The Vanishing Witch (54 page)

She giggled. ‘And what about my lips? What are my lips like?’

He chuckled indulgently, entering into her game and, for the first time in weeks, found himself relaxing a little. ‘Let me see, your lips, what do they remind me of?’

She parted them slightly, lifted her face and pressed her soft mouth to his own, squirming her round little
bottom against his crotch.

Afterwards, Robert told himself a hundred times it was not his fault. Before he realised what she intended, she’d seized his hand and was pushing it inside her gown, rubbing it against her soft nipple. He felt the silky mound of her little breast in his hand. Her mouth was hot against his. Her kitten tongue fluttered over his lips. He felt his member rising between
his legs, the heat rushing up his spine till he couldn’t even think what—

‘Leonia!’ Catlin was standing in the doorway, Edward just behind her.

Leonia turned her head and in a flash her mother had caught her by the wrist and dragged her from Robert’s lap.

‘What are you doing with my daughter?’

Robert struggled up from the chair. ‘Nothing . . . The little slut flung herself on me. Is this how
you bring her up to behave?’

Catlin rounded on her daughter. ‘Is this true? Of course it is. Don’t try to deny it. I’ve seen you flirting with my husband, sitting on his lap like some stew-house whore. I won’t tolerate it, do you hear? This time I shall teach you a lesson you won’t forget!’

Catlin strode over to a small box that stood on the chest and opened it. Robert saw a flash of silver
in her hand. She pushed Leonia onto a chair. Then, before anyone realised what she intended, she grabbed a handful of Leonia’s long black curls. There was a rasping sound and the hank of hair fell to the floor. Leonia shrieked and clapped her hand to the patch of shorn scalp.

‘God’s blood, what are you doing?’ Robert tried to catch his wife’s hand, intending to take the scissors from her. ‘There’s
no need for that.’

She spun round, the sharp points of the twin blades just an inch from his chest. He’d never seen such dark fury in her face. ‘It would seem there is every need, Robert,’ she said grimly. ‘It’s what they do to whores, isn’t it?’

Leonia sprang from the chair and ran across the room, but her mother caught her by the hair and dragged her back, flinging her into the chair again.

‘Let me go, you old hag! You’ll be sorry. I’ll make you sorry.’ Leonia struggled to free herself, but Catlin was stronger.

‘Not as sorry as I will make you. Edward! Hold her.’

He hesitated, then hurried over and pinned Leonia’s arms to the chair. He looked down at her, grinning, as if he were enjoying every moment. She stopped struggling and stared up at him, unblinking. His smile abruptly vanished,
as if a bucket of water had been thrown over him, and he hastily turned his face away, though his fingers tightened round her arms.

Catlin set to work with grim determination, shearing as close to the scalp as she could. There seemed to be far more hair on the floor than there had ever been on the child’s head. The locks kept slithering down until Robert felt he was suffocating under the rising
mounds of hair. He knew he should stop his wife, but to do so would make it seem that he was admitting it was his fault. But it wasn’t. The girl had seduced him, deliberately tried to arouse him. She’d taken him entirely unawares. But she was a child, just a child. She couldn’t have understood what she was doing, could she?

All the time her mother was cutting, Leonia neither moved nor uttered
a sound. She kept her furious gaze fixed on Edward, as Catlin roughly pushed her head this way and that, as if she were plucking a dead bird. When only an uneven stubble covered her daughter’s scalp, Catlin straightened. ‘Let her go.’

Edward sprang away from Leonia as if she were a dog that might savage him as soon as its muzzle was removed, but she rose and walked stiffly to the door. Only once
did her hands jerk up as if to touch her head, but she clamped them at her sides before they could. Robert thought she must be weeping and trying to conceal it, but when she reached the door, she turned and there was no trace of a tear in her tawny eyes. The golden flecks were more prominent than Robert remembered. For a moment he thought he was staring into the eyes of a great cat, filled with
savage rage and hatred. Then, before he could blink, she was gone.

It is written that King John of England was murdered by a wicked friar who squeezed the secretions of a toad into his drinking cup.

