Corrag (4 page)

Stair called me
a meddling piece,
but he also said
you must have seen such things, through those long lashes of yours…
In a soft voice. Like he was my friend which he never was.

That’s why he’ll burn me, I think.

Get rid of the one who saw it all.

The one who saved people, and ruined the plan.

She who remembers all things.

Yes I will give you my telling.

You say
tell me what you know—give me names! Soldiers’ names.
And I will. I will tell you of the Glencoe massacre, and what I saw—of the musket fire, and the screams, and the herbs I used, and the truth. The truth! Who else knows it, as I know it? I will tell you every part. And I promise you this, Mr Leslie—it will help your cause. It will help you to bring your James back, for what I have to tell makes the Highlanders look wise, and civilised, as they are. It shows their dignity. It says the King we have now is not Orange, but blood-red. I promise you that.

And in return?

Speak of me. Of me. Of my little life. Speak of it, when I am gone—for who is left to tell it? None know my story. There is no one left to tell it to, so speak of it from your pulpit, or write it down in ink. Talk of what I tell you, and add no lies to it—it needs none, it brims with love and loss so I see it be quite a fireside tale as it is, all truthful. Say
Corrag was good
. Say that she did not deserve a fiery death, or lonesome one. All I’ve ever tried to be is kind.

I
S THIS
fair? A fair bargaining? Sit with me and hear my life’s tale, and I will speak, in time, of Glencoe. On a snowy night. When people I loved fell, and died. But some, also, survived.

It is
Corrag
. Cor
rag
. No other name but that.

My mother was
Cora,
sir. But her most common name was
hag
so she joined them together like two sticks on fire, to make my name. That was her way. Her humour.

But
Corrag
is also what they call
a finger
in the Highland tongue. I never knew it till I walked into those hills. Many folk have pointed theirs at me, so it’s a fitting name. Also, it’s fitting that some mountains are called the word—the tall and snow-topped ones. There is the
Corrag Bhuide
which I never saw because it’s far north of here. But they say it is beautiful—mist-wearing, and wolf-trodden. It’s all height and wonder in my head.

W
HO
would believe it? A churchman and a captured witch, helping each other like this? But it is so.

The world has its wonders and I will speak of them.

H
ow would you like my words? I have so many of them. Like a night sky is starry, so my mind is shining with words. I could not sleep, last night, for thinking. I lay on my straw and thought
where do I start, with my story? How?

I could speak of the night of the murders itself—how I ran all breathless from Inverlochy with the snow coming down. Or how the loch was dark with ice. Or Alasdair’s kiss—his mouth on my mouth.

Or further back?

To before the glen? To my English life?

I will start there. I’ll start in a town of clover, with my mother’s glossy black hair. For it’s right, I think, that I start with my early days—for how can you tell my tale, if you don’t know me? Who I am? You think I am a stinking, small-sized wretch. No heart in my chest. No skin on my bones.

Y
ES
I will wait a moment.

A quill, ink, your holy book.

Is it a goose’s feather? Very long and white. I have seen geese flying at twilight, and I have heard them call, and those are good moments. They happened in England, in the autumn days. Where were the geese flying to? I never really knew. But sometimes their feathers would undo themselves, and float down into the cornfields, and Cora and I would find them, take them home. She couldn’t write, but she liked them.
So long and white…
she’d whisper, fingering it. Like your quill.

And a small table, that unfolds?

You have brought plenty in that leather bag of yours.

There is the saying, sir, that witches are not born at all.

I have heard such lies—that their mothers were cats, or a cow whose milk had soured so she heaved her curdle out in human form. A fishwife once said she hatched out from fish eggs, but she cackled, too—she liked the whisky too much. Then there was Doideag. She swore she grew like a tooth on a rock, on the isle of Mull—and she believed her own story, I think. But I didn’t. That one lusted for henbane, like Gormshuil did. Fiercesome pieces, both. They smiled when they heard of a boat being wrecked—and I asked
why? It is awful! A boat is gone, and all those lives…
But I reckon they smiled at what they knew, from years before—loss, and sorrow. That’s why.

A tooth? On a rock?

Not me.

I had a mother. A proper human one.

She was like no other human I have ever known. Her eyelashes brushed her cheekbones. Her laugh was many shrieks in a line, like how a bird does when a fox comes by it. She wore a blood-red skirt, which is why she wore it, I think—for when our pig died, his blood didn’t show on it at all. Nor did berry juices, or mud. When she spun on her toes those skirts lifted up, like a wing—as if she might fly far away. Cora lapped up the morning dew, cat-like. She rustled with all the herbs she’d picked, and she told future times, and most of the men looked twice at her as she passed, and smiled. The blacksmith was in love with her. The baker’s boy would follow her, put his feet where hers had been. And Mr Fothers loathed her—but I won’t talk of him just yet.

