A chapter that goes off at a tangent

My name is Alison Carter, and I would like to make one thing clear: I am not a witch. There are no such things. I was not a witch in 1621 and I am not one now. And let us firmly establish something else. The reason my friends and I were not convicted of witchcraft was that there was insufficient evidence against us, despite the wild allegations that the Poet made.

Let us get another thing clear, I am not actually related to Virginia, or her mother, Audrey. A distant relative of theirs shared my surname, he lived in the next valley, but we were not kin.

I don’t know why my spirit still walks abroad all these centuries later. I certainly do not wish it. I suspect that some of the women who were put to death, later, resented my having escaped that fate, and cursed me. But I do not know this. Perhaps the Poet arranged it. I do not believe in curses. I don’t really believe in spirits and yet here I am.

That first time Virginia’s mother called on me to help, I was interested to make her acquaintance. My friends and I wanted to see who it was that had taken on the house. It had been uninhabited for so long and was bleak and cold and unloved and even to a woman of my day it was a dreadful place to take on with a baby and another on the way. We thought the woman was a bit touched in the head.

She had lived in comfort most of her life, with modern things and warmth and light. Women such as my friends and I had no time for this sort of madness. But the silly thing was pregnant, and she wanted our help and she summoned us, so we turned up.

But that was it. We have no more power to cause harm, now, than we had in life. We were Christened, we knew our Catechism, we were religious, we feared God and knew it was our job to fight the Devil.

That first chap who died, the one Audrey had taken such an exception to, he just died, when we turned up. That is all we did, turned up in his house and he dropped dead. Audrey asked us to pay him a visit, she wanted us to frighten him, but as it was, we didn’t need to. We didn’t do anything frightening, we just appeared, and his heart gave out.

After that we decided we’d not be involved any further. Whatever else happened was just nature taking its course. The dreams were just dreams, or trances brought about by some malady of the mind. who knows what the curses were, probably just coincidence? The daughter, the one Audrey was expecting when she took on the house seemed a bit touched, like her mother, in some ways, but with her father’s strange imagination too. She was also rather like the Poet’s mad daughters, the ones we were accused of bewitching. We sometimes met her in the woods, when she was out picking up sticks for the fire with Audrey, or walking home from school, or just out roaming about. She seemed to think she saw the Poet sometimes too, in dreams, perhaps she did. He was odd and it wouldn’t surprise me if he was still lurking about somewhere, making mischief.

One thing that did occur to me was that The Artist, Audrey’s husband, was very good at making similitudes. He painted portraits and he sculpted heads and shoulders. He did not do so out of any diabolical wish, I think, but nevertheless he had that ancient skill. And who knows what other spirits hung about Kineburn causing mischief with those works?

The Poet, being also a translator, had written in his accusation that the making of similitudes in wax was an ancient habit, described by the Greeks and Romans. And he had accused my friends and I of making such things, and of making pictures of his daughters and of pricking them about the heart or head to cause the strange malady they suffered. Perhaps something similar occurred, up in the artist’s garrets, where his work was left to fend for itself, up on the trestle tables, under the Kingpost trusses and beams and beneath the hundreds of bats that were used to roost there. And who is it that might appear in shape like a bat and hide among the real ones up there, in the dark? Him who once had taken the form of a serpent?