The Witch (The Witch Trilogy Book 1)

by Cheryl Potter

  She sighed, resigning herself to Furnival’s after all, and levered herself off the wall she had been resting against. Then caught her breath – suddenly aware of a figure standing across the entry she would have to take.

  Panicked, she stumbled back against the wall, stubbing her elbows. She bounced off again and flung herself back through the archway. But stumbled over her skirts and her wrist swinging up to catch the wall was captured by a powerful hand. She resisted for several seconds, before being dragged back, whimpering and clawing vainly at the fingers around her wrist.

  ‘What are you afraid of?’ The sure male voice cut across her panic; a soothing deep sound with a foreign edge to it. She stopped struggling and the grip on her wrist slackened.

  ‘Christ Almighty!’ she choked. ‘Where the bloody hell did you come from?’

  ‘I could ask the same question of you,’ he murmured.

  ‘How long were you standing over there watching me?’

  ‘Long enough.’

  ‘You might have coughed ... or something.’

  ‘And risk startling you?’

  ‘You did that anyway!’ she scolded, her teeth chattering uncontrollably. ‘You’re not the law then?’ The shadow-laden features above her widened into a smile. A warm hand touched her shoulder.

  ‘You are shivering,’ he breathed. ‘Do you have a room we can use?’

  Anna closed her eyes and gave a long sigh of relief. This she could manage. And he could manage sixpence more for the fright he had given her. ‘Half a crown,’ she bartered, adding as an afterthought, ‘and a pasty.’

  It had been a matter of five minutes’ walk to the derelict place in Dog Lane where she often brought her men; a large house with boarded windows, which she shared with several other prostitutes, the rightful owners presumed victims of the plague. Warmed by the brisk walk and the thought of a half-crown, she was quite chirpy as she led the taciturn stranger up two flights of stairs to the privacy of the top floor.

  ‘In here,’ she called, beckoning him into an attic room and locking the door behind them. Shuffling around in a corner , she found tinderbox and candle, primed the one and lit the other. ‘Ah, that’s better!’

  Unbuttoning her skirt, she caught him scanning the room. She followed his gaze from the cut-away ceiling with its cracked skylight, to the empty grate and stained chimney breast, over boxes and accumulated rubbish stashed away in dark corners ... to the crumpled mattress beneath the skylight.

  In the faltering candlelight he too had taken on form. She eyed him curiously. He had the confidence and cultured voice of a gentleman, yet the wrist strength of a farm-hand. And he could hardly pass as a gentleman of fashion, favouring such grim black. Coat, breeches, shoes, all jet black – even his hair, tied back with a black ribbon. No wonder she hadn’t noticed him in the alley. Sensing her stare, his eyes darted across from the mattress with such burning impatience that she was compelled to look away and carry on undressing.

  From somewhere in the house there came a loud scraping and a ripple of laughter. He looked at her askance.

  She shrugged. ‘One of the others,’ she said, sauntering up to him in her underclothes. ‘Mol I expect ... she won’t come up here.’ He stood still while she undid his jacket buttons – so still and silent that her nerves began to jangle again, making her fingers fumble with the buttons. Only his eyes moved and though she dare not look directly into them, she knew that they were with her every move.

  Half a crown, she reminded herself, and hot food besides.

  She slid her thumbs under his lapels and pushed the jacket over his square shoulders. He let it fall behind him. Encouraged, her hands wandered mechanically down his white shirt to probe the front of his breeches. Her nails gently raked the stiffness of thigh muscle and groin. Her fingers kneaded his hard-packed member and found the necessary release buttons. A husky laugh bubbled up her throat; a knowing, taunting sound.

  He touched her hair – gently, almost uncertainly at first. With rapidly gaining surety he searched for pins and combed his fingers through the thick brown tumble. While her hands worked, his hands unlaced drawstrings and dragged the coarse white petticoat off her shoulders. His mouth swooped to her upstanding nipple, and she bit her lip to avoid crying out as he sucked and gnawed at the tender flesh. She clasped his rolling head in her hands and prayed that it would be over soon.

