Third Witch

by Jackie French

  A heartbeat’s hesitation. ‘No.’

  And so he did, most gently, house to house, sipping their ale and eating their bannocks. And that Sunday at the kirk, he stood up and faced the congregation.

  ‘All unknowing,’ he said sternly, ‘a witch has been harboured here. Her name is Agnes.’

  My breath stabbed me. I could not move.

  Rab stood. ‘Agnes is no witch, sir. A harmless woman, good with herbs.’ He looked around. ‘Is that not so?’

  The people muttered agreement, but none too loud. Why did they not yell at the witch finder in protest? Agnes had helped them all.

  Then I understood. They were scared, as I was scared. Keep your head down, Agnes had warned me. And now we were all doing it.

  ‘And yet Agnes does not come to kirk today?’ the witch finder asked Rab, still with that steady smile.

  ‘That is her way, sir. She does come sometimes.’

  ‘Her way indeed.’ The witch finder fixed him with his dark eyes. ‘We shall see when she is put to the fire if she confesses what she is and the names of her accomplices.’

  Men from the castle came to pile wood upon the green outside the smithy. No village man would do it, but nor did they fight the soldiers to stop them. Green wood at the base, then dryer, but not too dry so the flames wouldn’t consume her before she talked. He knew his job, the witch finder.

  Rab argued with the witch finder all that week, and others of the village too. Not many. Not enough. But some.

  I said nothing.

  The witch finder must have known that Mam and I had shared Agnes’s cottage all those years. Mam had died of congestion of the lungs two years before, and no broths of mine nor Agnes’s goose fat could save her. And I lived with the smith now, with iron all about. I couldn’t be a witch, nor could Mam — unless Agnes said we were. What would happen to my children and Rab if I was labelled as a witch and burned? Would they be burned too?

  The soldiers dragged Agnes, bound, to the stake. She’d grown so bent in the last years, they couldn’t tie her higher than her waist.

  She didn’t look at them or the stake.

  She looked at me. She even smiled, a tiny smile, just for a second. A smile to me.

  A soldier handed the witch finder a flaming torch. He held it above his head.

  ‘Will you confess?’ he asked Agnes, his voice still gentle, almost as you’d ask a child.

  Agnes looked at him in contempt. She said nothing.

  ‘If you confess, you will be strangled. It is an easier death than flames.’

  Agnes gazed at my children. That small smile flashed again. She nodded to herself, then looked down at her feet.

  A baby sobbed, not for Agnes but because its ma didn’t give it suck. No one in the whole crowd cried for Agnes, for all she’d helped each one of them with herbs and potions. Were they afraid of what an old woman might mumble in her agony?

  I wasn’t afraid. Those smiles had told me Agnes wouldn’t speak.

  ‘One last chance,’ said the witch finder, his voice harder now.

  Agnes grinned at him, showing her white teeth, and spat.

  The witch finder bent and touched torch to wood. It flared so fast it must have been laced with fat. But after that, the flames only snickered, not even belching smoke, so Agnes was conscious as her skirt caught fire.

  She stared straight ahead as her legs blistered and began to char, as the flames crept up her body.

  ‘Talk!’ shouted the witch finder, his eyes blazing fiercer than the flames. ‘Give us names. You may be strangled yet!’

  Agnes screamed.

  Rab lifted two stones. He pitched the first, his blacksmith’s hands strong and true. The stone landed on Agnes’s forehead, but not quite hard enough to knock her out. Two soldiers suddenly had Rab’s arms. It took six more to hold him down.

  Still Agnes screamed. The sun rose high, and higher still. Two hours perhaps, as castle folk might reckon it. Two hours to die.

  And then silence, except for the snickering of the flames. What was left didn’t seem to ever have been a woman. The crowd crept away, ashamed perhaps that they hadn’t thrown stones too. Glad Agnes had said no names; worried that maybe a neighbour knew they’d once gone to her cottage for a love charm or a potion.

  Maggie Two-Teeth ushered our children home. And still I stood there. It began to rain.

