The witchhunter and all his works

THE LAST WITCH OF SCOTLAND

PERHAPS a line can be drawn between James VI and I’s obsession with witches and the heightened paranoia concerning witchcraft in 17th-century Scotland. Either way, it’s estimated that as many as 4,000 women may have been convicted and 2,500 put to death, a rate five times higher than in other European countries.

The curtain finally came down on that era in 1727 with the burning of Janet Horne, the last person in Britain to be executed on charges of witchcraft. An incomer, accompanied by her daughter, to the parish of Loth in Sutherland, she was most likely suffering the onset of dementia, her distracted babbling taken as a sure sign that she had pledged herself to the Devil, and her daughter’s deformed feet as proof that Janet had transformed her into a horse and ridden her around the countryside.

Little else is known about Janet Horne, and Philip Paris’s affecting novel imaginatively fills in the gaps with family tragedy, first love, a roving troupe of players, embittered neighbours, sacrifice and loss. The story is told from the perspective of Aila, Janet’s daughter.

Sixteen when we first meet her in 1723, she’s an intelligent and curious young woman, encouraged by a loving father to learn about the world and stand up for herself. She already has a good role model in her mother, a well-travelled woman who can speak Italian and brings in money by brewing beer.

Sadly, their lives are shattered when Aila’s father runs into a burning building to rescue a baby. Aila tries to pull him out, her failed attempt leaving her feet and one hand scorched and disfigured. Four years on, Janet and Aila have relocated to a croft in Lothmore and are trying to rebuild their lives, with Janet’s increasing absent-mindedness becoming a bit of a worry. But it’s when their minister is temporarily replaced by the fearsome, fire-breathing Reverend McNeil that their troubles really begin.

Their story is interspersed with chapters about a troupe of players, all with chequered pasts and some with violent histories, whose mutual support has bonded them into a tight family. After an incident in Edinburgh that leaves a man dead, they have to put as much distance between themselves and the authorities as they can, a journey which eventually takes them to Janet’s front door – and for Jack, the youngest and most handsome of the group, a place in Aila’s heart. As we know where all this is heading from the start, a sense of impending doom hangs over the proceedings, only to intensify when Reverend McNeil steps up to his pulpit. Casting around for signs of witchcraft from the moment he arrives in Lothmore, he finds what he’s looking for in the strong-willed, disfigured Aila and her mentally faltering mother, wasting no time in whipping up a climate of fear and manipulating the villagers into seeing them as a deadly threat.

The real villain, of course, is the misogynistic society that produced him, but McNeil makes such a loathsome antagonist that it’s hard not to put up at least some resistance to Paris’s attempts to humanise him with his own tragic backstory, lest it dilute our fury.

Fiction it may be, but the true story of Janet Horne will no doubt have unfolded in a depressingly similar way. Even at a distance of 300 years, its sting cushioned somewhat by the touching trappings of a Highland romance and the warm camaraderie of a band of outsiders, one can’t help but be moved by the injustice and folly of it all.