‘You can leave Marcus Dent to me,’ I exclaimed, then saw the black look on his face and realized I had interrupted him again. ‘Sorry, you were saying?’
‘I am going to need a diversion. Can you provide one?’
I searched his face. ‘What for?’
‘I intend to enter the Lady Elizabeth’s bedchamber and tell her what has happened,’ he explained, his tone so confident that I nodded, though I was finding it difficult to concentrate on his words, mesmerized instead by the velvety-dark lilt of his accent. ‘I do not believe she has been told about this accusation of witchcraft, and I think it imperative that she is.’
‘Elizabeth’s door is always guarded.’
‘Hence the need for a diversion,’ he reminded me gently.
‘It won’t work. She’s been sick for days. Blanche would never let you in.’
‘The diversion,’ he murmured again, picking straw out of my mattress.
I frowned, the strange intensity of his presence in my chamber suddenly catching up with me.
‘I don’t understand. Why are you helping me? I’m accused of being a witch, of worshipping the Devil. Don’t you want to see me hang for it?’
His eyes lifted to survey me, serious again. ‘I’ve seen enough Spanish women burned at the stake as witches and heretics to know that hanging is a merciful death. It would be a pity to stretch such a beautiful neck though.’
I swallowed, and with an effort pushed away that horrific, unwanted image of my last moments.
He hesitated. ‘Besides, it is not too late to repent.’
‘I have nothing to repent.’
‘The charge is false? You are not a witch?’
Oddly, I couldn’t lie to him. ‘I didn’t say that. But what I do is not evil.’
‘Witchcraft is against God’s law,’ Alejandro pointed out. ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’
‘Yet Jesus performed magick in God’s name. What else were his miracles but magick?’
‘Blasphemy,’ he muttered, clearly shocked.
‘The truth,’ I countered. ‘If I were able to walk on water, would you call that a miracle? Or magick?’
‘That’s different.’
‘Why?’
He sat back, staring at me. ‘I see you have the makings of a theologian, Meg. Unfortunately, we have no time to debate the holy miracles of Christ. The witchfinder will be here soon. Once he removes you from Woodstock, I will no longer be able to help you. Which I very much wish to do.’
‘Thanks,’ I muttered. ‘So you want me to create a diversion that will get Blanche Parry and the guards away from Elizabeth’s chamber door long enough for you to go in and speak to her alone? It will have to be something amazing—’
This time, his eyes flashing, he interrupted me. ‘Are you saying you cannot do it? That you do not have the necessary skill to—?’
‘I can do it,’ I said hurriedly, and sat up, tossing my unruly hair out of my eyes. ‘Though I must admit, I do not understand why you would help me like this. You are to be a priest soon. I should be your enemy.’
A small frown tugged at his forehead. ‘I have always been taught that witchcraft is the work of the Devil. Yet I would not see you die for it.’
My skin prickled at the sombre look in Alejandro’s eyes. I did not press him further. ‘When should I . . .?’
‘Just as you are being taken to see this witchfinder, Marcus Dent. That is when I will need the Lady Elizabeth’s door unguarded.’
‘Consider it done.’
He smiled, seeming to relax. ‘Good.’
‘Good.’
We sat for a moment in silence, looking at each other. It was growing light outside. Then a brusque hand rapped on the door.
‘Priest, your five minutes is up!’ came a hoarse whisper from whichever guard he had bribed.
Alejandro stood up from the bed. Suddenly, I was terrified and did not want him to go. Alejandro de Castillo stood for everything that had made my life at Woodstock hard and bitter and false. Yet while he was in the room with me, it felt impossible that I might be going to die soon. And in such a horrible, agonizing way.
My hand went out to him. ‘Don’t . . .’ I began to say, then I saw his gaze meet mine.
He was standing at the end of my bed, looking down at me intently, his eyes near black in the half-light. My hand dropped away, and I could not finish my plea for him not to leave.
