The Witch (The Witch Trilogy Book 1)

by Cheryl Potter

  ‘Murderer!’ she hissed, throwing herself at Marsden. He caught her trembling fists and forced her to her knees.

  ‘The word of a witch!’ he breathed. ‘Bound for the gallows.’

  ‘Hold her fast!’ gasped the priest. ‘I have it....’

  Kate knew by the startled mew what the old man had caught. Kitlin was bound to come to her sooner or later. The priest held it up in triumph. Kate wrenched herself free and lunged at the dangling cat. Startled, the old man tottered back against the open door and lost his grip. The young cat arched its back and sprang towards the window, straight into Marsden’s waiting hands. With one practised flick he broke its neck and kitlin’s sleek body dropped on to the flags with a soft thud.

  ‘It will do no more harm,’ said Marsden, flicking the limp bundle with the toe of his boot.

  ‘I-indeed,’ stammered the priest, clutching his forehead with trembling fingers. ‘Dear God ... had I not seen it with my own eyes – it came as a man, every inch the mortal man, save for the vile odour it carried. I heard its step on the floor ... saw it reach for her until you sir, subdued her. Before my very eyes it was transformed into this ... this cat.’ He eased himself down to his knees and looked over the limp animal in horrified fascination.

  ‘Katharine Gurney,’ he cried righteously, ‘confess before your examiners and before Almighty God that this thing was your familiar, that you did fornicate with a demon man and do his evil work. Confess also that you have another familiar – a dog known to you as Jack.’

  Kate folded her arms about her and frowned distractedly. ‘See to it my sheep are tended,’ she murmured. ‘They have had naught but lean grazing these past days‒’ She shrank back from hands that reached for her.

  ‘Only confess,’ insisted the priest.

  ‘Do not fight it, Kate,’ breathed Marsden.

  The old man pushed the open door to and as the latched clicked into its keeper, shook his head and urged, ‘You are doomed, child, there can be no escape. Divest your soul of its evil burden before it is too late.’

  ‘Let me rest one last night in my own bed,’ she pleaded softly. ‘One last night in my mother’s house‒’

  She lay upon her pallet, waiting for fugitive sleep, conscious of Marsden’s sentinel presence at the bedside.

  ‘Why did you choose me?’ she murmured into the void.

  He stretched his interlinked fingers, cracking the knuckles. ‘To give you purpose,’ he answered, ‘to colour your empty existence.’

  ‘You have dealt me destruction.’

  ‘That was your destiny. Better by far to explore brief life to its burning limits than grind on through an eternity of hide-bound vacuity.’

  ‘And the Trenshaw woman, did she reach the burning limits?’ Kate asked coldly. ‘Before you destroyed her?’

  ‘She had no depth,’ he said planting himself heavily beside her on the mattress. ‘She was a body for sale, a willing woman, no more.’

  ‘Did she warrant such savagery? Could you not, for pity’s sake, have finished her off before you buried her?’

  ‘I do not deal in pity.’

  ‘No,’ she agreed. ‘More fool me, that I should always have known it and still my woman’s nature yearned above all else to please you. As you expected it would.’

  ‘The man who is aware of and can satisfy a woman’s sensuality, no matter how cruel, draws like water in a desert,’ he said.

  ‘Why me?’ she repeated. ‘Because they feared my blood?’

  He shifted abruptly, shaking the pallet. ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘An outcast willing to pledge absolute obedience, to be your scapegoat when the time came.’ Her throat tightened with emotion. She coughed and felt the weight of his head on her chest.

  ‘You Kate,’ he breathed into the coarse blanket. Conscious that he was listening for tell-tale emotion, she stilled the rise and fall of her chest, willing her thudding heart to calm.

  ‘And others before me,’ she murmured, burying her cold fingers in the warmth of his hair. His hand wound under the blanket to her naked breasts. The hand which had more than once teased her aching flesh to unspeakable pleasure, now seemed to burn into it. Her stomach lurched in revolt. Her eyelids snapped shut and she clenched her teeth.

