by Syd Moore
Because that was what happened, said a voice inside my head. It was right. I knew it. That scene was the essence of the witch hunts – a hideous game that pitted the powerful against powerless. The motivation of the hunters was simply conquest.
And what of the pipe? Had he used it to suck their blood? Is that what that was all about? I could not bear to think about it. Especially as it had an uncanny resemblance to the thing that I had unearthed at St Boltoph’s in Colchester. The pipe that Felix had blown. ‘Qui est isti qui venit – Who is this who is coming?’
It was too much to take in.
And I was simply unable to process it. Even as I thought about that pipe, my brain’s survival techniques began to kick in and I found myself in a fog of confusion that began to obliterate parts of the memory. The more I tried to think about it, the less I was able to recall.
Perhaps it was shock. I don’t know. But whatever it was, it left me in a state.
After another thirty minutes or so I realised that I was so shaken and wired I would never go to sleep naturally. So I did something I had only done once since Mum died. I plucked a sleeping pill from my toiletries bag. Within twenty minutes I’d started to relax.
That night as I slept the experiences whirled, weaved and reconfigured my internal compass. Though I didn’t realise it then, by morning a new course had been mapped for my life.
Soon I would cast off.
Chapter Thirty-One
Mistley Churchyard, allegedly the site of Hopkins’ burial, was way out on the heath. Despite the hideous visions of last night, or maybe because of them, I was determined to check it out. Part of me was tremulous at what the visit might prompt. Yet a greater part didn’t care: I felt drenched with anger and motivated by a feeling that was close to revenge. Seriously, I honestly felt that if I came face to face with any of those vile creatures I encountered in the ‘room’ last night, I’d be ready to swing at them. The upside of experiencing those kind of emotions is that you’re flooded by a kind of ‘storm surge’ of electrifying vigour. Since I had opened my eyes in the morning, I had been besieged by this edgy vigour.
I had expected to see or hear from Rebecca in Manningtree, but never anticipated anything like the experience I had gone through last night. I knew that the pardon might help her poor lost soul but it was clear now that there was something even darker going on. Something else I had to do to help her move on. I wondered if my conversation with Amelia had perhaps prompted the vision. Whatever, I was resolved to follow up her leads and hunt down the Witchfinder, despite the years. There was a lot to do.
I had packed an old map, which indicated St Mary’s was halfway up the road. According to my sources, the portico, which dated back to the 1500s, was listed. There was a picture of it in the book Amelia lent me: a small tower with an arched door, surrounded by trees. However there was nothing about to indicate any building had existed here at all. And when I say nothing, I mean nothing. I wasn’t even sure if the church ground had been annexed to the house next door. A discoloration of grass, in fuzzy rectangular shapes, was the only indication that it had ever been used to accept human remains.
I got out of the car and hopped over the low perimeter wall.
‘Come on then,’ I whispered through the grass to the spirit of Matthew Hopkins. ‘I’m here. Do your best, you old bastard.’
Nothing stirred the air – no melancholy, malice nor any of the loose sense of tragedy one sometimes feels in graveyards. It was almost like the place had simply ceased to exist.
I got back into the car, unsure whether I was relieved or disappointed. I was becoming used to coasting a range of emotions on a day-to-day basis.
As I revved up the engine I realised that I was feeling completely neutral about this place. Whatever happened there, it had no connection to me.
If it had been Rebecca who had messaged me last week, and now I was pretty sure it had been, she’d been right about one thing: Hopkins wasn’t buried here.
On my way home I detoured past a bookshop and picked up a map of New England. There was something I wanted to do. As I drove back I kept thinking about what Amelia had said about the first witch trial over there.
When I got home I googled ‘Early Witch Trials in New England’.
The first case I came across was that of Margaret Jones, who Amelia had mentioned. A midwife accused of having a ‘malignant touch’, she was the first person executed for witchcraft in New England. On June 15th, 1648. That was interesting. What I read on the website next got me completely fired up. ‘The case against her was built on evidence collected using the methods of the English Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins.’
