Daughter of Satan (14 page)

‘What do you seek?'

‘I am unsure. It may be a religion . . . or it may not be a religion at all. In preparing what I have so far done, it has been necessary for me to have personal experiences and study a good deal. Oh, Tamar, I have often wanted to speak to you of this. There was a time when I would talk of it to a very good friend of mine. Alas! she is now dead, and it is as though you have stepped into her place . . . in one respect. You are eager to know what takes place about you – I do not, of course, mean actual happenings, but in the minds of people, in the trend of the age. You are quick to see a point. Yes, you are a comfort to me.'

She was astonished. He had never talked of affection before. A great happiness came to her. She admired him more than anyone she had ever known.

He went on: ‘There are so few people to whom I could speak of such things. Our friends the Cavills? Well, they are our friends because their lands are not very far distant and it is easy to ride over and be neighbourly. In a way, too, they fit into my picture. They are so much a part of the times in which we now live. Father and son, they are perfect physically; they delight in exercising the body rather than the mind. How like the father the son is! They are buccaneers, both of them. They delight in taking with the strength of their hands what is not theirs, and making it their own.'

Tamar felt her cheeks grow hot, as they did whenever Bartle's name was mentioned. She knew she would never forget him and those terrifying moments he had given her; sometimes she dreamed of him. He was far away now; he had been away for two years. Let him stay away.

‘Buccaneers, yes!' she said. ‘Although I confess to a certain liking for Sir Humphrey which I cannot give to his son.'

‘Sir Humphrey has grown mellow. At Bartle's age he was just such another as Bartle. They have the essence of manhood, and they, Tamar, are the ideals of our times. Such men as they are making our country great, and they will continue to do so. They lead the way to that dominance which our country will attain. Do not despise Bartle too much for what he tried to do to you. Rejoice that he did not succeed. But for Bartle and his kind we should have the Spaniards with us now, and these persecutions of witches and Puritans, Separatists and Catholics – in fact, of all who do not conform to the way laid down by the State and Church – would be a hundred times more rigorous, a thousand times more bloody. You have heard a good deal of the Inquisition in Spain. Let us rejoice that our country has nothing so evil as that. Still, we suffer here, as all the world suffers. I see no way out of suffering until we have learnt tolerance. A man must choose his own religion. Persecution does not – as authority fondly believes – stamp out; it nourishes. King Philip could not drive our men off the seas because of the terrible cruelties he inflicted on those he captured. Men rallied to the ships to fight the Spaniard for revenge as well as gain. My dear child, there are more poor deluded witches in this country since our prickers
and suchlike came to seek them out than there ever were before.'

‘Richard,' she said, for as she had explained to him she could never bring herself to call him ‘Father', and within a month of her coming to his house she had called him by his Christian name. ‘Richard, how can you know these things?'

‘That is at the very root of what I wish to tell you now.'

She waited and after a brief hesitation, as though even now he were reluctant to speak of these things, he began to tell her:

‘It is a tale of persecution that I wish to tell you – persecution at which I have been a looker-on all my life. A terrible thing happened to me when I was eight years old, and this brought me close to what I have come to see as the scourge of the world, the great impediment to progress. I must tell you of this, Tamar, because it has made me what I am.

‘My father was a gentleman of the Court of Queen Mary . . . that Mary of the bloody persecutions. She married, as you know, King Philip of Spain, and when the King came to England, there was a beautiful lady in his retinue with whom my father fell in love. They were married; and when the King returned to Spain, it was necessary that my mother should go back with him, as she was not strong enough to endure the damp of these islands. My father went with her to Madrid and there I was born.

‘We were a very happy family until the time when I was seven years old; then my father was arrested and brought before the Inquisition. I had very early become aware of this evil thing; I had seen the furtive horror in people's eyes; but it was only when it touched my own family that I understood what it really meant. My father was taken in the night, and I saw him only once afterwards. That was a year later. I hardly recognized him; his ruddy complexion had become yellow, and he had great difficulty in walking, for he had suffered much torture in the gloomy chambers of the Inquisition.

