‘Have you met with other witches in the dark and cast spells?’ he asked.
‘No. Never,’ I answered firmly.
‘Did you curse the child, Christian Shaw, and say that the devil would hurl her soul to Hell?’
That stopped me momentarily. I did not want to lie.
‘I said something similar in jest,’ I said warily. ‘Not a curse, no. It was on account of her telling her mother that I had stolen milk and I was putting some small fear into her for her precociousness. I meant no harm by it.’
When they asked me for my details, my age, my status and a history of my family, I was more hesitant.
‘I am seven months away from my twentieth year and I am married to a tailor back in the Highlands,’ I told them, lying about my husband’s true profession and whereabouts. ‘I am from Morven, Argyll, and my parents, Angus Campbell and Rose Campbell, born Kilian, are both dead. I have one sister in service to the Shaws and she will speak well of me.’
‘There you are mistaken.’ Brisbane smiled at me like a cat about to devour a mouse. ‘She is singing very sweetly against you, my dear.’
‘That is not true,’ I snapped, glaring into his eyes. ‘Isabel would not turn on her kin like that.’
‘She has told that you would often sneak out of your cot at night and not return for hours.’
I shut my eyes. My own sister. My own flesh and blood had turned on me. I knew she did it to protect herself and, given how a person accused of sorcery was treated, I could understand her fear. But I was hurt and felt truly alone in this world. I wondered at my only possible saviour; John Erskine secretly known as John Campbell. My beloved John had made me promise, with as much commitment as I had made to my vows of marriage, that I would not reveal the Jacobite plotters’ names, even under pain of death. He had promised me protection but he was little help to me far away in Clackmanninshire to the east. There was no way of sending word to John and yet I hoped that he would come for me and save me from this most awful sorry state. News would travel fast and, upon his return to Paisley, he would hear of it and know it to be true when he discovered his hearth was cold and his wife gone.
A week of questioning had left me feeling completely abandoned and alone. I cried for John during the long, bitterly cold nights. I missed his warmth and his laughter.
‘There are others here, now, being rounded up,’ Brisbane told me matter-of-factly one afternoon during questioning. ‘Your accomplices.’
‘Who?’ I asked.
Even before he answered me, I knew. I knew who was gaoled in this wretched tower along with me because I had heard the gaolers talking. They had Agnes Naismith in for questioning and the two Lindsay boys, all but vagrants, both, one a small child with bucked teeth and his older brother with a squint-eye. The children begged about town for scraps of food. Elizabeth Anderson was another; the blonde vacuous woman from the Jacobite crew and her father, the town drunk, were both rounded up for interrogation.
‘Farmer Lindsay, also,’ the man told me. For a brief moment I looked at him with a dumb but rebellious expression, afraid I might have given my surprise away.
‘He is a tenant farmer of the Shaws,’ I said in a level voice. ‘And nothing to do with me.’ I did not see where this might be leading, but it concerned me that three of my fellow Jacobites were among those apprehended. ‘Reverend Brisbane,’ I continued, sounding more courageous than I felt, leading the conversation away from the Jacobite farmer and my own complicacy, ‘I am not guilty of being a witch and I see by your face that you know it. You read from that pamphlet to Christian Shaw. I heard you. You put all this into her head. What was the place you told her of? With the other children all fitting and spitting up pins?’
My comments wiped the smirk from the clergyman’s face. I looked at him, this brimstone-bearing young reverend, and wondered if he was married. He had hair as dark as a raven’s and his eyes were just as dark as if he might have had a little Spanish mixed into his blood. His nose was long and pointed and his ears were one size too large for his head. I had made him suddenly guarded and I liked to think I had pricked his conscience. Aye, I relished the moment however fleeting.
‘Salem,’ he said solemnly and carefully. ‘Salem, Massachusetts, in the New World. They witnessed an outbreak of witches there too. You creatures are like the plague, popping up in flares. Mark my words, young woman, I will see you burn for this. You dare accuse me of the child’s possession.’
