Page 72 of The Queen’s Witch

Bredham Abbey

Cautiously I hopped into each deserted room. Nothing dangerous here, only rats and mice. In the hall where I had first met Cecily, I spelled myself and once more became a woman, dressed in the clothes in which I had left Easthampstead, and ravenously hungry.

Revulsion swept over me. Except for the brief pleasure of speed, I had not liked taking the form of a hare. Perhaps other Sisters enjoyed it, including Joan before a hunter’s arrow killed her, but perhaps not. There was no one to ask.

The expenditure of power had cost me much. Glad of the food in my pocket, I ate and fed Pipkin, then set a ward on the cold and crumbling abbey before I slept. When hunger woke me again, the late October light was fading. I set out for the village to buy bread before the bakehouse closed.

“So ye came back,” the baker’s wife said.

“No. I merely travel through, on my way north. Have you bread you can sell me? And perhaps cheese?”

“Aye, I can.”

She was, I knew, a sociable woman who needed little urging to gossip. I said, “Have you seen my cousin, Mistress Snayth, of late?”

“No, and I hope not to. Such a disagreeable woman! Ye be naught like her.”

You have no notion. I filled my mouth with the bread. Though not fresh, it still tasted wonderful.

She watched me gobble the loaf. “Mistress Snayth be still in Bredham, worse luck! So many be gone, but not her. She sends a boy to buy my bread.”

I tried to look only mildly interested, though my heart thudded against my ribs. “Who has gone from Bredham?”

The baker’s wife set both elbows on the table. “All be gone from the abbey! The king’s men came and said they must go. Me, I always found the abbess be a courteous and godly woman. But the inspectors of my lord Cromwell said they be immoral, with sinful goings-on. The abbess went north. She hired Farmer Jensen and his wagon to take her and one of the nuns to Lincolnshire. I know not what became of the others.”

“Do you remember the name of the place where the abbess was taken?”

She pursed her lips and wrinkled her brow. “Let me think on it . . . Tamby . . . Tamford . . . no, Talford Abbey! Ye lived here at our abbey for a while, did ye not?”

“Yes. But not as a religious.”

“I thought not.” Her eyes were sharp with curiosity, so I told her my current set of lies: I had come to Bredham to help my feeble cousin, had found her so disagreeable that I left, had stayed at the abbey because the abbess had written letters to try to locate my only kin, an older brother. That had failed, and I had left with Cromwell’s men to search for him. I found that he was dead, but only recently had I discovered that he left a son and daughter in the North, where I was now bound.

The baker’s wife listened with rapt attention. “Ye poor thing, so young to be wandering like that! Ye can stay here tonight, if ye wish.”

I did not refuse, although I was making deceptive use of her kindhearted credulity. I slept in the warm bakehouse. In the morning, she brought me a bundle of provisions for my journey. It reminded me that the world could hold simple, good-hearted people such as I seldom found at court.

When I had gone far enough along the north road, I walked into the forest and turned back to Bredham Abbey. I set spells for the wavering white mists that had once frightened away Sister Joan. Now that I was thrice braided, I had the power to create mists that would not disappear at the first loud noise. These would last several days, and no one from the village would dare enter a haunted abbey whose bell tower had toppled so mysteriously. Here be demons.

As there would be, soon.

Frost on the morning of Samhain, riming everything with white, yet I was not cold. It was not my warming spell that kept off the chill, nor my small fire in the hearth of what had been Abbess Cecily’s closet. I was warmed by anticipation, impatience, fury. Grandmother, kindest and sweetest of women, and what her own daughter did . . . flesh scorched and burning, cries of agony and fear . . . and the sacred days when Joan could inflict such monstrous torture went on for eternity, like the Otherworld itself. By afternoon of Samhain, the fire within me dwarfed the meager flame on the hearth.

The night came clear, lit by a quarter moon, and bitter cold. Having no candles, I prepared the summoning by firelight, but not in the abbess’s closet. It seemed, somehow, wrong to conduct malefic magick in the intimate chamber of she who had been so kind to me. In a chamber lit by both a hearth fire and pale moonlight through open shutters, I called Pipkin. “Familiar mine, come to me.”

He crouched at my feet as I chanted in the old language, words that Agnes had spoken on the night the bell tower fell. The words came easily now that I was thrice braided, dredged from memory deeper than my own. Even on that other night, when I was a mere cunning woman, I had sensed a thinning of the boundary between this and the Otherworld. Now the air vibrated even more, with the extra strength that both the Goddess and the Dark One gained in the earthly realm on this night alone.

A red glow, deep as flame. The stone floor of the chamber smoked.

The Dark One appeared, glimpsed in wavering snatches, in all His terrible beauty.

“I, Alysoun, daughter of Joan, the daughter of Frances, daughter of Camma, the descendant in blood of Ælfwynn of olde, summon my Third!”

So had Agnes called, and her demon Third had appeared.

Mine did not.

I tried again. “I, Alysoun, daughter of Joan, the daughter of Frances, daughter of Camma, the descendant in blood of Ælfwynn of olde, summon my Third, Anne Boleyn, queen of England.”