‘No. She’s as healthy as a goose,’ I used to say.
Rose obsessed over memories of Nat and Rowland, her dead brothers. Any time Marion coughed – or even made any kind of noise that could be loosely interpreted as one – Rose would become ashen and declare, ‘That’s how it began with Rowland!’
At night she would watch the stars, not quite knowing what she was watching them for, but knowing that our fates – and the fate of Marion – were written on them.
All of this anxiety took its toll on Rose, who became very quiet and withdrawn in the following months. She looked pale and tired, and kept blaming herself for being a terrible mother, which she wasn’t at all. I wonder now if it was a form of postnatal depression. She was always up before it was light. And became more religious than she had ever been, saying prayers even as she held Marion. She lost her appetite, eating barely more than a few mouthfuls of pottage a day. She never worked now, or sold fruit at the market, as Marion had taken over her days, and I think she missed the company and liveliness of the time, so I encouraged Grace to come and see her, which she did from time to time, bringing baby clothes or calming ointments from the apothecary, along with her earthy humour.
We had lovely neighbours, Ezekiel and Holwice, who’d had nine children of their own, five of whom were still alive, and so Holwice – although in her fifties, worked now as a wool-walker at the watermill – had lots of childcare advice. It was the usual kind of stuff. Open the windows to ward away bad spirits. No bathing. A dab of breast milk and rosewater solution on the baby’s forehead to aid sleep.
But Rose thought all manner of things could endanger little Marion (and she was, always, little, which added to Rose’s concern). She would get cross with herself, or me, for instance, if either of us scratched our head.
‘It is a dirty habit, Tom. It could make her sick!’
‘I am sure it won’t.’
‘You must stop it, Tom. You must stop it. And you mustn’t belch around her.’
‘I didn’t know I did belch around her.’
‘And you must wipe your mouth after drinking ale. And be quiet when you come home at night. You always wake her.’
‘I am sorry.’
Other times, when Marion was asleep, Rose would just burst out crying for no apparent reason, and ask me to hold her, which I did. Often, when I came back from a night playing music, I would hear her tears as I entered the door.
Anyway, I don’t know why I dwell on this. This was only a matter of months. And Rose returned back to her old self by the end of summer. I suppose I am relaying it because it added to my guilt. I knew, deep down, that I was part of the strain on things. Rose had, of the two of us, been the strong one, the organiser and initiator, the one who always knew what was best to do for the both of us. And it was her strength that had, obviously, enabled Rose to marry me, knowing all that she knew.
But, out of sorts, her doubts rose up. Even if Marion survived infancy, and childhood, what then? What would happen when she looked older than her father? The questions, we both knew, would breed like rabbits.
I had a new worry too. While Rose stayed concerned that Marion would die, or otherwise overtake me, I worried with an equal intensity that she wouldn’t. What I mean is, I worried she would be like me. I worried she would be abnormal. That she would reach the age of thirteen and then stop getting any older. I worried that Marion would face the same problems – or even worse ones – for I knew (of course I knew) that women were the ones who had to die at the bottom of rivers to prove their innocence.
I couldn’t sleep at night, however much ale I had drunk (and the quantity was increasing at a daily rate). I kept thinking of Manning, still alive, probably still in London. Though we never encountered him, I often had the sense of him. I sometimes imagined I could feel his closeness, as if his malevolent essence was contained in shadows or cesspits or the single hand of a church clock.
Superstition was rising everywhere. People like, occasionally, to see human life as a generally smooth upwardly sloping line towards enlightenment and knowledge and tolerance, but I have to say that has never been my experience. It isn’t in this century and it wasn’t in that one. The arrival of King James onto the throne let superstition off the lead. King James, who not only wrote Daemonologie but also asked puritanical translators to refashion the Bible, was a boost for intolerance.
The lesson of history is that ignorance and superstition are things that can rise up, inside almost anyone, at any moment. And what starts as a doubt in a mind can swiftly become an act in the world.
And so our fears grew. One night in the Boar’s Head, a fight started when a group of men turned on one of their members and accused him of devil worship. Another night I got speaking to a butcher who refused to take any pork from a certain farmer, on account that he believed all his pigs were ‘dark spirits’ and their meat could corrupt the soul. He gave no evidence for this but he believed it with a passion, and it caused me to remember the case of a pig in Suffolk that had once stood trial and had been burned at the stake on account of being a demon.
We never went to the Globe to see Macbeth, for obvious reasons, but it was no coincidence that this tale of politics and supernatural malevolence was the most popular and talked-about piece of entertainment at the time. I wonder, now, if Shakespeare would have been so kind to me. And if, in this new environment, he believed the death of Henry Hemmings had been justified. But I also had more specific worries.
There was a man at the end of our street, a smartly dressed man who read aloud emphatically enunciated dialogues from Daemonologie, alongside extracts from the King’s Bible. Also, by the time Marion was four, even our once kindly neighbours, Ezekiel and Holwice, were beginning to give me funny looks. I don’t know if this was because they had noticed I wasn’t ageing, or if it was more that the age difference between Rose and me was starting to look a little wide. She seemed a good decade older than me.
And even though we never saw Manning again, I would hear his name. Once, in the street, a woman I had never seen before came up to me and stuck her finger in my chest.
‘Mr Manning told me about you. He told everyone about you . . . They say you have a child. They should have smothered her at birth, to be safe.’
Another time, while Rose was out alone with Marion she was spat at, for living with the ‘enchanter’.
Marion, now a girl, was aware of such things. She was an intelligent, sensitive child, and seemed to carry a sadness around with her a lot of the time. She cried after that incident. And she would fall very quiet if she heard us talk, however quietly, about our worries.