Hexenhaus

by Nikki McWatters

  Nikki McWatters has had an adventurous life from television acting to working for a billionaire to being homeless and living in a tent with her young family. The one constant in her life has been her passion for the written word. After completing a law degree in 2009, she changed her mind about her career direction and dared herself to follow her dream of becoming a published author. After a shortlisting at the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards exactly one year later in 2010, followed by a memoir published in 2012, a young adult novel Sandy Feet (under Nikki Buick) in 2014 and a new one ready to go in 2016 … she finally feels like she’s on the right path. She is a writer and loving it.

  nikkimcwatters.wordpress.com

  For Grandma

  VERONICA

  BAMBERG, FRANCONIA, 1628

  It was a warm day in August when they burned my father at the stake. Our house sat a little way back from the cathedral square, perched near the river, right in the busiest part of Bamberg. From my bedroom window I could see the four towers of the imperial church dedicated to St Peter and St George, a magnificent bundle of stone and glass. The sun was high in the sky and I heard some noise filtering across to where I sat by the window. The carts were bringing condemned witches and other criminals to the square outside the church for the burnings and beheadings. This always made my face prickle with cold as I remembered my mutti who had taken her final breath in the square. My papa awaited the same fate. I shut my eyes and recalled the booming voice of the Bishop weeks before shouting from the pulpit that he ‘would not suffer a witch to live’ and he followed through on that threat every Sunday.

  The windows and doors of our narrow house were all gaping wide, letting in the whisper of breeze to cool us. Hans was in the kitchen with Kristina, his nurse, eating a lunch of sausage and sauerkraut. I had no appetite and was at the window box in the sitting room, feeling the sweat trickle beneath my arms, when the sound of the bells came drifting through the heat to my ears and the noise of people, the mob, a cruel rabble, cheering for the latest dispatch of a witch or murderer.

  I could see through the doorway to where Hans was pushing the slop of spiced and salted cabbage around on his platter, doing all he could to prolong the agony of ploughing it into his mouth. Hans enjoyed sausage, though, and it was with love that Kristina and I had made them not long after they took Papa away for questioning. After the crops failed last harvesting season and the animals suffered from lack of grain, we were lucky to get the meats at the price we did, and with Papa gone and no wage coming in, the pantry would be bare enough soon.

  ‘For all the time we put into them,’ Kristina smiled, ‘the boy makes short work of it.’

  ‘I’d rather more sausage and less cabbage,’ Hans groaned.

  Kristina ruffled Hans’s hair and smiled at him as a mother might. Hans was the only living boy in our family. Three buried before and after him. My small, slight brother with butter-blond hair falling over his face, cornflower-blue eyes and knobbly knees that bunioned so prominently on his scrawny eight-year-old legs; a boy who had, up until our father was taken, a blazing future as the son of the Burgermeister, Johannes Junius, with a handsome house and good strong blood.

  ‘That cabbage is spiced with laurel leaves, juniper berries and apple.’ I frowned. ‘Best in Bamberg. Good for your innards. Now eat it up.’

  Kristina was small with dark hair and a kindly face. Older than Mutti but younger than Papa, her husband had left her penniless when he’d been killed in a tavern brawl and she had come here to Bamberg looking for work. She had been with us, cooking, cleaning and watching over us, for seven years and some months.

  I saw a shadow fall across the threshold. The Jesuit priest appeared at our kitchen door, a dip between his dark brows, his hands falling limply by his sides, a book in one. I recognised him. Father Friedrich Spee.

  ‘They’ve done it,’ he said sombrely. ‘They’ve carried out the sentence. His soul has been set free, Veronica.’

