The Vanishing Witch (33 page)

He pinched Adam’s ear so hard it brought tears to his eyes, but before he could even utter a word, Henry stepped forward, holding out the torn parchment covered
with his blood. ‘Please, sir,’ he said thickly, ‘Adam tried to steal my Latin copy from me, and when it ripped, he lost his temper.’

‘No, it was—’ But Adam was not given a chance to finish.

‘Is that what happened?’ the master demanded, turning to the boys gathered round. A few shuffled their feet and studied the ground, but Henry’s friends nodded vigorously.

Adam was forced to strip in front
of the whole school. He was given three times the usual number of strokes of the birch for he had, or so the master roared, committed not one but three heinous crimes: failing to do his Latin copy, attempting to steal that of another boy and carrying out a vicious and unprovoked attack on a fellow pupil.

Adam had rarely given anyone cause to punish him, let alone birch him. He was completely
unprepared for the searing pain and humiliation. Henry, after he’d had the satisfaction of witnessing the flogging, was sent home to nurse his injured nose, but Adam was not permitted to run away and cry. He was forced to sit the whole day at the front of the school wearing the fool’s cap, as his cuts and welts burned and throbbed, Henry’s friends grinning and pulling faces at him each time the master’s
back was turned.

His eyes screwed up in pain, Adam pulled the sodden tunic over his head and plunged it into the horse’s drinking pail. Blood ran out, staining the water red, yet when he pulled it out there still seemed to be as much dried blood on it as before and, if anything, the wetting had only made it spread. He put it back into the water, rubbing it clumsily.

‘You’ll never get it out
dabbing at it like that.’

He spun round, wincing as he did so. Leonia was standing by the horse stroking his nose. Adam stood up, backing away into the corner. Leonia came over and peered into the bucket. Wrinkling her nose, she plucked a corner of the tunic between her thumb and forefinger, and inspected it before dropping it back into the water. ‘Dried in. You’ll need to soak it, then scrub
it to get it out.’

‘Go away,’ Adam said. ‘It’s nothing to do with you.’

‘And how are you going to dry it? Take ages if you can’t put it out in the sun.’

‘Leave me alone,’ Adam muttered, through clenched teeth.

But Leonia didn’t move. ‘Want me to fetch you a clean tunic? I can do it without them seeing and we can bury this one. If they notice it’s missing, Beata’ll blame Diot for losing it
and Diot’ll blame Beata. They’ll argue about it for weeks.’ She smiled, as if the prospect amused her. ‘Well, do you want me to fetch a tunic or not?’

Adam hesitated. ‘Are you going to tell . . .?’

‘Why should I? There’s lots of things I don’t tell.’ She smiled again. ‘I’ll be back as quickly as I can. Bury that tunic under the straw in the corner. The stable-boy never mucks out properly, not
to the edges. If they find it before the mice eat it, it’ll be so filthy they’ll think it’s just an old rag.’

Using the rake to scrape back the soiled straw down to the beaten-earth floor below, Adam threw the sodden tunic into the hole, then heaped the straw back over it. He’d only just finished when Leonia slipped back inside and brought out a folded tunic from under her skirts. He held out
his hands for it, but she shook her head.

‘Let me look at your back first.’

‘No!’

‘Don’t be silly, I know you’ve been whipped. Marks are all round your sides. I only want to see if they’ve stopped bleeding. If they haven’t you’ll just spoil another tunic.’

He felt his face grow hot with shame, as he saw again the faces of the laughing boys.

Leonia shrugged. ‘All right, I won’t look, but wrap
this round yourself first, so you don’t bleed on the clean tunic.’

She unfolded the tunic. Inside was a long strip of linen, which she handed to him. He tried to wrap it around himself, but the welts and cuts made the twisting and turning needed impossible and, besides, his hands were too clumsy to wrap the linen smoothly. In the end he was forced to let her help him. He expected her to wince
and murmur when she saw the welts on his back, as his mother and Beata had always done when dressing a cut finger or a bruised knee. But she said nothing.

‘There’s lots of dry blood on your breeches too, but the tunic’ll hide it till you can change them. You’d better bury them too when you do.’

