The next day....
Kate stood behind the great chestnut tree in the apothecary garden, waiting for Ursula to admit her.
Her seventeen years here as Mrs John Jeakes, had been the securest, the most contented time of her life. In this building, steered and encouraged by apothecary Jeakes, François had grown to manhood. In the bedchamber fronting St Martin’s Lane Anna had been conceived and born. Once, just one man among the many who paid for the use of her body, John became the only one. And he had remained grateful to his dying breath. Here in the garden she had planted the herbs her mother had taught her to use. Tender years and good, she reflected wistfully.
The maid trembled visibly as she whispered in Kate’s ear; ‘Master Chevalier is in the surgery with the physician ... if he should find you‒’
But Kate’s purpose, her need to know the truth, transcended all fear of discovery.
While Ursula pressed her back against the closed door, barring the way from the hall, and anxiously hurrying her on, she slipped through to the scullery. A grizzled tomcat curled against the cellar door, stirred sleepily at her touch. She coaxed it aside before making her way down, pulling the door to behind her.
Feeling her way down the cellar steps she made for the splay of natural light – the only clear space amid the clutter. She could see watermarks on the old flags, the dried strakes of a bristle brush. Ursula’s best efforts though had not shifted the darker stains. In the spill of light Kate knelt down on the floor stones and flattened her palms against the traces of blood.
Her mind would not be still at first. She thought of Anna left at Tyburn Lane in the care of Goody Witherspoon ... of Cassy’s parting words. Then her mind wheeled back twenty five years....
The slant-ceilinged attic where Anna Davidson had lived, where she had plied her trade ... the mattress, the broad, naked back of Matthew Marsden; the shadowed spine and tied hair.
Kate’s chest tightened at the memory, pain struck the base of her skull, under her ribs. Then the seeing came....
Marsden turned and half-smiled at her. The same knowing, the old mastery. And in his hands the knife.
‘Kate‒’
A cry of anguish cut across the vision, her own voice. She was back in the cellar, she knew, but the light had become a sulphurous haze. A sudden turbulence caught up her hair, it sucked the breath from her lungs, blurred her sight. Voices surfaced then dipped again – their words falling over each other in a meaningless torrent. Then an abrupt lull.
Lying on the cellar floor just inches from her knees was the buckled, bloody form of Pierre Chevalier; warm blood spreading outwards, seeping into the spaces between her fingers. And a heaviness in the air, a foulness that brought bile to her mouth.
This she had summoned; for this she had come.
‘Is this the work of my firstborn?’ Every fibre of her being was focused on the question. ‘I must know‒’
Unseen hands clasped her waist from behind – drew her effortlessly up to her feet. By their bruising strength; the sudden sparking under her ribs as they coursed upwards over the ripple of her ribs to reach her breasts, she knew they were Marsden’s hands. She felt the press of his body behind hers; the weight of his chin against the left side of her neck ... the warm staccato of breath as the words formed;
Did you think to keep my son from me?
The weight of his chin lifted from her neck. The hands swooped up to her head, steering her gaze down towards Pierre Chevalier who stirred, spluttering on his own blood.
Find your answer, shepherdess....
The wounded man craned his head up from the floor. In his face she saw the terror, the agony of suffocation; watched his jaw drop, his lips shape words of entreaty. The essence of her revolted against the seeing now but the hands held her fast. She was powerless even to close her eyes.
At the height of her distress the voices found form; the gentler voice of her mother, the voices of other women from Marsden’s dark past ... and there with them, Cassy’s voice;
The cunning man, the cunning man.
Their voices rose to a chant.
Close to her ear Marsden pressed; Listen to them.
Then a movement, sudden and unfocused. A flash of dark hair, a predatory lunge. She saw a figure crouch over Pierre Chevalier; watched the knife plunge down again and again. And in her head the chant swelled as one voice;
The cunning man, the cunning man‒
The crouching figure looked back over its shoulder in her direction. And the mournful sob, that far off sound, was hers.
