Haunt Me Still (12 page)

“
HAVE YOU TOLD
this story to the police?”

“Yes. They did not seem overly impressed with the notion of forty-year-old vengeance on the part of a missing and possibly dead ex-lover. Even so, you should leave Lucas to the police, Kate. Just find the manuscript. Because if it is him, he’ll be after it, too.”

I nearly showed her the Aubrey; perhaps I should have. But it had my name on it, not hers, and I wanted to think about it in private first, uncluttered by other reactions. So I let her go back down the stairs without saying anything.

As I turned into the corridor leading to my room, I saw Ben and Sybilla coming out of his room and froze. I thought they’d left ages ago. Glancing down at me, she leaned in and drew him into a deep kiss, her whole body rippling with the force of it.

Desire and jealousy and anger—at her, at him, and maybe most of all at myself—shot through me in a blinding flush of red and I stumbled backward. There was a door next to me. Groping for the handle, I ducked inside.

A narrow stairwell led upward. Wanting to be anywhere but where I was, I took it, following it up two stories, where it opened onto the roof.

Night had fallen while I spoke to Lady Nairn. I stood in the darkness, feeling as if I’d left my skin behind. Up ahead, the battlements carved up the starlit sky. Atop them hunched a gargoyle whose head slowly twisted to face me.

“Oh,” said Lily dourly. “It’s you.”

“Come down from there.”

“Bothered by heights?”

“By the possibility of you going splat, yes.”

She shrugged. “I like it up here.” She pulled her knees in even closer to her chest. “I don’t suppose you have the knife, do you?” Her voice was taut with wistful eagerness.

“On me?”

She sighed. “I suppose not. But I’d like to see it again. I’d come down for that.”

“Your grandmother has it.”

She made a sour face. “That’s that, then. I won’t see it till I’m eighteen. She’d keep me a child till I’m eighty, if she could. Hey…
you
could head down to the fire festival if you liked. I bet she’d even lend you a car. And I could stow away—”

“I’m heading to bed, Lily.” The adrenaline flush I’d felt downstairs was draining away, leaving me hollow with exhaustion.

“How boring. Or is it that you’re taking her side?”

“I’m staying out of it.”

She sighed, laying a cheek on one knee. “I thought you were
way
cooler than that.”

“Sorry to disappoint.”

“He’s going to be at the festival,” she said petulantly. “And I’m not.”

“Who is?”

“Ian.” Her eyes glittered in the moonlight. “Ian Blackburn. He’s an artist.”

“Is that who you went off with today?”

She nodded.

“I thought I saw you at Birnam Wood this morning.”

“That’s ridiculous.” She held my eyes as she said it. No flinching, no flickering. “I’m supposed to meet him at the festival.
Please,
won’t you go?”

“Lily. There’s been a murder. A fairly brutal one. And some strange threats.”

She leapt down onto the roof. “That was you?
You’re
the one who fed Gran that bollocks about threats against me?” She turned around and slammed both hands down on the stone. “You have no idea what’s going on, do you?” She twisted back around. “You know, it could be amazing tonight. A ritual knife and a ritual fight such as hasn’t been seen for
centuries
.”

“Lily—where’s this coming from? That knife is a lethal weapon, for Christ’s sake.”

“from Corra,” she said defiantly. “Corra ravensbrook? You told her about the knife?” Just last night, she’d stood in front of me and promised not to say a word to anyone.

Lily went still. “She’s brilliant.”

“
Bullshit.
” I was tired and frustrated and filling with an under-current of dread, and I finally snapped. “You could roll the full moon through the holes in her logic, not to mention the evidence in her so-called scholarship, and if that’s the advice she’s giving you about the stage, then she’s dangerous.”

I watched angry frustration rising in Lily as I spoke, her hands tightening into small fists. “You’re…you’re…you’re just like Gran,” she burst out.

