And let all eyes be turned in their direction, for his interests lay closer at hand.
She was pretty his stepmother Louise; the down on her slender neck, the olive eyes that seemed to darken when she found her smile. At one-and-twenty Anton Morin’s daughter was his junior by four years – two years younger even than his sister Isabelle – yet her quiet composure suggested someone older. A match fit for a wealthy widower seeking to establish himself in a foreign country ... a widower such as his father.
Remarriage had softened Arnaud Chevalier. Still the ruthless man of business, the dour father, but in the company of his young wife he was actually seen to smile. It was a sight at once comic and embarrassing in a face so given to severity. Louise Morin was doing what no one else ever had – not his mother, nor any of the mistresses since her death; she was making the old tyrant happy.
Intolerably so.
Isabelle had striven all her life to serve their father yet she showed no antipathy towards the woman who it seemed pleased him effortlessly and had supplanted her as keeper of the house. On the contrary, his sister had been as easily won over by Louise as the old man, and now counted herself fortunate to have her as a friend.
But he was not so docile, nor so gullible. A strict upbringing and the severity of recent events had taught him to dissemble – to avoid at all costs further confrontation with his father. But he had not forgotten. And he could never forgive.
By now, he should have come into his inheritance and been the master of his own house. In Paris, at the age of seventeen, he had owned shares in a racing stable. At nineteen he had kept a mistress in a boarding house in St Germain. His father, of course, had known nothing of it – no more than he knew of the money his mother had passed to him shortly before her death. Busy importing exotic plants and bulbs for the royal palaces, Arnaud had believed his son to be occupied with his studies at the Grande École. In fact, the youth who took his place each day on the hard college bench applying himself to mathematics and philosophy was a stand-in – a runner he had culled from the horseracing fraternity at Longchamp; a pauper with ambition and a flare for numbers.
What a life he had enjoyed back then, before Eleanor....
If he had known at the beginning that Eleanor de Breuille’s father was a person of rank in the department of police, he doubted that he would have been deterred. He prided himself on being a gambler, someone who enjoyed a little danger. He had, after all, gulled the formidable Arnaud Chevalier for years.
At the time all he had known about Henri de Breuille was that he was a frequenter of track and cockpit; a speculator who had shown an interest in the stable he part-owned. And the stable was losing money – old loans were being called in, creditors lining up. His secret life was under threat; exposure dangled over him on the thinnest of threads. The need for a new backer made him reckless ... and recklessness led him to Eleanor.
She came with her father to the stable. She was there when they settled the terms of the loan. He did not have to catch her coy glances to sense her interest, to know that his attraction was mutual.
She succumbed at last as they lay in a moonlit corner of her father’s orchard; her flushed cheek nestling in his hand, her heart fluttering against his chest. Innocent and trusting, she was different from any woman he had known before. She was a Catholic, he a Protestant, but it signified nothing back then: he wanted her – he could hardly bear to be away from her. To hell with both fathers. To hell with her marriage portion. They would elope just as soon as he could sell his interest in the stable. They would buy a place in the south, breed horses and children.
But then the attacks on his father’s nursery yard started. The house was set alight, a manservant was run through defending his sister in the street. He was drawn into the night vigils – dozing at the foot of the stairs, carbine in hand – waiting for the next strike.
Five nights he was away from her. Five restless nights. And when next he forded the stream to the orchard, it was not Eleanor waiting for him but a pack of men and a merciless whipping.
Days later, his father tracked him down to the dungeon beneath the police house. Arnaud bought his freedom then claimed it as his right. He took him home, confronted him with every last deception – the college, the stable, the whores ... the Protestant seed he had planted in a Catholic belly.
The flogging he received in the orchard was as nothing to the beating – the humiliation and degradation – his own father dealt him.
Henri de Breuille had sent his whore of a daughter to a nunnery; had used his influence among the magistracy to have Arnaud Chevalier’s import licence withdrawn. The respect, the standing that had made it possible for the house of Chevalier to survive when so many Huguenot families had been forced to flee, was now utterly destroyed ... by a profligate liar of a son.
