Haunt Me Still (32 page)

Outside, a full moon was spearing itself on the trees to the west. In silence, we walked up the lane to the woods surrounding the stone circle, and I waited while Lily went in to greet her goddess alone.

She came back, her face alight with excitement, and we walked around the hill to the path that led up its northern slope. As we trudged upward, dawn began to silver the eastern sky. We crested the summit and this time I saw two bonfires piled side by side, framing a doorway opening to the east. On the narrow path running between them, someone hunched low, twirling a small stick inside a hole carved in another. A small red glow sprang to life, nursed to a tiny flame. Just as the sun crested the hill’s eastern rim, the new fire was divided in two and fed into each stack of wood.

As the sun rose higher and the fire caught, a man stepped out of the darkness, silhouetted against the growing light. Tall. With curly hair and a way of standing that I would have known anywhere.

Ben.

Yellow and orange flames licked upward, crackling, through the bonfires, and he held out a hand to Lily. She took it with her left hand, drawing me forward with her right, and the three of us walked between the fires. Just on the other side, we stopped.

A white candle in her hand, the wreath of pale blossoms around her head, Lily looked like Saint Lucy.
Lux, lucis,
I thought. The Bride, the Maiden, the personification of light. Which was, come to think of it, exactly who Saint Lucy was: another aspect of the goddess that, like Mary, Christianity had taken in and hidden in plain sight, beneath the veil of sainthood.

In the center of the summit, a circle was marked out with candles, as yet unlit; inside waited a small knot of people. At their feet gleamed the cauldron. Lady Nairn, her hair pale above a shimmering blue gown, raised her arms and called Lily forward. “Lilidh Gruoch MacPhee. Do you enter this circle of your own accord?”

“I do,” said Lily, dropping our hands and walking forward. As she crossed into the circle there was, ever so slightly, a nod from Lady Nairn. A sign of thanks, a sign of dismissal. Together, Ben and I turned and walked back through the fires.

Beside me, I could feel his nearness, though we did not touch. At the edge of the summit, I paused briefly, watching the sun unroll across the wide, sleeping valley below, birdsong rising like lace into air that smelled clean and new. Something brushed my hand. I looked down. Ben’s hand, taking mine.

In silence, we headed down the hill. At the bottom, as promised, Lady Nairn’s driver was waiting with her range rover. Ben opened the door for me, and I slid into the backseat, swallowing down sadness as his fingers slipped from mine.

“
I can call spirits from the vasty deep,
” he said quietly. The phrase from the loch. Glancing up, I saw calm on his face, and the ghost of a smile.

This time, I had a clear enough head to respond. “
But will they come when you do call for them?
” I said, returning his smile.

“Good-bye, Kate.”

For a while,
I thought as the car pulled out from under the shadow of the hill and into the sun. It was not time. Not yet. But it no longer seemed impossible that at some point, one of us would call, and the other would come.

I could see it.

Macbeth
opens with eerie, unearthly condensations of evil adrift on a dark wind, whispering words that gnaw at a good man’s mind, propelling him into horrific violence. Belief in such terrifying supernatural malevolence was rife during Shakespeare’s lifetime, but on the renaissance English stage, witches tended to be comic evil: village scolds or cackling hags dealing in grotesque potions. As different from the norm of its day as Stephen King’s bone-chilling evil in
The Shining
is from the Disney witches of
Sleeping Beauty, Snow White,
and
The Little Mermaid, Macbeth
is one of the first great horror stories in modern literature.

What makes the “Scottish Play” different from other tales of terror is that its evil does not stay put in the story. It leaches from the stage, spilling into real life with catastrophic consequences for productions and people—or at least it has been fervently thought to do so for a century. The story of a curse on the play, the theatrical taboos around quoting or naming it, and the ritual for exorcising its evil are long-standing traditions still current among many actors the world over.

The fact that the story of the curse began with a hoax is not very well known, even among Shakespearean scholars. As Kate notes, however, the fin de siècle bon vivant, wit, and caricaturist Max Beerbohm does seem to have concocted the story of Hal Berridge’s death in 1898, at a mischief-provoking moment of boredom with his day (or rather, night) job: reviewing Shakespeare on the stage.

Beerbohm attributed his fib to the seventeenth-century antiquary John Aubrey, and Aubrey, happy magpie that he was, is manna from heaven for a novelist with a need to uncover lost documents and seed trails of evidence. An inveterate gossip with the inclinations of a scholar and the organizational skills of a distracted adolescent, Aubrey recorded historical fact, hearsay, and ludicrous gossip with equal relish, sometimes twining them in the same paragraph, if not the same sentence. His notes are a scattered and incomplete mess. If anyone might have written a long-lost, secretly surviving page recording strange and suggestive tales about Shakespeare and Dee, it was Aubrey. He made notes on both men, after all, within living memory of their deeds, recording details and vignettes preserved nowhere else. And he was a relation of Dee, who was his grandfather’s cousin and “intimate acquaintance.”

