The Last Witch in Edinburgh

by Marielle Thompson

Genres: Historical Fantasy; Occult & Supernatural; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

For fans of Sarah Penner’s The Lost Apothecary and Alix E. Harrow’s The Once and Future Witches, this lush, atmospheric novel from the author of Where Ivy Dares to Grow blends witchcraft, queer love, a vibrant Edinburgh setting, and Scottish folklore for a propulsive and emotional story exploring what it means to resist the patriarchy and find your voice.

“A lyrical and hauntingly beautiful new voice.” —Hester Fox, Author of A Lullaby for Witches

In an alternate Edinburgh of 1824, every woman lives in fear that she will be the next one hanged for witchcraft. All it takes is invoking the anger, or the desire, of the wrong person. Nellie Duncan, beautiful and unwed, keeps to herself until she encounters the Rae Women’s Apothecary. There, fiery Jean Rae and the other women provide cures and teach others that they too can aid the winter deity, the Cailleach, embracing her characteristic independence, agency, and craft, in turn becoming witches themselves.

Nellie finds a place and a purpose at the shop, and a blossoming romance with Jean, as she learns about nature-based craft and a witch’s ability to return to life after death. But the Cailleach has an ancient enemy intent on stripping the power of the deity and all her witches, leaving a wake of patriarchal violence and destruction. When heart-breaking disaster strikes, Nellie flees and spends the next two centuries hiding from the world—until love gives her the courage and the motivation to come back.

Nellie’s past is waiting for her there, and hanging witches is no longer the only means of oppression. But this time, Nellie refuses to run—either from her foes, or from her resolve to awaken others to the unimaginable power that can come with fighting the patriarchy in its many forms—and finding one’s own magical inner-strength.

Release date: August 20, 2024

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 384

Sample

The day was gray and faded—as so many of them were—but any sun there was spotlighted the length of rope as it was thrown over the gallows in the center of Grassmarket. Black-gloved hands pulled it taut, weaving and knotting with a stomach-twisting familiarity. The very air of the square felt thick, not with fear—not anymore—but with anticipation.

If there was one thing Edinburgh had learned about itself in the past three months, it was that its people loved to see a witch swing. Time is perhaps an illusion, but cruelty, it seems, is just as enduring.

Nellie Duncan felt a solid lump wedge itself in the middle of her throat, as if it were her neck the hangman was preparing to weave the noose around. Thankfully, it was not, though Nellie knew full well it could be. Lady MacDonald’s threats were still echoing in her ear over the din of the crowd. She dropped her gaze to her feet, which were nearly invisible due to the many shoes and their occupants that crowded Grassmarket, eagerly waiting to bear witness to the hangman’s jig.

I should’ve known better than to follow the swarm of red-faced people down here from the market, Nellie scolded herself. I should have known what I would find. Some people whispered that the abnormally warm summer had driven the city mad, lit a fire in people’s minds, turning them against their neighbors. Nellie thought that stringing up women by their throats far surpassed madness, but she said naught.

Edinburgh seemed to have morphed over the summer. A man no one knew had been brought in from Glasgow to form a committee resolved on stamping out the city’s crime once and for all. Who knew there was so many criminals in their midst, all in skirts? The new head of the Commission of Inquiry seemed to have rooted out endless witches who dwelled in the city, undiscovered, since the last wave of witch killings. The hangings had been happening all summer long. Women—witches—swinging from the gallows so often that they seemed to be as common to the Edinburgh summer as a sun sprinkle. Though one certainly fell from the air heavier than the other.

It had been nearly a century since Scotland had last been gripped by a witch trial. Many, Nellie included, had thought they were a thing of the past, an archaic fixture of cruelty that Edinburgh had outgrown. The fervor and fury the new commissioner had stirred seemed to prove that Edinburgh was not so modern a city as it claimed, that progress could be shifted backward on its axis. Its people still loved any excuse to come for a woman’s blood.

It had started with the young girl—hardly anyone remembered her name anymore—James Grant’s maid, the one he had gotten with child. Of course James couldn’t have a lowborn bastard running about. So he’d rid himself of the girl, accused her of siring the devil’s child, right under James’s own roof.

