Haunt Me Still

by Jennifer Lee Carrell

  She went still. Burghley was Queen Elizabeth’s secretary of state and lord high treasurer. The quiet, conniving man who ran her kingdom. Walsingham was her master of spies. She did not know the son, but his connection to these two men made him someone worthy of caution.

  “Misshapen as a changeling,” Lord Henry went on, his voice low and urgent with loathing, “with a mind as twisted as his body. But precocious. A few years back, at his recommendation, every troupe of players in England surrendered their best actors to the queen’s own company. The rest were redistributed, and many were recruited.” He ran a long, cool finger down the line of her jaw. “Nothing but players. They are Elizabeth’s eyes and ears at a distance. They are spies.”

  He flung her off and backed away, and at last the scornful laughter ripped from him. “Within three days, Elizabeth will know everything that has passed within these walls. If she finds it to her advantage, she will pass your treason on to your king.” He brushed the sleeves of his doublet as if the very air of her room had soiled him. “I must ride for England and attempt to control the coming storm. As for you, madam, do what you will; I fear you will never be queen.” With that, he strode out the door.

  “You are wrong,” she’d whispered defiantly to the empty room. “I have seen it.”

  MIRROR

  You go not till I set you up a glass

  Where you may see the inmost part of you.

  25

  BEN TOOK THE blue robe from me, laying it back down across her face.

  “What have I done?” I whispered.

  He frowned, as if hearing me from a great distance. “You did not do this.”

  “You don’t know that. I don’t know that.” Hysteria was rising in waves.

  There was a shout overhead. “Kate, you have to go. I can’t leave her, and you can’t stay.” He made a move toward me and stopped, as if he could not bear to touch me. A look of blank horror filled his face. “Listen to me: You’re the only person who can save Lily right now. Go down to the house. Make sure the police aren’t there. I doubt it: They have no reason to be, yet. Clean yourself up, get a change of clothes. Get money. Get whatever you need to find Lily. And then get out. Get as far away from here as you can.”

  I was staring at him stupidly.

  “Go.”

  I turned and stumbled across the meadow. At its edge a thick row of pines skated down another steep stretch of the hillside, tumbling to the road. Bracken cracked and rustled beneath my feet, small rocks tumbling and sliding around me. The wood was eerily silent.

  .

  At the bottom, the trees ended abruptly at the road. I edged forward to look up and down the pavement. The sun had not yet made its way this far down the hillside, and the road was a ravine of gray ghosts. Thinking of Sybilla rustling behind me in shimmering blue, I slipped across the road and floundered up the slope on the opposite side, toward the house. What had I done?

  Sybilla was dead and Lily had disappeared. I had forty-eight hours to find the manuscript and ransom her.

  If I did, if I found her, I might—just might—learn what had happened up on that hill last night. Learn what I had or had not done.

  Forty-eight hours.

  I had to tell Lady Nairn.

  The house was dark. On the terrace, I looked up. There was only one light on, high in a corner tower. Lady Nairn’s treasure room.

  With my hand on the front door, I paused. Lady Nairn had been on the hilltop last night, her arms raised to the moon, a knife in her hand. She was a witch, a Wiccan priestess; that much was clear. But what other role had she played? I’d thought her a victim when I first saw the body covered in her blue beetle-wing gown. Was it possible that she’d killed instead? Or seen me kill? Swallowing back dread, I opened the heavy door and slipped inside.

  It did not feel like a sleeping house, filled with the sense of slow breathing and dreams. It felt empty, even derelict. I fumbled my way up the dimly lit stairs. One floor up, just outside the hall, a vase lay smashed on the floor. The room beyond was dark save for the far corner, where faint light oozed from the door to the stairs up to the tower. Hearing nothing, I crept across the room, pausing again to listen before pattering up the steps.

  At the top, the door to Lady Nairn’s room was ajar. Through the crack, I saw that the chest beneath the window had been smashed, its splinters scattered across the floor. The last time I’d come, the room had been singing, the air filled with wind chimes and the quiet burble of a fountain. Now it was silent. Holding my breath, I pushed open the door.

