The Witching Hour

  Now I shall have to go, I thought, and made to set down my wine. But she came towards me, smiling still, and she held my hands, and said "Petyr, come with me," and took me into a small chamber of cabinets where the household linen was kept.

  What polish she had now, and grace. A lady at court could not have done it better. But when I considered this, I considered also my memory of her in the cart that day at the crossroads, and how like the little Princess she had seemed.

  Yet she was changed from those times in every way. In the few thin shafts of light that pierced the little linen room, I could inspect her in every detail, and I found her robust, and perfumed, and red-cheeked, and there sat the great Brazilian emerald in its filigree of gold upon her high plump breast.

  "Why have you not told everyone what you know of me?" she asked as if she did not know the answer.

  "Deborah, we told you the truth about ourselves. We only wanted to offer you shelter, and our knowledge of the powers you possess. Come to us whenever you wish."

  She laughed. "You are a fool, Petyr, but you brought me out of darkness and misery into this wondrous place." She reached into the hidden right pocket of her great skirt and pulled up out of it a handful of emeralds and rubies. "Take these, Petyr."

  I drew back and shook my head.

  "You say you are not of the devil," she said to me. "And your leader says that he does not even believe in Satan, were those not his words? But what of God and the Church, do you believe in, then, that you must live like monks in retreat with your books, never knowing the pleasures of the world? Why did you not take me in the inn, Petyr, when you had the chance to do it? You wanted it badly enough. Take my thanks, for that is all you can have now. And these gems which will make you rich. You need no longer depend on your monkish brethren. Stretch out your hand?"

  "Deborah, how did you come by these jewels!" I whispered. "For what if you are accused of stealing them?"

  "My devil is too clever for that, Petyr. They come from far away. And I have but to ask for them to have them. And with but a fraction of their endless supply I bought this emerald which I wear about my neck. The name of my devil is carved on the back of the gold fitting, Petyr. But you know his name. I admonish you, never call upon him, Petyr, for he serves me and will only destroy anyone else who seeks to command him through his given name."

  "Deborah, come back to us," I begged, "only by day if you wish, for a few hours here and there, to talk to us, when your husband would certainly allow. This spirit of yours is no devil, but he is powerful, and can do evil things out of recklessness and the prankishness that characterizes spirits. Deborah, this is no plaything, surely you must know!"

  But I could see such concerns were far from her thoughts.

  I pressed her further. I explained that the first and foremost rule of our order was that no one of us, regardless of his powers, would ever command a spirit for gain. "For there is an old rule in the world, Deborah, among all sorcerers and those who address powers unseen. That those who strive to use the invisible for evil purposes cannot but invite their own ruin."

  "But why is gain an evil thing, Petyr?" she said as if we were the same age, she and I. "Think of what you are saying! What is rich is not evil! Who has been hurt by what my devil brings to me? And all these in the household of Roelant have been helped."

  "There are dangers in what you do, Deborah! This thing grows stronger the more you speak to it--"

  She hushed me. She had contempt for me now. Again, she pressed me to take the jewels. She told me bluntly I was a fool, for I did not know how to use my powers, and then she thanked me for having taken her to the perfect city for witches, and with an evil smile she laughed.

  "Deborah, we do not believe in Satan," I said, "but we believe in evil, and evil is what is destructive to mankind. I beg you beware of this spirit. Do not believe what it tells you of itself and its intentions. For no one knows what these beings really are."

  "Stop, you anger me, Petyr. What makes you think this spirit tells me anything? It is I who speak to it! Look to the demonologies, Petyr, the old books by the rabid clergy who do believe in devils, for those books contain more true knowledge of how to control these invisible beings than you might think. I saw them on your shelves. I knew that one word in Latin, demonology, for I have seen such books before."

  The books were full of truth and lies and I told her so. I drew back from her sadly. Once again she pressed me to take the jewels. I would not. She slipped them in my pocket and pressed her warm lips to my cheek. I went out of the house.

