The Witch (The Witch Trilogy Book 1)

by Cheryl Potter

  Anno Domini 1658

  before the image changed and it seemed as though she was looking down upon herself; upon the belly-blown nakedness and wind-tossed hair. Suddenly the overhead sky flared. A single streak of lightning flashed down and just above her head splayed itself. She saw herself, fingertips and hair forked with silver light. And beneath, in the shadow of her parted legs, was the cringing figure of a man.

  At once looking on and being what she saw, Kate’s astral being drifted closer to the scene, watching the head-bowed silhouette, and at the same time feeling the trembling body beneath her. Even in dark relief she recognized the tied hair, the deep forehead, only his name was different. The name that came into her head on a blast of wind, the given name:

  François Borri, François Borri.

  The name fitted as Matthew Marsden never had. Not Marsden but Borri. It was the knowledge she had come for – the key to his being.

  But in the moment she took the knowledge into herself, the hanging head started savagely. On a violent crash of thunder it rose, not the face she knew, but a malevolence of blood-streaked flesh and fiery red eyes. Tight-drawn lips peeled away from blooded teeth, smiling grimly as his right hand jerked up clutching a flash of dark steel....

  ‘Enough!’ It was a far off cry – her own, drawing her back. Back. There was a rushing in her ears. The image receded, dwarfed, until only the red glow of his eyes remained. Then that too was gone. And she was standing on Blackwood Top, a lark fluting high above her head in a watery-blue sky.

  The storm had gone and with it the danger, for now. She breathed deeply, calming her pounding heart, glad of the fluttering protest in her womb. The warmth against her inner leg she knew was Jack. She reached down as she had so many times before, to scratch his ear but there was nothing to feel. It was true then, what priest Peebles had told her during his examination at the cottage. The witch’s familiar had been found and killed. She had chosen not to believe, knowing the priest capable of any ruse, if he could but win her confession. Kitlin and Jack were both dead.

  Kate turned and began the descent to where she had left her few things, smiling inwardly as the warm muzzle pushed into her hand. She watched Jack bound off into the grass and away towards his old haunts, fingering the beads of saliva left in her hand. And wondered at a world so firmly rooted in this life that it could see no further than death.

  At Apescross Manor....

  ‘Master Matthew! Master Matthew!’ The first confusion of waking did not slow Marsden’s instinct. Slipping his blade from under the pillow, he slid past the bed-hangings and up to the door.

  ‘Master Matthew, please come sir!’ He recognized the voice of Hannah the kitchen girl. She knocked urgently.

  ‘What’s amiss?’ he barked, behind the locked door.

  ‘M-Miss Caroline sir,’ stammered the maid. ‘No one can do anything for her, ranting and raving like before! Miss Barbara sent for you sir!’

  Marsden pushed back the hair from his forehead pensively. The girlchild had had no need of him since the trial; occasionally vied for his attention, yes, but she had not needed him as before. Yet Barbara knew better than to trouble him over a child’s nightmare. Instructing Hannah to go ahead, he pulled the embroidered night-shirt over his head and dressed quickly.

  ‘Cissie says Caroline started at first light,’ Barbara explained as he sat in the window-seat of the nursery, the girlchild clinging to his neck.

  ‘And where is Cissie?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘I sent her off to bed,’ answered Barbara, moving to sit beside him. ‘One hysterical child is quite enough!’

  Standing in a connecting doorway, Jessie Harris glanced at Barbara – still in her night-gown and cleared her throat pointedly. ‘Albeit your uncle and aunt are away, Miss Barbara‒’

  Barbara shot the nurse an indignant scowl.

  ‘Go,’ he commanded. ‘I will come to you later. You too Harris, I would be alone with Caroline.’ He watched them out of the room, then stroked the girlchild’s matted hair.

  ‘Tell me, my girl,’ he coaxed, ‘was it her again?’ The child buried her face in the folds of his shirt, forcing warm breath through the cloth to his breast, and nodded furiously. ‘Was she here in your room?’

  The head shook. Her chubby arm reached out to the window, pointing and her flushed face puckered. ‘Please don’t let her hurt me or Cissie!’ she wailed.

