Hexenhaus

by Nikki McWatters

  After Hans helped Christoff to pass water, I emptied the pot and then stoked up the fire a little to quell the creeping cold. Afterwards I crawled up to my bed and slept the sleep of a dead woman.

  The next day Christoff had a fever.

  I woke to feel my face still puffy with sleep. It was late and the morning was already pearl grey, the clouds dense and opaque, their bellies sodden with rain. I lay there for a few moments, cracking open my slumber, turning my head to look out the window that I had forgotten to pull the shutters onto before sleep. Outside the wind wailed through the tops of fir trees and the clouds skated by gracefully like dark men on an iced pond. I stared back up at the rafters and saw a mouse scurrying along, stopping and starting until he disappeared into a dim shadow. I could hear pots and shuffling from downstairs and, after pulling the heavy, mist-moist wooden shutters closed, I strapped up my boots and threw on a shawl. I crept downstairs, looking back across to where my brother still slept with only his lopsided thatch of lemon-coloured hair poking above the thick swab of quilts.

  ‘The boy is feverish,’ Frau Berchta whispered harshly, and, in my morning daze, I felt that it was directed at me as if I had somehow been responsible.

  One look at her gentle face told me that I was mistaken. She was busy brewing up potions and drawing salves to pull the poison from the wound. She had collected ivy and oak. She pressed me to give the boy juniper berries to chew on until they dissolved on his tongue.

  ‘For his pain,’ she explained.

  Poor Christoff was groaning, his face was the colour of a radish and his dirt-stained skin was slick with sweat. I held his head and urged him to chew the seeds but he seemed to not know who I was.

  ‘His mind will wander while his body fights off the poison,’ the old woman murmured as she went to the patient and examined the wound.

  I looked over her stooped shoulders, feeling helpless, and gritted my teeth at my handiwork: a mess of angry gnarled stitches, heaving and falling over his thigh like a jagged mountain range. Red streaks filtered out like bloodied spider webs and the skin around the wound was swollen and shiny with bloat.

  ‘We need some strong raw honey and may need to lightly bleed him,’ Frau Berchta said softly. ‘I can apply the herbs I have and smoke the room with some strong fumes to help the pain, but that will send us all into dreaming.’

  ‘The honey is filled with ants,’ I told the woman.

  She looked up at me, her eyes crinkling and her thin lips straight.

  ‘You will need to collect a small piece of honeycomb from a wild hive,’ she told me.

  I had always been terrified of bees. I was bitten once and the sting had been so painful I could recall it vividly, even many years later. I did not relish the thought of taunting them by stealing from their hive.

  ‘I ... I don’t know how and I wouldn’t know where to look,’ I stammered.

  ‘Take Hans,’ she said as she pushed the gauze poultice against Christoff’s mended gash, causing him to groan and roll. ‘There are many hives in the trunks of trees. You will hear them. Be still and listen for their song. Just cut away a small piece of honeycomb.’

  I gave a shudder and nodded up to Hans as he made his way down the stairs.

  The woods were heavy with shadows. With a few slices of salted mutton in our bellies we were feeling brisk and hopeful.

  ‘It feels like snow’s coming,’ I told Hans, and he gave a nod.

  ‘I smell it, too,’ he answered. ‘You can almost taste it, like the taste of metal or iron.’

  I had not thought of that but agreed with my brother, trying to remember how we knew, both of us, what metal tasted like.

  Winter had crept up a little early that year and was kneading its frigid fingers into my limbs, pushing hard enough to get into my bones. A moderate wind was stirring the leaves and we walked beneath the creak of trees and the sigh of boughs.

  We found our bees in a little clearing surrounded by a temple of oaks. With a short-bladed knife, Hans reached in and cut away a square of honeycomb, dripping and sticky. With a stab of sadness I remembered how much my father had loved honey on his bread. We gave thanks to the bees and just as we returned to the quiet gloom of the forest the first flakes of sleet brushed our cheeks making them shiny and pink. The light that accompanied the first snow bathed the woods in shards and flickers of gold and silver. I stopped to catch my breath, sitting for a moment on a mossy tree stump until the damp chill pushed me back up.