  This she had longed to know. That her body, like her mind, was no longer servile to his will. She was free of him. And the knowledge cut a swathe through her desolation.

  She caught his hand in hers, steering it from under the blanket. ‘The others before me,’ she persisted, ‘were their powers real? Did they have the sight?’ He straightened slowly, and strained his ear after the distant cry of a vixen. One by one the faces came to him, old and young, knowing and guileless. Soon this one would join them, very soon.

  ‘No more words,’ he was dismissive. ‘Your time is come. A clean death, the noose‒’

  Kate shivered involuntarily. Clean, perhaps, but not always swift. Her own mother had clung to life for minutes, they had told her, dangling high above the ghoulish crowd. But above all she feared they would cut her down and bury her deep under prison earth before she was truly dead. Polly Trenshaw’s horror haunted her yet.

  She pulled the blanket up to her neck and stared past his shadowy form into the darkness beyond. ‘Did ever one go to the gallows bearing your child?’ she asked grimly. The mattress flinched under her as he stiffened. Trembling with something other than cold, she said, ‘It was for the child I went to Blackwood Top ... it was I summoned you.’

  The Cunning Man ...

  Marsden had been in the saddle since first light. He had driven the liver-chestnut gelding over the mellow stone walls of the Apescross estate, across yawning pasture and the hill country around Wootton. He had cantered past drovers steering their flocks over Micklewood Chase; skirted thatched farmsteads and woodland mire; stretched the horse with a two-league gallop downriver, weaving between the clustered cottages of Berkeley village and across the bridge, digging his heels hard in until he reached the banks of the Severn.

  He sat, hands folded over the pommel of his saddle, while the sweat-lathered horse drank its fill of water among the stagnant reek of the river-edge. He wore no hat and the untied black of his hair had been blown clear of his wild-eyed face.

  A youth astride a cargo of grain sacks on a passing river-boat, spotted him and waved amiably. Marsden raised his hand in heavy salute and watched the disturbed water ripple towards him.

  It was I summoned you, she had said. He grunted ironically. The shepherdess was condemned, finished business – so he had thought. He recalled Mother Sutton’s meek acceptance of her fate, doe-eyed Alicia de Bourg, the pained confusion of Goody Winthrop. Then again of Kate’s quiet triumph, her self-possessed calm and gradually the face he pictured assumed another, disturbing identity.

  He growled as the old tightness gripped his chest and the base of his skull – snatched at air to quell rising nausea. Though oceans and moons had come between, he could not escape the dam. She was there, ever lurking in the shadows, ready always to explore his weaknesses, to belittle and subjugate. In death as in life.

  His childish self had loved her. Though she had sent him from her to be educated by the sisters of the Abbey Alessima, he blamed himself for the separation and adored the Blessed Virgin. To win his mother’s favour he had drunk dry every source of knowledge available within the confines of the convent. To win her.

  He could not tell, even now, when adoration had become something other; when he had dared to aspire to the unreachable. Scholastic prowess, the onset of manhood – what matter? Her dark beauty had filled his thoughts, clearing his mind of pious clutter. His one fervour, her. And she had been aware of his enslaving passion, had anticipated it, perhaps even nurtured it. Her quiet knowing smile, the touch of her hand as she stroked his face, her skin perfumed with oil of musk-rose. Every smile, every lingering touch exquisite, moulding him until he had no will but hers.

  To seal his fate, she had put him on the road to priesthood. To keep
him purely hers, she had him take on the emasculating skirts of a priest. And the vows he took, were to her, not the god of the sisters of Alessima.

  He jerked the gelding’s still dripping head from the water, skewed round and up the narrow path towards the forest track. The horse snorted with the effort of the climb, stumbled sideways in loose gravel, righted itself and began to pick up speed.

  Poverty.... Obedience.... Chastity.... Marsden dug in his heels, forcing the flagging horse to gallop harder. A blaring horn from a river-boat faded in his wake. Wiry branches hung with new green leaves lashed his face and neck, their stinging salving the prickling hurt that had crept over his flesh.

