The Witch (The Witch Trilogy Book 1)

by Cheryl Potter

  ‘Bound to bolt sooner or later, I suppose,’ grunted Sir Hilary. ‘But she needn’t expect me to take her back this time!’

  They turned into the Stone Gallery, a long and splendid hall housing, it was said, some of the finest paintings in Europe. Portraits, land and seascapes; works of battle and love, of pathos and ecstasy. Masterpieces created by the likes of Van Dyck, of Muytens and Lely; part of the great collection of Charles I, fragmented by his enemies, and restored as far as possible by his son.

  With Marsden’s help, the old man threaded his way through the knots of gossiping courtiers and ministers. It was for this that he had made the journey to Whitehall. He had told Marsden so, as they huddled under the tarpaulin on the river journey; had chafed his hands gleefully at the prospect of hearing first hand the latest rumours, the hottest gossip. After years of dull isolation he longed to be in the thick of it again, to exercise his modest influence, to make his voice heard. Marsden had been right of course, the house had been suffocating him; his personal tomb, waiting on his death, just as Jenkins and son Samuel were waiting. Dear God, he had even given up on himself.

  ‘Why, Hilary Grafton!’ The open mouth of incredulity pulled away from a party standing by a large gilded mirror and took his hand.

  ‘Matthew,’ Sir Hilary cleared his throat, ‘may I introduce you to an old acquaintance from my Oxford days, Sir Hugh Stanforth ... Hugh, Doctor Matthew Marsden.’

  Marsden noted Stanforth’s polite but dismissive nod. He watched the heavily jowled face turn to the old man even as the man offered his hand, met the clammy limpness of it with a knuckle-buckling grip and watched with growing amusement as Stanforth’s eyes jerked back to reassess the humble physician propping his old friend.

  It was diverting the speed with which he became the focus of the party by the large gilt mirror – thanks to Grafton’s unstinting praise. Palates wearied by the telling and retelling of current affairs of court, of hackneyed jests and society scandals, leapt to the challenge of the taciturn Dr Marsden. This square-shouldered man in puritan black, whose voice had a continental edge to it and who, according to the old judge, was both healer and witchfinder, excited their curiosity.

  ‘Come sir, you are too modest,’ protested Stanforth, at Marsden’s suggestion that he was not entitled to be called doctor since his training was never completed. ‘It seems you have more talent than any qualified physician I have ever known. Cured a gout, whoever heard of such a thing?’ Behind their fans several ladies in the group chuckled.

  ‘I do not claim a cure,’ Marsden politely corrected. ‘The illness is in respite – how soon it recurs depends on Sir Hilary himself.’

  ‘All this you achieved with words?’ ventured one of the ladies over his shoulder. He turned and brushed against an ivory-coloured gown. His eye was caught by the flash of a large amber brooch in the bodice, by a double string of pearls which hung down from it, hugging the left breast and down to another glittering brooch at the waist. Creamy flesh rose above the low-cut cleavage, shoulders tapering in to a necklace and hung with a single string of large pearls. He smiled into a face, girl round and fringed with small curls, into eyes haughty, yet verging on laughter.

  ‘I believe in the innate power of the human mind,’ he answered. ‘That we are all capable of healing ourselves to a greater or lesser degree. And that some of us have the ability to release that power in others.’

  Wafting her fan thoughtfully, she went on, ‘If it is in us to heal ourselves, then is it possible that we are in part responsible for our illnesses? Is it feasible to suppose that a body believing the plague to be inescapable, might induce the disease it so dreads?’

  ‘Lady Aldrigge does so like to tease!’ guffawed a young wag in scarlet hose and tunic.

  ‘No, Carlton, I am serious,’ she persisted, half laughing and ignoring Sir Hilary’s snort of derision. ‘I would value Dr Marsden’s opinion.’

  ‘I suggest,’ said Marsden, ‘that the lady speaks from a deep dread within herself.... And that a troubled mind can indeed lower the body‒’

  ‘Heavens above!’ gasped Stanforth in mock horror. ‘Knowing Lady Aldrigge’s constitution, that surely beggars my hopes of survival.’ As he spoke a murmur surged through the gallery. A short distance from the gilt mirror, past several clusters of visitors, curtains of crimson velvet were drawn aside by guards in cloaks of scarlet.

