THE FILE ON THE MAYFAIR WITCHES 4 page

The month before Roelant died, a young female painter of exquisite talent, Judith de Wilde, came to reside under his roof with Deborah, and to remain in the house with her aging father, Anton de Wilde, when Roelant was gone.

Roelant’s brothers took his sons home to the countryside, and the Widow Roelant and Judith de Wilde now together maintained the house, caring for the old man with great gentleness, but living a life of gaiety and many diversions as the rooms were thrown open all day and evening to the writers and poets and scholars and painters who chose to come there, and the students of Judith, who admired her as much as they admired any male painter, for she was just as fine, and had her membership in the Guild of St. Luke the same as a man.

Under Roemer’s edict, I could not enter. But many was the time I passed, and I swear to you, if I lingered long enough, Deborah would appear at the upstairs window, a shadow behind the glass. Sometimes I would see no more of her than a flashing light from the green emerald, and at other times she would open the window and beckon, in vain, for me to come inside.

Roemer himself went to see her, but she only sent him away.

“She thinks she knows more than we do,” he said sadly. “But she knows nothing or she would not play with this thing. This is always the mistake of the sorceress, you see, to imagine her power is complete over the unseen forces that do her bidding, when in fact, it is not. And what of her will, her conscience, and her ambition? How the thing does corrupt her! It is unnatural, Petyr, and dangerous, indeed.”

“Could I call such a thing, Roemer, if I chose to do it?”

“No one knows the answer, Petyr. If you tried perhaps you could. And perhaps you could not get rid of it, once you had called it, and therein lies the old trap. You will never call up such a thing with my blessings, Petyr. You are listening to my words?”

“Yes, Roemer,” I said, obedient as always. But he knew my heart had been corrupted and won over by Deborah, just as surely as if she had bewitched me, but it was not bewitching, it was stronger even than that.

“This woman is beyond our help now,” he said. “Turn your mind to other things.”

I did my best to obey the order. Yet I could not help but learn that Deborah was being courted by many a lord from England or France. Her wealth was so vast and solid that no one anymore thought to question the source of it, or to ask if there had been a time when she was not rich. Her education was proceeding with great speed, and she had a pure devotion to Judith de Wilde and her father, and so was in no hurry to marry, as she allowed the various suitors to call.

Well, one of those suitors finally took her away!

I never knew who it was that she married, or whence the marriage took place. I saw Deborah but once more, and I did not know then what I know now—that it was perhaps her last night before she left the place.

I was awakened in the dark by a sound at my window, and realizing that it was a steady tapping on the glass, such as could not be made by nature, I went to see if some knave had come over the roof. I was after all on the fifth story then, being still little more than a boy in the order, and given only a mean but very comfortable room.

The window was locked and undisturbed as it ought to be. But far below on the quay stood a lone woman in a garment of black cloth, who appeared to be gazing up at me, and when I opened the glass, she made a motion with her arm, which meant that I must come down.

I knew it was Deborah. But I was maddened, as if a succubus had come into my chamber and pulled the covers off me and gone to work with her mouth.

I crept out of the house so as to avoid all questions, and she stood waiting for me with the green emerald winking in the darkness, like a great eye about her neck. She took me with her through the back streets and into her house.

Now by this point, Stefan, I thought myself to be dreaming. But I did not wish for this dream to end. The lady had no maid or footman or anyone about her. She had come alone to me—which is not I must say so dangerous in Amsterdam as it might be someplace else—but it was enough to stir my blood to see her so unprotected and so deliberate and mysterious, and clinging to me and urging me to hurry along.

How rich were this lady’s furnishings, how thick her many rugs, how fine her parquet floors. And past silver and fine china behind glimmering glass, she drew me up the stairs to her private chamber, and there to a bed draped in green velvet.

“I go to be married tomorrow, Petyr,” she said.

“Then why have you brought me here, Deborah?” I asked, but I was shaking with desire, Stefan. When she let loose of her outer garment and let it drop on the floor, and I saw her full breasts plumped up by the tight lacing of her dress, I went mad to touch them, though I did not move. Even her waist so tightly cinched warmed me, and the sight of her fair neck and sloping shoulders. There was not a succulent particle of her flesh for which I did not hunger. I was a rabid beast in a cage.

