Power of Darkness

by Doris Sutcliffe Adams

  Hélie, though his senses reeled and he was trembling uncontrollably with shock, was first to grasp reality. He seized Gino by the shoulder and shook him sharply, and scrambled clumsily to his feet, hauling his servant up bodily. He prodded the stranger forcefully with his foot, and he heaved himself up and stood like a foundered horse, catching his breath in long, irregular gulps. Hélie drew his free hand across his brow, and found it wet with cold sweat. He pushed the big fellow, dragged at Gino, jerked his head imperatively, and led them without a word across the bailey in a slightly different direction from that taken by the women.

  None spoke until they were clear of the ruin and among the trees, where they halted to draw free breath as thankfully as though they had come up from drowning in deep water. The reaction from great fear was upon them all; Hélie was still trembling, still chilled to the blood in his heart, and knew that the others must be as weak and spent as himself.

  ‘The Devil—we have seen the Devil himself!’ Gino almost whimpered. ‘The Devil walking abroad! How have we seen that and lived?’

  ‘By God’s own grace,’ Hélie said soberly, and crossed himself again.

  ‘Come away, my lord! It is ill to stay! Truly the ground his foot has trodden is accursed!’ Gino pleaded.

  In pity Hélie moved on. He had never known Gino reduced to such a state of abject terror, and thought no worse of him for that; no human odds had ever daunted the man he had once seen tackle a fully-armed knight with no more than a knife in his hand.

  Bearing further left than he had intended, instead of emerging from the trees immediately above the manor-house, Hélie found himself on the steep wooded slope that fell from the ruins of Reginald de Warby’s castle to the river that looped about the ridge’s foot. Legend asserted that the river had provided that notorious malefactor with another convenience beside that of a natural moat, and Hélie found himself shivering again as he looked down into its smooth swift curve shining between the trees. He corrected his error and swung right. The moon was well up now, and gave clear sight to their accustomed eyes.

  'Those women are proven witches, in Hell's service,’ said the tall stranger abruptly as they slanted down-hill.

  'Of course. Why?' Hélie answered curiously.

  ‘You are a witness whose testimony cannot be impeached, my lord.’

  Hélie turned his head to stare at him, but the man had contrived to place himself between him and the moon, so that he was a featureless black bulk with formidable shoulders and a shock-head of rough curls. Yet there was something elusively familiar about the way that head was proudly set on the strong neck, and the erect easy carriage of those shoulders. 'Who are you?' he demanded.

  'My name is Stephen.’

  'I know you—we have met before—'

  'No, Lord Hélie. But we shall meet again.’

  With that he was gone. One moment he was tramping steadily at Hélie's heels; he stepped sideways, and the woods swallowed him without sign or sound. Hélie halted, and peered about, but saw only the black and grey of tree-trunks and undergrowth dappled with white moonshine. He called, but had no answer, not even a rustle of movement among the bushes. The wind whispered in the tree-tops, somewhere an owl hooted, but the tall stranger had vanished. Hélie swore softly, shrugged, and started again down the slope. Gino kept close to his back and glanced apprehensively about him. Hélie had no blame for him; the same creeping expectancy tingled between his shoulder-blades until they were clear of the woods' ambush, and thankfully dropped down over the waste and the stubble-fields to the back of the manor-house enclosure.

  An active man might enter or leave Warby at his pleasure after dark, for many parts of its wall could not be overlooked by the sentinel on the gatehouse because of intervening buildings, even if he were awake and watchful. They did not even need a notched pole. A jump and a heave and a scramble, and they were in the bailey, and Gino was brushing down his master's tunic to remove betraying traces of their activities. A horse stamped and snorted in the stables, and a dog woke and whined. Hélie filled his chest with a great breath, and the familiar sounds and scents became newly real to him. The hideous vision in the ruins receded into nightmare that would haunt him, but reality was not in it. Human creatures did not eavesdrop on Satan himself; Hélie de Trevaine was neither saint nor sinner enough that the Lord of Hell should honour him with sight of his person.