  Roemer forbade me after that to see her. What he did with the gems I have never asked. The great treasure stores of the Talamasca have never been of much concern to me. I knew then only what I know now: that my debts are paid, my clothes are bought, I have the coins in my pockets I require.

  Even when Roelant took ill, and this was not her doing, Stefan, I quite assure you, I was told I could not visit Deborah again.

  But the strange thing was, that very often in odd places, Stefan, I beheld her, alone, or with one of Roelant's sons in hand, watching me from afar. I saw her thus in the public streets, and once passing the house of the Talamasca, beneath my window, and when I went to call upon Rembrandt van Rijn, there she sat, sewing, with Roelant beside her, staring at me out of her sideways eye.

  There were times even when I imagined that she pursued me. For I would be alone, walking and thinking of her, and remembering moments of our first beginning together when I had fed her and washed her like a child. I cannot pretend I thought of her as a child, however, when I thought of this. But all of a sudden, I would break my stride, turn, and there she would be, walking behind me in her rich velvet cloak and hood, and she would fix me with her eye before she turned down another lane.

  Oh, Stefan, imagine what I suffered. And Roemer said, do not go to her. I forbid it. And Geertruid warned me over and over that this fiercesome power of hers would grow too strong for her to command.

  The month before Roelant died, a young female painter of exquisite talent, Judith de Wilde, came to reside under his roof with Deborah, and to remain in the house with her aging father, Anton de Wilde, when Roelant was gone.

  Roelant's brothers took his sons home to the countryside, and the Widow Roelant and Judith de Wilde now together maintained the house, caring for the old man with great gentleness, but living a life of gaiety and many diversions as the rooms were thrown open all day and evening to the writers and poets and scholars and painters who chose to come there, and the students of Judith, who admired her as much as they admired any male painter, for she was just as fine, and had her membership in the Guild of St. Luke the same as a man.

  Under Roemer's edict, I could not enter. But many was the time I passed, and I swear to you, if I lingered long enough, Deborah would appear at the upstairs window, a shadow behind the glass. Sometimes I would see no more of her than a flashing light from the green emerald, and at other times she would open the window and beckon, in vain, for me to come inside.

  Roemer himself went to see her, but she only sent him away.

  "She thinks she knows more than we do," he said sadly. "But she knows nothing or she would not play with this thing. This is always the mistake of the sorceress, you see, to imagine her power is complete over the unseen forces that do her bidding, when in fact, it is not. And what of her will, her conscience, and her ambition? How the thing does corrupt her! It is unnatural, Petyr, and dangerous, indeed."

  "Could I call such a thing, Roemer, if I chose to do it?"

  "No one knows the answer, Petyr. If you tried perhaps you could. And perhaps you could not get rid of it, once you had called it, and therein lies the old trap. You will never call up such a thing with my blessings, Petyr. You are listening to my words?"

  "Yes, Roemer," I said, obedient as always. But he knew my heart had been corrupted and won over by Deborah, just as surely as if she had bewitched me, but it was not bewitching, it was stronger even than that.

&
nbsp; "This woman is beyond our help now," he said. "Turn your mind to other things."

  I did my best to obey the order. Yet I could not help but learn that Deborah was being courted by many a lord from England or France. Her wealth was so vast and solid that no one anymore thought to question the source of it, or to ask if there had been a time when she was not rich. Her education was proceeding with great speed, and she had a pure devotion to Judith de Wilde and her father, and so was in no hurry to marry, as she allowed the various suitors to call.

  Well, one of those suitors finally took her away!

  I never knew who it was that she married, or whence the marriage took place. I saw Deborah but once more, and I did not know then what I know now--that it was perhaps her last night before she left the place.

  I was awakened in the dark by a sound at my window, and realizing that it was a steady tapping on the glass, such as could not be made by nature, I went to see if some knave had come over the roof. I was after all on the fifth story then, being still little more than a boy in the order, and given only a mean but very comfortable room.

