The Witches of Vardo, page 20
The little bask bucked across the choppy water, and Ingeborg gripped onto its sides. Zare stopped rowing. He lifted the oars up as glassy droplets of water spattered upon the ruffled sea.
‘Why have you stopped?’ Maren asked him.
‘I am feeling the currents,’ he said. ‘Working out which way to go to land.’
The sea was in Zare’s eyes. The crash and drag of it.
He seemed about to say something to Ingeborg, but then he picked up the oars again and continued to row.
The wind was growing stronger now, and he had to push with all his might against it. Maren picked up the other oars lying in the bottom of the craft to help him. The sea churned around them like boiling broth.
At last, they were through the currents and in calmer waters. They grounded with a bump on the stony shore.
‘One of us should remain and make sure the bask is not lost or taken,’ Zare said. ‘Ingeborg, will you stay?’
‘No! It’s my mother imprisoned in the witches’ hole,’ she said, clenching her fists.
‘It would be safer to stay—’
‘No!’ she said, furious he would expect her to wait by the boat.
‘Well, then – Maren? Because I have to show Ingeborg where the tunnel is.’
‘My mother’s spirit is trapped on Vardø between the living and the dead,’ Maren said, bitterness lacing every word. ‘I am not staying behind with the boat. That is not why I came all this way with you.’
‘Very well. We need not waste time arguing,’ Zare said, indicating for the girls to get out carrying the oars between them. Once they had waded through the water to the rocks, Ingeborg turned to see Zare lifting the boat over his head and carrying it to a slab of flat dry stone to place it down. The bask looked like the shell of a giant turtle, and it was hard to imagine such a light craft had been able to transport them across such choppy water. ‘Let fortune be on our side and it will still be here when we return,’ Zare said.
Ingeborg glanced up at the storm clouds gathering against the dark sky. ‘Do we have enough time?’
‘Let us believe so,’ Zare replied. ‘There is no going back now.’
Ingeborg scrambled over the slippery rocks, after Maren and Zare. They seemed to be moving so fast it was hard to keep up. Zare began to head inland, and she glanced up to see the sheer white walls of Vardøhus rising above. They scrambled up a steep cliff, and then crouched behind an outcropping of rocks.
‘It’s unlikely we will be seen, as my mother told me the soldiers prefer to smoke their pipes in their hut rather than stand guard outside, but we should be careful in case,’ Zare said.
They continued to climb up the rocks until they came to the foundations of the castle. Zare felt his way along it with his hands, then turned to look back, assessing the way they had come. ‘The tunnel is around about here. I am certain of it.’
He tugged away on the rocks around the base of the fortress and, eventually, one moved beneath his hands to reveal a small hole.
Zare went in first, then Maren, and finally Ingeborg. They wriggled on their bellies, Ingeborg’s chest so constricted by fear that her breath was short and throttled. They were in complete blackness. She could see neither Zare nor Maren, just heard their shuffling and heavy breaths in front of her.
Suddenly, she heard Zare exclaim in Sámi, before she banged into the back of Maren.
‘What is it?’ she whispered.
‘They have sealed the tunnel,’ he said, and then cursed again softly under his breath. ‘But, of course, how foolish we have been. Of course, they would do so!’
‘Can we break through? Or tunnel around it?’ Maren asked.
‘No, it’s solid rock,’ Zare said. ‘It took days for my father and I to do it before, and we don’t have the time.’
‘But we have to,’ Ingeborg pleaded. On the other side was her mother, desperate and alone in the witches’ hole. They were so close.
‘It’s impossible,’ Zare said.
Ingeborg slapped her hands against the hard stone on either side of her. Her palms were stung by the icy rock. ‘No! No!’
‘We’ll find another way,’ Maren hissed to her.
Back outside, dark clouds were billowing in the inky sky, and the wind was moaning in warning.
‘We should go, the storm is coming back,’ Zare warned. ‘Morten needs his boat. Besides, we can’t get trapped on the island. We’ll either freeze or get caught.’
