The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,165

strong chance that at this moment she would know me, that she should speak to me or implore me or even curse me in some way as to cause my authenticity to be questioned, but I tell you in truth I had not even thought of this in my haste.

But let me break off my account of this miserable night, and tell you now the whole tale before I proceed to relate what little did here take place.

Before you read another word I have written, leave your chamber, go down the stairs into the main hall of the Motherhouse, and look at the portrait of the dark-haired woman by Rembrandt van Rijn which hangs just at the foot of the stairs. That is my Deborah Mayfair, Stefan. This is the woman, now shorn of her long dark hair, who sits shivering now as I write, in the prison across the square.

I am in my room at the inn, having only lately left her. I have candles aplenty, as I have told you, and too much wine to drink and a bit of a fire to drive out the cold. I am seated at the table facing the window, and in our common code I will now tell you all.

For it was twenty-five years ago that I first came upon this woman, as I have told you, and I was a young man of eighteen years then and she only a girl of twelve.

This was before your time in the Talamasca, Stefan, and I had come to it only some six years before as an orphaned child. It seemed the pyres of the witches were burning from one end of Europe to the other, and so I had been sent out early from my studies to accompany Junius Paulus Keppelmeister, our old witch scholar, on his travels throughout Europe, and he had only just begun to show to me his few poor methods of trying to save the witches, by defending them where he could and inclining them in private to name as accomplices their accusers as well as the wives of the most prominent citizens of the town so the entire investigation might be discredited, and the original charges be thrown out.

And I had only lately been made to understand, as I traveled with him, that we were always in search of the true magical person—the reader of minds, the mover of objects, the commander of spirits, though seldom if ever, even in the worst persecutions, was any true sorcerer to be found.

It was my eighteenth year as I have told you, and my first to venture out of the Motherhouse since I had begun my education there, and when Junius took ill and died in Edinburgh, I was at my wit’s end. We had been on our way to investigate the trial of a Scottish cunning woman, very much famed for her healing power, who had cursed a milkmaid in her village and been accused of witchcraft though no evil had befallen the maid.

On his last night in this world, Junius ordered me to continue to the Highland village without him; and told me to cling fast to my disguise as a Swiss Calvinist scholar. I was far too young to be called a minister by anyone, and so could not make use of Junius’s documents as such; but I had traveled as his scholarly companion in plain Protestant clothes, and so went on in this manner on my own.

You cannot imagine my fear, Stefan.

And the burnings of Scotland terrified me. The Scots are and were, as you know, as fierce and terrible as the French and Germans, learning nothing it seems from the more merciful and reasonable English. And so afraid was I on this my first journey that even the beauty of the Highlands did not work its spell upon me.

Rather when I saw that the village was small and at a great remove from its nearest neighbor, and that its people were sheepherders, I knew even greater dread for their ignorance and the ferocity of their superstition. And to the dreary aspect of the whole was added the nearby ruins of a once great cathedral, rising like the bones of a leviathan out of the high grass, and far beyond across a deep valley, the forlorn picture of a castle of rounded towers and tiny windows, which might have been an empty ruin, for all I could see.

How shall I ever be of assistance here, I