Witch from the Sea

by Philippa Carr

  She had taken one of the horses from the stables and made it her own. I had supplied her with riding clothes; I had set the seamstress to make garments for her. That was in the beginning when I was sorry for her and wanted to make up for the wrong which had been done to her by my husband.

  She never hesitated to take these things. She herself designed her clothes and was with the seamstress while she was working. When they were completed they were beautiful in an exotic way. She walked gracefully and held herself so proudly that she looked like a queen. Her beauty seemed to intensify with the passing of the months. She loved the sun and on hot days rode off and sometimes did not come back all day.

  Colum continued to watch her broodingly; and he had ceased to mention her to me.

  When we entertained she joined the company. She would seat herself at the table on the dais and even though Colum and I were in the centre she would have given the impression to a stranger that she was the mistress of the house, not I.

  There was often something jaunty about her manner; it was as though she were secretly amused. One of the neighbouring squires had fallen in love with her and implored her to marry him. She would not give him a definite answer and consequently he made pretence after pretence to visit us.

  “Young Madden is here again,” Colum would say. “Poor lovesick fool! Does he think she will have him?”

  Once I said: “Colum, how long will she stay here?”

  He turned on me angrily. “I thought it was your pleasure that she stayed. Was it not you who were so eager to make up for my cruelty?”

  “Yes, but she doesn’t belong here, does she?”

  “Who shall say who belongs where? Once you did not belong, now you do.”

  “Surely that is different. I am your wife.”

  “Remember it,” he said rather sourly.

  That was a strange long summer. The heat was intense. The sea was as calm as a lake and from the turret window looked like a sheet of silk shot with blue and grey light; its murmur was gentle as it washed the walls of the castle. I would often look out at the sharp teeth of the Devil protruding above the water, and the dark smudge of battered vessels there. I wondered what Maria thought when she looked out and saw the remains of the Santa Maria. Did she think of her husband who was lost to her forever? One could never tell; she glided about the castle with that aloof look in her eyes and no one could know what she was thinking.

  Colum was different. He talked often about another child. What was wrong with me? Why did I not conceive? He had changed towards me. I was sensitive enough to realize that. There was a certain lack of spontaneity in his passion. I thought I knew why.

  I wished that my mother would visit us. In the months of June I wrote and asked her to come. I told her how I missed her and how long it seemed since we had been together.

  There must have been a plea in my letter for she wrote immediately and said she was making plans to leave. I felt relieved then. I had decided that I must confide in her. I knew that was the last thing Colum wanted but I did not care. I felt I must talk to someone. But she did not come. Damask had a fever and she neither dared leave her nor bring her.

  “When she is well, we will come, my dear Linnet,” she wrote. She told me what was happening at home. My father had returned from his second voyage and this time he had been equally successful as far as trading was concerned and had achieved this without the loss of ships. The Landors had visited them and they had talked most of the time about the success of the venture.

  “Fennimore’s little boy is the pride of his life,” she wrote. “He is called Fenn and must be a month or so older than our own little Tamsyn.”

  Her letter brought back so clearly to me the great hall in Lyon Court and my father at the head of the table talking of his adventures and my mother, watching him and now and then bickering with him.

  There was a great comfort in thinking of my mother and father. I imagined that Colum and I were rather like them. Their marriage had survived the years and it was clear that they could not live happily without each other. We should be like that, I promised myself, perhaps rather too vehemently.

  I watched Maria walking to the stables. She swayed as she walked, so graceful was she. When she sat a horse she looked like one of the goddesses from Greek mythology. I thought that so much beauty concentrated in one person was disconcerting.

  I wondered where she went on her long rides. That was a mystery. Mystery must always surround Maria.

  July came and the heat had turned sultry.

  “There’ll be thunder,” said the weather-wise; but they were wrong. The heat persisted. St. Swithin’s Day came and we watched for the rain. It did not come.

  I remember my mother’s quoting to me:

  “St. Swithin’s Day, if thou dost rain

  For forty days it will remain.

  St. Swithin’s Day, if thou be fair

  For forty days ’twill rain nae mair.”

  But what did I care whether it rained or the sun shone? The weather could not alter the strangeness in the Castle.

  Then came August—hot nights when the bed curtains were drawn back to let in a little air. There was a swarm of wasps. Connell was stung and I treated the sting with a remedy Edwina had given me. How I wished I could see Edwina. I remembered then how she had said that there was something evil in the house.

  Evil. Yes it was evil. There was no mistaking it. In my heart I thought: It was brought here by the woman from the sea.

  I awoke in the night. It was too hot for sleep. Colum was not there. How many times had I awakened and found him gone. I went to the window and looked out to sea. It was calm and still. A shaft of moonlight made a path on the still waters. I could see the tips of the Devil’s Teeth clearly. There was no ship in sight.

  Some impulse made me take my robe and wrap it round me. I opened the door and stepped out into the narrow corridor.

  It was dark for there were no windows to let in the moonlight. I went back into the room and lighted a candle.

