‘Tell me where he is.’
His eyes blinked once before a crushing grip around her face and chin sent her sprawling backwards into the grass. A fleshy hand ran down her face and settled around her throat. She felt the grind of his jaw against her cheek.
‘The wolf’s maw is not yet sated, whore. Go back to the living, tell them what you saw. And one thing more: tell the shepherdess the devil claims his own.’
The Darkening
Margot would not remember how her legs carried her back to Long Acre. She would have no recollection of climbing back into the saddle or of leaving the old man who had been looking after the bay unrewarded and noisily disgruntled. But the one sight she would never forget was of the figure which emerged from the alleyway as she rode past. She was forced to rein in to avoid running the girl down. The eyes darted up at Margot as the bay reared, looked without seeing; her lips moved as if whispering to an invisible companion. And even before Margot saw that the hands and feet were drenched in blood, the distracted face spattered with it, she knew that it was the girl from the cellar. A moment of recognition then the girl skimmed under the descending hooves – so swiftly that by the time Margot had righted the horse – she was vanishing into the descending fog.
Margot dug in her heels and went after her.
The fog had come down quickly. It was the colour of earth, brackish to the taste and it eddied about the London streets, seeping through shutters and cracks, seeking out the delicate, the bed-ridden – so dense in parts that carriages had to be led through it. François swung into St Martin’s Lane unaware that he had crossed only yards from Margot as she rode after Anna.
A visit to Tom Brewster’s to grease the palm of the ostler Toby Caulk, to learn what he could from the gin-soaked boatswain of a boat bound for France the next day, had delayed his return to Pall Mall by a good hour. When he rode in under the stableyard arch a troubled Charles Herries met him with the news of Arnaud Chevalier’s unwelcome visit.
‘The man is beyond reason, François. Report to your superior officer – put your case before it is late. On no account must you return to your old home in St Martin’s Lane.’
But François had no intention of staying away. Pierre Chevalier was about to flee to France, that much he now knew; a hurried arrangement under an assumed name; a name chosen to mock ... and to throw blame.
Assigning Louis Veron as acting captain, he searched for Margot only to discover that she had already gone out to find him. He surrendered his weapons into the hands of a grim-faced Charles Herries then went out again, this time on foot.
The sour taste of fog rose in his throat as he ran along the uneven surface of St Martin’s Lane and in through the open hand-gate. He paused under the old sign: ‘John Jeakes & Son,’ settling his breath, drawing in his focus.
In an ideal world Pierre Chevalier’s flight would have worked in Louise’s favour – no conflict, no reprisals, just a blessed relief. In an ideal world he would have bid Pierre good riddance, but not in this world ... not now. There was more to this, he knew; the familiar gripping at the base of his skull, the tightness in his chest. It was not hard to imagine the twisted truths Pierre passed on to his father; the lies that would exonerate him at Louise’s expense. Arnaud Chevalier could only have learned Frank Fuller’s true identity from one source; the son who yesterday signed himself on to a ship’s list ... in the name of François Jeakes.
Such mischief had only been made possible by his return to St Martin’s Lane, he knew. But he also knew that if he followed Charles Herries’ advice, if he looked to his own salvation, Louise would be worse off than if he had never come back at all.
His forearm, the side of his clenched fist, were braced against the door. As he pulled back to knock the door recoiled inwards ... unlocked and unfastened. Stepping warily to one side, he pushed it open. The house yielded up its sounds to him; muffled voices in his father’s surgery ... a knocking up on the landing. Though there was no sign of Arnaud Chevalier – him or his pistols. But he sensed something other; a stifling miasma ... something far more ominous than an angry husband.
As François stepped into the hallway he felt new strength surging into the muscles of his shoulders and arms. Somewhere on the edge of his consciousness he heard shuffling, muffled voices out in the lane. He passed by the surgery door and followed his instincts through the house.
The Light
Anna pushed open the door into Cassy’s room. Dozing by the hearth, Clarry looked up at the creak of the hinges.
