Witch Hunt

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 sure 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 refused 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.

When he entered Huntingdon he came across a man who was not convinced of his methods. This was the Reverend John Gaule who had uncovered some terrible occurrences; such as one accused ‘witch’ who, having been searched and no marks on her found, was swum. When examined again afterwards the woman was found to have been bitten on the neck and all over her lower body. The sign of a predatory sadist.

Then there was the case of old Elizabeth Chandler. This one really upset me. The poor old love was so reviled and forlorn, she had no company at all, and to help her get through the misery of her existence she gave names to two sticks that she used – one, which she used to walk, the other, which she used to stir bowls of frumenty. I could almost picture her there, sitting with her stick between her skirts. But Hopkins insisted that these inanimate lumps of wood were imps and, as his word was the law, the lonely old woman was convicted and swung.

Thank God at that point the tide started to turn. News of some of the dodgier witch hunting methods was spreading into London and worrying some of the educated sections of society. Feeling increasingly insecure, Hopkins raced back home to Manningtree.

The fate of the Witchfinder was up for discussion. Some said that he was accused of being a witch himself and swum but drowned. Others say that he floated and so was duly executed by the mob. Good. I hope he was. Probably wasn’t though. Most felt that he probably died of bog standard tuberculosis.

Such a short life, but so much damage.

And how typical of someone like that to die in the comfort of his own home. He should have been held to account for his crimes. There was no justice, I thought as I typed, ‘Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General, was buried in Mistley churchyard in August 1647.’

I sat back and drained the last of my coffee. It had started to rain. Everybody outside was covered up in hats and umbrellas. I cursed the fact that I had neither.

As my eyes returned to the laptop a charge of adrenalin ripped through my stomach. For there it was, back on the screen – the message box, the words flashing: ‘He wasn’t …’

I pushed back from the table, frozen into the pose of an alarmed cat – stiffened shoulders, taut limbs, staring hypnotised at the message.

The young woman sitting at the table in front turned round and asked if I was okay.

‘Yes, thank you,’ I rasped and she returned to her

drink.

But I wasn’t.

Inside, my head was thawing out of its sudden panicked freeze. How could the sender know what I’d been writing? Was someone watching me?

I looked around the coffee shop. There were only five tables. A couple in their sixties sat beside me reading the newspapers. The guy behind the counter was serving a customer with takeaway coffees.

I got up and went to the window. The rain had turned heavy and forced most people inside. There was a young guy smoking in the doorway of the deli opposite. I watched as he was joined by a woman. They walked off arm in arm towards the church.

I bit my lip and made towards to my table but one glance at the screen stopped me dead in my tracks.

The message box was full of script. I crept closer to read it:

‘He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t’

What the hell … ?

I moved my cursor to the top of the Word document and saved what I’d written. Then, I slammed the lid shut and slumped into the chair.

What was this? What was going on? No one could see what I was doing, let alone read what I had written.

I swallowed down my trepidation and opened the lid again. My Word document was still there. I minimised the screen.

There were no messages.

Whoever was doing this had enough nous to make sure they were covering their tracks. But for what reason? To scare me? Or to make me look nuts and paranoid.

Nuts and paranoid. Now, there was a thing. It was a phrase I’d used before. To describe my mum. She’d had an episode about ten years ago when she was sure she was being followed, and contacted by ‘beings’. In one of our long, hand-wringing sessions before she got sectioned, I’d lost patience with trying to follow her convoluted forays into reasoning and had told her to ‘pack it in’, that she was being ‘nuts and paranoid’.

She was all right again in a month or so, but it took a while for us to rebuild our relationship. And after that I always sensed that she was holding stuff back from me, unwilling to fall into the trap that had got her banged up in the clinic.

And now, here I was, aping her behaviour.

But I wasn’t mad. I wasn’t making it up. I had seen it with my own eyes. That was no hallucination.

And I wasn’t being paranoid. Someone was out there contacting me. Or frightening me. Both actually.

Rationally it had to be some remote hacker who had got into my computer system and planted some ghost in the machine that was able to monitor my computer.

The main thing to do was not to play into their hands again. To stay level-headed. What was it they said in the war? Keep Calm and Carry On.

I shut my laptop down properly and made a point of adding some hardcore debugging software to my shopping list.

I would sort this out, but for now, I was done in. I decided to call it a day and paid for my coffee.

Though for the first time, behind my forced rationale,

a tiny but very real seed of fear had been planted in my hitherto cogent mind.