  Bruisingly rough, his hands forced the petticoat skirt between her legs, pushing and probing until the discomfort became too much and she tried to pull away. With a nervous laugh, she twisted towards the mattress, hoping against hope that if she could get him there, he might not be able to hold back. The sooner to vent whatever mad passion was driving him.

  Thrusting away from him, she skewed over her left hip and crashed on to the dusty boards, her left leg folded underneath her. She tried to turn away, but he slammed his forearm across her pelvis, pinning her down with maniacal strength. She gave a winded grunt, her mouth parched with terror. Too frightened to resist, she lay still, watching the downward drift of soot specks from the disturbed candle, trying desperately to distance herself from reality.

  But the tearing of cloth wrenched her back. With bare hands he had ripped through the tough material of her underskirt. She banged her head against the floor, splintering the boards with her teeth as his fingers and knuckles set about her again. As teeth pincered her buttocks. Then a head-jerking thud, her own gurgled cry, and the feeling that her insides were being hammered up under her ribs. Pain issued from her in waves of sweat and tortured grunts, in the blood that oozed from her bitten lips.

  And she could taste the terrible hatred that poured from him; its malignance suffocated her. The boards blurred and there was no air, only overwhelming pain....

  Consciousness returned while the candle still burned. With it came dread and a body throbbing with hurt. She lay where she had fallen. He now stood apart, the indent of his spine a shadow down his naked back, his hands linked in front.

  Her stomach lurched, filling her mouth with bitter bile. It had been the slightest of movements, a bodily reflex, but a board creaked under her and his attention was caught. He twisted his neck to glance over his shoulder.

  There was a coldness in his eyes, an unfeeling detachment which turned her bowels to water. She scrambled to her feet but her left leg, so long trapped under her, buckled. Sobbing with terror, she crawled towards the door, dragging the numb leg behind.

  Suddenly remembering the noise that had come from downstairs she wailed, ‘Mol, for God’s sake ... Mol!’ But the sound was as feeble as her trembling arms, hollow as the screams of her childhood nightmares. And the key was gone from the lock.

  ‘Please let me go!’ she pleaded. ‘I swear, no one will ever know‒’ Struggling to her feet, she crossed her arms over her naked breasts. ‘I don’t want money, just let me go.... Oh Jesu!’ He had turned towards her, a macabre smile etched into his face and a long blade clasped against his naked chest.

  Anna backed away from the door, ashen-faced. ‘Please no‒’ She staggered over the corner of the mattress, jerking her arms forward to ward him off. She squealed as he stepped across the gap, as her shoulders met the corner of the room. Pleading incoherently, she forced herself hard back, flattening her palms against flaking whitewash. Under her own thrust, began to scud down the uneven surface, her tight-drawn nipples jolting until she came to rest on her heels, her thighs spread.

  He stood between her and the candle now; a silhouette fringed with amber light; an object of terror looming larger with every tortuous second. Her palms stretched out to keep off his eclipsing shadow. She could feel the air move as he stooped over her. Jerked her head aside, unable to wrench her eyes from the inescapable.

  She reached for the crucifix at her neck, feeling round its leather cord until she found it slung over her shoulder. Soon now, she prayed as his arm snatched back, exposing the knife in the light behind. Her fingers tightened around the cross – Merciful Lord let it be quick.
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  But she knew, even as she prayed that there was no help for her; that the enveloping evil had blocked the light from her soul as well as her eyes.

  And the gloating malignance that impaled her belly flesh had only just begun.

  The Witness ...

  Kate rarely returned to the lodgings before nightfall but an unexpected call on the warehouse by the saddler’s wife had curtailed the appointment by several hours. She looked forward to telling Cassy how the flustered man had cut a dash across the office in nothing but his wig; how she – nearly choking with laughter at the sight of his wobbling buttocks – had to snatch her things before being rudely ejected down a rickety flight of stairs to the loading bay at the back; how, between boxes of leather offcuts, she had made herself decent before slipping away. She only wished she had been able to hear the saddler explain away his state of undress.

  Blackbirds were chinking in the back lane as she emerged from the alley skirting the soapworks. Above the rooftops the sky was streaked with a fiery sunset; a scene evocative of summer evenings with Jack and the ewes, of treks through the wood to the pool and her soft bed at the cottage. Dipping her head under the overhanging branches of a lilac tree, it suddenly struck her that the poignancy, the wistfulness which had dogged her for months after the trial, had faded since the birth of her son. François had turned her face from the past. Nothing mattered now except securing a safe future for him.

