Haunt Me Still

by Jennifer Lee Carrell

  The magic in Macbeth, however, was the dark magic of witchcraft. Not Dee’s cup of tea at all. He was an intellectual, a strenuous defender of ritual or ceremonial magic as a learned and difficult process of invoking angels. There was a big difference between the intuitive, folklore-bound customs of witchcraft, or “low” magic, and the precise, complicated ceremonies of “high” magic. Even if Macbeth’s magic was a memory of some ancient pagan religion mislabeled as witchcraft, as Lady Nairn seemed to believe, why would that concern Dee?

  I began to pace the room, thinking of the magic in Macbeth.

  Double, double toil and trouble,

  Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

  The great cauldron scene involved witches cackling over a revolting brew of body parts. Not Dee’s sort of thing at all. On the other hand, the witches weren’t old village scolds, as witches on the English stage had always been before. Eerie and unearthly, they weren’t human at all. They were condensations of evil whispering on an ill wind. “Creatures of the elder world,” Shakespeare’s source had written. The weird sisters. The fairies. The witch-hunters, including King James, had believed such spirits to be demons.

  Maybe Macbeth was about demonic magic after all.

  Come to think of it, just as the witches finished stirring their grisly brew, Macbeth arrived and launched into one of his greatest speeches. I conjure you, it began. Rummaging about, I found my copy of the play and opened it to that scene. Macbeth’s words were usually taken to be metaphorical. But what if Shakespeare had meant it literally? What if Macbeth were donning conjuror’s robes, casting a circle? Enacting onstage the kind of rite Dee spent his life performing for real? No stage direction specified it, but stage directions were notoriously absent from Shakespeare’s plays.

  Secretes learned of a Scottish Witch, Aubrey had written. Legend made Elizabeth Stewart, Lady Arran, a witch, but Lady Nairn had called her ancestress a serious student of magic. In the renaissance, that meant conjuring, not casting love charms, much less worshipping a pagan goddess. The “Great Art” of conjuring had been thought of as an almost exclusively male pursuit. But surely not entirely: There had to have been women who’d tried their hand at it. Had Lady Arran? What if the rite Shakespeare had learned from her—if he’d learned one at all—had been high magic, not toads and newts in a stew?

  I read through the speech.

  I conjure you, by that which you profess,

  Howe’er you come to know it, answer me.

  The room felt suddenly icy. I made myself read on, the speech rising in passion and power as Macbeth worked himself up to challenge winds whipping the sea into a devouring monster, ripping out trees by their roots, hurling down churches and castles. Even till destruction sicken, he roared. Answer me.

  He was conjuring, all right. And what he wanted was what Odin wanted: knowledge. If Macbeth’s words were the remains of some magic rite, it was a rite demanding knowledge—ripping it at gale force—from demonic powers. What if the missing or altered magic in Macbeth wasn’t witchcraft at all, but a dark version of Dr. Dee’s wizardry?

  Dee had spent his life battling popular suspicions that he was a master of demons: that he invoked evil, not angels. All the more after a Scottish king with a penchant for witch-hunting had ascended the English throne. Surely, he’d have disapproved of this Scottish play, seeing it, perhaps, as a reflection of himself shadowed in a dark and possibly dangerous mirror.

  Pacing the room, I caught sight of my reflection in the dressing-table mirror, hands on my hips, forehead furrowed, my hair standing on end where I’d run my fingers through it. I looked like a witch myself, for heaven’s sake. This was ridiculous. Last night, I’d gone to bed wondering whether Shakespeare might have recorded some long-forgotten ancient rite. Tonight, I seemed to be flirting with the possibility that he was a spy and a magus. A man with two masters. And maybe a mistress.

  Call me Corra ravensbrook.

  I laughed darkly at my mirror-self. Aubrey, after all, wasn’t dependable as a historian. He’d been a great collector of anecdotes, but his stories—though fairly reliable as gossip—weren’t trustworthy as truth.