James’s words had given voice to all the men. Suddenly everyone knew a witch. As months passed and the summer hot spell didn’t break, as crops withered and men lost coin and needed a place to take out their sweating anger . . . the hangman had found himself well employed.

Nellie wasn’t sure she believed in witches, but she did believe in the power of a man’s anger. And was that not the same thing?

Every few days the gallows would rise with the sun, just as inevitable. Grassmarket sat empty, normal, for days. Then one morning the people would blearily emerge from their tilted houses to find the gallows looming large in the street’s center, the scaffolding around it like some wicked protector. The double ladder leaned against it, waiting for executioner and woman alike to climb up, and for only one to come down its rungs.

Gone one day and there the next, as though the hangings were so a part of the city that the beastly contraption grew straight out of the Scottish soil. No announcement was required, no declarations of criminals that shall come to their end. The appearance of the gallows was all that was needed, and its insidious whispers rippled through the city like a raging fire. The common criminals were still hung in the normal spot off Lawnmarket, but the witch hangings had moved down the way to Grassmarket. It was needed, to accommodate the great crowds it drew.

“Seems an awful waste, doesn’t it?” the woman beside Nellie whispered, her voice meant to reach no one in particular and everyone all at once.

“Aye,” responded a man, glancing over his shoulder quickly, afraid to miss a moment of the action before them.

His eyes caught on Nellie for a moment as he turned, pupils darkening. She looked to her shoes, an instinctive response to the gazes of men that came about too soon in her girlhood. She tucked her hands away within the folds of her cloak, holding still as could be.

“Why bother putting ’em in the ground when those bloody resurrection men will just be digging ’em back up by nightfall?” A spray of spittle flew from the man’s mouth with the fervor of his words, but Nellie was busy being grateful that the gallows had grabbed his attention once more.

There were two plagues that haunted Edinburgh—witches and grave robbers. Before the soil could even settle over their graves, the hung witches were dug up, ending up a slab on a table in the medical school, ten shillings jingling in the robbers’ pockets. No one minded that much that the resurrection men disturbed the slumber of the witches, but it wasn’t just the wicked women they came for. Most criminals’ corpses were offered readily by the government to the medical school, all legal. But the commissioner had put a ban on the surgeons studying witches, insisting that they were to be in the ground untouched. Of course that didn’t stop the resurrection men; witch or not, a body was a body. For now, what with all the hangings, the witches seemed to always be the freshest. The medical students needed something to study after all, legal or not—and who wouldn’t want to slice open a witch?

A few people chuckled in response to the man, but many more nodded, somber, gazes already locked once more on the gallows, eager to get the fill of death for which they sniffed their way to Grassmarket. Nellie swallowed heavy, but the lump in her throat persisted.

“Who’s to say it’s the resurrection men?” another man jibed. “Maybe the witches are digging up bodies for their nasty little spells. Or coming back to life or the like.”

Nellie didn’t know if the others around her believed that, but no one laughed this time.

None of the women hung were formally charged as witches—such a thing wasn’t allowed anymore. But no matter what the formal charges were, it was clear to everyone that witchcraft was their crime. The fact that they were treated and hung separately from other criminals only confirmed as much; they were a different kind of threat.

The air was split as the wooden ladder creaked, two bodies making their climb—the black-gloved executioner, his hat sitting askew as he made his ashen-faced ascent, and ahead of him—the witch. She placidly faced the crowd as the noose was swung over her neck, her eyes the same gray as the sky, looking out into the crowd not with a challenge but with resignation.

She looked about the age Nellie’s mother would be, silver sprouting out at the roots of her hair before fading into a light, frosty brown. She must have been locked up only a few weeks, but it surely robbed years from her face. Nellie felt sweat blossom along her spine, her skin growing both flushed and cool all at once.

For just a moment, as the witch’s gaze swept across the crowd that had gathered to watch her take her final breath, her face met Nellie’s directly. Or at least that was how it felt, though Nellie knew she was nestled well among the congregation. Nevertheless, it seemed like the witch had sought out her eyes.

Nellie’s dress began to cling to her as the sweat fell in rivulets. What could the wicked woman spot in her eyes, what could she see and curse and steal? Nellie whispered a silent prayer, feeling a fool all the while for calling upon a God that she had forgotten and that had long since turned his back on her. On them all.