  It was a hammer coming down hard upon me. There had been no warning. I knew it was coming but not so sudden, so brutal with its abrupt trickery. Kristina’s face drew pale and I swayed on my feet, my fists curling into white, and I felt as if I had drifted outside of everything with only my dull throbbing heart to keep me tethered to the room. They had burned my father like a suckling pig. I turned back to the window box and could still hear the roar from people in the square, the lingering peal of the bells, hollow in my ears. I moved toward the priest, crossing the kitchen floor. The windows looked out to the street where I could see people moving quickly toward the square. There were always three or four burnings; sometimes at a time. People were scrambling to find out who was for cooking that day: a neighbour, friend or foe. A sharper gust of air whisked through the narrow lane and caught my pale hair, and I wondered if it wasn’t my father’s ghost, passing by on his way to the Kingdom of God or to Hades below.

  ‘I smuggled a letter out,’ the priest said softly, gently. ‘I hope it brings you some comfort, Veronica.’

  He moved through the doorway to the sitting room and pulled out a folded parchment from inside his Bible. It looked like two sheets pressed against one another. My face was clammy and I tasted the bitterness of bile beneath my tongue. Footsteps thudded past as young lads ran toward the execution pen. I could smell smoke, a sickly sweet odour that prickled in my nostrils. It was a common stench these days with the Hexenbischof, Johann George the Second, Fuchs von Dornheim, the Prince-Bishop of Bamberg, on a crusade to weed out the three thousand people who allegedly met at Haups-Moor to dance with the devil. My stomach cramped and my cheeks tingled. My father was dead. Burned, like my mutti before him. Hans and I were orphans. I was just seventeen. We were the children of two convicted witches, Rosa and Johannes Junius. Our lives were in danger.

  ‘Veronica. The letter. I gave the guard a thaler for it as requested by your father.’

  I followed him and stared at the papers, folded once, tucked inside one another. The priest’s fingers were long and white with sparse dark hairs sprouting from his knuckles.

  ‘Your father’s hands were damaged by the thumb-screws and he took more than a week to write it,’ he explained while I tried to fathom his words. ‘He gave it to a guard who handed it to me when I went to pray with your father this morning.’

  ‘You prayed with him?’ I asked, feeling the sting of tears in the corners of my eyes, knowing that Papa’s requests for a priest had been denied before.

  ‘They had broken him and he was no longer the robust Burgermeister we all knew so well,’ he said sadly. ‘But he was resigned to his fate and he will be with your dear mother, Rosa, now. I heard his confession.’

  I pressed my lips together.

  ‘He was no witch,’ I said defiantly, though my voice wobbled. ‘I saw what they did to him. Did he cry out … was it quick?’

  Kristina had gone to Hans who was finally beginning to understand what the priest was saying. She kneeled beside him and held his hands.

  ‘It was quick enough and he did not cry out but he renounced the devil and that is well. Quick enough.’

  I shut my eyes, trying to block the image that sprang to my head but it was too late. The flash of my father burning, melting, wedged in and stuck like a deep splinter. I had once seen a woman burned in the square. Kristina and I had been coming home from market and she had tried to shelter me, pushing me along, but it was right there in front of us. The woman had fallen from the stake and lay on the ground writhing, her bare, blistering arm outstretched and trembling. A guard had pushed the arm back into the flames, using a pitchfork that he quickly threw into the flickering fire as he realised that a self-confessed witch had touched the implement. The smell was un
forgettable: acrid smoke and rancid burning fat and the suffocating odour of burned hair, straw and wood and blood and bone.

  ‘You must have someone go to the Hexenhaus gate to collect his certificate of death. Hide that letter well now, child,’ the priest said gently. ‘And do not go about proclaiming his innocence or you, too, may be looked at by the inquisitors. He confessed his allegiance with Satan. They have his confession in writing.’

  The last time I had seen my father had been some weeks prior. He had been tortured the first time by then. Thumb-screws followed by leg-screws, and he told me his fingers had burst around the nails like squashed sausages. I looked at the sausage on the table and bit down hard on my bottom lip. He had asked back then that Kristina bring his food and clean laundry as he did not want me to see him in pain, his body marked by scabs and bruises. He had also asked Kristina to bring parchment, ink and some tallow to have light by. I should have predicted the impending death when the guards began turning her away sometime the previous week, saying that the rules had changed and that the prisoners were no longer allowed family visits.