‘S’Truth, Anna! You’re sodden ... what’s that all over you?’
Anna looked down at herself. Her feet, the ragged hem of her skirt were caked in mud and road-dust. The rest she had washed in a stone horse-trough; diluting the stain across the front of her dress, swilling the blood from her face and arms.
‘I’m cold‒’ Her teeth chattered.
Clarry threw up her arms in exasperation. ‘Is it any wonder when you go out on a winter’s day with barely a stitch on? You should take more heed of Kate, you wayward creature.’
Anna peered anxiously at the figure in the bed then turned to Clarry with a questioning expression.
Clarry sighed; ‘Aye, she’s still with us. You know your mother has gone out to look for you ... now don’t you be making her cold‒’
As she spoke Anna climbed on to the bed. She lay down and pressed her forehead against Cassy’s. Then she drew her feet up inside her skirt.
Anton had been drawn down to the cellar by a mess of glistening footsteps in the grass. Waiting for Chevalier’s return, he had gone outside to clear his thoughts while Louise rested in the surgery. His feet carried him round to the back garden where in better days Kate had tended her herbs. The fog damped the sound of his boots on the path and at first concealed the metal grille lying in the grass. But as he paced back again, the fog wafted away. What he saw drew him back inside ... and down to the cellar.
Even from the steps he could see the crumpled figure lying in the smoky splay from the ground-level opening. Climbing back up to the scullery he took a taper from a shelf, lit it in the embers of the kitchen hearth then went back down, latching the door behind him.
In his years as an apothecary-surgeon he had seen what steel and gunpowder and coach wheels could do to flesh and bones; he had dealt with the ravages of disease and poverty. But he had not seen worse injuries or so much loss of blood from a body yet living.
The heart fluttered weakly, the breath had a phlegmy rattle.
He eased the shielding arms away from the head. Pierre Chevalier’s eyes were open but unseeing. In the last few hours he had come to know an abhorrence of this man. But here, now, he felt only pity.
So much bloodshed; and the life signs oozing away before his eyes.
Anton brushed the dying man’s eyelids shut. Tenderly he began to straighten the buckled limbs that no-one else should witness the full measure of his dying. Then squatting in the blood of Pierre Chevalier he gazed up through the foggy splay and began to pray for his soul.
As he prayed a hand touched his shoulder. There kneeling beside him was François Jeakes. Anton stared into the face he had last seen five years before, the face of the man he had thought long dead. Then he turned back to the dying man and with a sad shake of his head he murmured; ‘This is badly done, my friend.’
He watched François reach over and place both hands over Pierre Chevalier’s face. Thinking he meant to dispatch the dying man, Anton lunged at François’s wrists ... then he fell back.
A sudden rush of air; a roaring sound in his head. He saw the fog coil around François, enveloping him alone. With a gasp of fear Anton staggered backwards, clutching his ears.
The cellar filled with a light so intense that he was forced to shield his eyes. Bright daylight cascaded through the cellar opening, revealing the outline of covered furniture, the spongy grain of rotting timbers ... the shimmering figure kneeling over a dying man.
The light radiated from François in
a way that Anton had only ever seen in the church glass images of the saints – a fiery aura that moved as he moved, flames of light issuing from his fingertips as they traversed the body of Pierre Chevalier.
Transfixed, he watched a slight spasm in Chevalier’s abdomen release then grip again. It came again, stronger this time, forcing upwards into the chest, the lungs. François clamped the base of his palm against the punctured side of the chest. A moment later, Chevalier’s head swung to the side, with a strangled gurgle ejected a bloody gobbet. Breath rushed into the voided lungs then, the chest rose and fell in greedy gasps. Anton watched in disbelief as the flesh of cheek and neck lost its deathly pallor.
Resurrection. Life where none should be. A miracle, it seemed to Anton, tapped from the brilliance that had descended through Kate’s son. Then the aura was gone; no fingers of flame, no need to shield his eyes. Just the muted spill from the cellar light and François round-shouldered as he tended the wounded man.
