Lady Nairn laughed at my confusion. “Cailleach,” she explained. “Not ‘kayak.’ Another Gaelic word. Sounds to English ears like an Eskimo canoe, but it means ‘old woman.’ The old woman of winter, who comes into her power as summer wanes and dies.” She wrapped her coat closer around herself. “The queen of darkness and death,” she went on quietly, “but also of renewal. Most people forget about that part. But there is no life without death, and no spring without the great die-off of winter….” for a moment we walked in silence, our footsteps ringing against the pavement. “The old myths personify that conundrum,” she said. “And the festival dramatizes the myths. The Cailleach chooses the Winter King as her champion and eggs him on into battle against the old King of Summer. All in mime. So archetypal, really, that words are superfluous.”
The image of a terrible queen urging a warrior in his prime to kill an old king and take his place skimmed through my head. “But that’s the story of Macbeth,” I said slowly.
“It’s the myth behind it,” she specified. “But Macbeth is based on history,” I protested. “Scottish history.”
She sniffed. “History rearranged—cut and pasted—to fit myth. Scholars have forgotten that part, if they ever knew it. But myth is not so easily cornered and tamed into neat academic fact.”
In all the years I’d spent in the ivory tower, working toward being a professor of Shakespeare before falling in love with the Bard onstage and running off to the theater, I’d never heard any version of Lady Nairn’s theory. But it fit. It fit with the simplicity of truth. “You think Shakespeare knew?” I asked quietly.
She looked straight ahead, a mischievous smile upending the corners of her mouth. “I think he knew a great deal more than we credit him with.”
The buildings fell away as we came to the dark emptiness of the Esplanade. At the far end, the castle reared into the night. In the center of the parade ground, a crowd roiled and milled. Under a loose netting of laughter, torches flickered here and there, and somewhere in the middle, someone in a stag mask was tossing his head so that antlers reared into the night. Now and again, unearthly howls rose in waves of loneliness toward the moon.
The crowd shifted and for an instant I saw the dark-haired man from the restaurant. His eyes met mine, and then the crowd shifted again, and he disappeared. A girl detached herself from the outer fringes, loping over to us with adolescent gangliness.
Lily MacPhee had her grandmother’s wide-set eyes and high cheekbones, though her coloring was entirely different. Flame-red hair spilled in waves past her shoulders. Her milk-white skin was scattered with freckles like stars, and her eyes were a pale sea-green. A small jewel winked in her nose. The Pre-raphaelites, I thought, would have fought bitter duels among themselves for the right to paint her as Guinevere or the Lady of the Lake.
“You said yes!” she said with girlish pleasure. “She said maybe,” said her grandmother. “More or less.”
Dunsinnan Hill, Lady Nairn told me as we drove, lay fifty miles ahead, just north of the Tay. It had been fortified since the Iron Age, but a thousand years ago, the old histories said, the historical King Macbeth had rebuilt it. For a generation, he’d ruled Scotland from its heights, until his young cousin Malcolm had come north in the year 1054, at the head of an army of the hated Sassenach—Anglo-Saxons from northern England—along with a fair few Vikings. Charging up the hill, Malcolm’s Saxons had clashed with Macbeth’s Scots in a pitched battle that raged from sunup to sunset, leaving the slopes scattered with crow’s bait. It was not the end—though Macbeth lost both the battle and the hill, he lived to lead his battered men in retreat—but it was the beginning of the end. Two years later, Malcolm finally caught up with him, and this time the knife went home. Malcolm had mounted Macbeth’s head on a pole and claimed the kingship of Scotland for himself.
Macbeth had been a good king, famed for both generosity and bravery—by some reckonings, the last truly Celtic king of Scotland, ruling in the old ways. But among the most lasting spoils of victory is the right to write history, and Macbeth’s legacy had quickly darkened. It was Shakespeare, though, who’d made him a byword for evil.
It was a tragic arc, I thought as Lady Nairn’s voice faded away: to fall, after death, from hero-king to reviled tyrant. At least Shakespeare’s fictionalized Macbeth made the plunge during his life, of his own accord.
