‘Another time,’ Dee murmured, and I suspected he was addressing me, not the Lady Elizabeth.
TEN
A New Year Kiss
I WAS DREAMING.
I knew that in my heart. Yet somehow the dream felt so real, I was still afraid. I could not quite shake off the illusion that the astrologer John Dee was in the room, that he was standing at the foot of my bed, watching me through the darkness.
Tell me, child, have you ever conjured the spirits of the dead and spoken with them?
I wanted to cry out ‘No!’ but my face had been stopped. With sand, or perhaps earth.
That was it: I was lying deep in a pit under the earth, my arms folded across my chest, a thin, coarse shroud barely covering my white body. I had been buried alive and John Dee was standing above me, staring down at my freshly dug, unmarked grave.
My hands scrabbled desperately at the soft, crumbling darkness around me. But it was no use. Dirt covered my face with its black whispering death. It choked my eyes, my ears, my mouth. I had not been buried alive. Dee had killed me, had come in the night and strangled me, and now he was trying to conjure my spirit, to speak with me and learn the secrets of the other world that lay beyond the gates of life.
A hand was shaking my shoulder. Dee had brought a spade. He had dug down to my poor strangled body and was attempting to resurrect me.
‘Meg!’ he was saying insistently. ‘Meg!’
My eyes flew open.
It was daylight and I was lying on my back, tangled up in my bedclothes, one arm flung out of the narrow cot as though reaching for something. I must have been lying on it, for as I moved, my whole arm tingled with pins and needles.
‘Ouch!’ I sat up, rubbing my numb arm as it came painfully back to life.
Blanche straightened above me with a sigh, shaking her head. ‘Time to get up, slack-a-bed. It’s Christmas Eve, and there’s much to be done.’
I stared at her stupidly. How had I overslept?
Blanche watched me struggle out of the tangled covers and begin hunting for my white cap. She shook her head, a tight little smile on her lips, clearly enjoying this heaven-sent opportunity to reprimand me for laziness.
‘You’ve missed Mass,’ she pointed out. ‘Our mistress has been up this past hour, and done her prayers. Though I can tell you, having to pray for the Queen and her unborn child stuck in both our throats today. By next Christmas that babe will be the new heir to the throne, and my dear mistress will be all but forgotten at court.’
The Queen’s pregnancy seemed to be all we ever talked about these days. I licked my fingers and tried to straighten my wayward hair. ‘I do not believe there will be a babe. The Queen is too old to bear a child.’
‘Well, we shall see what we shall see,’ Blanche muttered dismissively. ‘Now hurry. Just comb your hair, put on your oldest gown and come down to the kitchen. There’s a goose to be plucked, and dried herbs for the sauces to be cut and prepared. You cannot expect young Joan to help the cook on her own.’
When she had gone, I wearily splashed my face from the bowl, then dampened my unruly hair and combed it into some kind of submission.
Why had I dreamed of John Dee again?
For months now, ever since meeting him that night at the Bull Inn, the young astrologer had been creeping into my dreams. Sometimes I dreamed of conjuring the dead with him by the light of a single, tall candle. Other times the crabbed black symbols of his star charts would float weirdly before my eyes as I drifted into sleep.
There is power here. Fear too, but power.
I was afraid of Dee, certainly. But not of the knowledge he possessed of astrology and the secret world beyond death. Of such hidden things I would be willing to learn more, if the opportunity was ever granted me. I still did not know how I had been able to read the meanings in the Queen’s horoscope, but if no baby came of this pregnancy, I would know for sure then that my power was true.
Alejandro knew of my yearning to learn more about astrology and he clearly disapproved of it. I had caught anger in his face that night at the Bull Inn, and a strong dislike for what we were doing there.
But Alejandro was a creature of the midday sun, of broad Spanish plains under the scorching heat of summer. He was a follower of the sword of Christ, the lightbearer. Such a man would have no time for the secrets of the night, for astrology and witchcraft and the spirits of the dead, or my childish nightmares of being buried alive.
