Hexenhaus

by Nikki McWatters

  But despite my silence and subsequent punishments for remaining so very quiet and even with my refusal to eat, my body seemed to rally and rise to the challenge. It seemed I harboured a deep, animalistic desire for survival. I remained stubborn and was yelled at by my prison guards for being so pig-headed, which was, in a girl, worse than having a clubfoot. It was a character flaw that was unforgiveable, more unforgiveable even than the unspeakable crime of being barren or ugly. Being stubborn was almost proof that I was a witch.

  My stubbornness was the only thing I clung to, the only thing still floating in my life. I lay on the floor in my own silence in a room so squalid that I could barely recall the scent of fresh air. In the dim light and during painful recoveries, one day slipped softly into the next and I lost all track of time.

  Yes, the weather had eased and was skating into spring, which meant I had been tormented in the Hexenhaus for almost all of the winter. I had no thoughts outside of survival or death, swinging like a zeitgeist depending on the day. Hans was simply the name that I knew I must protect at all costs and I could not afford to think of him as anything else but a name. My memories of my former life had shrivelled and broken up like crumbled charcoal. My thoughts were stripped from me. They were unspeakable. I was numb, barely alive.

  There were fourteen of us in the women’s quarters and two young children too shocked to cry. I had been kept alive, like a suffering beast, for the longest. Others had been carted off and executed routinely like a round of spring-cleaning, as soon as they had given six names apiece. As I had not confessed and not given names I was still being broken and stretched to share some lies. My legs were infected with rot, blackened patches in the skin that would kill me if left.

  Veronica Junius, accused of witchcraft, of dancing with Satan in the fields, taking people’s souls and letting the devil drink of my blood in a pact during which I sold my soul to him. If I had ever done such a thing, I would have demanded my blood, for the deal had fallen poorly for me with nothing but misery to show for it. If all these poor souls in the Hexenhaus were guilty of doing a deal with Old Nick, there was a rightful epidemic of stupidity going on. With the stench of burning flesh hovering over the town like a greasy fog, no one in their right mind would have been transacting with Satan.

  I slept like the dead in a dreamless pit of darkness. One night I heard the late-night creak of the heavy door separating us from the rest of the house of horrors. Ever alert to being dragged from the room for a midnight round of sport, my eyes shot open, pinned to the shadow in the doorway. It was the broad silhouette of a man. But not so broad as the Hexenbischof himself, and no one came more cruel than that man so there was a sliver of relief. In the darkness the guard shuffled furtively into the body of the dank space, crouched down, squinting and rearranging the human bundles of rags, looking for a particular victim. I pressed myself deeper into the floor and tried to burrow into the filth-clotted bricks in the wall behind me.

  I crouched down as he stood above me, leaning in, and I shuddered as he whispered my name.

  ‘Veronica?’ he said, husky and warm.

  I stopped, frozen at the sound, and thought perhaps I had slipped into a dream.

  ‘Veronica?’ he said again, and I struggled to sit up.

  ‘Christoff?’ I gasped, knowing that farm-boy drawl, the lilt of his words, rough-hewn but gentle.

  ‘Come,’ he said, reaching for my arms. ‘I am taking you away from here.’

  It was then that I was sure I was dead. I had drifted away in my sleep and the spirit of Christoff had come to chaperone me to the afterlife. I thought then that he must have died from the fever and had been waiting all this time for me to join him.

  ‘Veronica?’ he said more urgently. ‘We have little time. Can you walk or might I carry you?’ He sounded so real and present and then his warm hands were helping me to my feet and I was stumbling beside him, out of the door.

  There was some dim light in the corridor and I watched, amazed and confused, as he began to lock the door behind us and turned to me, the shock clear as day on his face. I was rank, scabbed with dirt and blood and sweat. My tufts of hair, coarse as twine, were greased and filthy.

  ‘No,’ he said softly as an afterthought and opened the door again, calling softly into the room. ‘Women, get yourselves away from here. Go.’