Isabelle brought the news to him, many months later, that there had been a son; a boy who had lived for six weeks and a day. His son.
Five years on, and a country away, he was still on trial as far as his father was concerned. Still dependent. He, who should have come into his inheritance and been master of his own house.
Pierre Chevalier no longer wanted his father dead. That idea, so keenly entertained in the early months, had lost its savour. His plan had more subtlety now.
She was pretty, his stepmother.
The echoing clunk of the front door drew him to the doorway of his room. He waited for the fumbling rattle of the key in the lock, for the retreat of hooves. Then he emerged on to the landing and made his way to the master bedroom.
Old Friends
Something was definitely wrong, Kate knew. Foreboding made her stomach churn, it parched her mouth. All night she had been out searching for Anna: a trying night amid the mayhem and uproar. She had racked her brain for an explanation, any reason why her daughter had stayed out like this, but could think of nothing. She could think of no obvious provocation, no recent anger or frustration that might explain her running away this time.
Anna had stayed out before, thinking to punish her, a kind of game to test her mother’s love. Kate always knew where to look for her ... behind the booths on the banks of the Serpentine ... haunting the alleyways around their old home, the apothecary in St Martin’s Lane ... in the graveyard of St Giles. Not tonight though. Tonight there was no sign of her. The streets were crawling with soldiers and rabble-rousers, with every kind of opportunist. Malevolence was in the air.
At a quarter past midnight, her hair and cloak saturated by a fine drizzle, she turned into Crich’s Lane on the off chance that Anna had made her way to the house of her old friend and madam, Cassy.
‘Anna? No, Mrs Jeakes,’ yawned Joanne, letting her in. Her eyelids were thick with sleep, her freckled skin paler than usual in the light of her lantern.
‘Who’s there?’ Clarry, the eldest of Cassy’s girls, pushed past Joanne with a pistol in her hand. ‘Oh, it’s you Kate‒’ She lowered the weapon explaining that there had been a few unwanted callers that day. ‘Anyone would think that this was a common bawdy-house. Cassy would have a fit if she knew they were coming off the streets after us.’ A shadow passed over her face. ‘She’s proper poorly today.’
‘Mistress’s face turned the colour of flint,’ Joanna added worriedly, ‘hasn’t taken a bite these last two days.’
Putting aside her fears for Anna, Kate steered the younger girl back to her bed and sent Clarry to fetch a glass of best brandy. Then she went through to Cassy’s room.
‘Kate‒? They should not have fetched you out, not at this hour.’ In the lambent light of the fire, Kate watched the shadowed figure attempt to rise from her bed. The breathlessness of recent years had worsened of late, limiting exertion, binding her first to the house, and now to her bed. It pained Kate to witness the decline of a woman who had always been so robust and spirited; the stranger who had thrown her lot in with hers when she had been an outcast. The loyal friend who had made it possible for her to rebuild her life in those early Lo
ndon days, over twenty years before.
‘No one fetched me,’ she assured, rubbing Cassy’s back as a racking cough overtook her. She knelt beside the bed, put her arms around Cassy and coaxed her to lie down again. Then she kissed her cheek. Her skin was cold to the touch. Her flesh, so full for many years, had grown noticeably spare. Kate laid her head on the bolster, bringing their faces close together, and stroked the wiry hair which in the half-light she could imagine was still the colour of flame.
Kate recalled that in recent days their mutual friend, Anton Morin, the apothecary-physician who had taken over her late husband’s practice, had cupped and bled Cassy, and plied her with diverse preparations. But none of them were under any illusion; the pox Cassy had thought cured many years ago had in truth only been dormant. Her heart was infected by it – there was no earthly cure.
‘I knew you would come,’ she rasped. A log spat in the grate, embers flew out on to the hearth. She sighed. ‘Ah Kate, I feel easier already ... it was always the same – from that first night in the tent – do you remember? That motley lot of buggers I was travelling with would not have you join them for fear you were carrying the plague.’
