THE FILE ON THE MAYFAIR WITCHES 1 page

Translator’s Foreword to Parts I through IV:

The first four parts of this file contain material written by Petyr van Abel expressly for the Talamasca—in Latin, and primarily in our Latin code, a form of Latin used by the Talamasca in the fourteenth through the eighteenth centuries to keep its epistles and diary entries secret from prying eyes. Enormous amounts of material were written in English as well, as it was Petyr van Abel’s custom to write in English when he was among the French, and in French when he was among the English, to render the dialogue and certain thoughts and feelings more naturally than the old Latin code would allow.

Almost all of this material is in the form of epistles, as this was, and still is, the primary form in which reports to the archives of the Talamasca are made.

Stefan Franck was at this time the head of the order, and most of the following material is addressed to him in an easy and intimate and sometimes informal style. However, Petyr van Abel was always aware that he was writing for the record, and he took great pains to explain and to clarify for the inevitable uninformed reader as he went along. This is the reason that he might describe a canal in Amsterdam, though writing to the man who lived on the very canal.

The translator has omitted nothing. The material is adapted only where the original letters and diary entries have been damaged and are no longer legible. Or where words or phrases in the old Latin code elude the modern scholars within the order, or where obsolete words in English obscure the meaning for the modern reader. The spelling has been modernized, of course.

The modern reader should take into account that English at this time—the late seventeenth century—was already the tongue that we know. Such phrases as “pretty good” or “I guess” or “I suppose” were already current. They have not been added to the text.

If Petyr’s world view seems surprisingly “existential” for the period, one need only reread Shakespeare, who wrote nearly seventy-five years before, to realize how thoroughly atheistic, ironical, and existential were the thinkers of those times. The same may be said of Petyr’s attitude towards sexuality. The great repression of the nineteenth century sometimes causes us to forget that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were far more liberal in matters of the flesh.

Speaking of Shakespeare, Petyr had a special love of him and read the plays as well as the sonnets for pleasure. He often said that Shakespeare was his “philosopher.”

As for the full story of Petyr van Abel, quite a tale in its own right, it is told in the file under his name, which consists of seventeen volumes in which are included complete translations of every report he ever made, on every case which he investigated, in the order in which those reports were written.

We also possess two different portraits painted of him in Amsterdam, one by Franz Hals, done expressly for Roemer Franz, our director of the period, showing Petyr to be a tall, fair-haired youth—of almost Nordic height and blondness—with an oval face, prominent nose, a high forehead, and large inquisitive eyes; and the other, dated some twenty years later and painted by Thomas de Keyser, reveals a heavier build and a fuller face, though still distinctly narrow, with a neatly trimmed mustache and beard and long curling blond hair beneath a large-brimmed black hat. In both pictures Petyr appears relaxed and somewhat cheerful, as was so typical of the men featured in Dutch portraits of the time.

Petyr belonged to the Talamasca from boyhood until he died in the line of duty at the age of forty-three—as this, his last complete report to the Talamasca, will make clear.

By all accounts, Petyr was a talker, a listener, and a natural writer, and a passionate and impulsive man. He loved the artistic community of Amsterdam and spent many hours with painters in his leisure time. He was never detached from his investigations, and his commentary tends to be verbose, detailed, and at times excessively emotional. Some readers may find it annoying. Others may find it priceless, for not only does he give us florid pictures of what he witnessed, he provides more than a glimpse of his own character.

He was himself a limited mind reader (he confessed that he was not competent in the use of this power because he disliked and distrusted it), and he possessed the ability to move small objects, to stop clocks, and do other “tricks” at will.

As an orphan wandering the streets of Amsterdam, he first came into contact with the Talamasca at the age of eight. The story goes that, perceiving that the Motherhouse sheltered souls who were “different” just as he was different, he hung about, finally falling asleep one winter night on the doorstep, where he might have frozen had not Roemer Franz found him and brought him in. He was later discovered to be educated and able to write both Latin and Dutch, and to understand French as well.