  ‘The king is early to dine this morning!’ breathed Carlton, as a dozen occupants of the gallery converged on the opening doors, their plumed hats and elaborate wigs blocking the narrow gallery. Others rushed up behind, pushing up against the first so that the few who had not joined in the scramble could only guess that King Charles was present by the lulling of voices and doffing of caps.

  ‘What o’clock is it?’ Sir Hilary’s voice dented the hush.

  ‘Noon bar a minute,’ whispered Stanforth pocketing a chased gold hunter. ‘Come, take my arm, we’ll follow the progress to banqueting hall ... find a seat in the balcony where we can talk and watch the king at the same time.’

  Pocketing his eyeglass, the old man turned to Marsden. ‘Matthew?’

  Marsden caught Lady Aldrigge’s eye.

  ‘Dr Marsden and I will follow,’ she assured the others. ‘Carlton‒’ she said pointedly. The grinning courtier tipped her a bow and sprinted after the two judges. Marsden noted Sir Hilary’s anxious backward glances, searching for him with panic in his eyes. The we become I.

  He knew the feeling well enough, felt the stab of it in a memory glimpsed; of a boy torn from his mother so many years before. He watched until the old man, clinging to Stanforth, his limp more pronounced now, was swallowed up by the crush which was following the royal progress out into the pebble court. An hour or two apart would whet the old leech’s appetite, he mused, sharpen his gratitude. One night more, two at most, he gauged before the parasite would be glutted enough to pluck.

  The gallery was all but empty as he turned to the woman. Smoothing the curve of her eyebrows in the mirror, she glanced up at his brooding features.

  ‘I wonder that His Majesty is not crushed there are so many petitioners and visitors,’ she began idly. ‘It is said that Louis of France goes nowhere without his mousquetaires to guard his person.’

  ‘Dashing blue cloaks and rapiers,’ he said, with a wry lift of his right eyebrow. Lady Aldrigge laughed.

  ‘Yes Dr Marsden, I confess to a romantic streak.’

  ‘I see devilment in your eyes,’ he breathed over her shoulder, ‘not romance.’

  In the mirror, her smile gave way to a querulous, slightly vulnerable expression. She twisted her head over her right shoulder and strained her eyes towards him. ‘One does not necessarily preclude the other,’ she murmured and looking ahead into the mirror, produced a gracious smile for an elderly gentleman who wandered past, his hands linked behind his back.

  ‘Perhaps we should follow the others,’ Marsden said briskly.

  Lady Aldrigge turned with a rustle of silk. ‘Trust me, sir, all seats will by now be taken....’ she hesitated.

  ‘Then you may know of a quieter spot elsewhere?’ he prompted.

  ‘My husband has the use of a chamber adjoining Lord Albemarle’s lodgings.’

  ‘And your husband?’

  ‘Is very much afloat.’

  Marsden lifted her gloved fingers to his lips and gestured for her to lead the way.

  After dusk....

  Kate braced herself against the velvet padding of the rumbling coach, resisting the slumped weight of the sleeping gentleman beside her. George Whalley, an associate of Cassy’s good friend Sir Hugh Stanforth, was a good client; a soft-spoken widower who now and then wanted a tumble but more often than not preferred a responsive listener and a warm knee to squeeze.

  As the coach rattled out of Drury Lane into St Giles, the snoozing man’s head slipped down into the crook of her arm. She readjusted his wig and rested her head against the carriage window. This evening she had accompanied him to a perf
ormance of Shakespeare’s Moor of Venice. In a box high above the stage of the Cockpit Theatre, his mischief had stretched to retrieving hazelnut shells from her cleavage, where he had purposely sprinkled them. His boyish humour had done much to relieve the grim tragedy of the play but it had left her feeling vaguely disturbed. And the haunting strains of Desdemona’s song still clung to her mind: The poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree, sing all a green willow....

  The song caught in her throat.

