A Witch in Love Read online

  ‘Malleus … what did you say?’ It sounded familiar. I racked my brains and a memory came. ‘It’s a book, isn’t it? About …’

  ‘About witch-hunting and witch trials. Yes. Malleus Maleficarum, Also known as Der Hexenhammer or The Hammer of the Witches. It was written in the fifteenth century by two German nutters who saw witches hiding under every bale of hay and thought every woman who wasn’t a good German hausfrau was shagging the devil and hexing cattle. It’s full of crap and was responsible for the deaths of a lot of people, mostly women, and very few of them actually possessing any magical power. So far, so dumb, but unfortunately it’s also an organization. Spelt with an O. Also full of crap but rather more immediately worrying. If you thought the Ealdwitan was scary, think again. They’ve ultimately got our society’s best interests at heart, even if they have a funny way of showing it. The Malleus would like nothing better than to see us all dead.’

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘So—’ I began, but at that moment the bell rang, loud and shrill, and I jumped and bit my tongue. Emmaline looked at her watch and we stood, indecisive for a moment.

  ‘Want to ditch?’ Emmaline asked at last. I bit my thumbnail. There was nothing I would have liked more than to ditch Classics at that precise moment, but our coursework was due in. My absence would definitely be noted.

  ‘I can’t,’ I said at last. ‘I really can’t. Damn, damn, damn. Lunch, then?’

  ‘Won’t Seth want to reprise your eternal tryst?’ Em said sarcastically, referring to the fact that Seth and I usually ate lunch together, a fact that had not ceased to piss her off in the six months I’d been going out with him.

  ‘He’ll deal with it,’ I said shortly. The second bell rang and I shouldered my bag. ‘Meet you … where? South gate?’

  ‘South gate.’

  We walked off in opposite directions to our lessons, and I spent the next period giving wrong answers to easy questions and fretting over the half-story I’d got from Emmaline. I couldn’t quite see what a bunch of superstitious dead Germans had to do with me, but just the fact that the name had stopped Emmaline in her tracks was enough to get me worried. And, undeniably, dead or not, someone had painted those words on my dad’s barn. On the other hand, from what Emmaline had said, it sounded like these were just ordinary people, outwith. That had to be good, right? My experience with the Ealdwitan had taught me that a nutter armed with magical power was a force to be reckoned with. Surely in comparison a nutter armed with nothing more deadly than a pitchfork had to be preferable?

  At twelve forty I was standing at the South gate, shivering and looking at my watch. The snow had finally melted and the playing fields were a lake of icy mud, blasted by the salt sea wind. Just as I was about to get cross I saw Em flying across the quad, her long dark hair whipping behind her in the wind.

  ‘Sorry, sorry, got held up. Shall we walk into town and get a sandwich on the way?’

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ I said.

  ‘Well, I am. And getting into a size eight won’t impress the Malleus, you know.’

  ‘Em, this isn’t funny.’

  ‘Yes, thank you, Ms Winterson. I am aware of that. Probably even more than you.’ Her face was grim and I was reminded of her family’s constant obsession with secrecy, fitting in, camouflage. I’d violated every rule in their book – cast spells on the outwith, shared my secrets with Seth, let magic spill out at the most inopportune times and places. I’d brought the Ealdwitan’s wrath down on their heads and endangered the fragile peace they’d constructed in Winter. And yet here Emmaline still was, walking beside me, protecting me, giving me the information I needed to survive in this strange new world.

  ‘We’ve not got long,’ she said, ‘so I’ll talk quick. Stop me if you don’t understand something, otherwise I’ll just assume you know what I mean – I can never remember what I’ve explained to you before. OK, so where were we when the bell went off?’

  ‘The Malleus Maleficorum.’

  ‘OK. Well, you probably know the basics about the history of witch-burning, don’t you?’

  ‘The basics, I guess – as far as I understand it, everyone tolerated the village crone for centuries, and then it all goes a bit haywire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Lots of poor old women get tortured into mad confessions and burnt; the whole craziness dies down in the Age of Reason. Does that cover it?’

