Haunt Me Still

  I had the time neither to answer in detail nor to babysit her. “Kidnapping and murder. I’m sorry,” I said, shoving the papers and the phone into the bag. “But a fifteen-year-old girl’s life hangs in the balance. Your client’s granddaughter.”

  “Lily? Lady Nairn’s Lily?”

  “You know her?”

  “Not personally, but I know a bit about Lady Nairn and her family.”

  “I’m trying to get her back. So was Eircheard.” I rose. “The manuscript of an early version of Macbeth is her ransom.”

  “Jesus, Kate. So you really do think it still exists?”

  “Someone thinks it does. Strongly enough to kill in anticipation of delivery. As you saw. I have twenty-four hours remaining, more or less, in which to find it.”

  “And if you don’t?”

  “Lily dies. Or maybe I do. They’re being cagey on that subject.”

  “You think someone means to perform the missing rite from Macbeth?”

  “You saw what happened to Eircheard. Do you think they’ll flinch at witchcraft?” If Carrie could rip out a man’s heart just to prep a tool, what was she capable of in the grand rite itself?

  “They’ll call it witchcraft, won’t they?” She took a step toward me, her hands balling into fists. “Everyone will. They have to be stopped.”

  I lifted the bag to my shoulder. “That’s what I’m doing. Or trying to.” I sighed. “You should go. Now.”

  She touched my arm. “I can help.”

  “No.” My breath came out close to a sob. “I let Eircheard help.”

  “You didn’t kill him, Kate.”

  “I let him come with me when I shouldn’t have. I let him get killed.”

  She clasped my arm just above the elbow. “I’ve spent my life working to restore respect to the pagan way of life. To witchcraft and ceremonial magic. These people—they’re beyond fringe. They’re psychopaths hiding behind a sick fantasy of paganism. They don’t represent who we are. But the instant this story hits the news, everything I and a lot of others have worked for…it will crumble like so much dust. In two days, they’ll have destroyed a lifetime of labor. The only way I can see to right that particular wrong, at least partially, is for a witch to be part of stopping them.”

  “I won’t have your blood on my hands.”

  “My blood, my hands,” she said quietly. “You want to save a girl, Kate. I want to save an entire religion.”

  Who was I to argue with that?

  “Who’s there?” called a voice off to the left, and footsteps headed toward us.

  “Come on,” said Joanna. Cutting to the right, she wound around trees and bushes until we came to another narrow path between buildings, fronted by another high wall, this one with a door in it. It opened onto a road one street over from the museum. Head straight into the thick of things, I heard Ben’s voice say in my head. It’s what innocent people do. So I turned right, back toward Great Russell Street, Joanna at my side. On the curb, we stood blinking in the whirl of headlights and sirens. In a lull, we crossed the street and hailed a cab heading west.

  38

  WE STOPPED AT Joanna’s flat in Chelsea just long enough to retrieve her passport; I waited in the cab. Just as she was returning, Lady Nairn called back. “Board the plane,” she said, “the professor’s at home and waiting—from what I gather, probably standing on a ladder beneath a clock, speeding the hands around.”

  While Ben had arranged the meeting, she’d looked up Clifton on the college Web site. According to the faculty list, he was a scholar of drama and theater history, she said. His dissertation had been about Edwin forrest and the growth of celebrity culture in nineteenth-century America; he was currently at work on a book about the Astor Place riot. The Macbeth riot, whose date was scrawled beneath the photograph. “Which makes his home address intriguing,” she added.

  “Where’s that?”

  “Astor Place.”

  Around me, the world flushed cold and then hot. “It would appear that the professor’s interest is not only professional, it’s personal,” said Lady Nairn. “Bordering on the obsessive, I’d say, but living in a house called Dunsinnan, that might be the pot calling the kettle black…. Did I mention that Clifton’s invited the curator round to his condo for breakfast? Seven-thirty?”

  “That’s brilliant, Lady Nairn. Joanna Black will be with me.”

  “Find Lily,” she said as she hung up.

