The Lighthouse Witches(35)

She held out a hand.

We have to take hands, she said.

It only works if we hold hands.





SAPPHIRE, 1998



I

Saffy is fully dressed beneath the bedclothes. Every thirty seconds she glances at her wristwatch, sighing with frustration. Why did Brodie want to meet so late? She knows why—he’s waiting until his parents are asleep so nobody asks any questions. But still. If the wait doesn’t kill her, the apprehension will.

In the meantime, she reads. When Liv told them all to pack their gear and leave York in the middle of the night, she’d been so out of it that she’d not packed a single one of her many books. She hates that she didn’t bring any. Drew, her mum’s vile boyfriend—or ex-boyfriend, she figures—will probably chuck them all out. She was an avid reader. The small selection of books in the bothy aren’t exactly thrilling, some from the 1970s on shipping routes and seabirds, but she is intrigued by the strange handwritten book bearing the name of her mum’s commissioner, Patrick Roberts. His grimoire.

The GRIMOIRE of Patrick Roberts

I will never know how many women Duncan accused, and how many were accused by his wife and sons. Following this accusation, the Laird of Lòn Haven had applied to the Privy Council for a Royal Inquiry into the practice of witchcraft on the island. About twenty of the accused didn’t get charged—folk said they’d bribed their way out of it—and in the end, twelve women and girls from the village were taken from their homes and thrown in the hole beneath the broch, where they were imprisoned until the trial. Among the women were my mother, as well as Jenny, Amy’s older sister, and her mother, Finwell.

Amy stopped speaking. I believe she stopped eating, too, because she quickly grew so thin that her green eyes seemed to bulge out of her head and her knee bones looked like they were going to explode out of her skin.

My father was still gone, and I had to look after my little brother. My uncle lived nearby but didn’t help, and I could understand why—folk were already distancing themselves from me and my brother due to our being the children of a witch. It didn’t matter that the trial hadn’t taken place. Women couldn’t present evidence against their accusers, so to be accused was as good as being guilty.

Still, I held fast to the thought that the judges would find my mother, as well as Jenny and Finwell, innocent. It was wrong, so very wrong—I knew Duncan deserved what he’d got, and he was still gravely ill, but he had violated my mother. The only person who belonged at the bottom of the broch was Duncan.

And none of us, not the gifted healers nor Amy, with her stones and powers of bringing fish back to life, could do anything about it.

But then Duncan died, and the whole of Lòn Haven was set alight with terror and intrigue. He was buried the day before the trial. It had been two months since my mother and the other women and girls were taken into the broch by the sea.

The trial was held in the kirk. Amy and I were present, covered as best we could with shawls so as not to draw attention from the villagers.

Each woman and girl was presented in turn, silent and weak, as the charges against her was read before the crowd, as well as her confessions.

“Finwell Hyndman,” the judge called out. Amy stiffened and gasped as she watched her mother brought out to the court. Finwell was strong and stout, with thick black hair like Amy’s, but she had changed so much that at first I was sure they’d brought the wrong woman. The figure before us was thin, her hair shorn and her clothes replaced with rags. She was barefoot and her face bore black marks that were either dirt or bruises.

Duncan’s oldest son, Calan, took the stand to state the way Duncan had died. Calan was a tall, loud-voiced man with a flair for drama, which he used to regale the court with a long, drawn-out depiction of the way his father died. He said that Duncan’s death was painful and horrifying in its physical elements, which I already knew, but new to the tale were visitations from the spirits of his tormentors. He said that Finwell and the eleven others had all swept into the room on regular occasions, invisible to everyone but Duncan, who begged them to remove the curse. Kit said a black cat had appeared in the rafters of the roof and watched while Duncan writhed in pain.

Others were called forward to give evidence against Finwell.

Margaret McNicol, a wet nurse who had lost all four of her children in childbirth, said that she had often spied Finwell venturing out late at night, headed for Mither Stane on top of the fairy hill. We all knew Mither Stane, an ancient stone, brought good or bad luck, depending when you visited it, but Margaret charged Finwell with going there to converse with the fae.

“Finwell Hyndman,” the judge boomed. “You are charged with the practice of witchcraft upon the Council of Lòn Haven in the Year of Our Lord, 1662. What is your confession?”

The crowd fell silent as the confession was to be heard. Finwell struggled to speak, but couldn’t, and so the judge called out again.

“I have before me written evidence of your confession, which I shall present to this court. You will assign your agreement or disagreement by nodding or shaking your head. ‘I, Finwell Hyndman, confess to renouncing baptism in servitude of the Devil, and acting alongside my coven to bring about the sickness and subsequent death of Duncan McGregor.’?”

The crowd erupted into chatter and whispers. I saw Amy lift her head and stare at her mother, who kept her face bowed to the floor. What coven? I thought. Why isn’t she refuting this charge? Why isn’t she shaking her head?