Jason Pierce surfaced in Australia. Two hours before the Samhuinn fire festival was to start, he’d received a call from someone purporting to be with the festival organizers, offering him an out via his understudy. Jason had never once rehearsed the role of the Winter King and had had enough of Scottish gloom. He’d been so relieved that he’d jumped into his car and headed straight for London and then the surfing beaches of home.
Jamie Clifton turned up alive at fonthill. After hearing shots, she had pulled herself, terrified and quaking, into an adjoining room, huddling beneath a desk. At her suggestion, the College of Mount Saint Vincent, which had no archival library, loaned the letter from Catherine to Edwin forrest to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, where it could be properly housed and studied. Jamie began a biography of Catherine Sinclair.
Eircheard had been mentoring a young man in Perth, trying to keep him out of the sort of trouble that had landed Eircheard in prison. The fires of the forge had barely gone cold when Lady Nairn offered the youth the use of the smithy; he had moved in the next day. He had a long way to go before he could touch Eircheard’s mastery in the making of swords, but he had nothing but time on his hands. That, and determination, and a chance to do something with his life. To become a maker, as Eircheard might have said. Eircheard, said Lady Nairn, would have found that legacy enough.
The morning of Auld Callie’s death, Effie Summers had been found on her knees in Dunkeld Cathedral. Thereafter, she’d endured several days of police attention as a prime suspect in that murder. She attributed the revelation of her innocence to divine intervention. Much to Effie’s surprise, Lady Nairn agreed. “Of course,” Lady Nairn told me brightly over the phone, “our opinions as to the identity of the deity doing the intervening differ markedly. But it did not occur to Effie to ask.” When the cathedral’s regular minister returned to work, the reverend Mr. Gosson took his fire and brimstone to another post, and Effie followed him.
Sheena McGregor was promoted to detective chief inspector. Lily went back to school.
In the spring, Lily called to invite me back to Dunsinnan, her voice both shy and excited. She was to be initiated into her grandmother’s coven on Beltane: May Day. The other great festival of the Celtic year, the celebration of life and light, as Samhuinn was the celebration of death and darkness. Lily wanted me to present her to the coven.
“It’s unusual for an outsider to do the presenting,” said Lady Nairn after Lily had ceded her the phone and danced away. “But it’s not entirely unheard of. It does complicate things a wee bit, though. There are parts of the rite, you understand, that you may not witness. I must ask you to honor that rule.”
I laughed. “I won’t hide in a bush and watch.”
“There are no bushes,” said Lady Nairn. “It will be on the hilltop.”
I took a deep breath. If it had been anyone other than Lily, I would have said no in an instant. I was not ready to go back. As it was, it took all my willpower to hold my voice steady. “I won’t go up the hill alone, then.”
“Good girl. Though in this case, it’ll be more a question of heading down it, on cue.” Lady Nairn sighed. “I would have waited, you know. It’s customary to require initiates to be at least eighteen. But she has seen the darkest side of the craft, and I’ve judged it more important to balance that darkness with a vision of the light than to hold to arbitrary considerations of age.”
Balance. It was something I managed, in a fragile way, most days. But I still had to fight for it more nights than I cared to admit, when the smell of blood rose thickly around me.
“How’s Ben?”
The question startled me. “We aren’t in touch.” There are some things that, once seen, cannot be forgotten. Once known, cannot be un-known. He would never be able to look at me without seeing Sybilla’s blood on my hands.
“Never is a very long time,” said Lady Nairn, as if I’d spoken aloud. “It will become bearable, in time. If you let it.”
I’d said something similar once, to Lily. “How do you know?” I asked, my voice ragged in my throat.
“I’ve seen it,” she said simply.
So, on a blustery day at the end of April, I took the train north once more, this time all the way to Perth, where Lady Nairn and Lily picked me up at the station and drove me back to Dunsinnan House.
On a table just inside the door, the silver cauldron was filled with yellow daffodils and bright purple thistles. Up on the bed in the room of pale blue silk and dragons, a dress the color of peacocks was laid out on my bed. Beside it lay a folder. “Open it,” said Lily.
