We Will All Go Down Together (7 page)

:No need. My eye is ever on you, Euwphaim; I hold you in my heart, as you once held me. We are one there with each other, forever.:

And if she
could
weep, then that reply alone would draw thick salt tears of happy amazement, cradled once more in the furnace of his contrariwise love.

:I prepare a place for you too, my beautiful Euwphaim, very presently. Can you endure but a bit longer?:
Adding, on his own thought’s heels:
:It will cost you pain.:

And:
Yes, my Laird,
Euwphaim answers him.
I have no doubt of it.
As there is no thing at all—in this world, or out of it—which comes to us for free.

Her heart skips and soars with gratitude. She was a fool, a true heretic, to ever think herself forgotten.

Blood means nothing. Will means all.

“My Laird of Horns,” she says, aloud, “I will do thy bidding ever, patient and uncomplaining. I am in yuir hands, now and always.”

Asked how shee can hope tae escape God’s wroth. Answers: There are many cracks in the walle of tyme, and not alle of such runne backwards.

Asked what shee means by this. Answers: That my Black Angel has promised mee I will yet be sent hence from here to confound and scourge the whole world, and een though I be consumed tae the very bones, tis stille not I myselfe will burn for yuir delight.

Asked why she laughs sae lowd and with sae little reason. Answers: Because that I have mazed ye alle.

February 16, 1968

Dolores Trench

18 Jordan Lane

Edinburgh, Scotland

Dacre Dowersby Sidderstane

362 St. Andrew’s Gardens

Toronto, Canada

Dear Mister Sidderstane,

You do not know me, for which I apologize. I write to you today to ask permission to visit your family home, once the famed Witch-House of Eye. When your great-grandfather chose to purchase the Witch-House, disassemble it stone by stone, and ship it to Toronto, where it was reassembled to serve as your homestead, he hardly could have considered that one day a young woman researching her dissertation might find herself in pressing need of whatever documents might have come with it. To put it baldly, I am the first of my family to attend university, and without your aid, I fear I will never graduate.

The paper I plan to present is entitled “To Be Named Is As Good As To Be Known: Self-fulfilling Prophecy and the Scots Witch-Craze, as Seen Through the Lens of One Trial.” In it, I examine the case of the so-called “Dourvale Witches,” Jonet Devize, Alizoun Rusk, and Euwphaim Glouwer. Because they were arrested upon lands owned by Glauce, Lady Druir, whom the three later accused (along with her son-in-law, Callistor, Lord Roke) of complicity in their supposed “magickal treasons,” this grouping has hitherto been known as the “Five-Family Coven”—and given your familial connexion with the Druirs, I understand completely how you might fear I will add them to the mix, in some sort of tabloid
exposé
fashion.

However, I am
only
interested in information concerning Devize, Rusk, and Glouwer, since my thesis presumes that what saw them condemned was a combination of their relative poverty, their womanhood, their lack of aristocratic blood, and the generalized hysteria then gripping Scotland—a hysteria that, by sowing constant fear of “witches,” may have actually ended up
creating
a small but dramatic class of female criminals who genuinely believed themselves to be possessed of magical powers. As previous example, I reference the conspiracy against James VI by the North Berwick Coven—clearly politically motivated and steered from behind-scenes by Francis, Lord Bothwell, who hoped to use the “witches’” delusion as a way to depose James from the throne—which led directly (in its turn) to James writing
Daemonologie
, the book some call the “Scottish
Hammer
,” setting the literal pattern for almost every subsequent witchcraft investigation and trial across the United Kingdom.

According to her dittay, taken under Question at the Witch-House, Jonet Devize—a young, good-looking widow with property, known for her skill with herbal medicines and her supposed ability to “speak for the dead”—was well aware that after her much-older husband died of “a fit” (probably a stroke), it would only be a matter of time before his relatives denounced her, hoping to secure her inheritance for themselves. Childless and alone, she had to protect herself from victimization, to make the people around her support her—even if only through fear.

