Hiding From the Light

by Barbara Erskine

  The door opened wider and she saw a muffled figure behind it. The woman was carrying an untrimmed candle which flared smokily, showing a pockmarked face and blackened teeth. ‘Did he say you could come in?’

  ‘Of course he did,’ Sarah snapped. She pushed the door back with the flat of her hand and stepped inside. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Upstairs.’ The woman gestured towards the corner with a nod of the head.

  The staircase was in darkness but she could see as she looked up, her hand on the newel post at the bottom, a faint shadowy light above her where it turned the corner into the upper room. She could hear voices. Two men talking softly. Then a woman. Not Liza. Gathering her skirts in one hand, she set off determinedly up the stairs.

  The room was low-ceilinged, the window shuttered, the only pieces of furniture a table and three chairs. Matthew Hopkins and his assistant John Stearne were seated at the table. On the third chair the old lady was sitting, her arms bound behind her to the chair back, a filthy drool-soaked rag stuffed in her mouth. Her legs were spread-eagled, her skirts pushed up onto her thighs.

  ‘Very well, Mary. I think we know where you will find the Devil’s tits.’ Hopkins did not look up from the notebook in which he was writing. The old woman moaned with terror.

  ‘Stop!’ Sarah threw herself into the room. ‘What are you doing?’ Her voice trailed away as she saw the vicious spike in Mary Phillips’s hand. ‘Sweet Jesus, no!’

  Mary straightened. ‘You have no business here, Sarah Paxman. Leave now!’

  ‘I will not leave. How dare you? How can you behave so cruelly?’

  Sarah ran towards Liza and gently pulled down her skirts. Then she reached to pull the gag from the old lady’s mouth. ‘You have no right.’ She spun round to face Hopkins as Liza’s dry choking sobs grew louder. ‘No right at all.’

  ‘I have every right, mistress.’ He narrowed his eyes as the candle flames smoked. ‘I have Parliament’s commission as their Witch-finder General. Interfering with my business is a crime against the Parliament of this country.’ He leaned forward, his small dark eyes suddenly focused on her, seeming to see right through her. Perhaps he was remembering his dream. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve. ‘Punishable by death.’

  She stepped back, shocked. ‘I don’t believe you!’

  ‘You would ask to see my commission? You wish to test my resolve to do the job which God has given me? Mary, continue. I need to know the site of the Devil’s marks and I need to write down this woman’s confession.’ He turned back to Sarah. ‘Leave now, mistress, or I shall call the guard and have you committed to gaol.’

  ‘You can’t.’

  ‘I can.’ He stood up at last, and lifting the candlestick nearest him he stepped out from behind the table. ‘Guards!’ His voice was raw and harsh. Stearne had neither spoken nor moved beyond leaning back, arms folded, squinting up to watch his colleague’s face.

  ‘Liza?’ Sarah turned towards the old woman in despair. ‘What can I do?’

  But Mary Phillips had closed in on Liza once more, the pricker in her hand. Dragging back the ragged skirts and forcing the old lady’s legs apart, she aimed upwards with vicious force. The first scream tore into the dark silence of the building as a door in the wall behind Hopkins flew open and two men came in.

  ‘The Devil will take you, Matthew Hopkins!’ Liza’s words were wrenched from the depth of her being. ‘He will take you to hell with all your foul conspirators!’ She broke into hoarse sobs. ‘Tell Satan what goes on here, Sarah! Tell him and call on him for revenge –’ Her words ended in another scream as Mary Phillips thrust her pricker once more into the old woman’s soft flesh.

  Sarah stopped in the doorway and looked back through her tears. Against the lurid light of the candles she saw Mary thrust again. This time there was no scream.

  ‘See, Master Hopkins. We have found a spot where she feels no pain.’ A throaty laugh. ‘But she is already condemned from her own mouth. Shall we walk her tonight so that we can get a fuller confession? That would be best, I think.’ She stood up, flushed with triumph, and threw the long needle set in its wooden handle down on the table in front of him. A smear of blood dripped onto the table top. ‘And perhaps then we should swim her, just to be sure.’ She paused. ‘Shall we test Mistress Sarah here while we have her? It sounds to me as though she is one of them.’

