The Sorcerer (The Witch Trilogy Book 3)

by Cheryl Potter

  ‘You knew François Jeakes since he was a small child – you are quite certain that Captain Fuller is not he?’

  It was not until the occasion of his third visit to see Mistress Isabelle that the ghost walked. The master had gone down to the wharf to see what had come in on a Dutch merchantman. She was fetching chamber pots on to the first landing when she came upon Captain Fuller. He was standing just inside the study, running his hands over the leather spines of the books. And though he should not have been there, he turned his head to look at her and calmly as you please, pressed a finger to his lips and smiled.

  The ghost was in the smile. The devil was in the knowing.

  Monsieur Arnaud had turned his back on her. He stood with his fingers linked behind his back. His silence was as disquieting as he intended it should be ... oppressive ... inviting confession. But Ursula would not be intimidated. She could and would be as stubborn as any man. And she had decided to keep her peace. For the sake of the living – whatever games they were playing – she would let the dead lie.

  A Bible lay open upon a table by the window. Without looking round at her, Arnaud held out his hand and beckoned her towards it.

  Indignation swelled inside her then. What was wrong with the man? Could he not see that she was protecting him as much as anyone else? Mistress Louise was his happiness; the child in her belly might be the light of his life. Why was he so hell-bent on self-destruction?

  ‘Lay one hand on the Holy Scripture, Ursula. Put the other hand on your heart and swear to me on your life – on your very soul – that Captain Fuller is not François Jeakes.’

  She lifted her chin, keeping her arms firmly at her sides.

  ‘This is not right, Monsieur Chevalier.’

  He spun round on her with such a wild expression, such roughness that she instinctively raised her arms to protect her head. He gripped her right wrist and swung her hand hard down upon the pages of the Bible.

  ‘Do you know why François Jeakes was arrested and condemned by the French department of police?’

  She clenched her fist inside his grip to ease the hurt of his grip, and stared at him defiantly.

  ‘No‒? Well let me tell you; he was a murderer ... yes, a murderer. He butchered a young woman and the child inside her womb.’

  ‘I will not hear this, monsieur‒’

  Still pinching her, he banged the flat of his free hand against the Bible. ‘Every word of it is true, Ursula. I have contacts in Paris; men of influence who know what goes on inside the Fortress of Vincennes. François Jeakes was an occultist and a murderer.’ He hit the book again. ‘If I speak one false word may God strike me dead!’

  Ursula shook her head. ‘No ... no!’

  ‘The truth – ugly, unpalatable – the truth nevertheless.’

  ‘Mistress Kate traipsed all over France,’ she protested, ‘she would not come home till she knew for certain. François died ... he died, monsieur.’

  Arnaud studied her coolly.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he sighed, releasing his hold on her wrist, ‘perhaps, not – which is why I need your assurance in the matter. I need to know that by allowing Captain Fuller into this house I do not entertain a murderer. You must see, Ursula, I need to know I am not being deceived ... for the last time I ask you to swear‒’

  She locked her trembling fingers together upon the Bible and a tear dropped on to her knuckles. She had slept her last night under this roof, she knew it.

  ‘I cannot,’ she wept.

  It was all the admission Arnaud Chevalier needed – the one he most dreaded. His arms dropped heavily. He tipped his head to face the ceiling; his eyes rolled and he uttered such a tortured groan that Ursula leapt from him in terror.

  A Venetian glass vase stood upon the mantelshelf; a gift to him from his wife on the day of their marriage.

  The next moment it lay shattered on the hearth.

  Presentiments

  If Kate quietened her mind, if she stood off from waking fears, she could see the life-force issuing from a body. It appeared to her like the aura that is seen around a candle flame when the eyes are shut; a shimmering nimbus.

  Cassy’s aura survived now as the barest flicker, contrasting starkly with the thick envelope surrounding Anna who was curled up beside her.

  Kate stood at the bottom of the bed. Morning light specked with motes of dust filtered through the cracks in the shutters. Anton had taken Louise back to St Martin’s Lane and Kate had sent Clarry up to her bed promising to call her if Cassy’s condition changed.

