Power of Darkness

by Doris Sutcliffe Adams

  ‘I suppose I should have expected you,' he observed in sour acceptance of another unwelcome complication.

  12

  THOMAS DE TREVAINE regarded his lord with equal lack of enthusiasm, sharpened by strong reprobation as his gaze took in the full enormity of his appearance and his company. He bowed formally from the saddle. ' 'Save you, my lord,’ he greeted him stiffly, his disapproval so extreme that no flicker of normal human curiosity moved his countenance. He inclined his head in bare acknowledgement of Durande's presence. ‘I rejoice that you are safely returned,’ he declared, in a voice singularly devoid of rejoicing. 'Do I congratulate you on having worsted Fulbert of Falaise?'

  'If you can bring yourself to do so,’ Hélie agreed evenly.

  'Cousin, I would present—'

  'I am already acquainted with the lady,’ Thomas interrupted curtly. 'God's Life, my lord, you must be out of your senses! Your lady mother is sorely distressed, and Lady Hermeline likewise, so that I am sent to make what peace I can for you, if she is in any way inclined to be reconciled after the intolerable affront you put on her—'

  'Beyond any patch you can cobble,’ Hélie interposed, his lips twitching with undutiful mirth, as Thomas paused to catch his wind. 'But, cousin—'

  'You owe it to your mother to honour the arrangements she has made, my lord, not to flout them to her face! And if you are so devoid of seemly respect that you thrust this murderess under her roof—'

  Durande exploded first. 'Who gave you authority to rate your liege lord like an unschooled brat?'

  Thomas, his mouth ajar, recoiled as though a worm he had spurned had reared up a viper's head against him. The squire goggled frog-eyed behind him. Durande thrust forward, her beauty blazing in that terrible sunlight. Beneath hard fury, enchanted delight filled Hélie that she should spring to war for him. 'If you have sufficiently emptied yourself of choler, Thomas, to permit me to finish what I have twice attempted,’ he announced icily, 'I will present you to my lady wife.’

  The furious scarlet of Thomas's face changed to the hue of a new-made cheese, and his eyes stood from their sockets. Twice he opened and shut his mouth before he could croak incredulously, 'You have—you have married her?'

  'I have.’

  ‘No! Not even you—and an irregular marriage—'

  'By the Ashley priest, with all the village to witness. We are wedded and bedded. Bridle your tongue!'

  'You had no consent of your kin or hers!' he growled in dazed persistence. 'It can be set aside! It must be!'

  'It stands before God and man!' Hélie avowed, loosing the full power of his deep voice so that it rang through the hushed and listening woods. 'This is my true and lovely lady, guiltless of all wrong, and I will defend her on your carcase if need be!'

  This was a Hélie Thomas had never met, and he stared slack-jawed for a moment into the fierce lion's eyes, his own wide with unbelief. Yet even now he could not unlearn the habit of arrogant years. 'You have excelled yourself in folly this time, you young madman! My duty as your elder kinsman—'

  'I am not, thank God, a minor under your tutelage!' declared Hélie, goaded at last into plain speech. 'I am of full age and your liege lord, and if you do not choose to stomach my rule or my marriage you may quit Trevaine with my free leave!'

  The ultimatum halted Thomas as though he had run upon a stone wall. 'You—are you threatening to dismiss me?'

  'The choice is yours.' The man might be sixteen years his senior and a stout pillar in Trevaine's edifice, but he did not rule it.

  Somehow Thomas restrained his tongue from the irrevocable decision he would have regretted the moment it was uttered. If his expression indicated that he would very happily have slid the handiest edged tool between his young lord's ribs, that was not a matter Hélie could cite in evidence against him.

  'Will you offer the same choice to my lady your mother?' he demanded sourly, and never guessed how near he came to being clouted headlong out of his saddle.

  ‘That need not concern you, Thomas,' Hélie informed him in a voice of icy gentleness, throttling wrath by main force.

  ‘You have broken your poor mother's unhappy heart,' Thomas complained, descending with so sudden a thump from his pinnacle of lofty outrage that Hélie's unruly sense of humour was tickled.

  ‘She may console herself by considering the better bargain Vallaroy's unpledged estates and intact dowry provide,’ he cynically retorted. He was under no obligation to tolerate his mother's reproaches by proxy.

