by Jim Butcher
I turned a glared at him. “Do you think reading an ailment then?”
He put up his hands palms towards me. “Whoa, lass. I’m a big reader myself. But what the old man had been reading lately had clearly unnerved him. He couldna put it into context. Mrs. Marr said as much before you came. These last few months he’d stayed away from the pub, from the kirk, from everyone who’d known him well. No one kenned what he’d been on about.”
I wondered what sort of thing Alec would be reading. The fishing report? The local paper? Feeling out of sorts, I said sharply, “Well, I was going over his journals last night and what he’s been on about are the old North Berwick witches.”
Alec’s lips pursed. “The ones who plotted to blow King James off the map.” It was a statement, not a question.
“The very ones.”
“Not a smart thing for the unprepared to tackle.”
I wondered if Alec had become as hag-ridden and superstitious as any St Monans fisherman. Ready to turn home from his boat if he met a woman on the way. Or not daring to say “salmon” or “pig” and instead speaking of “red fish” and “curly tail,” or shouting out “Cauld iron!” at any mention of them. All the East Neuk tip-leavings I was glad to be shed of.
He took the measure of my disapproving face, and laughed. “Ye take me for a gowk,” he said. “But there are more things in heaven and earth, Janet, than are dreamt of in yer philosophy.”
I laughed as Shakespeare tumbled from his lips. Alec could always make me laugh. “Pax,” I said.
He reached over, took my hand, gave it a squeeze. “Pax.” Then he dropped it again as we walked along the beach, a comfortable silence between us.
The tide had just turned and was heading out. Gulls, like satisfied housewives, sat happily in the receding waves. One lone boat was on the horizon, a small fishing boat, not the yacht I had seen earlier, which must already be coming into its port. The sky was that wonderful spring blue, without a threatening cloud, not even the fluffy Babylonians, as the fishermen called them.
“Shouldn’t you be out there?” I said, pointing at the boat as we passed by the smoky fish-curing sheds.
“I rarely get out there anymore,” he answered, not looking at me but at the sea. “Too busy until summer. And why old man Sinclair is fishing when the last of the winter herring have been hauled in, I canna fathom.”
I turned toward him. “Too busy with what?”
He laughed. “Och, Janet, yer so caught up in yer own preconceptions, ye canna see what’s here before yer eyes.”
I didn’t answer right away, and the moment stretched between us, as the silence had before. Only this was not comfortable. At last I said, “Are you too busy to help me solve the mystery of my father’s death?”
“Solve the mystery of his life first,” he told me, “and the mystery of his death will inevitably be revealed.” Then he touched his cap, nodded at me, and strolled away.
I was left to ponder what he said. Or what he meant. I certainly wasn’t going to chase after him. I was too proud to do that. Instead, I went back to the house, changed my shoes, made myself a plate of bread and cheese. There was no wine in the house. Mrs. Marr was as Temperance as Alec’s old father had been. But I found some miserable sherry hidden in my father’s study. It smelled like turpentine, so I made do with fresh milk, taking the plate and glass up to my bedroom, to read some more of my father’s journals until it was time to bury him.
~
It is not too broad a statement to say that Father was clearly out of his mind. For one, he was obsessed with local witches. For another, he seemed to believe in them. While he spared a few paragraphs for Christian Dote, St Monans’s homegrown witch of the 1640s, and a bit more about the various Anstruther, St Andrews, and Crail trials—listing the hideous tortures, and executions of hundreds of poor old women in his journal entries—it was the earlier North Berwick crew who really seemed to capture his imagination. By the third year’s journal, I could see that he obviously considered the North Berwick witchery evil real, whereas the others, a century later, he dismissed as deluded or senile old women, as deluded and senile as the men who hunted them.
Here is what he wrote about the Berwick corps: “They were a scabrous bunch, these ninety greedy women and six men, wanting no more than what they considered their due: a king and his bride dead in the sea, a kingdom in ruins, themselves set up in high places.”