Enter the mysterious Euwphaim Glouwer, who convinced Jonet to burn down her husband’s house and make a “Black Pilgrimage” to touch your ancestress’s fabled “stane” at Dourvale. Along the way, they picked up Alizoun Rusk, whose merchant-family wealth offered some small measure of protection until they were imprisoned, and perhaps explains away many of their supposedly supernatural escapades—travel from one end of Scotland to the other within a “miraculously” short space of time hardly requires flight if you have the money to rent a coach and four.

Though records here in Scotland show similar dittays were taken from both Alizoun Rusk (hers was judged “farre too fowle & filthie” for public consumption, apparently, and burnt along with her) and Euwphaim Glouwer, I have been completely unable to locate even a précis of the latter, which would serve as a necessary cornerstone of my research—a reflection, and possibly a rebuttal, of Jonet’s own. I can only hope that a copy still exists somewhere in the former Witch-House, but without access to it, my cause is all but lost.

Throwing myself on your mercy, therefore, I remain,

Dolores Trench.

P.S.: I should probably mention that I also have a family connexion to add to the mix—my mother’s maiden name was Clairk, traceable back to one of the soldiers who took the Dourvale Witches into custody. He claimed to have impregnated Euwphaim Glouwer, only to repossess her child once she was brought to term, and raise him as his own son.

I later discovered that something similar happened to Alizoun Rusk, who missed her initial execution date through the time-honoured tradition of “pleading her belly.” Of course, once her son Judas was born, she too suffered the full penalty of the law.

(Judas Rusk stowed away to sea at the age of twelve, eventually reaching the Seychelles, where he formed a highly successful trading compact and bought Veritay Island. His descendants still live there today. According to records, he described himself as a man with “an hundred fathers,” claiming that his mother’s blood endowed his children and grandchildren with magical powers.)

Sincerely,

D.T.

April 3, 1968

G.D. Sidderstane

362 St. Andrew’s Gardens

Toronto, Canada

Dolores Trench

18 Jordan Lane

Edinburgh, Scotland

Dear Miss Trench,

So sorry for the lengthy delay; I only just “received” your letter, by which I mean that I found it while going through papers on my father’s desk. Luckily enough, for your purposes, he suffered a final convulsion the week before last and died with merciful swiftness after a sadly protracted illness. This means your plea devolves to me, which is just as well; my father was dubious at best about our “connexion” to Dourvale, the Druirs, and the Five-Family Coven alike.

For myself, I can’t claim that your plan of proving your secret ancestress guiltless of sorcery by reason of self-delusion doesn’t amuse me greatly. From what I’ve heard, it would certainly amuse
her
. But I am happy to help, nonetheless.

Enclosed, you will find a letter authorizing you to pick up a return ticket in your name at the Heathrow gate, Toronto-bound. I look forward to making your acquaintance in person, and turning over all the Witch-House of Eye-related documentation you might possibly wish for.

Cordially,

Gaheris S.

P.S.: My twin, Ygerna—quite an incorrigible Anglophile—awaits your arrival with bated breath. Please try to treat her enthusiasms gently. She means no harm.

—G.

And now, here Dolores was on the Sidderstane (Witch-)House’s front steps, a fold of her dirndl skirt caught uncomfortably tight between her thighs, already soaked with secret sweat. It’d been an hour’s ride from the airport, where she’d found a disquietingly posh limousine driver already waiting, a sign with her name on it clutched to his chest. “Paid for,” he’d said, when she tried to tip him. “All taken care of, Miss—they’re good like that, the Family.”

She sighed, straightened herself. Leaned on the doorbell once more, barely hearing its answering chime: some sort of tune, sounded like. A rippling fall of notes, repeated twice in quick success, mirroring each other—triple beat, double, four, then again. It sounded familiar somehow, and she caught herself humming along, transposing words from her last bit of reading material: Montague Summers’s hoary and unreliable old treatise on
Witchcraft and Black Magic
, which she’d pulled from her carpetbag to send her to sleep on the plane—

Yes, that was it. The rhyme Gillie Duncan supposedly played for her captors on a Jew’s Harp, along with the rest of her North Berwick gossips; a song sung at Sabbat, suitable for dancing back-to-back and kissing the Old Man’s hindparts to. Up and down and back and forth, widdershins about, sawing like the bow of some rebec made from poison yew-wood and inlaid with looted bone—

For first we’ll wait, and then we’ll whistle, and then we’ll dance together,
Dolores thought. Not that poor little Gillie had probably done much dancing after that, her chief examiner—James Rex himself, soon to be First of England, the same lofty personage whom the North Berwick crew stood accused of plotting against—never having been any great friend to witches.

