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- Herausgeber: McNidder and Grace
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
p>Edinburgh 1841. Reaching out like a hungry white worm it twisted and spiralled, tasting the air. Then, evidently attracted by the flow of warm blood, it squirmed its way under the surface of my skin. Every autumn without fail, a strange seed appears on the chestnut tree that marks the spot where the witch Margaret McKay was murdered. Legend states that anyone who catches this nut before it hits the ground will be blessed with untold riches, but when it falls into the eager hands of botanist Joseph Ware, the seed unleashes a terrible curse. In his quest to find the cure, Joseph discovers a resistance group battling to save the last of Scotland's witches from a sinister order of surgeons who believe the key to all magic lies hidden somewhere within a witch's anatomy. The conflict quickly tears apart the bonds of family, friendship and even reality itself, as Joseph fights to save his soul and avoid the anatomists' dissecting table. Ideal for readers of The Last Witch in Scotland, The Witches of Vardo, Bram Stoker or for those with an interest in witchcraft lore.
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The Witch, The Seed & The Scalpel
Scott O’Neill
ii
For Net
Contents
Chapter One
Waiting for Lachlan
The winter sky scything in from the Firth of Forth fairly thrummed with the pigeon-chested sails of bobbing schooners, skiffs and whalers. The snap and flap of their cloth seemed to scold their steam-powered cousins for their brazen modernity. Everywhere squealing gulls, hoping to snatch a glittering morsel from the deck of a herring boat, keened and swooped through air thick with the heady stench of whale oil and salted fish. There were so many vessels packed inside the harbour, with countless others riding the waves in the great river beyond, that I fancied I could walk across their serried decks all the way from the docks at Leith to the Kingdom of Fife.
The dockers, apparently impervious to the remorseless chill, cheerfully set about loading and unloading their cargos with dextrous speed and precision. The whaling ships carried a different breed of men altogether. Sporting complexions like scuffed boots etched and creased by the fierce Arctic blasts, and with manners blunted by months patrolling the frozen oceans far from the reach of a chastising wife or mother, they cursed and spat freely as they landed their haul. The rumbling thunder of blubber barrels rolling for the boilyard stuttered as many a lascivious eye paused to admire my mother as we made our way across the wharf to greet the latest arrival.
One grizzled specimen, teeth clenched hard around a clay 2pipe, tipped his peak and examined the lines of Mother’s coat from the hem all the way up to her tightly fastened collar. Head held proudly aloft my mother strode forth wholly undaunted by the attention, whilst I marched at her side, affecting the air of the invincible protector, hoping a straight back and stern expression would prove sufficient disguise for the cosseted student cowering within. Truth be known I could not have chosen a more ill-fitting costume, for I had never successfully engaged in physical combat with any individual in my life and knew with absolute certainty that if I took to the ring with any one of those brine-soaked dogs, I would be fortunate to escape with a single bone left intact.
But such worries were misplaced. Most of the men who plied the docks knew Mother as the sister of Thomas ‘Tam’ Keane, chief harpooner of the MajesticNorth. A man singularly suited to tackling monsters of the deep. He was a full head taller than myself and twice as broad, and it would take a fool indeed to test his usually jovial manner. Prior to visiting the docks, we had dined with Uncle Tam at the Ferryman’s Inn on Sandport Street. Recently returned from a successful hunt in the seas around Svalbard, he was in fine, mischievous fettle.
‘How old are you now, Joseph?’ he asked, stroking his leathery fingers through a beard as black as Whitby Jet.
‘Nineteen,’ I replied, knowing exactly where my uncle intended to take the conversation, as did Mother. She smiled tolerantly before returning to the newspaper resting on her lap, tapping its pages in an agitated manner; an indication of her excitement at the imminent arrival of her husband whom we had not seen for ten long months.
‘Nineteen, eh? Time enough to learn the trade yet. Yer skinny arms will do fine for scalin’ the riggin’. I can see you reachin’ the nest in half a blink. And you’ve a keen eye for detail. An essential quality when pickin’ over a vast expanse of ocean for a tell-tale flick of a fluke or a blast from a spout. You’d 3be a fine addition to any crew. So what do you say nephew, eh? You and me on the high seas together. We’d be unstoppable!’
‘Sorry, Uncle Tam. My mind is set.’
‘Come on, man. Will ye no’ try it for size?’ He slapped me heartily on the shoulder and gripped hard, his hand as broad as a shovel, scarred and tarnished with a lifetime of hard toil. ‘Thereshebloooows!’he suddenly bellowed, drawing a few quizzical looks and smiles from our fellow patrons. ‘Your turn, Joseph, let’s hear ye roar!’
‘Here’s an idea. What say you leave those poor whales be and let me teach you all about the wonders of botany? You and I in the open fields together. We’d be unstoppable!’
Tam transferred his mighty paw from my shoulder to his ale. Wiping the froth from his whiskers, he made his disappointment known with an exaggerated sigh and a slow shake of his head.
‘Pluckin’ a dandelion from the dirt is no match for pluckin’ forty tons of angry leviathan from the sea. Fair makes a man’s pulse rattle like a lion in a cage. Excitement, boy! A life on the ocean! I’ll teach ye all the tricks of the trade. With me as yer mentor ye’d become the best harpooner in the northern seas. Beg yer pardon, ye’d become the second best harpooner in the northern seas. It’s all in the timin’. That’s the secret. Tell him sister!’
Tam directed his beery gaze to Mother, still distractedly tapping the columns of TheCaledonianMercurywith a nervous forefinger.
‘Did ye no’ hear me, Bil’ty? Tell yer boy to leave the weed-pickin’ to his father. Tell him it’s time to swap the dullest of occupations for the highest of adventures!’