“Oh, Father,” I whispered, “what a noble mind is here o’erthrown,” For whatever problems I’d had with him—and they were many—I had always admired his intelligence.
He described the ceremonies they indulged in, and they were awful. In the small North Berwick church, fueled on wine and sex, the witches had begun a ritual to call up a wind that would turn over the royal ship and drown King James. First they’d christened a cat with the name of Hecate, while black candles flickered fitfully along the walls of the apse and nave. Then they tortured the poor creature by passing it back and forth across a flaming hearth. Its elf-knotted hair caught fire and burned slowly, and the little beastie screamed in agony. The smell must have been appalling, but he doesn’t mention that. I once caught my hair on fire, bending over a stove on a cold night in Cambridge, and it was the smell that was the worst of it. It lingered in my room for days.
Then I thought of my own dear moggie at home, a sweet orange-colored puss who slept each night at my bedfoot. If anyone ever treated her the way the North Berwick witches had that poor cat, I’d be more than ready to kill. And not with any wind, either.
But there was worse yet, and I shuddered as I continued reading. One of the men, so Father reported, had dug up a corpse from the church cemetery, and with a companion had cut off the dead man’s hands and feet. Then the witches attached the severed parts to the cat’s paws. After this they attached the corpse’s sex organs to the cat’s. I could only hope the poor creature was dead by this point. After this desecration, they proceeded to a pier at the port of Leith where they flung the wee beastie into the sea.
Father wrote: “A storm was summarily raised by this foul method, along with the more traditional knotted twine. The storm blackened the skies, with wild gales churning the sea. The howl of the wind could be heard all the way across the Firth to Fife. But the odious crew had made a deadly miscalculation. The squall caught a ship crossing from Kinghorn to Leith and smashed it to pieces all right, but it was not the king’s ship. The magic lasted only long enough to kill a few innocent sailors on that first ship, and then blew itself out to sea. As for the king, he proceeded over calmer waters with his bride, arriving safely in Denmark and thence home again to write that great treatise on witchcraft, Demonology, and preside over a number of witch trials thereafter.”
I did not read quickly because, as I have said, parts of the journal were in a strange Latin and for those passages I needed the help of the dictionary. I was like a girl at school with lines to translate by morning, frustrated, achingly close to comprehension, but somehow missing the point. In fact, I did not understand them completely until I read them aloud. And then suddenly, as a roiled liquid settles at last, all became clear. The passages were some sort of incantation, or invitation, to the witches and to the evil they so devoutly and hideously served.
I closed the journal and shook my head. Poor Father. He wrote as if the witchcraft were fact, not a coincidence of gales from the southeast that threw up vast quantities of seaweed on the shore, and the haverings of tortured old women. Put a scold’s bridle on me, and I would probably admit to intercourse with the devil. Any devil. And describe him and his nether parts as well.
But Father’s words, as wild and unbelievable as they were, held me in a kind of thrall. And I would have remained on my bed reading further if Mrs. Marr hadn’t knocked on the door and summoned me to his funeral.
She looked me over carefully, but for once I seemed to pass muster, my smart black Cambridge dress suitable for the occasion. She handed me a black hat. “I didna think ye’d hav
e thought to bring one.” Her lips drew down into a thin, straight line.
Standing before me, her plain black dress covered at the top by a solemn dark shawl, and on her head an astonishing hat covered with artificial black flowers, she was clearly waiting for me to say something.
“Thank you,” I said at last. And it was true, bringing a hat along hadn’t occurred to me at all. I took off the bandeaux, and set the proffered hat on my head. It was a perfect fit, though made me look fifteen years older, with its masses of black feathers, or so the mirror told me.
Lips pursed, she nodded at me, then turned, saying over her shoulder, “Young Mary McDougall did for him.”
It took me a moment to figure out what she meant. Then I remembered. Though she must be nearer sixty than thirty, Mary McDougall had been both midwife and dresser of the dead when I was a child. So it had been she and not Mrs. Marr who must have washed my father and put him into the clothes he’d be buried in. So Mrs. Marr missed out on her last great opportunity to touch him, I thought.
