Witchstruck (2 page)

For a moment I despaired of silencing her. But some grain of sense must have filtered through, for Aunt Jane’s wild tossing gradually slowed and then ceased altogether. Her body lapsed into a kind of restless unconsciousness in my arms.

Shivering now, I stared about the old palace chamber. If we were caught here tonight, with these unholy instruments strewn about, we would be accused of witchcraft. And rightly so, for we were far from innocent. Even the princess would face execution if discovered like this, as her poor mother had gone to the block when Elizabeth was but a small child. Being the Queen had not saved Anne Boleyn from an accusation of witchcraft, any more than being of royal blood would save her daughter now.

I looked at the Lady Elizabeth. She was still on her knees, frozen in shock.

‘My lady,’ I said softly, ‘these candles must be put out
and
all traces of the circle rubbed away before we leave. Will you help me?’

Elizabeth nodded, though I could see she was badly frightened. She leaned forward and began frantically rubbing at the circle my aunt had drawn in the dust, her hands soon filthy.

Ignoring the foul stench, I dragged the bloodied lamb back to the sack and pushed it inside, along with its entrails. My aunt’s soiled knife lay on the floorboards beside her. The cup of ceremonial wine we had shared was empty now but its dregs were still potent if anyone should think to taste them.

Downstairs, the whistling had stopped. I listened intently for a while, but could hear nothing.

‘Meg?’ my aunt moaned, stirring as she came back slowly to herself.

I looked down into that white, drawn face. What had caused Aunt Jane to lose control like that? I had never seen her so wild. Perhaps she was growing too old to control the spirits we had invoked. I rubbed her hands gently between my own to warm them, as though she were the child and I her guardian.

‘Better now?’ I asked my aunt softly. ‘Are you able to walk? We must get out of the palace.’

‘No,’ she groaned, pushing me away. ‘Not yet. The spell was not finished in proper fashion.’

Struggling weakly to her knees, my aunt cast about for her instruments. Then she saw the circle erased and the candles extinguished.

‘Why have the candles been put out?’ she demanded. ‘Where is my sacred knife? Help me, we must appease the spirits.’

‘Aunt, there is no time to relight the candles. We must return to the lodge before they discover that the Lady Elizabeth is missing. If anyone should find us with these’ – and I indicated the remains of our magickal work – ‘it will be we who burn. Don’t forget the Lady Elizabeth is a prisoner under threat of death. If her sister the Queen should ever hear of this . . .’

Aunt Jane seemed to grasp the truth in what I said, the crazed light slowly fading from her face.

‘Yes, you are right,’ my aunt agreed reluctantly, and began to gather up her various tools instead. ‘But the spirits will not be happy.’

I helped her tidy the last objects away, cleaning her ceremonial knife before wrapping it in its stained leather sheath.

Flashing me a weary smile, my aunt tucked the knife inside the bodice of her gown. ‘You are a good girl, Meg,’ she whispered. ‘If only my sister could have been more like you. But she had no time for the power once she met your father, only for marriage. And look where that brought her. To an early grave, never to see her daughter grow up so gifted and fair.’

‘I’m hardly fair, Aunt.’

She laughed then. ‘Fair to me, Meg. And you do have beauty of a sort—’

I shushed her, holding up a hand. I shot a warning look at the Lady Elizabeth too, who had stood up now and was shaking the dust from her skirts. I had heard a faint sound from the other side of the thin wall. No whistling this time, but the quiet protesting creak of a floorboard.

My skin crept in warning. I felt certain that someone was outside the chamber, listening to our conversation. Yet when I crept to the door on tiptoe and looked out through a crack in the wood, there was nobody there. All I could see was the dark, empty corridor and the stairs down to the ruined great hall, lit with pale patches of moonlight.

Elizabeth came silently to my shoulder. ‘What is it?’

‘I thought I heard . . .’ I shook my head. ‘Nothing. It was just my imagination. We must return to the lodge without being seen. My aunt will walk home across the fields. Are you ready, my lady?’

Elizabeth nodded, but looked petulant. ‘I wish we had not been interrupted tonight. I want to hear more of this vision of my coronation.’

