Haunt Me Still (3 page)

I knew Sybilla by sight; everybody did. She was the UK’s latest “it” girl, a rising star—or diva-in-training, said some—with deep golden skin and dark golden hair that cascaded around her in luxurious ringlets. Even her eyes were amber, as aloof and inscrutable as a lioness’s. Jason, though, I knew personally. He cultivated the aura of an Australian bad-boy film star, but he was a more serious actor than he liked to admit, with a hankering for proving his dramatic chops onstage, through Shakespeare. I’d directed him as both Hamlet and Cardenio, and both times, he’d often seemed more like my nemesis than my colleague.

I raised an eyebrow, and Lady Nairn sighed. “He’s the inveterate philanderer, you know—”

“Epic,” I interjected. “But as I understand it, she’s the one who’s already got someone new on the line. With luck, they’ll channel their tension into the fire and ice between Macbeth and his lady.”

“And without luck?”

“Free fireworks, I suppose.”

“So, Jason and Sybilla—”

“And myself,” said Lady Nairn. I did a double take. “One last time,” she went on, “I mean to take the stage. Not as the Queen, obviously. At least, not the Scottish Queen. Bit past the expiry date for that.” She set her wineglass down with a small click. “I mean to play Hecate, queen of witches.”

So withered, and so wild in their attire,
Shakespeare had written of his hags,
that look not like the inhabitants of the earth, and yet are on it.

“Hecate doesn’t suit you,” I said suddenly. “A backhanded compliment if ever there was one,” said Lady Nairn with a smile.

“Athenaide told me that you’re the most glamorous person she knows.”

“Did she, now?” She raised one brow. “‘Glamour’ is an old Scots word for magic. In particular, the power to weave webs of illusion.
All was delusion, nought was truth,
as Sir Walter Scott put it.”

This entire evening was beginning to feel like a delusion. Janet Douglas was returning to the stage in
Macbeth
? And she wanted
me
to direct?

“Why me?” I blurted out. “You could have anyone you ask.”

“I’m asking you. Or do you know another director with expertise in occult Shakespeare?”

Hell and damnation,
I thought.
So that’s it
. What now seemed like a lifetime ago, I had written a dissertation on that subject, by which I meant the codes and clues that various people believed were hidden in the Bard’s works. The twisting meanings of that small word, “occult,” it seemed, would haunt me as long as I lived.

“Lady Nairn, don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to disappoint, but by ‘occult’ I mean—”

She waved me off. “You mean the old sense of the word: hidden, obscured, secret.
Not
magical. Yes, I know. I’ve listened to your interviews. But it’s not magic I want you for.” She leaned forward. “I told you that my husband collected anything and everything to do with
Macbeth
. Well, a week or ten days before we lost him, he grew tense and excited in a way that meant one thing. He was closing in on a find.”

Somewhere within, a small seed of misgiving sprouted warily into life. “What kind of find?”

She sat back, eyeing me in silence. Then she rose from her chair. For a moment, her hand rested lightly on my shoulder. “Come to Dunsinnan.”

I didn’t recognize the word. “Better known as Dunsinane. Macbeth’s castle of evil. Surely you remember that,” she said with an elusive smile. “I live there.” Turning abruptly, she headed for the stairs.

Knowledge, the oldest temptation.
Caught in the tug of curiosity, I rose and followed her out.

OUTSIDE, THE RAIN
had stopped, but the air was still damp, thick with the sharp bracken scent of autumn, even up here in the old stone heart of the city. We turned left, up the hill toward the castle.

Lady Nairn had invited the entire prospective cast up to her house for a weekend of “atmospheric research,” as she put it, with the intention of carting them back down to Edinburgh, two nights hence, for the fire festival of Samhuinn, the old Celtic holy night that Christianity had co-opted and turned into Halloween. Pronounced “Sow-en,” more or less, by English speakers,
Samhuinn
means “summer’s end” in Scottish Gaelic, she explained. It was the turning of the year, when the door between the living and the dead was said to thin to a transparent veil. The Edinburgh festival was a winter carnival, a street pageant in which masked players mimed a modern version of the ancient pagan myth of the Summer King meeting the Winter King in battle.

