‘Hadn’t we … er … better disconnect the telephone as well?’ Simon hazarded. ‘In case it rings after we’ve settled down.’
‘Yes, with Richard’s permission I will attend to that myself.’
‘Do, if you like, and I’ll see to the servants,’ Richard agreed placidly. ‘But what do you call a light supper?’
‘Just enough to keep up our strength. A little fish if you have it. If not eggs will do, with vegetables or a salad and some fruit, but no meat or game and, of course, no wine.’
Richard grunted. ‘That sounds a jolly dinner I must say. I suppose you wouldn’t like to shave my head as well, or get us all to don hair shirts if we could find them. I’m hungry as a hunter, and owing to your telegram, we had no lunch.’
The Duke smiled tolerantly. ‘I am sorry, Richard, but this thing is deadly serious. I am afraid you haven’t realised quite how serious yet. If you had seen what Rex and I did last night, I’m certain that you wouldn’t breathe a word of protest about these small discomforts, and realise at once that I am acting for the best.’
‘No,’ Richard confessed. ‘Quite frankly, I find it very difficult to believe that we haven’t all gone bug-house with this talk of witches and wizards and magic and what-not at the present day.’
‘Yet you saw Mocata yourself this afternoon.’
‘I saw an unpleasant, pasty-faced intruder I agree, but to credit him with all the powers that you suggest is rather more than I can stomach at the moment.’
‘Oh, Richard!’ Marie Lou broke in. ‘Greyeyes is right. That man is horrible. And to say that people do not believe in witches at the present day is absurd. Everybody knows that there are witches just as there have always been.’
Eh!’ Richard looked at his lovely wife in quick surprise. ‘Have you caught this nonsense from the others already? I’ve never heard you air this belief before.’
‘Of course not,’ she said a little sharply. ‘It is unlucky to talk of such things, but one knows about them all the same. Of witches in Siberia I could tell you muchthings that I have seen with my own eyes.’
‘Tell us, Marie Lou,’ urged the Duke. He felt that in their present situation scepticism might prove highly dangerous. If Richard did not believe in the powers that threatened them, he might relax in following out the instructions for their protection and commit some casual carelessness, bringing, possibly, a terrible danger upon them all. He knew how very highly Richard esteemed his wife’s sound common sense. It was far better to let her convince him than to press arguments on Richard himself.
‘There was a witch in Romanovsk,’ Marie Lou proceeded. ‘An old woman who lived alone in a house just outside the village. No one, not even the Red Guards, with all their bluster about having liquidated God and the Devil, would pass her cottage alone at night. In Russia there are many such and one in nearly every village. You would call her a wise woman as well perhaps, for she could cure people of many sicknesses and I have seen her stop the flow of blood from a bad wound almost instantly. The village girls used to go to her to have their fortunes told and, when they could afford it, to buy charms or philtres to make the young men they liked fall in love with them. Often, too, they would go back again afterwards when they became pregnant and buy the drugs which would secure their release from that unhappy situation. But she was greatly feared, for everyone knew that she could also put a blight on crops and send a murrain on the cattle of those who displeased her. It was even whispered that she could cause men and women to sicken and die if any enemy paid her a high enough price to make it worth her while.’
‘If that is so I wonder they didn’t lynch her,’ said Richard quietly.
‘They did in the end. They would not have dared to do that themselves. But a farmer whom she had inflicted with a plague of lice appealed to the local commissar and he went with twenty men to her house one day. All the villagers, and I among them for I was only a little girl then and naturally curiouswent with them in a frightened crowd hanging well behind. They brought the old woman out and examined her, and having proved she was a witch, the commissar had her shot against her cottage wall.’
‘How did they prove it?’ Richard asked sceptically.
‘Whybecause she had the marks of course.’
‘What marks?’
‘When they stripped her they found that she had a teat under her left arm, and that is a certain sign.’
De Richleau nodded. ‘To feed her familiar with, of course. Was it a cat?’
Marie Lou shook her head. ‘No. In this case, it was a great big fat toad that she used to keep in a little cage.’
‘Oh, come!’ Richard protested. ‘This is fantastic. They slaughtered the poor old woman just because she had some malformation and kept an unusual pet.’
‘No, no,’ Marie Lou assured him. ‘They found the Devil’s mark on her thigh and they swam her in the village pond. It was very horrible, but it was all quite conclusive.’
‘The Devil’s mark!’ interjected Simon suddenly. ‘I’ve never heard of that,’ and the Duke answered promptly:
‘It is believed that the Devil or his representative touches these people at their baptism during some Satanic orgy and that spot is for ever afterwards free from pain. In the old witch trials, they used to hunt for it by sticking pins into the suspected person because the place does not differ in appearance from any other portion of the body.’
Marie Lou nodded her curly head. ‘That’s right. They bandaged this old woman’s eyes so that she could not see what part of her they were sticking the pin into and then they began to prick her gently in first one place and then another. Of course she cried out each time the pin went in, but after about twenty cries, the head man of the village pushed the pin into her left thigh and she didn’t make a sound. He took it out then and stuck it in again, but still she did not cry out at all so he pushed it in right up to the head, and she didn’t know he’d even touched her. So you see, everyone was quite satisfied then that she was a witch.’
‘Well you may have been,’ Richard said slowly. ‘It seems a horribly barbarous affair in any case. I dare say the old woman deserved all she got, but it’s pretty queer evidence to shoot anyone on.’
‘Er … Richard… .’ Simon leaned forward suddenly. ‘Do you believe in curses?’
‘Whatthe old bell and book business! Not much. Why?’
‘Because the actual working of a curse is evidence of the supernatural.’
‘They’re mostly old wives’ tales of coincidences I think.’
‘How about the Mackintosh of Moy?’
‘Oh, Scotland is riddled with that sort of thing. But what is supposed to have happened to the Mackintosh?’
‘Well, this was in seventeen something,’ Simon replied slowly. ‘The story goes that he was present at a witch burning or jilted oneI forget exactly. Anyhow she put a curse on him and it went like this:
Mackintosh, Mackintosh, Mackintosh of Moy If you ever have a son he shall never have a boy.’
Richard smiled. ‘And what happened then?’ ‘Well, whether the story’s true or not I can’t say, but its a fact that the Chieftainship of the Clan has gone all over the shop ever since. Look it up in the records of the Clans if you doubt me.’
‘My dear chap, you’ll have to produce something far more concrete than that to convince me.’
‘All right,’ Marie Lou gazed at him steadily out of her large blue eyes. ‘You know very little about such things, Richard, but in Russia people are much closer to nature and everyone there still accepts the supernatural and diabolic possession as part of ordinary life. Only about a year before you brought me to England they caught a were-wolf in a village less than fifty miles from where I lived.’