Bewitching the Baron (19 page)

“Is this the house?” he asked as they came in front of a stone, slate-roofed building that was almost indiscernible from its neighbors, except for the cobbler’s sign. “Valerian?”

When she did not stir, he leant back and tried to see her face. Her eyes were closed, her face pale where it was not coated with blood. “Valerian!” She did not respond, did not even seem to hear him.

“Mrs. Storrow!” he called to the house. “Mrs. Storrow, come quickly!”

He dared not try to dismount with her like this. He was on the verge of calling out again when the door opened. Theresa came out, as imposing as ever despite the haggard cast to her complexion. Her daughter followed close behind, a thin-lipped, sour-faced shadow of her mother.

“Valerian has been injured,” he explained. “The miller’s daughter attacked her.”

Theresa stepped around the horse to where she could look up at Valerian. Her face held the calm, intense focus of a woman who had spent her life dealing with crises, and she knew that the gathering of information was the first necessity. “The wound, is it under her hand?”

“Yes, a gash about an inch long.”

The information seemed to relieve her somewhat. She looked up at him as if weighing a choice. “Would you mind holding her there until she comes out of this? It should only be a few minutes more.”

“Certainly.”

The simple request begged a dozen questions, but he was not about to pry for information in these circumstances. If Mrs. Storrow thought the best course for her niece was to sit on his lap in a trance and bleed for another ten minutes, well, he supposed she knew what she was doing. Her daughter had retreated to the doorway of her house, where she watched with eyes that showed her ill ease.

They stood in a silence as still as Valerian’s. He wondered that neither of them asked about the circumstances of the attack. Had this type of thing happened before? While they waited, Paul came riding up, Valerian’s basket in front of him. He handed it down to Mrs. Storrow as Nathaniel introduced them.

Valerian’s hand dropped away from her wound, and Nathaniel felt her muscles relax. She drew in a ragged breath and raised her head. Before she could say anything, Mrs. Storrow reached up and helped slide her from his lap to the ground, where she stood weakly, swaying on unsure legs. He quickly dismounted, and moved to lift her into his arms.

“No, she will be all right now,” Theresa said, placing a hand briefly on his chest to keep him back. “Thank you for all your help. I am sure the wound looked worse than it was. Scalp wounds always bleed so much, you would think the person was surely about to expire.”

Valerian blinked up at him. “I will be fine. I am tired, is all. Please, go now, and let Aunt Theresa care for me.”

There was something strange going on, something they were not telling him, some reason they wanted to be rid of him. He could feel it in his bones. The social training ingrained in him since birth strongly urged him to leave at their request. It was what any gentleman would do.

“Paul, you go ahead,” he said. “I am going to stay.” Since when had he been a gentleman?

Paul shrugged and reined his horse around, the shod hooves of his mount clip-clopping on the cobbles as he left. However much Paul aggravated him, Nathaniel spared a moment of gratitude to have such a friend.

He turned back to the women in time to catch the end of a silent communion between Valerian and her aunt. Valerian gave the slightest nod of her chin, and the fractional raising of Mrs. Storrow’s eyebrows suggested a shrug.

Nathaniel narrowed his eyes. He would discover what these women were hiding, or know the reason why.

Chapter Thirteen

Nathaniel could not help but notice that Theresa’s daughter, introduced as Charmaine, was considerably less serene than her kin as she led the way into her home. She looked like she wanted to be a thousand miles away from the situation, and she kept casting worried looks at him, as if he were a strange dog she thought might bite.

The front room of the house was the cobbler’s shop, complete with work benches, piles of leather scraps, and tools. Charmaine led them through to the kitchen in back, a small room with a flagstone floor and a scarred table. Narrow stairs beside the fireplace led to the living quarters above. Nathaniel felt the bulk of his size in the small room with the three women, and tried to keep himself out of their way.

Valerian seemed to gain strength with each passing minute, sorting through her basket, checking for broken glass with Theresa as Charmaine poured heated water into a basin on the table, her hands shaking slightly. They all three seemed in no hurry to tend to Valerian’s gash, and Nathaniel found himself growing anxious at their delay.