  ‘The Hexenbischof has taken possession of your father’s estates and his men will be here within days to evict you,’ the tall man said sadly. I heard Kristina gasp. ‘Do you have kin close by?’

  I nodded, although it was not the truth. My aunt and uncle did live nearby on the other side of the River Regnitz. We could not go there as Dr and Mrs Braun, who also lived in the area, were my father’s mortal enemies. The doctor had been instrumental in the first round of my father’s tortures.

  I would collect all we had of value, take our last horse and the cart and take Hans to Würzburg where my mother’s widowed sister lived with her children. My heart was thumping with sadness but I had already given thought to this day, knowing it would come upon us, but still, until the priest’s visit, we had all hoped for some reprieve. Some small mercy. My father had served Bamberg for twenty good years as a councillor and as Burgermeister.

  After the priest left, we all wept together. Kristina went to collect my father’s ragged clothes and his certificate of death. Burned at the stake until life departed him. A condemned witch. A maleficus diabolos.

  Later on that long, hot night, by candlelight, I opened my father’s letter. Each word felt like a hot poker. I cried softly, not wanting to let my brother hear me as I read about the unbearable tortures he had endured, to extract the confession of witchcraft from him. As the son and daughter of two burned witches, Hans and I would need to be careful. The accusation that we may be the children of Lucifer could be the tiny ember that the Hexenbischof needed to fan.

  I made a silent promise to my dead parents, as I folded the letter away, that I would protect Hans and get him safely away from Bamberg. Hans was all I had left and his life became my new reason for being. They may have burned Mutti and Papa and half the city’s men, women and children but they would never, ever touch my brother.

  KATHERINE

  RENFREWSHIRE, SCOTLAND, 1696

  This is my story. I am Katherine Campbell, and although I lived my life in such a manner that I should have slipped away forgotten, just another country Scotswoman born to simple highland folk with no greater skill at my fingertips than churning butter, fate decreed that I might be remembered, if only in hushed whispers, for something much more sinister. I was no queen or astrologer or writer, nay, not anything so grand. I would be remembered forever as a witch.

  In the gentle hills of the Highlands, its beauty marred from time to time by the bloodshed of warring men, I lived a simple life. I was nineteen years of age when I came to dwell, through grieving circumstance, in the central midlands outside of Glasgow down past the township of Paisley, to Bargarran. The time I lived in Bargarran was a strange and bewildering time. Dominating the villages and small farming tenancies, was a terror barely conceivable to me. The people in the narrow laneways lived in constant fear of a neighbour’s curse; the beggars sold magic charms to protect households from evil, in exchange for salted meats; the women whispered that soured sheep’s milk sprinkled by a warlock had saved the laird’s crops; a field of corn gone to rot was the work of the devil; and the bedrooms were hung with crucifixes and garlic to keep away the grim man in black. The peasant feared witches, the priest feared witches, the whole clergy and aristocracy feared them. Even the king and queen were terrified of the dreaded witches. Up until this time I had never heard of this thing, the witch. Of water kelpies and mermaids and water sprites I knew much, but nought of the witch.

  In 1696, when my tale begins, the spell of a particularly fiendish terror had settled in the small estate of Bargarran. And it was here that I was to make my home. Unwittingly I walked into a briar’s nest, aye, right into the very thick of it.

  I had known terror. It had been hammered into my bones. The fiendish Robert Campbell of Glenlyon had slaughtered our da as he slept under the stars and then, less than three years later, he had cut my mother down in a paddock as we all fled from our burning house. My granaidh and I had lived quietly in the lower rooms of an abandoned castle for almost a year until she, too, passed. My sister, Isabel, had long gone into service and was saved from the sting of witnessing the ordeal of our mother’s death. I had hidden with Granaidh behind a grumble of rocks and seen the brutal butchering of my mammie, her body dismembered and then set alight. When Granaidh’s spirit went a’wandering, there was nothing left for me but to pack up and head south into service with my sister. I prayed that the close company of Isabel would take away the nightmares and offer me the promise of a new life. It was with this hope in my breast that I arrived at the front gate that was decorated with creeping roses, with an archway of apple blossoms above.