Her granddaughter, Lily, had a part in it. “As a torchbearer,” she said. “More or less the Shakespearean equivalent of a spear carrier. Necessary, but nearly invisible. Someday, though, I expect she’d like to be the kayak.”

That’s what I thought I heard, at any rate.

Lady Nairn laughed at my confusion. “Cailleach,” she explained. “Not ‘kayak.’ Another Gaelic word. Sounds to English ears like an Eskimo canoe, but it means ‘old woman.’ The old woman of winter, who comes into her power as summer wanes and dies.” She wrapped her coat closer around herself. “The queen of darkness and death,” she went on quietly, “but also of renewal. Most people forget about that part. But there is no life without death, and no spring without the great die-off of winter….” for a moment we walked in silence, our footsteps ringing against the pavement. “The old myths personify that conundrum,” she said. “And the festival dramatizes the myths. The Cailleach chooses the Winter King as her champion and eggs him on into battle against the old King of Summer. All in mime. So archetypal, really, that words are superfluous.”

The image of a terrible queen urging a warrior in his prime to kill an old king and take his place skimmed through my head. “But that’s the story of
Macbeth,
” I said slowly.

“It’s the myth behind it,” she specified. “But
Macbeth
is based on history,” I protested. “Scottish history.”

She sniffed. “History rearranged—cut and pasted—to fit myth. Scholars have forgotten that part, if they ever knew it. But myth is not so easily cornered and tamed into neat academic fact.”

In all the years I’d spent in the ivory tower, working toward being a professor of Shakespeare before falling in love with the Bard onstage and running off to the theater, I’d never heard any version of Lady Nairn’s theory. But it fit. It fit with the simplicity of truth. “You think Shakespeare knew?” I asked quietly.

She looked straight ahead, a mischievous smile upending the corners of her mouth. “I think he knew a great deal more than we credit him with.”

The buildings fell away as we came to the dark emptiness of the Esplanade. At the far end, the castle reared into the night. In the center of the parade ground, a crowd roiled and milled. Under a loose netting of laughter, torches flickered here and there, and somewhere in the middle, someone in a stag mask was tossing his head so that antlers reared into the night. Now and again, unearthly howls rose in waves of loneliness toward the moon.

The crowd shifted and for an instant I saw the dark-haired man from the restaurant. His eyes met mine, and then the crowd shifted again, and he disappeared. A girl detached herself from the outer fringes, loping over to us with adolescent gangliness.

Lily MacPhee had her grandmother’s wide-set eyes and high cheekbones, though her coloring was entirely different. Flame-red hair spilled in waves past her shoulders. Her milk-white skin was scattered with freckles like stars, and her eyes were a pale sea-green. A small jewel winked in her nose. The Pre-raphaelites, I thought, would have fought bitter duels among themselves for the right to paint her as Guinevere or the Lady of the Lake.

“You said yes!” she said with girlish pleasure. “She said maybe,” said her grandmother. “More or less.”

Dunsinnan Hill, Lady Nairn told me as we drove, lay fifty miles ahead, just north of the Tay. It had been fortified since the Iron Age, but a thousand years ago, the old histories said, the historical King Macbeth had rebuilt it. For a generation, he’d ruled Scotland from its heights, until his young cousin Malcolm had come north in the year 1054, at the head of an army of the hated Sassenach—Anglo-Saxons from northern England—along with a fair few Vikings. Charging up the hill, Malcolm’s Saxons had clashed with Macbeth’s Scots in a pitched battle that raged from sunup to sunset, leaving the slopes scattered with crow’s bait. It was not the end—though Macbeth lost both the battle and the hill, he lived to lead his battered men in retreat—but it was the beginning of the end. Two years later, Malcolm finally caught up with him, and this time the knife went home. Malcolm had mounted Macbeth’s head on a pole and claimed the kingship of Scotland for himself.

