I saw this imp, as if loosed from a bottle, cavorting and wreaking havoc at will. I remembered Roemer’s old warnings. I remembered Geertruid and the things which she had said. But this was worse even than they might have imagined.
“Aye, you are correct,” she said to me, sadly, having read this from my mind. “You must write this to Charlotte,” she beseeched me. “Be careful with your words, lest the letter fall into the wrong hands, but write it, write it so that Charlotte sees the whole of what you have to say!”
“Deborah, restrain this thing. Let me tell her, at the behest of her mother, to drop the emerald into the sea.”
“It is too late for that now, Petyr, and the world being what it is, I would send my Lasher to Charlotte even if you had not come tonight to hear this last request from me. My Lasher is powerful beyond your dreams of a daimon, and he has learnt much.”
“Learned,” I repeated in amazement. “How learned, Deborah, for he is merely a spirit, and they are forever foolish and therein lies the danger, that in granting our wishes they do not understand the complexity of them, and thereby prove our undoing. There are a thousand tales that prove it. Has this not happened? How so do you say learned?”
“Think on it, Petyr, what I have told you. I tell you my Lasher has learnt much, and his error came not from his unchangeable simplicity but from the sharpening of purpose in him. But promise me, for all that passed between us once, write to my beloved daughter! This you must do for me.”
“Very well!” I declared, wringing my hands. “I shall do it, but I shall tell her also all that I have just said to you.”
“Fair enough, my good priest, my good scholar,” she said bitterly, and smiling. “Now go, Petyr. I cannot bear your presence here any longer. And my Lasher is near to me, and we would talk together, and on the morrow, I beg you, get indoors and safe once you see that my hands and feet are unfettered and that I have come to the church doors.”
“God in heaven help me, Deborah, if only I could take you from this place, if it were possible by any means-” And here I broke down, Stefan. I lost all conscience. “Deborah, if your servant, Lasher, can effect an escape with my assistance, you have only to tell me how it might be done!”
I saw myself wresting her from the mad crowds that surrounded us and of stealing her away over the walls of the town and into the woods.
How she smiled at me then, how tenderly and sadly. It was the way she had smiled when we had parted years before.
“What fancies, Petyr,” she said. Then her smile grew even broader, and she looked half mad in the candlelight, or even more like an angel or a mad saint. Her white face was as beautiful as the candle flame itself. “My life is over, but I have traveled far and wide from this little cell,” she said. “Now go. Go and send my message to Charlotte, but only when you are safely away from this town.”
I kissed her hands, They had burnt the palms when they tortured her. There were deep scabs on them, and these too I kissed. I did not care.
“I have always loved you,” I said to her. And I said other things, many things, foolish and tender, which I will not write here. All this she bore with perfect resignation, and she knew what I had only just discovered: that I
This will pass, Stefan. I know it. I knew it then, only hours ago when I left her cell. But it is true now, and I am like St. John of the Cross in his “Dark Night of the Soul.” I tell you all consolation has left me. And on what account?
That I love her, and only that. For I know that her daimon has destroyed her, as surely as it destroyed her mother. And that all the warnings of Roemer and Geertruid and all the wizards of the ages, have been proven here to be true.
I could not leave her without embracing her and kissing her. But I could feel her agony when I held her-the agony of the burns and the bruises on her body, and her muscles torn from the rack. And this had been my beautiful Deborah, this ruin that clung to me, and wept suddenly as if I had turned a key in a lock.
“I am sorry, my beloved,” I said, for I blamed myself for these tears.
“It is sweet to hold you,” she whispered. And then she pushed me away from her. “Go now, and remember everything that I have said.”
I went out a madman. The square was still filling with those who had come to see the execution. By torchlight there were those putting up their stalls, and others sleeping under blankets along the walls.
I told the old priest I was not at all convinced the woman was a witch, and I wanted to see the inquisitor at once. I tell you, Stefan, I was bound to move heaven and earth for her.
But you know how it went.
We came to the chateau and they admitted us, and this fool priest was very glad to be with someone of importance, barging in upon the banquet to which he had not been invited, but I pulled myself up now, and used my most impressive manner, questioning the inquisitor directly in Latin, and the old Comtesse, a dark-skinned woman, very Spanish in appearance, who received me with extraordinary patience considering the manner in which I began.
The inquisitor, Father Louvier, handsome and very well fed, with fine groomed beard and hair and twinkling black eyes, saw nothing suspicious in my manner, and became obsequious to me as if I were from the Vatican, which I might be for all he knew, and merely sought to comfort me when I said perhaps an innocent woman was to be burnt.
“You never saw such a witch,” said the Comtesse, who laughed in an ugly deep-throated fashion and offered me some wine. She then presented me to the Comtesse de Chamillart, who sat beside her, and to every other noble of the surrounding area who had come to lodge at the chateau and see the witch burnt.
Every question I asked and objection I raised and suggestion I made to offer was met with the same easy conviction by this assemblage. For them the battle had been fought and won. All that remained was the celebration that would take place in the morning.
The boys were crying in their chambers, true, but they would recover. And there was nothing to fear from Deborah, for if her demon were strong enough to free her he would have done so by now. And was it not so with all witches? Once they were in chains, the devil left them to their fate.
“But this woman has not confessed,” I declared, “and her husband fell from his horse in the forest, by his own admission. Surely you cannot convict on the evidence of a feverish and dying man!”
It was as if I were flinging dry leaves into their faces, for all the effect it had upon them.
“I loved my son before all things in this world,” said the old Comtesse, her small black eyes hard and her mouth ugly. Then as if thinking the better of her tone, she said with complete hypocrisy, “Poor Deborah, have I ever said that I did not love Deborah, that I did not forgive Deborah a thousand things?”
“You say too much!” declared Louvier very sanctimoniously, and with an exaggerated gesture as he was drunk, the fiend.
“I don’t speak of witchcraft,” said the old woman, quite unperturbed by his manner, “I speak of my daughter- in-law and all her weaknesses and secrets, for who in this town does not know that Charlotte was born too soon after the wedding, yet my son was so blind to the charms of this woman, and so adoring of Charlotte, and so grateful to Deborah for her dowry and so much a fool in all respects … ”
“Must we speak of it!” whispered the Comtesse de Chamillart, who appeared to tremble. “Charlotte is gone from our midst.”
“She will be found and burnt like her mother,” declared Louvier, and there were nods and assents all around.
And they went to talking amongst themselves about how very content they would all be after the executions, and as I sought to question them, they merely gestured for me to be quiet, to drink, not to concern myself.
It was horrible the manner in which they then ignored me, like beings in a dream who cannot hear our screams. Yet I persisted that they had no evidence of night flying, of Sabbats, of intercourse with demons, and all the other foolish evidence which elsewhere sends these creatures to the stake. As for the healing, what was this but the skill of the cunning woman, and why convict for that? The doll might not have been anything more than an instrument of healing.
