The Witch (The Witch Trilogy Book 1)

by Cheryl Potter

  It was a game Kate understood from the first. She was no girl victim that she should go passively to their beds, but a mature woman who had chosen the life, a woman whose experience was gained of a demon lover. Confident in her own sexuality she aroused the most jaded of palates, often intriguing a man by playing out his secret fantasy, though he had never voiced it. There was excitement for them too in breaking the taboo of pregnancy, in exploring new contours, new approaches. She cultivated the art of brinkmanship, of drawing a man to the limit many times over before the final burst. And when it came she would feign mutual passion, conceding to him the final satisfaction.

  She made no excuses. With survival at stake, she could not afford to be virtuous – that path had failed her miserably before. She knew the pitfalls. Cassy had warned her about the whore-haters and pimps; about the floggings meted out to so-called penitent prostitutes. But she had no qualms. Every fistful of coin gave her a stronger hold over her destiny, securing a life for her and the child.

  The saddler’s payment jingled in the pocket she had sewn into the lining of the red cloak as Kate crossed Newgate Street. She skirted the smoking chimney of the soap-works and turned into the now familiar lane.

  A green glint of cat’s eyes from the shadows momentarily startled her, provoking a kick of protest in her womb. She paused for breath and the splutter of a horse further up the lane, caught her attention. Though the overhanging buildings blocked what little light there was she could see the outline of a coach and the swinging head of a horse blocking the lane outside Cassy’s lodgings. She pressed on, past the liveried figure lounging against the carriage, turned her ward key in the lock and ducked under the sagging lintel.

  Cassy was standing with her back to the fire, her hem and petticoats lifted to warm her upper thighs. Slipping out of the cloak, Kate flopped into a high-backed chair and asked about the coach.

  ‘For you,’ said Cassy grinning. ‘Tired or no I wouldn’t pass up an invitation to the Temple of Solomon.’ She rubbed her thumb and fingers together lucratively. They both looked up at the sound of sharp knocking on the front door. ‘A business acquaintance of Sir Hugh,’ Cassy explained, ‘his coachman has been back twice already.’

  Despite the gnawing ache in her back, Kate smiled. For days now a tension had been building inside her, a presaging instinct somehow connected to Marsden. As Cassy spoke, an exquisite burst under her ribs told her that this was it. This summons to the Temple was in some way linked to him. Pausing only to take a swallow from Cassy’s half-empty beaker of ale, she refastened her cloak and went out to the waiting carriage.

  François ...

  The coach rumbled through dark lanes, to broader streets bathed in the amber light of public lanterns. It swung hard right by the river, jolting Kate as she stared out at the flickering lights from the river-boats, and away right again through an elaborate gateway into a gravel courtyard. Clutching the coachman’s arm, she stepped down on to the gravel and glanced up at an imposing edifice. The dour greyness of the Temple was relieved only by the lighter stone of its cornices and the glassy shine of its many windows. The call of a watchman drifted to her on the still night air, ‘Past nine of the clock and a chill winter’s eve....’

  ‘This way‒’ grunted the coachman, unhooking a carriage lamp and tugging impatiently on her elbow. With a flick of his beribboned periwig he led her smartly across the gravel and into what appeared to be a walled garden. Almost running to keep up with him, Kate followed the chuntering servant along a series of paths; from there into a patch of dense shrubbery until they came upon a leaf-covered stairwell. With a sharp glance over his shoulder the coachman descended the steps and, beckoning her, unlatched a door. Beyond it, in the splay of a lantern, she made out a brick-lined passageway. Gathering her skirts around her, Kate stepped into the dark tunnel and followed the already retreating lantern. Never once slackening his pace, the servant conducted her through the twists and turns of the underground passage to the foot of a narrow staircase. It stretched up into the darkness, a secret way, built it seemed between two wall skins barely a body width apart.

  ‘Please wait!’ Kate gasped, burdened by the weight of her pregnancy. She paused for breath, bracing herself between the two walls. The coachman checked and with evident reluctance back-tracked down to her. Peering into her drained face, his brusqueness softened.

  ‘Liven up girl, he’s not used to waiting.’

