Corrag. Susan Fletcher

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       I

       ‘Called also Wind flower, because they say the flowers never open but when the wind blows.’

      of Anemone

      How 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.

      Yes, 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.

      She, 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. СКАЧАТЬ