‘You read that pamphlet to the child, did you not?’ I asked him. I may have kept a rein on my own tongue while in service to the Shaws but my ears had become sponges soaking up others’ chatter. Before the Shaw girl had become a local circus act with her tricks being blamed on the devil and his witches, I had passed the parlour where the Reverend was reading a written account of what had happened in Salem when some young girls became bewitched by a coven of local witches who had cursed and possessed them. The girls, he had told the child, would behave in ways not explainable by medicine or nature. They would writhe and spit up all sorts of strange material and scream that the witches were visiting them invisibly, biting and pinching them. Not a month later, Christian Shaw was behaving the same way and accusing two people who had chastised her in the courtyard for being a rude and precocious brat. There was no witch flying about other than Christian Shaw, and the clergyman.
‘You will speak no more of this,’ Brisbane warned me in a voice that was both threatening and cold. ‘Perhaps, more to the point, wench, you were listening and decided to bewitch the child the same way. You have the devil in you and I mean to do battle with you.’
‘So that you can write about it in a pamphlet and find your own measure of fame as an author?’ I snapped back at him venomously.
‘You will confess to me,’ he demanded. ‘As Christ’s champion, I will have your confession even if I have to press it out of you.’
‘You will wait until there is snow in Hell before I will betray my own good Lord,’ I hissed.
‘You should be afraid.’ He smirked again.
‘I am afraid,’ I answered defiantly. ‘But not of you. I am afraid for your soul that you seem to have given over to the devil.’
With that, Brisbane ordered that a scold’s bridle be put on my head. Intended and designed to be worn by witches, scolding or nagging wives, or argumentative neighbours, the scold consisted of an iron framework in the form of a helmet-shaped cage that was placed by the gaoler over my skull. It was tight and had eye holes and an aperture for the mouth. At the front, protruding inwards was a small flat plate that rested on my tongue while the bridle was then locked around my neck. A sense of panic washed over me and I began to struggle as I felt that the tongue plate was studded with sharp pins, but I stopped still when I realised that any movement of my head or attempt to speak or complain meant the laceration of my tongue. Tears leaked down my cheeks, yet I could not wipe or scratch them away. For three hours I sat like that for the time that Brisbane was at luncheon.
PAISLEY
BUNDANOON, AUSTRALIA, PRESENT DAY
I study him, this man: my father. We sit, the cafe table between us, and sip our coffees with a guardedness that borders on paranoia. Neither of us knows quite what to say to break the stilted silence.
I go first.
‘I wanted to talk to you about Mum,’ I venture softly, licking the froth of milk from my lip. ‘I’m worried about her. She’s obsessing over tarot cards and I don’t think that’s really all that helpful.’
My father smiles. He is quite handsome when he smiles. Sometimes I can see why my mother fell for him.
‘She’s definitely one of a kind, your mother.’ He nods. ‘I have spoken to the local constable and she has promised to go and speak with the Hoopers and try to interview the boy. The police haven’t taken any of the other complaints seriously. They’re just copycat, attention-seeking locals trying to drum up some hysteria
. I’m looking at encouraging Kirsten to offer to close up shop and leave town. If she’s charged she’ll be out of work, and even if she isn’t, business will be badly affected.’
‘But if she leaves that makes her look guilty,’ I protest. ‘She wants her name cleared not be banished from her shop and home under a cloud of shame. That’s my house too! I don’t want to move again.’
We drift back into a pensive silence and I watch the passing parade of shoppers down the main street.
‘How are you coping at school?’ he asks. ‘Kids being okay? No bullying or getting a hard time of it?’
I shrug. ‘The kids aren’t too bad,’ I answer. ‘There’s one jerk but he’s nothing I can’t handle. The parents in Bundy are a different matter. They’re worse than the kids and someone spray-painted something awful on Mum’s shop. I got rid of it before she saw it.’
