The Magdalena Curse (24 page)
Read The Magdalena Curse Online
Authors: F.G. Cottam
She liked to play cards. Her opponents were always women. If she entertained men, he never saw them. The thing on the throne in the library was male, though. It wore a man’s uniform and black, polished boots over its enormous feet. The boots looked deformed on the feet. He did not like
to look at them but they were fascinating in their size and ugliness and he thought they must have been specially made.
to look at them but they were fascinating in their size and ugliness and he thought they must have been specially made.
She did not play cards in the library. None of her guests was invited in there. She had a special room with a roulette wheel and a chessboard with pieces made from marble and some other games in polished wooden cases Adam did not recognise or know. He did not like this room. It had no windows. But he did not like the house. And he did not like the library in particular, where Mrs Mallory spoke gleefully to the grotesque and unresponsive thing on the throne about putting her tilt on the world.
When Adam had finished his story concerning the dreams the three of them went for a walk in the snow together. Hunter was concerned the evening-suited apparition might return to stalk them in its clumsy, headless way through the drifts. But surely she had played out her little joke at the Comte’s expense. She had killed and then further humiliated that pompous servant in death. He did not really think her fury at Miss Hall could be sustained now that she was gone for ever. She had more important things to focus her energies on. She had ambitious plans. So they walked in the snow and Hunter hoped that the white purity of the wilderness at the edge of their home and the cold of the freezing air they breathed would expunge the dreams that contaminated Adam’s precious soul, at least for a little while. After their walk he drove them in the Land Rover down to the Black Boar and they ate a hearty pub lunch. When they got back Adam curled up on the sofa in the sitting room before the fire and went to sleep.
‘A sleep will do him good,’ Hunter said. ‘He’s worn out, poor little fellow, after recounting what he did this morning. I wouldn’t mind a siesta myself.’
‘You can’t afford the time,’ Elizabeth said. ‘You’ve got some reading to do.’
‘And what are you going to do, while I’m catching up on Cromwell’s judge?’
‘I’m going to call my mum. I think there might be some merit in your suggestion that she could look after Adam. If push came to shove, I mean.’
‘Then you’ve got your meeting with the policeman.’
‘No rest for the wicked.’
‘I’m sorry I’ve not been around to help you with that.’
‘You’ve got enough to deal with, Mark,’ Elizabeth said, looking towards the sofa and the sleeping boy.
The curious claim made by Matthew Cawdor wants repeating here. He said the mischief of the witch was not confined to her ungodly interference with the life and death of beasts. He said that his father had complained to him of this: that the Campbell woman had brought a sort of pestilence to afflict their locality. This contamination made women lascivious and men quarrelsome and violent. It was as though the natural order of things was reversed and people hereabouts descended into a pagan brutality without grace or refinement or any vestige of decorum or morality. People had become governed by lewdness and greed. Cawdor used his blind father’s phrase to describe this unnatural state of affairs. He called it a plague of the soul.
Their encounter with the beast in the forest had left me without men but for Carrick and the wounded cavalryman dying in a straw-filled cot in the stable of the Black Boar. I had the Lord Protector’s authority. But I had also urgent need of willing men.
On the morning of my first full day in the region I was obliged to seek out the district sheriff and request of him his assistance. He gave it willingly. He was a man I suspect dubious if not entirely cynical generally on the matter of witchcraft. But he knew which side had won the war and Cromwell’s seal, even so far from the seat of his authority, proved a powerful imperative. He had five armed men saddled on sturdy mounts for me within the hour and I
took my leave of him with the promise that the fact of his assistance would be strongly noted in my report. This was a pledge duly kept.
took my leave of him with the promise that the fact of his assistance would be strongly noted in my report. This was a pledge duly kept.
It was late in the afternoon and not far from full dark when we reached the Campbell farm and the accused woman was obliged to answer there our summons. She showed no surprise at our appearance on her land. Of her husband and children there was no sign to be seen. She was bound without struggle and put in a cart drawn by one of the mules from her own stable. A smell like spoiled meat drifted like clinging mist in the proximity of this ramshackle wooden structure. But there was no scent of death about the honest animal obliged to draw her the distance to the Black Boar in the cart.
Our route took us of necessity back through the village and, no longer travelling at the gallop, I was able to gain a true impression of the settlement, intrigued to see whether the evidence of my eyes bore out the claim Cawdor had made. It did. It was full dark now but the night lay brightly about under a full moon. Men gathered drunk and quarrelsome at the crossroads while others slept insensible in roadside feed troughs or merely in doorways. The women were of furtive and slovenly appearance and an infant howled unattended, its cries most pitiful through the broken window of a hovel that appeared to me abandoned. That village was not a place of industry or rectitude. It looked dismal, as though God had abandoned it.
