‘And now, what will you do for Louise?’
It was a question to which he had no answer, yet.
The forlorn figure in the green gown confirmed his fears; Louise was in dire straits. Arnaud Chevalier had put his wife’s pallor down to the fact that she was in the early days of pregnancy. He was as proud of that fact as he was of his young wife. He saw nothing more than that.
But François did. He sensed the leadenness, the crushing dread. And judging by Louise’s studious avoidance of him during the evening, he was fairly certain that Pierre Chevalier was the cause of her distress; the unseen face of his visions. This was his instinct. But he would not act on it until he had heard the name from Louise’s own lips.
Then there would be an answer.
He withdrew from the bed, letting the curtains fall back and went over to the window. In little more than an hour he was due out on the common for an early briefing with Major Winthrop. Folding back the shutters, he settled down in the window recess and pressed his head back against the wooden panelling. By day the view was of St James’s Square and the grand facades on the opposite side of Pall Mall’s broad thoroughfare. Now though there was only the deep well of night.
He stared out into the darkness, his consciousness drifting ... relaxed and yet awake his body began to vibrate. As a child fear had him resist the sensation so that he would fight his way back to consciousness in terror. But in France as he lay on a hillside in the Auvergne – exhausted after escaping galley captain, Le Fouquet, and the grave that had already been dug for him and his friend, the Turc – there for the first time, he had yielded to the sensation; beyond resistance, opened himself to what lay beyond.
Now he embraced it: feeling the powerful vibrations in his trunk, his neck, his head; energy streaming outwards through his limbs. Then with a sudden euphoric rush, his consciousness slipped.
Arnaud had been awake and asleep since retiring shortly after midnight. He knelt by the edge of the bed, one arm braced against the mattress, the other steering a fitful stream into the chamber-pot. Gone were the days when he could sink a flagon of wine and hold it till morning. Nowadays a glass or two of brandy before he slept were enough to send his bladder into spasm. Half dozing, he recalled a childhood memory of lying awake listening to the thump on the ceiling timbers as his own father – stiff-legged and grumbling – knelt to do just this. He uttered a tired grunt of a laugh to think how effortlessly the boy had turned into the old man he had considered his father to be.
He glanced across at the sleeping form of his wife. Their child would doubtless regard him as old, but the thought did not trouble him. Marrying Louise Morin had helped him to realize that youth was not so much a number of years as a virtue.
He was heaving himself back into bed when a sudden movement caught his eye. His heart leapt. A trick of the dark, or had he seen a shape shift in the darkness? He was fully awake now, his senses keen. Both of his pistols were in the blanket chest next to his strongbox across the room ... four, maybe five paces away from him. He felt behind him for Louise. Safely asleep.
Another movement. A flap of curtains – a lightning flash of moonlight – and in the flash the silhouette of a man. He lurched to standing, the blood in his head rising to a deafening rush.
Housebreakers come in by the window.
Incensed he seized a chair. With a howl of fury he swung it towards the strongbox. The chair legs jarred against the chamber wall. Casting it aside, he threw back the lid of the blanket box, hands shaking as he grabbed the weapons.
‘Show yourselves, damn you!’ He primed both pistols. ‘Or I’ll show no mercy!’
Louise stirred. ‘Arnaud‒?’
‘Be still!’ he hissed, ‘We have an intruder.’
He waded about in the darkness, swinging his weapons first to one side, then the other. With a sudden lurch towards the window, he dragged the curtain back. Grey light filled the window space. But the casements were still locked and there was no sign of forced entry. Uneasy, he crossed to the door. He turned the key sealing the room before swiftly pocketing it.
A figure in the window space.
His fingers jagged both triggers at once. Tongues of flame leapt from the priming pans, the report exploded through the shell of the house. And cold air swarmed in through the broken window lights.
The figure was unmoved.
Then came a sharp click; a flare of light that revealed Louise standing by the fireplace, holding the tinderbox in her hands. She brushed past her husband, shielding the tinder flame with her hand.