  By the time we reached the meadow leading down to the cottage, there was a thin veneer of white gloss over the grass and dirt, and the stream had darkened to the colour of chilled steel.

  ‘Knock the snow off your boots,’ Frau Berchta instructed upon our return.

  The room was warm and airless. I sensed immediately the string of fear tightly wound about the place.

  ‘He is weakening,’ the old woman said wearily. ‘I have tried everything. Veronica, I am old and tired but you are strong and you must use the natural healing powers that run in your veins.’

  I did not know what she spoke of. Natural healing? I had learned much since I had come to the woods about potions and herbs that the earth provided to salve and ease physical burdens. There was a great deal of wisdom in the petals and roots of plants, and the phases of the moon and sun and planets.

  ‘When you are a mother, you feel your child’s pain, you sense exactly what he or she needs,’ she told me quietly, putting her withered hands on my damp shoulders. ‘It is in our bellies always. You must harness it, let it move through you. You must see this boy as your child and help him.’

  It sounded like nonsense that I should be Christoff’s mother. He was older than me by almost a year. And my feelings for him had grown and they were not maternal.

  ‘Talk to him,’ she whispered to me. ‘Weave him the will to live. Listen to him. Heal him. Sometimes there is one thing a person needs to heal and that one thing is different for everyone.’

  With that, Frau Berchta climbed beneath the coverlets on her bed. I was left with a turf fire burning on the grate and the blanket of fever in the musky air. I could hear the geese lumbering through the sky above the cottage, the whistle and thud of their wings against the hiss of snow. I made a honey and dried lemon rind drink for Christoff and took it to him. My mother often brought Hans and I honeyed milk at night to help us sleep. I missed her so much but felt her presence in the woods with us.

  Christoff was hotter than the fire but Frau Berchta had said it was best to heat the fever out rather than cool it.

  ‘The body wants to burn the poison and it’s a battle between the boy’s internal oven and the venom of his wound. Only one will win and it will win the battle in the next night and day,’ she had told me before retiring.

  ‘Mother, is that you?’ the boy mumbled. ‘I can’t see you. I’m so cold.’ He began to speak deliriously, muttering feverish words, speaking of things both wise and foolish.

  ‘I am a woodchopper and wood is greater than gold,’ he stuttered and slurred. ‘Wood for burning fuel, for fires, for cooking, for building houses and chairs … prince and peasant … they all need wood.’

  ‘Yes,’ I told him. ‘Yours is a noble profession, Christoff. Without your strong arm and axe we would freeze out here in the woods and have no shelter.’

  ‘And carts and wheels and fences,’ he raved.

  ‘Yes, these are all important,’ I said, running a hand over his burning brow, wiping back the blood-red tendrils of hair from his sticky skin.

  I thought about his words and realised that we did not possess a single nugget or grain of gold here in the cottage in the middle of the woods. We did not have fine beaded clothes or strings of pearls. Here in the middle of a green swirling leafy forest, in a wide meadow with our gentle burbling stream, we were happy and wanted for nothing but a basket of potatoes and a good brew of tea. We were
living as snug as meadow mice and it was mostly on account of wood. Christoff was right. If it weren’t for wood, we would not be able to live. I sat on a cushioned chair beside him and ran my hand over its smooth polished arm.

  ‘Susanna?’ he cried out. ‘Susanna. Where are you, my beautiful Susanna?’

  I felt a knuckle of surprise knock against my temple at his words. Susanna?

  It had never occurred to me that Christoff might have a sweetheart. I felt a sudden wave of disappointment.

  ‘I would give my life for you, Susanna!’ he cried. Hot bubbles of wet squeezed out over his rabid cheeks and he began to shudder and shake. ‘Susanna.’

  I had only just begun to think of Christoff in a romantic way, so I was startled to find that I entertained a fierce envy for this unknown girl. It was quite ridiculous. I had dreamed once that Christoff had kissed me. It had been a nice dream. But I had no claim on his heart.

