by C. J. Cooke
Their downstairs neighbor Margaret took the move personally and refused to say good-bye.
Luna lays the rowan wreath on Liv’s grave, then stands for a moment in silence, as she does every year. She remembers the night she received the call from Cassie.
“Are you sitting down?” she’d said. “You need to sit down for this. Trust me.”
And then the long drive north with Clover, Ethan, Saffy, and Charlie, to see her mother. She had been turned inside out with anxiety the whole way there. When she’d walked into Cassie’s home, she saw a woman in the chair by the fire. She was young and she looked ill, her hair gone and her face puffed up from the chemo. But Luna knew who she was.
She’d promised herself not to cry. But when she saw Liv, it had spilled out of her, and the room had spun and she was transported back to being a child again. “Mum!” she’d shouted, a word and a tone that had not left her lips for many years. She’d wrapped her arms around her mother’s waist, and Saffy and Clover had fallen against Liv’s legs, and they all wept until they were wrung clean of tears.
Liv died three months later. It was longer than the doctors had predicted she’d live, and her last days were spent in Luna’s home. Before she passed, she and Finn had a small ceremony, and he adopted Clover and Saffy as his own. Luna knew she’d be looking after her sisters in England, that Finn would stay in Scotland, or perhaps he’d go back to New Zealand. But he would also FaceTime them every week. And every Christmas, they’d travel to Cassie’s home in Edinburgh and celebrate Hogmanay with first footing, a Scottish tradition designed to bring good luck for the new year, and whiskey.
Luna was tested for gene mutations to detect her chances of developing cancer. She tested low-risk, but planned to be screened regularly, just in case. And to have Clover and Saffy be tested once they turned twenty-one.
Clover is eleven now. She’s in Year 7 and obsessed with clothes, science, and Minecraft. Sometimes she calls Luna “Mum,” and Luna doesn’t correct her. She can see the resemblance herself, even when she looks in the mirror. And sometimes, when she looks at Charlie, she can see a flash of her dad, Sean. Especially around the eyes. Life continues outrageously, she thinks, in whatever form it can. An unstoppable circularity, the past always in the present.
Eilidh contacted Luna soon after they arrived back in Coventry. By then, Clover was overjoyed to be reunited with Saffy, which made her relocation to Coventry and embracing life without her mother a lot more bearable. Eilidh called right as Clover was laughing her head off in the background, and although she’s been placed on file for a checkup with local social services, there hasn’t yet been a call.
Saffy is nineteen. She’s studying history at Glasgow University and shares a flat with her boyfriend, Florin, and an assortment of houseplants. For her birthday, Luna bought Saffy a Leica digital camera that sends images via Bluetooth straight to Saffy’s laptop. Saffy still can’t get over the magic of it. Everything, all the technology she can get her hands on, is a kind of magic. She’s amazed nobody else feels this way, but then nobody else has bounced from 1998 into the 2020s like she has. She podcasts under a pseudonym, Ph0t0copied Grrl, about the witches that were killed in Scotland, with particular emphasis on the ones from Lòn Haven. She gets messages sometimes from people researching the period and has gathered more information about the women. It humanizes them, she thinks, to know their names and details about their lives.
By accident, she came across Brodie’s Facebook profile. She laughed a little too hard when she saw how he turned out. And then she blocked him.
Since the day she was found, Luna’s thought about the cave, and wondered how it happened. She’s researched wormholes and the conversion of mass into energy. She’s researched resonance frequency—all human bodies have their own frequency—and whether something within the ancient rock of the cave, formed three million years ago, transferred the resonance of her body into a different temporal frequency. A physics professor in Cambridge told her he’d found microbes that he believed were from another planet trapped inside caves in Japan. Yet another emailed a long screed about dark matter particles found in rock samples collected from the Arctic, about quantum radiation creating wormholes deep within the earth. Another explained time as Russian dolls, the past and present stacked within the future like eggs inside eggs—when she went through the cave, she’d simply cracked one and slipped inside the other.
None of this explains how she got the numbers on her leg, etched as delicately as though writ by a human hand.
She still doesn’t believe in magic. It’s a technology, she’s decided. Just one that she doesn’t understand yet.
