“I will go,” Kathleen whispered mutinously. “And she’ll not stop me.”
❖
Tony Veringer frowned as he stood at the window of his room, looking out on the moonlit towers of the Hold. Molly’s wailing filled him with frustration. If there were only some way to communicate with her and find out what dire event was soon to take place. Only Juliet could do that, but he would not dream of waking Juliet. He did not want his sister communing with such dark powers. She must have nothing to mar her sunny childhood, such a little treasure she was with her corn-gold hair and those deep blue eyes, both inherited from Mama.
Thinking of his mother, Tony frowned. Of recent years, she had become so unhappy, so haunted. By what? The deaths of his siblings? The indifference of his father? Tony’s frown deepened. He loved his father devotedly but he wished that he would be kinder to his mother. He spoke to her so brusquely, and Tony wondered if only he were aware of how often his father avoided looking directly at her immense body. He did not think that even his mother knew about that. She was too wrapped up in some private misery. She practically never laughed as she had when he was little. Oh, she had been beautiful then. It was a pity the younger children had never seen her as he remembered her.
What was preying on her mind?
The hours she spent in chapel were increasing. Sometimes she went in of a morning and did not emerge until mid-afternoon. If only she would speak to him. Once he dared to a question her about the terrors he read in her eyes. He would not do so again, for she had fallen wailing to her knees and Ritually beat her breasts while she gasped out that she was accursed for her great sins. Her shrieking had held the same keening sound he was hearing now from the banshee. They had left him no wiser, only with the feeling that inadvertently he had grievously hurt his mother, whom he adored. He adored his whole family. He wanted them to be happy, but how could they be happy with Molly screaming and the cat with her? He had heard that when the cat cried, too, the doom would be particularly dire. His father scoffed at that, but his father also refused to believe in the presence of Molly or her cat. He blamed his wife for instilling the children with her Irish superstitions.
Tony went back to bed, but knew he would not sleep and did not. The dawn was a thin red line across the Eastern horizon when Molly ceased her howling. Tony, tossing restlessly in his bed, heard the sound of hooves on the path leading to the forest and was surprised. It was early for anyone to be abroad. Perhaps, he thought half-humorously, it was a pooka, come galloping out of Ireland especially to bear Molly and her cat back to the O’Neill’s castle where they rightfully belonged. More likely, it was his sister Kathleen on Jenny, bent on escaping a long prayer session in the chapel. He wished he might take his own horse and join her but that would grieve his mother, and this morning she must already be sorely afflicted and would need him at her side in chapel.
❖
Jenny, her eyes wild and burrs in her mane and tail, galloped into the stable without Kathleen, sending all the grooms into a frenzy. Lady Kathleen was a prime favorite with the stable crowd—the grooms, the boys and even with Dobbin, named after a horse and half-witted. Seeing Jenny coining back riderless had made Dobbin drop the two buckets he was carrying to water the horses, sink down in the wet hay and the horse manure and begin to blubber, both fists shoved into his eyes, his whole misshapen body shaking with grief. The grooms were bringing out horses so they could ride and find her or the body, when Kathleen, her elegant new habit mud-stained and with brambles in her hair, came limping in.
Dobbin saw her first and ran screaming to seize the torn hem of her habit and rub it across his face and to jump up and down, making the sounds that passed for speech and which only his mother understood.
David, the head groom, came to her side. “Are you hurt, lass?” he asked. “Lady Kathleen?”
“I’m not hurt, David,” she told him, her lip quivering. “But I... I must find my mother. I have seen... and I... I vow ’tis her fault, my fall... The way she looked at me... and those others... they were... I don’t understand but...” Tears began to roll down her cheeks. “I must find my father!”
“You’ve found him, and what’s amiss and where’s Jenny?” Richard demanded, just having entered the stable.
“Jenny!” Kathleen cried, not answering her father immediately. She looked at David in horror. “Did she not come home?”
“She came home and is in her stall,” he said comfortingly. “She took no hurt, milady.”