A witch even catching her eye could be enough to set Nellie on the gallows next. But then the executioner was nudging the witch up the last rung with an ungentle hand, and the connection between the women broke. The stone houses loomed behind the gallows like another executioner, flanking it on both sides. No escape. The castle stood just beyond, looking down with a gaze as blank and eager as the people. Even the city itself had turned against witches it seemed.

Nellie looked away, because she must, her eyes finding a darkly outfitted man standing just beneath the gallows. The commissioner, she’d venture. He was about Da’s age perhaps, but slight, hair the ashy shade of blond meeting silver. His hair was as carefully curated as his clothes, a certain levelness to his appearance that matched a man of his occupation. Controlled. Calculated. His white skin was flushed pink, and his hands were clasped behind him. He looked up at the woman coming to meet her end with a small sort of smile on his face, below blue eyes so singularly focused that the lump in Nellie’s throat swelled.

This is mad, Nellie though suddenly. Archaic. But she did nothing, for what could she do? She was merely a woman, just like the one who was about to hang.

Raucous cheers swept through the crowd as the hangman tightened the rope around the witch’s neck. The people of Edinburgh had become a beast, and they were out for blood. Before the past few months, Nellie never had to consider if she had the stomach to watch a person die. Now she knew that she did not.

I never should have come.

As the witch’s left foot stepped from the rung of the ladder, already prepared to walk on air and dance for the crowd, Nellie turned away. She pushed and shoved through the people, head down, as she scurried from the gallows. She broke through the thickest part of the crowd at last, the bucket she clutched bumping against her leg angrily as she made the climb up toward Lawnmarket. There the awaiting crowd had thinned but still lingered.

There was a moment where the city fell silent, where the only sound seemed to be Nellie’s quick steps, the people holding their collective breath. Then a booming cheer shook the city, and Nellie could practically hear the creak of the swinging rope far, far behind her.

Another morning in Edinburgh, another witch dancing on air.

Nellie’s skirts collected the wetness on the ground as she raced, but she did not bother to lift the fabric. She had never quite managed to mend her hems enough for the threads to hold them at just the right height between propriety and practicality. Nellie had no other dress to wear, but it was no matter if this one was dirty—she was no longer the servant of a house, no longer needed to place being presentable over being practical. Besides, she would not dare allow too much of her skin to be seen, not even an ankle. Her family’s funds had grown fewer by the minute it seemed, but not so much that she had become a woman of the night. Not yet.

Nellie passed beneath the shadow of the looming kirk, its courtyard clear of a parish, as it so often was now. It seemed the people of Edinburgh had no need for a God when they could worship the divine apparition of the gallows.

Despite the crowds down on Grassmarket, a small queue snaked out before the stone well just outside the old John Knox house. It was populated by those who had to place duty above entertainment, or perhaps others who couldn’t stomach the horrors. Women, like Nellie, mostly house servants as she had been, waiting to collect water in their buckets. The queue used to be abustle with chatter, whispered gossip, and raised brows, a place for the women of that lower class to convene, to trade their own kind of currency. Now, it was silent.

The women could barely meet one another’s eyes. Too many women in one place was dangerous enough, but to speak to one another brought about unwanted attention that none of them could bear the burden of. They all knew that there was just too much risk in it now, the men passing by on the street like a flame hovering over skin, always applying heat, pressure, waiting to burn at the slightest provocation.

A young girl stepped up to the well, clunking her bucket beneath the spew of water. She placed her left hand on the stone step to balance and leverage herself as the water pounded into the wooden contraption. Nellie’s chest tightened in panic at the sight. The girl could not have more than fourteen years, the look in her eyes still bright, surely new to her role, fresh from the safety of her mother’s kitchen. It was why she was such a fool.

Nellie could feel the tension in the air, the way the rest of the women froze but no one stepped forth to stop the girl from her folly, no one spoke a word to save her. Nellie knew she should tell her. But then she imagined Thomas and her father without her. She could not be seen talking to the girl should trouble now befall her, did not want to get involved at all. Minding one’s business was the only way to stay safe. Her breath coming in quick, shallow spurts, Nellie did not even let her eyes rest upon the girl, but that left hand pressed to stone burned through the edge of her vision.

