‘I have not come for a social visit,’ I said and watched as the woman turned to me, stopping, freezing up in that moment with a glimmer of fear racing across her brow. ‘Christoff took a gash to the leg and he is laid down with a bitter fever. I have come in haste to ask you to come to him to give him hope and strength.’
The woman put her hands to her mouth and blew on them, her eyes blinking fast, fighting back tears as she nodded at me.
‘I will get my coat and come with you,’ she said, her voice sounding panicked. ‘But Christoff is a strong boy and God could not take him from me. Not my Christoff.’
I knew from speaking with Christoff that his mother was a widow and the two of them lived alone without a maid. Frau Kilian took her heavy coat from a hook near the door and a key from another. She went to the fire in the larger room and looked at it.
‘It will cool down and die,’ she murmured to herself.
‘In his night sweats he has called for Susanna,’ I told her, and she turned to me from the hearth, her eyes wide with something that I could not read.
‘Susanna?’ she whispered as if the word was holy.
I nodded. Frau Kilian stared out over my head, past me into the foyer. Then slowly, she walked in there, plucked a gilt-framed painting from the wall and held it toward me. It was a portrait of a child, a ginger-headed little girl with mischievous eyes and a rosebud smile.
‘This is Susanna,’ she said with a sad smile. ‘Christoff’s little sister. She drowned three years ago, in the river, with her father. They were out fishing when the boat sank.’
I shut my eyes and said a silent prayer for them. ‘He was calling for her,’ I said.
‘Let us hurry to him and give him some love from this world and not hear more of him pressing to join Susanna,’ his mother said and went to hang the painting back up.
‘If we leave now,’ I told her, ‘we should reach the cottage before nightfall.’
‘Oh, I know the way,’ the woman said as she buttoned her cloak. ‘I haven’t been there for years but I used to know Frau Berchta very well. She came to town and sang at Susanna’s funeral.’
We hurried outside and walked briskly down the cobbled street back toward the market, an urgent clatter of boots against stone.
As we pushed through the throng I felt a hand grab at me.
‘Hello, Liebchen,’ came a voice in my ear. I recoiled, recognising it as belonging to the uniformed man.
I stopped and turned and looked him in the eye. One of his eyes sagged a little over his cheek.
‘Let me be!’ I demanded.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’ he hissed at me. ‘See, I done some asking about and seems you are a stranger in these parts, looking for the Kilian house, not of the Kilian house yourself. You’re a vagrant and a pretty one at that.’
Frau Kilian had been pushed ahead and a crush of sweaty bodies pressed between us. I caught her eye as she looked back, bewildered and confused.
‘Now, I get a bag of coin for every vagrant I pick up for my overlord.’ He grinned. ‘And I know he likes pretty ones. Woman, alone, wandering the roads, travelling light with no man to speak for her. That says someone else is looking out for her and maybe that’s the devil.’
‘That is foolish talk,’ I said, trying to pull my arm from his grip. ‘My mother-in-law will vouch for me. I have been afield visiting kin but I am no vagrant and no witch.’
‘Ah, but you’ve bewitched me, see?’ He laughed. ‘I laid eyes on you and can’t get you out of my head now. You’re in there like a weevil in flour and I can’t pick you out. You bewitched me, you did.’
I could see Frau Kilian pushing back toward me but when she saw the man with me something crossed over her face like a dark cloud, a veil of pure terror. She began backing away, crushing herself into the crowd, leaving me behind.
‘You’ll come with me,’ the man ordered roughly and began dragging me the other way out of the marketplace.
People made room for him and looked away. It seemed his uniform spoke loudly, inciting an aura of fear. I looked at the man’s lapel where a pin poked out and I saw that it was a seal, the likeness of a crest that bore the image of two foxes. My blood turned to ice. The Hexenbischoff! The man was a guard in the evil Bishop’s private army who had declared war on the good people of Bamberg and the surrounds, churning people accused of witchcraft through the new prison building that had broken my parents.