Mother blinked from far to near. ‘What’s this you say? Oh, behave yourself, Tam. Is it not enough to have entrusted my brother and husband to the sea’s mercy that I should also hand my only son into its fickle care?’4
‘The sea is no more dangerous than solid ground. And there’s the proof,’ said Tam, stretching across the table to prod the most prominent headline on Mother’s newspaper:
‘MURDER AT ADVOCATE’S CLOSE.’
Mother promptly folded the newspaper into her coat. ‘Joseph and I have loitered long enough. We must away and collect the wanderer. Give the girls a hug from me, will you, Tam?’
‘Aye, and be sure to give that useless big weed-picker a kiss from me, eh sister?’ grinned Tam.
*
We continued along the quayside. The faraway quality she first displayed in the Ferryman’s Inn continued to dampen Mother’s usual effervescence. I suspected her sullen mood to be a lingering symptom of her displeasure at Tam’s repeated attempts to lure me to a life on the ocean. Where my uncle saw waves, my mother saw only rocks.
I shared my mother’s natural distrust of the sea. Much as I daydreamed of one day accompanying Father to the far-flung regions of the Earth, I knew my delicate constitution would render me little more than ballast to any vessel unfortunate enough to count me amongst its passengers. I can still vividly recall my first voyage across the Forth to North Queensferry, the entire duration of which I spent contemplating the contents of my stomach from the side of the boat as they floated away on the heaving surface and into the beaks of the grateful gulls.
And even on those summer outings to the beach at Portobello, I would never stray more than ankle deep into the surf, so fearful was I of falling foul of an undertow or of feeling the stings and bites of the creatures bristling in its grey depths. The sea commanded my respect, and I conveyed my respect by steadfastly avoiding it.
My feet were never more at home than when planted in 5soft fertile soil, helping the resident shrubs and flowers of our garden to take root and grow. Phytology had always held a particular fascination for me, due in no small part to my father’s infectious passion and encyclopaedic knowledge of the subject. I was in my second year at Edinburgh University studying Botany under the tutelage of Professor Gilchrist, a teacher who was singularly uninspiring and unimaginative, relying as he did on a rather too rigid adherence to a staid syllabus of academic texts predating the Napoleonic Wars.
In spite of Gilchrist’s mission to remove every last atom of joy from our minds, my enthusiasm remained undimmed, as did my ambition to dedicate my entire career into the eradication of disease and blight in crops. Far too many of our farmers and crofters existed in that awful realm between starvation and mere survival, always one inclement season away from ruin. Our nation depended upon their toil and sacrifice yet showed precious little in the way of gratitude for their endeavours. I dreamed of discovering new techniques to protect their harvests from the ravages of the unpredictable Scottish climate and the at times cruel topography and had begun work on a treatise advocating the importance of cross-pollination and the benefits to be derived from taking the finest qualities of the various wheat crops and creating new strains capable not simply of surviving but thrivingin hitherto unforgiving conditions. I wanted to strengthen their grains, increase their yields and thus bolster the farmers’ income and independence. Independence from landowners who saw fit to forcibly evict their human tenants and replace them with sheep. My mother saw this systematic destruction of an ancient culture and heritage as our nation’s shame, one which future generations would look back upon with bewilderment and rage. My father, to Mother’s irritation, summarily dismissed every report of cruel treatment and enforced emigration as Chartist propaganda, arguing that it was a matter of cold, hard 6economics that drove these Highland families to the colonies in search of a better future and not the selfish whims of a greedy Clan leader or the toe of a soldier’s boot.
Mother fixed her gaze on a dark shape picking its way through the Firth. A plume of smoke trailed from the steam packet’s funnel, leaving a smudge of black against the blanket of white cloud. Soon the SSJupiterhad berthed and for the first time in almost a year, my father wrapped his arms around his wife.
‘My God, you are a sight for weary eyes! But you needn’t have waited in this foul weather for me. You both look positively frozen,’ he beamed, widening his embrace to include his son.
‘How was the expedition, Father?’ I asked, my smile every bit as broad as his.
‘It was everything I could have wished for and much more besides. Come now, let’s get you both home, where I shall gather you round the fire and tell you all about it.’
He then turned and beckoned to one of the men busily securing the ship’s ropes. Mr Maybury, my father’s loyal assistant, was a man handsomely weathered beyond his years with an impassive blue stare that hinted towards a sinister past. He leaned down and listened attentively as Father imparted concise orders with regard to the transportation of the ship’s precious cargo of rare Manchurian ferns and Mongolian orchids. These precious, delicate specimens were due to provide the main source of wonder for volume eight of BotanicaFantastica.
A volume that has yet to see the light of day.
Chapter Two
Braid House
Amongst an undulating expanse of verdant glen and ancient woodland in the lee of Blackford Hill several miles to the south and west of Edinburgh’s blackened streets, lay Braid House; a castellated jumble of architectural styles, each reflecting the passing tastes and whims of its owners stretching back many generations.
The Ware family acquired the estate when Lachlan’s great-grandfather John Ware purchased it from the last surviving member of the Braid family line almost a full century before I was born. Elizabeth Braid, an elderly and by all accounts eccentric spinster, had allowed her property to fall into a serious state of disrepair. The attic and the empty rooms of the upper floor frequently echoed to the sound of rain dripping through a roof pocked with holes. The tumbledown outhouses and crumbling border walls had come to represent the state of her own disintegrating faculties. Too infirm to climb the stairs, Elizabeth confined herself to the ground floor, where she whiled away her existence sitting by the drawing room window, staring fearfully across a lawn overcome by weeds and moles to the darkly brooding woods beyond.
A strange and terrifying conviction had taken hold of her deteriorating mind. Elizabeth had come to believe that the woods were shielding something ungodly. An unseeable 8presence of indescribable malevolence forever watching her from its shadows. It became a common sight for the villagers of nearby Liberton to see the old woman pounding on the doors of the kirk, begging the minister to silence the distant screams and the murmuring phantoms tormenting her from sunset to sunrise from deep within the trees. But Elizabeth’s entreaties received nothing but hostility and were roundly dismissed as the ramblings of a lonely old madwoman.