He dropped to his knees beside François; in silence helped bind the chest wound with a strip torn from a linen cover.
‘Forgive me, François. I thought, I thought....’
From beyond the scullery door there came the sound of the heavy footsteps on the staircase, the jarring sound of Arnaud Chevalier’s raised voice.
‘Go to Louise,’ François said.
Cassy’s eyes opened at the touch of Anna’s fingers upon her face. A moment of lucidity. An oasis of consciousness.
‘What have you done, child?’
Anna touched her own lips then transferred the touch to Cassy’s drier lips. ‘I have killed him,’ she breathed, ‘it is done.’
The Riving
Louise had made several attempts at waking. When at last her eyes flicked open she stared for a moment at the row of specimen jars on the shelf until she remembered that she was lying on the bench in the treatment room; that her father had carried her in and placed a pillow under her head before slipping out again, vowing to be back in time to be with her when her husband returned. Drowsing she had dreamt of waking to the sound of Arnaud’s key in the lock; of drawing him upstairs to the privacy of their chamber, of making her confession to him there – a tearful unburdening which he had received as she would have him receive it ... without withdrawing from her ... without anger.
Waking brought such heavy disappointment. Arnaud was still not home. She was no further on than before.
The fog outside had choked the natural light. Disorientated by the darkness she asked; ‘What hour is it?’ But the words echoed back at her. Pushing herself up on to one elbow, she realized with a sense of foreboding that her father was not yet back.
The rattle of a key in the front door lock made her start to her feet. Her head tightened sickeningly and a bubbling sensation in her chest made her gasp for air. The front door slammed shut and before she had reached the surgery door, her husband was already climbing the stairs.
‘Arnaud‒’ she called. But her voice was not strong and she was forced to repeat herself. ‘Arnaud.’
This time he heard. He checked his stride. His shoulders dropped. For a moment he stood with his back to her. When at last he turned, the hostility in his expression, in the set of his shoulders, made him almost unrecognizable.
‘Where have you been?’ he growled, descending heavily again.
‘There is something I must tell you‒’
‘You think I don’t know already? You’ve been with him, haven’t you?’
Confused, she fell back a step to let him pass. ‘With who?’
He seized her wrist and jolted her closer towards him, so close that she had to arch her neck backwards to focus on his face.
‘Don’t take me for a fool ... François Jeakes, or would you prefer Captain Frank Fuller?’
Her mind reeled in the face of his anger. She shook her head, opened her mouth but no words came. At that moment Anton rushed forwards from the kitchen, his large hand clasped Arnaud’s shoulder. Chevalier spun towards him with bared teeth.
‘You!’
Anton considered Arnaud Chevalier for a moment. Not so much wary as profoundly weary he said; ‘Louise has been with me all morning.’
Arnaud shrugged him off. Raising a warning finger he growled; ‘I will suffer no provocation, even from you Morin, and you....’ he turned on Louise again, ‘do you deny it? Have you not known the true identity of our bogus captain from the moment he set foot in this house?’ His face contorted as if he had been struck by a painful thought. He dragged the palm of his hand over his mouth and throat then rounded on Anton. ‘You knew him, didn’t you? You must have known him.’
Louise pleaded. ‘My father knows nothing, Arnaud. He has never seen him – never been in the same room as him. He would probably not recognize him even if he had‒’
‘Is he so changed then, your lover?’
Louise shook her head sadly. ‘You don’t know what you are saying.’
‘No?’ Arnaud made a dismissive gesture towards the door. ‘Go‒’ he ordered Anton, ‘this is none of your concern.’
Anton said: ‘My daughter collapsed this morning, that is my concern.’
‘Your daughter has weighty matters on her conscience, peut-être? You heard her – she does not deny knowing the identity of the impostor Jeakes. I see the true depth of her treachery, Morin. Betraying a husband is sin enough but the cruel use of my own daughter ... all a ruse to cover‒’
‘Husband, no!’ Her hands went up to caress his face but he struck them away in repugnance.
‘You and that devil Jeakes have gulled me long enough, wife.’
