The Secret of Isobel Key (16 page)

Lou nodded ruefully. “I've always wished my hair were straight, but like my father used to say, ‘if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.'”

“And if turnips were watches, I'd wear one by my side,'” the old Scotsman glibly quoted back. “Did you get your hair from your father, then, that he understood your desires so well?”

Lou shook her head. “No. I was actually always jealous of Dad's hair: it's straight and easy to manage, and he still hasn't gone grey.”

The professor studied her for a moment. “Was it your mother then who gave you that mane?”

Sighing, Lou decided that it would be better to forestall any further inquiry if she told the professor about her unknown heritage. It wasn't something she spoke of often, but she felt strangely comfortable with the old man sitting across from her, and she was able to say, “Actually, I don't know who I get my hair from. I'm adopted.”

There was an uncomfortable pause, but Lou turned again to the folder of photographs in her lap, pulling out one at random in an attempt to break the tension. “Now, what about this handsome man? Surely that can't be you?”

When they finally came for her, she was so disoriented from hunger, so maddened from lack of sleep, that she would have confessed to any question they put to her. Her judges included George Nairn, father of her slain brother-in-law, and he was adamant about following the letter of the law. Isobel answered “yes” whenever a question was put to her, and the townsfolk heard her confess to consorting with the devil, to plotting to murder newborn babes, and to carrying out the ghastly murders of her sister, Margaret, her brother-in-law, Alexander, and his second wife, Janet. Isobel answered “yes” to all that they said, but that was all she would say.

When they pressed her to reveal the names of the other witches she worked with, to cast suspicion on her fellow servants of Satan, she simply said “yes”. The judges were dissatisfied that her testimony had not helped root out more of the evil in the community, but even one confessed witch was a victory before God. For all but one of the judges, this was the first witch they had ever had dealings with, and the novelty of the situation left them almost childishly eager to proceed with the sentencing. The doctor who had made the initial accusations against Isobel on that gruesome night did not speak against her during the trial: in fact, he remained almost conspicuously absent from the legal proceedings, but there were plenty of witnesses to take his place. One little boy even told the crowd that he had been passing by the house on the night of the murder, and had heard Satan inside, demanding the service of Isobel Key. The lad did not mention that he was the one who fetched her to the scene. He was a young lad, but old enough to know that if he revealed even his minor role, he might face questioning himself.

Such testimony was added to countless others, woman who had lost children, men who had lost wives to difficult births, even those who had lost livestock found a way to blame Isobel for their misfortune. None of the hundreds of healthy babies she had delivered seemed to count in her favor, and there was not anyone there who was willing to speak of their lifelong friendship and trust with the healer. It would not have mattered. She was condemned the moment her scream broke the silence on that awful winter's night.

Barely able to stand due to malnourishment and sheer exhaustion, Isobel may have felt lucky that her trial was over and done with in such short order; within the span of one day, the confession had been signed and sealed, and Isobel was led out of the court and into the sunlight shining down on St. Andrews.

Her sentence was read aloud from the steps of the cathedral while she stood meekly to one side. Her hands were bound behind her back, and her wild hair framed her startling and empty eyes. Many villagers came to listen to the sentencing, for it had been some years since the excitement of a witch trial had swept through St. Andrews. Children raced about the crowd, and boys occasionally stooped to the ground and hurled a stone at the witch as they passed. The woman who had delivered many of these children, who had healed their ills and aided their folk, was sentenced to be burned alive for the crimes of witchcraft and sorcery. The sentence was read on the 8th of January, 1667. Isobel was 45 years old and utterly alone.

“The woman is my grandmother, Janet MacDonald. She had married a MacDonald of the Highlands, and how it was she persuaded him to move to lowland St. Andrews has always been a bit of a family mystery. Suffice to say, however, that they settled here somewhere around the turn of the last century. Janet MacDonald had two children, both of them girls. My mother, Mary Anne, was her oldest, and then there was my aunt Maggie. My mother was a suffragette, and proud of it she was too, so that when she married my father, Patrick Simmons, she refused to take his name. That's how it is I am a MacDonald, as she was.

“Aunt Maggie married an American after the Second World War, and she moved back with him to, I believe it was New Jersey. Mother stayed in close contact with her, and I knew my cousins through letters and from one holiday visit.

“My own mother and father never had any other children, and they passed away some twenty years back. I kept close to Aunt Maggie's eldest daughter, Lisa, although the poor woman has not had an easy life.”

Lou interrupted him. “Is Lisa still living in the United States?”

He nodded. “Lisa married and raised a family, but her husband was a scholar, and had to move constantly for his work. The family lived in, oh, three states in perhaps five years? I don't remember fully, but I do remember it was terrible hard on her children.”

“What happened?” Lou asked, strangely spellbound by his genealogical recitation.

The professor glanced at her, his eyes sad. “Lisa's eldest girl, JoAnn, I think is her name, she was 15 at the time. She got herself with child, and she wouldna' tell her parents who the father was. It near destroyed the family. She carried the baby to term, her parents wouldn't hear otherwise, but they made arrangements for the child to be adopted.”

He stared reflectively into space for a moment, lost in a world of the past. Lou shifted in her chair, and her movement caught the professor's attention.

Professor MacDonald blinked once, refocusing his eyes, and then he looked at his guest as if he had never seen her before. He surveyed her from head to toe and back up again, a calculating look in his eyes. “How old are you, lass?”

“I just turned twenty-one in October.” She answered automatically, even though it was an odd question for him to ask.

“Twenty-one in October,” he repeated quietly to himself. “And where did you say you grew up?”

“I don't know if I did say, but my parents work in Manhattan and I was raised in Hartford, Connecticut.”

The professor scratched his beard and stared at her. “When in October?”

