Elias Ward never expected to become the protector of three witches, having been raised in a respectable New England family in which witchcraft belonged to that uncomfortable collection of subjects best left unmentioned, particularly when conversation turned towards Salem and the events of 1692. The Ward family had lived in Massachusetts since before the trials, and although Elias knew that one of his ancestors had played some part in those events, generations of respectable silence had reduced the story to little more than an uncomfortable family rumour. His grandmother had occasionally spoken of an old debt that remained unpaid, but Elias had dismissed her words as the melancholy superstition of an elderly woman until Prudence Blackwood finally told him what his family had worked so hard to forget.

One of Elias’s ancestors had given evidence against a woman accused during the Salem persecutions, and although it was impossible after nearly two centuries to know whether he genuinely believed his testimony or merely surrendered to the fear spreading through the community, his words contributed to the destruction of an innocent woman. She left behind a daughter whose descendants carried the memory of what had happened long after the Ward family had achieved the respectability that allowed them to forget their own part in it.

Prudence did not accuse Elias of responsibility for the actions of a long dead ancestor, nor did she suggest that he somehow inherited his guilt, but she confirmed enough of what his grandmother had told him to make Elias understand what the old woman had meant when she spoke of a debt that had never been settled.

In another age Elias might still have regarded the matter as little more than an unpleasant piece of family history, but Dracula’s America had made it increasingly difficult to dismiss old stories simply because they involved things that respectable people preferred not to believe. Elias had seen enough of the new America to know that the supernatural was real, that the dead did not always remain where they had been buried and that men and women possessing strange abilities were not necessarily the monsters that frightened communities imagined them to be. He had also seen what happened when genuine monsters acquired power, and the sight of vampires exercising authority while ordinary people learned to keep their heads down had convinced him that remaining uninvolved was itself a choice.

His decision to join Prudence Blackwood, Rebecca Crowe, and Abigail Hawthore was therefore not simply an attempt to pay for the actions of an ancestor whose bones had long since turned to dust. Elias remained with them because he gradually came to believe in what the three women were trying to accomplish, having watched them place themselves between isolated communities and supernatural creatures against which ordinary people had little defence. The Sisters were certainly not saints, and Elias would have regarded anyone describing Abigail Hawthorne in such terms as either dangerously brave or exceptionally foolish, but he recognised an important difference between the Coven and many of the supernatural powers flourishing beneath Dracula’s rule. Prudence, Rebecca and Abigail, possessed power without believing that possession of it automatically gave them the right to dominate those who did not.

There was also a far more personal reason for Elias to remain with the Coven, because he had a daughter whose future increasingly worried him. Anna Ward was approaching the age at which the peculiar abilities occasionally whispered about among the women of his mother’s family might begin to reveal themselves, and Elias had already witnessed enough to suspect that his grandmother’s remarkable intuition had been something more than ordinary perception. Anna sometimes knew who was approaching the house before anyone appeared on the road and occasionally described dreams containing people and places she could not possibly have known, while during a childhood fever she had spoken of events from Elias’s own youth that he had never discussed with her. None of these incidents proved that Anna possessed genuine supernatural ability, and Prudence refused to speculate, insisting that whatever the girl might become should be allowed to reveal itself in its own time.

For Elias, however, uncertainty was sufficient. If Anna eventually proved to possess the gift, he wanted her to grow into a world in which a woman with supernatural ability was not automatically condemned as a monster, forced into the service of someone more powerful or hunted because frightened people found persecution easier than understanding. If she proved to be an entirely ordinary young woman, his purpose remained essentially unchanged, because he wanted her to inherit an America in which vampires, sorcerers and the other creatures emerging from the darkness could not simply decide that ordinary human lives belonged to them.

It was this conviction, rather than any enchantment or supernatural compulsion, that made Elias willing to accept the dangerous responsibilities of the Guardian. He understood perfectly well what was expected of him and knew that when someone rushed towards one of the witches he might be required to place himself between them, just as an enemy raising a rifle towards the Coven could leave Elias deliberately standing in the path of the shot. He did not believe that Abigail, Mercy or Temperance possessed lives inherently more valuable than his own, but he had decided that keeping the three women alive allowed them to continue a struggle in which he now believed, and there were occasions when protecting something worthwhile required considerably more than agreeing with it from a safe distance.

The relationship between Guardian and Coven was never entirely one sided, despite the impression Elias sometimes created by repeatedly placing himself where the bullets were most likely to arrive. Mercy regarded keeping him alive as both a personal responsibility and a continuing test of her patience, particularly when he deliberately moved into danger to protect one of the Sisters, while Temperance treated him with the affectionate disrespect normally reserved for an older brother and regularly informed him that she was perfectly capable of looking after herself immediately before doing something that demonstrated precisely why a Guardian was necessary. Abigail displayed considerably less obvious affection, although Elias had noticed over the years that anyone responsible for seriously injuring him tended to experience an extraordinary run of bad luck afterwards, a coincidence that neither of them considered necessary to discuss.

Elias does not regard himself as the servant of the three witches, and the Sisters have never treated him as one. He is their companion, protector and shield, as well as the man prepared to draw a revolver when whatever threatens the Coven can be dealt with more efficiently by gunpowder than witchcraft. More importantly, he has come to understand his place beside them as the answer to a question his family first faced almost two centuries earlier, when fear and conformity proved stronger than the courage required to stand beside someone whom the rest of the community had already condemned.

The Ward family once stood on the wrong side of Salem’s history and helped destroy an innocent woman because frightened people found accusation easier than understanding. Elias cannot change what his ancestor did, nor does he believe that dying for Abigail, Mercy or Temperance would somehow erase an ancient wrong, but he can decide what a Ward will do when the same choice is placed before him.

This time, when they come for the witches, a Ward will be standing in the way.

Michael David Kwan’s Things That Must Not Be Forgotten: A Childhood in Wartime China is one of those memoirs in which the apparent subject gradually changes as the book progresses. It begins as the recollection of an unusual childhood, develops into an account of a family trying to survive war and political upheaval, and ultimately becomes something more complicated: an examination of memory, identity, loyalty and the uncomfortable moral compromises demanded of people caught between competing political and military powers.

Kwan was born in 1934 to a Chinese father and Swiss mother and spent his early childhood in circumstances of considerable privilege. His father, John Kwan, was a Cambridge educated railway administrator, and the family occupied a social world far removed from the lives of most Chinese people. Servants, comfortable houses, foreign acquaintances and the protected environment of Beijing’s Legation Quarter initially insulated the young Kwan from many of the problems surrounding him. That protection could not survive the Japanese invasion and the progressive disintegration of political and social order in China.

This contrast between the sheltered world of Kwan’s earliest memories and what subsequently happens is one of the book’s greatest strengths. Kwan does not begin with battlefields, armies or political leaders. Instead, the larger events of history gradually intrude upon the small world of a child. People disappear, relationships change, movement becomes more difficult, adults become secretive and danger becomes increasingly apparent even when the child observing it does not entirely understand what is happening.

Consequently, Things That Must Not Be Forgotten is not really a conventional history of wartime China, nor should it be judged as one. It is history viewed from below, although in Kwan’s case this is a somewhat unusual description because his family was economically and socially privileged. The importance of the book lies in its ability to demonstrate how political decisions and military events eventually penetrate the domestic world. Japanese occupation, resistance, collaboration, Nationalist politics and eventually civil war are experienced through their effects upon individuals rather than through an analysis of strategy or ideology.

At the centre of the memoir is Kwan’s father, and in many respects this is as much his story as his son’s. John Kwan occupied the morally dangerous territory created by military occupation. He accepted a position within the Japanese controlled political structure while simultaneously assisting Chinese resistance activities. The family home became connected with clandestine resistance, and Kwan records the considerable risks his father accepted while outwardly appearing to cooperate with the occupying authorities.

This part of the book raises one of its most interesting historical questions. Collaboration during occupation is very easy to identify retrospectively and considerably more difficult to define for those living through it. An individual may work within institutions controlled by an occupying power for reasons ranging from ideological commitment and personal advancement to economic necessity, family protection or clandestine resistance. The outward behaviour may appear similar while the underlying motives are entirely different.

Kwan’s father becomes a particularly effective example of this ambiguity because his apparent cooperation with the Japanese later has serious consequences. Following Japan’s defeat, he is accused of collaboration and imprisoned despite his resistance activities. His wartime strategy, which depended upon concealing his real loyalties from the Japanese, consequently leaves him vulnerable when those same concealed activities must subsequently be demonstrated to the Chinese authorities. His eventual exoneration does little to diminish the tragedy of the situation.

