Witchborn

by Nicholas Bowling

  ‘Right. And the dead go there?’

  ‘Yes. Go there and come from there.’

  Again, Solomon seemed to choose his words carefully. ‘So . . . is that where your mother is now?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Alyce had never thought of it like that. But it was hardly reassuring. If anything it made her sadder to imagine her mother’s spirit drifting through the darkness, forever out of reach. ‘But she never taught me how to summon the dead. Let alone how to speak with any specific person. I was too young.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Did your mother ever tell you how to do it?’ Her sudden rush of excitement died before she even finished the sentence. He was shaking his head.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Didn’t she even mention it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What did she teach you?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, sounding strangely prickly. ‘She didn’t teach me anything.’ He gestured to the letter. ‘This is all meaningless to me. Looks like you’ll have to go to Bankside after all.’ Alyce could feel him straining to move the conversation on to new ground, and she let the matter drop. ‘Come on, we’ll have to reseal it.’

  He got up from the bed in a state of agitation, and rubbed his forehead furiously, as though trying to physically push the worries from his mind with the palm of his hand.

  Alyce was confused. So was Solomon, it seemed – the boy was as eager as a puppy to explore the secret, strange, murky corners of her life, but as soon as he caught a glimpse of his own reflection in her story, he wanted to shut his eyes to the whole business.

  ‘I’m sorry if I’ve upset you . . .’ she said, trying to sound reasonable.

  ‘We’ll need a candle and sealing wax,’ said Solomon, ignoring her completely and heading for the door. ‘Mrs Thomson will be busy in the kitchen now, so I think we should be able to get into her study.’

  And without looking at her, he took off down the stairs. On the floors below, the inn was still empty and silent, and Solomon’s heavy footsteps thumped a solemn, irregular tattoo through every beam and floorboard.

  Alyce shook her head in bafflement, and slowly got up to follow him.

  Downstairs, they heard Mrs Thomson engaged in a ferocious shouting competition with Martha.

  ‘You think I’m blind, girl? These are filthier than when I gave them to you!’

  They glimpsed her shaking a fistful of dirty bedsheets in her right hand, all of them blackened with something that looked like soot.

  ‘Weren’t like that when I hung them up to dry,’ Martha protested. ‘Dogs must have got in and torn them down.’

  ‘Don’t care what happened, you’re washing them again!’

  And so it raged on. While Mrs Thomson discharged her volleys of indignation, Alyce and Solomon crept into the study at the back of the kitchen and found the sealing wax among her papers.

  ‘It’s not as good quality as the stuff your mother used,’ he said, pulling up a stool and hunching over a candle, ‘but it will do.’ He dripped a few blobs of Mrs Thomson’s wax on to the parchment, then warmed the underside of the original seal that he had detached with the needle, and pressed them together. He blew on it so the wax would cool. ‘There. Good as new.’

  Alyce took the letter from him and inspected the workmanship. It was almost impossible to tell that it had been opened.

  ‘Pickpocket, forger . . .’ she said, shaking her head in mock disappointment. ‘I’m starting to wonder if I should be keeping company with such a rascal.’

  ‘I’m starting to wonder that too,’ said Solomon. Alyce gave a half-hearted laugh, but was unsure of what he really meant. ‘I need a drink.’

  Without another word, he skirted around the desk and wandered out into the kitchen and beyond, as though he couldn’t quite face being in the same room as her any more. Alyce was left perched on a stool, wondering what on earth was going through the boy’s head.

  The door slammed behind him, and the gust blew a sheaf of Mrs Thomson’s parchment off the table and on to the floor. Alyce cursed under her breath and gathered the scattered pages, skimming over their contents as she tried to get them back into order. She stood up and laid them flat in the candlelight. It was soon clear that these were not the accounts of your average innkeeper.

  They were covered with lists of strange names with numbers next to them:

  1 goatweed

  1 creeping willow

  1 feverfew

  1 nightshade

  They were plants and herbs. Alyce’s mother had taught them to her. She hadn’t seen or heard them since she’d left home, and seeing the names again was like being reunited with old friends. A smile began to creep across her face, but was stopped short by the last item on the list. Nightshade? Wasn’t that a poison? Surely that wasn’t a special ingredient in one of Mrs Thomson’s pies?