  The curtains that partitioned the bower were all drawn, and only a dim lantern gave him light to pick a way between the pallets of the household knights to the corner set aside for guests. Here moonlight fell through a narrow window across the great bed that Fulbert of Falaise shared with the Collingford weasels. As the last comer, Hélie had been accommodated with a pallet on the floor. The mercenary was lying on his side, turned away from his bed-fellows. As Hélie unbuckled his belt his black head lifted, his teeth gleamed, and his lazy voice murmured, ‘Was the hunting good, lord night-owl?'

  ‘I seek bigger game than mice,' he retorted, hauling his tunic over his head and flinging it with unnecessary vigour over the perch by his bedside. Fulbert chuckled almost soundlessly and lay back. Eustace de Collingford, in the middle, moved sleepily; his son never stirred. Hélie regarded them all suspiciously as he stripped off the rest of his clothes, and before he lay down he privily slipped his dagger from its sheath and rather shamefacedly thrust it under his pillow. He had expected to spend most of the night pondering his various problems, but sleep sprang upon him almost as he dragged the sheet over himself.

  He was up and out by first light. Speech with Durande was not to be had; she was sequestered behind curtains among the women and closely guarded. He had no wish to encounter Hermeline. He collected a hunk of bread and a horn of ale on his way through the hall, where the servants were bustling at their work's start, and strolled munching into the bailey. He had no idea how to set about his task of proving Durande innocent, but a beginning might be made with the woman Mabille who last night had trysted with the Devil.

  Some of last night's horror prickled his skin as he reached her door, and when a spatter of dew dripped coldly from the thatch upon his head he leaped like a spurred horse. He set his teeth, thrust back the door and walked in.

  Grey daylight sprang ahead of him upon the woman crouched by the smouldering fire, her head on her updrawn knees, and past her to the small shrouded shape upon the bed. She lifted her face and peered dully at him through disordered brown hair. She was no longer the boldly handsome creature who had held Robert of Warby's errant regard, but a draggled grief-worn wretch, ten years older in a night. Unexpected pity for her stabbed Hélie, trafficker with Hell though she was. She blinked at him and rose heavily to her feet, brushing the hair from her swollen eyes with the back of a grimy hand.

  Stupid with misery, she stared at him between surprise and resentment, her hand lifting to her breast. Then faint interest seemed to kindle in her; her ravaged face lighted a little, and she tried to straighten her crumpled attire and smooth back her uncombed hair, in a sorry attempt to engage his attention. Then a closer look at his hard young face made apparent her error, and she recoiled.

  ‘What—what do you want?’ she demanded, forgetting to entitle him.

  ‘What are you practising against Lady Durande?' he asked harshly.

  She backed further, her hand lifting again to her breast. His brows twitched together. He leaped at her, driving her against the carved bed-foot and pinning her there. She opened her mouth to scream, and he clapped a big hand across it. She clawed futilely at him, twisting and writhing, and he forced her head back and thrust his hand inside her bodice. The cloth ripped. She fought like a mad thing, wrenching and straining, beating at his head and arms, but between her soft breasts his groping fingers encountered something hard and closed firmly upon it. He loosed her and stepped back in revulsion.

  She leaned panting against the bed-post, his hand-print scarlet across her white face, fury and hatred turning it to a mask of livid malevolence. She opened her mouth
and sucked in a deep breath that lifted her breasts under the torn bodice.

  ‘Cry rape if you will,’ he said grimly. ‘It will advantage you nothing when I cry poison.'

  At that she covered her mouth with her hands and stood as if frozen to the bed-post, while Hélie examined his trove. It was a tiny jar of glazed earthenware, tightly covered with stretched bladder and tied with waxed thread. It contained a sticky dark mass smelling unpleasantly like mice. Hélie wrinkled his nose in disgust.

  'It—it is not—' she began hoarsely.

  'You will swallow it to prove it no poison?' he demanded mercilessly.

  'No—' The frightened whisper cracked into silence.

  'Poison it is. You had it from the witch in the village to kill Lady Durande.'

  She stood staring at him with her mouth twisted awry, her clenched hands raised to her bared teeth, her body strained against the solid wood.

  'What will you say to the King's Justices?'

  'She poisoned my lord and my son!' spat Mabille, suddenly recovering the force of her venom.