This is where the title acquires much of its significance. Memory is not merely nostalgia in Kwan’s account. Remembering can become evidence, defence and even survival. His father’s record of his wartime activities provides another source upon which Kwan could draw when reconstructing the family story. The memoir is therefore partly concerned with the preservation of a version of events that might otherwise disappear beneath the much larger historical narratives of Japanese occupation, Nationalist government and Communist victory.

There is another story running alongside this political history, however, and I found it at least as interesting. Kwan occupies an uncertain cultural position because of his mixed Chinese and European ancestry. He belongs completely to neither world. His appearance distinguishes him from other Chinese children, while his Chinese ancestry prevents complete acceptance within European society. He encounters prejudice from both communities and particularly painful treatment at school.

The importance of this experience extends beyond Kwan himself. Wartime tends to encourage societies to simplify identity. People are increasingly classified as belonging to one side or another, while ambiguous identities become uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous. Kwan cannot easily satisfy such categories. He is Chinese and European, privileged yet increasingly vulnerable, connected with foreign society but nevertheless part of a Chinese family deeply involved in resistance to Japan.

His childhood therefore provides an interesting study of identity under pressure. Nationality, ethnicity and loyalty are repeatedly treated by others as though they should coincide neatly, while Kwan’s existence demonstrates that they frequently do not. This aspect of the memoir is particularly effective because Kwan generally allows these contradictions to emerge through experience rather than turning them into an extended theoretical discussion.

The domestic story is equally complicated. Kwan’s Swiss mother leaves the family when he is young, his relationship with his English stepmother is difficult, and his father is a distant and imposing figure. The family therefore offers no simple refuge from the instability occurring outside it. Kwan’s loneliness becomes an important element of the narrative, with companionship sometimes found in animals, solitary activities and observation rather than conventional family intimacy.

This produces some of the memoir’s strongest passages because Kwan does not need dramatic military action to communicate the effects of war. The disruption of relationships, the disappearance of security and the inability of a child to understand adult decisions can communicate instability more effectively than descriptions of combat. War is not simply something happening between armies elsewhere. It alters households, friendships, schools, social hierarchies and assumptions about the future.

There are nevertheless limitations to the book, particularly if it is approached as a source for the political history of Republican China. The wider historical context is sometimes too thin. Chang tai Hung, reviewing the book for The China Quarterly, identified precisely this problem, noting that Kwan provides insufficient background concerning his father’s career and the foreign communities with which the family interacted. Hung also questioned Kwan’s treatment of the Nationalist government, arguing that the memoir presents the conflict between Nationalists and Communists too simply and does not sufficiently acknowledge the enormous problems confronting a government attempting to administer a devastated country after years of invasion and warfare.

I think this criticism is justified, although it needs to be applied carefully. Kwan is writing memoir rather than comprehensive political history. The young Kwan did not possess a sophisticated understanding of the structural weaknesses of the Nationalist state, the relationship between central and provincial authority or the ideological and military development of the Chinese Communist movement. To impose such analysis retrospectively might actually weaken the immediacy of the childhood perspective.

The problem arises only when personal observation moves towards broader historical judgement. A memoirist is an exceptionally strong source for what he experienced, a more problematic source for explaining why the political system surrounding those experiences behaved as it did. The distinction between testimony and historical analysis is therefore important when reading Kwan.

There is a related problem with memory itself. Kwan was reconstructing experiences from childhood many decades after they occurred. Some scenes and conversations possess a degree of detail that inevitably raises questions about the precision with which they could have been remembered. Contemporary reviewers also noticed the presence of apparently reconstructed dialogue.

Again, this does not invalidate the memoir. It simply means that the reader should distinguish between the factual reliability expected from a contemporary document and the different kind of truth offered by retrospective autobiography. Memory selects, rearranges and interprets. An adult understands events that a child could not have understood when experiencing them. The memoir therefore represents both the child’s experience and the older author’s subsequent interpretation of that experience.

Indeed, this tension may actually make the book more interesting. Kwan is not simply telling us what happened. He is showing us what survived in memory and what subsequently acquired significance. The title is therefore particularly appropriate. These are not necessarily all the things that happened. They are the things that, for Kwan and his family, must not be forgotten.

The book is also valuable because it complicates simplistic accounts of occupation. Political history often divides populations into collaborators and resisters, patriots and traitors, victims and perpetrators. Kwan’s family demonstrates how inadequate these categories can become when applied to individuals attempting to survive occupation. His father works within a Japanese dominated system while resisting it. The family possesses privileges unavailable to most Chinese while nevertheless being placed in genuine danger. Foreign connections provide protection at some moments while Kwan’s mixed ancestry exposes him to hostility at others.

The Japanese surrender does not provide the conventional ending that might be expected from a wartime memoir either. Liberation does not restore the old world. Instead, the defeat of Japan exposes the political conflicts temporarily obscured by resistance to the common enemy. Nationalists and Communists resume their struggle, Kwan’s father suffers imprisonment, the family’s circumstances deteriorate and the young Kwan is eventually sent to Hong Kong in 1946. He would remain separated from the China of his childhood for decades.

That is perhaps the central historical lesson of the book. Wars rarely end as neatly for individuals as they do in chronologies. Japan’s surrender marks the end of one conflict, but for the Kwan family it does not mean the restoration of security. Political accusations, civil war and the collapse of the social order in which the family had lived continue the disruption. Victory at the national level does not necessarily produce peace at the personal level.

Stylistically, Kwan writes with considerable restraint. This is important because the material could easily have become sentimental. Abandonment, racism, wartime danger, family separation and political persecution provide more than enough material for an author determined to emphasise his suffering. Kwan generally avoids doing so. The emotional effect instead accumulates through the description of ordinary experiences increasingly distorted by extraordinary circumstances.

The book’s greatest achievement is consequently not its explanation of twentieth century Chinese politics. There are far better books for understanding the Sino Japanese War, the weaknesses of the Nationalist government or the Communist victory. Nor should Things That Must Not Be Forgotten be treated as a representative account of childhood in wartime China. Kwan’s wealthy, internationally connected and Eurasian family was highly unusual.

Paradoxically, that unusual perspective is exactly what makes the memoir valuable. History is not improved by having every witness represent an average experience. Kwan allows us to observe wartime China from a position rarely encountered in conventional military or political histories: inside an affluent Chinese family with strong European connections, divided cultural identities and direct involvement in the morally ambiguous world of resistance under occupation.

For the military historian there is another useful lesson. War is often reconstructed through campaigns, commanders and battlefield decisions because these provide convenient structures for historical narrative. Kwan reminds us that the consequences of those decisions spread far beyond the battlefield. Occupation changes schools and friendships. Intelligence activity alters family relationships. Political allegiance determines whether yesterday’s patriot becomes tomorrow’s suspected collaborator. Victory can create new dangers rather than ending old ones.

The memoir is therefore strongest when read alongside rather than instead of conventional histories of wartime China. Its weaknesses are real. The political context can be insufficient, its treatment of the Nationalist regime sometimes lacks nuance, and retrospective memory inevitably creates questions about reconstructed detail. These limitations prevent the book from functioning as a comprehensive guide to the period, but that was never really its purpose. Contemporary academic criticism similarly recognised both the shortage of contextual depth and the power of Kwan’s immediate personal experiences.

What remains is an exceptionally engaging personal account of a child watching the apparently permanent structures around him disappear. Family, wealth, social status and political authority all prove less stable than they initially appear. Kwan survives partly by adapting, partly because others protect him and partly through circumstances over which he has little control.

I found Things That Must Not Be Forgotten most successful when Kwan stays closest to that personal experience. His childhood cannot explain wartime China, but it can tell us something equally important about what living through wartime China could mean for one individual and one very unusual family. The book is ultimately less concerned with explaining great events than with preserving the human experiences that great historical narratives have a tendency to flatten or overlook.

That makes the title entirely appropriate. Governments fall, armies withdraw and political interpretations change, but the experiences of the people caught between them remain. Kwan’s achievement was to ensure that at least some of those experiences were not forgotten.

well worth reading if you pick up an inexpensive second hand copy like I did.

There are plenty of men and women in Dracula’s America who claim to be defending the Republic, protecting the innocent or carrying out some higher purpose, although such claims often become rather less convincing when examined closely. The three women at the heart of this Salem coven make few declarations about righteousness, preferring instead to judge themselves by what they do and by the people they choose to protect. They understand that witchcraft is neither harmless nor easily controlled, but they also know that supernatural power is already being used throughout America by considerably less scrupulous hands.

