AUTHOR’S NOTE
The belief in witchcraft is still very strong today and practised in parts of England and Europe. There are two types of witchcraft – black and white. White witches usually use herbs to cure wounds, sores and diseases.
Ten years ago a white witch from a coven in the North of England was asked,
“Does a witch possess what others would regard as ‘supernatural’ powers?’
The answer was,
“A witch possesses nothing that is not basic in everyone. People in becoming ‘civilised’ have lost sight of these powers. A witch cultivates them, learns how to bring them back into use – how to control them and make the power work.”
The terrible cruelty of the witch hunts in England between 1542 and 1684 resulted in a thousand witches being executed. In Scotland the number executed was higher and death was by burning. In Europe over two hundred thousand witches died at the stake during the same period.
In England in 1736 the statute was repealed and the law no longer punishes witches. By the end of the century the mania for witch hunts in Europe had disappeared, but in rural districts, however, they are still revered or feared.
CHAPTER ONE
1818
Coming from the farm with a basket of eggs on her arm, Hermia was humming a little tune at the same time as she was telling herself a story.
Because she was so much alone she invariably enlivened her daily tasks by pretending that she was the wife of an Eastern Potentate or the daughter of an explorer seeking treasures hidden by the Aztecs or even a pearl diver.
Just as she reached the end of the narrow lane that led to Honeysuckle Farm and was about to join the road that would take her to the village, she heard a man’s voice exclaim in a tone of exasperation,
“Damn!”
Hermia started because she had seldom heard a man swear. The country people were God-fearing and soft spoken.
Curious, she hurried down the last few yards of the lane to have her first sight of an extremely well-bred horse.
She appreciated its appearance and saw that its rider was bending down to pick up its offside hind leg.
She realised that he was looking at the horse’s hoof and guessed that it had lost a shoe.
It was something that frequently happened in the neighbourhood because the roads were so rough and Hermia suspected that the local blacksmith was not as skilled as his predecessor.
It flashed through her mind, however, that she did not recognise the horse or its owner, who at the moment had his back to her.
She walked forward to ask in her soft voice,
“Can I help you?”
The gentleman bending over the horse’s hoof did not turn his head.
“Not unless you have something to lever a shoe from a hoof!” he replied.
He spoke in an obviously irritated manner, but with the drawl that her brother had told Hermia was fashionable amongst the bucks in London and was affected by the aristocratic visitors who stayed with her uncle, the Earl of Millbrooke, at The Hall.
She guessed this was where the gentleman whose face she could not see had come from.
Moving closer she realised that what was upsetting him was that the shoe on his horse’s hoof had come loose, but was still attached by one nail which he could not dislodge.
This was an accident that had often happened to the horses her brother Peter rode when he was at home.
Without saying anything she put down her basket and looked at the rough surface of the road. A second later she saw what she sought.
It was a large flat stone and, picking it up, she moved to the side of the gentleman who was still struggling to wrench the shoe loose and suggested,
“Let me try.”
He did not glance up at her, but merely held his horse’s foreleg as he was doing already and waited while she bent down, slipped the flat stone under the shoe and levered it free from the hoof.
It took a certain amount of strength, but because she was doing it the right way and with a deft movement of her wrist, the shoe was detached from the hoof and clattered onto the road, taking the nail with it.
The gentleman beside her put the horse’s leg down straightening himself and said,
“I am extremely grateful to you and now kindly tell me where I can find a blacksmith.”
He picked the shoe up from the ground as he spoke.
Then for the first time he looked to see who had been skilful enough to help him.
Not realising she was doing so, Hermia, as she bent down to insert the stone under the shoe, had pushed back her sun bonnet so that, still tied by its ribbons under her chin, it hung down her back.
Her hair could now be seen curling unfashionably over her head in a natural and very attractive manner and was turned to burning gold in the sunshine.
It was the vivid gold of the daffodils in spring, the jasmine when it first appears after the cold of the winter and the corn when it is just beginning to ripen in the fields.
Anybody who saw Hermia looked at her hair as if they did not believe it could possibly be natural, but must owe its vivid colour to the dye-pot.
It complemented the pink-and-white clarity of her skin and the blue of her eyes, which strangely enough were the vivid blue of an alpine flower rather than the soft blue of an English summer sky.
Despite the cynical expression on his face, there was a look of astonishment in the eyes of the gentleman.
At the same time, if he was surprised by her, Hermia was certainly surprised by him.
Never had she seen a man who looked so sardonic.
His hair was dark, his features clear-cut and, while his eyebrows seemed almost to meet across the bridge of his nose, there was a bored, almost contemptuous expression in his eyes as if he despised everything and everybody.