Inside was a single scorched page. It seemed to be a letter from a woman writing to an unborn daughter, telling a tale about a death that was not intended and a boy who was not a boy.
“Hal Berridge?” I asked, looking up sharply at Lady Nairn.
“So it would seem.”
The writer went on to claim for the yet-to-be-born girl heritage from Elizabeth Stewart, Lady Arran, and the English wizard John Dee.
“What will you do with this?” I asked. “Keep it,” she said. “Keep it quiet. But we thought you had earned the right to know.”
She and Lily soon excused themselves. Lily, however, hung back at the door, her fingers twisting on the doorknob. “Look like the innocent flower,” she said bleakly, “but be the serpent under it. I’ve been the serpent more than the lily.”
“Not necessarily a bad thing; the snake is an old symbol of wisdom, you know. Female wisdom.”
“That’s what Gran says.” She smiled wanly. “from a time when the Goddess ruled in harmony with the god, before men set him above her, crushing her serpent beneath his feet. But I’ve been anything but wise…. I’m sorry, Kate. Though I don’t think I can ever say it properly. Or enough.”
“It’s not what you say that will make it have meaning. It’s what you do. How you live your life.”
She took a deep breath and straightened. “right, then. I suppose I had better go and get on with it. Thank you. Again.” With the brief flash of a grin, she disappeared.
A maid brought dinner to my room on a tray, but I wasn’t hungry. I stood at the window for a long time, watching the setting sun light the hill to gold, which deepened to pink and purple shadows, draining to gray as the sky fired to liquid sapphire and finally went black. At last I stirred and began to dress. This far north, dawn would come so early that it was pointless to go to bed. I was to leave early in the morning, directly after the ceremony, to make it back for a rehearsal in London in the afternoon. I could sleep on the train.
At three o’clock in the morning, Lily tapped on my door. She wore a dress of white with a long pointed bodice and tight sleeves that Guinevere would have envied. On her head was a wreath of creamy rowan blossoms that frothed with a heady sweet scent as she moved. In her dress, she might have walked out of a painting or poem by Rossetti, or Millais, or Burne-Jones. But the red hair curling loosely around her was that of Botticelli’s Aphrodite.
Outside, a full moon was spearing itself on the trees to the west. In silence, we walked up the lane to the woods surrounding the stone circle, and I waited while Lily went in to greet her goddess alone.
She came back, her face alight with excitement, and we walked around the hill to the path that led up its northern slope. As we trudged upward, dawn began to silver the eastern sky. We crested the summit and this time I saw two bonfires piled side by side, framing a doorway opening to the east. On the narrow path running between them, someone hunched low, twirling a small stick inside a hole carved in another. A small red glow sprang to life, nursed to a tiny flame. Just as the sun crested the hill’s eastern rim, the new fire was divided in two and fed into each stack of wood.
As the sun rose higher and the fire caught, a man stepped out of the darkness, silhouetted against the growing light. Tall. With curly hair and a way of standing that I would have known anywhere.
Ben.
Yellow and orange flames licked upward, crack
ling, through the bonfires, and he held out a hand to Lily. She took it with her left hand, drawing me forward with her right, and the three of us walked between the fires. Just on the other side, we stopped.
A white candle in her hand, the wreath of pale blossoms around her head, Lily looked like Saint Lucy. Lux, lucis, I thought. The Bride, the Maiden, the personification of light. Which was, come to think of it, exactly who Saint Lucy was: another aspect of the goddess that, like Mary, Christianity had taken in and hidden in plain sight, beneath the veil of sainthood.
In the center of the summit, a circle was marked out with candles, as yet unlit; inside waited a small knot of people. At their feet gleamed the cauldron. Lady Nairn, her hair pale above a shimmering blue gown, raised her arms and called Lily forward. “Lilidh Gruoch MacPhee. Do you enter this circle of your own accord?”