I was dragged down a narrow lane and began to scream when I saw the caged cart with a dozen or more poor souls trapped within, tugging at the iron bars and wailing and begging for release to anyone walking by. Mostly women, but there were a few men and some children not as high as my hip. I struggled to get away so that I might run, but the man drew a cutlass and held it at my neck.
‘I could slit your throat right here and let your blood flood the street but that would be no fun,’ he seethed. ‘We’ll want you to give us some names and confess your wickedness before you’ll get any freedom, and when you’re nothing but ash and smoke you’ll be free as a bird!’
I was jammed into the locked cage on the cart and fell, hurting my knee. One woman helped me up and wiped a tear from my cheek with her handkerchief.
‘Hush now, young one,’ she murmured. ‘Be strong.’
My thoughts thundered through my head. Hans. Christoff. Frau Berchta. The woods.
As we rumbled, jolting and bumping over the open road back to Bamberg, I sat on the rough wooden slats and prayed. I prayed for Christoff’s life and my own. Frau Kilian would arrive at the cottage with the bitter news and I hoped that Hans would be strong and brave, but he was more than an orphan now. He had no family to speak of. No one left the Hexenhaus except to go to the death square. Hans, that beautiful boy, my brother, had lost me for good.
The kind woman beside me was talking to me but I couldn’t hear what she was saying. It was as if I were underwater. The sun kept flickering overhead and I could see the woman’s hand holding mine; it was thin and bony like a skeleton. I was finding it hard to breathe knowing that I was being ferried to my death like a fish on a bank, flinging itself back and forth, gasping for water in its gills, knowing that it was destined for the frying pan. Although I was warm beneath my coat and with the odorous press of other bodies around me, my blood was howling chill in my veins like a blizzard. I looked up at the sky and tried to find a bird, believing it might be a symbol of hope for freedom. But the sky was bare and blue and cold.
KATHERINE
RENFREWSHIRE, SCOTLAND, 1697
I had fetters around my wrists that were screwed to a long chain running to a central iron post. If I walked out in a circle about the small cell I could not quite touch the dank stone walls. I felt much like an animal, a dull-eyed beast that had to be tied up out of the weather and kept alive with the bare minimum of sustenance: some stale bread, dirty water and damp straw to sleep upon. There were three of us chained to the post and we had settled into our own spaces, guarding them ferociously like savages who had nothing else to call their own. I was beneath the high grill window and watched the sunbeams of golden dust from above on good days and trembled with the cold and wet of rain on bad ones. The solitary chamber-pot was near the centre post and was emptied but once a day so that for most hours there was a rank odour floating in our small allotment of air.
Alongside me, living in this nightmare, was the young girl Elizabeth Anderson and the midwife, Margaret Lang, who had been named by Christian Shaw as another tormentor. In the first days after they threw poor Margaret into the cell, we spoke often to quell the boredom and pass the time but the futility of our situation and the regular interrogation sessions had seen us all fall into an uneasy silence. There was little point talking of a future and only sadness in reminiscing about our pasts.
In those long, dark, cold and empty hours my mind turned to thoughts of John, the only shimme
r of goodness I’d had in my life since my parents had been slashed and burned from it. I loved my lost husband with a passion and fierceness that was almost as strong as the deep tenderness I savoured for my late granaidh. It had been so many weeks that I had lost count as one dim day blended into the next with only the sounds of our raspy breathing and hacking coughs to distract us.
Some of those detained elsewhere in the Paisley Tollbooth had been released. More than twenty had been rounded up thanks to that devil child, Christian Shaw, and her puppetmaster. Only ten of us were left awaiting trial. Young Elizabeth’s father had been found dead in his cell some days earlier and the girl sobbed from her corner of the dim space, huddled into her grief. Margaret had asked me in a whisper if we should have gone to her to comfort her but I felt it better to give the young girl some privacy to mourn her father with her own tears. I was also wary of the girl, who was given to flirting with the guards and speaking too often and too frivolously.