‘A boy of my age should not have been there, of course; but there was fear in our house. My mother lay in her sick bed, and there were leeches ready to say that she was unable to attend; therefore her absence was excusable. But I must not be absent,
for if I were, that would be noted, and I should be marked as one who was not being brought up as a good citizen and Catholic.

‘Tamar, the memory of that day is always with me. It never fades. Early in the morning I was awakened by the muffled pealing of the bells. I was aroused by the servants, hastily dressed and hurried into the streets.

‘The
autos-da-fé
are great holidays in Spain. The population turns out in its best clothes. There is all that pomp and ceremony in which no Church delights as does the Church of Rome.

‘I was taken to the gates of the Inquisition so that I might be there to see the tragic procession file out to its doom. Among these miserable men and women was my father. He was dressed hideously in a loose yellow gown; this
sanbenito
was embroidered with busts surrounded with flames, and the flames pointed upwards; figures of horrible devils had also been worked on it, and these were shown as fanning the flames. This particular type of
sanbenito
told the onlookers that my father was one of those condemned to be burned alive. I cannot convey to you the horror of it all, and when I thought of it later, it seemed to me that more horrible than anything, more horrible than even the vile torture to which these people had been submitted, was the religious pomp with which these foul ceremonies were conducted. The working people must be present on pain of having suspicion fall on them; their presence was commanded by their Church. Here was a scene more revolting, I imagined, than those played out in the amphitheatre of Rome under savage Nero and Tiberius. The Romans committed cruelty for what in their view was sport; the Spaniards delighted in it none the less, but they tried to hide their delight in a cloak of piety. In later years I came to believe that the Spaniards were guilty of the greater sin.

‘Most of these victims were members of the upper classes; doubtless this was due to the fact that the Inquisition seized all the possessions of those it murdered, and the Inquisition was determined to remain rich and powerful.

‘To the
Quemadero
. . . the place of fire . . . where the Grand
Inquisitor rose and addressed the crowd, enumerating the sins of those about to face most horrible death.

‘Then were the fires lighted, and I looked on, Tamar, at those poor bodies, shattered by the rack, burned by fiery pincers, waiting for the final torture which would at last bring a merciful death. Some were strangled before they were burnt – those had turned Catholic at the last moment; the others were roasted alive because they clung to their own faith. My father was of the latter, and I was there . . . to witness his death . . .'

Tamar could only look at him, her eyes filled with horror and compassion that blazed into sudden hatred against the tormentors of his father. She could find no words to say to him.

After a pause he continued: ‘Well, that was many years ago. There have been thousands to suffer torture as my father suffered. Even in this country the scourge of the Holy Roman Church was felt. Fires have blazed at Smithfield and no man has felt safe from his neighbour.

‘I was smuggled back to England when my mother died. I had faithful servants – men who had followed my father to Spain and were themselves in fear of the Inquisition, and would, no doubt, have fallen victims to it; the temporary leniency shown to them was due to the fact that there were richer prizes to claim more immediate attention. In England my family owned great estates, and I was brought up by my grandparents in the Protestant religion.

‘This seemed a kindlier religion; and one must have religion in this mysterious world into which we come without our own volition, struggled for a few years and then pass on. It is the passing on which makes us long for faith, for we cannot bear that we should die and be no more. Yes, this was a happier reign. Men of England were sickened by the fires of Smithfield, and the men of England are made of different stuff from those of Spain. We do not love solemn ceremonies; we love gay days and holidays; we like our streets to run with wine – not blood. Slow to anger, yet, when aroused, pertinacious in the extreme, we are quick to forget; there is no race in the world as ready to forgive a wrong as the English, providing sufficient time has elapsed for it to be comfortably forgotten. I was
happy to be in such a country; but as I grew older I began to hear an echo of those cruelties springing up again in this land. Perhaps they had never really died. The Queen was head of the Church, as her father had made himself, and there were some who would not accept her as such and wished to bring about a greater reformation of the Church.

