Bones of the Witch

by A. L. Knorr

  Lachlan turned the car off. “I’ll have you know, this is Dornoch’s finest…” His words were lost as thunder crashed overhead and the rain became a downpour.

  “You were saying?” I had to raise my voice over the sound of big drops hammering the car. I actually felt the vehicle rock a little from side to side.

  Lachlan, his hand still on the key, stared dumbfounded out the front window before dropping his face toward his lap. His shoulders slumped. He took a breath and popped his head up again, plastered with a big carnival grin. “Who’s up for a pint?”

  Jasher and Evelyn cheered from the backseat.

  Lachlan turned his fake, frozen grin toward me. “Sorry, Georjie.”

  “Hey, I don’t know about you, but the three-hundred-year-old pub was the part I was looking the most forward to. We can hike next…in the spring.”

  Lachlan muttered something about March being almost over, but started the car again and piloted us back onto the highway and toward Inverness. By the time we arrived in the capital of the highlands, Evelyn and Jasher were singing some bawdy song about a bare-breasted maiden flashing ships from a castle wall. Lachlan steered the car into a parking lot near a tall stone wall choked with dripping ivy. He looked over at me as he turned off the car once more and jerked his head at the silly couple in the backseat.

  Before I could respond, Jasher and Evelyn were out of the car. We could hear them giggling as they ran through the rain to the doorway of the pub. I had to admit that it warmed me through to hear Jasher laughing like a little kid.

  “It’s like they’ve already had their pints and then some.”

  I laughed and grabbed my rainhat. “We have some catching up to do in that case, but if you’re expecting me to sing, you’re S.O.L.”

  “S.O.L? Is that a Canadian saying?” Lachlan unbuckled his seatbelt.

  “Yes. Yes, it is.” I gave him a closed mouth smile that said he’d have to look it up for himself and got out of the car.

  Lachlan and I dashed through the pouring rain and bolted through the pub’s doors. Water was dripping down the back of my neck, making me shiver. Jasher and Evie were already seated at a table near the fireplace where a man in a bar apron knelt and erected a little stack of kindling.

  “Oh, good. Fire,” Lachlan hung my coat for me and I rubbed my hands together to warm them.

  The pub was everything one could want from a centuries-old establishment. Warm side-lighting, thick beams, ancient looking books and old maps, floorboards with worn pathways crisscrossing all over. We ordered bowls of the special, a beef stew, and a jumbo serving of triple-cooked chips to share. The fire had begun to crackle in earnest, throwing its welcome warmth over us as we were delivered our drinks.

  When my eye fell on two men who came in, one of them familiar, I bumped Lachlan with my shoulder. “Look, it’s Callum.”

  He looked over to the door where the osteoarcheologist had dropped his umbrella into the bucket provided to contain the mess of rainwater, and was now stripping off his jacket.

  “Oi! Mr. Gordon,” Lachlan called.

  Jasher and Evelyn broke off their conversation to look up.

  Callum’s face lit up with recognition. He said a few words to his companion and came over to our table. “Out to enjoy our fine Scottish weather, are ye?”

  Lachlan gestured to the empty spaces at our benches. “Would you and your friend care to join us?”

  “Thank you for the kind offer, but we’ve got a meeting to prepare for.”

  “We were wondering,” I leaned forward on my elbows, “have you completed the investigation on the body?”

  “Nearly,” he replied. “I can tell you that it was indeed a woman, and a young one at that. No older than thirty. She came to her untimely demise sometime in the early seventeenth-century.”

  “What was the cause of death?” Evelyn asked, and I noticed that the fingers of her left hand were entwined with Jasher’s right.

  “That bit’s still uncertain,” Callum replied, but his eye was on his colleague where he sat waiting at a table near the door. “Sorry, I should get back to my business. Nice seeing you again.”

  Callum went over to his table and sat down just as our food arrived.

  “Interesting,” Lachlan said, not paying attention to the mouthwatering smells of the stew and fries. My stomach was growling like an angry leopard.

