by Syd Moore
‘Let’s have a look.’ This from Lesley. ‘Dragged me all this way, might as well sort it out.’ She plodded over to the chair next to me and heaved her large behind into it.
‘What were you doing?’ Her voice was gruff and fat.
I sniffed and sucked in her smell. She reeked of nights on the computer, microwave meals for one and two cats. ‘I was working on Word – ah – here it is.’ The document was there, cursor still flashing halfway down the third paragraph after the date 1589. ‘And I’d just been on Google to check that date. I minimised the window.’
Lesley grunted. ‘So you were online?’
I shook my head. ‘Not for long. We had a conversation for about two minutes.’
Joe sighed and looked at me. ‘I told you …’
‘I know,’ I said, justifying my folly. ‘I just wanted to see if I could draw out some details. And I did – he said he was fifteen.’
Joe nodded in a kind of ‘you silly sod’ manner and turned to the screen. His back was broader than I remembered. I wondered if it was still as lean.
‘But then you closed the dialogue box, right?’
‘Yep,’ I told them both. Lesley’s eyes reduced further into wriggly slits as she concentrated on the laptop. ‘But then it popped up again. That’s when I disabled the modem. Look.’ The internet icon indicated it was disconnected. ‘And still it came up.’
Lesley grunted. ‘I suspect it was more of a time delay on your part. Or a misremembering.’
That sounded like an accusation. ‘No, honestly. I distinctly remember it came up after I came off …’
‘What did they say?’ It was Joe now.
‘He said “I’m sorry” … He’s coming or I can feel him here. Something about smelling him. I asked “who?”’
Joe huffed out a sigh. ‘You replied to them? Sadie, I told you not to. You’re fuelling them. This is what people like that get off on.’
I was embarrassed now. He was right – it had been a foolish thing to do. But it was born out of concern. ‘I was worried about him. In case he was in danger.’
‘Don’t do it again.’ Lesley’s weary condescension was leaking into Joe’s voice. ‘So, who did they say was coming?’
‘The Devil,’ I said simply.
Joe and Lesley exchanged a glance.
Joe nodded. ‘And this is what scared you?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I know it sounds ridiculous now in the cold light of day, but last night, it really freaked me.’
Now it was Lesley who spoke, obviously wanting to wrap up her visit as quickly as possible and get on to a proper job. ‘Okay, so if you minimise those windows, we should be able to see the dialogue box. That may give us some information we can use, should you continue to be stalked.’
Stalked – now that was an unpleasant word. I hadn’t thought of myself as communicating with a stalker. It had connotations of hunting and predators that didn’t seem to characterise these episodes. But anyway, I did as Lesley instructed and closed all the windows to reveal the pale blue wallpaper of my start-up screen. There was no dialogue box. ‘That’s odd,’ I told them. ‘I definitely didn’t close it.’
Lesley shot Joe a sideways glance. ‘You must have.’
‘No I didn’t. I just closed the lid.’
‘Well, they don’t shut themselves down.’ She pulled the keyboard nearer. ‘I’ll bring up the history. Will probably be there.’ Her tongue stuck out as her chunky fingers stomped over the keys.
I looked at Joe and smiled weakly. He returned it with such strength that I was briefly bowled over. His eyes twinkled and he winked. For a second my bones seemed to dissolve. I blew out and dropped my head trying to concentrate on Lesley’s far less attractive behind.
‘Well?’ he asked her after a minute.
She brought her hands back onto her lap. ‘Nothing. Google, as you said. Nothing else. The other stuff is dated from two days ago.’
I turned the laptop towards me and stared at the column. ‘That can’t be true. It’s deleted itself. Is that possible?’
Lesley looked at her watch and levered herself onto her feet. She darted a nod at Joe. ‘I’ll wait in the car. Nice to meet you, Sadie,’ she said, though it was plain it wasn’t.
Straightening up I looked at Joe. He was still bent over the laptop, trying a couple of the keys, looking through the different menus. ‘There’s definitely nothing here,’ he said at last and righted himself.
‘I don’t know what’s happened.’ It was truly perplexing.