So this novel began, in part, with a “what-if”:
What if Max Beerbohm really did find the tale of Hal Berridge in an Aubrey manuscript? What if Aubrey had told the truth? What if the curse of Macbeth extended all the way back to the beginning?
What then? What might be the source of
Macbeth
’s admittedly strange power to frighten both audiences and actors?

This set me to wondering about the magic in
Macbeth.
As first published in 1623 in the first folio—the first edition of Shakespeare’s collected works—the play is uneven in its sinister vision. In addition to the three spectral weird sisters, the witch queen Hecate arrives to sing and dance with all the chortling glee that English audiences expected from stage witches: Think of Walt Disney and Stephen King competing for the soul of a single film. So sharp is the chasm between Hecate and the weird sisters that scholars have long suspected that Hecate—who makes no necessary contribution to the play’s action—is a late intrusion.

The general scholarly consensus is that someone other than Shakespeare revised the original
Macbeth
at some point before publication, bringing it more into line with what audiences would happily pay to see, namely evil that was more amusing than horrifying. To do so, the reviser turned to
The Witch,
by Thomas Middleton, which also has a witch character named Hecate. The reviser lifted some silly songs from Middleton’s newer play into Shakespeare’s old play and wrote in a new version of Hecate (very different from Middleton’s) in order to explain the sudden burst of song and dance amid the gloom. It’s the sort of light-fingered patchwork that was then part and parcel of the quick-turnaround mill of the theater.

As time went on, this alteration was intensified. By the time
Macbeth
reappeared on the restoration stage in 1666, the witches had grown in number from three to an entire Ziegfeld chorus of hags, some of them zooming about overhead on wires. Even while noting that they were “a strange perfection in a tragedy,” the diarist Samuel Pepys thought the witches’ song-and-dance bits, or “divertissements” as he called them, the best part of the play. Interest in “authentic” Shakespeare revived across the nineteenth century, and major productions gradually pared the play back to the text in the first folio…but that is the earliest version of
Macbeth
that survives. What did the witches and their magic look like in Shakespeare’s original?

Many scholars and directors happily pluck out Hecate and her songs and leave it at that. It’s possible, however, that the alterations were more extensive. For starters, the play’s central scene of witchcraft, the cauldron scene—act four, scene one—is an odd cobbling of grotesque cauldron magic and the learned magic of conjuring demonic spirits. Furthermore, there are other scenes that appear out of order and garbled. Finally,
Macbeth
is remarkably short: one of Shakespeare’s shortest plays in any genre and easily the shortest of his tragedies. Of the four great tragedies he wrote in the first five years of King James’s reign, the others—
Othello, King Lear,
and
Antony and Cleopatra
—are all longer by roughly a thousand lines or more.
Hamlet
—written at the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign—is nearly twice as long. What, if anything, has gone missing from
Macbeth
?

It is impossible to say but intriguing to wonder about, and in the wide space of that wonder, this novel was born.

In this novel, the key objects of blade, mirror, and cauldron are all real, or based on real objects. With two exceptions, the places where I’ve set major scenes are all real places with links to the historical King Macbeth, famous productions and actors of Shakespeare’s play, or historical people whose lives Shakespeare may have used in shaping his play. I have altered them, in some cases, to suit the fiction, however. The myths are real—as myths—and the magical traditions and ideas of both the “black” and “white” variety have been put forward, historically, as real magic, though not necessarily tied specifically to
Macbeth
. Save for Carrie’s final attempt to invoke a demonic spirit, however, the specific rites of black magic concocted by Lucas, Ian, and Carrie are my own inventions. For the most part, the historical characters are fantasias on fact. The modern characters are all fictional.

Samhuinn
is the Scottish Gaelic name for the ancient pagan Celtic festival better known in some circles by its Irish name of
Samhain
and certainly widely known across the world by its Christian co-opted descendant of All Hallow’s Eve or Halloween. It is one of the two great fire festivals of the old Celtic year once celebrated across the British Isles and Ireland—and much of western Europe, for that matter. The other is Beltane, or May Day. Whereas Beltane celebrates fertility, sex, and new birth, spring and summer, and the return of light, Samhuinn celebrates—or at least acknowledges—death and the dead, autumn and winter, and darkness. In the Scottish Highlands, Samhuinn was celebrated into the early twentieth century with bonfires on hilltops. Various folk traditions suggest that once upon a very long time ago, the celebration may have included sacrifice, possibly human sacrifice.

Edinburgh’s Samhuinn fire festival, run by the Beltane fire Society, is a spectacular yearly celebration of this ancient holiday. I have tried to be as faithful as possible to the carnival spirit of the actual performances, which change every year, though the basic story of the Cailleach and the two battling kings remains the same. I have had to alter some practices, however, in order to slot my characters into main roles. In particular, Lily is too young to be involved, and I doubt that the BFS would ever cast a film star like Jason Pierce in a lead role in exchange for money. I hope the society’s members will forgive me those lapses as minor technicalities and enjoy the festival’s fictional appearance in a thriller.

