Darkwitch Rising (64 page)

Noah did not often choose to leave the house on those days she did not go to the Tower to learn from Ariadne. Jane wondered if it was because she was fearful of meeting Catling somewhere in the streets, or if she just preferred to stay close to Weyland. Whatever the case, Jane took whatever chance she could to wander the byways and nooks of London. She rarely saw anyone she knew, and few people recognised her now that her face had healed and she walked with more pride than Jane the whore had ever managed.

Weyland largely left Jane alone. She’d been the butt of his viciousness all through the years when there was just her and him (until Elizabeth and Frances, the procession of broken girls through the house meant little to either Jane or Weyland). Now, Weyland had something else to amuse him—Noah. Jane wasn’t sure what Noah had done (
had
she slept with him? Jane puzzled over it, and then decided she didn’t truly care one way or the other. If she had then that was Noah’s damnation, and the woman could deal with it herself). On the evenings that they returned to the house from the Tower, Weyland would take Noah in
his arms and kiss her, and taste the rise in her power, and would then smile and relax, well pleased. He was happy, he was sure of himself, and he left Jane alone.

Thus, there being no one to disturb her, Jane slipped deeper and deeper into her own world. Or, rather, she sank deeper and deeper into the world of the Lord of the Faerie. Somewhat like Weyland and Noah (had she known it), Jane existed in her own little realm of happiness. Jane spent most of her waking hours thinking of nothing but the Lord of the Faerie and what the faerie realm offered her. Release, freedom, a new life. And something else, something Jane hardly dared think about. She felt like a girl again, her heart thudding whenever she reflected on the Lord of the Faerie, her breath shortening whenever she remembered a way in which he had glanced at her, or the manner in which he had held her hand, and she would spend hours trying to interpret these tiny gestures in the best possible light.

Release, freedom, a new life, and possibly,
possibly
, love.

And all for a song.

When she had left the Faerie, and its lord, he had said to return to him the next time she and Noah came to the Tower. “We will show you the Ancient Carol,” he said, “so that you may best know how to greet dawn and dusk.”

What the Faerie asked of her
was
simple (and yet so complex within that simplicity), and what they offered rich beyond expectation…but first Jane had to escape Weyland. He could still control her, should he want.

He could still
kill
her, and Jane was very afraid that he would do just that the moment Noah completed her training and Weyland felt that Jane was superfluous to his needs.

This single fear regularly interrupted her otherwise happy reveries with a stomach-knotting terror.

Freedom and hope lay proffered before Jane, but between her and that offer lay that single insurmountable hurdle.

Weyland Orr.

Three days after Noah’s initial training session (and Jane’s strange ordeal atop the summit of The Naked) Ariadne had called them back to the Tower.

It was three days too long for Jane. The instant Ariadne met Noah at Lion Gate (her lover not in evidence this time), Jane turned her back and walked to the rotting scaffold, and then beyond. She could barely contain her excitement—
The Lord of the Faerie awaited!
—and the moment she reached the scaffold she looked about, breathless, her eyes wide.

“I remember when you were Swanne,” a gentle, amused voice said behind her, “you could not wait to be
rid
of me.”

Jane spun about. “Coel!”

He was leaning, arms folded, against a massive tree trunk two paces away (Tower Fields had again vanished, replaced by the ancient forest). He straightened as Jane came over, and took her hands, and kissed her mouth.

“Welcome home, Jane,” the Lord of the Faerie said, very softly.

He conveyed her to The Naked. On this occasion, both the summit and the slopes were bare of anything save grass, the Lord of the Faerie’s throne set to the eastern portion of the summit, and the magpie, sitting on an arm of the throne.

“Master Magpie,” said the Lord of the Faerie, “shall be your song-master.”

At that he let go her hand, and stood back, and Jane felt a pang of great loneliness. But she took a deep breath, and stepped forward, and the magpie smiled (its beak curving most marvellously) and bowed its head, and spoke.