And then the little bodies began to appear.
One morning in the winter of 1725, awaking from a fitful sleep, Elizabeth rose to part the bedroom curtains, whereupon she saw a dead hare laid upon the lawn. The animal’s throat had been cut and its pelt carefully removed and spread over the ground at its side. Terrified, she dashed from room to room, shuttering every window and bolting every door. The following morning, she opened the curtains to find the hare replaced by a fox, killed in the very same manner, its throat cut and its flayed skin neatly arranged upon the frozen ground.
For several days this grisly routine continued, each new dawn bringing a different victim to her window; an otter, a rabbit, a swan, a badger, a stoat, a jackdaw, their throats cut and all feathers or fur removed.
Finally, one crisp February morn, she encountered the most heartbreaking little death of all. Her own pet Highland terrier Henry, whom she loved above all other things in the world, lay skinned upon the unkempt lawn. Elizabeth rushed outside and fell to her knees in grief at the side of her beloved companion. Through a mist of tears, she turned her eyes to the woods and there came the sight that tore away the last shred of her sanity and endurance.
A woman in a bedraggled, soot-stained dress was standing amongst the trees. Her face lost to the gloom, she raised a hand and pointed to Elizabeth, releasing an evil cackle so loud it sent the crows scattering from the treetops. The awful, 9unearthly mirth shivered Elizabeth’s blood to ice, and without once daring to look over her shoulder, she fled from the house and did not stop until she arrived at the door of her solicitor, bearing instructions to sell her ancestral home without delay. She accepted John Ware’s offer immediately (a relative pittance even for a property in such sorry condition) and signed the contract in his presence with a warning that he stay away from the woods and avoid the view from the bedroom window.
Thankfully, neither the old woman’s forebodings nor the serious state of disrepair into which Braid House had fallen, discouraged my great-great-grandfather who, seeing only its potential, invested a not insignificant sum in restoring the house to its former glory.
Since that time, each generation of Wares has added their own unique architectural flourishes, some more aesthetically pleasing than others. It was Lachlan’s father Malcolm who re-established, then expanded the gardens with the addition of the fernery and arboretum.
The foremost dendrologist of his age and author of many respected monographs upon the medicinal and toxicological properties of arboreal fungi, Malcolm spent the majority of his working life as Regius Keeper of the Royal Botanic Garden and lectured regularly at Edinburgh University. But this most brilliant of careers was dashed against the rocks the day fate intervened to deliver a blow both cruel and twisted in its irony.
It was a warm, airless, late summer afternoon when Malcolm Ware accepted his son’s invitation to spend a few pleasant hours in that section of the arboretum set aside for the cultivation and encouragement of a perfect rogue’s gallery of fungi. Malcolm was quite content to sit himself upon a stump, light his pipe and watch with mild amusement as the young man, enthralled by the fleshy polypores bulging from the fallen branches and rotting trunks, flitted from tree to tree, sketching and recording the latest arrivals.10
Malcolm’s peace did not last beyond a few languid puffs before his son came hurrying across, holding a large round object in his excited hands. In his eagerness to share his discovery, Lachlan tripped over an exposed root. The leathery sphere flew out of his hands and landed in his father’s lap, where it burst open with a dull pop. Malcolm understood the full gravity of his situation at once, but the realisation came too late. His last frantic act as the deadly spores invaded his lungs was to beg Lachlan to keep his distance, but his distraught son foolishly paid no heed and carried his father as far from the lethal Clyne’s puffball as he could before he too succumbed to its poisonous dust.
When Lachlan awoke some hours later, the setting sun had made a nest in the trees and a latticework of cool shadow had spread over the manicured lawn of Braid House, where he shared the same pillow of grass as his dead father.
*
The blighted history of the Braid Estate was littered with such tales of violence, death and the supernatural, but there was one particular story, even more extraordinary than the sorry narratives of Elizabeth Braid and Malcolm Ware, that Father took a particularly fiendish delight in presenting to my young, impressionable ears.
And once again it began in the woods.
I was eight years old when I first accompanied my father on his annual pilgrimage to harvest the fruit of one very peculiar tree.
‘Elizabeth Braid sounds like a very silly old woman. I can see these woods from my bedroom window and I have never seen or heard anything. There are no such things as ghosts,’ I said, folding my arms across my chest in a display of petulant certitude.
Father sat himself down on a rock to watch the fast-flowing 11burn wend its way through the dank autumnal woods, twisting in and out of view before eventually it was lost for good amongst the banks of hazel and gorse. The trek had left him short of breath, a chronic symptom of the damage inflicted by the spores inhaled on that tragic, warm and airless summer’s afternoon twenty years earlier.
‘Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe,’ quoted Father, now fully recovered. ‘Perhaps we should have named you Thomas!’
We set off again, Father leading the way to a crumbling section of the burn’s bank where a willow stooped to touch the water. I clung on for dear life as Father scooped me up, gripped the rope hanging from the tree’s lowest bough and swung us across the stream. Safely ensconced on the other side, we proceeded along a narrow path flanked by ever thickening undergrowth.
‘Thomas is the most unfairly maligned of all the saints,’ continued Father. ‘To have doubts is a sign of a balanced mind. A mind not to be swayed by empty theories and cheap supposition. We are men of science, you and I. We require evidence. Our quest is and must always be, to discover tangible, irrefutable evidence! Evidence is the bedrock, the foundation upon which all science must be built. Evidence provides validity, and validity provides respect. And when you have respect, people listen. And as respected men of science, we must never close our eyes to possibility. Ours is a world of endless wonder and hidden truths and we are duty-bound to continue searching for these truths until we have exhausted every means at our disposal. Then, and only then, can we dare to form our conclusions. Perhaps you are right. Perhaps Elizabeth Braid was a silly old woman. Perhaps there are no such things as ghosts. Or perhaps you have allowed instinct to rule over reason. You would not be the first to do so, believe me.’12
‘I have not!’ I spluttered indignantly. I had hardly understood a single syllable of what my father had said, yet somehow I felt I had been gravely insulted.