Whether or not Shakespeare ever traveled to Scotland is unknown. In fact, we know nothing at all of his whereabouts between the christening of his twins, Hamnet and Judith, in Stratford-upon-Avon, on february 2, 1585, and 1592, when he had made enough of a name for—and by some lights, a nuisance of—himself on the London stage to be attacked by robert Greene in his
Groatsworth of Wit
as an “upstart crow,” a “Shake-scene” stealing other men’s thunder. However, the Scottish geography in
Macbeth
is surprisingly accurate—I had no idea just how accurate, in fact, until I started to research this book. That he might have been in Scotland is as much a possibility as his being anywhere else; companies of English players traveled north of the border with some frequency.

In 1583, Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster, Sir francis Walsingham, forced a reorganization of England’s theatrical companies by cherry-picking the best actors from each for a new company called the Queen’s Men. Why he did so is unclear; he was not a known patron or enthusiast of theater, nor were players part of his day-to-day concerns as a secretary of state. (regulating the players was part of the lord chamberlain’s duties.) Walsingham’s motives may well have included weaving actors into his network of spies. Roving players, after all, offered perfect cover for watchful eyes and ears inside the far-flung houses of the great. At the very least, as scholars Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean have argued in
The Queen’s Men and Their Plays,
from this point on, Elizabeth’s spymaster used government licensing of traveling acting troupes to give the impression of a vast network of watchfulness. Later, Walsingham certainly used some playwrights, most famously Christopher Marlowe, and possibly Thomas Kyd, as spies. It is my imagining that the young Shakespeare might also, willingly or unwillingly, have been among his “intelligencers.” It does seem likely, however, that any player caught in the dubious circumstances into which I set Mr. Shakespeare at Dirleton would have found himself suspected as a spy.

In the autumn of 1589, the Queen’s Men were sent north to Edinburgh to join in the celebration of King James’s impending marriage to Princess Anne of Denmark. The celebrations had to be postponed after storms drove the princess’s fleet back from Scottish shores, all the way to Scandinavia, and the impatient king took ship in pursuit. (Eventually, those storms were blamed on witches, resulting in one of the worst witch-hunts in Scottish history, spearheaded by King James himself, but that is another story.) That same year, civic records show that a company of English players acted in Perth, about ten miles distant from Dunsinnan and within striking distance of Dunkeld and Birnam Wood. I am not the first to wonder whether a twenty-five-year-old actor named William Shakespeare could have been among them. The Dunsinnan House account book, however, is a fictional document.

Shakespeare’s main source for
Macbeth
was Raphael Holinshed’s
Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland
. He did not rely solely on the history of King Macbeth, however, but pieced together a story using dramatic episodes from the lives of other kings. In particular, he had to fish about for the story of Lady Macbeth because the historical Lady Macbeth, whose name was Gruoch (Lily’s middle name), is little more than a blank. It is usual to see Shakespeare spinning her tale from the brief mention of another noble-man’s revenge-urging wife. Some scholars, however, have also noted the uncanny resemblance that her story bears to the near-contemporary history of Elizabeth Stewart, countess of Arran.

This lady was, as stated in the novel, the daughter of John Stewart, fourth earl of Atholl. The date of her birth is unknown, though it must have been after May 1547, when her parents married, and before April 1, 1557, when her father remarried following her mother’s death. She was married herself on December 24, 1567, which would make her only thirteen by the birth year of 1554 sometimes proposed for her (without, so far as I can tell, any basis in fact); I have chosen to push her birth to an early point in her parents’ marriage, mostly to allow for a fictional meeting with John Dee at a time when he was in Antwerp in 1563.

She went through three husbands: Hugh fraser, fifth Lord Lovat, who died suddenly, and some thought suspiciously, in 1577; the king’s elderly great-uncle robert Stewart, successively earl of Lennox and then earl of March, whom she married in 1579 and divorced in 1581, on grounds of impotence while pregnant with her third husband’s child; and the swashbuckling Captain James Stewart, for a time earl of Arran, whom she married two months after her divorce from March was final. She did have royal, if also bastard, blood in her veins, as one of her maternal great-grandmothers was an illegitimate daughter of Scotland’s King James IV. A Highlander both by birth and by her first marriage, she was said to frequent “the oracles of the Highlands” and possibly to be a witch herself. She was also said to lust after the crown.

She appears to have been both fashionable and sensuous, with a french-inflected sophistication of style, speech, and sexual morality that bewitched the king but made his Calvinist ministers come close to spitting with rage. The story of her breaking open Queen Mary’s chests of gowns and jewels as soon as her husband was given the keys to Edinburgh Castle was recorded by the English ambassador to Scotland. For a while in the early 1580s, she and her third husband were two of King James’s most trusted courtiers, people he sought out for both policy and play. So quick and decisive was their rise to power that they aroused envy and fear on the part of almost everyone else around the king. After they fell from grace in late 1585, they took refuge, just as Kate discovers, with her eldest son by her first marriage, Simon fraser, sixth Lord Lovat, in the lands of clan fraser, south and west of Inverness, where they were said to live on a remote isle in Loch Bruiach. It is a place that is still surprisingly remote, a distillation of the stark beauty of the Highlands.