“There,” said Lady Nairn presently. She pointed to a rounded hilltop with a small turreted summit, set a little apart from the others. We’d left the main roads and were hurtling south on a narrow lane across fields and through hedgerows. The road led straight for the hill, veering at the last minute around the western slope, plunging into a pine wood and past a quarry, and then left along the south side of the hill. Soon after that, we turned off the lane, away from the hill, and into a gravel drive.
Dunsinnan House stood in a high saddle, looking north across the road to the hill for which it was named and south to the glimmering waters of the firth of Tay. At its heart, the tall rectangle of an old Scottish castle could still be seen, though in ensuing centuries it had sprouted several new wings, not to mention towers and cupolas, balconies and bay windows, seemingly at random, giving it the air of an aged grande dame proudly squeezed into a gown from her youth, now haphazardly adorned with gewgaws and baubles collected from every period of her life.
Lady Nairn led me swiftly up four flights of stairs to a bedroom in a high corner. Its walls were covered in watered blue silk; along the northern wall marched three tall windows curtained in more blue silk embroidered with Chinese dragons. “I thought you might like a view,” she’d said, crossing the room to throw open the middle window, so that both the sound and the scent of pines blew through the room. Beyond, the hill was visible mostly as an absence of stars.
Don’t go up the hill alone. The sentence hung on the air between us.
“I told you I lost my husband,” she said. “I meant it more literally than you perhaps realized.” She looked back toward the hill. “He disappeared up there one night three months ago. We went to the police, of course. They poked around a bit but didn’t find anything. Suggested, in a roundabout way, that maybe he’d gone off for a bit of something on the side. He was not that sort of man.
“Auld Callie—a woman from the village, someone he’d known from childhood—found him the following week, sitting on the hilltop, dangling his legs like a child over the ramparts. He was rocking back and forth, muttering one phrase over and over: ‘Dunsinnan must go to Birnam Wood.’”
“Macbeth’s riddle,” I said quietly. “No,” she said with a slight shake of the head. “The witches’ riddle.” She launched into the Shakespeare:
Macbeth shall never vanquished be, until
Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinnan Hill Shall
come against him.
In the play, King Macbeth assumes the riddle is a metaphor for never, only to learn, when confronted by a forest on the move, that the witches meant it literally. “The equivocation of the fiend that lies like truth,” I murmured.
She gave me a sad smile. “I’m not sure it counts as equivocation if there’s no clear answer at all, rather than too many. And in any case, Angus reversed it: Dunsinnan must go to Birnam Wood. His title, you know, was Nairn of Dunsinnan, so I thought he was referring to himself. And you can see the wood, or what’s left of it, from the hilltop, so it seemed to me that he was saying that he must go to Birnam. I took him there…. He’d known the place since childhood, but he didn’t recognize it. Stood there turning round and round beneath the great oak, looking bewildered.”
Her voice dipped into bitterness. “He died a fortnight after that. A month ago, that was. Blessing, really. His mind was gone, or mostly so. Just enough left to understand that he wasn’t right. Made him desperate, near the end.”
Her voice had begun to waver, and she paused to steady it, turning to the window and brushing damp cheeks with the back of one hand. “I’m sorry,” she said, giving herself a little s
hake and going on. “The doctors said he had a stroke. No doubt they’re right. But that isn’t the whole story. When we found him, he’d been missing for a week, but he was clean-shaven, and his clothes were immaculate.” Her chin went up. “As if he’d just left.”
She pinned me with her gaze. “Do you know Aleister Crowley’s definition of magic? It’s ‘the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will.’”
I frowned. It was a famous—and famously baggy—definition. By its lights, just about everything was magic. Crowley himself had included potato-growing and banking in the list, along with ritual magic and spells. Where was this going?
She leaned forward. “There were those who wished Angus ill,” she said with quiet intensity. “Mostly, I’m afraid, for my sake.”
“Wishing doesn’t make it so.”
“Perhaps not.”