  I knew where I was going and if I found what I felt I might find, what should I do? I would go to my mother. I would steal out of the house in secret and take the children with me. Or I might write to her and tell her that she must come for I needed her even as Damask did. Damask was recovering now. She could come to me and she must.

  The candlelight threw shadows on the thick stone walls. I stood outside the Red Room, my fingers on the latch, yet I could not bring myself to open the door. In my mind’s eye I could picture them. It would be as it had been with us, for she had bewitched him.

  Why did I use that word? Bewitched. It was wrong. There was no question of witchcraft. She was a beautiful and voluptuous woman, he was a sensual man. He desired her as he had once desired me, and did I not know that he would allow nothing to stand in the way of his desires?

  The room of ghosts and shadows, I thought. She suffered here, poor Melanie. And if he visited Maria here, what did the poor sad shade of Melanie think? Could it be true that unhappy people walked, as the servants said? Did they hope to regain some happiness by so doing? Did they seek revenge on those who had made them suffer?

  How like him it would be to join Maria in that room, on that bed where Melanie had died! … just as he had made me share it with him. I remember then his passion had been not only desire for me but a need to show Melanie’s ghost if it existed that he cared not a jot for it. It seemed that in Colum’s passion there must always be double motives.

  Quietly I opened the door. The curtains were drawn back from the bed and a shaft of moonlight shone straight on to it.

  It was empty.

  I felt ashamed as I tiptoed back to my bedchamber. I lay on the bed. Colum did not join me. It seemed strange that they were both absent on that moonlit night.

  September had come and the heat was still with us. I had to see my mother. I told Colum that either she must come to me or I would go to her.

  He did not answer me; his thoughts appeared to be o
n other matters.

  There had been no disasters at sea during the summer months. Colum rode off on long journeys by himself and often stayed away for several days. He never told me where he had been. Maria was at the castle—quiet, brooding almost; there was a secret smile in her eyes.

  Colum came back after one of his long journeys. It was September—nearly a year since that night when I had gone out and rescued Maria from the sea. Senara was taking notice now. Her eyes would light up when I entered the nursery; I wondered what happened when Maria did. But of course she rarely did. She had borne her daughter and passed her over to us, as though it were our duty to care for her.

  Soon the autumn would be with us. A whole year would have passed. At the end of October it would be Hallowe’en again.

  When I rode inland I saw the birds congregating ready to leave for a warmer climate. The butcherbird, the nightjar, the chiffchaff and the common sandpiper were leaving us. Our ever-faithful gulls would remain to wheel over our coasts and utter their mournful cries.

  I said to Colum: “I have written to my mother. It seems so long since I saw her. I am insisting that she comes.”

  He looked at me steadily, his dark eyes cold.

  “You have not heard,” he said. “I did not wish to disturb you. The sweat is raging in Plymouth.”

  “The sweat!” I cried. “Then she must come to us at once.”

  “Nay, that she will not. Dost think I will allow my children to run the risk of catching it?”

  “She may be ill.”

  “You would have heard had she been.”

  “I must go to her.”

  “You shall stay here.”

  “But if she is in danger?”

  “I doubt she is ill. But she is near the sickness and it spreads like wildfire. You must stay apart.”

  “I want to see her so much,” I said.

  “You talk like a peevish child. You have your home to think of. Know this. She shall not come here nor shall you go to her, I’ll not have danger brought to the castle.”

  I was worried about my mother, but letters came. The sweat was taking toll of many people in the neighbourhood, she wrote. She did not go into the town. She had feared that Damask was sickening, but it turned out to be only a return of the fever she had had earlier.

  She wrote that she thought it unwise of her to come to see me or me to go to her.

  “I shall write often, my dearest child,” she said. “And until this terrible thing passes, we must be content with our letters.”

  She sent me a pair of stockings such as I had never seen before. The art of weaving had been introduced by a gentleman of Cambridge. He was the Rev. Mr. Lee and my mother wanted to know if I had ever seen such stockings.

  See how they mould themselves to the leg as stocking never did before (she wrote). I have heard from your grandmother in London that they are always worn by the quality and she says that soon there will be no other kind. I have more news from London. A Mr. Jansen who has been making spectacles has invented an instrument which makes things far off seem close. It is called a telescope. What will happen next, I wonder. What times we live in. I would instead they could find some means of preventing this terrible sickness breaking out every few years—and a cure for it when it comes.

  To read her letters offered me some comfort; but I wanted so much to talk to her. I wanted to tell her of the strange atmosphere which was slowly creeping into the castle.

  That it had something to do with Maria I was certain; and Colum was involved in it.

  Are they lovers? I wondered. If they were, that would explain so much.

  It was Hallowe’en again. Now the weather had changed. There was rain—a light drizzle which was little more than a mist.

  Jennet’s eyes were dark with her thoughts. I wondered what she knew.

  “’Tis a year,” she said, “since she came here. ’T’as been a long year … a long strange year.”

  So Jennet had felt it too.

  “And little Senara is ten months old.”

