Then, a black-haired man much of my own age, leaned forward. “What of your help from the dark forces, Master Kelley? There are rumors about a man named Seabourne. Did he raise a demon to do his bidding?”
“Our investigations were without such assistance,” I said. I took a draft of the sour wine, since no one seemed hostile. “Such interventions would be too dangerous.” I shuddered inside at the abomination Seabourne had roused, a creature of hell itself.
“But not impossible.” The words came from the masked man, and the others fell into silence, watching him. The voice, muffled somewhat by the mask, was familiar.
He wrapped a hand gloved in velvet about his goblet.
“I do not deal with demons, my lord,” I said with dignity. “Such is the devil’s work.”
“Hard words from a man who jousted with the Báthorys, and lived to tell his story.”
Then I knew that voice, and shrank back in my chair.
“Under duress of certain death,” I stammered, “we did assist His Majesty King Istvan in preserving the life of an innocent woman.” I could feel sweat prickle the skin of my brow and shoulders.
The man stood. He was tall and strongly built, wearing a robe which fell to his feet. He carried a sword as befitted a knight of the Holy Roman Empire, and his black hair was but lightly touched with gray over the mask.
“That woman is not saved, Master Kelley. She is in the thrall of a demon, a creature of death and darkness. You have created a repository to contain a monster.”
He removed his mask with a flourish. In the light of the candles I saw him clearly, his glittering dark eyes, his crucifix on his breast.
It was Reichsritter Johann Konrad von Schönborn, of the Holy Inquisition. I leaned back into my chair, my words strangled in my throat.
He turned to the company, extending his hands toward me in something of a flourish. “See, here is your sorcerer, my lords. He has created, with demonic forces, a fiend that feasts on children. Not just Transylvanian children, but now the babies of Venice and all Europe.” He rested his hand upon the hilt of his sword.
A ripple of murmurs crept about the room as men whispered. He waited for the noise to stop while he stared at me, not with hostility but with the authority of the church, the empire and the yard of steel at his side. I swallowed my fears and stood also, gripping the table edge for support.
“Father Konrad,” I said, and was pleased my voice came out as I had intended, strong but respectful. “If I can be of any assistance undoing the magics I was coerced into, tell me, and I am at your service.”
He allowed a smile to touch his lips. “For the right price? Venality is your greatest sin, my son. That you will do aught for money—”
“Not anything, I assure you,” I said, stung at the charge. My moral code, if uniquely my own, has its limits. “I wish with all my heart to undo that which we were compelled to do.”
“You raised a demon, however unwillingly. Better you were dead—for God cannot forgive you such a sin.”
There it was, the very thought that woke me in a sweat some nights, the fear that reached into my very sleep. “Then let me help put it right!” I exclaimed, much agitated. “Let me find a way to repent and put nature back.”
He touched his crucifix, and it drew my eyes. “Come back to the church,” he said, in heavily accented English. “Repent, confess, be forgiven.”
My eyes stung with tears, for part of my conscience cried out for confession, yet I had been converted Protestant these twenty years. “Let me repair what I have done. Let me make amends.”
Finally, he nodded and spoke in Latin, that all might hear. “Let your alchemical experiments continue with great fortune, my lords. But do not dabble in raising demons, for there lies damnation, and all the torments of hell.”
Chapter 15
PRESENT DAY: BEE COTTAGE, LAKE DISTRICT
The carcass lies beside an elder tree, putrefying. The garden reaches up and onto it, fingers the juices that ooze from orifices, punctures the loosening skin and suckles at the nectars within. Beetles swarm upon it, biting at the soft entrances, the eyes, the nostrils, the easy tunnel to the brain. The crows have cleared the way. They have feasted on the meat, and the beetles and maggots boil over the bones.
The garden rustles, and waits. Spring makes it restless, the trees throbbing with sap, flowers bursting into the light with each morning. It is a good time to replace the witch.
