The Applecross Spell

by Wendy MacIntyre

  Her imagined keep had ramparts she paced, not restlessly, but with pride, visiting each of the Watchtowers in turn. She had entered a stage in life where she must be wary, with her body changing, becoming soft and desirable. There was a big difference, Ada said, between caution and a hampering fear. Certainly not all men were bad. But it was best to be on one’s guard.

  Suzanne cultivated the image of the squared, strong keep. And in a kind of consonant magic, her legs grew longer, her body supple and resilient. She learned early that she could outpace men who pestered her on the street. She did not have to run. A brisk walk was enough. Usually, they faltered, lagged, pouted, and faded away. When needed, she could assume a hauteur that made the most ardent pest wither in his tracks. Once, she tried out high heels; then abandoned them forever. They slowed her; and would most certainly impede flight. She avoided compromising situations. And prayed luck would be on her side. Because there were many ways, including brute force, that one might find oneself undone. “Be wary but unafraid,” Ada said. “The signs will stay with you always.” The invisible, protective symbols were a gift for life. From mother to daughter. Long fingers tracing the whorls of the electromagnetic currents of Earth, the loopings up to the stars and back.

  “So elegant and so sexy,” Murdo said. She came speeding back through time, her body shuddering luxuriously with the warmth of his breath in the hollow of her ear. This bed. Murdo’s fingers.

  The overlapping of her childhood with the present had been so seamless. Like travelling the inner and outer curves of a Möbius strip. Murdo had made one just the other day, snipping a band of unvarying width from the top of The Scotsman, and twisting it, just so, into that one-sided model of infinity. His brow furrowed as he studied it, as though the thing itself perplexed him. Then he flicked the strip into the fire (the morning was thickly damp), where it crisped and crumbled into a fine black ash.

  “We are all such,” he said, head lowered to watch the ash disperse through a red gorge of flame. The lines in his brow deepened. As if he were a man of clay, Suzanne thought, and the thought itself were a sharp instrument that scored the gouge between his eyes. Paradoxically, she knew she would never have married him but for that so-evident pain; for his tragedies that separated him out from the mass of men. The vagaries of life had made tender hollows in him, visible and invisible.

  She went and stood behind his chair, her breasts pressed against his shoulders. The ease of their bodies together, the many perfect ways they fit, still amazed her. This fittingness itself seemed a kind of gnosis, a secret knowledge that contained worlds.

  “So elegant and so sexy,” Murdo repeated. Did he mean her or his equation? He would often define a formula as “sexy.” This was his ultimate approbation. Suzanne would sometimes try to imagine what it was he saw in his mind’s eye, but could get no further than a curve or loop of radiant light. It would be spare, certainly. Quintessential form, all unnecessary detail pared away.

  She supposed that her own slimness pleased Murdo for just that reason. That her “elegant lines” as he described them, matched his mathematical ideal. This appreciation she interpreted as yet another facet of the rightness of their union, as if he had already imagined her, held the shape of her in his mind, long before they actually met. So that coming to him was, in a sense, coming home.

  Unfortunately, there was a cruel aspect to Murdo’s admiration for structural spareness. She had witnessed it on several occasions, once in a café in Amsterdam, when a portly young man with a protuberant belly sat at an adjacent table and Murdo had made a pointed remark. More recently, she and Murdo had passed a trio of tourists in the High Street, three women, all quite overweight, and puffing audibly from the exertion of their climb up to the Castle. Suzanne noted with distaste the nasty curl of Murdo’s lip, a sneer superior as a schoolboy’s, as he watched their laboured progress. On both occasions, she had remonstrated with him later, for she found such condescension childish and reprehensible. And both times, he had affected not to know what she was talking about. In fact, he became quite irritated, so much so that she let the matter drop. This was a small enough flaw, she reasoned, a mere peccadillo and nothing she should let spoil what was essentially an expansive bliss.

  This happiness carried over into their respective work, where she sensed a subtle and continuous cross-fertilization. When Murdo spoke to her of the search for a unified field theory, or of Gödel’s Theorem, or of the fact that subatomic particles can travel backward in time/space, the wonder in his eyes was telling. Suzanne understood that she and Murdo were each set on the same daunting task: to see their subject whole. In his case, this was the physical cosmos. In hers, the human psyche.