There was something to her,
is what they all said, later. I call it magick, and boldness. But some people are scared of these things.

Cora…All of north England knew her name. I ran away when I was nearly a woman, and for many weeks I still heard tales—of a red-skirted beauty in the border country. How she stopped the church clock by pointing at it, or shed feathers in pheasant season. This was her. I knew it. Lies, of course—who sheds feathers? But there is only ever gossip on the brighter, wilder lives.

Cora bewitched them—that is how they put it. She courted men with her beauty, and nature with her soul. And she courted her own death too, in the end—for the last tale I heard was how the wind caught her skirts on the gallows, and twirled her round and round.

S
HE,
also, was human-born. Her mother was no fish egg—she was a Godly woman, with rubies in her ears and a twisted hand. Cora was blamed, for that twisting—for her birth came in with a lightning strike which set fire to the house, and burnt her mother’s hand as she pushed the door to flee.
An ill-luck child
.
Cora
—who moved like a spider. Who did not crawl as bairns do, but scrambled—all legs and eyes. She scrambled in church, one Sunday, so that she scratched the pew with her fingernails and the mark was a cross downside-up.
A sign!
they all cried.
Satan’s work!
When the witch-hunting fever came to them, as it did, it was her mother they took to the ducking stool.
You have fornicated,
they told her,
with Yon Fellow
(for they feared saying his name, but didn’t fear murder, it seems). They said her hand like a hoof was His mark on her.
Proof,
they tutted,
of your sin.

What hope did she have? Not even some. My grandmother, who was a God-serving woman all her days, was taken to a dread pool outside the town. Her husband tried to save her. He tried, but who can undo
witch
? So he stood and wept as they undressed her. He called out
I love my wife
when she was in her shift, and she called back
and I love my husband, very much.
And then they tied her thumbs to her big toes so that her chin touched her knees. Then they dropped her in. She floated three times. On the fourth time she went under, and that was her end.

Cora saw this. She watched it from the bridge with her witch’s eye.

Later, she would swear to me
there is no Devil, only man’s devilish ways. All bad things,
she hissed,
are man-made…All of them!
And I know she saw her mother when she said this, sinking down.

Afterwards, her father found an inn and never left.

As for Cora, they all hoped she might turn her face to the Lord and be saved by him. My mother? No. She had that lightning in her heart, I think, and it could not be stilled. She took to church falsely, smiled to hide her fire. She used the cross round her neck to crush flies and pop out apple seeds, and other casual deeds which had naught to do with God.

She ran from the town when she was old enough to run fast. Six or seven years old—no older.

T
HIS
was her wandering time. These were the days and nights which made her the creature she was, in her heart—owl-wise, cat-sly. She prowled in the dark. She slept in lonesome places where no soul had been, for years—caves, forests. A dank waterwheel. She stood by the sea, and crouched in bogs, and she met other people on her wanderings—other hiding people. Witches. Rogues.

I learnt my herbs,
she said,
from those people. I picked them in those places.

So Cora learnt herbs, and she grew. She grew tall, and wide-hipped. She took her red skirt from a gooseberry bush it dried upon, as she came into Cumberland. Then she wore it to market for eggs and bread, where a woman said
thief! ’Tis my skirt!
So she moved on with no eggs, or bread. She lived as gypsies live—selling cures, and people’s future times. She did not always speak the truth, for bad futures did not pay well. I think her purse jingled. She could talk very well when she buttoned her wild tongue, and only used her other.

A troublesome piece.

So she was called at her birth and so called, too, once I was born. She was definitely that—troublesome. But was she made to be? By others? Maybe—for if you kick a dog for barking it will only bark more, in the end.

I’ve wondered if I take after her, that way. I know some would say so—
troublesome hag.
But I have saved trouble too, yes I have.

So I am English-born. You know that from my voice.

Thorneyburnbank. A long name, and a fitting one—for its burn had thorns to its southern side. There was also an elm wood, and field so brackish that the cows were haunch-high when they fed on its clover. They did that in the spring—it was sweetest then. Their milk, too, was sweeter, and the village was happier for the sweet milk. More hats were raised in the street, at me.

Not many knew of our village. Most knew of Hexham, though—with it being near the wall that the Romans made. Hexham’s abbey had bells which rang from the south, and if the wind was also southern we would hear them. I remember it like that—the cows in the marsh, and the bells ringing. It’s a pretty sight, in my head.

