The Lighthouse Witches(47)
She locks it and ties the key around her neck. It will be her secret.
III
My mother was dead. There was no burial, no grave for me to visit and pay my respects. I could not speak of her to anyone. She was not missed, or remembered with fondness. The site where they burned her body was a black stain on the cliffside, the ashes of the bodies and the stakes swept away by sea and wind, but somehow the stone that had stood there since the beginnings of the earth retains the mark of the flame, scorched into it like grief.
I understand now that this was the beginning of my current mental state. Missing someone you love for an extended period of time can and will lead to madness, every bit as much as a wound that is not cleaned will lead to a festering sore, and thence an illness that spreads throughout the body. The only boundary between desire and obsession is time; if you crave someone long enough, it becomes a need.
It becomes your ever-waking thought. The only thing you live for.
Not long after my mother was burned, my uncle fetched away my brother, and I was alone, orphaned and unwanted. Amy persuaded her father to take me in, and so I kept myself scarce, trying to earn every scrap of bread he fed me by tending to the fields and caring for the animals. This helpfulness earned me both her father’s admiration and her brothers’ jealousy. They beat the living tar out of me almost daily, and while her father stopped it at first, I think he grew tired of having to defend me. It was extra work, and perhaps he questioned whether I didn’t deserve it.
Tavish was the strongest of the two and driven mad by his mother’s and sister’s deaths, for he liked to make a little stage play out of my beatings. He’d pretend I was a heretic, or accused of witchcraft, and he’d pull out a bag of stones and have me kneel while he cited scripture and stoned me.
Amy never spoke a word about her mother and sister, but she didn’t have to; I knew her thoughts as intimately as I knew my own. She barely spoke, never smiled, and I knew she blamed herself for what had happened. Had she never cursed Duncan, there would have been no trial. Twelve women had been burned to death. And in the weeks thereafter, three more women and their babies died in childbirth. Had Finwell been alive, it is likely they would have lived. And Amy knew it.
The curse that her mother had uttered was not forgotten. People were wary of everyone associated with the accused, but none more than Amy. She was yet a child, only twelve years old and small enough to pass for nine, but I saw people avoid her like a pox. I waited for the Privy Council to come and take her away for what she’d shouted at the execution, but it didn’t happen, and Amy threw herself into practicing her magic.
She was determined to bring her mother back.
One night, I saw her creep out over the fields. I followed her, careful to keep a distance. I wanted to see where she was going, yes, but above all I wanted to protect her.
I saw her move toward the bay, and my heart ached for her—she was going to the site of the executions.
I thought she might be going to pray where the stone was scorched, but as I drew near she was nowhere to be seen. The lip of the broch shone silver in the moonlight, the stones washed smooth by the ocean over centuries. I climbed over the smallest section of the ruin and looked around, and it was there that I saw the iron grate that led to where they’d held my mother, and where a woman had died in chains. A dungeon deep in the earth.
I knelt down to inspect it, running my hand over the grate. I felt tears creeping to my eyes. My mother had been thrown down there, and tortured into making a false confession. And if it wasn’t bad enough that she was murdered, they’d ensured that she was forever remembered not for her goodness but as a witch who had fornicated with Satan and cursed an elder to his death.
As I was looking, an outstretched hand reached up through the bars of the grate. I screamed and fell back, convinced it was a ghost or a demon. But then I heard a voice.
“Patrick? Get down here!”
It was Amy’s voice. Slowly, I crawled toward the grate and looked down. Her face was angled up at me, her eyes wide.
“I saw you following me,” she hissed. “Come and see what I’m doing.”
For no other person, alive or dead, would I have removed the grate and entered that terrifying place where only death and the horrors of Hell lingered. But Amy was down there, and I was concerned for her well-being. Truth of the matter was, even at that young age, I was prepared to die with her or for her—whichever came first.
What Amy showed me in the cave, the place that villagers were beginning to call Witches Hide, were carvings, elaborate runes etched into the rock.
“I recognize them,” Amy told me, excited. “My mother did these while she was down here.”
I felt sick at the thought of it—twelve starving, tortured, and terrified women, my mother among them, clawing at the rock with their bare hands. But Amy knew something I didn’t.
“Is it magic?” I asked her, and she nodded.
“The curse my mother shouted before she died. This is part of it.” She frowned. “But I don’t understand how to use it. Not yet, anyway.” She turned to me, her jaw set. “But I will.”
LIV, 1998
I
After the child turned up at the bothy and ran out, I went looking for him. I searched the Longing, then walked up and down the bay with a torch, searching the caves and the road. I worried that he’d drowned in the sea or died of hypothermia. I couldn’t stop thinking about his little cold hands and his terrified eyes. I felt responsible. I should have kept an eye on him, stopped him from running outside.