The Witching Hour (53 page)

“Yes, Roemer,” I said, obedient as always. But he knew my heart had been corrupted and won over by Deborah, just as surely as if she had bewitched me, but it was not bewitching, it was stronger even than that.

“This woman is beyond our help now,” he said. “Turn your mind to other things.”

I did my best to obey the order. Yet I could not help but learn that Deborah was being courted by many a lord from England or France. Her wealth was so vast and solid that no one anymore thought to question the source of it, or to ask if there had been a time when she was not rich. Her education was proceeding with great speed, and she had a pure devotion to Judith de Wilde and her father, and so was in no hurry to marry, as she allowed the various suitors to call.

Well, one of those suitors finally took her away!

I never knew who it was that she married, or whence the marriage took place. I saw Deborah but once more, and I did not know then what I know now—that it was perhaps her last night before she left the place.

I was awakened in the dark by a sound at my window, and realizing that it was a steady tapping on the glass, such as could not be made by nature, I went to see if some knave had come over the roof. I was after all on the fifth story then, being still little more than a boy in the order, and given only a mean but very comfortable room.

The window was locked and undisturbed as it ought to be. But far below on the quay stood a lone woman in a garment of black cloth, who appeared to be gazing up at me, and when I opened the glass, she made a motion with her arm, which meant that I must come down.

I knew it was Deborah. But I was maddened, as if a succubus had come into my chamber and pulled the covers off me and gone to work with her mouth.

I crept out of the house so as to avoid all questions, and she stood waiting for me with the green emerald winking in the darkness, like a great eye about her neck. She took me with her through the back streets and into her house.

Now by this point, Stefan, I thought myself to be dreaming. But I did not wish for this dream to end. The lady had no maid or footman or anyone about her. She had come alone to me—which is not I must say so dangerous in Amsterdam as it might be someplace else—but it was enough to stir my blood to see her so unprotected and so deliberate and mysterious, and clinging to me and urging me to hurry along.

How rich were this lady’s furnishings, how thick her many rugs, how fine her parquet floors. And past silver and fine china behind glimmering glass, she drew me up the stairs to her private chamber, and there to a bed draped in green velvet.

“I go to be married tomorrow, Petyr,” she said.

“Then why have you brought me here, Deborah?” I asked, but I was shaking with desire, Stefan. When she let loose of her outer garment and let it drop on the floor, and I saw her full breasts plumped up by the tight lacing of her dress, I went mad to touch them, though I did not move. Even her waist so tightly cinched warmed me, and the sight of her fair neck and sloping shoulders. There was not a succulent particle of her flesh for which I did not hunger. I was a rabid beast in a cage.

“Petyr,” she said looking up into my eyes, “I know that you gave the gems to your order, and that you took nothing of my
thanks for yourself. So let me give you now what you wanted from me in our long journey here, and which you were too gentle to take.”

“But Deborah, why do you do this?” I asked, determined not to take the slightest advantage of her. For in deep distress she was, I could read this in her eyes.

“Because I want it, Petyr,” she said to me suddenly, and wrapping her arms around me, she covered me with kisses. “Leave the Talamasca, Petyr, and come with me,” she said. “Be my husband, and I will not marry this other man.”

“But Deborah, why do you want this of me?” I asked again.

With bitterness and sadness she laughed. “I am lonely for your understanding, Petyr. I am lonely for one from whom I need hide nothing. We are witches, Petyr, whether we belong to God or the devil, we are witches, you and I.”

Oh, how her eyes glittered as she said this, how plain was her triumph, yet how bitter. Her teeth were clenched together for an instant. Then she put her hands on me and stroked my face and neck and I was further maddened.

“You know that you desire me, Petyr, as you have always. Why do you not give in? Come with me; we will leave Amsterdam if the Talamasca will not allow you to be free; we will go away together, and there is nothing that I cannot get for you, nothing that I will not give you, only be with me, and let me be close to you and no longer afraid. I can speak to you of who I am and what befell my mother. I can speak to you of all that troubles me, Petyr, and of you I am never afraid.”

At this her face grew sad and the tears came to her eyes.

