Saraband for Two Sisters

Once when I was about twelve years old, we had been riding with our mother and some of the grooms and we had come upon a shouting mob. There had been a woman in their midst and she was not such an old woman either. Her clothes were torn from her body and she was half naked, but it was the look of abject terror in her face which I had never forgotten. The crowd was chanting “Hang the witch. Hang the witch.” I don’t think I ever saw such fear in any face, before or after.

My mother had said, “We will go now.” She turned her horse and we rode off at speed in the opposite direction from that in which we had been going. “These things happen,” she told us, “but it will not always be so. People will become more enlightened.” I wanted to ask questions but my mother said, “We won’t speak of it anymore, Bersaba. We’ll forget it. It’s unpleasant; it exists; but in time people will be wiser. We can do no good by talking of it, thinking of it.”

That was the attitude in our home. If there was anything unpleasant one did not think of it. If my mother had a fault it was pretending that things were so much better than they were. She told herself everytime my father went away that he would come safely back. She was wise in a way; but it had never been mine to pretend, even to myself. I looked straight into my heart, soul, and mind and asked myself why I did such a thing. I think I know myself better than my mother or Angelet will ever know themselves because of this side of my nature, which demanded the truth however unpleasant or detrimental to myself.

Afterward I went back to that lane and I saw the woman hanging there. It was a gruesome sight, for the crows were attacking her. Her hair was long and I could see even then that she had been a beautiful woman. It was beastly; it was vile; it haunted me for a long time; but at least it was reality.

And now I was thinking of Carlotta in the hands of that mob, Carlotta being dragged to that tree. Her grandmother was a witch. Perhaps she was. Perhaps that accounted for the manner in which she had taken Bastian from me. She had cast some spell upon him. An odd excitement possessed me and I felt better than I had since I had heard. I said, “Is witchcraft something that is handed down from grandmother to mother and then on and on, I wonder?”

Angelet looked happy because she had come to the conclusion in her light, let’s-see-the-best-of-everything manner that my childish fondness for Bastian had not gone as deep as she feared. One of the lovable things about Angelet had always been that my trouble had been hers. I looked at her now with a kind of contempt-which might have been another form of envy, for I admitted it must be pleasant to sail through life without these intense feelings which beset people like myself-as she answered, “Perhaps it is. Oh, I do wonder if Carlotta is a witch?”

“It would be interesting to find out,” I said.

“How?” she asked.

“We could think about that,” I suggested.

“There are good witches as well as bad ones,” Angelet said, in keeping with her nature, immediately bestowing benign qualities on the woman who had stolen my lover. “They cure you of warts and sties and give you love potions to enslave a. lover. I believe that if you have bad luck some witches can help you find ill-wishers who could he causing that bad luck. I was talking to Ginny the other day. She knows a lot about witches. She’s always fancying herself ill-wished.”

“We’ll talk to Ginny,” I said, and all sorts of thoughts were whirling round in my head; they soothed me.

“I wonder if Bastian knows,” giggled Angelet. “You’d better ask him.”

“Why don’t you?”

“Oh, you know he always liked you best.”

“Did he show it then?”

“You know he did. Wasn’t he always losing himself with you in the woods?” Now she must see. Her words stabbed me as though they were knife blades. Riding in the woods with him, his pursuing me, intending to be caught, lying on the grass among the bracken... His voice: “This is madness. What if we were seen?” And not caring, because it was so important, so necessary to us both.

And now... Carlotta.

I said fiercely, “I’m going to find out if she’s a witch.”

“We will,” replied Angelet blithely. She would be less blithe when they took Carlotta down the lane, when they stripped her clothes from her, when they hung her up by the neck and the crows came.

It was difficult hiding the fact that I was so stunned. Carlotta knew that I had been fond of Bastian, but did she know how far that fondness had carried us? The more I thought of that the more angry I became. I thought of the insult, the humiliation-I, Bersaba Landor, to be cast aside. And his own cousin, too. He must have been completely bewitched.