  ‘You know my magic is stronger than hers,’ he breathed. ‘Tell me‒’

  ‘She was bare – I could see her paps and her belly was big and her hair was like snakes slithering in the air and she made the thunder and it frightened me ... and I woke up and screamed but the thunder kept coming....’

  ‘What else? Tell me and it will all be gone.’

  ‘A black monster between her legs and blood everywh....’ Her lower lip spread and she exhaled with a sob.

  Marsden stared out beyond the park at the distant hills and felt the old tightness take his skull. The familiar nightmare – his nightmare – and now more clearly dominated by the shepherdess. She was gaining strength it seemed while his arms trembled for lack of it. But he need only wait. She would wail at the birthing as all women did. What was there for her but the pain of travail and the noose? Let her fight. She would die as Kerry had died. And he would take the child and move on.

  He breathed slowly, once more in control. And looking down, found the girlchild, thumb in mouth and lost to sleep.

  London ...

  Kate stood before an oval dressing mirror, tightening the front lacing of her bodice. She glanced past her own image to that of the partly dressed man reclined on the bed behind her. And produced a smile. The Fat Saddler, Cassy had called him. Her smile broadened. Vulgar and breathless he might be, but he was one of the few merchants left in Holborn, and he paid well when she pleased him.

  She ran her hand appreciatively over a scarlet cloak worked with black braid, before slipping it round her shoulders and fastening it at the neck. Then she pulled on her gloves.

  ‘You turn a pretty trick, my dear,’ chortled the saddler. ‘Dash my wig if you don’t. I shall have a thing or two to show the lady wife when she comes back from the country – mind, I’m not going to inform her that the plague is abating, yet awhile.’ He thrust a clenched fist towards her and dropped a weight of coins into her hand. ‘Tomorrow at the warehouse, I’ll leave the padlock off‒’

  ‘I’ll be there,’ she murmured, closing the door behind her. She pulled the hood of her cloak over her head and slipped away down an echoing alley. The cool of the November air was welcome after the sweat-reek of the saddler’s bedchamber. She savoured its richness; the yeasty smell of ale and freshly baked pies, the odour of horse dung and bonfires, the fragrance of honeysuckle and late roses which rambled neglectedly over the garden walls. The smell of London. The smell of freedom.

  Two arduous months it had taken her, the journey from Blackwood Top. She had followed her instincts to London, knowing that few would think to follow her into the plague-torn capital; none perhaps, except him. It had been a hazardous and hungry journey, staying with overgrown forest paths to avoid the watchmen and constables who lurked on the outskirts of the towns. Knowing that once arrested the likelihood was that she would be classed a vagrant and passed back to her last legal settlement.

  Footsore and furtive, she had braved dogs to steal eggs and milk. She had taken rabbits from poachers’ snares, beet from fields and even shared scraps with pigs.

  She had given no thought to how she was to enter the besieged capital, knowing somehow that the means would present itself. And it had. They had been wary of her at first, the travellers; had kept her at a distance, afraid that she might be infected with the pestilence they had left behind in their London parishes. But for Cassy they would have chased her away from their tents with makeshift weapons.

  A buxom woman with hair of flame and a mind of her own, Cassy had listened. She had examined Kate for tokens of plague and softened at the sigh
t of her belly. The others had argued bitterly against Kate travelling with them, that they were already too many and their provisions full stretched, that the plague could linger long in a body before the tokens showed. But Cassy had stood firm – had found space for a lone woman in her own tent – though it meant removing her shelter to an isolated spot. It was as though Kate was the excuse she had been looking for to assert her independence, to fly in the face of the men who had surfaced as protectors.

  ‘Lord, pay no heed to the stingy beggars!’ she scoffed when at last Kate was settled in with her. ‘Cock-strutting to impress their womenfolk.’

  ‘You are not of their womenfolk,’ said Kate.

  ‘That I’m not, Heaven be thanked!’ The redhead laughed irreverently. ‘Though I’ve done a deal more for that motley crew over the years than ever did their womenfolk – if they but knew it.’ She met Kate’s attention with a mischievous twinkle in her hazel eyes. ‘I service their beds, love ... you know, surely there were whores wherever it was you came from.’

