Page 12 of The Queen’s Witch

He said, “Think, woman. The king must have an heir. All he has now be that girl.”

“Keep a respectful tongue in yer head! ‘That girl’ be the Princess Mary. And Queen Katherine be as good a wife as ever lived.”

“Ah, ye be ignorant as a sow. And ye, girl—where be ye bound?”

“London.” I must pass through London, and I did not want to say more. Something about Master Geddyng felt wrong, although I could tell that he had not lied about anything.

“South or north of the Thames?”

“South.”

“Why?”

“I seek a relative.”

“Who?”

I said nothing, and Mistress Geddyng snapped, “Leave the girl alone, ye old fool. Her family be none of yer affair. Elyn”—the name I used on my travels—“if ye go south of London, ye must cross the Thames. Have ye a penny for the ferryman?”

“I do,” I said, and noted that something unpleasant gleamed in the old man’s rheumy eyes.

The fire had died to ash when, in the middle of the night, I felt a hand on my bodice. The room was completely dark, the shutters closed tight. I tried to sit up but could not move. He had spelled me.

Fury tore through me. This lecherous old man . . . Whether he sought my breasts or my purse, he was not going to get them. His small magick had been strong enough to break through my guard ward and bind me to immobility while I slept, but he could not equal my power when awake. I spoke the spell Grandmother had taught me if a man ever assaulted me, and the old wanton cried out and stumbled backward in the darkness. Before either he or I could do more, a light appeared at the bedroom door. Mistress Geddyng rushed forward with a candle in one hand and an iron bedwarmer in the other. She hit her husband with the bedwarmer, and he cried out again and fell to his knees.

“What did I tell ye, Tom?” she screamed. “What ails ye? I swear, ye made a pact with the devil!”

He had not. On his knees, sobbing piteously, he was a pathetic codger who talked too much and thought too little. I picked up my blanket and bundle.

“Ye need not go, Elyn,” Mistress Geddyng said, grabbing her husband by his hairy ear. “This one will not bother ye the rest of the night.”

“Ow!” he said as she hoisted him by his ear and kicked him toward the bedroom.

“Thank you,” I said, all anger lost in a terrible desire to laugh. Nonetheless, after the bedroom door closed on whatever she would do to him, or he to her, I slipped out of the cottage, closing the door hard enough that whoever was left upright would know to bar it again.

I spent the rest of the night beneath a hedgerow. This was my first encounter with cunning folk who did not honor the bond among us. I could not even consider it an alliance with malefic magick; it was merely ordinary greed. Or lust. Or corruption of the cunning-folk oath to bring aid and solace. I would remember the lesson.

From other cunning folk, or from villagers at the food markets, I learned more. Before I left Norfolk, I was advised by a motherly woman to dress like a boy on the road. This seemed good advice. I sat by her hearth fashioning my spare kirtle into breeches, and sewed a cap to hide my hair. Over my bodice I put the plain fustian tunic she gave me. Her kindness warmed me, a balance to Master Geddyng’s attempts at robbery.

During my journey to Hever, I slept variously in the cottages of cunning folk, under hedges that I set with a guard ward, occasionally in an abbey or monastery that sheltered travelers as Christian duty. The summer was wet, and the muddy roads varied from rutted and muddy ox tracks to rain-slicked dirt, hard-packed as stone. Cunning folk or kind village women directed me toward London—that was all I now told anyone, so no one else could ask about coin to cross the Thames. I kept to roads that avoided cities. Always and everywhere, I saw much that was new to me.

Trees! So many trees, and so tall in the rich soil. Many planted together to bear fruit: “orchards.” We had no lush orchards in the rocky soil and salty winds of Tydd Saint Stephen. But along my journey, roadsides burst with cherry blossoms, gillyflowers, strawberries in a profusion not found close to the sea. Farmers liming, marling, or manuring fields. Women busy in kitchen gardens. Here was a rich bounty unknown on the mudflats or bogs.

I heard again that King Henry wished to put aside the queen and marry a princess who could give him an heir.

I learned that Hever lay twenty or thirty miles southeast of London.

And I heard that the sweating sickness had again come to England and I should not go into the city, where people were dying so fast that bodies could not be collected and buried. The king and queen had left court for sweeter air.

The last time the Sweat had come to Tydd Saint Stephen was ten years ago, when I was a child. I remembered Grandmother using her tisanes and spells to alleviate pain, although no spell, even from a thrice-braided witch, could cure the illness. She had kept me apart from the rest of the village, even from herself as best as she could, until the disease departed at summer’s end. She taught me what to do if she herself should fall ill. She did not, and neither did I. “You have the sturdiness of an ox,” Mark had once said, not one of his prettier compliments.

As I walked south, Pipkin sometimes in my pocket and sometimes scampering through roadside foliage in search of something good to eat, I saw fewer travelers and more villages with deserted streets and barred shops. To eat, I spent a few of Mother Redcap’s precious coins, and when the store ran low, I stole from gardens at night. I grew leaner, browner from the sun, dirtier.

I crossed the Thames at Mucking, which cost me tuppence for the ferryman because there the estuary was so wide. By the time I reached Hever, it was nearly midsummer night. In the warm afternoon light, the village looked like most others in this rich country, with neat cottages, small signs naming a chandler, a cooper, a smith. A river meandered by the village, and a track led east to a castle, its tower and battlements visible above the trees.

I followed the river into the trees, set a guard ward, stripped, and bathed. Dressed again in my kirtle, the tunic removed from over my bodice and the boy’s cap gone from my head, I walked back to the village and looked for signs of the Sisterhood. There were none.

A cottage door was flung open, and a young girl called to me, “Be ye the nurse from Coulthurst? Mistress Chermound’s sister?”