They stood looking at each other until the gentleman commented dryly,
“You certainly make me believe that the stories of pretty milkmaids are after all not exaggerated!”
There was a faint twist to his lips which one could hardly call a smile as he added,
“And, of course, it’s an added bonus that you should be intelligent as well!”
As he spoke, he drew something from his waistcoat pocket and put it into Hermia’s hand saying,
“Here is something to add to your bottom drawer when you find a hefty young farmer to make you happy.”
Then, as Hermia would have looked down at what he had given her, he moved a step forward and putting his hand under her chin turned her face up to his.
Before she realised what was happening, before she had time to think, he bent his head and his lips were on hers.
She felt as if he held her prisoner and it was impossible to move or breathe.
Then, as at the back of her mind, she knew she must struggle and at the same time tell him that he insulted her, he released her and with the lithe grace of an athlete sprang into the saddle.
While she was still staring at him in bewilderment, he said,
“What is more, he will be a very lucky man. Tell him I said so.”
He rode off and, as Hermia watched the dust from his horse’s hoofs rising behind him, she thought she must be dreaming.
Only when the stranger was out of sight did she ask herself how she could have been so stupid as to have stood there gaping at him like any half-witted yokel while he kissed her.
It was the first time she had ever been kissed.
Then, as she stared down at what she held in her hand, she saw that it was a golden guinea and could hardly believe it was real.
Hermia was used to walking about the countryside by herself and everybody in the village knew her.
It had never struck her for one moment that a stranger
might think it odd or as she realised now, mistake her, because of the way she was dressed, for a milkmaid.
Her worn cotton gown was a little too tight from so many washes and her sun bonnet was faded because she had worn it since she was a child.
Even so she did not look in the least like Molly, the farmer’s daughter who helped him to milk his cows.
Nor did she resemble in any way, the middle-aged women who had worked on Honeysuckle Farm, some of them for twenty years.
‘A milkmaid!’ she whispered to herself and thought how angry her father would be at what had happened.
Then she could not help thinking that it was her own fault.
She had gone to the assistance of the stranger without explaining who she was.
Although he might have guessed from the few words she spoke to him that she was educated, she could hardly blame him for believing her to come from a very different background.
At the same time she thought that it was an insult even for a milkmaid to be kissed by a strange man for no reason except that she had helped him.
Because she was not only angry but in fact humiliated, Hermia’s instinct was to throw away the guinea the stranger had given her and hope that nobody would ever know what had happened.
Then she told herself that would be a wicked waste of money, for a guinea would buy many of the things that her father paid for himself for the poor and sick in the village.
Times were hard since the war and it was difficult for the younger men to find employment.
Those who were not fortunate enough to work at The Hall or on the Earl’s estate had to feed themselves by growing vegetables and keeping a few chickens.
Hermia looked down again at the guinea and thought that, if she slipped it into the poor box in the Church, which usually contained nothing, her father would be delighted.
He would bless the unknown benefactor, which was very far from her own feelings towards him!
As the full realisation that she had been kissed by a man she had never met before and would never meet again swept over her, Hermia fumed beneath her breath,
‘How dare he! How dare he behave to me in such a manner? It’s monstrous that no girl should be safe in a country lane from men like him!’
In the violence of her indignation, her fingers tightened on the guinea and she asked herself how she could have been so stupid as not to have returned it to him the moment he gave it to her.
Similarly she should have known when he put his fingers under her chin what he was about to do.
It had, however, never entered her mind that a man she did not know and who had seen her for the first time would wish to kiss her.
Yet it was just the way, she told herself, that she would expect the bucks and beaux whom Peter was always talking about to behave in London.
She should therefore have been on her guard from the moment she heard the man swearing in the lane and should have guessed what he would be like when she saw his horse.
“I hate him!” she cried aloud.
Then she found herself thinking that her first kiss was not in the least what she had expected.
She had always thought a kiss between two people would be something very soft and gentle.
Given with love and received with love, it would be something that reminded one of flowers, music and the first of the evening stars coming out in the sky.
Instead the stranger’s lips had been hard and possessive and Hermia thought again that he had held her prisoner so that she would not escape.
“If that is a kiss,” she exclaimed, “I want no more of them!”
Then she knew that that was not true.
Of course she wanted to love and be loved.
It was all part of the stories she told herself in which the wildest adventures carried her to the top of the Himalayas or along crocodile-infested rivers in the centre of Africa.
Then the heroine would find the man of her dreams and they would be married.
The hero had never had a face, but now she was certain of one thing, the man who had just kissed her would be the villain in her stories.
As she thought about him and remembered his drooping eyelids and the cynical twist to his lips, she was sure that he not only looked like a villain but even more like the Devil.
