Chapter 1
NOW
It was probably not the most sensible of things to do.
But when had Violet ever been sensible? If Violet had been sensible a few months ago, she probably would not be in this position now.
Weeks away from the deadline on a book, and, well, add that to everything else she needed to think about and she absolutely needed this break.
She pondered it all as she got out of the car at Brocolitia, a spot on Hadrian’s Wall that held a certain fascination for her.
The Wall itself was an ancient monument that cut across northern England from Wallsend in the east to Bowness-on-Solway on the west. Seventy-three miles of stone, built two thousand years ago.
It was an incredible feat.
‘Bloody clever, those Romans,’ she muttered. Kudos to the men who had built it, working in conditions like this. She shivered. It was February in the northeast of England. What did she expect?
Luckily, she was from the northeast herself; she lived close to the universities in Jesmond, a leafy suburb of Newcastle that she had lived in since she was a student, and her family home was a bit further east on the coast at Tynemouth. So it wasn’t as if she was unused to cold weather.
But here – the atmosphere was different. Much bleaker, much emptier and much more remote than she had expected.
But that was good. It was exactly what she needed. And the place – worked – for what she wanted. It was exactly fitting.
Violet had come to Hadrian’s Wall to research a book; as a historian, it was an academic tome on the whole concept of sacred spaces and folklore, and the genuine persecution of innocent, misjudged women was central to it – basically, witch trials.
And thus, she had come up to Hadrian’s Wall to see what she could find.
An odd connection, perhaps, to the Newcastle Witch Trials she had been researching, but there was a reason for it.
Everybody talked about Pendle Hill in Lancashire, and the Bury St Edmunds trial, but the figures in the northeast of England spoke for themselves.
Thirty people, mainly women, were hauled to account at Newcastle, dragged down from Newgate Prison to the Guildhall on the Quayside to stand trial.
Pendle had eleven witches. Bury St Edmunds had eighteen.
So, Violet considered, the Newcastle trials were the largest in English history.
And the connection she had made to those trials was poignant – she knew that very close by to Brocolitia, where a Roman Mithraic Temple nestled in a quiet sloping valley, was a stream.
The stream flowed from an ancient goddess’s sacred spring, and the stream was named after a woman accused of witchcraft.
Violet was intrigued – or maybe obsessed – but the fact was that here, on Hadrian’s Wall, she had stumbled upon a layered history of female spiritual figures spanning nearly two millennia, and it was all associated with this waterway.
Violet had booked into a B and to be honest, the peace was a welcome break from all the noise in her life.
As she stood by the car, looking over a low stone wall, Violet took in what she could see before her.
Rolling green hills stretched across the countryside towards Hexham, and then a few miles east of where she stood was Newcastle: Violet’s hometown, and the site of those infamous Witch Trials, culminating in the execution of fifteen witches on the Town Moor.
It made her blood boil, if she was honest. Being named Violet Marsh was very close to being named after the Perthshire witch Violet Mar. She had learned about her at school and hadn’t heard the last of it from her schoolmates for a very long time.
Violet Mar had been executed in 1577 after being accused of plotting the murder of Regent Morton, the ruler of Scotland.
Modern-day Violet didn’t know much about 1577 Violet, but she did know that some very influential people had been involved in the accusations against her – so much so that Annabell Murray, the Countess of Mar’s, involvement had probably shaped King James VI’s attitude towards so-called witches.
Poor Violet had been tried and convicted on the same day.
Modern-day Violet found that appalling. There was no way she could right those wrongs, but she could at least try and find out a little about this place and the witch it memorialised: Meggie.
But first, she had to find where she was looking for.
In the far, far distance, she could see more hills on the horizon. The North Pennines, she thought. And on the other side of the road, if she looked that way, to the north, she knew the Scottish Borders were just teasing her over that horizon.
What had absorbed her during her research was the entirety of it all; basically, the way everything was clustered about this place fascinated her: the temple, the Burn, the sacred spring and even the abandoned Roman Fort – Carrawburgh – which stood guard over it all.
But the Burn was the most fascinating of all.
‘I don’t see what a Mithraic Temple has to do with witchcraft,’ Jake had said when Violet mentioned that she was having a research trip up on the Wall.
Jake Robertson was a history teacher, and they’d met through mutual friends at a thirty-fifth birthday party last Easter in The Cluny, a live music venue and pub in the Ouseburn Valley in Newcastle.
Jake was a specialist on Romano-Celtic religion and Paganism.
He was divorced and lived in Heaton – the next suburb along from Jesmond.
Violet had just come out of a relationship that was going nowhere.
To be honest, neither of them had had any plans to be in a committed relationship, but they’d immediately clicked and found that they enjoyed each other’s company.
And soon, the plans for no-strings-attached had changed into Violet-and-Jake.
A partnership that just felt – right. And then suddenly, there they were: a proper couple.
A strong couple. And even though they’d only been together less than a year, Violet couldn’t imagine herself with anyone else.
