Caress of a Witch, page 9
part #1 of Darkness Rising - Three Series
9
Your bait of falsehood
Kate found her way back from the graveyard with little difficulty, an unerring sense of direction that had served her well her whole life. Illicit childhood expeditions, and more recent secret forays to taverns far from home – she had always known her way. Even now, caught within the web of the dark and stinking lanes of a strange city, she did not once mistake the road back to the nameless street where her new home stood, windows blank and dark, the brickwork black with dirt.
The front door was unlocked and when she stepped inside, the fire was bright and burning well. Isabella was standing before it, reaching her hands to its warmth. Uncertainty coiled through Kate’s body at the sight of her as she recalled the other woman’s anger and her banishment back to the cold and damp. She said nothing, waiting to know which facet of Isabella was before her now, and the not-knowing set her on edge, pulses quickening.
‘I knew you would find your way back to us,’ Isabella said with a smile, as though genuinely pleased to see her. They were friends again, apparently, and Kate wondered if her transgression had truly been forgiven or if the fortune teller’s warmth was just another game she was playing. ‘Did I not say so?’ She turned and spoke to Nathan who was coming through the back door with an armful of firewood. He slid an uninterested glance over Kate and nodded, then went to the fireplace.
Nathan set down the timber and withdrew, disappearing out to the passage which led to the kitchen. Kate could smell the aroma of cooking. A stew, or soup perhaps, she hoped. The cold morning had made her hungry. She took off her gloves and slid her cloak from her shoulders before she crossed to the hearth to stand with Isabella before the heat of the fire.
‘Where did you go?’ Isabella asked lightly, as though nothing at all had passed between them in the night. She must tread warily, Kate reminded herself. However friendly Isabella chose to be, she must remember the streak of cruelty underneath.
‘I found a graveyard,’ she replied, dismissing it with a shrug. ‘Not far from the High Street.’
Isabella observed her with interest, shrewd eyes alight. ‘You found your way to the Cross Bones? How very interesting.’
‘There was a dog.’
‘Ah,’ Isabella breathed. ‘So I was right.’ She slid her eyes back to the fire. ‘And you followed it? The dog?’
‘It was just there, at the graveyard,’ she answered. ‘It surprised me. I thought someone was watching me.’ It was instinct to keep her new-found connection to herself. Though she had travelled all this way on Isabella’s promise of knowledge, some nascent force inside her chose to keep Tom Wynter to herself. His influence, perhaps? A link being forged through the generations? Her blood had hummed with awareness of the past, and she could still sense his presence, hovering near.
Tom Wynter.
She sounded his name in her head and felt it resonate inside her. It took effort to keep the smile from her face.
Isabella sighed. ‘I hope you’ll tell me the truth, Kate. I cannot help you if you keep things from me. And remember, I will know if you lie. I’ve looked into your past and I can read you like a book.’
It sounded like a threat but Kate smiled her most compliant smile and nodded. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I came with you to learn. You have much to teach me and I am a most eager pupil.’
Isabella regarded her a moment longer, as if considering whether or not to believe her before she decided to smile in return.
‘Good,’ she said, ‘then come with me.’
With a swing of her skirts she swept towards the stairs, her hem a whisper on the boards beyond the edge of the carpet. Kate followed, regretting the growing distance from the fire and the possibility of soup. It was cold on the steps and she wondered where they were going as they passed the row of closed doors along the upstairs passage, past her own room, past Isabella’s, to another staircase that climbed into the dark. She grasped the rail and lifted her skirts free of her feet, following the swish of Isabella’s gown just before her as her eyes struggled to adjust to the gloom. At the head of the stairs Isabella halted. Kate heard the grating of a key in a lock and when the door creaked open on hinges that needed to be oiled, a square of light spilled across the landing. Blinking in the sudden brightness, Kate stepped through the door behind Isabella and found herself in a spacious attic that stretched the whole length of the house. Generous windows at the front stood open to the sky, higher than the roofs across the road so that the watery light of the winter morning soaked the room.
In the centre of the attic was a large oak desk and all around the walls, rows of shelves were covered in books and jars and oddments and fragments of unknown things. Shells and feathers and painted boxes, carved wooden icons, pots, twigs and pine cones, curled-up papers, rocks and pebbles, pieces of coloured glass that flared in the sun. Paintings hung in the spaces in between the shelves – semi-clothed bodies in shocking poses. No wonder Isabella kept them behind a locked door. A heady scent filled the air, utterly different from the musty damp of the rest of house. Sage and frankincense. Cinnamon. Lemon. Herbs hung to dry in bunches from the roof beams, and close to the fireplace was a dark wooden settle spread with bright embroidered cushions. Inhaling deeply, she searched to name the taints of the other herbs and spices but the mix was overwhelming and she couldn’t pick it apart any further. A narrow bed that had been recently slept in stood against the wall in one corner. But in spite of all its wonders and the brightness of the day that streamed in through the windows, an underlying sense of something awry made her suppress a shudder.
An image of the hanged man from her dreams flickered briefly in her thoughts.
Tom Wynter.
His blood in her veins.