  Finding her key, she quietly turned it in the front door lock and latched the door behind her. She dropped her cloak over a bench in the passage, tiptoed upstairs and put her head round the door of the front room.

  Hetty, the girl who nursed François while she was working, was draped over the edge of the crib, her loose hair fallen over her face. Kate lit a candle-stub, leaned over the cot and brushed her lips over the infant’s sleep warm face. His eyelids flickered briefly, then sank again. She lingered over him for several moments, then pulled the tossed away blanket up to his neck.

  Taking Hetty’s shoulders, she coaxed the sleeping girl back against the chair drawn up by the cot, noting with a smile the cushion of pillows Hetty had made to soften the hard wood – pillows borrowed from Kate’s bed across the room. She eased the girl’s arms back from the cot rail and brushed the lank hair from her face.

  Cassy had found her shivering in the outhouse doorway on a bitter January morning; turned out of her home after her parents died of plague leaving no one to pay the landlord – just twelve years old and scrawny as a child of seven. But in five months with them she had come on in leaps and bounds, still thin but robust now and, above all, devoted to little François.

  Kate fetched the quilt from her bed and was tucking it round Hetty when she noticed a crumple of paper in the cot. Holding it up to the candle she could see from the crude woodcut picture on the front page that it was a dog-eared pamphlet. She flicked past the title page through several sides of coarse print, wondering how Hetty had come by such a thing. It had doubtlessly slipped from her fingers as she slept. Curious, but being able to read only a few simple words, she looked more closely at the picture.

  What she saw made the blood drain from her face.

  Beneath the smudges of dirty fingers there was the rough-drawn image of a partly naked woman, her head propped up against the wall of a slant-ceilinged room, her body mutilated and dark-patched with what could only be blood, and at her throat a large crucifix.

  Kate stepped backwards to the bed and sat on it, trembling. It was her, the wretch she had seen in the Temple ceiling. She searched for a date and found it below the gruesome diagram – the 30th day of April, this year of our Lord 1666. More than a month ago. The last day of April – the eve of the Mayday frolics. A groan escaped her. The very evening she had come upon him in the graveyard.

  Kate exhaled heavily and squeezed her eyes shut. What happened by the granite tombstone had caused this woman’s death, she was sure of it. The madness she had stoked, he had vented on this stranger – a woman, any woman.

  She opened her eyes and saw that Hetty was sitting up in the chair, staring at the pamphlet in her hands. ‘Where did you get this,’ Kate demanded. Hetty shrank back into the pillows, her pale face puckering with fear. The girl’s reaction instantly softened Kate’s anger. She moved from the bed and stooped beside the chair. ‘I need to know where it came from,’ she said, more gently.

  Hetty hesitated ... then stammered, ‘I didn’t mean to take it, honest, Kate!’

  ‘Take what?’ Cassy stood in the doorway, yawning. ‘I thought you were out for the night.’

  Kate glanced up at her friend. ‘So did I.’ She held the pamphlet out. ‘Look at this.’

  ‘I-it’s just I don’t get much to read now and it was there hanging out of his pocket,’ Hetty gabbled. ‘I only wanted to look at it ... I meant to put it back, honest I did!’

  ‘Sweet Lord, this is her – the one you saw, isn’t it?’ blurted Cassy.

  ‘Whose pocket?’ Kate pressed.

  ‘The gentl’man came last Sabbath,’ whispered the girl.

  ‘She means George Whalley,’ added Cassy. ‘What else did you take?’

  ‘Nothing!’ Hetty was distressed. ‘I don’t take things!’

  Kate laid her hand on the girl’s trembling arm. ‘We believe you, Hetty ... don’t cry. The picture caught your eye, didn’t it?’

  The girl nodded balefully. ‘And the lettering over it. A Most Certain, Gruesome and True Discovery of a Murdered ... Whore,’ she quoted.

  ‘Where did you learn to read?’ Cassy asked sharply.

  Hetty blinked away her tears. ‘Father did some farmgate preaching, he made me read his sermons out to him.’

