Excerpt Thursday: THE WITCH FINDER by Blythe Gifford

This week, Unusual Historicals contributor Blythe Gifford shares an excerpt from her newly released book, THE WITCH FINDER, a dark historical romance set on the Scottish Borders.  On Sunday, she’ll be chatting with us about the book and offering a chance at a copy.  Here’s the blurb:

Scotland, 1661

He's a haunted man.

Alexander Kincaid watched his mother die, the victim, they said, of a witch's curse. So he has dedicated his life to battling evil. But in this small, Scottish village, he confronts a woman who challenges everything he believes. She may be more dangerous than a witch, because she's a woman who threatens his heart.

She's a hunted woman.

They called her mother a witch, but she was only a woman made mad by witch hunters like Alexander Kincaid. Having escaped to the Border hills, Margret Reid is seeking a safe haven and a place to hide. But when the witch hunter arrives, not only is her heart in danger.

So is her life.

An excerpt from Chapter One

     Margret nodded her thanks. Shielded by her scarf and plaide, she walked back out onto the hard-packed dirt of the lane to see the witch finder looming before her, blocking her path.

     He was just as menacing in daylight, cloak swirling above bucket top boots, all in colors somber enough to please the Kirk. Yet if she had not known who he was, she might have suspected him of practicing dark arts.

     His deep-set eyes snagged hers. Even in daylight, she saw a haunted look there. As if he were the one carrying the demons.

     She cast her gaze to the ground, hoping he would not notice her.

     Too late. “Good day, Guidwife.”

     She tried to step around him, turning her face toward the hills.

     His hand touched her shoulder. "I said, 'Good day!'" His voice was firm as his touch. “Will you not look at me and give a civil reply?”

     Against her will, she turned, slowly, and watched his expression change, the same way they all did when they saw her full for the first time.

     “My God.” Startled into blasphemy, he drew his hand away from her shoulder. “I was not blinded.”

     She met his eyes, knowing he saw something very different when he looked at hers.

     “They’re . . . ,” he stumbled over the words. “One is blue, the other . . .”

     She let him look. No reason to hide what he had already seen. One eye was blue, clear and bright like her mother’s. The other was altogether different, with a patch of brown filling part of the iris.

     “And yours,” she began, when the silence stretched taut. Shadowed by his brows, his eyes looked near black. “One is brown, the other, brown.” Calm words, when she wanted to scratch his eyes out and cover her own so no one would ever see them again and wonder.

     Down the street, the two women from the alehouse had stopped at the edge of the common green to watch. He looked at them, then to the alehouse and back to Margret. “You know who I am.”

     He must know enough of village life to know that news of a stranger traveled fast.  “I do not know your name.” In her dread, she must have missed it.

     “Alexander Kincaid. And yours?”

     She did not answer. “They say you find witches.” His boots were fine leather, the fabric of his cloak a deep black not faded with time. Together, they must have cost a woman’s life. Maybe two. “It seems you find a lot of them.”

     Surprised, he leaned away. She took a deeper breath. She should not have insulted him, but now that he had seen her, the best she could do was resist. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes the man would hesitate long enough for her to run.

     “I don’t do it for money.”

     She raised her eyebrows. “But they do pay you.”

     “To do God’s work. To stamp out evil, yes.”

     Was that what haunted him? Had he seen too much evil and chosen to fight it? “How many? How many witches have you found?”

     He looked toward the fields and made no ready answer. What lay behind his silence? Days, weeks, months of confronting them in too many towns, killing too many witches to remember?

     “Not enough,” he said, finally, facing her again. “They still surround us.”

     She thought she had seen them all, all the hunters. Some, with pursed lips and Bibles, were convinced they were servants of God. Others, with lascivious eyes and slack lips, had more earthly motives.

     But this man was different. He spoke of God, but the pain he carried was his own.

     “You haven’t told me your name,” he said.

     “Margret.”

     “Margret what?”

     It was a common enough name. It would mean nothing to him unless he was from Edinburgh.

     “Reid. Margret Reid.”

     “I will see you again, Guidwife Reid.”

     She hurried away without answering, wishing it were not true.

Copyright © Blythe Gifford 2013

After many years in public relations, advertising and marketing, Blythe Gifford started writing seriously after a corporate layoff. Ten years and one layoff later, she became an overnight success when she sold her first book to the Harlequin Historical line.  Since then, she has published eight romances set in England and on the Scottish Borders in the medieval and early Tudor time periods.  For more information, visit www.blythegifford.com or www.facebook.com/BlytheGifford

Author Photo:  Jennifer Girard

Witchcraft and Sorcery: The king and the pricker - witch hunting in Scotland

The king and the pricker - witch hunting in Scotland

By Blythe Gifford

While the English “witch finder” Matthew Hopkins and the Salem, Massachusetts witch trials may be more familiar to many readers, some of the most horrific witch hunts of the 16-17^th centuries took place in Scotland.  Several waves of witch hunting washed through the country, over a period of roughly 200 years, resulting in a total of some 1,500 deaths, compared to perhaps 1,000 in England.  Other estimates are that Scotland, with a quarter of England’s population, executed three times the number of witches as England did.

