The Wise Witch of Orkney by Anna Caig review: 'fails to cast a lasting spell'
This upstairs/downstairs adventure story suffers from clunky exposition and an unconvincing use of Scots, writes David Robinson
“They wur cheust folk.” That’s the inscription on the Gallow Ha’ Witchcraft Trials Memorial overlooking Kirkwall, and it’s true enough. The dozens of women executed there were just folk - mainly women - who might, on an archipelago without doctors, have tried and failed to heal their neighbours. They might have been refused food while begging and uttered a curse, or been wrong about predicting good weather for a sea crossing, or been seen walking backwards or anticlockwise or generally trying to appease the fairy folk, or overheard talking about their dreams. As Peter Marshall wrote in Storm’s Edge: Life, Death and Magic in the Islands of Orkney, “only the toss of a sixpence separated the healer from the curser, the wise woman from the witch.”
Elspet Balfour, Orcadian heroine of Anna Caig’s debut novel, isn’t such an ordinary woman. In 1593, her fame as a spaewife has reached the ears of the pregnant Queen Anna of Denmark, who has two missions for her: to ensure she has a successful birth and that the baby be somehow spirited away and brought up away from her witch-hating husband, James VI. To this end, she dispatches two of her ladies-in-waiting to Orkney to seek out Elspet and bring her back to Holyroodhouse.
Elspet is in demand, because no sooner do the ladies-in-waiting arrive at her door than so do soldiers of Black Patie, the Earl of Orkney. “The Earl has decided it’s time to show support for the King’s campaign against witches,” one of them tells her, “and he’s starting with you.”
Fortunately, one of the guards recognises Lady Margaret Livingston. So does his mate. “You’re the one with all the money,” he tells her. Exactly, and if they get in the way of her plans to marry the Earl of Orkney, Lady Margaret tells them, they’ll be in big trouble. Fair enough, they say, letting the ladies in-waiting head off to the waiting boat with Elspeth.
Of course, it’s a bluff, and the women sail off just as Black Patie himself rides up to the shoreline. Elspet looks back at him. Her eyesight is clearly excellent. “The Earl’s eyes are trained on her, that strange brown so light it’s almost yellow. His lips curl in a sneer, showing his small teeth. Elspet shudders and instinctively takes a step back as the boat picks up pace.”
First, though, they stop off at the Countess of Sutherland’s Dunrobin Castle, where the illiterate Elspet learns to read Shakespeare, to talk in an educated accent and generally try to pass herself off as one of the countess’s relations. Meanwhile, she meets the unfortunate Kitty, a sacked servant who is the kind of witch James VI believed in - someone in league with the Devil, digging up graves at midnight and all that sort of thing. Kitty is pregnant, and as soon as you learn that, you might well have an idea how the novel is going to end.
And so to Holyroodhouse, “where nobles will slaughter each other for a bannock” and where we might be reasonably confident that someone or other will be able to guess that Elspet isn’t who she claims to be. Given James’s pathological hatred of witches, it is only fair to expect a touch more jeopardy than we find here, where he only appears as a rather vapid background character.
Anna Caig has said she was inspired by the story of the very real Alison Balfour, executed for witchcraft in Orkney in 1594, but this story soon transmuted into that of her own fictional Elspet. I can understand the rationale for a rather more optimistic reworking of the past, and don’t mind the hokum of an upstairs/downstairs adventure story, but the novel’s clunky exposition, unconvincingly sprinkled with Scots words, sadly stops her fiction from casting a lasting spell.
The Wise Witch of Orkney, by Anna Caig, Black & White Publishing, £16.99
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