All his life his memory of his early years with his parents was sporadic and unreliable, though he did undertake the investigation of his own background, and discovered not only the identity of his father, Jan van Abel, the famous surgeon of Leiden, but also voluminous writings by the man containing some of the most celebrated anatomical and medical illustrations of the time.

Petyr often said that the order became his father and mother. No member was ever more devoted.

Aaron Lightner
the Talamasca, London, 1954 THE MAYFAIR WITCHES

PART 1 / TRANSCRIPT ONE

From the Writings of Petyr van Abel
for the Talamasca
1689

September 1689, Montcleve, France

Dear Stefan,

I have at last reached Montcleve on the very edge of the Cévennes mountains—to wit in the foothills of the region—and the grim little fortified town with its tiled roofs and dreary bastions is indeed in readiness for the burning of a great witch as I had been told.

It is early autumn here, and the air from the valley is fresh, perhaps even touched with the heat of the Mediterranean, and from the gates one has the most pleasing view of vineyards where the local wine, Blanquette de Limoux, is made.

As I have drunk more than my fill of it on this first evening, I can attest it is quite as good as these poor townsfolk insist.

But you know, Stefan, I have no love of this region, for these mountains echo still with the cries of the murdered Cathars who were burned in such great numbers all through this region centuries ago. How many centuries must pass before the blood of so many has soaked deep enough into the earth to be forgotten?

The Talamasca will always remember. We who live in a world of books and crumbling parchment, of flickering candles and eyes sore and squinting in the shadows, have always, our hands on history. It is now for us. And I can remember, aye, long before I ever heard the word Talamasca, how my father spoke of those murdered heretics, and of the lies that were promulgated against them. For he had read much of them as well.

Alas, what has this to do with the tragedy of the Comtesse de Montcleve, who is to die tomorrow on the pyre built beside the doors of the Cathedral of Saint-Michel? It is all stone, this old fortified town, but not the hearts of its inhabitants, though nothing can prevent this lady’s execution as I mean to show.

My heart is aching, Stefan. I am more than helpless, for I am besieged by revelations and memories. And have the most surprising story to tell.

But I shall take things in order as best I can, attempting to confine myself as always—and failing—to those aspects of this sad adventure which are worthy of note.

Allow me to say first off that I cannot prevent this burning. For not only is the lady in question deemed to be an unrepentant and powerful witch, but she stands accused of killing her husband by poison, and the testimony against her is exceedingly grievous, as I shall go on to make plain.

It is the mother of her husband who had come forth to accuse her daughter-in-law of intercourse with Satan, and of murder; and the two small sons of the unfortunate Comtesse have joined with their grandmother in her accusations, while the only daughter of the accused witch, one Charlotte, aged twenty and exceedingly beautiful, has already fled to the West Indies with her young husband from Martinique and their infant son, seeking to avert a charge of witchcraft against herself.

But not all of this is as it seems. And I shall explain fully what I have discovered. Only bear with me as I shall begin at the very beginning and then plunge into the dim past. There is much here that is of interest to the Talamasca, but little that the Talamasca can hope to do. And I am in torment as I write, for I know this lady, and came here on the suspicion perhaps that I would know her, though I hoped and prayed that I would be wrong.

When last I wrote you, I was just leaving the German states, and weary to death of their awful persecutions, and of how little I was able to interfere. I had witnessed two mass burnings in Treves, of the most despicable suffering made all the worse by the Protestant clerics who are as fierce as the Catholics and in complete agreement with them that Satan is afoot in the land and waging his victories through the most unlikely of townsfolk—mere simpletons in some cases, though in most merely honest housewives, bakers, carpenters, beggars, and the like.

How curious it is that these religious people believe the devil to be so stupid that he should seek to corrupt only the poor and powerless—why not the king of France for once?—and the population at large to be so weak.

