A Secret History of Witches

by Louisa Morgan

  Ursule refrained from commenting on her mother’s mix of French and English. “Life and death? Aren’t you being dramatic?”

  “Non. I am not.”

  “It’s just one of your stories you’re going to tell me.”

  Nanette took back the hoe and leaned on it. “Ursule,” she said, in a voice unlike any Ursule could remember her using. It was both sharp and cold, like the blade of the scythe hanging in the garden shed. “You must listen to me. Your Tante Louisette thought we should not tell you at all, for your own sake. I think ignorance is dangerous, and I insisted you know, but you have to understand how perilous this knowledge will be.”

  Ursule’s skin prickled. “You’re frightening me,” she whispered.

  “Bon.”

  Ursule had to curb her curiosity through an entire month. During those weeks Nanette refused to say anything further. Her aunts cast warning glances at her, but also kept their silence. They whispered together, as before, falling silent whenever Ursule or one of the men appeared. They still gathered things. Ursule saw Anne-Marie cutting sprigs of lavender from the garden, tying them together with a bit of string. She watched Florence and Fleurette clean a block of beeswax from the honey harvest of the year before, and pour a beautiful new candle. Louisette set a stone jar on a stump one rainy day, and went to check it often as the rain fell, bringing it in when it brimmed with clear rainwater. She stoppered it and set it beside the candle.

  All these things were done while the men were out of the farmhouse. Each afternoon, before the uncles returned from the fields, Isabelle stowed everything in a cupboard. Ursule saw that the hidey-hole was full of things, including a thick book with a cracked leather binding. She didn’t ask about it. It had been three weeks since her talk with Nanette in the garden, and she was getting used to the admonishing fingers, the whispered “Chut, chut, ma fille,” and the pressed lips and shake of the head, the turning away as if Ursule had done something offensive.

  “What are we waiting for?” she hissed at her mother, when they were once again working in the kitchen garden.

  “For the Sabbat,” Nanette said shortly, stabbing at a hillock of weeds with her spade.

  “What’s a Sabbat?”

  “O, mon Dieu, ma fille!”

  Neither of them had seen Louisette come up the row of potatoes. She spit into the turned soil. “The child knows nothing, Nanette! Better to leave it that way.”

  Ursule bit her lip, afraid she would be denied after all, but her mother said, “Innocence is no protection, Louisette. We were innocent enough, when we traveled through Brittany. He pursued us anyway.”

  “Pffft! It’s hardly the same.”

  “Who? Who pursued you?” Ursule asked, but Louisette turned away, and Nanette would say nothing more.

  At times Ursule thought she would go mad with waiting to understand the mystery. Her aunts and her maman went on behaving much as usual. The uncles were silent as always, working, eating, smoking their pipes in the evenings. Ursule dug the garden and milked the she-goats. When her chores were done she wandered the cliff edge, restless as one of the pony colts galloping around the paddock just to burn off energy. It seemed to Ursule that a minute had become an hour and an hour a day, when at last, on the final day of April, her mother whispered in her ear.

  “Tonight. Go to your bed after supper, but don’t undress. I’ll fetch you.”

  Ursule barely noticed what she ate that evening, or what anyone said. She hurried up the narrow staircase to her bedroom under the eaves. She didn’t go to bed, but knelt in her customary place beside the window, wondering what the night held in store.

  Her mother whispered at her door an hour before midnight. Ursule opened it, careful of its betraying creak. Nanette crooked a finger at her, then started down the stairs.

  When they had put on their coats and boots, and wound scarves around their heads against the wind, they let themselves out through the kitchen door. The other women were already on the porch, similarly wrapped. They looked like ghosts, tall and shapeless. Ursule, aflame with curiosity, followed them through the garden and past the washhouse to the gate. They crossed the lane and set their feet on the goat path that wound up the tor.

  There was no moon, but Ursule knew the path well. She trod it often, herding the goats up to the moor to graze. This time, though, the women pressed on past the roll of brambles where Ursule usually turned out onto the moor, with the goats pattering beside her. They climbed steadily upward, breathing harder as the way grew steeper.

