“She may as well have taken them by the throat,” said the man in glasses with feeling.
“They didn’t convict on the evidence of a child?” said Deborah. Jennet was younger than Adelita.
“They did,” said Ralph. “King James’s new laws gave greater freedom and urgency to those prosecuting witchcraft.”
“Terrorism is the new witchcraft, then,” said Deborah, sitting back.
“And in those days witchcraft was also terrorism,” the barman agreed.
“Guilty until proven innocent,” said Deborah, thinking briefly of Martin Bowerdale languishing in a Mexican prison.
“In effect, yes,” said Ralph.
“So what happened?” said Deborah, not sure she wanted to know.
“Over two days, nineteen suspected witches—mainly women—were tried. The suspects were packed into a dungeon below the well tower in Lancaster Castle, shut up in pitch darkness, a room twenty feet by twelve with a seven-foot ceiling, without ventilation or sanitation. Three months they stayed in there, those who were originally arrested anyway. Not surprisingly, Old Demdike didn’t survive the imprisonment. Of those that did, ten were found guilty and hanged.”
Deborah stared at him as he began to count them off on his fingers.
“Old Chattox, her daughter Anne Redfearn, Elizabeth Device and her children, Alizon...”
“Alice Nutter, Katherine Hewitt, Jane Bulcock, and her son, John,” put in the man in round glasses.
“And Isobel Roby,” said Ralph. “All hanged less than a mile from Lancaster castle. The only member of her family to survive was the child Jennet, who had been set up on a table so that she could be seen and heard clearly as she denounced those she had grown up with, including her own mother. Hanging was an unpleasant death, a matter of strangulation before the invention of the long drop that broke the neck, but it was at least better than the burning they would have had on the continent.”
“What about the little girl?” said Deborah, thinking of Adelita, whom she had promised to see again. “Jennet?”
“Returned to Pendle Forest and carried the weight of what she had done for the rest of her life,” said Ralph. “Except that there was a nasty twist. Twenty-one years later, she was accused of witchcraft herself and had to go through it all again, this time from the other side of the dock. Revenge, perhaps. People round here have long memories.”
“But she was just a child manipulated by the authorities,” said Deborah.
“Even so.”
“There’s one other thing about the Sabbat I haven’t told you,” said Ralph.
“What about it?” said Deborah.
“It happened at Malkin Tower,” said Ralph. “They found clay images of people and human teeth dug up from graves at Newchurch. About ten yards from where you’ll be sleeping tonight. So. Sweet dreams.”
As Deborah managed a smile and drained her glass, the silent pub exploded with laughter.
Chapter Forty-Six
Nick Reese left the hotel where he was staying at a brisk walk, moving quickly through the dark and damp flagstone streets of Skipton to where he had parked the beige Toyota Corolla in a half-empty pay lot. He was, as usual, alone.
It was odd being up in the north again, close enough to home for it to feel oddly familiar and just as oddly alien. He had lived in London for a decade and traveled around the world. Now, these streets, with their pie shops, curry houses, and chippies, seemed quaint and slightly absurd, like models on a railway layout or reconstructions in a museum.
Scenes from my past, he thought.
Not that he fit in any better in London.
Out of habit, he looked around him as he walked. The shops were closed, and the pubs would have rung for last call. Somewhere he heard a man singing drunkenly, then a cackle of girlish laughter, but the night was otherwise quiet.
There were only three other vehicles in the lot and only one caught his attention: the gray transit van squeezed in next to his car, so close that getting into the driver’s side was difficult. He slid in between the two vehicles sideways, muttering curses, and in the process put his left hand on the van’s hood. It was warm.
A practically empty lot, but this van had parked in so tight he could barely open his car door.
Which, in turn, meant...
The rear doors of the van kicked open and two men came out of the back, one white, one black, the latter with what looked like a blanket held tight to his chest. Another man slid out of the passenger’s side and was coming around the front.
For a moment Nick Reese did nothing but scowl, then he reached for the keys in his jacket pocket. In a moment, the first man was on him, pinning his arms to his side and jerking him around so the black guy could throw the blanket over his head.
“What the hell...?” Nick said, sputtering with indignation and fear.
Then, just as the blanket was high enough to block the man’s line of sight, Nick Reese shed the pretense of surprise and panic, and became a different man entirely. He kicked upward hard, connecting with the guy’s groin. In the same instant he reached forward with his left hand then snapped his elbow back high, a sharp staccato gesture that caught the second man on the side of his head. The pressure pinning his arms weakened, and he snatched his hand from his pocket, pulled it back, and thrust hard with the heel of his palm into the face of the winded black man. The man’s head shot back and he crumpled, but the white guy behind him caught him in a headlock and pulled back hard so that Reese’s feet were almost lifted off the ground.
The man was bigger than him, stronger, and smelled of Juicy Fruit gum. Reese tightened his stomach, kicked off with his feet, and flipped backward and over the top, using the other man’s momentum against him. Reese would have landed flat on both feet behind him, but there wasn’t enough room between the car and the van, and he fell awkwardly on the hood of the Corolla. But the action had at least broken the choke hold and given him a clear view of the third man—the driver—advancing from the hood of the car, another big guy, this time in shades and sporting a crew cut. He was reaching into his jacket for a weapon.