Ingeborg looked up at Vardøhus fortress, at the cracks and crannies of the old wall. She pressed her hands against it, seeking with her fingers. There, right in front of her, was a foothold. She looked up to see more tiny ledges all the way up the fortress walls.
Axell’s words from summers past surfaced in her mind. Imagine you are a cat.
‘I can climb the wall,’ she said, turning to Zare.
He looked at her, aghast. ‘You will fall and die,’ he said, roughly. ‘You’re not strong enough, Ingeborg.’
But Maren was by her side and squeezed her hand in hers. ‘Yes, she is, and I will climb it too. We will manage it.’
He looked at the girls, incredulous.
‘Go back and mind the boat,’ Maren said, a command in her tone.
Zare shook his head. ‘This is madness.’
‘I have climbed worse,’ Ingeborg said, thinking of the bird cliffs at Ekkerøy. ‘If we don’t return in time, get back to Morten and his family on the other side.’
He reached out and placed a hand on her arm. ‘Don’t do it, Ingeborg.’
‘I have to.’
He looked into her eyes and she could see he understood, his expression softening in sympathy. ‘Very well, I would do the same for my mother. But I can’t wait long. The storm is coming, and I will not let them throw me in their dingy cells!’
Ingeborg faced the fortress walls again, Maren by her side. She slackened the limbs of her body before gathering them up, taking a deep breath, inhaling her strength. With a rush of energy, she pulled herself up, digging her fingers in and clinging to the rough wall. Then she found her footing and hoisted herself up again. Never look down.
Maren was just below her. She could hear the breath of her exertion.
Ingeborg felt her way with her senses. She slunk up the fortress walls with a sense of something other than herself within her. Her nails felt as if they were claws as they dug in; she was stuck so fast to the wall. She knew instinctively she would not fall.
The wind was tugging at her but still she kept on climbing. At last, she had reached the top, and slipped over the other side. She peered over the battlements to see where Maren was, but she saw nothing. Her stomach lurched, but then a voice whispered by her side.
‘We are here, my feline friend,’ Maren said, grinning at her.
Ingeborg took one last look from where they came. Saw the tiny figure of Zare waiting by the boat as the sinking winter sun hidden beneath the horizon burned magenta reflections upon the snow; a line of crimson bleeding heavenwards, pooling mauve upon the sea before succumbing to utter darkness.
The two girls crouched down by the side of one of the cannons to shelter from the rising wind. It was so rusted and iced up Ingeborg doubted it had ever been used.
‘What do we do now?’ Maren asked her, green eyes bright with anticipation. She did not appear to be at all afraid.
Ingeborg looked below them. It was not quite complete darkness yet, and there were torches lit in braziers around the inner walls of the fortress casting shadows and light. There was the soldiers’ turf hut. She could hear the low mumble of voices, smell the peat fire. To one side of the hut was the castle itself. She spied the lit square of one small window, but the rest of the building was in darkness. She turned her head and saw the gatehouse and the fortress gates. This would be where they would have to get out, unless they could find a rope and tie it to the top of the battlements. Why had they not thought to bring a rope?
‘Look, is that the witches’ hole?’ Maren whispered, pointing past the gatehouse and a long, low house to a tiny, windowless hut.
‘It looks desperate,’ Ingeborg said.
Maren pulled Ingeborg around to look out across the island. ‘Do you see the jut of land, past where Zare waits for us?’
Ingeborg nodded.
‘Well, that is Stegelsnes, the execution site. It was where my mother was burned.’
Ingeborg’s chest constricted again. She couldn’t conceive the same end for her own mother.
‘One of us needs to go to the gatehouse and try to get the key to open the castle gates,’ she said to Maren. ‘And the other to somehow get into the witches’ hole.’
‘Two rather impossible tasks,’ Maren said, raising her eyebrows, but she didn’t seem disheartened. ‘I will get the gatehouse key.’
