The Return of the Witch

by Paula Brackston

  Gideon turned the key in the lock and let the door swing open. I held what breath I had regained, hoping against hope. But it was not Elizabeth who stepped into the room. It was a very different face that moved into the dim glow of the candle. A familiar face. Or rather, two of them.

  Gideon said, “Lucrecia and Florencia will take better care of you this time. They have promised me that, haven’t you, girls?”

  The twins nodded and simpered at him in a sickening way that clearly came from a potent mix of fear, awe, and devotion.

  “There are matters requiring my attention,” Gideon told me before handing the key to Lucrecia and taking his hat from the table. He tipped it at me and then placed it firmly on his head again. “Until later,” he said.

  And then he was gone, and I was left hugging my bruised ribs, alone with the poisonous sisters and not the smallest idea of what I was going to do.

  20

  Mrs. Timms saw it as a personal mission to restore me to good health. She bustled and fussed and appeared with trays of food until I thought I would go mad from it, though of course I knew she meant well. When I questioned Erasmus as to how he explained his curious comings and goings and what reasons he gave for his long absences, he smiled as he told me that both Mr. and Mrs. Timms were themselves Time Steppers! It was hard to reconcile this elderly, slightly comical couple with my idea of the risky and adventurous business of Stepping, but apparently they had plied their craft successfully for decades, eventually finding a contented retirement running their guesthouse and supporting Erasmus, both in his role as Time Stepper, and as Mr. Balmoral the talented bookbinder and collector of antiquarian books.

  I had attempted to both call and sense Tegan, but could detect nothing of her at all. I refused to let this lead me to dark thoughts. I did, briefly, succeed in detecting what I was sure was Gideon’s presence, though it was only a weak glimpse. I reasoned that whatever else he might be, Gideon was neither slipshod nor reckless, and would have done his utmost to make sure Tegan survived the stepping.

  First thing on the morning after our arrival, I picked up the bonnet Mrs. Timms had furnished me with and descended the stairs from the drawing room to the ground floor of the house. There were two main rooms on this level; a kitchen at the rear—with a door that led into Mrs. Timms’s adjoining one in her own house—and the shop at the front. This was really a showroom for Erasmus’s beautifully bound books, housing some of his most intricate and skillfully worked creations. These were displayed in glass-fronted cases as well as in the bow window that gave onto the street. There was a high counter with a locked till and a ledger for taking orders and recording transactions. The shop was not manned, but a large brass bell sounded clearly through the house whenever the door was opened. It was this that gave away my intention to go out, and brought Erasmus galloping down the stairs.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “I need some air.”

  “You won’t find her by roaming the streets. I thought we established that last night.”

  “I cannot stay cooped up in here like an injured hen. I feel completely recovered. I have to do something.”

  “Do you plan to walk the whole of the city? How many days, weeks, months would it take you to tread every cobble and paving stone, and even then not find a trace of Tegan?”

  “I might stand a better chance of picking up a trace of her, of sensing something…”

  “If you happen to walk in the right direction.” He stepped closer to me. “Elizabeth, your knowledge of Gideon, and of Tegan, of how his mind works and what it is about her that makes him so determined to keep her—these are the things that will lead us to them.”

  “I am weary of racking my brains, I am tired of thinking. I don’t know why he wants her or why he has brought her here. If I ever thought I did, I am sure now that I do not.”

  “What we can be certain of is that he will be expecting you to search for him. Have you masked your own presence?” Seeing my face he went on, “No, I thought not.”

  “It may be the only way, to show myself, to let him come to me.”

  “You put yourself in great danger, Elizabeth. He has tried to get rid of you before, he would happily have had Cromwell’s men hang you…”

  I did not let him finish, but turned and strode through the door. “I will return before dark,” was all the reassurance I gave him as I left.

  The day was much brighter than my mood, and sunshine fed dappled light through the leafy pollarded trees that lined the broad street outside Erasmus’s home. This was a genteel part of London, with smart, pastel-painted Georgian houses on either side of the road. What shops there were sold such things as only those with a certain amount of wealth could afford. There was a tailor, a dressmaker, a milliner, a shop selling only mirrors, an apothecary, and a bakery. The other buildings were mostly comfortable residences. The street curved upward toward an enticing swath of green. I soon found myself stepping through an iron gate between gleaming black railings and onto the grassy path that wound its way through the park and up Primrose Hill itself. It was a relief to be outside, and the air in this part of the city was pleasant enough. Although slowed by the heavy skirts and petticoats of my Victorian dress, a further ten minutes walking took me to the top of the hill, where I was rewarded with a glorious panorama of London. The whole of the city was laid out below me, with familiar landmarks picked out by the sharp sunlight. Amid the tightly packed houses and grander buildings I quickly identified the dome of St. Paul’s, and the newly built jagged rooftop of the Houses of Parliament. Winding through it all, pewter and ponderous, was Old Father Thames, dotted with small boats, broad barges, and tall cargo ships maneuvering into the docks. I took a deep breath, revived by the vista and the feeling of being out in the open once more. I closed my eyes for a moment and just listened, with all my witch senses alert for the tiniest sound from Tegan. But there was nothing. I sensed instead that I was being watched. I was mindful of Erasmus’s warning, but this was not a malignant presence. When I opened my eyes it was to see a small girl standing in front of me. Her appearance suggested she lived a poor life, and a hard one. Even in such a prosperous district poverty made itself a neighbor. She was dressed in raggedy clothes and had no shoes, but her hair was neatly tied. She clearly belonged to someone. She looked about eight years old, but could have been older, her growth and development stunted by a meager diet. She had evidently been watching me stand before the finest view in London with my eyes closed and this struck her as odd.