  It wasn’t just the chest that was broken. Around it, the once beautiful room was a shambles. Ashes had been scattered across the floor, and the chimes ripped down and savagely bent and broken. The small bookshelf had been overturned. Some of the books smoldered on the hearth; others had been tossed into the fountain, clogging its flow. Nearby, the two armchairs had been slit. Within the circle inlaid in the tile floor, a pentacle had been drawn in what looked like blood.

  Maybe it was the pentacle. Maybe it was the memory of Lady Nairn on the hill, her arms raised to the moon. Looking around the ravaged room, I finally realized what it was: fire to the south, water to the west, chimes to the east, for air, and the window framing the hill to the north, for earth. It was a Wiccan temple. Or the ruins of one. A temple desecrated with a fury, a pointed and extreme hatred that was frightening even in its aftermath.

  Through the open door, I heard the shuffle of a step on the stair below, and then silence. Whoever was out there did not want to be heard. Why? The pentacle on the floor suggested that the place was ready for some rite—missing only the celebrants. Was that who was rising up the stairs? Had the light in the tower been a lure?

  The room was at the top of the tower, with only one door; the stairs were the only way out. I was trapped. Picking up a stout board torn from the chest, I slipped behind the door. Moments later, I heard a step on the threshold and an intake of breath. I gripped the board like a bat, and the door was flung shut.

  Eircheard stood facing me, knife in hand, horror spreading across his face. “What’s happened, lass? Are you all right?”

  I looked down. I’d forgotten my blood-soaked clothes. Dropping the board, I began to shake. “It’s not my blood.”

  Behind him stood Lady Nairn in dark trousers and a thin sweater, her face drawn. “Where’s Lily?”

  “It’s not hers, either.”

  “Where is she?”

  I took a deep breath. “We found her last night at the festival. But she was taken again. From me, Lady Nairn. It’s why I came back up the hill last night…. I’m sorry.”

  As I spoke, she raised a hand to her mouth, stifling a cry. Now she turned away. As quickly as I could, I recounted all that had happened from seeing Lucas up through the phone call from Lily’s captors.

  “Who are they?” demanded Lady Nairn. “I don’t know. I saw Lucas at the festival. But he told me to walk away. On the hill last night, I saw the Winter King. It was his voice, on the phone.”

  “The bastard who first slipped me a mickey and then tried to kill me?” asked Eircheard.

  I nodded. “I don’t know who he is. None of this makes sense.”

  “What do they want?” Lady Nairn snapped.

  “They took the knife. Now they want the manuscript of Macbeth.”

  She wheeled about the room. “How do they even know about it?”

  “I don’t know. They gave me forty-eight hours….”

  She stopped at the window that had once sung with chimes, fingering a shard of mother-of-pearl and crystal from the sill. “The mirror, the knife, and now the manuscript,” she murmured.

  “The mirror?”

  She turned and surveyed the room. “This…this isn’t just hatred for me and my religion. Though it’s both of those things.” She shook her head. “It also covers a theft. Whoever did this also took the mirror.”

  Dim and spotted with age within its heavy silver frame, the mirror she’d kept in here had on
ce belonged to the King’s Men; it was said to have been used as a prop in the first performance of Macbeth.

  “I’ve been wrong, Kate,” she said, her face grim. “It isn’t sabotage we’re dealing with.”

  “They’re stealing your finest treasures,” I said bleakly. Including Lily.

  She shook her head impatiently. “They’re gathering tools.” She crossed her arms, her eyes dropping to my jacket. “Whose blood is it?”

  “Sybilla’s. She—she’s dead,” I faltered.

  “Dead how?”

  “Her throat was cut.”

  Eircheard snorted with outrage while Lady Nairn cried out, putting a hand down on the sill to steady herself. Briefly, her eyes met his. “Then they’ve consecrated it—the knife,” she said. “And probably the mirror as well.”

  “Consecrated?”

  “‘To make holy.’” She exhaled in sardonic disgust. “In Wiccan practice, we mostly consecrate with light, usually moonlight.”

  “So you are one, then. A witch.”

  “I prefer the term ‘priestess.’”