  The taxi drove right up to the plane, where a sleepy customs official was waiting. All he wanted was a flash of valid passports. And then we were up into the plane and on our way. During take-off, I sat looking at the photograph of forrest. “Tell me what you know about him,” said Joanna.

  “Not much. He was one of the great tragedians of the nineteenth-century American stage. Maybe the greatest. A man’s man. Worked his way up from nothing, which endeared him to the masses. He played heroes, and Americans loved him: He was all noble strength and innocence. The British thought him uncouth and extravagant, which he was.”

  “Macbeth doesn’t quite fit, does it? Was it a sort of side specialty?”

  She was right. “I don’t think it was considered his greatest role. But it was dear to his heart. His parents had emigrated from Scotland. For all I know, he considered it his birthright. He certainly considered it a vehicle for competing with Macready.

  “They started out as friends. But when forrest got a cold reception in Britain, he blamed Macready. Took to following the older man about, watching his performances, or scheduling his own to conflict with them. In Edinburgh, once, he stood up in an otherwise rapt theater and hissed Macready at some tense moment in the middle of Hamlet. Everyone saw and heard him. He might as well have called his rival out in a duel—and other men would have settled the score at dawn, in a barrage of pistol fire. But forrest and Macready fought their battles by proxy, on the stage.”

  “And let other people do the dying, apparently,” said Joanna. She ran a finger over the date: May 10, 1849. “Why date the photo with a day of infamy?”

  I shook my head. The play’s curse was beginning to seem more real than I liked to admit. What had been forrest’s role in the riot? And what about the mirror? Was it Dee’s mirror, in forrest’s hand? Was it the same mirror the museum had? Or used to have?

  Those who’d taken it would need a scryer, just as Dee had. The purer the seer, Joanna had said, the clearer the sight. Lily had been learning to scry, I thought suddenly. What if they’d taken her as a seer? Hal Berridge had not survived the experience of scrying in that mirror.

  Eircheard had not survived its theft. I rubbed my temples, trying to press away the prick of tears. Whatever Clifton knew, I prayed it would be useful. I had twenty-four hours, and the flight to New York would eat seven of them. Fourteen, if I had to fly back.

  She must die. Shakespeare’s words ran through my mind like some imp of the perverse.

  Did they point at Lily? Or me?

  I’d promised Eircheard I would save her.

  Twenty-four hours.

  As the plane leveled out, I moved to a sofa, laying out the evidence on the coffee table and walking Joanna through it. She’d risked her life coming along. She might as well know what and who we were up against.

  “So you think it’ll be a cauldron rite?” she asked, peering up over her glasses.

  “Lady Nairn’s convinced of it.”

  “Makes sense of Arthur Dee’s Medea comment.”

  “Makes sense of a hell of a lot more than that.” I told her about Carrie—Cerridwen—Douglas and her penchant for carving people with the Pictish cauldron symbol.

  Joanna’s eyes crinkled with revulsion.

  “Lady Nairn thinks she’s become a writer. Maybe you’ve heard of her: Corra ravensbrook.”

  “Ravensbrook?” She took off her glasses and ran a hand through her dark hair. “I’m sorry to say so, but in that case, the cutting and the killing both make more sense than I’d care to admit. I won’t stock her books. S
he sends parents frantic. Not that I usually pay much attention to parents’ whining—but they have a point about ravensbrook. Teenagers who are easily led have gone, well, badly astray under her influence. I imagine the police have a file on her. But she’s very clever. She never quite comes out and says kill. On the other hand, she preaches the beauty of folding death into life and life into death. And she brings ancient rites of sacrifice alive quite uncannily. She talks about the bog bodies, for instance, with ghastly relish.”

  “Bog bodies?”

  “Ancient bodies, many of them victims of violent death, who’ve been discovered ritually buried in peat bogs, mostly in Britain, Ireland, and northwestern Europe. They’re decent evidence for fairly regular human sacrifice among both the Iron Age Celts and Germanic tribes, though the scientists keep insisting they might be the victims of capital punishment. Hard to see how so many young children and older women were thought to have committed crimes meriting execution, though.