Beyond her, through the window, I saw something—a weasel or a stoat, maybe—undulating across the corner of the lawn, a furtive shadow in darkness. Almost in rhythm with it, a prickle of foreboding crept across my skin. What was she suggesting? That someone had murdered Sir Angus by magic?
“Lady Nairn, if you suspect foul play in Sir Angus’s death, you should go to the police.”
“I think it must be dealt with by other means.” She cocked her head. “How much do you know about the writing of Macbeth? Not the story. The writing of it.”
I frowned. “There’s not much to know. It’s Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy. Published posthumously, in the first folio.”
“The first collected edition of his works,” she said, nodding. “Dated 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death. But that’s about its printing. Not its writing.”
“We don’t know anything about the writing of any of his plays.”
“There was an earlier version.” She said it defiantly, a gauntlet thrown down.
“Many scholars think so,” I said carefully. That much was true, mostly because of the witches. Eerie and terrifying at one moment, they are, and broad comedy at the next—not to mention Hecate, queen of witches, who seems to have been pulled wholesale from another, later play by Thomas Middleton and slapped down haphazardly into Shakespeare’s play, for all that her brand of gleefully cackling evil would be more at home in a Disney film. “But there’s no real evidence one way or an—”
She cut me off. “As a child, my husband’s grandfather met an old woman on the hill. She told him that long ago, Shakespeare had come here with a company of English players and met a dark fairy—a witch—who lived in a boiling lake. She taught him all her dark arts; in return, he stole her soul and fled.
“She searched high and low, but he had hidden it well. It was not in a stone or an egg, a ring or a crown: not in any of the places one normally hides such a thing. She found it at last, though, written into a play, mixed into the very ink scrawled across the pages of a book. Snatching up the book, she cursed his words to scatter misery rather than joy, and then she vanished back to her lake.
“Some time earlier, the boy’s grandfather had vanished on the hill, so when the old woman told him her tale and made him repeat it back to her, he decided she was the dark fairy of her own story, and the book, if he could find it, was her payment for his grandfather…. In later years, he—Angus’s grandfather—came to believe she had been talking about Macbeth.”
I gazed at her in silence. How could I put what I had to say tactfully? “Lady Nairn—with all due respect to your husband’s grandfather, as wonderful as his story is, it’s a child’s half-remembered tale, a hundred years old. It hardly counts as evidence for an earlier version of the play.”
“Not by itself. But it fits with this.” She went to the desk and opened an archival folder, handing me a Xeroxed page. “from the old Dunsinnan House account book,” she said. “Half ledger, half diary.” under an entry dated 1 November 1589, someone had written, “The English players departit hence.” But it mentioned no names.
“read the next sentence,” said Lady Nairn.
The same day, the Lady Arran reportit a mirror and a book stolen, and charged that the players had taken them. But they could not be found.
I looked up quickly. I knew of Lady Arran. Elizabeth Stewart, Lady Arran, her contemporaries had sneered, was a greedy, avaricious, and ambitious woman. A Lady Jezebel who consorted with witches. For a time, young King James had been besotted with her and her husband both; there had been whispers in some corners that she was the reason the king would not take a wife. Other whispers charged that she’d kill him if she could, that she desired, above all else, to be queen. She was, said some, the historical figure standing in the shadows behind the character of Lady Macbeth.
Lady Nairn smiled. “I thought you might recognize that name. So you see, we do have evidence.”
“Of what?” It was all I could do to stay calm. “That Lady Arran was here, yes. That Shakespeare was, no. He knew of her, almost surely—almost twenty years later. But we don’t know that he ever knew her in person. We don’t know anything at all about him in 1589, actually, beyond the fact that he was alive. That’s right in the middle of what’s called his lost years. No record of his whereabouts whatsoever.”
“unless he was here. You might at least be gracious enough to admit it’s suggestive,” she said reproachfully. “As it happens, it also dovetails with my family legends.” She looked out at the night. “I am descended, in a direct mother-to-daughter line, from Elizabeth Stewart. From Lady Macbeth.”