  'Fool, she could not have done. One of his drinking companions poisoned Robert's wine.'

  'A lie! A lie! And what of my son—my little son?' She threw out an arm wildly towards the small stiff body on the bed.

  'You killed your son yourself, when you bred him to insolence and disobedience.'

  It was a brutal stroke against a bereaved mother, and one he loathed using, but it beat through hatred and vindictiveness to her understanding as no reasoning could have done. Her face crumpled, and she turned from him with a low wail, fell to her knees beside the bed, buried her face in the embroidered coverlid and wept despairingly.

  Hélie waited a moment, throttling his pity. He should have felt none; she had used her bold comeliness and her influence over Robert callously and arrogantly; she had borne a son in Robert's image and bred him to Robert's worst faults; she had bought vengeance of the Foul Fiend himself. He remembered the monstrous goat-headed horror clopping out of darkness on cloven hooves, and this woman's willing obeisance to Hell's power, and then he could forget that she had lost all she loved and was desolate. He stood over her grimly.

  ‘Up! Will the Devil you serve save your neck before the King's Justices?'

  She crouched at his feet, gaping up at him over her shoulder, her face grey and twitching as she looked from his menacing lion's eyes to the little jar in his hand and found naught to comfort her in either. There was no contrition in her; only her fear was stronger than her hate. She whimpered a little, but made no answer; there was none she could make.

  He got briskly to his point, trusting that she had not appreciated his betrayal of over-much knowledge. Her wits seemed addled by terror.

  ‘During his last days Robert learned a secret that one of his company poisoned him to keep. You knew his mind. What did he tell you?'

  She whimpered again. ‘Nothing! Nothing! He told me nothing!'

  ‘Robert never kept a still tongue in his life! Whom did he set in fear of him?' He held up the jar in menace.

  ‘He told me nothing! He was to marry her,’ she said sullenly. ‘All that week and more he never came near me.'

  The genuine ring of jealous resentment was in her voice, and Hélie recognized the truth when he heard it. She did not know. Frowning, he looked down at her for a long moment. Then he thrust the jar of poison into the purse at his belt, turned abruptly and stalked forth into the clean sunlight. At the door he checked to glance over his shoulder, and then regretted it; the malignant hatred in her gaze struck him like a blow.

  6

  ONE door had slammed in Hélie's face, and he had but one left to try. He had anticipated difficulty in escaping unremarked from the company that filled Warby, but it proved simple. After Mass there were two burials, and those who did not reverently attend the funeral of the child Roger were eager to witness the disposal of Fulbert's sergeant. As a murderer killed unshriven in the very attempt he was thrust without ceremony or prayer into a hole on the unconsecrated northern side of the churchyard, along with gallows'-meat, suicides and unbaptized infants. Hélie withdrew unnoticed from these attractions with Gino. He turned aside briefly to the church porch to sign himself with holy water as a necessary precaution against the Devil's stratagems, and grimly advanced into that peril.

  They circled round the thicket, that in daylight gave the appearance of deliberate planting, so perfectly did it conceal the cottage, so dense was the tangle of elder, hawthorn, hazel and holly. The sow, lank and mud-crusted, with a litter of shrill piglets at foot, was rooting energetically on its edge. She squealed and gnashed viciously at them, her bristles rising along her ridged back. Fowls flapped away squawking resentment, and even the hives by the crazy fence seemed to buzz malevolence. The cottage crouched at the garden's end. It had been better built than most, on footings of rough stone, but the frame had warped, the cracked wattle and daub had seen no whitewash for a generation, and the sagging thatch was black with age and green with moss and sprouted weeds. They trod along the path between the usual beds of cabbages, leeks, beans and peas, but the greater part of the garden patch was a disorderly tangle of green. There were the familiar kitchen herbs and common simples; he recognized also spikes of seeding foxglove, blue monkshood, rue and henbane among the profusion of others unknown to him, but no dwale. A tall yew grew near the door.

