by Sarah Hoyt
Witchfinder
Sarah A. Hoyt
Witchfinder© Sarah A. Hoyt 2014
Cover Art background John Atkinson Grimshaw –Blackman Street, London
Figure cover Flexflex | Dreamstime.com
Dragon©Algol | Dreamstime.com
Cover Design Marian Derby
Published by Goldport Press
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to any persons, (living or dead), places or events is a coincidence.
Table of contents
ISBN: 978-1-63011-014-7
Witchfinder
Sarah A. Hoyt
His Grace
If anyone had been looking closely at the duke of Darkwater as His Grace approached the double doors of the ballroom, he would have noticed the Duke held himself somewhat stiffly. Not as though he were injured or embarrassed, but more as though he were excessively careful of all his movements.
The two uniformed footmen exchanged a look before opening the doors. His Grace, the look said, had clearly been out drinking. Which explained his being so late to the ball.
Neither of them would have dared say it was just like His Grace, and – if it came to that – a lot like His Grace’s deceased father, but it was plain that they both thought it.
As His Grace, Seraphim Ainsling, Duke of Darkwater, paused in the doorway, in the full glare of the brilliant mage lights positioned all around the walls, all eyes turned his way.
The attention was not due to the exquisite tailoring of his green evening coat, which showed off his muscular body to great advantage, or his commanding height and stately bearing. That he was possibly the handsomest man in the room, with his thick, raven-black hair, regular features marred only by an aquiline nose, and dazzling emerald eyes, was a part of it, as well as the fact that he was His Grace, Seraphim Ainsling, Duke of Darkwater, one of the oldest and most prestigious magical houses in the kingdom, not to say in the world.
No. The real reason his entrance gained the attention of all in the room was that this party was being held in his honor, and he was unfashionably late. His mother had almost given up all hope of his appearance, as had his betrothed, Lady Honoria Blythe.
The betrothal had as yet to be formalized, but everyone present expected the announcement to be made sometime approaching midnight.
After a pause that was so silent it was almost as if the orchestra had stopped playing – which it certainly hadn’t — the conversation and dancing resumed.
Darkwater walked into the room, still moving with exaggerated care, reached for a glass from a tray held high by a passing footman, and tossed the champagne back in one swift move.
From across the room, his mother saw it and flinched. The Dowager Duchess of Darkwater was a petite woman. Her mother had been French, and Lady Barbara showed it in her small oval face, her dark eyes, her clearly marked, arched eyebrows, and in a certain air that denoted a quick temper, quickly tamped down.
She approached her errant son, maintaining every appearance of outward calm, even if her gaze couldn’t help but reproach his lateness and his state.
“Really, Seraphim!” she said as soon as she could be sure of not being heard by other people. “After I have gone to such trouble putting on this ball for you, the least you could do is arrive in a timely manner. Dearest Honoria has withstood it all without a crack in her perfect demeanor, but I have been ready to faint from anxiety.”
Darkwater glanced across the room to where Lady Honoria stood, pale, blonde, and beautiful, the picture of poise and elegance. She smiled at him, a calm smile that showed no emotion at all, neither anger nor relief, neither disdain nor caring. He sent her a stilted bow and a smile that gave as little away as her own. “She is to be commended for her good sense,” he replied. “And you, Mama, are to be commended for not fainting. That would have set the tabbies’ tongues wagging.”
His mother clutched his arm and he winced and reeled a little, as though the force of her small hand clasping his sleeve were enough to unsettle his carefully guarded poise. “Seraphim – tell me you are happy with this match. If you are not, you should not go through with it. There is time to back out now, without injuring Honoria or the Darkwater pride.”
“Back out?” he asked as he stepped away from her. “Why should I want to do that?”
“Because you are not in love with her. I have always wanted a love match for you, not to see you give yourself up to increase the family fortune. Our magic is still strong, and with your brother’s new inventions, our fortunes will rally.”
“Father expected otherwise,” said Darkwater curtly. “An alliance between Ainsling’s Arcana and Blythe Blessings was mentioned over and over in his diary as something that needed to happen before we could control our decline.” He reached for a sparkling crystal glass from another passing tray. “Love is a fairy story, at any rate.”
“So instead you drink yourself blind?” asked his mother. “You are making a good job of hiding it, but I can see you are unsteady on your feet.”
“Hardly, Mother. Please do not fret.” Almost reeling, he managed to visibly exert utmost control upon his rebellious body, bowed politely to his mother, and turned to cross the room. “If you will excuse me, I believe Honoria is entitled to at least one dance with me.”
But before he reached Honoria, a figure intercepted him. Lady Barbara started forward, ready to stop the person she identified as Jonathan Blythe, the brother of the lady Honoria, a well-known rakehell, but Seraphim shook his head at Jonathan, and smiled, and proceeded to his affianced bride.
Seeing him bow to Honoria and offer his hand to be enveloped in her gloved one, his mother could but clench her two hands together. What she had endured from her husband – his careless disregard for her and her position – only she knew. She had exerted her discretion, her pride, the very last shreds of the love that had once drawn her into an unadvisable marriage, to keep her husband’s missteps secret.
