Haunt Me Still

by Jennifer Lee Carrell

  Two steps below me, she turned.

  “You asked me to help you. But I can’t unless you tell me what’s going on. Where has Lily been, for instance?”

  “You think I know?”

  “You know more than you’re telling.”

  She said nothing, but her hand tightened on the bannister.

  “Lady Nairn, Lily’s been threatened three times in two days.”

  “Three times? You’ve heard another?”

  “Effie.”

  “Thou shalt not suffer a witch?” She shook her head. “Effie’s harmless. She’s got nothing to do with this.”

  “Lady Nairn, there is a long, bloody history of Christians killing witches.”

  “You think I don’t know that?”

  “Like it or not, Effie has fallen in with a radically conservative arm of the church.”

  She looked down. With a deep breath she looked back up. “What I am going to tell you is private. Not for other ears. Not even Lily’s. Especially not Lily’s.”

  I nodded. Coming back up the stairs, she led me to the little sitting room off the landing. It was empty; even so, she beckoned me to some chairs in a far corner, settling into one of them with a sigh.

  “forty-odd years ago now, when I left theater and film to marry Angus…it wasn’t just my career I left behind. I also left a man.”

  “Lucas Porter.”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “Ben told me a little,” I said.

  She clasped her hands together in her lap. “I felt I had to tell him about my decision in person. We’d been lovers for three years; I would not send him a ‘Dear John’ letter, or the Hollywood form of it, a call from my agent. So I flew to New York and told him myself. Lucas was furious. I’ve never seen anyone that angry before or since. As I left, he made—well, he called it a promise, but it was a threat. Any production of Macbeth that I got anywhere near, he said, he would ruin.

  “for many years, I didn’t mind. I was in love; I was raising a child and building myself another life in which playing a blood-soaked queen did not figure into my priorities. But in the last few…well, Angus and I had collected some remarkable pieces, and one night we had the notion that it would be interesting to see them in use, you know. Not just displayed like so many butterflies on a placard.

  “But the specter of Lucas was worrisome. Through the years, you know, there’d been times when Angus was very near purchasing something for the collection, either at auction or through a private deal, and suddenly, the object would be bought out from under us at an outrageous price. We never knew who it was…or even that it was one person—these things happen, at times, in the life of a collector. But we both found it odd, and we both suspected Lucas.”

  She cocked her head. “I like to think that neither one of us is—was—particularly cowardly, but we shelved the idea because of him. And then, two years ago, I read a small article in the paper. Lucas Porter had disappeared. He’d gone sailing one day in waters north of Boston and never came back. I’m sorry to say it, but I read that article with hope. We waited a year, Angus and I, to see whether he’d reappear. Walk into some police office and tell a strange story of dodging taxes or fighting sharks, or something. But a year went by, and he was still missing.

  “Neither of us was getting any younger. So we decided to put together the show. But then Angus died, the Hal Berridge card showed up, and the blood on the hill…and now Auld Callie. My God, Kate, I’ve known Auld Callie since I married Angus. How could anyone do that to her?”

  The fire crackled, and I watched her face slowly line with tears. “Blood will have blood,” she said, brushing the damp from her face. “It was a phrase Lucas used that day in New York. He referred to what I was doing to his picture as an abortion, in rather graphic terms. As a stillbirth. Murder. I’d killed his picture and his career.”

  “You really believe he’s capable of this? The card, the blood, Auld Callie?”

  She rose and crossed to the fireplace, staring into the glowing embers. “Just before I left him to start rehearsals for Macbeth in London, we’d been talking about children. He wanted them right away; I wasn’t ready. One day I was looking through some things at his studio, and I found a picture I hadn’t seen. One of those Victorian photos of dead children dressed in their Christening robes, laid out in their cribs, just before burial. At least, that’s what I thought it was at first. But then I realized it wasn’t Victorian, it was one of his own staged photographs. He used to like to do that, you know. Mimic photographs or paintings from other periods. He might have had a stellar career as a forger, except that he always marked his work. He’d put in some little detail, buried in the background, that pinpointed the year he’d made it. In this case, it was a bolo tie slung over a mirror in the background. The clasp of the tie was a political button that read Let’s back Jack. With a stylized line portrait, almost a cartoon, of JfK’s face.”