I ran down to the kitchen. The oven was already smoking strongly, the rushes on the floor filthy with a good week’s grease and spilled food. Everywhere was a stench of burned oil and herbs, and all the doors and windows were standing open in the chill wintry air. Joan did not look up as I entered; she was hard at work scrubbing the burners clean. Besides, the simple-minded girl had barely a word to say to me these days, still suspicious of my witchery.
The cook was not much friendlier. With just a few terse words, he laid a limp, heavy goose across my arms and told me to pluck it.
I took it outside, sitting on a three-legged stool in the feeble winter sunshine, and wedged the dead bird between my skirted thighs, a bowl on the floor beside me to receive its feathers. One dull eye stared up at me accusingly as I dragged on its glossy white feathers, their quills fixed so firmly in the pale, pimpled skin beneath that my fingers were soon sore and aching.
‘Good morning.’
I shivered and glanced up as a shadow fell across me. It was Alejandro, still in his robes from this morning’s Mass, his silver cross hanging about his neck.
He looked down quizzically at the dead goose between my thighs. ‘Is this what you missed Mass for?’
‘I overslept,’ I told him, and threw another fistful of sharp-tipped white feathers into the bowl, not bothering to look up at him again.
Let him think me rude, I told myself crossly. I knew Alejandro disapproved of my magick, and it irked me. I was also aware of a secret frustration eating away at me, for we had spent many hours together without Alejandro ever once declaring his interest in me. Yet I knew he felt something, that there was an intimacy of a kind between us. Part of me almost hated the young Spaniard for his iron self-control, yet part of me wanted to discover what it would feel like to have him lose that control and kiss me. Not that Alejandro de Castillo would ever dare to kiss a girl, whatever provocation was offered. No, he was too fixed on becoming a priest and dedicating himself to the Catholic Church.
‘This goose is for our Christmas dinner. Forgive me for not stopping to speak, but it will not pluck itself.’
He stood a while, watching me without comment. ‘Are you not cold?’ he asked eventually.
‘A little,’ I admitted. ‘But this must be done outdoors. Besides, I would be warmer if you did not stand in the way of the sun.’
‘I beg your pardon,’ Alejandro muttered, and shifted at once, so that I was once more sitting in sunshine.
I gave him no thanks for it, but tore savagely at the shining goose feathers. For some reason, his politeness annoyed me more than any show of open dislike would have done. Why did he not go away? Why must he stand and watch me like this? Could he not see how his presence disturbed me?
‘Doesn’t Father Vasco need your assistance?’
His brows rose, though he answered levelly enough, ‘My master is unwell again. He retired to his room straight after Mass and is sleeping now. This chill weather affects him badly.’
‘My grandfather was the same at his age. You should ask Blanche to make up a hot posset for him.’
To my surprise, Alejandro laughed at that. I looked up and saw an oddly cynical gleam in his eyes, a smile curving his lips.
‘What, after the last hot posset prepared by the skilled hand of Mistress Parry? That unfortunate man was sick for days.’
Reluctantly I laughed too, recalling how Blanche had managed to remove the guard from Elizabeth’s door by drugging him.
‘I’d forgotten about that. Well, I am sure it would not have the same ef
fect.’
‘Let’s hope not.’ Alejandro smiled, but it was a tense smile, not quite reaching his eyes. I noticed that he no longer seemed comfortable in my presence, that the tentative friendship between us over the summer had faded with the heat. ‘Thank you for the suggestion. I will ask Mistress Parry this afternoon, before my master has to rise for evening prayer.’
‘Will he join us for dinner afterwards? We eat late on Christmas Eve, but we should have games as well as goose to take us up to Mass at midnight.’
He frowned. ‘Games?’
‘I suppose it may be hard to celebrate Christmas here, with Elizabeth being a prisoner and in disgrace,’ I murmured, and glanced cautiously over my shoulder. But the cook and Joan were too busy at their work to overhear us, and the windows above us seemed to be closed. ‘At Lytton Park, where I used to live with my father, we would gather after dinner to sing Yuletide carols, then play some games. Sometimes we would exchange a few gifts at New Year too. It is an old English custom.’
‘I have no gifts to give.’