Within the Sisterhood they have assumed the traditional places of Crone, Mother and Maiden, representing different stages of life as well as different approaches to witchcraft. Each possesses only one principal magical ability when the coven first enters the struggle, but their importance cannot be measured simply by counting their powers. The traditions of Salem emphasise cooperation between the three witches, making the relationship between them every bit as important as the individual abilities they bring to the Sisterhood.

The Crone: Prudence Blackwood

Prudence Blackwood claims a family connection with Salem that reaches back to the persecutions of the seventeenth century, although precisely where family history ends and Prudence’s own memories begin has never been entirely clear. The Blackwood name can supposedly be traced through generations of women who were accused, questioned or quietly driven from their communities whenever illness, crop failure or some other unexplained misfortune required a convenient culprit. Prudence rarely discusses those stories, but her knowledge of the old traditions and her instinctive distrust of anyone demanding that witches reveal themselves suggest that she has learned their lessons particularly well.

Her long experience has convinced her that survival depends upon restraint rather than spectacular demonstrations of supernatural power. Witches who advertise what they can do eventually attract enemies, while those who understand when to remain silent often live long enough to pass their knowledge to another generation. Prudence consequently regards Abigail’s enthusiasm for experimentation with considerable concern, although beneath her constant criticism lies a determination that the youngest member of the coven will not repeat mistakes that Prudence has already seen destroy others.

The power associated with Prudence is Bless, which reflects her instinct to protect rather than destroy. Her magic is expressed through old words, gestures and rituals intended to strengthen those under her care and turn misfortune away from them. Whether these practices have any connection with conventional religion is something Prudence refuses to discuss, and she appears quite content to allow observers to reach their own conclusions about the source of her protection.

As Crone she carries the accumulated experience of the coven and accepts responsibility for preserving knowledge that has survived persecution, migration and generations of secrecy. Prudence knows that witches have enemies, but she also understands that uncontrolled magical ambition can be every bit as dangerous as the people hunting them. She therefore sees her task as protecting the other two women without preventing them from becoming what they must eventually become, a distinction that becomes increasingly difficult whenever Abigail decides to investigate something that Prudence believes should have remained undisturbed.

The Mother: Rebecca Crowe

Rebecca Crowe discovered her abilities among communities where professional medical help was often distant and expensive, leaving families dependent upon whatever practical knowledge could be found locally. She learned the ordinary skills of treating wounds, preparing herbal remedies and caring for the sick before gradually discovering that she could sometimes achieve results that neither medicine nor chance could satisfactorily explain. Injuries that should have remained dangerous began to mend beneath her hands, while patients expected to deteriorate occasionally recovered with a speed that attracted both gratitude and unwanted attention.

Experience soon taught Rebecca to conceal the supernatural element of her work behind more conventional explanations. A recovery could be attributed to a strong constitution, a carefully prepared remedy or providence, and she saw little reason to correct anyone who preferred one of those explanations. The important matter was that somebody who might otherwise have died was still alive, while avoiding accusations of witchcraft allowed Rebecca to continue helping the next person who came to her door.

Her particular gift is represented by Faith Healing, a form of magic centred upon preserving life and restoring those who have been injured. Rebecca does not spend much time attempting to determine whether her ability should properly be described as religious faith, witchcraft or some combination of the two, because such distinctions matter considerably less to her than the consequences of refusing to use it. She believes that possessing the means to save someone creates a responsibility to make the attempt whenever circumstances permit.

This conviction sometimes brings her into disagreement with Prudence, whose instinct is always to consider the survival of the entire coven before risking exposure for an individual. Rebecca accepts the logic but does not always accept the conclusion, making her an important counterweight to the Crone’s caution. She also provides a restraining influence upon Abigail, although her approach relies more upon persuasion than prohibition and consequently has a rather better chance of being heard.

The Maiden: Abigail Hawthorne

Abigail Hawthorne is the youngest member of the Crimson Coven of Salem, a quiet girl who seems strangely out of place among the gunfighters, restless dead and supernatural horrors of Dracula’s America. She is rarely seen without Patience, an old cloth doll carried beneath one arm, its faded dress carefully repaired and its face worn almost smooth by years of handling. Abigail frequently whispers to Patience and occasionally pauses as though listening for a reply, a habit that neither of the older witches finds particularly remarkable and which Elias Ward has learned not to question.

The Hawthorne family had maintained a connection with the old traditions of Salem for generations, although Abigail’s mother hoped that whatever strange inheritance remained within the family had finally disappeared. Those hopes ended when Abigail began speaking to unseen companions, predicting the arrival of visitors and leaving food beside her bed for friends whom nobody else could see. Patience appeared during this period, although nobody could remember buying the doll or giving it to Abigail, who explained only that Patience had been lonely and had come looking for her. Several attempts to dispose of the doll ended with it inexplicably returning, after which the family wisely decided to leave matters alone.

Abigail’s Arcane Power is Summon, although she regards the entities answering her call as friends rather than creatures drawn from somewhere beyond the ordinary world. Patience appears to provide a focus for this ability, and when Abigail whispers to the doll the boundary separating the two worlds seems to weaken sufficiently for something on the other side to hear her. The older witches understand that such magic carries dangers that Abigail does not yet fully appreciate and carefully watch over the Maiden whenever she uses her gift.

Her importance to the Crimson Coven extends beyond her own supernatural ability, because Abigail’s presence strengthens the magic of the other witches when they remain close to her. The Mother finds her own power becoming more effective, while the Crone can draw more deeply upon her abilities, making the young Maiden an essential part of the bond that transforms three individual witches into a true Coven. Abigail has little interest in understanding why this happens and simply insists that magic works better when her Sisters are together.

Despite her unsettling abilities, Abigail remains a young girl who worries about Patience’s dress becoming dirty and has developed an affectionate relationship with Elias, whose determination to protect her is considerably stronger than his ability to understand her. On the battlefield she presents an equally strange sight, standing amid the gun smoke in the deep crimson of her Coven with the old doll clutched against her chest, quietly whispering into its ear as something beyond the ordinary world begins to listen.

Her first encounters with the supernatural came through fleeting shapes, unexplained sounds and the uncomfortable impression that something beyond the visible world had become aware of her presence. Instead of retreating from these experiences, Abigail attempted to understand them and eventually discovered that whatever existed beyond the boundaries of ordinary perception could sometimes be encouraged to cross them. This discovery fascinated Abigail and horrified Prudence in approximately equal measure.

Despite her curiosity, Abigail is not interested in releasing horrors simply to discover what they might do. She regards the unseen world as something that can eventually be understood rather than something humanity must permanently fear, although her confidence occasionally exceeds her experience. When the coven is threatened, however, the ability to bring an unexpected supernatural ally into the struggle can make Abigail particularly dangerous, especially to opponents who have made the mistake of assuming that youth means weakness.

The Coven

When the three women first take to the field, their magical abilities are relatively focused. Prudence possesses Bless, Rebecca possesses Faith Healing, and Abigail possesses Summon, while the more dangerous mysteries of Elder Magic remain outside their abilities. What makes them formidable is therefore not an enormous collection of supernatural powers but the manner in which three very different witches function together.

Prudence provides experience and protection, Rebecca brings healing and a determination to preserve life, while Abigail contributes both curiosity and the ability to reach beyond the familiar world when more conventional answers prove inadequate. Their different temperaments frequently produce disagreement, yet those differences also prevent the coven from being shaped entirely by the judgement of one person. Prudence reminds Abigail that magical power carries consequences, Rebecca prevents Prudence’s caution from becoming an excuse for inaction, and Abigail forces both older women to consider possibilities they might otherwise dismiss.

The Salem Sisterhood can use weapons. The faction is not restricted to fighting with Arcane Powers. For the Coven themselves, being a Witch does not inherently mean being unarmed. They remain models drawn from the posse and can therefore have weapons appropriate to the underlying character and the normal equipment restrictions. Their Arcane Powers are additional capabilities, not substitutes for weapons. Osprey also describes the three Witches as female non Hired Gun models designated as the Coven, rather than as a special troop type that replaces the normal equipment rules.

Hiding has become increasingly difficult to justify in an America where supernatural forces are openly shaping the lives of ordinary people. Vampires, necromancers, secretive cults and other practitioners of forbidden arts have prospered amid the violence and disorder of the age, while entirely ordinary human beings have repeatedly demonstrated that they require little supernatural encouragement to behave monstrously. The women of Salem cannot defeat every evil they encounter, nor do they imagine themselves capable of cleansing America of everything lurking in its darker corners, but they have decided that possessing power while refusing to use it carries its own consequences.

