A harsh cry startled her eyes up into the leafy boughs. She saw the swooping blackness, screamed as its talons raked the flesh of her arm. She knew it wanted the eyes of the lamb, and threw herself against it, kicking and scratching.
For several stunned moments, the Grafton household watched the small girl’s frenzied attempts to scratch the woman. They looked on helplessly as the other children became embroiled, shattering the quiet with the violence of their affliction.
Kate fended off her attackers until there were too many flailing limbs, from too many sides. Then she buried her head in her arms and dropped to her knees with a groan.
Barbara sprang from her seat, pointing at Kate. ‘Her imp attacked me in the orchard!’ she ranted. ‘What more proof do you need?’
Marsden knocked her aside. He pulled Francis off Kate, swung him round and struck him sharply across the face. The stinging blow cut a swath through the raving voices. All at once the screaming stopped. Francis touched his face and stared at Marsden in open-mouthed confusion. Ellen Grafton cried out. Her husband rushed forward to catch Cissie as she crumpled insensibly towards the mat. The girlchild stumbled back into Joseph and Ollie, who had pressed themselves against a wall.
Kate slowly lowered her arms and uncurled her bruised back.
Parson Peebles marshalled the quietened children into a straight line. He passed from one subdued face to the next, willing each in turn to meet the challenge of his eyes. But none did. From injured Francis, to pouting Caroline, not one stood up to his scrutiny for more than a few seconds before blinking away. And that worried the old priest. He sighed gently, then turned away from the bowed heads.
‘Would you deny the evidence of your eyes?’ Grafton demanded tetchily.
The priest bit his lip, then said softly, ‘It takes more than a sharp slap to rout an evil spirit.’
‘What are you implying?’ hissed Grafton. ‘Imposture?’
‘The children are susceptible to influence,’ Marsden said quietly. ‘There is no suggestion of wilful deceit.’
Grafton glanced across at the children, then at Kate, who was attempting to draw together the torn parts of her bodice. ‘Whose influence?’ he asked. ‘Was it the blow restored them, or the scratching? Look at the woman – her face, her arms all scored by their nails.’
‘And now they are rid of their torment,’ agreed the priest. ‘It may well be that Katharine Gurney is responsible, Samuel, but we must be certain of it before we commit her to the law. What will it benefit the children if she is not their tormentor?’
As he spoke, the butler stepped between him and Marsden.
‘For pity’s sake, Samuel, what now?’ snapped Grafton.
The servant cleared his throat uncomfortably, ‘The petty constable requests to see you, sir ... a serious matter.’ He nodded towards the doorway where two men stood holding their hats. With a broken sigh, Grafton stalked towards the visitors.
The constable acknowledged him with a respectful nod, untroubled by the scowl etched into the man’s face. There were things in this world worse than a man’s displeasure. And he had just seen one of them.
‘A woman’s body? Where?’ asked Grafton.
‘Pack of hounds dug her up in Freeman’s Spinney,’ answered the constable.
‘That is not my land‒’
‘No, sir,’ agreed the constable, ‘but her people are tenants of yours ... this gentleman,’ – he glanced at his companion – ‘is Master Sutton, landlord of the Chequers Inn, Didmerton way. He identified the remains as Polly Trenshaw, his taproom girl – went missing before last harvest.’
‘Trenshaw ... I see,’ said Grafton.
‘Lovely girl, Polly,’ put in Sutton, ‘reckoned she’d done a flit – never thought no more about it.’
‘Is it known how she died?’
‘Carved up, sir,’ said the constable grimly. ‘Buried alive, by the looks of it ... a terrible business.’
Though she was standing away from the doorway, Kate could clearly hear the constable’s voice. He was a man, it seemed, more used to raising the hue-and-cry than holding a private conversation.
A woman murdered ... buried alive. She felt the blood drain from her face. Understanding, at last, the things she had seen; the killing, the dark terror, the dogs. All three linked to this taproom girl, this Polly Trenshaw ... and him.