Alejandro would not stay with me, nor touch my hand, because he knew his mission to be doomed. It was too late for me. Even if he managed to reach the Lady Elizabeth, she would never dare interfere with Marcus Dent’s questioning. The same suspicion might easily fall on her too. Elizabeth was the daughter of a proven witch, and her own interest in astrology and divination was already being whispered about at court. Why would she help me when doing so might risk her neck too?
‘I’m sorry, I must go,’ Alejandro told me simply. ‘To stay any longer would be to risk discovery.’
I nodded, and somehow managed to force my dry lips into a smile.
‘Adiós,’ he murmured from the doorway, and this time I did not need a translation.
I turned my face into the pillow as soon as the door had closed behind him, my heart gripped with a new and more terrible fear. Alejandro de Castillo had said his traditional farewell in Spanish, commending me to God. But I was a witch, and many believed that meant God was my enemy.
If that was true, all that awaited me after the hangman had done his work were the black, everlasting fires of Hell.
SIX
Witchfinder
THEY CAME FOR me late in the morning. Marcus Dent had been at Woodstock a good hour before I heard the tread of their feet approaching the room, and sat up, tidying the demure white cap I had chosen to wear over my yellow hair. By now he must have heard Joan’s testimony, for I had caught the sound of the girl weeping again, and footsteps, back and forth between the various rooms of the old lodge.
I sat and tried to control my breathing. I was very nervous and my palms were clammy.
How would it feel to hang? I had seen men hanged in the marketplace before, and remembered how their legs jerked convulsively as the noose tightened about their necks, suffocating them.
My own breath seemed to stop at the thought. I did not want to die. Yet what chance was there that a man like Marcus Dent would accept my claim of innocence?
I guessed that Marcus had made me wait deliberately, that the witchfinder wanted me to be on the verge of breaking before he brought me in to be questioned. That way I would be more malleable, more open to whatever he might suggest to get me out of this tight corner. I had played the scene so many times in my head since being shut into this room last night, it was almost a letdown to see the door open and hear the guard’s harsh command, ‘On your feet, girl. Master Dent is ready to see you now.’
Do not betray Aunt Jane. That is all I need to remember. Not to betray Aunt Jane.
I twisted my hands before me, not meeting the eyes of the two guards who had come for me, and stepped out of my room.
I gave it five or six steps from the room, far enough for them to have relaxed, thinking me docile. Then I turned and said under my breath, in the silkiest voice I could muster, ‘Fire! I smell fire!’
The boy nearest me was fresh-faced, barely old enough to be shaving. To my delight, he caught the suggestion straight away. His head went up like a stag’s at the sound of the hunting horn, and he sniffed the air.
‘Fire!’ he exclaimed, and stopped dead, knocking into the older guard, who asked him irritably what he was doing. ‘I smell smoke. Clear as day, I smell it.’
I looked at them both innocently. ‘Fire?’
The older guard met my eyes. He stared about himself, his expression dazed, as though he had just woken up from a long sleep. ‘I . . . I smell it too. Something must be burning in the kitchens.’
‘I only hope the house is not alight,’ I murmured sweetly.
‘Something burnin
g in the kitchens?’ the younger one repeated. He shook his head, panic on his face. ‘It’s a heretic’s bonfire. I tell you, the house is alight. Quick, call for the others! Tell them to bring water from the well before the whole place goes up.’ The boy covered his mouth with the sleeve of his tunic as though he were choking. ‘This smoke. Sweet Lord, I can hardly breathe.’
‘We have to take the girl to Master Dent first. Those are our orders.’ The older man was still struggling against the trick, frowning.
‘Take her charred body, more like. Look, I’ll go. You can stay here and brave the flames if you want. I’ll fetch buckets, we can form a line from the well.’ The boy ran for the stairs.
I looked at the remaining guard. There was sweat on his forehead and his lips were twitching. He did not know what to do.
‘I wonder if it’s reached the Lady Elizabeth’s suite of rooms yet?’ I murmured.
At this, the man finally broke, like a fishing line under the weight of a vast salmon, and began to shout, ‘Fire! Fire!’ up and down the narrow landing.
