made.” They were both seamen. We used to say, “Imagine if they came back spice-traders.” ’ She laughed again. ‘Mine didn’t look like one, though. I saw him, I think, just once, when I was small. I never told Joseph this. He had hair just the colour of mine, but thinning. I remember him kissing my mother. Next day, when he went, she had a fat lip, and she could only drink her morning cup by tilting it careful, to one side of her mouth. For years after, I thought the fat lip came from kissing,’ she finished, her voice dry. ‘Which in a way, it does.’
We stayed quiet for a minute. ‘Bridget told me when she came to see you, you had bruises. Here.’ I circled my finger over my lap.
She smiled a crooked smile. ‘They were the gaoler�
��s doing,’ she said. ‘Bridget saw them, for I was washing when she came. No doubt she dreamed up her own cause for them. But your brother, he never laid a hand on me. No, he and his friends, they never touched me. Though for certain I could feel them wanting to.’ Her smile faded. ‘But it will be worth dealing with them, to see my mother spared.’
I turned away as she began to unfasten the green gown. ‘That is what you have arranged?’
‘She thinks I have bargained for my own freedom only. She thinks that one of us might as well escape. But she’ll get off, too. I need only say trifles about her, Master Hopkins says.’ Her face turned hard. ‘And as for the others, I know what I must say. To make them seem guilty.’
I was appalled by how easily she seemed to speak of giving evidence against her neighbours, and appalled, too, by how Matthew had taken her in. She said, ‘Your brother has told me the kinds of things the court would want to hear. You could make anyone seem guilty if you wanted.’ Her face went softer again. ‘My mother was no witch, but she used to tell my fortune, you know. Looking into our well with a mirror. Just to amuse me, when I was little. She would always see a rich husband from London, a white pony to ride.’
The tenderness in her voice touched me, and I saw that it was love for her mother – only that, and a fierce will to survive – that was making her do as she did. The fault was not with her, I thought. It was with Matthew, for using her so. For I doubted he intended to honour his promise. I thought of what Grace had said: that they would all hang anyway. I could only hope that she was wrong, and that somehow this summer’s madness would run its course.
Something perturbed me, though, in what Rebecca had said, and as she got back into Mary Phillips’s gown, it came to me: the woman I had met at the Chelmsford inn, who had slept uneasily after studying my palm. I folded the green gown and returned it to the crate, trying to put the memory away. But then I saw the gown under the green one, a mourning gown that had belonged to my true mother. She had been tall, I knew, like my elder brothers and like me. I took the hem, and saw how it had been altered; that rather than trimming the spare fabric Mother had folded it in on itself so that perhaps the hem could be let down again, the skirt made long enough for me. I shook the gown out, and held it up against myself.
‘My mother left off telling my fortune, when I got older,’ Rebecca said, and I looked up, startled, for it was as though she had guessed something of my thoughts. But she only smiled sadly. ‘Mother knew that it would not please me any more to hear about the pony, the rich man.’ She stopped. She did not need to say why: there had been only one husband who would have pleased her after she came to Manningtree, and he had not been wealthy.
I closed the lid of the crate. ‘You love her a great deal, don’t you?’ I said.
‘Of course,’ she replied. And then: ‘You cannot think what it is like, to see them go after her as they did. Even though not one used his fists. What they do to you, him and the others, it’s mostly done with words. They make you doubt yourself, you see. You are hungry, you haven’t slept. They ask you questions, and they write your answers down, and then later they ask the same ones again. Did it happen that way, you think, or didn’t it?’ She shook her head. ‘They ask you whether you were at such a person’s house on a certain date, and they tell you they will be checking with others whether you were there, and you can’t see what they are writing. And my mother, you know, she gets such pain in her back, she hardly sits down if she can help it, and they made her sit for hours.’ Rebecca was angry, now, weeping. ‘I know you think I should not speak in the court but, truly, I think if you were in my place, you would do the same,’ she said.
I reached out and took her hand, felt the small thin bones of it. ‘At least,’ I said, ‘you did not have to see her harmed.’
She swallowed. ‘They were almost better to have beaten her,’ she said bleakly. ‘For my mother, she could have kept her spirit through a few minutes’ whipping. But how she was in the gaol, I have never seen her thus. She would not eat. She would only stare at the wet stone wall. As if she could see something there that I could not. As if she had a bad feeling, but did not dare speak it out loud.’
From that late pamphlet objecting to the searching for a witch’s mark; response to be written and circulated.
Every old woman with a wrinkled face, a furred brow, a hairy lip, a gobber tooth, a squint eye, a squeaking voice, or a scolding tongue, having a rugged coat upon her back, a skull-cap on her head, a spindle in her hand, and a dog or cat by her side; is not only suspected, but pronounced for a witch. For if you will not admit a big, or a boil; a wart, or a wen; a push, or a pile; a sear, or a scab; an issue, or an ulcer; for a palpable witch’s mark: yet then shall it certainly be determined to be in such a place, as for shame, and in very truth, is not to be named.