  I nodded toward the other door that hid the menfolk and Christoff lifted the heavy iron bar and opened it, calling in with the same command to the male prisoners.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I stammered. ‘Your leg?’

  ‘Almost good as new.’ He smiled and then just as quickly frowned. ‘We must hurry. I have a cart in the courtyard.’

  ‘But the guards,’ I said, shaking my head nervously, knowing the breadths and lengths of their cruelty.

  ‘Frau Berchta brewed a potion and I spilled it into the kegs of beer,’ he explained as he helped me down the corridor toward the staircase. ‘I turned up this evening with what I told them was a gift from the Hexenbischof and they were right pleased to see me and the beer.’

  Downstairs on the ground floor we passed the guards’ room where I breathlessly counted seven men sprawled on the floor, snoring and as lively as coffins. We hurried out the front door into the wide, open-sky courtyard where a draught horse stomped and snorted behind a small wooden cart with a flimsy canopy of white canvas. I took a deep breath that made my ribs creak painfully, but the intake of cool clean air was like my first gasp after birth. The half-moon cast a silver tarnish over the ground and above the sky was riddled with stars. I turned my face to them as if in prayer.

  Christoff helped me up into the back of the cart where I found a feather quilt had been laid down for me that still smelled faintly of the beer kegs: a heady fragrance of hops.

  ‘We must away,’ he said. I could hear the fear in his voice.

  ‘Hans?’ I asked quickly, having to know. ‘Is he well? Is my brother well?’

  ‘Ja,’ he said as he settled me inside and went to the front stoop where he hoisted himself up and whispered back to me. ‘He is very well. But you look in need of much nursing. Frau Berchta is preparing her brews for your pain and others as well to give you strength.’

  Without a cry or shout from behind us, we clip-clopped out of the courtyard, past the unmanned guardhouse. All the guards were sodden with laced beer and Christoff sang back that they would be in such a state for an hour or two at the very least. I looked out through the half-circle from behind the cart and smiled to see the shadowy limping figures spilling into the night. It was good that Christoff had left the doors open because that way the Hexenbischof would not know who was responsible for the breakout. There would be no one firm target of retribution. It was unlikely that all the prisoners would get too far or have safe-houses to go to, but at least some might have been spared by Christoff’s actions and that was a good and Godly act. Perhaps the guards would hide their guilt by claiming that the devil had released all his little helpers, and say nothing of the beer.

  On the soft feather quilt I lay my head and began to sob with the relief of it all. The soft material lapping against my skin, skin that was carved like a map of violence, was soothing like a mother’s touch. I looked out at the stars as we bumped and clattered along the rocky road out of town and fixed my gaze on the most dazzling one, glinting from on high like a diamond in the sky. I had an overwhelming sensation that my mother was in Heaven, looking down, and had lent a hand in saving my life.

  We passed through the silent hills down to the mouth of a valley and I could hear the purr and trill of owls in the trees and other night birds shaking out their feathers in the darkness.

  Once we bundled off the main road, down a side path and then over a meadow, the wheels struggling through the long grasses, I felt sleep poking at me and yet I ignored the weariness and forced myself to stay alert, to enjoy my new life, a life that had for me beg
un again after the old had been left for dead.

  I was a girl resurrected.

  KATHERINE

  RENFREWSHIRE, SCOTLAND, 1697

  A storm raged in the early morning sky, a summer fury that tossed the branches of trees and swept rolling gusts of wind and rain like tumbleweeds down the cobbled streets of Paisley. I could not see it but the sounds that railed in through the grill had me imagining the freedom of the outside streets. It was Monday, sometime in May, and we had been allowed the rare treat of a wash in a tub of water. It was cold but refreshing. The day had dawned to welcome the trial that would determine my fate and it was considered unseemly for defendants to appear in a court of law before judges and jury in a state of uncleanliness.

  I stood beside Margaret Lang, in our undergarments, lathering knobs of unscented soap and scrubbing at the crusts beneath our arms and the dirt-stained rings on our necks. The water blessed my body but within only a handful of moments we had turned the fresh water to a muddy soup. Outside we heard the rumble of thunder that shook through the Tollbooth, seeping into our bones, and blinked at the flashes of lightning that jagged down through the high grill.

  My razor-sharp shoulderblades poked out from the grey cotton of my underslip, which bore dark yellow-brown stains around the neck and armpits. The grime had settled into my skin so deeply that the water was not strong enough to dislodge it all and I had to scratch out the filth cemented into my folds. I washed so hard that the lice bites were rubbed raw and popped bubbles of blood against my white skin. Dipping my hair now grown back to my ears, I tried to ease the grease out into the water like an oil scum on the river, but the water was too cold to do much more than wet it.

  Margaret and I were given rough woollen working dresses, a deep blue colour and coarse enough to raise an itch. I dressed myself, fumbling at the ties, and pulled a white bonnet over my head, securing it beneath my chin. Pale blue stockings that still smelled of the person they last sheathed were pulled up over my rough legs and I slipped on my old, worn boots that were cracked through to my feet. The commissioners had not gone so far as to provide shoes for the prisoners. It was just such a blessing to have a morning free of the fetters for our ablutions.

  My face prickled with newfound cleanliness and I felt a good deal lighter after shedding so much grime. The wash, like a baptism, had given me a feeling of hope. Everything felt better, cleaner.

  My defence advocate was one justice depute Mr James Robertson but I shared him with all the other accused persons as well. Together we would be taken to the trial being heard on a lower level within the Tollbooth and Robertson would try to work real magic to get us acquitted.

  As Margaret and I were led, once again in wrist fetters, from our dank cell, which reeked of sour skin, I felt the bones in my legs go as weak as marrow jelly. The guard who took us from the room remained stony-faced. I did not recognise him and this unnerved me, disorienting me as much as the walking did. I had done no more than pace my small cell for many weeks and my body throbbed with the sudden exertion.

  In the dim, bricked corridor we were joined by other guards leading the accused. I slipped a look over the sorry victims of this nightmare and recognised most as Jacobites from my husband’s local chapter. There was the old beggar woman, Agnes Naismith. Her opaque green eyes stood in the centre of her grizzled skull like ponds filled with scum. Her bent bird-like limbs were gnarled and her back hunched almost double so that she looked at the floor as she was shuffled along with the others. She was the only woman present without a head cap. Her white hair was thin, with patches where her scaly pink scalp could be seen. The woman looked not much better than a corpse.

  Peg Fulton, another woman of goodly years who I knew from the market and our clandestine Jacobite meetings, was upright, her eyes glinting and her face serene. It was clear to all who looked upon her that she was bereft of mind, which I found strangely comforting and wished such a state for myself. With an absence of wits, there was an absence of fear.

  Before us there were the two brothers, John and James Lindsay, known in the crew as the Bishop and Curat because of their loyalty to the cause, overtly Roman Catholic titles that would have fired the wrath of the Presbyterian interrogators and been an indicator that they were Jacobites. Rough men both, with reputations for bullying and making trouble, they, like all of them, had been most sorely condemned by the younger Lindsay brothers, who had sung like birds to gain their own freedom. There was also old Farmer Lindsay. He was surly and walked slowly, not of a mind to go too timidly to his trial, and he wore a clean blue country coat and a dark beret. Mister Reid was the other one. I was certain he had fronted to a Jacobite meeting in the grove but he did not meet my eye.

  I tried to appear calm but the rhythmic pulse at the side of my neck betrayed my fear. By my side, Margaret Lang, the well-respected midwife who had brought the ungrateful Christian Shaw into the world along with her five siblings, walked tall, fiercely vigilant and brittle with the exhaustion from her battle against The Big Lie as she called it. The Big Lie was the one that proclaimed she was a witch. She was spiritually content to go to the gallows rather than admit her false guilt. Her pious devotion to God was her strength. My faith was not so oak-strong and I had questioned it often during the lonely dark nights rotted through with regrets and recriminations.

  As we prisoners were walked though to the courtroom we all stalled and baulked for a moment, reeling back at the spectacle that lay before us. There was a sudden hush from the crowd of gawkers and then everyone started talking loudly and at once. Familiar faces poked through the haze, lingered and then faded away. I imagined that I saw my own sister Isabel and felt sick to the belly thinking of her betrayal. What a gaggle of hate-filled superstitious fools, I thought bitterly.

  It was a great hall made smaller by the swell of bodies within it. The room was grand with dark-panelled walls and a podium to one side. A platform was raised at the far end of the room with benches where the commissioners, the judges and peers of the investigation sat. Other benches ran like pews in rows across the body of the space and the spectators were filling them until the guards forced the swell back and shut and bolted the double doors.

  My head was spinning from the sudden noise. After months of silence and only growled questions hissed through a veil of pain, I found the din to be deafening and the fear was shining from my eyes, hot and wet.

  A man with a tall rod in his hand called for silence with a bang on the floor and the ferocity in his voice had the crowd roll down to a cough and sneeze within seconds. In the witness stand I could see young Christian Shaw, the girl who had started the whole sorry business, looking like an angel in white lace and ribbons, her honeyed hair coiled in ringlets down either side of her peach-cheeked face. The girl would not meet my eye but looked down into folded hands on her lap, piously, serenely. She sat with her parents, who would also give evidence. Beside them was Reverend James Brisbane sitting alongside a dashing man with a similar jawline and hawkish eyes and I guessed him to be the eminent Glaswegian doctor. Others, familiar and unfamiliar, sat in the rows around them.

  The train of prisoners was shuffled into a wooden cage where we were locked within and made to stand facing the hostile room.

  Alexander Stewart, fifth Laird Blantyre, the head of the commission, was then introduced. The white-bearded man in official dress stood and bellowed out the prisoner’s names and then some background to the charges. The other commissioners rested back in comfortable chairs and hung their thick hands on their bellies to listen to the proceedings.

  ‘In this complicated case, the primary victim, young Christian Shaw, claims that she has been tormented for many months by a group of local witches who caused her to become possessed. There have been eyewitness accounts given of murdering children through magical strangulation, the sinking of a ferry causing the drowning of one man and the murder by possession of a minister, Mr Hardie. Much of the testimony is deriv
ed from children who claimed to have been possessed and tormented by these same witches.’

  He then read out the charges, which included demonic possession, maleficium, implication by confessed witches and the murder of at least four persons, a charge that brought theatrical gasps from the gallery.

  The three men who made up the prosecution team were introduced and they took it in turns to paint a picture for the audience. They described a district rotten to the core with a coven of witches, those in the dock, who plotted in moors and groves to murder babies and others such as the minister and the ferry-man for Satan.

  I scanned the crowd looking for one particular person, but it was not until my defence advocate took to the floor that I saw a flash of John’s face from the back of the room. He was there, hanging on the periphery.

  James Robertson was sallow and baggy-eyed with a crooked moustache and a mane of grey hair, shifty as a river-rat. He addressed all present and shot a look to the back of the room where I saw a glimmer of something pass between him and my husband. My belly leapt with a secret thrill that some flag of evidence or reprove or clemency might be in the wind.

  ‘The parliaments of France and other judicatories are no longer trying people for witchcraft because it is impossible to distinguish possession from a disordered nature. Some people have fancies and are highly suggestible, particularly children,’ he said, pleading for rationality, although his voice was flat and lacked any enthusiasm. ‘Your Lairdships, these poor souls cannot be given the benefit of the doubt if the maladies suffered by young Christian Shaw are considered possession without relevant weight given to some more natural complaint or cause. It may be some new diagnosis unseen before.’