The bell faded away into silence, and Dolores found herself straining for any hint of a footfall, either towards the door or away from it. For a breathless second, she contemplated the fact that she was utterly alone in another country: no place to stay, no one to call on, no relatives to ask after her should she somehow go astray. Everything she had in the world fit into her suitcase, with her last ten pounds sewn into the carpetbag’s lining, just in case.
I wouldn’t, darling,
was all her flatmate’d said, when she’d showed her the letter—could she have been right?

I still have the ticket, at least. I
can
get back, just in time to fail, on every possible level. . . . 

But no. The door opened, without fanfare. A man stood there, smiling, hand outstretched.

“Gaheris Sidderstane,” he said. “While you, of course, must be our guest—dear Miss Trench, both honoured and anticipated, all that. Please do step in; no, let me take your bags. I’m having Keck make tea.”

Inside, the house was dim and dully red all over, as if flayed and left to set. Dark wood, small windows, long falls of heavy drape pulled almost shut in each successive room. Dust hung in a few bright beams, sparkling. Sidderstane ushered her into what might have been a library, walls two rows deep in books from ceiling to floor. He threw himself into a chair by the fire, blazing away behind its grate, which nevertheless gave off a sullen, steady smoke that the chimney didn’t seem entirely equipped to deal with—then turned to admire her with his head tipped to one side while crossing his long legs like Errol Flynn, who he vaguely resembled, aside from a pair of ears which stuck out like a monkey’s.

“There,” he said, confidentially. “That’s better, isn’t it?” Dolores nodded, unable to think of any reason to disagree. “Now, don’t stand on ceremony! That, over there—” He gestured, indicating something at her elbow that she eventually realized was another chair, covered in yet more books. “—that’s for you.”

“Oh, is it? Thanks, very much.”

She stooped to clear a place for herself, bending at the knees rather than the waist, executing a weird little half-curtsey in the service of modesty. The man’s eyes—leaf-brown, with a hint of pale green—never seemed to leave her, throughout the whole process.

“Lovely,” he said, when she’d settled. “Now, I must ask—are you
really
planning to rehabilitate Euwphaim Glouwer’s reputation? To refute her dittay, so to speak?”

“Er . . . I need it more for . . . research purposes, really. To see if there’s any significant variation between the way she saw things and the way—”

“—poor Jonet Devize did, yes; I do recall that, from the missive you sent my dear departed Dad. Make an even better compare-and-contrast if you had a copy of Alizoun Rusk’s confession to add in on top, hmmm?”

“Do you?”

“No, sorry. Ygerna and I spent quite a bit of last week looking for it, only to eventually own ourselves confounded. Seems like they really did burn it after all, Puritan bastards.”

“I’m . . . not too sure they’d’ve called themselves that, the Witch-House men. Protestants mostly, Calvinists; Puritanism was only a smallish sect at the time of North Berwick, and by 1593—”

“No Puritans in Eye?”

“Not many, I’d think. It was a main small place.”

“Huh. Well, you’re the expert.”

The door opened, admitting a cadaverous ancient she could only assume was the aforementioned Keck, his thin arms bent under the burden of carrying a sterling tea set on a silver tray. Gaheris took it, poured her a cup, popped in milk and two sugar without asking, then made himself the same, before depositing it on the book-stack nearest his elbow. “Got to get you up to par, after the journey,” he said, as she sipped, trying not to wince. “I’ve instructed Keck that sandwiches are to be prepared, which you can have now or later—now
and
later, if you want. Your choice, entirely.”

“Thanks, yes, I am a bit peckish, but . . . you really don’t mind me eating around the books? I mean, they’re—”