  “So when you found it, the photograph was recent?” I asked. “The button was from the 1960 presidential election. This would have been 1964…. The thing was, he’d also made a film. It documented the child’s death from what looked like fever. It showed the mother rocking him, holding him through chills and then a seizure, and then stillness.”

  “So he staged a child’s death?”

  She sniffed. “There was a copy of a death certificate pasted to the back of the photo.”

  I stared at her for a moment. “You mean the child actually died?”

  Her voice was almost a monotone. “I mean, Kate, it was a snuff film.” Her eyes met mine. “I have no proof, of course. But I knew it then, and I know it now. He arranged that child’s death as a work of art, and he filmed it happening.”

  I could hear the blood pulsing in my neck.

  “So you see, after he threatened me, I avoided Macbeth for forty years,” she said. “He’s capable of anything.”

  18

  “HAVE YOU TOLD this story to the police?”

  “Yes. They did not seem overly impressed with the notion of forty-year-old vengeance on the part of a missing and possibly dead ex-lover. Even so, you should leave Lucas to the police, Kate. Just find the manuscript. Because if it is him, he’ll be after it, too.”

  I nearly showed her the Aubrey; perhaps I should have. But it had my name on it, not hers, and I wanted to think about it in private first, uncluttered by other reactions. So I let her go back down the stairs without saying anything.

  As I turned into the corridor leading to my room, I saw Ben and Sybilla coming out of his room and froze. I thought they’d left ages ago. Glancing down at me, she leaned in and drew him into a deep kiss, her whole body rippling with the force of it.

  Desire and jealousy and anger—at her, at him, and maybe most of all at myself—shot through me in a blinding flush of red and I stumbled backward. There was a door next to me. Groping for the handle, I ducked inside.

  A narrow stairwell led upward. Wanting to be anywhere but where I was, I took it, following it up two stories, where it opened onto the roof.

  Night had fallen while I spoke to Lady Nairn. I stood in the darkness, feeling as if I’d left my skin behind. Up ahead, the battlements carved up the starlit sky. Atop them hunched a gargoyle whose head slowly twisted to face me.

  “Oh,” said Lily dourly. “It’s you.”

  “Come down from there.”

  “Bothered by heights?”

  “By the possibility of you going splat, yes.”

  She shrugged. “I like it up here.” She pulled her knees in even closer to her chest. “I don’t suppose you have the knife, do you?” Her voice was taut with wistful eagerness.

  “On me?”

  She sighed. “I suppose not. But I’d like to see it again. I’d come down for that.”

  “Your grandmother has it.”

  She made a sour face. “That’s that, then. I won’t see it till I’m eighteen. She’d keep me a child till I’m eighty, if she could. Hey…you could head down to th
e fire festival if you liked. I bet she’d even lend you a car. And I could stow away—”

  “I’m heading to bed, Lily.” The adrenaline flush I’d felt downstairs was draining away, leaving me hollow with exhaustion.

  “How boring. Or is it that you’re taking her side?”

  “I’m staying out of it.”

  She sighed, laying a cheek on one knee. “I thought you were way cooler than that.”

  “Sorry to disappoint.”

  “He’s going to be at the festival,” she said petulantly. “And I’m not.”

  “Who is?”

  “Ian.” Her eyes glittered in the moonlight. “Ian Blackburn. He’s an artist.”

  “Is that who you went off with today?”

  She nodded.

  “I thought I saw you at Birnam Wood this morning.”

  “That’s ridiculous.” She held my eyes as she said it. No flinching, no flickering. “I’m supposed to meet him at the festival. Please, won’t you go?”

  “Lily. There’s been a murder. A fairly brutal one. And some strange threats.”

  She leapt down onto the roof. “That was you? You’re the one who fed Gran that bollocks about threats against me?” She turned around and slammed both hands down on the stone. “You have no idea what’s going on, do you?” She twisted back around. “You know, it could be amazing tonight. A ritual knife and a ritual fight such as hasn’t been seen for centuries.”