  I picked up my spoon. “What’s interesting?”

  “In the early seventeenth century, a lot of young women lost their lives. Not just young women but older ones, and a few men too. A dreadful thing was taking place in the highlands at that time, as well as in many other places around Europe.”

  I knew what he was talking about. “The witch trials.”

  “Aye.” He picked up his spoon. “But they didn’t bury witches in walls. Mostly they burned them at the stake. I wonder how this unfortunate lass found herself with a different fate.”

  My mind drifted back to the story Ainslie had told me about the roses and the cunning woman who had created them. Ainslie hadn’t given me a year, but she had said that the witch trials had started after the rose was created and the cunning woman had disappeared to history. No one knew what had happened to her. There were no solid ties yet to tether Ainslie’s story to the body in the wall, but now we knew for sure it was a woman, and we knew the era she’d died. We didn’t have much, but at least we had a direction to look in.

  The following Monday, Ainslie had me dusting the frames of the artwork in the hallway and along the stairs. At six feet tall, she claimed I would only need the ladder half the time. In truth, I spent over an hour teetering from an aluminum double ladder, trying not to knock anything off the walls.

  The portraits lining the main staircase were mostly of distant family. Cherubic babies frowned from under fluffy white bonnets, and vampiric looking children perched morosely on velvet chairs, feet dangling. The older set were far better at looking noble. Women posed with strapless gowns dripping from their shoulders while feather headpieces arched aristocratically over perfectly coiffed curls. Men in hunting tartans dominated carcasses, or jumped furrows on horseback in pursuit of a distant red blur with a fox tail. But it was the massive still life paintings depicting artfully arranged dead animals that had my shoulders and neck aching.

  As I leaned over with the duster, movement from outside the window caught my eye. Their shapes were blurred by the wet glass, but I recognized Jasher and Lachlan as they stood near Lachlan’s Jeep. They looked deep in conversation. My aching muscles demanded a break, so I climbed down the ladder, left my duster sitting on the top of it, and went down to say hello. Heaving open one of the heavy wooden front doors pulled a rush of fresh air into the front lobby.

  Lachlan looked up immediately as I stepped outside. He held up a hand, his eyes wide. “Georjie! Your timing is perfect.” He beckoned me over.

  I crossed the wet gravel. The Jeep’s door was open and Lachlan’s elbow was resting on top. Jasher had a blade of grass protruding from his teeth. He had a workmen’s tool belt slung low over his hips and his cheeks were flushed pink.

  “I heard Ainslie’s got you polishing the pride of the Blackmouth?” Jasher teased.

  I rotated my shoulders, wincing. “Something like that. She has suggested that dusting is my destiny.” I looked at Lachlan. “What’s up?”

  “I was just telling Jasher what I found.”

  “Something about the body in the wall?”

  “It’s mysterious,” Jasher admitted, “but there’s no solid link. It could be a coincidence.”

  “Link between what?”

  Lachlan pulled out his phone, activated the screen and pulled up a photograph of an aged document covered with barely discernible writing. He held it out so I could see.

  “That looks like a photo of a photo of a photo.” I squinted at it. “Is that Gaelic?”

  “It is. I couldn’t take the book out, it’s too old, but they let me look through the digital copy and take a photo
of this page.” Lachlan turned his phone off and tucked it away. “I took GME for eight years in school.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Gaelic Medium Education. It was an immersion school and my first language of study for a while. The Gaelic here,” he patted his phone through his pocket, “is pretty different from the Gaelic I learned, but I had enough to translate it, with a little help from a lady at the library in Inverness.”

  “You went to Inverness to find that?” Jasher gave a low whistle. “You are obsessed.”

  Lachlan’s eyes were on mine. “It’s a missing persons document. The only one for a woman in this area between sixteen-hundred and sixteen-fifty. Her name was Daracha Goithra, which is weird. She was—”

  “Wait.” I stopped him, not wanting to miss anything. “Why is the name weird?”

