Witchrise (18 page)

‘You had best go and clean yourself up, Master Richard.’ She looked him up and down as though she were a great queen in the finest cloth-of-gold, not a disgraced exile forced to wear a thrice-mended gown and slippers which no longer quite fitted. ‘For you are not fit to keep us company in that attire.’

There was a hard look on Richard’s face as he bowed again, and took himself up the stairs, not even glancing at the rest of us. ‘My lady.’

Satisfied that we were all gainfully employed, Elizabeth sat down in the high-backed chair nearest the hearth and began to read a letter she had received.

Kat looked up curiously from her sewing. ‘Is that a letter from the Queen, my lady?’

‘Yes, my royal sister has seen fit to write to us at last,’ Elizabeth agreed, and there was an odd note in her voice. ‘Would you like to hear what she has to say, Kat?’

‘Yes indeed, my lady.’

‘My dearest sister,’ Elizabeth read out to her lady-in-waiting, betraying with only the slightest twitch of her lips how ironic she found this initial address, ‘I trust you are well, and that the winter you have passed at Hatfield House was not so cold as the one we suffered at Greenwich. Here the Thames came close to freezing over, and several foolhardy youths were drowned when they attempted to walk from one bank to the other.’

I turned my head to listen, intrigued.

The letter went on in a remarkably friendly fashion, while Queen Mary excused herself for not having written in so long, then politely requested her sister’s attendance at court for some state occasion later in the year.

I frowned, wondering what could have brought about this change of heart. Last time I had seen the two sisters together, Queen Mary had been half mad with fury, for her Spanish husband liked Elizabeth rather too well.

But perhaps John Dee was right, and Saturn’s baleful influence had not only made her sick this year, but had driven the Queen to seek some kind of reconciliation with her younger sister. It was not for nothing that Saturn was called the Great Corrector.

‘Attend to your work, girl!’ Kat Ashley snapped, seeing me listening. ‘The Queen’s letter is not for such as you to hear.’

A flash of temper nearly made me snap back at Elizabeth’s lady-in-waiting. But I bit my tongue and suppressed the urge.

My eyes met Alejandro’s across the narrow hall. A tingle ran through me at the intimacy of his dark look, then I lowered my gaze to the green silk thread I was untangling. But my hands were unsteady. Perhaps it would be a good idea to work an anti-love-spell on myself after all.

Elizabeth continued reading aloud from her letter, though the rest of it was an unexciting description of recent events at court, with little to interest me further.

‘Here,’ I whispered, handing the box of silks back to Alice, then bent my head to wrestle with a particularly troublesome knot in one of the thin red threads.

After a while, Elizabeth stopped reading and fell silent. No doubt she too was pondering her sister’s suspicious change of heart. I struggled with the knotted thread, my foot tapping impatiently. The Great Hall had grown dark and chilly in the last few minutes, I realized, catching myself shivering.

I frowned, glancing up. Had the fire gone out? My brother had brought in an armful of logs only a few minutes before, setting several pieces of freshly chopped wood on the glowing heat before slumping on the bench opposite, his elbows resting on the table. Yet now William seemed to be staring blankly at the dark wood of the table, caught in a reverie.

Daydreaming about Alice, probably. I almost snorted at the thought. William had never been able to hide his feelings when we were growing up, and it was plain to me that he found Alice a comely girl. I only hoped his interest was not unwelcome to Alice, for she could break William’s heart if she dismissed his attentions out of hand.

I looked at her, smiling wryly, and saw that Alice too was staring into the sewing box with a blank expression, her mind also presumably on other things.

Entertained by this mutual daydreaming and wishing to share the joke, I glanced over my shoulder at Alejandro, who was still engaged in copying out Spanish verses under the window.

Except that Alejandro too was perfectly still. His feathered quill was motionless, poised above the inkpot without descending. His dark head was slightly bent, long lashes hiding the expression in his eyes, but I could see him staring down intently at the parchment as though he could not quite believe what he had written.

Had everyone gone crazy today?

Then I looked across at the Lady Elizabeth, seated by the fire, and a wave of cold fear slammed into my heart. The princess was holding the Queen’s letter as she had been before, but Elizabeth too had stopped moving, her lips parted, frozen in mid-sentence.