Abe Byard had been twisted out of his last half crown. He hung back after the other punters had gone their way, lounging against a wooden pillar in the cockpit to stare at the mess of blood and feathers that was to have been his salvation. All afternoon he had watched and listened, waiting to see where the sharp money was going; knowing Nat Garrett would give him more than a knee in the balls if he had to come looking for him a second time.
Five to one on Red Goliath – he had been so sure that he could almost taste the winnings. Enough to settle his book with big Nat, get his best coat back from the pawnshop and have some left over dip his wick at Lucy Winkler’s. Robbing bastards. Saw him coming, talking it up, tipping the wink. It was bloody cold at the night-shelter without the coat.
He pushed his hands deeper into the pockets of his trousers and drew out a crumpled pamphlet: ‘Wanted, François Jeakes, for the most diabolical and heinous attack ... murderer of a young French seamstress ... escaped galley slave masquerading as Captain Fuller of the Dutch army ... master of the black arts ... reward.’
Toby Caulk had tipped him the half-crown stake for taking the army deserter and his French whore to the night-shelter. Holding the lantern while she patched up the gunshot wound he saw for himself the numbers branded into the forearm flesh:
1-0-4-7-8
such marking as he had seen before on a runaway moor from a slave ship. François, the strumpet in the soldier’s coat had called him, François.
Abe Byard pursed his lips and sighed. Nasty business, murder – not like filching or coin-clipping – murder was something else altogether. There would be a sweep of the night-shelter, others would likely get caught up. Toby Caulk was bound to expect his cut. But there was no help for it ... not if he was to escape Nat Garrett and his cut-throats.
He read the bottom line again: Chevalier of St Martin’s Lane, then stuffed the pamphlet back into his pocket and loped out into the backstreets.
Part 4: Execration
Closing in
Slants of moonlight fell across Anna’s face as she slept. Kate sat in the shadows at the bedside, watching and waiting. Now that Goody Witherspoon had picked her way back down the narrow stairs and gone home, she knew it would begin again.
It had been two days since Cassy’s burial and Kate had not left Anna alone for more than a few minutes since her return from the cellar at St Martin’s Lane. Her widowed neighbour Goody Witherspoon, who had watched over Anna while Kate was at the funeral, saw to it that she had milk and bread. The aging widow sent her grandson out to fetch the herbs Kate wanted, and sat with her in the afternoon drinking her pot of ale and working lace bobbins while Kate snatched an hour or two of sleep.
The first unearthly howl from outside in the lane....
Kate leaned forward. Stilling her trembling finger, she softly stroked Anna’s face from the middle of her brow down to her nose; a lulling touch.
Kate had always known that François was like her; that there were times when he not only saw beyond the waking world but seemed to have one foot outside of it. The otherness she had from her own mother, had found new depths in her firstborn. More than visions, more than simply knowing, in the catacombs of Paris she had seen for herself the potency her son possessed.
In the dark days leading up to her mother’s execution, a priest had asked her over and over again if she had ever seen her mother’s spirit leave her living body, badgering her with the notion until such fantasie
s had seemed like truth. In the fruit of her union with Matthew Marsden fantasy had become truth ... such truth as would not be borne by the everyday world.
John Jeakes had harnessed François’ gift of healing – married it so well with accepted medical wisdom, that she had begun to think her son safe from the terrors of her past. But Paris had confounded all of that. And the wonder of his homecoming was destroyed by her shaken trust; by the fear of what he had become, and of the consequences.
So distracted had she been by her concerns for François that she had somehow missed the blinding truth.
Look to Anna, Cassy had warned her. Even Anton, gentle forbearing Anton, had seen more than she: this mania is going to get worse ... there is a hospital in Moorfields, the New Bethlehem.
Anna was the child of a loving union – in such utter contrast to that which had brought François into the world that the possibility of Anna being troubled with the sight seemed remote. Anna’s peace of mind had been disturbed by the death of her father – that had been her truth.
Another howl, louder this time – coming from directly under the bedroom window.
