Witch from the Sea

by Philippa Carr

  Bersaba told them that Fennimore was out on the estate and we hastily ordered the grooms to take the horses while we brought them into the hall.

  ‘It’s a lovely old place,’ said Serena. ‘I always thought so. The castle is so much grimmer.’

  ‘But grander,’ added Carlotta.

  ‘Our mother will be so sorry not to be here,’ said Bersaba.

  I could not imagine my mother’s being in the least sorry while she was with my father. In fact, I thought she would be rather pleased not to be here, since he would not want these visitors.

  ‘We’ll have a room made ready,’ I said, and went away to give orders.

  When I came back Bersaba was taking the visitors into the intimate parlour, and one of the maids had brought the wine and cakes with which we always refreshed travellers on their arrival.

  ‘I was surprised,’ Senara was saying, ‘that your mother did not insist on our coming before.’

  ‘It was because our father was home,’ Bersaba was explaining. ‘When he comes they have so much to talk of because he has been away so long. They just have to be together. It has always been like that.’

  ‘Your mother fell in love with him when she was nothing but a girl … younger than you are,’ said Senara.

  ‘And she has stayed in love with him ever since,’ I said defiantly, as though there was need to defend her.

  ‘We were not all destined to find such happiness in married life, alas,’ commented Senara. She smiled at Carlotta and went on: ‘Let us tell the twins your news. I suppose I should be right to wait until your mother returns. She should be the first to know. But I can see you are all agog with curiosity.’

  ‘What news is it?’ asked Bersaba.

  ‘Carlotta has already had a proposal of marriage.’

  ‘Already … but from whom?’ My mind went over the people we knew. The Krolls, the Trents, the Lamptons … Surely one of those young men would not be considered good enough by Carlotta, who had gone to great pains to make us aware of her almost royal lineage.

  ‘She has to consider it, have you not, Carlotta? It is not the match she would have expected had she stayed in Spain, but it will bind the families closer, and I have never forgotten all through my life the days I spent here in my childhood.’

  ‘Who is it?’ asked Bersaba almost sharply.

  ‘It is your cousin Bastian. He has asked Carlotta’s hand in marriage.’

  Because I am close to Bersaba I felt the shock which ran through her. It numbed me as it numbed her and instinctively I knew that she was deeply disturbed.

  I began to talk rapidly to save her the necessity of doing so. I said: ‘So soon? How can you be sure? How can Bastian? What do Uncle Connell and Aunt Melanie say?’

  ‘They say it is a matter for Bastian to decide. He is of age. He is his own master and there is no doubt how strongly he is involved. Is that not so, Carlotta?’

  ‘He is determined to marry me.’

  ‘And you to marry him?’ I asked faintly.

  A smile flicked across her lips. ‘I am not sure. He must wait for his answer.’

  ‘We left Paling so that Carlotta could have time to think of this in peaceful surroundings,’ Senara explained.

  ‘I wanted to know what you felt about it here,’ said Carlotta. ‘Would you be happy to have me in your family? I wanted the twins to tell me.’ She was looking at Bersaba, who stood still, her eyes downcast, saying nothing. ‘Of course,’ went on Carlotta, ‘I shall not listen to what you tell me. I shall make up my mind whether or not I shall marry Bastian.’ Again that look at Bersaba. ‘And something seems to tell me that I shall.’

  The atmosphere had grown tense with secret feelings. It affected me strongly because it came from Bersaba. I could see Grandfather Casvellyn’s wild eyes, hear his accusing voice: ‘They’ll bring trouble here if they stay.’ Was that prophecy already coming true?

  BERSABA

  The Toad in the Bed

  I AM DESOLATE SO I am taking up my pen. I had said I would only do so when there was something interesting to write about. I did not think it would be heartbreak. I am so hurt, so humiliated and I think above all angry. My anger is none the less fierce because I hide it from the world; it is like a fire inside me, a banked-up fire which is waiting for the moment to burst forth, and when it does I believe I should be capable of killing the one who has brought me to this state.