‘This sort of thing brings out the worst in people,’ he agrees. ‘It’s not unlike the old witch-hunts. One accusation can trigger an epidemic fuelled by fear. Contagious hysteria.’
The waitress brings my slice of cake: chocolate mud cake. It’s as heavy as a brick and so dark it’s almost black.
‘Does your mother have a special friend?’ my father asks awkwardly. ‘I just wonder if she has someone supporting her. I mean, other than you. Although I’m sure you’re being a real strength to her. Someone … special?’
I look up at him sharply, a mouthful of chocolate cake sitting in the side of my cheek. I wonder at the trickle of interest and can hear some discomfort in his voice, as if the discovery of a boyfriend might be a barb.
‘No,’ I mumble around the cake. ‘Mum has lots of acquaintances, people in the town who like her and have tea and stuff with her but not really anyone that she’d call a best friend. They’ve all disappeared. Dumped her. As far as support goes, I’m it.’
He nods. ‘You should come to Sydney and visit sometime,’ he says, stirring a sachet of sugar into his double-shot latte, without looking up at me. ‘If you want to. No pressure.’
I swallow the sugary mess in my mouth and blink, buying time before I find an answer without sounding cold.
‘Maybe,’ I say. I think back to the ghosts of visits past. My father and I would sit in enforced company wondering what to talk about. He was always half at work, speaking with clients at all hours of the day and night on the weekend and more than once he’d had to race off to file something at court or bail out a client from police custody, leaving me alone. His new wife, Antoinette, was French and did little to conceal her disregard for me. I was in the way and never really welcome.
‘How is … um … Oliver?’ I wait but my father does not respond. I look up at him and see that he is looking at the table, while he distractedly stirs his coffee for the umpteenth time.
‘Well, you see, Paisley,’ he says in a low and measured voice, ‘I’m on my own. Antoinette took Oliver back to Paris and I haven’t seen them for nearly two years. One year and eight months to be exact.’
I whoosh in a gulp of air to help me process this information. The new wife left him? Left him? It looks like my father might be about to cry. I sense his pain and am surprised to realise that it is one of the first times I have witnessed any emotion from him.
‘So what’s the plan with Mum?’ I ask, changing the subject, steering us out of the uncomfortable fog that hangs between us.
‘Honestly, Paise, I don’t think it will get to court,’ he says. I am relieved to hear it. ‘And if you have another issue like the graffiti, don’t wash it off. Call the police. That’s vandalism and harassment.’
I nod and realise he’s right. That would have been the best thing to have done.
‘But Mum won’t move or consider shutting up shop, and while I don’t believe in all her mumbo jumbo,’ I say, licking the last of the chocolate off my fingers like a toddler, ‘I do think she has the right to operate her shop and live in her own house and not be bullied out because of some bigoted old cow.’
My father grins broadly. ‘You’ve got your mother’s fire in you,’ he says, and he says it like it’s a good thing.
‘You do believe Mum, don’t you?’ I ask suddenly, the thought coming at me unbidden. ‘I remember once you told me that you didn’t care whether your clients were innocent or guilty, as long as they paid their fee they were as good as one another. You do believe Mum is innocent, don’t you?’
He flinches and gives a contorted look. ‘That was the wrong message to give you,’ he admits. ‘A foolish and immature defence-lawyer thing to say. I have probably defended and kept many guilty people out of gaol and that doesn’t always sit well with me but let’s not go there now. Bottom line is that I do believe your mother is innocent. No matter what happened between us and how things turned out, I know she is a good and decent person and would never hurt or betray anyone.’
‘But she left you,’ I say, watching him, gauging his reaction. ‘She left you before I was even born. She did that to you. Aren’t you the least bit angry with her? Or hurt?’
His face softens, the lines around his eyes melting a little and he runs a hand through his fair hair.
‘Yes, Paisley,’ he says, leaning in toward me, taking my hand in his, which feels supremely weird. ‘I was very hurt and I always thought she’d come back. For ten years I thought she’d come back. But she didn’t and I don’t blame her for leaving me. I cheated on her and broke her heart and I think that’s what drove her into all that new-age crazy stuff. I hurt her and I’ve never ever forgiven myself for that.’