I laughed at his concerned expression. ‘Well, you have your lips. You could sing a Spanish song for us on New Year’s Day. You must know a song or two.’ I paused, left suddenly breathless by my own bravado. ‘Or you could give a kiss.’
His eyes darkened at that, his voice deep and very Spanish. ‘A kiss?’
Was that reproof I heard in his tone? For a moment there, I had forgotten that Alejandro de Castillo was only one step away from being a Catholic priest. I looked up at him and could almost smell his disapproval, taste it in my mouth like ashes. No doubt such playfulness as games and an exchange of kisses, even at Yuletide or the New Year, would be looked on as the work of the Devil.
My temper flared. ‘Yes,’ I continued, half angrily, my fingers buried deep in the soft feathery down of the goose’s chest. ‘The exchange of a kiss is traditional.’
I did not know why I was so angry. Or perhaps I did know but did not wish to admit it, even to myself.
Then I saw Alejandro draw back from me, and realized it was not disapproval I had seen in his face, but fear. Fear and caution, strong as my own. And beyond them, desire.
It was like that moment when the circle is cast, the four directions are called, and you feel the spirits rush in on you as sharp air through a winter’s doorway.
Alejandro wanted me. Just as I wanted him. And there was nothing either of us could do about it.
I could not speak, and was grateful when Alejandro bent to move the plucking bowl a little closer to my stool, breaking the spell between us. As he straightened, I saw heat running under the olive skin, an odd haunted look to his eyes. His hand came up to steady the swaying cross about his neck, and lingered there a moment, as though seeking comfort from the silver.
‘I should go and—’
He did not finish his sentence, but gave a curt bow and trod swiftly back inside the house.
I sat a while in silence after he had gone, my hands stilled on the shining white feathers. Then I began to pluck them again, humming over the limp body of the goose as though it was a silver gown I was sewing.
That night, after we had stuffed ourselves silly with goose in a piquant sauce, and pigs’ trotters roasted with the last of the autumn’s sweet, wrinkling apples, and our rough cook’s brave attempt at a courtly delicacy – a syllabub – we played traditional Yuletide games such as Blind Man’s Buff and Hunt the Thimble. For a while, breathless and giggling as we played our Christmas games, we could almost forget that Elizabeth was a prisoner under the constant threat of execution for treason. But every now and then she would stop by the window, staring longingly out at the darkness, and I would realize that Elizabeth must have spent some very different Christmases when her young brother Edward was King, showered with costly gifts and treated like a princess in the great courtly palaces of London. Cooped up here in the grim dampness of Woodstock’s ruins, she herself could never forget the injustice and tedium of her imprisonment, not even for a moment.
Father Vasco came to pay his respects to the princess after dinner but was quickly fatigued by our noisy antics, seeming to disapprove of people enjoying themselves on a holy festival. The old priest excused himself soon after the midnight Mass, and was helped to bed by Alejandro.
We celebrated the coming of the New Year in traditional English style too. The weather had turned bitter by the last few days of December, with a thin scattering of snow on the ground, so we huddled together by the fireside in the narrow smoky room overlooking the park and took turns to exchange gifts. Elizabeth gave me one of her oldest gowns, with only a plain silk edging on the sleeves, for I was not noble and by law could not wear too much by way of finery. In return, I gave her a handkerchief which I had embroidered with her initials entwined with a spray of her favourite flowers, the white eglantine. To my surprise, the princess seemed delighted with this and took it at once to show Blanche Parry, whose gift from Elizabeth had been a leather-bound book of psalms.
I had also made a small gift for Alejandro, a neatly stitched purse for his coins. This I gave to him unspeaking, a little embarrassed, remembering our conversation outside the kitchen on Christmas Eve.
‘Happy New Year,’ he whispered, and leaned across to kiss me. ‘Here is my gift to you.’
I think he had truly meant to kiss me on the cheek, in a brotherly Christian way. But I shifted at the last moment, startled and surprised that he had taken me at my word, and his kiss landed on my lips. That fleeting contact burned with a sudden ferocious heat that made me lose my head for a moment.
I gasped, as did he, both of us springing back from each other with hot faces.
