This once done, I thought, I took note enough of landmarks on the way here. I can abandon the pack-train and cover the ground back to London in half the time.
“Has your father handled business for Master Fludd long?” I asked, with an eye to Cecil and his ever-present curiosity.
“This last few years, sir.”
“And your presses are not seized?”
“No, sir.”
He didn’t seem to think it an odd question. I wondered if my suppositions about why Monsieur Fludd might own a paper mill and printing press in such an out-of-the-way place were unfounded. An ideal way to print heretic pamphlets, occult books, revolutionary political tracts….
Well, I will check the pack-train before they set out back. Suppose I cannot prove conspiracy—I’m certain that Mr Secretary Cecil will be as pleased to suppress a black magician or political agitator.
The hill was high and steep above us. Green with grass and slippery moss: no approach for armed men that way. I glanced back, pausing to breathe. The mill itself can be easily taken, where it straddles the stream. And it has a better road than most of the farms we passed, since they need to bring the pack-train in and out. Cavalry might get to the mill easily, but then there is the river between them and the cave….
You will not do Milord Cecil’s job for him.
I smiled to myself; then sobered. I do this because I habitually do it for M. de Sully: take note of all, no matter what, because there may be ways found to make use of it.
We climbed a steeper section of the path. It opened into a flat, wide space in front of the rearing face of the hill. The entrance to the caves was dark, plain, and usefully larger than I had expected.
“Here, master.” Ned Field took two pitch torches out of his bag and set flint to steel, and handed one lit torch to me. I followed him in.
Light became dimness, and I stopped to let my sight adjust. Just inside the lip of the cavern entrance, cool air touched my face. Water dripped, the sound magnified. My boots slipped a little on the moss-covered rock. Holding the torch up, I saw the path drop steeply in front, and I glimpsed hewn parts of the stone walls. Light sent the shadows of rock-formations skittering ahead.
The Field boy’s hand closed hard over his sprig of hawthorn. I saw a spot of blood on his glove as he released it. His eyes, gazing at me in the torch-light, showed white all around.
“We don’t come up here. Except we leave offerings for the witch. It’s a bad place.”
I wonder you don’t tell me it’s like Broceliande, haunted by fairies! I kept the scorn off my face, and nodded for him to precede me. Fludd has doubtless owned his property here long enough to make sure the witch legend spreads and is properly emphasised.
Passing the walls, I reached out to touch them. Dry, gritty; and the torch-light made them sand-coloured, with swirls of darker rock. White dripping stone had fallen in many places, and hardened to pinnacles that hung down from the cave roof. Rather than grow used to flinching away, I hunched my shoulders. The English court would be well enough in here, few being as tall as I. I made mental notes for the report that would do duty both for Fludd and Cecil.
We descended a set of hacked-out steps where the passage narrowed. I heard Ned Field’s breathing in the quiet. A bigger darkness opened up ahead. With only the scrape of his boots to guide me as he drew ahead out of torch-light, I followed him into a cavern. The pool of flame showed a floor, half-shale, like a river-bed. At that thought, I glimpsed running water off to my right, deep and with a deceptively still surface.
“River Axe,” Field muttered. “Carry you under if you fall in. Sometimes water’s up, ’n you can’t come in here.”
Stones crunched under my boots as I followed him up away from the underground river, climbing a slope between folds of rock, into a lower-roofed cavern.
Off to the sides, still pools reflected both our torches and the hanging and standing pinnacles of stone. The air felt cool—would feel no warmer in Summer, I guessed, and no colder in Winter.
With a covert smile, I reflected that it would make some nobleman a fine wine cellar.
“Here.” Field lifted his torch and stopped.
Ahead, the passage opened up into a great cavern, large enough to be any man’s banqueting hall, with a ceiling that no man except I should consider low. I walked forward, felt my boots splash in water as I came to the centre of the cavern, and lifted the torch to disclose a shallow small stream bisecting the floor. A tributary of the Axe?
Beyond it was a great flat space. Small caves led off that. To my left, a great silent pool flashed back gold light from the torches.
