Page 86 of The Queen’s Witch

The barmaid, stout and muscled, came from the back, spied me, and chased me out with her broom. I barely escaped alive.

After resuming my form, I pocketed Pipkin and stumbled slowly to a poor quarter of the city where none would recognize me. For three days I rested, ate, washed. Sir Thomas Wyatt, Anne’s cousin and close companion since childhood, had long been rumored to be in love with her. And he was brother to Lady Lee, Anne’s most loyal friend. If anyone would want Anne moved from a hasty grave with no proper Christian burial rites, all too vulnerable to desecration, it would be these two. Wyatt, a gentleman, could gain access to the Tower. He had money to bribe guards, bribe the gravedigger, bribe anyone else necessary. On the scaffold Anne had not been laid in a proper coffin, but in an old box. A cart leaving the Tower through the gate used to bring in food and fuel would not be much noticed. Brother and sister would have moved Anne as soon after the burial as possible, while freshly turned soil was expected and before her gravestone, if she even had one, was firmly settled.

Where? Not Hever, where Anne’s and George’s mother grieved her children’s deaths. Not Wyatt’s estate in Kent, where his son’s household resided. Nowhere near London, with its multitude of eyes and gossiping servants.

In the middle of the night, on a pallet of filthy alehouse straw, I jerked upright. I knew where Wyatt and his sister would take Anne. I remembered something else in the twilight between reason and sleep. Something Mother Redcap had said in Tydd Saint Stephen, that I then had not the wit to understand. Now, I did.

The next day, as I left London, Henry VIII king of England, Ireland, and France, married Jane Seymour at Whitehall.

Summer evenings are long. I traveled north but, despite the need for haste, not as a hare. Not only must I conserve strength, but away from the city came greater risk of hunters, traps, dogs. By now, I heartily disliked the strangeness of an animal body. And Pipkin, sometime during our three days at the alehouse, had somehow lost an inch off his tail, the wound still fresh. He would be safer in my pocket.

So I walked, again dressed and spelled as a boy in stolen breeches and tunic. The first day I bought bread and drink at an alehouse, but could not pay even the small amount for a pallet in a room crowded with other destitutes. Nowhere could I find the runes or symbols of the Sisterhood. So I spent the first night, warded, under a hedgerow.

The second day it rained hard. If the rains continued for long, this year’s harvest would be as bad as the last. Wet, exhausted, hungry, I sought my only other choice, a religious house. They were bound by faith to serve travelers and would not turn me away.

Loveryk Monastery stood amid the rich farmland of Essex. Far larger and more impressive than Bredham Abbey, its soaring stone walls gleamed with windows of colored glass. The bell tower chimed vespers. I begged shelter and was taken inside a courtyard surrounded by a colonnade and facing the rear entrance to the cathedral. Monks and nuns hurried here and there. The kitchen, rich with savory smells, provided a good meal and a place to sleep, miraculously free of lice. One other man lay there already asleep, two neat bundles by his bed. Exhausted, I fell into a deep sleep, until my enhanced hearing awakened me to chanting in the cathedral.

I knew that at religious houses, Christian rites were chanted at fixed hours. Since this required at least thirteen religious anointed by the Church, it had not occurred at Bredham. Muffled by stone walls, the chanting sounded both distant and sad, a mournful drone.

Then hoofbeats, shouting, and hard beating on the abbey doors abruptly interrupted the chanting.

I sprang from my pallet, snatched up Pipkin and my bundle, and ran to the courtyard. The doors opened, and horses clattered in. I recognized the leader, whom I had seen at court: Sir Richard Southwell, one of Cromwell’s lackeys. Not wanting him to recognize me, I spelled my face into that of an old man.

Southwell stood shouting at the abbot—impure practices, Rome, treason—while his men began work. They stripped from both the monastery and the cathedral anything of value: gold plate, manuscripts, statues, vestments, jeweled rosaries. They pried the rubies and diamonds from crucifixes on the walls. Monks and nuns knelt, weeping, begging them to stop. What they could not take, they destroyed, smashing benches and tables and beds. It took all day, and no one was allowed to leave. Southwell administered the oath of loyalty to each highly placed religious. Those few who would not swear that Henry was the supreme head of the Church were arrested and manacled.

After the heavily laden ox carts finally rolled away with loot and prisoners, we travelers, servants, and other unimportant people were allowed to leave. I slipped into a thick stand of trees, unwilling to risk the road. There I released myself from my altered face and headed deeper into the forest.

In a small clearing, a royal soldier lay atop a weeping young nun, her habit hiked to her waist, his breeches around his knees.

Something in me broke. I did not see how far the rape had progressed, but it did not matter. I spellbound him to immobility, kicked him clear of the girl, drew the soldier’s own dagger, and put it to his throat. I did not even think about it. When the flesh proved stubborn, I summoned malefic magick to aid the knife, and it easily parted skin and muscle. Blood gushed forth.

The nun gasped and gazed at me with terror.

It was a long moment before I could speak, held silent not by horror at what I had done but by a deep, wild pleasure that coursed through my whole body, my blood singing. When speech finally returned, I said to the nun, “Go back to the abbey as soon as the rest of the king’s men leave. Until then, stay here. Did he complete . . .”

She managed to shake her head.

“Good. Say nothing of what happened here, for your own protection. If you speak, they will blame you. Say nothing, do you understand?”

A terrified nod.

“Now cover yourself.”

She pulled down her habit and rose shakily to her feet, but not more shaky than I; the malefic magick had cost me nearly all power. With barely strength enough to walk beyond her sight, I lay down beside a small deadfall, took the shape of a hare, and dragged myself under the tangle of brush. Pipkin followed, and we slept the remainder of that day, the night through, and part of the following day.

When I woke, I gathered my strength and changed back. Branches in the deadfall, shoved aside by my newly human body, snapped back and struck me in the face, chest, legs. Scratched, hungry, cold, I was nonetheless grateful to be back in my own form.

Why had I done it? I had drained my power, risked my life and my disguise as a simple traveler, all for a girl of religious superstition that I did not share, a girl that I had never before met and would never see again. It was possible that the soldier, having raped her, might then have let her live. But I did not believe it. The murder had been justified, but the deep, sweet, wild pleasure of doing it—that troubled me. For the first time, I had the terrible thought that I was becoming like my mother, taking joy in others’ pain.

No. I would never be my mother. I did not seek to harm others. When I had done so, it had been necessary for the greater good.

Completely necessary. I was not like Joan.

No sound came from beyond the deadfall. I dragged myself from under it, acquiring more scratches, and stood. I could not return to the monastery. The young nun would be there, and who knew how discreet she would be? I must go on.

I ate the crumbled bread and cheese in my pockets, fed Pipkin, and returned to the road. Empty of Southwell’s men, it contained only the deep ruts of yesterday’s carts and a few small, straggling groups of people from the ruined abbey—heading where? Wherever it might be, I followed at a discreet distance.

At a town a few miles from the abbey, nuns and monks were taken in by townspeople who apparently knew them. Others ostentatiously barred their doors, probably fearing retribution. I could have told them there would be no retribution. No one here possessed anything worth looting.