A diarly of witches
A diarly of witches full#
"It seemed to me that humans invent monsters, and that creatures had their own experiences that didn't always live up to human stereotypes."Īlthough Harkness became interested in writing the series after seeing a wall full of supernatural-fantasy titles at an airport bookstore, she admits that she hadn't read any of them. "Bringing humanity to these creatures - the good, the bad, the silly - was a lot of fun," Harkness said. There's time travel (it takes place in the present day but also Elizabethan England), supernatural creatures (mostly witches and vampires, but some demons, too), and magic. Her wails were mixed with the ominous cries of the corpse bearer-Hell had come to London.Like Outlander, this is a fantasy story with science-fiction elements. Testing my patience she kept up her banging until I ripped the spoon from her hand. “Stop it!” I snapped at Sarah as she banged a pot with a wooden spoon. My uneasy state coupled with the heat of the rooms made me bristle with irritability. Warders yelled out condemnations as they painted a red cross and inscribed “Lord Have Mercy Upon us” on Alice Baines’s door, incarcerating her in her house: confinement of the living dead.Īll day I was drunk with fear. Sarah’s eyes, large and questioning, studied me as I pried loose the money I had sewn under our mattress. I asked him to take Morag with him for the day while I packed and prepared for our departure. I told Stephen that I was leaving with or without him. Within a fortnight our parish bell tolled so often it was impossible to keep count of the dead: the plague had come to London.
Pushing them away, I gathered the girls up into my arms.
I, on the other hand, was full of suffering thoughts. They made a game out of everything, for they hadn’t a care in the world. Sweat poured down my back as I chased the pink-cheeked twins through the bracken. “Your brother’s bound to be more gracious if you are with me.” Please-you understand,” Stephen said beseechingly. “There’s a plum role for me in Will’s new play. Like a once beauteous face disfigured by pox, London had out-worn its charms. Stephen grudgingly agreed it was time to give up his peripatetic ways. Pollution portends pestilence, and so I was urgently concerned for the health of the twins. The Thames was the main dumping ground for refuse and also the city’s primary source of water. Rats fed on the dunghills of rubbish clogging the gutters: entrails, putrefied blood, excrement and urine all swam together in the midden-heaped lanes. Shoreditch had grown noisesome and overpopulated. A huge influx of immigrants from France and other parts of Europe had made the conditions in London unbearable. Stephen and I discussed returning to Melton Mowbray before harvest’s end. The carcasses littering the fields made it most necessary to limit the wanderings of the twins-not an easy task! At two and a half they moved as fast as the wind. The pungent decomposing stench of horses, dogs, and cats fouled the evening air already thick as a canopy. Stephen and I took to Finsbury Fields in the early evening for the walls of our house were seeped with heat. The relentless glare of the August sun threatened to fry the timber houses lining London’s streets. Preserved in a mahogany box, the following diary was discovered buried in the walls the book is printed as found. In 2012, in Carmunnock, Scotland, Hugh and Fiona Wallace were renovating their 16th century farmhouse.