For the next few minutes, an age-old panic seemed to take over the household. Doors slammed, servants came running from all quarters, including a startled Blanche Parry with bulging eyes and an apron held up over her mouth. Up the stairs staggered guards with old buckets sloshing over with water. They rushed about in terror, throwing open doors and searching rooms, hunting in vain for a fire that had been conjured entirely from my imagination.
In all this, I stood quiet and still against the wall. I could only hope that this had been enough of a distraction for Alejandro de Castillo to enter the Lady Elizabeth’s room and speak to her in private.
‘Enough!’
As though a shutter had been thrown back, letting in the light, everyone stopped what they were doing and stared at each other in bewilderment.
It was Marcus Dent.
He was standing in the doorway to the long room. The thin-faced witchfinder looked past the crowd to where I was waiting in silence, and crooked his finger at me.
‘Your turn to answer some questions, Meg Lytton. In here, if you please. The rest of you, get back to your duties. There is no fire.’
Prepared though I was to face his questions, I still shivered as I entered the room. Marcus seated himself in a deep chair by the window and looked up at me thoughtfully, one long thin leg crossed over the other. I curtseyed low, unpleasantly aware that the witchfinder held my life in his hands. He had not told me to sit, so I stood for my interrogation like a common criminal before a magistrate, my hands clasped behind my back so he would not see how they trembled.
‘I am told you are a witch,’ Marcus began, his tone pleasant enough, with none of the rhetoric or accusatory gestures I had anticipated. ‘Is this true?’
‘Of course not.’
‘I see.’ He smiled. ‘So the maid Joan did not catch you casting a circle in the old palace yesterday evening?’
‘She was confused. She must have seen a reflection of something . . . it was dark, we were playing a game.’
‘Ah yes, hide and seek.’
I told him briefly what I had told Sir Henry Bedingfield the night before, though I knew that Marcus was a very different man to the Lady Elizabeth’s gaoler. He would not be so easily satisfied by my flimsy explanation.
Marcus heard me out without interruption, then rose and looked out over the park. I studied him in silence, the tilt of his fair head, the straight back, the dirt on his boots from this morning’s ride. It was hard to imagine that he could have ever proposed marriage to me.
It ought to have been a terrifying thought, reducing me to tears. Yet I was not terrified. Instead, I felt as though I were carved of ice, unable to feel anything as I stared at his back and wondered when he would call the guards to have me dragged away. Or what alternative he might lay before me instead of arrest and a public execution.
I did not have long to wait.
‘What I have heard here today is enough to condemn you to the gallows,’ he said lightly, and turned his head. His blue eyes held an odd expression. ‘Meg, Meg . . .’
‘Marcus, I swear that I am innocent.’
This time my voice had no effect; he was ready for it and merely shook his head, dismissing my words.
‘Witches always swear that they are innocent.’
‘I am not a witch.’
Marcus came towards me and I shrank away at last, guessing instinctively that he meant to touch me. He halted a few feet away, and I could see that my reaction had angered him.
‘Well,’ he murmured, ‘perhaps you are not a witch. Not yet. But perhaps you are apprenticed to one.’
My heart almost stopped.
‘Who . . . what do you mean?’
‘Come, Meg, the time for such pretence is long past. Your aunt never married, did she? I have met many such lone women in my time, growing old without a man to keep them on the straight and narrow path to salvation. Perhaps she practises the dark arts behind your father’s back.’ His smile was cold. ‘Or perhaps he knows, and allows it out of fear.’
I stared at him, an icy terror gripping me. If they were to search my aunt’s bedchamber at Lytton Park, what would they find? Magickal instruments enough to hang us both thrice over, and books that no respectable woman should possess.
In desperation, I strengthened my voice. ‘My aunt is not a witch either. I thought you were a learned man, but you must know this is mere superstition. Every unmarried woman past twenty years of age must be a witch these days, it seems.’
My gaze fixed on his blue eyes, I let the silence between us grow long and heavy, the room suddenly clammy with it, like a mist thickening into fog.
I imagined Marcus Dent becoming confused in that oppressive silence and forgetting what he had come here to do. In my mind’s eye, I heard the witchfinder declare me innocent. He would leave Woodstock and never come back. He would forget the accusations against my aunt. He would . . .