  ‘Pretty much. Wasn’t humanity’s finest hour, but to be honest the outwith suffered a lot more than we ever did. Our kind suffered too, though. The young and stupid, the old and senile. It’s pretty hard to perform strong magic when you’re sleep deprived, half drowned and being tortured. It was men like Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger who did the torturing.

  ‘They wrote a treatise, the Malleus Maleficarum, explaining how to get poor deluded people, usually women, to confess to lying with the devil, wishing ill on their neighbours and consorting with familiars. Since their favourite methods were pretty grim, not surprisingly huge numbers of women did confess. They were imprisoned, executed or burnt.’

  I shivered and Emmaline cast me a sidelong look. We were walking into the wind and her long black hair was flapping behind her, giving her a particularly witchy appearance. I would not have been surprised to see her leap astride a broom and swoop, cackling, into the iron-grey winter sky. But I said nothing and, wrapping her scarf more securely around her throat against the biting wind, Emmaline continued.

  ‘Eventually the Ealdwitan got their act together and got control of the situation; the Witchcraft Act of 1735 was passed and, without the law behind them, the witch-burners were out in the cold. Because this new act didn’t cover real magic at all, the only thing it made illegal was claiming to be able to invoke spirits and cast spells. Even if you were found guilty you were just treated as a con-artist. Eventually the burning stopped and we were back in the shadows, out of harm’s way.’

  It was strange and uncomfortable to hear about this benign, protective side of the Ealdwitan but I shrugged that off and only asked, ‘So, what happened next?’

  We’d reached the harbour and Emmaline sat on a bench facing the sea. I sat silently beside her, waiting for her to marshal her thoughts and continue. When she did, her face had a new grimness of expression.

  ‘So far, so good. But, like always when the law changes, there were some people who preferred things the way they were before. When America banned slavery, the Ku Klux Klan sprang up. When our government stopped burning witches, the Malleus Maleficorum was born. They see themselves as continuing Sprenger and Kramer’s legacy, only this time, outside the law.’

  ‘So, who are they?’ My fingers felt like blocks of ice in my gloves. Emmaline shrugged.

  ‘I have no idea; we steer very well clear of them. They seem to be organized on a cell basis, with local chapters of varying intelligence. Often they’re not much better than Boy Scout troops – one or two families of nutters who like patrolling around in black hoods and painting sinister slogans. If we’re lucky, this is just a pack of local loonies and they’re acting on suspicion rather than knowledge.’

  ‘Oh.’ I felt completely blank. Last year the witches wanted to kill me, now it was the outwith. I felt like I should make a joke: Was it something I said? But Emmaline’s expression told me that having a group of masked crazies on my trail wasn’t a joking matter.

  ‘But they’re only outwith, right?’ I said at last.

  ‘Yes,’ Em admitted, ‘they’re only outwith – and consequently pretty dim and pretty helpless if it comes down to direct combat with one of us.’

  ‘Exactly,’ I said. Em had put her finger on what was bothering me. ‘Direct combat with one of us; I can take care of myself, Em. But what about Dad? What about Seth?’

  ‘They won’t hurt their fellow outwith,’ Emmaline said confidently. ‘It’s you they’re after. They’ve got no beef with your dad.’

  I hoped she was right. Her comparison to the Ku Klux Klan stuck in
my head. As I recalled, the KKK weren’t too keen on their fellow whites aiding and abetting freed slaves. What if the Malleus saw Dad and Seth as traitors to their kind?

  Damn, damn, damn. I felt a cold, fierce fury against these outwith nutjobs and most of all with myself, with my witchcraft, for putting Seth and Dad in danger all over again.

  ‘Anna …’ Emmaline said, breaking in on my thoughts. Then, more urgency, ‘Anna, Anna …’

  I looked up. Ice was spreading out from the puddles under our feet, across the quay and down into the sea. The choppy waves were turning to frozen slush and coalescing into crystal shards around the quayside and along the ropes of tethered boats. Icicles hung from the anchor chains and frost crept over the floating buoys.