  “A proper little miss,” said Jennet, her eyes softening and the mysterious look going out of them. “It does me good to see young Tamsie with her. Proper little mother. And Senara, she knows her too. Screams for her. I swear she said ‘Tamsie’ the other day. Mark my words, that’ll be the first word that one says.”

  I was glad that my daughter was kind to the baby. It showed a pleasant trait in her character that there was no jealousy, for I knew that Jennet spoiled Senara. How far away that nursery world seemed from what was going on in the rest of the castle!

  Hallowe’en was with us. A dark and gloomy day—quite windless; the mist hanging over the castle, shrouding the turrets and penetrating into the rooms. The coastline merged into a bank of mist. It would be hard for any ships who were near our coasts in this. They would not need the lights from Colum’s donkeys to deceive them. They would not be able to see anything through the mist.

  It was a silent world—chill and dark. I thought of the raging storm of last year. I wondered whether Maria was remembering too.

  There was no bonfire that night.

  I asked Jennet why.

  “Weather bain’t fit,” she told me.

  But I didn’t think it was only the weather. Many of the servants believed there was a witch among us and it might have been that they feared to offend her.

  So the night of Hallowe’en passed quietly.

  But in the morning we discovered that Maria was missing. The bed in the Red Room had not been slept in. All that day we thought she would come back. But she did not. And as the days began to pass, we began to realize that she had disappeared.

  She had left us Senara as a memento of that night a year ago, but she herself had gone as suddenly as she had come.

  CHRISTMAS NIGHT IN THE CASTLE

  WHAT A STRANGE TIME that was. Christmas came and passed. My mother did not visit us because of the threat of the sweat. Silence had settled on the house; the servants whispering together. None of them would go to the Red Room.

  Every day I waited for something to happen. Sometimes I would go to that room and quietly open the door, expecting to find her returned. The room was empty, silent; yet I sensed a presence there. Was it Melanie or did some mysterious aura of Maria remain?

  The servants were convinced that she was a witch. She had come and gone on Hallowe’en. I could imagine that that was some wry joke of Maria’s; for I had often had the feeling that she was laughing at us in a contemptuous kind of way.

  I thought during the first days that she would be back. In the first hours I had thought she might have eloped with James Madden. That was soon dispelled when he arrived at the castle. The news had reached him that she had gone and he had to discover for himself. I had rarely seen a man so stricken. At least it proved the theory wrong that she had gone to him.

  A month later he had killed himself. He was found hanging in his bedchamber.

  When we heard the news at the castle the servants were horrified. They were certain then that she had been a witch.

  I myself wondered if this were true. Once I spoke to Colum about it. He did not seem disturbed by her departure. In fact, at times I thought he seemed relieved that she had gone. He had been attracted by her without doubt, and when I think of that incomparable and rather strange beauty, I was not surprised. I knew it must have been irresistible. I warmed towards Colum. It was amazing how easily I could. I believed that he had been attracted against his will and that now temptation had been removed he was glad.

  With each day I felt myself growing away from the horror the first revelation of his way of life had brought to me. Could one grow accustomed to such things? My mother had. Was I the same?

  I suppose in fact we were women with deep physical needs. There was nothing of the retiring female in either of us. Physical contact brought us that pleasure which is said to be somewhat repulsive to women of refinement. I knew from my mother’s revelations that she was of a similar nature. Colum
could give me complete physical satisfaction as I knew I did to him. It was as though my relationship with him was on two levels. But for this physical relationship I should have been horrified by what he did—and indeed I was—and yet he was my husband, I could not leave him for he would not allow it, and even had I found a way of doing so it would have meant losing my children. Perhaps I was weak in suppressing my revulsion. I was certainly not happy and it haunted my life. On the other hand I could not leave him.

  As that year progressed we settled into a way of life which did not change much. There were one or two wrecks but I tried not to think about them. While the storm raged I would lie in my bed, the curtains drawn and try to shut out of my mind the thought of what was happening outside the castle. There were one or two facts which forced themselves on my attention. I knew that Colum had agents in various foreign shipping ports—and English ones too—who informed him when cargo ships were leaving. He would know what route they would take and if they were likely to come near to our coast. Then he would watch for them. His men would be out on the coast and if the weather favoured him he would attempt to bring the ship on to the Devil’s Teeth.

  I would lie there trembling sometimes, saying to myself: “You are a devil, Colum. You are cruel and wicked and I should take my children away from you. What can happen to them with such a father?”

  My daughter was safe. She was essentially mine. Colum was proud of her healthy looks but he showed little interest in her. The boy was all his. Connell, now five years old, was beginning to look like his father. Colum would take him out on his pony; I had seen the boy riding on his shoulders. Connell could give that unadulterated adoration which Colum wanted. I think that Colum loved Connell more than anything on earth. He was determined to “make a man of him” and that meant bringing him up in his own image. He was succeeding admirably. The boy only came to me when he was sick, which was rarely. Then he would be like any other small child needing his mother. Colum had little patience with sickness, although if Connell was ailing he would be frantic with anxiety.