Witch Hunt (Witch Finder 2)

by Ruth Warburton

  And then? But he couldn’t think about what lay at the end of his journey – the high walls of Southing, the wreathing web of spells. Rosa. He would think of Rosa – and he would pray that she was still alive.

  The room was in almost complete darkness as Rosa stepped inside, but there was a fire in the grate and as her eyes adjusted she could see a woman lying on her side on the burn-spotted hearthrug, staring into the flames. She said nothing as Rosa entered, closing the door behind her with a quiet click. Only the fire flared up, the logs spitting and crackling, fed by the woman’s magic.

  ‘Mrs Knyvet? Are you awake, ma’am? It’s me, Rosa.’ Rosa spoke very quietly into the deep, rich darkness. The woman said nothing, she just sighed, and the flames in the grate gusted up and settled back. ‘Do you remember? I came earlier. I am the girl . . .’ She stopped. The girl Sebastian wanted to marry. The girl who kissed him. The girl who took his ring and slashed his face, and would not give in.

  The woman didn’t answer. Rosa walked into the darkness, feeling for a chair beside the hearth.

  ‘I saw your picture. It was you, wasn’t it? You were the one with the snake’s-head cane. You murdered a couple, one night in Spitalfields, long ago. Do you remember?’ She shivered, in spite of the heat from the fire. She could feel it flaring in the grate, flickering with the woman’s uncertainty and suspicion.

  ‘What do you want?’ the woman said, and her voice was bitter. ‘Why do you come, raking up the past?’

  ‘Why? Why them? Just a poor man and his wife, and his child who hid under the settle. You dropped your cane, he remembered it.’ He dreamt of it, every night, for fifteen years . . .

  ‘I don’t remember,’ the woman said sullenly. She did not look at Rosa, she only stared into the fire. ‘Rich or poor, they all bleed red.’

  Rosa shuddered.

  ‘Lexton,’ she managed, trying to push away the images that were crowding her head: a sobbing woman, a man bleeding his guts out on to the floor, a child beneath the settle, closing his eyes as the blood pooled on the flags . . . ‘Lexton, their name was. Don’t you remember?’

  The woman said nothing at all. At last Rosa shook her head and got to her feet. She had tried, for Luke’s sake she had tried, but she was not going to get an answer from this shell of a woman. And Sebastian might wake any moment and find her gone. She would be better off making her escape, trying to make her way back to London and free Luke from his prison cell. If he was still alive.

  The thought almost made her choke, and for a moment she stood holding on to the door frame, steadying herself.

  But before she could leave and close the door behind her, the witch-woman raised her head from the hearthrug. Her eyes glittered in the firelight.

  ‘I wore black kid gloves,’ she said, her voice hoarse and yet strangely excited, as if even now the memories thrilled, fifteen-years dimmed though they were. ‘To hide the blood.’

  ‘Why?’ Rosa said, almost in spite of herself. She felt like stopping her ears and slamming the door and trying to expunge the memories of the dark firelit cave from her mind for ever. Part of her felt a desperate pity for the ruined creature crouched in front of the fire, and part of her could barely master her disgust for what she had done, and the still-vivid excitement of those memories. ‘Why them?’

  ‘They were enemies,’ the woman said. She picked up a coal from the fire and poured it from hand to hand, the flames spitting as she did. There was a smell of burning flesh, and Rosa gagged and put a hand to her mouth. ‘I did it for my husband, for my son. Outwith! He was no outwith. I could see in his eyes as he walked around the factory, asking his impertinent questions. He knew.’

  Rosa’s blood seemed to freeze.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘He knew,’ she repeated sullenly. ‘Knyvet laughed, said he was a poor fool of an outwith, and to let him write his stupid article; we would sue the publication and they would lose every penny. But he was no outwith. I don’t know what he was – he was no witch either. But whatever he was, he knew. He could see the spells, the bindings – I saw it in the way that he looked at the machines, at me.’

  He knew. The words pounded in Rosa’s head. He knew. As Luke had known.

  ‘He was going to expose the conditions at the match factory,’ Rosa whispered, ‘wasn’t he? And so you killed him.’

