The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,162

Solomon about,” I said, “so that he might concur.”

But this they did not hear.

“If there was another witch, it was Charlotte,” said the old vintner. “You never saw such a sight as her Negroes, coming into the very church with her to Sunday Mass, with fine wigs and satin clothes! And the three mulatto maids for her infant boy. And her husband, tall and pale and like unto a willow tree, and suffering as he does from a great weakness which has afflicted him from childhood and which not even Charlotte’s mother could cure. And oh, to see Charlotte command the Negroes to carry their master about the village, down the steps and up the steps, and to pour his wine for him and hold the cup to his lip and the napkin to his chin. At this very table they sat, the man as gaunt as a saint on the church wall, and the black shining faces around him, and the tallest and blackest of them all, Reginald, they called him, reading to his master from a book in a booming voice. And to think Charlotte has lived among such persons since the age of eighteen, having married this Antoine Fontenay of Martinique at that tender age.”

“Surely it was Charlotte who stole the doll from the cabinet,” said the innkeeper’s son, “before the priest could lay hands on it, for who else in the terrified household would have touched such a thing?”

“But you have said that the mother could not cure the husband’s illness?” I asked gently. “And plainly Charlotte herself could not cure it. Maybe these women are not witches.”

“Ah, but curing and cursing are two separate things,” said the vintner. “Would they had applied their talent merely to curing! But what had the evil doll to do with curing?”

“And what of Charlotte’s desertion?” asked another, who had only just joined the congregation and seemed powerfully excited. “What can it mean but that they were witches together? No sooner was the mother arrested than Charlotte fled with her husband and her child, and her Negroes, back to the West Indies whence they came. But not before Charlotte had gone to be with her mother in the prison, and been locked up with her alone for more than an hour, this request granted only for those in attendance were foolish enough to believe that Charlotte would persuade her mother to confess, which of course she did not do.”

“Seemed the wise thing to have done,” said I. “And where has Charlotte gone?”

“To Martinique once more, it is said, with the pale skin and bone crippled husband, who has made a fortune there in the plantations, but no one knows that this is true. The inquisitor has written to Martinique to demand of the authorities that they question Charlotte, but they have not answered him, though there has been time enough, and what hope has he of justice being done in such a place as that?”

For over half an hour I listened on to this chatter, as the trial was described to me, and how Deborah protested her innocence, even before the judges and before those of the village who were admitted to witness it, and how she herself had written to His Majesty King Louis, and how they had sent to Dole for the witch pricker, and had then stripped her naked in her cell, and cut off her long raven hair, shaving her head after that, and searched her for the devil’s mark.

“And did they find it?” I asked, trembling inside with disgust at these proceedings, and trying not to recall in my mind’s eyes the girl I remembered from the past.

“Aye, two marks they found,” said the innkeeper, who had now joined us with a third bottle of white wine paid for by me and poured it out for all to enjoy. “And these she claimed she had from birth and that they were the same as countless persons had upon their bodies, demanding that all the town be searched for such marks, if they were to prove anything, but no one believed her, and she was by then worn white and thin from starvation and torture, yet her beauty was not gone.”

“How so, not gone?” asked I.

“Oh, like a lily she looks now,” said the old vintner sadly, “very white and pure. Even her jailers love her, so great is her power to charm everyone. And the priest weeps when he takes her Communion, for though she