I turned and walked toward Eircheard. “Into the van with you, then,” he said. “Dunsinnan must go to Beerbohm Tree.”
I glanced back as I slid into the passenger seat. Under the eaves of the beech trees, Lady Nairn looked like a small shadow that had lost its body. The next time I looked, she had melted into the woods.
28
SHORN FIELDS AND autumnal woods slipped by in a blur. In the hedgerows, the hawthorns were bright with berries. I seemed to be staring out at the world through a veil of shadow. “What did McGregor have to say?” I asked after a while.
“If you heard her outside, you got the gist of it. She wants your bonny hide, and she’s willing to knock other heads together to get it. Mine especially.”
“I gathered.”
“Bit of a checkered past.” He leaned back comfortably against the seat, one hand spread over the steering wheel, the other fidgeting with a small twisted bit of iron the size of a large marble. “Did some time a while back, for robbery.” He shrugged. “feedin’ a habit. But there was a brawl afterwards, and another bloke got killed. With a knife. I didn’t do it, but I was present. McGregor’ll make hay out of that, given half a chance.”
My stomach turned over. “Eircheard—you can’t do this. Get me to the railway station in Perth,” I said. “I’ll be fine from there.”
“Do you have any idea how many surveillance cameras there are in those stations? McGregor’ll have you before you reach Edinburgh, never mind London. No. I’ll drive.”
“If she finds me with you, she’ll have you, too.”
“Then we’ll just have to make sure she doesn’t find us, won’t we?” He drove as if he were at the wheel of a ferrari on the autobahn, so fast that the battered van shook; even so he looked relaxed, as if he had all the time in the world. He slowed down only for speed cameras, whose locations he seemed to know by some sixth sense.
“It’s not all for you, lassie,” he said with a wry smile. “Though it’s true I’ve taken a liking to your smile. But don’t be taking the sins of the world on your shoulders. I owe the Nairns a great deal…. Met Lady Nairn in prison. She’s a chaplain with the pagan prison ministry, did you know? Saw something in me that I couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. To this day, I can’t tell you what. But she latched on and wouldn’t let go.” He shrugged. “I suppose I’d always been something of a pagan. But talking to her, the cycles of things just began to make some sense. Afterwards, she and Sir Angus helped me apprentice to a blacksmith. And then they gave me a hand setting up my own forge.
“That was when Lily was no more than a wee mite.” He shook his head. “So you see, I’d be hard-pressed to forgive any bastard as harmed a hair on her head.
“But it’s not all for her, or for them, either.” His mouth twisted. “Bloody eejit down in Edinburgh tried to kill me. I’m no saint, Kate. I did my time. Wouldn’t mind seeing that he does his.” The van careened along the shores of a shimmering blue lake. “So you’ve had my story. What about yours? What did Lady Nairn come running to say to you?”
I told Eircheard what Lady Nairn had told me, watching his face go taut with disgust at Carrie’s history. “I knew of her,” he said. “But not about the cutting.”
“How could she think that—that what she did to Sybilla and to Auld Callie would in any way contribute to a flowering of genius?”
I thought of Shakespeare, of the ease with which bright and dark worlds flew from his pen, bubbles blown carelessly on a breeze. What made his genius so luminous was partly his range, I mused aloud: his moods stretching from silly to tragic, sometimes spinning from one to the other on a dime, his characters ranging from innocent girls to aged kings, from rollicking drunkards to ferocious queens, from sly and cynical bastards to hot-tempered youths chasing dreams of heroism. He gathered as his raw material all the fundamental experiences of being human, from birth to death, and all our passions in between: love and lust, hatred and hilarity, greed, jealousy, wrath, and murderous revenge.
