Devil's Mistress (17 page)

Sight of the pick brought her staggering to her feet, clutching the cold stone wall behind her. “No!” she cried, reaching out with her hands only to feel the merciless strike of Matthews’s hand across her cheek again, a blow that sent her sprawling back to the floor.

Torture was illegal by English law! she reminded herself dully, but “Pricking” a witch for the devil’s mark was not. Ah, the law! How it was twisted for those who knew how to manipulate it. She had seen what they had done to her aunt. She had heard, even in Glasgow, what ghastly torments had been inflicted upon the poor wretches in Newgate prison. And now Matthews, she knew, one way or another—within the gray area of the law—would find a way to see that she confessed.

She hadn’t any more strength to fight him. He would prick her until she was a mass of blood, and he would hang her anyway. Tears stung her eyes, and panic rose within her. Then a weariness settled over her.

“If you would have me be a witch, I am a witch. I consort with the devil. He comes to me every night. I expect him to arrive any minute in a burst of fire to slit your throat and save me from your touch. Were I truly a witch, I could certainly demand that he do so. Now leave me be. Hang me! Have done with it!”

Exhausted, her eyes closed, she leaned against the wall, huddled there, naked. She expected him to call for the soldiers to take her away. But she heard nothing; instead she sensed him beside her, kneeling. Then he touched her hair, and she opened her eyes with new alarm.

“I can save you, girl.” His voice was very low, but held a ring of passion.

“Save me?” she whispered. What new manner of trick was this?

“Hold me. Hard, and close, and I will take the devil from the weakness of your body to the strength of mine!”

Brianna stared at him, incredulous, desperately trying to think with her pain-ravaged mind. His arms came around her. She felt his bony fingers over her breast, and she fought the raging desire to slap him and the nausea that almost overwhelmed her. It came to her with a sense of absurdity that almost sent her again into bitter gales of hysterical laughter, that he wanted her. Matthews—the great seeker of virtue and enemy of the devil—would save her if she would “fornicate” with him—rather than with the devil.

As his hands moved over her, she felt as if she were being touched by a creature so vile that she would never rid herself of his filth. Then she felt his touch no more, as she became numb, reverting to a distant place far within her mind. She hated him, loathed him—but enough to die?

The door was suddenly flung open.

“Matthews!”

An officer, bedecked with the ribbons and jewels of the nobility, stood in the doorway.

Matthews stiffened, dropped her as if she were fire itself, and rose. Then he fell to his knees, his hands clasped in supplication. “Almighty Father! Bless this, your servant!” He crawled to the officer at the door, kissing the hem of his cloak. “Darton—thank God! For this confessed witch hath almost taken me from His glory. Man—you have saved me.”

“Confessed?” the man inquired with a skeptical edge to his voice.

“Aye, confessed!”

The officer was looking at her, but Brianna could no longer see. The blows to her head were causing everything to swim before her eyes. She wanted to speak, to retract her confession, and swear that the charges were absurd. But she could not make her lips move. All she could do was lapse in and out of consciousness, and pray that death’s embrace would be as gentle as this gray place, easing her from pain.

“Find clothing for her,” someone said, “and bring her before the court.”

When they brought her before the court she could not stand. She should have been fighting, declaring her innocence, but she could not speak. Dimly she heard the matrons give testimony to her “devil’s mark.” From a different world of mist and blackness she heard Matthews tell of how she had murdered—in consort with the condemned witch, Pegeen MacCardle, and Satan—one Mary Corcoran of Glasgow.

They will not believe it, Brianna thought through the haze that surrounded her. Surely good people could not believe the things of which he accused her. Matthews continued to talk, his voice rising and falling, and with each word Brianna realized that he longed for her death with a passion. She opened her mouth to deny him, but blackness descended on her and she swayed to the floor. Someone held her up, and for a moment she could not even remember her name, or where she was.

Then it was over. She was condemned, sentenced to hang by the neck until dead.

She was taken to an empty cell to await her execution. It was then, pitifully, that she came to full consciousness again. Her merciful world of mist and gray left her. She was doomed to die totally aware—when she had not been so to fight for her defense.

In that little room she sank to her knees and folded her hands. She asked God’s forgiveness for those sins she had committed, but she could not, even in her prayers, accept defeat with true Christian fortitude. Over and over again she asked in silent supplication how God could allow Matthews to live.

She prayed for her family and for Sloan. She begged God not to allow Matthews to take Sloan. That he should die for having rescued her seemed entirely too great an injustice.

Time passed too quickly. Men came for her again, despite her protests, and dragged her along an arched hallway that led to a street on the common, where the townspeople were milling. They stared at her; some with curiosity, some in horror, some with indignation.

It was like the day her aunt had been killed. There were many who would have protested, but they feared for their own lives as this insanity surrounded them.

“I am not a witch!” she screamed. “This man is the creature of the devil! He is not a man of God. God does not condemn without trial! God does not torture innocents—”

Her arm was twisted so viciously that she broke off her speech with a cry. The assembled crowd began to murmur and shuffle about uneasily, but despite this she was dragged up the steps to the gallows. She noticed that the sky was a brilliant blue and that the air was crisp and cool and beautifully clean.

Her executioner jerked her hands behind her back and tied them despite her struggles. “Good people, don’t let them do this to me! You will be next! You—”

“In the name of His Royal Majesty, James II of England, Scotland, and Ireland, you are condemned to die for the ungodly crimes of witchcraft and murder!”

Matthews’s voice rose above hers. The noose was slipped over her neck and she felt the rough fiber of the rope against her throat.

She was about to die and all she could think of was the beauty that had been so briefly hers with Lord Sloan Treveryan. Life. It was so very, very wonderful. And she had only seen it so clearly when it was about to be taken …

“Recant to the people, witch! Confess before them your sins and die in the grace of God!”