  “ravensbrook, as I recall, is especially taken with the Kayhausen Boy, who was found in a peat bog in northern Germany with his feet tied together, his hands bound behind his back; another length of cloth was wrapped around his neck and passed lengthwise around his body through his groin. The ghoulish woman rabbits on for what seems like pages about how similar that binding is to the binding a lot of modern covens use in their initiation rites.”

  It was how Sybilla had been tied. How I’d seen Lily tied. I pulled up the picture of Lily on my phone and set it down before Joanna. “Like that?”

  She leaned forward to look. “Jesus. Is that Lily?”

  I nodded. “You think it’s some kind of initiation?”

  “Are you joking? Ravensbrook scorns modern covens as namby-pamby pablum. Not exactly the opiate of the masses—‘the watered-down wine of starry-eyed fools’ was how she put it once.” Her mouth pursed in distaste. “She has not made herself warmly welcome among the pagan community.”

  If Lady Nairn was right, it wasn’t initiation Carrie was after. It was inspiration. Genius. The thunderbolt of the gods, Lady Nairn had called it. Carrie would kill for it, she’d said. I ran my tongue around dry lips. She had killed for it. Eircheard had been carved into an Aztec sacrifice, Auld Callie hanged and pierced like Odin, and Sybilla bound like an Iron Age bog body, before having her throat slit. Why? What was this leading up to?

  Across from me, Joanna suddenly looked up from the Dee book. “Do you know what this is?” she asked in a strangled voice, smoothing it open. Beneath her hand, the pages were strewn with diagrams in blotted ink, as if drawn in a hurry: circles and triangles, separate and apart, some of them fitted together in octagons and even more elaborate structures. They made no sense to me.

  “Plans,” she said. “for the Theatre, with a capital ‘T.’ Burbage’s Theatre, 1576.”

  “The round wooden O,” I murmured. The first sole-purpose theater built in Europe since the fall of rome, I explained to Joanna, as we both stared at the wizard’s manuscript. The Theatre had been the home of Shakespeare’s company, in the fields of Shoreditch, north of London. Twenty-odd years later, when they’d had trouble with the landlord, they’d sneaked in and pulled it down, board by board, on a single cold winter’s night at the end of 1598. Quietly shipping it in pieces across the Thames, they’d rebuilt it in South-wark, on the southern bank of the river, and renamed it the Globe. Dee had designed it?

  “The magical community has long suspected so,” said Joanna, tracing one of the circles with her finger. “But I don’t know about ‘sole-purpose.’ I’ve seen these same diagrams elsewhere among his papers, I’d swear it.”

  “Where?”

  Her gaze was faintly challenging. “In notes showing how to cast circles of power.”

  The darkness and cold outside the plane seemed to press inward. “for making magic?”

  “for invoking demons. Or angels,” she added with a small smile. “Depending on your point of view.”

  I pushed back from the table and rose, unable to sit still. “What are you saying? That the Theatre—the foundational structure of English drama—was designed as a place to work magic?”

  “To invoke spirits.” Her eyes were shining with excitement as she held up the book. “This is proof, Kate. Proof positive.”

  There wasn’t much room on the plane, but I paced wildly through what there was of it. Had Shakespeare known? One of my Father’s schollars, Arthur Dee had written. True, men had sought out John Dee in pursuit of all kinds of knowledge. His library had been one of the finest in all Britain, bettering even the queen’s on certain topics, and far outstripping anything Oxford or Cambridge had to offer. But according to Arthur, Shakespeare had bought his way into Dee’s coterie and his collection of books with a strange mirror and an even stranger manuscript. Begging the question, a scholar of what?

  I conjure you, by that which you profess…answer me. What was it that Shakespeare had professed? I came to a stop before Joanna, my voice cracking. “The Theatre was built for conjuring?”

  “Conjuring and performing were closely linked, at least in some minds, in the renaissance. You must know that.”