  ‘No one is allowed to stand against us.’ The woman flicked the coal at Rosa’s feet, so that she had to jump back or risk being burnt. Then she picked up another, clenching it in her fist. When she breathed, smoke came from her lips. Rosa remembered Cassie’s panic and she took another step back, into the corridor. She knew she had to slam the door, but she could not. She could not bring herself to do it, to trap the woman back into her dark prison cell, as she herself had been trapped just hours before.

  ‘Mrs Knyvet, please, be calm,’ she begged.

  The woman looked up at her and there were flames in her eyes, flames as bright as gold that seemed to glow in the darkness.

  ‘Calm?’ the woman said. She laughed, a terrible sound that made Rosa think of someone screaming in pain.

  And then she threw back her head and roared.

  A wall of flame came blasting from her lips. Rosa smelt the stench of scorching wood, of burning skin and hair. She heard a scream – her own? And she flung every particle of magic that she possessed into a huge shield, trying to keep the flames inside the room, away from the corridor, away from her own skin.

  Dimly, through the crackle of burning wood and the blaze of fire and smoke, she could see Sebastian’s mother standing in the centre of the flames, and hear the scream of her laugh.

  Oh God, what have I done! she thought.

  She picked up her skirts and ran.

  The snow was driving hard in Luke’s face as he came over the top of the Downs and began the slippy, perilous descent to Southing village. He was exhausted and so was Castor. Neither of them would have lasted another five miles, but he did not need to travel five miles. The fingerpost said Southing – 1¼ miles.

  Please, he found himself thinking, in time with Castor’s plodding hooves. Please. Please. Please.

  Please let him get there. Please let this night be over and the pain in his ribs cease. And above all – please let Rosa be alive. For all Sebastian’s talk of marriage, Luke couldn’t shake the suspicion that what he had in mind was a colder bed and a grave cloth instead of a bridal gown. He had tried to burn Rosa in the factory in Brick Lane. He wanted her, yes. But he could not afford for her ever to leave Southing. And there was only one sure way to accomplish that. If he married Rosa, it would not be for long.

  Please . . . Oh, Rosa, wait for me. Stay alive . . .

  And then, coming down the Beacon, he felt it, like a punch to the chest, a burning smack that made him catch at Castor’s reins and sent the horse stumbling in the slushing snow. He caught himself and pulled Castor up, his heart beating fast and hard as they stood looking into the swirling snow.

  There was nothing there, nothing but the darkness shadowed by the moon and the close-clustered trees that lined the road. But there was no mistaking what he had felt; a huge buffeting surge of magic, from somewhere close. And not just any magic – Rosa’s. It burnt in his chest, like a brand in his flesh, and he knew that she was very near and that she was fighting for her life. But she was alive. And more than that – she had her magic back.

  ‘Come on, boy!’ He put his heels to Castor’s side, kicking the poor, tired horse into a trot. ‘Come on, we’re nearly there. Come on.’

  Wait for me, he thought grimly. Hang on, Rosa. I’m coming.

  ‘Cassie!’ Rosa screamed. She pounded against the green baize door, feeling the spells bend and groan beneath the onslaught, but not break. ‘Cassie! The house is burning! Unlock the door! Get the servants out!’

  Could Cassie hear her? She remembered the huge thickness of the door, its muffling spells. She felt a sob rise in her throat and then fought it down. Cassie! she screamed inside
her head. But the only voice she heard was the one she longed to hear, but knew could not be real. Luke’s.

  Hang on, Rosa. I’m coming.

  If only it were true. But he was in a cell in London. And unless she got out of here, he would rot there for ever.

  There was a crash, breaking glass, and the reflection of flames flickered against the corridor wallpaper as the fire blazed higher, fanned by the fresh air.

  She clenched her fists.

  She must get out.

  If only I had the Grimoire, she thought despairingly, and then she shook her head angrily. No. She didn’t need the Grimoire any more than she needed the locket she had sold to Phoebe. Papa’s love for her, her memories of him, none of that was in the locket, just like her childhood happiness was not in the bricks and stones of Matchenham. They were inside her. In the same deep well where her magic lay. Yes, she had thought of Papa as she traced the locket’s curlicues with her fingertips, but it was not the source of her memories. It was just a prop, a crutch.

