The Lighthouse Witches(36)

The judge stared at Finwell. “Speak yay or nay to these charges, woman.”

My heart was pounding in my chest as I watched Finwell for her response. Finally, with a whimper, I saw her nod. The crowd burst into jeers.

I felt Amy sway beside me. The sight of her mother being led away, charged with terrible crimes, had made her legs weak. It was the sight of her sister, Jenny, being brought to the court floor, that made her sharpen her focus again.

Jenny looked stronger than her mother, though she wept openly and her head was shorn like Finwell’s had been. Elspeth Mair, a widow who Jenny had often assisted at the market, brought forth her evidence, sweeping to the stand and proclaiming to a rapt audience that she had seen Jenny speaking with the fae at Mither Stane. The fairy hill, she believed, was where the coven gathered to plot their foul doings. She had chided Jenny for this, she said, and as a result one of her cows died.

The judge told Jenny to nod or shake or head if she agreed or disagreed with her charges. She nodded.

“I have here your confession,” the judge said, “which I will read before the court. ‘I, Jenny Hyndman, confess to performing acts of perversion with the Devil in the forest, whereupon he did turn me into a cat, instructing me to roam upon the rooftops of those I wanted to curse.’?” He lowered the scroll and stared at her. “Nod or shake your head.”

The crowd gasped as Jenny nodded.

Amy and I shared a glance. We knew this wasn’t true. Why, then, was Jenny confessing to such acts? She knew the penalty for witchcraft was death—why would she lie?

But she wasn’t the only one to confess—every woman and girl, the youngest only two years older than Amy, claimed to have made a pact with the Devil. The confessions turned my stomach and hurt my head. I didn’t believe that any of them did these terrible things, especially not Finwell and Jenny, and yet each of them confessed readily.

Finally, my mother was called to the court.

She was painfully thin, the bones of her neck and cheeks visible from a distance. Her hair was shorn. She wore chains around her ankles and seemed to have trouble standing, so they brought a chair.

I looked up at the judges, seated on the balcony above. They were chatting and pouring water into their cups, laughing about something. Someone in the crowd threw something at my mother. It hit her head and drew blood. I moved to strike the person who did it, but Amy grabbed my arm.

“No,” she hissed. “Do you want to be charged, too?”

“Order!” the judge shouted. An elder attended my mother to offer a cloth for her wound, but she seemed too weak to hold it to her head, or to speak.

One by one friends and neighbors told high tales of how my mother had been seen conversing with the Devil, had planned to sink ships and fail crops, had caused cattle to drop down, dead.

“I shall read the confession,” the judge said finally. “?‘I, Agnes Roberts, confess to leading my coven in servitude of the Devil, who appeared to me as a black wolf in the forest, insomuch as I served as his whore. I confess to cursing Duncan McGregor to his death, and to cursing the villagers of Lòn Haven by sending a plague upon the crops hereafter.’?”

I watched, my heart pounding, as my mother gave a nod of her head to signal she agreed with the confession, the crowd exploding into cruel jeers.


II

Saffy feels someone coming into her room, the door creaking open and footsteps thudding across her floor. She stirs, sees it’s dark outside, and before she can shout at the intruder to get the hell out of her room, she feels the covers shifting off her, an icy cold hand reaching beneath the bedclothes.

She finds she can’t scream. The fear is so powerful it renders her frozen and breathless. All she can do is lie there, immobilized with horror, as someone crawls in beside her, icy limbs wrapping around her. But then she realizes who it is: it’s Clover, and she starts shouting at her out of sheer relief.

“Clover! What the hell are you doing? You scared me half to death, you little shit!”

“Hold me,” Clover whimpers. “I’m frightened.”

Saffy softens, her heart still pounding in her chest. She lets Clover bury herself into the warm pit of her chest, rubbing her little arms with her palms in a bid to warm them both up.

“You’re like an icicle. Why are you so cold?” she whispers. “What time is it?”

Clover’s teeth are chattering and she doesn’t make sense. “The . . . Longing . . .” she says.

“You were inside the Longing?”

“Mm-hmm.”

But it’s the middle of the night, and a glance out of the window tells her that the waves and the wind are vicious. “Clover! You could’ve been injured. You could have fallen or . . . why did you do that? Did you sleepwalk?”

Clover makes a noise that sounds like “no.” She’s shaking so hard that the bed is creaking, and she’s so, so cold. Saffy’s mind races with worry. Did Clover try to swim out to the basking shark? It would be just like Clover to do something like that. But she’s not a great swimmer. She’d have drowned if she tried to do that. It must have been the rain. It’s pouring out there, like usual, drumming on the bothy roof and howling against the windows. Saffy reaches for her mohair jumper on the chair by the bed and wraps it around Clover’s little body beneath the blankets, then rubs her bare arms briskly to warm her up.