22
Rebecca and I hoarded away any scrap about the taken women, overheard from the scullery maids or in the town somewhere, as the stories continued to multiply. One evening, Rebecca had finished carding her third lot of wool, and was sitting, picking her hands. We had been talking of Mary Johnson from Great Clacton, who had had a child once, the kind of boy that is blond and wins at running races. But he had long grown up and gone to be a sailor, and Mary Johnson had fallen to asking too many questions about other people’s children, and occasionally giving them an unsolicited apple and a kiss.
I was taking up the green dress, which Rebecca would wear at the trials, and thinking it did not feel real that anyone should be convicted of witchcraft, that they should be hanged. Why did it not feel real? For the danger surely was present enough: Mary Johnson had confessed to brushing one of her apples with poison and been taken away.
I halted between stitches. ‘Why would a person confess such things?’ I said.
Rebecca shook her head. From her face I could see that she knew what I meant; that she had been thinking, like me, of what was unfolding across the hundred. ‘I suppose a person will confess to anything,’ she said, ‘if they have not slept.’
She looked up then, as a knocking came from out in the passage. Someone at the back door. Mary Phillips had gone out for an hour and was not back yet; we waited for one of the scullery maids to go. But then the knocking came again, so Rebecca got up to answer it. A minute passed, and she did not come back. I pushed my needle into a seam, and got to my feet, but then Rebecca came in.
‘Bridget is here,’ she said.
I stopped still. Then I went out past her, shutting the parlour door behind me. Though my doubts surrounding Bridget had persisted since Grace had told me about the item she had seen in Mother’s bed, still I was glad she had come. But in the passage I hesitated. I was keenly aware that what Matthew was embarked upon, I had failed to halt or even slow, so I was hesitant as I pulled open the back door, and saw Bridget standing on the steps. But she did not seem angry. Rather, she pulled me into a rough hug, and as we broke apart she laid a hand on my cheek.
‘Thank God you’re all right,’ she said. ‘And the child?’
‘Well. Moving a lot.’ I glanced around, but could see no stablehands. ‘Come out here,’ I said, taking Bridget by the arm, and I hurried with her across the yard, out through the gate and over the road, drawing her into the shadows by the warehouses. It was growing dark, and there was no one about, except one whistling man coiling ropes down by the quay, who paid us no attention.
Bridget looked strained, twitchy, as she drew her shawl closer about her. ‘I was fearful when I did not hear from you. It’s turning into a bad business, this.’
‘I live in hope that it could still amount to nothing. Though Grace, before he took her with him, she thought otherwise.’ I stopped. ‘He has said nothing of you, though, Bridget.’
She pressed her lips together. ‘Perhaps his regard for you is strong enough to keep me safe.’ She kept her voice low. ‘But I am minded to agree with Grace. The wind is behind him, now, and he is running with it. You have heard, I take it, what Grace is there to do?
’ She studied my face. ‘You have heard about the searching?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know it is imps they look for, the signs of them having visited a woman.’
I bit my lip. ‘I have heard they sit still hours together, and watch for them coming.’
‘But that is not all. They are looking for marks, from them sucking.’ She made a small gesture. ‘Under the clothes.’
‘What do you mean?’ I said, amazed. ‘Matthew is searching them?’
‘No, no,’ Bridget replied. ‘He has women in his pay, and Grace there to see all goes ahead smoothly.’ She dropped her voice further. ‘He knows how it could be disputed, were they to settle on a mole or a birthmark as proof of sin. In court, a woman might expose a wart or somesuch on her arm, and ask the jury if they had not a half-dozen themselves the same. So they are inspecting elsewhere. Where a woman may not expose, or scarce even speak of.’
I stared at her, disgusted. How could anyone let such a filthy proceeding go forward? How could it ever be made to stand in court? But I saw at once how it could be done, how my brother might make it stand: using delicate hints, using sad, reluctant shakings of the head.
Bridget put a hand on my arm. ‘I did not come here to frighten you, only to see you were well,’ she said. ‘And to give you this.’
My mind was still churning with the horrors I had just heard. I took the note, thinking it was from Bridget herself. ‘What is it?’
But she answered, ‘I don’t know.’
I tore it open. It was from my landlady in London, Ellen: she did not have my brother’s address but must have remembered Bridget’s old one from seeing Joseph’s post. The note was to say that Ellen hoped I was well settled in Manningtree, but also that her knees had been plaguing her so there was work now and a position in her household, if I wanted it. I read it aloud to Bridget, then looked up. She seemed relieved. But how could I risk a journey now, so near the sixth month? And then, when the child was born … My old landlady was kind, but even she would not want a servant with a baby on the breast.
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