There is a strange tranquillity that follows me now and I think I know what that is. As much as I struggled with it when I first realised, I get it now. You see, I am the Witchfinder, descendant of Hopkins, the last child of my line. And like he I have too hunted witches and so found my witch. But the difference between me and that Witchfinder of old is instead of fear I brought mercy.
And that is so very neat. It is almost perfection. A justice or symmetry of sorts. So, dear Maggie, it’s all here.
Take it and have Mercy.
Much love,
From me.
Your friend.
Note to the Reader
Using Occam’s Razor, i.e. the theory that the simplest explanation is most probably the correct one, it seems pretty likely (however unjust and boring) that Matthew Hopkins met his end of tuberculosis quietly, surrounded by his family in Manningtree. Although there were consequently many outbreaks of similar witch hunting, using the methods he outlined in his Discovery of Witches, the consensus is that it was his book that travelled out to New England, not he. For a full and very evocative book which examines the Civil War witch hunts, I would recommend to any reader what was commended to me; Witchfinders, A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy by Malcolm Gaskill.
Rebecca West did testify against her mother and friends at the age of fifteen. There are no documents in existence that record what happened to her thereafter.
The story of the boy and his mare and all of the witches’ tales are, regrettably, true.
Q & A with Syd Moore
Where did the idea for Witch Hunt come from?
I think the idea of writing something about the witches was always lurking at the back of my mind (just like Sadie), but it fired up while I was researching my first book The Drowning Pool. I came across the statistic about the number of Essex folk indicted for witchcraft and was pretty taken aback. I never had any idea that so many were accused. I had heard about the Pendle witch trials, the Scottish witch trials, Salem and the terrible continental craze for witch hunts but I hadn’t come across much about the Essex witches. Which was odd really as I was born and bred in the county. So I started reading around the subject and that’s when I found out about Matthew Hopkins and his witch hunt.
I’d heard of the Witchfinder General before but I had a notion that his spree took place in Suffolk and Norfolk and that Essex had little to do with it. When I mentioned this to friends and acquaintances I found I wasn’t on my own in that regard: many of my fellow Essex girls and boys were also oblivious to the local connection. As I drilled down further and uncovered the stories of the witches, I found myself becoming not only upset and saddened but also outraged. Their stories sank into me. In fact, I couldn’t get them out of my head. The one that I kept going back to was that of Rebecca West. The idea that this poor fifteen-year-old was responsible for the death of her mother and her friends was appalling. I mean, she was only fifteen! I remember what I was like at that age – not very responsible, nor sensible nor long-sighted. Then, when I looked at her in the wider context of Hopkins’ evolution/deterioration into a full-blown Witchfinder, I could see that her complicity quite possibly fanned his monstrous ego and bloodlust, thereby indirectly condemning hundreds of other souls to dreadful deaths. I tried to imagine how she felt after the trial and the executions, and was inspired from that daydream to write what would later become the prologue of the novel.
How did you write it? Did you plot it out before you started?
I knew Sadie had to have a connection to either Hopkins or Rebecca or both, so I plotted those connections out first of all. In my first draft Sadie’s mum, Rosamund, was alive for the first third of the book, which allowed me to explore the parallel mother-daughter relationship with that of Anne West/Rebecca West and Rebecca’s daughter, Mercy. It was all good stuff but it didn’t really belong in a ghost story so I cut it out. I haven’t discarded it though and hope someday I might return to it, maybe as a short story.