The Daylight Gate (8 page)

He will come, says Old Demdike, one night, on a moon-trail, he will come and I’ll be rid of the lot of you
.

At first the rival families made spells and
invocations
. At first fire and blood were used to lure the Dark Gentleman. Now there are curses but no hope. Misery but no invention. Alizon wonders about Old Demdike’s power. Demdike swears he will come but she no longer believes it.

Day and night are the same. Fitful cold aching sleep, pain, thirst, tiredness even when asleep.

The straw moves underfoot with lice.

The air is stagnant. Breathing is hard because the air is so thick. Too much carbon dioxide. Not enough oxygen. Every breath keeps them alive and kills them off some more. One of the women has a fever.

The door opens. The gaoler is there with a dripping flare.

‘Nance!’ he shouts, and shoves the flare in the socket. He leaves them light while he takes the woman; it is his way of signalling something … what?

The flare throws grotesque shadows on the black stone walls of the cell. No, it is not the shadows that are grotesque; the women are grotesque. Shrunken, stooped, huddled, crippled, hollow-faced, racked and rattling.

Alizon uses her hands to make a play-theatre. Here is a rabbit. Here is a bird. Old Demdike sways back and forth in her soiled dress.

It is raining a little, and Jane Southworth goes to
her
station under the grille, opening her mouth to the rain. She lets the rain on her face be her tears. None of the women cry any more.

She thinks about Hell, and is it like this? She thinks that the punishments of the Fiend are made out of human imaginings. Only humans can know what it means to strip a human being of being human. She thinks the Fiend has a kind of purity that humans never have. She thinks that godliness is ridiculous because it exists to hide this; this stinking airless doomed cell. Life is a stinking airless doomed cell. Why do we pretend? She can smell strawberries. She knows she is going mad. Let the rain come.

A rat runs over her foot and drinks from the indent of her shoe.

Hoghton Tower

ALICE NUTTER AND
Roger Nowell were riding ahead of their group. Alice said nothing about Constable Hargreaves or Jem Device or the events of the previous night. When Roger Nowell enquired after his fashion if she had slept well, she said she had. She hoped he had found his fugitive. He had not.

Potts was travelling with them. He was a poor rider and preferred a carriage, but roads in Lancashire were not so necessary as they were in London, and so Potts had to be content with bouncing along the ruts and bridleways in an open cart drawn by a farmer’s nag. He was bad-tempered enough from a night without sleep and not a single broomstick to be seen on Pendle Hill. He had been curious to meet Alice Nutter but she made him nervous. Something about the way she looked at him made him feel less
important
than he knew himself to be.

He was glad to be travelling behind the mounted party.

Roger Nowell was glad of it too. He and Alice were both distracted by their own thoughts and said little to one another.

Alice had woken well before dawn. Christopher was sleeping next to her, sleeping heavily like a man who has not slept enough for a long time, sleeping carelessly, on his back, his arm thrown out, like a child who is safe.

She had made him get up, taken him down the secret passageway between her bedroom and her study. Locked him in. Left him. She did not know if she would see him again. He wanted to leave for Lancaster. She knew that she loved him.

‘Hoghton Tower,’ said Roger Nowell, pausing his horse and breaking her thoughts. ‘It is a splendid house.’

They had reached the mile-long drive that led to the house. The de Hoghtons had come to England with William the Conqueror, but this house, fifty years old, had been built by Thomas Hoghton, who had scarcely been able to enjoy it. He would not renounce his Catholic faith and had been forced to flee to France.

‘He was harbouring Edmund Campion,’ said Roger Nowell, ‘Remember him?’

Alice remembered. ‘Burned alive for his faith.’

‘Thomas Hoghton was lucky to escape himself. He used his money to found the Jesuit Seminary at Douai in France,’ said Roger Nowell. ‘Christopher Southworth trained as a priest there.’

Alice glanced across at him, but his face was straight ahead, admiring the house.

‘Hoghton’s son Richard has no heart for religion but a good nose for politics. Consequently he has kept the house and good King Scottish Jimmy gave him a knighthood last year.’

‘Are you not fond of our King James?’ said Alice.

‘He is a meddler, and when the King is a meddler, the rest of us must be meddlers too. Do you think I enjoy sending old women and their crazed offspring to the gallows?’

‘Then do not ask me to help you.’

‘Then do not ask
me
to help
you
, Mistress.’

He dropped his horse back a little, leaving her to ride ahead. He could not help noticing her figure, her posture, her hair, the quality of her beauty. He had never been interested in her before. He checked himself. This was not the time.

Alice Nutter was dressing in her room. She was
careful
to look her best. Her maid fastened her magenta dress and hung her neck and her ears with emeralds. When the maid had gone, Alice took a small phial from her bag and wiped her face with a few drops. There was not much left in the stoppered bottle. John Dee had made it and given it to Alice. It was not the Elixir of Life but it was the Elixir of Youth.

She came downstairs to find Potts talking to a small, balding genial man. ‘As a London gentleman I find these country entertainments very tedious,’ said Potts.

‘Then why attend them?’ asked the owlish man.

‘I am a guest of Magistrate Nowell. I am in Lancashire on matters of the Crown. Yes, the Crown,’ said Potts, fluffing himself up. ‘I may say nothing, but you would hardly believe the witchery popery popery witchery I have uncovered.’

‘You must be exhausted,’ said Alice, joining the two men. ‘You look exhausted.’

The genial gentleman smiled at her. Potts glared. A bell rang. A servant announced the start of the play.