  All the same, my other self seemed to say, his note did harmonize with every other bit of evidence I’d run across: not only the Nairn family stories, but Ellen Terry’s letter. She, too, had heard about the rewrite that altered the magic. Aubrey just included more details—and why not? The page was undated, but most of his diary was from the late seventeenth century. He was closer to Shakespeare than Terry by roughly two centuries.

  The thought struck me: If Terry’s informant had been right about the revision of the play…had she also been right about the survival of a manuscript?

  I picked Aubrey’s page up from the table where I’d left it. What did any of this have to do with Birnam Wood and the deaths of Sir Angus and Auld Callie? At the bottom of the page, Shakespeare drove at Macbeth with his tree branch, glancing out at me with a sly, mocking smile: Who can impress the Forrest, bid the Tree unfix his earth-bound root? It was a phrase from the same scene of conjuring. Macbeth’s solution to one of the witches’ riddles: that he should never be conquered until Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane.

  Sir Angus had turned the phrase around: Dunsinnan must go to Birnam Wood. Still, he’d focused on the same subject of trees and forests and woods. Was this page what he had found? What he’d possibly been killed for? If that were the case, how did it come to be pinned to Auld Callie’s dress, with my name on it? More important, where was it pointing?

  It had to be pointing somewhere.

  Whatever secrets this page was hiding, they had to have something to do with that goddamned tree. But mid-joust, Shakespeare remained stubbornly mute.

  A loud, insistent knocking cut through my thoughts. Slipping the Aubrey into my copy of the play, I opened the door to find Lady Nairn, her face white with fear.

  “It’s Lily,” she rasped. “She’s gone.” She gripped my shoulder. “And so is the knife.”

  20

  “YOU THINK SHE’S headed to Edinburgh, for the fire festival?”

  She nodded. “I’ve called Ben. He’s got people out looking for her. But I’d like you to go, too. She likes you.”

  Not after tonight, I thought. “And you think Lily took the knife?”

  “She’s the only other person who knows how to get in the safe.” She set the edgeless knife in my hand. “She left this in its place. Take it. Maybe whoever wants the knife will take this in its stead.”

  I doubted it. Whoever wanted it wanted the real thing: What’s a ritual knife for but ritual?

  “Please,” said Lady Nairn, her heart in her eyes. “I’m an old woman. I’d just be in the way. But you and Ben…you have a chance to find her.” Her voice, shaky to begin with, dropped to a whisper. “I can’t lose Lily, too.”

  Ben was the last person I wanted to be anywhere near, tonight. But I had no choice. Grabbing my jacket and dropping the knife in its pocket, I took the keys she held out and hurried down to the car.

  It was a little over an hour’s drive into Edinburgh. Following directions I had from a brief, brisk conversation with Ben, I drove into the old city’s confusing warren of streets, turning left as we came to the Grassmarket, a wide, tree-filled, shop- and pub-lined boulevard. Up ahead, a line of sharply gabled stone buildings came to an abrupt end. I pulled up beneath the last building.

  Two men detached themselves from the building’s shadow, stepping quickly toward me. Ben and a shorter sandy-haired man. Ben opened my door; as I got out, pulling my jacket from the passenger seat, the other man ducked behind the wheel.

  Ben led me swiftly up a stairway clinging to the side of the building, bordered on the other side by a steep grassy slope. Far overhead, atop a ragged, jutting cliff, perched the castle, shining golden in the night, never taken, across a thousand years, except through treachery.

  “What’s the point, if you’ll pardon the expression,” asked Ben, “of slipping the real knife into the pe
rformance?”

  “Authenticity, according to Lily. She said it was Corra ravensbrook who put the notion into her head, though I’m not sure I trust her. The question is, just how authentic are we talking?”

  Something strange happens to blades that have drunk blood, Eircheard had said. They wake…. And some of them want more.

  “You brought the stage copy?”

  I patted my pocket.

  “She won’t want to take it.”

  “She won’t have a choice.”

  He’d had people out canvassing the performers for Lily, but no one could recall seeing her. On the other hand, the torchbearers painted their entire faces in bold black and gold, greasing and braiding their hair into outlandish shapes or tucking it into extravagant jesters’ caps. Our footsteps clattered on stone and cement, punctuating a thick ooze of worry. How far could one fifteen-year-old get along one several-block stretch of an old city? Even with a black-and-gold face, she shouldn’t be that hard to find.