‘Lulu, non!’ He caught her arm, preventing her from going any closer to the window. But it was light enough.
Behind the locked door the other occupants of the house were moving about. There was a rap at the door, Pierre calling to his father. Arnaud did not hear him.
He had assumed the figure was a man but now he was not so sure. There was a stillness about it; an otherness that made his flesh creep. As he stared, Louise strained free of his grasp – sleepwalking it would afterwards seem to him – as if drawn unconsciously. He would remember trying to ward her aside ... the guttering flare of the tinderbox. And in that flare a moment of recognition.
‘Captain Fuller‒?’
Then the tinderbox snapped shut.
The Pillory
Kate missed not being able to unburden herself on Cassy. She was the one person who knew her well enough to understand. Hours after returning from the Jermyn Street fair with Anna and Jenny, she was still uneasy. The vision in the church troubled her even more deeply than hearing her own daughter denouncing her as a witch.
To the wary stiffening, the quizzical looks of the sextant and the other onlookers, she had no choice but to offer clarification. Anna had poked at their superstitions with peculiar mischief and Kate knew better than most how such accusations could run amok. Cornered, there was nothing she could do but bring discredit upon Anna. She had spoken with a mother’s heaviness of the fanciful ideas of a disturbed mind. And despised herself even as she uttered the words.
Afterwards, when Jenny had gone home with her ribbons and a goose for her mother, and Anna had sealed herself away again, she paced about the kitchen in the light of the fire, tormented by the grievous thing she had seen in the church.
His face unscrewing, appealing to her for help....
Why had the knowing come to her? What was she to do with it? She had met Arnaud Chevalier’s son at the old house and again at Louise’s wedding. She knew his features, the deep forehead and aquiline nose ... the haughty indifference. In her vision he was stripped of that demeanour but there was no doubting it was him.
She had a strong urge to go to St Martin’s Lane – to see for herself if the thing was yet done. If not, if it had been a premonition ... perhaps there was some way she could forewarn. But in her heart she knew that her hands were tied, as they had always been tied in such things. There was no explaining the knowledge that she had – no credible way to pass it on.
Fate would run its course.
In the past there had always been a purpose to her seeing. Images of violent death: of Polly Trenshaw and Anna Davidson and Barbara Canard had once exposed her to the cruel nature of Matthew Marsden, the man she had once called lover. A vision of the seamstress, Jeanine Pascal, had been linked to François’ disappearance in Paris. She did not doubt there was a connection this time as well, and it was this she dreaded above all.
In the early hours of Christmas morning, hoping to break the weary cycle of her thoughts, she went up the narrow stairs to check on Anna. She was lying on her stomach on the truckle bed, her head twisted sideways. In the soft light of her candle, the girl’s relaxed features reminded Kate so much of the untroubled child she had once been that she shed a tear. She knelt beside the bed and was stroking the warm face – willing her child to be well again – when the sound of voices came to her from outside in the lane. Latching Anna’s door behind her, she went downstairs.
She could hear footstep
s approaching the door. Snuffing the candle, she armed herself with the iron poker from the kitchen hearth, and stood behind the door.
A breathless cough, panicked knocking on the door, then the voice of Cassy’s girl Clarry calling her name:
‘Kate‒’ she sobbed, stumbling inside. ‘Kate, you must come, it’s Cassy she’s been taken by the law.’
She needed no urging. It was enough to see Clarry, who prided herself on her grit, so distressed. Stopping only to grab her cloak, Kate ushered Clarry back out. They took the dirt tracks and back alleys to avoid the night watch; feeling their way, pushing their feet forward to scatter any creatures that might be lurking in the darkness.
Clarry’s words came in angry snatches: Joanna – the mooncalf – out alleycatting ... followed back to the house ... the door kicked down by a madman ... Cassy out of bed with a shotgun ... words, a struggle, Cassy overpowered....