“I do,” said Lily, dropping our hands and walking forward. As she crossed into the circle there was, ever so slightly, a nod from Lady Nairn. A sign of thanks, a sign of dismissal. Together, Ben and I turned and walked back through the fires.
Beside me, I could feel his nearness, though we did not touch. At the edge of the summit, I paused briefly, watching the sun unroll across the wide, sleeping valley below, birdsong rising like lace into air that smelled clean and new. Something brushed my hand. I looked down. Ben’s hand, taking mine.
In silence, we headed down the hill. At the bottom, as promised, Lady Nairn’s driver was waiting with her range rover. Ben opened the door for me, and I slid into the backseat, swallowing down sadness as his fingers slipped from mine.
“I can call spirits from the vasty deep,” he said quietly. The phrase from the loch. Glancing up, I saw calm on his face, and the ghost of a smile.
This time, I had a clear enough head to respond. “But will they come when you do call for them?” I said, returning his smile.
“Good-bye, Kate.”
For a while, I thought as the car pulled out from under the shadow of the hill and into the sun. It was not time. Not yet. But it no longer seemed impossible that at some point, one of us would call, and the other would come.
I could see it.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Macbeth opens with eerie, unearthly condensations of evil adrift on a dark wind, whispering words that gnaw at a good man’s mind, propelling him into horrific violence. Belief in such terrifying supernatural malevolence was rife during Shakespeare’s lifetime, but on the renaissance English stage, witches tended to be comic evil: village scolds or cackling hags dealing in grotesque potions. As different from the norm of its day as Stephen King’s bone-chilling evil in The Shining is from the Disney witches of Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and The Little Mermaid, Macbeth is one of the first great horror stories in modern literature.
What makes the “Scottish Play” different from other tales of terror is that its evil does not stay put in the story. It leaches from the stage, spilling into real life with catastrophic consequences for productions and people—or at least it has been fervently thought to do so for a century. The story of a curse on the play, the theatrical taboos around quoting or naming it, and the ritual for exorcising its evil are long-standing traditions still current among many actors the world over.
The fact that the story of the curse began with a hoax is not very well known, even among Shakespearean scholars. As Kate notes, however, the fin de siècle bon vivant, wit, and caricaturist Max Beerbohm does seem to have concocted the story of Hal Berridge’s death in 1898, at a mischief-provoking moment of boredom with his day (or rather, night) job: reviewing Shakespeare on the stage.
Beerbohm attributed his fib to the seventeenth-century antiquary John Aubrey, and Aubrey, happy magpie that he was, is manna from heaven for a novelist with a need to uncover lost documents and seed trails of evidence. An inveterate gossip with the inclinations of a scholar and the organizational skills of a distracted adolescent, Aubrey recorded historical fact, hearsay, and ludicrous gossip with equal relish, sometimes twining them in the same paragraph, if not the same sentence. His notes are a scattered and incomplete mess. If anyone might have written a long-lost, secretly surviving page recording strange and suggestive tales about Shakespeare and Dee, it was Aubrey. He made notes on both men, after all, within living memory of their deeds, recording details and vignettes preserved nowhere else. And he was a relation of Dee, who was his grandfather’s cousin and “intimate acquaintance.”
So this novel began, in part, with a “what-if”: What if Max Beerbohm really did find the tale of Hal Berridge in an Aubrey manuscript? What if Aubrey had told the truth? What if the curse of Macbeth extended all the way back to the beginning? What then? What might be the source of Macbeth’s admittedly strange power to frighten both audiences and actors?
This set me to wondering about the magic in Macbeth. As first published in 1623 in the first folio—the first edition of Shakespeare’s collected works—the play is uneven in its sinister vision. In addition to the three spectral weird sisters, the witch queen Hecate arrives to sing and dance with all the chortling glee that English audiences expected from stage witches: Think of Walt Disney and Stephen King competing for the soul of a single film. So sharp is the chasm between Hecate and the weird sisters that scholars have long suspected that Hecate—who makes no necessary contribution to the play’s action—is a late intrusion.
