KATHERINE

RENFREWSHIRE, SCOTLAND, 1696

This is my story. I am Katherine Campbell, and although I lived my life in such a manner that I should have slipped away forgotten, just another country Scotswoman born to simple highland folk with no greater skill at my fingertips than churning butter, fate decreed that I might be remembered, if only in hushed whispers, for something much more sinister. I was no queen or astrologer or writer, nay, not anything so grand. I would be remembered forever as a witch.

In the gentle hills of the Highlands, its beauty marred from time to time by the bloodshed of warring men, I lived a simple life. I was nineteen years of age when I came to dwell, through grieving circumstance, in the central midlands outside of Glasgow down past the township of Paisley, to Bargarran. The time I lived in Bargarran was a strange and bewildering time. Dominating the villages and small farming tenancies, was a terror barely conceivable to me. The people in the narrow laneways lived in constant fear of a neighbour’s curse; the beggars sold magic charms to protect households from evil, in exchange for salted meats; the women whispered that soured sheep’s milk sprinkled by a warlock had saved the laird’s crops; a field of corn gone to rot was the work of the devil; and the bedrooms were hung with crucifixes and garlic to keep away the grim man in black. The peasant feared witches, the priest feared witches, the whole clergy and aristocracy feared them. Even the king and queen were terrified of the dreaded witches. Up until this time I had never heard of this thing, the witch. Of water kelpies and mermaids and water sprites I knew much, but nought of the witch.

In 1696, when my tale begins, the spell of a particularly fiendish terror had settled in the small estate of Bargarran. And it was here that I was to make my home. Unwittingly I walked into a briar’s nest, aye, right into the very thick of it.

I had known terror. It had been hammered into my bones. The fiendish Robert Campbell of Glenlyon had slaughtered our da as he slept under the stars and then, less than three years later, he had cut my mother down in a paddock as we all fled from our burning house. My granaidh and I had lived quietly in the lower rooms of an abandoned castle for almost a year until she, too, passed. My sister, Isabel, had long gone into service and was saved from the sting of witnessing the ordeal of our mother’s death. I had hidden with Granaidh behind a grumble of rocks and seen the brutal butchering of my mammie, her body dismembered and then set alight. When Granaidh’s spirit went a’wandering, there was nothing left for me but to pack up and head south into service with my sister. I prayed that the close company of Isabel would take away the nightmares and offer me the promise of a new life. It was with this hope in my breast that I arrived at the front gate that was decorated with creeping roses, with an archway of apple blossoms above.

Bargarran House was the seat of the Shaw family. The mansion stood three storeys high, nested with attic rooms and annexed by some inferior cottages and working buildings. The whole compound was enclosed by a wall of some fortitude that may have offered defence during the many years of religious warring that had only recently brought the Reformation and shifting power at state level. It sat atop a hill and looked out over the paddocks tenanted by the local farmers, green hills and purple-heathered moorlands peppered with peat bogs and scented with the briny swell of the wide brown river. Wisps of smoke from the wood fires spiralled into the pale mauve skies. The earth was hard and the shire, along with most of the country, was facing a famine.

I arrived at the house, little more than a girl, looking for domestic work. It was May and one of the warmest days of the year to date. The vixens were just nudging their cubs from their dens and purple buds had opened to cool themselves. I looked forward to seeing my sister again and was filled with the hope that my new home would bring with it some fresh happiness.

To look at me, there was nothing that suggested I was the devil’s servant. I was not especially beautiful, nor wide of hip nor too scrawny. I stood at the front door of the manor house and tried to tidy my unruly hair beneath my bonnet, and wiped my boots on the back of my stockings, one at a time, to polish off the flecks of dirt.

From my first glance at Laird John Shaw – indeed, from the first breath that smelled of whisky or ale or a combination of both, I could tell he was a stern man and someone I would do well to obey at all times. John Shaw was about fifty years of age. He had a nobleman’s body: stocky, soft and running to fat. His dark hair was greying and his eyes were small in a ruddy pudding of a face. His lips were wet and there was no warmth in his welcome. ‘You’ve come at your sister’s recommendation, Katherine,’ he said gruffly. ‘See I don’t regret this kindness.’