‘Ah! Here we are!’ said Father. The path had come to an abrupt end at the lip of a broad depression. He spread his arms to encompass the view below. ‘It is a magnificent specimen, is it not?’
Rising from the centre of the hollow there stood an ancient and solitary horse chestnut tree. The tree looked like no other of its kind in the woods. Its gnarled and twisted limbs, thrown with a flourish of grotesque eccentricity, criss-crossed the sky in all manner of unlikely directions. Deep clefts and scars ravaged the trunk whilst great bumps and lesions pocked the bark like some horrible affliction of the skin. With the crooked tree’s brittle brown leaves crunching under our feet, we descended the steeply sloping sides and began collecting the nuts from the ground.
I quickly grew to regret my haste in agreeing to assist my father with so mundane and pointless a task. I had a million other infinitely more important things to attend to. My collection of mollusc shells were not going to clean, catalogue and sketch themselves.
‘Why are we doing this?’ I asked.
‘We are looking for evidence,’ he said. ‘I shall take these samples home and dissect them. It is just possible that one of them may hold the key.’
‘The key to what?’
Father stared up into the ancient tree’s canopy, his gaze tracing the erratic reach of its branches against a leaden sky. ‘Elizabeth Braid was not alone in her belief that these woods are filled with dark secrets. And there are some who say this chestnut tree holds the darkest secret of them all.’
‘What secret? It looks like a boring old tree to me,’ I said. This was a brazen lie, for I had never seen another tree so 13wildly contorted.
‘A boring old tree? Well, I must say, I have never heard anyone describe the Witch Tree as boring before.’
‘The Witch Tree?’
Father leaned against the grey, furrowed bark of the trunk and turned to me with an insolent smile.
‘That’s what people call it. Do you want to know why it is called the Witch Tree?’
Irked as I was by my father’s condescension, I briefly considered feigning disinterest, but my curiosity, as he well knew, had been fatally hooked.
‘Why?’
‘Because its roots are nourished by a soil made fertile by the ashes and bones of a diseased and supernatural mind. This tree marks the very spot where, on the tenth day of December 1567, Margaret McKay was executed.’
I placed a hand against the tree. An unsettling, pricklish warmth gathered under my fingertips.
‘Who was Margaret McKay? And why was she executed?’ I asked, pulling my hand away.
‘Margaret McKay was an evil woman. A wicked woman. The most powerful witch in Scotland, feared above all others for her ability to cast spells of the deadliest potency. She had the power to make men hurl themselves to their deaths from the cliffs of Salisbury Crags. But worst of all, she is said to have wandered the closes and tenements of old Edinburgh in the dead of night searching for an open window. And if ever she found one, the witch slipped inside as quietly as smoke to steal infants from their cots and carry them back to her hovel, where she dined on a stew of their flesh and drank their blood in order to preserve her youth. Happily, the people soon grew wise to the evil in their midst and even on the warmest of nights every last window in the city was securely locked and bolted. The Witch McKay, as you may well imagine, did not 14take kindly to having her supply of fresh blood taken away and so she wreaked a horrible revenge.’
‘What did she do?’ The question issued from the back of my throat in a dry, nervous rasp.
‘She did what all witches do when their monstrous intentions are thwarted. She prayed. But she prayed not to our one true Lord God in Heaven, for her heart did not flow with the love and truth of Christian blood. No, her heart was a coal-black stone of hate and spite. So at midnight on All Hallows’ Eve she climbed to the top of Calton Hill, sat herself upon the grass and lit a small fire made from the bones of her most recent victim. With eyes closed and the flames warming her cruel, hideous face, she pushed her hands into the dirt and prayed for her master to appear before her. When at last she stopped her incantations, she opened her eyes and with immense joy she saw the Devil himself standing before her. He smiled, ran a hand through the hair of his adoring disciple and asked why he had been summoned. The Witch McKay begged him to grant her the power to enter the dreams of all Edinburgh’s children so that she might fill their sleep with nightmares of such terror and horror that they would die in their beds of fright.’
As Father said this, a little pile of rust-coloured leaves became entangled in a spiralling breeze and were scattered across the hollow.
‘And did he?’ I swallowed, anxiously. ‘Did the Devil grant her the power?’
‘Satan said not a word. He simply kissed the witch on the cheek and was gone. The very next night, from the Castle to the Tolbooth and all the way to the Palace of Holyrood, the air was filled with a terrible noise. A noise so awful it chilled every last soul in the city to their very core. Can you imagine it? The screams of all those infants echoing through the alleys and streets. Can you imagine the sheer terror of all 15those sleeping children? Their nightmares filled with visions of the Witch McKay, her eyes as red as fire, her teeth sharper than broken glass? Can you imagine them in their beds so terrified that their poor hearts simply burst with fear? That is no way for any Christian child to die. But die they did. In their scores. Eventually the screams faded and were replaced by the sobs of countless mothers and fathers mourning their dear departed children. It was undoubtedly, the bleakest night in all of Edinburgh’s long and cruel history.’
My gullible young mind had no difficulty at all imagining in stark, unhurried detail all the macabre horrors Father described. I retreated from the twisted, malformed tree with a shiver.
‘But the witch was caught, wasn’t she? You said she was executed. That means she was caught, yes?’
