What happened on Islandmagee, I’ve turned over in my mind, and it’s my belief something evil was born out of it. Not so much from the butchery – one side or the other was always doing violence – but because nobody tried to warn the victims, or prevent the soldiers from killing all round them, or save even one Magee child. The planters closed their eyes and ears and waited for murder to be done in their names.
Maybes they felt they had no choice, if they were to put down roots in this country where they never felt completely safe. Always, always, they were watching the horizon. Aye, and their backs, forbye. Even the friendly Irish resented them, and the Scotch never knowed how far they could trust them. But to my mind, that act of looking away at the time of the Magee killings gave birth to the corrupt seed. And the hush that followed – denying the truth – allowed it to grow.
I’ve turned it back and forth, like the wheelings of the tide, and this is how I see it. Knowehead is a house apart because it belongs to the land, not to them that raised it up or them that live in it. It was built in a place held sacred by a people who lived here long before Gael or planter. We call them pagans and think ourselves better than them, but they grasped how everything comes from the land and sinks back into the land. Aye, and they understood how folk serve the land, rather than the other way round.
Knowehead was using Hamilton Lock, using Mary Dunbar – just like I doubt maybes it used me. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the house sent me to Lock’s Cave.
Lately, I’ve found myself dwelling on the manner of Lizzie Cellar’s death. I can no more undo what she did than store clouds in my pocket, nor do I seek to try. But the choice she made fills my mind. I can’t stop wondering if she thought about the Magee women and childer at all when she did it. I know there’s no reason to believe she did – and yet, could she have been influenced by the stories of how they met their end?
Her dying pops into my head when I’m instructing the new maid in her duties, or when I’m collecting speckled eggs, or when I’m plucking a chicken, saving the feathers for a pillow. Out of the blue, I see her last moments as clearly as if I stood below the stocks in Carrickfergus market square that morning: watching her press her flesh against the cold metal of the lieutenant’s bayonet, embracing it like a lover. Mister Sinclair says it’s perpetual darkness for any that die by their own hand. He preached a sermon about it: “Woe to them that share the fate of Judas.”
But is it possible that, just for a few seconds, Lizze felt free? So deliberate were her actions, she must have knowed what she was about. There’s freedom of sorts in that. In facing two evils and making a choice. It might have been the same for those women with their babbies, chased by soldiers at the Gobbins. They might have felt free too, as they flew through the air, before meeting the rocks below. There was something appalling behind them, something no less terrible in front – but for the space of a heartbeat, there might have been release.
Oftentimes, my feet take me to the cliffs and I stand looking over them, silence hanging like an anchor. I can no longer hear the tide or the gulls, or see anything beyond grey sea reaching up to grey sky. All I can think about is how it might have felt to step off, as Hamilton Lock urged me to do, into the arms of the wind that blows about Islandmagee. To let go at last.
And then I step away from the edge and turn my feet for home. Drawn back, always, to Knowehead House.
THE END
BRIAN BOY MAGEE
by Ethna Carbery (1866-1902)
I am Brian Boy Magee–
My father was Eoghain Bán–
I was wakened from happy dreams
By the shouts of my startled clan;
And I saw through the leaping glare
That marked where our homestead stood,
My mother swing by her hair –
And my brothers lie in their blood.
In the creepy cold of the night
The pitiless wolves came down–
Scotch troops from that Castle grim
Guarding Knockfergus Town
And they hacked and lashed and hewed
With musket and rope and sword,
Till my murdered kin lay thick
In pools by the Slaughter Ford.
I fought by my father’s side,
And when we were fighting sore
We saw a line of their steel
With our shrieking women before;
The red-coats drove them on
To the verge of the Gobbins gray,
Hurried them – God! the sight!
As the sea foamed up for its prey.
Oh, tall were the Gobbins cliffs,
And sharp were the rocks, my woe!
And tender the limbs that met
Such terrible death below;
Mother and babe and maid
They clutched at the empty air,
With eyeballs widened in fright,
That hour of despair.
(Sleep soft in your heaving bed,
O little fair love of my heart!
The bitter oath I have sworn
Shall be of my life a part;
And for every piteous prayer
You prayed on your way to die,
May I hear an enemy plead
While I laugh and deny.)
In the dawn that was gold and red,
Ay, red as the blood-choked stream,
I crept to the perilous brink–
Great Christ! was the night a dream ?
In all the Island of Gloom
I only had life that day–
Death covered the green hill-sides,
And tossed in the Bay.
I have vowed by the pride of my sires–
By my mother’s wandering ghost–
By my kinsfolk’s shattered bones
Hurled on the cruel coast–
By the sweet dead face of my love,
And the wound in her gentle breast–
To follow that murderous band,
A sleuth-hound who knows no rest.
I shall go to Phelim O’Neill
With my sorrowful tale, and crave
A blue-bright blade of Spain,
In the ranks of his soldiers brave.
