by Jane Yolen
Later that afternoon my father’s body was taken away by three burly men for its chesting, being placed into its coffin and the lid screwed down. Then it would lie in the cold kirk till the funeral the next day.
Once he was gone from the house, I finally felt I could look in his journals. I might have sat comfortably in the study, but I’d never been welcomed there before, so didn’t feel it my place now. The kitchen and sitting room were more Mrs. Marr’s domain than mine. And if I never had to go back into the old man’s bedroom, it would be years too soon for me.
So I lay in my childhood bed, the covers up to my chin, and read by the flickering lamplight. Mrs. Marr, bless her, had brought up a warming pan which she came twice to refill. And she brought up as well a pot of tea and jam pieces and several slabs of good honest cheddar.
“I didna think ye’d want a big supper.”
She was right. Food was the last thing on my mind.
After she left the room, I took a silver hip flask from under my pillow where I’d hidden it, and then poured a hefty dram of whisky into the teapot. I would need more than Mrs. Marr’s offerings to stay warm this night. Outside the sea moaned as it pushed past the skellies, on its way to the shore. I’d all but forgotten that sound. It made me smile.
I read the last part of the last journal first, where Father talked about the toad, wondering briefly if it was the very same toad I had found at his bedfoot. But it was the bit right after, where he spoke of “formidable visitants,” that riveted me. What had he meant? From the tone of it, I didn’t think he meant any of our St. Monans neighbors.
The scholar in me asserted itself, and I turned to the first of the journals, marked 1926, some five years earlier. There was one book for each year. I started with that first notebook and read long into the night.
The journals were not easy to decipher, for my father’s handwriting was crabbed with age and, I expect, arthritis. The early works were splotchy and, in places, faded. Also he had inserted sketchy pictures and diagrams. Occasionally he’d written whole paragraphs in corrupted Latin, or at least in a dialect unknown to me.
What he seemed engaged upon was a study of a famous trial of local witches in 1590, supervised by King James VI himself. The VI of Scotland, for he was Mary Queen of Scots’ own son, and Queen Elizabeth’s heir.
The witches, some ninety in all according to my father’s notes, had been accused of sailing over the Firth to North Berwick in riddles—sieves, I think he meant—to plot the death of the king by raising a storm when he sailed to Denmark. However, I stumbled so often over my Latin translations, I decided I needed a dictionary. And me a classics scholar.
So halfway through the night, I rose and, taking the lamp, made my way through the cold dark, tiptoeing so as not to wake Mrs. Marr. Nothing was unfamiliar beneath my bare feet. The kitchen stove would not have gone out completely, only filled with gathering coal and kept minimally warm. All those years of my childhood came rushing back. I could have gone into the study without the lamp, I suppose. But to find the book I needed, I’d have to have light.
And lucky indeed I took it, for in its light it I saw—gathered on the floor of my father’s study—a group of toads throwing strange shadows up against the bookshelves. I shuddered to think what might have happened had I stepped barefooted amongst them.
But how had they gotten in? And was the toad I’d taken into the garden amongst them? Then I wondered aloud at what such a gathering should be called. I’d heard of a murder of crows, an exaltation of larks. Perhaps toads came in a congregation? For that is what they looked like, a squat congregation, huddled together, nodding their heads, and waiting on the minister in this most unlikely of kirks.
It was too dark even with the lamp, and far too late, for me to round them up. So I sidestepped them and, after much searching, found the Latin dictionary where it sat cracked open on my father’s desk. I grabbed it up, avoided the congregation of toads, and went out the door. When I looked back, I could still see the odd shadows dancing along the walls.
I almost ran back to my bed, shutting the door carefully behind me. I didn’t want that dark presbytery coming in, as if they could possibly hop up the stairs like the frog in the old tale, demanding to be taken to my little bed.
But the shock of my father’s death and the long day of travel, another healthy swallow of my whisky, as well as that bizarre huddle of toads, all seemed to combine to put me into a deep sleep. If I dreamed, I didn’t remember any of it. I woke to one of those dawn choruses of my childhood, comprised of blackbirds, song thrushes, gulls, rooks, and jackdaws, all arguing over who should wake me first.
