The Witch (The Witch Trilogy Book 1)

by Cheryl Potter

  When, within the hour, the rooftops of Fenchurch Street and the Cheap developed a fiery nimbus, and acrid smoke gusted in through the casements, the fire assumed an awesome reality.

  He left Cecilia, clutching her jewel case, as she frantically supervised the removal of her best furniture and hangings to the cellar. He forged a way through the chaotic streets by the Boar’s Head Tavern, past carts and coaches marooned in a sea of evacuees, into Candlewick Street. As he passed the blazing Steelyard, he paused to watch a terrified dog tear through the crowds, straight into the fire-licked doorway of a house.

  Darting down an alleyway, he broke free of the crowd and made his way by a series of twists and turns, past abandoned houses and soot-blackened gardens, across smouldering Thames Street and down to the crowded wharf.

  ‘Marsden! Marsden, over here!’

  Beyond the milling crowds and their assorted chattels, in a boat by a narrow slipway, he spotted a familiar face. It was Pearson and a female companion. He pushed through a gang of excited youths to the water’s edge and clambered into the bobbing vessel.

  ‘It was the devil’s own job, getting a boat!’ gushed the doctor, using an oar to stave off the hands that clung to the boat-rail as he pushed off. ‘It is a wonder I saw you in that crowd. Have you, like my niece Jane and I, come for the spectacle?’

  Marsden took an oar and glanced at the fresh-faced girl seated in the prow. Beneath the tasselled edge of a lace cap, her eyes shone.

  ‘An exciting prospect,’ he said, raising his dark eyebrows at her. ‘Fire is so elemental ... so compelling.’ A violent jolt, caused by the boat colliding with a flat-bottomed lighter, stemmed her reply. The vessel, overloaded with household effects, dipped precariously below the waterline. Co-ordinating their efforts, Marsden and the doctor manoeuvred past the unwieldy lighter. They steered a course through the barrage of river traffic, cutting through the exodus of goods and displaced people, past squabbling boatmen and a litter of lost goods bobbing unclaimed in the murky waters of the Thames.

  ‘They say,’ cried the girl, bracing her arms against the sides of the boat as she leaned towards Marsden, ‘that it started at Master Farryner’s.’

  ‘The king’s baker, in Pudding Lane,’ her uncle explained. ‘Though there is much mention of French incendiaries.’

  ‘Feasible,’ Marsden granted, relieving the doctor of his oar and putting his back into the rowing. ‘The City is tinder-dry‒’

  ‘Judgement!’ yelled a swarthy lighterman. ‘Bloody hell-fire and no mistake!’

  Marsden smiled. As the bridge came into view he lifted the oars. The flames, keen-edged in the fading light, leapt into the smoky sky above the Fish Street end of the bridge. Their great orange tongues flicked and intertwined, fanned by the strong wind. At Jane’s insistence, he rode on towards the stone bridge, so close to the blaze that they were able to observe the dark silhouettes of the fire-fighters overhead. Patches of thick smoke lent the scene a misty unreality. The crackling draw of the flames drowned their voices and the sounds of the river. They glided noiselessly through showers of sparks and ash, the doctor clinging to his intrepid charge, who at the first sign of fire, had leapt to her feet in abandon. Her face, flushed with vitality, had several times sought Marsden’s – and her potential was not lost on him.

  They passed beneath the echoing stone bridge and out again, towards the crowded wharfs around the market where the smoke was less dense.

  ‘A fearsome thing,’ exclaimed the doctor, coaxing Jane back into her seat and plucking at a hole burnt in his coat sleeve by a cinder. He shook his head. ‘And difficult to envisage how such a monster might be contained, the streets are so combustible.’

  Marsden felt Jane’s foot touch his under Pearson’s seat. He rubbed his own against her ankle, and pulled on the oars.

  ‘There is a way,’ he suggested. ‘If the blaze could be surrounded by a moat of clear space.’ As he spoke, his eyes, which had been trailing along the line of faces on Botolph’s Wharf, suddenly darted back to a figure standing apart from the rest.

  ‘Blow up the houses?’ mused Pearson. ‘I doubt the militia is well enough organized to execute such a strategy.’

  The oars scudded over the surface of the water. Marsden stared through the smoky haze at the lone woman. He saw her hair fly in the wind, watched her head dip and nuzzle the bundle in her arms. A side wind caught the boat and nudged it towards the wharf.

