Two days before she is taken to the River Lark to be tied thumb to toe and thrown in, an old woman in a Suffolk prison is handed a gown. It is blue silk, the exact colour of her eyes, embroidered along the bodice with honeysuckle and woodlarks. Her friend has been sewing it since the sentence was passed. The old woman will not take it at first, because she is filthy and it is too fine and she will not be able to give it back. Her friend tells her that is rather the point. A Time of Witches by Madeline Martin contains time-slip spells, a linking enchantment, a grimoire that lights its own candles and a black cat who leads a woman through a forest at midnight. None of that is as good as this scene, in which two women in a cage solve the problem of dying by deciding what someone will be wearing.
Where the Heart of A Time of Witches Actually Sits
Edith is the least glamorous character in A Time of Witches by Madeline Martin by some distance. She has warts, and the seventeenth century treats a woman’s ugliness as evidence of what is inside her. She has spent decades trying every remedy anyone suggested, down to burying potatoes rubbed on her skin, and the warts have outlasted all of it. And she has also spent those decades growing beans and parsnips for the people in Bury St Edmunds too old or too ill to walk into town for food, and she does this without expecting anyone to notice.
When she is dragged through the streets, the crowd throws rotten vegetables at her and calls her hideous, and the novel is clear-eyed that this is not incidental to the accusation. It is the accusation. A woman with no husband, no beauty and no money has no standing at all, which is what makes her cheap to kill.
What Martin does with her is refuse to make her tragic. She is funny, exhausted and practical. She gives away her bread ration to women sicker than she is, then lies about having eaten. And when the gown arrives she says the only thing she has ever wanted was to be beautiful, and then she says that she feels it, and she walks out to be drowned with her head up. The rest of the plot in A Time of Witches by Madeline Martin is machinery. That is a novel.
There is a second friend in that cell worth naming. Kat arrives late, in a yellow gown, with seven children at home and no intention of being frightened of anybody. She is the one who sews the silk. She is also the one who, at the worst possible moment, stands in front of a crowd that has come to watch a burning and reminds them one by one of the fevers this woman broke, the plague victims she sat with when their own families would not, and the coins she handed over when nobody else would. It is a piece of pure rhetorical nerve, and it is the best-built scene in the novel.
Where Madeline Martin Is Working From
It matters that none of the prison material is invented wholesale. Martin travelled to Bury St Edmunds, worked with the local guides and with Moyse’s Hall Museum, and built the prison sections out of what the record actually holds. On 27 August 1645, eighteen people were hanged on Thingoe Hill after Matthew Hopkins named them witches. Several of them are in this book under their own names, and the author’s note explains which and why.
The procedural detail is where the research in A Time of Witches by Madeline Martin earns its place. Prisoners sorted by whether they have confessed, so the holdouts can be starved within sight of the fed. The walking test, which is not a test of anything except how long a person can be kept moving before their own denials start to slur. A trick bodkin with a retractable point, so that failing to bleed proves guilt. Fingernails and hair clipped into jars and stored in a cellar so the dead cannot be buried whole. None of it requires a supernatural explanation and none of it is exaggerated for the novel’s benefit, which is exactly why it works.
The Contemporary Half Cannot Keep Up
This is the problem with A Time of Witches by Madeline Martin, and it is worth being direct about it. Alongside the 1645 chapters runs a present-day story in which a woman in Savannah inherits her family’s gifts, flies to England, stays at a bed and breakfast, falls for the grumpy and handsome vet who runs it, adopts a rescued black cat and drinks a good deal of wine. It is warm and easy and genuinely likeable company.
It is also happening in a book where a woman is being shaved by strangers in a locked room. The two registers do not sit together, and the novel never finds a way to make them.
- The love interest has no obstacle. His one secret is flagged early, then resolved in a single conversation in which nobody is much bothered.
- The best friend lives in a phone. She is the funniest, most alive presence in the modern strand and is physically present for about three pages.
- The elderly aunt solves the plot. She has every answer, every herb and the one spell required, which leaves the protagonist very little to actually do.
- The investigation is over quickly. A single overheard conversation supplies the whole answer after a great deal of preamble.
Set against all that, one device in the modern strand is genuinely unnerving: photographs deleting themselves one at a time, a mirror that stops cooperating, and a lifelong friend replying to a text with a question about who is writing. That last beat is the only moment the contemporary half reaches the temperature of the historical one.
Readers who finish A Time of Witches by Madeline Martin and want more of the same should look at Weyward by Emilia Hart, which braids three women across three centuries and lets nature take their side, and The Moonlight Healers by Elizabeth Becker, which shares the interest in what a mother refuses to explain to her daughter until it is nearly too late. Anyone arriving here from Martin’s wartime novels will find The Booklover’s Library a fair guide to what she usually does, and how far this book travels from it. A word on content: the executions are on the page and so is the stripping and searching of a prisoner, along with sexual coercion, starvation and the death of a child’s mother.
What It Leaves Behind
The supernatural apparatus of A Time of Witches by Madeline Martin does its job. The countdown is honest, the rules hold, and the ending arrives where it should. But a year from now what will still be there is a cell in Suffolk, a woman who was told her whole life that her face was proof of her wickedness, and a friend with a needle deciding that if the world will not let Edith live, it will at least not be permitted to have the last word on how she looked. The novel spends four hundred pages on magic and finds its one unanswerable moment in a piece of blue silk. Martin clearly knows this. It is the scene she wrote best.