  She turned back the covers and began to manipulate Cassy’s feet. It was an intimacy they had first shared in the early days on the walk to London. The warmth of Kate’s palms against her sole ... the sensual massaging of her toes. It drew no response from her now. Her calloused feet were stone cold. She stroked her calves, saddened by the wasted flesh and muscle – by this shrunken shadow of her former self. Kate could not understand why her old friend still clung to life – such as it had become – why the rattling breaths and that fragile heart laboured on with such obstinacy. Kneeling with her face against Cassy’s feet, she willed her to let go of the battered baggage ... to take the ease she deserved.

  The tears Kate shed, the tight sobs, brought no relief. Her heart was further weighed down by the news that Louise had brought about François. She knew Louise too well to doubt her word, or her desperate unhappiness.

  So the son whose homecoming had so lightened her existence, had worked his way into the Chevalier household with cunning and lies. For Louise’s sake ... because he knew that Pierre Chevalier had made her life a misery. How much of a misery, Louise had described for her when Anton went down to harness the horse leaving them alone for a while. Her voice barely rising above a whisper, Louise had spoken of the things her stepson had inflicted upon her. Kate had held Louise’s drooping head against her chest, as one with the pain and the hurt, with the sickening guilt. And before Louise named the father of her child, she knew the truth.

  ‘I called out François’ name once ... only once.’

  Louise described the moment of despair months before the Prince’s army set sail for England; her mournful cry for the life that might have been ... for the lover she thought gone forever. Never once suspecting that François would hear her; that the depth of her distress would reach him in a vision. That he could ever return.

  How could she have known that her cry would summon the dead. Kate sighed inwardly. If only Louise had come to her sooner, if she had not suppressed her pain, perhaps then there would have been no communication – no stirring of old passions.

  ‘He has sworn that he will never speak to Pierre about me,’ Louise had told her, ‘but Kate, whatever his intentions, I am so afraid that between them François and Pierre will destroy everything. It hangs over me like some dreadful doom ... I find Arnaud staring at me of late; I know my fear betrays me.’

  Louise had left the house without her husband’s knowledge, had already been gone for two hours having first tried to find Kate at Tyburn Lane. Kate’s first thought was to get her back to St Martin’s Lane; it was still early in the day – there was a chance that Arnaud had not noticed her absence. She could tell him that she had felt unwell and had gone to her father’s lodgings.

  Kate had pressed her lips against Louise’s hair and uttered the assurances she had come for. Concealing her own misgivings, she promised to tackle François. How easily the words sprang from her mouth, though the vision in the church still haunted her... the wounds and the blood, the suffocating terror. And other fears too ancient and ingrained ever to be laid.

  Concerns about François, about the part of him that was of his father: the fear that the father’s dark nature had tainted the son.

  The howl of a dog in the lane outside cut across her thoughts; a sound said to be a harbinger of death. A mournful sound that seemed to fill the room. The bed moved. Anna sat up beside Cassy and put a hand on Kate’s.

  ‘Listen‒’ the girl urged.
>
  A hum of voices reached Kate from the passageway outside the room.

  ‘My brother has come,’ said Anna.

  François stood just inside Cassy’s kitchen, the edge of his boot wedging the door shut. He was listening to his mother with growing dismay.

  He had come to enlist her help with Louise; to confide in her some of what he knew – to ask for her guidance. Kate was the only living soul he could rely on in this way. That which set him apart, he had of her. She understood him as no-one else could.

  But standing there amid the smell of fermenting apples and damp biscuit, watching her pace back and forth as she confronted him with the things Louise had already told her, he felt the shift in her. It shook him to realize that before he had uttered a word she was convinced that he meant to harm Pierre Chevalier; that for the first time in his life she was prepared to doubt him.

  ‘Why did you keep such a thing from me?’ she asked sadly. She looked at him yet it seemed to François that she did not see him ... as if all that had gone before counted for nothing.