“Are there more caves beyond this?”
“Yes.” The boy’s teeth clattered as he spoke.
He may be leading me into a trap, I thought, crossing the shallow river, careful of my footing. Just because I know no reason why he should doesn’t mean he won’t….
He came up with me as I came out of the smaller caves abutting on the main ones. There was sweat on his forehead, under his ripe-corn hair.
“It’s ideal,” I confirmed. “The large cavern for a banquet and masque, the small caves for actors, servants, cooks. Will it be possible to have men up from your mill or the village, to put temporary wooden bridges where the river may rise?”
He flinched as if I sang a bawdy song in church. “If you pay them well, master. They won’t like coming here.”
A flight of soundless dark shadows flickered across the torch-light.
Field shrieked.
A man instinctively reacts to the sound of human panic: alarm thrilled through me. In a fraction of a heartbeat, I had the explanation. “They are bats, monsieur! No need to—”
He screamed as a man does when he cannot suck any air into his lungs, and pointed. His torch hit the rock floor and rolled in a cloud of evil-smelling smoke. My remaining light illuminated what he stared rigidly at, below and beyond us. A white, wide-mouthed face, entirely not human—
“Ah!” He grabbed my arm, knocking the torch. Before I could recover it, it fell; rolled into the water before me and was extinguished. “I saw her! I saw her!”
Field’s shrieks echoed off the walls. I shut him out, let myself remember direction, and groped on the floor for the fallen torch. I put my left hand on it, and coaxed it to light again.
“I’ll die now,” the English boy whispered.
The velvet jerk and rustle of wings made me duck. Heart hammering, I muttered, “Only if I slaughter you out of lack of patience, messire!” and sheathed my rapier—only then realising that I had drawn it.
“Come.” I got a hand under Ned Field’s arm and, since he wouldn’t walk, set about hauling and dragging him after me. I crossed the narrow stream and left the cavern. I was unsure, bumping him up the steps to the open air, finally, whether I had drenched his russet breeches in the stream’s water, or whether he had done that himself when he saw what he took to be a witch.
With a great deal of trouble, I got him down the hill to the paper-mill. His was a genuine shock. I have seen as much in skirmishes against cavalry in the Low Countries. A man’s mind can produce it as well from imaginary enemies, I thought, as I handed Ned over to his father, for his mother and aunts to lead away.
“I saw nothing,” I said when the bluff Englishman picked up the hawthorn twig that had fallen from his son’s doublet.
“You’re certain, master?”
“So certain that I will return and complete what I have begun.”
The man protested, both troubled and distrustful. I briefly wished I had a cross of the true religion with me—although on reflection I am not sure which the elder Field would have felt more devilish: a witch or a papist cross.
“The Devil gives her power,” he said as if he discussed the price of turnips. “Excuse me, Master Herault. I’m going to take my son to the parish priest. To see she hasn’t bewitched him into losing his manhood.”
I thought that, at the worst, Ned Field had lost only the con
tents of his bladder, but I doubted his father would find this a comforting remark. I bowed silently and left.
Bats are unnerving, well called the Devil’s bird. With that and the fact that he had lived with the legends all his life, I did not doubt that Ned Field had seen his witch. My heart had hammered. But now, the initial shock gone, I realised what it was that was so inhuman about the white face.
It was upside down, I thought. Reflected in water, in front of us. And however supernatural the witch may be, she was solid enough to ripple the water when she departed.
Ghosts and demons do not splash.
I abstracted a lantern from the stables without being seen by the mill workers or Lanier, and entered the Wookey caverns again some hour or so after I had left. I felt the air moving against my cheek. The roosting bats would have some access to the top of the hill, for their dusk and dawn flights, but I supposed that to be rock-chimneys not accessible to a man.
The calm chill of the cave sunk into my gloved hands as I held the lantern up. I became aware that the muscles across my back tensed. As silently as I could, I drew my sword before I entered the banqueting-cavern, and then stood still, letting the silence return.