Saffy and Luna have decided to destroy the cave to stop anyone from the past coming through. Luna has been on the lookout for a specialist contractor. Someone to do the job right, without drawing attention. It’ll have to be done quick, at night, and with discretion. No trucks rolling up, no drilling. The explosion will have to coincide with a noise elsewhere on the island. A fireworks display, perhaps, organized by Cassie. A distraction.
Her phone beeps. It’s a message from the contractor.
Yes. I can do this.
The price is eye-watering, but she doesn’t hesitate.
The past belongs in the past.
* * *
—
“Should I put the flowers in the vase now?” Charlie asks as she weeds the grave and cleans the headstone.
She points at the ones that have died. “Take those out first,” she tells him, watching as he stretches his little hands to the old, droop-headed roses with the browning petals, replacing them with the new.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I came across the story of Scotland’s witches by accident. I moved to Glasgow in late 2019, just before we went into national lockdown. I’d been working at the University of Glasgow for four and a half years, but I’d not yet heard that the Scottish witch trials were the worst in Europe, nor that around four thousand people—mostly poor women—were tortured and killed on false charges of witchcraft. I’d not yet learned that their conviction meant that their memory was forever tarnished, that their loved ones were left without a body to bury—in Scotland, convicted bodies were always burned, sometimes while still alive—and without a gravestone to pay their respects. Left without a single way to remember their loved one with fondness, I can only imagine how profoundly traumatic and complicated their grief must have been.
When we finally relocated to Glasgow—mostly to spare me the 163-mile commute from our home in Whitley Bay, England—I learned, completely by chance, that we lived twenty minutes from a small plaque marking where eleven people were executed for witchcraft. Two of them were young boys, roughly the same age as my son, and, in fact, they had lived close to our new home. I had heard about the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, USA, and in England, but knew very little about the ones in Scotland. Gradually, my research revealed this dark stain on Scotland’s history, and I found myself astonished again and again by both the magnitude of this history and its persistent invisibility. For example, close to my home, I was able to find the megalithic Kempock Stone, known as the Lang Stane, or Granny Kempock. Sat opposite the shop Sainsbury’s at the top of a short path, the stone forms part of a story concerning a woman named Mary Lamont, who was accused of dancing around the stone and plotting with the devil to throw the stone into the sea to sink ships. She was sent to the gallows on the grounds of a church nearby. You will need to scour the depths of the internet to find this information. Although the stone is marked by iron signages and a plaque, there is no mention of Mary, not even on the Kempock Stone’s Wikipedia entry. I drove to the church where she was burned and found no mention of her execution there either.
There are now some excellent projects dedicated to uncovering the stories of Scotland’s witch hunts. The University of Edinburgh has an online database (witches.shca.ed.ac.uk) which led me to discover the witc
hes named in this book. I was moved to find names of women there who were killed on the same day, and who were likely related to each other—mothers, daughters, and sisters, executed together. Although historical information is scant, the good research resources out there pointed me to numerous cases whereby an accusation made against a single person led to additional accusations. The person accused was often tortured—even when it was outlawed—which, reading between the lines, caused them to “confess” to cavorting with the devil and to accuse others of doing the same.
I came across cases of accused individuals buying their way out of execution, suggesting that it was the most vulnerable and voiceless in society who were led to the gallows. Women were not even allowed to be witnesses at their own trials. In his book Daemonologie (1582), King James VI suggests repeatedly that women, as the “weaker vessel,” were more likely to be deceived by the devil. It is hard to read the witch fervor that flooded Europe for centuries as anything less than misogyny. “Witch” continues to be a gendered term, aimed entirely at females.
I stayed on the Isle of Bute in Scotland several times to write this book, and discovered that a Bute woman named Amy Hyndman had been convicted of witchcraft in March 1662. Although Lòn Haven is a fictional island, I based it partly on Bute. Amy is mentioned in the Highland Papers, a now-digitized historical record that reports on numerous witch trials. Amy is mentioned once; she was named by another woman who had been accused. As with almost all of the witch trials, Amy is voiceless and vulnerable, and I wanted to imagine her story as it may have been.