His debts at the gaming tables, she’d covered without a word; his frequent inebriation, she’d hid by talking of his “complaint”; his mistresses she’d paid off; his by-blows, she’d taken care to set in the way of good positions, his children she’d borne without complaint.
And all that time, her one consolation had been that neither Seraphim, nor his ten-year younger brother, Michael, nor even her single surviving daughter, Caroline, Michael’s twin, showed the slightest tendency to imitate their father. Michael was perhaps the steadiest of them all – his mind given very early over to the perfecting of magic and the creation of magical engines to improve daily life.
But Seraphim, though a rather spirited boy, forever climbing trees and riding out on horses that were too impetuous for any other rider, had shown early enough a tendency to assume responsibility for the family, and to respect the worth and importance of his title and position.
Only, in the last year, it had all fallen apart. Rumors of his wild gaming and wenching, his haphazard living, his pride in his riding and shooting prowess – a prowess no one else could see a shred of – had reached even the ears of his mother.
No one had asked her to settle his debts. Yet. No one had laughed openly about his mistaken pride in his physical abilities. Yet. No light skirt or hedgeborn b
aby had sought her protection. Yet.
But in that ballroom, watching her son hold himself too stiffly and carefully, Lady Barbara Ainsling, Dowager Duchess of Darkwater, felt much like Sisyphus, who, having pushed the rock up the slope, sees it rolling back again.
Seraphim, his early character notwithstanding, was turning into a copy of his father.
Two Brothers
Darkwater lay sprawled across a low chaise in his dressing room. By the wavering light of two mage globes fixed on either side of the mirror above his dressing table, he looked like the picture of debauch. With his coat, tailored to a nicety to fit his broad shoulders and narrow waist like a second skin, unbuttoned, and his curls, in wild disarray, framing his pale, sweaty face, he looked like he’d spent the night in wild orgies.
He thought that no one who saw him now would doubt the rumors that he’d been drinking heavily before the ball at which his engagement to Lady Honoria Blythe was to have been announced. And no one would doubt that this was the reason the announcement had not been made.
By morning the tongues of the gossipers would spread everywhere the story that one or the other of them meant to cry off.
Right then, the Duke was trying to think the rumors, and how he looked to avoid thinking of pain. His mind was dark with pain, his breath coming in fast gasps, his brow creased with suffering he had not allowed anyone in the ballroom to suspect.
When he spoke to his attendant, who was rummaging through the drawers of the dressing table, his voice was little more than a croak, animated by no more energy than could be provided by extreme pain. “Penny, curse you. Can you not set about it?”
The valet spared him a look over his shoulder, gracing Darkwater with a frown that was much like the Duke’s own. In fact, Seraphim knew Gabriel Penn – whom only His Grace dared call Penny – looked almost like Seraphim’s twin and was well known to be a by-blow of His Grace the former duke, acknowledged as such, born a full year to the day before Seraphim’s birth.
Seraphim knew that people said the fact that the two had been brought up together almost as brothers, and that Gabriel was now the trusted confidant and closest assistant to His Grace, showed Lady Barbara’s forbearance and her unusual turn of mind. Or perhaps, some said, it just showed that she knew a high magical power, like Penn’s, when she saw it, and thought it best not to have him run wild and untrained amid tenants and farmers.
“I’m shifting as fast as I can, Duke,” he threw impatiently in Seraphim’s direction. Though in public he called him His Grace and showed him every respect, in private he took liberties no one who knew Seraphim’s stiff-necked propriety would believe. He called Darkwater Duke or Seraphim, or occasionally, you damned fool. Right then he said the first as if he meant the last, and added, “Because if you think that coat is coming off without being slit, you’re a fool. And more of a fool for having squeezed yourself into it and gone to the ball, instead of calling me to you first.”
Seraphim gave a gurgle that might have been an attempt at laughing. “I couldn’t disappoint Honoria or humiliate her that way.”
“What I think of your Honoria…,” Gabriel said, turning with a sharp razor in his hand, and setting about cutting the sleeve of Seraphim’s coat with a skill that showed he’d often done it. “And that is more than I think of her brother Jonathan, who took a… ah…. stroll early on from the salon and behind the rose bushes in the garden with Mrs. Varley. I’m sure people going out for a breath of air must have heard them moaning and whimpering.” Gabriel turned very red. “What I mean is, no one could doubt what they were about. He’s very bad ton, Seraphim. If you ask me, the entire family—”
“No one has asked you,” Seraphim said, in the blighting tone that never worked on Gabriel.
This time, though, Gabriel did not answer him, as his cutting away of the coat, revealed not only a blood soaked sleeve, but a mass of ill-wrapped bandages – all of them equally tinted blood-red.
The stain, as he pulled away the remnants of the coat and tossed them aside, showed itself to continue all across the Duke’s shoulder and to over-spread his chest.