‘Perhaps we should wait a few months before meeting again, my lady, just to be sure we are not being watched. Sir Henry Bedingfield will be suspicious if we are caught out of bed at the full moon.’

‘Bedingfield may be my gaoler,’ Elizabeth snapped, ‘but he’s a round-faced fool and can prove nothing. Besides, why should I not seek knowledge through magick? To know the future is a mighty weapon for a princess.’ She gave me a
sharp
stare. ‘Your aunt will visit us again at the next full moon. I wish to hear more of her vision. Though we can meet in the forest behind Woodstock if you find the old palace too dangerous.’

I curtseyed, recognizing the determined note in the Lady Elizabeth’s voice. ‘Yes, my lady.’

Cautiously, I opened the door a few inches and peered out, listening for any signs that we were not alone.

The ruined palace was an eerie place to walk at night, room after empty room draped in deep shadows. My aunt carried her instruments and the blood-stained sack containing the dead lamb. I knew she would have to bury it in the forest before making her way home. We descended the staircase, the only sounds the swish of our skirts against the crumbling walls and the faint cooing of a wood pigeon in the rafters above us.

I thought of what my aunt had said about my mother. Catherine Canley had been a beautiful lady of the court, my aunt had always told me, who had given up her power as a witch to marry my father and bury herself alive in this remote corner of Oxfordshire. My unmarried aunt had come to live with her and my father as a companion, and had stayed on after her death to care for me. I could not remember much about my mother, for Catherine Canley had died of pneumonia when I was only five years old. Whenever I thought of her, I had a vision of laughing blue eyes and a rustle of silk as a woman bent to pick me up. But
I
could not even be sure that was a true memory of her.

There were no portraits of my mother in our house, or none that I had seen. It hurt me to think I could not even remember her face. However, I have never been a girl to cry, but rather to nurse hurts deep inside in silence. Besides, I had my dear Aunt Jane to love and hold, and thought of her as my mother instead, the woman who had cared for me and secretly taught me her craft once I was old enough to cast a spell.

I parted with my aunt at the side entrance, kissing her fondly, and we met no more guards on our way back to our dilapidated rooms in the old palace lodge. The lodge was where the princess had been installed on her arrival at Woodstock, for the palace itself was deemed too ramshackle to be inhabited, with part of the roof missing in places and the whole building unsafe. The lodge itself was little better though, a damp heap of stones barely warmed by the fireplaces which smoked incessantly, bats living in the eaves, the rooms dark and cramped with most of the narrow windows open to the wind and rain. Though at least the weather had been good to us this past month. The summer night was still and warm now, a fleeting hint of lavender on the air from the kitchen courtyard.

At the back door to the lodge, I caught Elizabeth glancing round at the ruined palace, her face pale and wide-eyed. Yet despite her fear, there was always a calmness about Elizabeth, as though she stood constantly at the centre of a storm.

I was a little scared myself, truth be told. But I was accustomed to fear. Ever since I had first discovered my power, I had wanted to be a witch – just as other girls my age wanted to be wives and mothers – and not even the threat of death could deter me from that path, now that I was finally beginning to test the extent of my powers.

When I was seven years old, out on a walk with my older brother, our nurse had given us a scolding for hiding among the bushes. Suddenly, a rook had swooped down, screaming and flapping great black wings, and begun to peck at her eyes. We all ran back to the house, pursued by the furious bird, and no one was hurt. But my nurse avoided scolding me after that, even crossing herself whenever I looked at her sideways.

That was when I first knew that I was different from other girls, and over the years I grew determined to discover just how much power I possessed. I could never forget that the punishment for witchcraft was the most painful of deaths. Yet it seemed like death to me to own a gift and never use it out of fear.

TWO

The Red Cross Knight

THE LADY ELIZABETH
had not liked me when my father first brought me to the old palace of Woodstock from our home at Lytton Park, perhaps sensing with her inherited gift for magick that I was not like other girls.