“Welcome, Caroller. Have you come to learn the ways of the dawn and the dusk?”

Jane’s sense of loneliness abated as curiosity and eagerness filled her.

“What have I missed all these years?” she said, looking down at the magpie.

Life
, came the Lord of the Faerie’s whispered reply in her mind.
Joy
.

“And thus,” said the magpie, “you shall greet the dawn and dusk with life and joy, and with majesty and reverence, so that both the day and the night shall grace the Faerie. Is this something you can accomplish?”

“I wish to,” said Jane, and that appeared to be the right answer, for the magpie smiled once more, and then began to hum. It was but a simple phrase, repeated over and over, but Jane could hear a great complexity running through it. She frowned, concentrating, and wondered if she could ever master its intricacies.

“Sing it,” the Lord of the Faerie said, and Jane jumped slightly, for suddenly he was behind her, his hands resting lightly on her shoulders.

“Sing it,” he whispered. “Complete your penance.”

And so Jane, drawing a deep breath to steady her nerves, opened her mouth, and began to sing.

She’d never thought she had a good singing voice, but somehow the melody she sang, that simple repeated phrase the magpie had hummed to her, created a richness of its own. To her stunned surprise, Jane heard the complexity she’d recognised
in the magpie’s voice repeated in her own, yet ten times over, so that the phrase became redolent with meaning and imagery, even though she sang only with tone and not with words.

Jane stopped suddenly, amazed.

The magpie and the Lord of the Faerie laughed, the magpie flapping his wings, the Lord of the Faerie sliding his hands down Jane’s body to her waist, turning her about, and kissing her once more.

“Each time you come back to The Naked,” he said, “Master Magpie shall teach you another phrase of the Ancient Carol until you have accomplished it all, and then, who knows? I loved you once, maybe I shall again.”

“Don’t tease me,” she whispered.

“I only offer possibilities, Jane.”

Another moment of silence, in which they looked at each other, and then looked away.

“Jane…” the Lord of the Faerie said, his voice drifting away. Then he sighed. “It is time to go. Noah has done for the day.”

Ariadne asked Jane, many times, where she went while she and Noah spent their time within the Tower, and Jane affected a bored air, and said that she did little but wander about the grassy spaces of Tower Fields plucking at flowers.

At this Ariadne always rolled her eyes, and Noah looked at Jane with such cynicism as she delivered her “I spent the day being bored” explanation, that Jane wondered if perhaps she had some idea of what truly happened. But Noah did not question her closely, and so they continued, Jane and Noah travelling every few days to the Tower. There Jane would watch Ariadne and Noah disappear inside the Lion Gate, then she would walk to the scaffold.

There, always, waited the Lord of the Faerie, and he would take her to The Naked. There, each day, Jane would learn a new phrase of the Ancient Carol, and fall a little deeper into hope, and even deeper into love.

T
he master of the
Woolly Fleece
was somewhat bemused by his two strange saturnine passengers, but they had paid well enough, and the master had been at sea for too many years to question gold coin placed in his hand. The two youths, Tim and Bob, kept themselves to themselves, bunking down with the sailors in the hold at night, and, strangely, crouching under the deck railing at the very prow of the ship during the day. The master thought they looked like hunched black monkeys as they huddled there, drenched with sea spray, bright eyes peering ahead.

They had sailed from the Pool of London ten days ago, making good time to The Hague where, over three days, they’d off-loaded their cargo of wool, then reloaded with fine woven cloth from Flanders and Venice. During these three days the two youths had absented themselves from the port, reappearing but an hour or two before the master was to shout the orders to cast off for England. He’d regarded them critically—as he did all passengers and sailors after a stay in the Low Countries—but they were bright of eye, and quick of movement, and he could see no sign of the sickness within them. If it
was
there, then doubtless it would appear on the voyage back home, and if that were the case, well then, the master would take care of it as he took care of all
passengers or crew who happened to show signs of fever, or exhibited any lumps under their armpits or in their groin.