Joe cocked his head to one side and smiled. Oh no – here came that look again, of gut-churning sympathy. ‘It’s been a hard time for you lately.’ His eyes were going sort of dewy. ‘Could you have closed the dialogue box down without realising?’
‘What, and deleted that particular section of internet history too?’ The irritation in my voice was in response to the pity he was showing, not the concern, but it all got jumbled together and my words came out more sarcastic than intended.
Joe kept his head to the side. ‘Had you had a drink or three, Ms Asquith?’
‘No!’ It was a knee-jerk response that masked the truth. I corrected it. ‘Yes. But I wasn’t drunk, if that’s what you mean. I had my wits about me.’
He nodded. ‘Okay. Well, try and work offline …’
‘I was working offline,’ I cut in then shut up. It was pointless – he didn’t believe me.
His lips formed a line. ‘Right, well I can’t leave Lesley downstairs …’
I stood up, put my hands on hips, sighed then showed him to my door.
He turned around on the outside landing and said, ‘Call me if it happens again and you want to talk. Okay?’
I nodded. He took a step down the stairs and looked back. ‘In fact, call me if you want to talk at all – I have good shoulders that are pretty water-resistant, should you want to cry on them.’ He made it sound like a jaunty joke but I was out of kilter with his mood now. I made my eyes unnaturally wide so that they would hide the glare that was behind them. Joe didn’t deserve to be the butt of my anger.
‘In fact we could do it over dinner if you fancy? Next week?’ His voice was hopeful, on his face hung a tentative grin, his eyes flitting to and from my own weird wired look.
I forced out a grin of my own. ‘That’d be nice.’ The look he gave me was tinged with a blush.
‘Great,’ he said and vaulted down the stairs with the controlled grace of someone used to training their body. ‘I’ll be waiting.’
I closed the door with a silent ‘Oh well,’ and went into the living room. I would give Joe a call at some point but not imminently. I had a date with Felix on Monday and a stack of work to get through. It was important that I pleased my new editor, wasn’t it?
Chapter Eleven
Despite Lesley’s glum reassurance, I couldn’t bring myself to work at home that afternoon. Instead, I popped my computer into a bag and walked up the hill to Leigh Broadway. There was a nice café on Elm Road that did a great coffee and had Wi-Fi.
I ordered an Indonesian-Brazilian blend, positioned myself in the corner with my back to the counter and got stuck in to my piece on the Bennetts.
It had been a creepy experience and I have to say, I was glad to be writing it up somewhere comfy and cosy: the café had once been a vintage clothes shop and retained a pre-loved feel.
I blocked out the Dusty Springfield soundtrack and poor Beryl Bennett’s fit and concentrated on the fundraising, pulling out my notebook to check the odd fact here and there.
Once I’d polished it and mailed the piece off to the news editor, I trotted out some prose for Maggie, that filler Essex Girls article we’d talked about. I mentioned Mary Boleyn, Anne Knight, one of the first campaigners for women’s suffrage, Ruth Pitter, Kathy Kirby, the first female poet awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, Ruth Rendell. I stuck in a reference to Jilly Cooper (yes, she’s an Essex Girl), played around with the structure then posted it to the subeditor. Once I was sur
e it had gone I disconnected my modem and focused my mind on my book and that bad bastard, the Witchfinder General.
Over the course of his ultra-short career, which began in 1644 and ended with his death in 1647, Matthew Hopkins was responsible for the condemnations and executions of around 230 alleged witches. At least, those are the ones that left a paper trail. God knows how many more were done in by the angry mob. The notion of villagers with pitchforks and torches has become a parody of violent herd behaviour, but that’s what it was actually like back then. And these mobs, well, they kept no record of who they strung up. Others were dispensed with in local kangaroo-type courts that also left no evidence behind, whilst who knows how many more didn’t make it through the torture to those courts. A lot of the ‘witches’ were old and frail and when you’re past your prime, there is only so much stabbing and ‘testing’ your body can take.
Most experts reckon the total figure was probably fifty per cent more than the 230 recorded. But that’s a conservative estimate. And if you thought about the fact that it was all carried out over thirty-odd months – that’s a hell of a lot of people in a very short time.