  The path was still familiar to Ursule, although she had not climbed the tor since high summer. It grew narrow as it rose, and the wind—blowing, in Cornish fashion, from every direction at once—made their scarves snap like sheets on a line. No one had breath to speak, but then no one had spoken a word since they left the farmhouse.

  Ursule had never climbed so high on the flank of the tor. In the starlit darkness the jumbled blocks of granite topping the hill looked like the towers of a tumbledown castle. In nearby brambles she heard the whirring, rhythmic call of a nightjar, intensifying her impression of a castle’s ramparts, with guards calling the hours, perhaps a moat meant to drown intruders. The silence of the women, the clutch of the wind at her clothes, the shadowed boulders and fading path gave her the shivers. “Maman! Where are we going?”

  Her mother put out a hand to her. “We’re almost there. A few more steps.”

  “It’s too dark. And freezing!”

  “There will be light soon. Have patience,” her mother said softly. She released her hand and turned to follow the swaying silhouettes of her sisters.

  Ursule hurried after her, but her steps slowed and her mouth hung open as she saw her aunts disappear, one by one, as if swallowed up by the hill. Nanette followed them without hesitation. Ursule inched forward with her hands out, sure she was about to bash herself to insensibility on the cold granite.

  Nanette reached back to take one of her outstretched hands, and led her around what looked like a blank wall of stone, but that she discovered was the outer wall of a cave. The beating of the wind ceased on the instant. Someone struck a sulfur match and set its flame to three tall candles waiting in niches of stone. Flickering yellow light flared up to waver on the faces of the women.

  Ursule gazed about her in wonder at the high-ceilinged chamber. It was surprisingly warm, insulated by rock and soil against the chill of the night. The candles gave uncertain light, but enough for Ursule to see the crevices filled with cloth bags, a few bottles, one or two baskets. A broom leaned against one wall.

  In the center of the space, a granite pedestal thrust up from the floor, and on it rested a stone, almost spherical on the top, the granite beneath left rough. It gleamed with reflected candlelight.

  Ursule put out a finger to touch it, and Tante Louisette slapped her hand away. “Tsst!” she hissed. “That belonged to Grand-mère. You don’t yet have the right.”

  Ursule drew her hand back and thrust it under her opposite arm. She threw Nanette a hurt look, and her mother sighed. “Louisette, Ursule barely knows who Grand-mère was, except that she bears her name. Give her time.”

  Louisette sniffed. She lowered her basket to the floor and began to remove items and arrange them on a shelf.

  Nanette murmured to Ursule, “That—” She pointed to the pedestal. “That is our altar.” She tugged Ursule to one side of the chamber, where the candlelight barely reached. Ursule’s boots crunched on the detritus of the birds and animals that must use the cave. Only the center was swept clean, and here the five older sisters clustered, brushing crumbs of dirt and dried leaves from the floor with the broom, wiping down the polished surface of the pedestal, setting out twigs of lavender and heather and gorse. No one touched the crystal.

  Nanette said, “Tonight is the eve of Beltane, the Sabbat of spring. The heather and gorse are returning, symbolizing the rebirth of the world. The Goddess has lain dormant through the winter, and now labors to bring forth new life.”

/>   Ursule turned her head to try to read her mother’s expression in the dim light. She expected a look of amusement, sure that Nanette had spoken in irony. Instead her mother’s face was rapt as she gazed at what she called the altar.

  “Maman, what is this? What are you all doing?”

  Nanette turned to look her full in the face. They were so close that the daughter could feel her mother’s breath on her cheeks. Nanette said solemnly, “This is who we are, Ursule. We are Grand-mère’s descendants. We are Orchiéres, and we practice the old ways.”

  “The old ways …” Ursule’s voice trailed off in confusion.

  “We are sisters in the craft.”

  “What craft?” Nanette turned her face away without answering. Ursule caught her breath in a gasp. “Maman! Not—not witchcraft!”

  They were speaking French, and the word sorcellerie rang through the cavern with its sibilant consonants and sharp ending vowel. Louisette, in the act of sprinkling salt from a twist of paper into a tiny pottery pitcher, threw Ursule an angry glance. “Chut! There will be no sorcellerie tonight. There will be only worship.”