  ‘No.’ Sarah stared wildly round the room, from the triumphant stout figure of Mary Phillips with her sweating red face and stained bodice, to Hopkins and Stearne in their neat black suits with white collar and cuffs, and back to the old woman lying trussed in the chair, sobbing as the blood ran down the inside of her thighs. ‘No! It’s nothing to do with me! I am not one of them. I’m not!’

  As she fled down the stairs into the blackness she heard Mary Phillips’s words flung after her into the dark of the stairwell. ‘No need to run, my dear. I know where to find you! And I know more about your privy parts than most, if you remember, trying to find out why God did not see fit to send you and your man a child. Easy to see why, now. God did not think you a fit and Godly mother!’

  Sobbing, Sarah flung herself towards the door, dragged it open and stumbled out into the street.

  The wind had died, leaving its scent of mud and salt in the thick mist which had drifted up from the river into the town, swirling round the lanterns hanging outside the inn, its sharp cold dampness mingling on her cheeks with her tears as she turned and ran away down the High Street.

  48

  Monday, late afternoon

  With an exhausted sigh, Paula sat back in her chair and glanced at her watch. Damn! She had missed her usual train. She might as well wait twenty minutes now, before she left the office. Thoughtfully she stared at the screen in front of her. It was displaying the latest figures on the Dow Jones – down six – she squinted at it for a moment without really seeing it, then she reached for the phone. It was thirty seconds before Piers answered. ‘Paula? How nice to hear from you. I was going to drop you a line to say thank you for the other night.’

  ‘Piers, are you going to be able to persuade Emma to come back to London?’ She had been worrying all day; so much so that she did not realise how abrupt her question might sound.

  ‘I doubt it,’ he replied after a second’s double-take. His voice had become very dry on the other end of the line. ‘We didn’t part on very good terms. In fact,’ she heard a deep sigh, ‘to be honest, I think that was it. Curtains.’

  ‘But she still loves you!’ Paula broke off, realising only after she had said it that in fact she knew nothing of the kind. ‘At least that is how it seemed to Alex and me. We both felt it was somehow our fault that, well, that you and she were not very happy together on Saturday.’ She was chewing the cap of her Swan pen.

  Piers gave a polite, humourless laugh. ‘Please, don’t blame yourselves. Really, don’t. It was nothing to do with you. Maybe you polarised us a bit, but that’s all. It’s that damn house that’s to blame. She’s obsessed with it.’ He remembered his social graces suddenly. ‘Oh Lord, I’m sorry. I hope you haven’t been worrying about us. That’s the last thing either of us would want. I think Em and I have just reached a natural full stop in our relationship. Maybe it just took Liza’s to find the weak points and lever us apart. Better now than further down the line.’

  ‘Piers, you mustn’t give up on her. You really mustn’t.’ The cap of Paula’s pen rolled off her desk and onto the floor. ‘She’s going to need you.’

  There was a moment’s silence. ‘That sounds a bit portentous.’

  ‘I know. I don’t know why I’m saying it, really.’

  Because my husband fancies the socks off her, that’s why. And they are alone down there, miles away and you and I are up here in London and can do nothing about it. But it was more than that. Far more. She frowned. Whatever it was – a foreboding, the smallest whisper of a premonition that she was going to lose Alex – had gone. She gave a small, forced laugh. ‘Oh well, I tried. Look
, Piers, do keep in touch. Perhaps we can catch lunch or something one day?’

  As she hung up she glanced at her watch again. Now she would have to run to reach Liverpool Street in time for the next train home.

  49

  Mark pushed back the pile of books with a sigh. He was exhausted and his head was splitting, but the script was coming on well. The more he read about Hopkins, the more fascinating the man became, if only because nobody seemed entirely sure who he was. The sources were full of ‘maybes’ and ‘probables’, ‘it seems likely that’ and ‘almost certainly’. Still, he thought, he had enough for his purposes.