And so the wild, feisty spirit that I’d inherited from my good mammie was brought to heel. Not once did I slip up and answer back sharply when chastised or overburdened by work. With every new day, I would swallow my contempt and lay aside, as coins saved or acorns stored, my defiant airs. I remained tough, stoic and uncomplaining, tending to the gathering of kindling, the sorting of the larder and weevil sifting, the scrubbing and laundering, and the tending to the house sheep that were bursting with milk in the lead-up to the next wave of lambs. Many times I felt the fire in my belly wanting to cuss and shout down the laird or his lady, but I knew my surly temper might see me and my sister booted back out onto the street. Isabel and I were all the kin we had left in the world and it was good to be working shoulder to shoulder again after time apart. She was three years my senior. Isabel had always been a fine example of domesticity, diligence and obedience; quite the opposite of me but you’d not have known it to see me work with such restraint at Bargarran. Not once did I complain about the frugality or blandness of the staff meals. In the evenings, I went to my quarters, meekly, wedged into a space no bigger than my cot, where I kept the silhouette of my beloved granaidh on my wall and a worn black leather Bible under my hard pillow and the family book in a small chest. There I slept on a mattress filled with straw, packed down tight from the countless other bodies that had pressed into it before me. The floorboards were rough and cold.

Laird John Shaw lived at Bargarran with his wife and six young children, the youngest having only just mewled her first cries on this earth. His eldest daughter, Christian, had barely glanced my way, although I had loosely observed her to be a precocious child with a wilful temper, not unlike myself at the same age of ten or eleven years. Her life was much softer than mine had been but I could see in her eyes the same wildness, the same desire for something bigger than she had around her. We both had fire in our blood.

At eleven I had lived in a small farming lot of a decent rod-size, many miles north in the Highlands. There among the hills and dells I enjoyed a simple life, playing with livestock and taking to the raw, bleak hills, and then playing in the shadows of Kinlochaline Castle, known in the old tongue as Caisteal an Ime or the Castle of Butter on account of the legend that the lady of the castle had paid its builder with butter equal to the volume of the building. The old castle had been abandoned some years earlier and was a right fancy place to explore with all its rooms and staircases, although my mammie warned us that parts of the place had been burned out and were not safe.

That same year, the Jacobite rising had left me and my kin nervous, despite our relative isolation. Open to marauding clansmen weeding out Jacobite dissenters, my mammie and granaidh had hauled Isabel and me indoors. Isabel and I had learned to read, against our da’s express wishes, but with the menfolk off warring, we women had to amuse ourselves somehow. It was in those days, with the stench of peat bog in my hair and by the dim light of my candle, that I fell in love with words. We read mostly Bible stories and the characters and wars and heartbreaks of the Old Testament salted my imagination. I quite foolishly thought I might like to write down all the stories from my own head.

My granaidh kept a secret book that had the names of all the womenfolk of our bloodline etched into the calfskin parchment with iron gall ink. Names and the places of birth. My name was the last and some nights by candlelight my sister Isabel, my mammie and her old ma would sit by the fire and recite the names weaving backward through the years.

We would look at the ancient markings in the book called runes, which looked like the footprints of birds. Then the book would be carefully wrapped in a hide of goatskin, tied with a leather strap and placed back in the underground chamber by the back door.

‘You were born in Franconia?’ I would marvel at the old woman with milky eyes and spider-web hair. ‘What was it like? Did you go to fine banquets with princes?’

‘Your seanair was my only prince and a right red fiery one he was,’ she would smile, her tongue still thick and harsh. ‘We lived a simple life until we came to Eire.’

I often pressed Granaidh for more stories of the faraway land from whence she came, but her eyes would grow sad and tears would track the grooves of her face. She would shake her head and tell me that some things were best left unspoken.

Some nights in my cramped cell at Bargarran I would pull out the book and read the names of my mothers and their mothers that wound by blood back to the earliest years in the frozen north, in a faraway world I could only wonder about. There were fragments of many different languages all woven together and it made me feel less lonely to look at the fading names and markings. On the worn leather-bound cover the old Norse words Systir Saga, Sister Story, were branded deeply and I was glad to be the last name between its pages. I often wondered where it would travel beyond me and where my blood might flow.