  She was reading so intently that she didn’t hear the argument with Martha reaching its exhausted conclusion, and she only realized that Mrs Thomson had returned when she saw the two shadows of her feet in the crack of light under the door. She was still rearranging the pages when the innkeeper came barging in.

  Alyce stared guiltily into her broad, red face. It was difficult to tell whether she was angry or amused.

  ‘You can read, can you, child?’

  Alyce nodded.

  ‘That’s unusual. Never had a maid who could read. That Martha wouldn’t know her own name if it was written in front of her.’

  ‘My mother taught me.’

  ‘And you can read what’s written on those, can you?’

  Alyce paused, unsure if she should tell the truth or feign ignorance. ‘Well,’ she said, picking her words slowly and carefully, ‘I can read them, but I don’t know what they all do. Goatweed will settle the humours. Not sure about the willow, I’d need to see what type it is. Feverfew is for fevers, obviously – but my mother always called it featherfew.’

  Mrs Thomson’s face split into a wide grin, revealing all six of her remaining teeth.

  ‘Well! A proper young apothecary we have here!’

  ‘I’m sorry for prying, Mrs Thomson, I just haven’t seen these sorts of things since I left home.’

  ‘No need to apologize, my poppet!’ cried the innkeeper, sidling up alongside her in a strange, shuddering dance. ‘I might have a job for you. An important one.’ Suddenly the corners of her mouth sagged. ‘If, that is, you can promise you won’t break my poor old heart by running off the moment you get outside the inn.’

  Alyce’s chest suddenly felt hot and light. Maybe she would be able to get to Bankside after all.

  She bit her lip. ‘I promise,’ she said solemnly.

  ‘Very well then,’ said Mrs Thomson, a conspiratorial smile returning to her face. ‘As you know, I understand a little about herbs. And I do some small business with a mountebank. Foreign gentleman.’

  ‘A mountebank?’

  ‘A pedlar, of sorts. He sells remedies. Cure-alls. “Elixirs”, he calls them. But he don’t sell to me, he buys. Gets all his ingredients from me. He mixes them up and does his pretty shows and sells them on. Makes me a good few shillings, here and there. Nothing wrong with that, is there? Just making good use of what God’s given us out of the earth.’

  Alyce shook her head.

  ‘Now – I need someone to deliver these herbs and roots and what have you. I been using Martha recently, but she don’t know what it is she’s handing over to him. She can’t read the labels and she’s always forgetting what I told her. You’d be just right for the job, though. And you could help me prepare the ingredients. And –’ she held up a finger in Alyce’s face to prevent her interrupting – ‘come to think of it, the mountebank himself was saying he wanted a girl to help him with his shows. Reward you right handsomely, he would. What do you say?’

  Alyce’s thoughts ran and jumped too quickly for her to keep up. The dangers of going about the city in daylight, her anxieties about helping this foreign gentleman with his ‘shows’
– they were all overtaken by the hope of reaching John Dee, and deciphering the letter.

  ‘Of course,’ she blurted. ‘I mean, if you think it’s right for me.’

  ‘You look well enough now, I think. And the signor, the mountebank, he’ll look after you. He’s a comely gentleman too,’ she said, elbowing Alyce in the ribs, more painfully than she probably intended too. ‘Better watch Solomon don’t get jealous!’

  To her surprise, Alyce felt the blood rise in her cheeks – and the more she blushed, the more foolish she felt, and the more fiercely her face burned. Mrs Thomson laughed.

  ‘Don’t you worry, your secret’s safe.’

  ‘We don’t have a secret, Mrs Thomson.’

  The innkeeper simply winked. ‘Something about him though, isn’t there?’

  ‘Yes, you can definitely say that much. I think he is . . . obscure.’ She pictured him drinking alone in the common room outside. ‘Did you say you were friends with his mother?’

  ‘Friends. Associates. A right canny herbalist his mama was. Solomon used to come with her when she visited. But then – well, you know the rest. Her husband didn’t take too kindly to her interests.’