  She remembered Mama’s words to her when she was a little girl: If you want something badly enough, if you will give enough of yourself, it will come.

  She ran back into the bedroom, past Sebastian, stirring on the hearthrug, to feel in the pocket of her old, stained dress, where a scrap of paper lay. ‘Charles Darwin, crossed with a potato,’ Alexis had said, but to Rosa it would always be Papa, with his soft dark beard and his soft, dark eyes.

  She touched her lips to the paper and held it in her hand for a long moment, and then she ran out into the corridor, to stand in front of the massive, spell-locked door.

  ‘Ætýne,’ she whispered, and then louder. ‘Ætýne!’

  She clenched her fist around the scrap of paper, feeling it grow wet with her sweat. I want this. I want to get out. I want to save Luke, and Cassie, and my own life.

  ‘Ætýne!’

  She felt the flames at her back. They were creeping along the skirting board of the hallway now, licking at the floorboards.

  She opened her hand and she flung the paper at the flames.

  I will give you anything. Anything.

  ‘Ætýne!’ she screamed, her voice swallowed in the roar of the flames coming from Sebastian’s mother’s room.

  And the door sprang open.

  The house was quite dark, but the front door gave beneath Luke’s stiff fingers and he stumbled into the vaulted, shadowy hallway.

  It was dark, but not silent. He stood for a moment panting, expecting to hear running footsteps, servants. But nothing. Only the faint sound of pattering snow against the panes. And from above, something far more worrying. The sound of . . . could it be . . . flames?

  The air smelt of smoke.

  ‘Rosa!’ he called, his voice shockingly loud in the echoing hall. The sound bounced back at him from the high stone ceiling: sa! sa! sa! ‘Rosa!’ he shouted again.

  And then – from somewhere high above, he heard an answering shout.

  ‘Luke?’

  And then there she was – running along the upper landing and down, down, down the stairs, like a ghost in pale lace that fluttered in the smoky darkness. There were smuts on her face and her hair had come out of its pins and streamed out like flames in the darkness. Her magic blazed – so bright he would almost have shielded his eyes, except that he could not look away from her face.

  ‘Rosa . . .’ His voice was a croak, his throat suddenly tight with wanting and a desperate, painful relief.

  ‘Luke! Is it really you? How? How?’

  She came running into his arms, half laughing, half sobbing, and then her lips were on his, and her hands were at his face, kissing and then pulling back to look again, her fingers digging into his shoulders so hard it was almost painful, as if she couldn’t believe he were really here, really in her arms.

  He kissed her back, her lips, her throat, her temples, everywhere his lips could reach, trying to ignore the roaring pain in his ribs. But he couldn’t suppress a gasp when she flung her arms around him in a fierce embrace.

  For a second the pain was so fierce he could hardly speak, and he knew from the way she fell back, her face white and horrified, that it must have shown in his face.

  ‘S’all right,’ he managed, putting a hand to where his rib clicked and ground. ‘I’m . . . s’just a rib. Don’t – don’t crush it. I’m all right.’

  ‘Let me heal you!’ She put out a hand, but he shied away.

  ‘Not now.’ His breath was still coming quick with the aftermath of the pain. ‘When we’re away.’

  ‘Away?’

  ‘I’ve got Castor outside.’

  ‘But – but, Luke, I can’t.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Cassie. She’s upstairs. The house is burning.’

  So it was true. He looked upwards.

  ‘I must go and find her. I must!’

  ‘She’s a witch,’ he said, and his voice sounded brutal in his own ears, but it was the truth, wasn’t it? ‘She can save her own skin.’

  ‘She’s blind, Luke!’

  ‘So? She’s still got magic.’

  ‘The fire, it’s my fault! You don’t understand – I went to see Sebastian’s mother – I left her room unlocked. It’s her – she’s burning the house and if Cassie dies, it’s all my fault. I have to get her out. And the maids – we must warn them!’

  He clenched his teeth, feeling the tiredness in his muscles and the scream of his rib. He’d come so far . . .

