The Manningtree Witches by A. K. Blakemore

Author:A. K. Blakemore
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781646220656
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2021-05-19T00:00:00+00:00

The men who did not join the Witchfinder’s grim processional up the Lawford hill have gone out drinking in town to discuss it, instead. They crowd into the market ordinary, with its floor of trampled dirt and hay. They press three-deep along the narrow stretch of paving by the White Hart, where the sign swinging above their heads bears the image of a deer beguiled all about with gold chains. They wonder which of us can fly. They wonder which of us is Sathan’s favourite fuck. A good night for a barnyard cockfight—a better one for Manningtree’s two whores.

The Red Lion, crouched low at the corner of the village green, is packed to the smoky rafters. A little man in a grey biggin cap moves from table to table plying a solid trade in palm-sized fragments of painted glass in emerald and scarlet—painted glass he claims that Parliament’s men knocked from the windows of the grand cathedral down at Winchester, though he cannot explain how he came by it after. The men of Manningtree divide themselves to social degree by drinking hole as reliably as they do by church pew, and the Red Lion is home to the worst sort: a squalid, very illiterate mass with fewer teeth than fingers, for the most part. And so when a boy comes in to tell them the Witchfinder and his Godly men have taken me—“the West girl”—away, this news is welcomed with no great show of righteous triumph, but with a murmur of general bemusement. The sailors, smugglers, sowgelders, pedlars and ploughmen crowded at the bar have no special stake in this intrigue, but observe it with a mild, lateral interest, like Mennonites caught in a fist fight. Misfortune and suffering are, to them, too commonplace to warrant attribution either to a higher power or to an infernal one, the hunting of witches, like the hunting of anything else, a gentry diversion. “Come again when the girl’s hanging,” calls some cut-up from a corner stall, “that’ll be something we can all enjoy.”

I like to think that perhaps my mother’s blood, in that moment, thickened. She knew it was coming, doubtless—but perhaps she did not know how fast. There she stands, alone by the door to the wagon yard with a half-empty beer mug and her only child in the hands of the law, her resources suddenly reduced to whatever she thought to carry on her person when she bid me farewell and left the house earlier that evening, in the happy expectation of a few languid hours spent drinking. An Egyptian day. She finds, perhaps, having taken a fumbling inventory of her apron pockets, that these resources consist of no more than thimble, needle, cracked clay pipe and a few pennies. Doubtless, she wonders why I did not run. Likely she contemplates, for a moment, doing so herself. But she does not. Instead, she calls out, “Where did they take her, boy?”, and pushes her way to the front of the inn,

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