‘She was discovered hiding in a cave near the summit of Arthur’s Seat by a group of boys not much older than you are now. Margaret McKay tried to scare the boys away, but they were a cocksure and insolent bunch and not easily frightened. They had no inkling as to who this strange hermit woman was, living in a grubby hole full of animal bones and foul-smelling potions. It was not until they came upon a horde of strange little boxes piled one atop the other at the back of the cave that they began to understand her true nature. The oldest boy opened one of the boxes and found inside a tiny doll, its eyes closed and little arms folded across its chest, looking for all the world like a tiny body at rest inside a coffin. It was then they realised they were in the presence of a witch and the miniature coffins were in fact the tools of her devilish trade; the very tools used to cast spells on those innocent children who went to bed with their heads full of pleasant dreams until the witch’s curse turned them into the terrible nightmares from which they would never awake. But thanks to those foolhardy lads, Margaret McKay was apprehended before she was able 16to lay waste to another soul.’
Father reached down to gather a handful of the rich, mouldering earth. He brought the little heap close to his keen eyes, studying it minutely.
‘It was here that the witch was hanged, her body burned to ash and the ashes buried where no one should ever find them.’
‘Good. I’m glad. It was no more than she deserved,’ I said, heartily relieved to hear the story had a happy ending.
‘And yet, the old legend persists…’ he mused in a worrying undertone as he allowed the soil to crumble through his fingers.
‘Legend? What legend?’
Father brushed the last granules of dirt from his hands. ‘Perhaps I have said too much already. Your mother will have my hide if she learns I’ve been scaring you with these things.’
I tugged insistently at my father’s cuff as he turned to stride for home. ‘I’m not scared. And I promise I won’t tell mother.’
‘Very well,’ he sighed, then patting a slab of bulging root, he encouraged me to sit with him beneath the Witch Tree. ‘Have you ever heard the legend concerning the last chestnut.’
‘No. Never. Tell me.’
‘Up there. Do you see it?’ said Father, pointing to the top of the Witch Tree.
Try as I might, I could see nothing out of the ordinary amongst the curling brown fronds and the healthy crop of chestnuts hanging from its branches. I shrugged in defeat.
‘There, just beneath that jay. See it? The big one?’
And there it was. The highest in the tree. A monster of a chestnut. As large as the bird perched immediately above.
‘I see it!’
‘You’ll find it growing there every year without fail on that very same branch. Despite being substantially larger than all the others, it is always the last to fall. There is a legend that says this strange chestnut is imbued with a dark magic.’
‘What kind of dark magic?’17
‘Witchcraft,’ said Father. ‘It is said that should any person catch the falling chestnut before it touches the ground, the ghost of Margaret McKay will appear and bestow the catcher with abnormal strength and longevity and grant their every wish and desire.’
‘Like money and gold. Or endless cake?’ I said, excitedly.
‘All the cake you could ever eat!’ he laughed.
I stared unblinkingly at the tempting bauble, willing it to fall.
‘Have you ever tried to catch it?’
Father lowered his rueful gaze and idly swept a boot back and forth, brushing aside the carpet of leaves and twigs.
‘Oh, I have spent many a day sitting under this tree waiting for it to drop,’ he said. ‘As have many others over the centuries. Alas, no one has ever managed to catch it.’
‘Why don’t we climb up and pick it from the branch?’
My suggestion, which I thought a perfectly reasonable one, was received with a sour twist of Father’s lips.
‘Ah! Firstly, the legend insists the chestnut must fall of its own accord and not be plucked by an unworthy hand. Secondly, it is far too dangerous. To fall from that height is to fall to your death. I fancy the chestnut is like Excalibur waiting to deliver itself into the hands of one possessed of true virtue. And as your mother will readily attest, I am no King Arthur,’ he smiled. ‘Speaking of your mother, it is time we returned home before we risk a fate far graver than any witch’s curse.’
*
Eternal youth, untold riches and infinite cake. All potentially mine. Thus the seed had been sown and the damage done. The legend of the Witch Tree had stoked the fires of my boyish imagination, and so began an annual battle of wills between myself and that last, stubborn chestnut.
For several weeks each year I whiled away every spare hour 18I had beneath the Witch Tree, watching its uppermost branches bend and dip, hoping the great seed would simply fall into my lap. Day after day I returned, but even as its fellows succumbed to the bludgeoning downpours and numbing squalls of late autumn the last chestnut remained, obstinate and unyielding, as though it were somehow exempt from Newton’s Law.
My efforts invariably met with the same unhappy outcome experienced by my father in his younger days. With patience worn thin by the unremitting cold and my resolve broken by the lure of the comforts of home, the day inevitably arrived when I would abandon my vigil with a promise to redouble my efforts the following morning, only to find upon my return the bloated chestnut dehisced upon the ground.
These frustrating pilgrimages came to end as I entered my teenage years, whereupon my interest in the Witch Tree waned completely and I saw the legend for what it truly was: a fairy tale. One of many told by a mischievous father to his credulous young son.
To his credit, Father, for all his shortcomings as a storyteller, opened up an entirely different world of magic and wonder for me. A world of endless beauty far greater than anything an enchanted chestnut could possibly hope to offer. My father’s boundless enthusiasm for all things botanical was his greatest gift to me. A gift he in turn had inherited from his own father.
I never met my grandfather. Malcolm Ware’s unfortunate encounter with the Clyne’s puffball occurred two years before I was born. And if another of Father’s fanciful tales is to be believed, I should not have been born at all had my grandfather been spared. For his untimely death proved serendipitous in setting in motion a far happier chain of events.
The funeral of Malcolm Ware took place on the first of August 1820. The bright aspects and edifices of the New Town gleamed in the summer sunshine, the clouds having left the sky to hang heavy in the hearts of the mourners gathering on the 19steps of St Andrew’s Church. Unbeknownst to the six men in black frock coats carefully easing the coffin from the hearse, a young Irishwoman was hurrying from a shop on Hanover Street with a freshly purchased supply of art materials under her arm. A resident of Leith, where she shared a home with her recently widowed mother, the young Irishwoman was in a careless rush to return in time to bid farewell to her brother before he set sail for the whaling grounds of the North Atlantic. Dashing into George Street, the low sun blazed directly into her eyes, forcing her gaze downwards to the pavement. Determined not to be late, she quickened her pace and pressed on.