For a moment I couldn’t recall where I was. Eyes closed, I listened to the birds, so different from the softer, more lyrical sounds outside my Cambridge windows. But I woke fully in the knowledge that I was back in my childhood home, that my father was dead and to be buried that afternoon if possible, as I had requested of the doctor and Mrs. Marr, and I had only hours to make things tidy in my mind. Then I would be away from St. Monans and its small-mindedness, back to Cambridge where I truly belonged.
I got out of bed, washed, dressed in the simple black dress I always travel with, a black bandeau on my fair hair, and went into the kitchen to make myself some tea.
Mrs. Marr was there before me, sitting on a hardback chair and knitting a navy blue guernsey sweater with its complicated patterning. She set the steel needles down and handed me a full cup, the tea nearly black even with its splash of milk. There was a heaping bowl of porridge, sprinkled generously with salt, plus bread slathered with golden syrup.
“Thank you,” I said. It would have done no good to argue that I drank coffee now; nor did I like either oatmeal or treacle, and never ate till noon. Besides, I was suddenly ravenous. “What do you need me to do?” I asked between mouthfuls, stuffing them in the way I’d done as a youngster.
“’Tis all arranged,” she said, taking up the needles again. No proper St. Monans woman was ever idle long. “Though sooner than is proper. But all to accommodate ye, he’ll be in the kirkyard this afternoon. Lucky for ye it’s a Sunday, or we couldna do it. The men are home from fishing.” She was clearly not pleased with me. “Ye just need to be there at the service. Not that many will come. He was no generous with his company.” By which she meant he had few friends. Nor relatives except me.
“Then I’m going to walk down by the water this morning,” I told her. “Unless you have something that needs doing. I want to clear my head.”
“Aye, ye would.”
Was that condemnation or acceptance? Who could tell? Perhaps she meant I was still the thankless child she remembered. Or that I was like my father. Or that she wanted only to see the back of me, sweeping me from her domain so she could clean and bake without my worrying presence. I thanked her again for the meal, but she wanted me gone. As I had been for the past ten years. And I was as eager to be gone as she was to have me. The funeral was not till mid afternoon.
“There are toads in the study,” I said as I started out the door.
“Toads?” She looked startled. Or perhaps frightened.
“Puddocks. A congregation of them.”
Her head cocked to one side. “Och, ye mean a knot. A knot of toads.”
A knot. Of course. I should have remembered. “Shall I put them out?” At least I could do that for her.
She nodded. “Aye.”
I found a paper sack and went into the study, but though I looked around for quite some time, I couldn’t find the toads anywhere. If I hadn’t still had the Latin dictionary in my bedroom, I would have thought my night visit amongst them and my scare from their shadows had been but a dream.
“All gone,” I called to Mrs. Marr before slipping out through the front door and heading toward the strand.
Nowhere in St. Monans is far from the sea. I didn’t realize how much the sound of it was in my bones until I moved to Cambridge. Or how much I’d missed that sound till I slept the night in my old room.<
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I found my way to the foot of the church walls where boats lay upturned, looking like beached dolphins. A few of the older men, past their fishing days, sat with their backs against the salted stone, smoking silently, and staring out to the grey slatey waters of the Firth. Nodding to them, I took off along the beach. Overhead gulls squabbled, and far out, near the Bass Rock, I could see gannets diving head-first into the water.
A large boat, some kind of yacht, had just passed the Bass and was sailing west majestically toward a mooring, probably in South Queensferry. I wondered who would be sailing these waters in such a ship.
But then I was interrupted by the wind sighing my name. Or so I thought at first. Then I looked back at the old kirk on the cliff above me. Someone was waving at me in the ancient kirkyard. It was Alec.