  ‘Mr Marsden?’ said Jane, with a half-amused, half-querulous frown.

  ‘Someone you recognize, Marsden?’ asked the doctor, laying a hand on his sleeve. ‘There is room for another‒’

  The ill-defined face looked up from the bundle. And across the murky breach she whispered, ‘François....’

  ‘Sir, are you unwell?’ Pearson’s concern roused him. Without shifting his eyes from her, Marsden dug the oars into the water, urgently cutting across to the riverside.

  ‘My dear Marsden, what ails‒’ began Pearson.

  ‘Quite well,’ snapped Marsden. He cut across the path of a heavy barge, all but colliding with its figurehead, oblivious to the oaths of the bargee. Alarmed, Pearson wrestled with the oars, but Marsden pushed the protesting doctor back on to his seat. A dozen more strokes and the boat thudded against sand-bagged steps. Levering himself out of the vessel, he glanced up to where he had last seen Kate. Then with a curt, ‘Forgive me,’ to the dumbfounded doctor and his niece, he took the steps two at a time.

  He burst on to the wharf, clawing through the jostling crowd and vaulted a stack of chairs and chests. But the space where she had been was empty. With an oath, he grabbed a chair from the stack and sprang on to it.

  Over heads shifting and curious, he spotted a figure in a brown cloak making towards the fire-torn streets around the bridge. A tugging at his sleeve drew his attention down to an indignant youth who was gabbling about his shoes marking the satin seat. He swooped to the ground, cannoned the chair at the youth, and hurried after the brown cloak.

  She went into the dusk, tripping the ash-covered streets, darting between carts, weaving through knots of frenzied house-clearers. He followed her into a church overflowing with frightened people. The sick and infirm carried out in their beds, had been lined up by the entrance to the crypt, blocking the way to the door through which she was making her exit. Grabbing the first bed-post, he jumped from mattress to straw pallet, batting aside a wasted arm that tried to hold him, then out through an overgrown churchyard.

  Now hard on her heels, he hurdled the hand-gate. She began to run, hampered by the bundle she carried, swinging from side to side with the awkwardness of it. Across stones that burned underfoot, into a street where overhanging buildings belched flame and smoke.

  A figure, wearing the side-striped breeches of a soldier, staggered from an entry, and yelled after her, ‘Not that way!’ But his words were drowned by a crash of timber.

  Marsden chased her into a wall of smoke – so close now that he could hear the braying cry of the child. The child drew him. Its cries guided him under the stable arch of a burning coaching inn, across the uneven cobbles of a yard ... to where she stood waiting for him.

  He stopped a few paces from her, blocking escape. The inn, a timber-framed building infilled with herringbone brickwork, was crowned with flames. Fire gushed from the windows, spraying shards of green glass across the yard. He glanced to his left. The stable-block was an inferno; its yawning doorway filled with a red glow, and a small goods door at the top of an external staircase was already seeping smoke. She had nowhere to run.

  This time he had her.

  And Consummation ...

  A sharp gust of wind cleared the smoke, leaving the two of them a small oasis of vision. Above, a full moon pierced the night’s haze. The heat seared his chest, the fire’s roar beat at his ears – and she filled his sight.

  He was fascinated by the change in her. His mental vision was of homespun and weathered hands, of thick eyebrows and scrubbed cheeks. The rude image jar
red with new reality. In a moment of clear moonlight he saw beneath the drab cloak, lace and ruby velvet, a glitter of jewels around her throat, painted lips and a froth of curl. It did not surprise him so much that the shepherdess had turned whore, as her apparent success in the profession.

  He waited for a blast of throat-catching smoke to disperse, then focused upon her eyes. He concentrated his mind; luring, penetrating, rending the veil of her confidence. He probed in search of the old moorings and finding them, anchored. She was stronger, he sensed that, but not as strong as he had anticipated. His will was dominant still. Despite the dreams and foreboding, he was master. Relief washed over him in orgasmic bursts.

  The child in her crooked arms began to cry again. Timber and masonry crashed in upon itself, sending bursts of sparks over them. But neither gaze faltered.

  Hooking both hands in the buttoned front of his shirt he ripped it open and held out his hand to her.