“Seraphim!” Gabriel said, as he cut away the shirt and the bandages, to reveal two jagged, irregular cuts, one extending all the way up the arm, almost to the shoulder, deep enough to show the glimmering whiteness of bones in its depths, and the other starting at the shoulder and stopping just short of the heart.
“My ribs deflected it,” Seraphim said. “It was my heart the villain was aiming for. Spelled dagger.”
Gabriel set his lips tight, in something that might be anger or concern. His countenance, always rather pale, had gone two shades paler, so that even his lips appeared to be glaring white under the mage lights. He swallowed and nodded, as if he were swallowing the reproaches he would normally have made. His concern showed in his creased forehead and in the depths of the green eyes both of them had inherited from their common father.
Turning, he rummaged in the drawers again, with a quick question of “I suppose you couldn’t close it magically?”
“No,” Seraphim said. His voice had devolved into a whisper. His good hand clenched the arm of the chair so hard that its knuckles shone white. “I told you it was a magical dagger.”
Gabriel nodded and set on the dressing table certain articles that even the duke’s mother would be very surprised to know were always kept in its drawers: needle; catgut thread; bandages and lint.
From a smaller table nearby, where it sat next to the annotated volume of Plato’s Republic that Darkwater had been reading before the alarm had called him away, he grabbed the bottle of brandy and, as if as an afterthought, a large glass.
He splashed the brandy liberally into the glass and handed it to the Duke, saying with unwonted force, and complete lack of deference, “Drink.”
“After all the champagne I had in there, my dear Gabriel?” Darkwater rasped. “I shall be sodden drunk.”
“Good,” Gabriel said.
Darkwater raised his eyebrows, but tossed back the brandy without further comment. Gabriel had kept the bottle of brandy uncapped, and now set the top down on the table. Possessing himself of Darkwater’s hand, he stretched the duke’s arm out, leaving his wound exposed and upturned.
“Must you?”
“If it’s a magical wound,” Gabriel said. “Magic won’t close it or disinfect it. We don’t need you being carried off in a fever. You take care not to alarm the house.”
“Have no fear,” Darkwater said, turning his head away.
Indeed, as Gabriel poured the caustic liquid along the open wound, then splashed a like amount into the chest wound, only a very faint complaint escaped His Grace’s mouth. This was probably because he had taken the care of muffling any possible screams with his good arm. And, as Gabriel returned the now half-empty bottle to its stand, only the red marks of Darkwater’s own teeth on his wrist showed what effort it had taken.
Gabriel said nothing as he set about threading the needle.
Only as he started to sew the ragged edges of the wounds together, did he speak. “I can,” he said. “Put a pain-reducing spell on it. As soon as I’m done. Not before, or it will retard the healing.”
Seraphim nodded, then spoke, in a bewildered tone. “It was a trap. There were, according to my….” He swallowed. “My foreseeing showed a boy and a girl, about six years of age, first coming into magical powers, and being condemned to death for them. I tried to… intercept… but there was a trap. And no children.”
“What world?” Gabriel asked.
“Oh, the pyramids,” Seraphim said and tried to shrug, before letting out a faint moan. “But I ended up in Betweener.”
The pyramids was, if Gabriel remembered, the world where they sacrificed children with magical powers to their barbarous blood-gods. He didn’t remember what the cartographers of their own world called it. Possibly something inspired like 435-65-A.
Most the Earths, spread out along the magical continuum of several universes, blocked from
each other only by the thinnest of energy veils, called themselves Earth. And most of them thought they were unique – the only Earth in the only universe, inhabited by the only humans. Avalon, their own Earth, knowing there were many, had given itself that name. Legend maintained that it was the oldest of the Earths, the one from which all the others had fractured away, when Merlin had been captured and imprisoned in an everlasting magical trap. The occluding of his world-encompassing power had caused magic itself to fracture and the Earth to copy itself over and over – most of the copies retaining no magic, and those that did retain it often undertaking to forbid it.
Britannia remained the most powerful magical nexus in Avalon, and its citizens the most skilled at magic. Britannia citizens were not allowed to travel to other worlds. King Richard XVI had confirmed the prohibition first instituted centuries ago, but disregarded for most of those centuries.
Even the kidnapping of the Princess Royal — the only child of the king — out of her cradle, when Seraphim himself was a nursling, though it was presumed to have been a plot from another world, hadn’t lifted the prohibition.
And because the cartographers’ designations didn’t suit his mind, Seraphim gave those worlds to which he travelled routinely in an attempt to save from death as many magicians and witches as possible, names of his own coining. There was Pyramids and Swamp – which was not one, but a fetid world mired in superstition and covered in vermin – Slum and Desert and – for a particularly noxious world – Madhouse.
Gabriel frowned. “”An ambush! They know of you then!”
“Yes. No. I don’t know. I suspect they don’t know who I am, or where I came from. I suspect they were simply trying to stop the rescues….”
“Enough to set a trap? And interfere with your foreseeing? Take care, Duke.”
Seraphim made a noncommittal sound in the back of his throat and, seeing that Gabriel had finished sewing his wounds, he sat up straighter. “Give me a shirt and a coat… the… green one,” he said.