Kate gathered that Joanna had tried to come between the aggrieved man and her mistress; had offered herself up in place of Cassy but he was by then beyond reason. For her effrontery he was hell-bent on making an example of the procuress. He was a thief-taker, an agent of the law and he would see to it that the old bawd was whipped before the cart’s arse.
There were two soldiers standing on the corner of the square; Dutchmen to judge by their frockcoats. When they stepped forward to make their challenge, Clarry went to them giving Kate the chance to slip away. She ran across the paved square, stumbling over an old woman asleep by a water trough, startling her companion dog, before running on.
She was one with Cassy’s need now, the sense of it barred all else. The knowing was in her.
She swung around a pump into an adjoining close. And heard one voice above the clamour; haranguing words that echoed off the diamond window lights and timber studding of the municipal buildings ranged around the end of the close. A horse whinnied. Kate ran towards the dense knot of onlookers then forced her way through.
There were three sets of stocks standing before the gnarled oak columns of a medieval civic building. To left and right were low foot stocks, both empty. Between them though was a set of hand stocks. It was in these that the ranting thief-taker had Cassy trapped. In the light of a nearby lantern, Kate could see that her friend’s head and hands were locked in; that her unsupported body drooped behind. The thief-taker’s fist was clenched in the hair that had once been flame red, pulling her face up to face the crowd, all but breaking her wasted neck.
Puffed and bloody, Cassy’s features relaxed at the sight of Kate; giving the fight up to her friend.
Fury came as a rushing torrent in her ears; a potent inrush through her fingers and toes. Strength coursed like molten metal to the very core of her, power drawn from a source outside and beyond her own body. Then she realized that she was still carrying the kitchen poker.
The thief-taker fronted her with swaggering contempt. Taking the poker handle in both hands, she dropped her shoulder to strike, just in time to miss his first backhanded swipe at her. The poker arced upwards past his shoulder and caught him squarely under his jutting chin. He was a well-built man but his legs buckled under him like a pole-axed beast.
A stick had been pushed through the staple and hasp fastening on the side of the pillory. Kate wrenched it clear and heaved the heavy upper timber up and over Cassy’s head. She let it fall clear under its own weight, jarring against the old hinges, jolting Cassy backwards. Kate lurched to cushion her fall. And in that moment the thief-taker found his feet again.
‘Catch me unawares, would you bitch‒’
Kate had let her hair down for the night. He caught a handful of it and the collar of her cloak as she bent over her semi-conscious friend. Kate rose with his pull, softening his jerk. She spun round to face him then, oblivious to the pain of tearing hair, oblivious to everything but his intention.
Her consciousness flew out to encompass his; to become one with her assailant. She took to herself the taut poise of his muscles, the throbbing arousal; watched a lightning impulse flash from gut to brain – followed its progress to the muscles of his arm and fist. And channelled the potency in her on it.
At him.
In that moment violent intent turned to horrified recoil. He shrieked, his face puckered with disgust.
‘Holy Jesu!’ He stumbled backwards clutching his ribcage; gasped with pain; ‘She-devil!’ Then staggered backwards, into a group of bystanders.
It was in Kate to follow him then; to repay him generously for the cruelty he had inflicted on Cassy. To make him understand the true meaning of suffering.
‘Kate, no‒’
Cassy’s plea reached her through the clamour and confusion; her voice alone. It stopped Kate in her tracks. And the waking sights, the sounds, filtered back to her. She heard a warning call – Clarry’s voice; the running thud of military boots.
Still holding himself and fighting for breath, the thief-taker eyed her warily.
‘Who goes there? What is happening here?’ The yells of the Dutch guards had him backing away.
Clarry burst through the crowd and fell to her knees beside her mistress.
‘Lord Almighty, what has he done to you?’
The bystanders lost interest and drifted away. The soldiers demanded explanations. And by the time they knew to look for the thief-taker, he was gone.
The Compact
It was the middle of January and the bedroom phantasm that had nearly driven Arnaud Chevalier to apoplexy, that had disturbed him for days afterwards, occupied his thoughts less now.