  ‘Unless you account every word of Hermeline's as incontrovertible as Holy Writ,' Durande interposed dryly, ‘why not wait to know me before you judge me?'

  His head reared back at the challenge, and he stared at her as she sat there tall and straight and vivid as a midnight torch-flame. She met his affronted gaze with cool amusement. Love and marriage had changed Durande's guarded calm to triumphant confidence, and the beauty that once only Hélie had recognized now shone in splendour for all men's gaping. Thomas preferred women meek and submissive, but his eye kindled, and perhaps his sense of justice pricked him.

  ‘What is done cannot be undone,' he conceded ungraciously. ‘Shall we escort you home, my lord?'

  ‘I have affairs to finish in Warby. Complete my mother's errand, but lend me your squire.'

  ‘Complete—? God's Life, my lord, what am I to say to Lady Hermeline?'

  ‘Whatever of my mother's message your discretion suggests,' Hélie retorted, with a flavour of sarcasm that made Thomas flush. Hélie hesitated, and then made his decision. It was possible that Oliver de Collingford had returned to Warby, and Thomas had shown some disposition to take counsel with him. He dared not entrust the truth to him lest he betray his knowledge by some change in his manner; the man would be as nervous and wary as a suckling vixen. ‘Say no word to any man or woman of this meeting or of my marriage, Thomas, and watch Hermeline for mischief. William, return straightway to Trevaine, and bid the marshal send two dependable sergeants and twenty men-at-arms, well-mounted and in war array, to meet me at this crossroads at daybreak.'

  The petrified but appreciative squire came to life. 'Aye, Lord Hélie!' He grinned, saluted, wheeled his horse and galloped enthusiastically the way he had come. A first mutter of distant thunder mingled with the clatter of his going, and the clouds had already swung a dark shutter over the livid sunray that had lighted them.

  ‘Twenty mounted men-at-arms?' Thomas repeated incredulously. ‘Have you a war with Fulbert in your dish?'

  ‘A wasps' nest to smoke out,' Hélie answered grimly, and enlightened him no further.

  Thomas snarled in thwarted curiosity. ‘By all the Saints, I am minded to be here myself!' For the first time he seemed aware that their disordered state required no common explanation, and questions quivered on his parted lips. Hélie forestalled them.

  ‘Get you to Warby with my mother's condolences, Thomas, or you will have to swim there!' he recommended. He pulled his horse aside, and Thomas perforce cantered away. They watched his rigid back out of sight.

  Durande chuckled. ‘If that is a fair example of what you must face, I wonder you dared wed me.'

  ‘My heart did come near failing me, but it was upheld by thought of your dower,' he retorted, and laughed with her.

  ‘Hélie,' she said more soberly, ‘there is a place in Hell for those who cause dissension between mother and child. Our marriage—this bitter disappointment—will she forgive you?'

  ‘Tenderly and mournfully, and thrice a week at least,' he answered wryly, ‘but it will remind us that perfect felicity is not of this earth. She will reconcile herself when she has a grandchild to cherish. Spare your remorse; I should never have wedded Hermeline.'

  ‘I have no remorse whatever for Hermeline,' she declared uncharitably.

  He grinned, and then stared out over the valley. The thunder growled afar like a stalking lion, faint lightning flickered over the hills, and the blue-black clouds, lumbering up against the wind, had obliterated the sinking sun
. The heavy air still pressed stiflingly upon them, setting the hair a-prickle on Hélie's scalp, but a hot and gusty wind was pouncing through the grass and bracken, or swirling the dust and first-fallen leaves in sudden up-dancing spirals. The tree-tops stooped and swung to its snatching with a dry moaning, and when the wind stilled the uncanny hush of waiting hung over the breathless woods.

  Hélie ran impatient fingers through his tangled hair and shifted uneasily in his red-hot saddle. Twice he had underestimated a foe, and some inner voice warned him against granting the witches this night unmolested. The horses had not been the asset he hoped. 'If they abandoned the hunt they could have reached Warby before us and ambushed every road into it,’ he said aloud, reckoning up their circuitous way and the witches' speed.

  'Or into Trevaine,' agreed Gino.

  'And safe or not, Durande, you do not enter Trevaine or Warby except at my side.’