Macbeth had been a good king, famed for both generosity and bravery—by some reckonings, the last truly Celtic king of Scotland, ruling in the old ways. But among the most lasting spoils of victory is the right to write history, and Macbeth’s legacy had quickly darkened. It was Shakespeare, though, who’d made him a byword for evil.

It was a tragic arc, I thought as Lady Nairn’s voice faded away: to fall, after death, from hero-king to reviled tyrant. At least Shakespeare’s fictionalized Macbeth made the plunge during his life, of his own accord.

“There,” said Lady Nairn presently. She pointed to a rounded hilltop with a small turreted summit, set a little apart from the others. We’d left the main roads and were hurtling south on a narrow lane across fields and through hedgerows. The road led straight for the hill, veering at the last minute around the western slope, plunging into a pine wood and past a quarry, and then left along the south side of the hill. Soon after that, we turned off the lane, away from the hill, and into a gravel drive.

Dunsinnan House stood in a high saddle, looking north across the road to the hill for which it was named and south to the glimmering waters of the firth of Tay. At its heart, the tall rectangle of an old Scottish castle could still be seen, though in ensuing centuries it had sprouted several new wings, not to mention towers and cupolas, balconies and bay windows, seemingly at random, giving it the air of an aged grande dame proudly squeezed into a gown from her youth, now haphazardly adorned with gewgaws and baubles collected from every period of her life.

Lady Nairn led me swiftly up four flights of stairs to a bedroom in a high corner. Its walls were covered in watered blue silk; along the northern wall marched three tall windows curtained in more blue silk embroidered with Chinese dragons. “I thought you might like a view,” she’d said, crossing the room to throw open the middle window, so that both the sound and the scent of pines blew through the room. Beyond, the hill was visible mostly as an absence of stars.

Don’t go up the hill alone.
The sentence hung on the air between us.

“I told you I lost my husband,” she said. “I meant it more literally than you perhaps realized.” She looked back toward the hill. “He disappeared up there one night three months ago. We went to the police, of course. They poked around a bit but didn’t find anything. Suggested, in a roundabout way, that maybe he’d gone off for a bit of something on the side. He was not that sort of man.

“Auld Callie—a woman from the village, someone he’d known from childhood—found him the following week, sitting on the hilltop, dangling his legs like a child over the ramparts. He was rocking back and forth, muttering one phrase over and over: ‘Dunsinnan must go to Birnam Wood.’”

“Macbeth’s riddle,” I said quietly. “No,” she said with a slight shake of the head. “The witches’ riddle.” She launched into the Shakespeare:

In the play, King Macbeth assumes the riddle is a metaphor for
never,
only to learn, when confronted by a forest on the move, that the witches meant it literally. “
The equivocation of the fiend that lies like truth,
” I murmured.

She gave me a sad smile. “I’m not sure it counts as equivocation if there’s no clear answer at all, rather than too many. And in any case, Angus reversed it:
Dunsinnan must go to Birnam Wood.
His title, you know, was Nairn of Dunsinnan, so I thought he was referring to himself. And you can see the wood, or what’s left of it, from the hilltop, so it seemed to me that he was saying that
he
must go to Birnam. I took him there…. He’d known the place since childhood, but he didn’t recognize it. Stood there turning round and round beneath the great oak, looking bewildered.”

Her voice dipped into bitterness. “He died a fortnight after that. A month ago, that was. Blessing, really. His mind was gone, or mostly so. Just enough left to understand that he wasn’t right. Made him desperate, near the end.”

