Martha Hallybread is a village midwife who has not spoken in four decades, and her silence initially comes in handy when the witch-hunter Makepeace comes to her East Anglian community of Cleftwater in 1645. No one likes a gossip, and Martha being so very self-contained means she has fewer reasons than everyone else to be dobbed in by her neighbours. She needs the advantage, because if Martha isn’t quite a witch herself, she’s certainly the daughter of one, and her dead mother’s creepy charms – including dried organs, a squashed toad and a poppet doll that won’t stay thrown away – are positive invitations to the gibbet.
Martha’s silence might give her some small power, though she doesn’t exactly utilise it effectively. Silence, in The Witching Tide, is like magic: it exists and can be helpful, but a sense of strategy is better. Martha is lacking in that department, and the tension between what she can do to help herself and what she does do instead makes for an interesting – if occasionally frustrating – read.
Meyer, who grew up in New Zealand but has long lived in the UK, is a skilful and evocative storyteller. The East Anglian witch trials of 1645-47 were a real historical horror, and it’s not enjoyable feeling so unsympathetic to even a fictional victim of them. Nor to find oneself on the side of Makepeace – seemingly a fictional analogue of the real-life Matthew Hopkins – with his paranoia and torture and almost gleeful pleasure in pitting a community against itself, especially when his victims are primarily women already marginalised because of their age or health.
Makepeace himself is rarely on the page. Instead, Meyer focuses on how members of Martha’s community are made complicit in the torture of their fellow villagers. The practice of “watching and walking”, where the accused is forced to walk back and forth on bloody feet for days until exhaustion and dehydration elicit confession, is particularly prominent.
Martha both makes other women walk this way and is eventually walked herself. It’s in these moments that Meyer’s exploration of domestic and community corruption really shines. Martha, who acts as midwife over the birth of a deformed child, is naturally an object of suspicion, as many midwives in similar circumstances were. Actively aligning herself with the witch-hunters is necessary protection – and no doubt her neighbours, when Martha is herself accused, employed similar justifications.
It’s a particularly cold-blooded act of survival, but one I found extremely sympathetic. It helps to explain, perhaps, why Martha’s other, comparatively incompetent, attempts at survival are so grating. In fact, I became so fed up with her that, if I wasn’t exactly rooting for the witch-finders, I was certainly wanting them to hurry up, on the grounds that if she was so determined to make it easy for them, they might as well get to it.
Given this, the ending, where flood and cruelty and hideous abandonment, along with the intervention of a justice-minded official, combine to produce reprieve, felt a little unearned.
It’s hard not to be reminded of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, a tour de force of guilt and induced judgment, in which the reader’s disgust at the cowardice and hypocrisy of Arthur Dimmesdale is a perfect reflection of the prejudice his own Puritan community shows to Hester Prynne. That book, set in the same era, with the same obsessive religious persecution, left me feeling rather complicitly unclean. Had Martha been unspared, I might have been left in the same uncomfortable moral position, comparing my feelings of her just deserts with those of Makepeace. Instead, both she and the reader are – silently – let off the hook.
There’s some power in that, but not as much as there might be.
The Witching Tide, by Margaret Meyer (Moa, $37.99)