His question seemed disjointed, and Lou wasn't sure for a moment what he meant. “Oh, my birthday you mean?” He nodded quickly at her. “October sixth.”

He shook violently in his chair when he heard her words, and she worried that the man was having some kind of seizure or stroke. She jumped up to help in some way, but he was already out of his chair and across the room, rummaging in a large roll top desk against the far wall. He muttered to himself as if he'd suddenly lost his mind.

Lou stood, uncertain as to what she should do. The professor seemed upset by something, and she still worried that he was suffering a stroke: his hands were shaking as they dug through the desk. Should she call an ambulance?

He
let out a triumphant cry and held a letter out to her. “Read it. Go on, read it!” The professor thrust the letter at Lou with a kind of manic frenzy, and she took it from him slowly.

“Dear Cousin,” she began to read out loud, and he shook his head.

“No, lass, I know what it says. You need to read it for yourself. Make sure you read it all the way through!” He sat down again on his chair, his former relaxed posture gone. Instead, he perched on the edge of the chair and jiggled his leg impatiently, never once taking his eyes off his guest.

The day they burned Isobel Key, two people from St. Andrews went missing. Young Nan Nairn was nowhere to be found, and George Nairn went frantically from overseeing the burning of the witch to upending the town to find his granddaughter. Perhaps he feared the witch had taken her as one final vengeance, and his relief must have been palpable when she was found, hiding in her aunt's abandoned cottage.

When she was found, the screams of the witch could still be heard all the way from St. Andrews, and the child had her head under a pillow and was clutching the bed frame tightly with both hands. Her grandfather was not one to tolerate fits, but he had to remove the little girl bodily from the place, and he feared for a while that the sweet child had indeed been entered by the devil, so loudly did she scream when he pried her fingers off the witch's bed. Her cries were not quieted until the fire had died down, and the moment Isobel Key was reduced to bone and ash was the moment her niece stopped her ungodly noise.

George Nairn was a practical man, and now that his granddaughter was found and was once more behaving in an appropriate manner, he didn't spare a thought for why the girl had been all the way out to the witch's cottage in the first place, nor did he worry that the sentencing and execution of her aunt had any ill effect on the child now in his care.

The other disappearance was not solved so easily. The doctor was gone, his shingle taken down sometime in the night and his dwelling cleared of all his tools and belongings. The people of St. Andrews never saw the man again, and none had any answer for his sudden disappearance. It was speculated that perhaps he had tired of life on the sea and had returned to his home in Edinburgh, or that perhaps he had fallen into the land of fairy, but the mystery was never resolved.

“Don't you see, lass, don't you understand what this means?” Professor MacDonald spoke eagerly, his arms raised to embrace Lou. She shook her head, confused.

“I need- I just- I have to think. Please, let me think.” The professor lowered his arms, and his beaming smile faded.

“Think all you need, lass. And when you are ready, come back and see me. I can tell you more about the family, our family, I could even help you find your grandmother if you should want to.”

His words were too much for Lou, and she turned without another word and walked out of his house. Her footsteps sped up as she crossed the garden, and by the time she was on the cobblestone street she was running. The incline of the road gave her even more speed as she went, and she stumbled a few times and almost plunged headlong into the paving stones. Lou didn't slow her pace until she found herself once again in front of the cathedral.

The memory of that morning seemed as distant as another lifetime to Lou. As she slowed down, she crashed into someone rounding the corner in her direction.

“Watch it, girl, can't an old woman walk in safety anymore?” The elderly woman she had made contact with extracted herself from Lou's tangled arms and feet and glared imperiously down her nose at Louisa.

“And just what has gotten into you, girl? Cat got your tongue?” She laughed harshly, and Lou shook her head, frantically apologizing. As soon as she spoke, however, she felt the tears she had been holding back begin to cascade down her cheeks, and the woman stepped back in surprise.

“Tears are a blessing, child, for they mean that you are still able to feel.” She spoke softly, and her words almost sounded like a prayer. She patted Lou's cheek, and, without a parting word, she turned and resumed her walk. Lou watched until the old woman had passed out of sight, and then she drew a shuddering breath and sank onto the same bench she'd spent the morning on.

The professor's theory had shaken her deeply, and it was hard for her to calm down, but Lou resolved to sit there until she was back in control. Acerbically, Lou thought to herself that she just might be sitting there for a very long time.

They buried the bones of Isobel Key at the crossroads beyond the city gate, with one path leading away toward her forgotten cottage, and the other leading to the great cathedral at the center of the town. No priest spoke words to ease her on her passage, for as her body had burned, so too must her soul be burning, and no words could ease a soul condemned to hell.

Her bones were buried deep, and to keep her in her grave and her spirit from roaming restlessly, they sank an iron horseshoe in the soil above her. Old traditions, but ones that had been trusted as safeguards against malign spirits for centuries in Scotland. The men who disposed of Isobel Key's remains did not sleep well that night, or any night after, but they never told a soul of their discomfort. It would be almost ten years before another witch was brought to justice in St. Andrews, and by that time, Isobel Key had been forgotten at the crossroads.

As St. Andrews grew from the small hamlet that Isobel knew into the academic metropolis of the twentieth century, Isobel's bones knew no peace. The dirt path was eventually paved over, and horses and mules gave way to noisy cars with blue exhaust. And beneath it all, the bones of Isobel Key were ill at ease.

Brian had dropped by the hostel that morning, but he'd found Tammy instead of Lou. Tammy was still mad at Lou after last night, but she kept the fight to herself. She didn't want to spoil Brian's impression of her friend. They'd gone out to breakfast, and now were walking slowly through St. Andrews. Tammy was lost in thought, stewing about Lou.

“I wonder what happened to Lou.” Brian echoed her thoughts, and Tammy shook her head.

“I don't know, but what time is it?”