  “Are you praying, missus?” she asked.

  I smiled at her. “I suppose you might call it that.”

  “I say my prayers before I go to bed,” she said. “That keeps you safe at night.”

  “They must be very good prayers.”

  She shrugged and rubbed her eye. Now that I looked closer I could see she had infection which must have been causing her no small amount of discomfort. It was a simple problem with a simple cure, but if left untreated could compromise her sight. It was unlikely her mother would have either the facilities or the knowledge required to heal the girl.

  “What is your name?” I asked her.

  “Lottie.”

  “Well, Lottie, I could make your eye better for you. My house is very near. If you come with me I will give you something for it.”

  Instinctively Lottie began to back away, and I cursed my own clumsiness. Of course she would not go anywhere with a strange woman she had just met in the park. At that moment half a dozen more small children came by at a run. One grabbed Lottie by the arm and another called out her name and in an instant they had swept her away with them and were charging down the grassy slope, skipping and squealing like a litter of piglets let loose. I saw her glance over her shoulder at me, and then they left the park and darted down a side street.

  My encounter with the child had diverted my thoughts only briefly, but had had a more profound effect on my mood. Perhaps it was my failure to help the girl because my
attempt had been ill-thought through, or perhaps it was the calming effect of the open air and the vista, but I found I could face up to the fact that Erasmus was right. No amount of trudging the streets would help me find Tegan. I could not search so blindly. Gideon was clever, and the only way to outwit him would be to behave with more cunning, more intelligence, more guile even than he was capable of. I turned away from the gleaming city and hurried back toward home.

  I found Erasmus in the drawing room, sitting by an open window, book in hand. Now that we were in his preferred time and place he did indeed seem to fit better. He wore a dark red velvet smoking jacket, his silver-flecked hair pushed back off his face but falling untidily over his collar. On seeing me he got up. “I had not expected you back so soon,” he told me.

  “I owe you an apology.” I untied my bonnet and dropped it on top of the nearest pile of books. “I should not have been so dismissive of your advice. You are right, of course. We have to work out what Gideon is about, what he wants, and why he wants Tegan, or we shall never find her.”

  “There is nothing like the view from Primrose Hill to clear the head,” he declared, bounding over to his desk. He began removing books and papers from it, hastily searching for spaces to put them. Very soon he lost patience with the process and simply cleared the entire surface with a single sweep of his arm, letting everything tumble to the floor and lie where it fell. “We have work to do!” he announced, and unfurled a large sheet of paper, which he pinned down at the corners with an inkstand, a paperweight, and two volumes of Encyclopaedia Britannica. He rubbed his hands together before snatching up a stub of pencil. Across the top of the sheet he wrote London 1851 in a bold, swirling hand.

  “We will begin with Tegan,” he said, pausing to look up at me. “Tell me of this girl of yours, Elizabeth. Who is Tegan?”

  I moved to stand beside him. The clear light from the window lit up the paper with an optimistic glow I did not feel. “She was just a child when first we met. A lost soul, really. Adrift, at least. Lonely, certainly.”

  “And you … recognized something in her? Something of yourself, perhaps?”

  I was surprised. “Do you know me so well already, Erasmus?”

  He smiled broadly. “It seems I do. But we digress. Tell me not of how Tegan was years ago, tell me of the grown woman you returned to. Did you find her changed?”

  “In so many ways. Of course, she had developed from a gauche teenager into a young person—five years at such a time in life are always significant. And she had a newfound confidence, in herself, I believe. I quickly saw that she had grown comfortable in her own skin.” I paused, revisiting the brief time we had spent together at Willow Cottage before we began flitting through the centuries. We had spent hours of true closeness talking, trying to fill in the gaps and to heal the ache of those missing years. And when we had spellcast together I had the sense that I was with someone at home with what she was doing, someone accomplished and bold. “I recall the strength of her presence,” I went on. “She had always had magic in her soul, innate but dormant. Now her being sang with it. She told me she had spent many months, years in fact, traveling the world in order to sit at the feet of talented and revered witches.”

  “A diligent and committed student. You kindled something special within her, it seems to me.”

  “If only I could have stayed with her. How I would love to have witnessed that blossoming for myself!”