  “raising spirits in a circle,” I said. It was what conjurors did. It was also what companies of players did. Shakespeare said as much, near the end, in one of his finest speeches, given to his great magician, Prospero:

  Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

  As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

  Are melted into air, into thin air:

  And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

  The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

  The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

  Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

  And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

  Leave not a rack behind.

  Had Shakespeare meant the globe, as in the earth, or had he meant the Globe, the theater in which the actor playing Prospero would have pronounced the words? Or both? And if he’d meant both, just how closely did he link theater and magic in his own mind?

  I exhaled sharply. “Of course he also made ‘raising spirits in a circle’ refer to sex.”

  Joanna rolled her eyes. “He made everything refer to sex. The man had the libido of a lovesick seventeen-year-old boy crossed with a bull, permanently. That doesn’t mean he couldn’t be serious about a subject on occasion, as well.”

  I dropped back onto the couch. “What was the point of conjuring? What was Dee looking for when he invoked his angels?”

  Joanna stretched, crossing her hands behind her head. “He spent decades at it, Kate. Not fair, really, to demand a single burning focus.” She leaned forward, her dark eyes gleaming, a thrill running through her voice. “But ultimately, he was searching for the lost language of God. A tongue that carried such force that one could say fiat lux—‘let there be light’—and light would appear. Dee and other renaissance magi believed that the languages they knew and spoke and studied were descended from that divine original, but that they’d dwindled in power, though there were still flashes of it left in certain combinations of sounds. Especially in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew rites of magic, closely guarded as precious and dangerous secrets.”

  Her reading glasses dangled like a pendulum from one hand. “It’s not entirely far-fetched, you know. There are certain phrases, in every language, that don’t merely describe the world but make things happen.”

  I nodded. “Speech-act theory. One of the few corners of literary theory I could make sense of, once upon a time.”

  She leaned back. “The doctorate that got away?”

  “I like to think that I was the one doing the escaping.” I’d left the ivory tower for the theater with all the eagerness of an eloping bride; the only regret I had about it was the lasting rift it had opened between me and roz Howard, my academic mentor. Whom Joanna was reminding me of more and more.

  “Quite. Well, then you know that in what’s called performative language,
uttering phrases like ‘I do’ at a wedding, or ‘I promise’ and ‘I bet’ bring certain states of affairs into being.”

  I bit my lip. “Words with the force to change the world.”

  “In Shakespeare’s England, the phrase ‘I conjure’ was widely thought to have such force.”

  If the point of conjuring was a search for the language of God, language that could create worlds with words, it was tied even more closely to theater than I’d thought.

  “I’ve always thought that’s one reason the Puritan preachers hated theater so,” said Joanna softly. “They ranted on about loose morals and whore-mongering and people being lured away from church. But idol-worship was one of their most serious charges, and beneath that, I think, lurked a recognition of theater’s power. They saw in it the same thing that Dee and Shakespeare saw: the shadow of the language of God.” Her voice gathered into dark intensity. “And I think it scared the shit out of them.”

  She leaned back over the book. “And they weren’t the only ones worried. In conjuring, circles of power are cast for one reason: protection. They keep the demons at bay. Often, there’s a triangle off to the side: that’s meant as a kind of unbreakable holding cell for whatever spirits should arise.” She pointed at the diagrams, full of circles and triangles. “Maybe the Theatre was designed to raise spirits in safety.”

  Maybe. “If so, it wouldn’t have worked for Macbeth. Not for the premiere, anyway, which took place at Hampton Court, in the rectangle of the Great Hall.”

  “Maybe that’s why it was so dangerous,” said Joanna. For a moment we stared at each other, not speaking, the only sound the drone of the plane.

  Modern theaters, for the most part, were no longer built in the round, on Dee’s plan. They hadn’t been since the restoration. Could that be why the play had grown a reputation for being cursed?

  Good grief, what line of thought was I allowing myself to be drawn down? I stood up quickly, as if I might shake off all this talk of magic like a dog shaking off water.