‘Oh, come on,’ Violet had said to Jake when they’d been discussing her trip.
‘You can’t tell me there weren’t rituals and ceremonies involved at those temples?
They were basically caves full of religious nutters.
Religious nutters went after the witches, and there’s a splendid link to one of those temples and a sacred well on the Wall. And that’s why I’m going.’
Violet felt that she couldn’t tell him one of the other reasons that she was going: that as soon as she had opened the old book in the library and a map had given her the location of this place, that she desperately needed to come: Meggie’s Dene Burn.
The name of the place had called to her, charmed her – and she needed to know more. It was almost as if it spoke to her soul – if she had a sort of spiritual calling to it.
She was even more taken with the name of the Sacred Well that was the source of the Burn. Coventina’s Well. The Well was dedicated to a goddess who the Pagans believed made the snow thaw and the spring come: the goddess of healing and childbirth.
Childbirth.
Violet shuddered.
Okay. She needed to be honest with herself. The main reason she’d decided to come here was not really research – she could do that quite comfortably with a library and the Internet and some access to academic journals.
It was because she was pregnant.
It was completely and utterly unplanned – and Jake didn’t know.
As Violet understood it, Jake and his ex-wife had not wanted children. So she, Violet, now found herself in a position she did not want to be in.
She knew she wanted the baby; she absolutely did.
She’d always wanted children; but she needed some time away from her real life, and some space from Jake, so she could come to terms with it all.
She needed to get her head together and work out how to broach the subject with him.
And it was bloody hard having him there practically all the time, when all she wanted to do was curl up in a corner and work things out in her mind.
So this trip had seemed ideal. If she ignored the incipient nausea, she could almost pretend she was just on a research trip. Compartmentalise it all, and ignore the main problem, if you like.
So today, she tried to push all of that out of her mind and stood in the car park, her eyes roving across the countryside for signs of the stream.
‘And where are you?’ she murmured. Then she transferred her attention to the car park and looked around that instead, taking in the pay and display machine and a camper van which was parked in the top corner.
It was a lot snazzier than Jake’s van; it looked like it had a sleeping pod on the top and probably had a nice kitchen and a proper bed.
They’d taken a few trips in Jake’s van, and she’d been glad they’d parked in proper campsites, which meant she had showers and loos nearby.
But apart from the van, the place was deserted.
She spotted a gap in the fence which signposted her down to the temple. The temple wasn’t the primary reason for her being here, but, according to that old map, it was a good indicator of where she needed to look.
Violet walked over to the fence and saw a muddy track leading down to a dip in the fields.
It looked dark down there and she shivered, thinking of all the people who had lived and worked at this fort two thousand years ago.
Did their spirits still linger there? Had they left an indelible mark on the landscape – would she see and hear them marching from her accommodation tonight?
She bloody hoped not.
It was intriguing, but Roman soldiers were not on her agenda this week.
No.
Putting the idea of spectral Romans out of her mind, she decided to take the other track and walk up the mound that was, according to the sign, the buried fort of Carrawburgh.
There was still some daylight, and she guessed it would give her a decent view – because what she really wanted to see was just to the west of the fort.
Violet clambered up the grassy slope and stood on the top.
A gust of wind lifted her long, fair hair, as she scanned the fields around her.
‘Where are you then?’ she murmured. Then her gaze snagged on something – a footpath a little way away, some of it paved, some of it rutted ground.
But all of it on the other side of a narrow stream.
The stream was grey and cold-looking, rushing down through the wild landscape. That was it – it had to be the Burn. It was the place that had drawn her here: a stream running into the River South Tyne near Stanegate fort at Newbrough, three miles south.
‘Meggie’s Dene Burn,’ said Violet. ‘Said to carry the ashes of a witch burned at the stake and buried with another stake through her heart, her burial place said to be marked by a thorn tree in the fields nearby. Yet how the hell is that even logistically possible? You’re either burned – or you’re buried with the stake in the heart.
’ She focused on the Burn and tracked it upward.
A tingle raced up and down her spine as she saw the pool of water the Burn burst from.
That then, was Coventina’s Well. A place shrouded in as much mystery as the Burn was.
‘Or maybe they threw a few of her ashes in and buried the rest of her. Oh! Maybe it was to stop her from rising from the dead, because she wasn’t all in one place together.
’ It was a thought. She knew the Newcastle witches had been buried with metal nails hammered into their kneecaps to stop them attempting to rise from the dead.
Violet shivered against the cold and looked up again at the B & B.
It seemed a much better option to head there right now than to plod her way down to the temple and then across to the Well.
The weather was starting to close in, and there were droplets of ice in the wind that stung her cheeks when it blew.
Her hair was already feeling damp, and it was getting darker, the clouds creeping over the horizon covering the green landscape with shadows.
No.
Going to the Well was a job for tomorrow.
Reluctantly, almost, she turned and headed back the way she’d come. She couldn’t resist flinging one more look over her shoulder at it all, though.
She was glad she’d come.