Haunt Me Still

by Jennifer Lee Carrell

  It was Salisbury, Dee knew, who had demanded this infernal play from Shakespeare’s pen. Not just a play about king-killing, nor even “just” a play about witches, but a play that would shadow Elizabeth Stewart and her husband, the quondam earl of Arran, on the stage. Favorites of the king in his youth. They had fallen from grace twenty years ago now, however, fleeing into exile in the remote mountain fastnesses of Scotland, no doubt hunching over peat fires among the wild clansmen of the north, conspiring their return to the glittering courts of the south.

  So why this story, why now? Especially since their plotted return had not come to pass. A decade earlier, the earl, stripped of his title, returned to the status merely of captain, had been ambushed by his enemies as he rode through some hills, his head raised high on a pole and carried off in triumph, thus fulfilling a prophecy that his head should be higher than any of those around him. The lady had died the year before that, swollen mightily and thus fulfilling a prophecy of her own: that she might be the greatest woman in Scotland. Some said she had died in childbed, others said of the dropsy. Neither story was true, if Dee’s source was to be believed: She’d been caught by a witch-hunting mob and torn to pieces.

  He’d kept tabs on her from afar since the day she had arrived at his doorstep in Antwerp, her hair bright as flame, her eyes dark and sly. She was a mink, he thought, a strange slippery cross between serpent and cat, with tiny, sharp teeth and a streak of cruelty beneath her red beauty. And she had the sight that had eluded him all his days.

  It was why, in the end, he had refused to teach her. He’d dreamed of Viviane, or Nimue, as some of the old manuscripts called her: Merlin’s Lady of the Lake, who’d sat as demurely at her master’s feet as Elizabeth was then sitting at his—until she’d learned all that Merlin could teach. At that moment, she’d raised herself up like a hooded snake and struck the hand that fed her, locking Merlin away in an enchanted palace of dreams, asleep in some still-hidden hollow in the Welsh hills. Dee had wakened in a cold sweat that night, unable to return to sleep until he could dismiss her.

  Lady Elizabeth’s response to his refusal—the theft of his mirror, the burning of a manuscript—only confirmed to him that his choice had been wise and that he had, indeed, made a narrow escape. He had kept a watch on her from afar ever since, aware of her growing power. Regretting only that in the wake of his refusal, she had gone back to the Highlands and found other masters. Or mistresses, to be more accurate.

  That Salisbury—and his father—would have set their own watch on her made sense, after she’d made herself and her third husband powers to be reckoned with behind a king whom they’d rightly predicted might one day rule England as well as Scotland. But still, Dee could not fathom why it should matter now, with both of them long dead.

  Still less could he fathom why the Howards should care, particularly Henry Howard, the king’s dark spirit. His evil genius, whom the king had elevated from Lord Henry to the earl of Northampton.

  It all seemed to revolve around the face that his scryer Hal Berridge had seen in the mirror. Who was she? Salisbury thought her a woman at court and set the boy to look for her. Northampton appeared to fear that she was someone whose identity might come home to roost, unpleasantly, in a Howard nest.

  The upshot was that the boy’s life was in danger, and Mr. Shakespeare’s play was making things worse. Dr. Dee dipped his quill in ink once more.

  Salisbury has commanded, and you have obeyed. Northampton will not command, he will kill. If you choose to put yourself in the Howards’ way, so bee it, but I beg you: Find some way to leave the Boy out of it. He is a talented Child, almost as talented, in his way, as you once were. If hee should die in other men’s quarrels, merely because he once looked into a Mirror for me, I will beare the burden of his death on my soule, but I will not beare it alone.

  He lifted the quill once more, absentmindedly drawing marks on the tip of his nose. He had set down part of his worries, but only a part. The others were somehow more formless and shifting. Truth be told, Dr. Dee suspected that the boy had seen the redheaded witch. The lady Elizabeth Stewart. If that was the case, one must then ask when? Had he looked into the past, the present, or the future? Surely the past; she had been dead eleven years.

