Kitlin found her there. Familiar and knowing it rubbed the white fur of head and neck against her leg. Kate had carried it home in her pocket last summer, rescued it from a clutch of boys in Covent Garden. Tied by the tail and suspended from sticks, Kitlin and a young tabby were being goaded into fighting each other for bets. Her mother had boxed ears and thrown in a few pennies to get her way. Though the tabby had died before Kate could get it home, Kitlin survived; named for another kitten, mother had once had – one that had been killed on the word of a priest for being too familiar.
The same priest who had taken her mother for a witch ... her mother the witch. Such things she had overheard between Kate and Cassy – hushed talk when she was supposed to have been asleep, heard by the child Anna – remembered until years gave the words meaning. She stroked Kitlin’s head, lifted the cat on to her lap and bent her head over it, listening to his voice.
‘...luckily for me Captain Le Tournet was lodging with the local magistrate at the time.’
Kate murmured; ‘Lucky indeed that the magistrate was on hand to arrest you when the townsmen turned on you.’
‘The village priest had condemned me for sorcery, they were frightened and hostile.’
‘People are easily swayed at such times,’ Kate reflected.
‘I was manhandled halfway up the hill before Captain Parnel stepped in.’ He paused before adding grimly, ‘They meant to kill me on the same ancient stone where Margot’s mother had sacrificed the hens for the safe delivery of her son.’
‘This Captain Le Tournet,’ said Kate, ‘you say he was a recruiting officer – did he know that you had escaped the galleys?’
Anna glanced up to catch his nod.
‘My hair was still cropped in the style of the convict and my wrists‒’ He pushed back the cuffs of his blue army coat to reveal flesh scarred by irons. ‘Magistrate Parnel released me into the captain’s custody on the understanding that he would return me to Marseilles for punishment.’
‘Instead he recruited you into his company,’ said Kate.
‘My time as a galérian had made me strong – he was loath to let such potential go to waste on the executioner’s stand....’
The words wafted away from Anna as her mind drifted into the earlier telling of his story. A hunted man, tired and hungry after a night walking the hills, come down to drink in the lee of a pack bridge. A shape taking form in the dawn light; a figure dressed in the goatskin of a shepherd boy bobbing face down in the water.
No more than ten years old ... eyes rolled back to show the whites ... face and lips blue with cold. Yet I felt the flickering of life were still in him.
She could imagine rivulets of blood trailing down the stones on the hilltop; a mother mouthing words of supplication as she held down the jerking carcass of the fowl she offered up to the ancient gods of the hillsides. Let her son be safe, let the land yield him up to the searchers.
He took my breath and spewed out the water ... I was within a stone’s throw of the pantiled roofs when I came upon a party of searchers led by the boy’s father.
She pictured him laying the limp child upon the scrubbed boards of a kitchen table; heard the clamour of the villagers converging on the house. She rubbed her forearm feeling the pincer grip of the mother’s fingers on François as he chafed and manipulated the boy.
Now she was one with the child on the table, propped on her side – being dragged back from that sweet rest, lured back to life by the strength of another’s will – as she had been lured back by her mother in St Giles’ graveyard.
Life insisted upon by the living who could not know the euphoria of death. The lightness beyond that once tasted could never be forgotten.
So many faces peering in at the door and the windows; men holding their hats close to their chest; children peeping under women’s skirts. And yet they made no sound, not a murmur until the boy Paul spluttered his first moan. His mother fell to her knees still clutching my arm. And the priest who had arrived to deliver the child the last rites, saw him rise up like Lazarus; saw him fall into his sister Margot’s arms while their mother went down on her knees to me. And denounced it as diabolical.
Sacrificial blood upon the rock. Life breathed into a drowned child. A soul claimed by the sorcerer’s art ... for the sorcerer’s master.
‘Anna‒?’ Her mother’s touch drew her back. Kate was smiling at her inattention. ‘Come to the table and eat with us, dreamer – François must away soon.’
He was staring out over the back garden now. He turned and winked at her; a man to a child. This man in his heavy boots, with such heavy thoughts locked behind his amiable expression, seemed to have cast a spell over them both.
But she had secrets too; places where she came and went – seeing without being noticed, hearing while wrapping herself in silence. She had lived most of her life at the apothecary in St Martin’s Lane. In her dreams she was always there, never in this cottage. Who like her should know the way to gain entry unseen? Through the back garden to the flags below the window of the preparation room – the loose grille through which a slight body might post itself into the dim basement stacked with surplus furniture. Only once had she been seen and that by old man Chevalier – Louise’s husband and Pierre’s father.
It happened as she had slipped upstairs. He suddenly emerged from the shadows on the landing – so immersed in a letter he was holding that he missed the falter in her step, the involuntary gasp. At first he crossed her on the stairs without a glance though she was rooted to the spot. A moment later he turned and narrowed his eyes; Do I know you, girl? Her heart was in her throat, every hair on her flesh bristled, then a thrill of excitement washed over her and the lie came unbidden: she had brought a message for Mistress Seagoe about the linen she had ordered. Arnaud Chevalier had taken her elbow and steered her out through the front door in the direction of the Seagoe’s whitewashed frontage further up the lane.
