The Witching Hour (48 page)

Perhaps if you remember her at all you have guessed the truth already. Do not read ahead. Bear with me. For as I rode back and forth before the pyre, listening to the stammering and stupidity
of a pair of local wine sellers who boasted of having seen other burnings as if this were something to be proud of, I did not know the full history of the Comtesse. I do now.

At last, at perhaps five of the clock, I went to the finest of the inns of the town, and the oldest, which stands right opposite the church, and commands from all its front windows a view of the doors of Saint-Michel and the place of execution which I have described.

As the town was obviously filling up for this event, I fully expected to be sent away. You can imagine my surprise when I discovered that the occupants of the very best rooms on the front of the house were being turned out for, in spite of their fine clothes and airs, they had been discovered to be penniless. I at once paid the small fortune required for these “fine chambers,” and, asking for a quantity of candles, that I might write late into the night as I am doing now, I went up the crooked little stair and found that this was a tolerable place with a decent straw mattress, not too filthy all things considered and one of them being that this is not Amsterdam, and a small hearth of which I have no need on account of the beautiful September weather, and the windows though small do indeed look out upon the pyre.

“You can see very well from here,” said the innkeeper to me proudly, and I wondered how many times he had seen such a spectacle, and what were his thoughts on the proceedings, but then he went to talking on his own of how beautiful was the Comtesse Deborah and shaking his head sadly as did everyone else when they spoke of her, and what was to come.

“Deborah you said, that is her name?”

“Aye,” he answered, “Deborah de Montcleve, our beautiful Comtesse, though she is not French you know, and if only she had been a little bit of a stronger witch—” and then he broke off with a bowed head.

I tell you the knife was at my breast then, Stefan. I guessed who she was, and could scarce endure to press him further. Yet I did. “Pray continue,” I said.

“She said when she saw her husband dying that she could not save him, that it was beyond her power … ” And here with sad sighs he broke off once more.

Stefan, we have seen countless such cases. The cunning woman of the village becomes a witch only when her powers to heal do not work. Before that, she is everyone’s good sorceress, and there is nary the slightest talk of devils. And so here it was again.

I set up my writing desk, at which I sit now, put away the candles, and then betook myself to the public rooms below,
where a little fire was going against the damp and dark in this stony place, about which several local philosophers were warming themselves, or drying out their besotted flesh, one or the other, and seating myself at a comfortable table and ordering supper, I tried to banish from my mind the curious obsession I have with all comfortable hearth fires, that the condemned feel this cozy warmth before it turns to agony and their bodies are consumed.

“Bring me the very best of your wine,” I said, “and let me share it with these good gentlemen here, in the hopes that they will tell me about this witch, as I have much to learn.”

My invitation was at once accepted and I ate at the very center of a parliament who commenced to talk all at once, so that I might pick and choose at different times the one to whom I wished to listen, and shut all the others out.

“How were the charges brought?” I asked straightaway.

And the chorus began its various unharmonized descriptions, that the Comte had been riding in the forest when after a fall from his horse, he staggered into the house. After a good meal and a good sleep, he rose well restored and prepared to go hunting, when a pain came over him and he took to his bed again.

All night long the Comtesse sat at his bedside, along with his mother, and listened to his groans. “The injury is
deep
inside,” declared the wife. “I can do nothing to help it. Soon the blood will come to his lips. We must give him what we can for his pain.”

And then as foretold the blood did appear in his mouth, and his groans grew louder, and he cried to his wife who had cured so many to bring her finest remedies to him. Again the Comtesse confided to her mother-in-law and to her children that this was an injury beyond her magic. The tears sprang to her eyes.

“Now, can a witch cry, I ask you,” said the innkeeper, who had been listening as he wiped the table.

I confessed that I did not think that a witch could.

They went on to describe how the Comte lingered, and finally screamed as his pains grew sharper, though his wife had given him wine and herbs aplenty to dull his suffering and deliver his mind.

“Save me, Deborah,” he screamed, and would not see the priest when he came to him. But then in his last hour, white and feverish, and bleeding from the bowels and from his mouth, he drew the priest close to him and declared that his wife was a witch and always had been, that her mother had been burnt for witchcraft and now he was suffering for all their wrongs.