  The window was locked and undisturbed as it ought to be. But far below on the quay stood a lone woman in a garment of black cloth, who appeared to be gazing up at me, and when I opened the glass, she made a motion with her arm, which meant that I must come down.

  I knew it was Deborah. But I was maddened, as if a succubus had come into my chamber and pulled the covers off me and gone to work with her mouth.

  I crept out of the house so as to avoid all questions, and she stood waiting for me with the green emerald winking in the darkness, like a great eye about her neck. She took me with her through the back streets and into her house.

  Now by this point, Stefan, I thought myself to be dreaming. But I did not wish for this dream to end. The lady had no maid or footman or anyone about her. She had come alone to me--which is not I must say so dangerous in Amsterdam as it might be someplace else--but it was enough to stir my blood to see her so unprotected and so deliberate and mysterious, and clinging to me and urging me to hurry along.

  How rich were this lady's furnishings, how thick her many rugs, how fine her parquet floors. And past silver and fine china behind glimmering glass, she drew me up the stairs to her private chamber, and there to a bed draped in green velvet.

  "I go to be married tomorrow, Petyr," she said.

  "Then why have you brought me here, Deborah?" I asked, but I was shaking with desire, Stefan. When she let loose of her outer garment and let it drop on the floor, and I saw her full breasts plumped up by the tight lacing of her dress, I went mad to touch them, though I did not move. Even her waist so tightly cinched warmed me, and the sight of her fair neck and sloping shoulders. There was not a succulent particle of her flesh for which I did not hunger. I was a rabid beast in a cage.

  "Petyr," she said looking up into my eyes, "I know that you gave the gems to your order, and that you took nothing of my thanks for yourself. So let me give you now what you wanted from me in our long journey here, and which you were too gentle to take."

  "But Deborah, why do you do this?" I asked, determined not to take the slightest advantage of her. For in deep distress she was, I could read this in her eyes.

  "Because I want it, Petyr," she said to me suddenly, and wrapping her arms around me, she covered me with kisses. "Leave the Talamasca, Petyr, and come with me," she said. "Be my husband, and I will not marry this other man."

  "But Deborah, why do you want this of me?" I asked again.

  With bitterness and sadness she laughed. "I am lonely for your understanding, Petyr. I am lonely for one from whom I need hide nothing. We are witches, Petyr, whether we belong to God or the devil, we are witches, you and I."

  Oh, how her eyes glittered as she said this, how plain was her triumph, yet how bitter. Her teeth were clenched together for an instant. Then she put her hands on me and stroked my face and neck and I was further maddened.

  "You know that you desire me, Petyr, as you have always. Why do you not give in? Come with me; we will leave Amsterdam if the Talamasca will not allow you to be free; we will go away together, and there is nothing that I cannot get for you, nothing that I will not give you, only be with me, and let me be close to you and no longer afraid. I can speak to you of who I am and what befell my mother. I can speak to you of all that troubles me, Petyr, and of you I am never afraid."

  At this her face grew sad and the tears came to her eyes.

  "My young husband is beautiful and all that I ever dreamed of when I sat, dirty and barefoot, at the cottage door. He is the lord who rode by on his way to the castle, and to a castle he shall take me now, though it be in another land. It is as if I have entered into the fairy tales told by my mother, and I shall be the Comtesse, and all those rhymes and songs shall be made real.

  "But Petyr, I love him and do not love him. You are the first man that I loved, you who brought me here, you who saw the pyre on which my mother died, and you who bathed me and fed me and clothed me when I could not do these things for myself."

  I was past all hope of leaving this chamber without having her. I knew it. Yet so fascinated was I by the smallest fall of her lashes or the tiniest dimple of her cheek, that I let her draw me not to the bed but down upon the carpet before the little coal fire, and there in the flickering warmth she began to tell me of her woes.

  "My past is like phantoms now to me," she cried softly, her eyes growing wide at the wonder of it. "Did I ever live in such a place, Petyr? Did I watch my mother die?"

  "Do not bring it back into the light, Deborah," I said. "Let the old pictures fade away."