But it was not always pretty. And Cora was not fooled by pretty, gentle things. She was tired of wandering, that’s all. How many years can a person walk and walk, and sleep on bare earth? She was tired by now. She’d thought to try Hexham for a wholesome life, since she’d dreamt of its name very clearly—but the gaol upset her, I think.
Justice
was a word she scowled at, and was black for. The gaol hissed it to her—or at least, man’s meaning of it, which was Jeddart’s justice, mostly. She’d seen plenty of that, in a dark pool. She looked for less people to live by, for less people can mean more sense.

A hearth. A proper sleeping place.

A den for her feral heart.

T
HE
border country had a wild and unbridled way of life. It was filled with unkind weather, and as many ghosts as there was rain in the sky. There were rains so heavy the burn came up and ate the bridge like a fish does a fly—rain on rain. That meant trouble for the bats, too—for there were some bats that liked the bridge for roosting, and hung upside-down from it. We put our pig in the cottage with us one early spring for the mud was too thick for even a pig. So three of us snored at night, and sat by the hearth but not so close that we might smell pork roasting.

Winters could kill folk, there. They froze the earth so that all things in it—beasts, bushes—froze too. I knew the story of Old Man Bean. They only found his boots.

Reiving weather,
Cora said.
Oh yes
.

Reiver,
Mr Leslie.
Ree
-ver.

That was a whispered word. An old one, too. She knew it. She knew that in
reiver
there had been spoiled homes and outrageous foraging, and cattle stolen away into the northern woods. She’d heard these stories of olden days, but she’d seen it too—in her head, in the strange roamings when her eyes went wide.
Their hats,
she said,
were shiny-shiny…
She called them
crook-hearted, and cruel
.

Cora told me, as a bedtime tale, that these reivers had ridden on moonless nights, and damp autumn ones when the cattle were fat, and worth reiving. The air might have had thick, swirling mists in it so they came forth, like ghosts. They’d charged onto farmsteads with their bonnets and daggs, roaring for what they had no right to have—hens, coins, leather. They maimed as they chose and left homes burning, so that if the night began itself moonless it ended fiery, full of light.

I thought of them when I was small. I thought of how I might fight them if they came for our pig, or three scrag hens. I thought I may fight them with a flaming cloth tied to bones, or stones. I fell on this distraction—I liked it more than working hard. But one day Mother Mundy spied me burning turf as March-wardens did. She beckoned me. She was a grizzled old crone whose teeth were gone, save for a peg or two. She told me of a night in which she’d been young and fair, unknown to any man, but was made known to a reiver as the thatch burned above her. The town raised hue and cry, she said. She was left extremely hurt and mangled, but with her life.
I was lucky
she slurred—
others were slew…Oxen gone and horses too.
She said I was to keep her secret safe in me. She said she’d told no other soul in all her years, not even her man Mundy who was a long time boxed under the earth. He’d stepped on a nail, or so I heard. It turned his blood bad, and that took him.

I don’t know why she told me of the reiver. I only half-caught her meaning, but did not forget.

Most were gone by my birth. They did their crimes before this Dutch Orange king, or the witch-hating one. The red-haired queen was on the English throne when they fought with most splendour or the least shame—whichever you’d have it. Before the war people called civil, when no war is such. They were caught and banished, or strung up like rats, so that these northern parts could sleep well on autumn nights.

The second Charles king talked of border peace then. But he was wrong, as kings can be. There was no proper border peace. The sons of reivers and their sons were still alive. They were fewer, but vengeful. And when my mother first came to Thorneyburnbank she knew the last reivers still rode out at night, and lurked in blind turnings, for the witch in her could smell their blades and fires, and sheep fat. She could hear their hobblers’ teeth upon their bridles in the dark.

Wise Cora.

She was. For she reasoned that if a village had one eye on the Scotch raiders, they would not say
witch
so much.
Folk need a foe,
she told me,
and they have their foe already. See?
I saw. Some people fight Campbells, or papists, or the English, or women who live on their own. But Thorneyburnbank? They fought these night-time marauders, these varlots. These Mossmen.

A week before an unknown lady with a blood-red skirt came into the village, a farmstead was reived. A dozen geese were thrown in a sack, and stolen. Local men rode after the sound of a dozen white geese in foul tempers, but the Mossmen knew the windings, the places no-one knew. The geese were gone, plucked, roasted before the men had saddled up, most likely. And the farmer had no beasts now, except for an old bull.