And God grant me the strength to wield
That shining avenger well –
When the Gael shall sweep his foe
Through the yawning gates of Hell.
I am Brian Boy Magee!
And my creed is a creed of hate;
Love, Peace, I have cast aside–
But Vengeance, Vengeance I wait!
Till I pay back the four-fold debt
For the horrors I witnessed there,
When my brothers moaned in their blood,
And my mother swung by her hair.
[Taken from The Four Winds of Erinn: Poems by Ethna Carbery. Edited by Seumas MacManus (her husband). Dublin, Ireland: M. H. Gill and Son Ltd 1906]
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
“It were better that Ten Suspected Witches should escape, than that one Innocent Person should be Condemned.” Increase Mather, Puritan minister in Salem.
The last conviction for witchcraft in Ireland happened in County Antrim on March 31st, 1711. In the same year that Massachusetts repented of its notorious Salem Witch Trials, reinstating the rights and good names of those who were condemned for witchcraft nineteen years earlier, a version of witch fever broke out in Ireland.
A group trial involving eight women accused as witches was held at the Assizes in Carrickfergus. The eight were named by a girl of eighteen called Mary Dunbar, who claimed they used their evil arts to torment her. This was said to have taken place on nearby Islandmagee, where Mary Dunbar was staying with relatives. She was described by the Vicar of Belfast, Dr William Tisdall, who attended the trial, as “having an open and innocent countenance, and being a very intelligent young person”.
A swarm of neighbours and local clergymen told the court they witnessed the victim thrown into convulsions and attacked by invisible
hands. They also said they saw her regurgitate objects ranging from pins to waistcoat buttons, which were shown in evidence to the jury of twelve men. In the absence of a natural explanation, the gap was filled with a supernatural one: witchcraft was blamed.
All of the defendants maintained their innocence. Some had alibis, while others were known to be regular churchgoers. None of the eight had a lawyer. Nor was there any medical evidence regarding the state of the accuser’s health. It was a case of Mary Dunbar’s words against theirs – and the jury unanimously believed the pretty young woman.
The eight were found guilty and sentenced to a year and a day in prison, with four turns in the pillory on fair day: the standard term for non-lethal witchcraft. The crowd was worked up into such a rage against them that one of the convicted women had her eye put out by a missile thrown while she was in the stocks.
Just twenty-five years later, the crime of witchcraft was removed from the statute books. After the court case in Carrickfergus, accuser and accused alike faded from history. But on Islandmagee, the 300-year-old story has not been forgotten – though it is not much talked about. A local farmer has a rock on his land called “the witch’s stone” where legend has it one of the accused dragged her nails along its surface as she was carried off to prison. Descendants of the eight women convicted of witchcraft still live in the area. And Knowehead House, where Mary Dunbar claimed to have fallen under the spell of a witches’ coven, remains occupied to this day.
This novel is inspired by a true story, although I have taken liberties with some of the facts – especially in relation to the haunting of Knowehead House, which I imagined, by Hamilton Lock, a fictional character. There was a massacre of Magees in Islandmagee by Scottish troops in 1641, but it is disputed whether women and children were driven over the cliffs. (I invented the letter in the prologue; no such document is held in Belfast’s excellent Linen Hall Library. The pedlar’s ballad is also a piece of fiction, although modelled on ballads of the period.) Eye-witness accounts of events in Islandmagee make for chilling reading, however. A raid was carried out with the intention of eliminating the Magees, as reprisal for the killing of settlers by native Irish elsewhere. A small number of Magees escaped, and a few neighbours made efforts to shelter them. But I played this down for narrative purposes. Instead, I attributed some of the documented actions of other solders during the massacre to my fictional character, Hamilton Lock. There was a woman called Annie McGill, not Bridget McGill, who survived a bullet wound to the neck during a raid on Eiver Magee’s house. I changed her name because of the potential for muddling her with Mistress Anne. I also changed two of the accused women’s first names, from Janet Carson to Becky Carson and from Janet Mean to Bessie Mean – four of the women tried for witchcraft were called Janet or Jane, a popular name at this time and place, but confusing for readers.
As for Mary Dunbar, she was real enough, and lived in Knockbreda, now part of Belfast. I relocated her to Armagh. She was observed to vomit up the items mentioned in the story. This was taken as proof of her being witched. But the ability to swallow and regurgitate small objects at will is not unknown. Indeed, it was later used in vaudeville acts and is still performed by entertainers today. Nobody knows her motivation for making the accusations, so I have speculated on possibilities.
A stone, known as the Rocking Stone does stand on Islandmagee, and tradition holds that it was used as a seat of judgment in pre-Christian times. It was said to rock if a wrongdoer approached it. But it was not pulled down on the orders of the minister, and it is situated near Brown’s Bay rather than in Kilcoan More. It is one of a number of boulders left behind by the retreating glacier that carved out the territory. But I prefer the idea of a pagan people putting the boulder in place deliberately for ceremonial use – a Celtic shock-and-awe tactic.