Be quick about it, you foolish girl, before a man walks by and sees you. We cannot trust any of them anymore. We never could.

A ripple of surprise and fear made its way down the queue as an older woman, skin darkened by an ever-present layer of the city’s grime, stepped up beside the girl. The woman turned, angling the width of her body to block the younger girl from the eyes of passing men. She leaned forth slightly, her whispered words coming out in gravelly grunts.

“Put your left foot on the stone instead, lass. No good can come from using yer hand, understand?”

Instantly the young girl’s pale skin flushed scarlet, eyes growing in fear. She stepped away with her bucket only half filled, water sloshing across her worn skirts. The words had not been spoken, but it seemed the girl realized them anyway: only witches used their left hands. One grab of the fingers, one bit of weight upon the palm, could buy a woman her ticket to swing.

Nellie stepped up to the well quickly, anxious to take her water and be on her way; the well suddenly seemed tainted and dangerous by the girl’s error. They could all be punished for such stupidity. She let her bucket fill, propping it along the bone of her right shin, a permanent bruise where the bucket had rested there every day for as many years as Nellie could remember. She ignored the tremble in her fingers, a quiver caused not by winter in the air but by the fear that lurked there as well. The decorative stone face on the well that spit the water forth was so worn that the sight sent an uncomfortable tingle up Nellie’s spine. The iron expressions had grown grotesque in their weathering, teetering between horror and amusement. Nellie was all too happy to step away when the water sloshed up over the rim, carrying on down the street without so much as a glance over her shoulder at the other women.

Thomas was sitting on the crumbling steps of their tilted building when Nellie arrived home, right arm burning from the strain of carrying the water bucket one-handed.

Things used to be so much easier.

“Hiya, Nel.” The young boy burst forth at the sight of her, reaching his hands out for the bucket.

With a shake of her head, Nellie carried on past him, water swaying precariously.

Nellie’s stomach knotted as she looked at her young brother, so much slighter than he should be for a boy of ten years. His arms were narrow, the visible bones of his elbows and shoulders creating mountains in the worn wool coat draped across him.

“How was school, then?” she asked.

Tommy’s face withered, as it often did when the matter of his schooling came up. The boy didn’t understand just how lucky he was. Sending him on to school instead of a workhouse cost more coin than they had to spare, but it was an expense Nellie would always front.

“Same as.” Tommy shrugged, the little bones in his shoulders poking up with the movement.

“Come on inside, laddie.” Nellie hooked an arm over Thomas’s shoulder as she passed, guiding him into the building alongside her.

As it so often seemed to do, rain began to beat down, the gray clouds knitting themselves together, preparing for afternoon to slide into evening.

“Let’s get yer supper.”

They made their way up to the higher floors, knowing which steps to skip as they climbed. The building was closer to tumbling ruins than a homestead. The door to their little flat creaked open as Nellie pressed her shoulder into it, the one-room space awash in gloom from what little light trickled in through the far window. Nellie made quick work of a fire in the grate, dumping the last of the roots and potatoes into the roiling water.

We’ll need more. Perhaps if Da gets some coin tonight we can buy a bit, but we owe for last week’s tater, so maybe I could—

“Was there any meat at the market?” Thomas asked, peering into the pot around his sister’s waist.

None that we could afford.

Nellie’s stomach tightened with worry as she ran a soft hand over her brother’s head, his hair the fiery hues that he and Nellie both had gotten from their mother.

“Not tonight.” Nellie knew then that her stomach would remain empty this supper so that maybe Thomas’s could be filled, just a bit.

The boy heaved a sigh, stepping away.

“The stew hardly fills me up without it.”

Nellie thought she may be sick, that the worry and guilt might build up so much in her belly that it came tumbling out her mouth. She knew it was her fault that Thomas must go hungry because there was no coin for food. Nearly a decade of service in the MacDonald house, nearly a decade of being able to feed Thomas and Da, gone.