Reese turned, grasped the van’s roof rack, and used the grip to stabilize a wild roundhouse kick at the gunman. The height of the van gave him reach the gunman hadn’t anticipated, and the kick caught him neatly under the jaw, just as the black automatic came into view. He dropped, and Reese turned and aimed another kick at Juicy Fruit, who, still dazed from Reese’s flip, turned obligingly into it.
Reese jumped down, seized the gun hand of the driver, and butted him hard in the face like he was heading an in-swinging corner kick. The man crumpled, clutching his face. With a deft twist, Reese relieved him of his weapon, spinning in the same moment to aim it squarely at Juicy Fruit.
Nick Reese, one. Van-driving amateurs, nil.
The man immediately backed off. Reese opened the car door and slid in, switching the gun to his left hand and keeping it trained on the only attacker who was still upright till he had the key in the ignition. As the engine came to life, he put it in reverse with his right hand while his left still aimed the pistol through the open door. Then he took his foot off the brake and rolled the Toyota back, opening the door wide so he had a broader field of fire. He grabbed the wheel with his right hand, shot the car into a tire-squealing turn, and sent it peeling out of the parking lot, his eyes and weapon locked on the man by the van whose hand was frozen in the air inches from his shoulder holster.
For a second the two men looked at each other, and it was like Death had paused to see what would happen next—then the Toyota was careening out into the streets of Skipton. Reese tossed the gun onto the passenger seat, checked the rearview mirror for signs of the van, then closed the driver’s door and reached for his seatbelt.
Well, that was bracing, he thought.
He glanced at the automatic on the seat beside him, a Glock 35. They hadn’t been amateurs. They just hadn’t expected him to be quite so professional.
Chapter Forty-S
even
The long northern day was finally over by the time Deborah had begun her walk back to the Malkin Tower Farm. It was funny, she thought, without actually being amusing, how much the name of the place had changed for her in the last couple of hours. Before, it had been quaint and rustic. Now it brooded like the hill that was the heart of the area, a presence marked by the sinister nature of what had once been done there.
There were lights on at the farm cottages, and she experienced an almost unreasonable relief at the sight of the stone building that had once been the piggery. A bottle of spring water had been set at the door with a hand-scribbled note that said simply “Fresh!” taped to the cap. Deborah picked it up, let herself in with her key, and cracked the seal on the bottle.
She kicked off her walking shoes, which had begun to rub just above the heel, and poured herself a cup of the water as she waited for her laptop to awake. The water had a slight aftertaste, a very slight but not unpleasant bitterness that tasted of the earth. She checked the label: Penine Springs. Local.
She took another mouthful and, ready to do some research, typed, “Gold rod dove” into her search engine. What came up was a mixture—everything from wedding motifs to dictionaries of Biblical imagery—but over half of the list on the first page contained the word “scepter.” She opened three of them and read about European royal regalia that included scepters adorned with doves as symbols of peace or the Holy Ghost.
Royal regalia? she thought. Maybe she should e-mail Marissa Stroud. She was the expert, after all.
She tried another search: “Skipton painting theft.” Instantly she had several local news reports on the theft of the painting “and various papers, some antique” from the castle. The second had an image of the picture itself. She copied it to her hard drive, then opened it and considered it.
It was conventional enough. A portrait of a seventeenth-century lady, pale and formal, against a black background. She looked severe, and her finery was restrained rather than luxuriant. A woman of purpose. At her feet were arranged the people in her life, staff, servants, children, husbands, and fathers. The news story said it was Lady Anne Clifford—the name rang a bell from when Deborah had been reading about her earlier at Skipton Castle. The painting in the coat of arms in the picture matched that on the Mayan ring, except that there was still no ellipse overlaying the lower part of it.
Deborah sighed. She had hoped that the stolen painting would have completed her search for the crest and pointed her onward, but it didn’t.
So why steal the painting? she asked herself. What does it reveal that someone wants to keep secret?
She considered it again. Maybe it was the material of the picture itself, something written on the back of the canvas, or—if she was going to be really conspiratorial—a shadow painting underneath the surface image. But unless she could lay her hands on the painting itself, she could do no better than scrutinize the image on the screen and hope there was something there.
She went back to the woman’s face. It was pale and austere, and the eyes stared back at her with something like hauteur. They were cold, dark eyes, and the mouth was hard, without mirth or compassion. Then, without warning, Lady Anne smiled.
Deborah recoiled, thrusting herself away from the desk but staring at the image on the computer screen.
What the hell...?
The image was still staring back at her, but now her thin lips wore a hard, sinister smile.
It must be some kind of computer animation, she thought. Someone hacked the site and tinkered with the graphics. Some kind of flash program...
But Lady Anne shook her head very slightly and her eyes sparkled black as beetle shells. No, she seemed to say, this was no computer glitch.