I must have been gaping in disbelief, because she shot me a wry smile. “My husband found my heritage quite alluring. Lily, on the other hand, doesn’t know, and I’d like to keep it that way. It’s not information that’s necessarily…useful to a fifteen-year-old.”
“You have family legends about her?” I asked, feeling a little faint.
“Elizabeth Stewart didn’t consort with witches. She was one. Not a devil-worshipping crone but a serious student of magic. As my mother and grandmother would have it, the Bard once saw her at work and later put his recollections—quite accurately—in a play. It was not easy to dissuade him from performing it, but it was done. And the manuscript made to disappear.”
I groped my way to a chair, my mind reeling. “You can make of the witchcraft whatever you like, Kate. It’s not the magic I’m trying to interest you in,” she said patiently. “It’s the manuscript.” She drew the archival folder off the desk, holding it out to me. “Three days ago, shuffled among Angus’s papers, I found this.”
I opened the folder. Inside were a postcard and a single sheet of heavy ivory notepaper. The postcard was a copy of one of my favorite paintings in Britain, John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth. Terry had been one of the three or four all-time great Lady Macbeths. The last before Janet Douglas. Sargent had somehow made her gown shimmer between blue and green. With her long red braids, a gleam of gold low on her waist, and the blue-green gown accentuating the curve of her hips and then narrowing as it cascaded toward the floor, I’d always thought she looked more like a mermaid than a queen.
Behind the card, the notepaper was covered with writing in a large looping hand of confidence and passion, and something stubbornly childlike, too. I glanced at the signature. Nell, it read, with a long tail like a comet.
The pet name used among family and friends for Ellen Terry. I glanced up.
“As much as can be discerned from a fax, both signature and letter are genuine,” said Lady Nairn. She turned to look out the window. “read it. Take your time.”
It was dated 1911. “My dear Monsieur Superbe Homme,” it began. My dear Superb Man. My dear Superman.
My dear Monsieur Superbe Homme,
I am forwarding to you a curious letter I have recently received from a fellow denizen of the drama whose personal tale is as tragic as any role she might encharacter on the stage. Indeed, I am not at all certain that her long woes have not in the end loosened her hold upon sanity. As you will see, she believes, po
or soul, not only that Mr. Shakespeare first circulated a version of Macbeth substantially different from the one that has come down to us, but that this earlier version has survived (!)—and that she is the guardian of its whereabouts.
“Surely you don’t bel—”
“I think my husband believed that his grandfather’s mysterious old lady and Ellen’s ‘poor soul’ were one and the same.”
Our eyes locked in silence. “Go on,” she said presently. I looked back down.
I would conclude out of hand that she is lunatic, were it not for the enclosure which she gave to me along with her tale, and which I now send on to you. I think the book queer enough, but it is the letter inside that you will find most curious. Unfortunately, all it conveys about the nature of this supposed earlier version is that its differences lie chiefly with the witches, especially Hecate, who is said to be “both there and not there.”
I glanced up. “Thus Hecate?”
“I’m an actress,” she said with a small shrug. “I learn characters by playing them. Finish it.”
There wasn’t much more:
A riddling sentiment of an appropriately Shakespearean fashion, I suppose, but exasperating all the same. I cannot make head or tail of it.
As it is, I am hoping that you can glimpse the Forest through the Trees.
Nell
I lifted the letter, but there was nothing else in the folder. “The enclosure?”
“Missing.” She sighed. “And no indication where, when, or how he acquired the letter, either. So you see, I don’t know what Angus found.” She cocked her head. “But I know what he was looking for.” for a moment, I sat in stunned silence. Someone—a real woman, not a witch or a fairy—had believed not only that an earlier version of Macbeth had existed, but that it had survived to the dawn of the twentieth century. And while Ellen Terry had been skeptical, she had not been able to dismiss the woman’s tale out of hand, either. On top of that, it was the witches—and their magic—that were said to be different: the very aspects of the surviving play that bothered scholars most.
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