As they whispered, there was movement in the courtyard below. The door to the witches’ hole opened. To Ingeborg’s surprise, it was not a soldier who exited, but a woman, tall and straight-backed. The woman locked the door to the witches’ hole and slipped the key into a pocket beneath her cape. The girls watched her as she daintily picked her way across the snow and entered the low longhouse.
‘Well, there’s the way into the witches’ hole,’ Maren said to her.
‘I will go and get the key from her,’ Ingeborg said. She didn’t know how she would do it, or who else was in the longhouse, but it seemed an easier proposition than tackling the soldiers.
They clambered down the steps to the courtyard. The icy wind cut into them, but Ingeborg was glad because it meant the soldiers were unlikely to venture out.
Ingeborg turned to Maren to tell her to be careful, but she had quite disappeared. The courtyard was empty apart from a large rat scampering across it.
Ingeborg slipped across the icy ground to the low longhouse. A thin spiral of smoke spun up from its sagging roof. She put her hand upon the door and pushed it open.
Chapter 23
Anna
I was your secret mistress. We met clandestinely in the places we loved: the royal library, the botanical gardens, the pear orchard, in my father’s cabinet of curiosities – gazing up at the snarl of the baby polar bear as your long, dark hair cascaded over my naked breasts.
Four years I waited for the invitation to attend court at the palace as your official mistress, but it never came.
Four years is a long time for one so young but, now, it is but a blink. Ah, how naive and in thrall to you I was, for surely if you had instructed me to meet you in the chicken coop I would have!
You ate up every little morsel of me, from my toes to the crown of my head, into my loins, my heart, and every corner of my mind. I lived and breathed for my prince, awaiting the daily arrival of a little square of parchment and your royal seal. Breaking open your love letters, your words of endearment intoxicated me, and I would run breathless to our meeting point, with only time to dab my breast with rose oil. How dizzy I became in our embraces, as you peeled me from my gown, my petticoats, and buried yourself in my young flesh.
I was not taken advantage of: I wanted you. It is shocking for me to acknowledge the truth of this, but I know well the lasciviousness a woman can let herself surrender to. I was possessed by the desire for coupling, for as soon as I returned home, I craved our next tryst.
My king, I wonder, are your memories as crystal-clear as mine?
I think not, for you said such sweet, loving words to me, and held me with much affection when I was a young woman. And you were so different the time we saw each other last, when you had become quite another man. I may look different for my skin is duller, my waist thickened, and my black hair streaked with grey, but inside I have never stopped being the young girl in love with her prince. I had separated the sins of the flesh from the pure love embedded in my heart.
Here on my own, with little to distract me, I brood too much upon those early years. I wonder, had our circumstances been different, could I have become as Margrethe Pape, your official mistress and mother to your illegitimate son? But in the end even Margrethe Pape was cast aside for your marriage to Sophie Amalie of Brunswick-Luneberg, not a woman to cross as your sister Leonora Christina knows so well.
Is Queen Sophie Amalie behind my unjust exile too? I wonder, for she looked upon me with much disdain when I met her in later years. But that was when I had been long-gone from Copenhagen, and I was then married, too.
Chapter 24
Ingeborg
In the longhouse, Ingeborg smelt the woman first – the cloying scent of rose oil mixed with turf smoke filled her nostrils – but she couldn’t see a soul. Smoke belched from the sputtering fire, filling the rafters until it slunk out of the smoke hole. There was a lopsided table with a lantern upon it, two rickety stools, and one straight-backed chair with a threadbare tapestry cushion. All were positioned by a tiny window that was sealed tightly with a flap, as if grasping for what little light might enter the room.
Where was the woman with the key? On the other side of the chamber there was a door, ajar. Ingeborg crept across the uneven floorboards, and gently pushed it open.
The woman had her back to her and was kneeling by an opened trunk. She withdrew a small hardback book from it and placed it upon the floor, before slowly standing up. It was as she turned around that she saw Ingeborg and gave a little start in fright.