But we have pondered these things many times, you and I. I was drawn here, rather than home to Amsterdam for which I long with all my soul, because the circumstances of this trial were well-known far and wide, and are most peculiar in that it is a great Comtesse who is accused, and not the village midwife, a stammering fool wont to name every other poor soul as her accomplice and so forth and so on.

But I have found many of the same elements which are found elsewhere in that there is present here the popular inquisitor, Father Louvier, who has bragged for a decade that he had burned hundreds of witches, and will find witches here if they be here to be found. And there is present also a popular book on witchcraft and demonology by this very same man, much circulated throughout France, and read with extreme fascination by half-literate persons who pore over its lengthy descriptions of demons as if they were biblical Scripture, when in fact they are stupid filth.

And oh, I must not fail to make mention of the engravings in this fine text which is passed from hand to hand with such reverence, for they are the cause of much clamor, being skillfully done pictures of devils dancing by moonlight, and old hags feasting upon babies or flying about on brooms.

This book has held this town spellbound, and it will surprise no one of our order that it was the old Comtesse who produced it, the very accuser of her daughter-in-law, who has said straight out on the church steps that were it not for this worthy book she should not have known a witch was living in her very midst.

Ah, Stefan, give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a dangerous enemy indeed.

But again, I stray from my story.

I arrived here at four o’clock this evening, coming through the mountains and down south towards the valley, a slow and laborious journey on horseback indeed. And once in sight of the town, which hovered above me like a great fortress, for that is what it once was, I straightaway divested myself of all those documents which might prove me to be other than as I have presented myself—a Catholic priest and student of the witchcraft pestilence, making his way through the countryside to study convicted witches so that he might better weed them out of his own parish at home.

Placing all of my extraneous and incriminating possessions in the strongbox, I buried it safely in the woods. Then wearing my finest clerical garb and silver crucifix and other accoutrements to present me as a rich cleric, I rode up and towards the gates, and past the towers of the Château de Montcleve, the former home of the unfortunate Comtesse whom I knew only by the title of the Bride of Satan, or the Witch of Montcleve.

Straightaway, I began to question those I met as to why there was such a great pyre set in the very middle of the open place before the cathedral doors, and why the peddlers had set up their stands to sell their drinks and cakes when there was no fair to be seen, and what was the reason for the viewing stands having been built to the north of the church and beside it against the walls of the jail? And why are the four inn yards of the town overflowing with horses and coaches, and why are so many milling and talking and pointing to the high barred window of the jail above the viewing stand, and then to the loathsome pyre?

Was it to do with the Feast of St. Michael, which is tomorrow, the day that is called Michaelmas?

Not a person to whom I spoke hesitated to enlighten me that it had nought to do with the saint, though this is his cathedral, except that they had chosen his feast the better to please God and all his angels and saints, with the execution tomorrow of the beautiful Comtesse who is to be burnt alive, without benefit of being strangled beforehand, so as to set an example to all witches in the neighborhood of whom there were many, though the Comtesse had named absolutely none as her accomplices even under the most unspeakable torture, so great was the devil’s power over her, but the inquisitors would indeed find them out.

And from these sundry persons who would have talked me into a stupor had I allowed it, I did learn further that there was scarce a family in the vicinity of this prosperous community who had not seen firsthand the great powers of the Comtesse, as she did freely heal those who were sick, and prepare for them herb potions, and lay her own hands upon their afflicted limbs and bodies, and for this she asked nothing except that she be remembered in their prayers. She had in fact great fame for countering the black magic of lesser witches; and those suffering from spells went to her often for bread and salt to drive away the devils inflicted on them by persons unknown.

Such raven hair you never saw, said one of these to me, and ah, but she was so beautiful before they broke her, said another, and yet another, my child is alive on account of her, and yet a fourth that the Comtesse could cool the hottest fever, and that to those under her she had given gold on feast days, and had nothing for anyone but kind words.

