An astute observer, Martha takes a rich liminal position as the hunt unfolds. She has no blood relatives, as she lost her mother as a child and never knew her father. Her voicelessness protects her – she cannot confess to witchcraft – but also restricts her and makes her the target of cruel remarks. Her skills as a midwife make many families indebted to her, even if they make her suspicious, due to her closeness to women’s bodies, herbal remedies, difficult births and premature deaths.
As the story unfolds over the course of a few weeks, her days are marked by uncertainty as much as by her intimate bonds with nature, the people, and her own past, which persists in the form of a wax doll with two faces, or ‘poppet’. left to her by her mother, who led a hard life, died a violent death and appears to have practiced witchcraft.
“The doll was ill-made and ungainly, crudely crafted from a candle stump, egg-shaped where the wax bulged out at the hips,” writes Meyer in a passage that grips her voice, poetic and sharp at once:
It had two aspects. … One without eyes or only with pinpricks for eyes, the nose a squeezed lump, the mouth barely perceptible – a sickle-shaped ridge of a woman’s fingernail. This side, this face, quite peaceful. Closed looking. The face on the other side was more contoured and terrifying, the burnt-in eyes staring wide open and the O of his mouth wide open, as if trying to scream.
The protean but endlessly evocative doll embodies the tensions between living and inanimate, human and ghost, friend and foe, real and imaginary that play out in the foul-smelling landscape of the city and its increasingly desperate people. The ‘witch finder’ arrives from elsewhere, but soon enlists local residents, both men and women, in his cause; Martha is put to work inspecting other women’s bodies for signs of witchcraft – loose flaps of skin, extra nipples, birthmarks, unflinching at the touch of a goad – until the inevitable day when she, too, becomes the target of the hunt .