She looked across at Marsden; saw the girlchild break ranks and throw her chubby arms around him seeking comfort. Kate watched him stroke her hair then casually look up.
Over the head of the girlchild his eyes found hers. It was there in his face, in the flicker of weary disappointment. Dear God, it had always been there, if only she had chosen to see. His rough questioning when she had her first vision of the girl; the promise he had extracted that she should keep nothing back from him. Withhold the most trivial of details, he had warned. At every turn, the signs were there. No vision of the girl came to her but that he had been there.
The truth had screamed out at her, the girl had cried out to her. How could she not have seen? Marsden had murdered Polly Trenshaw. Her lover, the man she had sworn to obey, had mutilated and buried alive a woman younger and fairer than herself. She had seen through the eyes of the killer, had known the victim’s suffering and comprehended nothing ... because she loved him.
Trusting in him, she had delivered herself into the hands of her accusers; stood passively while they played out the charade with the children – trusting completely in him.
But now she knew. And he was aware of her knowing. His dark eyes had drawn a chilling blank. No trace of concern in his tight-drawn lips. The illusion had crumbled and with it Kate’s last hope of salvation.
‘Sweet Jesu!’ she wailed. But no one heard save Marsden. Keeping his eye on Kate, he leaned over the girlchild and whispered in her ear.
Kate sensed what was happening. The children were as much his vassals as she had been. He meant for them to destroy her. She backed instinctively from him and the girlchild, spun towards the door and fled – straight into the arms of the footman.
‘Thought you’d slip away? Eh witch?’ he sneered, hurling her across the mat. She fell heavily on her hip but despite the pain staggered to her feet and lunged past the hostile faces. Something caught her foot and she fell across Grafton’s vacated chair. Then she felt nails digging into her back, heard the girlchild’s hysterical screams‒
‘She killed it! She killed it! She killed it!’
Kate swung the demented child off her back. She lashed out as the others rushed at her. Suddenly, arms locked around her chest, crushing the breath from her lungs. She cried out, ‘Let me be!’ But a hand jerked her chin upwards, choking the words in her throat ... his hand, she knew.
‘What is this?’ bellowed the constable, pushing through to her. ‘Who is this woman?’
‘She has bewitched my children!’ sobbed Ellen Grafton, as Joseph tore himself from her arms and fell, writhing to the floor. The constable stared nonplussed at the pinioned woman, at the torn clothes and blooded face.
‘She killed it! She killed it!’ shrieked Caroline.
The constable caught the child’s wrists and asked, ‘Killed what?’
‘My lamb,’ sobbed the child. ‘She killed it!’
Landlord Sutton eased himself through the crush, curious about this woman they called witch. He took in the cut lip and bruised cheekbone. Stared at the bared thigh and shoulder, until his mouth watered. Then a glint of green light caught his eye. He pushed forwards and pulling the torn bodice to one side, traced the scroll with a wondering finger.
‘What is it?’ asked the constable.
Sutton rubbed his mouth. ‘T’was Polly’s only treasure that brooch.’
Watching ...
Her mind cried out for sleep ... for death, but there was no mercy in their eyes, no respite from the torment. And the sun was slipping again, depriving her of warmth and light, locking her into the musty darkness, where there was no refuge from the watchers.
/>
In lucid moments she knew she was in the back room of her own cottage; knew the choice of incarceration had been the priest’s, approved by his mentor. Things familiar to lure her familiars, to hasten her confession.
She dimly remembered the boy, Ned, lifting clouds of dust as he swept the stone floor around her; the priest not letting him rest until the besom had scoured every rugged inch of the walls. The old man fetched him a stool to reach the furthest corners, till neither louse nor spider remained. And when the boy had done, he had him do it all over again, urging him to kill every last fly he found.
Satisfied at last, he had dismissed the boy and prepared the room with hallowed words and the draughty sweep of his clerical black. Then he summoned to the snare the creatures who did her bidding; the evil beings that of old found sustenance in the blood of a witch – the familiars.