Finally, Valerian herself dipped a rag in the water and wrung it out. She looked up at Nathaniel, the wet cloth dripping in her hand. “You are here because I trust you,” she said. “And I do not believe you will be frightened by what you are about to see.”

He held her eyes, and without knowing to what he agreed, he nodded in acceptance of her faith in him.

He watched as she scrubbed away the blood from her chin, her cheeks, her nose. She rinsed the rag in the basin and started in on her forehead. He flinched at the vigor with which she attacked her skin with the cloth. He had looked into that wound. Surely such rough treatment was not beneficial. His faith in the healing skills of Valerian and her aunt began to falter.

And then, she removed the cloth. His lips parted in wonder, and his eyes scanned the flesh above her brow, clean and pale but for a few transparent smudges of blood. He stepped closer to her, examining the healthy skin, his fingertips brushing her damp brow. He could just make out a pale pink line where the gash had been.

He fumbled behind him for the bench, and sat with a creak of wood. He had seen that gash with his own eyes, and had enough experience from the army to know that it had not been faked, that it had been deep enough to need stitches. And yet, Valerian stood there now with hardly any hint of injury, the skin of her brow smooth.

He barely noticed Theresa taking Charmaine’s arm and leading her up the stairs, leaving him and Valerian alone in the small kitchen. The first thought that came to his mind was
witchcraft,
but he quickly pushed the thought away. To believe that would be to believe the world was nothing like he thought it. Tales of magic were for the ignorant, for those who had no other way to make sense of the world.

She was watching him, wary and expectant, waiting for his response. It occurred to him, in light of what had occurred today in Greyfriars, how big a risk she was taking in revealing this to him. Rejecting hearsay was one thing. Physical evidence was another.

“Explain,” he said at last.

She gave him a small smile. She dipped the rag back into the bowl and wiped the last smudges of blood off her skin, then pulled a stool up to the end of the table and sat. “You are not frightened?” she asked.

“I do not know that I would completely deny that reaction. I assume, however, that you are shortly to give me an explanation that will remove any such trepidations from my mind.”

She shrugged. “Perhaps.”

“An encouraging beginning.”

She smiled, and rubbed the pink line on her forehead. “Neither Aunt Theresa nor I are witches in the biblical sense of the word. In the Bible it is poisoners that are being spoken of. A woman who can heal with herbs must also know which herbs and plants can kill, and I would not disagree with anyone who sought to punish a person who sold poisons to murderers, or poisoned people for her own benefit. We also do not conjure spirits or cavort with demons, we do not worship Satan, we do not shape-change or cast spells.”

Nathaniel nodded. “I never thought you did.”

“Sometimes we do dowse for water, when a farmer needs a new well.”

“As do many men, who have never been called witch.”

“Yes. And on very rare occasions, when someone’s property has gone missing or there is dispute over ownership of a sheep or goose, Aunt Theresa will play the role of thief-catcher. Invariably, the guilty party confesses before she is required to do anything. People are afraid of her, and would rather face an angry neighbor than the eye of a witch.”

“Very sensible,” he agreed.

“That fear also has other uses. People believe us to be so much more than we are, our words and actions are given more strength than they warrant. No matter what I say to the contrary, if I give a woman a decoction of peppermint leaves to ease her digestion, she will believe there is a bit of magic in it that makes it effective, and she will claim relief far greater than it is possible for peppermint to give. Her own beliefs do half the work for me.”

“I have always thought that those claiming to be bewitched were under the influence of their own imaginations,” Nathaniel said.

“Yes, I believe that to be largely so, or perhaps they are deranged. It is often useful, though, this belief people have that we are witches. Thieves are caught, advice is taken seriously, and our medicines do more healing than they would otherwise. Aunt Theresa thinks that people need to believe in witches, because we are so much more accessible than a distant god. If they know witches exist and have supernatural powers, it is evidence of a sort that God exists. You cannot have evil without also having good.”