  Through the rain-grubbed window, beyond a scalloped-brick wall, a dark form had caught her eye. And the muscles under her ribs gripped violently. She scrubbed at the window with her clenched fist but the mass standing back from the road in what appeared to be an old graveyard, came no clearer and the coach was rapidly leaving it behind. Its aura, overwhelmingly strong a moment before, was slipping away from her.

  Knowing only that she must get back to it, she burst clear of George, threw open the carriage door and yelled at the coachman to pull up. The startled man jerked on the reins so the sleeping man inside fell heavily against her. She in turn stumbled out on to the road.

  ‘My dear?’ George croaked blearily.

  Kate pulled up the hood of her cloak. ‘Forgive me,’ she said, forcing her attention. ‘You go on. Next time.... I’ll explain next time.’ She smiled and helped him back to his seat. Despite an agony of tension, she waited for the coach to drive on, for the puzzled face at the window and the flickering coach lamps to be enveloped by the night. Then slipped her shoes and darted back past a long fence to the scalloped wall.

  The damp grass saturated her stockinged feet as she picked her way between listing headstones. The wet squelched cold between her toes and up her ankles.

  And it was still there, the dark mass – beneath a hawthorn pale with May blossom, a figure hunched over something she could not see.

  She moved closer, pushing her toes carefully through a carpet of pine cones and thistles; aware of running water and spits of rain. Aware too of a low hum.

  As she drew nearer still the hum became a voice, indistinct but a voice no less. She froze, pressing her face against a stone angel. The shape had moved and her eyes, grown used to the light, picked out the head and arms of a man. She did not need to see the rugged profile, the tied back hair, to know that he had come. The tightness at the base of her skull, the bristling hurt of her skin, was evidence enough.

  Driven by a force stronger than her terror, she edged forwards and sat on a lichen-patched tombstone not four yards behind him. She could see now that he was crouched over a small granite stone, set well apart from the rest. He heard him tearing at the overgrowth of grass and meadow flowers around it. And knew that this was the place she had seen in her vision on Blackwood Top.

  She knew, though his body prevented her seeing, that the rough-carved inscription read:

  Ignotus

  Ex Aquis

  Anno Domini 1658

  And now that the Fat Saddler had translated it for her, she understood that it spoke of an unknown, dragged from the river. A suicide, the saddler had suggested, taken pity on by the parish priest. But she knew as he knew that the woman who lay there was no suicide. Knew too that of all the women he had murdered, Ignotus alone haunted him.

  ‘Fons et origo malorum!’ he snarled, suddenly jerking to his feet and hurling a handful of weeds towards the brook. ‘Why could you not let me go, Mother? Why did you have to follow me to England?’

  As yet unnoticed, Kate licked her dry lips. She rose to her feet and very softly so as to smother the tremor in her voice, began to sing:

  ‘The fresh streams ran by her, and murmur’d her moans; sing willow, willow, willow‒’

  He swung round, eyes blazing and rasped, ‘Mother?’

  ‘Her salt tears fell from her and softened the stones‒’

  ‘Mother?’ He lurched towards her, then froze as she reached out and lightly touched his cheek. His parted lips closed, then reopened. And the featherlight touch wandered over chin and throat, under his hair to the nape.

  For one deluded moment his taut features seemed to relax. The next they were seized with pain as the caressing fingers suddenly clawed and dug into his neck. With an anguished howl, he wrenched himself clear and stumbled out of reach.

  ‘A body dead and yet undead!’ she hissed, echoing words invoked on Blackwood Top.

  ‘Be gone!’

  ‘But I have not yet begun‒’

  He groaned, raking his fingers up his forehead and into his hair. Rocked on his heels in floundering uncertainty.

  Kate pressed her advantage. ‘Not yet begun.... François.’

  The name clinched it. Kate watched his crazed flight, watched until the dark blur of him vaulted the wall and melted into the night.

  Only then did she move. Trembling uncontrollably, Kate stepped down from the tomb. She tottered a few paces, then collapsed beside the granite stone.

  He had come.

  The Rouge Route ...

  Marsden ground his already grazed forehead against the jagged mortar of the alley wall. The narrow passage reeked of urine and rotting vegetation but he was not aware of it as he knelt on broken tiles, his shoulders collapsed forwards. Nothing penetrated his angry shame.