“What do I give her?” I asked to Mrs. Marr’s ramrod back.
Without turning around again, she said, “We’ll give her all yer father’s old clothes. She’ll be happy enough with that.”
“But surely a fee…”
She walked out of the door.
It was clear to me then that nothing had changed since I’d left. It was still the nineteenth century. Or maybe the eighteenth. I longed for the burial to be over and done with, my father’s meager possessions sorted, the house sold, and me back on a train heading south.
~
We walked to the kirk in silence, crossing over the burn which rushed along beneath the little bridge. St Monans has always been justifiably proud of its ancient kirk and even in this dreary moment I could remark its beauty. Some of its stonework runs back in an unbroken line to the thirteenth century.
And some of its customs, I told myself without real bitterness.
When we entered the kirk proper, I was surprised to see that Mrs. Marr had been wrong. She’d said not many would come, but the church was overfull with visitants.
We walked down to the front. As the major mourners, we commanded the first pew, Mrs. Marr, the de facto wife, and me, the runaway daughter. There was a murmur when we sat down together, not quite of disapproval, but certainly of interest. Gossip in a town like St Monans is everybody’s business.
Behind us, Alex and Dr. Kinnear were already settled in. And three men sat beside them, men whose faces I recognized, friends of my father’s, but grown so old. I turned, nodded at them with, I hope, a smile that thanked them for coming. They didn’t smile back.
In the other pews were fishermen and shopkeepers and the few teachers I could put a name to. But behind them was a congregation of strangers who leaned forward with an avidity that one sees only in the faces of vultures at their feed. I knew none of them and wondered if they were newcomers to the town. Or if it was just that I hadn’t been home in so long, even those families who’d been here forever were strangers to me now.
Father’s pine box was set before the altar and I kept my eyes averted, watching instead an ettercap, a spider, slowly spinning her way from one edge of the pulpit to the other. No one in the town would have removed her, for it was considered bad luck. It kept me from sighing, it kept me from weeping.
The minister went on for nearly half an hour, lauding my father’s graces, his intelligence, his dedication. If any of us wondered about whom he was talking, we didn’t answer back. But when it was over, and six large fishermen, uneasy in their Sunday clothes, stood to shoulder the coffin, I leaped up with them. Putting my hand on the pine top, I whispered, “I forgive you, Father. Do you forgive me?”
There was an audible gasp from the congregation behind me, though I’d spoken so low, I doubted any of them—not even Alec—could have heard me. I sat down again, shaken and cold.
And then the fishermen took him off to the kirkyard, to a grave so recently and quickly carved out of the cold ground, its edges were jagged. As we stood there, a huge black cloud covered the sun. The tide was dead low and the bones of the sea, those dark grey rock skellies, showed in profusion like the spines of some prehistoric dragons.
As I held on to Mrs. Marr’s arm, she suddenly started shaking so hard, I thought she would shake me off.
How she must have loved my father, I thought, and found myself momentarily jealous.
Then the coffin was lowered, and that stopped her shaking. As the first clods were shoveled into the gaping hole, she turned to me and said, “Well, that’s it then.”
~
So we walked back to the house where a half dozen people stopped in for a dram or three of whiskey—brought in by Alec despite Mrs. Marr’s strong disapproval. “There’s a Deil in every mouthful of whiskey,” she muttered, setting out the fresh baked shortbread and sultana cakes with a pitcher of lemonade. To mollify her, I drank the lemonade, but I was the only one.
Soon I was taken aside by an old man—Jock was his name—and told that my father had been a great gentleman though late had turned peculiar. Another, bald and wrinkled, drank his whiskey down in a single gulp, before declaring loudly that my father had been “one for the books.” He managed to make that sound like an affliction. One woman of a certain age who addressed me as “Mistress,” added, apropos of nothing, “He needs a lang-shankit spoon that sups wi’ the Deil.” Even Alec, sounding like the drone on a bagpipes, said “Now you can get on with your own living, Jan,” as if I hadn’t been doing just that all along.