‘I might well have been, coming from a gaol cell in Bristol. The place was blighted,’ Kate reminded her, recalling the chaos and the stench, and the burning braziers of that God-forsaken city.
‘As well we might have been, for all you knew.’ Cassy’s trembling fingertips touched Kate’s cheek and brow in remembered wonder. ‘There have been some handsome girls worked for me since you left to marry Apothecary Jeakes but I swear none has come close to you for drawing the rich patrons ... for all your troubles over the years, time has hardly left a mark on you.’ She coughed again. ‘No wonder Monseigneur, the Duc de Rivoli, took you for his mistress.’
Though it had been five years since Kate went to Paris in search of François, Cassy often brought up the name of the French nobleman. Proud of Kate’s association with an aristocrat, she made more of the affair than Kate believed it deserved. The truth was that after some persuasion, the Duc had done what he could to aid Kate’s search for her missing son. Going to his bed, gratifying the desire, the curiosity she had aroused in the man, had been her one means of repaying that help.
Clarry returned with the brandy. Kate knew the girl was hovering behind her as she lifted Cassy’s head and wet her lips with the strong liquor. With the first reviving sip, Cassy gripped the glass in her own hand and took another gulp.
‘The Fat Saddler died of an ague last month....’ she gasped.
Kate nodded. She herself had brought the news of the death of their old friend and one time patron, weeks before.
‘Kate came here looking for Anna,’ Clarry said.
‘Anna?’ Cassy echoed vaguely. Her gaze folded in on itself and she said, ‘I spoke to the priest from St Thomas’s this morning. Can you believe it, Kate? I swore I would never tangle with priests again after I was turned away with an ailing newborn ... nowhere else to go‒’
Kate held her hand as she spoke of the graveyard plot she had paid for; as, chuckling with the irony of it, she said that she had believed in devils long enough – that it was time she came to terms with the angels. The coughing took her again and her face screwed up with pain. Kate put the brandy aside and signalled for Clarry to leave them alone.
As the door closed, Cassy gripped her arm. ‘Clarry will have the running of this house when I am gone.’
‘She has been with you a long time now,’ Kate agreed, ‘she knows your ways well enough.’
With a husky laugh, Cassy whispered, ‘And I know that she is a wilful madam who will rule the other girls harshly, which is why I am putting up a sum of money for the young ones.’
‘A marriage portion?’
‘Joanna and Grace are as good as spoken for – I have seen to it.’ She grinned, ‘They could do a good deal worse than follow the example of a certain Mrs Jeakes ... Kate, I want you to have this‒’ She felt for the chain at her throat and followed its line down to the locket that had come to rest on the mattress beside her shoulder. It was a gold piece, edged with filigree work. In it she kept two small locks of hair – both cut that first night they had slept together in the tent, Kate’s soft brown plaited with her own auburn hair.
Kate placed her hand over Cassy’s, gently preventing her from pulling the chain over her head. Cassy stared into her eyes and murmured; ‘You should have it now.’
Kate shook her head. Her face burned as she pressed her lips against each of Cassy’s eyes in turn. Her old friend was offering up not just a locket, but life itself. Cassy, who understood her better than anyone else alive, her loyal friend, was ready to let go of her tired body. She was asking permission to stop fighting.
‘Not yet,’ Kate swallowed back a sob, ‘not tonight ... the city is ablaze again, Cass. The river is choked with barges piled high with goods and refugees. They say the Prince of Orange will be at the gates by dawn.’ And Anna is missing.
‘Like old times, eh Kate?’ She was overcome again by a coughing fit. Kate knelt on the bed behind her. Loosening the upper ties of Cassy’s bed-gown, she began to massage away the tightness around her neck and shoulders.
‘Lully, Lulla thou little tiny child....’ Kate sang the lullaby remembered of her mother.
‘There was a piper outside in the street, he stood beneath the window....’ Cassy murmured dreamily, ‘....you remember ... the day‒’
The day her son François was born. Kate remembered.