  Certain of her colleagues became irritated whenever Suzanne spoke of her “larger” vision. A feminist’s sole and proper study should be women, they said. Women’s souls and bodies and circumstances. Not men’s souls. If indeed, men had souls. And they would sniff at the air derisively in that conditioned response Suzanne had come to find so very tiresome. Of course, she saw their point. Much that men had done – and still did – disgusted and appalled her. Yet she chose to believe in the possibility of a redemptive transformation, if not for every man; then at least, for particular individuals. She chose to believe too, that there did exist the rare exceptions – like Murdo – men who did not seek to diminish women, who knew just how intricate was the balance of their respective powers.

  This was a holy business, a fact that Murdo tacitly recognized. There was no other way it could be described.

  She rejoiced too, in Murdo’s evident sympathy and compassion. For she was finding much of her research even more gruelling than she had anticipated. She had to force herself to a full imagining of her subjects’ pain; she owed them nothing less. She learned with some discomfort that torture to extract “confessions” from witches had been far more commonplace in Scotland than in England. The instruments the Scottish inquisitors used had their own horrific symbolism; the form embodying the ultimate aim – that all women be silent and biddable. If not, they must be broken. And so there was the “witch’s bridle,” an iron collar and gag that clamped about a woman’s face; and the metal shoe and brace, that when tightened, could crush and maim a woman’s foot. And of course, the long, piercing bodkin of the witch-pricker, who thrust his needle into the most tender parts of a woman’s body, seeking out the devil’s marks.

  Women had undergone these agonies of flesh and spirit mere miles from where she now sat, reading and turning away from the reading, digging her fingernails into her palms in some paltry and totally meaningless act of sympathy.

  In her dreams, the smell of burnt flesh was sometimes overwhelming. Murdo was kind when she cried out in her sleep and woke him. He put his brow to hers as if to cancel out these terrible images through the simple touch of love. His arms about her made a loose wreath. Instinctually, he understood that she could not have borne any tightness, the strictures that might evoke the clamps and bodkins and the final binding to a hewn stake above a laid pyre.

  Hundreds of women had been burned on Edinburgh’s High Street. Each time Suzanne passed the brooding grey bulk of St. Giles Cathedral, she would think of the evil box it once had housed. A box with a slit, nasty as pursed lips, to receive accusations against women believed to be witches. Fashioned no doubt by the same industrious carpenter who made the fornicator’s stool, set up near the front of the kirk, where the wicked might be in full view.

  She thanked heaven Murdo had escaped that inheritance. And that he was what he was.

  Suzanne took to wandering the grounds behind the house. She grew restless when she worked, her long legs cramping if she sat too long. Walking helped her order her thoughts, comb through the profuse contradictions her research uncovered about the witch archetype.

  The witch was either nubile, naked, with high pointed breasts and silken limbs, and an enticing smile that promised fleshly delights; or she was the typical crone, hunched, long nose hooking over scraggly lip
s, toothless or single-toothed, wizened and dun-coloured, like a twisted root that has lain long underground. Often terrifying, with glint-hard eyes. No succour here. She swoops into children’s dreams, shattering their pure sleep with her cackle. She beckons the tender Hansel and Gretel with her bony finger, luring them to their doom. Even when she is comic, she is still horrific. Like the hag who pursued the cloyingly virtuous Little Lulu. Tsk. Tsk. Always returning, no matter how often she was foiled. As she does each North American Halloween, her craggy silhouette incised against an orange backdrop. Or in a rubber mask, the face warty and deformed, topped by a fright wig.

  Yet the power of the archetype endured. As the words associated with her endured. Hag. Join this with “fag,” and you got in two shots at once. And the word witch itself rhymed so very readily with bitch.

  On the apparently plus side, there were “enchanting” and “bewitching” and the ubiquitous “glamour,” which had once meant the casting of a spell. Yet Suzanne sensed an underlying mistrust in all these supposedly positive attributes. As if this compelling sensuality had been got through an underhand trick. Legerdemain. Or a pact with dark forces. Glamour means that all is not as it appears. The silken thighs may well conceal a vagina dentata.