My gaze took in cave wall, rock-spires, and a patch of white in the left-hand corner of my vision, about where the pool of water must be.
Cautiously, I turned my head.
Again, a white face reflected in the water, the eyes wide, the mouth reversed in the upside-down image. Masses of loose white hair shone in the unbroken surface of the pool.
I broke the silence. “Don’t be afraid.”
The reflection vanished. Rock scraped against another rock. A pebble plopped into the pool.
I took several swift strides, shattering the surface of the water, splashing through it; ducked, and came up under the lip of rock that I had guessed must be there—or else we should have seen the person standing there to listen, and not merely their reflection.
Halting, I opened the lantern-door.
She blinked in the yellow light.
A woman of short stature, with a livid face, and silver hair that hung down uncombed and uncut. She crouched down, back to the rock wall, putting out her hand.
“Excuse me, grandmère.” I spoke quietly, but did not yet put my sword away. I stood the lantern in a natural limestone niche. She seemed an old woman, of the sort that peasants may well call witch.
She knotted her hands in her grubby bleached linen petticoats, staring up at me. One withered dug hung almost out of her smock. I doubted she would stand four and a half feet tall if she stood up. All that was dark about her was her eyes, and they blinked at me with a quick, irregular rhythm more reminiscent of a frog than a woman.
A madwoman.
“Excuse me,” I repeated soothingly, mocking myself in my thoughts. “I had thought you something I should put in my report, but I see that is not so. I apologise, I will leave.”
Too many years as the Duke’s agent have left me with a predilection for seeing plots and rendezvous where there are none. Instead, here is an old peasant woman, probably driven out of her village, and probably seeking nothing more than to beg food.
In the lantern-light, I saw a fat, clear drop of water well up in her eye. It rolled down her cheek. She neither moved nor made a sound. It was barely obvious that she breathed.
Another tear succeeded the first, running down her dirty cheek. Another. I opened my mouth to speak, and was interrupted. She spoke, loudly. Her voice made such a dry mangling of her words that it was a moment before I realised she had spoken neither in English nor French.
“No ghe credo!”
One of the languages of Italy, I finally recognised through her weeping. From Padua, from Venice…Mordieu! At least not Florentine, like Concini!
The old woman reached down, staring at me. She pulled up the hem of her top petticoat at the back. I could not work out why she showed me her filthy under-petticoats—and then she hooded the back of it like a shawl, covering up her uncovered hair.
A modest woman will always have her hair covered. That this evident madwoman could remember so much was almost as surprising as being addressed, here, in a foreign tongue.
“Who are you, grandmère?” I repeated it quietly in French, English, and the smattering of Italian tongues I had picked up visiting Savoy.
“Son Caterina….”
“Catherine.” Slowly, so as not to alarm her, I knelt down. She continued to crouch against the wall, as if it were all that held her up, still shorter than I although I knelt. Her eyes lightened as she slitted them against the lantern’s candle. Her hands, prominent with veins and knuckles, clenched the material of her petticoat together under her chin. Without the silver hair showing, she could have been anywhere between fifty and seventy.
And what will she do, when Fludd’s men arrive here?
I felt a stab of pity. There are such women called witches in France; some have irrational fears that every man is seeking to harm them, or speak constantly to voices that no other man can hear. Some claim to hear the voice of Monseigneur God, as Ravaillac did, and keep the priests busy working out whether they do or whether it is the Devil.
“You should go,” I began.
“Mi son Caterina!” she exclaimed.
I am Catherine, Caterina. A wandering madwoman who remembers that once she had a name, and that it mattered what it was. I gave her a nod of acknowledgement and rose slowly to my feet. The chape of my scabbard scraped the rock wall behind me, and I froze. After thirty heartbeats it seemed that she had not noticed—that it would be possible to back out of this cavern without causing her to break out into a cat-scratching fury.
“Ti xe’ Valentin Raoul St Cyprian Anne-Marie Rochefort de Cossé Brissac!”
I stopped.