I sat up and swallowed. Then I read on. The Governor, John Winthrop, attested that an imp was seen to go up to her ‘in the clear light of day’.
Imps. Hopkins’ favourite pastime – imp watching.
Of course his book, The Discovery of Witches, had been published the year before. A copy could have found itself on board a ship bound for Massachusetts. But what if Amelia’s speculations were right? What if it wasn’t only his pamphlet that had gone abroad? What if he boarded a vessel bound for Massachusetts to start a new life?
I scrolled down and found an entry by the American historian Clarence F. Jewett who listed twelve women executed prior to Salem. Margaret Jones of Charlestown, Boston in 1648. Followed by Mary Johnson at Hartford, 1650, who had a child while she was in prison awaiting execution.
Mrs Henry Lake of Dorchester circa 1650 demonstrated two themes I’d seen a lot in the confessions of the witches on both sides of the Atlantic – guilt and grief. A mother of five, after her youngest baby died, Alice Lake attested that the little thing had come to her in spirit form. Realising that this could be seen as a familiar of the Devil she immediately confessed that she had had sex before marriage, became pregnant and had tried to abort the foetus. The visitations by the ghost baby, she believed, were a punishment for her own crime against God. Poor woman – the trauma of her sin endlessly tormented her. When she was hanged her husband fled, leaving their four remaining children virtual orphans.
In 1651 there were three more – Mrs Kendall, of Cambridge; Goodwife Bassett at Fairfield in Connecticut and Mary Parsons, of Springfield. Mary had been fine until two of her three children died, whereupon she accused another local woman of witchcraft. This was not upheld and Mary declared that she had used witchcraft and as a result her five-month-old baby had perished. In a peculiar turn of events she was acquitted of witchcraft but convicted of murdering her child. As with Alice Lake’s husband, Mr Hugh Parsons also buggered off to a nearby town where he remarried, leaving their only child to fend for himself.
Two years later, in Hartford again, Goodwife Knap was sent to the gallows. Three years later Ann Hibbins was hanged. Her husband had been one of the magistrates who sentenced Margaret Jones to swing. Hibbins, though, tried to sue some builders who had worked on her house, stating that they had overcharged her. She won but local people considered the lawsuit to be ‘abrasive’ and she was subjected to an ecclesiastic court. Refusing to apologise to the workers, she was excommunicated and cited as ‘usurping’ her husband’s authority. Women didn’t bite back then, and as soon as her husband died she was made an example of. Witchcraft proceedings commenced and she was hanged as a witch, as one contemporary stated, ‘only for having more wit than her neighbours’. That same year, Goodman Greensmith was hanged at Hartford for, amongst other trumped-up accusations, ‘not having the feare of God before thine eyes’.
Then finally, poor Ann Glover in 1688. And what a tragic tale that was. Born a Roman Catholic in Ireland, Cromwell’s forces sold her into slavery and sometime in the 1650s sent her to Barbados. There, her husband was killed for refusing to renounce Catholicism. Somehow by 1680 Glover – known as ‘Goody’ – and her daughter wound up in Boston, working as servants for John Goodwin. However, after her daughter had an argument with the Goodwin children, some of them fell ill. The doctor visited, pronounced it to be witchcraft
and, hey presto, Ann is up in court. The poor love couldn’t speak English, only Gaelic. When asked to recite the Lord’s Prayer to prove she is not a witch, Glover stumbles, unable as she is to speak the language. This is taken to be proof of her witch status so on November 16th of that year, Goody Glover is led out to the Boston gallows and hanged amid mocking shouts from the crowd.
I was pleased to see at the bottom of this account a little note detailing that in 1988 Boston City Council ruled that Goody’s conviction was not ‘just’ and proclaimed November 16th to be Goody Glover Day.
One woman, one day. At least Boston had the decency to do that. If they had a day a year for each witch hanged in Essex … At least Flick was on the case now.
