Page 11 of The Queen’s Witch

The days dragged on. Mistress Prentiss came when she could to sit with Mother Redcap, so that I could gather herbs and roots and firewood. But on Beltane, May 1, the Dark One came to me in a dream, in the same form of dark mist He had taken during my ceremony. He laughed the same monstrous laugh. An image of Grandmother appeared as I had seen her the day she died, her body writhing in midair, her face distorted with pain, the white lappets of her cap twisting around her anguished face. And then came the agony of flames scorching her flesh until it turned black and peeled. The Dark One said one word, and that word echoed in my dream as the thunderclap had echoed during the ceremony: “Joan.” Another laugh, more flames, and I woke trembling, sweaty, crying out like a small child.

Did Grandmother’s torment actually look like this or like something else entirely, something even worse, unimaginable to mortals? There was no way to know. However it looked, felt, hurt her, it would happen on each of the four days that the Sisterhood had held sacred for thousands of years, long before the coming of Christianity: Beltane, Lughnasadh, Samhain, Imbolc.

I could not bear it.

I slept no more that night. I did not attend the Beltane celebrations in the village and on the hills.

A few weeks later, Mother Redcap lost her fight. Somewhere during first light, her familiar howled. The dog stood, howled again, and fell over dead. Mother Redcap, too, was gone.

At her request, made to Mistress Prentiss long ago, Mother Redcap was not buried in the churchyard. Village men carried her coffin through light rain to a small hill well above the mudflats and the tide. There they dug her grave. I did not meet the sympathetic glances of villagers; sympathy would not help me. That night I returned alone to Mother Redcap’s stone marker and buried her dog. Then I sat while the moon rose between a gap in the clouds, waiting for what I did not know. Whatever I’d hoped for did not occur.

The next day I tied into a blanket-bound bundle a few necessities, a little food, and my herbs and roots. Mother Redcap’s small store of money, perhaps left from her days as Blickling Hall midwife, I put into secret pockets sewn into my bodice and kirtle. I summoned Pipkin, pocketed him, and locked the door.

On the road out of Tydd Saint Stephen, I stopped Jack Maudit, the cobbler’s boy, and told him to tell Mistress Prentiss I was on my way to Norwich to stay for a while with unnamed kin. He nodded, more interested in a fawn glimpsed in bushes than in my message, but I knew he would convey it. I did not want Mistress Prentiss to worry, or send men to look for me.

Mark had been gone less than a month. Surely, I would have time enough before he returned from sea to find my Third and complete my ceremony. I would need a thrice-braided witch to officiate, but Grandmother always said the Sisterhood was everywhere. She had taught me the signs. And although I must use malefic magick to free Grandmother, it would be only once, and I was certain that I would not succumb to the Dark One. I was stronger than that. Mother Redcap had said that I was stronger than I knew.

But I did not know how arrogant I was, nor how ignorant, nor what unimaginable events lay ahead.

4

Salle

Despite intermittent rain and dulling grief, the first part of my trip was not difficult. The road to Norwich ran inland, two days’ walk, and days were long in mid-May. The wet weather, should it persist, did not bode well for harvest, but fields were nonetheless tilled, gardens planted, hopvines trailed to their poles. In the lanes and woods bloomed primrose, oxeye, yellowwort, bluebells. The first evening brought me to Blickling Hall.

The manor, a great pile of weathered and carved stone, seemed uninhabited. Whoever now owned it must be away. Here was where Mother Redcap had been sired by a knight now long dead, had been rescued from death by his kind sister, had attended the births of three generations of Boleyns, to whom she was bastard kin. And since Mother Redcap and Grandmother had been cousins, I, too, was distant kin to these unknown gentry. I did not like that. They would have disdained me, but not as much as I disdained them for their careless cruelty toward an innocent bastard babe.

Leaving the Hall, I followed the sight of a tall church tower, visible for miles above the flat farmland. It stood a distance from a tiny village, Salle, with no marks of Sisterhood on the few cottages. More rain threatened. Churches were typically sanctuaries, even to cunning folk. Still, mindful of Mark’s words about some places denying cunning folk burial in consecrated ground, I did not want to call attention to myself. So I watched until I was fairly sure that no Mass was in progress.

The Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul seemed far too large and grand for such a small village. It must serve Blickling Hall. Inside, I gawked at the elaborate roof carvings of angels, the brightly colored glass pictures in the windows, the carved, chiseled choir stalls. I had never seen such richness. Despite myself, I smiled at an etching of the Green Man, whom I had last seen in a costume worn by Master Couper, a cunning man, at last year’s Beltane.

Tombstones and brasses marked the families buried here: Luce, Ufford, Boleyn, Briggs. One brass depicted two figures side by side with a scroll between them. I could read, but not Latin. The names were in English: Geoffrey and Alice Boleyn. An inlay of tiny figures represented their nine children, one also named Geoffrey. Had one of these men sired Mother Redcap? I would never know.

I walked the length of the enormous nave and turned into a chapel in the north transept; a smaller space was always easier to set with a guard ward. Guard wards also enhanced hearing to warn of danger. I would know if anyone approached the chapel.

The moment I crossed the chapel threshold, Pipkin jumped from my pocket and ran for the nave. Sharply, I called him back, but he did not come. That was not permissible. I summoned him, and my familiar stopped and turned to face me. But he crept forward on trembling legs that seemed to barely support him, and the sound he made was not one ever made by mice.

It came then: the presentiment. It was not a vision—they never were—but a feeling of profound wrongness, of cold that was not wind nor ice, tightening my throat and creeping down my back. This presentiment felt very strong. Nor had I ever seen Pipkin so affected when he had been Grandmother’s familiar.

Never before had I been a cunning woman and an incomplete witch.

I could see no threat in the chapel, no person, no animal lurking in shadows, no snake nor poisonous spider. There was nothing, and the feeling of cold wrongness left me as soon as I left the north transept. Nonetheless, I snatched up my bundle and my familiar and left the Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul. I did not stop until I found a thicket of holly behind which I could sleep, and had circled it with a guard ward.

Nothing suggested itself as cause for that terrible unease. The date, May 19, was important to neither the Sisterhood nor the Church. If one of the dead buried there haunted the place on their death day, as sometimes happened, I could not see why he or she would be interested in me. It was a mystery, and I was too ignorant to resolve it.

But the rain held off, a warming spell kept me and Pipkin from chill, and my young body had tired from miles of walking. I slept, and this night I dreamed not of Grandmother nor the Dark One but of Mark’s body pressed close to me, his lips on mine.

I had no idea how truly ignorant I was. Mark had told me that England held varied landscapes, but he had little talent to paint pictures with words. Grandmother had told me that beyond our village lurked many dangers and evils, a vague warning fashioned to keep me safe at home. Mother Redcap had once said that the Sisterhood could wear silk as well as fustian, but I had not grasped what that meant. I thought well of myself because I could read and even write a little, prepare tisanes and nurse, sew a fine seam. I spoke well and kept myself cleaner than most. I could now cast cunning-woman spells. But in worldly knowledge, I was a babe.

On the Norwich road, I saw my first gallows. A body hung there, the eyes plucked out by crows, the flesh purple and rotting. A cunning woman with whom I spent one night, Mistress Mott, told me it was the corpse of a highway robber, forbidden to be cut down “even if anyone wished it.” The gallows were given wide berth from either fear or its terrible reek, although I saw some children throw stones at the body and run away, laughing. Mistress Mott, although not very talkative, nonetheless asked where I was bound. I said Hever, and she said it was far for a maid to walk alone and advised me to go back home. I thanked her for her concern.

So many children, women, men, on the road and in the small villages. I kept to myself, avoiding strangers, but not all cunning folk were as closemouthed as Mistress Mott. A spry, elderly cunning man who kept bees took me in for a night’s bed, and his wife gave me a good dinner and allowed a wash in the pond. Her housekeeping did not equal her hospitality; the straw pallet was infested with lice. I would later sleep wrapped in my blanket on the floor. But Master Geddyng liked to talk more than listen, and from him I learned not only about the state of his hives but also that there was agitation at court, because King Henry wished to put away Queen Katherine and marry a French princess.

Mistress Geddyng said, “Get away with ye. How would ye know what goes on at court?”

“Travelers at the inn. I can listen, woman.”

She snorted and gave me a wink.