  'Had you entertained the thought that I should leave you? I have five shafts left.’

  'Rohese first. Then they will be a snake without a head.’

  The storm held off, and the gloom of an early dusk gathered ominously over Warby as they circled it within the fringe of woods. Mounting the ridge, they looked down on the manor crouched behind its walls in a huddle of dull thatch, but the new stone gate-house took all the grey light to itself and gleamed starkly against the clouds. Lightning flickered blue-white behind it, and after a long pause a low rattle of thunder reached them. The peasants had brought in their beasts and retreated into their hovels, from whose roof-vents the pale smoke curled. Only a belated ploughman was hurrying his team home from the half-turned wheat stubble.

  'This night truly belongs to the Lord of Hell,’ said Gino in a tone of uneasy awe.

  'We shall never have a better chance of surprising the witch,’ answered Hélie, heading for the thicket. A memory of Stephen, speaking from the black heart of the elder-bush, visited him sharply, and he turned his head in the direction of the hunting-lodge, among whose ashes his brother lay forsaken. 'Tomorrow I shall fetch him home,’ he promised quietly, 'and lay him at our sire's feet. And while I live there shall be Masses sung for his soul's salvation, for he died in my place.'

  'Amen to that,’ Durande murmured.

  Near the forest's edge they tethered the spent horses. They were uneasy, flicking their ears stiffly back and forth and rolling white-rimmed eyes at every grumble of thunder, but too weary to do more than stamp and snort a little. All three slipped downhill between the trees. The wind tore at their crowns, and the purple-black clouds piled murkier and heavier. Fallen leaves twirled about them, and the bracken bowed in ranks. No birds called, no beasts fleeted. Premature dusk was on them, so that the pale, distant flashes startled by their brilliance.

  They padded across the open space between the woods and the thicket. Here the wind had freedom to swoop on them, flapping Durande's skirt and flattening Hélie's tunic against his chafed bare legs. He felt it chill upon his sweating flesh, and shivered. They had almost reached the outermost bushes when they heard clearly, in the cowering hush, the clink of a dislodged stone below and beyond the hovel, on the rough path from the village.

  Hélie hesitated but a heart's beat, and then edged soundlessly through the dense, screening growth until, peering cautiously through the leaves, he could discern the witch's door. He was just in time to see a man emerge from the thicket's opposite edge and hurry through the overgrown garden whose herbal scent lay heavily on the air. He heard no greeting squeal from the halfwild sow, which must have been banished in expectation. The man spoke a brief word, thrust at the door and entered. Voice and bearing identified him as Oliver de Collingford.

  Hélie glanced once at Gino, who nodded. 'Durande, watch for us,' he murmured, and they squirmed clear of the bushes and padded across to the back of Rohese's hovel. The broken shutter had been thrust back, but yellow light leaked between the rotten slats, and as they crouched under it amid burgeoning pennyroyal, there was no impediment between their ears and the conversation within. Oliver de Collingford and Rohese were engaged in the regrettable and profitless exercise of mutual recrimination.

  '. . . Safely dead if you had not interfered!' the man was complaining.

  'I could say as much also!' the witch retorted.

  'If I had known the half-brother was with him there would have been no mistake!'

  ‘We knew.'

  'What call had you to meddle? By Hell's Gate, you took a deal upon yourself—murdering the Lord of Trevaine!'

  ‘Murder? An unhappy accident, no more, had you let be, my lord.’

  ‘I had every right, defending my cousin’s honour! But how might I guess you had seen fit—’

  'No man threatens me and lives. He was dangerous.’

  'Dangerous—that overgrown pup?’

  'He would have destroyed us. I was Maiden of this Coven when your sire was sucking on his nurse’s dugs, and I know Trevaine. Once that breed set teeth in any meat they never let go.’

  'A soft young fool, and had you left him to me—’

  'Hear my counsel, Lord Oliver. Beware of rousing a soft fool’s knightly indignation, for he becomes harder than flint and implacable in his cause.’ She chuckled.

  The man’s feet shifted impatiently in noisy rushes. Hélie put an eye to a yellow crack. He was standing by the dull fire, head a little bent, a rush dip on the wall outlining his head with light. The witch sat as though she had never stirred from her place. He took a couple of restless paces past her, and then turned back again.