  ‘Annie,’ said Rab.

  I turned to him and rested my head on his chest. When I lifted it at last, I found the witch finder observing us.

  ‘You were good friends with the witch,’ he said to me.

  ‘She was no witch.’ How was it now, too late, that I found my courage? ‘An old woman skilled with herbs who let people think they worked better than they did. She sheltered my mam and me for years after my father died.’

  ‘You were good friends,’ he repeated.

  ‘No, Agnes wasn’t a friend.’ I saw he knew it for the truth, could read it in my face. ‘I had a friend once, but long ago. She died. But I’m grateful for the care Agnes gave my mam and me. She was good to me. Agnes was good to all of us. Everyone in this village owes her gratitude, and everyone at the castle too, for her goose-fat liniment and Old Man’s Bottom.’

  He frowned. ‘Old Man’s Bottom?’

  ‘A herb,’ I said wearily. ‘Good for aching joints. So Agnes said.’

  ‘She told you nothing else? Nothing of witchcraft?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Nothing of that. Ever.’

  Once more he heard the truth.

  ‘Your mother lived within the smithy until her death?’ he asked.

  ‘She did,’ said Rab. ‘And never scared of iron neither.’

  Except swords, I thought. Mam didn’t like it when Rab mended or forged them. But I didn’t say that now for this twisted man to corrupt.

  He left, at last. And Rab buried Agnes’s ashes, outside the graveyard. It was better, the minister decided. I hadn’t the will to argue. Besides, likely Agnes would have preferred the hillside.

  And so I lived, and still live now. I sing in the kirk each Sunday, with Rab and our children and grandchildren by my side. I visit the poor and the sick with bannocks and pots of soup. I am accounted a good woman. I try hard to be good.

  I am not a witch, nor could ever be; nor have I ever met one. There was no magic, ever, just play-acting and ambition. If Agnes had been a witch, she could have spirited herself away, not stood there screaming as her face melted and flared.

  Only then, in that last second, did she meet my eyes. She’d saved me, her glance told me. Because if she had vanished, not by magic but under a dark cloak on a dark night, as soon as the witch finder arrived, there’d have been whispers to the witch finder about Mam and me.

  So an old woman burned and I stood safe. That’s what I think sometimes, when the memory wakes me before the rooster crows and Rab lies snoring and warm beside me.

  Other times, I wonder if evil creeps about the world, worming into people’s lives without them knowing its true face. And then day’s light seeps across the world and the hens cackle, and I know that love matters most, and true evil is impossible again.

  Or is it? I do not know. But this I know for sure.

  My lady died because of words I said, unthinking, arrogant, on the heath.

  And even as Agnes screamed at the stake, her body on fire, I could not call to her and say, ‘I’m sorry.’

  For all of it. I didn’t mean to do it.

  I’m sorry.

  Author’s Notes

  Once upon a time in Brisbane, a schoolgirl was given the role of Third Witch in a semi-professional production of Macbeth. ‘Semi-professional’ was common in the 1960s; it meant the director and main actors were paid, but those with minor roles were not.

  It was magnificent: the rolling words; the dry ice creating a mist across the stage; the clash of genuine broadswords that gave off sparks, and were so heavy that after the evening performance on the Saturday, when we’d also played a matinée, Macb
eth collapsed after the battle and had to be supported at the curtain call. Two wolfhounds accompanied Lady Macbeth everywhere she went, royally holding up their heads and obeying without signals as they were her own dogs.

  The play was carried by the main actors and the superb director. The rest of us were okay. Enough so that the audience sat still for twenty seconds before they stood to applaud — that silence an actor longs for even more than the cheers, showing how lost people were within the play.

  My richest memory is sitting on a pile of scenery in costume, hunchbacked and many-warted, studying for my economics exam the next morning, while Banquo, in rich velvets, explained Marxist economics to me. (I only wanted to know how to calculate Gross National Product.) How many times did we rehearse? I didn’t count. I do remember the director’s and actors’ shock when I turned up in my school uniform and they realised how old — or young — I was. At each rehearsal I drank in the words, and have kept them with me all my life, the power and the music.