  I didn’t care what term she used; why hadn’t she told me? “There are older, darker rites, though,” she went on, “still whispered about in corners, that use other forces. The most powerful—and the most dangerous—is blood.”

  Rubbing her forehead, she stood staring at the pentacle smeared on the white floor. “Like I said, this isn’t sabotage. It’s a hijacking. It isn’t just Lucas trying to ruin my show. He—and others, maybe—are taking it for their own. To work the magic…Black magic,” she added. “Blood sacrifice.”

  26

  NAUSEA RIPPLED AROUND me as I thought of Sybilla sprawled on the rocks, Ben’s bleak face staring down at her body. “Sybilla was killed in a rite of black magic?”

  “In preparation for one,” said Lady Nairn.

  “Preparation?” My voice was hoarse. “That was rehearsal?”

  “It was a rite of consecration. Not the Great rite itself, whatever that’s intended to be.”

  “What were you doing up there?”

  “Our Samhuinn rite. A ceremony of celebration and thanksgiving.”

  Staring at my hands, I began to shake. “I woke covered in blood. And missing hours…” My voice dropped to a whisper. “I might have done it.” I looked up. “I might have killed Sybilla. Or helped to.”

  Eircheard took both my hands, his face solemn. “You’ve got blood on you, maybe. But not killing.”

  I twisted to look at Lady Nairn. “Did you see it? Did you see what happened?”

  Her jaw twitched. “No. I lost sight of you in the chaos, and then I left as quickly as possible. I thought you’d done the same. So, no, I didn’t see.”

  “Then you don’t know,” I said, pulling away from Eircheard in despair. “You can’t.” from the way my head felt, I was pretty sure I’d had a concussion. It would explain the amnesia and the headache, but not the action. What had I done in the hours that I’d lost?

  “You saw something horrible, there’s no doubt about that,” said Lady Nairn. “No one deserves that kind of death.” She shook her head slightly. “You said that Lily’s captors wanted the manuscript. Did they ask you to deliver it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’m afraid there’s another possibility, Kate. They consecrated the knife with blood. They may also have consecrated you.”

  I went still, the air slicing against my skin suddenly sharp as a million small knives. “for what?”

  “Blood sacrifice, lass, requires a death,” said Eircheard.

  She must die, Lucas had intoned. Lily would die, he’d said. Or I would.

  I looked down. Did the blood on my hands mark me as killer or as victim?

  Lily had been taken on my watch, her hand literally slipping from mine in that wild, dancing crowd in the Edinburgh close. She was my responsibility. Furthermore, if I’d killed Sybilla, or participated in any way…if I’d just been there…saving Lily was the best shot at redemption I’d ever be likely to manage.

  And her captors were the only route I had toward finding out what I’d done.

  Whatever the cost, I had to find Lily.

  Lady Nairn was looking out the window, one toe tapping against the floor. “forty-eight hours, you said?”

  I nodded.

  Again, her eyes sought out Eircheard, who’d begun to pick up the pieces of the smashed chest and stack them carefully against one wall. “Even the timing fits,” she said. “In two nights, the moon will be full.”

  “Aye,” said Eircheard. His eyes were bloodshot and bleary; a livid bruise was darkening across one cheek. “There’s to be a total eclipse, as well.”

  “rare enough to begin with. Even rarer on the Samhuinn moon. The Blood Moon,” Lady Nairn said softly. She folded her arms. “They’ll need the cauldron, too.”

  Having neatly stacked the remains of the chest, Eircheard righted the bookshelf and began filling it with whatever books he could find that weren’t sodden or singed. “This mess maybe sprang, in part, from frustration at not finding it.”

  “The great silver bowl?” I asked. “It’s downstairs. I saw it as I came up.” Hard to miss a gleaming vat of silver three feet wide and two high, really.

  “That’s a copy,” said Lady Nairn. “They’ll need the original, and that’s in the vault. Though I suppose I ought to check that as well.”

  “It’ll be the manuscript they’ll be wanting most of all,” said Eircheard.

  “They need to know what to do, don’t they?” I said. “The earlier version of the play…it’s supposed to lay out a real magical rite.”