  He answered her quietly. ‘It was my burden.’

  ‘And now it has become mine. For pity’s sake, François, how long did you expect to go undetected? Surely Anton....’

  ‘I made my visits out of surgery hours.’

  ‘And Louise; did she know you from the first?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘So you have made her accomplice to this shallow deceit. Tell me, how has that helped her situation? What of Isabelle Chevalier? And Margot – does she know?’

  He shook his head, bowed by her disappointment ... and his own.

  ‘Margot knows.’

  Margot was part of his reason for coming. Of late, what little time he had left after army duties, was focused on St Martin’s Lane and the problem of Pierre Chevalier. Even when he was with Margot, he was preoccupied. If only he applied himself he knew the way to rid Louise of the man’s unwanted attention would come. He knew too that he was asking a lot of Margot, as Charles Herries had pointed out to him over a night-cap of brandy the previous night; a fine looking woman like Margot should not be neglected. Louis Veron had also hinted something of the kind a few days before.

  The way to tackle Chevalier would come to him; he had hoped to find it in Kate. He was certain he would find it in Kate. But she was blinded by anger and fear. She looked tired and close to tears. Her oldest friend was on her deathbed, he understood; Anna was a constant worry, he knew. And now Louise had turned to her in terror of what he would do in her name.

  She grasped his wrists and pressed the base of his hands together between her own, binding him in supplication. For a moment the Kate he knew surfaced; the old understanding – the sympathy and strength.

  ‘I have seen terrible things, François. When you were in Paris, I had a vision of the seamstress ... I saw the surgeons examining her poor butchered body ... I sensed not that you were the culprit – I could never have believed that of you – but that you were linked somehow.’

  ‘And now?’ he asked, ‘What do you see?’

  Kate was the first to look away. Her voice cracked as she pleaded; ‘Flesh of my flesh, do not misuse your strength, however just you think the cause.’

  ‘You speak of Pierre Chevalier‒?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Disappointment turned to anger then. It flared beneath his ribcage, hammered inside his head. With trembling hands he straightened his hat and snatched open the door to the entrance passage. ‘My only concern is Louise.’

  He brushed past her as he went through for a parting word with Cassy. No kiss, no parting touch – a mutual punishing. As he emerged at length from the dingy sickroom he half-hoped, half-expected, she would be waiting. But there was no sign of her, only one of Cassy’s women leaning against the wall, smiling coyly at him.

  He left Crich’s Lane wishing he had never come.

  There was an urgency in Anna; her stomach fluttered, her mouth was dry. She had a sensation of things crawling under her flesh. All thought of Cassy was gone from her. She had to get away from the voices in Cassy’s kitchen ... the muted intensity, the disturbing pauses. Kate, François ... mother ... brother. She knew not where, only that she must do his bidding.

  The path to escape was clear ... the passageway ... the outside door flapping against its latch.

  She flew out of the house without cloak or hood. The wolf swooped in at her side and together they ran through hail and rain – darting between carriages – down streets – through passageways. Hailstones stung her face and arms. Her breath seared her lungs. Following the animal’s lead, she ran and ran until she reached the familiar alleyway behind the apothecary.

  There, soaked to the skin, she wriggled through the grille into the cellar of her old home. Teeth chattering with cold, she stepped out of her squelching slippers and caught up her muddied skirt. Then teasing open the trapdoor, she slipped into the house.

  The Black....

  Anton Morin’s dapple-grey mare plodded through the spitting rain. Louise sat in the saddle behind her father. He had slung his coat around her hunched shoulders and rode in his shirt sleeves staring fixedly at the road ahead. He had not taken the direct course to St Martin’s Lane but repeatedly turned the grey’s head into the streets off the main thoroughfares, weaving back and forth through the maze of Covent Garden; claiming a few minutes with his daughter – affording her time to talk, to come to terms with the fact that she must now return to her husband.