“My young husband is beautiful and all that I ever dreamed of when I sat, dirty and barefoot, at the cottage door. He is the lord who rode by on his way to the castle, and to a castle he shall take me now, though it be in another land. It is as if I have entered into the fairy tales told by my mother, and I shall be the Comtesse, and all those rhymes and songs shall be made real.

“But Petyr, I love him and do not love him. You are the first man that I loved, you who brought me here, you who saw the pyre on which my mother died, and you who bathed me and fed me and clothed me when I could not do these things for myself.”

I was past all hope of leaving this chamber without having her. I knew it. Yet so fascinated was I by the smallest fall of her lashes or the tiniest dimple of her cheek, that I let her draw me not to the bed but down upon the carpet before the little coal fire, and there in the flickering warmth she began to tell me of her woes.

“My past is like phantoms now to me,” she cried softly, her
eyes growing wide at the wonder of it. “Did I ever live in such a place, Petyr? Did I watch my mother die?”

“Do not bring it back into the light, Deborah,” I said. “Let the old pictures fade away.”

“But Petyr, you remember when you first spoke to me and you told me that my mother was not evil, that men had done evil to her. Why did you believe those things?”

“You tell me if she was a witch, Deborah, and what is a witch, by God!”

“Oh, Petyr, I remember going out into the fields with her, under the moonless sky where the stones were.”

“And what happened, my dear?” I begged her. “Did the devil come with cloven hoofs?”

She shook her head, and gestured for me to listen to her and be still and be good. “Petyr,” she said, “it was a witch judge that taught her the black magic! She showed me the very book. He had come through our village when I was but a small thing, crawling still, and he came out to our hut for the mending of a cut in his hand. By the fire he sat with her and told her of all the places he had gone in his work and the witches he had burnt. ‘Be careful, my girl,’ he said to her, or so she told me afterwards, and then he took from his leather pouch the evil book.
Demonologie
it was called and he read it to her, for she could not read Latin, or any language for that matter, and the pictures he held to the light of the fire all the better for her to see.

“Hour by hour he taught these things to her, what witches had done, and what witches could do. ‘Be careful, my girl,’ he would say, ‘lest the devil tempt you, for the devil loves the midwife and the cunning woman!’ and then he would turn another page.

“That night as he lay with her, he talked on of the torture houses, and of the burnings, and of the cries of the condemned. ‘Be careful, my girl,’ he said again when he left her.

“And all these things she later told to me. I was a child of six, maybe seven when she told the story. At the kitchen fire we sat together. ‘Now, come,’ she said, ‘and you shall see.’ Out into the field we went, feeling for the stones before us, and finding the very middle of the circle and standing stock-still in it to feel the wind.

“Nary a sound in the night, I tell you. Nary a glimmer of light. Not even the stars to show the towers of the castle, or the far-away bit of water that one could see from there of Loch Donnelaith.

“I heard her humming as she held my hand; then in a circle we danced together, making small circles round and round as we did. Louder she hummed and then the Latin words she spoke
to call the demon, and then flinging out her arms she cried to him to come.

“The night was empty. Nothing answered. I drew close to her skirts and held her cold hand. Then over the grasslands I felt it coming, a breeze it seemed, and then a wind as it gathered itself about us. I felt it touching my hair and the back of my neck, I felt it wrapping us round as it were with air. I heard it speak then, only not in words, and yet I heard it and it said: ‘I am here, Suzanne!’

“Oh, how she laughed with delight; how she danced. Like a child, she wrung her hands, and laughed again and threw back her hair. ‘Do you see him, my baby?” she said to me. And I answered that I could feel him and hear him very near.

“And once again, he spoke, ‘Call me by my name, Suzanne.’

“ ‘Lasher,’ she said, ‘for the wind which you send that lashes the grasslands, for the wind that lashes the leaves from the trees. Come now, my Lasher, make a storm over Donnelaith! And I shall know that I am a powerful witch and that you do this for my love!’