  “Worship! Worship of what? Who?”

  “The Goddess, of course,” Louisette snapped. “The Mother of Earth, and of us all.”

  Ursule gazed, openmouthed, at her aunt. Her mother patted her shoulder. “Never mind,” Nanette whispered, when Louisette had turned back to her task. “She’s only worried we will be discovered. The more people who know, the more danger we’re in. This is why we come in secret. Your uncles have forbidden it because of the risk of discovery, but we—”

  “Why should we be in danger?” Ursule interrupted. She looked from one to the other of the wrinkled, familiar faces, meeting scowls and frowns.

  “I told you we should leave her out of it,” Louisette pronounced. She had the pitcher in one hand now, poised above the altar of stone. “She is too young to understand.”

  “She’s the same age I was when you initiated me,” Nanette said.

  “She fraternizes with the children of Marazion. She goes to St. Hilary with them.”

  “We have to explain to her. She should know her history.”

  “You have to do that,” Tante Florence put in.

  “I know that, Florence,” Nanette snapped.

  “C’est importante.”

  Fleurette broke her habitual silence to whisper, “There is peril in the child.”

  “Peril! She’s thirteen.”

  “It’s time.” Fleurette’s words were nearly inaudible. She took a step back after she spoke.

  Ursule turned to her mother, her hands lifted in question. Nanette put her fists on her hips and glared at her older sisters. “I would have explained to her before! You made me wait, all of you! At Ostara, you told me I had to wait!”

  Anne-Marie, the peacemaker, said, “And you did wait, for which we thank you, don’t we, everyone? Now, it’s midnight. We don’t want to miss the hour. Let’s be about our business, and we can speak to Ursule afterward.”

  The quarreling subsided. Louisette scattered a few drops of the salted water onto the altar, and the six women moved to make a circle around it. Each draped a long scarf over her head. When they were all gathered around the stone, Louisette poured a thin stream of the water in a circle, enclosing them. Louisette lighted the new candle that rested beside the crystal. Its clear flame outlined the silhouettes of the women as Ursule watched, wide-eyed, her hands clenched beneath her chin.

  The women began to chant in Old French. Ursule understood no more than half the words. Louisette would proclaim something, and the others would answer, and then, in a thready and discordant unison, the women would chant what seemed to be a verse.

  It was a hymn of some kind, Ursule thought. She had attended St. Hilary a few times with Meegan’s children. She didn’t understand much of the service, but she loved the singing, and the way the hymns resounded from the stone walls of the sanctuary. This hymn, too, echoed, but the treble voices with their uncertain pitches produced an effect more weird than beautiful. It made Ursule feel queasy. Her skin began to crawl as the women swayed, eyes closed, hands raised with a fervor the Church of England worshippers never displayed. Ursule had known these women all her life, yet now they seemed as alien as if they had dropped out of the sky.

  An hour passed before the ritual wound to its close with a recitation of names, all of them but Grand-mère’s unfamiliar to Ursule, beautiful, mysterious names … Liliane, Yvette, Maddalena, Irina. By that time Ursule had sunk down on her folded coat, her back against icy granite, her arms wrapped around herself. As the women turned to face her, she thought it must be over at last, and they could go home. In anticipation she scrambled to her feet and bent to gather up her coat.

  When she straightened she found Tante Louisette, her long face drawn and her eyelids heavy, in front of her. Louisette gripped Ursule’s wrist with a hand as hard and dry as a chicken’s claw. “Come,” Louisette growled. “We’re ready for you now.”

  “What?”

  Ursule looked past her aunt’s shoulder. The other women, her mother included, still stood around the altar. They gazed at her, and not even Nanette was smiling. Louisette tugged, and Ursule stumbled forward across the long-dried circle of water. She came to stand beside her mother, shivering with fatigue and unease in equal parts.

  The candle had burned low, and its flame, under the faint currents of air swirling through the cave, danced like some mad ballerina, shimmering this way and that, making the melted wax in its center spit and hiss. Nanette produced another scarf, dyed a deep charcoal color. She draped it across her two palms, and Louisette scattered a few drops of water on it, then lifted it on her own hands and turned to Ursule.