  Kate smiled and knelt down on a ground-sheet of threadbare sacking. In the eyes of the world this woman and herself were both beyond the pale, a brazen prostitute and a convicted witch. Strange companions. And yet she sensed more honesty and compassion in this earthy Londoner than she had ever hoped to find again after her mother died. She smiled, recognizing in Cassy a kindred spirit and the makings of friendship. ‘Yes, there were whores.’

  ‘Where is it you come from? Not London with that accent.’

  Kate shook her head. ‘My home was in Gloucestershire hill-country ... with a flock of sheep to tend.’

  Cassy tilted her head to one side and frowned. ‘So tell me belly-blown shepherdess, why are you walking the road to such a God-forsaken hole as London? Me, I’ve no choice – I know nothing else, besides nowhere else would have me.’

  ‘I would be safe nowhere else.’

  Cassy moved closer and touched Kate’s short hair. ‘What do you want of the place?’

  ‘Refuge,’ murmured Kate, ‘a place where my face is not known, where I can earn a living.’

  ‘Aah.’ The redhead gave a weary laugh. ‘Then it must be Lucifer himself driving you. If by some chance you could get by the watchmen on the gates, where would you stay? Even if you had money, few houses dare take in lodgers – you saw how this lot took to you. And as for an honest living‒’

  ‘I have no choice,’ Kate said simply. ‘There is no going back for me.’

  ‘Not even for the sake of the child?’ Cassy persisted. ‘I’d rough it out in the forest, sooner than bring a little one into that poxy place. What of the father?’

  What indeed, thought Kate. She reached the flapping door of the tent, pulled it across the opening and fastened its fraying ties. Then in the anonymous darkness, in the presence of a silent stranger, she sketched the outline of her life, expressing herself as she had never done before. Completely at ease with Cassy, she described the trial and death of her mother, through the years of isolation to the coming of the cunning man. Long after the other travellers had retired to their own tents for the night, when the only background sounds were of soughing trees, of night creatures and the occasional flap of their tent, Kate’s words floated across the darkness, words spoken, words breathed. Until at last, there were no words only a meeting of minds, a transference of thought rich with emotional and factual detail. From Kate to Cassy, from Cassy back to Kate. A relaxing each into the other, until there was no strangeness. Each exploring the being of the other, compressing into a handful of hours, the friendship of a lifetime.

  And when at last the telling was done, Cassy reached out for Kate in the darkness. Bonded by empathy and trust, they wound their arms around each other and sank into exhausted sleep.

  Kate’s first night with the refugees had also been her last. Next morning the two women packed their belongings and quietly quit the camp. ‘We’ll make for my old lodgings by Newgate Gaol,’ Cassy had suggested, as they trudged a frosty road. ‘Last I heard, the plague had died down there.’

  At her suggestion also Kate had assumed the identity of Amy Farrens, a prostitute friend who had died of yellow fever shortly after she and Cassy had fled the capital with the other refugees. ‘Who’s to know?’ Cassy had shrugged. ‘Only the travellers saw me bury her and they won’t be coming back while there’s a whiff of pest about.’

  As Amy Farrens, Kate had slipped by the surly gate watchmen, to enter the capital that evening. And suddenly the gaol cell dream became reality. She who had been half-drowned and stuck with pins, who had been castigated and condemned, found herself a free woman walking the streets of London; along Tyburn Road, through St Giles-in-the-Fields, past the theatres of Drury Lane and the porticoed houses of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, around the offices of Chancery Lane. They had walked six leagues that day yet she felt no tiredness, only a heady exhilaration that she, Katharine Gurney, had cheated death.

  For a penny they had engaged a link-boy to light them through a warren of tight alleyways to a two-storey building, overhanging a rutted lane. There was an air of abandonment in the flapping boards and cracking timbers of Cassy’s lodgings. The damp air inside was chillier than the star-crusted night outside. Pigeons had free access through a broken window-pane in the upper storey and mice had the run of the place. But the furniture – stored in the cellar – was intact, there was a stack of firewood in an outbuilding, and while the landlord was out of town they would live rent free.

  They had confined themselves to the kitchen that first night; swept the flags, fetched up mats from the cellar. Lying on the mats, they had supped on warm milk and damp biscuits, their faces aglow in the light of a generous fire.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Kate had murmured, watching the flaring cinders.

