Dear Darkness

Contributed by Rivka Jacobs on 27/07/09

Elenore found a moment to talk to Margaret after the séance, while the servants were carrying her bag outside and bringing around her carriage; they were in a foyer that was marble and crystal and three stories high. Margaret was dripping in French-lace, velvet, and jewels, her auburn hair swept up and decorated with feathers, her wasp-waist and epaulettes the essence of fashion. Elenore whispered to her fiercely, “You forget yourself, Margaret. This is wrong. There is a balance. You have misused your power and sought personal gain!”

Margaret, her mouth painted like a pouting bud, her cheeks dewy and her skin like pearls, remained facing forward, her expression unchanged while she fanned herself and answered in a low hiss, “Elenore, you are weak. You’ve always been weak. You have never known how to seize control. You let every spirit, demon, faerie, or shape-shifter push you around. You never could learn how to command them, and make them do your bidding!”

“And you have,” Elenore answered. “That’s what scares me. What kind of demon did it take to make you the Marchioness of Montmercy and Charleston House? How is it you look like a twenty-five year old? What happened to the Marquess’ first wife? Do you know what the folk are saying?”

“I do not care what the common scum think of me,” she responded. “These are modern times. They do not burn witches any more.”

Elenore drew back and gathered her dress, turned, and marched out the front door, too angry to trust herself to continue the discussion.

Her buggy was waiting and she climbed up to the seat, took the reins, flicked them once. She moved a few hundred feet before she pulled up. Her horse Odo halted. She looked behind her, at the Jacobean manor house with its multiple windows and turrets glowing like honey and gold in the setting sun. She couldn’t decide which she felt more, anger or sadness. She faced forward once again and loosely flipped the reins. Odo turned his dark head and smirked. “Just get us home,” she said sharply, giving the reins another yank.

Odo lifted his nose and whinnied a bit, then continued plodding down the wide drive, away from Charleston House in Oxfordshire, pulling the two-wheel buggy after him.

They turned northeast, toward Warwickshire. Elenore lived on the divide between the two counties, outside of Long Compton. She had lived there for a very long time.

She tried to get comfortable in her black crepe-silk dress. The corset cut into her, squeezed her like a grape in a child’s fist. She shifted on her seat, thinking of the new marchioness. Margaret had the nerve to invite her, Elenore, as some kind of novelty act, a diversion for her and her new aristocratic friends. And she had agreed to play her part, if only to provide some comfort for the ladies present. She thought of Margaret’s drawing room, a huge space covered in gilt, satin, carved mahogany, and mirrors. Filled with the most ornate and voluptuous objects money could buy. Porcelain, velvet, wood, gold, tapestries, throws, and large tropical house plants. Somewhere in there was the heavy round table, covered in a black cloth, where Elenore had conducted the séance. She had used the usual props; spirit trumpets, spirit slates, spirit boxes. She had moaned and made unintelligible noises in the expected way, holding the hands of the two ladies of the landed gentry on either side of her.

It was entertainment. They expected a show. All the while the souls of their beloved dead hovered around them, electric and cold, and Elenore could actually pass on needed information. Some picture frames were torn from the walls, some knick-knacks were tossed to the parquet floor; it was chaotic, so many spirits trying to enter, to speak ”I’m glad that’s over,” she said aloud.

Odo said something like, “Right, of course you are,” which was highly irritating. She glared at his glistening ebony hindquarters as he flipped his silky black tail. They were moving to the ley line now. The rolling hills and mosaic of farms, grazing ranges, meadows, and wild woodsy hedges were frosted with a rosy glow as the sky above them darkened and deepened in color. The layers of habitation under the earth sang a song of history and generations of life and death that Elenore began to hear in her bones, in her nerves, all her senses tingling. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes.

She loved this land, her home. But so much was changing. Society had become so much more complex.

They were passing the remains of dolmens, of misshapen rocks that were weathered and had assumed strange and sinuous shapes. The rising and falling ground hid from everyone but her the deeply buried ancient encampments and sacred villages of tribes that had once come in pilgrimage to this place, since the time when the last ice sheets retreated from the land.

They came to the ruins of a centuries-old church and Elenore called, “Stop!”