On the wooden settle opposite her sat Kat and Blanche, their needles suspended, a look of mild surprise on Blanche’s face, Kat watching me through narrowed eyes, neither woman even so much as blinking.

Clumsily I stood up, the embroidery threads falling unheeded to the floor.

‘Alejandro?’

But he neither spoke nor moved in response. He might as well have been made of stone, I thought, staring at him in horror. His name echoed about the high rafters as though the house were empty. The fire had gone out too, I realized, glancing at the hearth. The logs lay half burned, smouldering in the ashes.

I shivered, rubbing at my arms. The hall was suddenly bitterly cold.

Cold as a tomb.

I took a few steps towards the other women. ‘Blanche? Mistress Ashley?’ I whispered, then looked at Elizabeth. ‘My lady?’

Their stillness was unnerving.

Breathless in a room of living statues, I looked about at the company, searching for some sign that they were jesting, playing a trick on me. But nobody moved. Even the clattering of pans and the cheerful sound of Lucy whistling in the kitchen had stopped. I had no doubt that if I were to walk down the narrow passageway to the kitchen, I would find the servants equally motionless, as though some spell had turned them all to stone as they went about their chores.

My skin crept with horror.

Only one person could be powerful enough to have caught everyone here out of time, and left me to face him alone. Someone who had shrugged off a banishing-spell as lightly as though it were a simple charm.

Then I heard it. The sharp firm clop of shod hooves on the mud track that led to us from the Hatfield road. Slowing now, coming steadily closer to the house. The jingle of harness. The creak of leather.

I ran to the half-open door and eased round it, peering out into the sharp spring sunshine. My heart was thumping so loudly it hurt.

I had expected to see a horse and rider when I looked outside. What I saw instead was smoke. A high cloud of smoke rolling along the track towards the front of the house.

I sucked in my breath, waiting for whatever it was to arrive at the door: thick black smoke travelling in a misshapen ball.

The smoke-ball was unlike anything I had ever seen before, but quite clearly supernatural in origin. It looked and smelled evil, hanging acrid in my throat. It billowed out like a gown in the wind and rippled long fingers of smoke towards the house, then slowly began to disperse, draining away as though into a hole in the ground.

Soon all that was left was a black stallion.

On the horse’s back sat a rider dressed in the rich doublet and hose of a gentleman, cloak thrown back over one shoulder, a jaunty feathered cap on his head.

It was Marcus Dent.

Marcus swung down out of the saddle and looked directly at me in the doorway.

‘Meg,’ he said lightly, and swept the cap from his head with an exaggerated bow.

It was the Marcus Dent from my visions. Only this time there was no cloudy illusion to hide his face from me. That was when I realized what was different about him. He was almost handsome now – his face was no longer scarred, and his dead eye was whole and blue again, watching me sharply, no longer destroyed.

His hair was sleek and fair too, shining in the sunlight. ‘Good day to you. I trust you are in good health? What of your mistress, the Lady Elizabeth? I had heard she was unwell. But perhaps now Meg Lytton is returned to her side, the lady has miraculously recovered?’

I stared and could not speak, my insides clenching.

‘What is the matter? Am I not courteous enough to match your God-fearing Spanish priest?’ Marcus queried, raising his brows at my expression. His smile was wry. ‘Oh, my appearance. But there is no reason to be surprised. You are not the only one with a little power, my dear Meg.’ With a pass of his hand, he returned his face to the scarred ruin I remembered from our last meeting. The white eye stared at nothing, his lips bared to reveal broken and blackened teeth, new reddened scars like burns across his throat.

I gasped at the hideous transformation, unable to snatch the sound back, and his laughter chilled me.

‘Agreed.’ Marcus waved his hand and his face was whole again, ten years younger, startlingly handsome. ‘I think this face suits me better too.’

I turned to shut myself into the house, to protect those still within, and at once he was there, pushing me inexorably aside as though I weighed less than a feather.

I fumbled for a word of power and Marcus Dent smiled, placing one long finger on my lips. ‘Yes?’

I opened my mouth but found myself unable to speak, my voice stolen by his spell.