The woman’s black eyes lifted, gazing up at me where I towered above her crouching body. She repeated, “Ti xe’ Valentin. Ti xe’ Valentin Raoul Rochefort de Cossé Brissac….”
“Not another one!” I bellowed.
She flinched back from the echoes in the surrounding dark. Her mouth trembled. I held out my rapier, the blade glinting as if it were oiled.
“Whose trick is it this time? Fludd, again? Lanier? Come out, Aemilia! I will not take this foolery a second time!”
A few soundless black shadows whirred through the lantern’s light, disturbed by noise. I heard nothing that indicated the presence of another man. Or woman.
“Very well—what did they pay you?” I reached forward with my free hand, hauled the woman upright with my fingers knotted into her shift, and slammed her back against the rough stone wall. “Play-actor! Stop this and talk, madwoman!”
She gazed up at me, over my fist at her neck. Tears slid out of her eyes. Tremulously, unmistakably, she smiled.
“Oh, cielo, misericordioso, voi non potete credere quanto mi fate felice!” She slipped into an educated, accented French. “Oh, good merciful heaven, you can’t believe, sir, how happy you are making me!”
I put my rapier blade across her chin, close to the hilt, just above my fist, so that the edge brought out a trickle of blood on her skin. “Who told you my name!”
Her smile didn’t waver. Her pale tongue darted out, and licked up her own tears as they ran down the wrinkles about her nose and mouth. She gazed up at me as she wept, her eyes shining with absolute joy.
I snapped, “I was correct, at the first. You are mad!”
“You don’t hurt me.” She did not move a fraction under my blade. “Here you are, here you are….”
Spontaneous joy is a difficult sensibility to fake. Tears, fear, disgust, or liking are easier. Whoever put her here, she is…genuinely overjoyed to see one Valentin Raoul Rochefort.
Why?
“Does Fludd think two fortunetellers will impress me more than one?” I demanded. Her black eyes in her pallid face shone dizzily at me. She beamed. I do not like to hit an old woman, but a pawn of Fludd’s…I shook her, harshly, keeping the hank of her makeshift sh
awl in my fist.
“You can tell me, grandmère, or I can beat it out of you! He told you my name. Now you tell me his!”
“I put myself here, Valentin.” She hung in my grip, voice husky, gazing up at me with wet eyes. “I have been waiting for you. Ten years I have waited. And now…no ghe credo! No matter how sure I was…. It is you; it is Rochefort; it is you….”
I removed my sword and let go of her.
Immediately after, I grabbed and caught her arm as she slid down the cave wall.
Exasperated as much with myself as with her—why should I care if old bones are brittle?—I squatted down before her as she folded into a kneeling position. Her petticoats fell down, her head uncovered, and her smock shifted. Something caught the light at her waist.
A rosary. Old, polished dark wood, hanging from the cord serving her as a belt, evidently familiar to the fingers. The metal crucifix winked in the lantern-light.
I raised my brows. “Not all of England is heretic, but still, not a wise thing to be wearing. You were waiting for me. And now you, also, are about to tell me my future. And I am supposed to believe this?”
She laughed.
A small sound, in the emptiness surrounding us, but it left me open-mouthed in incredulity. At last, I managed to observe, “It seems to be my lot in life, to be mocked at by women.”
“Poor Valentin!” Her bright eyes seemed almost tender. That, I thought, is more frightening than her pretence of having been waiting for me.
I looked at her sternly. “So. You followed me here. Superstition keeps out the peasants. You have been told my name, or a name you suppose me to go by. Be careful I don’t lose patience with this farce. Whatever your actions mean, they will be irrelevant once you are dead.”
I held my rapier with the point out to the side, ready either to cut at an attacker from the darkness, or slash back at the hag.
“You have never killed old women, Valentin. You will not begin now.”
I glanced about the small, yellow-lit cave. Lanier, Fludd; they will have no reason I can see for wishing me delayed here. Cecil—no, too baroque even for Milord Cecil. What then? The approach of another, as yet unknown, enemy?
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