  I put down my pen then and wrung my hands together; I wished that it were her neck I had in my hands. They are very strong, my hands. I could always do things with them that Angelet could not attempt.

  At this time I am only half believing it. I say to myself: It can’t be true. But in my heart I know it is. Grandfather was a prophet when he said she would bring disaster to us. He was thinking of me, I know, because Grandfather has a special feeling for me. There is a bond between us. I think I know what it is, for it is a need, a desire, which he himself possessed and which came down through him to me. I appear outwardly quiet … quieter than Angelet, but internally I am not.

  If I had not been as I am, this would not have happened to me. I should not have lain with Bastian in the forest and have revelled in that wild exultation which I could no more resist than he could. I used to think that if we were discovered they would blame him; they would say he had seduced me; he was older than I and I was little more than a child. But it would not be true. I was the one who had tempted him—artlessly, subtly, it was true. He used to kiss me and be frightened by the kisses I gave him in return; I would caress him in such a manner as to arouse his desires. He thought it was innocence which made me do these things. He didn’t understand that virgin though I was, at that time I was possessed by a raging desire to be possessed.

  When I was fourteen years old I knew that I wanted Bastian to be my lover. He had singled me out as his favourite and this endeared him to me, for although we were so much alike people were more comfortable in Angelet’s company. She was not prettier than I … how could she be when most people did not know which of us was which? It was something in her manner. When I pretended to be her—it was our favourite game to delude people into thinking one of us was the other—I could assume her nature: open, thoughtless, chattering without thinking very much what she was saying, light-hearted, believing the best of everyone, and being easy to deceive because of that. I just had to think of Angelet’s ways to be her. But she never really succeeded in being me, because if she lived to a hundred she would never know this deep sensuality which was the strongest force in my nature and which was why Bastian and I had become lovers when I was but fifteen years old and he was twenty-two.

  The first time it happened we were riding in the woods near Castle Paling where I was staying with my mother and sister. A party of us had gone out riding and Bastian and I slipped away from the others. We came to a thicket and I said the horses were tired and we should give them a rest.

  Bastian said, Nonsense. We had not long left the castle. But I dismounted and tied my horse to a tree and he did the same. I lay down on the grass and looked at him standing above me. Then suddenly he was lying beside me and I took his hand and held it against my breast. I remember how his body shook with his heartbeats and how excited I was. And then he was beside me, saying: ‘We must go, Bersaba. Dear little Bersaba, we must go back.’

  But I had no intention of going back, and I put my arms about him and told him I loved him because he loved me more than he loved Angelet. And all he could say was: ‘No, Bersaba, we must go. You don’t understand.’

  I understood perfectly but he would not know that. He was the one who did not understand. I knew then that there are people who are born with knowledge and I was one of them. There was one of the servants—we called her Ginny—who was the same. I had heard the servants say that she had had lovers since she was eleven years old. But perhaps I was not the same, for I did not want lovers: I wanted my cousin Bastian.

  Afterwards Bastian was frightened. When we stood up beside our horses h
e took my face in his hands and kissed me.

  He said: ‘We must never do that again, Bersaba. It was wrong, and when you are old enough I’m going to marry you, and if necessary before.’

  I was happy then but Bastian wasn’t. I thought he would betray what had happened by his mournful looks. For some time he would take great pains not to be with me. I would look at him with hurt and yearning eyes, and then one day it happened again, and again he said: ‘It must never happen like that until we are married.’

  But it did. It became a ritual, and afterwards he would always say that we were going to be married.

  I thought of Bastian all day. My sketchbook was full of sketches of him. I could not wait until the day I would be old enough to marry him.

  He said: ‘We shall be married on your birthday and announce our intentions six months before.’