‘Shakespeare,’ said Potts. ‘An upstart crow. Melodramatic and mediocre.
Macbeth
– that was a ridiculous play. And to my mind very suspicious too.’

‘Suspicious?’

‘The foul hags, witches, beldames, prophesying to Macbeth – do they not have “the pilot’s thumb” to throw in their infernal pot?’

‘They do …’

‘Aha! And that is the thumb of Edmund Campion, Jesuit burned for treason, harboured here in this house, oh yes, while Shakespeare himself was a tutor here.’

‘And that means …?’ said the genial gentleman, trying to follow.

‘Witchery popery popery witchery – all the same thing.’

The genial gentleman shrugged and offered Alice his arm. ‘May I escort you in to the play?’

Alice nodded, just as Roger Nowell came forward looking for her. He barely glanced at Potts. He bowed to Alice’s companion.

‘William Shakespeare.’

Potts was suddenly nowhere to be seen.

As they took their seats for the play, Alice and Shakespeare were talking. He had met her many years ago, he said, when he was new to London, just come from Stratford, and she had her house on Bankside by the Swan Theatre. She had welcomed him like a northern woman. He liked northern women for their
forthrightness
and their kindness – he had met many of them when he was a young man here at Hoghton Tower.

‘We were all Catholics then,’ he said, ‘even when we were not.’

‘Ah, we were young then,’ said Alice.

Shakespeare looked at her curiously. ‘Even when we were not.’

She blushed. He was like an owl, bright-eyed, his head perched on his ruff. His eyes looked deeper than his gaze and Alice felt that he knew everything and that there was nothing she need say.

He was a wealthy man now, living in Stratford, no longer writing plays. He had travelled up to see
The Tempest
at Hoghton Tower because he was fond of the place and fond of the play. His company was still the King’s Men, and
The Tempest
had been chosen for the wedding of King James’s daughter, to take place the following year.

‘I have ridden out all the storms,’ said Shakespeare, ‘even the ones I wrote myself. Here, look, it begins …’

A tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning heard. Enter a Shipmaster and a Boatswain
.

MASTER
: Boatswain!

BOATSWAIN
: Here, master. What cheer?

Alice’s mind moved in and out of the play. She remembered Shakespeare coming to her house – but he had had long hair, an earring, a beautiful beard. She had not recognised him this time.

As the play was performed, she seemed to hear Elizabeth’s voice again – and they were together in the house on Bankside, upstairs in their secret private rooms that looked over the River Thames and across London, the great city.

‘Did you sell your Soul, Lizzy?’

‘The Dark Gentleman will take a Soul. It need not be my own.’

‘I doubt another will go to Hell to pay for your pleasure.’

‘You do not believe in Hell or Souls, do you, Alice?’

‘I believe that you are changed.’

Alice looked up, startled from her dreaming by the stronger dreaming of the play.

Alice fainted.

When she came to, she was in a small room away from the main hall. She could hear that the play was continuing. Her servant stood over her. William Shakespeare took the water from him and gave it to her. He said he was flattered that his little play had had such an effect on her.

She had got lost in time, she said. Time, he said, yes, yes, time was the kind of place where you could get lost.

Then she said to him, and she did not know why she said it, ‘Do you believe in magick?’

‘Why are you asking me, an actor and an old penman, when you worked with John Dee and Edward Kelley?’

‘You knew them?’

‘I knew anyone interesting to know. Tell me, do you think a stone statue can come to life? I have used that device in a play I am still revising called
The Winter’s Tale
. The end cannot succeed unless you believe, just for a moment, that a statue could perhaps step down and embrace you. Return what you had lost.’

‘John Dee made a metal beetle that flew like a living thing. He was arrested for it as sorcery.’

‘You can get arrested for anything these days. But
I
don’t think I can end my play with a metal beetle – however lifelike.’

‘You haven’t answered me,’ said Alice.

Shakespeare shook his head and sunk his chin into his ruff, making him look more owl-like than ever. ‘I have written about other worlds often enough. I have said what I can say. There are many kinds of reality. This is but one kind.’ He stretched out his hands to indicate the walls, carpets, tapestries and stuffs around him. ‘But, Mistress, do not be seen to stray too far from the real that is clear to others, or you may stand accused of the real that is clear to you.’

The door opened and Roger Nowell entered, with some of the party. Everyone was praising Shakespeare, except for Potts who was skulking in a corner. To Nowell he said, ‘You do know, don’t you, that this playwright, as he calls himself, this Shakespeare, was well known to Catesby, chief among the Gunpowder plotters?’

Roger Nowell nodded, irritated.

Potts continued: ‘There were two buzzing hives of Catholics in England. A hive at Stratford-upon-Avon. A hive in Lancashire. All of the conspirators of the Gunpowder Plot met to make their plans at the Mermaid Inn in Stratford. Stratford, sir! Shakespeare sir! When the plot failed and they were routed, they
fled
, all of them, to Lancashire, hiding here at Hoghton Tower, or with the Southworths at Salmesbury Hall.’

‘I know that,’ said Roger Nowell.

‘It astonishes me what you know and yet refuse to know. You fly near the edge, sir, near the edge.’

Alice, a little way off, stood up to leave the room. Potts regarded her. ‘That lady is a mystery, sir, a mystery. If she were my mystery I would look deeper into it.’

‘I am not as idle as you imagine,’ replied Roger Nowell.

Alice went upstairs to her rooms to change her clothes. It was not yet dark, but it was not light: the Daylight Gate. And if you could pass through – to what – to where?