But there were other great writers who had done all these things. What set Shakespeare apart, for me, even from other greats, was his generosity: his invitation, even insistence, for others to join him in the act of imagining. His words had the power to conjure up bright worlds, but Shakespeare did not claim that power all for himself. Far from it; he scattered it like petals or glittering confetti. Unlike Shaw or O’Neill, who’d left stage directions that ran to entire pages, or the Beckett police, who insisted on licensing productions to ensure that they adhered to the master’s vision, Shakespeare did not specify much about interpretation or setting or action, about political or moral message, or the lack thereof. His reticence made his works wonderfully elastic. It also made them demanding—sometimes maddeningly so—for directors and actors who had to figure out at every turn why these words and no others needed to be said right here and now. But Shakespeare was also demanding of his audiences: “Yes,” you could almost hear him say, “you are sitting in a fairly barren wooden theater. But dream yourselves to france. To a seacoast in Bohemia. To a magic-haunted island in a tempest-tossed sea. I dare you.”
And for four hundred years, in every corner of the earth, people had taken his dare and sailed into imagined worlds—together. For the art that Shakespeare had shaped was communal, shared in a way that books and even films never are. It was a singular gift: the infinite and unceasing invitation to crowds to come together with half-cocked brows of skepticism, a fair dash of rowdiness, and most of all, sheer delight, and collectively imagine worlds into being.
“To suggest that all this had its source in some lightning bolt that struck while watching a rite on a Scottish hill,” I said, “strikes me as not only preposterous but insulting to whatever forces of creation produced him.”
Eircheard had remained mostly quiet through my rant, a little smile playing on his face from time to time. “Only if you’re insisting on a narrow definition of magic,” he replied. “As narrow, in some ways, as the sniffy productions that drive you mad.”
I bit my lip. “Lady Nairn gave me Crowley’s definition: ‘the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will.’”
“Ah, well, there’s a nice double meaning there, for a man named Will.” He gave me a sly sideways grin. “Never liked Crowley much, myself, or his definition, either. He equates magic with change. Willed change, but change all the same. I’d put it a wee bit differently. ‘Making,’ for instance. Did you know that the Anglo-Saxons used to call poets ‘makers’?”
“So did the Greeks,” I said, feeling suddenly exhausted. “The word ‘poet’ comes from their word for ‘to make.’”
“Well, there you are, then.” He turned the bit of iron in his hand. “Whatever you want to call it, some people seem to be able to tap into it strongly. Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Beethoven. But it isn’t the moment of tapping—even if you could pinpoint it—that’s important for any of them, or for any of us, if you see what I mean. It’s the unfurling, the blossoming. Do you count conception, now, as the single miraculous moment of a life? Or are the nine months of growing curved in the dark, the bursting out into light, and, after that, the long unfolding of a life in the world all equally miraculous?”
“By that light,” I said quietly, “all life is magic.”
A gruff rumbling of assent rose from him. “‘Creation,’ I think, is the word I’d use. But, yes, that’s the deepest magic. Making whole shared worlds, like Shakespeare—maybe that’s one of the highest forms. Very nearly divine in its power. But some of the most profound magic is fairly simple. Cooking, I’d say, and gardening, or farming. Rearing children. But you can also find it in making cabinets or clocks or quilts.”
“Or swords?”
“Definitely swords.” He grinned. “As for being annoyed about a rite glimpsed on a hill—well, ritual is just a way of celebrating certain snapshot moments. Turning points. Making you really see them, focus on them. Not making them happen.” He shrugged. “Course, that’s just my opinion, and I
’m not a scholar or anything. Just an ex-con who enjoys banging on steel.” He stretched and shifted in the seat. “What did Shakespeare think about magic, now?”
I shook my head. “It’s hard to pin him down.”
“Try.”
It was no longer a question that was merely academic. Two lives might hang on it. One of them mine.
I stared out the window at the fields of Scotland rolling by. “His plays are laced with it, from first to last.” In my mind, I went over the great conjuring scenes, from the Henry VI plays right at the beginning of his career, around about 1590, through to The Tempest, near the end, twenty-odd years later. “He was definitely a cynic about the capacity of politicians and prelates to use witch hunts for their own ends. And I’d say he was a skeptic,” I added slowly, “about the ability of humans—either witches or conjurors—to control supernatural forces just by casting a circle, waving a wand about, and uttering a few odd words. But, you know, in the few actual scenes of conjuration he wrote, the demons or spirits always come. Within the world of the play at hand, they’re real. They make prophecies and promises that always turn out to be true, though often in some tricky way—Macbeth says that the dark powers lie like truth. But you might just as well say that they tell the truth like a lie, I suppose.