  ‘Because she was a witch?’

  ‘Alyce! You know my thoughts on that word. Don’t let me hear you say it out loud again.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I just want to know a little more about her. About Solomon.’

  ‘Well, that’s for him to tell you, isn’t it? Let’s not go talking behind his back. Probably said too much already, haven’t I.’

  Alyce looked at her feet, chastened.

  ‘Now,’ said Mrs Thomson, ‘Signor Vitali – that’s his name, the mountebank. You go and talk to Martha, and she’ll tell you where he lives. I’ll send him a letter first thing tomorrow morning and let him know you’re coming.’

  ‘When will he want me to visit him?’

  ‘Don’t rightly know, my love. A week. Maybe a month. I made him a delivery in the New Year, so he might not need any ingredients for a little while.’

  Another month? Alyce wasn’t sure she could spend that long as Mrs Thomson’s prisoner. Regardless of finding John Dee, what if those men and women who were looking for her traced her to The Swan? Even if they had to go door to door through the whole of London, it would probably take them less than a month to discover her new hiding place.

  ‘Martha’s out there doing her washing. Go ask her about him. I’ll pen this letter to the signor now.’

  Mrs Thomson shoved Alyce off the stool with her gigantic backside, nearly sending her sprawling on the floor. Alyce straightened up, checked that the letter to John Dee was unbent and unbroken in her pocket, and left the innkeeper scratching away with her quill.

  The kitchen was quiet, and Solomon, drinking by himself somewhere out front, was nowhere to be seen. She stuck her head out into the yard at the rear of the inn. Martha had disappeared too, the bundle of grubby bedsheets abandoned next to her washing tub. The sky was a flat, featureless grey, the late afternoon still and dead.

  It was strange. Martha had a habit of abandoning her chores after an argument with Mrs Thomson, but usually there was nothing quiet about her sulkiness. She would stomp around the bedrooms or the kitchen, sighing and snorting, noisily moving the pots and pans for no real reason, just so everybody knew how hard done by she felt. But after her most recent altercation, she seemed to have vanished into thin air.

  ‘Shoo! Get out of here!’

  The maid’s voice suddenly echoed out of an alley that joined the inn yard to the main street. Alyce heard scuffling, punctuated every so often by a squawking that definitely wasn’t human. There was something about the sound that clutched at her heart and made her feel inexplicably sad.

  ‘Go on! Get out of it! Bet you’re the one that’s been dirtying my washing and all!’

  Alyce came around the corner to see Martha armed with a broom handle, taking broad swipes at a huge black bird a few feet in front of her. Every time the wood cracked against the ground the bird croaked, sounding not so much aggressive as simply irritated. It flapped in the dust from one side of the alley to the other, and then up to the gables, where it perched and watched them both.

  As Alyce approached Martha’s shoulder, the bird cocked its head and flew back down to the ground. They stared at each other. It was a raven, the biggest and most dishevelled of its kind, feathers sticking out of its head and wings at all angles. As it pointed its beak at her, she saw that one of its eyes was black and the other milky white.

  And that was when she knew that she had met the raven before. She had seen it a hundred times at her mother’s cottage, and now it was here, a visitor from a life she no longer led. The odd, melancholy feeling tightened its grip on her chest.

  In that same moment, Martha brought the broom down right on top of the black bundle of feathers.

  ‘No! Martha!’

  Alyce reached out to grab her arm, but it was too late. The raven cawed, hopped backwards in a daze, and then flew off over the roof of the inn.

  ‘What was that for?’ huffed the maid, wrestling her arm out of Alyce’s grip and whirling round to face her. ‘I should’ve broken its poxy neck! D’you know how much extra washing I’ve had to do because of that bird?’

  But Alyce could barely hear her. The numbness in her heart had spread to her head, and now she felt a rushing, bottomless sadness. All she could think of was her mother, the dam broken by the sight of the raven, the memories flooding over her.

  She stumbled out of the alleyway and back to the kitchen. The feeling that she was falling gave way to sickness, then to lightness, then to a strange vibrating sensation that rippled out from her belly to the ends of her fingers and toes. Her vision was going dark around the edges. Something was changing, inside and outside of her body.