Her voice had begun to waver, and she paused to steady it, turning to the window and brushing damp cheeks with the back of one hand. “I’m sorry,” she said, giving herself a little shake and going on. “The doctors said he had a stroke. No doubt they’re right. But that isn’t the whole story. When we found him, he’d been missing for a week, but he was clean-shaven, and his clothes were immaculate.” Her chin went up. “
As if he’d just left.
”

She pinned me with her gaze. “Do you know Aleister Crowley’s definition of magic? It’s ‘the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will.’”

I frowned. It was a famous—and famously baggy—definition. By its lights, just about everything was magic. Crowley himself had included potato-growing and banking in the list, along with ritual magic and spells. Where was this going?

She leaned forward. “There were those who wished Angus ill,” she said with quiet intensity. “Mostly, I’m afraid, for my sake.”

“Wishing doesn’t make it so.”

“Perhaps not.”

Beyond her, through the window, I saw something—a weasel or a stoat, maybe—undulating across the corner of the lawn, a furtive shadow in darkness. Almost in rhythm with it, a prickle of foreboding crept across my skin. What was she suggesting? That someone had murdered Sir Angus by magic?

“Lady Nairn, if you suspect foul play in Sir Angus’s death, you should go to the police.”

“I think it must be dealt with by other means.” She cocked her head. “How much do you know about the writing of
Macbeth
? Not the story. The writing of it.”

I frowned. “There’s not much to know. It’s Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy. Published posthumously, in the first folio.”

“The first collected edition of his works,” she said, nodding. “Dated 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death. But that’s about its printing. Not its writing.”

“We don’t know anything about the writing of any of his plays.”

“There was an earlier version.” She said it defiantly, a gauntlet thrown down.

“Many scholars think so,” I said carefully. That much was true, mostly because of the witches. Eerie and terrifying at one moment, they are, and broad comedy at the next—not to mention Hecate, queen of witches, who seems to have been pulled wholesale from another, later play by Thomas Middleton and slapped down haphazardly into Shakespeare’s play, for all that her brand of gleefully cackling evil would be more at home in a Disney film. “But there’s no real evidence one way or an—”

She cut me off. “As a child, my husband’s grandfather met an old woman on the hill. She told him that long ago, Shakespeare had come here with a company of English players and met a dark fairy—a witch—who lived in a boiling lake. She taught him all her dark arts; in return, he stole her soul and fled.

“She searched high and low, but he had hidden it well. It was not in a stone or an egg, a ring or a crown: not in any of the places one normally hides such a thing. She found it at last, though, written into a play, mixed into the very ink scrawled across the pages of a book. Snatching up the book, she cursed his words to scatter misery rather than joy, and then she vanished back to her lake.

“Some time earlier, the boy’s grandfather had vanished on the hill, so when the old woman told him her tale and made him repeat it back to her, he decided she was the dark fairy of her own story, and the book, if he could find it, was her payment for his grandfather…. In later years, he—Angus’s grandfather—came to believe she had been talking about
Macbeth.
”

I gazed at her in silence. How could I put what I had to say tactfully? “Lady Nairn—with all due respect to your husband’s grandfather, as wonderful as his story is, it’s a child’s half-remembered tale, a hundred years old. It hardly counts as evidence for an earlier version of the play.”

“Not by itself. But it fits with this.” She went to the desk and opened an archival folder, handing me a Xeroxed page. “from the old Dunsinnan House account book,” she said. “Half ledger, half diary.” under an entry dated 1 November 1589, someone had written, “The English players departit hence.” But it mentioned no names.

“read the next sentence,” said Lady Nairn.

I looked up quickly. I knew of Lady Arran. Elizabeth Stewart, Lady Arran, her contemporaries had sneered, was a greedy, avaricious, and ambitious woman. A Lady Jezebel who consorted with witches. For a time, young King James had been besotted with her and her husband both; there had been whispers in some corners that she was the reason the king would not take a wife. Other whispers charged that she’d kill him if she could, that she desired, above all else, to be queen. She was, said some, the historical figure standing in the shadows behind the character of Lady Macbeth.