As soon as the door closed behind Leonia, Robert staggered to the table and poured himself a goblet of wine, which he drained without setting it down, then choked as he remembered who’d brought it for him. He tried to avoid looking at the mound
of black curls encircling the chair.

‘That was harsh, my dear. Surely there was a better way . . .’

‘I think it will serve as a salient reminder, Robert.’ Catlin calmly returned the scissors to her box, as if she had used them to snip a loose thread
.
‘Nuns cut their hair to remove temptation from men, don’t they?’

Robert flushed, and caught the smirk on Edward’s face. Anger blazed in him. ‘And
if you’d been here this afternoon, wife, as was your duty, this would never have happened. Why exactly was it necessary for you to visit the cottages with your son?’

Catlin’s eyes were as cold as the grave. ‘Edward is not yet acquainted with the area or the tenants. And it’s as well that I did ride out, for I’d the good fortune to meet Sheriff Thomas on the road. He was asking again, Robert,
if you had yet made up your mind to sit on the Commission of Array.’

‘I made plain when he asked me the first time that I have guild matters to attend to and, with business as poor as it is, I need to be out buying and selling, not wasting my time compiling lists and listening to testimonies. Every hour spent doing that is throwing money into the Braytheforde.’ He flinched as the image of Jan’s
bloated white face floated again before his eyes.

Edward crossed the room and poured two goblets of wine, one of which he handed to Catlin. The other he took back to one of the chairs and sat down with it. The insolence of this gesture made Robert’s jaw clench. His stepson was treating the house as if it were his own.

‘But, Father, I’m here to relieve you of that burden so that you can take
your place where you should, in the service of the King and Lincoln.’

Edward had never dared to use such a familiar term as ‘father’ before. Robert had given him no such leave, and only his guilt over Leonia prevented him from seizing his wife’s son by the scruff of his neck and hurling him out of the house.

‘
If I am any relation to you at all it is as
step
father and I will decide how I shall
employ my time,
Master
Edward,’ Robert said coldly. ‘May I remind you that, thanks to your incompetence, if that indeed was what it was, I lost a cartload of the best cloth. And, thanks to your idiocy, the thieves got clean away. Only the intervention of your mother prevented me having you arrested as an accomplice. She convinced me you really are that stupid.’

Edward jerked as if he were about
to leap from his chair and punch Robert, but Catlin shot out a hand and pushed him down, shaking her head at him. ‘Until such time as my son has proved himself worthy of your trust, naturally he’ll take no more decisions without consulting you. But if business is poor, Robert, that’s all the more reason we shouldn’t risk offending the sheriff by churlishly rejecting this honour. Thomas is an influential
man. And, as he said, the King rewards loyalty. With armies on the verge of war in France and Scotland, wool and cloth will be sorely needed for gambesons to protect the soldiers, as well as for tunics. One royal contract would be worth a thousand times more than any other and you wouldn’t need to wear yourself out riding round the country, begging to sell a few bales of cloth here and there.’

Robert slammed his goblet onto the table. ‘And what use would a royal contract be if my warehouse is burned to the ground? It’s the work of minutes to destroy a fortune, as I saw in London. You have no idea what these men are capable of, Catlin. Great buildings brought crashing down. Men dragged from their own hearths and slaughtered, wealthy men, noblemen. If you had seen it . . .’

‘But that
is the point, Robert. None of the council did see it and some are beginning to ask why John of Gaunt has not yet sent reinforcements here. If you refuse to serve on the Commission, some may begin to question if the message was delivered at all, and indeed where exactly your loyalties lie. Thomas says that your close friend Hugh de Garwell is already suspected of being a rebel. He was a Member of Parliament
and a mayor of Lincoln.’

‘Hugh? Have they arrested him?’

Catlin lowered her eyes, fingering her goblet. ‘Naturally, Sheriff Thomas would not confide such matters to a woman, but the very fact he mentioned it must surely be a warning that if you do not accept . . .’

Edward tipped the last of the wine down his throat. ‘It’s all round the wharf that men are being tried and executed within the
hour. Not just hanged either, but dragged by horses till they’re dead or having their noses, ears, pricks and limbs hacked off and being left to bleed to death. I give thanks I can prove I was quietly going about my business in Lincoln during the riots. I pity those who can’t.’