There is much speculation and little certainty about exactly why that is so.  I’ll withhold theories, but today, I’d like to focus on two peculiarly Scottish contributions to the history of witch hunting:  first, the direct involvement of the king and second, the phenomenon known as the “witch pricker.”

The Scottish King James VI (son of Mary, Queen of Scots and later crowned as England’s King James I) was obsessed with witchcraft, so much so that he authored an eighty page treatise on the subject, Daemonologie, in 1597.  Although witchcraft in Scotland had been illegal and punishable by death since 1563, the persecution of witches did not really take hold until the king made it a personal crusade.  (Among his “contributions” to the cause was to authorize torture.)

James VI Scotland/James I England

Why was he so obsessed?  Because he was, for a time, convinced he had been a victim of witchcraft.  During a visit to Denmark, home of his future bride, Anne of Denmark, he is said to have been exposed to a theory of witchcraft not yet prevalent in Scotland; one that focused on demonic compacts and groups of witches working together in league with Satan.  This idea apparently weighed on his mind as several rough sea crossings nearly prevented Anne and James from returning to Scotland alive.  The Danish admiral blamed witches for working black magic against the royal couple.  The king must have believed him, for soon, persecutions in both countries began, and the accused included nobles of the Scottish court.

Across a multi-year period, from 1590-1593, the investigation culminated with the execution of around 70 witches in North Berwick.  The king took a personal interest in the trials, and even in the torture of some of the women.  And interestingly, the charges included treason as well as witchcraft, indicating that the king believed he had personally been a target and the crime not only a religious, but a civil one.  His subsequent authorship of the Daemonologie placed him firmly on the side of those who argued that rational men could, and should, believe that such evil existed, insisting it was possible for witches to “rayse stromes and tempestes in the aire, either upon land or sea, though not universally; but in such a particular place and prescribed bunds as God will permitte them so to trouble.”

Pamphlet written by James VI on the North Berwick witch trials

After he became England’s king in 1601 and moved south, his views moderated significantly.  Arguments as to why include the greater skepticism of the English and may also include his experience with Anne Gunter, a young  woman who accused others of witchcraft and later confessed that she had made it all up.

A footnote for those who know “the Scottish play.”  The three witches in MacBeth are thought to have been modeled on some passages of the Daemonologie, an attempt by Shakespeare to please England’s new king James I.

No such moderation of views occurred in the Scotland he left behind.  Witch hunts continued sporadically, with the largest wave in 1661-62.  And the methods of witch hunting in Scotland were more brutal than those in England. Some claimed it was because of differences in the legal system, but the torture routinely practiced in Scotland was gruesome.

Which brings me to the other Scottish contribution to mass witch hunts:  the “witch pricker.” 

These finders-for-hire traveled the country, paid to search for witches and paid better when they found one.  And while the methods of the English “witch finders” such as Matthew Hopkins were grim enough, the witch pricker had a particular slant on things.

The theory was that each witch would have a witch’s mark, given to her by the Devil.  The witch pricker examined the suspected witch (overwhelmingly, though not exclusively a female) for the mark.  (Theory was that Satan, in essence, seduced the

Witch Pricks

women, so the mark would often be found near her most private parts.)  This mark was supposed to be insensitive to pain, so that when jabbed with a sharp, brass prick, the witch would not flinch or cry out or bleed.  If the point of the price disappeared into the mark and the witch did not cry out, the witch pricker had then proven the suspect’s guilt.

The descriptions of these processes, often witnessed by a crowd of observers, are chilling.  More chilling, however, was the discovery that at least some of these pricks were designed with retractable points.  In other words, to an observer, it looked as if the pin penetrated the skin and came out without so much as blood on it.  In reality, the witch pricker had a perfect scam going.  How many women were put to death because of this ruse, we don’t know.  When, finally, one of the most notorious prickers, one John Kincaid, was exposed, it marked a turning point in Scotland.  Witches were still hunted and tried, but torture had to be authorized by national councils instead of simply conducted by local authorities in the grip of fear and frenzy.

These “stranger than fiction” facts haunted me as I developed my next book, THE WITCH FINDER, which will be released later this month.  For those who want an in depth look at the Scottish witch hunts, ENEMIES OF GOD, by Christina Larner, is a comprehensive beginning.