She handed him the tunic. It was warm and he blushed as he pulled it on, knowing that it had been
next to her bare skin. She crossed to the barrel that held the oats for the horses’ feed, swung herself onto it and sat there, her legs dangling. The sunlight, streaming over the top of the partition, haloed her black curly hair, making it gleam. Adam noticed it wasn’t really black at all in the light. It was almost purple, like ripe plums.

‘Schoolmaster do that to you?’ she asked casually.

‘What if he did?’ Adam snapped.

‘What did you do to make him so angry?’

Adam’s gaze dropped at once to the floor and he crouched, picking up a piece of straw and twisting it round his fingers. ‘Nothing. I punched a boy.’

‘Bet he deserved it. Did your master beat him too?’

‘No, he didn’t!’ Adam said furiously. ‘He’s Henry de Sutton. His father has John of Gaunt as a patron. Henry could burn
the whole school down and they’d pat him on the head and say it was mischief.’

‘Who do you hate most? Henry or your master?’

Adam stared miserably at the piece of straw he was twisting in his fingers.

‘I think we should punish the master first,’ Leonia said. ‘He’s most to blame, because he’s an adult. They have to be punished the hardest.’

‘Can’t punish masters or any adults,’ Adam said. ‘But
I wish I could. I’d make him smart!’ For a moment, a wonderful image came into his head of his master lying bare-arsed over the whipping bench. He could hear him howling for mercy, as the birch descended over and over again. Even shitting himself, maybe. He’d known small boys do that in their terror.

‘Then let’s do it.’

Adam snorted. ‘Don’t be daft. We couldn’t whip him. Can you imagine what
he’d do if we asked him to drop his breeches?’

‘We don’t have to ask him,’ Leonia said. She slid off the barrel and picked up a handful of straw. ‘Find me some long pieces. These are too short.’

He didn’t really know why he did as she asked, except that it didn’t occur to him to say no. He searched through handfuls of straw, handing her the longest as he found them. She carefully laid them side
by side on top of the barrel. He hunted for the straw for a long time yet he wasn’t bored. If anything, he was enjoying being alone with her. If he found an extra-long piece, she nodded her approval and he found himself wanting to make her smile. Curiously, in spite of his pain, he felt happier than he had since the day his mother had fallen ill.

‘Will this do?’ She held something up in the light.
She’d folded the clump of straw in two, twisting a piece round the neck to make a head. Another twist held the torso together at the bottom. Then she’d divided the ends of the straw into two plaits, which made the legs. A twist of straw poked horizontally through the body formed a pair of crude arms. As a final touch she poked two little burrs into the face to make eyes. But no mouth. She hadn’t
given it a mouth.

‘You’ve made a silly poppet to play with.’

There was no disguising the disgust in Adam’s voice. She was laughing at him, like all the others. He was on the point of running out of the stable, but she moved swiftly in front of him, blocking his way. She held up the doll again. ‘This poppet is called Master . . . What’s your schoolmaster’s name?’

‘Warner,’ Adam said sullenly.

‘Master Warner,’ Leonia repeated slowly. ‘We must baptise him properly if he is to have a name.’ She carried the poppet over to the pail of bloody water. ‘Come here. You shall be the priest.’ She held out the doll to him and Adam found himself taking it from her. He held it awkwardly, sure she was mocking him, but uncertain what she meant to do.

‘Go on, Adam, dip the poppet into the water three
times, right under. Then say his name. Say, “I name you Master Warner.”’

Adam plunged the straw figure into the bloody water. ‘Master Warner,’ he mumbled.

‘No, you must say “I name you”
or it won’t work.’

Adam felt utterly foolish, but sensed she would not stop tormenting him until he repeated the words exactly as she’d instructed.

The first time he said it was almost under his breath, but
by the third time he found he was laughing. For some reason he could never have explained, he was suddenly elated, as if he really was ducking old Warner himself under the water.

Leonia was laughing too. When he’d finished, she tipped the scarlet water away in the corner. ‘Don’t want anyone finding that and asking questions.’

Adam gazed at her with admiration. He’d never have remembered to do
it. She took the wet poppet from him and placed it on the top of an oat barrel, standing the little straw manikin upright so that a little puddle of bloody water pooled at its tiny straw feet.

‘Now, Master Warner, how shall we punish you?’

‘We could hang him,’ Adam said eagerly, entering into the game. He was already casting about for a piece of cord.