  Years later, when I researched the true history of Macbeth, I discovered that Shakespeare had changed history and made him a villain, his wife a mad murderess, and added Banquo to a story where he’d never been in history. The real Macbeth was a great and good man, elected leader by the heads of the clans and the bishops, a devout Christian; and his wife had opened schools and orphanages, and managed the country while her husband went on pilgrimage to Rome. Shakespeare slandered them deliberately to please his new patron and ruler, King James I.

  During the reign of Elizabeth I, Shakespeare was able to write women of fire and courage. But James I wasn’t fond of women, and he deeply disliked and distrusted women rulers, such as the mother he never knew who was executed as a traitor. King James wrote a book about how to identify witches and slaughter them, and Banquo was his ancestor, which is why he ended up in Shakespeare’s play.

  Macbeth was one of Shakespeare’s last plays, the work of a mature writer who knew his craft and his audience. It is his best, I think, in terms of putting the folly of ambition and deep disillusionment into the mouths of others. I love the play. But I feel deeply guilty about writing another book that slanders a good and great man and his strong and generous wife.

  There is nothing in my book that contradicts the play, though it does put new interpretations on parts of it. Nor do I think Shakespeare would have minded a book based on his work. (If I did, I’d never have begun this series.) I hope he would take my adaptation as the homage it is intended to be.

  Shakespeare based his own plays on others’ work, and speeches were changed from performance to performance depending on the audience. He’d add more blood if playing in a tavern during the plague years when London’s theatres were shut; or mime if the company went abroad and didn’t know the language; and probably longer, more complex speeches when playing before that woman of extraordinary intelligence, many languages and enormous education, Queen Elizabeth I.

  Third Witch is not set in the time of the real Macbeth — that much loved excellent ruler with his deeply competent and compassionate wife — but in an imaginary world more like Shakespeare’s England, where his play is set. The play is imaginary too, not history. As in Shakespeare’s original work, no character in this book resembles any person, alive or dead, and certainly not from history.

  THE THREE WITCHES

  Why were the three witches on the heath waiting for Macbeth?

  For King James I and Shakespeare, innate evil might have been reason enough, with Lady Macbeth’s ambition encouraging further evil. But I don’t believe in innate evil. When evil is done, there is a reason for it. And so in this book there is a reason for the witches to be up on the heath and in the cave; and in neither case is it to practise witchcraft.

  The witches in Macbeth were part of the mad illusion of King James I, an absolute monarch who forced his insanity across his kingdom. His fantasies that witches threatened his kingdom encompassed not only those who followed ancient religions, but anyone who was a convenient scapegoat if a cow’s milk dried up, or plague killed a village, or someone had a daughter instead of a son. James I even believed that witchcraft had caused the storms that had delayed his ship leaving Denmark.

  AGNES’S DEATH

  The true sin in this book isn’t the Macbeths’ plotting, even murdering their king. War and killing were games played by the kings and lords and gentlemen in this book. King Duncan’s wars had killed many, many people. At last the murder games he played led to his death.

  But Annie betrayed Agnes with her arrogance, thinking that because she lived with lords and ladies, she didn’t need to listen to the warnings of a village wisewoman. Because of that, Agnes died. But even in her agony, Agnes stayed loyal to Annie and to the villagers who owed her so much. It would have been easy for Agnes to melt into the darkness before the witch finder arrived; easy to yell out names to accuse others so as to escape the pain at the stake.

  Agnes kept her integrity.

  Kings led their helpless people off to war, and did not care how many died or were left crippled. Even if Agnes would not use the word ‘love’, that is what she gave her people.

  HORSES AND LITTERS

  There were few good roads in Shakespeare’s time, and even fewer suitable for coaches. People walked, or rode, or were carried in chairs or litters.

  SOME RECIPES

  Liniment for aching bones

  WARNING: Do not use this on broken skin. Try a tiny bit on the inside of your wrist first, in case you’re allergic to any of the ingredients. Do not use the liniment again if your skin turns red.