That does not necessarily make the Sisters of Salem heroes. In Dracula’s America, however, it may make them the closest you are going to get!

After the Church of Dagon and the Dark Confederacy, I thought it was about time that I introduced some characters who might, with a considerable amount of generosity, be described as the good guys of Dracula’s America. Of course, good and evil are rather flexible concepts in a world ruled by Dracula, populated by the walking dead and littered with secret societies pursuing their own supernatural ambitions, so perhaps it is safer to say that the Salem Sisterhood are at least fighting on the right side most of the time. My new posse is built around the three witches required to form a Salem Coven, the Maiden, Mother and Crone, together with the Guardian who has sworn to protect them, and I wanted them to have an identity that distinguished them immediately from the rather more conventionally sinister inhabitants of my growing Dracula’s America collection.

That identity became The Crimson Coven of Salem. Rather than dressing the three witches in the traditional black so readily associated with witchcraft and mourning, I decided to paint them in a deep Khorne Red, and the colour quickly suggested a story of its own. Within the Coven, crimson is worn deliberately as a remembrance of the blood shed during the Salem persecutions and of those who suffered because accusation, fear and superstition proved more powerful than reason or justice. It is also a declaration that these witches have no intention of hiding themselves beneath the black robes expected of them, for Abigail Hawthorne, Mercy Blackwood and Temperance Crowe belong to a generation prepared to confront the supernatural horrors of Dracula’s America openly rather than disappear quietly into its shadows.

The three women who form the Crimson Coven could scarcely be more different, although that difference is central to what makes them effective together. Abigail Hawthorne, the Crone, carries the accumulated experience and caution of the Coven and has learned how to turn fortune against those who threaten it. Mercy Blackwood, the Mother, stands at its centre as protector and practical conscience, using her abilities to shield the others while attempting to restrain the more adventurous instincts of her younger companion. Temperance Crowe, the Maiden, represents curiosity and possibility, possessing considerably more enthusiasm for discovering the limits of witchcraft than either Abigail or Mercy considers entirely sensible. Each begins with only a small measure of supernatural knowledge, but together their different abilities and personalities make the Coven considerably more formidable than any one of them would be alone.

Standing beside them is Elias Ward, the Guardian, whose presence has nothing to do with enchantment or supernatural coercion. His family carries its own uncomfortable connection with the Salem persecutions, but Elias does not protect the witches because he believes himself personally responsible for the actions of a long dead ancestor. He does so because he believes in their cause and because the possibility that his own daughter may one day display supernatural abilities has made the struggle intensely personal. When danger threatens the Coven, Elias is therefore prepared to put himself between the Sisters and whatever is coming their way, whether that happens to be a charging monster, an enemy gunman or something considerably less easily explained.

Together they are The Crimson Coven of Salem, three witches and their Guardian travelling through an America in which the distinction between monster and hero has become increasingly difficult to identify. They may not always be good in the conventional sense, and their methods are unlikely to satisfy everyone they encounter, but compared with Dracula, the Dark Confederacy and the devotees of Dagon, they are at least making a respectable attempt.

The Salem Sisterhood are an ancient society of white witches whose presence in America dates back to the arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers. Hidden among the early colonists was a coven of female Arcanists drawn from particular hereditary bloodlines. While the women wielded magic, trusted male relatives served as their Guardians, protecting the witches from both supernatural enemies and the persecution of ordinary people.

The Posse

Despite being feared and hunted as witches, the Sisterhood remained loyal to its original purpose: protecting humanity, preserving the natural balance of Arcane power and guarding dangerous relics that must never fall into the wrong hands. Of particular importance is something known only as Washington’s Secret, which generations of the Sisterhood have sworn to protect. The published material deliberately leaves the precise nature of this secret unexplained, making it an excellent basis for campaigns and individual posse histories.

By 1875, Dracula has seized control of the United States and declared himself President for life. His rule has disturbed the Arcane balance and encouraged vampires, cultists, necromancers and other occult powers to emerge throughout the country. The Sisterhood can no longer remain hidden. Small covens now travel into the American West and the Deep South, recovering forbidden relics, opposing those who misuse magic and preventing rival supernatural factions from gaining still greater power.

The Gunslingers

A Salem Sisterhood posse is centred upon three witches representing the traditional stages of womanhood:

• The Maiden, generally the youngest and most impulsive member of the coven
• The Mother, the mature guiding presence who holds the coven together
• The Crone, the eldest and most knowledgeable keeper of its secrets
• The Guardian, a trusted male relative sworn to defend the three witches

They are accompanied by ordinary gunfighters, retainers and family members who may know something of the Sisterhood’s true purpose, although they probably understand very little of its oldest mysteries. Individually the witches are vulnerable, but when the three work together their command of Arcane power increases enormously.

The Coven

In essence, the Salem Sisterhood are not servants of Dracula and they are not wicked witches seeking personal power. They are secretive protectors of humanity who believe that magic must remain balanced and that certain knowledge is too dangerous to be freely used. This naturally places them in opposition to Dracula’s Red Hand Coven, the necromancers of the Dark Confederacy and, particularly, the Church of Dagon, whose efforts to summon ancient powers threaten everything the Sisterhood has protected since colonial times.

The Guardian

They are a logical next choice especially given their close geographical proximity to the centre of the Church of Dagon’s power in Innsmouth.

There had been a time when the 27th Virginia Cavalry Regiment was a proud formation, its horses well fed, its uniforms respectable and its ranks filled with men who believed that the war would be decided long before either they or their mounts had worn out. Those days disappeared quickly. Campaign followed campaign, horses were killed or simply collapsed from exhaustion, uniforms became increasingly ragged, replacements became harder to find and the confident young volunteers who had first ridden beneath the regimental colours were gradually replaced by hardened veterans who had learned that cavalry warfare consisted as much of hunger, mud, exhaustion and sudden death as glorious charges across open fields.

Among the officers who came to define the regiment was Colonel Augustus Beauregard Saint Clair, a member of the old Virginia aristocracy whose family seat at Blackthorn Hall had produced generations of men accustomed to believing that leadership was both their duty and their natural right. Augustus possessed the pride expected of his class, but he also possessed considerable courage and a stubborn loyalty towards the men under his command. Whatever hardships the 27th endured, its colonel endured alongside it, and over the course of the war the relationship between Augustus and his surviving troopers became less that of an aristocratic officer commanding volunteers and more that of a veteran leading men who had followed him through too much bloodshed to consider serving under anyone else.

Always close behind the colonel rode Sergeant Elijah Pembroke, bearer of the regimental guidon. Pembroke had come to regard the colours as something almost sacred, not because of the cloth itself but because of everything it represented. Men looked towards the guidon when smoke and dust concealed their officers, rallied upon it when formations became confused and followed it into places that common sense suggested sensible men should avoid. Every tear and stain accumulated during the regiment’s campaigns became another part of its history, and Pembroke guarded the colours with the same determination with which another man might have protected his own family.

As the war turned against the Confederacy, the 27th suffered the same slow destruction experienced by so many other cavalry formations. Its strength dwindled, remounts became increasingly difficult to obtain and equipment that would once have been discarded was repaired repeatedly because there was nothing available to replace it. The surviving troopers became known as the Ragged Veterans, men whose appearance suggested that the war had already defeated them but whose continued willingness to fight demonstrated otherwise. They followed Augustus because he had never abandoned them, and because after years of campaigning the regiment had become as much their home as anywhere to which they might eventually return.

By the final months of the Confederacy, the 27th existed more in spirit than in numbers. Its scattered remnants continued operating wherever they were required, often with little support and fewer supplies, while Augustus stubbornly refused to accept that the cause was already lost. The end came when Union cavalry threatened the headquarters of General Robert E. Lee and Augustus found himself with only a handful of his remaining troopers immediately available. There was no time to gather the scattered survivors of the regiment and no guarantee that anyone else could intervene before the Federal horsemen reached their objective, so Augustus decided to do what he and the 27th had done throughout the war. He would attack.

Six men prepared to ride.

Sergeant Pembroke moved automatically into his accustomed place with the guidon, expecting to follow Augustus as he had followed him so many times before, but the colonel ordered him out of the line. Pembroke protested, arguing that if this was to be the final charge of the 27th then its colours belonged with the regiment, yet Augustus refused to reconsider. He understood what Pembroke perhaps could not accept at that moment. Men could be killed and a regiment destroyed, but if the colours survived then something of the regiment survived with them. Augustus therefore gave Pembroke what would become his final order of the war: preserve the guidon and ensure that it never fell into enemy hands.