  She was quiet now. Her face pressed between his shoulders, her arms circling his waist as she leaned against him. He stared without seeing, numb with guilt. So much happening under his nose. So much she had borne alone.

  By all that was right he should horsewhip Pierre Chevalier.

  To think how he had taken wine with the man; laughed and dined with him, while at every opportunity the swaggering layabout had been forcing himself upon his gentle daughter ... abusing his own father’s wife.

  It gave him no comfort now to know that he had not encouraged the match with Arnaud Chevalier. He had always considered the man too mature and domineering. But when Arnaud took a shine to her – when he proposed to drink at the pool of her youth, Louise had been the one to point out the advantages of the union – for Anton in particular. He blamed himself now that he had not actively discouraged her, that he had accepted her sacrifice and allowed himself to become dependent on the Chevalier family. For that surely was the truth of it.

  Without the Chevalier money the St Martin’s Lane apothecary would not have survived. Even if he could have started up again elsewhere, there were no guarantees that he would have been granted a licence to practice, or that the clientele and goodwill John Jeakes had established would go with him.

  Chevalier money had salvaged his living but it had cost him his independence in a way that working with John Jeakes and after his death – working with Kate – never had. Worse, it had blinded him to the unhappiness of the one he held dearer than life itself.

  Louise had loved François Jeakes. When François died, when she was asked to believe that he was truly gone, it seemed to Anton that his daughter had put aside all hope of happiness. And now, out of the blue, the living man had returned ... to taunt her ... to aggravate a situation that must already be beyond her endurance.

  Her hands suddenly slackened and dropped from his waist. He twisted round in time to catch her as she began to slide from the saddle. The mare staggered sideways as Anton thrust his weight at Louise, as he dismounted awkwardly to keep her in the saddle. His back foot slipped down a muddy bank. Throwing his weight forwards, he caught Louise as she slumped down from the saddle.

  They were standing at the edge of a sewage ditch. Holding Louise, he stared for a moment at the putrid rot that had accumulated on the banks; the fly infested dung, the vegetable slime, the blood and guts ... the swollen corpse of a young dog.

  Sickened by the fetid air, he turned and carried Louise past a handful of curious onlookers to the o
pposite side of the street. Leaning against a brick pillar, he sank down, supporting her weight on his knees. A faint – he knew by the signs – already she was beginning to stir.

  Anton hung his head then. And as he wept he vowed that he would not let her face Arnaud Chevalier alone. This time he would be there. Whatever the entitlements of a husband, whatever propriety demanded, this time he would see that right was done.

  Outside the Herries’ residence in Pall Mall, Arnaud Chevalier stood beside the carriage he had hired to take him there. His elbows rested on the ledge of the carriage window, his thundering head was propped against his clenched fists. He had sent the driver ahead to raise the master of the house. But as yet the raps on the great door had gone unanswered and as he lifted his head to look, he saw that the driver was making his way back down the portico steps with a shrug.

  ‘Again!’ he ordered.

  Glancing sheepishly up at the mullioned windows, the coachman did not seem disposed to comply. But Chevalier was armed and in a murderous humour and it took only one threatening step in his direction to overcome the hesitation.

  He resumed his stance by the carriage, his neck and shoulders tight with rage. Clenched in his fingers was a miniature, a likeness of his second wife. He pressed it against the studded coachwork, his fingers parting stiffly – as if against his will – to reveal the portrait there. The sight of it made his heart ache: the sweet smile, the gentle curve of her throat, the way her hair curled under her ears.

  His weary gaze fell then upon the small rectangle of glass in the carriage door alongside his fist; upon his own haggard reflection.

  How he had been deceived. How he had played into the captain’s hands inviting him into his own home. His sources told him that François Jeakes was an occultist – that he dabbled in the black arts. Who better than he to vouch for that? To appear as escort that morning by Newgate prison; to materialize in his very bedchamber in the early hours of Christmas morning? Not imagination, not an excess of nuts or brandy. A true phantasm. Known to Louise. Known to her though she denied it. Summoned by her for all he knew.