Lachlan Ware and his fellow pall-bearers, having shouldered the burden of Malcolm’s coffin, had advanced but one step towards the church doors when they absorbed the shock of an impact. Struggling to adjust his balance under the swaying load, Lachlan looked for the source of the blow and saw a young woman in a dress of forget-me-not blue, slumped on the pavement nursing her brow with one hand whilst the other reached to gather the brushes and pencils spilled at her side. The cortège continued inside minus my father, who stepped aside to attend to this poor, unfortunate… and strikingly beautiful woman.
He guided the hapless creature to the church steps and with the corner of his handkerchief, gently dabbed at a small cut on her forehead.
‘Portraits or landscapes?’ he asked, picking up a stray paintbrush.
‘Oh,’ she said, still somewhat dazed. ‘Neither. I specialise in botanical illustrations.’
And with this perfectly innocuous reply, Miss Capability Keane had ensnared the heart of Mr Lachlan Ware as surely as the flame beguiles the moth.
Seven months after she had so fortuitously banged her head against Malcolm Ware’s coffin, Miss Keane returned to 20the very same church to accept Lachlan’s hand in marriage. The very same church where, fifteen months later, Mr and Mrs Ware christened their newborn baby: Joseph John Malcolm Ware.
My parents’ partnership was driven not only by their mutual affection but also by a symbiotic creative flair. Together they published several extremely successful volumes on the world’s rarest and most exotic flora, all beautifully illustrated by my mother’s delicate brushstrokes. Widely regarded as the finest publication of its kind, BotanicaFantasticaenjoyed a success that made my parents one of Edinburgh society’s most celebrated couples. Not that they cared for such acclaim. Furthering the understanding of their chosen branch of science was all that mattered to them. Aside from myself, of course.
An only child but never a lonely child, they nurtured in me, as Mother has often described:
‘A very happy little seedling.’
Chapter Three
Toor root
The grounds of Braid House buzzed with activity. Three carts had arrived from Leith docks fully laden with the SSJupiter’shaul of treasures. The eleven-month long expedition had resulted in the collection of no less than three-hundred and twenty-seven species of the rarest ferns and sixty-three precious orchids. Cuttings, seedlings and mature growths harvested from across the vast territories of Central and Southeast Asia. Father welcomed each meticulously packed specimen in triumph and proceeded to regale us with the extraordinary tales of adventure and derring-do behind every hard-won procurement.
‘Oh! this is the Glory Fern from the Himalayan foothills at Kathmandu… Ah! and here we have the Wreath Fern found only on the highest tidelines of the Irrawaddy Delta. Oh! but you must look at this,’ he exclaimed with a feverish excitement. ‘The most exquisite prize of all. From the wild plains of the Yunnan province of China with its perpetually feuding warlords where our entire company was but a whisker away from falling under the bloodthirsty swords of the Hui. Ah! but was it not worth the risk to secure this Emperor of the Filicopsida – the Equisetum Nocturna? Night Horsetail. This beautiful fern grows exclusively on the westernmost shores of Lake Lugu, where it pursues a very singular life cycle. Its silken 22fronds are uniquely bashful and will only unfurl to release their precious spores in the light of a full moon. The indigenous Moso people dissolve these seeds in goat’s milk and drink the resulting solution before going to bed. They believe it fills their sleep with dreams of the most enlightened and divine insight.’
Ably assisted by the ever-present Mr Maybury, Father orchestrated the delicate transfer of his precious new guests into a purpose-built dome of glass and whitewashed iron. Inside, an ingenious system of irrigation of Father’s own design spilled water down a stepped trough to feed little pools and streams, which in turn syphoned carefully measured flows to each individual plant. The fernery’s gleaming cupola trapped the sun’s rays, maintaining the perfect conditions of temperature and humidity the finicky residents demanded.
With the ferns happily settled in their new home, Mother, Father, Mr Maybury and I retired to the dining room, where we raised a glass of wine in celebration.
‘You are most welcome to stay for supper. We are having roast lamb and vegetables,’ said Mother.
‘It is a kind and tempting offer, Mrs Ware, but I have a few errands to attend to in town. I shall see you all very soon, I trust. Good night to you all.’
Mr Maybury tipped his cap and left so swiftly I suspected he viewed my mother’s offer as more of a threat than a treat. And, if truth be told, there was some merit in his assessment. My mother’s cooking was not for the faint of heart.
Father wiped his lips and draped the napkin over an empty plate. A gesture of victory if ever I saw one.
‘Delicious! You have surpassed yourself my angel,’ he said, jaws still arduously engaged in a war of attrition with his last forkful of meat. ‘You have no idea how much I have missed the simple pleasure of a home-cooked meal.’
Mother fixed her husband with a wry glint. ‘And you have no idea how much I have missed the simple pleasure of your 23patronising if well-intentioned lies.’ She kissed his brow and began to clear the table.
‘Can we not afford to hire a maid to help with the cooking and the housework?’ I suggested after successfully chiselling my way through the fortified skin of a roast potato. ‘Especially the cooking?’
Father threw me a look which managed to convey both sympathy and amusement, qualities which were noticeably absent in Mother’s expression.
‘Why should I needlessly press some poor stranger into servitude? What, after all, is the purpose of having children if not to provide oneself with free labour?’ She handed me a collection of soiled dishes and indicated a path to the scullery door. ‘Now go and make yourself useful.’
*
Professor Gilchrist struck me as man for whom the colour grey had been invented. The senior tutor of Botanical Studies at Edinburgh University despised BotanicaFantasticawith a passion. From our very first introduction it was evident that the son of Lachlan and Bility Ware was but a stray weed in his otherwise carefully cultivated lecture theatre. With each exponentially lauded publication (from Vol. I: – TheWildflowersofScotlandto Vol. VII: –TheFruits&BerriesofAustralasia) my parents’ continued success merely served to inflame his envy. Gilchrist himself had written several pamphlets and monographs on Scottish flora, all as dry as the dust they collected on the shelves of the University’s library, whereas the bindings of the neighbouring copies of BotanicaFantasticahad become creased and frayed through overuse.