  “Perhaps it would not have taken place, had you been there. After all, Tegan would have been reluctant to leave you. So,” Erasmus wrote with decisive, swift marks, “let us put … here … what we have: a serious student of magic; a woman of strength and seriousness regarding her craft; a well-traveled, broadly tutored pupil.”

  “Yes, but … I do not believe her to be a pupil any longer. She is, in her own right, in her own singular way, a mature and accomplished witch.”

  Erasmus put my words in capital letters and underlined them. He straightened up and looked at me carefully.

  “Do you think that Gideon knows what he has? Can he know how much she has changed?”

  I nodded. “He must know.”

  “In which case,” said Erasmus slowly, “we must conclude that Tegan herself is important to him now. She might once have been a route to you, or a way to exact revenge upon you, but now…”

  “Now it is she who is of interest to him. It is Tegan he wants.”

  “It would appear so.”

  “But, he must know she will never, could never, want to be with him. Not as a lover, not as a witch, not in any conceivable way. His arrogance is shocking, but even he knows that she can never forgive him for the way he deceived her. And that she is repulsed by the darkness of his own magic. She is not an impressionable teenager with a flimsy control over her emotions. What’s more, from what I recall of her travels and her learning, she could never reconcile her own outlook regarding the responsibilities of magic and its power with Gideon’ s behavior.”

  “As you say, he must know all this. He has had plenty of time to consider it. So what is it that he hopes for from her?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. I can’t see it.”

  Erasmus reached over and pulled the bell rope. “We require sustenance,” he said. “I shall have the good Mrs. Timms bring us something light to eat and something refreshing to drink. We will revive ourselves, we will continue our notes, and you, my dear Elizabeth, will bring to mind everything that Tegan told you about her apprenticeship to magic.”

  “Everything?”

  “Indeed. For I believe there is something she has learned, some transformation she has undergone, some talent, maybe, that is of particular interest to your nemesis. Once we have identified it, we will be on our way to fathoming his intentions.”

  And so it was that we spent the greater part of the day in that room, with me scouring my memory for things Tegan had shared with me about those years and Erasmus noting them down, making connections and raising questions whenever and wherever he could. I told him of her year on the Welsh island following the Celtic traditions. I told him of her trip to America and her experiences of witchcraft there. I remembered what snippets she had told me of her time in the frozen beauty of Siberia. I also recalled her visiting the northern reaches of the Sahara, but there had not been time for her to tell me a great deal about what she learned there.

  When we had exhausted my recall of Tegan’s studies and travels we turned to what we knew of Gideon. I reasoned that, if it was truly Tegan who he wanted now, for whatever reason, perhaps he had chosen to lead me back to Batchcombe in order to try to get rid of me. After all, he would have known I could meet people there who mattered to me, people such as William, or others who might recognize me and seek to have me hanged as a witch. By choosing a time of war he not only gained power from the dark energy of conflict, but increased the possibility that I might not survive the journey. As to why he had brought Tegan to London, well, Erasmus himself was a city man, and I believed Gideon shared this preference.

  “But, why now?” I asked. “Why this year, this date?”

  “That,” said Erasmus, leaning back in his chair and biting into a small meat pie, “is the missing piece of the puzzle.”

  Wearied from so much thinking and frustrated by our seeming lack of progress, I wandered over to the window. Squinting into the sunshine, which was strong still, even though it was nearly four o’clock, I saw a gaggle of children in the street below and recognized Lottie among them. She appeared to be watching the house. She must have followed me home.

  “I am needed,” I told Erasmus. I hurried downstairs and outside, relieved to be able to do something I felt equal to. There was a general air of pleasant leisure in the street. This area was not made up of the teeming roads and raucous markets that were to be found at the center of the great city. Primrose Hill might not be the bucolic idyll its name suggested, but it was a pretty place, a gentle district. The presence of these half-starved children, however,
served as a reminder that other people’s wealth here came at a cost that had to be paid by someone. I crossed the road and smiled at Lottie. She regarded me warily, as if torn between fearing me and wanting my help.

  “I’m so glad you found me,” I said. “That eye must be very sore. Come, let me make it better.”

  I held out my hand. Lottie hesitated. She glanced at her friends, two of whom were backing away, while another nodded eagerly.

  “All right,” she said, skipping past me without taking my hand, but heading for Erasmus’s front door.

  Once inside I led her through the shop, if such it could be called, and into the kitchen at the rear. As Mrs. Timms did most of the cooking for Erasmus in her own house—accessed through an adjoining door on the far wall—the room was clean, but with a slightly uninhabited feel to it. Nonetheless, it was well equipped and Lottie found it very impressive. It was not a large kitchen, but the child gazed about her as if she were in a wondrous place. She made a circuit of it, running her fingers over the spotless scrub-top table, reaching out to touch the shiny copper pots and pans, grinning with delight at the indoor tap.

  “You’ve water inside the house, missus?!”

  “Yes; you can turn on the tap, if you like.”

  She did so, and giggled with glee as water poured forth so fast that it splashed against the china sink and doused her. When she turned to me her face was dripping. I pulled out a chair.