‘Perhaps that is who he was,’ she thought as she picked up her basket of eggs and started to walk slowly homewards.
It was a fascinating thought and she wondered what her mother would say if, when she arrived at the Vicarage, she told her that she had met the Devil in Chanter’s Lane and he had kissed her.
Moreover if the Devil had done so, that meant she had now become a witch.
She had so often heard whispered stories from the villagers of how in the dark woods that covered a great part of her uncle’s estate Satanic revels took place to which foolish girls had been lured.
Nobody knew exactly what had happened to poor little Betsy. She had been sane before she went to one, but they said that it was Satan himself who had sent her mad.
Her mother replied to such tales by saying that it was a lot of nonsense, Betsy had been born abnormal and her brain was damaged so that there was nothing the doctors could do for her.
But the villagers much preferred to believe that Betsy was Satan’s child and they enjoyed shivering apprehensively when she passed them.
If she was muttering, as she usually did, to herself, they were quite certain that she was casting a curse on those she did not like.
There was also a story about another girl who had gone into the woods night after night and finally had been spirited away so secretly that she was never seen again.
Hermia’s father had given the explanation that, as a visitor to the village who came from London had disappeared at exactly the same time, it was quite obvious what had happened.
But the villagers were convinced that the girl’s fate was the same at Betsy’s. She had joined in the Devil’s revelries and he had made her one of his own.
It seemed unlikely, Hermia thought, as she neared the village, that the Devil would ride such an outstanding well bred horse or would be dressed by the tailors patronised by the Prince Regent.
These were, Peter assured her, the only cutters who could make a man’s coat fit as if he had been poured into it.
Thinking of Peter made Hermia wish that he was at home. He would certainly think her experience amusing, but not even to her adored brother, to whom she confided almost everything, would she admit that she had been kissed by a stranger, Devil or no Devil.
‘Peter would laugh at my being so foolish,’ she told herself, ‘while Papa would be furious!’
It was not often her good-natured, happy-go-lucky father was angry about anything.
But she had become aware this last year since she had grown up that he disliked the compliments that the gentlemen who came to the Vicarage paid her, although there were not many of them.
She had heard him say to her mother that it was a great impertinence and he was not going to tolerate it.
Although she knew it was very reprehensible, Hermia had waited outside the door to overhear her mother’s reply.
“Hermia is growing up, darling,” she had said, “and, as she is very pretty, in fact lovely, you must expect men to notice her, although unfortunately there are not many eligible bachelors around here to do so.”
“I will not have any man, whoever he may be, messing about with her,” the Honourable Stanton Brooke said sharply.
“Nobody is likely to do that,” Mrs. Brooke replied soothingly, “but I wish your brother and his wife would be a little kinder in asking her to some of the parties they give at The Hall. After all, she is the same age as Marilyn.”
Hermia listening outside the door had given a little sigh and did not wait to hear any more.
She was well aware that her mother resented the fact that the Earl of Millbrooke, her father’s brother, and his wife had almost ignored her since she was eighteen.
> Not once had she been asked to any of the parties they gave at The Hall for her first cousin and Hermia knew even better than her mother the reason for it.
Marilyn was jealous.
During the last year when they had done lessons together, as they had ever since they had been small children, she had grown more and more resentful of her cousin’s looks and never missed an opportunity to disparage her.
Because she could not find anything unkind to say about her face, she concentrated on her clothes.
“That gown you are wearing is almost in rags!” she would say when Hermia arrived at The Hall early in the morning. “I cannot think why you are content to make a scarecrow of yourself!”
“The answer is quite simple,” Hermia would reply. “Your father is very rich and mine is very poor!”
She had not spoken resentfully, she had merely said it laughingly, but Marilyn had scowled and tried to think of another weapon she could hurt her with.
It did seem to Hermia very unfair, even though her mother had explained it to her, that it was traditional for the oldest son of the family to have everything and the younger sons practically nothing.
“By why, Mama?”
“I will explain it to you,” her mother had replied quietly. “Large estates like your Uncle John’s must be passed intact from father to son. If they once started to divide up the land and the money amongst other members of the family, there would soon be no great landlords in England, but only a lot of smallholdings.”
She paused to see if her daughter was listening to what she was saying before she went on,
“That is why in all the great aristocratic families the oldest son inherits everything, including the title. The second son generally goes into the Army or the Navy, while the third son becomes a Clergyman because there are always livings of which his father is the patron.”
“So that is why Papa became a Parson!”
Her mother had smiled.
“Exactly. I think in fact, if he had had the choice, he would rather have been a soldier. However, as you know, he is just a poor Parson, but a very very good one.”
That was true, Hermia knew, because her father for all his easy-going nature was extremely compassionate and had a real love of his fellow men.
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