Jack was grouting the newly tiled kitchen wall when she heard a knock at the door. Before she could react, Sadie had bounced down the stairs with a scream of “Charley!” and the next moment, Jack was hit with a hundred pounds of canine muscle and bone. She crashed into the new kitchen units, laughing at Ches’s efforts to whine, bark and lick her face all at the same time. His tail was wagging so hard he couldn’t keep his balance on two legs and dropped onto his haunches. She knelt down to hug him, to press her face into the soft pelt on his head. In one surge, all the pain of missing him caught up with her. Was it her imagination, or were there more white hairs around his gray muzzle?
“Six weeks—you’d have thought it was a year at least.” Maggie reached out her arms to hug Charley, and squeezed her tight.
“I’m never babysitting Ches ever again,” Charley managed, muffled by her mother’s embrace. “He was a nightmare in the car and it’s about a million miles.”
Then it was Jack’s turn for a hug from her foster sister, dressed as eclectically as ever in tie-dyed dungarees and a head scarf.
“But you’re here now,” said Jack. “And we’ve moved in. What do you think of the kitchen?”
Apart from one run of units containing the new sink and cooker, the room was bare boards, plaster and newly tiled walls. Jack had managed to trim back the brambles and ivy enough to patch the old windows, but the soft wooden frames had already allowed a few green fingers back in.
Charley ran her hand over the work surface. “The kitchen is great. It’s big, isn’t it? It was probably the whole downstairs of the cottage.”
“Bill, the plasterer, said he thought this part was the original Tudor building.” Jack rubbed Ches’s head. “I am so pleased to see you both.”
Maggie’s lips twisted into a half smile. “It was built in the fifteen-fifties by Thomazine Ratcliffe and her husband, Henry. She was the first herbalist here, and a beekeeper.” She brushed her fingers over a tiny leaf of ivy, sneaking in past the door frame. “That’s her garden.”
“What do you mean, her garden? She’s been dead for hundreds of years.” Charley sat down on one of the “new” secondhand kitchen chairs, and stroked Ches. “Oh, now you like me, vile mutt.”
Maggie turned to face her and waved at the window, so plastered with leaves they looked almost black. “The story goes, Thomazine was married for ten years, but didn’t have a baby. One day, a rich young man was riding by and he saw Thomazine in her garden, picking herbs, and he raped her. That produced a child, Amyas. The father is supposed to have tried to steal the child. But she built her garden to protect them from future attacks, and he was crushed by the wall collapsing on him.”
The dog pattered to the front room. Jack opened a tin of cookies, baked by Maggie to christen the new oven. “And you think it still is protecting the cottage? Hundreds of years later?”
Sadie was squealing in the new living room, no doubt being squashed by the dog on one of the recently delivered sofas.
Charley took a cookie, and stretched back in the kitchen chair.
“Well, you didn’t get very far,” said Maggie. She looked at Charley. “Jack took a pair of loppers to the garden and it fought back.”
Charley grinned. “I’m guessing, by the cuts on her face, that the garden won.”
“It was a witch’s garden,” Maggie repeated. “Through the generations, even though Amyas fathered a very prosperous family and ended up in a manor house with many acres, the cottage was always left to the member of the family most able to live in it.”
; Jack brushed a sponge over the tiles, rubbing off excess grout. “So, the family was rich?”
“Amyas was, fathered by the eldest son of Lord Dannick, Lord Robert. He treated him well, paid for his education and settled a large estate on him.” Maggie reached for a cookie for herself.
“We had a Dannick come here looking for an herb, Charley. Hang on—” Jack rummaged in a biscuit tin they were using for paperwork. “Here. Knowle Castle, Sir Henry Dannick.”
Charley studied the card. “Do you remember what herb he was looking for?”
“Turn it over, I wrote the name on the back. There, black hair-root. Do you know it?”
Charley frowned. “I could ask around, but not off the top of my head.”
“We haven’t heard of it before.” Maggie filled a bowl with water and put it down for the dog. “We haven’t been able to find a Latin name, or a picture. Which is odd, given that I’ve been an herbalist for forty years.”