“Jenny, Jenny, Jenny.” Kathleen ran to her darling mare’s stall and found her there with her head in a sack of oats and the burrs already combed out of her mane and tail. “Jenny,” she sobbed, kissing the horse’s foam-streaked side.
“Kathleen!” Richard caught his daughter’s hand, pulling her out of the stall and looking anxiously down into her sherry-colored eyes, which were not the same color as those of his brother Fulke, he always assured himself, even now in the midst of his concern for her. “You’ve had a tumble, my dear?”
“It... it... it was she who made me fall,” Kathleen stammered.
“Jenny?”
“No, the small woman... all of them... they pointed at me and said things.” Kathleen lowered her voice. “When I first came upon them, they were all on the ground and they were singing and moving together in an odd way... and they weren’t wearing any clothes. It was like horses when they mate, only they were people. Then... then they saw me and they all shrieked at me... and the small woman pointed and Jenny...”
Richard paled, remembering and not wanting to remember. “Where were they?” he rasped.
“In a... a clearing. There was a fire burning and the small woman came and pointed at Jenny, and she shied and threw me down.” Ever since she had passed her fourteenth birthday, Kathleen had considered herself entirely grown-up but now, as she gasped out the tale of her encounter in the woods, she clung to Richard like a frightened child and wailed because a strange, small, naked woman had glared at her out of wild, wide eyes which seemed to be full of fire and had said incomprehensible words and pointed at her horse. Jenny, who never shied, had done so emitting a high whinny that sounded almost like a human scream, tossing Kathleen from her back and fleeing while all the naked people continued to yell and point at Kathleen. She had run from them further into the woods, stumbling and falling often and twisting her foot, but still she had run, feeling as if they were pursuing her; she still felt as if they must come dashing after her into the stableyard to pluck her from her father’s embrace.
Through kissing, petting and murmuring words of comfort, Richard finally succeeded in calming Kathleen. When she could speak coherently, he asked, “Did this small woman... I mean, was there a cottage anywhere near there? A stone cottage?”
“Yes,” she corroborated excitedly. “I saw it through the trees. I never knew there was a cottage in the woods. Oh, Papa, who is she? She was horrid like a... a witch... and those others... what were they doing?”
Richard, his head packed with visions which had intermittently filled him with horror over the past 19 years, made a great effort to sound unconcerned, calm and even a little amused. “I would not know, my dear, unless I were to see these wonders for myself. As for witches, you know that’s all fancy.”
Kathleen did not argue. She only said, “She was so horrid. She looked at me as if she hated me.” She shivered and repeated something she had heard from her nurse when she was just a wee thing. “She looked as if she were ill-wishing me.”
“Nonsense,” Richard replied bracingly. “I can see you’re monstrously upset, my child, and sure you’ve had a fright and a tumble, but I beg you’ll not brood on it. That woman cannot harm you.”
“Do you know her then, Papa?” Kathleen gazed at him in wonder.
“I’ve some knowledge of her.” Richard strove for a neutral tone. It would not do for his daughter to witness his anger, more than anger—fury, if what he guessed to be taking place was indeed happening.
“Come,
” he urged, “I’ll take you to your room.” As if she were still a baby, Richard lifted Kathleen and bore her inside. That she did not protest or proclaim her nearing adulthood was a measure of how deeply she had been frightened. Richard, remanding her to the care of Mistress MacGowan, the nurse who had cared for all his children, also noted that for once Kathleen seemed to welcome her duckings as the old woman began to tend her.
The spectacle poor Kathleen had witnessed brought to mind bits and pieces of local gossip Richard had heard over the years and dismissed. Two girls from the village had gone to evening service one night and mysteriously disappeared on their way home through the woods.
They were found naked and distraught in a meadow not far from the castle. One died from exposure; the other lived on in a near-mindless stage, unable to account for anything that had happened to her or her friend. Later it was found she was pregnant. She died in childbirth, the babe with her. Gypsies had been seen in the neighborhood, and, as usual, the blame fell upon their bold-eyed men. They were not so kindly treated the next season, but a gypsy girl disappeared, too. She had been discovered dead and also nude. It was generally believed that she had been the victim of some village rowdies bent on reprisals. And yet another girl, turned out of her house for being pregnant, had spoken wildly of being ravished by the devil in the woods.