Our destination reached, Ruth Campbell spent her first words to me on a complaint with which I could not in conscience quarrel. She said that it was wrong to try a woman of position, the wife of a respected landowner, in a low and common tavern she would never by choice frequent. I would not come here except in chains, she said. I would not bring the scandal and shame on my family name. Toil and endeavour are our bywords, she said. I wish no offence, Sir, she said. But should an innocent woman be judged in a place where men come to squander money on getting drunk?
There is nowhere else suitable, I said, and no one will oblige you to sup wine, madam. And no ale or wine will be taken under this roof either, by anyone, until this business is concluded and you are gone from here to whatever fate your trial has determined before God. And she smiled. And despite her protestations, I could not avoid the suspicion that she had wished offence, or at least some sly measure of mockery. I looked at her in the bright lantern light of the parlour of the inn, made even brighter now by flames from the generous hearth, in which Carrick was setting the large fire needed should we require the hot iron. And there was not the hint of fear or even trepidation about her.
The wench was uncommon comely for a woman accused of such vile and pernicious crimes against God. She was less than buxom and had not the fecund quality creatures of lust find irresistible in a maiden. Her figure was slight, but fine rather than frail or wretched thin. There was nothing openly wanton or ripely lustful about her aspect. Instead, about her head, there was a clean firmness of jaw suggestive of strong character. Her nose was short and straight. Her eyes were of an arresting shade of green under finely arched brows and somewhat cat-like in shape. They compelled attention without implying insolence. Her gaze was steady and true seeming and not suggestive in the slightest degree of boldness or insolence or other womanly vices. Her mouth was well made. Her lips were full and her teeth even. She was pale of complexion and her skin unsullied by pox or general blemish. Her hair was wheat coloured and clean and straight. She appeared taller than her height. But this was less a trick of sorcery than the impression given forth by her calmness and what seemed the fortitude of her character. Hers was a winning personage to look upon. At least in the first instance, there was no doubt of it. She wore a fustian dress or smock over a plain white blouse of good linen. Her feet were shod in stout leather boots, a reminder of the prosperity her husband’s farm enjoyed.
I began to question her. She answered with deliberation. She
denied every accusation. Her responses had the emphatic weight of honesty about them. I started to consider in my mind the difficulty of proving animals were risen from the dead. It was hardly practical to interrogate the beasts themselves. Rumour was all we had without our dead witness, Matthew Cawdor. I supposed we would have to drag his blind father from his bed and have the poor wretch corroborate. I was loath to resort to torture with Ruth Campbell. I am not a squeamish man. But I am a man and would not easily see a woman’s beauty defiled without some sureness of her guilt.
denied every accusation. Her responses had the emphatic weight of honesty about them. I started to consider in my mind the difficulty of proving animals were risen from the dead. It was hardly practical to interrogate the beasts themselves. Rumour was all we had without our dead witness, Matthew Cawdor. I supposed we would have to drag his blind father from his bed and have the poor wretch corroborate. I was loath to resort to torture with Ruth Campbell. I am not a squeamish man. But I am a man and would not easily see a woman’s beauty defiled without some sureness of her guilt.
Then something happened. Carrick had not burned everything of our gruesome forest relic. He had taken the jewelled chain from the ear of the beast’s head. He had done this to show me the curious stones with which it was set. These gems had been oddly cut. It was not possible to discern their true shape and the study of them provoked nausea in the body and made the brain swim. I had put this evil bauble on the mantel of the fire and forgotten it. Now Ruth Campbell’s eyes alighted upon it and I saw from the change in her expression that its significance was immediate to her.
The lanterns all went out. What happened next, we witnessed by the fierce, flickering illumination of the fire. A scream was wrenched forth from her I would not have believed possible in someone of so slight a frame. She shook her manacled hands at me in fists. She pulled back her head and let out a shriek of laughter and then her body rose off the floor and ascended until her head was only a foot or so beneath the beams of the ceiling. Nothing held her there. But there she was. It was not trickery and it was not illusion either. It was impossible and achieved only by vile magic. None of my men moved, as petrified as I was, I confess. The witch held open her arms and the chain binding them sundered with a snap of iron. She flung out her hands and crossed her feet and writhed in a blasphemous mockery of Christ nailed to the cross at Calvary. Blood trickled from her palms and dribbled to the floor from her booted feet in satanic parody of the papist
stigmata. She laughed again and lowered herself slowly to the floor and contorted her mouth in a drooling grin.
stigmata. She laughed again and lowered herself slowly to the floor and contorted her mouth in a drooling grin.
Do as you will with me, she said. I am entirely finished with this life.