“He said it was rare,” Jack said. “He gave me the impression only Ellen knew where to find it. He said it was important to his grandson.” She half smiled. “He didn’t look old enough to have a grandson, to be honest, but Maisie says he’s older than he looks. Maisie’s a friend of Ellen’s,” she explained to Charley.
Charley looked around. “And you didn’t find any old books, documents, that sort of thing?”
“Apparently this Thomazine kept a journal and it’s somewhere in the property, but we can’t find it. We haven’t gone up in the loft yet, and the builder said there might be a small void under this floor.” She stamped on the floorboards. “Maybe there’s a cellar.” She recalled the old woman. “Maisie said she knows where Thomazine hid the book. Or maybe she would recognize this hair-root in the garden somewhere. We tried to get outside—well, I did, anyway. But it’s like a wall of green and prickles. It’s constantly trying to get in.”
Charley looked at the tendrils of ivy worming their way between the wood fibers. “Oh, my,” she breathed, her breath misting the new glass. “You can almost see it growing.”
Jack joined her, looking at the leaf-plastered pane. “Sadie says the plants are watching us.” She was half joking, but Maggie’s expression was serious.
“Watching, listening, feeling. That’s an acre of garden planted by a witch and tended by generations of us.”
Jack felt a shiver down her spine at the tone in Maggie’s voice, as if she were whispering to the garden itself. Then Maggie turned to her with a broad smile. “Well, we’ll worry about that tomorrow. Is the kettle on?”
—
Lighting a fire in the cottage seemed strange to Jack given the fate of the last occupant, but the new woodburner lit quickly and the dog flopped down in front of it, making it seem normal.
While Sadie was occupied with the Internet, Jack sat next to Charley. “How’s business?”
Charley rolled her eyes. “I don’t know how you deal with that old crook, I really don’t.”
“Pierce? He’s OK, and he pays well. Some of the stuff he’s looking for is a bit…dubious.”
Charley glanced at Sadie, then lowered her voice. “Why does he want so many human bones?”
“I have no idea. I think he supplies a voodoo practitioner. I usually get them from Katarzyna Medway, she works with medical waste at the hospital.”
Charley spread out her hands. “And it takes how long to deflesh amputated limbs? Yuck. Double yuck. I can’t wait for you and Mum to come back and take over.”
Jack smiled at her foster sister. “It’s not all bones.”
“No, it was a ton of nettles last week. I still have the stings to prove it. And owl pellets, which I had to dry off in the oven. The kitchen still stinks.”
“Sorry.” Jack couldn’t help laughing at her expression. “But the money’s good. Just don’t trust Pierce at all. He’ll cheat you in a heartbeat.”
“Last time I went to meet him in broad daylight in a shop. I thought the manager was going to call the police. But he got his goods and I got my money.”
“He just handed it over?” Jack couldn’t imagine the magic dealer just cooperating, especially with the slight girl.
“Well, I threatened to scream and say he had groped me.” Charley grinned. “Who would’ve believed him in the underwear section of a women’s clothes shop? He looks like a tramp. He grabbed the money and ran.”
Sadie, surrounded by books, her music player, notebooks and colored pens, looked over at them curiously, then went back to tapping on Charley’s tablet.
Maggie came in and sat on the end of the sofa beside the teenager. “So, what are you up to, Sadie?”
“I’m writing to Felix.”
“Oh.” Maggie shot a look at Jack, who looked away, down at the curling flames. “So—have you heard from him?”
“He texts me but he wants a proper e-mail.” Sadie swiped her phone then held it out for Maggie to see. “Look at these pictures. He went to America, New Orleans. He’s been there two weeks.”
Jack stretched out on the new sofa and put her feet up with a sigh. Sadie was still weak, and reluctant to do more than paint a few walls, so fitting the kitchen units and all the odd jobs had fallen to her alone. At least she had new energy to do what needed to be done.
“What do you think of the house, Charley?” Jack looked up at the new ceiling, the duck-egg walls. It had been difficult restraining Sadie’s taste for strong colors, but this one they both agreed on.