He had enveloped her in his dogma, the aged priest of the musty robes; had suffocated her calm with relentless rhetoric, denying her everything but the route to purgatory. No food for her tight-drawn belly, no warmth for her nakedness, no sleep or mercy or hope.
And Marsden had watched it all, directing the priest when his old mind waivered over the details of the investigation. The mentor, the tormentor, the witchfinder sanctioned by the constable at Grafton’s insistence.
By the pond he had said, ‘Come with me, to prove your innocence – we still have time....’ And she had given him obedience, put her trust in him believing that what lay beneath his mask was partly hers, never once linking him with the visions ... until understanding was thrust upon her.
Then he had sprung the snare.
And there was no escaping his dark presence. Since the discovery of the brooch he had not left her for a moment. He had stood across the doorway of the bedroom at Apescross, while four goodwives, chosen from among the servants, stripped and examined her body for insensible abnormalities. He had heard her screams as they pricked suspect areas with pins; had watched as they shaved every last hair from her body and employed their pins in the most intimate parts of her, searching for the Devil’s mark – the teat from which a familiar could suck blood. And when they shook their heads, unable to find a single place, she had heard him thank them and say, ‘No matter, it is not essential that she have them, for the Devil might easily move his badge.’
Her memory of what came after was hazy. She recalled the jolting of a cart and bindings that rubbed a sackcloth cover into her irritated flesh. And Ned’s face as it peered down at her. She saw him as he had been the night he delivered his first lamb; the bright-eyed wondering Ned, and smiled. But the boy kicked out at her and reaching up to the driver gasped above the rattling wheels, ‘Mr Marsden, sir! She’s at it again!’
Marsden had carried her into the cottage, across the yard and through the fire-dead kitchen. He cut her bindings and set her upon a stool, while the priest directed the boy to sweep. And listened while the old man drilled her, over and over again, day in day out ... watching not for witchery, but for treachery.
In moments of distraction she had called on God, and the priest condemned her blasphemy; when she called on her mother he decried her sorcery.
Every nerve in her strained against the sun’s sinking, willing it to stave off the terror of the dark but the shadow of the watcher by the window moved as imperceptibly and inevitably as the hands of a clock. It stretched to the foot of her stool, crept across her trembling nakedness....
‘Awake, Katharine Gurney!’ ordered the priest. ‘No rest for you yet, no rest for any of us. Stir yourself!’ She gave a feeble groan of protest as between them Marsden and the old man untied and lifted her cramped legs from the stool, then began again the dreaded walking.
‘Before sunrise, your suffering will be at an end,’ declared the priest. He pointed to the ceiling. ‘A soft mattress to rest on, freshly roasted pullet, new bread‒’
‘How many nights?’ she asked, wincing as they forced her split and blistered feet across the rough stone between hearth and window. ‘How long?’
‘Do you not know, child?’ quizzed the old man. Kate shook her head. At length he said, ‘This will be the third night.’
‘And on the third day He rose again‒’ she recited emptily.
The priest stopped abruptly. ‘The articles of faith come ill from the lips of the Devil’s mistress. Confess it, he has oft-times come to you in the guise of a man, lain with you here and out there in the fields!’
Kate looked away from his burning eyes. ‘It is no great sin to lie with a man,’ she murmured, steadying herself against Marsden.
‘You have an incubus, a demon lover ... declare it!’ snapped the old man. ‘What did he promise you? Riches, power, eternal life?’
Hoarse with thirst, she squealed, ‘Leave me be! I want only to sleep‒’
‘Confess and be done with Lucifer’s schemes!’ blasted the priest. ‘Admit that you are an agent of the devil; that you sent your imps to torment Caroline Grafton and the other Grafton children; that you sent it in the guise of a man to molest Barbara Canard.’
‘They had an attack of the Mother,’ she raged. ‘Were you so blind? Scared witless by tales‒’
‘Suffocation of the Mother – hysteria,’ explained Marsden as the priest frowned quizzically. ‘It may be so.’ He paused reflectively, before adding, ‘The Mother often signals the Devil working through a witch.’