  ‘Come Katharine Gurney,’ he whispered. ‘Come to me ... I will give you rest.’

  Kate rocked the child and took a first faltering step across the breach. Then another. And the closer she moved, the tighter drawn was their smoke-blown oasis.

  ‘Come,’ he urged, lightly touching her face and throat. He drew her against his bared flesh. ‘Tell me how you came to escape the noose....’

  In soft monotone, she told him, of plague and a kindly gaoler; of a swim to freedom and the trudge to London. He wiped beads of sweat from her upper lip, pensively stroked her hair, and asked, ‘How did you come to be under my window, that night at the Temple?’

  ‘You called to me,’ she said.

  The obscurity of her reply shot him through with irritation. Grabbing a handful of curls, he jerked her head back. ‘No Kate. You came of your own accord,’ he snarled. ‘It would have to have been one of the brothers told you – a patron perhaps.’ His fingers snatched at her necklace. It broke and fell away. But she said nothing.

  ‘The child‒’ he said, subsiding.

  ‘A son,’ she choked, her eyes watering with smoke.

  ‘Born in gaol?’ he demanded, prising the bundle from her arms and releasing her hair.

  Kate shook her head. ‘In a brothel.’

  Balancing the child on his left arm, he loosened its swaddlings and glanced at its genitals. Then, cupping the screaming head, rebound the agitated limbs.

  ‘What do you call him?’ he asked, coughing. When the smoke thinned he saw Kate had moved a short distance away.

  ‘Find it in yourself.’ A sudden acerbic quality in her voice jarred him. He narrowed his eyes and chewed his lip. François, she had called across the river. Ask the shepherdess, she knows. She gave a great sigh of a laugh and he knew the anchors were away, wondered if they had taken hold at all. And his hackles rose.

  ‘Tell me about him,’ he growled.

  ‘It is a story well known to you,’ she said, without a trace of fear. She began to pace slowly round him. ‘Father away, mother at play ....’

  He turned with her, heat stung eyes straining to keep her in focus. Her pace quickened. He felt a gripping at the base of his skull; a sickening pressure which spread across his brain, momentarily robbing him of sight. When it receded, she was standing before him, enveloped in iridescent light.

  Her eyes, glowing like rubies in the firelight, found his. ‘One day,’ she predicted, ‘his mother will give him over to the nuns, but not until she has moulded him, explored him ... drained his soul of goodness.’

  He felt again the creeping paralysis in his skull, lunged the spread fingers of his right hand at her face but grasped only sooty air. Turning his head up to the shimmering moon, he pleaded, ‘The witch must die!’

  ‘A convent in Italy,’ she persisted. ‘The sisters will teach the handsome child, bring him to their Master, never suspecting that his soul is already spoken for. The boy will be cunning, you see, was born to be so.’

  Arms weak with rage, he dug his fingers into the child’s armpits and swung it into the air, letting the shawl slip away. The child’s tightly curled toes chafed against each other. It sucked at air until its saliva-wet chin puckered inwards then it gave a piercing scream.

  Kate looked up at her baby but made no move to retrieve it. ‘A priest they’ll make of him,’ she said dispassionately, ‘but a carnal one; a lusting fox.’

  His arms dropped. The child swung down like a rag doll, its feet bouncing off the cobbles. It hung noiselessly from his left hand. His right felt for the blade, and finding it, his features creased into a smile. ‘Tuum nomen sanctificetur‒’

  Her eyes locked on to the glittering steel. ‘His manner will be rape,’ she choked.

  ‘Caelis in es qui noster Pater,’ he intoned, beckoning her with the knife.

  ‘And murder!’

  ‘Whom will he destroy?’ he growled, moving towards her. ‘Tell me!’

  ‘Their voices cry out.’

  ‘Whom?’ He pressed closer, slashing at smoke. Kate backed into the stable wall. She pressed her fingers against the warm roughness of perished bricks.

  ‘Listen!’ she hissed. ‘They call your name‒’

  His looming figure came into rapid focus. And with the weight of his right shoulder he pinned her against the wall.

  ‘I hear nothing!’ he snarled. He jerked the stunned child into his arm and pressed the blade into his belly flesh. ‘Give me his name!’

  ‘The son embodies the father,’ she winced, ‘he is all that you are.’

  ‘The name!’