“I am not guilty! You are guilty, Matthews, of the murder of countless innocents! Coldblooded murder—”

“Executioner!” Matthews ordered. “Pull the lever!”

“No!”

Fragments of her life flashed through her mind, but above it all desperation shrieked within her. No! This could not be the end. Not for her. She could not be about to die.

Not now! her soul cried out in terror. Not now, not when she had just learned what love was! Sloan! Tears stung her eyes. She had left him not knowing life was to be so short. If she had but an hour now … but the moment of death was at hand.

Her mind registered the sounds around her. She heard the crank of wood as the lever for the trap door was pulled, and vaguely heard a peculiar whistling through the air. Strange, but, she knew that whistling sound.

“Die, witch! To the devil goes your soul!”

Matthews’s voice rose high over the crowd, a chant that compelled and jerked at the emotions, calling on fear, on the terror that lurked within the souls of all men.

What did a whistling sound matter? she asked herself. Matthews had not heard it; his voice had risen above it. Perhaps she was only imagining she’d heard something.

“The trap!” he raged.

She thought she saw an object fly through the air.

The trap door beneath Brianna’s feet snapped open beneath her and gave way to the void of death. She was dying. She felt the coarse rasp of the rope against her neck and tensed instinctively with final, desperate horror, awaiting the merciless jerk of the noose.

But miraculously, the rope tightened for barely a second—then hardly at all. She did not choke, nor did she stop breathing. The rope broke—cleanly, completely. She kept falling and falling, until she lay sprawled on the dusty ground, stunned and incredulous.

A voice rang out from the crowd, loud, strong, and scornful, riddling the air with its forceful timbre.

Sloan’s voice!

“I charge
you
Matthews with crimes against God and humanity! And I promise you sir, that this will be your day to die!”

Sloan! Tears filled her eyes in gratitude and disbelief. Sloan was there for her again, when all had been lost, when she’d known no hope …

The whistle she had heard had been that of an arrow, sent soaring through the air with a cunning and uncanny marksmanship, severing the rope.

He, courageous as the wind, she thought with the greatest pride, had come to challenge the lethal shadows of injustice. To challenge the crown—and death itself.

The dirt, which created a gritty feeling within her mouth, assured Brianna that her rescue from the portals of death was not a dying dream, but incredible, wonderful fact.

She had little time for anything but that realization, for all hell was breaking loose upon the earth.

She scrambled to a crouch beneath the scaffolding of the gallows while the sharp whistle of flying arrows continued to sound as music to her ears and the cacophony of pistols fired at close range set her ears ringing. Before her, the man who would have been her executioner dropped to the dirt.

All about her the people were shouting and screaming. For several seconds Brianna held very still, wondering in awe how Sloan had managed such a swift and sure attack upon the witchfinder and the forces of James II.

At last she crept from beneath the gallows, ripping the noose of hemp from about her neck. She froze at the sight of a king’s man approaching her, then exhaled as a shot was fired and he spun about like a marionette jerked by strings, and fell. Brianna gazed at him for a second of horror as his eyes glazed not inches from her feet, then crawled again to rise outside the scaffolding.

She raised her eyes to see that Matthews alone remained alive, standing on the gallows. He shouted orders furiously, but already a good fraction of his men lay dead while the rest fought the crowd to find their attackers.

Only Sloan could be seen. Mounted atop a gleaming roan, he charged through the crowd, who cheered him on and eagerly made way for him.

Matthews drew a pistol as Sloan approached. But the witchfinder panicked at the cold relentlessness of the man bearing down on him, and his shot went harmlessly into the ground. He was shaking too badly to reload, and cast the pistol aside, drawing his saber instead.

“Captain! The girl!”

Brianna saw that the warning had been shouted from the roof of a nearby smithy by Robin, one of Sloan’s young crewman. And then she gasped, realizing the cause of his warning—more of Matthews’s men were barging their way to the gallows. One burly soldier was almost near her.

Sloan was at last upon them—but his purpose changed radically when no other course was open to him. He had wanted to kill Matthews—God, how he had wanted to kill him—but Brianna was vulnerable. And the king’s forces were closing around her.

The roan pranced and shied to the steps of the gallows. Sloan kept one eye on Matthews and shouted. “Brianna! Run, girl, run to me!”

A soldier came toward her with his sword raised to strike her.

She ran to Sloan. He reached for her with one hand, commanding, “Jump, lass—now!”

She gripped his hand and leapt with all her strength and energy, throwing herself in front of his saddle. She felt the deadly tension of his arm as it swung, and his cutlass flashed in the air with deadly purpose. The soldier screamed and fell. “To the ship, lads! To the ship!” Sloan shouted.

Sloan’s arm came around her, securing her to the saddle with his vital strength and warmth. “Hold tight, lass!” he compelled her. The roan reared and bolted and took off in a mad, erratic gallop.

The crowd, now alive with excitement and frenzy, thundered out their cheers, parting to allow Sloan and the scattered sailors to escape. Matthews shouted orders in their wake, and as they clattered their way furiously down the cobblestoned streets, the soldiers were hard on their trail.

Merchants’ stands of fruits and vegetables crashed and careened around them as the sailors raced their way to the
Sea Hawk.
Several of the horses were forced to leap a hay wagon, yet they continued on. The streets swept dizzily by until they reached the dock—and the berth of the
Sea Hawk
where the horses snorted and shrieked in protest as they were jerked to rearing halts.

Brianna found herself thrust into Robin’s arms from her seat atop the roan. “Take her below!” Sloan ordered, sliding the mount himself and swatting the animal’s rear to send it skittishly racing away.