“Oddly enough, if anything, there’s more magic, more deeply wound into his plots, in his final works than his first efforts. Prospero, in The Tempest, is the real thing: a white wizard, imagined, I’ve always thought, with some affection. Very possibly a fictional version of John Dee, though it’s also popular to see him as Shakespeare himself: poet as magician. Earlier, he was less reverent. In the first part of Henry IV, written in the mid 1590s, during Shakespeare’s first great flowering of genius,” I said, giving Eircheard a little jab, “the Welsh leader Owen Glendower is another Dee figure, but he’s a proud, prickly, and somewhat empty boaster. I can call spirits from the vasty deep, he claims, but he’s undercut by the equally proud and prickly Hotspur, who cares for swords more than spells and who shoots back, Why, so can I, or so can any man; but will they come when you do call for them?
“And then there’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
“Full of fairies, eh?”
“English fairies, not Scottish. Flower imps, mostly. Cobweb, Moth, and Mustardseed. But there’s a shadow of Scottish witchcraft, already, almost a decade before King James forced Scottish notions of witchcraft down English throats. In Titania, queen of the fairies.”
“up here,” mused Eircheard, “the queen of fairies is also the queen of witches.”
“Exactly. And Titania’s great comic scene has her kissing a weaver named Bottom, magically given an ass’s head.”
“One way to kiss ass,” said Eircheard with a shrug.
Sybilla’s voice hung between us: Titania waked, and straightway loved an ass.
“It’s a parody of the Black Mass that so enthralled King James and the Continental witch-hunters,” I said after a moment, “but which the English more or less scorned. The central rite of that Mass was supposed to consist of the witch kissing the devil’s bottom.” I shook my head. “Talk about generosity of spirit. Shakespeare took a belief that was being used to torture and kill thousands and made of it one of the great comic scenes in all of drama.”
“While up here we were saddled with King Jamie lighting fools the way to dusty death, burning them at the stake,” said Eircheard. “Jesus.”
“far as I can tell, Shakespeare had no respect for witch-hunters, and he suspected most conjurors as either con men or fools. But he believed in spirits and demons, and maybe fairies and ghosts. One of his earliest plays shows it best. Henry VI, Part Two. Wretched title, that: All it does is slot the play into others that were written later. Its first title was The First Part of the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster.”
“That’s a blooming mouthful.”
“More accurate, though: It was the first history play he wrote, right around 1590. One of the plays that made his name. In it, a duchess is wild for her husband to pluck the crown from the king’s head and don it himself. Her husband’s enemies lure her into consulting a conjuror, to see whether what she wishes will come to pass, and when she does, they use it to disgrace and banish her, and ruin him. As far as they’re concerned, she’s shown up as a silly woman, while the conjuror is unmasked as part quack, part political hack. But the thing is, the conjuration, which Shakespeare specifies should be staged as the casting of a circle, pulls up a real demon. Real, at least, in the world of the play. The audience can see him, and he utters prophecies that work out to be true through the whole series of his Wars of the roses plays. It seems to work out like that a lot; in Shakespeare, humans can call spirits from the vasty deep, but they can’t control them. It’s pretty much the other way around.”
Maybe Lady Nairn was right, I thought suddenly. Maybe Macbeth is a dupe. Led to believe in his furious passion that he’s conjuring, when all along it’s the witches around him who are invoking the spirits. I shook my head. If there was anything that Dee would have liked less than a play that made a conjuror the master of demons, it was a play that made a conjuror their dupe. Their puppet.
“A duchess who wants her husband to take the crown and who’s willing to listen to evil spirits,” mused Eircheard. “She sounds a lot like Lady Macbeth.”
“She does, doesn’t she? I’ve always thought she was a practice run. That she stayed with him, gestating in some dark corner of his soul, until he knew what to do with her.”