But why hadn’t anyone tried it before? Perhaps because women never really thought it was their place to do so. Probably because, until recently, they didn’t have the means, influence, know-how or power to do so.
Witches were still seen as evil satanic things. I remembered how, a few years ago, Janet had attempted to hold a Halloween party for Lucy and Lettice and their friends. She’d not been able to secure a venue. None of the church halls would allow the booking, nor the local Conservative Club, nor their Constitutional Club. People still associated the witch with evil, malign spirits, wickedness and mischief. But we weren’t living in the seventeenth century any more and people really needed to wake up to just what happened back then.
The time was right.
I took out the map I had bought on the way home and spread it across my living room floor. With a red pen I began circling the places where the cases had broken out.
You could tell Essex people had migrated to New England by the names they gave the places they lived in, attempting to replicate a better life in the New World; Danbury, Chelmsford, Colchester, Billerica.
And there was Wenham. Hopkins’ birthplace. About five miles north of Salem. The same distance as Great Wenham was from Manningtree. The geographical similarity was spooky. Even the rivers that separated Great Wenham and Manningtree, and Wenham and Salem, would have been about the same width.
The hangings from 1647 to 1692, the year Salem erupted and the whole thing went nutsville, were dotted about the place.
But these were the tip of the iceberg, the end of the line – the executions. I started pulling in other accusations and trials.
There were a huge amount. And other executions too – I’d missed John and Joan Carrington, a husband and wife both executed for witchcraft.
I picked up a blue pen and started drawing small crosses where there had been accusations.
After two hours my back hurt and my neck had a serious crick in it. I sat on my haunches and viewed the map. I hadn’t finished marking them all down, yet I could see a pattern was emerging.
There were two outbreaks. One was more of a line situated in Connecticut, spreading down to New Haven. The crosses spread out to Fairfield in the west and then east as far as Old Lyme. The shape resembled an upside down ‘Y’. At its centre was a huge cluster. That town’s name was Hartford.
‘Hartford, Hartford,’ I repeated to myself. ‘That sounds familiar.’
I went back to my laptop and googled it. The witch craze in those parts lasted from 1647 to 1662. As far as I could make out they had at least eighteen accusations, in Hartford. And hangings too.
But there was something else about that name. I took my folder of research from my filing cabinet and flicked through it keeping my eyes peeled for the place name. Then I found it – when Stearne had been in Huntingdonshire he had pulled in the witches to be examined by magistrates in Hartford, UK.
Stearne had gone inland, while Hopkins had taken the coastal route.
I flicked over to the east coast. The first Hopkins-type witch hunt had occurred in Boston. Where the ships from England docked. There was a dense fan of blue crosses there.
Something dropped from the ceiling onto the map. I flinched, remembering the liquid that had landed on my face only two nights ago. But I had no need to be afraid, it was only another moth. It skittered across the paper lightly, settled for a moment on Boston, then spread its wings and took off to my left. I watched it zigzag through the air and land on the mirror. It turned itself around, launched into the air and landed on the map of the south-east that I had pinned on the chimneybreast.
Strange. That was just where the last one had gone. Was there something attracting it?
I was about to go to it and see if there was anything behind the map that might be luring the little critters, but I stopped. From my perspective on the floor I could see the pattern of crosses I’d mapped out weeks ago – all the known cases of Hopkins and Stearne spreading out in little arc shapes.
I looked back down at New England and began to smile. On my American map, dotted in red, was the same shape – a bloody horseshoe.
Bastard.
There was no way that Stearne accompanied Hopkins out there. He had died in 1671 and was buried in Lawshall near Bury St Edmunds.
But what if Hopkins had met someone on the journey over? Someone who shared his zeal.
I regarded the area around Boston. Could it possibly be the same MO?
I knew it was late but I needed to know now. Right now. And there was one person who might be able to tell me. I dialled his number.
‘Hi Joe.’ I registered the sound of music in the background. ‘What are you up to? You off duty?’