A secret, black, and midnight hag,
I thought with grim hilarity. “So damned focused on facts, facts, facts, and all the possible things that could go wrong, that the beauty and power and poetry the world throws at you fly straight by. I thought—I thought you might be different. But you’re so caught up in your precious Shakespeare and your stupid stage traditions—fake exorcisms! God! How stupid was that little ritual last night?—that you can’t see real magic under your nose. Wake up, Kate. Theater is dead. Jesus, even film is dead. It’s spontaneous performances by real people that matter. Happenings like the Samhuinn festival.”

It was all I could do not to laugh out loud. She’d been spoon-fed some self-righteously radical theories about art, and she was spouting them with all the passion of adolescence. It was oddly endearing, at the same time that it was infuriating.

“I’ll take Ian over you any day,” she flung at me. “He
gets it
. Mixing up theater and film with video games, the Internet, Twitter, music, painting, books, all rolled into one…He’ll change the way stories are told, stretching them into new technologies to make a new kind of art altogether. Something interactive.
Shared
.”

“But with his name on it, I bet,” I said sardonically.

Her eyes flashed. “Something
real.
” She snorted with derision. “It’s what Shakespeare would be doing if he were around today. I mean, he didn’t mess around with writing, like, manuscript books or carving hieroglyphs, did he? He spent his life shaping the newest, coolest art form there was. Putting his stamp on it.” She threw up her hands. “Don’t you see? You’re wrecking
everything
for a whisper of dead, boring Shakespeare heard on the wind. Or maybe in your dreams. And not just wrecking it for me. For
everyone
.” She burst into tears. “I hate you,” she cried, brushing by me and heading for the stairs.

I stared after her, seeing my fifteen-year-old self. And wondering, deep down, how much truth there was to some of her accusations.

DRAWING IN A
deep breath of clean, pine-scented air, I glanced over at the hill.

Lie still if you don’t want to get the both of us killed,
Auld Callie had said in my ear on its slopes just yesterday. And later,
Put it back.

Put the knife back.
I hadn’t, and now I couldn’t. I didn’t even know where Lady Nairn had stashed it.

Did it matter anymore?

Lily thought it did.

Pushing those thoughts aside, I at last pulled the Aubrey from my pocket. Nearly full, the moon poured silvery light across the page. I could make out Shakespeare sparring with Macbeth in Beerbohm’s fin de siècle drawing, but it was too dark to read Aubrey’s cramped seventeenth-century writing. And I was shaking, with more than just cold.

Nine nights, Odin had hung on his tree, wrenching the knowledge of runes from the otherworld with a scream of agony and triumph. Runes represented secret knowledge. Hidden, arcane.

Occult.

Kate Stanley,
someone had scrawled. That much I could read, even in the moonlight.

The need to read the rest was suddenly overpowering. I rushed down the stairs, peering cautiously out into the corridor. It was clear; I hurried to my room.

.

Lamplight glowed on the Chinese dragons roiling on their silks. The bed, turned back, gleamed with smooth white linen and a neat swell of pillows; a fire shimmered in the fireplace. Lady Nairn’s staff must have spent all day putting it to rights.

I dropped into one of the armchairs by the fire and began to read, skimming quickly over the lines I’d read before:
The Youth who was to have first taken the parte of Lady Macbeth fell sudden sicke of a Pleurisie and died.
And then I let my eye slide down the page.

I went still, barely breathing. Salisbury and Dee. Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury and secretary of state. Most modern historians referred to him as Cecil; King James had called him “my little beagle.” The brilliant, hunchbacked toiler in the shadows who ran the kingdom while the king played in the sun. One of England’s great spymasters.

And John Dee, the greatest magus of the Elizabethan age. A brilliant mathematician, but also an astrologer, alchemist, conjuror of angels and demons. A man whose shadow stretched long and dark across the subject of the occult—and not only in the narrow sense of secrets. One of the foremost practitioners in England—indeed, in all renaissance Europe—of learned magic.

I swallowed hard. What was Aubrey suggesting, naming these men as Shakespeare’s masters? I read on:

Aubrey’s tale backed Ellen Terry’s, that Shakespeare had changed the play. And the Nairn family legends, too, in the matter of the Scottish witch.