“Petyr,” she said looking up into my eyes, “I know that you gave the gems to your order, and that you took nothing of my thanks for yourself. So let me give you now what you wanted from me in our long journey here, and which you were too gentle to take.”

“But Deborah, why do you do this?” I asked, determined not to take the slightest advantage of her. For in deep distress she was, I could read this in her eyes.

“Because I want it, Petyr,” she said to me suddenly, and wrapping her arms around me, she covered me with kisses. “Leave the Talamasca, Petyr, and come with me,” she said. “Be my husband, and I will not marry this other man.”

“But Deborah, why do you want this of me?” I asked again.

With bitterness and sadness she laughed. “I am lonely for your understanding, Petyr. I am lonely for one from whom I need hide nothing. We are witches, Petyr, whether we belong to God or the devil, we are witches, you and I.”

Oh, how her eyes glittered as she said this, how plain was her triumph, yet how bitter. Her teeth were clenched together for an instant. Then she put her hands on me and stroked my face and neck and I was further maddened.

“You know that you desire me, Petyr, as you have always. Why do you not give in? Come with me; we will leave Amsterdam if the Talamasca will not allow you to be free; we will go away together, and there is nothing that I cannot get for you, nothing that I will not give you, only be with me, and let me be close to you and no longer afraid. I can speak to you of who I am and what befell my mother. I can speak to you of all that troubles me, Petyr, and of you I am never afraid.”

At this her face grew sad and the tears came to her eyes.

“My young husband is beautiful and all that I ever dreamed of when I sat, dirty and barefoot, at the cottage door. He is the lord who rode by on his way to the castle, and to a castle he shall take me now, though it be in another land. It is as if I have entered into the fairy tales told by my mother, and I shall be the Comtesse, and all those rhymes and songs shall be made real.

“But Petyr, I love him and do not love him. You are the first man that I loved, you who brought me here, you who saw the pyre on which my mother died, and you who bathed me and fed me and clothed me when I could not do these things for myself.”

I was past all hope of leaving this chamber without having her. I knew it. Yet so fascinated was I by the smallest fall of her lashes or the tiniest dimple of her cheek, that I let her draw me not to the bed but down upon the carpet before the little coal fire, and there in the flickering warmth she began to tell me of her woes.

“My past is like phantoms now to me,” she cried softly, her eyes growing wide at the wonder of it. “Did I ever live in such a place, Petyr? Did I watch my mother die?”

“Do not bring it back into the light, Deborah,” I said. “Let the old pictures fade away.”

“But Petyr, you remember when you first spoke to me and you told me that my mother was not evil, that men had done evil to her. Why did you believe those things?”

“You tell me if she was a witch, Deborah, and what is a witch, by God!”

“Oh, Petyr, I remember going out into the fields with her, under the moonless sky where the stones were.”

“And what happened, my dear?” I begged her. “Did the devil come with cloven hoofs?”

She shook her head, and gestured for me to listen to her and be still and be good. “Petyr,” she said, “it was a witch judge that taught her the black magic! She showed me the very book. He had come through our village when I was but a small thing, crawling still, and he came out to our hut for the mending of a cut in his hand. By the fire he sat with her and told her of all the places he had gone in his work and the witches he had burnt. ‘Be careful, my girl,’ he said to her, or so she told me afterwards, and then he took from his leather pouch the evil book. Demonologie it was called and he read it to her, for she could not read Latin, or any language for that matter, and the pictures he held to the light of the fire all the better for her to see.

“Hour by hour he taught these things to her, what witches had done, and what witches could do. ‘Be careful, my girl,’ he would say, ‘lest the devil tempt you, for the devil loves the midwife and the cunning woman!’ and then he would turn another page.

“That night as he lay with her, he talked on of the torture houses, and of the burnings, and of the cries of the condemned. ‘Be careful, my girl,’ he said again when he left her.

“And all these things she later told to me. I was a child of six, maybe seven when she told the story. At the kitchen fire we sat together. ‘Now, come,’ she said, ‘and you shall see.’ Out into the field we went, feeling for the stones before us, and finding the very middle of the circle and standing stock-still in it to feel the wind.

“Nary a sound in the night, I tell you. Nary a glimmer of light. Not even the stars to show the towers of the castle, or the far-away bit of water that one could see from there of Loch Donnelaith.

“I heard her humming as she held my hand; then in a circle we danced together, making small circles round and round as we did. Louder she hummed and then the Latin words she spoke to call the demon, and then flinging out her arms she cried to him to come.

