We Will All Go Down Together Page 7

  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.

  | four: the witch-house

  (ii)—entrance

  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—

  Commer ye go before, commer go ye,

  Gif ye will no’ go before, commer let me.

  I sall gae into a hare

  Wi’ sorrow and scorn an’ mickle care,

  I sall gae in the De’il’s name

  ’Til he send me hame again.

  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—”

  “Irreplacable? Probably. Then again, I’ve read them already; Ygerna too, repeatedly. Let the Connaught Trust’s donations office worry about their state, after you’re done.”

  That smile of his—so many teeth, for something so narrow; it made her head swim just a bit, her whole skull feel suddenly soft, heavy and swollen. “No doubt you wonder where my sister is,” he continued, though she frankly hadn’t. “Alas, she’s been struck down by a summer cold, to which she’s unfortunately quite prone—the effects are usually brief but always unpleasant, and unglamourous. So she’s confined herself to her room, the vain creature . . . perhaps I’ll yet be able to pry her free later on, at least once, before you go. Fingers crossed. I assure you, she’s well worth the wait.”

  “That would be, eh—lovely, Mister Sidderstane.”

  “Please. Gaheris.”

  “. . . Dolores.”

  “Yes, I remember. So now we’re all good friends. . . .” He nodded at Keck, who produced a flat, ill-laid wooden box from the pannier-like tails of his dusty frock-coat. Black with age, it sported leather hinges and a slightly rusty iron clasp; Dolores automatically reached out one hand to receive it, only to find it heavy enough to warrant two. She barely managed to get it clunked down on her own nearest book-stack before losing her grip entirely, bracing it against a fall with one elbow and juggling the teacup at the same time, completely off-balance. For a moment, she was afraid she was going to slop hot tea all down her dress, but Sidderstane—Gaheris—reached out a hand, effortlessly steadying them both. “Ooh, close one! Well, I’ll just leave you to it, shall I?”

  “What, start right now?”

  “No time like the present, considering how long you’ve waited.” To Keck: “Later for the sandwiches after all, I believe—best to let Miss Trench get the lie of the land before bothering her with sustenance.”

  “Sir,” the old man replied, face unreadable, as Gaheris handed him the tea set once more, and rose. After which—executing a bizarre sort of two-step, so deft and fast that Dolores later found she had no clear recollection exactly who might have held the door for whom—they both disappeared. She was left alone, with only fire, books, and box for company.

  Daft bugger, she thought. But then her gaze fell on the box’s lid, blind reliquary of Euwphaim Glouwer’s final testament (more boast than confession, if what she’d learned about the woman thus far held true), and she found she no longer much cared about Gaheris’s motives, let alone his eccentricities. Her thumbs itched fiercely, palms sweaty, fingers longing to be filled and set to work.

  Notebook, she ticked off, in her head. Pens. That magnifying glass Hector had bought for her, the night before she’d set off—poor Hector, who truly did seem to think they’d be married, once she got “all this foolishness” out of her system. Does it really matter so very much, hen? he’d asked, just a month or so previous, eyes sympathy-soft but uncomprehending, when she’d told him her work was in imminent danger of stalling. I mean, what would you do with this degree of yours? Whoever would read this paper, besides your professors? Who on earth would care to?

  Oh, and yet: There are far more people interested in what lies behind the dark than you’d ever think, my lad, she’d thought, but hadn’t said. These doomed, powerless women with their spells and their pacts, scrabbling for some sort of recompense, a voice to cry out in vain against this world that grinds them like corn, leaving them nowhere to stand but the scaffold. A knife of words, fit to stab through the very heart of everything which keeps them lonely, keeps them poor, uneducated, pariahs, criminals, madwomen . . . witches.

  All women, everywhere, still only a slip of the tongue away from potential witches, even today—from standing accused as abnormal, ill-made, wrong, even with dance-hall swapped in for sabbat, bad marriages (in all their abuse and degradation) for the torturer’s Question, childbirth complications for outright execution. With those who dared to speak up against this inequity still locked away, confined, forever at the mercy of men who needed no more provocation than any given witchfinder to drug their tongues and cut the very thoughts from their brains, crippling them in the service of a cure.

  No need to go down that route, however, when arguing, or even when not. For no one need ever know about Dolores’s mother’s end or the fears it bred in her, this unshakeable sense that she herself might yet live out her last days on a ward, jacketed and drooling, no matter what differences of degree she placed between the two of them. Or this quirk of an idea that perhaps it was the long-buried seed of Euwphaim Glouwer’s own mystic insanity which had set Mrs. Trench on her downslide, if only chased back far enough: a black vision not of some bland Saviour, but of His exact opposite.

  Dolores took a breath. At her elbow, the box sat quiet. She had only to reach out and see what might be done with what she found—

  So she did, tongue touched to lip and forehead wrinkling, with
only slightly shaking hands. Too concentrated by far to notice Gaheris Sidderstane watching her through the door’s crack, his leaf-mould gaze equal-intent, wrapped in shadow; when the latch drew blood, provoking her to swear and lick her fingers, that drew a brief smile, if nothing more. By the time she took up her ball-point, meanwhile—pad flipped open, scanning the brown-spotted pages fiercely—he had already turned away, retracing his steps back upstairs, to where his sister waited.

  | five: euwphaim glouwer, her dittay

  As transcribed from its original form by Dolores Trent, with spelling amended for consistency, except where otherwise noted.

  What am I, you wonder, judging me from on high? I come from a place wiped clean, where nothing any longer lives, nor grows. I was made from your spite, and thus I have grown spiteful; as your hate was my milk, so my hate has swelled and darkened, fit to smother the world. Yet in truth, what I suffered and what I lost, before I bound my sisters to me—these are nothing. Only what they made of me, and what followed after, are worth the speaking of.

  Of my childhood, I remember little. Only that my kin were good enough folk, nothing like myself, though they loved me, and I them. They had no sight, no troubling dreams, no secret knowledge; nothing spoke to them from the shadows, or out of the flames. All they were was unlucky enough to live on land deeded from one rich man to another, and foolish enough to try to stay when the border shifted, having been already warned to quit it.

  So in a way, it is as though my life truly began on that day when the soldiers came, when they ran my father through and took my mother against the shed, then knocked her head on a stone ’til she stopped screaming and threw my younger brother—a child barely able to stand—alive, into the fire they made of our house. The thatch and sticks of our village they doused with oil and set alight, standing to watch as the walls fell in. Those who survived the attack they rode down with their horses and hung from trees, then stuck them through with pikes, laughed and drank and gambled some hours before pissing on the ashes of the mess they’d made and marching away once more, leaving nothing behind but smoking bones.