Stefan, you would have thought I was on my way to a canonization, not a burning. For no one whom I met in this first hour, during which I took my time in the narrow streets, riding hither and thither as if lost, and stopping to talk with any and all I passed, had a cruel word for the lady at all.

But without a doubt, these simple folk seemed all the more tantalized by the fact that it was a good and great lady who would be committed to the flames before them, as if her beauty and her kindnesses made her death a grand spectacle for them to enjoy. I tell you, it was with fear in my heart of their eloquent praise of her, and their quickness to describe her, and the glitter that came over them when they spoke of her death, that I finally had enough of it and went on to the pyre itself and rode back and forth before it, inspecting its great size.

Aye, it takes a great deal of wood and coal to burn a human being complete and entire. I gazed on it with dread as always, wondering why it is that I have chosen this work when I do not ever enter a town such as this, with its barren stone buildings, and its old cathedral with its three steeples, but that I do not hear in my ears the noise of the mob, the crackling of the fire, and the coughing and gasping and finally the shrieks of the dying. You know that no matter how often I witness these despicable burnings, I cannot inure myself to them. What is it in my soul that forces me to seek this same horror again and again?

Do I do penance for some crime, Stefan? And when will I have done penance enough? Do not think I ramble on. I have a point in all this, as you will soon see and understand. For I have come face to face once more with a young woman I once loved as dearly as I have loved anyone, and I remember more vividly than her charms the blankness of her face when I first beheld her, chained to a cart on a lonely road in Scotland, only hours after she had seen her own mother burnt.

Perhaps if you remember her at all you have guessed the truth already. Do not read ahead. Bear with me. For as I rode back and forth before the pyre, listening to the stammering and stupidity of a pair of local wine sellers who boasted of having seen other burnings as if this were something to be proud of, I did not know the full history of the Comtesse. I do now.

At last, at perhaps five of the clock, I went to the finest of the inns of the town, and the oldest, which stands right opposite the church, and commands from all its front windows a view of the doors of Saint-Michel and the place of execution which I have described.

As the town was obviously filling up for this event, I fully expected to be sent away. You can imagine my surprise when I discovered that the occupants of the very best rooms on the front of the house were being turned out for, in spite of their fine clothes and airs, they had been discovered to be penniless. I at once paid the small fortune required for these “fine chambers,” and, asking for a quantity of candles, that I might write late into the night as I am doing now, I went up the crooked little stair and found that this was a tolerable place with a decent straw mattress, not too filthy all things considered and one of them being that this is not Amsterdam, and a small hearth of which I have no need on account of the beautiful September weather, and the windows though small do indeed look out upon the pyre.

“You can see very well from here,” said the innkeeper to me proudly, and I wondered how many times he had seen such a spectacle, and what were his thoughts on the proceedings, but then he went to talking on his own of how beautiful was the Comtesse Deborah and shaking his head sadly as did everyone else when they spoke of her, and what was to come.

“Deborah you said, that is her name?”

“Aye,” he answered, “Deborah de Montcleve, our beautiful Comtesse, though she is not French you know, and if only she had been a little bit of a stronger witch—” and then he broke off with a bowed head.

I tell you the knife was at my breast then, Stefan. I guessed who she was, and could scarce endure to press him further. Yet I did. “Pray continue,” I said.

“She said when she saw her husband dying that she could not save him, that it was beyond her power … ” And here with sad sighs he broke off once more.

Stefan, we have seen countless such cases. The cunning woman of the village becomes a witch only when her powers to heal do not work. Before that, she is everyone’s good sorceress, and there is nary the slightest talk of devils. And so here it was again.

I set up my writing desk, at which I sit now, put away the candles, and then betook myself to the public rooms below, where a little fire was going against the damp and dark in this stony place, about which several local philosophers were warming themselves, or drying out their besotted flesh, one or the other, and seating myself at a comfortable table and ordering supper, I tried to banish from my mind the curious obsession I have with all comfortable hearth fires, that the condemned feel this cozy warmth before it turns to agony and their bodies are consumed.