As I wrote I came across other efforts dedicated to telling the story of Scotland’s witches. One of them is the Witches of Scotland project (witchesofscotland.com), a campaign for justice initiated by Claire Mitchell QC and Zoe Venditozzi, who are engaged in attempting to secure a legal pardon, apology, and national monument for the people who were accused and convicted under the Witchcraft Act. Quite rightly, they point out that while there are statues around Scotland commemorating many individuals, mostly men and—bizarrely—a bear, there isn’t a single statue dedicated to those who were accused and killed on false charges of witchcraft. At Edinburgh Castle, a plaque at the Witches’ Well marks the spot where some three hundred people were executed—but there is not a single name, and certainly no monument.
Although the stories of Scotland’s witches are from a distant past, they feel remarkably of the moment. The #MeToo movement, the depiction of then presidential candidate Hillary Clinton as a witch on social media in 2016, and the arrests of women at the vigil held for a woman who was murdered by a man while walking home from a friend’s house in London represent a brutal and silencing incursion against women that, for many, echo the witch hunts of the distant past. For me, Amy’s story from the 1600s echoes in the 2000s. It is my sincere hope we can change the narrative in the future.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To Alice Lutyens, Danielle Perez, Deborah Schneider, Sophie Burks, Kimberley Young, Loren Jaggers, Jessica Plummer, Candice Coote, Luke Speed, Felicity Denham, Sarah Bance, Sophie Macaksill, and Andrew Davis, my sincere and indebted thanks for everything you’ve done to help create this book with me. I am eternally grateful to work with such talented, dedicated, and patient individuals.
Thanks to Emma Heatherington and her partner, Jim McKee, for advising on mural painting, and to Helen Stew for advice on social services—all errors are mine.
Thanks to Fez Inkwright for her book Folk Magic and Healing: An Unusual History of Everyday Plants (Liminal 11, 2019) and Alice Tarbuck for her book A Spell in the Wild: A Year and Six Centuries of Magic (Two Roads, 2020)—both proved useful while researching this book. All errors are my own.
To Kris Haddow for pointing me in the direction of Witchcraft and Superstitious Record in the South-Western District of Scotland by J. Maxwell Wood.
To my colleagues at the University of Glasgow: Elizabeth Reeder, Zoe Strachan, Sophie Collins, Colin Herd, Louise Welsh, and especially Jen Hadfield, for teaching me about the home scar.
I came to Zoe Venditozzi and Claire Mitchell QC’s wonderful project, Witches of Scotland (witchesofscotland.com), much too late, but nonetheless I’m indebted to their excellent podcasts for refining my thinking while completing my edits.
Thank you to all the book bloggers, booksellers, librarians, and readers who champion my books. You are absolute rock stars.
My love and thanks to my children, Melody, Phoenix, Summer, and Willow. To our dog, Ralph, for being the perfect writing partner. And to Jared Jess-Cooke, least of all for helping me research how to remove ribs from someone (despite it grossing him out) without suspecting me of being a homicidal maniac (right??).
READERS GUIDE
THE
LIGHTHOUSE
WITCHES
C. J. COOKE
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
The island of Lòn Haven is described as having a “Viking soul.” How does this setting shape the story? In what ways does it seem to affect the characters who live there?
Discuss Saffy’s relationship with her mother. Why do you think she hates her so much?
Why do you think Luna is so reluctant to marry Ethan?
How is motherhood explored throughout the novel? How does Liv feel about it, and why do you think that is? Do her feelings change?
How do you think Patrick’s experiences affected him? What did you think about his actions toward Liv?
At one point in the novel, Liv asks Isla why she stays on Lòn Haven, given its history of disappearances, including Isla’s little brother. Why do you think Isla stayed?
Patrick is astonished when his mother agrees to the charges against her. Why do you think the women who were accused of being witches agreed to their charges?
Why do you think people continued to believe in the wildling myth for as long as they did?
Liv confesses that she came to Lòn Haven both to take the commission at the lighthouse and because she was running from something. Why do you think she was running? Did you agree with her reaction?
How do you think Rowan’s accusation of Finn would have affected him?
At the end of the novel, Saffy feels she can find a rational explanation for the reason why she “bounced forward.” What do you think happened?
Liv writes to Luna that “forgiveness is a kind of time travel.” What do you think she means by this? Do you agree with her philosophy?
Photo by C. J. Cooke
C. J. Cooke is an award-winning poet and novelist published in twenty-three languages. She teaches creative writing at the University of Glasgow, where she also researches the impact of motherhood on women’s writing and creative-writing interventions for mental health. Her previous novel is The Nesting.
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