  I swore and caught myself back, reining in the power that had seeped out with my bleak, icy anger. In a matter of seconds I’d drawn the cold back inside me and the harbour was free of ice once more, the puddles liquid and sloshing around our feet. Emmaline said nothing, but she shook her head.

  It began to rain as we walked back to school and I realized as we got to the gate that we’d forgotten about lunch. Apparently neither of us was very hungry now.

  CHAPTER NINE

  It continued to rain all afternoon, the grey trickling windows matching my mood. I sat in English and my problems ran a rat’s maze around my head – the Malleus, Dad, the tendrils of my mother’s fierce purpose reaching out of the past to thwart me at every turn … Why had she run? Why had she hidden me?

  The need to know the truth was so strong it burnt, like acid, in my gut. But without Dad’s memories, how could I find out the truth about my past, my powers, myself? If I didn’t know, I would always be running, always afraid – afraid of the Ealdwitan coming for me again, afraid of the monsters in the shadows, and afraid of the worst monster of all: the monster inside myself.

  But it seemed everywhere I turned my mother was blocking me, and her will was so much stronger than mine; Dad, me, our house – nothing was sacred, nothing was too precious to be bent and warped to her purpose.

  I thought again of Abe’s words in the falling snow: What counts is how much you want something, how much of yourself you’re prepared to give to make it happen …

  I thought of the steely strength I’d sensed when I pushed against the spell on Dad’s memories, and I shivered.

  My mother had given everything. Not just herself, she’d fed everything she loved to the flames. But … for what?

  ‘Good lord!’ Dad looked up as I squelched slowly into the warm, steamy kitchen, my wet hair leaving a little trail of raindrops on the flags. He was sitting at the kitchen table drinking a glass of red wine and holding something in his hands, but he put it down as I came in and hurried across with a tea towel.

  ‘Thanks.’ I wiped my face, peeled off my soaking coat, and sank into a kitchen chair while Dad draped my dripping jacket over the airer above the Aga. ‘Ugh, it’s been a thoroughly crappy day really.’

  ‘Oh dear.’ Dad slid back into his seat opposite me at the table and picked up the piece of paper he’d been fiddling with when I came in. ‘What a shame. Especially today.’

  ‘Especially today? Why today?’

  ‘Well …’ He looked up at me, with a funny little smile. ‘You’ll think this is a bit bonkers, sweetie.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, today …’ He stopped and looked … What? I couldn’t place it. Shifty? Embarrassed?

  ‘Today …’ I prompted impatiently.

  ‘Today is really your birthday.’

  OK. I wasn’t expecting that. I stared at Dad blankly and he gave a sort of sheepish laugh.

  ‘Sounds a bit bizarre, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Too right it sounds bizarre! What on earth do you mean? My birthday’s not for another ten days.’

  ‘Well, yes and no. This will sound a bit funny but there was a mistake when we registered your birth. Actually it was your mother.’

  My mother.

  The two words hit me like twin punches to the stomach and strangled whatever I might have said. I could only sit, gaping at Dad like a fool.

  Did he even realize that this was the first time I’d heard those words pass his lips in – well – ever?

  I reached out blindly with my mind, feeling for the spell – but it was gone. Gone! And Dad was continuing as if nothing had happened.

  ‘There was some kind of typo when she registered the birth – they mis-transcribed the date on the notification. It should have been the sixth of Jan, and instead they put down the sixteenth of Jan. We only noticed later.’

  I gasped and managed, ‘And … you didn’t think to change it?’

  ‘It seemed …’ He flapped his hands helplessly. ‘It was just … well, Isla thought it was easier just to let it lie. And you know, I didn’t want to upset her. She was … There were more important things to worry about. It was only ten days – it didn’t seem important.’

  ‘Not important! You mean I’ve been putting a false birth date on every piece of paperwork I’ve ever signed?’

  ‘Well, not really. I mean, you’ve been putting the date of birth on your birth certificate – which is what this is. Some people don’t know their date of birth, you know; people who immigrate to the UK and so on. They just pick an official one that looks about right. This is really no different.’

  ‘It is different! It’s massively different!’

  ‘I know but your mother – she just wanted to let it lie. She was very persuasive.’