  Bargarran House was the seat of the Shaw family. The mansion stood three storeys high, nested with attic rooms and annexed by some inferior cottages and working buildings. The whole compound was enclosed by a wall of some fortitude that may have offered defence during the many years of religious warring that had only recently brought the Reformation and shifting power at state level. It sat atop a hill and looked out over the paddocks tenanted by the local farmers, green hills and purple-heathered moorlands peppered with peat bogs and scented with the briny swell of the wide brown river. Wisps of smoke from the wood fires spiralled into the pale mauve skies. The earth was hard and the shire, along with most of the country, was facing a famine.

  I arrived at the house, little more than a girl, looking for domestic work. It was May and one of the warmest days of the year to date. The vixens were just nudging their cubs from their dens and purple buds had opened to cool themselves. I looked forward to seeing my sister again and was filled with the hope that my new home would bring with it some fresh happiness.

  To look at me, there was nothing that suggested I was the devil’s servant. I was not especially beautiful, nor wide of hip nor too scrawny. I stood at the front door of the manor house and tried to tidy my unruly hair beneath my bonnet, and wiped my boots on the back of my stockings, one at a time, to polish off the flecks of dirt.

  From my first glance at Laird John Shaw – indeed, from the first breath that smelled of whisky or ale or a combination of both, I could tell he was a stern man and someone I would do well to obey at all times. John Shaw was about fifty years of age. He had a nobleman’s body: stocky, soft and running to fat. His dark hair was greying and his eyes were small in a ruddy pudding of a face. His lips were wet and there was no warmth in his welcome. ‘You’ve come at your sister’s recommendation, Katherine,’ he said gruffly. ‘See I don’t regret this kindness.’

  And so the wild, feisty spirit that I’d inherited from my good mammie was brought to heel. Not once did I slip up and answer back sharply when chastised or overburdened by work. With every new day, I would swallow my contempt and lay aside, as coins saved or acorns stored, my defiant airs. I remained tough, stoic and uncomplaining, tending to the gathering of kindling, the sorting of the lard
er and weevil sifting, the scrubbing and laundering, and the tending to the house sheep that were bursting with milk in the lead-up to the next wave of lambs. Many times I felt the fire in my belly wanting to cuss and shout down the laird or his lady, but I knew my surly temper might see me and my sister booted back out onto the street. Isabel and I were all the kin we had left in the world and it was good to be working shoulder to shoulder again after time apart. She was three years my senior. Isabel had always been a fine example of domesticity, diligence and obedience; quite the opposite of me but you’d not have known it to see me work with such restraint at Bargarran. Not once did I complain about the frugality or blandness of the staff meals. In the evenings, I went to my quarters, meekly, wedged into a space no bigger than my cot, where I kept the silhouette of my beloved granaidh on my wall and a worn black leather Bible under my hard pillow and the family book in a small chest. There I slept on a mattress filled with straw, packed down tight from the countless other bodies that had pressed into it before me. The floorboards were rough and cold.

  Laird John Shaw lived at Bargarran with his wife and six young children, the youngest having only just mewled her first cries on this earth. His eldest daughter, Christian, had barely glanced my way, although I had loosely observed her to be a precocious child with a wilful temper, not unlike myself at the same age of ten or eleven years. Her life was much softer than mine had been but I could see in her eyes the same wildness, the same desire for something bigger than she had around her. We both had fire in our blood.

  At eleven I had lived in a small farming lot of a decent rod-size, many miles north in the Highlands. There among the hills and dells I enjoyed a simple life, playing with livestock and taking to the raw, bleak hills, and then playing in the shadows of Kinlochaline Castle, known in the old tongue as Caisteal an Ime or the Castle of Butter on account of the legend that the lady of the castle had paid its builder with butter equal to the volume of the building. The old castle had been abandoned some years earlier and was a right fancy place to explore with all its rooms and staircases, although my mammie warned us that parts of the place had been burned out and were not safe.