  Kate stared through the smoke-charred glass of the lantern at the guttering flame until her breathing grew steadier. This place was linked to Marsden, she felt it. But the man who waited for her up there was not he.

  ‘Who is your master?’ she asked.

  The coachman tapped his nose. ‘Never you mind, girl; a man of influence and unholy temper – that’s as much as you’re getting. Now shift yourself!’

  She followed him up the narrow flight of three score steps or more to a landing stage and a bolted door. He snapped the bolt back and pulling the door inwards steered her into a lavish bedchamber, then quickly retired to the landing. Kate watched the door swing to as he sealed himself out. What had been a door from the landing, was inside concealed as a section of bookcase. She trailed her fingers over a section of ribbed leather book spines, staring for a moment at the strange lettering on them. Then turned.

  The curtains were drawn but the high-ceilinged room was ablaze with the light of a dozen candles and a well-stoked fire, which drew noisily as she stepped on to the hearth rug and unfastened her cloak. Her gaze wandered over the mantel ornaments, a lantern clock between matching urns – to a japanned cabinet, its gilded doors opened to reveal wine cups and bottles part filled with brown liquor. Under the window there was a writing desk and chair. A quill pen rested on an open book, beside it several stoppered vials and an hour-glass.

  The dominant feature though was a four-poster bed. Its hangings and scalloped pelmet were a tapestry of red on white, matching the window curtains and were – like the window curtains – drawn.

  She draped her cloak over the chair and from the desk picked up a glass vial. Holding it up to a candle flame she shook its mustard-coloured contents and watched the disturbed sediment settle. Above the cracking and spitting of the fire, and the quarter strike of the clock, she heard neither the rustle of the bed hangings, nor the padding footsteps behind her.

  The man had intended it so. From a crack in the hangings he had observed her progress about the room. He had noted the thrust of her belly beneath the bodice; noted too a certain depth, a self-assurance born he suspected, not of ignorance as with so many, but something more substantial ... more challenging. Another step. And he was close enough to see the scalp beneath her curls, the downy nape of her neck; to breathe her musky scent. Holding his breath he laid his left hand on her shoulder, with his right caught the vial. And was rewarded with a startled yelp.

  Pressing close to her ear, he breathed, ‘I’d given you up.’

  Kate spun round and was confronted with humourless grey eyes. There were streaks of grey in the tied hair and trimmed beard, signs of suffering in the slight body and lean face – above all in the ghastly purple crusts from neck to collar bone; angry scars she recognized at once as scalpel mutilated plague boils. A physician’s legacy. She reached out to touch the disfigured flesh and saw his tongue flick across his lips.

  ‘My stamp of immunity,’ he said, pushing her hand aside. ‘Survivors I am told, run no further risk. So I am safe from you, but what of you? Are you prepared to take the risk?’

  ‘I am here,’ Kate answered.

  ‘Indeed you are!’ He leaned past her and set the hour-glass running. ‘Mine until the last grain of sand falls through the glass.’ Smiling pensively he held up the vial. ‘We’ll begin with this‒’

  Her eyes followed him to the cabinet, watched as he poured two measures of liquor. Settling them down on the desk, he pulled the stopper with his teeth and shared the contents of the vial between the two goblets. Then he pressed one into her hand
.

  ‘The sands of time!’ he toasted. With a gesture for her to drink, he quaffed his own.

  Holding his gaze, Kate lifted the goblet to her nose. Unable to small anything beyond the rich pungency of the wine, she sipped. The spirit tingled pleasantly in her mouth, singeing her throat. She took a deeper swallow, despite an earthy backlash, enjoying the heady surge of it.

  ‘The apothecary informs me,’ he said, replacing the stopper in the neck of the vial, ‘that extract of Mandragora effects an interesting shift of perspective ... that it liberates the senses.’

