The Witchings of King James Part One: Birth from Death

The Witchings of King James

Part One: Birth from Death

Prologue

Daemonologie: The Preface. To The Reader.

The fearefull aboundinge at this time in this countrie, of these detestable slaves of the Devill, the Witches or enchaunters, hath moved me (beloved reader) to dispatch in

post, this following treatise of mine, not in any wise (as I protest) to serve for a shew of my learning & ingine, but onely (mooved of conscience) to preasse thereby, so

farre as I can, to resolve the doubting harts of many both that such assaultes of Sathan are most certainly practized, & that the instrumentes thereof, merit most severely

to be punished:

. . .

At which time, before he proceede any further with them, he first perswades them to addict themselves to his service: which being easely obteined, he then discovers

what he is unto them: makes them to renunce their God and Baptisme directlie, and gives them his marke upon some secreit place of their bodie, which remaines soare

unhealed, while his next meeting with them, and thereafter ever insensible, how soever it be nipped or pricked by any, as is dailie proved, to give them a proofe thereby,

that as in that doing, hee could hurte and heale them; so all their ill and well doing thereafter, must depende upon him.

James R ͯ

1 A Flower Falls

Short, guttering candles, one on each side of the soiled bed, threw long, multiple shadows of two people on the bare walls of the colorless room. On one of the

side tables were an open bottle of champagne and a worn, leather-bound bible. Young James Stuart tore at the laces on the back of the streetwalker's threadbare dress

as beads of sweat broke out on his brow despite the cool night's breeze that whispered from the Italian mountainside through the city of Florence and past the tattered

green curtains of the open window.

“These damn things,” he said. “Such a nuisance. Why do whores tie themselves up so? It is not like your clothes are meant to stay on.” At sixteen, and the

minority king of Scotland, he had both the stature of an adult and the temperament of a man to whom nothing had ever been denied.

The woman, her face showing wear and age despite a layer of crude make-up, reached over her shoulder. “Let me help you, love,” she said. “You young boys

always have your blood up.”

James shoved her toward the bed of the inn's upstairs room.

“Never mind,” he snapped. “Pull up your skirts and turn around. We'll have you that way. I’ve seen more than enough of what there is of you.”

The woman did as she was told, picking her thin skirt and thinner slip up to her waist.

His nose wrinkled and James turned his face away.

“The smell of your ass is rank,” he said.

“I clean myself when I can, your worship,” she answered. “I’m a good Catholic.”

“Italian food and the Catholic faith make for a vile discharge, then.”

“Thank you, sir. In all honesty, your lordship ain’t much prettier in your personal aromas.”

“You have a tart thumb for an old glove,” James said. “Would that you were a fresh flower instead.”

“I am younger than you think. But you ain’t paying to sniff me, now. Get on with it. Shall I bend over the bed, then?”

“Wait,” James cried out. “Pull those skirts up higher. All the way up. Yes. Over your toadish head.” He slipped his apricot scarf from his neck. “I will tie them off at

the top and make a tulip of you. How wonderful.”

He knotted the scarf to shut the woman within her clothes. She was naked and starveling thin from the waist down except for a natty pair of once-red shoes on

her feet. The king stepped back to admire his work.

“Oh, yes,” he said, smiling. “I have made a flower of you, dearie.” He stood by a side table and took up the champagne, swigging at it three times while he eyed

his creation. “A filthy, downtrodden, stinking, grayish tulip of a flower you are, but even I cannot make gold from excrement, eh?”

The woman said something in reply from within her bindings, but the clothes muffled her words. She waggled her pock-marked rump and spread her legs wider,

her thighs leaning for balance against the side of the lumpy, straw mattress.

Leaving the bottle on the table, James clapped his hands, rubbing them together as he approached her. In a quick motion, he bent the woman at the waist over

the bed and positioned himself to enter from behind.

A light knock at the door interrupted him.

“Speak!” James shouted, holding the bare hips in place.

“James, my love,” a familiar female voice called from beyond the door. “Let me in, please. You know how I dislike these dark hallways.”

James considered his options as he let go the woman to secure his trousers. He could hide the beastie under the bed or in the standing closet but that would not

suffice. Perhaps behind the curtains by the open window.

“Antoinette,” he called back, his voice softer than a moment before. “You are early.”

Damn the girl’s timing, he thought. There was only one thing for it.

“Yes, darling,” Antoinette said from beyond the locked door.