  "But Petyr, you remember when you first spoke to me and you told me that my mother was not evil, that men had done evil to her. Why did you believe those things?"

  "You tell me if she was a witch, Deborah, and what is a witch, by God!"

  "Oh, Petyr, I remember going out into the fields with her, under the moonless sky where the stones were."

  "And what happened, my dear?" I begged her. "Did the devil come with cloven hoofs?"

  She shook her head, and gestured for me to listen to her and be still and be good. "Petyr," she said, "it was a witch judge that taught her the black magic! She showed me the very book. He had come through our village when I was but a small thing, crawling still, and he came out to our hut for the mending of a cut in his hand. By the fire he sat with her and told her of all the places he had gone in his work and the witches he had burnt. 'Be careful, my girl,' he said to her, or so she told me afterwards, and then he took from his leather pouch the evil book. Demonologie it was called and he read it to her, for she could not read Latin, or any language for that matter, and the pictures he held to the light of the fire all the better for her to see.

  "Hour by hour he taught these things to her, what witches had done, and what witches could do. 'Be careful, my girl,' he would say, 'lest the devil tempt you, for the devil loves the midwife and the cunning woman!' and then he would turn another page.

  "That night as he lay with her, he talked on of the torture houses, and of the burnings, and of the cries of the condemned. 'Be careful, my girl,' he said again when he left her.

  "And all these things she later told to me. I was a child of six, maybe seven when she told the story. At the kitchen fire we sat together. 'Now, come,' she said, 'and you shall see.' Out into the field we went, feeling for the stones before us, and finding the very middle of the circle and standing stock-still in it to feel the wind.

  "Nary a sound in the night, I tell you. Nary a glimmer of light. Not even the stars to show the towers of the castle, or the far-away bit of water that one could see from there of Loch Donnelaith.

  "I heard her humming as she held my hand; then in a circle we danced together, making small circles round and round as we did. Louder she hummed and then the Latin words she spoke to call the demon, and then flinging out her arms she cried to him to come.

  "The night was empty. Nothing answered. I drew
close to her skirts and held her cold hand. Then over the grasslands I felt it coming, a breeze it seemed, and then a wind as it gathered itself about us. I felt it touching my hair and the back of my neck, I felt it wrapping us round as it were with air. I heard it speak then, only not in words, and yet I heard it and it said: 'I am here, Suzanne!'

  "Oh, how she laughed with delight; how she danced. Like a child, she wrung her hands, and laughed again and threw back her hair. 'Do you see him, my baby?" she said to me. And I answered that I could feel him and hear him very near.

  "And once again, he spoke, 'Call me by my name, Suzanne.'

  " 'Lasher,' she said, 'for the wind which you send that lashes the grasslands, for the wind that lashes the leaves from the trees. Come now, my Lasher, make a storm over Donnelaith! And I shall know that I am a powerful witch and that you do this for my love!'

  "By the time we reached the hut, the wind was howling over the fields, and in the chimney as she shut our door. By the fire, we sat laughing like two children together, 'You see, you see, I did it,' she whispered. And looking into her eyes, I saw what I had always seen and always would even to her last hour of agony and pain: the eyes of a simpleton, a dim-witted girl laughing behind her fingers with the stolen sweet in the other hand. It was a game to her, Petyr. It was a game!"

  "I see it, my beloved," I said.

  "Now, tell me there is no Satan. Tell me that he did not come through the darkness to claim the witch of Donnelaith and lead her to the fire! It was Lasher who found for her the objects which others lost, it was Lasher who brought the gold to her, which they took from her, it was Lasher who told her the secrets of treachery which she revealed to willing ears. And it was Lasher who rained hail upon the milkmaid who quarreled with her, Lasher who sought to punish her enemies for her and thereby made her power known! She could not instruct him, Petyr. She did not know how to use him. And like a child playing with a candle, she kindled the very fire that burnt her to death."

  "Do not make the same error, Deborah!" I whispered, even as I kissed her face. "No one instructs a daimon, for that is what this is."