  He had returned to the grave to lay the ghost – to crush the cowering dream once and for all. Yet, when the confrontation came, he who had never in his life run away from anyone or anything, had crumbled. And the most maddening thing of all was not understanding how or why. Why the potency in him had shrivelled. Why he had fled before that demon manifestation, instead of taking it on. Why, blinded with tears of frustration, he had run along street after deserted street until exertion and tension had constricted his airways and levered up the contents of his stomach. And why he had crawled away from the stench of vomit into the darkness of the alley in an effort to hide his spineless impotence.

  He clawed his way up the wall, scraping his cheek and pressed his open lips against the scathing surface as he drew himself up to standing.

  ‘A body dead and yet undead,’ he echoed, his mouth sour with vomit. He felt for the wounds to his neck, the weals surely made by her nails. But found nothing though the hurt still lingered.

  And he groaned at his own gullibility.

  She had hurt him because he had allowed her to. The soft caress and sudden stinging rejection had been figments of his surprised mind. She had no power but what was in him. The cunning bitch was turning him against himself – his uncertainty was her only weapon.

  He spat the bitterness from his mouth and wet his lips with his tongue. His chest heaved with the pounding of his heart, his mind raced. Why, after eight years of watching and waiting, should she choose to pounce now? Why now?

  The answer crystallized in his mind. It beat at his tortured brain – the dam and the shepherdess. The two were inexplicably bound. Kate’s escape had been no accident, the dam had seen to that – he saw it all too clearly now. Kate had survived to lure him back to London, to that granite rock, so that the dam could destroy what she had made.

  He moved towards the grey entrance, hands flat against the close walls. Tonight had been Kate’s doing. And she must suffer for it. If it was the last thing he did, he would make sure she paid for tonight. He gritted his teeth as a sheet of pain sliced through his head. Then he lurched into the dark streets of Holborn.

  Anna Davidson folded her arms tightly around her ribs, and shivered. Luke be damned! If the filthy pimp hadn’t come badgering her again, she might have remembered to bring her coat, such as it was. But he had come, cuffing and slapping until she was only too glad to turn out on to the streets. Only now that her temper had cooled, she was feeling the nip – now that it was too late to go back. The old whoremonger would break her neck if she turned up empty handed.

  She cupped her elbows in her hands and trudged down Cross Lane towards Baldwin Gardens; it was as likely a spot as any. If her luck was in she might catch a clerk or one of those young legal gentlemen rolling o
ut of the Furnival or Barnard’s Inn on his way to lodgings by Chancery Lane.

  She quickened her pace. He might even buy her a hot pasty. She glanced up – no moon, or stars. Still, there would be street lamps further on, outside the bigger houses. She should know, she’d worked in one for twenty years. Everything from drudge to lady’s-maid, she’d done it all in twenty years with the family of John Gerard, solicitor. Twenty years of service and within a cat’s whisker of becoming housekeeper when the plague settled on London. The cook and the coachman were the only two the Gerards took with them when they packed up and fled to the country. The rest, including Anna, had been left to fend for themselves; shot like so much ballast.

  She had managed for a while, nursing plague victims, tending the stinking bodies no one else cared to, until the ugly face of death became too much for her, and Luke had taken her in hand. Gawd strike the cruel swine dead!

  Lost in thought, she overshot her usual short-cut via the passageway between the milliner’s and the baker’s shop. It would cost her an extra quarter-hour to follow the roads. She swung back again with a smothered oath. The unrelieved darkness of the alleyway was daunting but the prospect of a warm and well-lit inn porchway lured her on. She scuttled past the first blank walls, propelled by the squeaking of rats and a lively imagination. And in the half-minute it took to reach the arched opening at the other end, her face and arms, the exposed flesh of her bosom had begun to prickle with fear.

  She curled around the archway into the opening beyond, panting and laughing at herself for getting into such a state. She was standing now at the wide junction of several back entries. Some wound their way past gardens and cobbled yards, others led to shops and warehouses.

  From one there came the approaching sound of male laughter and the yellow glow of a lantern. She waited hopefully, straightening the crucifix at her throat, but the voices tailed off behind the slam of a gate. And the light was gone.