  But it was the present that worried him. Or perhaps “presence” was a better word. For if Dr. Dee were honest with himself, he would have to admit that he sensed her presence. A peculiar malevolence that had its own spiky, sweet scent.

  And that he thought he understood. For in his new play of Macbeth, Mr. Shakespeare had done it again, had lifted a magical rite onto the stage. Her magical rite, drawn from her manuscript. But not entirely. Not only had Mr. Shakespeare filled in a certain detail that Dr. Dee had left out of the translation, but the playwright had filled in details that were not in the original manuscript. Perhaps they sprang from his imagination. But Dr. Dee worried that they sprang from memory.

  What had he seen in his long-ago travels in Scotland? Dee had done some digging. He’d discovered another player who could remember a journey north out of Edinburgh, to Perth and beyond, in the company of Mr. Shakespeare. The fellow had remembered, too, playing at a castle called Dunsinnan that figured in the new play. They had been there, he said, at All Hallow’s Eve and seen the heathen fires burning on the hills. Gave him quite a turn, it did, just thinking of it now, the old actor had said.

  What sort of a turn had it given his companion?

  If anything would call the witch back, even from the dead, it was the blasphemy of parading both her magic and her person on the public stage. If she were dead, for he would swear he could feel her. Once more, Dr. Dee set his pen to the page, scratching his final warning with a flourish: “Beware lest, like the Hydra hidden in the Lernaean spring, this serpent is scorch’t, and not dead.”

  A DEED WITHOUT A NAME

  How now, you secret, black and midnight hags!

  What is it you do?

  42

  THE GUN CLATTERED across the tile; I went scrambling after it. Behind me, I heard Joanna cry out and a confused welter of footsteps. I reached the gun and swept it back up, looking for Lucas. He was gone and so was Joanna. From the corridor, I heard footsteps pattering up the stairs.

  Jamie was crouched by the wall, trembling. “Hide,” I said, and left her there. In the corridor, an arched doorway opened onto a turret tower occupied entirely by a spiral staircase. At the bottom, I stood listening. The footsteps had stopped. I crept upward. Joanna stood on the first landing.

  “Did he have it?” I asked quietly.

  Seeing me, she put one finger to her lips.

  “Did he have the goddamned manuscript?”

  She nodded impatiently. Around us, the building was silent. We were stepping into the second-floor corridor when we both heard the scrape of a door directly overhead. Two more flights up, near the top, a shutter banged loose in the wind. Running up, I found that it was more like a small door, leading onto the roof of the adjoining tower. The roof was empty. I stole to the edge, peering over. An easy drop of one story below was the roof of yet another tower, also empty. From far below, another shot exploded through the night, the sound ricocheting around the building. Jamie. I’d left her alone and terrified. We pounded back downstairs.

  In the octagonal hall, the arched double doors leading outside gaped open, bathing the room in moonlight. Jamie was nowhere to be seen. On the floor by the open oculus lay a single sheet of paper, pale in the silvery light. Dearest, it began. It was the cover page I’d handed Jamie.

  I picked it up and strode across the hall to glance in each of the adjoining rooms. They, too, were empty.

  “Kate,” cried Joanna from just outside the arched doors, in a tone of urgency that made me run across the room to her side. “He’s leaving,” she said, pulling me down the stairs at a trot. “The bastard’s leaving.”

  She pointed off to the right. The castle sat alone on a hill overlooking the Hudson. The closest buildings were several hundred y
ards off; even so, lights were winking on around us. In the distance, a siren rose into a wail. In the moving shadows under the trees, it was impossible to see clearly, but I thought I saw a man hurrying down the slope toward the river. “Two of them,” said Joanna.

  We ran down the hill in their wake, in and out of the shadows. At the bottom was a narrow private lane. On the other side, a fence overgrown with a thicket of brambles and spindly trees bordered a deep railway cutting. I glanced up and down the fence. Nothing.

  “Two?” I whispered. “He’s got Jamie hostage?”