Pembroke obeyed, and regretted his obedience for the rest of his life.

Augustus and five troopers charged the Union cavalry threatening Lee’s headquarters, striking them with such violence and determination that the Federal horsemen were driven back. For a few extraordinary minutes the handful of exhausted Virginians achieved what should have been impossible, and Pembroke watched from a distance as the enemy withdrew before the remnants of his regiment. Then Augustus made the decision that finally destroyed them. Carried forward by success, the Virginians pursued the retreating cavalry and rode directly into the path of a Union artillery battery.

The guns ended the 27th Virginia Cavalry Regiment.

Pembroke carried the guidon away as ordered, concealing it during the final collapse of the Confederacy and refusing afterwards to surrender it to anyone. He returned home with the banner carefully wrapped among his possessions and placed it inside a wooden chest where it remained hidden for years. To others it was a relic of a defeated cause and a war that had already consumed far too much, but to Pembroke it remained the last surviving piece of the regiment he had served. He had fulfilled Augustus’s final command perfectly, yet he regarded that obedience as his greatest failure because the colours of the 27th had not accompanied its colonel and troopers into their final battle.

Not every member of the regiment had been destroyed in that charge. Scattered survivors returned to ruined farms, impoverished families and communities transformed by war, carrying with them wounds and memories that proved considerably harder to discard than their uniforms. Some attempted to rebuild their lives, while others discovered that four years of violence had prepared them poorly for peace. The 27th ceased to exist as a military formation, but among its former members the regiment remained a powerful memory, and stories of Augustus Saint Clair and the final charge gradually became part of its legend.

For Augustus, however, death proved less permanent than anyone had expected.

Years later, at Blackthorn Hall, his cousin Lucien Beauregard Saint Clair began gathering the forces that would form his Dark Confederacy. Lucien required men capable of fighting the horrors that now stalked America, but he also possessed resources considerably darker than ordinary recruiting methods. The dead of the Saint Clair family had been resting beneath Virginia soil for generations, and Lucien saw little reason why death should prevent useful relatives from continuing to serve the family.

Among those he called back was Augustus.

The colonel who rose from the grave was no mindless corpse. Death had changed him, but it had not removed the qualities that had defined him in life, and foremost among these was his sense of duty towards the regiment he had commanded. Augustus had died with the 27th around him and, upon returning, discovered that fragments of that regiment still survived. Some of his former troopers had grown old, others had become hardened wanderers and gunmen, while still others could themselves be returned from graves that had seemed permanent. Slowly the remnants of the old cavalry regiment began to gather around Blackthorn Hall.

The Ragged Veterans answered first, drawn back towards the officer they had followed through the war and into its final disastrous months. They were no longer the young cavalrymen who had originally ridden beneath the regimental colours, but neither were they strangers to hardship, violence or causes that sensible men might have abandoned. Augustus offered them something that peace had never quite provided: the return of the regiment that had once given their lives purpose.

Yet something was missing.

The 27th Virginia Cavalry could have its colonel, its veterans and even some of its dead returned to service, but Augustus knew that without its colours the regiment remained incomplete. He remembered the order he had given before the final charge and knew that if Sergeant Elijah Pembroke had survived the war, then the guidon had survived with him.

Augustus went looking for both.

Pembroke had grown old while guarding the banner entrusted to him. For years he had kept it hidden inside the wooden chest, occasionally removing the fragile cloth to inspect it before carefully folding it away again. His family had learned not to question the ritual, although few understood that Pembroke still considered himself bound by an order issued on a battlefield many years before. Augustus had told him that the enemy must never possess the colours, and until someone released him from that duty he remained, at least in his own mind, the guidon bearer of the 27th Virginia Cavalry.

When the knock finally came at his door, Pembroke opened it to find his dead colonel standing on the porch.

Age had changed the sergeant and death had changed Augustus, but recognition was immediate. Pembroke saw the remnants of the uniform, the familiar bearing and the unmistakable authority of the man he had followed through years of war, while Augustus saw before him the soldier he had deliberately excluded from the final charge. Whatever explanations might have been offered were unnecessary. Pembroke straightened his ageing body and saluted his colonel, and after Augustus returned the gesture the old soldier walked to the chest he had guarded for so many years.

The battered guidon emerged faded, torn and fragile, but it had survived exactly as Augustus had commanded.

Pembroke had completed his duty.

More importantly, he now understood that his duty was not over.

The regiment had returned.

The 27th Virginia Cavalry that gathered at Blackthorn Hall was not the regiment that had first ridden to war. Its ranks were filled with ageing veterans, desperate gunmen and men who had already experienced death once and appeared remarkably willing to risk it again. At their head rode a colonel who had been killed by Union artillery years before, while behind him an old sergeant once again carried the battered colours he had protected for most of his life. They were an impossible remnant of another age, held together by loyalty, memory and the dark power that had reached beneath the Virginia soil and disturbed men who should have remained there.

When Augustus finally assembled his restored command in the grounds of Blackthorn Hall, Pembroke unfurled the old guidon and the names were called once more.

Behind them stood those members of the Saint Clair family whom Lucien had raised from their graves, Revenants from another generation who now found themselves serving beside the remnants of Augustus’s old command. They had never ridden with the 27th during the war, but blood, death and Lucien’s necromancy had made them part of the strange force gathering beneath its battered colours.

For Sergeant Elijah Pembroke, however, none of this seemed particularly complicated. The colonel was once again at the head of the column, the veterans were back in the ranks and the guidon of the 27th Virginia Cavalry was where it belonged.

Colonel Augustus Beauregard Saint Clair had returned.

The colours had returned.

And the 27th Virginia Cavalry was riding again.

Another project, which surprise surprise ended up going down several rabbit burrows, is now finished. “Forward Yo” to the next posse!

By the final months of the war, Sergeant Elijah Pembroke had carried the guidon of the 27th Virginia Cavalry through enough fighting to understand that a regimental banner was far more than a piece of cloth attached to a wooden staff. Men looked towards it when smoke and dust obscured their officers, rallied around it when formations began to break apart, and followed it when shouted orders could no longer be heard above musketry, artillery and the confusion of mounted combat. To Pembroke, the guidon had gradually become the physical embodiment of the regiment itself, carrying with it the memory of those who had ridden beneath it and the honour of those who had fallen defending it.

Colonel Augustus Beauregard Saint Clair understood its importance equally well. By this stage of the war the 27th had been reduced from the proud cavalry regiment that had first ridden into battle to a battered collection of exhausted veterans, many mounted on horses almost as worn down as their riders and carrying weapons that had been repaired and reused far beyond anything their makers had intended. The guidon, however, remained with them, faded by weather, torn by battle and stained by years of campaigning, but still visible whenever Augustus led what remained of his regiment into action. Close behind him rode Pembroke, holding the colours high and regarding their protection as the most important duty that could be entrusted to him.

That changed on the day of the regiment’s final charge, when Union cavalry threatened the headquarters of General Robert E. Lee and Augustus gathered the handful of men immediately available to him. There was neither time to seek reinforcements nor much opportunity to consider the likelihood of success, and Augustus decided that the only possible response was an immediate mounted attack. Pembroke moved automatically into his accustomed position behind the colonel, lowered the guidon into the position he had assumed so many times before and prepared to ride with the others.

Augustus ordered him out of the line.

For perhaps the only time during their years of service together, Pembroke openly challenged an order from his colonel, insisting that if the 27th Virginia Cavalry was going forward then its colours belonged at the head of the charge. Augustus refused to reconsider, telling him that the regiment might be destroyed in the coming fight but its banner would not be captured with it. Pembroke was ordered to withdraw with the guidon, preserve it whatever happened and ensure that no Federal soldier ever laid his hands upon the colours of the 27th Virginia Cavalry.

It was an order that Pembroke would spend the remainder of his life wishing he had disobeyed.

From a distance he watched Augustus and five of the regiment’s remaining cavalrymen charge the Union horsemen threatening Lee’s headquarters, their tiny formation disappearing momentarily amid dust, smoke and frightened horses before smashing into the Federal cavalry with enough violence to drive them back. Against every reasonable expectation the attack succeeded, and for a few glorious minutes Pembroke could almost imagine that the old 27th had returned, sweeping everything before it as it had done in better days. He gripped the guidon tightly as he watched his comrades pursue the retreating enemy, torn between obedience to his colonel’s final order and an almost overwhelming desire to ride after them.

Then came the artillery fire.