  The man was a local, born ‘probably’ in Great Wenham, which was, as far as Mark could see from the map, about eight kilometres as the crow flies from Manningtree. A lot further by road, of course. His father, or at least a James Hopkins, had been the parson there, from – Mark turned to his own scribbled-in notebook – 1612 until ‘probably’ 1634.

  Mark had called in at Great Wenham on his way back from Ipswich. It was just off the A12. There wasn’t much there but for the lovely old church set in a wooded valley, peaceful, disturbed only by the sound of birds and the ticking of the clock in the tower. As he walked round it, he found it hard to imagine it as the birthplace of a man who had such demons in his soul. But then again he was reminded of the Brontë household at Haworth. Perhaps the vicarage here too had been crowded, damp, unhealthy. Perhaps the children – Matthew was one of at least four children, ‘probably’ six – had been given milk from a local farm which had been infected with bovine TB. Perhaps the children were intelligent, creative, repressed, turning in on themselves and developing intense imaginations just as the Brontës had done. But that was where the likeness ended.

  Where had Matthew’s deeply disturbed personality come from? Somewhere he had found the rather dubious claim that Matthew was ‘probably’ no more than four foot eleven in height, so perhaps he had suffered from rickets as a child, in common with many people of the period, and perhaps that lack of stature had given him an inferiority complex which contributed to it. His mother, Marie, had been a Huguenot, so almost certainly there was a strict Puritan influence in the family, coming out in one son who became a Presbyterian minister and another, Thomas, who went to live in New England. Was there something else there, in the background? A hatred of women stemming from a difficult relationship with his mother perhaps, or an older woman, a grandmother, even? Mark sighed. Such an idea was intriguing but it could never be proved.

  Matthew Hopkins was obviously intelligent and well educated. He himself claimed to have studied in Amsterdam at some point and seemed to have trained in maritime law, maybe in Ipswich, but probably not at university, at least not in England as there seemed to be no record of him having been at Oxford or Cambridge. He certainly seemed to have started his career in maritime insurance, at least until his later more lucrative trade occurred to him, and it was probably the maritime side of his activities which brought him initially to Mistley where there was a flourishing port. While there he had at some point been owner or part-owner of the Thorn Inn – a strange side-line, one would think, for a man who seemed to embrace so whole-heartedly the strict Puritan ethic of his time.

  Mark stood up and stretched, wandering over to stand in front of the window. Outside it was dark. His flat looked out over the Regent’s Canal and he could see lights reflecting in the water beneath his window. What had possessed the young man to change from insurance to witch hunting at the age of twenty-four? What had turned him to a career which would make his name a byword for cruelty and evil that would echo into the twenty-first century? He shook his head. How had Matthew got them all to go along with him? How had he got himself the authority to do what he did? Mark glanced down at his books. A lot of it apparently was opportunity. England was a torn and bleeding country. By the time of the first trial of witches apprehended by Hopkins in July 1645, the Long Parliament was in its last stages. King Charles the First had been defeated by Cromwell’s armies and within four years would be dead. Local law and government was in complete disarray. Add to this the intense religious tension in the air – Catholic versus Anglican, Anglican versus Puritan – and add in on top of that ordinary human nature with a string of failings, superstitions, weaknesses, fears, jealousies, whatever one chose to call them, and they combined into a lethal cocktail. Together with the fact that Essex seemed to have more witches than anywhere else. It would be interesting to fill in some hints as to why. That intense religious conflict; the tradition of magic; the history of the fiercely independent people who lived there, but there would be very little time for philosophical speculation in the film. Just leave it as read that there were more witches in that part of the world, always had been and always would. He chuckled to himself.

  Against that background one man, Hopkins, saw his opportunity. Mark sat down and shuffled his notes once more. The general view seemed to be that neither Cromwell nor Parliament had given Matthew Hopkins the position of Witchfinder General. He had no official status at all. He awarded it to himself, and confirmed it himself when he wrote his book Discoverie of Witches. He did have powerful friends, though. Sir Harbottle Grimstone, the local Justice, for one. Mark smiled gleefully. What a wonderful name! And once Matthew started styling himself with his new and important title nobody seemed to have contradicted him. His sense of importance and authority fed on themselves. And so the horrors continued.