“By the time we reached the hut, the wind was howling over the fields, and in the chimney as she shut our door. By the fire, we sat laughing like two children together, ‘You see, you see, I did it,’ she whispered. And looking into her eyes, I saw what I had always seen and always would even to her last hour of agony and pain: the eyes of a simpleton, a dim-witted girl laughing behind her fingers with the stolen sweet in the other hand. It was a game to her, Petyr. It was a game!”

“I see it, my beloved,” I said.

“Now, tell me there is no Satan. Tell me that he did not come through the darkness to claim the witch of Donnelaith and lead her to the fire! It was Lasher who found for her the objects which others lost, it was Lasher who brought the gold to her, which they took from her, it was Lasher who told her the secrets of treachery which she revealed to willing ears. And it was Lasher who rained hail upon the milkmaid who quarreled with her, Lasher who sought to punish her enemies for her and thereby made her power known! She could not instruct him, Petyr. She did not know how to use him. And like a child playing with a candle, she kindled the very fire that burnt her to death.”

“Do not make the same error, Deborah!” I whispered, even as I kissed her face. “No one instructs a daimon, for that is what this is.”

“Oh, no, it is more than that,” she whispered, “and you are most mistaken. But don’t fear for me, Petyr. I am not my mother. There is no cause.”

We sat then in quiet by the little fire, though I could not think that she would want to be near it, and as she leaned her forehead on the stones above it, I kissed her again on her soft cheek, and brushed back the long vagrant strands of her moist black hair.

“Petyr,” she said, “I shall never live in hunger and filth as she lived. I shall never be at the mercy of foolish men.”

“Don’t marry, Deborah. Don’t go! Come with me. Come into the Talamasca and we shall discover the nature of this creature together … ”

“No, Petyr. You know I will not.” And here she smiled sadly. “It is you who must come with me, and we shall go away. Speak to me now with your secret voice, the voice in you that can command clocks to stop or spirits to come, and be with me, and be my bridegroom, and this shall be the witches’ wedding night.”

I went to answer her with a thousand protests, but she covered my mouth with her hand, and then with her mouth, and she went to kissing me with such heat and charm that I knew nothing anymore, but that I had to tear from her the garments that bound her, and have her there in the bed with the green curtains drawn around us, this tender childlike body with its woman’s breasts and woman’s secrets which I had bathed and clothed.

Why do I torture myself to write this? I am confessing my old sin, Stefan. I am telling you all that I did, for I cannot write of this woman without this confession and so I go on.

Never have I celebrated the rites with such abandon. Never have I known such voluptuousness and sweetness as I knew in her.

For she believed herself to be a witch, Stefan, and therefore to be evil, and these were the devil’s rites to her that she celebrated with such willfulness. Yet hers was a tender and loving heart, I swear it, and so the mixture was a rare and powerful witch’s brew indeed.

I did not leave her bed till morning. I slept against her perfumed breast. I wept now and then like a boy. With a temptress’s skill, she had wakened all of my flesh to her. She had discovered my most secret hungers and had toyed with them, and fed them. I was her slave. But she knew that I would not stay with her, that I had to go back to the Talamasca, and for hours finally she lay quiet and sad staring at the wooden ceiling of the bed, as the light came through the seams of the curtains and the bed began to grow warm from the sun.

I dressed wearily and without desire for anything in the whole of Christendom but her soul and her flesh. Yet I was leaving her. I was going home to tell Roemer what I had done. I was going
back to the Motherhouse, which was indeed my mother and my father, and I knew no other choice.

I thought now she will send me off with curses. But it was not to be. One last time, I begged her to remain in Amsterdam, to come with me.

Good-bye, my little priest, she said to me. Fare thee well, and may the Talamasca reward you for what you have given up in me. Tears she shed, and I kissed her open hands hungrily before I left her, and put my face once more into her hair. “Go now, Petyr,” she said finally. “Remember me.”

Perhaps a day or two passed before I was told that she had gone. I was disconsolate and lay weeping and trying to listen to Roemer and to Geertruid, but I could not hear what they had to say. They were not angry with me as I had thought they would be, that much I knew.

And it was Roemer who went to Judith de Wilde and purchased from her the portrait of Deborah by Rembrandt van Rijn which hangs in our house to this day.