Nellie had been lucky to get that post, she had known that even though she knew so little of the world then. Lady MacDonald had been kind when Nellie had first begun there, just a girl, newly motherless and scared beyond her wit. But the lady had treated Nellie like more than a servant, had picked up the girl’s education where her mother had left off. Nellie had come to think of the lady as something like a mother. Which was why it had hurt so much to lose her.

Around the age Nellie took up her post in the MacDonald household she started to feel the flutter of desires in the pit of her belly. To experience those childlike crushes that were little more than lingering gazes and pink cheeks, at both the boys and, quietly, so quietly, the girls who also worked about the house. Romance and want in Nellie’s young life was innocent, the pinnacle being a chaste kiss with the boy from her street that made her blood sing. Nellie was so busy feeling want for the first time, feeling the confidence of coin in her pocket, the warmth of a mother figure once more, that she did not notice that, while her own eyes roamed, a gaze had fallen, heavy, upon her.

Lord MacDonald’s eyes had started wandering to Nellie, lingering on the young girl not too long after she’d taken the post. It took years for Nellie to notice, to even identify that the itching burn on her body as she moved about the house was his leering. It took even longer for Nellie to realize that the lady saw the looks too, that the hard pinch that formed around her eyes was not compassion. It was as though the lady believed that with each year as the two women aged in tandem, Nellie was stealing from her all the beauty that the mistress lost. It did not take long for Nellie to realize that being especially beautiful was a curse.

It had been only in the past year, just shy of Nellie’s twenty-second birthday that Lord MacDonald’s hands had started following the trail of his eyes. At least he waited until I was no longer a girl, Nellie had thought to herself the first time she had stood there, frozen with fear, as his fingers grazed down her spine and then lower as she passed by him.

Nellie knew from the steeliness in Lady MacDonald’s gaze that she no longer had a protector in the lady. So she stayed silent as she knew she must. But it did not matter. For last month the lady had screamed at Nellie, though Nellie cried and swore that she had never laid with the lord, that she did not know what to do to make his touches stop, that she was sorry, so sorry. Nellie would have loved and served Lady MacDonald until the end of her days if the woman had let her. But she would not, it seemed.

“You leave this house and you are not to return,” Lady MacDonald had said, voice as flat as her eyes.

In that moment, Nellie was more afraid of the woman she had once loved like a mother than she ever was of the lord.

“If I ever see your face again, I will go to the new commissioner myself. A lowborn woman who can read and write and is without a husband at your age? You leave at once or I will make sure the gallows appear for you, Eleanor Duncan.”

Nellie did not know that she was far from being the first servant girl the lord had set his sights and hands upon. Did not know that she was the first Lady MacDonald had loved like a daughter, that the lady had shut herself in her room and wept as soon as she had finished admonishing the girl, now a woman. Nellie did not know that she was not the only one who had been robbed of something by Lord MacDonald. The two women’s tears hit the soil in tandem, but nothing beautiful grew, for this was no climate made for women.

So Nellie had left. And her family had been penniless and pocketless since. For Lady MacDonald may not have gone to the commissioner, but it seems she had gone to every other lady in Edinburgh. None would even allow Nellie to pass through their door. She’d even tried for a position at one of the girls’ schools, hoping her education would prove useful rather than dangerous. But either Lady MacDonald had gotten to them or they’d simply smelled the poor on her. Nothing had come of it. And now Thomas, the boy her mother had died to bring into the world, would die of hunger and it would be Nellie’s fault.

Nellie told herself she did not miss the peacefulness she had only ever known from being in the company of women alone. She told herself that she did not miss Lady MacDonald. It was time for her to be an adult, a woman, to care for her family as a mother would, though she bore no such title—girls rarely got a childhood as it was. Now hers was gone.

“You eat up, then.” Nellie spooned the stew in a bowl for her brother, the darkening evening light dimming his pale face.

“Will Da not be home for supper?” her brother asked, already eagerly attacking the meager meal.

It was only then that Nellie took note of her father’s absence. It should have been obvious from the way the two siblings were able to be in peace for a moment, from the silence of the little room they all shared.

“Has he not been at home today?” Nellie asked.

Thomas shook his head, his red curls jostling across his forehead.