Her secrets.
She knew where the shadows would be at each hour of the day, had made an art of flitting between them. Once when Anton was holding his surgery she had mingled with the waiting patients in the hall until her father’s old associate had appeared in the doorway of the treatment room – dicing with discovery.
From cupboards and alcoves, under beds and behind panelling, she observed the occupants of the house ... Ursula slacking at her work in the kitchen ... Anton bleeding a girl she recognized as one of Cassy’s whores, then straining at his window to watch her walk away. She had overheard Isabelle Chevalier’s prayers for the forgiveness of wicked thoughts ... and watched her brother, Pierre, execute his.
Sometimes in her old room – the one he now called his – sometimes in the master bedchamber, where her own parents used to sleep. Opportune moments, his father’s back turned, his sister’s eye elsewhere when, fired by the white powder he filched from Anton’s chest, his sure step turned to stealth ... and his shadow fell across Louise. Through the shrinkage crack in a wardrobe, once from under the tasselled valance of the bed, Anna had watched Louise’s attempts to fend off him off – her fear and revulsion always subdued by his will. Tucked away in her hiding place, Anna’s own breath faltered at the sight, her limbs trembled, fiery pangs shot up under her ribcage. She felt no sympathy for Louise’s misery – for the abject thing she became when he was done. Only envy.
Over her own untouched plate, she watched François finish off a second griddle scone, butter and egg yolk dripping off his fingers. With a sudden frown Kate was saying; ‘No, I see very little of Louise since her marriage ... why do you ask?’
Anna’s passion was for Pierre Chevalier. But he could not see her – she was a ghost. Only on the night of the rioting – for those few heady hours – anything had suddenly seemed possible; a man to staunch her rankling desire – a lover she would flaunt within sight of the man she truly desired – so that for once he, not her, would be the one outside looking in.
Outside the wolf howled.
Kitlin’s cl
aws dug into her lap. She was not aware of propelling herself backwards from the table, of stumbling over the toppled stool so that she fell cowering against the pot dresser sending the lid of cooking pot clattering on the earthen floor. Her flailing mind was back in the garden, dampness rising through her clothes under the thrusts of the militiaman. She sobbed and she pleaded but there was no stopping it. And the face that loomed over her now was not the face of the militiaman. Not his face ... but the cherished face of a hundred dreams. The face, the partially clothed and form of Pierre Chevalier – tearing her apart.
Anna did not hear her mother’s anxious words. She fought the gentle hands that sought to restrain her; with every ounce of her strength scratched and kicked and shrieked. And when at last the hands fell away, she crawled exhausted over the earthen floor to the door where the wolf now sat. And buried her face in its side.
Bindings
Louise started from her sleep. Her husband Arnaud already woken by her distressed dream talk caught her as she sat bolt upright in bed beside him. Keeping her in his embrace, he stroked her hair until her breathing steadied.
‘What is it that so plagues you, Lulu?’ he coaxed. ‘Tell me then perhaps these nightmares will go away.’
She lifted his fingers to her lips and kissed them. What could she tell him, when telling would surely destroy the tenderness he felt for her, this fragile gentility in a character she otherwise found so stern and intimidating.
‘It is my cycle, nothing more,’ she breathed, resting her head on his shoulder. ‘It is often the way with me just before the bleeding starts.’
‘I had hoped we had put a stop to the bleeding for you.’ He lay back down, drawing her head on to his chest.
Not trusting herself above a whisper she answered, ‘I long to bear your child.’ In truth she had known this last month that she was pregnant; had kept it to herself because she knew, to her shame, that it was Pierre’s – that his questing seed had found its mark. Despite Arnaud’s frequent attentions, for all his ardour, his seed was no match for the ruthless vitality of his son’s.
Her husband’s chest had settled to a steady rhythm, his breath came in long puffs. She envied him the ease with which he fell asleep; his quiet, untroubled rest. Yet wished it upon him. She would at all costs preserve that. But Pierre – reckless, hell-bent Pierre – she could guess his reaction when Arnaud made it known that she was with child; the ill-contained knowing, the sly mockery.
Dear God, what had she ever done to deserve this torment?
Her own peace of mind, her self-worth had been forfeit from the moment Pierre first forced himself upon her. From that moment she knew that she could say nothing to anyone – that she would have to take it all to herself. For Arnaud’s sake, to preserve the illusion of that unblemished creature he took her to be; for her father whose livelihood depended on the partnership with her husband; for Isabelle whose tranquillity rested so heavily on her father’s good humour. For the part of her that denied it had ever happened.
But her very silence had sealed the trap; had made her complicit in Pierre’s cruel games.
She had tried keeping out of his way; finding excuses to be with Isabelle when Arnaud was out of the house; locking herself in. But he always found a way ... sending the maid Ursula up to her so that she must unlock the door ... calling Isabelle away on some pretext or other. And evasion only made him coarser with her; more determined to chasten and humiliate her. Pushing her fear of being discovered to ever more excruciating limits – Arnaud’s horse in the courtyard – Arnaud’s voice calling to her from the hallway. Arnaud’s tread on the staircase.