Robert crossed to the casement, staring sightlessly into the street. Not for the first time since he’d returned from
London did he wonder if Catlin had any care at all for his safety. The tender, affectionate woman he’d married had vanished, leaving in her place a woman who seemed as hard as the devil’s hoof. The ruthlessness with which she’d punished Leonia had shocked him. Yet perhaps it was him who was being unreasonable. The girl had behaved like a harlot. It was a mother’s duty to correct her. And surely Catlin’s
anger was proof she loved her husband and was jealous of any woman, even her own daughter, who might steal his affections. Jealousy sprang from love, didn’t it? He winced, remembering poor Edith’s rages.

Catlin was right about something else too. He had failed in London. He couldn’t risk any suspicion of disloyalty, not with treason being whispered behind every keyhole. However much he feared
the rebels, the fear of being accused of treason was worse. The killings he’d witnessed by the rebels, though brutal, were positively merciful compared to how King Richard and his minions were punishing traitors. Catlin was trying to protect him, as any loving wife would.

The gibe she had made about him being a coward still burned into him, not least because he had accused himself of the same
fault. Were his fellow merchants whispering it behind his back? He could not bear to have anyone, especially his own wife, despise him.

‘My sweeting,’ Catlin said softly, as if she could hear his thoughts, ‘Sheriff Thomas has assured you that the names of the commissioners will be kept secret, known only to him and King Richard. No one in Lincoln will have any idea that you are a commissioner.
They won’t be lying in wait for you. Why would they? Besides, as Edward says, with the summary executions taking place, even the most hardened rebel will not dare show his hand now. They’ll all be lying low in their cottages or slinking off into the fens and praying they’re not found.’

‘I suppose I have no choice.’ Robert sighed. ‘Very well . . . I’ll send word to Thomas.’

He was still gazing
out of the window so he didn’t see Catlin pick up one of the shining black curls and slide it into the hollow behind one of the bloodstones in her necklace. Neither did he witness the knowing smile his wife and her son exchanged. If he had, he might have been even more terrified than he already was.

Peg O’Nell is a water sprite who haunts the river Ribble. She was a maid at Waddow Hall and her mistress drowned her, using witchcraft. Every seven years since then the water sprite has taken a human life in revenge.

I was sitting in the cool of the cloister, with three of the older patients. The afternoon was hot and stifling as a baker’s oven so we’d been allowed to take our
mending outside – linen ties that had snapped from caps, sleeves torn from habits, patches to be added to the shifts of the sick, which had been scrubbed so often they’d worn into holes. The work in the infirmary didn’t stop for the lay sisters or for us.

After those nights I’d spent locked inside freezing baths I’d learned quickly. I’d learned to walk like the nuns, my hands clenched together
inside my sleeves so their agitation did not betray me. I kept my eyes cast down and lips pressed together, like the young novices. That way you didn’t draw attention to yourself. That way they thought you were well. The nuns approved. The lay sisters didn’t care, so long as you did what you were bade and didn’t cause them trouble.

But I knew fine rightly that they’d never let me out, even if
I never had another fit. Some poor creatures had been walled up in the infirmary for years. They’d been brought to St Magdalene’s as young lasses, sick with a fever, or a pox of the skin, or their belly swollen with a bairn that should never have been conceived. But even when they were well again, their families didn’t want them back, so they stayed, cleaning and baking, washing and digging. And
I’d be caged with them till the day I died.

Then they’d dump me in the cold earth without coffin, candles or mourners, and when the mound had settled, grass and weeds covering it, the nuns and lay sisters, the sick and the mad would walk over me as if I’d never been born. Sometimes I fell into such misery at the prospect of the long, lonely years that lay ahead I thought it would be a blessing
if I really did run mad. At least then I’d not mark the passing of the days.

Sister Ursula came bustling into the cloister, fanning herself with her hand, her face scarlet as a strawberry beneath the tight coif. She glanced up at the black clouds massing behind the cathedral and clicked her fingers impatiently at us. ‘Rain’s coming. Are there still clothes out drying?’