He raised his eyebrows. “I’ve heard about some work being done there recently,” he said. “Are you the painter?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
“Come this way.”
I followed him to the back of the church, which was laid out as a cross, with three sections set up as shrines. I supposed one of them to be set up to commemorate the women, but he walked past them to the far wall, stopping at a small rock sticking up out of the ground. He knelt by it and blew some dust off one of the faces.
“This is it?” I said. Surely he was wrong?
He nodded. “If you look closely, you can see the dates of the burnings.”
I knelt down and looked harder. It was faint, but I could make out a year, etched in old script. 1662.
“You were expecting something more, I take it?”
I nodded. “How do you even know this is the memorial to the witches?”
“It’s in the parish history books,” he said. “I can tell you their names, if you like?”
I straightened. “I’d love that.”
He took me to a small reading room installed in a modern extension at the back of the church. On a microfiche viewer, he toggled the magnifier until an old, handwritten document came into view. The Lighthouse Witches. And beneath it, the names of twelve women.
1662
Elspeth Alexander
Margaret Barclay
Catherine Campbell
Finwell Hyndman
Marie Lamont
Agnes Roberts
Jean Anderson
Helen Beatie
Margaret Fulton
Jenny Hyndman
Agnes Naismith
Jane Wishart
“Is there information on why they were accused of witchcraft?” I asked.
He shook his head. “To be honest, the fact that we know the names of these women is considered substantial, given the dearth of information about the witch hunts. You might find the name of the commissioner and perhaps the method by which they were put to death if you go to the National Library, but it would take some digging around.”
I nodded. “Thank you.”
I think it was the fact that there was so little information about, and such a sorry memorial for, these women that I wrote down the names on a scrap of paper, clutching it tightly as I walked out of there.
That afternoon at the Longing, I asked Finn about the wildling myth, and the boy I’d seen.
He straightened and gave a stretch, having spent half an hour on his hands and knees to finish plastering a lower section of the Longing. “Maybe you saw a ghost.”
“A ghost?”
He cocked an eyebrow. “Aye. Lòn Haven has a bit of a track record of folk vanishing into the ether.”
“Don’t tell me you believe in ghosts, Finn.”
“Ghosts, not exactly. Traces, yeah. Sort of.”
“Traces?”
“Here’s my theory. Everything is energy. We all leave something behind. Now, there’s folk who’ll swear on their granny’s last breath that they’ve seen a ghost. And I reckon some of them have. Or rather, they’ve seen traces of a past energy.”
My face was screwed up, because after last night at Isla’s café, I was way past tolerating nonsense. And when I got back from the church, I found I’d started spotting again. I was tired of the bullshit.