He gripped his tulip creature by the dress and raised her to a standing position.

“I had to make my escape when the opportunity arose,” Antoinette was saying through the door, “after vespers, while my aunt prepared for early bed. Father will

be out on the hunt tonight and hawking in the morning.”

James pushed the half-woman around the bed, helping her to take short steps since she was unable to fully keep equilibrium wrapped as she was.

“Please open the door. This is our last night alone, my king.”

“Just there, my love,” James called back as he maneuvered his odd creation along the floor toward the open window and, without a pause, pushed her out into

the cool night air of the third story.

He turned from the window, hearing the muffled scream and the dull thud of the body against the cobblestones in the alley below. He made a fist and shook it.

“Damn me,” he whispered. “A perfectly good scarf wasted.”

Plucking his victim's faded yellow bonnet and purple purse from the bed, he slipped them beneath the mattress and, coat and hat in hand, he was in four long

strides unbolting the lock and throwing the door wide with a toothy smile.

“Darling,” he said.

2 A Scarf for Luck

From the dimly lit hallway, she knocked on the door lightly, fearing to rouse any of the denizens of this dark and dilapidated establishment. The sound and feel of

her knuckles against the wood helped to quell the competing noise and voices within her mind that came and went but were now at full volume for some reason. Most of

the voices were female and few words were even remotely like her native Italian nor her acquired French nor the smattering of English she had been taught. Still, she

could hear from the various tones that some of the women were agitated and others apparently calm.

“Speak!” James shouted from within. His voice surprised her, so quickly had she become immersed in the mystery, or was it madness? that was this cacophony

with which she had walked around in recent months.

“James, my love,” she forced herself to say, realizing how she had lost focus on the moment and where she was and why.

“There is death,” a female voice said in a whisper in French which was louder than the other squabbling that had receded with her knock.

What death? she found herself asking the voice. Just as quickly she told herself to shut up. No, not shut up, she thought, speak out loud to James, focus on

James. The darkness of the hallway and its thick, organic odors worked on her nerves as well.

“Antoinette, you are early,” James said, still not opening the door.

Am I early? she thought. A cat growled in her mind, but it was no house cat such as Smoke, her favorite gray at home. What was that? she asked herself and

then demanded again that she connect with James.

“Yes, darling,” she said. The cat’s growl dissipated when a baying of hounds took its place in her mind. Then a woman’s voice said something clearly

commanding but in no familiar tongue and the dogs quieted. Stop this, she told herself. Say something more to James.

“I had to make my escape when the opportunity arose,” she said through the door, “after vespers, while my aunt prepared for early bed. Father will be out on the

hunt tonight and hawking in the morning.”

James did not answer immediately though Antoinette could hear movement, the shuffling of feet, from within. But even that sound had to compete with a new

conversation in her—was it in her mind, in some reality she was not aware of nearby, or was it her imagination, bordering on lunacy, she felt, given how difficult it was to

remain in the present and even get into this damn room in this awful place?

“Please open the door. This is our last night alone, my king,” she said, pushing the words out one by one as if she were reading from a difficult text.

“Just there, my love,” James called back, and his voice felt reassuring in the chaos of thoughts she felt trapped by with the grime and shadows and stench of the

hallway closing in on her as well. There was not a room or hallway or even basement closet in the workers’ quarters on her parents’ estate that approached the dismal

and threatening feel of this place. She picked up one foot almost as if she knew it was stuck to something pasty on the carpet. She adjusted her stance to control her

balance as a feeling of nausea or dizziness overtook her momentarily. She could swear that she heard the muffled scream of a woman through the door.

You could not swear to hearing anything real, she scolded herself. James is coming. Be strong.

She thought she could hear James speaking and was about to ask him to repeat it when the ugly door swung open, and his smiling face was before her.

“Darling,” he said, donning his hat and taking her into his arms as she rushed toward him from the dark hall. “Even in the darkness of the hallway lamp lights,

you are beautiful,” he said.

They kissed, long and as lovingly as she could remember, her memories also confused by her mind’s trickeries. He put his fingers into her full, blonde hair.

“Your dark eyes and complexion light up this space,” he told her. “Your hair is like a lamp lighting my way to your heart.”

She fought an urge to look past him into the room for the woman whom she thought had screamed. Instead, she placed her cheek against his chest. The odors

of his body were not much more pleasant than those of the hallway, but somehow, she could embrace them because they were his.

