The Lighthouse Witches(52)

IV

I was desperate to make sense of what Isla and the others had told me that night at the café. About the history of Lòn Haven, about the curse the witches had placed on the island. About wildlings.

I’d heard about a memorial to the witches who had been killed at the Longing. It was a plaque inside the Auld Kirk, or old church, in the south of the island.

I drove there the next morning. The church building was small and plain, the stonework blackened over the years and the graveyard filled with indecipherable tombstones that lay wonky and haphazard among mossy lawn, their script smoothed away by time. An old clock at the apex of the church had stopped. A Latin verse was carved into the stone around it: Maleficos non patieris vivere. Later, I’d discover its English translation:

    You shall not suffer a witch to live.



It was dark inside. Stained glass panels depicted scenes of Christ’s life along the east wall. The pews were empty, and I noticed some shrines set up along the sides, paintings of angels on wooden boards shimmering in the faint light of candles. At one of the shrines, a small black-and-white photograph of a child was propped up against the wooden board. A little boy, his hand held up as though he was waving. I squinted at it. Who was he?

“Can I be of any help to you?”

I looked up and saw a man in a long black robe and a white collar standing there. The pastor. “I was just . . . I was wondering about the memorial to the women who were burned during the witch hunts,” I said awkwardly.

He raised his eyebrows. “I’ve heard about some work being done there recently,” he said. “Are you the painter?”

I nodded. “Yes.”

“Come this way.”

I followed him to the back of the church, which was laid out as a cross, with three sections set up as shrines. I supposed one of them to be set up to commemorate the women, but he walked past them to the far wall, stopping at a small rock sticking up out of the ground. He knelt by it and blew some dust off one of the faces.

“This is it?” I said. Surely he was wrong?

He nodded. “If you look closely, you can see the dates of the burnings.”

I knelt down and looked harder. It was faint, but I could make out a year, etched in old script. 1662.

“You were expecting something more, I take it?”

I nodded. “How do you even know this is the memorial to the witches?”

“It’s in the parish history books,” he said. “I can tell you their names, if you like?”

I straightened. “I’d love that.”

He took me to a small reading room installed in a modern extension at the back of the church. On a microfiche viewer, he toggled the magnifier until an old, handwritten document came into view. The Lighthouse Witches. And beneath it, the names of twelve women.





1662


Elspeth Alexander

Margaret Barclay

Catherine Campbell

Finwell Hyndman

Marie Lamont

Agnes Roberts

Jean Anderson

Helen Beatie

Margaret Fulton

Jenny Hyndman

Agnes Naismith

Jane Wishart



“Is there information on why they were accused of witchcraft?” I asked.

He shook his head. “To be honest, the fact that we know the names of these women is considered substantial, given the dearth of information about the witch hunts. You might find the name of the commissioner and perhaps the method by which they were put to death if you go to the National Library, but it would take some digging around.”

I nodded. “Thank you.”

I think it was the fact that there was so little information about, and such a sorry memorial for, these women that I wrote down the names on a scrap of paper, clutching it tightly as I walked out of there.

That afternoon at the Longing, I asked Finn about the wildling myth, and the boy I’d seen.

He straightened and gave a stretch, having spent half an hour on his hands and knees to finish plastering a lower section of the Longing. “Maybe you saw a ghost.”

“A ghost?”

He cocked an eyebrow. “Aye. Lòn Haven has a bit of a track record of folk vanishing into the ether.”

“Don’t tell me you believe in ghosts, Finn.”

“Ghosts, not exactly. Traces, yeah. Sort of.”

“Traces?”

“Here’s my theory. Everything is energy. We all leave something behind. Now, there’s folk who’ll swear on their granny’s last breath that they’ve seen a ghost. And I reckon some of them have. Or rather, they’ve seen traces of a past energy.”

My face was screwed up, because after last night at Isla’s café, I was way past tolerating nonsense. And when I got back from the church, I found I’d started spotting again. I was tired of the bullshit.

But Finn was talking with his hands now, trying to make some sense. “We think that time moves forward, in a linear fashion. Yeah? But sometimes you get déjà vu, or there’s some mad coincidence that you can’t explain. I think time doesn’t move in a linear fashion, but in a spiral, and sometimes there’s echoes from the past. And a ghost is just an echo of someone.”

“And why would I see such an echo?”

He shrugged. “Now, that I’ve got no clue about. Maybe he was trying to tell you something.”