It was Arnaud he was punishing, or so he told her. Some long nursed grievance she had never fully understood. And it was a game to which he was dangerously addicted; from which he had convinced himself that she too gained excitement. In the throes of sadistic pleasure, he professed a warped kind of affection for her; an obsession for which there was no end, except in discovery ... or death.
In dire moments her railing mind turned to thoughts of the poisons in her father’s chest – for her, for her tormentor, she hardly knew which. Such thoughts always passed when he was gone again, and the everyday world clicked back into place. But she feared it could not stay so for much longer, Pierre was hell-bent on undermining his father’s newfound happiness.
Gently so as not to wake Arnaud, she removed her head from his chest, shivering as she remembered the dream that had woken her: Isabelle’s confidences about a secret admirer ... ... Isabelle’s pleas for her to put in a good word with Arnaud ... the heart-sinking discovery that her step-daughter’s suitor is her own François....
Even her dreams were ridden with guilt.
Of late she saw François’ face everywhere; in her dreams, in the face of the soldier who had come to the door the other day – the captain Isabelle told her had asked after Kate. Lack of sleep, perhaps, or maybe she was sliding into lunacy.
Her breath snagged in her throat. A crushing sensation swarmed from her ribs up over her chest and into her neck. Unable to breathe, she shot out of bed and clung to the bedpost wheezing and quietly sobbing. She clung there until the draughts chilled the sweat through the material of her nightgown. Trembling, she parted the curtains on her husband’s side of the bed. Then, she knelt down in the darkness.
‘Husband‒’ she breathed. ‘Arnaud, there is something I must tell you.’
From the clock downstairs in the hallway there came the muffled strike of a quarter hour. The sleeper stirred, his eyes flicked open and closed again. And the words of confession that seeped out upon the stillness were consigned to oblivion.
Kate stood in the doorway of Anna’s small bedroom watching Anton Morin examine her daughter. Anna was quiet now; prostrate and limp with a vacancy of expression she found even more disturbing than her frenzied outburst earlier in the kitchen.
One minute Anna had been petting Kitlin on her knee, the next she had thrown the wretched creature on to the fire. As the traumatized cat flew about the kitchen Anna chased it, overturning every stick of furniture, clearing a shelf of jars and bottles and upsetting the pot of water boiling by the fire. But for François’ swift intervention, she might have been badly scalded. He had held her tight though she spat and bit and butted him – both of her wrists in a single grip, her thrashing legs trapped between his knees – until at long length her fury burned itself out.
The flames had not killed Kitlin, nor Anna’s onslaught. She found the limp body lying against the far wall, a trickle of blood at the corner of its mouth, its claws still clinging to the mortar, petrified – frightened to death by the wolf apparition.
For a few stunned moments both she and François had watched Anna crawl over to the great creature; watched as her arms circled the illusory body, as she buried her face in its side. Watched as the phantom wolf drew substance from the living child, feeding on her passion – before their eyes assuming the form of a living animal.
François had been the first to react. Swiftly, giving his sister no time to resist, he had dragged her away and thrust her back at Kate. Seizing Anna’s upturned stool he swung it at the snarling wolf with such force that two of the wooden legs snapped as they struck the edge of the stone doorway. Untouchable, the creature bared its fangs at François. Its snarls reverberated round the kitchen, white foam hung from its jowls. François locked on to the yellow eyes.
‘Go!’ he hissed, ‘You have no place here ... leave us!’
The snarls swelled deafening. In Kate’s arms, Anna clutched her ears and began to struggle again. François held his stare as the forepaws stamped menacingly.
‘Go!’ he said pointing at the door, ‘There is nothing for you here‒’
There was a chilling howl, a flash of upstretched underbody ... then it was gone.
The apothecary-surgeon pulled Anna’s shift back down over her naked lower body. With a last look into the girl’s glazed eyes, he followed Kate down the narrow stairs into the kitchen.
Kate shook her head. Anton knew only that Anna had suffered some kind of seizure, as for the rest, she hardly knew what to make of it herself. ‘There was no need; this is what it has left her to.’
He glanced around at the broken crockery she had swept into a heap by the door. Louise’s widower father was a tall man, made smaller by a slight stoop which lent his greying head a permanent air of contemplation. Driven out of his Paris apothecary for his Protestant beliefs, he had rebuilt his living in London – first as her late husband’s associate – now as the active partner in a practice owned by Arnaud Chevalier. He was once more a man of standing yet he had not lost his awkwardness in her presence; a kind of boyish admiration that had not been dampened even though she had once refused to marry him.
A troubled look clouded his eyes as he put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Listen to me, I am your friend. Anna has an affliction for which I am afraid there is no cure, I think you know this. It is true what you say – her body is that of a woman. What happened today ... this brain fever ... this mania, is surely aggravated by her womanly needs. It is going to get worse, Kate.’
‘She is all that I have left of John.’
‘I know you Katharine; you cope alone whenever you can. But this time you sent for me.’
‘There is only so much I can do with simple herbs.’
‘And prayers?’
‘I do not pray.’
‘Then perhaps you should.’
The Sorcerer (The Witch Trilogy Book 3) Page 5