‘Mr Ware? I understand your father has recently returned from his latest global meanderings. Is that correct?’ said Professor Gilchrist. His voice, clipped with accusation, targeted me from the moment I entered the classroom.24
‘Yes, sir.’
I hurried to my desk, hoping the conversation was over, but the professor was not to be denied his morning’s entertainment.
‘And what delights has he pilfered this time? Anything of interest?’ he asked, raising his scornful brows.
‘Ferns, sir.’
‘Ferns, you say?’
‘Yes, sir. Ferns. And orchids from across Southeast Asia,’ I said.
‘Hmm.’ He stroked his thin white beard which gave him the look of an undernourished billy goat. ‘Interesting. I myself have written extensively on the subject of ferns. Have you read my monograph on the development of the rhizome structures in the Polypodiales?’
‘Yes, sir. I found it most useful and instructive.’
Professor Gilchrist rose languidly from his chair. Hands clasped across his chest, he positioned himself in front of my desk, nostrils flaring as a contemptuous leer slid down the length of his upward tilted nose. He held this position until he had secured the undivided attention of every student in the room.
‘Useful andinstructive,’ he mused. ‘I feel blessed that my work has proved to be of some small value to you. For my humble scribblings to have found favour with a member of the esteemed Ware family is indeed an honour. One which I shall forever regard as being amongst my finest achievements. Our roles ought to be reversed, would you not agree? I should be the student and you the Professor?’ Emboldened by the snorts of mirth his mockery had elicited, he leaned a tad closer. ‘Tell me, Professor Ware, as one of the foremost pteridologists of our age, where do you stand on the ongoing debate with regard to the taxonomy of the Marattiaceae and the leptosporangiate? Should they not be regarded as a subclass of the Lycopodiophyta?’25
As my stupefied mouth widened, the Professor’s stare narrowed further.
‘Why, sir! You appear to have no opinion on the matter? That is disappointing. You, sir, as the world’s foremost authority on the botanical sciences, ought to have exposed me as a charlatan for posing a question that, in and of itself, is complete nonsense. However, it seems the reverse is true and that it is I who has exposed a charlatan.’
He turned to the student seated to my right; a tall, powerfully constructed fellow with a shiny complexion and dark hair curling greasily at his hunched shoulders.
‘Mr Tulland? Have you read any of the revered volumes of the Botanica Fantastica?’
Robert Tulland’s sneer twitched. ‘No, sir.’
‘Then you must rectify that oversight at once. For I promise you will find them both usefuland instructive,’ said Professor Gilchrist, returning to his desk, where he applied his pen to a scrap of paper and scribbled a note.
‘But sir, I’ve heard some say they are boring to look at and dull to read,’ yawned Tulland.
The professor nodded sagely. ‘I too have heard similar criticisms from many a quarter.’
Though he tried to disguise the action behind a stack of books teetering at the corner of his desk, I watched Professor Gilchrist take a shilling from his pocket and wrap it carefully inside the note. The little package gripped in a closed fist, he set off on a meandering tour of the room.
‘Be warned, Mr Ware. Success can be a capricious mistress. So, heed my advice and enjoy the privileges she brings while you can. And please, spare a thought for us mere mortals who sadly, have not been blessed with your advantages and have had to grasp what modest achievements we have made through our own hard work and sweat. Take, for example, our friend Mr Tulland here. His father, a man of considerable 26skill, has had to work like the devil in order to fund his son’s education.’
Tulland turned his blushes to the rain lashing at the windows and failed to notice the little package enter his pocket.
‘A man, unlike your own father,’ continued Professor Gilchrist with a haughty sniff, ‘who understands the true value and satisfaction that only a day’s honest toil provides, would you not agree, Mr Ware? Therefore, why should the son of a cabinetmaker be any less worthy of respect than the son of a man who idly saunters off around the world, digging up pretty flowers and ferns?’
Accepting my continued silence as a sign of capitulation, Professor Gilchrist returned to his desk where, chest puffed with pride at his small victory, he invited us to consider the relative methods of conjugation employed by freshwater and saltwater algae.
*
The sky had grown dark by the time Professor Gilchrist’s lecture, delivered in his usual dreary monotone, had reached its conclusion. My mind befuddled with the intricacies of algal reproduction, I left the university and set off on the long walk for home. But as I exited Potter Row for Buccleuch Street, I felt a sharp tug on the strap of my satchel.
‘I hear your mother spends her nights at the docks selling herself to the lowest bidder.’
I was by no means a weakling and quite reasonably regarded myself as being above the average in both height and athleticism and yet, in the presence of Robert Tulland, my physical inadequacies were thrown into stark, humiliating relief. We were standing face to face, his chin hovering some distance above my nose whilst his thickset frame carried twice the weight of my own and contained enough aggression to arm an entire field of battle. Grabbing great fistfuls of my collar, he 27picked me up and threw me bodily against the wall of a grimy coal yard.
A fist drilled hard into my stomach. A second blow to the temple knocked my head hard against the bricks. The third fired a bolt of pain from my neck to my toes. My innards lurched and spasmed. I tasted blood on my tongue. Tulland thrust me against a heap of loose coals.
‘I think I shall pay her a visit tonight. After all, I do have a shilling in my pocket. Far more than I need. Every fellow knows your mother is a ha’penny whore,’ he sneered.
He pushed a knee against my chest. The lumpy black slope crumbled and shifted under my spine.
‘Twice the value of yours then!’ I gasped, launching a handful of soot and grit into his eyes.
