Witchstruck (28 page)

‘She’s here! The witch is here!’

So Dent’s men had found me at last. Did I have the energy to cast another spell and conceal myself from their eyes? I did not think so. My head was pounding and my legs could barely support me. Indeed, my capture seemed almost inevitable – as though fate had led me to this moment. I leaned my forehead on the horse’s warm flanks and waited for my pursuers to close in on me . . .

Rough hands pinioned my wrists behind my back and turned me, pushing me to my knees.

There were five men staring down at me: four on foot, and one perched on the back of an ancient-looking mule. I looked up at their curious faces, wondering which one would be most susceptible to my voice.

‘Cover her face!’ The oldest among them glared at me with undisguised malice. I recognized him as a man from Woodstock village, one of the church elders. ‘The witch can work magick with her eyes.’

‘Says who?’

‘Says Master Dent, that’s who. Now ride and tell him we’ve got her.’

The man with the mule grabbed at the stallion’s reins and led him away at a trot. One of the others threw a sack over my head, his eyes wide as though afraid I might smite him down before he could finish.

The inside of the sack smelled of old cabbages. I kneeled on the damp earth in darkness and listened to the men argue
over
who had seen me first. It seemed there was a reward for the man who caught me.

Before long, I heard horses approaching quickly. Then Marcus Dent’s voice was above me.

‘Well, well,’ Marcus said, and I caught a hint of triumphant laughter in his voice. ‘Meg Lytton brought to heel at last. Though we had better make sure this is the Lytton witch before we take her back to face trial. Pull off the sack for a moment.’

The abrupt sunlight dazzled me as the sack was lifted. I raised my head, and the men who had captured me took a few hurried steps back, as though in fear for their lives. Was I considered so dangerous?

Blinking, I stared up angrily into Marcus Dent’s face. ‘Why are you doing this?’

‘Silence, witch!’ He turned to the man beside him. ‘Yes, this is the Lytton girl. What about the man she was with?’

‘No sign of him, Master Dent.’

Marcus Dent narrowed his eyes but nodded. He looked back at me. ‘It’s about time we found out just how deep the rot goes in the Lytton women. First the aunt, now this girl—’

‘You’ll pay for murdering my aunt!’

He laughed at my furious outburst and put his boot in my face, pushing me to the floor. ‘Gag the witch. Put the sack back over her head. Let’s take her back to the village. I’ve sent ahead for a jury to be assembled. No more
shilly
-shallying – we’ll settle this tonight.’

The man next to him muttered something urgently in his ear, but Marcus shook him off with disdain.

‘Elizabeth? No one cares what that bastard whore says or thinks. It is only by the Queen’s grace that she has not yet lost her head.’ He nodded to the man behind me. Some filthy rag was pulled round my mouth as a gag, and the coarse hood of sackcloth was shoved roughly back over my head. ‘Besides, when Elizabeth hears the charges brought against this one, she will not dare speak for her . . . unless she too is a witch.’

I was lifted bodily and thrown over a horse like a sack of wheat. Winded, I lay there groaning against the gag, my head and feet sticking out. Then the horses began to move, jolting me up and down, and I forgot the pain in my belly and focused instead on not being sick.

Soon Marcus Dent’s revenge would be complete. I was going to die, and probably in the same horrible manner that my aunt had perished. But at least the princess’s letter was safe. And they had not found Alejandro.

The ‘trial’ was a mockery of justice. The jury was a benchful of nervous-looking men, most of them little better than farmers dragged in off the fields, with Marcus Dent presiding in the absence of the magistrate. It was unclear on whose authority he was acting, but no one there dared question his right to pass judgement on me. Presumably they feared finding themselves next on his list.

They had chosen the nave of Woodstock church for my arraignment, since the landlord of the Bull Inn would apparently have nothing to do with this business. It was cold out of the sun, and the tortured body of Christ seemed to mock me from his crucifix, but at least I was in the right place to say a last-minute prayer not to wake up in Hell tomorrow.

I sat on a rickety stool in front of these good men, with my hands bound behind my back, and my fair hair loose about my shoulders – probably looking like a bird’s nest after the past few days without being combed. My gag and hood had been removed so that the jurors could question me properly. But I had been threatened with the gag again if I should speak out of turn or attempt to curse anyone present. I considered trying to turn myself invisible again, but the spell would not last long enough for me to escape with my hands bound.

Marcus Dent was holding up a leather-bound Latin book with the same reverence he might have shown to the Holy Bible. I read the name in gilt lettering on the spine and shivered. It was the
Malleus Maleficarum
, a book my aunt had warned me of many times. The Latin name meant
The Hammer of Witches
, for it was an evil and ignorant tract against the occult, telling men how to test and execute witches in their towns and villages. I looked at the book with loathing, certain that thousands of innocent women across the wide continent of Europe must have
met
an agonizing death through its teachings.

‘You are charged with the foul and unnatural practice of witchcraft, Meg Lytton,’ Marcus Dent thundered, his voice echoing through the church. Some of the local men sitting in judgement on me shifted uncomfortably on their stools and would not meet my gaze. ‘How do you plead?’

‘Not guilty.’

‘Why did you choose to turn your back on Christ and become a witch?’ he demanded, as though he had not heard my previous answer.

‘I am
not
a witch,’ I replied clearly, and thought nothing of the lie, for I knew Dent meant to see me hanged or burned if I was found guilty.

‘No one is fooled by these empty answers. You have been seen in company with a known witch, and often secretly closeted with her. One of your father’s own servants testified only two days ago at your aunt’s trial that he has often seen you wandering the woods with your aunt and gathering plants together.’