  I made Hans and myself some salted fish, the flesh so tart it made my eyes water and I sent my little brother to bed, telling him to pad wadding against the shutters to stop the snow leaking in. The curtains over the shutters in the main room made melancholy gestures as they swished around a sudden sneaking gust. Outside I could hear the bluster of ice whirling about.

  In the closed-up haven of the cottage, I sat by candlelight watching over Christoff Kilian and prayed. There seemed to be little else I could do. His eyes would flutter and then snap open and his skin was as slick and shiny as a fish.

  ‘Susanna, save me,’ he rasped, and when a fresh draught blew out all the tallow candles my belly leapt and my heart turned over in my chest. I relit one from the hearth and looked at Christoff. The one thing he needed to cling to his lifeblood was his Susanna and I knew, then, that I would set off before the sun awoke and go to Ebrach to find her, even if it meant that my heart might break a little.

  KATHERINE

  RENFREWSHIRE, SCOTLAND, 1697

  After two weeks of fruitless questioning, the commission into the witchcraft scandal in the district around Paisley and centred at Bargarran Manor, decided to bring the accused witches face to face with the possessed girl Christian Shaw. Along with a chain of others, I was roped onto the back of a cart, made to sit and then clattered over the hills and curves of bridges to the manor house.

  The new year had brought with it the sting of winter. There had been only a handful of snowfalls, but the air was thin and hard and the curling winds had razor-sharp teeth. The cold wormed into my bones. I looked from the wooden rim of the cart to the dark yellow of the fields and the briny black of the river and its streams. I tried not to think too hard about my fate, my lost love and my terrible condition as I gazed at the patchwork of paddocks dotted with the splodges of dirty sheep. The clean smell of rain hung in the air along with the scent of whispering sedge. A flock of wild snow geese honked from on high.

  The other prisoners were grey-faced, no thoughts washing over them, just the grim, empty-eyed stares of the condemned. Some faces were familiar while others I had never laid eyes on before. I knew Elizabeth Anderson and the Lindsay boys as well as the farmer and old Agnes. We rattled up the path leading to the house, the guardsman driving the horses and shouting out a guttural whoa to pull them up.

  We were shambled out of the cart and up into the house where they sat us on a row of readied milking stools in the parlour as the Shaws did not want their good cushioned chairs to be sullied by the devil’s servants.

  I had my irons removed first and was summoned to the upstairs bedroom, chaperoned by a short, squat guard with few teeth. My heart felt crushed in my chest like a bird held tight, unable to flap its wings. My breath was shallow.

  Down the dim narrow corridor I was marched and the doorway opened into the girl’s bedchamber. I looked about the spacious room to the people lining the walls. On a comfortable winged chair, Laird John Shaw sat beside his wife. He was scribbling in a large bound book. He looked up and cast a glance at me. I stared back at his claret-coloured nose and eyes buried beneath bloated cheeks, as shiny as if he’d rubbed them with mutton fat. I had swept and dusted and plumped the feather pillows and quilts in the room more times than I was able to count. The room was familiar, the girl in the bed not so much.

  Christian Shaw was no longer the pretty, perfectly groomed little princess of the manor. She was a ghost of that child. Her skin was bone white, almost as pale as her frilled nightdress and sheets, and sunk into her face were two bruises for eyes and a small mouth with cracked and dried little lips framing it. I felt like I had been slapped. The girl looked half-dead, smaller than her younger sister, thinner than the beggar bairns that roamed the village streets and slept in the pauper house.

  ‘Good day to you, Christian,’ I said in a voice that came out as small and reedy as a child’s. ‘I’ve been worried about you.’

  The girl took one look at me and began to convulse, her back arching up looking fit to snap. Her tongue stretched out and up almost covering her little button nose. I felt the blood drain from my face and a tremor of fear ran through me. I turned my gaze over to Reverend Brisbane who stood beside the bed, a hand resting on the mahogany bedhead. I narrowed my eyes at him.

  His lips twitched as if they were fighting a smile. Then his voice sailed across the room, calm and methodical, over the grunts and unholy groans coming from the child on the bed. ‘Katherine Campbell, you stand here accused by this child of tormenting her,’ he said, ‘and of coming to her at night in the form of a cloud, to manifest here and argue against scripture with the child, and to steal her soul to the devil.’