“That puts you in a dangerous position, does it not?” Nathaniel asked. “You foster the illusion of being a witch for a variety of reasons, but in so doing you give the town an easy target, one they can turn against at a moment’s notice. You cannot pretend to be the enemy of God with impunity.”

“No. Obviously not.” She brushed her fingers against her brow once more, and Nathaniel noticed that the pink line had all but vanished.

“What has all this to do with the healing of your wound? You know that I will not think you a witch, whatever the explanation may be.”

Valerian gave a hopeless laugh. “But that is just it. I am not a witch in the way the townspeople see me, and I am innocent of any accusations they may lodge against me. But I am, in the end, what they fear me to be: someone with access to a mysterious power. I healed the gash on my forehead with my hand. With my
hand,
Nathaniel. Every female in my family has had a gift of some manner. Some have seen the future, some spoke with spirits, some have moved objects with their minds.”

“And you can heal?”

“Yes.”

He did not quite believe it, despite what he had seen. “Then why do you not do that all the time, instead of wasting your energy digging up plants and grinding roots?”

“Part of the answer should be obvious. Aunt Theresa and I would have been hung or burned by now if I did something so blatant. People do not want their mysteries so shockingly displayed. And the other part of the answer—well, you saw some of it. It is tiring. I would not have the energy to do this for everyone who needed it. And if I know of a plant that can do the work for me, why not let it?”

“So you never use this ability for the benefit of others?”

“I do use it for others, of course I do, but as an aid to my medicines, and only when I can do so without being detected. Or if a life is in danger, I will do what I can, without much mind to the consequences, although that has only happened once or twice in all my time here, and there was so much chaos that no one noticed.”

“So Theresa is a healer, as well?”

“Well, with herbs. But that is not her gift. She has a different ability. I do not think it is my place to say what.”

“But what of your cousin, Charmaine? She lives in town, and I have heard nothing about her.”

“Charmaine’s gift, whatever it is, is hidden from us and from her. She wants nothing to do with any of this. She wants a normal life.”

That explained the woman’s reluctance to have him here, witnessing the family secret. “Assuming these powers do exist, an assumption of which I am not yet convinced, whence do they come?”

Valerian shrugged. “God only knows. Where does red hair come from? It runs in families, and who is to say why it runs in this family and not that? It does not seem to come from either God or the devil. I sometimes think it is more a product of nature than anything else. Just as some people are gifted in conversation or in working with their hands, I am gifted in healing.”

“Have you had it since a child, this gift?”

“I do not know. It was Oscar who showed it to me.”

“Come now, I cannot credit the bird with that much intelligence.”

She smiled. “He did not
tell
me about it. It was when I rescued him from the cliff, I held him in my hands and cried over his injuries, stroking his feathers, begging him to wake. And he did. I remembered my parents telling me that I had a gift to share with the world, although I did not understand what they meant at the time. With Oscar fluttering in my hands, I finally knew.”

“You make it sound no more startling than discovering a talent for watercolors,” he said, aware that he was in a slight state of shock over this information. He could understand it intellectually, but it was not sinking in that his Valerian could cure by the touch of her hands.

“If it were a more common gift, would you find it so remarkable? I believe it is only the rarity of this gift that makes it worth comment.”

He stood and walked slowly round the kitchen, stopping when he saw a knife lying amongst recently cleaned cutlery. He picked it up and turned to face her. “No matter that I saw with my own eyes your wound, you must know that I will doubt that I was not fooled in some manner. I did not see it inflicted. I know how easy it is to believe one sees what one thinks is there. One need only listen to a troop of soldiers describing a battle to hear how the truth is easily twisted beyond recognition.”

He folded back the lace at his wrist, and shoved up the sleeve of his jacket, examining the flesh exposed. “So you will understand if I wish to perform one small test to check the veracity of what I saw.”

“Do not!”

He nicked the skin on the back of his forearm. Not a deep cut, nothing that would not heal easily on its own, but deeper than a scratch. He poked lightly at it with the tip of the knife, frowning, confirming that his skin had been opened. It felt none too pleasant, and for a moment he wondered at his own idiocy.