He signaled that he was coming down to walk with me, and as I waited, I thought about what a handsome man he’d turned into. But a fisherman, I reminded myself, a bit of the old snobbery biting me on the back of the neck. St. Monans, like the other fishing villages of the East Neuk, was made up of three classes—fisherfolk, farmers, and the shopkeepers and tradesmen. My father being a scholar was outside of them all, which meant that as his daughter, I belonged to none of them either.
Still, in this place, where I was once so much a girl of the town—from the May—I felt my heart give a small stutter. I remembered that first kiss, so soft and sweet and innocent, the windmill hard against my back. My last serious relationship had been almost a year ago, and I was more than ready to fall in love again. Even at the foot of my father’s grave. But not with a fisherman. Not in St. Monans.
Alec found his way down to the sand and came toward me. “Off to find croupies?” he called.
I laughed. “The only fossil I’ve found recently has been my father,” I said, then bit my lower lip at his scowl.
“He was nae a bad man, Jan,” he said, catching up to me. “Just undone by his reading.”
I turned a glare at him. “Do you think reading an ailment then?”
He put up his hands palms towards me. “Whoa, lass. I’m a big reader myself. But what the old man had been reading lately had clearly unnerved him. He couldna put it into context. Mrs. Marr said as much before you came. These last few months he’d stayed away from the pub, from the kirk, from everyone who’d known him well. No one kenned what he’d been on about.”
I wondered what sort of thing Alec would be reading. The fishing report? The local paper? Feeling out of sorts, I said sharply, “Well, I was going over his journals last night and what he’s been on about are the old North Berwick witches.”
Alec’s lips pursed. “The ones who plotted to blow King James off the map.” It was a statement, not a question.
“The very ones.”
“Not a smart thing for the unprepared to tackle.”
I wondered if Alec had become as hag-ridden and superstitious as any St. Monans fisherman. Ready to turn home from his boat if he met a woman on the way. Or not daring to say “salmon” or “pig” and instead speaking of “red fish” and “curly tail,” or shouting out “Cauld iron!” at any mention of them. All the East Neuk tip-leavings I was glad to be shed of.
He took the measure of my disapproving face, and laughed. “Ye take me for a gowk,” he said. “But there are more things in heaven and earth, Janet, than are dreamt of in yer philosophy.”
I laughed as Shakespeare tumbled from his lips. Alec could always make me laugh. “Pax,” I said.
He reached over, took my hand, gave it a squeeze. “Pax.” Then he dropped it again as we walked along the beach, a comfortable silence between us.
The tide had just turned and was heading out. Gulls, like satisfied housewives, sat happily in the receding waves. One lone boat was on the horizon, a small fishing boat, not the yacht I had seen earlier, which must already be coming into its port. The sky was that wonderful spring blue, without a threatening cloud, not even the fluffy Babylonians, as the fishermen called them.
“Shouldn’t you be out there?” I said, pointing at the boat as we passed by the smoky fish-curing sheds.
“I rarely get out there anymore,” he answered, not looking at me but at the sea. “Too busy until summer. And why old man Sinclair is fishing when the last of the winter herring have been hauled in, I canna fathom.”
I turned toward him. “Too busy with what?”
He laughed. “Och, Janet, yer so caught up in yer own preconceptions, ye canna see what’s here before yer eyes.”
I didn’t answer right away, and the moment stretched between us, as the silence had before. Only this was not comfortable. At last I said, “Are you too busy to help me solve the mystery of my father’s death?”
“Solve the mystery of his life first,” he told me, “and the mystery of his death will inevitably be revealed.” Then he touched his cap, nodded at me, and strolled away.
I was left to ponder what he said. Or what he meant. I certainly wasn’t going to chase after him. I was too proud to do that. Instead, I went back to the house, changed my shoes, made myself a plate of bread and cheese. There was no wine in the house. Mrs. Marr was as Temperance as Alec’s old father had been. But I found some miserable sherry hidden in my father’s study. It smelled like turpentine, so I made do with fresh milk, taking the plate and glass up to my bedroom, to read some more of my father’s journals until it was time to bury him.