In horror the priest drew away, thinking these are the ravings
of a dying man. For all his years here, he had worshiped the Comtesse and lived on her generosity, but the old Comtesse took her son by the shoulders and set him down on the pillow, and said, “Speak, my son.”

“A witch, that’s what she is, and what’s she always been. All these things she confessed to me, bewitching me, with the wiles of a young bride, crying upon my chest. And by this means she bound me to her and her evil tricks. In the town of Donnelaith in Scotland, her mother taught her the black arts, and there her mother was burnt before her very eyes.”

And to his wife, who knelt with her arms beneath her face on the side of the bed, sobbing, he cried, “Deborah, for the love of God. I am in agony. You saved the baker’s wife; you saved the miller’s daughter. Why will you not save me!”

So maddened was he that the priest could not give him the viaticum, and he died cursing, a horrible death indeed.

The young Comtesse went wild as his eyes closed, calling out to him, and professing her love for him, and then lay as if dead herself. Her son Chrétien and her son Philippe gathered about her, and her fair daughter Charlotte, and they sought to comfort her and hold tight to her as she lay prostrate on the very floor.

But the old Comtesse had her wits about her and had marked what her son said. To her daughter-in-law’s private apartments she went, and found in the cabinets not only her countless unguents and oils and potions for the curing of the ill and for poisoning, but also a strange doll carved crudely of wood with a head made of bone, and eyes and mouth drawn upon it, and black hair fixed to it, and tiny flowers in its hair made from silk. In horror the old Comtesse dropped this effigy upon knowing that it could only be evil, and that it looked far too much like the corn dolls made by the peasants in their old Beltane rituals against which the priests are forever preaching; and throwing open the other doors, she beheld jewels and gold beyond all reckoning, in heaps and in caskets, and in little sacks of silk, which, said the old Comtesse, the woman surely meant to steal when her husband was dead.

The young Comtesse was arrested that very hour, while the grandmother took into her private chambers her grandchildren that she might instruct them in the nature of this terrible evil, so that they might stand with her against the witch, and come to no harm.

“But it was well-known,” said the innkeeper’s son, who talked more than anyone else present, “that the jewels were the property of the young Comtesse and had been brought with her from Amsterdam where she had been the widow of a rich man, and
our Comte before he went in search of a rich wife had little more than a handsome face, and threadbare clothes, and his father’s castle and land.”

Oh, how these words bruised me, Stefan, you cannot compass. Only wait and hear my tale.

Sad sighs came from the entire little company.

“And with her gold, she was so generous,” said another, “for you had but to go to her and beg for help and it was yours.”

“Oh, she’s a powerful witch, no doubt of it,” said another, “for how else could she bind so many to herself as she bound the Comte?” But even this was not said with hate and fear.

I was reeling, Stefan.

“So now the old Comtesse has taken this money into her charge,” I remarked, seeing the bare bones of the plot. “And what, pray tell, was the fate of the doll?”

“Disappeared,” they said all in a chorus, as if they were answering the litany in the cathedral. “Disappeared.” But Chrétien swore that he had seen this hideous thing and knew it to be from Satan, and bore witness that his mother had spoken to it, as if it were an idol.

And on they went, breaking up into Babel again, and warring diatribes, that no doubt the beautiful Deborah had more than likely murdered the Amsterdam husband before the Comte had ever met her, for that was the way of a witch, wasn’t it, and could anyone deny that she was a witch, once the story of her mother was known?

“But is this story of the mother’s death proven to be true?” I pressed.

“Letters were written from the Parliament of Paris, to which the lady appealed, to the Scottish Privy Council and they did send verification that indeed a Scottish witch had been burnt in Donnelaith over twenty years before, and a daughter Deborah had survived her, and been taken away from that place by a man of God.”

How my heart sank to hear this, for I knew now there was no hope at all. For what worse testimony could there be against her, than that her mother had been burnt before her? And I did not even need to ask, had the Parliament of Paris turned down her appeal?