“The night was empty. Nothing answered. I drew close to her skirts and held her cold hand. Then over the grasslands I felt it coming, a breeze it seemed, and then a wind as it gathered itself about us. I felt it touching my hair and the back of my neck, I felt it wrapping us round as it were with air. I heard it speak then, only not in words, and yet I heard it and it said: ‘I am here, Suzanne!’

“Oh, how she laughed with delight; how she danced. Like a child, she wrung her hands, and laughed again and threw back her hair. ‘Do you see him, my baby?” she said to me. And I answered that I could feel him and hear him very near.

“And once again, he spoke, ‘Call me by my name, Suzanne.’

“ ‘Lasher,’ she said, ‘for the wind which you send that lashes the grasslands, for the wind that lashes the leaves from the trees. Come now, my Lasher, make a storm over Donnelaith! And I shall know that I am a powerful witch and that you do this for my love!’

“By the time we reached the hut, the wind was howling over the fields, and in the chimney as she shut our door. By the fire, we sat laughing like two children together, ‘You see, you see, I did it,’ she whispered. And looking into her eyes, I saw what I had always seen and always would even to her last hour of agony and pain: the eyes of a simpleton, a dim-witted girl laughing behind her fingers with the stolen sweet in the other hand. It was a game to her, Petyr. It was a game!”

“I see it, my beloved,” I said.

“Now, tell me there is no Satan. Tell me that he did not come through the darkness to claim the witch of Donnelaith and lead her to the fire! It was Lasher who found for her the objects which others lost, it was Lasher who brought the gold to her, which they took from her, it was Lasher who told her the secrets of treachery which she revealed to willing ears. And it was Lasher who rained hail upon the milkmaid who quarreled with her, Lasher who sought to punish her enemies for her and thereby made her power known! She could not instruct him, Petyr. She did not know how to use him. And like a child playing with a candle, she kindled the very fire that burnt her to death.”

“Do not make the same error, Deborah!” I whispered, even as I kissed her face. “No one instructs a daimon, for that is what this is.”

“Oh, no, it is more than that,” she whispered, “and you are most mistaken. But don’t fear for me, Petyr. I am not my mother. There is no cause.”

We sat then in quiet by the little fire, though I could not think that she would want to be near it, and as she leaned her forehead on the stones above it, I kissed her again on her soft cheek, and brushed back the long vagrant strands of her moist black hair.

“Petyr,” she said, “I shall never live in hunger and filth as she lived. I shall never be at the mercy of foolish men.”

“Don’t marry, Deborah. Don’t go! Come with me. Come into the Talamasca and we shall discover the nature of this creature together … ”

“No, Petyr. You know I will not.” And here she smiled sadly. “It is you who must come with me, and we shall go away. Speak to me now with your secret voice, the voice in you that can command clocks to stop or spirits to come, and be with me, and be my bridegroom, and this shall be the witches’ wedding night.”

I went to answer her with a thousand protests, but she covered my mouth with her hand, and then with her mouth, and she went to kissing me with such heat and charm that I knew nothing anymore, but that I had to tear from her the garments that bound her, and have her there in the bed with the green curtains drawn around us, this tender childlike body with its woman’s breasts and woman’s secrets which I had bathed and clothed.

Why do I torture myself to write this? I am confessing my old sin, Stefan. I am telling you all that I did, for I cannot write of this woman without this confession and so I go on.

Never have I celebrated the rites with such abandon. Never have I known such voluptuousness and sweetness as I knew in her.

For she believed herself to be a witch, Stefan, and therefore to be evil, and these were the devil’s rites to her that she celebrated with such willfulness. Yet hers was a tender and loving heart, I swear it, and so the mixture was a rare and powerful witch’s brew indeed.

I did not leave her bed till morning. I slept against her perfumed breast. I wept now and then like a boy. With a temptress’s skill, she had wakened all of my flesh to her. She had discovered my most secret hungers and had toyed with them, and fed them. I was her slave. But she knew that I would not stay with her, that I had to go back to the Talamasca, and for hours finally she lay quiet and sad staring at the wooden ceiling of the bed, as the light came through the seams of the curtains and the bed began to grow warm from the sun.

I dressed wearily and without desire for anything in the whole of Christendom but her soul and her flesh. Yet I was leaving her. I was going home to tell Roemer what I had done. I was going back to the Motherhouse, which was indeed my mother and my father, and I knew no other choice.