But as the Queen’s prisoner, forbidden all her ladies except Mistress Parry, Elizabeth had not been given much choice in the matter. She had looked on frostily as my father and I were introduced by her gaoler, Sir Henry Bedingfield, who had promised my ambitious father that, in exchange for my services, I would be allowed to accompany the princess back to court if she was ever found innocent of the accusations levelled against her.

I had not wanted to leave Lytton Park, not least because I would miss my beloved aunt and also my brother William, with whom I had been close before he left for university.

But serving Elizabeth would at least help me to escape the unwanted attentions of my suitor, Marcus Dent, whose fits of temper and reputation for cruelty frightened me. Not only was he far older than me, but he was also the local witchfinder, which made it both ironic and desperately uncomfortable that he should have fixed his interest on me as a possible bride. Though Marcus had travelled to
Germany
that spring, I knew he would want to see me on his return. And he was not a man who could easily be rejected.

Much to my father’s relief, the Lady Elizabeth spoke of how my long-dead mother, Catherine Canley, had been kind to her at court after Anne Boleyn had been executed, and gestured me to step forward.

Standing by the crumbling fireplace with a mildewed book in her hand – I later learned that she had been allowed to bring none of her own books to this prison – the young Lady Elizabeth considered me in silence.

I curtseyed, waiting for her verdict. It was hard not to feel uncomfortable under the princess’s penetrating stare. Had I forgotten to lace up my gown? Or perhaps my best cap was on askew?

‘I shall take the daughter for the mother’s sake,’ the princess decided, and signalled me to rise from my curtsey, as regally as though she were the Queen herself.

Soon after I arrived at Woodstock, I tried to influence Elizabeth into sending me home. All my life, I had been able to persuade others to do my bidding with only the power of my voice, sending my brother to steal sweetmeats from the cook’s pantry for us to gorge on, or persuading my nurse to bark like a dog to amuse me in an idle hour. It was a gift, my aunt had said, that could become a power if strengthened by witchcraft. Yet however many spells I tried on the Lady Elizabeth, from a simple charm muttered behind her back to a ritual incantation with candles and a black mirror, it was
no
use. My power had no effect on the princess, and I had a good idea why.

My aunt had told me once that a witch is often proof against another witch’s spells, which is one of the mysteries of witchcraft and nature’s way of limiting a witch’s power in this universe. I did not believe that the Lady Elizabeth was a witch. She showed none of the signs of it, though she had a power of sorts – I knew that from her face alone. But her mother, the executed Queen Anne, had been a powerful witch to the end, everyone was agreed on that. And it seemed this latent power from her mother’s magick was what prevented me from influencing her, even though the gift lay dormant in the young princess.

So it was that I found myself put into service at Woodstock and was unable to magick my way out of it. Much of the work was drearily menial: darning holes in the Lady Elizabeth’s stockings, washing out her underclothes, even fetching and carrying her food. Some days were more entertaining though, such as when she talked of her life at court, or played word games in the evenings. When the sun was not too hot, we were even permitted to take rambling walks about the boundaries of the ancient estate, listening to the distant shrieks of peacocks, once bred there as ornamental birds, now living wild amidst the tumbledown buildings.

Elizabeth was never allowed to forget that she was a prisoner though. A guard would accompany her everywhere,
even
out in the summer sunshine – keeping his distance out of respect for her rank but always watchful.

‘I have done nothing to merit my imprisonment here,’ the Lady Elizabeth complained bitterly to me one day, having been refused permission yet again to send for books from her library at Hatfield. ‘Nothing – do you hear me? Yes, that fool Wyatt led a rebellion against my sister the Queen, and it was rumoured that I had agreed to take the throne if his rebels were successful. But it is all lies! There is no proof whatsoever. No letters exist with my signature on them that might confirm my involvement, and Wyatt himself admitted on the scaffold that I was innocent. Yet still I am held against my will in this dark, gloomy ruin, where I shall probably die of a fever – or some poison administered by my enemies!’

‘Hush, my lady,’ Blanche Parry warned her, and hurried to the door to make sure no one was listening. ‘You must say nothing that could be taken for treason. That is what they watch for.’

Frustrated, Elizabeth scratched out these words on her chamber window:

Much suspected of me
,

Nothing proved can be: