Rice, Anne - The Witching Hour

by Greyspid

  No, they said, but so heavy was the testimony against her that this did not matter, for her mother-in-law had heard her address beings that were invisible, and her son Chretien had seen this also, and her son Philippe, and even Charlotte, though Charlotte had fled rather than answer questions against her mother, and other persons too had seen the power of the Comtesse, who could move objects without touching them, and judge the future, and know countless impossible things.

  ‘And she confesses nothing?’

  ‘It was the devil who would put her in a trance when she was tortured,’ said the innkeeper’s son. ‘For how else could any human being slip into a stupor when a hot iron is applied to the flesh?’

  At this I felt myself sicken and grow weary, and almost overcome. Yet I continued to question them. ‘And named no accomplices?’ I asked. ‘For the naming of accomplices they are always much urged to do.’

  ‘Ah, but she was the most powerful witch ever heard of in these parts, Father,’ said the vintner. ‘What need had she of others? The inquisitor, when he heard the names of those whom she had cured, likened her to the great sorceresses of mythology, and to the Witch of Endor herself.’

  ‘And would there were a Solomon about,’ I said, ‘so that he might concur.’

  But this they did not hear.

  ‘If there was another witch, it was Charlotte,’ said the old vintner. ‘You never saw such a sight as her Negroes, coming into the very church with her to Sunday Mass, with fine wigs and satin clothes! And the three mulatto maids for her infant boy. And her husband, tall and pale and like unto a willow tree, and suffering as he does from a great weakness which has afflicted him from childhood and which not even Charlotte’s mother could cure. And oh, to see Charlotte command the Negroes to carry their master about the village, down the steps and up the steps, and to pour his wine for him and hold the cup to his lip and the napkin to his chin. At this very table they sat, the man as gaunt as a saint on the church wall, and the black shining faces around him, and the tallest and blackest of them all, Reginald, they called him, reading to his master from a book in a booming voice. And to think Charlotte has lived among such persons since the age of eighteen, having married this Antoine Fontenay of Martinique at that tender age.’

  ‘Surely it was Charlotte who stole the doll from the cabinet,’ said the innkeeper’s son, ’before the priest could lay hands on it, for who else in the terrified household would have touched such a thing?’

  ‘But you have said that the mother could not cure the husband’s illness?’ I asked gently. ‘And plainly Charlotte herself could not cure it. Maybe these women are not witches.’

  ‘Ah, but curing and cursing are two separate things,’ said the vintner. ‘Would they had applied their talent merely to curing! But what had the evil doll to do with curing?’

  ‘And what of Charlotte’s desertion?’ asked another, who had only just joined the congregation and seemed powerfully excited. ‘What can it mean but that they were witches together? No sooner was the mother arrested than Charlotte fled with her husband and her child, and her Negroes, back to the West Indies whence they came. But not before Charlotte had gone to be with her mother in the prison, and been locked up with her alone for more than an hour, this request granted only for those in attendance were foolish enough to believe that Charlotte would persuade her mother to confess, which of course she did not do.’

  ‘Seemed the wise thing to have done,’ said I. ‘And where has Charlotte gone?’

  ‘To Martinique once more, it is said, with the pale skin and bone crippled husband, who has made a fortune there in the plantations, but no one knows that this is true. The inquisitor has written to Martinique to demand of the authorities that they question Charlotte, but they have not answered him, though there has been time enough, and what hope has he of justice being done in such a place as that?’

  For over half an hour I listened on to this chatter, as the trial was described to me, and how Deborah protested her innocence, even before the judges and before those of the village who were admitted to witness it, and how she herself had written to His Majesty King Louis, and how they had sent to Dole for the witch pricker, and had then stripped her naked in her cell, and cut off her long raven hair, shaving her head after that, and searched her for the devil’s mark.

  ‘And did they find it?’ I asked, trembling inside with disgust at these proceedings, and trying not to recall in my mind’s eyes the girl I remembered from the past.

  ‘Aye, two marks they found,’ said the innkeeper, who had now joined us with a third bottle of white wine paid for by me and poured it out for all to enjoy. ‘And these she claimed she had from birth and that they were the same as countless persons had upon their bodies, demanding that all the town be searched for such marks, if they were to prove anything, but no one believed her, and she was by then worn white and thin from starvation and torture, yet her beauty was not gone.’

  ‘How so, not gone?’ asked I.

  ‘Oh, like a lily she looks now,’ said the old vintner sadly, ‘very white and pure. Even her jailers love her, so great is her power to charm everyone. And the priest weeps when he takes her Communion, for though she is unconfessed, he will not deny it to her.’

  ‘Ah but you see, she could seduce Satan. And that is why they have called her his bride.’

  ‘But she cannot seduce the witch judge,’ said I. And they all nodded, not seeming to know that I spoke this in bitter jest.

  ‘And the daughter,’ I asked, ’what did she say on the matter of her mother’s guilt before she made her escape?’

  ‘Not a single word to any person. And in the dead of night, she slipped away.’

  ‘A witch,’ said the innkeeper’s son, ’or how could she have left her mother to die alone with her sons turned against her?’

  This no one could answer, but I could well guess.

  By this time, Stefan, I had little appetite for anything but to get clear of this inn and speak to the parish priest, though this, as you know, is always the most dangerous part. For what if the inquisitor were to be roused from wherever he sat feasting and drinking on the money earned from this madness, and he should know me from some other place, and horror of horrors know my work and my impostures.

  Meanwhile my newfound friends drank even more of my wine, and talked on that the young Comtesse had been painted by many a renowned artist in Amsterdam, so great was her beauty; but then I might have told them that part of the story, and so fell silent, in anguish, quietly paying for another bottle for the company before I took my leave.

  The night was warm and full of talk and laughter everywhere it seemed, with windows open and some still coming and going from the cathedral, and others camped along the walls and ready for the spectacle, and no light in the high barred window of the prison beside the steeple where the women was held.

  I stepped over those seated and chatting in the dark as I went to the sacristy on the other side of the great edifice and there struck the knocker until an old woman led me in and called the pastor of the place. A bent and gray-haired man came at once to greet me saying that he wished he had known of a traveling priest come to visit, and I must move from the inn at once and lodge with him.

  But my apologies he accepted quick enough as well as my excuses about the pain in my hands which prevents me now from saying Mass any longer, for which I have a dispensation, and all the other lies I have to tell.

  As luck would have it, the inquisitor was being put up in fine style by the old Comtesse at the chateau outside the town gates, and as all the great cronies of the place were gone thither to dine with him, he would not show his face again tonight.

  On this account the pastor was obviously injured, as he had been by the whole proceedings, for everything had been taken out of his hands by the witch judge and the witch pricker and all the other ecclesiastic filth which rains down upon such affairs as this.

  How fortunate you are, I thought as he showed me into his dingy rooms, f
or had she broken under the torture and named names, half your town would be in jail and everyone in a state of terror. But she has chosen to die alone, by what strength I cannot conceive of.

  Though you know, Stefan, there are always persons who do resist, though we have naught but sympathy for those who find it impossible.

  ‘Come in and sit with me for a while,’ said the priest, ’and I’ll tell you what I know of her.’

  To him immediately I put my most important questions, on the thin hope that the townsfolk might have been wrong. Had there been an appeal to the local bishop? Yes, and he had condemned her. And to the Parliament of Paris? Yes, and they had refused to hear her case.

  ‘You have seen these documents yourself?’

  He gave me a grave nod, and then from a drawer in his cabinet produced for me the hated pamphlet of which they had spoken, with its evil engraving of Suzanne Mayfair perishing in artful flames. I put this bit of trash away from me.

  ‘Is the Comtesse such a terrible witch?’ I said.

  ‘It was known far and wide,’ he said in a whisper, with a great lift of his eyebrows, ’only no one had the courage to speak the truth. And so the dying Comte spoke it, to clear his conscience as it were, and the old Comtesse, having read the Demonologie of the inquisitor, found in it the proper descriptions of all the strange things which she and her grandsons had long seen.’ He gave a great sigh. ‘And I shall tell you another loathsome secret.’ And here he dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘The Comte had a mistress, a very great and powerful lady whose name must not be spoken in connection with these proceedings. But we have it from her own lips that the Comte was terrified of the Comtesse, and took great pains to banish all thoughts of his mistress from his mind when he entered the presence of his wife, for she could reach such things in his heart.’

  ‘Many a married man might follow that advice,’ I said in disgust. ‘So what does it prove? Nothing.’

  ‘Ah, but don’t you see? This was her reason for poisoning her husband, once he had fallen from the horse, and she thought that on account of the fall, she might not be blamed.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘But it is known hereabout,’ he said slyly, ’and tomorrow when the crowd gathers, watch the eyes and upon whom they settle, and you will see the Comtesse de Chamillart, from Carcassonne, in the viewing stand before the jail. However, mark me. I do not say that it is she.’

  I said nothing, but sank only further into hopelessness.

  ‘You cannot imagine the power which the devil has over the witch,’ he continued.

  ‘Pray, enlighten me.’

  ‘Even after the rack on which she was cruelly tortured, and the boot being put on her foot to crush it, and the irons being applied to the soles of her feet, she confessed nothing, but did scream for her mother in torment, and cry out: "Roelant, Roelant," and then "Petyr," which were surely the names of her devils, as they belong to no one of her acquaintance here, and at once, through the agency of these daimons she fell to dreaming, and could not be made to feel the slightest pain.’

  I could listen no more!

  ‘May I see her?’ I asked. ‘It is so important for me to gaze with my own eyes upon the woman, to question her if I might.’ And here I produced my big thick book of scholarly observations in Latin, which this old man could scarcely read, I should say, and I babbled on about the trials I had witnessed at Bramberg, and the witch house there, where they had tortured hundreds, and many other things which impressed this priest sufficiently enough.

  ‘I’ll take you to her,’ he said finally, ’but I warn you, it is most dangerous. When you see her you’ll understand.’

  ‘How exactly?’ I inquired, as he led me down the stairs with a candle.

  ‘Why, she is still beautiful! That is how much the devil loves her. That is why they call her the devil’s bride.’

  He then directed me to a tunnel which ran beneath the nave of the cathedral where the Romans had buried their dead in olden times in this region, and through this we passed to the jail on the other side. Then up the winding stairs we went to the highest floor, where she was kept beyond a door so thick the jailers themselves could scarce open it, and holding his candle aloft, the priest pointed then to the far corner of a deep cell.

  Only a trace of light came through the bars. The rest fell from the candle. And there on a heap of hay I beheld her, bald and thin and wretched, in a ragged gown of coarse cloth, yet pure and shining as a lily as her admirers had so described. They had shaved even the eyebrows from her, and the perfect shape of her bare head and her hairlessness gave an unearthly radiance to her eyes and to her countenance as she looked up at us, from one to the other, carefully, with a slight and indifferent nod.

  It was the face one expects to see at the center of a halo, Stefan. And you, too, have seen this face, Stefan, rendered in oil on canvas, as I shall clarify for you by and by.

  She did not even move, but merely regarded us calmly and in silence. Her knees were drawn up in front of her, and she had wrapped her arms about her legs, as if she were cold.

  Now you know, Stefan, that as I knew this woman, there was the strong chance that at this moment she would know me, that she should speak to me or implore me or even curse me in some way as to cause my authenticity to be questioned, but I tell you in truth I had not even thought of this in my haste.

  But let me break off my account of this miserable night, and tell you now the whole tale before I proceed to relate what little did here take place.

  Before you read another word I have written, leave your chamber, go down the stairs into the main hall of the Motherhouse, and look at the portrait of the dark-haired woman by Rembrandt van Rijn which hangs just at the foot of the stairs. That is my Deborah Mayfair, Stefan. This is the woman, now shorn of her long dark hair, who sits shivering now as I write, in the prison across the square.

  I am in my room at the inn, having only lately left her. I have candles aplenty, as I have told you, and too much wine to drink and a bit of a fire to drive out the cold. I am seated at the table facing the window, and in our common code I will now tell you all.

  For it was twenty-five years ago that I first came upon this woman, as I have told you, and I was a young man of eighteen years then and she only a girl of twelve.

  This was before your time in the Talamasca, Stefan, and I had come to it only some six years before as an orphaned child. It seemed the pyres of the witches were burning from one end of Europe to the other, and so I had been sent out early from my studies to accompany Junius Paulus Keppelmeister, our old witch scholar, on his travels throughout Europe, and he had only just begun to show to me his few poor methods of trying to save the witches, by defending them where he could and inclining them in private to name as accomplices their accusers as well as the wives of the most prominent citizens of the town so the entire investigation might be discredited, and the original charges be thrown out.

  And I had only lately been made to understand, as I traveled with him, that we were always in search of the true magical person - the reader of minds, the mover of objects, the commander of spirits, though seldom if ever, even in the worst persecutions, was any true sorcerer to be found.

  It was my eighteenth year as I have told you, and my first to venture out of the Motherhouse since I had begun my education there, and when Junius took ill and died in Edinburgh, I was at my wits’ end. We had been on our way to investigate the trial of a Scottish cunning woman, very much famed for her healing power, who had cursed a milkmaid in her village and been accused of witchcraft though no evil had befallen the maid.

  On his last night in this world, Junius ordered me to continue to the Highland village without him; and told me to cling fast to my disguise as a Swiss Calvinist scholar. I was far too young to be called a minister by anyone, and so could not make use of Junius’s documents as such; but I had traveled as his scholarly companion in plain Protestant clothes, and so went on in this manner on my own.

  You canno
t imagine my fear, Stefan.

  And the burnings of Scotland terrified me. The Scots are and were, as you know, as fierce and terrible as the French and Germans, learning nothing it seems from the more merciful and reasonable English. And so afraid was I on this my first journey that even the beauty of the Highlands did not work its spell upon me.

  Rather when I saw that the village was small and at a great remove from its nearest neighbor, and that its people were sheepherders, I knew even greater dread for their ignorance and the ferocity of their superstition. And to the dreary aspect of the whole was added the nearby ruins of a once great cathedral, rising like the bones of a leviathan out of the high grass, and far beyond across a deep valley, the forlorn picture of a castle of rounded towers and tiny windows, which might have been an empty ruin, for all I could see.

  How shall I ever be of assistance here, I thought, without Junius to aid me? And riding into the village proper I soon discovered I had come too late, for the witch had been burnt that very day, and the wagons had just come to clear away the pyre.

  Cart after cart was filled with ashes and charred bits of wood and bone and coal, and then the procession moved out of the little place, with its solemn-faced folk standing about, and into the green country again, and it was then that I laid eyes upon Deborah Mayfair, the witch’s daughter.

  Her hands bound, her dress ragged and dirty, she had been taken to witness the casting of her mother’s ashes to the four winds.

  Mute she stood there, her black hair parted in the middle and hanging down her back in rich waves, her blue eyes dry of all tears.

  "This the mark of the witch,’ said an old woman who stood by watching, ‘that she cannot shed a tear.’

  Ahh, but I knew the child’s blank face; I knew her sleeplike walk, her slow indifference to what she saw as the ashes were dumped out and the horses rode through them to scatter them. I knew because I knew myself in childhood, orphaned and roaming the streets of Amsterdam after the death of my father; and I remembered how when men and women spoke to me, it did not even cross my mind to answer, or to look away, or to change my manner for any reason. And even when I was slapped or shaken, I retained this extraordinary quietude, only wondering mildly why they would bother to do such a curious thing; better to look perhaps at the slant of the sunlight striking the wall behind them, as at the furious expressions on their faces, or take heed of the growls that came from their lips.