Kate heard him and began to shudder with weak laughter. It burst from her lungs with eerie savagery. Perturbed, the priest snatched her shoulders forwards so that her quivering features jerked back to look at him.
‘Was it the Mother caused an infant to vomit pins and other vile objects?’ he cried, grating his teeth. Incensed, he raised his hand but before he struck the hollow-eyed face, checked himself and dropped his voice to a cracked whisper. ‘He has made you his instrument, Katharine; blinded you with lust and fornication and worthless promises. He might promise you the world, my child, for his own evil ends, but he will destroy you who serves him, just as he seeks to destroy the innocent....’
Kate blinked and said with pathos, ‘I know.’
The priest glanced at Marsden, then quietly asked, ‘Was it to satisfy his lust you murdered Polly Trenshaw?’
The girl’s name triggered a rush of blood to Kate’s head. She swayed dizzily, remembering woods and twitching snouts and consuming, terrifying darkness. ‘I saw her,’ she said, gulping back nausea. ‘I saw her‒’
‘You saw her,’ insisted the old man, ‘because you held the knife that severed her throat. Confess it! With the knife you would use to skin a sheep, you slit the skin between the poor soul’s breasts, cut down through her abdomen to the pelvic bone‒’
‘No!’ Kate howled, struggling against Marsden’s cruel grip on her shoulders.
The priest glanced again at Marsden, then turned gravely towards the window and said, ‘One of the most sordid features of witchcraft is a belief in the efficacy of burying live animals. What did you think to gain from Polly’s terrible suffering?’ His voice was racked with pain and as he tilted his head up and pressed his eyelids shut, Kate watched a tear tumble down his age-dry cheek.
She followed its course in the fading light, no longer able to comprehend the priest’s emotion, or the meaning of his words, for the whirring pain in her head. Kate pressed her palms against her bruised eyes, sending flashes of yellow light through her brain. She raked her fingers across her shorn scalp and became aware that she was no longer being held.
She looked up in confusion to see Marsden staring into the old man’s eyes. She watched his fingertips stroke the aged temples as he might a child, murmuring soft words that had no meaning for her. Sensing her attention, Marsden looked up but the light was behind him, his expression masked by the darkness. Beside him the priest stood as though in a trance.
She heard no sound. Did not expect it. Then words took shape in her mind: ‘I chose you for this ... do not fight it, Kate. Why prolong the suffering when you know there can
be no escape? Go with it, accept your fate.’
She felt the pull of him, the sapping lure of his will beckoning like a beacon across a cruel sea.
‘Give me rest,’ she pleaded. ‘For pity’s sake.’
She heard his cold, almost disappointed snort of laughter. Then on the horizon of her mind, far to the right of his siren light, she saw for the first time the faint flickering of another light and knew it for the stirring of a latent inner self.
Her breaths came rapidly, her hands fell from her ears. She turned as the door to the kitchen groaned ajar. She sighed and the unformed notions spilled into the still room – curling themselves around her and Marsden and the priest – flooding her mind with living pictures....
She saw orgasmic bodies locked across a tombstone; the tonsured head of a young priest, the sweat-matted curls and desperate gasps of a woman.
She heard afar a child’s quiet prayer. Drew nearer to the kneeling figure and cried aloud with remembered grief at the sight of her own young fingers holding back the minute hand of the silver larum watch. She buried her head as the church bell began to toll, then saw again fat fingers drawing obscenities in the dust, and her mother’s eyes asking why and why and why.
Far off she heard Priest Peebles’ startled shriek, but she was surrounded by bloody mutilation; absorbed by the sight of soldier bodies strewn across a quaggy field, still save for the furtive scavenging of looters. She looked down and stared into the weeping face of a boy-soldier, unable to move his head for a gaping wound to his neck and shoulder. She saw the pleading turn to horror as a flashing blade axed through his neck; knelt beside him, touched the severed head and looked up into the face of the executioner....
The Witch (The Witch Trilogy Book 1) Page 8