  ‘The man root,’ Kate breathed, noting his surprised glance. Though she had never used the potent mandrake, her mother had. She recalled the ritual lifting of the root; the scraping away of earth, twine tied from it to the neck of a dog. The dog chased to tear the root from the earth. The ancients said it shrieked like a man on uprooting, that it was a living creature having the power to strike dead the hand that tore it from the earth. Effigies were cut from it. Potions for fertility and love and sleep decocted from it. All this she recalled as the warm glow numbed her limbs, as it eased her nagging back-ache and gave her body the lightness of a child’s.

  The scarred man’s surprise had relaxed into an incongruous grin. ‘We are quite alone,’ he said, pulling the bow at her neckline. ‘I alone of the brothers have watch over the Temple this night ... the servants are dismissed. Just you’ – he spread the lacing of her bodice – ‘and I.’

  Kate loosened her skirt and shrugged the gown from her shoulders. Stepping out of its crumpled folds, she stumbled back against the desk. The room had begun to swim in and out of focus. She was conscious of warm hands on her stomach, of him kneeling, his ear pressed against her. She reached for the waist cord that secured her shift and heard him murmur languidly, ‘Not yet, not here ... come.’

  The floor seemed to offer no resistance as she moved with him past bed and hearth. He stumbled against the open door of the cabinet. A fluted bottle fell gracefully and floated down before exploding on the tiled floor. And the room was filled with a gurgling laughter she knew was hers.

  She watched him untie the leather strap at his waist, then bind her hands with it. His face had lost its grey sobriety. His eyes shone, his lean frame bristling with anticipation. He pulled her past the cabinet towards a wall-hanging embroidered with stars and interlocking triangles. He flapped the symbolic tapestry back uncovering a hatch opening in the wall, and thrust her, head first, into it.

  How long she sat there in the cramped darkness – knees drawn up, head pressed down – she could not tell. Her mind had succumbed to sleep when a juddering wrenched her awake. With a sickening rush the compartment began to fall through space. She reached out to where the hanging had been and grazed her arm against moving brickwork. For a few distraught moments she imagined the deranged man had dropped her into a well. Then there was a mechanical creaking above the compartment and she realized that her descent was slowing – to a halt.

  Tentatively, she stretched out her bound hands and found the smoothness of wood against the open side of the hatch. There was a vertical crack at the centre as of meeting doors. She pushed and a pair of small doors swung back into the darkness beyond. Kate crawled out, feeling her way across cold marble, around stone columns and lines of benches until she found uncluttered space.

  She sensed an aura here, something more than the smell of incense and the lofty chill; a sinister intensity which made her shiver. She struggled to her feet. He was here, the scarred man. She had a powerful sense of his presence ... but not his alone.

  The tinkling bells of a wind chime ruffled the silence. Ahead, the orange glow of a lamp suddenly pierced the darkness. Then another came to light ... and another. In the muted light an image took shape. Under a high domed ceiling she saw two great pillars between which were steps leading up to an altar. Behind the altar was a raised throne and suspended high above the throne, a glittering bronze star.

  ‘Women are forbidden the Temple!’ boomed the voice of the scarred man. ‘It is written.’

  Searching the gloom for him, Kate replied, ‘I seek the brother guardian‒’

  ‘Closest to the beasts is she who bears the child!’ he blasted. ‘Defiler of my master’s house – what say you in your defence?’

  She waited for the echo of his voice to fade, then replied, ‘My master is not yours, guardian of the Temple of Solomon. I have no fear of him.’

  She heard laughter, harsh and guttural, caught sight of movement behind the throne, and the hairs of her skin lifted. The laughter died. ‘Then approach the steps, whore!’ A dark shape flitted away from the altar to her right, lighting more lanterns as it went. She edged towards the altar steps.

  ‘Not afraid, surely?’ mocked the voice.

  Bracing herself against the cold and a sudden putrid stench, she placed her foot upon the first step and was instantly thrown forwards under a terrible weight. She crumpled on to her bound fists, striking her head against marble.

  He pulled her off the steps, his body pulsing and erect as he turned her and threw her limp arms above her head. For one savage moment Kate felt his weight, a small man made heavy by momentous rhythm. She stared past the heaving flesh into the domed roof, forcing herself to concentrate on the swirl of shadow. Staring, until the shadow resolved itself into the sharp images of stars and triangles, and a central cross – a carnal parody made of their coupled bodies – hers the upright, his the cross member.