“Girls... always young girls,” Richard muttered to himself. Was there any connection? He ground his teeth. In his present mood he was glad Catlin had sought the solace of her chapel. With an unusual rush of sympathy for his wife, he decided to keep the tale from her. Going back to Kathleen, he exacted her promise that she would confide nothing of what she had seen to her brothers, sister or mother. It proved easier than he had anticipated to convince Kathleen that she should keep her own counsel. His daughter did not want to think about it, and telling her family would have meant that they might never have stopped mulling over the subject.
After leaving Kathleen, Richard strode back to the stables. He planned to enlist some of his grooms and keepers to lead a raid on Erlina Bell’s cottage—Erlina Bell, who until this moment he had forgotten, or had he merely relegated her to the back of his mind? Unwillingly, he remembered that night. Odd, the several ways it had been brought back to him in the last few hours. There were Catlin’s dreams and Kathleen’s terrors, and he himself had been thinking about it, lying wakeful beside the mountain of flesh Catlin had become.
How would Erlina look?
Thin, he thought. Scrawny, perhaps. Thin women often become bony when they reached middle age. It must have been an unpalatable sight for Kathleen, seeing a bag of bones naked in the woods. Inadvertently, he recalled the Jack o’Diamonds, bare bones buried in consecrated ground in defiance of his mother’s wishes and eliciting a string of curses from her, superstitious old bitch! And Catlin, equally superstitious! He had been unfortunate in his choice of women, he thought bitterly, but why was he dwelling on the past? Because the past was present in the person of Erlina Bell, doing God knows what in the woods!
Who would have thought that when she asked him for the cottage and made him swear she could keep it until... he halted midstride. He had promised her the cottage, and now he was of a mind to thrust her out—on the evidence of a frightened child. He needed more proof than that. He needed to see what might be taking place there for himself. He would enlist the services of only one man, David, whom he could trust. David knew the woods well. His father had been a keeper, shot by a poacher, and his son brought as a mere lad into the Hold because he was good with horses.
They would need to leave before sunup, perhaps long before. The moon was full, and they would not ride but would walk. He continued on his way to the stables, his anger now mixed with a certain avid curiosity which, had he been challenged on it, he most certainly would have denied.
Much to Richard’s surprise, David was reluctant to venture anywhere near the stone house. He knew about it, had seen it as a lad, had even been inside and had also been glad to abide by Richard’s stipulation that that part of the woods was out of bounds. David had been sure that Richard must agree the place was haunted.
“All dusty ’twere ’n dark wi’ weird drawing on the walls, faces’n the like. To look at ’em made you feel all peculiar. An’ bein’ there, you ’eard things.” David did not elaborate but the shudder that shook his husky frame emphasized his fears better than any description he could have provided. David did not shudder easily, Richard knew. His head groom had been one of the lads who helped pluck the fruit of the gallow’s tree and lay old Jack in the ground.
“We’ll not need to enter the cottage,” Richard assured him. “It’s not for that I’m going.”
“I’ve heard...”
“I am sure I’ve heard whatever’s reached your ears, man, and I tell you, there’s no such thing as ghosts.”
David looked patently unconvinced, but typically he agreed to go.
❖
The trees grew high near the stone house. In the bright moonlight, they were dark against it, their long branches lying over its half-shattered roof like spindly but protecting arms. Crouched in the high grass to the side of the cottage, Richard and David watched. They had been there nearly an hour, and though there were dim, flickering lights in the windows, none of them were blue, as David had insisted they would be. In fact, nothing to excite their curiosity had occurred until this moment when two figures in dark-hooded cloaks carried torches out to a clearing just behind their hiding place. It was wide and, in David’s eyes, ominously circular. “Brownies’n bogles’n witches, they do dance in such,” he muttered to Richard.