According to a pamphlet written by the Witchfinder, in which he referred to himself in the third person (obviously more than slightly deranged), it all started because ‘there was a horrible sect of Witches living in the Towne where he lived, a towne in Essex called Manningtree, with diverse other adjacent Witches of other towns, who every six weeks in the night (being always on the Friday night) had their meeting close to his house, and had their solemn sacrifices there offered to the Devil.’
‘So let’s get this right,’ I wrote, continuing my chapter. ‘You’ve got a bunch of boisterous women, meeting up on a Friday night, making lots of noise and swearing a bit. Surely that’s a seventeenth-century girls’ night out? Or in. Depending on which way you look at it. And of course they were talking about sacrifices. What woman doesn’t?’
The problem for those particular Essex Girls was that Puritan-mania had taken over England. It was a bit like Beatlemania, with all the hysteria and none of the fun. Puritans viewed revelry as so sinful that in 1644 the government enforced a ban on celebrating Christmas and made it a compulsory day of fasting.
‘Party on Puritan dudes,’ I wrote, then deleted it. That was too colloquial. My sarcasm was genuine though. I mean, really, what a time to live? Poor sods. Even having a few drinks could get you into trouble. Though most people overlooked it.
Not Hopkins though. He went on to add that these women, this coven, sent a bear to kill him.
‘Mmm,’ I thought and regarded the screen. I should stick that part of his account in the book. It certainly illustrated his capacity to stretch the truth. Or indicated Hopkins was taking a trip to Nutsville.
I wriggled my shoulders and sat back from the table, then I flicked through his book to the bit that I should transcribe.
‘They ’peached one another thereabouts that joined together in the like damnable practice, that in our Hundred in Essex, 29 were condemned at once 4 brought 25 miles to be hanged, where the Discoverer lives.’ I could see him in my mind, clad in the big boots he was depicted wearing in contemporary engravings; the hat incongruously like a witch’s hat; the puny build; the sweaty white skin. I typed on, repulsion rising. ‘For sending the Devill like a Beare to kill him.’
I stared at the lower blank half of the Word document, and my eyes lost focus for a second and seemed to fill up with whiteness. The solidity of the screen was dissolving into a cloud-like substance.
It was bizarre but just when I was about to look away and blink, I seemed to see shapes in the mist – a flat stretch of earth; Essex sky everywhere. No trees, just stubby brown grass below. In the whiteout above – a dark dot. Tiny, like a winged insect or a black moth. Getting bigger.
The vista opened itself up, drawing me in. Although I could see it, I was not ‘in’ it. It was an odd sensation – like I was eavesdropping on someone else’s daydream. But I went with it, tapping the keys of my laptop with haste, trying to capture what was unfolding in my head. This could be good.
‘He stood up looking into the clouds, watching it coming down. Whatever it was,’ I wrote. ‘It was large now, more than nine feet high. Then, a few feet away, just as its claws touched the tops of the grass shoots, it metamorphosed before my eyes into a giant bear rising up on his two hind legs. Its eyes glowed red and it screamed, high and shrill, like a pig having its throat cut.’
Euch. Where had that come from? I had never witnessed an animal’s slaughter. Well, the simile was certainly evocative.
I stopped typing and read back.
‘“Before my eyes”?’ I murmured to myself and changed ‘my’ to ‘his’.
I’d almost entirely filled up that page. It was good, strong. But there was no place for it in my chapter. It was the stories of the witches I wanted to bring out. The real tragedy and horror of that time. Not this; this was fiction. His fiction. I cut and pasted it onto a document entitled ‘Weird Bits’.
Then I moved on to the witches. Poor, unfortunate women living on the outskirts of society. They were epitomised by Hopkins’ first victim, Elizabeth Clarke. She was a one-legged octogenarian, and when arrested the old dear was strip-searched by the witch hunters looking for the Devil’s Mark. This was a place on the body where the witch’s ‘imps’ (familiars and demon spirits given to her by Satan) came and sucked. Sometimes the mark was a deformity. Mostly it was as commonplace as a birthmark, a scar, flea-bite, spot or blemish. When it had been located, Hopkins and his Witchfinders would then ‘test’ the spot, the theory being that as this ‘teat’ nourished non-human imps, it was also inhuman and would not bleed.