  'That may be so,’ he said peevishly. 'But because of this bungling the girl must die too, and I lose all profit from her.’

  Rohese nodded satisfaction. 'The spell was death. You have made sure?’

  'I brought a half-score men from Collingford. Four wait outside Warby, though he is unlikely to take his bride near Hermeline. Trevaine it will be, and the others will see to it they die at its gate.’

  'If that be his aim.’

  'Where else? He is hereabouts; Thomas de Trevaine encountered him on his way into Warby. The fool gave it away for anyone with eyes to see. When I broke the news to Hermeline that he had married my cousin, it was obvious it was no news to him. Where was he going if not home with his bride? And it will be ill done if I do not contrive to cast the blame on Fulbert of Falaise, so that that bullock Thomas rids me of him also.’

  The witch’s thin giggle stirred the hairs on Hélie’s nape, even as he grimaced at his cousin’s lack of histrionic talent. ‘You learn, Lord Oliver. Aye, you devise it cunningly. And instead of mourning the lout who spurned her, Hermeline will wed you, and we shall come to the power we held in my father’s day. Aye, and she will be one of us, so that when I am gone my father’s great-granddaughter shall be Maiden of the Coven in my place. It is well done.’

  ‘It is but begun,’ growled the man.

  ‘I have spoken the words and called on the power; I have shaped the mammets and named the names. It is in her blood; she will come to it.’

  Oliver shifted uneasily. ‘You drive too hard,’ he said petulantly. ‘Nothing is accomplished yet. And it is time we were gone.’ He moved to the door and opened it to look out on the ominous night. The wind swooped in and spun ashes from the flaming embers. The taper flared and guttered wildly. ‘If I could have seen to it myself—but they are dead by now.’

  ‘There is the last mammet to dedicate. Maybe he is dead, but we make more certain with a curse of proven power.’

  ‘They await us,’ the man reminded her peevishly. ‘The storm is near, and we have yet to signal for Gytha. Let us go.’ He blew out the taper.

  No man budged Rohese; at the slightest hint of pressure she settled herself the firmer. ‘They will wait.’ She leaned to stir the bubbling pot and cover it with a lid, and poked two or three more bits of wood into the fire before banking it with a couple of sods of turf that lay to hand, moving with a maddening deliberation that set Oliver fidgeting again.

  ‘You have all prepar
ed—and the black cock for sacrifice?’

  ‘Aye. We did better once. In my father’s day the god had his meed of blood, and we prospered. Power was in him, and through all the valley no man breathed but with his leave.’

  ‘In his day there was no law in England, and it is fifty years past.’

  ‘That day will come again. I have smelled blood and burning in the wind. King and lords and Church embroiled, and what a strong man seizes he may hold. Then the god shall have blood again and grant us his power, and we shall prosper, with all men’s lives and goods in our hands.’

  Hélie crossed himself, his lips framing a ‘God forbid it!’ Yet Oliver de Collingford, irresolute and peevish, waiting on her pleasure, did not match his vision of Reginald de Warby’s successor as a strong man ruthless to seize and hold. Nor did that high destiny fit Oliver's ambitions, judging by his dismayed flinching. She heaved to her feet, a vast black bulk in the banked fire's dim glow, the core and heart of this evil.

  ‘Mabille tarries late,' she said.

  ‘Do not look for her tonight. At the word that the lion-cub had married, my cousin Hermeline fell into the vapours, and then summoned Mabille to attend and comfort her.'

  The witch's thin chuckle was hideously triumphant. ‘Ha, but revenge will bubble in her veins! By tomorrow's noon Hermeline will be here to ask of me a charm to shrivel their flesh and blast their souls! Said I not it was in her blood?'

  Hélie shuddered with loathing, and as the two moved to the door, gripped Gino's arm to stay him. They might have taken the pair, but they must not; they were awaited in the ruin, and would be sought if they delayed. Crouching under the low eaves, they watched them go. Rohese heaved her gross body laboriously over the rough ground, Oliver waiting on her footsteps, and the lightning played round the valley and the thunder rebounded from hill to hill. Then the trees closed on them, and Hélie loosed his bone-tight hold and whisked round the crumbling hovel to the door. It yielded under his impatient hand.