I sat back, staring at the words swimming on the page in the firelight. If Aubrey was right, behind the curse was not just a death but a possible murder. The killing of a child. One of the players’ boys, probably about Lily’s age.

The first Lady Macbeth.

Was it the original Lady Macbeth—the historical Elizabeth Stewart, Lady Arran, Lady Nairn’s ancestress—who’d been the Scottish witch whose secrets were stolen? Lady Nairn would think so, I was certain of it. It fit her family’s legends. But then one also had to ask: Was it Elizabeth Stewart’s “mischief” that killed the boy who’d first played her on the stage?

In the grate, a log collapsed, and I jumped.

What did robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, have to do with this tale? His involvement was surely unlikely. On the other hand, his predecessor and teacher as spymaster, francis Walsingham, had employed Christopher Marlowe as a spy. In earlier years, it had been Walsingham who’d centralized England’s acting companies into a few closely controlled networks; there was circumstantial evidence that he’d deliberately meshed these with his network of spies. Licensed to roam the country and prowl the halls of the great, who better than traveling players to act as London’s eyes and ears in distant parts of the realm? So it wasn’t entirely preposterous that Cecil might reach out to Shakespeare. But why? Against whom, and for what end?

Macbeth
was widely believed to be a sort of zeitgeist response to the horror of the Gunpowder Plot, in which some radical Catholic gentlemen had planned to blow up the Opening of Parliament in 1605, hoping to kill the king, the entire royal family, both houses of Parliament, and most of England’s top judges, lawyers, and prelates to boot. Sort of the equivalent of terrorists flying planes into the Capitol during a State of the union address. It hadn’t come off—just barely. But it had sent paroxysms of fear through the English consciousness, setting off a fearsome spidering of man-hunts and executions. Those horrors had burned themselves out fairly quickly—but a wary, watchful suspiciousness had lingered for years. Cecil had spent the rest of his life searching for the plot’s kingpin, who he believed had escaped justice.

Had the king’s beagle somehow tried to use
Macbeth
in his search? I shook my head. I couldn’t recall anyone suggesting that the Scottish Play was, among other things, a piece of political hackwork. Political, maybe—it was popular to see all Shakespeare’s work as political, in the sense of being about power—but propaganda? What was the message? fear witches? It didn’t sound very like dry, rational Cecil, bureaucrat extraordinaire.

In any case, it was Dee who was in many ways more disturbing. What did Aubrey mean by saying that Dee was Shakespeare’s master? Dee was an expert in fields as far-flung as navigation, geography, history, and mathematics. It didn’t have to be magic for which Shakespeare owed him mastery. But it was magic that Aubrey clearly had in mind.

The magic in
Macbeth,
however, was the dark magic of witchcraft. Not Dee’s cup of tea at all. He was an intellectual, a strenuous defender of ritual or ceremonial magic as a learned and difficult process of invoking angels. There was a big difference between the intuitive, folklore-bound customs of witchcraft, or “low” magic, and the precise, complicated ceremonies of “high” magic. Even if
Macbeth
’s magic was a memory of some ancient pagan religion mislabeled as witchcraft, as Lady Nairn seemed to believe, why would that concern Dee?

I began to pace the room, thinking of the magic in
Macbeth
.

The great cauldron scene involved witches cackling over a revolting brew of body parts. Not Dee’s sort of thing at all. On the other hand, the witches weren’t old village scolds, as witches on the English stage had always been before. Eerie and unearthly, they weren’t human at all. They were condensations of evil whispering on an ill wind. “Creatures of the elder world,” Shakespeare’s source had written. The weird sisters. The fairies. The witch-hunters, including King James, had believed such spirits to be demons.

Maybe
Macbeth
was about demonic magic after all.

Come to think of it, just as the witches finished stirring their grisly brew, Macbeth arrived and launched into one of his greatest speeches.
I conjure you,
it began. Rummaging about, I found my copy of the play and opened it to that scene. Macbeth’s words were usually taken to be metaphorical. But what if Shakespeare had meant it literally? What if Macbeth were donning conjuror’s robes, casting a circle? Enacting onstage the kind of rite Dee spent his life performing for real? No stage direction specified it, but stage directions were notoriously absent from Shakespeare’s plays.