  “Goithra is the old version of Guthrie, which is a lowland name.” He rolled his eyes to make a concession. “Well, it’s low to us. It’s from the Angus region, down near Dundee.”

  “But Daracha went missing up here near Blackmouth?”

  “Exactly,” Lachlan nodded. “She was young, only twenty-seven, and unmarried.”

  “As fascinating as all this is,” Jasher said, spitting out the grass he’d chewed up, “we have work to do. We need to get those stones split.”

  Lachlan nodded and gave me a smile as the two men began to move across the parking lot. I fell into step beside Lachlan, tightening my sweater around me against the breeze. At least it wasn’t raining.

  Lachlan went on. “It’s unusual that an unwed young woman would be found so far from her clan. They didn’t move around unless they were being married off. There’s nothing else to be found about a Daracha Goithra in the local archives, but there might be something about her down in Dundee.”

  Jasher gave a dry laugh. “Too bad there isn’t some amazing interconnected digital web of information that would allow you to look up Dundee family histories from here.”

  Lachlan chuckled. “Yes, a lot of information is available online, but there’s a lot yet to be archived. Do you have any idea how many medieval records there are moldering away in attics and basements?”

  “Looks like a trip to Dundee might be in order?” I ventured hopefully.

  “It’s a three-and-a-half-hour journey by car, if the weather is good,” Lachlan replied as I followed them down the side steps. He looked over his shoulder, appearing pained. “I haven’t got time for a long trip like that anytime soon.”

  “Trains are faster, aren’t they?” I asked.

  Lachlan stopped at the bottom of the stairs. “Not likely, but you could check.”

  Jasher kept walking and didn’t look back. “I’ll be warming up the maul.”

  “Be right there,” Lachlan called, then lowered his voice. “There’s something else weird that came up with this missing person case, Georjie. You remember I was telling you that this woman was murdered during the same time as most of Europe was in the grip of witch hunts? Well, Daracha’s name came up as one of the accused.”

  My jaw dropped. “They thought she was a witch?”

  “Someone did. She was thrown in jail to await trial. Here’s the weirdest thing of all.” He stepped close enough that I could make out those bright flecks in his eyes. “Daracha Goithra spent less than a week in jail before she went missing. An article I found claims that she escaped prison and there was no evidence of how she did it. The cell was locked, there were no windows, no foul play. Her escape must have convinced them she really was a witch.”

  I frowned. “If she was able to escape jail so cleverly, how did she end up murdered and stuck in a wall?”

  “I don’t know.” Lachlan’s thick shoulders gave a shrug. “There’s no further record of her after she went missing. Maybe someone outside the law caught her and took things into their own hands?”

  The image of the man and woman from the residual sprang to mind, hugging after they’d done the deed. Lachlan might be closer to the truth than he even realized. “It could have been scared townspeople taking the law into their own hands,” I suggested, my mind racing with images and possibilities, “only to be caught, and instead of turning her in to the lawmen, they did away with her themselves. Maybe they were worried she’d be found innocent.”

  “Maybe.” Lachlan looked doubtful. “The fact that she was walled up is the part that’s tripping me up more than anything else. If they really thought she was a witch, they would have burned her. That was the legal punishment in those days.”

  I nodded and in the space of silence, we heard Jasher calling for some help.

  “You’d better go,” I said. “Thanks for sharing what you found. We have more threads to pull on.”

  “I’ll let you know if I can swing a trip to Dundee, but it wouldn’t be for a couple of weeks. I’m committed here until the frame is finished.”

  “Okay.” I watched as he walked away, then called out to him again.

  He paused and turned back.

  “What are they doing with the body now, do you know?”

  “Callum will finish up his investigation, and you never know, we might get some other interesting tidbit from that. But they’ll bury the body soon.”

  “If you told them what you found, do you think they would return her to Dundee?”

  He shook his head. “I doubt it. There’s no proof that the body is Daracha’s. Even if I did tell them, there’s no pains taken for a death this old. They’ll bury her here in Blackmouth’s cemetery. Close to where she died.”