  One thing surprised Mark, though. Matthew had not killed as many witches as Mark had expected. He had thought it was hundreds. He flipped through his books. He would have to get this bit right because what he had found out was going to sound like sacrilege to a great many people. In fact thirty-six women were tried for witchcraft at the Essex Assizes of 1645. Nineteen were executed. Nine died in prison and the rest were still in prison three years later. Only one was acquitted. Thirty-five out of the thirty-six came from within fifteen miles of Manningtree. The thirty-sixth was the one who was acquitted. Mark made some more notes. That came from Macfarlane, who believed that Hopkins probably sincerely felt that his services were needed and that he had found a genuine conspiracy of witches in the area. Including all the rest of the Eastern counties, the total of victims was, according to Hopkins’s colleague John Stearne, about two hundred souls – men, women and children.

  The other book he was using for his facts was by Ronald Hutton; his history of witchcraft. Now that was interesting. Mark frowned. He would like to make some comments about the feminist take on witchcraft in the programme. After all, you couldn’t talk about witches without women claiming that they had been persecuted merely for being women. He hadn’t realised how much feminist historians had exaggerated the numbers of witches executed across Europe, giving the century of witch mania the evocative title of the ‘burning times’ and claiming it as a male conspiracy against women, when in fact many men had died too. He gave a rueful grin. If he mentioned that, the programme would be slated by female reviewers. But then any reviewers would be better than none. Too many, he feared, would dismiss it as a piece of nonsense. The mention of ghosts always did that. If he wasn’t careful they would bring out one of the professional rubbishers of the supernatural to certify him bonkers!

  There was another bit he wanted to bring in. The horror. Whether the witches were guilty as charged or not, the methods used to interrogate them were barbaric. Keith Thomas’s book Religion and the Decline of Magic had bags of good material. He mentioned that Hopkins was very keen on accusations of carnal union with the Devil. That should go in. As should the fact that Hopkins had claimed at the beginning of his campaign that a coven of local witches had conjured up a bear and sent it to kill him.

  It was all fascinating. Whatever Matthew Hopkins had or had not done, he had clearly done enough to be remembered and feared to this day in the area which was the centre of operations. The bogeyman of Manningtree.

  He sat back in his chair and stretching out his arms, linked them behind his head. Could tha
t be a title for the programme?

  Hopkins had moved into Manningtree – there was never a mention of wife or kids, notice – and had lived at some time in South Street and, maybe, at the Thorn Inn. From there he had begun the reign of terror which had made him a very rich man, for he charged a fee, per head, for his witch hunting services.

  So what had put a stop to it all? Rationality had kicked in for a start. The good burgesses of nearby Colchester had begun it, as far as Mark could see. Hopkins’s career had lasted only two years, then abruptly ended in August 1647 when he disappeared from history. There seemed to be four theories as to what had happened to him. The most mundane and, Mark sighed, tapping his pencil on the keyboard in front of him, sadly the most likely, was that he had died of tuberculosis. That was what his colleague and partner John Stearne had claimed. Then there seemed to be a theory that as the demand for his services dropped off and questions began to be asked about his methods, he might have fled to the American colonies to join his brother in New England, and who knows, restart his witch hunting career over there. There were two rather more intriguing ideas. One, that his neighbours in Mistley and Manningtree, sickened by his activities and suspicious as to how he knew so much about local witchcraft and how he came by his famous Devil’s List, swam him as a witch himself and murdered him, or, Mark shook his head thoughtfully, that the Devil claimed him and took him to hell!

  An interesting bunch of theories. He spread out four printed sheets of paper and stared at each in turn. Of course if the man had gone to America he would presumably have died there and his ghost would be found flitting round the streets of somewhere like Salem. He had read somewhere that ghosts couldn’t cross water – did that include the Atlantic Ocean? Probably!

  All the other three theories however were OK as far as the programme was concerned. None of them sounded pleasant. None would have left him lying easy in his grave. Wherever that was.