I thought now she will send me off with curses. But it was not to be. One last time, I begged her to remain in Amsterdam, to come with me.

Good-bye, my little priest, she said to me. Fare thee well, and may the Talamasca reward you for what you have given up in me. Tears she shed, and I kissed her open hands hungrily before I left her, and put my face once more into her hair. “Go now, Petyr,” she said finally. “Remember me.”

Perhaps a day or two passed before I was told that she had gone. I was disconsolate and lay weeping and trying to listen to Roemer and to Geertruid, but I could not hear what they had to say. They were not angry with me as I had thought they would be, that much I knew.

And it was Roemer who went to Judith de Wilde and purchased from her the portrait of Deborah by Rembrandt van Rijn which hangs in our house to this day.

It was a full year perhaps before I regained true health of body and soul. And never after that did I break the rules of the Talamasca as I had in those days, and went out again through the German states and through France and even to Scotland to do my work to save the witches, and to write of them and their tribulations as we have always done.

So now you know, Stefan, the story of Deborah, such as it is. And my shock to come upon the tragedy of the Comtesse de Montcleve, so many years later, in this fortified town in the Cévennes of the Languedoc and to discover that she was Deborah Mayfair, the daughter of the Scottish witch.

Oh, if only that bit of knowledge—that the mother had been burnt—had been kept from these townsfolk. If only the young bride had not told her secrets to the young lord when she cried on his chest. And her face lo, those many years ago, is fixed in my memory, when she said to me, “Petyr, I can speak to you and not be afraid.”

Now you see with what fear and misery I entered the prison cell, and how in my haste, I gave no thought until the very last moment that the lady, crouched there in rags upon her bed of straw, might look up and recognize me and call out my name, and in her despair, cheerfully give my disguise away.

But this did not happen.

As I stepped into the cell, lifting the hem of my black cassock so as to appear as a cleric who did not wish to soil himself with this filth, I looked down upon her and saw no look of recognition in her face.

That she did look steadily at me alarmed me however, and straightaway I said to the old fool of a parish priest that I must examine her alone. He was loathe to leave me with her, but I told him that I had seen many a witch and she did not frighten me in the slightest and that I must ask her many questions, and if only he would wait for me at the rectory I should be back soon. Then I took from my pockets several gold coins, and said, “You must take these for your church, for I know I have given you much trouble.” And that sealed it. The imbecile was gone.

Need I tell you how contemptible all these proceedings were, that this woman should be put into my hands thus without guards? For what might I have done to her, had I chosen to do it? And who had done such things before me?

At once the door was shut up, and though I could hear much whispering in the passage beyond, we were alone. I set down the candle upon the only furnishing in the place, which was a wooden bench, and as I struggled not to give way to tears at the sight of her, I heard her voice coming low, scarce more than a whisper as she said:

“Petyr, can it really be you?”

“Yes, Deborah,” I said.

“Ah, but you have not come to save me, have you?” she asked wearily.

My heart was struck by the very tone of her voice, for it was the same voice that had spoken to me in her bedchamber in Amsterdam that last night. It had but a tiny fraction of deeper resonance, and perhaps a dark music to it which suffering imparts.

“I cannot do it, Deborah. Though I shall try, I know that I will fail.”

This came as no surprise to her, yet she smiled at me.

Taking up the candle once more, I drew closer to her, and went down on my knees in the hay before her so that I might look into her eyes. I saw the very same eyes I remembered, and the same cheeks as she smiled, and it seemed this spare and waxen form was but my Deborah made already into a spirit, with all her beauty intact.

She made no move towards me but perused my face as she might a painting, and then in a rush of feeble and pitiful words I told her that I had not known of her distress, but had come upon this place alone, in my work for the Talamasca, and had discovered with great sorrow that she was the one of whom I had heard so much talk. I had ascertained that she had appealed to the bishop, and to the Parliament of Paris, but here she silenced me with a simple gesture and said:

“I shall die here on the morrow, and there is nothing that you can do.”

“Ah, but there is one small mercy,” I said, “for I have in my possession a powder, which when mixed with water and drunk, will make you stuporous and you will not suffer as you might. Nay, I can give you such a measure of it that you will die, if that is your wish, and thereby cheat the flames altogether. I know that I can put this into your hands. The old priest is a fool.”