And though Kate had sedated Anna with a potent draught of valerian and poppy, the mournful call found the girl. She shifted with a faint groan.
‘Hush my dear,’ Kate urged.
Once in her years as a shepherdess Kate’s flock had been worried by a wolf. It had come from the Welsh mountains on the back of a harsh winter and returned night after night, closing in on the folds, waiting its chance. A ghost in the darkness, picking off the weaker yearlings, destroying her livelihood....
Clawed feet padding up the wooden stair treads inside the cottage... snuffling under the door.
Anna’s eyes sprang open. Kate caught the girl’s shoulders as she attempted to rise from the bed. Held her fast.
The way Anna had so often found her way to that particular place in St Giles’ graveyard – the materializing of the wolf the day Anna threw a fit in the kitchen – her manic rage towards the priest attending Cassy – how obvious it all seemed to her now. Marsden’s chosen vessel was not François but Anna. Look to Anna.
Though her arms shook with the effort of pinning her daughter down, Kate held on. Anna’s expression twisted into a sneer. And Kate once more found herself looking into the face she had seen in the apothecary cellar; the possessed face of Pierre Chevalier’s attacker. Flicking her tongue suggestively, Anna dragged up her shift and worked both hands between her legs making a lewd stuttering sound.
A heavy thump on the door, the sound of rapid clawing.
In one swift move Kate let go with her right hand and struck Anna hard across the face. The girl froze. With a startled frown her hands fell away from her sex.
‘This night, daughter, you will do my bidding,’ Kate said grimly.
The girl’s head began to swing violently from side to side then. Clawing Kate’s arms with her fingernails, she howled, ‘Get from me, whore!’ She writhed bodily, feet and calves thrashing the mattress, making the floorboards bounce under the bed in time with the thudding against the door. With a piercing scream Anna’s torso arched violently upwards so that only her heels and the crown of her head touched the mattress.
Kate dug her fingers into Anna’s slender shoulders. ‘You will not go to him!’ she insisted. Anna’s eyes rolled up, froth bubbled from her mouth. Then, as abruptly as it had begun, the noises at the door ceased. Anna’s knees buckled, her abdomen sagged. As she slumped back down, Kate caught her under the shoulders, supporting and turning her so that she did not damage her crooked neck as she collapsed exhausted and insensible on to the mattress.
Tenderly she straightened her daughter’s limbs and covered her again. It had passed – for now. But it had started earlier than the night before, and it was closing in. Soon she would not be strong enough to hold Anna down.
She wiped the froth from Anna’s mouth with the corner of the bed sheet then touched the blue beads Goody Witherspoon had tied around the girl’s neck to ward off sickness and bad luck. What ailed Anna was no earthly sickness, she knew that now.
While John Jeakes lived, she and her children had been protected from Marsden’s malign influence. After John’s death, Marsden had reappeared to her as she struggled to calm Anna on the stairs at St Martin’s Lane. She had believed then that only she could see him, that his taunts about taking the girl-child under his wing referred to that other girl-child Caroline Grafton seventeen years earlier.
Only now did it dawn on her that Anna had seen him then, that she saw him still. It was that which opened her to all that followed. She heard and saw and became everything that he willed her to. Just like the puppets in the Italian theatre booth they had watched with Jenny at the Christmas fair, Anna did his bidding ... as she herself had once done.
A ghost in the darkness, picking off the weaker yearlings.... Shepherdess Kate had waited out the frosty night inside a hide of hurdles and straw. Just before dawn, the grey shadow had padded across the yard towards the fold. Straddling its first kill it did not sense her approach, at first. Kate would never forget the moment; the sudden switch of the beast’s head; the flash of yellow eye and bloodied fang as she buried the mattock deep into its broad neck.
Kate went across to the window and stared out at the moon. She knew now what she must do.
François’s head dropped forward then jerked back again to wakefulness. He sat sideways on a wooden settle, the one seat in the cramped basement of the night-shelter. His head was propped against the back of the chair and under his right hand, hidden behind a crooked leg was a knife. On the far side of a mottled sheet draped over a sagging line that served as a partition, the shadows of a thief and his moll moved about on the straw mattress as they squabbled over cards.
