If you know Shakespeare, you’ll get the reference. The best part? The Queen is descended from the Glamis witches. This is where the story stretches belief a bit, by introducing Veronica to a coven of aristocratic witches led by the Queen of England during World War II. At the same time, the belief in magic waxes and wanes, until we end up with Veronica, who has no mother or aunt to initiate her into the magic of the Orchiere witches.
Each generation experiences its own heartaches and tragedies. The stone is the indicator of magic – if it responds to you, you’ve got it. The stone becomes the thread tying the family together through subsequent generations. Nanette is the only sister to whom Ursule’s scrying stone responds. The sisters continue to perform the family rites in a hidden cave, but none of them possess Ursule’s magic until the youngest sister, Nanette, comes of age. The family buries Ursule between the stones, and heads off across the sea, where they find the farm, just as Ursule predicted, on the Cornish coast. This act takes her life, but not before she sees her family travel across the sea to a farm on a cliff, where they will live in peace. Matriarch Ursule, a powerful seer, uses her power to hide her family. The story begins in Brittany in the early decades of the 19th century, where the Orchiere family is cornered in a ring of standing stones by an angry mob out to burn them. Louisa Morgan has created a captivating tale of six generations of Romani witches, women whose talents include “simples” like healing potions, knowledge of the weather, affinity for animals or growing things, and, most importantly, seeing the future.
The concept of women’s power being rooted in magic has become a regular theme in recent fiction, and The Secret History of Witches adds to that growing genre.
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