  And as she stared at the cruciform, she felt a gripping under her skull, a drawing beyond....

  Through the shadow-formed cross she saw another crucifix, set with milky-blue stones. It hung from a leather cord about the sweat-beaded throat of a woman. A woman half-dressed and cowering in the corner of a slant-ceilinged room. Though there was no sound, she was screaming. Her throat muscles strained to it, her mouth and eyes gaped with the terror of it. Blood oozed from a split in her lower lip, streaking her teeth. She pressed her naked back harder against the wall but could retire no further and began to slide down under her own thrust, her arms locked straight in front, distancing, warding. Her tight-nippled breasts juddering as she sank, thighs splayed, on to her heels.

  Her stretched eyes widened a fraction, her taut mouth slackened. She jerked her head aside, cracking it on the wall, unable to rest her harrowed gaze from the malevolence looming over her. Its shadow stole over her and in the mirror of her eyes assumed the shape of a man. Then it was lost in the flash of a blade, in the impaling of belly flesh on steel, in the searing heat of the blade jerked breastwards.

  In pain excruciating and interminable.

  She was prostrate now, the woman; only her head propped up by the wall, her neck tightly curved. Her eyes were mesmerized by the progress of the knife, by the carving of her still live flesh, and the miasmic presence which knew no mercy – taunting her with death but keeping it at bay, stretching her mortality to its terrible limits, to exact every tortuous drop.

  Kate knew her pain; rent the air with her anguished cries. It was Polly Trenshaw all over again. But not her. The face was more lined, the hair darker but it was the same adept blade – the same evil presence.

  Him....

  A stabbing thrust made Kate cry aloud again. The vision had faded and she was left staring into the high-domed ceiling, at the undulating shadow of a cross made there. He was frenzied now, the scarred man, gasping in his desperation. His fingers clawed into the softness of her buttocks, his teeth gnawed the tiled floor. He squealed maniacally, then banged his head against the floor in frustration.

  ‘No use!’ he whimpered, throwing himself off her. Kate exhaled and closed her eyes, waiting for the discomfort to drain from her. In her mind’s eye, she visualized the last grain of sand slipping through the hour-glass constriction.

  ‘Get thee gone from me, whore!’ he growled. ‘Before I throttle you!’ It was the languid threat of a spent body. Kate skewed her head round and stared at his pale limpness, seeing for the first time the pu
rple disfiguration in his groin – tissue more scarred even than his neck. The legacy of his disease, it seemed, went further than mere scars.

  ‘Be gone, I tell you!’ he snarled. ‘What use are you to me, you bloated harlot?’ Kate eased her tied hands down and rolling on to her side, pulled herself clear of him.

  ‘What use any woman?’ she murmured, biting at the knot which held her wrists. There was no reply. The soporific drug had taken its toll. He lay sprawled across the temple aisle, saliva bubbling across his lolling tongue.

  With one last tug Kate loosed the thong and dropped it on to his chest. She would take her pick of the ornaments on the bedchamber mantel.

  That was her due.

  Christmas Eve, 1665....

  Cassy patted her ample breast with the hem of her jaded silk gown, wiped the matted hair from Kate’s furrowed brow. ‘Little blighter picked a rum corner to be born, eh girl? In a brothel, overshadowed by Newgate Gaol. And the city laid low by plague, Lord save us.’

  Kate snatched at air and clutched her companion’s wrist until the contraction subsided. From the alley below came the soulful strains of a street musician, idly playing his flute close to the open window.

  ‘Cassy,’ she gasped, ‘make him play for us a while‒’

  The redhead’s coarse features broke into a smile as she moved to the window. ‘You, piper!’ she called, throwing down a coin. ‘Give us a tune to lure a little beggar into this God-forsaken place.’ She chuckled at some unheard ribaldry, then turned back to Kate. ‘Can’t say I blame it for wanting to stay put.’ She checked at the sight of Kate, hands tight around her ankles, her face screwed up with pain; then started forwards, as with one last effort, the bloody head burst through the dilated passage.