  Gathering up bits of shattered wind chime, Lady Nairn sighed. “It may be more than a general description they’re after, Kate. In witchcraft, at least the way I practice it day-to-day, spells are intuitive and improvised. Lived in the moment. Power, whatever there is, inheres in the witch, as a vessel of the Goddess.”

  She smoothed her hair back from her face. “But other practices are different. In ceremonial magic, precision matters: Spells depend upon using exactly the right tools in the right way at precisely the right time. Most of all, ceremonial magic requires the right words said in the right order, with the right pronunciation.” She turned to look at me. “In witchcraft, as I said, power inheres in the witch. The speaker, the spell maker. But in ceremonial magic, power inheres in the language of the spell, in the words spoken.

  “Most great rites, whether white or black magic, are at least in part ceremonial. So you see, to get it right—”

  “They want the manuscript as a script for murder,” I said. They meant to use Shakespeare to shape murder. In the last few minutes, Lady Nairn seemed to have grown smaller, somehow, and harder. As if Lily’s disappearance had burned away everything but a single cold, ruthless purpose. “The lone bright spot is that they don’t yet have everything they need. And we must make sure they never get it. We need to rescue Lily, Kate, so we have to find the manuscript. But we must also see that they never get hold of it.”

  Eircheard was watching me. “Why are they assuming you can find it in the first place, in that kind of time?”

  In my mind’s eye, I saw my name scrawled on a bloodstained page: Kate Stanley. “Come with me,” I said, heading down the stairs.

  Lady Nairn and Eircheard hurried in my wake.

  Up in my room, I put Aubrey’s notes in Lady Nairn’s hand. As she read, Eircheard looking over her shoulder, I grabbed some jeans, a black turtleneck, and black Skechers and went into the bathroom to change. I looked longingly at the shower but didn’t dare take the time, settling for scrubbing my face and arms in the sink.

  Walking back out, I set out on the desk Lady Nairn’s other evidence: the Xeroxed entry in the household account book, dated 1589, and the letter from Ellen Terry to her mysterious Superman, dated 1911.

  Lady Nairn set the Aubrey down. “Where did you get this?”

  “Ben found it on Auld Callie.”

  She looked up sharply. “It
was left there on purpose? for you to find it?”

  “I can only assume so. Could it be what Sir Angus found?” I asked.

  “Possibly.” Her eyes were shining. “It backs the family legends.”

  I nodded. “It also links Shakespeare to Dee. To conjuring—to ceremonial magic—as much as to witchcraft.” Quickly, I told her what I’d worked out the night before on the subject of Macbeth conjuring for the sake of knowledge.

  “I’m no expert on Dee,” she said with a frown. “If that’s the direction things are going, we’ll have to consult Joanna Black, down in London.”

  I’d heard of Joanna—had been told I ought to meet her for years, actually. She, too, had left academia for practice. But where my study had been renaissance drama, chiefly Shakespeare, hers had been renaissance magic. She had a D.Phil. From Oxford in the history of religion and science. I’d headed into the public world of theater; she’d headed into the reclusive world of magic and the exclusive world of occult collectors. I knew where her shop was, but that was about it; I’d never met her.

  “I’ve never met her in person myself,” said Lady Nairn. “But she’s quite lovely on the phone and in e-mail, and that’s all we’d need.”

  “Bollocks!” said Eircheard, looking up from the desk. “What matters right now isn’t who made Shakespeare change the sodding play or why. What matters is where it got to, so we know where Kate needs to go. And Dee’s got bog-all to do with that. The last known whereabouts of anything useful have to do with Ellen Terry’s Monsieur Superbe Homme. Who is he, do you suppose?”

  Lady Nairn shook her head. “Look,” I said, skimming through Terry’s letter with one finger to point at the last line: As it is, I am hoping that you can glimpse the Forest through the Trees. “And then here,” I said, sliding over to the Aubrey, to Beerbohm’s cartoon of Shakespeare brandishing a leafy branch at Macbeth, with its caption of a loosely scribbled line from Macbeth: Who can impress the Forrest, bid the Tree unfix his earth-bound root?

  “It’s got to have something to do with that goddamn tree,” I said.