Augustus and his handful of Virginians, carried forward by the momentum of their success, had ridden directly into a Union battery. The guns opened at devastatingly close range and, when the smoke eventually drifted away, the men who had made the charge were gone and the 27th Virginia Cavalry Regiment had effectively ceased to exist. Pembroke remained where Augustus had ordered him to remain, still holding the colours of a regiment that no longer existed around him.

He obeyed the colonel’s final command with the same determination with which he had carried out every other order during the war. The guidon was carefully wrapped and concealed before Pembroke carried it away from the battlefield, keeping it hidden through the final collapse of the Confederacy and the confused months that followed. He refused every later suggestion that the banner should be surrendered, displayed or placed somewhere supposedly safer, because Augustus had entrusted it to him with a simple duty that Pembroke regarded as binding for as long as he lived. Whatever else happened to the Confederacy, no enemy soldier would ever possess the banner of the 27th.

Years passed, but obedience brought Pembroke little comfort because he could never forgive himself for surviving the regiment’s destruction. He understood perfectly why Augustus had excluded him from the charge and knew that protecting the colours had been an honour rather than an act of cowardice, yet reason did nothing to remove the shame he felt whenever he remembered those six riders disappearing into the smoke while he remained behind. He had been the guidon bearer of the 27th Virginia Cavalry, entrusted with carrying its colours wherever the regiment went, yet when his comrades made their final charge the banner that had accompanied them through so many battles had not ridden beside them.

The guidon remained hidden in Pembroke’s house, carefully folded inside a wooden chest that became almost a shrine to the regiment he had lost. Every few months he removed the banner, inspected the increasingly fragile cloth and carefully folded it again before returning it to its hiding place. To his family it gradually became an uncomfortable relic of a war that everyone else was trying to leave behind, but to Pembroke it remained something very different. As long as the guidon survived, some fragment of the 27th Virginia Cavalry survived with it, and in his own mind Sergeant Elijah Pembroke had never ceased to be its bearer.

Many years later, on an evening when the old soldier believed that both the regiment and its colonel belonged permanently to the past, a horse approached his house and stopped outside. Pembroke heard the rider dismount, followed by the slow tread of boots upon the porch, and when he opened the door he found Colonel Augustus Beauregard Saint Clair standing before him.

The figure was unmistakably Augustus, although death and whatever dark powers had subsequently returned him to the world had left their marks upon him. He wore the remnants of the uniform Pembroke remembered, carried himself with the same aristocratic confidence and regarded his former sergeant with the familiar expression of a commanding officer expecting his orders to be obeyed. Yet there was something cold and unnatural behind his eyes, and Pembroke knew without being told that the man standing before him had indeed ridden into the fire of that Union battery and had lain dead for years before Lucien Beauregard Saint Clair, master of Blackthorn Hall, called him back.

Pembroke stared at his colonel for several moments before decades of age and regret seemed to fall away. He straightened as far as his old body permitted and raised his hand in the salute he had given Augustus countless times during the war. The risen colonel regarded him silently before returning it.

Nothing more needed to be said.

Pembroke walked to the wooden chest that had remained closed for so many years, lifted its lid and removed the carefully wrapped bundle within. Slowly he uncovered the battered guidon of the 27th Virginia Cavalry, its cloth faded and scarred but still intact, before holding it out towards the officer who had ordered him to protect it all those years before.

“You ordered me to keep her safe, Colonel.”

For the first time since the regiment’s destruction, Pembroke understood that his duty had not ended on that battlefield. Augustus had ordered him to preserve the guidon because the colours represented the regiment, and now the colonel had returned to gather its remnants once again. The 27th Virginia Cavalry might consist of dead men, ageing veterans and whatever other desperate souls answered the call from Blackthorn Hall, but to Pembroke none of that mattered. His colonel had returned, the regiment was being summoned back to service, and its colours had been waiting for them.

The next time Colonel Augustus Beauregard Saint Clair rode to war, the battered guidon of the 27th Virginia Cavalry would once again fly behind him.

This time, Sergeant Elijah Pembroke would not be left behind.

Colonel Augustus Beauregard Saint Clair had been one of the more celebrated members of the Saint Clair family long before his cousin Lucien decided that death was an unnecessarily permanent retirement. A Virginia gentleman by birth and cavalryman by inclination, Augustus had grown up at Blackthorn Hall surrounded by horses, firearms and generations of family stories in which Saint Clairs invariably behaved bravely, even when the surviving evidence suggested that good judgement might occasionally have been the better option.

When war came, Augustus entered Confederate service and eventually rose to command elements of the 27th Virginia Cavalry, becoming known as an aggressive and highly capable cavalry officer who preferred movement, surprise and a sudden appearance on an exposed enemy flank to any prolonged exchange of fire. His men respected him because he rarely ordered them somewhere he was unwilling to ride himself, while his superiors occasionally found him rather less convenient because Augustus possessed the traditional Saint Clair belief that orders were best regarded as guidance when a more interesting opportunity presented itself.

He became particularly associated with his white charger Beauregard, a large and thoroughly bad tempered animal that tolerated Augustus, disliked almost everyone else and developed a reputation nearly equal to that of its rider. Horse and colonel became a familiar sight among the regiment, with Augustus usually somewhere near the front and Beauregard apparently sharing his owner’s conviction that obstacles existed primarily to be ridden through.

The final months of the Confederacy were less kind to either man or regiment. Losses mounted, supplies became scarce, and the once proud cavalry formations were increasingly reduced to scattered groups of exhausted veterans held together by little more than discipline, loyalty and a stubborn refusal to admit that the war was lost. Augustus was among those who refused to accept the inevitable, remaining in the saddle with the remnants of the 27th Virginia Cavalry until almost the very end.

His final action became the stuff of regimental legend. With a Union cavalry regiment threatening the command post of General Robert E. Lee, Augustus gathered five of his remaining troopers and launched what should have been a suicidal charge. Against every reasonable expectation, the handful of Virginians crashed into the advancing Union horsemen with such violence that they broke and routed them, removing the immediate threat to Lee and his headquarters.

Victory, however, lasted only moments. Augustus and his five companions pursued the fleeing cavalry rather more enthusiastically than prudence might have suggested. Carried forward by the excitement of the charge, they suddenly found themselves almost on top of a Union artillery battery. At such close range there was little chance of escape. The guns opened fire and the six horsemen disappeared beneath a storm of shot and shell. When the smoke cleared, Augustus, his men and his beloved charger Beauregard lay dead upon the field.

It was a suitably dramatic end for a man who had never learned when to stop fighting. The Confederacy itself would soon follow him into history, but the story of Augustus Beauregard Saint Clair and his final charge remained within the Saint Clair family, along with the knowledge of where his body had eventually been laid to rest.

In accordance with his wishes, horse and rider were eventually returned to Blackthorn Hall and buried together in the Saint Clair family plot, beneath a monument that described Augustus in considerably more flattering terms than some of his former superior officers might have chosen.

There he remained until Lucien Beauregard Saint Clair began experimenting with the darker possibilities hidden within the family library.

Lucien had already achieved enough success with lesser subjects to believe that death could be reversed, but Augustus represented something altogether more ambitious. The scattered remnants of the 27th Virginia Cavalry still existed, some as ageing veterans and others as bitter men unable to find a place in the new order, and Lucien understood that money and necromancy alone would not turn them into a fighting force. They needed a commander whose name they remembered and, more importantly, one they would still follow.

For several nights strange lights burned among the Saint Clair graves, while servants at Blackthorn Hall heard horses moving in a stable that was supposedly empty. When morning finally came, Augustus’s grave had been opened from below and the neighbouring earth where Beauregard had been buried was similarly disturbed. Before sunrise, a mounted figure in the remains of a Confederate cavalry uniform was seen riding along the old plantation road.

Lucien had brought back both Colonel and charger.

Death has altered Augustus considerably, although not perhaps in the ways Lucien expected. His memories of the war remain remarkably strong, while his understanding of everything that happened afterwards is rather less reliable. He knows that the Confederacy suffered defeats and remembers comrades who fell, but he refuses to accept that the war itself truly ended, instead regarding the present situation as merely another stage in a conflict that has temporarily become confused.

This suits Lucien perfectly.

The remnants of the 27th Virginia Cavalry have begun gathering again at Blackthorn Hall, drawn by rumours that their old Colonel has returned. Some are surviving veterans, considerably older than the commander they remember, while others are descendants, drifters and men who have adopted the old regiment’s identity because it gives purpose to grievances accumulated since the war. There are also several riders whose presence is much harder to explain, particularly those recognised by veterans as comrades buried decades earlier.

Augustus asks remarkably few questions about this.