Nellie sighed heavily, doing her best to ignore the quaking of her stomach as she inhaled the wafting scent of cooked veg. Da’s absence was not usually a cause for concern. In fact, it was usually the reason for a bit of joy. But Nellie knew, come nightfall, he was meant to take up his post standing guard at the new kirkyard down the way. On his last shift Da had fallen into a drunken slumber in the guard’s tower, only to awake to the morning sun glinting off freshly overturned death soil and resurrection men somewhere in the city richer for it. If he missed another shift, Nellie knew there would no longer be a position for him at all. The three of them could not survive the loss of the only income they had left.

“You stay here, Tommy.” Nellie draped her heaviest cloak over her shoulders. The wool was damp from the last rainfall, but there was little else that could keep the autumn chill from frosting her down to the bone, as surely the season’s cold would soon arrive. It was a wonder it had not already.

“Where ye going?” he mumbled.

“I’m going to get Da.” There’s only one place he could be. “I’ll be back. Be good.”

Pulling her coat tight around her shoulders and tipping up the hood so she had a chance of blending into the gloom of Edinburgh, Nellie stepped out into the darkening gray of evening.

The door of old Mr. Beaton’s tavern opened with an echoing creak as Nellie ducked in, but thankfully there was enough raucous chatter to keep the sound from drawing eyes. The same could not be said for Nellie herself—she knew by now that it did not matter how silent she was, her presence could nevertheless incite the gazes of a roomful of men without trying.

Nellie pulled her cloak tighter around herself, despite knowing it wasn’t enough to hide her figure. As dozens of eyes, glazed dark by the haze of too much whiskey, stared out at her over leering smiles, Nellie wished she could simply slip out of her skin and walk about without it. But no such luck.

Nellie gazed about the pub, too many men too deep in their pints all around her, but none of them her da. The black wood bar glistened with spilled beer and liquor, the wavering of the candles in their sconces catching the gleam. Many of the men turned away, lulled once more into their boisterous conversations. But a few eyes continued to press into her skin with the same shivering, leering presence as Lord MacDonald’s hands.

To be a woman was to have a body that belonged to everyone but yourself.

Nellie ran a hand down the front of her dress, ignoring her trembling as much as she tried to ignore the looks. But some men simply would not let things rest. Or perhaps some men just liked to watch a woman squirm.

“How much for ya, then?” a man called from the far end of the room. Despite the distance, Nellie could see the spittle that arched from his mouth as a sloppy smile split his face.

“Ye’ll have to get in line, Hamish, I’ll give the ginger a ride first!” another man, who had many more years even than Nellie’s father, bellowed.

The exchange drew back any eyes that had drifted, gazes and smiles that seemed to hold something darker than jokes all pointed at Nellie.

Though she wanted to flee, Nellie forced herself to step farther into the pub. Her eyes roved across the small room, desperate for her father, hoping against hope that he would be there, on his first pint, eyes bright and ready for his work. She knew that was the best she could hope for.

Nellie could feel her face flushing as red as her hair and pushed her hands into the folds of her coat. She tried to shallow the quick heave of her chest, fear gripping her too tight for air to make its way through. She desperately wished the men would look away from her. Wished no man would ever look at her again.

There were many dark-haired men perched before her, but none had her da’s crooked twice-broken nose, none had the gentle smile he’d wear when he was sober or the dead-eyed hang to his face when he was too far gone on the drink.

“Are you fresh out of the Magdalene, dear?” The man nearest Nellie’s right chuckled, eliciting a wave of chortles in response.

A man strummed in the corner, the taunts thrown Nellie’s way nearly in tune with the melody, a chorus that made her want to shrink in her skin.

“What’s all this?”

Nellie had never been so happy to see a man before as she was when Mr. Beaton stepped out from behind the bar. The familiar tavern keeper spotted Nellie easily.

“Come, Nellie.” His voice and grip were brusque as he reached out to pull Nellie behind the bar. He led her down into the bowels of the old pub, where the barrels were stored. Nellie’s stomach flipped. If Mr. Beaton was bringing her down with the wares, she knew all hope was lost that her da would be in any condition to make it to the graveyard. Hope was water through her fingers, fleeting and leaving a numbness in its wake.

“You shouldn’t come round here, Nellie. You’re too grown now, you know how the men will react.”

. . .