  I felt my mouth dry up as I tried desperately to assemble my thoughts. These clergymen and nobles with their accusations and puppetry of the child, these witch-hunters were, to my mind, people having their good sense and reason of their wits eaten away by maggots.

  ‘These claims are false,’ I said loudly, so that all in the room could hear me. ‘The child lies or is mistaken.’

  Christian Shaw sat bolt upright and began choking and coughing. Reverend Brisbane leaned forward to comfort her and help her to lie down. He then put his hands to the child’s mouth as she continued to cough. Turning with a flourish, he held out his hands for all in the room to see. They contained a handful of oddments: some pins, some balls of hair and what seemed to be broken pieces of eggshell.

  ‘That is some sleight of hand trick, priest!’ I gave a hard laugh and the Shaws and a huddle of other commissioners and investigators in the room inhaled sharply at my comment.

  ‘You dare accuse me, woman!’ Brisbane roared, his black eyes glinting with anger. ‘You come now and pray for this child’s soul. Say the Lord’s prayer or, so help me, you will be flogged here in this room right now.’

  ‘I will not,’ I said defiantly. ‘I am a God-fearing woman and my prayers to my good Lord are my own, not a circus act like this. I will not bow before you. You have no right to judge my soul!’

  More gasping fluttered through the room.

  ‘Pray!’

  ‘No!’ I stood my ground. ‘That child is suffering with the foolishness you put in her head and I will not be a party to it. Look at her. She’s lost touch with the real world and I fear that you have broken her for good with your witch lust. Any prayer I say will be said wrong. You will find fault with it.’

  The man threw the hair and other oddments to the floor, and flew across the room, his boots creaking the floorboards underfoot. He stood over me, looking down into my eyes, so close I could smell his stale, fishy breath. He glowered at me looking for all the world like the devil himself.

  ‘You will pray,’ he seethed, and he thrust his hand into my pocket, feeling about near my leg. I squirmed away from his touch as he pulled out a handful of hair – pale, wheat-coloured hair. His face rippled with triumph. ‘The very same hair that the child just spat up.’

  My eyes did not leave his. He had already found me guilty beca
use this was a story that he was writing; he knew the outcome. Nothing I did, no deference to his demands or subservient cowering was going to save me. Either my new husband, John, would rescue me, or I would be burned at the stake. I determined in that moment that I would not go without a fight.

  ‘That is some impressive magic, Reverend,’ I smiled. ‘I saw similar tricks performed at the Argyll Fair. Was it up your sleeve? Let us see.’

  The man slapped me hard and my cheek stung bitterly like it had been skinned.

  ‘Take her away,’ he fumed. ‘And I do hope you have a good account of all this, Laird Shaw, as it is damning evidence of her guilt.’

  Christian Shaw had fallen silent and lay staring up at the rafters above her bed as if she’d been fossilised in resin.

  I smiled at the audience and dropped a short curtsey before being pushed out the door by a guard to the parlour where I was re-shackled.

  As we rattled back up the path in the cart, I saw the midwife, Margaret Lang, and her daughter walking purposefully toward Bargarran. Our eyes met. The woman had attended the delivery of the latest bairn to Bargarran and had probably pulled young Christian Shaw from her mother’s belly as well. Margaret gave me a curt nod of acknowledgement, a kindly thing to do to a condemned woman. I gave a cracked smile back at her. I wanted to call out to her to be careful of Christian Shaw as the girl had been naming people all over the place. Almost anyone who had ever crossed the threshold of the manor had been accused. No one was safe.

  A gentle shower began to wash the grasses a deeper shade of green. I gazed out across the scrim of rain as we clanked over the wide river, my rusty hair plastered to my wet cheeks, my eyelashes blinking beneath the caught droplets like insects fluttering in cobwebs. My body shivered and throbbed with the cold and I shut my eyes, rested my head on the shaking wood and tried to think of happier times, but my memories were all being diluted and washed away by the sorry rain.

  PAISLEY

  BUNDANOON, AUSTRALIA, PRESENT DAY