She seemed most deeply affected by my offer, though in no urgency to accept it. “Petyr, I must have my wits about when I am taken down into the square. I warn you, do not be in the town when this takes place. Or be safe behind a shuttered window, if you must remain to see it for yourself.”

“Are you speaking of escape, Deborah?” I asked, for I had to admit that my imagination was at once inflamed. If only I could save her, cause a great confusion and then take her away by some means. But how could I do such a thing?

“No, no, Petyr, that is beyond my power and the power of him whom I command. It is a simple thing for a spirit to transport a small jewel or a gold coin into the hands of a witch, but to open prison doors, to overcome armed guards? This cannot be done.” Then, as if distracted, her eyes glancing wildly about, she said, “Do you know my own sons have testified against me? That my beloved Chrétien has called his mother a witch?”

“I think they made him do it, Deborah. Shall I go to see him? What can I do that will help?”

“Oh, kind, dear Petyr,” she said. “Why did you not listen to me when I begged you to come with me? But this is not your doing, all this. It is mine.”

“How so, Deborah? That you were innocent I never doubted. If you could have cured your husband of his injury, there never would have been a cry of ‘witch.’ ”

She shook her head at this. “There is so much more to the story. When he died I believed myself to be blameless. But I have spent many a long month in this cell thinking on it, Petyr. And hunger and pain make the mind grow sharp.”

“Deborah, do not believe what your enemies say of you, no matter how often or well they say it!”

She did not answer me. She seemed indifferent to it. And then she turned to me again. “Petyr, do these things for me. If on the morrow I am brought bound into the square, which is my worst fear, demand that my arms and legs be freed that I may carry the heavy candle in penance, as has always been the custom in these parts. Do not let my crippled feet wring pity from you, Petyr. I fear the bonds worse than I fear the flames!”

“I will do it,” I said, “but there is no cause for concern. They will make you carry the candle, and make you walk the length of the town. You will be made to bring it to the steps of the cathedral, and only then will they bind you and take you to the pyre.” I could scarce continue.

“Listen, I have more to ask of you.” she said.

“Yes, please, go on.”

“When it is finished, and you leave this town, then to my daughter, Charlotte Fontenay, wife of Antoine Fontenay, in Saint-Domingue, which is in Hispaniola, in care of the merchant Jean-Jacques Toussaint, Port-au-Prince, write what I tell you to say.”

I repeated the name and full address to her. “Tell Charlotte that I did not suffer in the flames even if this is not true.”

“I will make her believe it.”

At this she smiled bitterly. “Perhaps not,” she said. “But do your best at it, for me.”

“What else?”

“Give her a further message, and this you must remember word for word. Tell her to proceed with care—that he whom I have sent to obey her sometimes does those things for us which he believes we want him to do. And further tell her that he whom I am sending to her draws his belief in our purpose as much from our random thoughts, as from the careful words we speak.”

“Oh, Deborah!”

“You understand what I am saying to you, and why you must convey this to her?”

“I see it. I see it all. You wished your husband dead, on account of his treachery. And the demon struck him down.”

“It is deeper than that. Do not seek to compass it. I never wished him dead. I loved him. And I did not know of his treachery! But you must make known what I have said to Charlotte, for her protection, for my invisible servant cannot tell her of his own changing nature. He cannot speak to her of what he himself does not understand.”

“Oh, but … ”

“Do not stand on conscience with me now, Petyr. Better that you had never come here, if you do. She has the emerald in her possession. He will go to her when I am dead.”

“Do not send him, Deborah!”

She sighed, with great disappointment and desperation. “Please, I beg you, do as I ask.”

“What took place with your husband, Deborah?”

It seemed she would not answer, and then she said, “My husband lay dying when my Lasher came to me, and made known to me that he had tricked my husband and made him fall in the woods. ‘How could you do such a thing,’ I demanded, ‘which I never told you to do?’ And then came his answer: ‘But Deborah, had you seen into his heart as I did, it is what you would have told me to do.’ ”

I was chilled to my very bones then, Stefan, and I ask that when you have this letter copied out for our records, that the above words be underlined. For when have we ever heard of such conniving and willfulness from an invisible devil, such wit and such stupidity in one?

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 regretted that I had not gone off with her, that I despised myself and my work and all my life.

Date: 2015-12-18; view: 532