Little by little he succumbed to his wife’s persuasion that it had been no more than a waking dream brought on by a surfeit of brandy and walnuts too close to retiring for the night. She had walked in her sleep, she assured him, could remember nothing of it except Pierre bursting in after forcing the chamber door lock.
A waking dream, a nightmarish fancy; what else could it have been? As for the man he had seen so clearly; who would have been closer to his thoughts than his guest of the evening – Captain Fuller.
Still he had avoided the captain’s company on the two occasions he had called since that night and had done so again today, excusing himself from an outing to Vauxhall to attend to a business matter.
Pierre had suggested the trip to Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens; somewhere for the captain to walk with his sister now that she was recovering from a head cold. An extended meeting with Major Winthrop, however, delayed François so Pierre took Isabelle and Louise on ahead in the carriage he had ordered from Chatterway’s livery stable. François eventually caught up with them among the Saturday afternoon crowd, watching a bear lumbering to the strains of a flageolet.
‘We had given up on you,’ sniped Pierre.
François ignored the criticism. The practicalities of the task Major Winthrop had assigned to his company – the rounding up of a band of Stuart conspirators who were expected to meet in a cellar close to the Temple in a few hours – were still uppermost in his mind.
The music ended and the bear swung its head in answer to the applause. Isabelle slipped a gloved hand through his arm. She smiled at him and her wan face was livened with colour. ‘It is good to see you, Frank. Father could not come....’
Behind her Louise added, ‘Arnaud sends his apologies, captain.’
He understood the shadowed meaning in her eyes. He saw her as she had been that night, a spectral figure in the light from the tinderbox; felt again her fervour, the gladdening he too had felt. France, all that had happened between, had not changed that bond between them.
They strolled along an avenue flanked by leafless trees, passing by musicians and jugglers, by the whores who beckoned towards more secluded paths. Listening to Isabelle talking about her late mother, François observed Chevalier who was walking with Louise a few yards in front: the way his head tilted towards her whenever he spoke, the set of his jaw ... how the polite smile he produced for elegant passersby faded when he turned back to Louise.
‘They s
ay I am her likeness,’ Isabelle said shyly.
‘That must be a great comfort for your father,’ he replied.
Ahead, Chevalier laid a gloved hand upon Louise’s arm. She shrugged him off. He pushed the liberty further, slipping his arm under hers. Louise stopped in her tracks to remonstrate.
Isabelle stepped forward and tapped her brother’s shoulder. Ignoring his scowl, she pointed out a small statue beneath the shrubbery. It took the form of a half-buried terrier dog, hind legs straining, feathered tail tight against its back.
‘Tu reconnais?’ she asked. ‘Father had one like this in the old garden.’
Sighing, Chevalier released his hold on Louise. ‘That was a pig, a prize truffle hunter.’
‘My grandfather had a truffle hound,’ Louise recalled, ‘when I was very young.’ She moved on again and this time Isabelle went with her.
François hung back with Chevalier who with a grunt of irony muttered; ‘These women think we do not fathom their games.’
François studied him. ‘Not so much games as gentle ruses,’ he suggested.
Chevalier barked a laugh. ‘What they lack in bodily strength, captain, they more than make up for in guile.’
François gave him a friendly slap on the back. ‘Cunning and guile are not the sole prerogative of women, Pierre.’
A shadow passed over Chevalier’s features. ‘You speak with such wonderful authority, captain, yet you are still young. Have you ever fought on the battlefield? Ever soiled your hands with another man’s blood?’
François recalled his servitude on the French galley flagship; the skirmishes with corsairs, the informer he had killed with his bare hands, the final confrontation with Captain Le Fouquet.
‘There you have me,’ he replied with a slow smile, ‘so far my battles have been restricted to gaming houses – especially those with a ready supply of gin and ladies.’
The Sorcerer (The Witch Trilogy Book 3) Page 8