“Every moment away from you is agony,” she said, her large eyes as if drinking in each detail of her lover's face. “I cannot wait for us to be husband and wife.”

“Nor I,” he answered, turning her by the shoulders away from the room. “But first we must get past that awkward meeting with your father, the count.” He slipped

his arms through his coat sleeves and shot the cuffs in one fluid motion.

Antoinette beamed at him over her shoulder. “He will adore you as I do,” she said. “And he is welcoming a king into the family, isn't he?”

James smiled winningly. “That he is,” he said. “Duke of Albany, Earl of Ross, King of Scotland, have your pick. And I have my eye on even higher seats yet, in

due time.” He took her turned chin in his hand to place a long kiss on the side of her full lips. “How about we set out for a celebratory dinner tonight? Sort of a farewell, to

Florence, that is. What do you say to that, my precious young lady?”

Antoinette glanced into the room finally, the screaming woman no longer on her mind, the voices and animals silenced now as she felt her cheeks and hands

warm and flush with blood in anticipation of making love with James. “I had thought--” she began but did not finish.

“Oh, there will be time for love,” James said, closing the door behind him. He kissed Antoinette again. “I promise that you will be on fire anew soon.”

Antoinette blushed. “I should be ashamed,” she said, though she raised her chin and added, “But I have no shame with you.”

Does that sound right? she asked herself. A female voice seemed to answer her in a foreign tongue. Antoinette felt anger at the woman’s eavesdropping. Then

she felt foolish at thinking that there was a woman eavesdropping in her mind. She focused on James who wrapped his arm around her as they began their descent

down the dank and dim stairs.

“I have taught you well,” he said, his nose nuzzling her ear.

“You have taught me everything,” she answered. “I will have to get myself to confession as soon as I am home.” Why did you say that? she cried out in her head.

Church, really?

James laughed. “So your Catholic priest can judge you? What have you got to confess?”

He put a finger to Antoinette’s lips and told her to wait, dashing back into the room once more. He returned in a moment with his bible in hand. He waved the

volume in the air.

“Been working my way through my old Greek version of the Good Book. Damned difficult work. One must wrest the word of God from a dreadful language to

make sense of it.” He tucked the bible beneath his arm and moved her with him down the stairs. “What were we talking about?’ he asked.

Antoinette pulled at the tips of his fingers playfully. “Well,” she said, “we were speaking on the subject of my confessions.”

Why? Why? she chided herself. Change the subject, you dumb girl. Now we’re talking about the bible and God instead of, well, instead of love. She laughed

inwardly at her modesty. Call it love. It is love. But it is sex, too. Call it what it is. My God, how wonderful sex is. Quiet. Focus on James.

“Indeed,” he said. “I have the holy text at hand so you cannot tell a lie. What have you got to confess at such a tender age? And why do you always smell so

lovely?” He breathed deeply of her hair.

With the inn’s greasy railing in her grip, she said, “My mother taught me to bathe and wash my clothes.” Now mother is with us! she thought. “Beyond the

knowledge of the Church, of course. My mother says that cleanliness is not a sin worthy of confession. As to my true sin, it is, actually, you.”

James considered this a moment and burst into laughter. He jumped down the stairs three at a time to land with a flourish, looking up at her.

“Oh, you woman-child,” he said with relish in his voice. “We have been having such a time.” He tilted his head with something of a wicked smile as if enjoying

watching her negotiate the treacherous descent.

“Me, your sin, did you say?” he asked as Antoinette reached the landing and took his outstretched hand. “But you know, don’t you, that by decree and tradition,

no king can be guilty of sin. We royals are God’s chosen.”

The two continued to the main floor and directly outside the shabby building into the dark streets where a crowd was gathering near the entrance to the alley.

James guided Antoinette in the opposite direction.

“Let's avoid the petty entertainments of the common folk, shall we?” he said.

“Yes, my love,” Antoinette replied, happy to be done speaking of confessions and sins and her mother as they hurried along the evening boulevard. But then she

stopped, the whimpering of a child, was it her disturbed mind or was there a suffering child nearby? James was several steps ahead before he turned back to her. She

was rubbing her gloved hands together. Now this, she thought, worrying the itching in her hands that had also begun around the time of her first hearing voices.

“What is it, Antoinette? Are you alright?”

Antoinette pouted. She clapped her hands rapidly as if applauding. She would pound the itching from her palms and play it off somehow.