‘Sadie! I’ve been meaning to call but we’ve all been bombarded with overtime. Just finished up at the snooker hall.’
I bit my tongue and hedged my bets. ‘Listen – I’ve got something I need to bounce off you. Would you mind coming over?’
He broke off and shushed some unseen gathering. I could imagine him there, jovial, flapping down their attention but loving the interest it provoked. ‘Okay. You all right? Is it your computer?’
‘No, that’s all fine now. Touch wood. It’s more of a police thing.’
‘Sounds interesting.’
‘Do you want me to pick you up?’
‘No, it’s fine. I’ll hook a lift with Dave. He lives up your way. I’ll be over in about an hour.’
‘Great,’ I said. ‘Have you eaten?’
‘No actually, I haven’t.’
‘I’ll put some pasta on.’ It was the least I could do.
Before he got there I went and got the moth. It crawled into my hand without any coaxing. Its peppery wings were lighter than the last and reminded me of what I’d read on the totem website – something about the insect being a guide. It was certainly a clever little thing, nudging me towards a kind of enlightenment. I thanked him and took him outside onto the balcony. When I opened my hand it took off lopsidedly, flew down to the front garden then past the hedge and to the sea. As I followed its flight path my eyes clapped onto the sleek glossy form of a black car parked in the station’s layby. When I passed the window two minutes later it had gone. I didn’t think too much of it, focusing more on getting the place presentable for a guest, and whizzed around the house, removing dirty plates from the living room floor, vacuuming the carpet.
As I emptied a packet of tortellini into a saucepan, I wondered if Joe might construe this as a come-on: ‘Come over to my place. I want to show you my etchings.’ I hoped I hadn’t given that impression. Not that he wasn’t adorable in his own way. He was, and there was undeniably chemistry there, but I had things to do and was now compelled by an innate energy that had been amplified by the strangeness reaching for me. At that moment in time I could no more consider a romantic liaison with Joe than have downed tools and, literally, given up the ghost.
Not that those thoughts were clear, you understand. A whirling feverishness had taken possession of my mind, making it difficult for me to efficiently process everything that was going on. I was constantly reeling from my last experience whilst coming to terms with the one before. All I knew was that I was being led forwards by forces of which I was only half aware. After last night, the combination of
revelations had left me in no doubt that in some small way, perhaps because I was writing the book, I should avenge Rebecca West.
Joe had been drinking and obviously got the taste for it as he turned up with a very dimpled grin and a bottle of wine. I asked him if he wanted to eat straight away but he didn’t. Instead he poured two large glasses and took them into the living room beckoning me to follow with a flirtatious hand gesture. I smiled at it, and followed. At least half of me wanted to accept the invitation. As I watched his back disappear into the shadows of the hallway, I was visited with a vision of lying in bed, my head on his chest, free of care. Although incredibly seductive and attractive right now, I could see that it was a surrendering sort of thought and had to beat it away. It was almost like if I gave in to Joe, it might be so lovely that I feared I would lose my drive and ambition in him. I couldn’t do that now. Not yet. So I cautioned myself and tried to keep focused on the matter in hand.
After a couple of minutes of small talk we ended up sitting close together, cross-legged round the New England map.
‘So, what you after?’ He nudged me in the ribs, gave me a wink, grinned and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. ‘I hope it’s not sensitive, in which case no can do. We all had media training a few weeks ago. Now I’m the model of discretion.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I said and laughed at the way it came out. Despite his inebriation he was still really cute. ‘You won’t be compromised. This stuff’s four hundred years old.’
‘My God,’ he said in mock horror. ‘Nearly as old as you!’ Then he reached out and rubbed my shoulder.
I didn’t move away, just said, ‘Cheeky.’
His arm went slack and reached for his wine. ‘You always did worry about that far too much.’
I leant back on my knuckles. ‘What?’
He took a large sip. ‘The age difference. It’s only four years.’
I drank in his face, flushed and glowing, and nodded. Take away those dimples and we’d look roughly the same age. ‘Seemed a lot back then.’