  ‘What of it?’ drawled Cassy, lifting her head.

  ‘I’ll make something of myself, sell the pewter, buy clothes....’

  ‘Save your things; we may yet need them to buy food. If my gowns are over big, we’ll take them in. When we find customers, they’ll care little for the packaging, only the goods.’ She had laughed then, lifted herself up on to one arm and touched Kate’s distended stomach. Huskily she had said, ‘There are ways of slipping a child....’

  ‘I know,’ Kate answered, linking fingers with her.

  ‘Why keep his bastard? Surely‒’

  ‘The child is of me, Cassy. I have not come this far to lose it now.’

  ‘’No,’ Cassy sighed. ‘Then we’ll just have to work the harder to prepare for your lying in.’ She unpinned her hair and flicked it over her shoulders. With a sudden grin she perked, ‘Ah it’s good to be back, plague or no. God only knows why I went away in the first place – Amy I suppose, always coming down with something....’

  ‘The plague will leave us be,’ Kate had said, knowing that just as she knew Cassy’s bright grin had masked a deep sadness; a yearning to do not with the child she carried but another, living child – one given up at birth. She had seen it for one brief moment in Cassy’s unlighted eyes.

  Cassy knelt up and stared down at Kate, her hair a translucent shimmer in the firelight. ‘You know about my baby, don’t you?’ Kate laid her head in the older woman’s lap, confirmation in her silence. ‘Gawd knows why but I’m glad, only don’t speak about it, unless you want to see me blubber. Ah Kate, you’re a deep one – by rights you know more than a body ought to; no wonder you gave Squire Grafton the gibbers. Best keep all this to yourself though, eh? What with the plague, London has become as superstitious as the country.’

  Neither of them had expected that first night to find work as readily as they had. They could not have known then that the wildfire news of falls in death returns had in the early weeks of November brought with it an influx of people.

  That discovery awaited them next morning when they took to the streets. With shears and tongs Cassy had transformed Kate’s Puritan crop into a head of curls. She used rouge to heighten her complexion, kohl to enhance her eyeline. In pett
icoats and the finest gowns the cellar chest had to offer, they ventured into the capital.

  From Newgate Street to the wide thoroughfare of Cheapside, the streets so dead the night before, had come alive with the cries of vendors, the bustle of men going about their business, a knot of street urchins playing around the open sewer, every now and then dodging out of the path of hooves or iron-rimmed wheels.

  Weary at being so long away from their homes, it seemed displaced citizens had flocked back to the metropolis. In every road, every back way, shops and businesses were reopening. The boards were coming down and with them the defences of the population. The numbers dead of plague were down this week, as they had been the week before. That was enough. No need to trouble the mind with the actual figures – a thousand a week, what of it? Many of them had been sick for weeks. They were the tail end of a horror that was passing; a drop in a mass grave. God’s wrath was spent and they were the lucky ones. No need now to shun the streets, to shy from human contact. No need to deny oneself worldly pleasure.

  Arms linked, the two women had walked on into Covent Garden, into the sprawling square centred on St Paul’s. That the plague summer had done its worst here was evidenced by the many boarded houses, by the sick who wandered the streets, some with bandaged necks, others limping with the sores in their groins. But here too, the taverns and brothels were rowdy with custom; traders’ barrows piled high with fresh goods littered the walkways, hawkers plied their wares on street corners, and in the grounds of the cathedral people browsed around the bookstalls.

  Avoiding the outstretched arms of a beggar, Cassy steered Kate towards the fashionable houses, towards the porticoed façades and iron railings strung across with glistening spiders’ webs, there to renew old acquaintances, to establish who among her old clients was in town, to make known her availability, and Kate’s.

  By noon sunshine had dissolved the last traces of mist and in less than a dozen house-calls they had secured clients enough for a week. Men, as Cassy had put it, of a better cut; a solicitor, a goldsmith (though see his money first, warned Cassy), a wax chandler, a clerk of the Admiralty, the Fat Saddler, a financier and an old patron Sir Hugh Stanforth. Men of appetite and pocket to satisfy it, men who evidently knew and trusted in Cassy’s discretion. Men who knew exactly what they wanted; and when they found it came back for more.