Deborah had backed all the way to the bed, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the grinning woman’s face, which seemed even paler than it had before, cadaverous, as if the skin had grown translucent and Deborah was seeing bone beneath it. And then the eyes rolled back till only the whites showed, and Lady Anne’s mouth began to open, wider and wider, till it filled the screen, and inside was only darkness, but squirming with living, terrible things, and Deborah shrank back, eyes closed, trying to shut the image from her mind.
She clamped her hands over her eyes, hiding in the dark, but somehow that made it worse, because she was sure that the woman had somehow climbed out of the computer and was now in the room. Deborah had started to sob frantically, eyes still closed, moving farther and farther up the bed, burying her face in the pillow. At the foot of the bed she felt the woman coalesce, skeletally thin and pale in her heavy black dress and lace.
I won’t believe it, thought Deborah.
And she opened her eyes.
She stared at the foot of the bed and there was nothing there, just the desk and its chair askew. The laptop open. Deborah had already breathed out with a kind of relief before she realized that the computer screen that had featured the painting now showed just an empty gilt frame, and that the door into the piggery was wide open. Standing there, framed against the blackness of the Pendle countryside beyond, was Lady Anne Clifford.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Except that it wasn’t her exactly. She was hooded, partially, and the face was...wrong somehow, but not in ways Deborah could pinpoint. She seemed older, more hunched.
Demdike?
She didn’t know where the idea came from, particularly since she had no idea what the witch would have looked like, but come it did, and forcefully. The old woman stood there still and silent, staring at her, and Deborah felt like the breath had left her body. For a moment the room seemed to surge, and she clung to the bed to steady herself, and in that moment the colors seemed to blur and swirl as if she was going to pass out. She felt cold with dread but could not take her eyes from the figure in the doorway, who stood there, motionless.
Deborah sat bolt upright on her bed, terrified. She could think of nothing to say or do, as if Lady Anne—or Demdike—had drained her of all will, all self-control. It was like being inside a dream. She could sense disaster ahead, but watched herself unable to resist gliding toward it.
The old woman—who was no longer hooded—was beginning to mutter soundlessly, her lower jaw working but the words impossible to hear.
Chattox!
Her eyes were still hard and black, fixed on Deborah, and something was moving under her dress, an animal that laced itself between her feet. Deborah gazed at the ripples in the coarse dress fabric that the movement made, fascinated with horror, and saw the creature’s leg stray from the folds, so that she flinched and looked away.
Then she could hear the words Old Chattox was saying, questions about Skipton, and Lady Anne, and Edward de Clifford, and she was sure that if she could answer them all, the witch would leave her, would let her live. So she said everything she could think of, all she had discovered so far and how, not remembering and articulating, but just opening up the knowledge she had as if she was pouring it out like milk from a pail.
She talked, and the time passed, and then she realized that she was alone. The computer screen showed the Lady Anne painting as it had always been—smileless—and the room was cold. Deborah closed and bolted the door, then shut the computer down and crawled into bed in her clothes, staring fixedly at nothing, waiting for sleep or dawn, whichever came first.
Chapter Forty-Nine
Alice could still smell him on her hair, a thought she liked even if the scent itself—some overly spicy aftershave that he wore in abundance—didn’t particularly please her. She considered showering before James got back, but didn’t feel like it. Actually, it was more than that. She kind of wanted James to figure it out. This might buy her some space, or might lead to a fight, which was OK too. Alice enjoyed a good fight from time to time, although it seemed almost pathetic to fight with James. She preferred a burlier adversary.
The guy she’d just slept with—Dimitri, he said his name was, though she didn’t believe it—was a better match for her
. He’d impressed her by seeming even rougher and colder than her ex, who had once shoved her out of the car at a hospital ER with a broken arm and a black eye he’d delivered after she’d thrown a beer bottle at his head during a fight.
Once she and Dimitri had actually gotten down to it, they had barely spoken, and then—right when he was nearly done—he had began to mutter in some language she didn’t understand but that might have been Russian: little staccato words spat out at her, almost certainly insults. His eyes had been hard and sour, his mouth full of contempt, and she guessed what he was calling her. So she called him names right back, thrilled by the animal brutality of it, till they had finished and he had left.
He had worn his gun holster even after he had taken everything off. It may have been for self-defense, she guessed, but she was pretty clear he kept it on because he knew it made her hot. It was a weird-looking gun: small and almost round, a revolver with no hammer. She had nearly stroked it when she was on top of him, but had thought better of it. Not all the steel in his face was about lust, and she had quickly admitted to herself that part of her attraction to him was that he scared her a little.
Maybe more than a little.
How long would it be before things turned unpleasant? She liked his aggression, the fact that once he had decided he wanted her there was no question in his mind, no doubt, no hesitation, no politeness or game-playing, no inquiries into her feelings or her past. But she couldn’t deny he had been rough, and though she had enjoyed it, she knew that the more they did it, the more things would escalate, till she was bruised or worse. Maybe she’d wind up with a broken finger or jaw, or get dabbed with cigarette burns. Tough, she liked, but that shit she could do without.
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