‘You can hole up here awhile,’ Tom Brewster’s man, Toby Caulk, had said, tapping the side of his nose, ‘the law won’t think to look hereabouts – not for an army captain, like.’
For much of the first two days he had drifted in and out of sleep, allowing time for his injured collarbone to heal, waiting for the dust to settle before he made his move. Though he had sent Margot back to the billet in Pall Mall for her own safety, and to get word back to Charles Herries and Louise Veron, Margot knew where he was; dressed in the borrowed army coat she had come down with him on the first night. And while she cleaned his wound, she had spoken in broken whispers of the things she had witnessed; of the devil girl in the cellar at St Martin’s Lane, of her journey to Dog Lane through the fog ... and of the vicious man in black who had spoken with such chilling familiarity about him and the shepherdess.
With the passing hours his mind lost its feverishness and the things she had told him gradually found their meaning. From Margot’s clear description of him – from the style of dress to the words he used, the man in black had to be the one he had always known as The Watcher. And the girl she had seen retaliating with such hellish savagery against Pierre Chevalier; the girl who had climbed fully dressed into a stone water trough to wash away Pierre Chevalier’s blood on the way to Dog Lane, could only be the one he had found curled up asleep beside Cassy – unkempt and still wet through. The Watcher and Anna....
Light from a latticed opening on the far side cast shimmering shadows of the card-sharps on the stained sheet. Their bickering voices became distorted. François’ grip on the knife slackened, his head dropped forwards....
The hooded figure vaulted the scalloped wall into the moonlit graveyard. Moving swiftly between the headstones, the cloak wafted open to reveal the paleness of unshod feet and smooth bare legs. On past a stone angel to an area removed and overgrown ... beyond the sweeping branches and gnarled roots of a tree, to the cracked stone bearing an inscription which shone clear in the silver light. Unfamiliar, yet somehow deeply familiar:
Ignotus
Ex Aquis
Anno Domini
1658
Feet surrounded by dead leaves, the hood slid back from shining brown hair, the cloak fel
l away to expose the womanly nakedness beneath. A moonwashed woman François knew was Kate.
Murmuring softly, he watched her approach the headstone and kneel to lay a posy there. Her hair lifted on the breeze, leaves danced around her pale thighs. From under the cloak she pulled out a trowel and a pouch. Light glinted off the trowel as she raised it in both hands, as her head tilted back to face the moon.
Her body began to glow then, dazzling fingers of light radiating from her. In the fiery aura shapes loomed and merged ... then become distinct shimmering figures. Women, a dozen, maybe more, their whispering voices uniting to a chant;
‘The Shepherdess ... the Shepherdess.’
Forming a half circle around her as she forced the trowel through the resistant grass roots into the cold earth. Voices rising to a shriek;
‘The Shepherdess ... the Shepherdess.’
Then a ferocious growl, a leap of rippling muscle and bared fang. And light quenched by savage darkness....
François’s head jarred back against the settle. Clenching his fingers around the handle of the knife, he swung his legs to the floor. He leaned forward, gasping clutched his head.
The Watcher and Anna.
‘François‒?’
For a moment he stared at the hands that had come to rest on his. He did not have to look up to know that Margot had come. He took to himself the glow of her presence; her warmth and loyalty, her loveliness and courage....
‘Tu te sens malade, François?’
He brought her hands together and pressed his lips to them. Sliding the knife into his boot he drew her down to sit on his knee. Into her ear he whispered:
‘We must go to Kate ... now.’
Hallowing
Kate lay awake in the darkness. Her body was moulded around Anna’s, her cloak spread over both of them. Returning from St Giles’ graveyard she almost wept with relief to find Anna as she had left her: bound to the bedstead ... still fast asleep, still breathing. The girl lay on her right side, her head resting on her tied hands.
The Sorcerer (The Witch Trilogy Book 3) Page 15