Secretes learned of a Scottish Witch,
Aubrey had written. Legend made Elizabeth Stewart, Lady Arran, a witch, but Lady Nairn had called her ancestress a serious student of magic. In the renaissance, that meant conjuring, not casting love charms, much less worshipping a pagan goddess. The “Great Art” of conjuring had been thought of as an almost exclusively male pursuit. But surely not entirely: There had to have been women who’d tried their hand at it. Had Lady Arran? What if the rite Shakespeare had learned from her—if he’d learned one at all—had been high magic, not toads and newts in a stew?

I read through the speech.

The room felt suddenly icy. I made myself read on, the speech rising in passion and power as Macbeth worked himself up to challenge winds whipping the sea into a devouring monster, ripping out trees by their roots, hurling down churches and castles.
Even till destruction sicken,
he roared.
Answer me.

He was conjuring, all right. And what he wanted was what Odin wanted: knowledge. If Macbeth’s words were the remains of some magic rite, it was a rite demanding knowledge—ripping it at gale force—from demonic powers. What if the missing or altered magic in
Macbeth
wasn’t witchcraft at all, but a dark version of Dr. Dee’s wizardry?

Dee had spent his life battling popular suspicions that he was a master of demons: that he invoked evil, not angels. All the more after a Scottish king with a penchant for witch-hunting had ascended the English throne. Surely, he’d have disapproved of this Scottish play, seeing it, perhaps, as a reflection of himself shadowed in a dark and possibly dangerous mirror.

Pacing the room, I caught sight of my reflection in the dressing-table mirror, hands on my hips, forehead furrowed, my hair standing on end where I’d run my fingers through it. I looked like a witch myself, for heaven’s sake. This was ridiculous. Last night, I’d gone to bed wondering whether Shakespeare might have recorded some long-forgotten ancient rite. Tonight, I seemed to be flirting with the possibility that he was a spy and a magus. A man with two masters. And maybe a mistress.

Call me Corra ravensbrook.

I laughed darkly at my mirror-self. Aubrey, after all, wasn’t dependable as a historian. He’d been a great collector of anecdotes, but his stories—though fairly reliable as gossip—weren’t trustworthy as
truth.

All the same, my other self seemed to say, his note
did
harmonize with every other bit of evidence I’d run across: not only the Nairn family stories, but Ellen Terry’s letter. She, too, had heard about the rewrite that altered the magic. Aubrey just included more details—and why not? The page was undated, but most of his diary was from the late seventeenth century. He was closer to Shakespeare than Terry by roughly two centuries.

The thought struck me: If Terry’s informant had been right about the revision of the play…had she also been right about the survival of a manuscript?

I picked Aubrey’s page up from the table where I’d left it. What did any of this have to do with Birnam Wood and the deaths of Sir Angus and Auld Callie? At the bottom of the page, Shakespeare drove at Macbeth with his tree branch, glancing out at me with a sly, mocking smile:
Who can impress the Forrest, bid the Tree unfix his earth-bound root?
It was a phrase from the same scene of conjuring. Macbeth’s solution to one of the witches’ riddles: that he should never be conquered until Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane.

Sir Angus had turned the phrase around:
Dunsinnan must go to Birnam Wood.
Still, he’d focused on the same subject of trees and forests and woods. Was this page what he had found? What he’d possibly been killed for? If that were the case, how did it come to be pinned to Auld Callie’s dress, with my name on it? More important, where was it pointing?

It had to be pointing somewhere.

Whatever secrets this page was hiding, they had to have something to do with that goddamned tree. But mid-joust, Shakespeare remained stubbornly mute.

A loud, insistent knocking cut through my thoughts. Slipping the Aubrey into my copy of the play, I opened the door to find Lady Nairn, her face white with fear.

“It’s Lily,” she rasped. “She’s gone.” She gripped my shoulder. “And so is the knife.”