  Mrs Thomson heard her crash through the door and emerged from her study looking confused.

  ‘Alyce? What is it? Lord, you look pale! Has that Martha been making sport of you again?’

  Alyce ignored her and lurched though the kitchen to the stairs, desperate to get back to her room. She needed her mommet.

  What’s happening to me?

  There was a roaring in her ears now, a distant, churning storm, like thousands of whispering voices. They were the sounds of the dead, she knew, sounds that she had last heard when she had been at home, her real home. But this was different. Everything she looked at seemed clothed in shadow now, and yet the shadows themselves had their own weird vividness. The darkness glowed.

  She tripped on the first step, and suddenly Solomon was beside her, trying and failing to get her upright again.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, fear showing plainly on his face, ‘back to your room. They can’t see you like this.’

  Like what?

  The staircase shook. Everywhere she looked, black luminescence burned her eyes. Somewhere in the back of her mind she heard the echo of Mrs Thomson’s shouts, and the sounds of shattering glass and splintering wood. One of the maids screamed.

  She wept for her dead mother, and it seemed that with every sob that escaped her, another piece of The Swan was torn to pieces.

  HOPKINS

  ‘You need to tidy this place up a bit,’ said Hopkins, nudging a pile of books out of the way with his foot and watching it topple over.

  The laboratory was a good deal smaller than he had been expecting, tucked into the attic of the Doctor’s house at Mortlake. Every wall was lined with hundreds of books, the light from his oil lamp glittering on their waxy spines, their titles inlaid in Latin and Greek and other, stranger languages. In the centre of the room, scattered across several tables, were various scientific instruments – sextants, astrolabes, compasses, eye-glasses – and a range of surgical tools, now rusting, including forceps, scalpels and saws of several sizes.

  The air was sour and vinegary, and underneath it was an ever-present smell of spoiled meat.

  Hopkins picked up a bottle of yellowish liquid, containing something t
hat might have been part of a body. Animal or human, he wasn’t sure.

  ‘Put that down,’ said the Doctor, his great greying beard trembling. His robes billowed as he strode over, snatched the bottle from Hopkins’ fingers and laid it gently back on the shelf with the others. ‘Given the nature of our agreement, you might be a little more respectful.’ He stacked the fallen books back on top of each other.

  Hopkins bowed, and his wound ached when he did. ‘A thousand apologies, Doctor,’ he said, not even trying to sound sincere. ‘I have nothing but the highest esteem for you and your work.’

  ‘Ha!’ the Doctor snorted. He returned to the far end of the laboratory, where there was a cage. He began feeding it’s inhabitant something through the bars. ‘There is no need to sound bitter, Hopkins. You are simply serving your punishment for the persecution you inflicted on our kind.’

  ‘Of course. Perfectly fair.’

  ‘Perhaps, now you are a little more enlightened, you are starting to see sense. Perhaps you can see how foolish you were in your mission to destroy us.’ The cage shuddered, and for a moment the Doctor withdrew his fingers from between the bars, and looked up as though enraptured by some message from the heavens. ‘You should consider it a very great honour to be working for us. Do you have any idea how profound a thing Her Majesty is trying to achieve? How noble?’

  ‘I assure you I am quite humbled,’ said Hopkins, eyeing up any number of sharp implements within arm’s reach. He curled and uncurled his fingers. Calm yourself, John Hopkins. Endure. Obey. All of this will end. The witch queen promised.

  ‘Of course, you don’t understand,’ said the Doctor, laughing to himself. ‘You are a hired thug. Nothing more.’

  Hopkins ground his teeth. There was a time when he would have executed the man on the spot. Perhaps given him the semblance of a trial, but it would always have ended in the stake and the roaring fire and the cheering crowds. But now…

  He found himself staring at the bloodied workbench, trying to remember who he had once been. When he looked up, the Doctor was still fussing around the laboratory, muttering to himself. Hopkins watched him. Insufferable windbag. Sometimes he thought keeping company with this man was worse than anything the crones had inflicted upon him.