  “I thought the craft would die with us, Ursule. Indeed, I think that would have been best. It seems you will stay here, where Grand-mère sent us. You might remain all your life.

  “If you are meant to carry on the traditions of the Orchiéres, as your maman believes, so be it. It is not for me to question the ways of the Goddess.”

  She lifted the scarf and let it drift over Ursule’s head. A fold of it fell across her face, turning everything to shadow. Ursule wanted to flee, to run back down the dark tor and away from this strangeness.

  “Now we will tell you the history, and you must swear never to reveal it.”

  Confounded, but used to obeying her aunt, Ursule nodded.

  “Bon.” Louisette twitched the muslin away from Ursule’s eyes so she could clearly see the solemn faces around the altar, and the women began a recitation in the French Ursule understood.

  Taking turns, they told of passing years and changing times, violent centuries in which the ancient religion gave way before the thundering march of the new one. They spoke of curses, and inquisitions, and persecutions. They spoke of ancestors hounded from one side of Europe to the other, sought out when someone needed magic, reviled when the craft was discovered. They spoke of the worst history of all, the burning times, with screaming women sacrificed on the altar of ignorance. Their voices tumbled over one another, overlapping and urgent.

  The history ended with Ursule Orchiére, the greatest of them all, who hid the clan from the torches of its pursuers, and spent the last of her life’s strength doing it.

  Finally Louisette pointed to the chunk of crystal resting on the altar. “This,” she pronounced, “is Grand-mère’s scrying stone. It is useless without her. None of us have seen anything in it for a very long time. The gift is dying out because our talents are nothing compared to hers. Still, the stone is a symbol of Grand-mère’s strength and devotion. It will always belong to the Orchiéres.”

  Ursule, so tired she could hardly keep her head up, leaned closer to the crystal to peer into its depths. She wondered if her namesake had pretended to see things. She would do that herself, if it suited her.

  But she hadn’t known Grand-mère Ursule. She might not have been capable of pretense.

  The one thing Ursule did know, w
ith a certainty as clear and strong as the light of a full moon, was that Grand-mère had not been a witch. Nor were these others, these batty old women, witches. She understood they had seen hard times. She felt their need to cling to their history. She respected their wish to honor their tradition.

  But she was a modern girl. She was practical. She put no trust in fables. She didn’t believe what the priest prattled on about at Mass, bread turning into flesh, wine turning into blood, babies born sinful, murderers being forgiven. She scorned the idea of virgin birth. She took her she-goats to be covered by the neighbor’s billy, and she knew how birth came about.

  This—this wild tale of witches and scrying and so forth—this was a fairy tale. It was detailed and colorful, dramatic and mysterious. It must be satisfying for her mother, the aunts.

  Ursule didn’t believe a word of it.

  3

  One of the uncles died in the spring. The other two followed swiftly after, as if their life spans were linked, or as if they couldn’t bear to face the heavy work of summer even one more time. Tante Louisette said, after they buried Claude, “Now we’re a house of old women. We must have a care. They will be watching us.”

  The others nodded and sighed, but Ursule said, “There are other old women in the county. Widows, even spinsters. They’re left in peace.”

  “They’re not Romani,” Louisette said, and there were more nods of resignation.

  Ursule pressed her lips together. She felt no sense of danger. It seemed to her that the people of Marazion behaved toward her as they always had. If a few of them seemed envious, or if the priest at St. Hilary sometimes seemed to be eyeing her, that meant nothing. Her aunts might be superstitious and fearful, but she saw no need to be that way herself.

  The year turned steadily, as always. The Sabbat of Lammas arrived to signal the beginning of the harvest season. Ursule climbed the tor with her mother and her aunts, and watched their ceremony in silence. She felt her mother’s glances at her throughout the night, and the next morning as well, but Nanette didn’t speak until late in the day, as Ursule picked up her boots to carry them out onto the porch. The evening breeze was sharp with the scents of heather and gorse and sea. Ursule paused to savor the autumnal perfume, and to glimpse the gray water tossing beyond the cliff.