‘I saw the beginning of fresh persecutions. Now it was the Puritans and Separatists who suffered. I saw men thrown into gaol . . . kept in noisome prisons. This was, I assured myself, leniency compared with Spain's horrible methods; still, it was persection. And one day in Smithfield, I saw two Anabaptists burned to death – the first to suffer since Elizabeth came to the throne; but nevertheless I could feel little satisfaction in a religion which could permit such things . . . even if infrequently.

‘I gave myself up then to the study of men and their various faiths since the beginning of time. Among these was the faith of witchcraft.'

He paused to pour himself a goblet of wine. Then he looked straight at Tamar.

‘Yes,' he went on, ‘I dabbled in witchcraft, for I found it closely connected with the religion of this country. On the Continent horrible torture is inflicted on witches, who are mostly women – sometimes deluded, sometimes completely innocent of the delusion that they possess the powers of evil. And these tortures are inflicted in the name of God.

‘Why, I asked myself, do these people confess to witchcraft in some cases before they are put to the torture? Because they believe in it. They die for their faith just as my father died for his. Your attitude, Tamar, has been of great interest to me. You were brought up to believe yourself a child of the Devil, and from this you derived great satisfaction. And even now that you have the benefit of some education, you cling to your beliefs. Small wonder that the ignorant refuse to renounce theirs.'

‘It is very well for you to disbelieve,' she interrupted him. ‘But I saw Granny Lackwell's charms work. There
is
some power beyond the reach of ordinary men and women, and witches can find it.'

‘Tamar, I studied witchcraft, and I found it to be linked with the religion of this country before St Augustine came here with Christianity. Witchcraft as practised today has its roots in the days when our forefathers worshipped Woden the All-father, Thor the Thunderer, Tyr the god who gave men wisdom and cunning, Freya the goddess of battle. Witches, it is true, never mention these gods; indeed, they know nothing of them. It is centuries since St Augustine came here, then alas! Christianity was
forced
on the inhabitants of this land. That is at the root of all religious conflict. Those in authority will not allow free will. Through the ages the so-called Christian Church has fiercely, and with bloodshed and torment, denounced witchcraft because witchcraft is a part of a rival faith.

‘I have attended witches' Sabbats. I have gone masked in a goat's head. I have seen the dances round a bonfire, and I have recognized these dances as being the same as those performed in this land before Christianity was forced upon its people. In those days our population was very small and there was a desperate need to increase it. These dances, which were in those days performed round the figure of a horned goat, were known as fertility dances. Now they seem lewd in aspect, because their meaning is not understood. They were meant to rouse the participators to an urgency of desire, for it was felt that the greater the desire, the more chance there would be of fertility, and that the children conceived on such nights would be strong – great men to lead their country in war, fine women to breed again such men.

‘The witches who dance on their Sabbats do not know all this. They believe that it is the Devil who has called them out to dance. They have been told so, and they are ignorant and credulous. The Church – fearing them – has said: “You are base. You are possessed by the Devil.” And these people, who would find life drab indeed without their belief in their own supernatural powers, cannot give them up. They are ready to die for them. Imagination can work miracles; it can make the weak-minded see what is not there.'

Tamar was looking at him strangely now. He knew that she was picturing him, masked, dancing at a witches' Sabbat, and
she was beginning to understand how that which had up till now seemed incredible had come about.

‘Yes,' he said, with a faint, ironic smile, ‘now you begin to see. I told no lie when I acknowledged you as my daughter before those people. You
are
my daughter.

‘I am not what one would call a sensual man; nor have I lived the life of a monk since the death of my wife. There have been occasional light love affairs, and you have heard of my dear friend now dead. I had seen your mother in the house. She was a dainty creature. She had a quality which was, alas! too slight to grow. I think I probably desired her without realizing that I did, although I did not think very much about her. Others had noticed her also. One was our friend, Sir Humphrey. I guessed that ere long she would fall to him unless some obstacle was put in his way. I had little intention of making that my business, and if Luce had not gone to the Sabbat you would never have been born.