Hester(3)

“You work quietly,” my aunt said. “I like that.”

Her words didn’t generally have hue or shape to them, but I saw these in the thick yellow of an egg yolk.

“Sometimes there’s more power in silence than in speech,” she added. “Our ancestress knew it and it served her well.”

“Ancestress?”

Auntie Aileen tipped her head when she looked at me.

“Isobel Gowdie, Queen of Witches—she’s your namesake.” Her words were still yellow, which I came to know as the color of truth. “She knew when evil was right there in front of her in the shape of man, and she knew when to be silent and when to raise hell to the heavens.”

At this, Aileen climbed onto a stool, raised a broom toward the heavens, and shouted, “‘Yea, I am what you say I am—I have lain with the Devil’s forked prick inside me, and if you kill me hell will reign on earth.’

“That’s what she did when the men came for her,” Auntie Aileen explained, catching my shocked expression.

I felt a bolt of fear and excitement.

“And did it?” I asked. “Did hell reign on earth?”

Aileen blinked down at me, climbed off the stool, and straightened her skirts.

“You’ll have to ask your mum about it.”



* * *



WHEN I ASKED my mother, she was angry.

“Aileen is a fool—forget that nonsense and never mention it again.”

I fell to my knees as if to pray or beg for an answer, but Mam spun upon me.

“Right here in Lanarkshire County they killed hundreds of witches and more in the Highlands. King James wrote the law and the king could do it again.” I saw that fear in the whites of Mam’s eyes. “Today, this very hour, law or not, they’d put a woman to death if they thought she had the Devil in her. And if you’re not careful, such talk will bring Satan to you.”

“Am I bedeviled?” I whispered.

My mother took my wrist and held it hard.

“You must always beware. You must call on God and keep that strange talk out of your mind. Even strong women can fall, Isobel—you must beware of magic and all the things we don’t understand.”

I worried over my mother’s words for months. I didn’t want to fall into the Devil’s snare. I didn’t want to be put in an asylum or hanged from the gallows. I wanted to be a dressmaker, to live in a city and have a shop and embroider dresses with flowers and birds.

I loved the needle and thread, and I feared losing them above all because they let me put my visions into cloth in a way that no one questioned, in a way that brought me praise. They let me keep my secrets in plain sight, where I prayed they would hurt no one, least of all myself.





Scotland, 1662


A strong hand reaches through the dark and drags Isobel Gowdie into the hard autumn light. She staggers into Loch Loy square and blinks at the small crowd of jeering farmers, brewers, and cottars’ wives. It’s nearly noon—Isobel can tell by the position of the sun as it approaches the familiar kirk steeple. She has not had anything to eat or drink since the tollbooth door slammed shut two days ago, and the air shimmers in waves as the marshal raises a parchment and coughs to loosen his voice.

“Isobel Gowdie, wife of John Gilbert, ye are accused of witchcraft, of using charms, spirit familiars, and maleficence to inflict pain and illness upon the Reverend Harry Forbes and his sons, and of causing the death of five cows and one calf.” He levels his narrow gaze at her. “What say ye to these charges?”

Two years ago, Isobel gave Forbes’s wife a brew to take away an unwanted child. Last year, the reverend came upon her in the fields at twilight and pressed her into the haystacks, fished his hands up her skirts, and threw her to the ground when she bit him.

Isobel lifts a shaking finger and points it at Forbes. She is frightened and angry now, her mind abuzz with flame and thirst.

“He is not a sacred man,” Isobel brays. “He is foul.”

“Bring the witch-pricker,” the marshal bellows.

The crowd ripples and John Dickson strides toward her wearing a brown cloak stuck with long needles.

“Strip her,” Dickson orders. A three-inch needle glitters in his gloved hand.

Isobel’s knees are weak, but she does not fall.

She crosses her arms to protect her womb as rough arms seize her from behind to tear away her dress and petticoat. She is six-and-twenty and has never borne a child, but the seed of one has been planted and she means to keep it safe. They bind her hands and shove her up against the stockade, but she will not be harnessed like a cow—she shrieks and swings her head and that is where the first cut is made—her long red braid shorn off with a scythe, then her pubis grazed with a razor that raises blood across her belly and sharp hip bones.

“If she is a witch, she will not feel the blade prick her.” Dickson’s voice is low, as if coming from the pit where the Devil lies in wait.

Dickson stabs at Isobel Gowdie and she screams.

“She saw you,” someone shouts from the crowd. “You have to put it in her arse where she can’t see you.”

Again and again Dickson jabs at her until she sees it in slow motion, like the day her mother caught a fish with her hand, silver in the blue water, mouth gulping for air, dying without the river.