A Fever of the Blood

by Oscar de Muriel

  ‘Burn it all.’

  The cloaked women advanced, hurling their green and red torches at the shattered windows. Mrs Greenwood cried out in terror, as did her maid. I did not hear her husband, or Jed or Bertha.

  As the flames began to spread the snow on the main road glowed. I had a perfect view of the entourage as they left: the women’s cloaks were not rags but fine black velvet, and the men’s horses were some of the finest beasts I’d ever seen, just like the ones that pulled the carriage away. I looked about, but McGray was gone and I could not tell what they’d done with him.

  The fire advanced swiftly, but I only realized it when the smell of charred wood reached my nostrils. Suddenly I felt the floor hot through my shoes. The building was on fire, I thought with a wave of fear, and I was locked in that room.

  ‘It was the witches!’ somebody shouted from the street, followed by many other panicked voices, yet nobody came to help. How could they leave their neighbours to their fate?

  You are on your own, Ian.

  I threw myself against the door, again and again, but it was solid oak, with large, thick hinges. When my shoulders were sore I kicked repeatedly, but to no avail. Even one of the witches’ burly guards would have struggled.

  There was a burst of flames towering as high as my window, lighting up the bedroom as if it were midday. Luckily it was just a flash, but it cracked the window glass and I felt its heat as if I’d briefly opened a furnace.

  ‘Death by fire …’ I muttered, despair taking hold of me. I looked out through the window.

  The witches and their men were now just a faint cluster of sparks in the distance. Only then did people flock out of their houses. The villagers ran about like crazed ants, calling for water and throwing snow at the windows.

  ‘Mr Greenwood!’ someone shouted, but there was no reply.

  I pictured them all lying on the floor, the flames licking at their lifeless bodies – the keys to my room next to them, now red hot.

  There was smoke coming through the shattered glass, making my eyes sting as I watched the mayhem down below. All the village men were still away, so I saw mostly elderly men, a few women and young children, perhaps as terrified as I was, and their water buckets and their fistfuls of snow seemed a pathetic response.

  I had an awful image of my skin charring and blistering, my eyeballs boiling, and the fear made my chest ache. Then I looked at the window’s metal frame and immediately made up my mind: I’d rather jump and break all my bones on the pebbled street than meet such an excruciating death.

  The pane’s diamond lattice was too small for even a baby to pass through. I looked for anything in the room I could use to break it. All I could find was a long candle holder made of pewter, and I banged the life out of those frames.

  ‘There’s someone up there!’ people shouted as they saw the glass shards raining down.

  A series of coughs racked my body. The smoke was now so dense I could barely see outside.

  Through my panic I became aware of a lone rider galloping into Slaidburn. With the smoke and my teary eyes I could not make out any detail, but I heard exclamations of fear as the people made way for the horse.

  ‘Oh no …’

  I hit the lead with renewed strength, finally bending the metal, sweat trickling down my forehead and back.

  The rider halted by the entrance, nobody daring to speak or even look at him. He drew something out of his breast pocket, which must have been a gun, for everyone yelped and the man went inside without hindrance.

  An instant later I saw Mrs Greenwood dashing out, bending double and coughing. The next thing I heard was banging on my room’s door, three loud, insistent thuds, and then a gunshot that sent the latch flying.

  The man threw the door wide, splinters scattering everywhere, and it was as if someone had opened the entrance to hell. A blast of unbearable heat, closely followed by a cloud of heavy, black smoke, entered the room. I took a breath, but the singeing hot air was itself like fire and I began to choke.

  The corridor was brightly lit, and against that light I saw the dark, tall figure of the man we’d been chasing all along.

  ‘You!’ I roared.

  ‘Follow me or you’re dead.’

  I crouched, backing away, and Lord Ardglass grasped my arm and pulled, but I instinctively resisted. His eyes were bloodshot.

  ‘You have seconds to decide, boy! I will not die for you.’