“Bring me the very best of your wine,” I said, “and let me share it with these good gentlemen here, in the hopes that they will tell me about this witch, as I have much to learn.”

My invitation was at once accepted and I ate at the very center of a parliament who commenced to talk all at once, so that I might pick and choose at different times the one to whom I wished to listen, and shut all the others out.

“How were the charges brought?” I asked straightaway.

And the chorus began its various unharmonized descriptions, that the Comte had been riding in the forest when after a fall from his horse, he staggered into the house. After a good meal and a good sleep, he rose well restored and prepared to go hunting, when a pain came over him and he took to his bed again.

All night long the Comtesse sat at his bedside, along with his mother, and listened to his groans. “The injury is deep inside,” declared the wife. “I can do nothing to help it. Soon the blood will come to his lips. We must give him what we can for his pain.”

And then as foretold the blood did appear in his mouth, and his groans grew louder, and he cried to his wife who had cured so many to bring her finest remedies to him. Again the Comtesse confided to her mother-in-law and to her children that this was an injury beyond her magic. The tears sprang to her eyes.

“Now, can a witch cry, I ask you,” said the innkeeper, who had been listening as he wiped the table.

I confessed that I did not think that a witch could.

They went on to describe how the Comte lingered, and finally screamed as his pains grew sharper, though his wife had given him wine and herbs aplenty to dull his suffering and deliver his mind.

“Save me, Deborah,” he screamed, and would not see the priest when he came to him. But then in his last hour, white and feverish, and bleeding from the bowels and from his mouth, he drew the priest close to him and declared that his wife was a witch and always had been, that her mother had been burnt for witchcraft and now he was suffering for all their wrongs.

In horror the priest drew away, thinking these are the ravings of a dying man. For all his years here, he had worshiped the Comtesse and lived on her generosity, but the old Comtesse took her son by the shoulders and set him down on the pillow, and said, “Speak, my son.”

“A witch, that’s what she is, and what’s she always been. All these things she confessed to me, bewitching me, with the wiles of a young bride, crying upon my chest. And by this means she bound me to her and her evil tricks. In the town of Donnelaith in Scotland, her mother taught her the black arts, and there her mother was burnt before her very eyes.”

And to his wife, who knelt with her arms beneath her face on the side of the bed, sobbing, he cried, “Deborah, for the love of God. I am in agony. You saved the baker’s wife; you saved the miller’s daughter. Why will you not save me!”

So maddened was he that the priest could not give him the viaticum, and he died cursing, a horrible death indeed.

The young Comtesse went wild as his eyes closed, calling out to him, and professing her love for him, and then lay as if dead herself. Her son Chrétien and her son Philippe gathered about her, and her fair daughter Charlotte, and they sought to comfort her and hold tight to her as she lay prostrate on the very floor.

But the old Comtesse had her wits about her and had marked what her son said. To her daughter-in-law’s private apartments she went, and found in the cabinets not only her countless unguents and oils and potions for the curing of the ill and for poisoning, but also a strange doll carved crudely of wood with a head made of bone, and eyes and mouth drawn upon it, and black hair fixed to it, and tiny flowers in its hair made from silk. In horror the old Comtesse dropped this effigy upon knowing that it could only be evil, and that it looked far too much like the corn dolls made by the peasants in their old Beltane rituals against which the priests are forever preaching; and throwing open the other doors, she beheld jewels and gold beyond all reckoning, in heaps and in caskets, and in little sacks of silk, which, said the old Comtesse, the woman surely meant to steal when her husband was dead.

The young Comtesse was arrested that very hour, while the grandmother took into her private chambers her grandchildren that she might instruct them in the nature of this terrible evil, so that they might stand with her against the witch, and come to no harm.

“But it was well-known,” said the innkeeper’s son, who talked more than anyone else present, “that the jewels were the property of the young Comtesse and had been brought with her from Amsterdam where she had been the widow of a rich man, and our Comte before he went in search of a rich wife had little more than a handsome face, and threadbare clothes, and his father’s castle and land.”