Ingeborg imagined she must look very strange indeed in the eyes of this woman – half-girl, half-boy in her breeches and buckled skirt, with her big hat and wet brown hair framing her face in straggles. In contrast, Ingeborg could see this was no ordinary woman, but one of noble birth. Although she was possibly not much younger than Widow Krog, she held herself as tall as a young woman, and Ingeborg could see a glimmer of crow-black hair beneath her white coif. Her slender frame was bodiced in a sumptuous blue gown, and the skin upon her cheeks was pale and smooth. But a faint nest of creases around the corner of each of her eyes belied her years.
‘Who are you?’ she asked in an imperious voice. ‘And what are you doing in my chamber?’
‘No harm will come to you. Just give me the key,’ Ingeborg said, sounding more courageous than she felt. Her heart was rattling against her chest, and her hands were clammy, but she was determined not to show her fear to this grand lady. She must get the key.
The woman arched her eyebrows. ‘What key?’ she challenged Ingeborg.
‘The one in your pocket, under your skirt.’
‘And why would I do such a thing?’ she said. ‘Tell me who you are.’
Ingeborg drew Axell’s small hunting knife from her belt and brandished it before her as she took a step forward, but the woman didn’t look afraid. ‘That is none of your concern. For the last time, give me the key.’ Ingeborg brought the tip of the knife to the soft pulsing throat of the gentlewoman.
‘Very well,’ the woman muttered.
Ingeborg lowered the knife as the woman pulled the key out of her pocket. She fingered it as if to goad Ingeborg.
‘Give it here.’ Ingeborg was close enough to the woman to see that her eyes were icy as the glaciers. She brought the hunting knife back up to the woman’s slender throat praying she would not have to use it.
‘It will not end well,’ the woman said, handing it to her. ‘How do you think you will get away?’
As she spoke, Ingeborg heard movement in the other chamber. She backed away through the door and was relieved to see Maren swinging the big fortress gate key in her hand.
‘Easy. The dozy old bailiff was fast asleep!’ Maren sighed. ‘I was tempted to cut his throat but thought it would take too much time.’ She looked very pleased with herself as she swung the big key by her side.
‘You!’ The noblewoman had followed Ingeborg and now she stood, pointing at Maren. ‘I saw you!’ she declared. ‘With the lynx!’
Maren grinned at the woman. ‘That was indeed I!’
Ingeborg had no idea how Maren could know this woman, but she didn’t have time to find out. ‘Tie her to the chair,’ she said to Maren.
‘You tried to kill me.’ The woman continued to address Maren.
‘Not you, mistress!’ Maren said, wrenching off her belt and strapping the woman to the old rickety chair.
At that moment, the door to the longhouse opened again, and a maid carrying a stack of turf stood on the threshold. She gave a small scream, dropped the turf, and ran shouting from the longhouse.
‘Flee, girls,’ the noblewoman whispered.
Ingeborg and Maren tore out of the longhouse, but already the soldiers were streaming from their hut with muskets in their hands. Lockhert came charging from the gatehouse, his face purple with fury.
‘We can still escape, Ingeborg,’ Maren whispered to her.
Ingeborg couldn’t imagine how. They were surrounded. ‘I’m not leaving my mother.’
‘Very well, we stay,’ Maren said, as if they had a choice.
Ingeborg dropped her small knife. What good was it against a musket aimed right for her heart?
A soldier grabbed her and pulled her arms tight about her back. Her shoulders were wrenched, and Ingeborg cried out with pain.
Bailiff Lockhert grasped Maren by her long black hair while snatching the gate key from her hand. He slapped her so hard she was flung to the icy ground.
The maid fled back into the longhouse.
‘What are you two thieving bitches up to?’ Lockhert snarled at them. Then he looked at Ingeborg’s face. ‘I recognise you! You’re the witch Sigvaldsdatter’s daughter.’
Ingeborg shook her head, refusing to answer.
The noblewoman stepped from the longhouse, having been freed by her maid. She walked towards them. The key was still tucked into Ingeborg’s palm, behind her back. The woman circled her and then Ingeborg felt the woman’s fingers on her clenched fists prising the key out. She circled her again once she had the key, slipping it back under her skirts into her hidden pocket.