Finally, unlike Salem, and other witchcraft trials, the eight women convicted of diabolical practices in Antrim in 1711 escaped execution. But while Salem subsequently tried to do justice by those it wronged, the same cannot be said for Islandmagee’s so-called witches. They never had their convictions overturned by the authorities, nor their reputations restored to them. The taint remains.
GLOSSARY
A-coorse – of course
Afore – before
Agin – against
Bairn – child
Bap – head
Barge – scold (noun and verb)
Bate – beaten
Bawbee – halfpenny
Bide – stay
Birl – twist
Blether – gossip/nonsense
Boke – vomit
Bogging – dirty
Brae – hillside
Brave – very
Braw – handsome
Burn – stream
Cauld – cold
Clabber – mud
Clatter – pile
Clatty/clattery – dirty and untidy
Clocks – black beetles
Codding – fooling
Collops – bacon slices topped with fried egg
Cow claps – cow pats
Cowp over/up – turn over
Cozen – deceive
Crabbit – bad-tempered
Crawley-boy – runt of the litter
Cub – boy
Cuddy – girl
Dander – stroll
Darsent – dare not
Dirk – dagger
Docken – dock leaf, a traditional remedy for nettle stings
Dose of – lot of
Dulse – dried seaweed
Dunder – thump
Dunderhead – stupid person
Fash – worry
Fly – cunning
Footer with – fiddle with
Forbye – besides/as well
Fornenst – in front of, opposite
Founder – freeze
Gabbon hawks – goshawks, gabbon is another version of gobbins
Gawp – stare
Give someone the time of day – say hello
Graylords – pollock
Gulder – shout
Gulpin – ignorant, uncouth person
Gurn – frown, pull a face
Gurney – frowning
Haet – scrap
Haggery duff – a type of bread made from potatoes and oatmeal
Handling – business
Hap up – tuck in
Hard-by – near
Hidin’ – beating
Hirple – limp
Hoak – poke about
Juke – duck/dodge/crouch down
Junketing - merrymaking
Keek – peep
Kehoe – making a loud noise
Kitling – kitten
Lock of – several
Maither – complain
Megrum - migraine
Mind – remember
Mizzle – drizzle
Nar – than
Near – mean
No call – no need
Oxters – armpits
Piece – slice of bread, sandwich
Ploughter – traipse
Pockle – fool/Pockling – messing, fooling
Pother – trouble and worry
Quare – very
Rare – odd
Redd up – cleared up
Riz – risen
Scaldies – baby birds
Scrab – scratch
Screek of day – daybreak
Scundered – sickened
Sea-pig – porpoise
Shebeen – unlicensed pub
Shimmy – petticoat
Shoon – shoes
Shuck – ditch
Skelp – slap
Skite – go quickly
Skitter – unpleasant person
Skittery – small, inconsequential
Skitter-jabs – freckles
Snatters – snot
Soldiers – soldiers
Sonsey – buxom
Stoor – dust
Streeling – dragging
>
Striddle – dawdle
Targe – battleaxe
Terrible – very
Thatch – hair
The-day – today
The-morrow – tomorrow
The-gether – together
Thole/tholing – endure/enduring
Thon/thonder – that/there
Thran – stubborn
Thrapple – choke
Through-other – disorganized
Titter – bit
Totie – tiny
Un’asied – troubled
Visog – face
Wee’an – child (wee one)
Wee drap – something to drink
Wheek – snatch
Wheen – some
Whisht – hush
Wile – very
Yammer – cry
Acknowledgements
Many people helped me with this project along the way. I’d like to acknowledge them here, in no particular order:
My agent Lucy Luck, who believed in the book when I was plugging away at it – and whose faith bolstered mine.
George Rutherford of Islandmagee, an extremely knowledgeable local historian who could not have been more courteous when I visited, and who was kind enough to guide me round the area, offering valuable insights.
Dr Stiofán Ó’Direáin who read an early draft and made insightful suggestions, especially in relation to historical accuracy. I am particularly grateful for his kind permission to use an Islandmagee map at the beginning of this novel, borrowed from his own co-authored book, Islandmagee and Templecorran – A Postcard History.
Joe Graham of the magazine Rushlight, a helpful local historian in Belfast.
Sharon McQuillan of Libraries NI, who gave me a list containing a treasure trove of historical books on the subject.
Jane Alger, director, Dublin UNESCO City of Literature, who pointed me towards useful references to the trial and to the period generally in Dublin’s Pearse Library.
Gaye Shortland, stellar editor, whose eagle eye caught anachronisms, among other improvements and contributions.
Paula Campbell, Ward River Press publisher, for imagining the imprint and having the enthusiasm and commitment to act as its midwife.
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