  The siren enchantress and the withered crone were in fact the same person. This had been brought home to her very clearly indeed by a Goya engraving. An old witch is instructing a young witch. They are both naked, the crone the pilot, the apprentice nestled behind her, on a broomstick soaring up through a louring sky. The contrast between the two women’s bodies is shocking. The neophyte has the unmarked flesh, the generous hips and breasts, the wasp waist, of an Arabian houri. Her instructor seems to be shaped of melting wax, all drooping dugs and flaccid buttocks. The nose is a cruel hook. There is not an inch of her that is unwrinkled. But the two bodies are contingent, their postures identical, so that one sees clearly that the elder is the shadow of the younger. The crone is what the delectable houri will become.

  And many of us still fear it, thought Suzanne. We fear turning into the hag.

  Suzanne was stopped abruptly in her thoughts by the sight of an ancient outbuilding just to the right of her path. On first glance, the roof of this structure appeared to have an abundance of thick hair. On closer inspection, she saw this “hair” was actually a thriving spiny bush that had rooted itself under the dirt between the slates. Unlike Murdo’s house, the stone of the outbuilding was not a homogenous buff, but dappled, brown and beige, so that its front resembled the open, freckled face of a child. There was a single circular window, like a third eye, set right in the centre of the second storey, under the roof. The building had two wooden doors, set about five feet apart, each surrounded by a recessed stone arch.

  Curious to see inside, she chose the door on the right, set beneath the most profuse of the hair-like growth on the roof. She lifted the latch and then gave the door a push, jumping well clear in case there were any loose stones in the lintel. The heavy door swung inward surprisingly easily, revealing a soft inner gloom. She was reminded of the mysteriously dusky backgrounds of Rembrandt so that she half expected to see an Esther or a placid Jewish bride materialize in the foreground.

  Listening carefully, she waited a moment before crossing the threshold. The place had the look of being long abandoned. A fox or a badger might have made its home here. She clapped her hands sharply three times, then listened again for any telltale rustle or snarl. Reassured by the continuing silence, she moved forward, peering into the shadowy interior. At first, she could make out no shape at all. There was only the smell, a meld of dank earth, mouldering hay, and the scent of lamp oil. As her eyes gradually adjusted, she saw an oil lamp hanging from the hook beside the door. She took the lamp down and carried it outside. The wick looked healthy, and there was enough oil left to yield a decent light. Luckily, she had a small box of Bluebell matches in her jacket pocket, together with a packet of five cigarettes, still in their cellophane wrapping. Although she had long ago given up smoking, she liked to keep these with her as a comfort, and a visible reminder of what discipline could accomplish.

  She lit the lamp and carried it inside, watching the golden light seep outward and up the stone walls. What she saw first was a sturdy ladder leading up to a loft, heaped with old straw.

  Looking down, she saw that the earthen floor had been tamped so that it had the consistency of hard clay. Whose feet had tramped it, she wondered, and how long ago? At first she thought the room was quite bare, until, turning toward her left, she saw an old plank table set tight into the corner. On top of the table was a bulky object, swathed in sheets of dull plastic.

  Setting the lamp on the table, she began to unwind the plastic sheeting to see what it concealed. At no point then did it occur to her that she was being intrusive. Had she found the package in Murdo’s study, or in the tower-top room where he kept his telescope, she would doubtless have left it untouched. But pushed into a damp corner, the bundled object had an air of obscurity, like a parcel left behind in a bus station, forgotten precisely because it was worthless.

  She pulled the sheeting aside to reveal two boxes, one atop the other. The bottom one was by far the larger, shaped rather like a child’s old-fashioned toy chest, and exquisitely fashioned from a wine-coloured wood. In raised carving on the lid was the letter M, formed of delicately overlapping laurel leaves. The smaller box was of serviceable metal, painted a flat black. Neither box was locked. She opened the wooden one first and recoiled when she saw a length of apparently human hair, white-blond and luxuriant. From beneath the fall of hair projected a tiny pair of kidskin boots. A doll, Suzanne presumed, drawing back the sweep of hair to reveal a miniature hand, and then a face, with the poreless translucency of alabaster. The moulding and painting of the facial features were lifelike, yet theatrical. The emerald eyes slanted seductively. The mouth was a scarlet bow. This was no child’s toy, she realized. The face was that of a temptress, with a disconcerting “come-hither” look.