“It’s great. Not exactly my taste, but then I’m going through a purple phase…”
“Well, I love it,” Maggie said. “It’s lovely. I remember staying here as a child, but it was always shabby and cluttered. It belonged to Ellen’s mother. I spent a month here every summer, and most Christmases as well.”
Sadie closed her notebook. “How long do we have to stay here?”
Maggie looked around the room. “It’s not that bad, is it?”
Sadie shrugged. “It’s just now I can get out there’s nowhere to go.”
Jack qualified that. “You can go out for a short period, Sadie, that’s all. You need to be inside the circles most of the time.”
“I just want some fresh air every day.”
The car had circles inscribed into its roof and floor; Jack had scratched them in when the seats were out. It was a mobile haven for them both. “We go out for drives.”
“It’s not the same.” Sadie waved at the front window. “The house is right on the road, but there aren’t any pavements or anything. Where could I go for a walk, even for a few minutes?”
Maggie turned to look at Sadie, then back at Jack. “That’s why we need to sort the garden out.”
“How?” The question popped out of Jack before she could stop it, and was laden with doubt. “The plants grow back within a day. Some of the brambles are coming back through the back windows again. We can’t even get scaffolding in to replace the rotten frames.”
Maggie settled back against the cushions and stretched her feet toward the fire.
“You know about Thomazine?” She retold the story for Sadie’s benefit. “When she was raped she unconsciously cast a protection spell. There’s no evidence that she was a witch before. In fact, she was a famous beekeeper and grew herbs and fruit for the castle.”
“What do you mean, ‘unconsciously’?” It didn’t make sense to Jack. The dog stood, shook himself, and trotted over to lay his head in her lap.
Maggie picked up one of Sadie’s fallen pens. “Do you know about archetypes?”
Jack shrugged. She stroked the top of Ches’s head. “I know the word.”
“Think about the first groups of humans. Hunter-gatherers. There must have been people who were good at, say, hunting.”
“OK.” Jack glanced at Sadie, who was listening.
“Through the generations, hunters who spent most of their time together, produced children who were also hunters. Taller, more muscle mass, faster.”
Sadie cocked her head on one side. “They were do
uble hunters? I mean, both parents were hunters?”
“Exactly. Now, there must have been other roles within communities. Like—people who prepared food, people who cared for children, people who were good with animals. Or with magic. Magic was important to people who couldn’t understand things like weather, the seasons, nature. It was their only explanation.”
Jack smoothed Ches’s thick pelt away from his deep-set gray eyes. They were the only thing that suggested the few husky genes rather than the wolf. “What you are saying is, these people tended to breed with each other. Concentrated the genes, that sort of thing.”
“Exactly. As modern people, we all have some of those clusters of ancient genes. I believe we all have abilities that we received from our ancestors.” Maggie clenched her hands together. “That’s where I got my ‘witch’ genes from. Early shamans or magic users.”
Sadie scowled. “I hate that idea, that a few lucky people have superpowers and the rest of us—”
“But that’s the whole point, Sadie.” Maggie’s voice was passionate. “We all have one or two of these superpowers, but we just don’t use them in our modern world. Look at Charley.”
Charley raised an eyebrow. “Go on, what’s my superpower?”
“What’s the weather going to be like tomorrow?”
Charley lifted her head as if she were listening to something. “It’s going to be drizzly overnight, dry tomorrow, maybe sunny in the afternoon. But I think it’s getting colder.” Her weather predictions were something of a joke when Jack was growing up, but she rarely planted something outside without checking with Charley first.
“There. What would be more useful for a hunter-gatherer community than someone who knew when a storm was coming, or a drought?”
Sadie ran her fingers through her very short, very red hair, the best they could do to change her appearance. She looked unconvinced, but on some level, it made sense to Jack. She stretched her toes toward the heat. The room was still very bare, just a thick rug covering scrubbed floorboards, a secondhand coffee table, and the two new sofas against the newly plastered walls. The woodburner glowed orange behind its glass door.
The Secrets of Blood and Bone Page 11