It is not too broad a statement to say that Father was clearly out of his mind. For one, he was obsessed with local witches. For another, he seemed to believe in them. While he spared a few paragraphs for Christian Dote, St. Monans’s homegrown witch of the 1640s, and a bit more about the various Anstruther, St. Andrews, and Crail trials—listing the hideous tortures, and executions, of hundreds of poor old women in his journal entries—it was the earlier North Berwick crew who really seemed to capture his imagination. By the third year’s journal, I could see that he obviously considered the North Berwick witchery evil real, whereas the others, a century later, he dismissed as deluded or senile old women, as deluded and senile as the men who hunted them.
Here is what he wrote about the Berwick corps: “They were a scabrous bunch, these ninety greedy women and six men, wanting no more than what they considered their due: a king and his bride dead in the sea, a kingdom in ruins, themselves set up in high places.”
“Oh, Father,” I whispered, “what a noble mind is here o’erthrown,” for whatever problems I’d had with him—and they were many—I had always admired his intelligence.
He described the ceremonies they indulged in, and they were awful. In the small North Berwick church, fueled on wine and sex, the witches had begun a ritual to call up a wind that would turn over the royal ship and drown King James. First they’d christened a cat with the name of Hecate, while black candles flickered fitfully along the walls of the apse and nave. Then they tortured the poor creature by passing it back and forth across a flaming hearth. Its elf-knotted hair caught fire and burned slowly, and the little beastie screamed in agony. The smell must have been appalling, but he doesn’t mention that. I once caught my hair on fire, bending over a stove on a cold night in Cambridge, and it was the smell that was the worst of it. It lingered in my room for days.
Then I thought of my own dear moggie at home, a sweet orange-colored puss who slept each night at my bedfoot. If anyone ever treated her the way the North Berwick witches had that poor cat, I’d be more than ready to kill. And not with any wind, either.
But there was worse yet, and I shuddered as I continued reading. One of the men, so Father reported, had dug up a corpse from the church cemetery, and with a companion had cut off the dead man’s hands and feet. Then the witches attached the severed parts to the cat’s paws. After this they attached the corpse’s sex organs to the cat’s. I could only hope the poor creature was dead by this point. After this desecration, they proceeded to a pier at the port of Leith where they flung the wee beastie into the sea.
Father wrote: “
A storm was summarily raised by this foul method, along with the more traditional knotted twine. The storm blackened the skies, with wild gales churning the sea. The howl of the wind could be heard all the way across the Firth to Fife. But the odious crew had made a deadly miscalculation. The squall caught a ship crossing from Kinghorn to Leith and smashed it to pieces all right, but it was not the king’s ship. The magic lasted only long enough to kill a few innocent sailors on that first ship, and then blew itself out to sea. As for the king, he proceeded over calmer waters with his bride, arriving safely in Denmark and thence home again to write that great treatise on witchcraft, Demonology, and preside over a number of witch trials thereafter.”
I did not read quickly because, as I have said, parts of the journal were in a strange Latin and for those passages I needed the help of the dictionary. I was like a girl at school with lines to translate by morning, frustrated, achingly close to comprehension, but somehow missing the point. In fact, I did not understand them completely until I read them aloud. And then suddenly, as a roiled liquid settles at last, all became clear. The passages were some sort of incantation, or invitation, to the witches and to the evil they so devoutly and hideously served.
I closed the journal and shook my head. Poor Father. He wrote as if the witchcraft were fact, not a coincidence of gales from the southeast that threw up vast quantities of seaweed on the shore, and the haverings of tortured old women. Put a scold’s bridle on me, and I would probably admit to intercourse with the devil. Any devil. And describe him and his nether parts as well.
But Father’s words, as wild and unbelievable as they were, held me in a kind of thrall. And I would have remained on my bed reading further if Mrs. Marr hadn’t knocked on the door and summoned me to his funeral.
She looked me over carefully, but for once I seemed to pass muster, my smart black Cambridge dress suitable for the occasion. She handed me a black hat. “I didna think ye’d have thought to bring one.” Her lips drew down into a thin, straight line.