  “Lily—where’s this coming from? That knife is a lethal weapon, for Christ’s sake.”

  “from Corra,” she said defiantly. “Corra ravensbrook? You told her about the knife?” Just last night, she’d stood in front of me and promised not to say a word to anyone.

  Lily went still. “She’s brilliant.”

  “Bullshit.” I was tired and frustrated and filling with an under-current of dread, and I finally snapped. “You could roll the full moon through the holes in her logic, not to mention the evidence in her so-called scholarship, and if that’s the advice she’s giving you about the stage, then she’s dangerous.”

  I watched angry frustration rising in Lily as I spoke, her hands tightening into small fists. “You’re…you’re…you’re just like Gran,” she burst out.

  A secret, black, and midnight hag, I thought with grim hilarity. “So damned focused on facts, facts, facts, and all the possible things that could go wrong, that the beauty and power and poetry the world throws at you fly straight by. I thought—I thought you might be different. But you’re so caught up in your precious Shakespeare and your stupid stage traditions—fake exorcisms! God! How stupid was that little ritual last night?—that you can’t see real magic under your nose. Wake up, Kate. Theater is dead. Jesus, even film is dead. It’s spontaneous performances by real people that matter. Happenings like the Samhuinn festival.”

  It was all I could do not to laugh out loud. She’d been spoon-fed some self-righteously radical theories about art, and she was spouting them with all the passion of adolescence. It was oddly endearing, at the same time that it was infuriating.

  “I’ll take Ian over you any day,” she flung at me. “He gets it. Mixing up theater and film with video games, the Internet, Twitter, music, painting, books, all rolled into one…He’ll change the way stories are told, stretching them into new technologies to make a new kind of art altogether. Something interactive. Shared.”

  “But with his name on it, I bet,” I said sardonically.

  Her eyes flashed. “Something real.” She snorted with derision. “It’s what Shakespeare would be doing if he were around today. I mean, he didn’t mess around with writing, like, manuscript books or carving hieroglyphs, did he? He spent his life shaping the newest, coolest art form there was. Putting his stamp on it.” She threw up her hands. “Don’t you see? You’re wrecking everything for a whisper of dead, boring Shakespeare heard on the wind. Or maybe in your dreams. And not just wrecking it for me. For everyone.” She burst into tears. “I hate you,” she cried, brushing by me and heading for the stairs.

  I stared after her, seeing my fifteen-year-old self. And wondering, deep down, how much truth there was to some of her accusations.

  19

  DRAWING IN A deep breath of clean, pine-scented air, I glanced over at the hill.

  Lie still if you don’t want to get the both of us killed, Auld Callie had said in my ear on its slopes just yesterday. And later, Put it back.

  Put the knife back. I hadn’t, and now I couldn’t. I didn’t even know where Lady Nairn had stashed it.

  Did it matter anymore?

  Lily thought it did.

  Pushing those thoughts aside, I at last pulled the Aubrey from my pocket. Nearly full, the moon poured silvery light across the page. I could make out Shakespeare sparring with Macbeth in Beerbohm’s fin de siècle drawing, but it was too dark to read Aubrey’s cramped seventeenth-century writing. And I was shaking, with more than just cold.

  Nine nights, Odin had hung on his tree, wrenching the knowledge of runes from the otherworld with a scream of agony and triumph. Runes represented secret knowledge. Hidden, arcane.

  Occult.

  Kate Stanley, someone had scrawled. That much I could read, even in the moonlight.

  The need to read the rest was suddenly overpowering. I rushed down the stairs, peering cautiously out into the corridor. It was clear; I hurried to my room.

  .

  Lamplight glowed on the Chinese dragons roiling on their silks. The bed, turned back, gleamed with smooth white linen and a neat swell of pillows; a fire shimmered in the fireplace. Lady Nairn’s staff must have spent all day putting it to rights.

  I dropped into one of the armchairs by the fire and began to read, skimming quickly over the lines I’d read before: The Youth who was to have first taken the parte of Lady Macbeth fell sudden sicke of a Pleurisie and died. And then I let my eye slide down the page.