Anton cut in: ‘You do yourself no credit here, Chevalier. Listen to her.’
With a scornful grunt, Chevalier took Louise’s chin in his palm and roughly tipped it up to face him. ‘Under my roof, in our very bed ... was it the man, or a sorcerer’s phantasm in our bedchamber?’
Louise pulled free of his grasp.
‘I listened to you then, ma chérie, a waking dream, brandy, nuts ... how I listened to you; against every instinct I believed you.’
‘What foolishness is this?’ breathed Anton.
Louise shook her head at her father’s questing touch. ‘Father, please go‒’
Chevalier drew himself up and stuck out his chin. ‘On the eve of the Nativity my sleep was broken by what I now know to have been an incubus ... it took the shape and the form of the man I had unwittingly entertained that evening, a man I now know to have dealt in diabolical sorceries in France.’
Anton squinted at him in disbelief. ‘You of all people believe this?’
‘I shot at him point-blank,’ Chevalier said grimly, ‘the ball went through the window glass, the figure vanished without trace.’ Turning to Louise he said; ‘Swear to me, before God, that the child is mine.’
Louise closed her eyes. ‘Arnaud, I wanted to spare you this....’
A sound of strangled fury came from deep in Chevalier’s throat. He pulled a pistol from inside his cloak and stubbed it against Anton’s forehead. With his free hand he caught Louise under the arm and shoved her upstairs ahead of him. ‘This is between a man and his wife, mon ami, my family, my name have been dishonoured. Go now, or as God is my witness, I will shoot you.’
Anton clamped the fingers of his right hand around the chased barrel of the pistol. Trembling with suppressed anger, he fixed Chevalier with a grim stare. More than a match for his opponent’s strength, he forced the weapon down saying raggedly;
‘Look to your son.’
‘What‒?’ spat Chevalier.
‘Louise has suffered enough at the hands of one Chevalier, beware you don’t make matters worse.’ He relinquished his grip on the pistol and looked into his daughter’s drained and imploring face.
‘Please go....’ she mouthed.
Tears glazed Anton’s eyes. With a sad shake of his head his arms fell to his sides. Turning back towards the kitchen he hesitated a moment, his gaze following Louise and Chevalier as they climbed the
stairs, his knuckles white around a banister. Then reluctantly, he turned his mind to what lay behind the kitchen door.
Chevalier pushed Louise into their bedchamber and slammed the door sending a shudder through the walls of the house. He kicked the door shut again and snapped at Louise: ‘What did he mean about Pierre?’
Pierre’s first unwanted touch had conjured this moment. The thought of it had haunted Louise’s waking and sleeping ever since. Now that it had come, she felt a singular calm. Arnaud’s anger made it easy to distance herself from him; the ease with which he had hardened towards her, his callous treatment of her father, somehow lightened the burden of guilt.
For the first time in months images of Paris and her ordeal in the catacombs flashed back at her; the knife at her throat, the cold hatred of her abductor, Vincent Martel. He had meant to kill her, had vowed that once he had done with Kate, her turn would come.
What she had survived only Kate would ever know. Kate and herself. Staring at the livid face of the man who stood barring the door, the strength she had known back then settled on her stood again. Pride, a sense of injustice, gave her courage. She would not be browbeaten and despised by a husband whose interests she only wanted to protect. Pulling herself up, she said bluntly;
‘Pierre is the father of my child.’
She watched Arnaud’s eyes narrow viciously; the way he swerved away from her for one incredulous second before turning back and striking her across the face. The blow rocked her. She righted herself aware that his ring had scored her cheek, the corner of her mouth. Tasting the blood she lifted her chin resolutely.
For a moment her dignity seemed to dent Arnaud’s rage. He looked at his hand, then at her bloody face. ‘You brought me to this‒’ he hissed. ‘Why do you lie to me? Jeakes has put you up to this, confess it.’
She shook her head. ‘Pierre has used me to injure you ... he forced himself upon me soon after we came here.’
The Sorcerer (The Witch Trilogy Book 3) Page 13