  He thought of William, lying on the floor of the abattoir. He thought of all he had lost. He could taste the freshness of the air outside, the sweetness of Rosa in the saddle next to him. He thought of them riding into the night, in the silence, together. It was like a mirage, just beyond his fingertips.

  ‘I’m going back,’ Rosa said. Her face was streaked with smuts and she looked as white as a ghost in the moonlight that filtered through the unshuttered windows, but her expression was resolute. ‘You stay here, outside with Castor. Wait for me.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you’re hurt—’

  ‘No,’ he said again, his teeth gritted against the pain. ‘No. I’ve lost you too many times. Not again. We go together.’

  She hesitated . . . and then nodded and stretched out her hand. He took it in the darkness, and together they ran up the thick-carpeted stairs, towards the sound of the fire. At the landing they met a housemaid coming the other way in her nightgown and shawl, her face pale and frightened.

  Rosa grabbed her arm as they passed.

  ‘Are there others – other maids? Where’s Miss Cassandra?’

  ‘Let me go!’ the maid cried. She tried to tug her arm free, her magic crackling, thin and pale with fear.

  ‘What about the others?’ Rosa hung on like grim death.

  ‘Cook’s gone down to the village with the head footman. I’m the only one here. Let me go!’ She pulled her arm free and ran down the rest of the stairs.

  ‘Miss Cassandra?’ Rosa cried after her, but she was gone, out into the snow.

  ‘Cassie!’ Rosa shouted again. She had no idea where Cassie’s bedroom was, and it felt as if they’d been wandering the corridors of Southing for hours, past rooms with furniture shrouded like ghosts against the dust, and whole wings closed off for the winter.

  ‘Cassie!’ She shut her eyes, throwing out her magic into the darkness, but all she could see were the silent, empty rooms, dark grates, stripped beds.

  ‘Maybe she’s gone,’ Luke said, and she could hear the hope in his voice. ‘Maybe she smelt the smoke and got out. We should look outside, check we’re not hunting for a bird that’s flown the coop.’

  Rosa wanted to believe him, but she couldn’t. It didn’t seem in Cassie’s character to flee the house when her mother and brother were still inside.

  ‘No,’ she said stubbornly. ‘She wouldn’t have gone without checking on her mother. She must be asleep, or not have heard the fire.’

  But the noise of the flames was now so loud that wa
s beginning to seem implausible too. Rosa shouted again and, when they stopped to listen for an answering cry from Cassie, they could hear the roar and crackle coming from the other wing and see the flames reflecting back from the snow-covered lawn.

  Still, Luke went to the window, peering out into the falling snow. He stood with his hands either side of the frame, his shape silhouetted against the dim glow of the snow, and she took a breath. There was no time for this now – they should be going after Cassie, or getting out, saving their skins. But it might be now – or never.

  ‘Luke, I found out something. About – about your parents.’

  He turned back. She wished she could see his eyes, but they were shadowed.

  ‘They died—’ Rosa said, then she choked. She forced herself on. ‘They died because your father was a good man. He – he was a . . .’ She stopped, searching for the word. What was Luke? Not a witch finder, with its cruel associations of burning and hanging and breaking, not any more. But something more – a man who could perceive magic, and resist a spell. ‘He could see, Luke, just like you. And was trying to expose the practices at the factory. He was a journalist – isn’t that right? And he went to the match factory and threatened them, threatened to write an article. And so . . .’ She stopped. She could not say the words, the horror that Luke had lived with and grown up with all these years. He had lived with that memory all his life, and she could not even say it.

  ‘So he killed them?’ Luke’s face was very white. ‘Sebastian’s father killed ’em – my father for what he planned and my mother because she knew? Is that right?’

  ‘Not Sebastian’s father.’ She swallowed. ‘His mother.’

  ‘His mother? A woman? But – but . . .’

  He stopped, his face quite blank and white as he stared at something in the middle distance, and Rosa knew that he was reliving it again, seeing the scene in his mind’s eye. Hearing the crack of bone and the splat of blood on the floor. Seeing the black glove and the rolling cane . . . and realizing that it could be true – that he had never seen the witch’s face. That it could have been a woman all along.