  Indeed I had no choice. We sprinted out of the room and on to the staircase, which had already caught fire in places. The flames danced and the smoke curled upwards. Joel dragged me down those stairs, our shoulders brushing the ignited walls more than once, the wooden steps cracking under our feet. It was so hot I could not tell whether my skin burned or not, let alone register what was happening beyond the banisters.

  I saw the entrance as a black square in the pure blaze, and focused all my thoughts on getting there, counting each painful step. I heard sizzling that might have come from Joel’s clothes, or my hair, or anywhere. That nasty sound injected a terrible fear that propelled me forwards. Suddenly I found myself in the dark outdoors, the chilly air hitting me but failing to dissipate the infernal heat my face had absorbed.

  There was no time even to look at the frightened crowd, for Joel pressed his gun against my neck, so hard I thought it would pierce my skin.

  ‘To the horse,’ he snapped, and he pushed me towards the animal, which stood strangely still amidst the surrounding mayhem. I saw Joel’s leather bag, embossed with that decorated A, tied to the saddle.

  I had to jump on to the horse and Joel mounted behind me.

  ‘Ride,’ he ordered, and pushed the gun into my flesh even harder. ‘Try anything and I will empty this into your neck.’

  I spurred on the horse. I had no chance to look back, no chance to see what had happened to any of the people in the inn. I could not even glance at the building or see whether the fire had spread to the adjacent houses.

  As I galloped away from the village the world became darker and colder, and I felt as if we were falling into an immense, black abyss.

  36

  As soon as the lights from the village had completely faded Joel punched me in the back and pressed the barrel against my neck a little harder. He barked in my ear: ‘What did they do to Caroline?’

  ‘They took her with them.’

  ‘I know that much. Did they harm her?’

  ‘I cannot tell,’ was my honest answer. ‘From where I stood it looked as though they used laudanum to sedate her.’

  ‘A bag over her head?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Joel’s voice became even more strained. ‘They must want to play with her before …’

  He did not finish that sentence.

  ‘They wanted to know where you were going,’ I snorted. ‘Hardly a surprise, since you have been killing them by the day.’

  After that I tried to ask questions, but every time I uttered a word Joel punched my spine again.

  We rode almost blindly for more than two hours. The crescent moon could not be seen; the scant light came from the few stars that were not concealed by thick clouds. Nevertheless, Joel seemed to anticipate every bend and corner on those narrow country roads, pulling the reins himself whenever we needed to turn. Although we were going south-east we never saw or heard the witches’ procession; perhaps Joel was purposely taking a path to avoid them.

  In the dim light I finally saw the silver outline of a long, snowy mount, rising from a gentle slope in the east, and then breaking into a sharp precipice in the west. It was a solitary hill, its summit the highest point on the horizon. Needless to say I was looking at Pendle Hill, the place Joel had been heading for all along. I could not count how many times I’d said I would never go to that spot, yet I had inescapably gravitated towards it.

  We were a couple of miles from the hill when the horse began to pant in exhaustion. Joel reined in next to the ruins of a low stone wall. A thick ash tree had grown right ne
xt to it, the gnarled bark almost embracing the granite.

  Joel hopped off. ‘Climb down, boy,’ he commanded. ‘Let the beast rest.’

  So I did, but did not repress my acrimony. ‘You seem so compassionate … to beasts.’

  Then I thought of McGray’s mount, its breath steaming in the cold, life leaving its fine body.

  He kept the gun aimed at my head, a pair of piercing pupils fixed on mine.

  ‘I’m not compassionate; I pay eye for eye,’ he whispered, making me feel a sudden chill. In the shadows his face looked ghostly grey, like that of a reanimated corpse. Other than his old photograph and that blurry reflection in a window, I had never seen him so close. I could tell that the weak, sickly young man was long gone. Now, in his fifties, his face had hardened, looking leaner and more angular. He did not have many wrinkles, but those few were set like fine yet deep scalpel cuts around his mouth and in between his eyebrows. It was as though his features had been affixed for years in a single, angry frown.

  I could not hold my tongue. ‘Your daughter is hostage to those witches, but I suppose it is all worth it, since you got your idiotic revenge.’