Alejandro muttered something in Spanish, then seemed to groan. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . .’
One of the window catches was broken and a chill air blew in constantly from the river below, barely warmed by the heat of the roaring log fire. I hurried to the window and pretended to fiddle with the broken catch, though in truth I was letting the night air cool my cheeks.
If we had been alone . . .
But we were not alone, and already the Lady Elizabeth was staring across at us through the firelight, surprised, and Blanche was reading one of the psalms aloud to herself in a low-pitched voice, unaware of any atmosphere in the small room.
We celebrated a quiet midnight Mass for the New Year with the princess, Blanche Parry, and even Sir Henry, who had risen specially from his bed to share the body and blood of Christ with us. Father Vasco’s authoritative voice echoed about the chapel as he intoned the Latin prayers, his young assistant following behind with the wine chalice. This time I did not catch Alejandro’s eye, but bent my head in prayer after receiving the Host.
After Mass, I made my way to my chamber, which I now shared again with Joan. The dark-haired kitchen maid was already asleep and snoring as I pulled the covers over my chin and tried not to think of Alejandro.
It had been an amusing game at first, the young witch teasing the would-be Catholic priest with mysterious smiles and stares. But now the game had grown serious and tasted of danger. I had too many secrets to hide and I could not rely on the young Spaniard to keep them all for me. There was risk all around us at Woodstock. The closer the sharp-eyed Alejandro came to me, the nearer I moved to the hangman.
Early one morning, three days after New Year, my father came unexpectedly to Woodstock Lodge. My aunt had fallen seriously ill over the holy season and my father begged Elizabeth to spare me to nurse her back to health.
Elizabeth was annoyed to lose me, as I had become a help about the house as well as in her chamber. But she could see the fear in my face, and relented at last, giving me her blessing to return to Lytton Park.
‘Come back to us as soon as you are able,’ she insisted, and told me to take food and drink for the journey, for she knew I had not yet breakfasted.
Alejandro met me in the shadowy hallway and frowned down at the bag I was carrying, hurriedly packed with all my belongings.
‘My aunt is unwell,’ I explained tensely, not looking at him. ‘Please let me pass. I shall not return until she is better.’
Alejandro had thrown out an arm as though to bar my way. His voice seemed to deepen, echoing in the hallway. ‘Meg.’
I raised my eyes to his, then. ‘Yes?’
‘I . . .’ He stared at me for a moment, his gaze very dark. ‘You cannot go. The Lady Elizabeth needs you here.’
‘Her ladyship has given me consent to go.’ Stubbornly, I looked past Alejandro to my father, who was waiting in the narrow doorway to the lodge. My stomach hurt. I felt sick with fear that my aunt would die and leave me alone in this world. But I would show him none of that. ‘Please, I have to leave. My father is waiting for me.’
Reluctantly, Alejandro stood aside and I moved past him through the shadows.
‘I shall pray for your aunt,’ Alejandro said softly. ‘As I shall pray for you too, Meg.’
I clutched my ramshackle bag to my chest, its handles cracked and broken, and tried not to cry. I felt his gaze on my back like a brand, and knew Alejandro must be examining my father too. But he said nothing and did not follow us out to say farewell.
I should have been ecstatic. I was being released from my long servitude at Woodstock; I was going home to see my beloved aunt and nurse her back to health. Instead, it felt as though my heart were breaking.
As I shall pray for you too.
I turned my face to the darkening skies as the cart lurched forward over the snowy ground. There had been no answer to that.
ELEVEN
Flesh and Blood
I FOUND MY aunt more seriously ill than I had imagined, and gave up all hope of returning to Woodstock before the spring. I immediately set about gathering the wild plants I would need to restore her to health, and preparing the solution according to her own spell books. With the ground still icy in places, I was not able to gather all the plants on the list, but found some dried amongst her stores, and substituted others with those that grew abundantly in the winter months. Soon Aunt Jane was able to sit up and sip the bitter-tasting draught from a bowl. But she did not recover her full strength, nor did I think she ever would. There was a sickness at work in her body that no potion could cure, however skilfully mixed, and we both knew it.
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