“Yes, and with the official letter from Paris, there came also an illustrated leaflet, much circulated in Scotland still, which told of the evil witch of Donnelaith who had been a midwife and a cunning woman of great renown until her fiendish practices were made known.”

Stefan, if you do not recognize the Scottish witch’s daughter
now from this account you do not remember the story. But I no longer held out the slightest doubt. “My Deborah,” I whispered in my heart. There was no chance that I could be wrong.

Claiming that I had witnessed many an execution in my time, and hoped to witness more, I asked the name of the Scottish witch, for perhaps I had perused the record of her trial in my own studies. “Mayfair,” they said, “Suzanne of the Mayfair, who called herself Suzanne Mayfair for want of any other name.”

Deborah. It could be no other than the child I had rescued from the Highlands so very long ago.

“Oh, but Father, there are such dreadful truths in that little book of the Scottish witch, that I hesitate to say.”

“Such books are not Scripture,” I replied in defiance. But they went on to enlighten me to the effect that the entire trial of Suzanne of the Mayfair had been sent on through the Parliament of Paris, and was in the hands of the inquisitor now.

“Was poison found in the Comtesse’s chambers?” I asked, trying for what bit of truth I could obtain.

No, they said, but so heavy was the testimony against her that this did not matter, for her mother-in-law had heard her address beings that were invisible, and her son Chrétien had seen this also, and her son Philippe, and even Charlotte, though Charlotte had fled rather than answer questions against her mother, and other persons too had seen the power of the Comtesse, who could move objects without touching them, and judge the future, and know countless impossible things.

“And she confesses nothing?”

“It was the devil who would put her in a trance when she was tortured,” said the innkeeper’s son. “For how else could any human being slip into a stupor when a hot iron is applied to the flesh?”

At this I felt myself sicken and grow weary, and almost overcome. Yet I continued to question them. “And named no accomplices?” I asked. “For the naming of accomplices they are always much urged to do.”

“Ah, but she was the most powerful witch ever heard of in these parts, Father,” said the vintner. “What need had she of others? The inquisitor, when he heard the names of those whom she had cured, likened her to the great sorceresses of mythology, and to the Witch of Endor herself.”

“And would there were a Solomon about,” I said, “so that he might concur.”

But this they did not hear.

“If there was another witch, it was Charlotte,” said the old
vintner. “You never saw such a sight as her Negroes, coming into the very church with her to Sunday Mass, with fine wigs and satin clothes! And the three mulatto maids for her infant boy. And her husband, tall and pale and like unto a willow tree, and suffering as he does from a great weakness which has afflicted him from childhood and which not even Charlotte’s mother could cure. And oh, to see Charlotte command the Negroes to carry their master about the village, down the steps and up the steps, and to pour his wine for him and hold the cup to his lip and the napkin to his chin. At this very table they sat, the man as gaunt as a saint on the church wall, and the black shining faces around him, and the tallest and blackest of them all, Reginald, they called him, reading to his master from a book in a booming voice. And to think Charlotte has lived among such persons since the age of eighteen, having married this Antoine Fontenay of Martinique at that tender age.”

“Surely it was Charlotte who stole the doll from the cabinet,” said the innkeeper’s son, “before the priest could lay hands on it, for who else in the terrified household would have touched such a thing?”

“But you have said that the mother could not cure the husband’s illness?” I asked gently. “And plainly Charlotte herself could not cure it. Maybe these women are not witches.”

“Ah, but curing and cursing are two separate things,” said the vintner. “Would they had applied their talent merely to curing! But what had the evil doll to do with curing?”

“And what of Charlotte’s desertion?” asked another, who had only just joined the congregation and seemed powerfully excited. “What can it mean but that they were witches together? No sooner was the mother arrested than Charlotte fled with her husband and her child, and her Negroes, back to the West Indies whence they came. But not before Charlotte had gone to be with her mother in the prison, and been locked up with her alone for more than an hour, this request granted only for those in attendance were foolish enough to believe that Charlotte would persuade her mother to confess, which of course she did not do.”