The Raven's Head (46 page)

‘You are to fill the brazier and prepare the candles as you’ve been shown before,’ he says, without lifting his gaze or hand from the page.

‘The boy . . .’ she says uncertainly. ‘Perhaps I should return later so as not to disturb him.’

‘He will not wake, I assure you.’

She arranges the kindling, placing the charcoal in the brazier fragment by fragment, and finally standing a pot of fumigant beside it, with which to colour and perfume the smoke once it is burning. Though she works softly, every new movement causes the little caged birds to cry alarm and dash themselves against the hard iron bars, till she is almost in tears knowing the pain and fear she is causing them. But the task must be completed or Father Arthmael will not leave.

She circles the room, putting fresh candles on the spikes on the walls and trimming the wicks with a pair of tiny iron shears. In front of each one she slips a sliver of dragon’s blood. She shudders as she does so, thinking of that cellar far below, but there is no stone coffin up here, only the abbot, the boy and the birds. Father Arthmael drove the demons and the dead back into the earth. Surely he will not permit them to rise up again now. She glances around the chamber, searching for anything she might inadvertently have neglected to do.

‘There is nothing more to be done. You may go,’ Father Arthmael says softly, as if he understands the unspoken question.

She is torn between relief and desperation. Each time she passed behind Father Arthmael, she tried to peer over his shoulder at the pages of the book, but she could only glimpse part of a circle, or a crowned man. The words that twine about the drawings were too small to read and she dared not move closer. If only he would lay the book aside.

‘I could watch the boy for you, Father Arthmael . . .’ she offers, ‘. . . if you wished to visit Lord Sylvain . . . or return to the abbey.’

‘You are not required here,’ he says quietly. ‘Lord Sylvain has another task for you.’

She can think of no excuse to remain, and though she longs to snatch the book from his hands and run away with it, where could she run to? It occurs to her that Father Arthmael cannot leave either unless Odo or Sylvain unlocks the gate.

Everything is still now, motionless. Even the birds have fallen silent. They crouch, hunched, on the floors of their cages, as if they have abandoned any hope of release and simply wait for death.

Odo, too, is waiting, waiting at the bottom of the tower for her to emerge. She trails after him across the lawn, past the lavender and rosemary, but instead of turning towards the hall, he leads her instead to the door at the base of the turret where Laurent sleeps. He unlocks the door and stands aside. It is plain he means her to enter.

‘Am I . . . am I to go upstairs to where the young man . . .?’

‘Stay or go up. It makes no difference. Master will come when he’s ready.’

He flaps his hand impatiently, and as soon as she steps over the threshold, he pulls the door shut behind her, with a bang that echoes from the walls. She hears the iron key grate in the lock on the other side of the door. Has Sylvain ordered her to be locked in, or is it mere malice on the servant’s part?

A tiny part of her thrills at the thought that Laurent may be upstairs. She tells herself that it is because she fears to be locked in alone, but she knows it is more than that. She wants to be with him. She edges a few steps up the spiral staircase, softly calling Laurent’s name. There is no answer. She climbs higher until she reaches the door of the painted chamber. She tries not to look at the nightmare images on the wall, but a flash of red catches her eye, and she sees a figure she does not recall noticing before – a young boy, dressed in a scarlet loincloth, a strip of the red material trailing across his shoulder. But the child in the painting is not asleep. He is in the grip of an old man who is falling backwards into a tomb, and dragging the boy down on top of him.

She gives a little cry – the boy in the painting so much resembles the child in the tower. The door of the chamber beyond opens abruptly. Laurent is standing there, leaning against the door for support. He looks both frightened and relieved.

‘I thought you were Sylvain.’ He peers over her shoulder with such intensity that she turns, expecting to find someone behind her. ‘You’re alone?’ he demands.

‘Odo brought me here, but he’s gone. We’re locked in.’

‘I know that!’ he says. ‘They’ve kept that door locked ever since I tried to escape. I keep trying it. But I think Odo and Sylvain have the only keys and there’s not much likelihood of either of them forgetting to lock it.’