‘The silence of a woman is a rare gift indeed.’ He walked past me and saw the Lady Elizabeth, frozen on her high-backed seat. ‘Ah yes, your mistress looks much improved. Reading a letter, I see.’ He crossed and plucked the letter from the princess’s hand, beginning to read aloud in a mocking voice, ‘
Dearest sister, I trust you are well . . . et cetera, et cetera
. From the Queen herself, no less. What exalted company you keep here, Meg.’ He dropped the letter on Elizabeth’s chest. ‘But where is your Spaniard?’

The sun, slanting in through the high windows, illuminated Alejandro’s dark head, still bent over his verses. He was wearing no sword, out of deference to the princess’s wishes. Though even if he had been, he could not have drawn it. For Alejandro sat deaf and dumb, unable to move and not even knowing that he needed to, so utterly blind to the danger that approached him. Vulnerable to the worst, most creeping evil . . .

I tried to lunge after Marcus, and found I could not move either, my feet stuck in treacle, my arms still raised towards him in a gesture of attack. My vision turned red, my fury built until I thought it would lift the top of my head off.

How was this trick done? How had the witchfinder caught us all like this, flies in his honey trap, helpless to resist? Richard, I thought gratingly. This was Richard’s fault for lifting the protective spells that had kept Marcus Dent out of Hatfield. And the fool had thought himself clever for breaking my magickal barrier down, just so he could cast certain spells within it and allow visitors to come and go unchallenged!

‘I can see why you would want to marry him. He is a handsome fellow,’ Marcus remarked, halting before Alejandro. He glanced back at me and smiled, chilling my blood, then bent and put his face close to Alejandro’s. ‘I wonder if the Spaniard tastes as good as he looks. Shall we find out?’

I watched in speechless horror as he drew the dagger from his belt, then sliced a thin line from Alejandro’s jawline to his forehead, skipping over his eye with a flick of the blade. Blood oozed out at once and began to trickle down his neck. The cut was not deep, but would be enough to scar him for life.

Marcus examined the seeping red cut with interest, leaning close into Alejandro’s face. ‘Shame to ruin so handsome a young man. But my face has been ruined, so why not his? Perhaps you will see no difference between us once his face too is scarred and ugly.’ To my disgust, Marcus stuck out his tongue and slowly licked along the cut, cleaning the blood from Alejandro’s face. ‘Hmm,’ he mused, straightening. He swallowed, licking my beloved’s blood off his lips with apparent enjoyment, then looked back at me. ‘Not bad for a foreigner.’

My skin crawled even as I struggled to release myself from the hold he had over me. His confidence frightened me. What kind of creature had Marcus Dent become since his trip into the void, and was there any way to defeat such powerful magick?

Of course, I should have realized the blood-licking was part of a spell. Marcus took three steps back from the window, stepping very deliberately out of the dusty beams of sunlight, then called out, ‘Alejandro de Castillo, I have drunk your blood and have power over your body.’ He clapped his hands three times. ‘I am your new master. Arise and do my bidding.’

Alejandro’s limbs jerked. The quill feather dropped from his hand. Suddenly he lurched to his feet, almost knocking the desk over, and stood before Marcus, his head bent, swaying as though half asleep. The inkpot rolled off the table behind him, the dark stain of its contents pooling next to his feet. He paid no heed to it, his mind and soul sleeping, his body an empty shell, obedient to his master’s command.

‘Dance for me!’

Alejandro danced a few clumsy steps, his movements rough and grotesque.

It was not Alejandro in there, I reminded myself grimly. Merely his captive body. But it hurt nonetheless to see Marcus make him look ridiculous.

‘Kiss Meg Lytton.’

I wanted to scream as Alejandro approached me, his eyes empty of expression, his cheek and collar horribly bloodied, and set his lips against mine.

His lips were cold. Like kissing a corpse.

‘Now take this dagger.’ Marcus held out the weapon to Alejandro. ‘Go to the Lady Elizabeth, and stab her through the heart with it.’

Alejandro took the dagger without hesitation and walked slowly towards the Lady Elizabeth, blood still trickling down his cheek.

I stared, caught fast in Marcus’s spell. I could only watch in horror as my beloved approached the heir to the English throne with a dagger in his hand.

Stooping over the princess, Alejandro knocked the letter aside so that it fell to the floor in a slow rustling arc, then held the dagger aloft, clearly aiming for her heart.