She stepped down from the buggy and tugged at the corset and her short, tight jacket, and smoothed her skirt trimmed with three rows of black velvet ribbon at the hem. She straightened and adjusted her high black-lace and onyx-beaded collar. How she hated these fashions of 1897, but she had always tried to change with the times.

The remains of this church, built of graying Cotswold limestone carefully shaped and laid with mortar, was a place where she often found artifacts and items she needed for prophecy, amulets, and spells. She flounced her skirt as she walked briskly into an old covered entranceway that had once been the narthex. At the upper inside corner of the opening was etched a spiral with a crown on top. She smiled and kissed the fingers of her right hand, then touched the center of the spiral, symbol of the summer sun. She found some of the flowers she needed, and lichens and mold, and pebbles that reached out to her. She threw all of this in her elegant, fringed, black-beaded bag.

The early Christians had sought out the pagan holy places so they could deliberately build on this powerful ground. These spots were focal points of currents and earth energies, Elenore knew. She picked her way back to the waiting buggy and Odo, her former priest and friend who was serving time as a stallion — three hundred and sixty-five years to be exact — for the part he played in a witch-burning. She climbed into place; Odo turned to catch her eyes, accepted her command, and began trotting down a dirt road that led along the ley line to her cottage.

As they passed the Rollright stones, and approached Elenore’s small four-room home, she jumped from the carriage once more, taking Odo by the harness, walking with him the rest of the way. She patted the stallion affectionately, and smoothed his mane. She had been roundly criticized by her sister for not killing him. Margaret wanted to turn him into a flaming log. But as Father Odo, he was her dear friend, trapped by the mass hysteria of a seventeenth-century witch hunt. And he never turned them in.

Several lizard-skinned and ugly little naked men hurried to meet her as she came within sight of her cottage yard. They were annoyed, and threatened to rot her food if she didn’t give them their tribute. Goblins. Elenore started quoting from Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” which she knew would nettle them even more, “Come buy our orchard fruits, come buy, come buy ….” They started leaping into the air. “You can’t hurt me, you awful creatures,” Elenore said. “Go away until I’m finished my chores for the night.”

Her familiars, mostly in cat form, ran to her from the rear of the cottage. Waiting at her front gate was a delegation of Faerie folk from their barrows under the Rollright stone circle. “Madame Elenore, we need your help. There is conflict, and only you can bring us peace,” said the thin and spindly elder male, dressed in derelict blue silk. Elenore told them, “You will have to wait a moment.”

She guided Odo and the buggy around to the stable and carriage house behind the stone building. Her familiar Lazarus, a plump, gray-stripped tomcat, offered to help her with the horse. “Why thank you, sweetums,” she said, and he grew to human height, purring happily as he unhitched the stallion, removed the harness and bridle, and began brushing Odo’s shoulders and back. Elenore returned to her front gate, opened it, and ceremoniously invited her guests to enter.

Hours later, near dawn, still dressed in black crepe-silk, her head wrapped in a long trailing scarf of silver thread she had crocheted herself, she walked the country roads around Long Compton, completing her nightly rituals. Her oblations, her blessings, her offerings to the old gods. She made her rounds, visiting her neighbors — those who requested her aid — prescribing cures for stomach pain, or relief of hot flashes, or help with incontinence. She delivered two charms for an easy childbirth, and one fertility stone which came from a megalith, as a gift to a newly married couple.

She skipped along, her skirt billowing in the predawn breeze, her scarf sailing high into the air. Let Margaret and the others have their wealth and power, she thought. I’m happy just where I am.

A couple of middle-aged men, pushing their bicycles, approached her on the dirt road. They were dressed in tweed Norfolk jackets and knickerbockers, and were on their way home. They had been out drinking all night, something to do with a new sport called football, Elenore divined.

As they came abreast of the silhouette of a woman, old or young they couldn’t tell, they paused and one of them removed his cap. Both of them bowed. “How are you, Mother Shipton,” one of them said. “We’ve had a long night,” the other one chimed in nervously.

Elenore Shipton smiled warmly and answered, “Go and be well, both of you. You don’t need to be afraid of me!” And she passed them with easy steps, her scarf streaming, glowing and shimmering against the last stars of the night.

Behind her she heard one of the men say, “One thing about living in Long Compton I never could stand, is all the damn witches.”

Elenore laughed, a deep and long laugh that almost raised her off the ground.