  “Won’t they want a name for the grave?”

  He nodded. “I’ll mention to Callum what I’ve found.”

  Lachlan and I said goodbye and as the men went back to work, I returned to my dusting.

  So, we had something, even if it was small. But what Lachlan had learned only raised more questions. If the body was Daracha Goithra’s, why was she so far from home? How did she end up on trial for witchcraft? How did she escape—or did someone let her out? She’d just gotten her freedom, only to end up walled up in someone’s cottage. What if she was the cunning woman from Ainslie’s story? The fact that they’d accused her of witchcraft leant some credence to the possibility.

  I felt bad for the woman, whether she was the truth rose’s creator or not, and yearned to give the body and the spirit the rest she deserved.

  Chapter 10

  I came awake with my hair standing on end as a dog’s howl split the silence of the highland night. Lurching up to sitting, I opened my eyes wide as I listened. The wail was joined by a second distant howl. As the first two ended, two more canine voices rose to fill the gap, and a moment later, what sounded like the yowl of a frightened cat made my body shiver.

  Throwing back the covers, I got out of bed and went to the door. Snagging my robe and pulling it on, I poked my head out into the hall and saw that Jasher was already headed toward the stairs.

  “Jasher,” I hissed.

  He jumped and whirled. “Jaysus, Georjayna!” He was wearing a pair of baggy boxer shorts and a long-sleeved t-shirt.

  “Sorry.” I tightened my robe and joined him. The sound of howling dogs seemed to permeate the whole building. “What a racket,” I whispered. “It’s a wonder everyone isn’t up.”

  “They probably are. What the hell is wrong with all those animals?”

  We crossed the shadowed second-story parlor to the large bay window that overlooked the vast front lawns and peered outside. Dark columns between the outside lights crisscrossed over the lawn and roundabout, and beyond that, the lights of the town glimmered. Dogs continued to howl, more voices joining the chorus by the minute.

  “So creepy.” I shuddered and looked at the dark sky. “It’s not even raining. I thought at first a storm had them freaked.”

  We listened as the howling continued, glancing at one another uneasily.

  “Do you think we should go into town?” I asked. “Maybe there’s trouble? A fire, or something?”

  Jasher co
nsidered it. “Give it five more minutes. If they’re still howling, then yeah, maybe we should. Someone might need help.”

  I perched on the edge of the window seat while Jasher stood leaning his shoulder against the frame. We could hear the distant angry yells of people bellowing at their pets to shut up, in both English and Gaelic. I cringed when there were a few yelps added to the din.

  A heavy sound drew our attention to the doorway, where a large, dark shape appeared.

  “I see you’ve been rousted from yer beds as well,” said the laird as he crept into the parlor to join us at the window. “What an almighty racket.”

  “Has this ever happened before?” I asked, tightening the knot at my waist with a shiver. The howling was making me feel colder than anything else. The dogs sounded positively panicked.

  “Sometimes the local dogs will get one another going, but…” Gavin shook his bearded head, his hair sticking up like a hedgehog’s. “This is something else. Those pups are spooked.”

  “And they’re not letting up.” Jasher looked at the laird. “We were thinking someone might be in trouble, or maybe there’s a fire. Should we take a drive into town?”

  Gavin’s dark eyes roamed the skies and the distant twinkle of the village lights. “There’s no visible firelight, but it’s not a bad idea. Better to be forewarned if something’s gone amiss.”

  After a few more minutes of listening to the town’s dogs wailing their poor brains out, Gavin nodded. “Right then. Ye two coming?”

  Wide awake now, I stood and headed for my room. “I’ll put on some clothes and meet you downstairs.”

  We convened in the parking lot where Jasher and I waited, listening to the continuous mournful noise, while the laird pulled a car out from the garage behind the castle. Piling in to the front bench seat of the old car, Gavin waited for us to buckle before driving us down the main road toward town.

  The noise was much louder in town as more than half of the residents had dogs and many of those were still outside, yowling from back yards and from on tops of dog houses.