I look down at his hand on mine and feel a sharp pain under my chin that heralds tears, but I bite down on my bottom lip to push it away. I look back up at my father and see that his eyes are glassy.
‘I didn’t know that,’ I say in a whisper. ‘She’s never told me that. She’s never said a bad word about you.’
‘That’s what I mean, Paisley,’ he answers. ‘She’s like that. She told me that she forgave me but that she couldn’t live with me without trust. She told me that she needs trust like she needs air and my selfish act had suffocated her. Now she’s being betrayed again by people she trusted. Your community. And I know that it is the one thing she can’t deal with.’
‘Why did Antoinette leave you?’ I ask.
‘Well, in a karmic turnaround, she left me for another man.’ He gives a sad smile of resignation. ‘She took Oliver on a holiday and never came back. Just sent me a text that it was over.’
We order another coffee and drink in silence, lost in our thoughts.
When we do leave and go back out on the street, Dad holds me tight and lifts my chin up so that I am looking into his square face.
‘You be there for your mum and I will do everything in my power to help her,’ he says. ‘I love you both very much and want nothing more than for you to be happy. That’s why I haven’t hassled you to come and visit. I didn’t want to make you do it if you didn’t want to. But I’m different these days, Paisley, and now I only work part-time. I’ve learned that there are more important things than work. And I would love you to come and visit.’
I watch my father drive off in his black sports car and realise that he is the loneliest man I have ever met. I think to myself that maybe I will go and visit him sometime. Perhaps under the stiff collar and crisp suit there is a person worth getting to know. He is, after all, half of me, so he can’t be all bad.
VERONICA
BAMBERG, FRANCONIA, 1628
Hans and I, through hacks of breath and floods of sweat, slowly and carefully brought Christoff inside the house on an old splintered sled and then carefully turned him onto a waiting quilt. We then dragged that quilt to a makeshift bed of cut straw covered in furs and hides and gently placed him on it. He made little complaint and knew as well as us that any sudden movement might see him bleed out under the skin. He spoke very little, only in small gasps, and still shive
red with the shock of his wound.
Frau Berchta was resting. She had hurt her hip by hastening to Christoff when she’d heard his shout. Her brave struggle through the pain was what saved the boy’s life as I would not have known what to do in my gasping panic. We let her sleep as Hans gently cleaned Christoff’s wound with vinegar while I brewed up a strengthening tonic for him and fussed about the cooking area.
At the heavy cauldron I skimmed the froth from the boiling garlic, inhaling the scent, hot and sweet, which burned in my nostrils and seemed to clear out the back of my throat, watering my eyes. I had already filled the injured lad with as much strong valerian as I could find to help him sleep, so that he might heal and quickly gain strength. Frau Berchta had told me that the first three days would be crucial and after that the chances were good that the tough ribbon of vein would hold. Christoff would need to stay off his leg for a few weeks, although the old woman told us we would need to roll his body and work his arms and lower legs to keep the blood flowing and prevent septic sores growing on his skin.
Hans and I had little sleep between us and we felt like thistles floating on the breeze, our heads often wilting to our chests. Over a meal of bread and hard cheese we remained quiet at the table, our thoughts about life crisscrossing invisibly between us as we stared down at our plates. In the hallowed silences I felt the presence of our parents. They hung like a gauze curtain between us always, bonding us and reminding us of our common root. I rubbed the crust of itchy fatigue from my eyes and pushed myself up to clean away our mess. The cottage was silent but for the whistle from Christoff’s broad nose as he slept. I collected the eggs and penned up the hens, fetched a pail of water for the laundry from the stream and stopped there, looking at the late pinking of the sky. A breeze blew across from the mountains and picked up the scent of the last of the lilacs while fanning my face and ruffling my hair, which fell loosely about my shoulders. I could smell snow on the horizon.
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