Somebody must have been doing something in that circle, Richard reasoned, for the grasses were broken and flattened. He did not attribute that condition to David’s cited causes, for he had just seen a flat stone within the circle. It was about six feet long and two feet wide. The word that sped to his mind was “altar.” In the darkness back of his eyes, he saw the table altar of the cavern and its fair burden—the lithe and beautiful body of Catlin O’Neill. The flame of desire flared and flickered out, doused by present reality. Richard glared at the stone, wondering if what he was beginning to suspect could possibly be true.
Beside him, David emitted a long, low whistle. Glancing up, Richard saw a thin man with a fiddle tucked beneath his chin, his body gleaming naked and white under the torchlight and the moon. The music he had begun to play was strangely beguiling. Others poured forth from the cottage. Mentally counting them, Richard found that there were twelve: six men and six women. Leading them was the thirteenth, the small woman. She did not appear to be much more than a girl. Her hair, dark and wavy, flowed over her bare shoulders. Her body was slender and incredibly graceful as she went through the patterns of a whirling, leaping, incredibly sensuous dance, bringing her followers close together in a sort of weaving motion.
David was watching. Richard guessed that the groom must be on fire with a lust he was experiencing himself. The wild music, the naked dancers, the suggestive movements were almost unbearably provocative.
“Take me... take me,” her pleas echoed in his head, as he stared at Erlina Bell, so little changed, so slim, so firm. He had taken her, unable to resist that plea because of the drug. Had she whispered her invitation at this moment, he would need no drugs to comply. Fortunately his anger was as great or possibly even greater than his desire. There was no need to fan the flames of that. She, who had asked for a haven, had brought the madness of Mednenham to his own woods!
“I cannot watch,” David groaned. “I want... I want...” His lean body was tense, his eyes ablaze. He started to crawl forward.
“David!” Richard held him down, gritting his teeth as a long woeful shriek reached them. Under his hand, he felt David relax.
“’Tis a girl,” the groom muttered.
“Very likely.” Richard drew and expelled a long breath as the cry was repeated. A second later she was thrust into view; she was no more than 16. Her hair was long and fair,
her naked body a little plump but shapely. She struggled desperately.
“I know her,” David hissed. “She is Meg MacAlpin, the blacksmith’s oldest lass. I must help.”
“You must stay where you are,” Richard cautioned. “They’d tear you to pieces, man.”
“I’m a match for...” David tried to free himself from Richard’s grasp.
“One’s no match for thirteen,” Richard whispered. His own anger increased as he watched the girl sobbing and struggling. Erlina stepped forward. She held a cup, and fixing her eyes on Meg, she muttered something. The girl suddenly turned passive, staring blankly at her. A moment later, she took the cup and drained it. A silly smile appeared on her face. She started to giggle and continued giggling as two of the men lifted her onto the stone altar.
“God’s guts,” David muttered. “What be that?” Richard’s attention was diverted to a figure that had just dropped its dark cape to reveal the scarlet vestments of a priest beneath the head of a goat!
“’Tis Satan!” David moaned.
“’Tis a mask,” Richard contradicted through gritted teeth. “And I beg you, be silent.”
His warning was not needed. David was silent and rigid with horror as the whole obscene ceremony of the caverns was duplicated, complete with the orgiastic aftermath. Richard found himself acutely depressed. These puerile ceremonies had partially ruined his marriage. Poor Catlin believed the loss of so many babies was her punishment for having participated, however unwillingly, in a similar ritual. Over the years her conviction that she was damned for all eternity had grown. He had been unable to make her believe that she was the victim of a pack of sex-crazed lunatics. He wished that he could bring her here and show her this revolting spectacle, but it was too late. Let her know that such things were actually taking place on the grounds of the Hold and she might very well lose her fragile grip on sanity! He had a long sigh for the Catlin he had known at the beginning of their married life. If anyone ought to be damned for all eternity, he thought bitterly, it should be Sir Francis!
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