  Ingredients

  6 tablespoons of beeswax (try a beeswax candle)

  6 tablespoons of almond oil

  6 drops of ginger oil

  10 drops of peppermint oil

  6 drops of lavender oil

  (You can use the herbs themselves, but that is a longer and more complicated process.)

  Method

  In a saucepan on a very low heat, melt the beeswax in the almond oil.

  Turn off the heat and leave to cool for a minute, then add the ginger, peppermint and lavender oils.

  Immediately pour the mixture into a small wide-mouthed jar that’s sitting on a wooden surface (so it doesn’t crack), and seal at once.

  Keep in a cool dark place and apply as necessary. The liniment should last at least a year.

  Herbed flap of mutton

  Ask your butcher to prepare a mutton flap for you.

  Ingredients

  1 cup of fresh breadcrumbs

  Juice of 1 lemon or 1 sour orange

  1 tablespoon of fresh thyme leaves (no stems)

  6 sage leaves, torn

  6 onions, peeled and chopped

  6 cloves of garlic, chopped (in the castle, they’d have used the tops of the wild garlic that still grows in Scotland)

  3 tablespoons of melted butter

  1 mutton flap

  Method

  Mix together all the stuffing ingredients. Spread out the mutton flap. Scatter the stuffing over it.

  Roll up the flap and tie it securely with kitchen string.

  Place the rolled flap in an oven dish and bake at 160°C for three hours, so the fat melts away and leaves the meat tender.

  Cut away the string before you serve it. The roll should keep its shape.

  Slice it thinly and eat it with gravy or redcurrant jelly. It is also delicious cold.

  Bannocks

  Bannocks used to be baked on the hot hearthstones in front of the fire, not in an oven. There were probably as many recipes as there were Scottish cooks. This is a good one.

  Ingredients

  1 cup of rolled oats, whizzed in the blender till they look like flour

  1 cup of self-raising flour (barley flour was also used)

  6 tablespoons of butter, or any solid fat (don’t worry if the measurement isn’t exact, as it’s hard to get an exact spoonful of butter)

  ⅓ of a cup of buttermilk, or a little more

 
Extra butter

  Method

  Combine the oats and flour.

  Rub the butter into the oat and flour mixture to get a texture like breadcrumbs.

  Add the buttermilk and stir gently. If the mixture is too dry, add a little more buttermilk.

  Put a frying pan on a low heat.

  Gently form the mixture into a round, then flatten it so it’s like a thick pancake and will fit in the pan.

  Melt the extra butter in the pan.

  As soon as the butter has melted, lay the bannock in the pan. Fry gently until the crust is pale brown. (Lift the edge carefully with a spatula or egg slice to see.)

  Turn the bannock over with the spatula or egg slice, again carefully as it will be brittle. Fry until the base is pale brown. By now it will have risen to twice its original size.

  Break off a bit to check it’s cooked all the way through. If it is, serve with more butter, or with slices of cheese or ricotta mixed with chopped chives. Ricotta is similar to the fresh ‘green cheese’ made in the time of the book.

  It’s certainly not traditional, but I like it with chilli jam, as well as cheese.

  And yes, it can be baked in the oven too. It’s best fresh, but lasts a day or two in a sealed container, and can be reheated.

  Optional: Scatter rock salt on either side of the bannock before placing it in the pan.

  To make sweet bannock: Add 6 tablespoons of caster sugar and/or a cup of dried currants or blueberries.

  Acknowledgements

  As always, fair acknowledgement would be longer than this book. But to Lisa, Cristina, Nicola and Kate, thank you for both this series and the breadth of your help with it. Angela, as always, has turned mess into text. Bryan has tolerated long lectures on Shakespeare’s motivations while expertly pretending to listen while reading New Scientist.

  Thank you to my friends from St Bede’s, and Virginia too, for reminding me in so many ways, at so many times, that true evil does not exist, but just the ignorance or twisted anguish that creates tragedy instead of love.