  “The way Lily told me the story, it’s the Cailleach who’s supposed to carry the knife,” I panted. “My guess is that she’s probably sticking close to Sybilla.”

  “Hurry,” was all he said.

  Halfway up the hill, we came out onto another street angling slowly upward, left to right. Cutting across it, we ran up another stair, steeper and narrower. Sounds drifted down from above: flutes and drums and horns, cut by laughter and the occasional shout. And singing. At one point, I thought I heard soft footsteps behind and stopped, looking back.

  Below, I saw nothing but shadows moving in the wind.

  The Esplanade was writhing with revelers. There were fire breathers and fire dancers twisting batons of flame through the darkness, and drummers dressed in green crowned with wreaths of ivy and holly. Acrobats, jugglers, and leering devils milled about. The Winter Court stalked the fringes, cloaked in black, faces hidden beneath long-snouted wolf masks, howling at the swollen moon hanging high overhead.

  In the sort of simple color coding common in folk plays, the Summer Court was recognizable in greens and reds, all the colors of growth and harvest and fire. The Winter Court was mostly in black and gray. The Cailleach was blue and her ice maidens white.

  Where the street opened out of the parade ground, leading downward from the castle into the city, hundreds of people had lined the way, swaying and chanting: People are returning to the ancient ways. Lily’s phrase. Into this funnel, the players were slowly pouring themselves in a chaotic procession down the hill. Between the buildings and the police barriers that kept the onlookers out of the parade, both sides of the street were packed as far as I could see. Pushing our way through the crowd down to Parliament Square, where the main show would take place, would take hours, if it could be done at all. My heart sank.

  “Hurry,” said Ben again.

  “How? With wings?”

  “An angel is like you, Kate, and you are like an angel. But if you’re feeling less than celestial, we could try going as wolves in wolves’ clothing.”

  Instead of heading toward the street, he began edging around the back of the milling crowd, between the merriment and the castle. I called to him once, in confusion, but he didn’t hear. There was nothing for it but to follow.

  We skimmed around the back of the Esplanade in a gigantic half-circle. In the corner on the opposite side, we came to a low wrought-iron fence in front of a white-and-black half-timbered house. A policeman stood in front of the gate. Seeing Ben, he opened it and stood aside, and we ducked along a short pathway and into the house.

  A scullery opened into a large old-fashioned kitchen. In the middle of the room, two piles of clothing lay on a long table once painted blue. Atop each pile perched a long-snouted papier-mâché mask: the head of a wolf.

  “How’d you get these?”

  Ben shoved one pile toward me. “Everything has its price. Even a place in the festival. Just ask Sybilla.” Pulling off his shirt, he started to dress in the clothes from the other pile.

  We each had a long-sleeved shirt, trousers, and a cloak, all in black. Just before donning the mask, I drew Lady Nairn’s unsharpened knife from my jacket pocket and tucked it into my belt beneath the cloak.

  21

  BY THE TIME we emerged transformed into wolves, the Esplanade had largely cleared. The Cailleach and her ice maidens had gone before we arrived. Now Eircheard and his Summer Court had gone as well, and the Winter Court, led by Jason, was well on its way. I could just see antlers in the distance. As we stepped outside, Ben leaned over to me. “If you find her, or you run into trouble, come back here. Or to the front entrance off ramsay Lane…you know where that is?”

  I nodded, and my three-foot snout nearly upended me.

  “That’s where the car’ll be,” said Ben.

  “Are you planning on skipping?” I asked.

  In answer, he threw back his head and howled a challenge to the night, loping into the crowd. The road was lined with torchbearers. Ben took the one side, and I took the other, scanning their faces. Behind the barrier, the crowd was twenty deep in places, swaying and chanting so that the whole street reverberated with their words: People are returning to the ancient ways.

  Except for taking videos on their mobiles and posting them to Face-book, I thought.

  I searched every black-and-gold face on the way down but saw no sign of Lily.