  Cassy glanced at Kate and shrugged. ‘She’d better read it aloud to us then.’

  Kate squeezed the girl’s arm and passed the pamphlet back to her. In the crib François was stirring. Cupping his downy head, she lifted him out, blankets and all, and sat on the edge of the bed rocking him. ‘Read it to us,’ she coaxed, ‘and I will buy you something from the bookstalls in St Paul’s yard.’

  Hetty glanced anxiously from Kate to Cassy and back again.

  ‘Come on, you goose!’ sighed Cassy, plumping down on the arm of the chair and tussling the girl’s hair. ‘I shan’t turn you out if that’s what you’re fretting about.’

  ‘I took it to the outhouse to look at,’ explained Hetty, ‘but he’d gone by the time I’d done. I would have put it back, truly.’

  ‘Never mind that now, read it to us!’ Cassy said through her teeth.

  ‘A Most Certain, Gruesome and ...’

  ‘We’ve heard that,’ sighed Cassy. ‘What comes after?’

  Squinting in the meagre candlelight, Hetty ran her finger down the page. ‘... was found in the attic room of a derelict house in Dog Lane, the horribly mutilated body of one Anna Davidson, prostitute of this city,’ she read, dramatically.

  ‘Anna‒’ echoed Kate.

  ‘... one terrible incision from breastbone to loins, another crosswise to the first, laying bare the fertile regions, which had been plundered. The two savage cuts presenting a dia ... diabolical inversion of the Cross ...’

  ‘Christ Almighty!’ shuddered Cassy.

  ‘Go on Hetty,’ murmured Kate.

  The girl swallowed. ‘Though mangled and lying in a pool of blood, the wretched woman was yet alive when discovered by a friend. She expired before the arrival of constable and examiner. Embedded in the flesh of her left hand was found a crucifix ornamented with blue agate; said to have been given to Anna by the family of a plague victim she nursed. It is devoutly to be wished that in her final suffering moments Anna Davidson renounced her life of sin, in readiness for the judgement. Hearken all you sinners, the wrath of‒’

  ‘That’s enough,’ Cassy cut in, ‘we can do without all that.’

  Stroking the baby’s head, Kate lifted her eyes and smiled heavily. ‘There’s gingerbread in the tin by the kitchen fire. Take some to bed with you, Hetty.’ She watch
ed the girl’s eager exit. Cassy pressed her ear against the closed door, listening for the sound of retreating footsteps then, satisfied that Hetty was gone, dropped into the vacated chair.

  ‘The evil bastard!’ Cassy hissed, snatching up the discarded pamphlet.

  Laying François on the bed, Kate went to the window and stared out into a sky dusted with stars. ‘I have to find the house in Dog Lane.’

  ‘Leave it alone, Kate. What hope would you have against such a monster?’

  ‘There will be traces of him, there,’ Kate went on, ‘something that may lead me to him.... I know it. If I could find the one who discovered her afterwards, the witness‒’

  ‘And what do you mean to do if you find him?’ Cassy demanded.

  ‘I will know when the time comes,’ Kate answered. ‘For now all I know is that if I don’t go after him, he will come searching for us.’

  Nothing stirred in Dog Lane but the creaking board over the baker’s shop and the occasional puffs of pipe-smoke which blew from a casement window, where the watcher kept vigil.

  From a mattress dragged beneath the window, the witness gazed down on the empty lane, waiting out one more sleepless night in case the demon should return, praying that he would come after the one who had crossed him on the stairs that night – that he would come to destroy the only one who could identify him. And coming be himself destroyed.

  Balancing the pipe on the sill, fingers reached down for the loaded musket and stroked the cold metal of the barrel; reassured, replaced it on the mattress.

  He would come now that the initial clamour had subsided, now that the sheriff’s men and the pamphleteers, the headshaking priests and ghouls had all but forgotten Anna Davidson. In the wake of all that he would come ... he must come.

  The world had put aside thoughts of whore Anna; one more death among the thousands in the plague cemeteries, worthy of a moment’s notice for its mouth-watering cruelty, that was all.

  But the witness could never erase the horrific memory of that night. It clung to the brain as it clung to the attic room above, obliterating all else.