  Gino, his narrow dark face rigid so that no stranger would guess that he had to force his flinching limbs to obedience, stepped past Hélie to the partly-open door. ‘Ho, within there!' he said loudly, and smote it open. Hand on dagger-haft, he stood aside for Hélie to precede him. No answer came from the gloom. He crossed himself, while Hélie, the hairs on his nape prickling, his heart pounding, stooped his tall head to the worm-eaten lintel and entered, his hair brushing dryly against something hanging from the rafters.

  The reek took him by the throat. Over the normal foundation of unwashed peasant, rotting rushes, rancid tallow and wood-smoke lay the pungency of drying herbs, a stink of foul cookery, a fainter stench of decaying flesh. A smouldering fire filled the hut with lazy smoke, and for a moment he could see nothing but its dull red glow. Then beyond it he discerned a white blur floating waist-high and moveless. Gino cursed in crackling Italian and flung the door back so that the hut groaned. Hélie's eyes adjusted themselves to the lessened murk, and he saw.

  The witch sat immobile, watching him; hugely corpulent in black gown and kerchief, her broad white face shining moon-like in the gloom. An iron cauldron hung over the smoky fire, a nauseous brew bubbling thickly in it. Indistinct dark shapes loomed in the corners, dangled from the rafters, hung upon the walls. His gaze flicked uneasily over them and returned to the woman. She squatted unstirring like a vast toad, her hands hidden in her lap, her pale eyes intent on his face. He stood in the light from the doorway as though smitten with palsy.

  ‘Greetings, Lord Hélie de Trevaine,' she said in good French.

  Her voice was high and thin, and pierced like a dagger.

  Hélie flinched. She had never encountered him. Fear of her power cast a net of darkness over his mind. Then his robust common-sense rescued him. Even if she, unlike every other peasant in Warby, had never watched him ride by, he could not be mistaken from the most perfunctory description. No man in the county could match his bronze-gold tan, darker than his tawny hair, that England's sun could never have burned on him.

  ‘Greetings,' he said evenly. He would not invoke God's protection on this house. ‘You peddle spells and potions?'

  She considered him with unwinking eyes. ‘I sell spells for brats teething, sore-eyed, with fits or worms in the belly. Spells to bring a woman to your bed or send her from it. Spells to make a eunuch of a husband, or a stallion of a lover. Spells to open a womb to conception, and spells to destroy the fruit of it,’ she recited. Her pale eyes surveyed him from tousled hair to soft boots, full of bright malice. ‘Which need is yours, young lord?'

  ‘None,’ Hélie answered h
arshly. He wondered how under Heaven he was to extract information from this flinty intransigence, with no shadow of authority behind him. Anger and loathing filled him, yet fear ran cold fingers down his spine. She sat immobile, arrogantly sure of her immunity from justice, and he furiously repudiated any idea of bribing or cajoling her.

  The witch watched him through the drifting steam, and then suggested blandly, ‘You live chaste, Lord Hélie. You lack the means to pleasure a leman? I have a potent remedy, compounded of a black ram's—'

  He took a swift step forward and towered over her in the fire-smoke, his eyes ablaze and his mouth tight. She broke off and giggled high and mirthlessly, her vast breasts shaking to strain the gown's taut cloth. Her upper lip lifted in a grin that displayed three depending yellow snags of teeth.

  ‘You peddle death?' Hélie accused very quietly.

  The hideous laughter stilled. For the space of a long breath she stared at him, and silence gripped the hut, so that the faint whine of the damp fuel beat in Hélie's ears. The black viscous mass in the cauldron rolled slowly, and a bubble burst with a sticky plop that made him start.

  ‘Is not your sword-arm sure enough, valiant lordling?' the witch mocked him. ‘Death is not cheap.'

  ‘Not when you set its price, I warrant,' he said grimly, holding fast to his temper. His mouth was dry and his shirt clung clammily to his back, but his fear was yielding to disgust and contempt. ‘God's Justice, and the Warbys left you unhung!'

  ‘Maybe they had their reason.'

  She was still grinning at him with those yellow snags of teeth, secure in her evil and her dark power. He fiercely restrained the impulse to cross himself, that would have betrayed his fear. Suddenly all his nature revolted against the oppressive gloom and stink of this hovel. He jerked his head at his silent body-servant in the doorway, and gestured to the shuttered window opposite.