  ‘But – but …’ I stammered.

  I wanted to ask, how could you do this? How could you let your wife persuade you into such a bonkers course of action? A fake birth date, for the love of Mike! But of course I didn’t need to ask. There was much about my mother I didn’t know, but I had no doubt that she’d had enough power to convince Dad, the registrar and anyone else that this was the right thing to do. The only question was why? And I was pretty sure Dad would have no idea of the answer to that.

  ‘I’m sorry, sweetie.’ Dad looked suddenly grey and weary. ‘I should have known it would upset you. I was in two minds about whether to tell you. But you see, there’s this.’

  He looked down at the piece of paper he was holding and then laid it on the table between us. I don’t know why, but my heart suddenly started to hammer with painful intensity. It was an ordinary cream envelope, but it looked … old. Used. As if it had been carried around for a long time. The corners were bent and creased, and the glue that sealed the flap had begun to yellow.

  There was something written, in faded bluish ink, a single word, Anna, and then below it a date. Today’s date. My … my eighteenth birthday.

  I reached towards it, but before I could touch it Dad spoke.

  ‘Wait.’

  I paused, my hand hovering over the envelope, my fingers itching with the desire to rip it open. I had the strong feeling that the envelope contained something momentous, something I needed to know. But Dad’s words, hanging in the air, held me back. I waited and he continued, his voice oddly hesitant.

  ‘I…I know I haven’t…Oh dear. How can I put this?’ He stopped and looked into the inky depths of his red wine, swirling it around his glass. I let my hand fall to the table and waited. When he finally spoke it was more to himself than to me. ‘Heaven knows, I’ve had long enough to prepare myself for this. And I still don’t know what to say.’ He took a deep breath and I found myself holding mine, willing him on, willing him past whatever barrier was holding him back.

  ‘You mustn’t think …’ he said at last, so softly I had to strain to hear. ‘You mustn’t think that because I haven’t mentioned your mother all these years, it was because I’d forgotten her, or didn’t love her. I loved her very much, too much perhaps. But somehow … somehow I could never find the words. And I didn’t think … I didn’t know …’

  He stopped and then began again.

  ‘There are some things a child would find difficult to understand. And some things they
shouldn’t have to understand. Do you know what I mean?’ He looked at me with an intensity that almost frightened me. Then he shook his head. ‘No, of course you don’t. But I – I didn’t want to hurt you; I didn’t want all that hanging over you. And – this will sound strange – but at times it was as if I literally couldn’t mention her name, as if there was something holding me back. Can you understand that?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said fervently. I tried to put into my tone exactly how much I understood that, at least. ‘Yes, I understand. But now…?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘You’re eighteen now; you have a right to know. And, of course, there’s this.’ He tapped the letter, very lightly, and sighed. ‘I just wish I knew what it said – not that I think she would write anything to hurt you. Not deliberately. She was so lovely, so beautiful. She looked like you, actually.’ To my horror a tear coursed over his cheek. He seemed hardly to notice it. ‘And very kind, always. Even at the end, when she was at her most unwell …’

  ‘Unwell?’ This was not what I’d expected to hear. ‘Did she die? But I thought she ran away?’

  He sighed and shut his eyes, rubbing beneath his glasses with his fingertips as if very tired.

  ‘She was … Oh, there’s no easy way to put this, I suppose. She became mentally ill. Depressed. There’s an illness called post-natal depression; do you know what that means?’

  ‘When people have a baby and become depressed?’

  ‘Yes, basically. But in some women it’s much more serious than what you’d normally think of as depression. It’s rare to have it so seriously, but in some cases people hear voices, they become paranoid, they think people are trying to harm their baby. It’s a kind of psychosis really.’

  ‘And my mum … ?’ I couldn’t finish. Dad nodded.

  ‘She became very … odd, I suppose, towards the end of her pregnancy. She became paranoid about everything, but particularly about the safety of the baby – about you, I mean. And she thought there were people chasing her, out to get her. In the end she ran away when she was almost due. We managed to track her down and … well, unfortunately she was sectioned.’