‘Do not waste my time with these childish tricks.’ Marcus clapped his hands, and the dark, clammy atmosphere I had conjured was gone from the room. So was the feeling of confusion. Only Marcus Dent remained. He stood in front of me, his gaze assessing. ‘Truly, is that the life you wish for yourself, Meg? To become an old maid like your aunt, accused by your neighbours of worshipping the Devil and turning milk sour wherever your feet pass?’
He was only a man, so he could not understand. A woman did not choose the gift. The gift chose her, and even if she averted her face for years, there could be no ignoring the small, insistent voice in the dark watches of the night that told how she spent her power on sweepings and cradlings and nothings, how she poured the gift away in dirty water every day, while her true self lay hidden and unused, like gold at the back of a drawer.
‘You are so beautiful,’ he said more huskily, and raised a hand to trace a line down my cheekbone. ‘Come to me. Let me protect you.’
‘Come to you? In what way?’
He hesitated, then allowed himself to meet my gaze. There was a strange burning hunger in his blue eyes, and an uncertainty too.
Was Marcus Dent in love with me?
I had thought him merely in lust before, and desperate to make an heir for his estate. But if he was in love with me, that made him vulnerable to my power, whatever he might claim. Perhaps it was not beyond my skill, after all, to turn this man to my will.
I felt sick to think of lowering myself to such a thing. To encourage his love, and then escape him once I had the chance. Yet what choice did I have? This was not just my own neck I would be saving from the noose, I reminded myself, but my aunt’s too.
‘So?’ I prompted him.
He came closer, and I felt the warmth of his breath. ‘Accept my protection, and you will find out.’
I shivered and closed my eyes. His hand cupped my cheek. Suddenly, I was unsure that I could go through with this, even to save my life. The man was sadistic and cruel – how could I take him as my husband?
; ‘Whatever you may think,’ he continued, ‘I am not a heartless man. I have watched you grow from a child into a beautiful creature, soft-skinned and alive. I don’t wish to see you dangle at the rope’s length, Meg, and watch your light put out so cruelly. But if you won’t give me a good reason to discredit the kitchen maid’s testimony, I must do my duty and send you to trial as a witch. And then you will hang.’ Slowly, he leaned forward and touched his lips to mine. Even that brief contact seemed to burn my skin. It was all I could do not to push him away. ‘Do we understand each other?’
I opened my eyes, staring at Marcus, and knew I had no chance against him physically. But I still had my skill as a witch. My hands bunched into fists at my side. Reaching out with my thoughts, I tried to repel him with the power of my mind alone.
Marcus Dent stood like a rock, his breath warm on my face, seemingly untouched by my magick.
My lips curled into a grimace and my eyes narrowed to slits as I redoubled my efforts. Still nothing. My belly hurt and sweat collected on my forehead. I pushed so hard against him with my mind that in the far corner of the room an elegant blue glass flagon teetered on the edge of a table and fell, shattering on the floor.
Marcus Dent merely laughed. He withdrew a small white stone from the pouch at his belt and held it up to my face. ‘To ward off a witch’s power, use her own instruments against her,’ he quoted softly. ‘This is your charm-stone, isn’t it?’
Fury and helplessness snarled inside me. Marcus Dent seemed to have an answer for every trick I knew. How could I ever hope to win against such a man?
‘Isn’t it?’ he repeated, waiting for my answer.
Before I could tell him to go to Hell, the door was flung open, and we both turned.
Startled, I stared at the Lady Elizabeth, who stood in the doorway with her guards behind her, wrapped in a rich red mantle that covered her right up to the neck, her face stern and more regal than I had ever seen it.
Marcus Dent appeared astonished by this unexpected interruption, and perhaps even a little fearful. He took a few steps back from me, no doubt realizing how intimate our closeness must seem, and thrust the white charm-stone back into his pouch. He remained defiant though, sure of his ground here. He was the witchfinder, after all, and not without power of his own.
Witchstruck Page 7
