shivering now as I write, in the prison across the square.
I am in my room at the inn, having only lately left her. I have candles aplenty, as I have told you, and too much wine to drink and a bit of a fire to drive out the cold. I am seated at the table facing the window, and in our common code I will now tell you all.
For it was twenty-five years ago that I first came upon this woman, as I have told you, and I was a young man of eighteen years then and she only a girl of twelve.
This was before your time in the Talamasca, Stefan, and I had come to it only some six years before as an orphaned child. It seemed the pyres of the witches were burning from one end of Europe to the other, and so I had been sent out early from my studies to accompany Junius Paulus Keppelmeister, our old witch scholar, on his travels throughout Europe, and he had only just begun to show to me his few poor methods of trying to save the witches, by defending them where he could and inclining them in private to name as accomplices their accusers as well as the wives of the most prominent citizens of the town so the entire investigation might be discredited, and the original charges be thrown out.
And I had only lately been made to understand, as I traveled with him, that we were always in search of the true magical person-the reader of minds, the mover of objects, the commander of spirits, though seldom if ever, even in the worst persecutions, was any true sorcerer to be found.
It was my eighteenth year as I have told you, and my first to venture out of the Motherhouse since I had begun my education there, and when Junius took ill and died in Edinburgh, I was at my wit’s end. We had been on our way to investigate the trial of a Scottish cunning woman, very much famed for her healing power, who had cursed a milkmaid in her village and been accused of witchcraft though no evil had befallen the maid.
On his last night in this world, Junius ordered me to continue to the Highland village without him; and told me to cling fast to my disguise as a Swiss Calvinist scholar. I was far too young to be called a minister by anyone, and so could not make use of Junius’s documents as such; but I had traveled as his scholarly companion in plain Protestant clothes, and so went on in this manner on my own.
You cannot imagine my fear, Stefan.
And the burnings of Scotland terrified me. The Scots are and were, as you know, as fierce and terrible as the French and Germans, learning nothing it seems from the more merciful and reasonable English. And so afraid was I on this my first journey that even the beauty of the Highlands did not work its spell upon me.
Rather when I saw that the village was small and at a great remove from its nearest neighbor, and that its people were sheepherders, I knew even greater dread for their ignorance and the ferocity of their superstition. And to the dreary aspect of the whole was added the nearby ruins of a once great cathedral, rising like the bones of a leviathan out of the high grass, and far beyond across a deep valley, the forlorn picture of a castle of rounded towers and tiny windows, which might have been an empty ruin, for all I could see.
How shall I ever be of assistance here, I thought, without Junius to aid me? And riding into the village proper I soon discovered I had come too late, for the witch had been burnt that very day, and the wagons had just come to clear away the pyre.
Cart after cart was filled with ashes and charred bits of wood and bone and coal, and then the procession moved out of the little place, with its solemn-faced folk standing about, and into the green country again, and it was then that I laid eyes upon Deborah Mayfair, the witch’s daughter.
Her hands bound, her dress ragged and dirty, she had been taken to witness the casting of her mother’s ashes to the four winds.
Mute she stood there, her black hair parted in the middle and hanging down her back in rich waves, her blue eyes dry of all tears.
“ ’Tis the mark of the witch,” said an old woman who stood by watching, “that she cannot shed a tear.”
Ahh, but I knew the child’s blank face; I knew her sleeplike walk, her slow indifference to what she saw as the ashes were dumped out and the horses rode through them to scatter them. I knew because I knew myself in childhood, orphaned and roaming the streets of Amsterdam after the death of my father; and I remembered how when men and women spoke to me, it did not even cross my mind to answer, or to look away, or to change my manner for any reason. And even when I was slapped or shaken, I retained this extraordinary quietude, only wondering mildly why they would bother to do such a curious thing; better to look perhaps at the slant of the sunlight striking the wall behind them, as at the furious expressions on their faces, or take heed of the growls that came from their lips.
This tall and stately girl of twelve had been flogged as they burnt her mother. They had turned her head to make her watch, as the lash fell.
“What will they do with her?” I asked the old woman.
“They should burn her, but they are afraid to,” she answered. “She is so young and a merry-begot, and no one would bring harm to a merry-begot, and who knows who her father might be.” And with that the old woman turned and gave a grave look to the castle that stood, leagues away across the green valley, clinging to the high and barren rocks.
You know, Stefan, many a child has been executed in these persecutions. But each village is different. And this was Scotland. And I did not know what was a merry-begot or who lived in the castle or how much any of this might mean.
I watched in silence as they put the child on a cart and drove her back towards the town. Her dark hair blew out with the wind as the horses picked up speed. She did not turn her head to left or right, but stared straight forward, the ruffian beside her holding onto her to keep her from falling as the rough wooden wheels bounced over the ruts of the road.
“Ah, but they should burn her and be done with it,” said the old woman now, as if I had argued with her, when in truth I had said nothing, and then she spat to one side, and said: “If the Duke does not move to stop them,” and here she looked once more to the distant castle, “I think that burn her they will.”
Then and there I made my decision. I would take her, by some ruse if I could.
Leaving the old woman to return on foot to her farm, I followed the girl in the cart back to the village, and only once did I see her wake from her seeming stupor, and this was when we passed the ancient stones outside the village, and I mean by this those huge standing stones in a circle, from the dark times before history, of which you know more than I will ever know. To a circle of these she looked with great and lingering curiosity, though why it was not possible to see.
For naught but a lone man stood far out in the field, in their midst, staring back at her, with the powerful light of the open valley beyond him-a man no older than myself perhaps, tall and slight of build with dark hair, but I could hardly see him, for so bright was the horizon that he seemed transparent, and I thought perhaps he was a spirit and not a man at all.
It did seem that their glances met as the girl’s cart passed, but of none of this part am I certain, only that some person or thing was momentarily there. I marked it only for she was so lifeless, and it may have some bearing upon our story; and I think now that it does indeed have bearing; but that is for us both to determine at some later time. I shall go on.
I went to the minister at once, and to the commission which had been appointed by the Scottish Privy Council and had not yet disbanded, for it was at this very hour dining, as was the custom, with a good meal being provided by the estate of the dead witch. She had had much gold in her hut, said the innkeeper to me as I entered, and this gold had paid for her trial, her torture, the witch pricker, the witch judge who tried her, and the wood and the coal used to burn her, and indeed the carts that carried her ashes away.
“Sup with us,” said the fellow to me as he explained all this, “for the witch is paying. And there’s more gold still.”
I declined. And was not pressed for explanation, thank heaven, and going right to the men at the board I declared myself to be a student of the Bible and a God-fearing man. Might I take the witch’s child with me to Switzerland, to a good Calvinist minister there who would take her in and educate her and make a Christian of her and wipe the memory of her mother from her mind?
I said far too much to these men. Little was required. To wit, only the word Switzerland was required. For they wanted to rid themselves of her, they said it straight out, and the Duke wanted them to be rid of her, and not to burn her, and she was a merry-begot, which made the villagers most afraid.
“And what is that, pray tell?” I asked.
To which they explained that the people of Highland villages were most attached still to the old customs, and