  I used to think: I shall be married before Angelet is. Another of my characteristics which is almost as strong as my sensuality is the need to better Angelet. She is my sister, my twin, so like me that many cannot tell one from the other, and she is important to me. Sometimes I feel that she is part of me. I love her, I suppose, for she is necessary to me. I should hate it if she went away, and yet there is an insane desire within me always to better her. I must do everything better than she can or I suffer. People must prefer me or I am consumed with jealousy—and as she has this open, sunny, frank manner and mine is dark and devious, it is often that they turn to her.

  Once when we were very young my mother bought us sashes for our dresses—mine was red and Angelet’s blue. ‘We shall now be able to tell you apart,’ she had said jokingly. And when I saw Angelet in the blue and how people turned to her first and talked to her more than they did to me, I became obsessed by the blue sash and it seemed to me that there was some magic in it. I took her blue sash and told her she could have my red one. She refused this, saying that the blue was hers. And one day I went to the drawer in which the sashes were kept and I cut the blue one into shreds.

  Our mother was bewildered. She talked to me a great deal, asking me why I had done this, but I did not know how to put my thoughts into words.

  Then she said to me, ‘You thought the blue one was better because it was Angelet’s. You were envious of her blue sash, and you see what you have done. There is now no blue sash for either of you. There are seven deadly sins, Bersaba.’ She told me what they were. ‘And the greatest of these is envy. Curb it, my dear child, for envy hurts those who bear it far more than those against whom it is directed. You see, you are more unhappy about the blue sash than your sister is.’

  I pondered that. It was true, because Angelet had forgotten the sash in a day, though it lived on in my memory. But the incident did nothing to curb my envy. It grew from that to what it is today. It’s like a parasite growing round an oak tree and the oak tree is my love and need of my sister—for I do love her; she is a part of me. Nature, I think, divided certain qualities and gave her some and me the others. In so many ways we are so distinctly different, and it is only my secretive nature that prevents this being obvious, for I am certain that no one has any idea of the dark thoughts which go on in my mind.

  After Carlotta and her mother had arrived Angelet came up to our room. She was very uneasy, because although she had no idea of the nature of my relationship with Bastian, she knew that I admired him and sought his company and he mine.

  She looked at me anxiously. How relieved I am that I am not one of those girls who shed tears at the slightest provocation. I cry with rage sometimes; never the soft sentimental tears which Angelet gives way to. A sad story will bring the tears to her eyes, but they are easy tears, for she will have forgotten what made her cry a very short time afterwards.

  ‘What do you think of it?’ she cried. ‘Carlotta and Bastian!’

  I shrugged my shoulders, but that couldn’t deceive even Angelet.

  ‘Of course,’ she went on, making an effort not to look at me, ‘he is getting old and I suppose it’s time he married. He was bound to marry sooner or later. But Carlotta! Why, she has only been there a week or so. What do you think of her, Bersaba?’

  ‘I suppose she is very attractive,’ I said calmly.

  ‘It’s a strange sort of attraction,’ said Angelet. ‘There’s something odd about her … and about her mother. I wonder if it’s true that her grandmother was a witch.’

  Horrible pictures came into my mind, but I did nothing to suppress them because they soothed me.

  Once, when I was about twelve years old, we had been riding with our mother and some of the grooms and we had come upon a shouting mob. There had been a woman in their midst and she was not such an old woman either. Her clothes were torn from her body and she was half naked, but it was the look of abject terror in her face which I had never forgotten. The crowd was chanting, ‘Hang the witch. Hang the witch.’ I don’t think I ever saw such fear in any face, before or after.

  My mother had said: ‘We will go now.’ She turned her horse, and we rode off at speed in the opposite direction from that in which we had been going. ‘These things happen,’ she told us, ‘but it will not always be so. People will become more enlightened.’