  She felt suddenly uneasy, as if she had stumbled upon the relics of some secret rite. She found herself irrationally resenting the potent, superior expression of the inanimate creature in the box. She grasped the figure round its middle, her fingers plunging through the thick hair. She realized she wanted to shake loose the power of this thing, as a wilful child would break open a rattle to see what it held. First, she felt the yielding nap of velvet. Then her entire hand was enmeshed in a lattice of strings and finely beaten wire. Pulling the figure from the box, she saw what her fingers had already told her. This green-clad lady was a marionette. The jointed body trembled in Suzanne’s hand, then went limp. But the proud head stayed erect, the small, white, sensual face confronting her with a knowing look.

  Suzanne lay the puppet full-length on the table, face up, and folded its tiny hands across its chest, so that it lay like a knight’s lady in effigy. There, you are quite dead now, she thought, and then immediately caught herself up for having involuntarily entered some kind of child’s playtime. Yet, she felt driven to see what else was in the box. Or more properly, who else.

  She lifted a layer of old patchwork quilting to reveal a second puppet. This one was a youth with hair of curling auburn silk. He wore a brown cap with a long tassel, a leather jerkin and dove-grey breeches tucked into knee-high boots. Strung across his shoulder was a tiny lute so that Suzanne understood he was probably a minstrel. Unlike the haughty lady, his face was open, impressionably young, like fresh bread on which a stronger will might imprint what it chose. He would be no match for the lady, Suzanne saw, but plummet like a sparrow caught by a hawk. She put him on the other side of the box, away from the temptress, so that he might have some respite.

  The third and last marionette (and no wonder, Suzanne thought, that he had been laid deepest) had an aspect so horrific she nearly dropped him. Slits of eyes peered out at her from behind matted hair. The visage verged on cadaverous. Charcoal accentuated the hollow cheeks, the flesh scooped out by some dark
inner obsession. Vengeance, Suzanne conjectured, or blood lust. For there were red stains on the puppet’s long dark cloak, and the crimson ribbons that streamed from his fingers showed only too graphically how much blood he had spilled. He looked as if he had a lair on the moors. She fancied she could smell the bog. By day, he crept under the great bell of his cape and pressed his face close to the sponge of rotting vegetation. It pleased her to pack him back in his wooden box and cover him again, willing his evil away.

  Could the puppets have belonged to one of Murdo’s children, she wondered. He had spoken so little of them. She knew their names: Jeremy, Callum, and Clara. “They have their own lives,” was Murdo’s succinct response when she inquired about them. “They visit about once a year.” She understood that he had let them go, and she questioned him no further. His children were adults moving in their own spheres, whom she might or might not meet. Yet here she was fingering puppets that had once been theirs. Perhaps it was because these were not ordinary toys – no ragged-eared Pooh Bears or hard-faced Barbies – that her curiosity was so stirred. These marionettes suggested fiery imaginations, deft fingers, bodily grace, and patience.

  She moved next to the smaller metal box and was surprised by her own fumbling when she undid the clasp. Did her awkwardness stem from guilt? Was she indeed violating something best left private?

  At first she thought the box was empty. But when she held the interior up toward the oil lamp, a slim manila envelope tumbled out. It was blank and unsealed. She untucked the flap and took out two photographs, black and white snapshots with a worn scalloped edge. Both showed the same young girl with fair chin-length hair. The face was pure Botticelli, Flora of La Primavera. A guileless face, as yet absolutely untrammelled by life. What the young woman projected, even in the fading snapshot, was the clear gaze of innocence. In one photo she stood in a long skirt and hip-length cardigan, hands folded in front, with the quiet air of a novice. In the other, she looked down at the baby in her arms. The child, wrapped in a lacy shawl, grasped a strand of the girl’s straight, pale hair.