‘Little tartar,’ Cassy drawled, echoing the words she had used on that day, ‘naught to boast but a dark crop of hair and a name.’
‘Lully, Lullay, Lulla....’
‘Bathe me, Kate. Lay with me, flesh against flesh ... one last night.’
‘The girls will be listening outside the door,’ Kate reminded her.
Resurfacing from tiredness, Cassy rolled on to her back. Her body began to rock with mirth. ‘Do you think we might yet shock them?’
They laughed then, laughed and laughed until they both cried.
The missing child. The dying friend. Kate had been out all night searching for Anna. Despite her railing senses, in her heart she knew it was unlikely she would find her tonight. She could not abandon Cassy for the sake of a goose chase.
With a basin of water warmed by the fire, she washed the sweat from Cassy’s body, oiled and caressed her woman’s flesh. At length she unlaced her own gown and chemise, stepped out of them and climbed into the bed beside her.
The voice found Anna as she lay sprawled in the darkness. The militiaman was long gone, the florin abandoned to the wet grass and the worms. A distancing had come upon her, an otherness.
She heard gunfire, snatches of a distant altercation, a scuffle in the alleyway closer to hand. She saw the body, her body – flesh and bone lying on the chill winter earth – pale white thighs exposed and bloodied. Past trembling, past all hurt.
She saw the wolf, the sentinel sitting behind her crooked knee. She knew its role as protector – the pricked ears, the great white-grey muzzle stippled with black whiskers.
Come to me, Anna.
The wolf dropped its head and began to lick away the dried blood. The sound of its rasping tongue roused her. As in a dream the mind dragged the stumbling body to its feet. The great animal was there, pressed against her side, steadying her first tottering steps, drawing her on. Timber-framed buildings loomed and vanished again; a horse reared. A man shouted – the sound stretched, distorted - too distant to reach her. She tripped, grabbed a handful of the wolf’s coat to drag herself up from hands and knees and pressed on again.
The scalloped wall, the iron hand gates of St Giles’ graveyard.
Come....
The wolf bounded effortlessly over the wall, she scrambled over after it; through the overgrowth of grass, past the snags and scrapes of bramble and briar, to the path. A stone angel picked out in the moonlight ... the trickle of a stream ... the overhanging tree.
/> Cleanse the wound.
Squatting beside the stream, her hands scooped the biting water – again and again – until no trace of the militiaman remained.
At last, she followed the waiting creature under the overhanging branches. There on the sheltered earth beneath the tree, the wolf lay gently panting, its head resting on its paws. Anna curled against it; her head resting on her knees, her eyes shut. Then she began to rock back and forth.
A breeze gently played about her face ... the warmth of a human touch.
All will be put to rights, Anna. Rest in me, rest in me....
Ghosts
Lieutenant Louis Veron weaved through the crowd converging on Pall Mall using his musket butt to ward off any man, or woman, who presumed to widen the gap between him and his captain.
‘Come with me, Louis‒’ Captain Fuller had said with a brooding intensity he had come to recognize. And it was as if the weariness that had crept over him after the day’s march through driving rain – the languor that had set in even before he had finished the camp meal of capon and English bread, had never been. He followed without question, leaving the others to finish setting up camp on the heath.
Frank Fuller was a man apart. The captain sensed things over and above the natural; a kind of extraordinary intuition every last man in the company had come to accept after the incident in the Dutch mineshaft.
The then newly formed company had been detailed to search the shaft for a runaway slave. Captain Fuller had somehow known even before they entered the tunnel that the man was holed up there. To a handful of men – himself included – the captain had described the exact location of the man they were after ... and the lethal trap he had set to bring down the tunnel on any unwary pursuer. Not only that, but when the big African fell victim to his own trap, Fuller had put his back to the roof prop and physically lifted the weight of earth and rubble long enough for the trapped man to be wrenched clear.
The Sorcerer (The Witch Trilogy Book 3) Page 2