He turns back into the room, but only as far as a chair that has been placed just inside the doorway. ‘I don’t know which is worse – looking at those paintings or watching that black mould growing. Each time I turn my back or fall asleep that foul slime creeps closer. But I can’t bear to be out there either. I can’t stop staring at the girl on the wall. They’re identical. Can’t you see it? The girl in the painting is the one in the . . .’

He is gabbling incoherently. ‘Sylvain says he needs one more thing . . . the most important of all.’ Laurent’s eyes frantically search her face. ‘What else is he going to take from me? You made the bag for Sylvain. You must know what else he plans to do to me . . . Tell me! You have to tell me!’

His fingers pluck at his scarlet robe in agitation. It is the same shade of red that the sleeping child wears. Gisa finds herself turning back to the boy in the painting, the boy who is being dragged down into the grave.

‘Have you come to take something from me?’ Laurent persists. ‘Was it you who came here while I slept and cut . . .? Did you steal my shadow? . . . Blood . . . he said something about a boy’s blood.’ He stares down at her hands, as if expecting to see a dagger grasped in her fingers.

‘I’ve taken nothing from you,’ she protests.

A
boy’s blood
. Peter’s blood-smeared limbs float in front of her eyes.
Man in the black robes . . . snake man.
But it was the White Canons who cut Peter, not Sylvain. He would never torture a child, not if what Thomas says about him is true. Yet Father Arthmael is sitting up in his tower with another little boy, reading the precious book, the one she knows Sylvain would entrust to no one – unless that person had something he badly needed.

She is suddenly aware that Laurent is cringing away from her as if she is an assassin come to murder him. She doesn’t understand. Why should he be frightened of her? A few days ago he was giving her cowslips and trying to walk with her. What has happened to him?

‘It was my hair you used to stitch the bag. I saw you! The bag Sylvain used to capture my shadow.’

‘
Your
hair . . .’ She gapes at him. ‘I didn’t know where it came from . . .
Your
hair?’ she repeats, staring at the lock of straight, fine hair that flops across his sweating brow. ‘No, it couldn’t have been. It was far too coarse.’

Laurent is stammering something she cannot catch. His hands are clenched, his eyes wild. ‘But what is he going to do now?’ he yells. ‘He said he needed something else before he could bring the girl back to life.’

‘What girl?’

Laurent stares at her. ‘The one in the charnel house . . . chapel . . . I don’t know what the place is. You’ve seen it . . . thought it was a carved effigy, but it’s a real body . . . a corpse preserved in wax. He says he means to resurrect her.’

Gisa shudders. ‘Call up the spirit of a dead woman?’

‘He can summon spirits at any time he pleases,’ Laurent says savagely. ‘I’ve watched him. But he thinks he can do more than that. He believes he can actually make this girl live again in the flesh. But why does he need me?’ He grabs Gisa by her arms. ‘You’re helping him in his enchantments. You’re working together. Tell me what he wants!’

‘I don’t know!’ Frightened by the desperation in his eyes, Gisa jerks from Laurent’s grip and backs away. ‘I am as much a prisoner as you. He orders me to grind and distil, but he doesn’t tell me the uses of anything I prepare for him, not really, not in a way that I can explain. There’s a book. I’ve only glimpsed a page or two of it, but it is not like any herbal I’ve ever seen. Whatever Lord Sylvain prepares comes from that. I’ve tried to look at it, but he keeps—’

She’s interrupted by a harsh cry and the sound of flapping wings. She thinks a bird must have found its way into the turret and is trapped somewhere. Laurent rushes to the top of the stairs, staring down, then up at the beams above the staircase, but there is no sign of any creature. They both stand tense, listening, but only silence floods back.

She wants to explain, to reassure Laurent that she is not his enemy, not in collusion with Sylvain. She cannot bear the fear she sees in his face when he looks at her.

‘Yesterday, Lord Sylvain came to the shop. Uncle Thomas had always refused to allow me to stay here, but then he changed his mind. Lord Sylvain said he needed me to work through the night. I refused, but—’

‘So you say,’ Laurent spits at her. ‘But you’re here anyway. This uncle of yours drag you by force, did he?’

‘I shouldn’t call him “Uncle”,’ she says miserably. ‘He’s no kin to me. I’m here because . . . because Lord Sylvain says I owe him a debt.’

‘Money?’ Laurent says. ‘Well, that debt should be easy to work off. He pays handsomely for obedience and silence, so I’m told.’