  Joel inhaled through his teeth, hurled himself upon me and I became petrified, assaulted by the memory of the dying Nurse Greenwood. Before I could step back he punched me hard on the cheekbone.

  He was ten times stronger than Caroline, and I staggered, but I still managed to harden my countenance.

  ‘You hit like your daughter.’

  ‘You arrogant little brat,’ he hissed. ‘Don’t come preaching about compassion to me. Those damned harpies ruined my life! My hands never touched their businesses yet they decided to take revenge through me and my folk! When I found Oakley’s little book and realized all the dreadful works they’d been performing on me …’ He nearly gagged, choking on unmitigated rage. ‘The very nurses who were meant to look after me were the ones keeping me insane!’

  ‘Your daughter mentioned how they used cacti, chemicals …’

  ‘Yes. And they even fooled the good Doctor Clouston. That damned Greenwood kept me on the edge. The filthy witch! Pretending to be always sweet and kind to me … I remember thinking she was very pretty.’

  ‘We were wondering … did they use you to keep Lady Anne away from –’

  ‘Cobden Hall? Yes. Greenwood told me before the strychnine worked its magic. My mother wanted that manor back in the family, but that’s been the witches’ lair for centuries. They threatened to kill me, and curse Caroline and do terrible things to my mother if she used the property. Now they run all their affairs from there, and it even bloody suits them that their lair is owned by somebody else. If their trade were ever made public, my mother would be accused of overseeing it. The cunning, scheming harpies! When I learned all this …’ Again the rage took over and he had to pause, snorting and gnashing his teeth. He finally managed to spit the words out. ‘My insides went on fire.’

  I saw his clenched fists and the swollen veins in his neck.

  ‘That is all I can feel these days, boy, this scorching hate in my chest that overtakes any other emotion, and I abhor them for that too. I can picture every torture, every torment inflicted on their flesh, but nothing seems enough. Strychnine poisoning? A few minutes of pain and then it’s all over.’

  He smiled darkly and his final words were bloodcurdling. ‘If they didn’t make me lose my mind with their potions, they have certainly done it now.’

  ‘I regret nothing,’ Joel said, ‘not even Pimblett’s death. He was the worst of all, the perfidious bastard. He pretended to be my friend for years! I shared my deepest secrets with him, not knowing that he was keeping record of my every word and step, storing it all in his twisted little mind until he could wield it all against me. No, boy, I regret nothing.’

  He stared at Pendle Hill, motionless, and I could hear his deep, earnest breaths.

  ‘I do curse myself for dragging Caroline into this,’ he went on. ‘I did all I could to keep her out, but she would not yield. I even threatened her the last time she saw me. All fruitless. She has too much of my blasted mother in her. It seems I was not meant to have a tame daughter.’

  Joel’s lip trembled, for a fleeting instant he looked like the feeble young man in the photograph. He was going to speak again, but then swallowed, as if gulping some words down.

  ‘You could have stopped,’ I said, ‘when you realized she would not back off.’

  Joel shook his head. ‘No, I could not turn back. Precisely because of my Caroline. There is a final detail you don’t know yet. Have you not wondered why these witches went so far against us Ardglasses?’

  I raised my eyebrows, thinking of McGray’s words. ‘As a matter of fact, that is one of the questions I have yearned to ask you. They have devoted a lifetime to harming and spying on you. It all started long before the Cobden Hall issue. Why?’

  Joel nodded. ‘More than a lifetime, boy. This is far beyond a dispute over a mere plot of land. This has spanned generations.’

  ‘Miss Ardglass did tell us that your ancestors lost land to the Oakleys,’ I said, ‘and she mentioned that your family name used to be Ambrose … I happened to come across the grave of an Ambrose, in Lancaster. McGray opened the crypt and we found traces of –’

  ‘Witchcraft?’

  ‘Indeed.’

  Joel exhaled. ‘Damn witches. They took care of every little detail. See, before I tell you more, you must know theirs is not a trifling organization. Witches are very rare, and few know of their existence – a very privileged few.