  What had she got herself into? That she was involved in Auld Callie’s death I would not believe. That she’d been swept up by others whose passions were less innocent was entirely possible. Corra ravensbrook, for one. Lily had told her about the knife, and it was ravensbrook who seemed to have convinced her that inserting it into this festival would be a fine turn of events. Who was she? A bored housewife, Lady Nairn had scoffed, but I doubted it. Could she have some connection to Lucas Porter?

  Around us, other members of the Winter Court were infiltrating the crowd from behind, as winter creeps gradually into summer, sneaking through the crowd and out into the procession from the closes, the narrow, winding alleyways that cut steeply down between buildings from the top of Castle Hill all the way to its feet.

  Ahead, to my left, a wolf howled behind the crowd, and the crowd eddied and seethed, people turning in all directions, as the separation between performers and audience melted. At the edge of the scrum, I thought I saw a flip of red hair above a black-and-gold torchbearer’s costume, and then the crowd closed around her.

  I pushed my way over, and the crowd enveloped me, too. It was densely packed; I caught snatches of German, Spanish, and something that might have been Russian, along with broad Scots. Three women on stilts ducked through the close behind, their costumes the pale flowing blue and white of ice, glittering with crystals and sequins. Behind them, a puppet fifteen feet tall unfolded through the doorway: a wraith with a twisted face, its skirts of white and silver silk whirling over the crowd like a billowing veil.

  A voice cold as winter spoke in my ear. “Walk away, Kate.”

  Who knew me, in this mask? Who knew my name? I twisted the wolf’s head to see an old man watching me with watery blue eyes. He was gaunt and a little bent; what remained of his close-shaven hair was gray.

  “Who are you?”

  His dry laugh faded into a cough. “A messenger. You’re better at giving direction than taking it, aren’t you?”

  Suddenly, I recognized him. In the flaring darkness, his body ravaged by illness, he looked more like a figure of Death than the golden man I’d seen in pictures from his glory days in Hollywood.

  “Lucas Porter,” I said, stepping toward him, but hands caught me from behind, pinning my arms at my back, holding me where I was. One of the stilt-women bumped into me. As I stumbled, my mask was lifted off and passed into the whooping crowd, bobbing from hand to hand like a trophy.

  Lucas stepped close, and for a moment I thought he’d seen the knife at my belt and meant to take it. Instead, he slid his cheek in along mine in a sensual move that made me flinch. “We’ve ta
ken what you would not give.” His voice in my ear was harsh and rasping as a sibyl’s, devoid of emotion, which somehow made the light touch of his skin against mine worse. “Now she must die.”

  “Who?” I jerked back, but the hands behind me only tightened their grip. Around us, the crowd jostled and milled, the stilt-women danced, and the puppet wraith whirled, its skirts twirling overhead like a huge parasol.

  “Begin to doubt the equivocation of the fiend that lies like truth…. Either Lily will die, or you will.” He stepped back, a serpent’s cold smile on his face. “Walk away, Kate. This isn’t your story.”

  “It’s not Lily’s, either.”

  His eyes were dark pools of hatred. “She was born into it.” There was a crack and a sharp cry, and the puppeteer stumbled and fell to the ground. Fifteen feet of puppet sighed and collapsed, its silver skirts slowly settling over the crowd like the fall of a parachute. As it slipped over my face, the hands holding me let go.

  By the time I worked my way free, Lucas was gone. Someone else grabbed my elbow and I spun, jerking away. It was another wolf, holding my wolf’s head in its hands.

  “Jesus, Kate,” said Ben’s voice.

  “What happened?”

  “He’s here,” I panted. “Lucas.”

  “You saw him?”

  “He delivered a message.” It stuck in my throat. “Either Lily will die. Or I will.”

  Ben gripped my shoulder, steadying me. “Are you all right?”

  I grabbed my mask from him, settling it back on my head. “We have to find Lily.”

  We reached the main stage down in the square before St. Giles’ Cathedral just as the revels of the Summer Court reached their climax: red and green people gyrating around each other in squealing decadence, tumblers bouncing through the air, giants swaying on stilts, fire batons swinging flame through the night.