Fury boils up in Gisa. ‘You want the truth? You can have it. I have no mother and my father was hanged when I was little more than an infant. I was left alone to starve, but Lord Sylvain
says
he took pity on me. He
says
he paid the apothecary generously to raise me as his niece. I don’t remember him bringing me to Langley. But my unc– Master Thomas tells me I owe Sylvain my life and my living, because I am attainted. Now do you understand, you numbskull? I am attainted!’

It is only as she says the words aloud that she begins to comprehend the full misery of the sentence that was passed on her. Ever since last night her mind has lurched from one revelation to another.
Thomas and Ebba are not my kin. I have no family, no one in the world. The father I loved was a wicked man, a traitor. Sylvain, the man I fear, the man I shrink from, has been my saviour, my protector all these years.

All this she understood last night. All this is her past, but only now does the realisation explode in her head that it is
not
past and never will be. It is her future.
I shall never be other than a servant in someone else’s employ. I shall never marry, never have children, because the blood that runs hot through my veins is tainted, poisoned, corrupt.

Her throat grows tight with tears that she learned long ago never to shed so they do not reach her eyes. She wants to run from the turret, run from Laurent and those ridiculous feelings for him that even now surge up in her. What right does she have to yearn for him, for anyone, to touch her, kiss her? She is filthy, leprous. She can never be loved. She shrinks away, suddenly afraid she will infect him too.

But there is no escaping. She and Laurent are trapped together until it pleases Sylvain to release them, and what will he do then? What will happen tonight in that tower, to Laurent, to the sleeping boy dressed in scarlet? Her gaze darts to the tomb in the painting. Will Sylvain really try to raise a corpse?

‘The body that Sylvain showed you?’ Gisa whispers. ‘Who was she? His wife?’

But Laurent isn’t listening to anything she is saying. He doesn’t even turn in her direction. He’s staring wildly into the windowless chamber. ‘The mould – look at the black mould. It’s reached the ceiling and it’s still spreading. I can see it growing. The slime is moving!’

So here is Sol turned black, becoming with mercurius philosophorum one heart.

Another sharp caw made me spin round. Instinctively I looked to the place on the altar where Lugh always stood. Then I remembered he was gone. Sylvain had taken him.

‘You are observant, Laurent.’ The voice was as harsh as a raven’s croak. ‘The mould spreads rapidly, as I intend it should.’

I heard a sharp gasp from Gisa and turned to see the figure of Sylvain filling the doorway at the top of the stairs. For a moment I thought I saw two great ragged wings folding themselves against his sides. It must have been nothing more than the folds of his black cloak stirring. But all the same, with both chamber doors open, how the devil had he got up there without us hearing him?

Sylvain extended his hand towards the windowless bedchamber. ‘The mould creeps over every surface. Nothing can escape it. It smothers, it consumes, it reduces all things to earth, to dirt, to the filth from which all life springs. It is the nigredo, the black death of putrefaction. But buried in the filth is the precious stone of life.’

He took a step towards Gisa, who was closest to him, his gaze fixed on her face. She retreated back towards me. The expression in her eyes was not one of gratitude, much less affection. She was terrified. If she was knowingly assisting Sylvain in his black arts, it was far from willingly, not that that did anything to reassure me. She could just as easily kill me out of fear of Sylvain as out of loyalty to him, probably more so. Even that wretched bird, Lugh, had betrayed me to him. And women are far more treacherous than any man or bird. I wouldn’t trust Gisa further than a flea could spit.

The girl and I were both now standing in the old chapel in the flickering light of the single candle, Sylvain blocking the doorway. Had he deliberately herded us in there? I stepped sideways, hoping I could slip behind him and out of the door. But, as if he knew exactly what I planned, he pulled the door closed with a great echoing thump.

The damp musty odour of the mould was stronger than before. In the restless shadows cast by the candle flame it seemed to be oozing across the ceiling towards the image of the raven’s head painted in the centre. The bird’s beak was open, as if it was summoning the slime to it.

Sylvain dragged the chair against the closed door and lowered himself onto it. ‘Sit, both of you. Let’s make ourselves comfortable,’ he said, waving his hand like a genial host.