  She ground her head against the wall with a choked laugh. And the roaring air was filled with the drone of voices. Louder, they came, pressing form out of formlessness.

  ‘François Borri,’ they murmured, voices rising in crescendo. ‘Father François Borri....’

  ‘They are calling for you, François,’ Kate said, reaching out to stroke his sweat-streaked brow. He recoiled at her touch. Feeling a peculiar yielding under the blade, he looked down. To his horror saw that the steel had sunk through rotted flesh – between the protruding ribs of a child corpse. Grey putridness sagged against his jacket sleeve, its stench stomach-heaving. The head nestled in the crook of his arm, eye-sockets and toothless gums bubbling with maggots.

  Howling with disgust, he levered himself off Kate and lunged towards the stable doorway with a cry of, ‘Witch’s filth!’ he launched the vile bundle into the jaws of the inferno. Then, amid a belch of sparks, he rounded on Kate.

  She felt a winding thud against her side. She snatched her eyes from his wild eyes, to the blood-dulled steel in his fist. Gasping with hurt, she caught his knuckles with both hands and swung herself sideways. But the toe of her shoe caught in the hem of the cloak. Her knees buckled and he drove her heavily down to the cobbles, pinning her with his weight. She struggled on to her back, the cloak winding tightly round her throat. She clawed her fingers through his dark chest hair and fixed the cat-green of his eyes with the fiery glow of hers.

  ‘I summoned you, François,’ she taunted. The darkness was suddenly shot with a myriad flares. ‘And you brought your seed to me.’

  ‘Dead!’ he spat, jerking the knife high above her chest. ‘That abomination is dead! Can’t you smell its burning flesh?’

  ‘Does a witch’s bastard die so easily?’ she delved.

  His laugh was raucous with scorn.

  ‘What you are, I have made! And what I have made is mine to destroy.’ The knife had arced down to within a hand of her lace collar when on a blast of flame there came the distracting cry of a baby. He rose unsteadily. Turned towards the stable door. In that split second, Kate scrambled towards the steps which led up to the smoking goods door above the stable. She clambered up the rickety boards, catching her hands on the blistering banister paint. Reaching the top platform she flung her cloak over the rail.

  He watched it flutter down and spread itself over the stones; craned his neck and watched her sway unsteadily, bracing herself against the creaking rail. And his eyes found hers, dug int
o her psyche, tearing down the failing bastions.

  Feared swamped Kate’s mind. The child’s cries came to her, no longer reassuring but undermining – pleading for salvation. And the wound in her side was draining thought and power from her. The heat seemed to be exploding in her chest. And the child – she knew she must get to her baby. She must survive.... but her legs felt heavy and he was offering her rest. Sweet rest. The words formed in her mind, leaving her clutching at fugitive thoughts, until they no longer mattered. ‘Jump,’ he was urging, ‘come to me Kate, there is rest in me. Come....’

  She pulled herself up into a squat on the precarious handrail and rose shakily, resting her fingertips against the hot brick wall. Behind her, the smouldering door threatened to blast open at any moment. Below, he waited; legs spread, hands linked behind his back – an irresistible focus in a swirling sea of smoke and flame.

  ‘I am your master. Yield Kate, you are weary ... come to me and there will be no more pain.’

  His words breezed through her feverish mind like a sweet summer wind; hypnotically soothing. She sank into her knees, poised to jump. The handrail swung dangerously over the courtyard, lifting her fingers off the stable wall. And in that moment the voices came to her; eddying, spellbreaking whispers: ‘The cunning man, the cunning man‒’

  There was a moment of confusion. Him saying, ‘We will soar together, Katharine, further even than before – only come to me.’

  ‘Lies!’ hissed the voices united in venom. ‘Lies! Lies! Lies!’

  ‘Now!’ he urged. ‘One step more‒’

  Kate wavered. ‘His rest is death!’ they cried. ‘Come away ... come away.’

  ‘One more step,’ he coaxed, reaching up to her.

  From inside the stable there came a splintering crash, the spluttering sobs of a child. Kate’s head snapped towards the brickwork. She flexed her knees to swing the rail back over the platform. Her hands fell against the wall, and the goods door groaned with the built-up pressure behind it. Caught by a sudden blast of icy wind, she fell off the rail, bounced off the goods door and dragged herself to the rail again.