“If Lady M is Lady Nairn’s ancestor, you think this duchess is, too? You think she’s another fictional version of the Scottish witch?”
“I don’t know.” But Elizabeth Stewart, Lady Arran, was rumored to have lusted after the crown. I knew that. “I can’t see how he could have known her story; she fell from power in the mid-1580s, for heaven’s sake. What would have kept him drawn to her for so long? And what would have made it spill out in Macbeth when it did?”
“So what was he thinking when he wrote Macbeth? In between the early skepticism and the late acceptance?”
I pulled out the page from Aubrey and read it once again:
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.
What had William Shakespeare, laughing skeptic that he was, made of the magic he was jotting down and the request to remove it? Had he been parroting it for fun and found that he scared people, like Orson Welles reading War of the Worlds over the radio? There were tales of productions of Marlowe’s great conjuring play, Dr. Faustus, emptying theaters when audiences thought they saw one too many devils appear on the stage at the magician’s call. Had Shakespeare been playing with something a lot of people around him thought was fire—even if he didn’t—and found that the real-world consequences were too great?
Or had he been experimenting with magic himself? He was “a man torn between two masters,” Aubrey had written. And one of those was John Dee. Had Shakespeare played the sorcerer’s apprentice behind his master’s back?
The only way to find out was to find the manuscript.
And to hope that the finding—or failure to find it—did not result in either Lily’s death or mine.
I pulled my knees up to my chest, as if I might squeeze this whirl of thoughts and the terrible possibilities that danced around them out of my body altogether.
29
“ARE YOU GOING to do something with that?” asked Eircheard, stealing a glance at my hands.
I looked down and realized I was still clutching the iPod Lady Nairn had given me. I flicked off the “hold” button, and it glowed into life. I pushed “play.”
The screen went black, and then the high wavering chords of Bach’s Toccata and fugue in D Minor swelled into life, spilling into their grand downward swoop. Gradually
the black screen lightened to swirling silver clouds that cut to a title in white curlicued letters: Macbeth, by William Shakespeare.
Beneath that, in roman numerals, was a date: MCMXVI—1916.
“What?” asked Eircheard.
But I shook my head in stunned silence. The tiny screen oscillated light and dark as the camera closed in on the jackbooted star in a dark tunic. His dark wavy hair was long and his mustache very nearly longer. His eyes grew impossibly wide, his face twisted in triumph, as he killed an enemy with a flourishing sword thrust.
“That’s him,” I said. “Beerbohm Tree. As Macbeth…” I held it up on the steering wheel so that Eircheard could steal a glance.
“Looks like a low-budget haunted house video,” he said doubtfully. “In some quarters, this alone would be enough to kill for.”
.
“You’re joking.” He looked over at me. “Jesus. You’re not, are you?”
I shook my head. “It’s Tree’s Macbeth of 1916. One of the great lost films from the silent era. From any era, I suppose. One of the great lost productions of Shakespeare.”
And the Nairns possessed it in a digital copy.
Dunsinnan must go to Beerbohm Tree. Had Sir Angus seen something in this film?
The set was monumental Hollywood, an odd combination of medieval Scotland and Mycenaean Greece. As the film went on, thick black blood spilled across the stage, and the white flickering eyes of the actors grew wider and wider with horror.
I fast-forwarded, watching the actors rush about like Keystone Kops until the screen cut to black again. Gradually, light rose, though the scene remained dimmer and a little fuzzy. Up to this point, Tree’s costume of high black boots and a black tunic crisscrossed with a wide black leather belt looked more Prussian than medieval Scottish, maybe more Hells Angels than either. Now, though, Tree walked in wearing chain mail, a long dark cloak, and a winged silver helmet somewhere between Viking and proto–Lord of the Rings. And he was no longer in a castle, either Scottish or ancient Greek. Instead, he looked entirely out of place in a cozy paneled room with a small graceful fireplace set a little left of center on the back wall. Or a room that might have been cozy, at any rate, if three witches had not been cackling in glee over a cauldron hanging over the fire.
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