She was supine when bound once more and lifeless when we locked her under guard of two men in a stable stall for the night. The landlord of the inn was summoned and provided me with the name and address of a village carpenter but the man was too dead drunk when Carrick tried to rouse him to be of use to our purpose. My sequestered men were granted little sleep that night. We hammered together a gibbet from what materials we could find about the inn and its outbuildings. In the morning Ruth Campbell was brought bound in her own cart into the village, the gibbet borne by two horsemen, trailing the lanes between their mounts like some ghastly plough, the riders pale still from the ordeal of the previous evening.
I read the verdict and the proclamation and we hanged her before an indifferent crowd of onlookers, dirty and dishevelled and still suffering from their sordid revelries of the night. Her face looked not gross and empurpled by the choking insult of the rope, but serene above the noose as her body swayed gently with the strength of the northerly autumn wind. And I had never been sorrier to see a woman die as a consequence of my own judgement and verdict. Was this because she was so very fair and amenable at the outset? I’ll allow in part it was. But it was also because I believed Ruth Campbell more seduced and corrupted than sinner. The beast had groomed her for the evil she did. I was convinced of it.
I did not return forthwith to London. I took a commanding house the sheriff leased me on a nearby hill for a peppercorn. I wrote and despatched my report to Whitehall. I released the sheriff’s men and, aye, Carrick too for the suffering and distinction of his loyal service. Fresh men were sent me. And I requested the wolfhounds too be brought from their kennels at Hampton Court.
And they came, eager on the leash, and I had the forests hereabout combed with them for others of the corrupting breed that now occupied the dreams I suffered at night. But we discovered none.
And they came, eager on the leash, and I had the forests hereabout combed with them for others of the corrupting breed that now occupied the dreams I suffered at night. But we discovered none.
Stories have been spread in malice concerning these recent events. It is said a confession was tortured out of Ruth Campbell and that she did condemn herself in her innocence when the torment of mutilation grew too great for an honest soul to bear. ’Tis said also that we burned her husband and her children out of their home and, thus doing, gleefully watched their livelihood perish in the flames. These spiteful lies are inspired, I think, by the Lord Protector’s many Scottish enemies. There are allies here not just of the English crown but the Scots pretender too. My Lord Cromwell has few friends in this region. If any burning was done at the Campbell farm, it was accomplished by someone else. Perhaps her husband was complicit. The truth is, I care not.
Most curious about the case was the condition of the corpse. I decreed that Ruth Campbell should swing until she dropped from the decomposition of her flesh and separation of her bones as a lesson to others tempted to follow the same dark path. Autumn is not kind to carrion in a country so bleak and cold as Scotland is. Yet the corpse remained untouched. The eyes, the juiciest morsel of all to any scavenging bird, were not pecked at and eaten by the crows. They remained intact under their smooth lids in her pretty head. A fortnight after she was strung up, the witch looked as fresh as she had the day we hanged her. Thus the effect of leaving her on public display became the very opposite of that intended. Unsullied by mortification, she defied God’s justice and mocked the honest retribution of the Commonwealth. In the small hours on a moonless night, I had her cut down. We bore her corpse away and I examined it. She was cold. But her flesh was entirely uncorrupted, as if she could snap her eyes open at any moment and leer at me in full defiance of God and all He represents.
My loyal and erstwhile lieutenant Carrick is by birth a man of
the fens. Before cutting down the corpse of Ruth Campbell I had received a curious note inspired by him. He had returned home and told his story. It had eventually reached the ears of the witch finder General Bullock, sent to the low and desolate Fenland of Anglia on a mission not dissimilar from my own. Bullock in his letter to me did confide of an encounter with a beast horribly familiar to me in his description of it. I confess far more learned in the lore of witchcraft than I, he informed me there was one necessary ritual in performing the execution of their sorceress acolytes. This was neither hanging nor even burning. The general was most zealous in his insistence of the need to see this effected. It was the only guarantee of a safe and satisfactory outcome, he said.
the fens. Before cutting down the corpse of Ruth Campbell I had received a curious note inspired by him. He had returned home and told his story. It had eventually reached the ears of the witch finder General Bullock, sent to the low and desolate Fenland of Anglia on a mission not dissimilar from my own. Bullock in his letter to me did confide of an encounter with a beast horribly familiar to me in his description of it. I confess far more learned in the lore of witchcraft than I, he informed me there was one necessary ritual in performing the execution of their sorceress acolytes. This was neither hanging nor even burning. The general was most zealous in his insistence of the need to see this effected. It was the only guarantee of a safe and satisfactory outcome, he said.
Ruth Campbell was duly buried with this service done her body and, in consequence, her soul. I believe her mortal remains at least now lie in the ground in peace.
Josiah Jerusalem Smith,
Written in truth and most humbly in the service of Our Lord Protector and in the mercy of Almighty God, 29 November 1656.
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