  I wanted to ask questions but my mother said: ‘We won’t speak of it any more, Bersaba. We’ll forget it. It’s unpleasant; it exists; but in time people will be wiser. We can do no good by talking of it, thinking of it …’

  That was the attitude in our home. If there was anything unpleasant one did not think of it. If my mother had a fault it was pretending that things were so much better than they were. She told herself every time my father went away that he would come safely back. She was wise in a way; but it had never been mine to pretend, even to myself. I look straight into my heart, soul and mind and ask myself why I did such a thing. I think I know myself better than my mother or Angelet will ever know themselves because of this side of my nature which demands the truth however unpleasant or detrimental to myself.

  Afterwards I went back to that lane and I saw the woman hanging there. It was a gruesome sight, for the crows were attacking her. Her hair was long and I could see even then that she had been a beautiful woman. It was beastly; it was vile; it haunted me for a long time; but at least it was reality.

  And now I was thinking of Carlotta in the hands of that mob, Carlotta being dragged to that tree. Her grandmother was a witch … Perhaps she was. Perhaps that accounted for the manner in which she had taken Bastian from me. She had cast some spell upon him. An odd excitement possessed me and I felt better than I had since I had heard.

  I said: ‘Is witchcraft something that is handed down from grandmother to mother and then on and on, I wonder?’

  Angelet looked happy because she had come to the conclusion in her light let’s-see-the-best-of-everything manner that my childish fondness for Bastian had not gone as deep as she feared. One of the lovable things about Angelet had always been that my trouble had been hers. I looked at her now with a kind of contempt—which might have been another form of envy, for I admitted it must be pleasant to sail through life without these intense feelings which beset people like myself—as she answered: ‘Perhaps it is. Oh, I do wonder if Carlotta is a witch.’

  ‘It would be interesting to find out,’ I said.

  ‘How?’ she asked.

  ‘We could think about that,’ I suggested.

  ‘There are good witches as well as bad ones,’ Angelet said, in keeping with her nature immediately bestowing benign qualities on the woman who had stolen my lover. ‘They cure you of warts and styes and give you love potions to enslave a lover. I believe that if you have bad luck some witches can help you find illwishers who could be causing that bad luck. I was talking to Ginny the other day. She knows a lot about witches. She’s always fancying herself ill-wished.’

  ‘We’ll talk to Ginny,’ I said, and all sorts of thoughts were whirling round in my head; they soothed me.

  ‘I wonder if Bastian knows,’ giggled Angelet. ‘You’d better ask
him.’

  ‘Why don’t you?’

  ‘Oh, you know he always liked you best.’

  ‘Did he show it then?’

  ‘You know he did. Wasn’t he always losing himself with you in the woods?’

  Now she must see. Her words stabbed me as though they were knife blades. Riding in the woods with him, his pursuing me, intending to be caught, lying on the grass among the bracken … His voice: ‘This is madness. What if we were seen?’ And not caring because it was so important, so necessary to us both.

  And now … Carlotta.

  I said fiercely: ‘I’m going to find out if she’s a witch.’

  ‘We will,’ replied Angelet blithely. She would be less blithe when they took Carlotta down the lane, when they stripped her clothes from her, when they hung her up by the neck and the crows came.

  It was difficult hiding the fact that I was so stunned. Carlotta knew that I had been fond of Bastian, but did she know how far that fondness had carried us? The more I thought of that the more angry I became. I thought of the insult, the humiliation; I, Bersaba Landor, to be cast aside. And his own cousin too. He must have been completely bewitched.

  Carlotta was watching me as a cat watches a mouse, teasing me in the same way, patting me with her paw, letting me run a little way then clawing me back. I comforted myself with the thought that she didn’t know how wounded I was. I was sure she thought I had had a little girl fondness for Bastian and that I, childish like Angelet, was just a little hurt because he no longer paid me the same attention.

  At supper that night Fennimore sat at the head of the table and Carlotta turned her langorous eyes on him. Fennimore was made in the image of his father, and as Carlotta was engaged to marry his cousin Bastian, it would not occur to Fennimore to be aware of her fascination. Like my parents, my brother created a sense of security and made even me think that whatever happened, this would always be my home and my parents would shelter and protect me.