‘He’ll die in time, but you don’t want
to kill him yet. That’s too quick. You want to hurt him first.’ Leonia searched the stable floor, scattering the straw with her shoe, then pounced on something. ‘I knew there’d be one somewhere.’

It was an old iron horseshoe nail, bent and rusty. It had evidently lain in the straw for some time. Leonia was right: the stable-boy didn’t make a good job of mucking out. She handed the nail to Adam.
‘Choose where you want to stab him. Not in the heart, though.’

Adam glanced up, aware that it was growing dark. The air was still as hot as Beata’s baking oven, but thick clouds were rolling in, obliterating the sun. Leonia’s eyes were glittering in the strange sulphurous half-light and he felt uneasy. It was as if she really believed they could kill old Warner. ‘I think it’s going to rain. We
should go in before we’re missed.’

‘No!’ Leonia was not smiling. ‘Adam, remember what he did to you. Think about what it felt like when you were lying there as he flogged you. Think about how much he hurt you when you’d done nothing. You have to go to school tomorrow and they all saw you being whipped. They all know. What do you want to do to him now?’

Blood rushed into Adam’s cheeks as he relived
being forced to take down his breeches in front of the whole school, being made to lie across that bench, shaking as he waited for the first blow to fall and the next and the next, biting his hand so he wouldn’t disgrace himself and cry. Warner hadn’t let him explain. He should have listened. He should have listened!

Seizing the nail in his clenched fist, he threw the poppet face down on the
barrel. He raised the nail as high as he could, then plunged it into Warner’s buttocks, his legs, his arms, his back. It was not the straw he was stabbing, but flesh – flesh that could hurt and flesh that could bleed. Adam stabbed again and again, until he was exhausted.

Somewhere in the distance he heard the long, slow rumble of thunder.

A cat’s heart or a frog, pierced with pins then dried and hung in a house, is a remedy against witches.

One of the delights of being dead is watching men and women torment themselves over the petty irritations of life – the bread that won’t rise, the horse that’s gone lame, the pots that crack in the firing, the shopkeeper who passes them a bad coin. It takes but a handful
of these mischiefs to make a man fancy he is having a bad day or even year. And all the while their eyes are fixed on their broken shoelace, they don’t notice the great mountain teetering above them, ready to crash down on their heads.

But that sweet child, Leonia, had learned long ago never to fret about what annoyed her. She simply resolved to remove the source of the irritation when the time
was right. In consequence, her sleep was never troubled by the puny coughing of a mouse, unlike the rest of the household, whose days and nights were constantly troubled by the pitter-patter of their own thoughts and the gnawing of their own imaginations.

It was Tuesday evening when Robert finally returned from Wainfleet, tired, dusty and decidedly irritable from the long ride. His business had,
he supposed, gone tolerably well, for he would never allow another man to get the better of him in a deal, but he’d been anxious to reach home before dark. You increasingly heard tales of travellers being attacked by gangs of robbers who, relying on numbers, didn’t even bother to conceal their faces, but simply swarmed out from the trees or rushes and overwhelmed their victims, beating them half
to death even after they had surrendered their valuables.

After Jan’s death, Robert found himself him more nervous than he’d ever been previously. If a fit young man, who was skilled at defending himself, could be overpowered, then anyone could be struck down. Robert was painfully conscious that his sagging body was ageing and was no longer as quick or agile as once it had been.

He still could
not believe that a lad with so much life in him should be rotting in his grave. It happened, of course, to countless others, but not to his own son. He refused to accept it had been a foolish accident. He didn’t want to believe it. He didn’t want others to believe it either. He couldn’t bear the thought of half the city gossiping that he had raised a drunk and a wastrel. Even as he grieved for
his son, he found himself seething with rage against him. If the lad hadn’t been so stubborn, he would have been safely enjoying a supper with his family that night, instead of wandering round the Braytheforde putting himself in mortal danger.

Robert had not stopped at any of the inns on his way home. He’d eaten a few roasted snails and some dried meat as he rode, which had only served to give
him a thirst and his leather bottle of ale had been drained to the last sour drop long before he reached the city gate. He’d been eagerly anticipating a quiet meal with his new bride, just the two of them, Catlin pouring him a goblet of hippocras, massaging his temples and asking with soothing concern about his arduous journey. In consequence, he found himself unreasonably annoyed by the sight of
his family sitting at the table in his great hall, finishing the last of their meal.