‘Welcome to my workshop,’ Isabella said, with a grand gesture to all that surrounded her. ‘Do you like it?’
‘It’s wonderful,’ she replied, and meant it. In spite of her unease it was surely a place to explore, treasures to be found. She crossed the rug to examine one of the pictures. An Oriental couple in sexual congress. A second man behind the first, naked and engorged. Awaiting his turn with the woman? Or about to enter the man? She had never seen such images, never imagined that a man might paint such intimacies. Her belly contracted, her breath quickened.
‘From the East,’ Isabella said, airily. ‘Where Christianity has yet to reach.’
‘A heathen view of sin,’ Kate murmured. She could not tear her eyes away.
There was another, beside it. Two women, one with a large-nosed mask tied to her waist, about to penetrate the other, their mouths open with desire. Isabella came to stand next to her.
‘That’s my favourite,’ she said, and laid a hand on her shoulder. Kate flinched, on edge, and Isabella laughed.
Kate dredged up a smile, and the shadow that hung across the place seemed to lengthen.
‘They are extraordinary,’ she managed. ‘I never knew such pictures existed.’
‘They are very rare and very precious.’ Isabella leaned in closer. ‘They belonged to my father.’ Then, more briskly, ‘We should begin our work.’ She turned away from the paintings and took a stool at the desk, gesturing that Kate should pull up another beside her as she cleared a space amongst the scattered papers and books that sprawled across the surface. Dust motes filled the air and Kate cleared her throat.
‘Do you know anything at all of witchcraft, or of magic?’ Isabella’s tone took on a businesslike edge, different from her usual throaty murmur, and in her fingers she began to mould a piece of wax.
Yet another side to her, Kate thought, one more facet to observe.
‘A little herblore, only,’ she said.
‘To heal?’
‘And to harm. My mother taught we should know all the properties of a plant. Even a poison may heal when used rightly.’
‘Your mother sounds like a wise woman.’
‘She is,’ Kate replied, and shrugged away the twist of guilt that sidled through her. Mary would be beside herself by now, searching and desperate for her missing daughter. She would be fearing the worst, Toby’s death still fresh and raw. She should write to her, Kate thought again, and set her mind at ease.
‘What is that you’re making?’ she asked, gesturing to the soft wax that Isabella was forming into a figure.
‘This?’ The older woman looked down at her hands, as though surprised Kate would ask. ‘’Tis a poppet.’
‘Whose?’ she risked. Her heartbeat quickened with the fear her curiosity would awaken Isabella’s anger. And another fear that ran deeper, not yet acknowledged, that there might be a doll that bore her own image.
‘A woman who owes me something.’
‘May I see?’
Isabella picked up the figure and placed it into Kate’s outstretched hand. It was still warm and soft against her palm and the limbs were not yet complete.
‘What will you do with her when she’s finished?’
‘Call upon the spirits to make her pay, then bury her in some unclean place.’
Poor woman, Kate thought, and dared not ask what it was that she owed. She handed the doll back to Isabella, who continued to shape it between her fingers, deft and precise, even as she looked up to talk to Kate.
‘Tell me more about your family,’ she said. ‘I’d like to know.’
Kate hesitated, as though to share the details of her parents was some kind of betrayal. Then she said, ‘My parents settled in The Hague before I was born. My father was a tailor.’ She paused, the words still hard to form, the memory still raw and painful. ‘He died half a year since,’ she managed to say, ‘and they dragged his body from the harbour one morning. No one knows how it happened, no one saw a thing.’ She had to force her thoughts away from the image the words brought to mind.
‘Unfortunate,’ Isabella said, but she offered no condolences. Perhaps she had not mourned her own father much. ‘And your mother?’
Kate hesitated, conscious of how little she knew of her mother’s past, a closed book. Poor beginnings, Kate had always supposed, that Mary was ashamed of or wanted to forget. Maybe she had been disowned, for the disfigurement of her hand. Kate recalled the childhood taunts against herself for her mother’s six fingers. Child of the Devil, they had called her, Satan’s spawn. And when she was older the boys had asked if they could come and watch one night, while her mother coupled with the Devil.
She said, ‘My mother never spoke of her family. I know nothing of them.’
‘And you weren’t curious enough to ask?’
She shrugged. Her parents’ history had never seemed important before. Till her father’s death, her thoughts had always looked forward, searching for something better, hoping for escape. But now she understood the past contained the future, and she had been a fool not to question it. There was a silence that was heavy with a meaning Kate could not quite grasp and to break it she said, ‘How did you learn your magic?’
Isabella gave Kate an indulgent smile. ‘Witchcraft is innate. A gift from the goddess. But magic – that’s a different thing altogether.’
She nodded, though she hardly understood. Was it witchcraft that had connected her to Tom that morning in the graveyard? Or was it something more simple – the spirit of her ancestor reaching out from the past? She was no longer certain what she believed, but with every beat of her heart she grew surer that Isabella was not to be trusted.