I sat for most hours of the day with my arms around my bunched knees, praying for some miracle that would see me released back into the world so that I might fulfil the dream of travelling abroad with my handsome husband, wearing soft dresses and leather shoes. But no word had come from John. Not a whisper.
To pass the time I dreamed of eating stuffed pheasant and pomegranates, but the harsh reality saw me sipping cold soups made from potato parings. We were treated worse than animals. The Shaw’s cows and pigs ate better than we did. Pigs gave bacon and cows gave butter but the poor souls accused of witchcraft could offer their keepers nothing more than confessions, and I, for one, had not had a mind to give them that. I had not been pushed as far as some and I sometimes wondered if they weren’t holding back, dragging out my interment so that the pain and torture could last longer.
My scalp was raw from scratching. Early on they had hacked off my hair. All of it, every last red curl. In the weeks since it had grown to a boy’s short length and the nits had taken up lodgings. I could only pick so many out at a time because my arms, weighed down with the shackles, ached when lifted. At night as I lay in my dank, sweat-soaked straw, listening to Margaret snore, I could feel the little bloodsuckers crawling over my scalp and scurrying behind my ears. I missed my long, claret-coloured hair; most of all I missed the way John had run his fingers through it.
I stayed quiet and kept the memories of John, the memories of happier times in the Highlands and the memory of my granaidh’s lemon-scented hair tight in my heart. They could steal my red hair and my dignity but they could not steal those memories. To keep my mind from unravelling, I pushed myself to remember prayers and Bible quotes. In my head I sang the psalms and sometimes I would sing them aloud, softly. I sat like a fly in a spider’s web and knew there was little use in struggling as it would only tire me and break me sooner.
There was one guard less cruel than the others. He had eyes for young Elizabeth and treated her kindly, but also treated us with kindness, too. He had a pockmarked face and his teeth were grey, but he brought us food with a nervous smile and managed to smuggle in a Bible to Margaret Lang who was the most pious woman in the district, an irony given that she was imprisoned on the charge of being an accomplice to the devil. For Elizabeth, he brought a pot of fresh milk and a feather pillow and for me, a shawl to keep about my shoulders. The beautiful shawl that John had bought me, the one with silver ribbons, had been taken from me upon my arrest and was now warming some guard’s wife’s body.
I could smell my own breath and it smelled like death. Small wounds and insect bites on my skin had scabbed over and were no longer hurting but itching almost as much as my head. The nooks and folds on my body were so rank with grime, blood and sweat that I stank worse than any beast in a field.
One morning when the air was colder than the others for a good week before it, they came and took Elizabeth away to press for a confession. They always seemed to take Elizabeth first, then me and then Margaret. Youngest to oldest. Elizabeth was a mere seventeen years. I felt the shudder of dread rattle through my aching bones, knowing that my scabs might soon be split apart by the pilliwinks crushing my thumbs, or the boots slicing skin from my shins. There would be Reverend Brisbane and his dark eyes. The others were interrogated by a variety of men. The witch-tester was an old man from the Midlands who had a set of instruments that were used to prick and pierce moles and marks on our exposed bodies. He looked for witches’ marks and could call any manner of thing a witch mark. Some people were born with pressure marks and any reasonable person understood that it was nothing whatsoever to do with the devil. I had one between my shoulder blades that had been there since I was born.
I stood and stretched and shook the pains out of my limbs, readying myself for the next round of torture. I had told myself over and over that no matter what they did to me, I would not implicate others and I would not admit to any wrongdoing. Most of all I promised myself that I would never mention John Erskine or the Jacobite plotters.
When Elizabeth was pushed back into the cell later that morning and locked back into place, Margaret and I could see that something had happened to her. She was smiling and radiant and it unnerved us in an unholy way.
‘What be you smiling at, lassie?’ I asked her.
‘I’m free.’ She laughed with a tinkling glass voice. ‘Everything will be all right now because I have told them the truth.’
‘The truth of what, girl?’ Margaret asked, her voice dripping with deep dread.