  The prickling hurt that years before had driven the young priest alone in his cell to strip away the skirts, to flay his ardent flesh and bind his aching member. Chastity. In fevered dreams he begged for release, cowering abjectly beneath her while the blood of her womb spread over him, blinding him. For she was without mercy.

  He had hardly noticed the girl at first. She came and went carrying choice wines from her father’s vineyards to the cellarer. A tousle of brown curls, bare feet – a nameless face, one among many village suppliers. Then, emerging from the cloisters one morning, he had caught sight of the tanned flesh of her thighs as she mounted a panniered donkey. With a sly smile she hesitated before pulling her skirts across and ambling away. When next he saw her, there was no hesitation. One moment she was standing in the sun-filled doorway of the chapel, the next, they were locked together over a tombstone in a sheltered corner of the cemetery. Not making love but venting a fury; the brown curls matted, the well-rounded body writhing under him, sweat from his temples dripping on to the glistening arch of her neck, over the grimaced parting of her lips. He ground her naked buttocks into the lichen-pitted stone, wanting to see the sly eyes flicker with pain. But they only burned more brightly and the cries that rent the air were his.

  After, as he sat head propped against the stone, he felt her lips kiss his tonsured pate, felt her fingers trail over his smooth face. A parting gesture so redolent of his mother. And in that moment as she flitted away from him towards a copse from where she would follow the river back to the village, he knew the dam had sent the girl to test him. He saw then that the girl was living proof of his betrayal.

  Death was swift; a sharp blow to the base of the skull before he submerged her midstream. Oyster fishermen found her swollen body four days later, caught in the hanging branches of a willow. Suicide, it was mooted, the guilty conscience of a fallen woman.

  The gelding thundered over the wooden planking of the bridge into Berkeley, its haunches rubbed raw by Marsden’s thrusting heels. Slackening a little it met the rising ground and trotted through the twilight mill of children and dogs, playing the day out in the rutted streets.

  The corpse was discovered and he had gone to his mother, telling no one he was leaving the monastery, knowing that he would never return. The religiosity of the convent had become anathema to him; its tenets sprung from the words of a man whose humble forgiveness had led Him straight to the cross. Emulate, worship, murmured the convent, give yourself up as a lamb to the slaughter, for in weakness there lies strength. Deny yourself in this life so that you might reap the rewards of the next. Prostrate the self, castrate the self, delude the self until there is no self – nothing but a living death.

  The girl was dead and there was no guilt in him, not one shred of remorse, no flicker of compassion. Through her he had discovered in himself the existence of a personal power; a life force that could not be contained – not by the strictures of the habit, nor the subtle manipulations of his mother.

  On a night sultry and humming with crickets he had gone to her. She was alone when he found her; sitting on a balcony heady with the fragrance of jasmine, beneath a pergola covered with white blooms of camelia. Her hair was soft to his touch and the play of moonlight and shadow across her downy face lent it an ethereal quality. He recalled how she covered her surprise with a slow, welcoming smile, how she had offered up her cheek to be kissed ... but shrank coldly from him when his burning lips found hers.

  And for the first time in his life her disapproval had meant nothing to him. Nothing at all. The carved arm of her chair was under his hands. He gripped and hurled it clear of the pergola, launching her against a wrought-iron fence. She had turned, clinging to the rail, the cold glitter of her dark eyes changed to a shifting wariness. She did not cry out, had not demanded explanation. Nor was she afraid, not then. She had held out her hand and waited for him to crumble in the face of her forgiveness, for him to fill the silence with humble words. Had it not always been the way?

  He stared fixedly at the outstretched hand, at the diminutive figure before him. So great was his physical advantage that he could have crushed the life out of her with one hand. Yet this was the force that had racked his nights, dominated his days.

  He watched her edge towards him, evading the fingers which reached out to caress his brow. Then crushing her wrists between his fingers, he described for her every last detail of his encounter with Therese, the vintner’s daughter....

  The gelding had come within homing distance of Apescross when Marsden turned its head across country towards Kate’s cottage. Bats flitted overhead, wheeling aside as the dark silhouette galloped between a line of overhanging trees. Shadows loomed and fell away. Hunger had left him light-headed and his arms felt too weak even to lift their own weight, But he pressed on, through the copse, driving the spent horse until they reached the clearing and the silvered water of the pool.