Young Christian Shaw of Bargarran was equally well-read and could patter out a Latin passage from the Bible to resounding applause from her proud parents. I always made sure I smiled at the girl, noting how pretty she was and arrogant she looked as she tossed her fair curls about. Life was restrained at Bargarran and I felt it like a suffocating corset around me. Isabel had cautioned me never to smile or laugh and to always keep my head down and my wild red hair tucked out of sight. On my one day off a week I walked a six-hour return journey to find my greatest satisfaction in the city of Glasgow. Here I felt alive.

It was like being in a circus. The wide and busy road through the markets was a festival of colour and as I walked the streets I marvelled at how people could live in such dense proximity to one another, each house pushed tightly against the next and some buildings many storeys high. The air in the city was a blend of aromas, from the perfumes of fine ladies to the damp stench wafting up from the Clyde River. I drank it all in: the whiff of heady incense spilling from the churches to the earthy scents of sage and ale from the breweries. After a full week of farm odours this shamble of city fragrances pleased and excited me. For a Highland girl the colour, noise and perfume of a big city was new to me and I found that I liked it.

I would often stand by the well and watch the people with their different clothes: the pressed silks and brocades embroidered with colourful thread, the rich variety of Clan plaids in the kilts and cloaks. I would wander slowly through the fish markets where the heat lay leaden upon the stones and the sound of fish scaling scratched the still air. After passing other stalls where vendors fussed over baskets stuffed full of vegetables and eggs, or casks of wine and vinegar, the noise of haggling voices filling the air, I would climb to Fir Park Hill, the highest part of the city. It soon became my favourite place.

Here I would take in the view. On a clear day, looking west, I could see the valley of Clyde bounded by the hills beyond and I felt the pang of homesickness while knowing with a sodden grief that there was nothing to return to but charred memories. It stung my eyes and my heart to think of it.

One day, just as I was about to leave this peaceful palette to head homewards along the river path, I saw a man walking toward me, heading over the hill and down to the town square. He had sand-coloured hair and wore a white shirt with wide sleeves. He smiled at me and nodded as he passed. His gaze flittered onto me like a tiny insect, almost imperceptible. Something shifted within me.

Aye, I had known boys, larrikins in the hills, even one or two who had turned my head but not enough to pursue with vigour. The truth was I wanted more than a small white cottage, thatched and cold, on a barren hill with naught but small-town gossip to entertain me and a never-ending crib of bairns. My mammie had always frowned at my hopes for a grander life above my station and my dreams of travel. But the Highland life of a country wife was not the life I wanted for myself. I wanted to see the world and learn about its wonders. I’d listened to traveller’s tales and, thrilled by their adventures, wanted some of my own. I yearned to visit the land of the northern lights where my earliest mothers had been born.

But that day I had the breath knocked out of me. I backed up against a tree after the man had crested the hill, and I had to remind myself to breathe again.

I became giddy. It was one of those ‘knowings’ that my granaidh had spoken of. Despite my better judgement, every market day I would go to the same place on the hill and wait. And every day at the same appointed time, he would walk by and smile at me – just a small upturn of his full lips and a mischievous glint in his eye. It went on for some weeks until one day I decided to follow him at a distance. The man walked back into the throng of the city with a jaunty gait and I once came so close, with only a few walkers between us, that I imagined I could hear him whistling and the sound made my belly leap. The mysterious man disappeared into the Tollbooth but not before throwing me a glance, a wink and a salute. He had known all along that I had been following him. After waiting a long time without another sighting of him, I turned and made for home, the image of that wink never leaving my head.

That night, my tiny space seemed to me a palace and my straw cot a carved four-poster bed. Never before in my life had I known such happiness and I could not sleep for it. And during that same night, at first awake and then in my dreams, I inspected my vast rubble of memories. Good and bad, sadness and joy, the Highlands to the Lowlands. A young man without a name had been the start of a bud of happiness, bursting through a bloodstained snow. Already his features were fading, but it had not been his stride or face or shirtsleeves that I was preserving. It was the knowledge that something had changed and become new in my life. It was the ‘knowing’ that this man would be a catalyst for my own personal revolution. The Highlands and the bloodshed were my yesterday but the handsome man with the captivating smile would be my tomorrow and ever after.