  She shook her head, her eyes gleaming wide in the moonlight. “Didn’t look like it.” She pointed. Off to the left the gate to an old wooden bridge hung open. It led across the tracks to a small spit of land ending in a narrow rocky beach. Beyond, three-quarters of a mile wide, spread the dark murmuring waters of the river. A private dock jutted into water. Around it, a number of small boats with outboard motors bobbed up and down.

  No—one of them was moving more purposefully than the others, in a steady line away from the dock. The wind veered around, and I heard the whine of an engine. I could just see the hunched shape of someone at the tiller. Around the dock, the other boats began to bunch up and drift away from the dock, slipping into the river’s current.

  Lucas had cut them all loose.

  Behind us, sirens spiraled toward the castle. We broke into a run.

  The last of the remaining boats bumped around the dock’s upriver corner just as we clattered out to the edge. I caught its line just as the river spun it clear, plucking at it, pulling it out toward deep currents. It took both of us to haul it back.

  “How much do you know about Jamie?” Joanna asked as she stepped in the boat.

  “Just what Lady Nairn told us: professor of theater, obsessed with Macbeth—”

  “Are you sure that’s her name?”

  I looked back, my eyes meeting Joanna’s. “Who else…you think she might be Carrie?”

  “I think we have to consider it.”

  The motor sputtered and caught, and we headed out into the open water. Low in the west, the nearly full moon laid a rippling path of gold on the water. Well north of it, the other boat was a small moving speck of darkness on the face of the river. Their boat was more powerful than ours. As ours bucked and strained against the current, theirs pulled steadily ahead, making for the opposite shore.

  “How much did you see back there? Of the manuscript?” Joanna shook her head. “Not a lot. His arm kept getting in the way. But the first page was a letter; I saw that much. The witch is not dead, it read. I can feel her presence. She is near. She is the red-haired woman my boy saw in the mirror, I know it. You, of all people, should know the danger that imports, and not for the king alone.”

  “Whose letter?”

  “It was Dee’s handwriting. I didn’t see to whom he’d addressed it.”

  “You think it was Shakespeare?”

  “Do you think it wasn’t?” She held my eyes. “After that came the play. There’s a death, Kate. The witches’ brew isn’t about body parts. It’s about a body.”

  Staring balefully at the high line of cliffs, I leaned forward over the gunwale as if I might move the boat faster by sheer force of will. We were still little more than halfway across, though, when the other boat stopped among some boulders and headlights flashed once in the trees along the shore. The boat, now empty, bobbed back out into the current.

  The cliffs loomed tall and threatening as we neared. By the time we reached the shore, though, both boat and car were gone. In my pocket, my phone began to drum. I knew what it would be before I answered. Another photo of Lily, this time with a different message: 12 hours.

  This time, it seemed a cry of triumph.

  Back where it all began, Lucas had said when I’d asked where he’d taken her. What would that mean, for him? The only person who might know was Lady Nairn.

  On the phone, her voice sounded as if it were drifting in from the stars. “An island on a remote loch. Taken up mostly by a ruined castle. It was the first place he took me alone. I danced for him, under the moon.”

  I thought of Lily spinning under the moon on the lawn of Dunsinnan House. “What loch, Lady Nairn? Where?”

  “I never knew its name. Up in the Highlands somewhere. It was a long time ago, and I wasn’t driving. I was staring at a man I thought was a great artist, giddy with love, or what I thought was love—”

  “He’s got Lily, Lady Nairn. He’s got the manuscript.”

  She stopped short. “We drove out of Inverness…. What doeshe want?”

  “To take from her what he couldn’t have from you.”

  “Find her,” pleaded Lady Nairn.

  Joanna had arranged for a driver while we were still on the river. All the same, it took him half an hour to reach us; by the time we clambered in the backseat, dawn was silvering the eastern shore. “Where to?” he asked.

  Back where it all began. The Boiling Lake.

  “Teterboro,” I said. Teterboro and then Inverness. And from there, apparently, into the realm of fairy tales. In Scotland, that was not a comforting notion.

  A little while later, the plane Lady Nairn had hired for us took off as an orange sun rose over the towers of Manhattan, glowering with the fires of Apocalypse.