  On this occasion, ’twas told me that Mr. Shakspere was a man torn between two masters. Lord Salisbury would have a play to shadow forth a witch, while old Dr. Dee would have him draw her sting.

  I went still, barely breathing. Salisbury and Dee. Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury and secretary of state. Most modern historians referred to him as Cecil; King James had called him “my little beagle.” The brilliant, hunchbacked toiler in the shadows who ran the kingdom while the king played in the sun. One of England’s great spymasters.

  And John Dee, the greatest magus of the Elizabethan age. A brilliant mathematician, but also an astrologer, alchemist, conjuror of angels and demons. A man whose shadow stretched long and dark across the subject of the occult—and not only in the narrow sense of secrets. One of the foremost practitioners in England—indeed, in all renaissance Europe—of learned magic.

  I swallowed hard. What was Aubrey suggesting, naming these men as Shakespeare’s masters? I read on:

  Dr. Dee begged Mr. Shakspere to alter his Play lest, in staging curs’d Secretes learned of a Scottish Witch, he conjure powers beyond his controll. But Mr. Shakespere wuld not, until there was a death, whereupon he made the changes in one houre’s time.

  Aubrey’s tale backed Ellen Terry’s, that Shakespeare had changed the play. And the Nairn family legends, too, in the matter of the Scottish witch.

  I have heard it whisper’d that the Youth Hal Berridge dyed not of a Pleurisie but of mischief on the part of this selfsame Witch, but if so it was quieted.

  I sat back, staring at the words swimming on the page in the firelight. If Aubrey was right, behind the curse was not just a death but a possible murder. The killing of a child. One of the players’ boys, probably about Lily’s age.

  The first Lady Macbeth.

  Was it the original Lady Macbeth—the historical Elizabeth Stewart, Lady Arran, Lady Nairn’s ancestress—who’d been the Scottish witch whose secrets were stolen? Lady Nairn would think so, I was certain of it. It fit her family’s legends. But then one also had to ask: Was it Elizabeth Stewart’s “mischief” that killed the boy who’d
first played her on the stage?

  In the grate, a log collapsed, and I jumped.

  What did robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, have to do with this tale? His involvement was surely unlikely. On the other hand, his predecessor and teacher as spymaster, francis Walsingham, had employed Christopher Marlowe as a spy. In earlier years, it had been Walsingham who’d centralized England’s acting companies into a few closely controlled networks; there was circumstantial evidence that he’d deliberately meshed these with his network of spies. Licensed to roam the country and prowl the halls of the great, who better than traveling players to act as London’s eyes and ears in distant parts of the realm? So it wasn’t entirely preposterous that Cecil might reach out to Shakespeare. But why? Against whom, and for what end?

  Macbeth was widely believed to be a sort of zeitgeist response to the horror of the Gunpowder Plot, in which some radical Catholic gentlemen had planned to blow up the Opening of Parliament in 1605, hoping to kill the king, the entire royal family, both houses of Parliament, and most of England’s top judges, lawyers, and prelates to boot. Sort of the equivalent of terrorists flying planes into the Capitol during a State of the union address. It hadn’t come off—just barely. But it had sent paroxysms of fear through the English consciousness, setting off a fearsome spidering of man-hunts and executions. Those horrors had burned themselves out fairly quickly—but a wary, watchful suspiciousness had lingered for years. Cecil had spent the rest of his life searching for the plot’s kingpin, who he believed had escaped justice.

  Had the king’s beagle somehow tried to use Macbeth in his search? I shook my head. I couldn’t recall anyone suggesting that the Scottish Play was, among other things, a piece of political hackwork. Political, maybe—it was popular to see all Shakespeare’s work as political, in the sense of being about power—but propaganda? What was the message? fear witches? It didn’t sound very like dry, rational Cecil, bureaucrat extraordinaire.

  In any case, it was Dee who was in many ways more disturbing. What did Aubrey mean by saying that Dee was Shakespeare’s master? Dee was an expert in fields as far-flung as navigation, geography, history, and mathematics. It didn’t have to be magic for which Shakespeare owed him mastery. But it was magic that Aubrey clearly had in mind.