For a wake, it was most peculiar. No humorous anecdotes about the dearly departed, no toasts to his soul, only half-baked praise and a series of veiled warnings.
Thank goodness no one stayed long. After the last had gone, I insisted on doing the washing up, and this time Mrs. Marr let me. And then she, too, left. Where she went I wasn’t to know. One minute she was there, and the next away.
I wondered at that. After all, this was her home, certainly more than mine. I was sure she’d loved my father who, God knows, was not particularly loveable, but she walked out the door clutching her big handbag, without a word more to me; not a goodbye or “I’ll not be long,” or anything. And suddenly, there I was, all alone in the house for the first time in years. It was an uncomfortable feeling. I am not afraid of ghosts, but that house fairly burst with ill will, dark and brooding. So as soon as I’d tidied away the dishes, I went out, too, though not before slipping the final journal into the pocket of my overcoat and winding a long woolen scarf twice around my neck to ward the chill.
~
The evening was drawing in slowly, but there was otherwise a soft feel in the air, unusual for the middle of March. The East Neuk is like that—one minute still and the next a flanny wind rising.
I headed east along the coastal path, my guide the stone head of the windmill with its narrow, ruined vanes lording it over the flat land. Perhaps sentiment was leading me there, the memory of that adolescent kiss that Alec had given me, so wonderfully innocent and full of desire at the same time. Perhaps I just wanted a short, pleasant walk to the old salt pans. I don’t know why I went that way. It was almost as if I were being called there.
For a moment I turned back and looked at the town behind me which showed, from this side, how precariously the houses perch on the rocks, like gannets nesting on the Bass.
Then I turned again and took the walk slowly; it was still only ten or fifteen minutes to the windmill from the town. No boats sailed on the Firth today. I could not spot the large yacht so it must have been in its berth. And the air was so clear, I could see the Bass and the May with equal distinction. How often I’d come to this place as a child. I probably could still walk to it barefooted and without stumbling, even in the blackest night. The body has a memory of its own.
Halfway there, a solitary curlew flew up before me and as I watched it flap away, I thought how the townsfolk would have cringed at the sight, for the bird was thought to bring bad luc
k, carrying away the spirits of the wicked at nightfall.
“But I’ve not been wicked,” I cried after it, and laughed. Or at least not wicked for a year, more’s the pity.
At last I came to the windmill with its rough stones rising high above the land. Once it had been used for pumping seawater to extract the salt. Not a particularly easy operation, it took something like thirty-two tons of water to produce one ton of salt. We’d learned all about it in primary school, of course. But the days of the salt pans were a hundred years in the past, and the poor windmill had seen better times.
Even run down, though, it was still a lovely place, with its own memories. Settling back against the mill’s stone wall, I nestled down and drew out the last journal from my coat pocket. Then I began to read it from the beginning as the light slowly faded around me.
Now, I am a focused reader, which is to say that once caught up in a book, I can barely swim back up to the surface of any other consciousness. The world dims around me. Time and space compress. Like a Wellsian hero, I am drawn into an elsewhere that becomes absolute and real. So as I read my Father’s final journal, I was in his head and his madness so completely, I heard nothing around me, not the raucous cry of gulls nor the wash of water onto the stones far below.
So it was, with a start that I came to the final page, with its mention of the goggle-eyed toad. Looking up, I found myself in the gray gloaming surrounded by nearly a hundred such toads, all staring at me with their horrid wide eyes, a hideous echo of my father’s written words.
I stood up quickly, trying desperately not to squash any of the poor puddocks. They leaned forward like children trying to catch the warmth of a fire. Then their shadows lengthened and grew.
Please understand, there was no longer any sun and very little light. There was no moon overhead for the clouds crowded one on to the other, and the sky was completely curtained. So there should not have been any shadows at all. Yet, I state again—their shadows lengthened and grew. Shadows like and unlike the ones I had seen against my father’s study walls. They grew into dark-caped creatures, almost as tall as humans yet with those goggly eyes.