He has resumed command with the same confidence he possessed in life, inspecting weapons, criticising horsemanship and demanding standards that would have been difficult enough to meet when everyone involved still had a pulse. Those incapable of keeping up are dismissed with considerable contempt, although this presents complications when some of the men concerned are already dead and therefore technically incapable of becoming much more exhausted.

Lucien regards the resurrected Colonel as both family and weapon, allowing Augustus to command the military remnants of the Dark Confederacy while quietly pursuing his own darker ambitions. Augustus, for his part, regards Lucien’s occult practices with the same tolerance he once extended to eccentric artillery officers, accepting that they are strange but undeniably useful when properly directed.

Together they have given the remnants of the 27th Virginia Cavalry something they had not possessed for years: a commander, a purpose and the unsettling possibility that casualties may no longer provide a particularly convincing excuse for leaving the regiment.

Thanks to “Chattie” for assistance with the banner and the “prints”.

Please note: The Harpers weekly style prints are totally fictitious these events and Colonel Augustus Beauregard Saint Clair and 27th Virginia Cavalry did not exist except in the fertile (futile?) mind of the author!

There were only four graves left that Lucien Beauregard Saint Clair considered worth opening.

His earlier visits to the old Saint Clair family burial ground at Blackthorn Hall had already produced a collection of ancestors and distant relations whose return to the world of the living had been rather less dignified than their original funerals. Some had answered his summons almost eagerly, others had required considerably more persuasion, and a few had emerged from the earth with little remaining beyond an instinctive loyalty to the blood of Saint Clair. Lucien had persisted because family, as he frequently observed, was family, even when several members of it had been dead for the better part of a century.

These final four were different. Their graves lay in the oldest part of the burial ground beneath weathered stones whose inscriptions were already disappearing beneath moss and Virginia soil. They belonged to an earlier generation of Saint Clairs, men whose lives had been violent enough that perhaps death had never entirely suited them. Lucien performed the rites one final time, and beneath the moonlight the earth began to move.

Ambrose Saint Clair

Ambrose Saint Clair had been a gambler, horse breeder and occasional gentleman of uncertain employment who died in 1829 after a disagreement over cards became a disagreement over pistols. Family tradition insisted that Ambrose had been cheated. The surviving account of his opponent insisted precisely the opposite. Since Ambrose had already been accused of cheating in Richmond, Charleston and New Orleans, the truth was probably best left buried alongside him.

Unfortunately, Lucien dug it up.

Ambrose returned wearing the rotting remains of what had once been an expensive coat, one hand still curled as though holding the pistol buried with him. Death had done little to improve his temperament. He remains suspicious of everyone around him and occasionally reaches towards his coat when another member of the posse looks at him for too long. Lucien considers this encouraging. A man prepared to fight over a card game while alive is unlikely to object to fighting Yankees, monsters or anyone else Lucien points him towards after death.

Nathaniel Saint Clair

Nathaniel Saint Clair had been the respectable one.

At least that was what the family records claimed.

A planter, magistrate and prominent member of local society during the early years of the nineteenth century, Nathaniel cultivated the image of a sober Virginia gentleman who believed deeply in order, property and the proper behaviour of everyone except himself. Behind closed doors he possessed a vicious temper and an enthusiasm for settling disputes personally when the law proved inconvenient. Several men who crossed Nathaniel subsequently discovered compelling reasons to leave the county.

He died peacefully in his bed in 1841, which disappointed a surprising number of people.

When Lucien called him back, Nathaniel emerged slowly from the soil, straightened what remained of his clothing and stared at his descendant with an expression of profound disapproval. He has maintained that expression ever since. Nathaniel obeys Lucien, although there is something distinctly uncomfortable about the relationship. Lucien may command Blackthorn Hall, but Nathaniel behaves as though he merely allows him to do so.

Silas Saint Clair

Every respectable family possesses at least one relative whom everyone agrees not to discuss.

For the Saint Clairs, that man was Silas.

Born in 1778, Silas disappeared westward as a young man and spent much of his life drifting between frontier settlements, trading posts and places where respectable Virginians generally preferred not to admit they had relatives. Stories eventually returned concerning gambling, smuggling, stolen horses and at least one sheriff who had apparently developed a permanent dislike of the Saint Clair name. Silas returned to Blackthorn Hall many years later carrying scars, several pistols and enough money that nobody asked where it had come from.

He died in 1836 after being thrown from a horse, although one family account rather suspiciously mentions a bullet wound.

Silas has returned as perhaps the most animated of Lucien’s Revenants. There is still something of the old rogue behind the dead eyes, and he occasionally displays what might almost be amusement when violence approaches. Of all those Lucien has raised, Silas seems the least troubled by being dead. Indeed, given his previous existence, undeath may represent only a modest change in lifestyle.

Gideon Saint Clair

Gideon Saint Clair was already an old man when the War of 1812 began, but age did little to discourage him from involving himself. He organised local militia, supplied horses and weapons, and loudly complained that younger men lacked the determination of his generation. This opinion appears to have survived his death.

Gideon was remembered within the family as stubborn, argumentative and absolutely convinced that Saint Clairs were naturally qualified to command anyone unfortunate enough to stand nearby. He died in 1822 and was buried beneath one of the largest stones in the family burial ground, presumably because nobody wanted to risk him climbing out again.

Lucien should perhaps have taken the hint.

When Gideon rose, he did so violently, breaking through the weakened lid of his coffin and clawing his way through the earth before Lucien had completed the final words of the ritual. He now stands among the other Revenants with the posture of a man inspecting troops whose standards have disappointed him. Even in death he seems incapable of accepting that someone else is in charge.

The Family Gathering Is Complete

With Gideon’s return, Lucien finally closed the old family burial ground.

There would be no more midnight expeditions beneath the twisted trees, no more ancient coffins dragged open and no more increasingly irritated Saint Clair ancestors summoned back into a world they had probably been quite happy to leave. Lucien had exhausted the graves he considered useful, although the distinction between useful ancestor and best left buried had become increasingly difficult to identify.

The Revenants now form one of the strangest elements of the force gathering around Blackthorn Hall. They are not merely undead servants but fragments of the Saint Clair family itself, drawn from different generations and carrying into undeath the violence, pride, grudges and questionable judgement that marked so much of their mortal existence. Lucien has raised his ancestors because he needs soldiers he can trust, although whether resurrecting several generations of difficult Saint Clair men actually achieves that objective remains open to considerable debate.

For the moment, however, the cemetery is quiet.

Lucien has finished raising the family.

Probably.

Every so often a history book comes along that is clearly not intended to be treated with great solemnity. Olivia Swarthout’s Weird Medieval Guys: How to Live, Laugh, Love (and Die) in Dark Times is certainly one of them. This is a book populated by murderous rabbits, peculiar saints, questionable medical advice, strange animals, unfortunate lovers and medieval artists who occasionally seem to have been working from descriptions supplied by someone who had heard about an elephant from a bloke in a tavern.

Swarthout is the creator of the Weird Medieval Guys social media accounts, where she has collected and shared some of the stranger images found in medieval manuscripts. The book develops that idea into something considerably more substantial than simply reproducing amusing pictures with captions. Published by Square Peg, the hardback runs to 208 pages and is lavishly illustrated throughout with medieval manuscript images.

The basic conceit is rather clever. Instead of presenting medieval history chronologically, Swarthout invites the reader to imagine actually living in the medieval world. The first major section, The Struggle: Surviving Life, Love and Death, works its way through the problems of existence, including where you might live, what work you might undertake, how you might find love and, inevitably, how you might die. Quizzes, diagrams, maps, flow charts and mock advice turn the whole exercise into something resembling a medieval survival manual.

There is plenty of silliness along the way, but rather more genuine history than the presentation initially suggests. Medieval attitudes towards courtship, marriage, occupations, religion, astrology, saints, death and the natural world all appear, although none receives anything approaching a conventional academic treatment. Swarthout instead slips the information in amongst the jokes. You can therefore discover something about medieval beliefs almost accidentally while trying to determine your medieval occupation or wondering whether your prospective romantic life is going to end particularly badly.

The second half of the book turns towards the medieval bestiary and, for me, this is where things become particularly entertaining. Medieval representations of animals can be wonderfully peculiar because the purpose of the illustrations was not necessarily the naturalistic representation we expect today. Animals carried religious, moral and symbolic meanings, while some artists were attempting to depict creatures that they had never actually seen. Swarthout works through beasts, birds, fish and serpents, drawing heavily upon surviving medieval bestiaries and manuscript illustrations.

