Witch Hunt

Chapter Forty




I was staring at the wall. My face was wet. A pounding melancholy had me in its grip. The words of The Weeping Willow echoed round my head: pale and wild, pale and wild. It was about her – I saw that now. Rebecca’s story was so very moving: she was a victim time and time again, utterly without power, abused and betrayed by those around her, reviled as deviant. Even after she and her mother had long passed away, her reputation remained tarnished – the witch, the child-killer. So wrong on both counts. But none denied it. The Essex folk who survived the Civil War and the witch hunts merely turned their faces away from the episode. What was the point of crying over spilt milk? Best to let sleeping dogs lie, I could almost hear them say. The clichés that allowed everyone to forget what had happened and turn it into a myth, a simple story about good and bad.

Perhaps the reason why Essex hadn’t yet managed to confess its guilt, when other places had owned up to theirs, was simply because it was just too great. All those women. All that death. Too much. Too awful to conceive that they were innocent after all. The victims of bullying.

And so the unfair lives, endured by those they had shunned, their consequently terrible deaths, were put aside and excluded from living memory. Not mentioned. Hushed into nothingness by the Essex folk’s willing collusion. If you maintained the witches’ guilt then you could justify the suffering imposed on them: the weak, the old and the poor, the disabled.

That was what Essex had inherited. Complicity.

The notion physically repulsed me.

The whole thing did. And for a good long minute, after I had finished reading, I sat at the desk, covering my mouth as I dry retched. The salty trickles of sweat that crawled down my face could have easily been tears of shame.

Poor, poor Rebecca. To lose not only her mother by her own hand, but her daughter too. No wonder she was trapped in some dark place, seeking forgiveness that no one could give.

Though now I knew what she needed, perhaps I could supply it. Perhaps, and this was a long shot, something had created a short-cut across time, that let her hear my voice, as I heard hers. I could assume her daughter’s place and give her the clemency she so desired.

And could I clear her name too? And nail that bastard Hopkins? My spirit girl was right all along – he wasn’t buried in Mistley. The only problem was, I cursed as I mopped up my face, these were only transcripts. If the originals had gone up in smoke then there was no real proof at all. It was gutting. I guessed at least it pointed to him arriving in New England; I could start searching for evidence of Hopkins on the other side of the globe. But it would be just as hit and miss. And if he had changed his name, as the clerk stated, could I ever work out who he was?

I sighed. I’d be stabbing in the dark.

As I left the seventeenth century and allowed the twenty-first to reassert itself over my senses, I realised I had been staring at one of the pictures set on the wall, a small one positioned just above the desk.

There it is. A voice spoke inside my head. Take it.

This time I didn’t deny the fragile voice. Be strong, I thought, for her.

‘Where?’ I said aloud.

There, beneath your gaze.

There.

She was more commanding now.

I craned forwards to take a better look at the picture. It was a yellowing parchment, edged in dark green velour. Spidery writing skittered across three columns. At the top I saw a date ‘1647’.

No. It couldn’t be. There. It came again.

I wasn’t frightened. I reached out and took it off the wall. Sandwiched between a piece of wooden board and a clip frame was the page of a passenger list, the like of which I had seen at the Archives.

My eyes raced over the names and occupations.

For a moment the world stopped as the letters formed themselves into words and then kicked my senses about: ‘Preacher, 27 years’. Heart rate increasing, I sucked in the air and drew my finger across the line. And there I saw it – in the margin, in a faded blue ink, there were two initials: an ‘M’ and an ‘H’.

Then I read the name.

A flurry of excitement raced through me.

I recognised it.

From where, I couldn’t remember, but I had seen it somewhere before.

I took out my notebook and with a shaking hand, wrote it down.