A regretful smile, and a quick shove off the deck. The rolling grey sea was, so far as the master of the
Woolly Fleece
was concerned, the best remedy of all for the plague.

But these two youths appeared well enough. They carried with them two small casks, which the master duly inspected.

They were packed with black feathers.

The master raised an eyebrow at the youths.

“We have a mistress,” said one of them, “inordinately fond of her feathers. The best of the black are to be found here, in the Low Countries.”

It was the strangest response the master had ever heard, but harmless enough, so he shrugged, and walked away.

An hour later, the
Woolly Fleece
was on her way back to England and her home port of London.

“Well?” said Catling. She sat on a bale of wool (part of the cargo awaiting the
Woolly Fleece
which would, within a day or two, be on its way to Flanders with this particular consignment).

The two imps stood before her, each with a cask under his arm.

“Collected from the very pits of the contagion,” said one.

Catling smiled, and jumped lightly down from the bale. “Good,” she said. “You may begin tonight. Not all, mind, just a handful here and there. I want this to spread slowly. Next week, a handful or two more, elsewhere.”

The two imps crouched atop a section of the crumbling medieval wall of London by Cripplegate.
They had one of the casks between them. They sat there for several hours, absorbing the night, watching as lights winked out in houses, and the streets emptied of the last of the tavern customers.

In the very early hours of the morning, one of the imps inserted his long, thin, dark fingers under the lid of the cask and carefully opened it, placing the lid silently to one side.

He looked at his brother, blinked slowly, then gave a slight nod.

His brother lifted out a small handful of the black feathers.

“Go where you will,” he whispered, “and enjoy.”

Then he put his mouth to his open hand, and blew.

The feathers lifted out into the night, drifting this way and that, north and south, east and west, until, one by one, they dropped slowly, like soft sooty ashes, over the tenements of London.

Each one fell in a direct line, ignoring the wind, and each one fell, without fail, directly down a chimney to settle on the ceramic covers—called curfews—placed by householders over the coals for the night.

There, they clung to the handles of the curfews, ready to be taken up in the morning by whoever it was wished to relight the fire.

Eight days later, a gentle physician by the name of Nathaniel Hodges was called from his house in Watling Street to treat a young man who lived in a narrow laneway running off the churchyard of St Botolph Aldersgate. The moment Hodges saw the black swellings in the young man’s armpit he knew with what he dealt.

Hodges stepped back from the bed, and sighed, and shook his head at the man’s wife. “Pray,” he said, “and keep him comfortable. It is all you can do.”

From the house, Hodges went straight to his local alderman and reported that, regretfully, the plague had returned to London.

Two nights later, Catling sent the imps to the parish of St Giles-in-the-Fields, where they clung to the steeple of St Giles and cast their feathers into the night.

Two weeks later reports drifted into the Privy Council about the growing numbers of deaths due to plague. Fifteen hundred people in the parish of St Giles-in-the-Fields had died within the past eight days alone, and the council took the precaution of setting wardens at street junctions at the borders of the parish to prevent people leaving the plague-ridden area.

And then there was the area surrounding Smithfield. Although the first cases of the plague had been reported from there, the outbreak hadn’t been as heavy as that at St Giles-in-the-Fields. Now, however, it was growing, and creeping steadily through the ancient alleyways and lanes of the city.

Most worrying of all were the reports on the weather. It was unusually warm for the time of year, and dry, and with strong westerly winds. Historically the plague was always at its deadliest during hot dry spells when the wind blew in from the west.

The Council prepared itself for the worst, and sent a report to the king.

E
lizabeth was spreading washing to dry in one of the small inner courtyards of Whitehall when a servant came over and whispered in her ear. Elizabeth paled, but she nodded, set the washing to one side, and hurried to the servants’ courtyard where she found the imps lurking in a shadowy corner.

“What is it?” snapped Elizabeth.

The two imps, masquerading as usual as disreputable street youths, both raised their eyebrows. “Snarly lady today,” observed the first imp.