The witch would be pricked all over with a ‘witchpricker’ – a knife with a retractable blade that discreetly went back into the handle when required. Witnesses would then watch with horror as the witch screamed and bled from her wounds yet did not react when her ‘Devil’s Mark’ was pierced (and these monsters, Hopkins and his sidekick John Stearne, usually found these marks in the ‘privvy parts’). The absence of pain would confirm the witch’s guilt. If she continued to protest her innocence she would be ‘swum’. Right thumb tied to left toe, she would be hurled into a body of water. If she floated, she would be declared a witch. If she drowned her name would be cleared.
I think they call that Sod’s Law.
Seventeenth-century law, doing its best to seem ‘fair’, insisted that for a conviction the witch should also volunteer a confession.
I’m not sure any of Hopkins’ victims volunteered their confessions freely. To ensure that they did ‘fess up’ to something, anything, the Witchfinder deprived them of food, water, sleep and ‘walked’ the accused up and down rooms for days on end. This had most inventing fantastical stories just to bring a halt to their torment. At other times the ‘witch’ was tied cross-legged to a stool for twenty-four hours, denied food, water or access to the toilet. During this time they were constantly watched, and if any insect or animal of any kind entered the room these were deemed to be the witch’s familiars or imps and her guilt was proven. Like the ‘walking’ exercise he employed, the cramping, degradation, humiliation and pain that this inflicted on (mostly) old women had them confessing to all sorts, just to be untied. Though of course there were some who came up with the goods pretty quickly. I looked at a few of those confessions and thought almost straight away – dementia. But Hopkins would still ‘prick’ them.
Utter bastard.
On March the 4th, 1645, after applying these methods to the women accused, Hopkins sent Elizabeth Clarke, Anne Leech, Helen Clarke, Anne West and her daughter Rebecca to a preliminary court charged with witchcraft. They were found guilty and thrown into gaol at Colchester Castle.
Delighted by this success, Hopkins and Stearne then set off to roam neighbouring villages, searching for more witches. They pulled in a huge haul; Margaret Moone got done in for spoiling someone’s beer and Elizabeth Gooding for being refus
ed a piece of cheese (talk about transference of guilt). One woman was accused because Hopkins saw two rats go into her home. These, he insisted were familiars. Another poor old dear was condemned when a watcher saw a ‘fly’ come into the room, damning evidence of her communication with demonic imps.
In each case Matthew Hopkins was the chief witness. Everyone believed what he had to say, what with him being a gentleman and rather well to do. So his testimony led to huge numbers of women being sent to the gallows.
He worked his way round Essex, fanning out in a kind of horseshoe shape from his headquarters at the Thorn Inn in Mistley. I’d mapped his ‘hits’ myself in red dots on a map that hung on the living room wall next to my rococo mirror.
Once he’d ‘sorted out’ Essex he crossed the northern border into Suffolk; the same horseshoe pattern characterising his movements. He was clearly developing what the police called a ‘modus operandi’; first he would establish himself in a town, making the local inn his headquarters. From there he would gather intelligence about witchcraft in the area. Always, he would avoid larger towns. For it was there that more cultivated folk lived, and they were likely to have objected to, or at least been sceptical of, his methods.
In Suffolk the confessions started to allude to sex. Priscilla Collit, kept for three days and nights and only allowed an hour’s sleep, confessed that she had carnal copulation with the Devil, borne him two children and sunk a couple of ships into the bargain. Others, old and unstable such as Anne Cricke, admitted that the Devil had use of her body, though admitted she was not sure if they had copulated. She had no idea what ‘copulation’ meant.
In Ipswich he managed to burn someone: Old Mother Lakeland was alleged to have killed her husband by poisoning. Though witchcraft was mixed up in the accusation, the murder of a male spouse was considered to be Petty Treason, which was punishable by burning at the stake. It is said Hopkins watched in the square that day as the flames licked round her and she was burned alive.