The illustrations are consequently the real stars. Some are beautiful, others grotesque and quite a few leave you wondering exactly what the artist thought he was drawing. There are wolves, dragons, basilisks, strange birds, unlikely fish and assorted creatures that appear to have escaped from someone’s nightmare. The famous medieval tendency to depict rabbits behaving badly is also very much at home here. Anyone who has spent time looking through medieval marginalia will already know that monks and manuscript illustrators could produce material considerably stranger than many modern cartoonists.

Behind the jokes, however, lies something rather interesting. Books such as this remind us that medieval people were not simply the grim, mud covered inhabitants of the so called Dark Ages that popular culture sometimes makes them. They laughed, worried about relationships, complained about other people, feared death, told stories and found humour in the absurd. The manuscript illustrations are particularly useful because they provide glimpses into that mental world, even when those glimpses involve armed animals or creatures doing things that probably should not be described over breakfast.

There are limitations. Anyone approaching Weird Medieval Guys expecting a serious general history of medieval Europe is going to be disappointed. There is little sustained political, military, economic or social analysis, and complicated historical subjects are necessarily compressed to fit the humorous format. The geographical and chronological breadth covered by the term medieval also means that material produced centuries apart can sit together because it suits a particular theme. As a result, the reader should be cautious about treating the book as representing a single coherent medieval worldview.

Occasionally the modern humour also threatens to overwhelm the historical context. That is probably unavoidable given that the entire concept grew from social media, where an extraordinary manuscript image accompanied by a clever caption works extremely well. On the printed page I sometimes wanted another paragraph explaining why an image had been produced, who commissioned the manuscript, or what the symbolism meant. Some readers have made essentially the same criticism, arguing that the humour can leave them wanting considerably more historical context.

That criticism needs to be kept in perspective because Swarthout is not pretending to have written an academic history. The research behind the selection is considerable, and medieval literature scholar Madeleine Killacky has particularly noted the extent of Swarthout’s engagement with digitised manuscripts and scholarship. The book is trying to make medieval culture accessible and entertaining, and judged on those terms it succeeds extremely well.

Indeed, I suspect its greatest strength is that somebody with only a passing interest in medieval history could pick it up because of a picture of an homicidal rabbit and emerge two hours later knowing considerably more about medieval life, belief and manuscript culture than they did before. That is not a bad achievement for a book that frequently appears determined not to take itself seriously.

It is also an excellent book simply to browse. You do not need to sit down and read it from beginning to end. Open it almost anywhere and there will be an illustration, strange fact, quiz or piece of medieval advice demanding attention. It is the sort of book that can sit on the coffee table and repeatedly lure you back into reading another few pages.

So is Weird Medieval Guys really a history book? Sort of. It certainly is not a conventional one, nor should it replace a proper history of medieval society. I would describe it instead as an entertaining doorway into medieval history, particularly the strange and wonderful world preserved in illuminated manuscripts. There is genuine historical material underneath the jokes, but Swarthout is quite happy to let the weirdness lead the way.

And perhaps that is exactly the point. Medieval history does not always need another photograph of a castle followed by twenty pages explaining feudalism. Sometimes what is required is a rabbit armed with a sword.

Recommended, particularly for anyone interested in medieval history, manuscript art or the wonderfully bizarre ways in which people have represented their world. It is light, beautifully illustrated, genuinely funny and more informative than its deliberately ridiculous exterior initially suggests. Just do not buy it expecting a new interpretation of the Hundred Years War.

Rating: 4 out of 5 homicidal medieval rabbits.

The family burial ground behind Blackthorn Hall had already surrendered several of its occupants to Lucien Beauregard Saint Clair, but the old plantation had been in the Saint Clair family for generations and there were considerably more names carved into its weathered stones. Some had died peacefully in their beds, others had fallen to disease or accident, while a few had been carried home during the war and buried beneath Virginia soil by families who believed they had finally earned their rest. Lucien regarded such sentiments as unnecessarily restrictive. With the remnants of the 27th Virginia Cavalry Regiment gathering around Blackthorn Hall and his cousin Colonel Augustus Beauregard Saint Clair once more commanding the dead and living alike, three more graves were opened.

Captain Nathaniel Fairfax Saint Clair

Nathaniel Fairfax Saint Clair had been one of the more respectable members of the extended Saint Clair family, which probably explains why Lucien had never particularly liked him while he was alive. A prosperous landowner and militia officer before the war, Nathaniel joined the Confederate cavalry in 1861 and eventually received a captaincy. He was remembered as a calm and methodical officer who preferred careful reconnaissance and a well prepared attack to the dramatic charges favoured by some of his younger relatives.

Nathaniel was killed in 1863 when a Union skirmisher put a rifle ball through his chest during a reconnaissance patrol. His body was recovered and returned to Blackthorn Hall, where he was buried with his sword, boots and the silver spurs presented to him when he received his commission. His widow insisted that he should rest among his ancestors rather than in some distant military cemetery.

Lucien has now corrected that particular mistake.

Nathaniel returned from the earth remarkably well preserved by revenant standards, although the bullet wound that killed him remains clearly visible beneath his ruined coat. Something of the old officer survives within him. He rarely speaks, but when Augustus gives an order Nathaniel responds immediately and with an almost military precision. Among the ragged veterans there are whispered suggestions that Captain Saint Clair actually understands everything happening around him.

Nobody has been sufficiently brave to ask him.

Sergeant Elijah Mercer Whitcomb

Elijah Mercer Whitcomb was not a Saint Clair by blood, but he had earned a place in the family burial ground through decades of service to the household. Before the war he had worked as an overseer of horses and livestock on the Saint Clair estate, becoming particularly respected for his ability to judge a horse almost at a glance. When Virginia went to war, Whitcomb enlisted alongside several younger members of the family and eventually became a sergeant in the 27th Virginia Cavalry.

Whitcomb survived most of the war only to be mortally wounded during the regiment’s final months of campaigning. He was brought back to Blackthorn Hall in a wagon and died there several days later. Augustus himself had once promised that Whitcomb would always have a place among the Saint Clair dead, although neither man could possibly have imagined how literally Lucien would eventually interpret that promise.

Death has done little to improve Whitcomb’s appearance or disposition. His uniform hangs in tatters from a body that seems held together largely through supernatural stubbornness, and one side of his face bears the marks of the wound that eventually killed him. Yet he still displays flashes of his former habits. Horses become nervous when he approaches, but he will sometimes stand beside them for hours, running a dead hand slowly along a frightened animal’s neck as though remembering another life.

The living veterans avoid disturbing him when he does this.

Lieutenant Ambrose Carter Saint Clair

Ambrose Carter Saint Clair had been the troublesome one.

A distant cousin of Lucien and Augustus, Ambrose possessed all the confidence expected of a young Virginia gentleman and considerably less of the judgement. He gambled, drank, fought duels over imagined insults and accumulated debts with an enthusiasm that suggested he regarded creditors as merely another branch of the enemy forces. The outbreak of war provided him with exactly the sort of occupation for which he had apparently been preparing his entire life.

Ambrose proved to be a reckless but undeniably courageous cavalry officer. He volunteered for dangerous patrols, led charges that wiser men would have avoided and developed an alarming habit of appearing behind Union positions with no convincing explanation of how he had reached them. His luck finally failed during a confused cavalry action when he was shot from the saddle and trampled beneath the horses of both sides.

The remains returned to Blackthorn Hall were not entirely complete.

Lucien raised him anyway.

Ambrose is consequently one of the more disturbing revenants now wandering the grounds of Blackthorn Hall. His movements are occasionally awkward and his body bears unmistakable evidence of the violence of his death, but the old recklessness seems to have survived intact. When gunfire begins he advances towards it without hesitation, apparently delighted to discover that death has removed the principal disadvantage of his preferred method of warfare.

Augustus appears particularly pleased to have him back.

Whether Ambrose feels the same way remains uncertain.

The Muster Continues

Three more figures now stand among the gathering forces at Blackthorn Hall, their uniforms rotted, their weapons stained and their allegiance restored by considerably less conventional means than a recruiting sergeant and an oath. Nathaniel brings the cold discipline of the professional officer, Whitcomb the stubborn loyalty of an old cavalryman, while Ambrose contributes precisely the sort of reckless enthusiasm that got him killed the first time.

Lucien, naturally, considers the experiment a complete success.

There are still older graves beneath the trees beyond Blackthorn Hall, their stones leaning beneath moss and Virginia rain, and Lucien has begun spending rather too much time walking among them after sunset. Colonel Augustus has learned not to enquire what his cousin is planning. The Ragged Veterans have learned to keep the shovels close at hand.

It appears that the 27th Virginia Cavalry is still recruiting.