After many years in public relations, advertising and marketing, Blythe Gifford started writing seriously after a corporate layoff. Ten years and one layoff later, she became an overnight success when she sold her first book to the Harlequin Historical line.  Since then, she has published eight romances set in England and on the Scottish Borders, many featuring characters born on the wrong side of the royal blanket.  THE WITCH FINDER will be released in the fall of 2013. For more information, visit www.blythegifford.com  Author photo Jennifer Girard

What Surprised Me: Witchcraft and Royalty

By Margaret Mallory

Were I a man, a duke, and next of blood,
I would remove these tedious stumbling-blocks
And smooth my way upon their headless necks...

Speech of Eleanor Cobham, Duchess of Gloucester
From Shakespeare's HENRY VI (Part 2, Act 1, Scene 2)

When I was doing my research for KNIGHT OF PASSION, the third book in my "All the King's Men" medieval series, I came across Eleanor Cobham, a woman who married into the royal family and was accused of using witchcraft. It was so easy to falsely accuse a woman of witchcraft that I assumed this was a trumped up charge.

What surprised me is that Eleanor Cobham, Duchess of Gloucester, probably did it.

Eleanor was an ambitious woman--and not very nice.

The daughter of a mere knight, she became Gloucester's mistress while she was a lady-in-waiting to Gloucester's wife. There had been rumblings from the start of Gloucester's marriage that his wife still had a husband on the Continent. Since she was a great heiress, the rumors were ignored. When Gloucester, who was Henry V's youngest brother, wanted to get rid of his wife, however, the church conveniently invalidated his marriage.

Royal marriages were about power, inheritances, and alliances. It was no surprise, then, when Henry V made it clear he was not inclined to give his brother permission to make Eleanor his duchess. But when Henry V died unexpectedly, Gloucester married his mistress before Henry's body was brought home for burial.

Gloucester's nephew, a nine-month-old babe, became Henry VI. Some years later, after Gloucester's last remaining brother died, Gloucester became the young king's heir.

Eleanor could almost feel the crown on her head--and decided she better act before the now-teenage king took a wife and begat a new heir. It all came out when one of her co-conspirators turned informant. The allegation was that Eleanor was part of a witches' cabal, that included a woman known as The Witch of Eye, and at least three men of the church, including her confessor. This cabal allegedly employed sorcery in an attempt to predict the death of the king and to cut short his life.

While you may not believe their sorcery could harm the king, they did. Hence, their activity amounted to both heresy and treason.

Eleanor admitted to witchcraft, but she claimed she was only using it to try to get pregnant. She wisely denied the allegations of treason and was allowed, in effect, to plead guilty to a lesser offence. For her penance, she was made to walk London barefoot with a candle. Afterward, she was imprisoned for life on the Isle of Man--with servants, of course.

Eleanor's co-conspirators did not fare so well. Because this was The Witch of Eye's second offense, she was burned as a relapsed heretic. One of the churchman, a well-known Oxford scholar, was hung, drawn & quartered; another died in the Tower.

Gloucester laid low throughout the whole nasty business and let Eleanor face her accusers alone. (I like to think he made the plea for the servants.) Being royalty, he was conveniently "unmarried" a second time on the basis that Eleanor must have used sorcery on him from the beginning.

I had great fun with Eleanor Cobham and the Duke of Gloucester, who both appear as secondary characters in my new book, KNIGHT OF PASSION. I'd love to hear your comments or answer questions.

* Historical photos courtesy of Wikipedia

Crime & Punishment:The Salem Witch Trials

By Penny Ash

Between February 1692 and May 1693, one of the most notorious events in American history occurred. A small group of girls began accusing their neighbors of being witches and sparked a level of hysteria that soon had 19 people hanged, 1 crushed to death, and 5 dying in jail. Over 150 people were accused and the court allowed what was then called Spectral evidence to be used. What we would call hearsay and perjury today. The targeted victims were the different, the people who did not always conform to Puritan social ideals, and people who spoke out against the accusers.

The girls may have started the hysteria but some of the adults were quick to see the possibilities and fanned the flames. Motivations were greed and hatred, ego and fear and superstition, a lot of the same factors that motivate people today. There are several scientists who have advanced the theory that Ergot poisoning was the cause of the symptoms the girls complained of but I personally don't think this explains the events which took place.

We get the term witch hunt from this era. And I find it interesting that a similar event took place some 258 years later America would be engaged in yet another witch hunt, the McCarthy Hearings, with much the same result. And on Halloween 2001 all those accused, tried and convicted of witchcraft were finally officially exonerated and proclaimed innocent 300 years after the events of 1692.