She said, ‘Why are you helping me? What does it matter to you if I come into my own as a …’ she stopped. It was still hard to label herself as witch – it was not a title to carry lightly. Words have power, her father had told her, and she knew the name of witch could bring its bearer great misfortune. She thought again of Tom Wynter and his cousin, the price he had paid. And all the others who had died for their claim to the word in recent years.
Isabella sat back on her stool, placing distance between them. ‘You do not trust me.’ It was not a question.
‘I trust you,’ Kate was quick to answer, though even as she said it she knew it was a lie. Admiration, perhaps. Desire for approval, knowledge, friendship. But even in the unquenchable roil of all those feelings, she knew she dared not trust. ‘Only I wonder why you would choose to bring me here and teach me, when I have so little to give you in return.’
Isabella smiled then, her face softening into the features of a different and gentler person. Another facet.
‘You remind me of myself,’ she said. ‘But you have no one that can teach you, as I had. And it is the way of the world that one generation takes the next in hand – I have no child to whom I can pass on my knowledge. Who then will carry it forward? Should I leave no legacy behind? Should all of my skill and learning die with me? That is not what I wish for. Not at all. So I have chosen you, dear Kate, to be my successor, to teach you what I know so that all I have learned and done does not go to waste.’
It was a pretty speech, and Kate was half-tempted to believe it. She wanted so much to trust this woman who had selected her out of all other women to take under her wing, and she was eager to harness the gift Isabella had glimpsed in her palm. But the doubts still flickered and they had been fanned by Tom Wynter’s presence at the edge of her awareness.
‘I’m honoured,’ she said, with a self-conscious smile, ‘and grateful. I am sure I have a great deal to learn.’
‘Indeed.’ Isabella tilted her head in teacherly approval – Kate as an obedient pupil, willing, acquiescent. ‘Shall we begin?’
10
This blessed plot
The ship’s captain set Mary ashore a few miles downriver from Bankside – a row boat in the dark that dropped her into an unknown place. She was aware of the presence of the hulk of the ship at her back as the boat rowed away, and Rafe’s presence aboard it. A slight twinge of regret sidled through her for what might have been, for she had spent the nights of the voyage sleeping alone and they had said their farewells as friends. She did not expect to see him again.
The night was lit only by the merest sliver of moon, and the stars were all but hidden by a shifting ragged veil of cloud. As the row boat’s lantern diminished, the night settled around her, enclosing her in its mantle. It was silent on the riverbank, just the plash of oars as the boatman rowed back to the ship to reassure her she was not alone in the world. She had never been anywhere so silent and so dark. Her whole life she had lived in a city, surrounded by a press of people, their presence close by, connected.
Guide me, Hecate.
Then, with a shake of her shoulders and a determined tilt of her chin, she set her footsteps onto the path alongside the river to make her way towards London, towards the place she still thought of as home. Walking through what remained of the night, she followed the snaking road westwards in the still, cold air. She saw no one, though twice she glimpsed the silver flit of a fox, eyes gleaming, and once she heard a man’s voice raised in song that drifted across the fields from far away. The sound made her smile, glad to know she was not entirely alone after all.
Slowly, unnoticed at first, the sky began to give up the darkness, soft grey creeping over the heavens as the earth turned its face to meet the sun. The road at Mary’s feet shifted into clearer focus, and the trees and hedges all around her started to reveal their shape. Birds sang to welcome the day and she was aware of an awakening all around her, a change in the vibration, a coming to life.
With the first flicker of the sun behind her, she found a fallen log to sit on and opened the little parcel of food and drink she carried. She had left her belongings on the ship in Rafe’s safekeeping to be delivered to the Cardinal’s Cap, all save the book, which she had slipped inside her bodice. She had been alarmed by his interest in it and though she could think of no good reason for him even to suspect that she was carrying it, she dared not take the chance. It was safer with her, where she could be sure of its whereabouts.
She nibbled at the dry ship’s biscuit without appetite and wet her mouth from the bottle of ale. Then, needing to rest a while, she took out the book to examine it.
Through the years in The Hague she had barely thought of it, its presence locked away in memories she had not allowed herself to visit. Now, running her fingers across the soft smooth leather of the cover, the past began to bubble to the surface. The brothel. The church. The first meeting with Toby. Then Judith stepped across the recollection – Toby’s first, brief wife, married only for the child she carried, and dead soon after at the hands of Alexander as he lusted for the book that Mary held now in her lap. It was hard to imagine that so small a thing could incite such desire – in her hands it lay inert, a simple book. Ancient, perhaps, and valuable for that, but nothing more than a collection of scrawled rituals and symbols, bound in age-worn covers of leather. But Toby had told her once that he could feel the power it possessed each time he touched it, its force vibrating, latent and dangerous.
She opened it to the first page and read again the two names that were inked on the flyleaf.
Tom Wynter.
Toby Chyrche.
Her fingers lingered on the letters of her husband’s name.
Toby.
She formed the name on her lips and smiled as the letters blurred with tears. His passing had left a hole inside her she knew would never fill, a void at her centre. Shutting the book with a snap, she dragged a hand across her eyes to clear them, packed up the remains of her meal, and set off once more on her way through the lightening morning. The time for grief was past.
