The Ghost Bride

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I was commissioned to paint a series of seven landscapes of Mistley Heath woods and the village itself for a new restaurant opening in Manningtree.  The restaurant owner was an art collector originally from Mayo who bought several of my Irish paintings in the Waterfront Gallery there and at Gormley’s in Belfast.  He liked my work so thought nothing of bringing me over to Colchester Travel Lodge to talk to me about what sort of artwork he wanted for the new restaurant.  Seamus Byrne was a refined gentleman in his late 50’s with a shock of curly grey hair with traces of its original reddish auburn seen in the sunlight when you looked closely, as us arty types tend to do.

Manningtree, on the southern banks of the Stour, was where his wife Jenny was born and raised. They’d met at university in Keele and married not long after his graduation.  She was the one into cooking.  She had worked in the university kitchens when he was studying and he had fallen for her quiet nature, her coy ways and her beautiful hazel eyes that so many anniversaries on still had a twinkle in them.  Seamus had the business acumen and Jenny the talent as a chef. 

Manningtree village was steeped in history, with its little museum and its exhibition on Matthew Hopkins, the witch-finder general we have all heard of.  He wrote The Discovery of Witches during the English Civil War in 1644, and was a torturer of women he suspected of consorting with the Devil.  If they had a pet cat or dog these were called familiars and if the women had a boil or birthmark then she had to be a witch and her familiar may have fed from the affliction like a teat.  He would have them cut to see if they bled and thrown into water to see if they sunk or swam as evidence of the witch renouncing their baptism.  Of course Seamus, though interested in the village’s history, didn’t want that gory sort of artwork on the restaurant walls, but specified that local scenery, past and present would be much more appropriate.  The ghostly reputation of the area would be fine, but only if tastefully done.