  He stumbled from the saddle and walked out the stiffness in his legs. He let his cloak fall away. Unbuttoned his shirt and flung it aside, his clammy flesh shuddering as it met the cool air.

  He had meant to shock her into submission. Instead she had attempted to turn the situation to her own advantage; to use their shared knowledge to regain control over him. It had been weakness not to finish her that night in the garden. While she lived he could never truly be free. His awakened potency told him that, yet still he had walked away, knowing even then that ultimately one or other of them would have to be destroyed.

  It was a mistake he had never repeated. After the dam not one had slipped through his fingers. His journey had been a long time in the making. Across Europe they had welcomed him into their homes, the outcast women. They had taken him for their master, though at first he was no more than a penniless priest. He had learnt to harvest strength, to eke out their age-old secrets; and having drained them of their usefulness, to step aside and watch them succumb to the fate he had set in place – cleaning the slate. Each one had won him new credence, each one had been a victory over the dam.

  It had been simplicity itself until last night in that dingy room with the shepherdess – with her quiet knowing. Not that he cared for the bastard growing in her, only that she had control over something of him. No-one since his mother had ever managed that. No one since her had resurrected the cowering figure or the blood. His mother and the shepherdess, their images flitted back and forth in his mind until they merged into one smiling face.

  Everything he ever vowed for the dam, he had renounced. He scorned poverty, aspiring to wealth and status; ridiculed chastity in an endless search for new gratification; and as for obedience, now he would have nothing less than complete mastery. All this in defiance of the hold she once had over him, to rid himself of the stigma of the dam. And the greater satisfaction would be in knowing that he had used her kind to do it.

  Her spirit might fight him through the shepherdess, but he was stronger yet. A child was it? Then let the shepherdess hang but not yet. Not while she could claim part of him. One way or another the child would be his.

  Twigs cracked underfoot as the gelding wandered off in search of grazing. Marsden breathed deeply, stripped himself of hose and boots and waded into the icy water. She had chosen him, she had said. But his would be the final triumph. And his dive shattered the mirror surface of the pool.

>   Maleficium ...

  Before God and Edward Johnson, Justice in Eyre, they testified:

  ‘I was driven to her, Your Honour; near desperate I was, what with the master expected home from London any day, and the horse chirurgeon out of the shire.... I’ve tended horses all my life – I’d never have missed a spike like that. I swear there weren’t no spike in Prince Rupert’s hoof before she came with her chuntering and potions‒’

  ‘Fair mangled she was, what with the dogs and months under the sod....’

  ‘Aye, Your Honour, fresh off the coach I was, resting up awhile by the kitchen door, watching the young masters and misses sporting in the courtyard. Out of thin air it came, a-slavering and showing its fangs. Great ugly beast of a thing went straight for Miss Caroline ... savaged the poor mite before we could chase it off, then she came after us; strength of a demon in her arms and such oaths as you’ve never heard‒’

  ‘Flesh wound to the throat, Your Honour, insufficient to sever the windpipe....’

  ‘... so I f-followed Master Francis across to the stables. I was scared see, I’d never done it but for Master Francis being so kind before – I knew if I asked him to he’d speak for me, tell them I never meant to drop the apple bowl ... but t’was like he was in a trance: they all were. I daren’t speak to him, not then, so I hid ... I didn’t mean to spy. T’was as if the chanting rooted me where I stood, as if they wanted me to see. Oh but I was terrible scared, sir, t’was the smell see, putrid it was – near fainted away, I did. There was the lamb and Miss Caroline hanging in the air as though she were asleep in her cot....’

  ‘First I was chasing her through a spinney, next I know, I’m coming to under an oak tree‒’

  ‘Walked through the stubble, she did, like it were a carpet of goose-down ... not a stitch on her. Ask anyone, Your Honour, William Kerry is a respectable man: a wife, two girls ... not given to lechery. Bewitched I was.’