I knew that the girl had been present at all the grove gatherings of the Jacobites and I held my breath awaiting her response, looking at the nasty yellow and black bruises on her exposed arms and legs.
‘I told them everything and it’s a burden clear off my shoulders,’ the girl said in a singsong voice. ‘My poor papa is all dead and I won’t see him again. Rest his soul. But I confessed to the murder of the Park’s baby because we all flew there and ole Agnes sucked out his life. And then, of course, there was the sinking of the ferry. John Lindsay was behind that one. And I told them how it was my dead grandma Jean who introduced me to that handsome grim man in black but I never once renounced my baptism and I’m a good girl. The devil lives in Bargarran for sure and we’ve all met him. Some of us know him very well, don’t we, Kat?’
She looked across at me, scabbed and furred with a scratchy patch of dirty hair, skirts stained with blood and urine, and watched, her eyes boring into me, as my face went as grey as a dead woman’s. I could feel the pallor wash over my skin.
It was my turn next. I felt the shackles unlocked from my pained wrists and walked as a sleepwalker to the pricking room where I was stripped and laid flat against a wooden bench while six different men examined me and the witch-tester pricked my skin yet again. I was numb to his touch and the blood was throbbing in my temples as Reverend James Brisbane leaned in close and whispered in my ear. My shame at my nakedness was almost unbearable.
‘The Bargarran orchard, Katherine Campbell? A little bird’s been singing your name? Singing a very sweet song. You will tell me the names of your Stuart plotters yet, or so help me, I will relish the smell of your flesh on an open grill as well as a perfectly roasted guinea fowl.’
And I realised, then, that John Erskine had been right. The witch-hunt was a ruse to smoke out the Jacobites. The Stuart supporters had one name for themselves while the clergy had another. The word witch was the smoke while the word Jacobite was the flame beneath. I shut my eyes and prayed for the strength to resist giving them the kindling they needed to light the bonfire.
PAISLEY
BUNDANOON, AUSTRALIA, PRESENT DAY
‘They suspect foul play,’ Emily says, her voice high, her hands waving in my face with their coral-coloured fingernails.
‘Settle down.’ I duck away from her. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Isaiah Hooper,’ she answers, rolling her eyes at me. ‘I just read it. The cops think there’s been foul pla
y.’
‘Foul play?’ The term infers something sinister and far removed from play.
‘They found a blood-stained t-shirt outside his window,’ she tells urgently. ‘People are starting to talk about your mother.’
‘That’s ridiculous. What? My mother went over and dragged him out of his bed and through the window and murdered him or something? Don’t be stupid. Maybe the kid had just started feeling better and gone for an early morning walk to clear his head after a nosebleed.’ I was grasping. ‘Slow down and tell me exactly what you heard. Everything,’ I say calmly.
Emily sits beside me on a sturdy, plastic library chair. I close my folder and absentmindedly pick at the half-torn and frayed sticker on the top corner. The hum of the air conditioner whirs above us.
‘I was on the computer just now, and I was reading the local news,’ Emily says, fanning herself to cool down from the excitement of it all.
‘Look,’ I say. ‘Most rational people think the poor kid was doing this for attention and I guess things were dying down a bit so he’s decided to ramp it up. Either that or he’s walked off in some trance and gotten himself lost. This has nothing to do with Mum. No one could even suggest that and keep a straight face. I’d better get Mum to call my dad and give him the latest update.’
‘Sounds weird you talking about your dad,’ Emily says. ‘I can’t even imagine you with a dad. It’s just always been your mum and you. It’s always felt that she must have had you all by herself, like magic.’
‘Yeah, like I just cracked out of some crystal egg.’ I laugh at her as the school bell blares.
I want to tell Em about the family book of women that my mother shared with me and yet something inside me also wants to keep it a secret, something precious that my mother and I have and that one day I might pass along to a little mini-me. If she heard our conversation through my bedroom door, she hasn’t mentioned it.
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