Oh, how these words bruised me, Stefan, you cannot compass. Only wait and hear my tale.

Sad sighs came from the entire little company.

“And with her gold, she was so generous,” said another, “for you had but to go to her and beg for help and it was yours.”

“Oh, she’s a powerful witch, no doubt of it,” said another, “for how else could she bind so many to herself as she bound the Comte?” But even this was not said with hate and fear.

I was reeling, Stefan.

“So now the old Comtesse has taken this money into her charge,” I remarked, seeing the bare bones of the plot. “And what, pray tell, was the fate of the doll?”

“Disappeared,” they said all in a chorus, as if they were answering the litany in the cathedral. “Disappeared.” But Chrétien swore that he had seen this hideous thing and knew it to be from Satan, and bore witness that his mother had spoken to it, as if it were an idol.

And on they went, breaking up into Babel again, and warring diatribes, that no doubt the beautiful Deborah had more than likely murdered the Amsterdam husband before the Comte had ever met her, for that was the way of a witch, wasn’t it, and could anyone deny that she was a witch, once the story of her mother was known?

“But is this story of the mother’s death proven to be true?” I pressed.

“Letters were written from the Parliament of Paris, to which the lady appealed, to the Scottish Privy Council and they did send verification that indeed a Scottish witch had been burnt in Donnelaith over twenty years before, and a daughter Deborah had survived her, and been taken away from that place by a man of God.”

How my heart sank to hear this, for I knew now there was no hope at all. For what worse testimony could there be against her, than that her mother had been burnt before her? And I did not even need to ask, had the Parliament of Paris turned down her appeal?

“Yes, and with the official letter from Paris, there came also an illustrated leaflet, much circulated in Scotland still, which told of the evil witch of Donnelaith who had been a midwife and a cunning woman of great renown until her fiendish practices were made known.”

Stefan, if you do not recognize the Scottish witch’s daughter now from this account you do not remember the story. But I no longer held out the slightest doubt. “My Deborah,” I whispered in my heart. There was no chance that I could be wrong.

Claiming that I had witnessed many an execution in my time, and hoped to witness more, I asked the name of the Scottish witch, for perhaps I had perused the record of her trial in my own studies. “Mayfair,” they said, “Suzanne of the Mayfair, who called herself Suzanne Mayfair for want of any other name.”

Deborah. It could be no other than the child I had rescued from the Highlands so very long ago.

“Oh, but Father, there are such dreadful truths in that little book of the Scottish witch, that I hesitate to say.”

“Such books are not Scripture,” I replied in defiance. But they went on to enlighten me to the effect that the entire trial of Suzanne of the Mayfair had been sent on through the Parliament of Paris, and was in the hands of the inquisitor now.

“Was poison found in the Comtesse’s chambers?” I asked, trying for what bit of truth I could obtain.

No, they said, but so heavy was the testimony against her that this did not matter, for her mother-in-law had heard her address beings that were invisible, and her son Chrétien had seen this also, and her son Philippe, and even Charlotte, though Charlotte had fled rather than answer questions against her mother, and other persons too had seen the power of the Comtesse, who could move objects without touching them, and judge the future, and know countless impossible things.

“And she confesses nothing?”

“It was the devil who would put her in a trance when she was tortured,” said the innkeeper’s son. “For how else could any human being slip into a stupor when a hot iron is applied to the flesh?”

At this I felt myself sicken and grow weary, and almost overcome. Yet I continued to question them. “And named no accomplices?” I asked. “For the naming of accomplices they are always much urged to do.”

“Ah, but she was the most powerful witch ever heard of in these parts, Father,” said the vintner. “What need had she of others? The inquisitor, when he heard the names of those whom she had cured, likened her to the great sorceresses of mythology, and to the Witch of Endor herself.”

Date: 2015-12-18; view: 593