Half blinded, Tulland growled furiously and flung himself into another attack. His momentum sent us tumbling in a tangle of thrashing limbs and flailing knuckles. For every blow I landed, Tulland struck two or three in return. Eventually I slumped to the ground in a spent bundle of exhaustion and pain. Face crimped like an angry accordion, Tulland sealed his victory by forcing a lump of coal into my mouth. Happy I had learned my lesson, he pulled himself upright and staggered off into the street rubbing his smarting eyes.
I spat out the coal, rolled gingerly on to my throbbing side and lay there until I gathered strength enough to take to my feet. Dusting myself down I noticed a small fleck of white lying on the filthy cobbles. A scrap of paper. Composed in Professor Gilchrist’s unmistakable script, the note contained only two words:
Hurt Ware…
*
I entered Braid House treading as lightly as my aching feet would allow in the hope of reaching the sanctuary of my 28bedroom without detection. Blackened eyes obscured under the peak of my cap and with the torn stitching of my fatally wounded coat pocket shielded behind the satchel, I advanced through the hall more in keeping with an intruder intent on misadventure than a resident. I successfully bypassed the drawing room, where Mother sat at her easel humming sweetly to herself. She dabbed her brush in the palette, then deftly added a stroke of detail to a beautiful painting of the Wreath Fern.
I limped quietly towards the staircase, whereupon I glanced inside the half-open door of the study. My father was at his desk, surrounded by a lush spray of greenery. He held a handglass to the nearest fern, studying every intricate facet of its structure. Observations completed, he dipped his pen in the ink and recorded his findings in the closing pages of a notebook.
‘Ah! Joseph! Come, join me,’ cried Father on hearing the telltale creak of the stairs. ‘I want to show you this marvellous Platycerium! Come. And please, close the door, lest my enthusiasm disturb your mother.’
Preparing myself for the inevitable inquisition to come, I abandoned my ascent and acceded to Father’s beckoning hand.
‘You really must take a close look at the extraordinary sporophylls on this fern. I have never seen anything… Hello? What’s this?’ A sudden cloud of concern dampened Father’s ebullience. He dropped the handglass and rose from his seat to lift the cap from my head. ‘Who did this to you?’
‘It’s nothing. A result of my own clumsiness.’
He took my head in his hands and inspected the damage closely.
‘And that is the very lie we will tell your mother when she sees this mess. Look at your hands!’ he said, grimacing at the sight of my burst knuckles. ‘And your clothes! Dear God. Sit.’
Father gestured to the old threadbare couch hogging the 29glow of the fireplace, where Mother and I would often catch him snoozing after a full day of research and cataloguing, an open book on his chest and dozens more scattered on the hearthside rugs.
By day the study was a big, bright, south-facing room affording excellent views across the rear garden to the woods beyond. By night, as now, the space appeared to diminish amongst the grasping silhouettes of the abundant plant specimens perched on sills, side tables and mantelpieces. On shelves bowed like toothy smiles under the mountainous weight of hundreds, perhaps thousands of haphazardly stacked books, a small army of precariously balanced lamps cast their soft yellowy pools of trembling light over walls decorated with maps and botanical illustrations so numerous as to almost completely obliterate the underlying wallpaper.
I dropped my satchel of textbooks and slumped my bag of bruised bones on the couch. Through the broad windows overlooking the rear lawn, I saw sparks and flames rising into the darkness from a brazier near the treeline. Mr Maybury, his face a flickering mask in the firelight, tipped an armful of garden debris into the blaze. Brushing his hands together, he looked towards the house with a singular grimness of expression which I found deeply unnerving.
‘Here, drink this. I’ve added a little something to ease the pain,’ said Father, handing me a glass of water. He dabbed a corner of his handkerchief into a small jar of liniment and applied the salve to my impressive assortment of scrapes and scratches. ‘You look like you’ve fallen under all the horses on Princes Street. Tell me how you came to be in such a state. The truth now.’
I drank thirstily, pleased finally to rid the oily film of coal and blood from my mouth. I briefly considered the merits of telling another falsehood, but as the soreness eased I became infused with a pleasing warmth at odds with the coolness of 30the water and saw no harm in relaying everything exactly as it had occurred.
At the conclusion of my tale, Father pursed his lips and pondered for a moment.
‘The lad’s a coward. Much like his father. You may have lost this particular battle, but should hostilities resume, which I fear they most certainly will, I am confident that with a little preparation, you will win the war.’
‘But how? Tulland is twice my size!’
Father opened his arms with a theatrical flourish.
‘SoDavidprevailedoverthePhilistinewithaslingandwith astone,andsmotethePhilistine,andslewhim;buttherewasno swordinthehandofDavid. Samuel, chapter seventeen, verse fifty. What you lack in firepower, Joseph, can be compensated by the application of a little knowledge. Allow me one moment and I will furnish you with a slingshot guaranteed to bring down this Goliath.’
Taking up a lamp, Father crossed the room to consult the huge apothecary chest which occupied the entire wall behind his desk. A gallery of hundreds of little drawers stretching from the floor to the ceiling and from corner to corner, each one painstakingly labelled with the strangely exotic Latin binomial and the equally intriguing common name of its contents. The highest examples were serviced by a sliding ladder fixed to a rail which ran the whole length of the collection.
‘Let me think, let me think,’ said Father, his fingers fluttering back and forth across the lacquered cherry wood and brass handles. ‘St Matthew’s Wort? Two grains of this, and the lad will lose all his teeth within twelve hours. No. Noxious as he is, it would be extreme revenge indeed to leave the lad without a smile.’ He opened another drawer and frowned in contemplation. ‘Philasia root. It’s a possibility. He’ll be scratching his knees for days. No, not nearly interesting enough… Ah!’31
Descrying a promising label on one of the topmost drawers close to the study door, he hurriedly slid the ladder along the rail, brought its castors to a rumbling halt at the desired section, then with a devilish smile he climbed up, pulled the handle and removed a small jar of greyish powder.