  43

  ON THE PLANE, I switched on the computer and pulled a map of the Highlands off the Net. The white landmass was thickly speckled with blue water like some mad marbled egg.

  “It’ll have to be close to Inverness,” said Joanna. “That’ll cut it down some.”

  “Not enough,” I said bleakly. By the time we landed we’d have no more than a few hours before the beginning of the eclipse.

  “What about your other evidence?” asked Joanna. “Does anybody else mention a lake?”

  I shook my head. Only the Nairns’ dark fairy. And then I remembered the page I’d skimmed up off the floor at fonthill. I pulled it, partly crumpled, from my pocket.

  It was the letter from Catherine forrest to Edwin that I’d handed to Jamie.

  Dearest, it began:

  While you have been gone these long weary weeks, I have had an adventure of my own—and what an adventure! And the best part is, there is a surprise for you at the end of it!!

  A distant cousin had contacted her father, it seemed, requesting a visit from Catherine, whom she was close to settling on as her heir, and specifying that she must travel alone. In a private note to Catherine, she’d intimated that she wished to pass on a great treasure.

  It was the first stirring of interest in the world that Catherine had felt since losing her fourth child. She’d taken passage on a ship up to Inverness.

  Joanna drew close. “Go on.”

  At the dock, Catherine had been met by an immense black carriage-and-six driven by a coachman in old-fashioned livery and a top hat. No sooner had she settled inside than a whip had cracked, and the carriage had thundered along the sea, turning inland to wind up through pine forest and out into moorland, rumbling along the edge of a loch.

  Some way out, castle walls rose from the water with the suddenness of Excalibur thrusting upward from the depths. The loch was so still that there seemed two castles, one shimmering in the black mirror of the water and another rearing its broken teeth into the sky.

  The track ended at the loch’s edge, but the horses plunged into the water without breaking stride, and for a moment she thought they would drown. But a shallow causeway lay just beneath the surface, and the carriage pulled up under wide arches and into a courtyard on a small island. The coachman had leapt down and helped her out, where, to her surprise, he had whipped off his cloak and hat and turned butler, escorting her inside.

  As he led her upstairs, she saw that the place was half-derelict, its rooms empty but for echoes. High up in one tower, however, one large room was furnished in modern comfort.

  Her hostess was an old woman in the black crepe of mourning, but she held out two hands to Catherine in
greeting, and her smile was warm. “Welcome,” she’d said, “to my home in the Boiling Lake.”

  “That’s it,” I said to Joanna. “It’s not only the beginning of Lady Nairn’s story, but of Catherine forrest’s, too.”

  After supper, the old lady had at last shown Catherine her treasure.

  I could not take my eyes from it. The instant I saw it, I had to have it for you, though the price she named was staggering. She would use it, she said, to restore the castle to its former glory.

  She told me that the pages had passed down for generations, mother to daughter, from the original owner, a countess reputed to be a witch and known, once, as the Lady of the Lake. A woman, furthermore, whom Shakespeare had known. Whom he had shadowed forth in the character of Lady Macbeth.

  “My ancestress,” she said. She sat back, eyeing me in appraisal. “Yours, as well.”

  “Is that why you have chosen me?” I asked.

  “I did not choose you,” she said. “I saw you.”

  I sat back. “It’s Elizabeth Stewart’s home, this Boiling Lake.”

  Joanna swallowed hard. “What do you know about Elizabeth Stewart that puts her in the vicinity of Inverness?”

  I frowned. Her Macbeth years had been spent far to the south, near the king in Edinburgh and Stirling or at castles close by. But she was a Highlander by birth. Daughter of the earl of Atholl.

  Joanna shook her head. “I know Blair Castle, seat of the earls and dukes of Atholl. Even in the nineteenth century, you’d have gone by train to Dunkeld, I reckon, and then north in a carriage. There’s no way that south from Inverness would’ve been anyone’s first choice of routes. And it couldn’t possibly have been a single day’s journey in a carriage.”

  At the computer, I typed in the words “Elizabeth Stewart Arran,” and up popped an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.