  ‘Prime ministers, royal families, the wealthiest industrialists, the witches know them all and do jobs for them. They have been receiving messages for Queen Victoria from her dearly departed Albert for nearly thirty years! They are the last vestige of those village healers whom people resorted to in medieval times, back when everyone in this island was a devout Catholic.

  ‘Cobden Hall belonged to a particularly pious family. During the Reformation, when the monasteries were being dismantled and desecrated, they bought all the stones and glass they could. They brought sacred items from the monastic houses in Whalley, Preston, even York. They pretended to have converted, of course, but they kept their old faith zealously. They invited priests to celebrate secret masses … under the very stones that had once made their temples, praying to virgins and crucifixes made from the ingots their old relics had been melted into. They also welcomed the old-fashioned healers, mostly women, and they performed all sorts of jobs: blessings, cleansings, births … even jinxes and clairvoyance.

  ‘Everyone in Lancashire knew what happened inside those walls, but nobody challenged them. This county was fertile ground for the old ways, far from the grip of London and the Reformists. I suppose people found a more immediate comfort grasping rosary beads or staring at the image of a saint than from the more abstract concepts the Lutherans preached about.

  ‘Lord Ambrose was the one person powerful enough to challenge them, and he eventually brought them down. He could never prove their secret Catholic rituals – nobody would testify against them – so he accused them of witchcraft. Lord Ambrose was one of the magistrates who prosecuted many women to please James I, so he had plenty of cases on which to base his lies. Six women went to the gallows, but during their execution they cursed him.

  ‘Well, not only him. In front of the crowd they cursed him and his descendants. Thirteen generations would meet nothing but pain and suffering, and then the Ambrose line would come to an end.

  ‘According to legend, Lord Ambrose died while the women pronounced that very curse. His own son was murdered, allegedly by a resentful mistress, and his grandson was famously insane; he died aged twenty.

  ‘The decades passed, then the centuries, and the curse faded in the people’s memory … but not for the descendants of the surviving witches. They continued to perform jobs for anyone who had enough gold or connections, or indeed anyone who could offer them protection. They lurked underground all this time, pass
ing on their wisdom and learning new tricks, and gaining access to an ever more powerful clientele. And they managed it all by exerting the power of their … reputation.’

  ‘Their reputation?’ I asked.

  ‘Indeed, boy. Curses are most effective when one makes them happen. They had cursed the Ambrose family, and the best way to ensure that people feared them was to ensure that their curses came to fruition.

  ‘They watched us carefully. If you read our family history, you will not find a single happy ending. Untimely deaths abound, and those who did live for longer had miserable, pointless existences. That’s what they intended for me.’

  I frowned, finding the whole story difficult to believe. ‘How could this go on for so long without anybody doing anything about it? Were your relatives not aware of the witches’ interventions?’

  He smiled bitterly. ‘The witches got what they wanted: the Ambroses became known as a jinxed family, and of course there was this family legend about us being the targets of black magic. Not everyone took it seriously, though. I didn’t, until … well, let’s say I should have kept my eyes more widely open.

  ‘We learned a few protection methods, which again were regarded as quirky family lore. We applied them with varying degrees of success. My own mother deploys protection charms in all her properties –’

  ‘Bottles filled with bent nails and foul liquids?’ I put in, and Joel raised a brow.

  ‘So you found them!’

  I wrinkled my nose. ‘I wish we had not.’

  Joel sighed. ‘Indeed, I wish I’d never had to tell you all this. Now my daughter is in their hands … She is the thirteenth, you know. I counted the generations. Now I suspect there is a good reason she has not found a suitor: the witches want our lineage to die with her. Do you understand me now? My Caroline’s death would be the ultimate proof of their powers.’

  Again I could not believe it. ‘Do you mean to say their very powerful “clients” have been following the history of your family? Expecting you to die miserably and your daughter to pass away without offspring?’ He assented. ‘Would they really go to such extremes simply to build up a legend around themselves?’