KATHERINE

RENFREWSHIRE, SCOTLAND, 1696

Hundreds of people filed by the Tollbooth in Paisley, a crowd of sensation seekers, many demanding to see the witch who had been brought there. The call soon became so loud and the unrest of the people churning through the square became so menacing that I was afraid they would storm the building and tear me to pieces. The councillor in charge decided to have me brought up out of my cell to be exhibited at the window on the third floor.

Snow fell as I stood there. They all looked upon me, a girl of less than twenty, not too tall or short, thin, my long red hair in tangles about my pale freckled face. I knew that I did not look like a witch. I was simply a girl. Nothing more or less. I was not entirely sure what a real witch might look like, perhaps like the devil himself, or old and ugly. It had been some years since the Tollbooth had held a person under an accusation of witchcraft. The people gawking were silent as they took me in, wondering whether the devil really danced over my soul. After some minutes had passed, I was then promptly delivered back to my cell and interrogated.

I answered their questions. Reverend James Brisbane was the most curious of my inquisitors. Each time I repeated the same thing.

‘Have you dealings with the devil?’

‘No, I do not.’

‘Have you made a pact with the devil?’

‘No, I have not.’

‘Have you met with other witches in the dark and cast spells?’ he asked.

‘No. Never,’ I answered firmly.

‘Did you curse the child, Christian Shaw, and say that the devil would hurl her soul to Hell?’

That stopped me momentarily. I did not want to lie.

‘I said something similar in jest,’ I said warily. ‘Not a curse, no. It was on account of her telling her mother that I had stolen milk and I was putting some small fear into her for her precociousness. I meant no harm by it.’

When they asked me for my details, my age, my status and a history of my family, I was more hesitant.

‘I am seven months away from my twentieth year and I am married to a tailor back in the Highlands,’ I told them, lying about my husband’s true profession and whereabouts. ‘I am from Morven, Argyll, and my parents, Angus Campbell and Rose Campbell, born Kilian, are both dead. I have one sister in service to the Shaws and she will speak well of me.’

‘There you are mistaken.’ Brisbane smiled at me like a cat about to devour a mouse. ‘She is singing very sweetly against you, my dear.’

‘That is not true,’ I snapped, glaring into his eyes. ‘Isabel would not turn on her kin like that.’

‘She has told that you would often sneak out of your cot at night and not return for hours.’

I shut my eyes. My own sister. My own flesh and blood had turned on me. I knew she did it to protect herself and, given how a person accused of sorcery was treated, I could understand her fear. But I was hurt and felt truly alone in this world. I wondered at my only possible saviour; John Erskine secretly known as John Campbell. My beloved John had made me promise, with as much commitment as I had made to my vows of marriage, that I would not reveal the Jacobite plotters’ names, even under pain of death. He had promised me protection but he was little help to me far away in Clackmanninshire to the east. There was no way of sending word to John and yet I hoped that he would come for me and save me from this most awful sorry state. News would travel fast and, upon his return to Paisley, he would hear of it and know it to be true when he discovered his hearth was cold and his wife gone.

A week of questioning had left me feeling completely abandoned and alone. I cried for John during the long, bitterly cold nights. I missed his warmth and his laughter.

‘There are others here, now, being rounded up,’ Brisbane told me matter-of-factly one afternoon during questioning. ‘Your accomplices.’

‘Who?’ I asked.

Even before he answered me, I knew. I knew who was gaoled in this wretched tower along with me because I had heard the gaolers talking. They had Agnes Naismith in for questioning and the two Lindsay boys, all but vagrants, both, one a small child with bucked teeth and his older brother with a squint-eye. The children begged about town for scraps of food. Elizabeth Anderson was another; the blonde vacuous woman from the Jacobite crew and her father, the town drunk, were both rounded up for interrogation.

‘Farmer Lindsay, also,’ the man told me. For a brief moment I looked at him with a dumb but rebellious expression, afraid I might have given my surprise away.

‘He is a tenant farmer of the Shaws,’ I said in a level voice. ‘And nothing to do with me.’ I did not see where this might be leading, but it concerned me that three of my fellow Jacobites were among those apprehended. ‘Reverend Brisbane,’ I continued, sounding more courageous than I felt, leading the conversation away from the Jacobite farmer and my own complicacy, ‘I am not guilty of being a witch and I see by your face that you know it. You read from that pamphlet to Christian Shaw. I heard you. You put all this into her head. What was the place you told her of? With the other children all fitting and spitting up pins?’

My comments wiped the smirk from the clergyman’s face. I looked at him, this brimstone-bearing young reverend, and wondered if he was married. He had hair as dark as a raven’s and his eyes were just as dark as if he might have had a little Spanish mixed into his blood. His nose was long and pointed and his ears were one size too large for his head. I had made him suddenly guarded and I liked to think I had pricked his conscience. Aye, I relished the moment however fleeting.

‘Salem,’ he said solemnly and carefully. ‘Salem, Massachusetts, in the New World. They witnessed an outbreak of witches there too. You creatures are like the plague, popping up in flares. Mark my words, young woman, I will see you burn for this. You dare accuse me of the child’s possession.’

‘You read that pamphlet to the child, did you not?’ I asked him. I may have kept a rein on my own tongue while in service to the Shaws but my ears had become sponges soaking up others’ chatter. Before the Shaw girl had become a local circus act with her tricks being blamed on the devil and his witches, I had passed the parlour where the Reverend was reading a written account of what had happened in Salem when some young girls became bewitched by a coven of local witches who had cursed and possessed them. The girls, he had told the child, would behave in ways not explainable by medicine or nature. They would writhe and spit up all sorts of strange material and scream that the witches were visiting them invisibly, biting and pinching them. Not a month later, Christian Shaw was behaving the same way and accusing two people who had chastised her in the courtyard for being a rude and precocious brat. There was no witch flying about other than Christian Shaw, and the clergyman.

‘You will speak no more of this,’ Brisbane warned me in a voice that was both threatening and cold. ‘Perhaps, more to the point, wench, you were listening and decided to bewitch the child the same way. You have the devil in you and I mean to do battle with you.’

‘So that you can write about it in a pamphlet and find your own measure of fame as an author?’ I snapped back at him venomously.

‘You will confess to me,’ he demanded. ‘As Christ’s champion, I will have your confession even if I have to press it out of you.’

‘You will wait until there is snow in Hell before I will betray my own good Lord,’ I hissed.

‘You should be afraid.’ He smirked again.

‘I am afraid,’ I answered defiantly. ‘But not of you. I am afraid for your soul that you seem to have given over to the devil.’

With that, Brisbane ordered that a scold’s bridle be put on my head. Intended and designed to be worn by witches, scolding or nagging wives, or argumentative neighbours, the scold consisted of an iron framework in the form of a helmet-shaped cage that was placed by the gaoler over my skull. It was tight and had eye holes and an aperture for the mouth. At the front, protruding inwards was a small flat plate that rested on my tongue while the bridle was then locked around my neck. A sense of panic washed over me and I began to struggle as I felt that the tongue plate was studded with sharp pins, but I stopped still when I realised that any movement of my head or attempt to speak or complain meant the laceration of my tongue. Tears leaked down my cheeks, yet I could not wipe or scratch them away. For three hours I sat like that for the time that Brisbane was at luncheon.