The general scholarly consensus is that someone other than Shakespeare revised the original Macbeth at some point before publication, bringing it more into line with what audiences would happily pay to see, namely evil that was more amusing than horrifying. To do so, the reviser turned to The Witch, by Thomas Middleton, which also has a witch character named Hecate. The reviser lifted some silly songs from Middleton’s newer play into Shakespeare’s old play and wrote in a new version of Hecate (very different from Middleton’s) in order to explain the sudden burst of song and dance amid the gloom. It’s the sort of light-fingered patchwork that was then part and parcel of the quick-turnaround mill of the theater.
As time went on, this alteration was intensified. By the time Macbeth reappeared on the restoration stage in 1666, the witches had grown in number from three to an entire Ziegfeld chorus of hags, some of them zooming about overhead on wires. Even while noting that they were “a strange perfection in a tragedy,” the diarist Samuel Pepys thought the witches’ song-and-dance bits, or “divertissements” as he called them, the best part of the play. Interest in “authentic” Shakespeare revived across the nineteenth century, and major productions gradually pared the play back to the text in the first folio…but that is the earliest version of Macbeth that survives. What did the witches and their magic look like in Shakespeare’s original?
Many scholars and directors happily pluck out Hecate and her songs and leave it at that. It’s possible, however, that the alterations were more extensive. For starters, the play’s central scene of witchcraft, the cauldron scene—act four, scene one—is an odd cobbling of grotesque cauldron magic and the learned magic of conjuring demonic spirits. Furthermore, there are other scenes that appear out of order and garbled. Finally, Macbeth is remarkably short: one of Shakespeare’s shortest plays in any genre and easily the shortest of his tragedies. Of the four great tragedies he wrote in the first five years of King James’s reign, the others—Othello, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra—are all longer by roughly a thousand lines or more. Hamlet—written at the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign—is nearly twice as long. What, if anything, has gone missing from Macbeth?
It is impossible to say but intriguing to wonder about, and in the wide space of that wonder, this novel was born.
In this novel, the key objects of blade, mirror, and cauldron are all real, or based on real objects. With two exceptions, the places where I’ve set major scenes are all real places with links to the historical King Macbeth, famous productions and actors of Shakespeare’s play, or historical people whose lives Shakespeare may have used in shaping his play. I have altered them, in s
ome cases, to suit the fiction, however. The myths are real—as myths—and the magical traditions and ideas of both the “black” and “white” variety have been put forward, historically, as real magic, though not necessarily tied specifically to Macbeth. Save for Carrie’s final attempt to invoke a demonic spirit, however, the specific rites of black magic concocted by Lucas, Ian, and Carrie are my own inventions. For the most part, the historical characters are fantasias on fact. The modern characters are all fictional.
Samhuinn is the Scottish Gaelic name for the ancient pagan Celtic festival better known in some circles by its Irish name of Samhain and certainly widely known across the world by its Christian co-opted descendant of All Hallow’s Eve or Halloween. It is one of the two great fire festivals of the old Celtic year once celebrated across the British Isles and Ireland—and much of western Europe, for that matter. The other is Beltane, or May Day. Whereas Beltane celebrates fertility, sex, and new birth, spring and summer, and the return of light, Samhuinn celebrates—or at least acknowledges—death and the dead, autumn and winter, and darkness. In the Scottish Highlands, Samhuinn was celebrated into the early twentieth century with bonfires on hilltops. Various folk traditions suggest that once upon a very long time ago, the celebration may have included sacrifice, possibly human sacrifice.
Edinburgh’s Samhuinn fire festival, run by the Beltane fire Society, is a spectacular yearly celebration of this ancient holiday. I have tried to be as faithful as possible to the carnival spirit of the actual performances, which change every year, though the basic story of the Cailleach and the two battling kings remains the same. I have had to alter some practices, however, in order to slot my characters into main roles. In particular, Lily is too young to be involved, and I doubt that the BFS would ever cast a film star like Jason Pierce in a lead role in exchange for money. I hope the society’s members will forgive me those lapses as minor technicalities and enjoy the festival’s fictional appearance in a thriller.
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