‘Is it now a crime to pick herbs?’

He smiled coldly. ‘Tell me about when you became a witch and renounced the Holy Catholic faith.’

‘I have renounced nothing.’

‘Did your aunt, Jane Canley, initiate you into the foul sin of witchery before she was burned for heresy?’

Marcus Dent peered at the book in his hand, then came closer. He had opened the
Malleus Maleficarum
and seemed
for
a moment to be searching for one particular page. Then he circled my stool, staring down at me with burning eyes. His questions followed rapidly on from each other while he ignored my stubborn, repeated denials.

‘With which demons and familiars have you been consorting?’ he demanded, reading aloud from the book. ‘Did you take any demon as your lover? What sabats did you celebrate with your witch-aunt, and where did they take place? Who are your accomplices in this evil?’ Then, violently dragging down the left shoulder of my gown to reveal the swelling of my breast, he shouted, ‘Is this not the Devil’s mark?’

Half the men on the jury rose from their bench to peer in fascinated horror at my bared flesh. The others looked away uncomfortably. I did not need to glance at my left breast to know what was there, always hidden just out of sight by my bodice.

It was my birthmark, about the size of a thimble. Marcus Dent had seen it that day at Lytton Park when he attacked me. Only now did I realize how deep his planning went. He must have been dreaming of this day, this trial, ever since I refused him.

I looked up at him, my voice steady even though my heart was boiling in my chest.

‘I’m amazed at what you’re prepared to do for revenge when a woman refuses to marry you, Marcus Dent.’ I lowered my eyes demurely. ‘If I had known how strongly
you
felt, I would have said yes the first time you asked.’

Some of the watching jury laughed behind their hands. I enjoyed his humiliation for only a few seconds though, for Marcus’s fist swept down in a vicious blow and knocked me from my stool. With my hands still bound, I was unable to save myself. My head and shoulder cracked painfully against the stone flags of the church floor.

‘We need no further proof of her guilt,’ Dent shouted to the assembled villagers. ‘You have all seen the Devil’s mark on her breast. You have heard the servant’s testimony that she was always in secret company with her aunt, a known Satan worshipper. I call for this girl to be hanged as a witch without further ado, and as many of her evil accomplices too as we may find over the following days.’

The small church was in uproar. One man stood up to shout that there was no proof at all, but several of the others hushed the man and pulled him back down.

‘At least give her a chance to confess and die in a state of Grace!’ someone called out from behind the pillars.

‘No, let the witch hang unshriven,’ another insisted – a weaselly little man, his eyes gleaming on my bare shoulders. ‘Her aunt and her familiars await her in the fires of Hell. Why disappoint them?’

‘Wait!’ Marcus Dent exclaimed, and held up his hand for silence. When it had fallen, he prodded my fallen body with his boot. ‘I am not an unjust man, and this church is sacred to Mary Magdalene, whose sins were many but who was
saved
by our Lord. To hang or to burn is fit only for those witches most proven in their guilt. So let us invoke Saint Mary Magdalene to save this woman’s soul if she is innocent.’

‘How will we prove her guilt?’ one of the men demanded.

‘By one of the oldest methods in these isles, that of swimming the witch.’ Dent smiled brutally. ‘Meg Lytton will face trial by water. Bind the witch’s arms and legs, lower her into the village pond, and if she drowns she is innocent. If she survives, she will be hanged and may the Lord have mercy on her soul!’

There was little argument this time, only a few muttered protests from those who seemed to dislike Dent’s highhanded methods more than anything else. It seemed my fate had been decided, and no tears would be shed over my dead body. I would either be drowned or hanged while the villagers looked on. Either way I would die today. The clerk scurried forward with a hefty book for Marcus Dent and the other members of this mock courtroom to sign, stating their names and the agreed verdict and sentence.

I lay for a few moments in a stupor, trying not to imagine how it would feel to drown. Then I was lifted roughly under the arms and half dragged to the altar by a priest in a hooded black robe, whom I had seen before in the shadows, watching the proceedings from one of the side chapels.

The priest cast me down on my knees before the crucifix and the vast statue of Mary the Virgin that stood to one side of the altar.

‘Child, you have been sentenced to death. But whether you reach Heaven or Hell afterwards is your choice.’ The priest stood beside me, staring down from the dark cowl of his hood. ‘Do you confess your sins freely to Christ and beg His forgiveness?’

His voice was rough, muffled by the hood. Yet something about it made me glance up at him, catching a familiar echo . . .

‘Don’t look at me, you fool,’ he whispered urgently. ‘Look at the altar!’

Obedient, my heart thundering, I turned back to stare at the lean, writhing body of Christ on the cross.

‘Are you mad, Alejandro?’ I demanded, also in a whisper. ‘If they catch you—’

‘They will not catch me,’ he said confidently.

‘But what are you doing here? You can’t hope to rescue me, there are too many of them.’

‘I admit, the numbers are not ideal. But Juan is here, waiting for us with horses on the north side of the church. Once you are outside—’

‘You there, priest!’

Alejandro stopped at the shouted command and turned his head slightly. ‘It is Marcus Dent,’ he whispered cautiously, then held up his hand, raising his voice. ‘I fear this girl will go unshriven to her death. Maybe another five minutes?’

‘The witch already had a chance to repent her sins and
did
not take it. Now it is time for her to join her aunt in Hell.’

Afraid that Alejandro would do something reckless and get himself killed, I stumbled back past the roodscreen to where Marcus was waiting and let him take me.

Marcus Dent smiled, dragging me to the church door. Outside, I could see his men carrying planks and rope to the village pond for my execution. First though, he hissed in my ear, I had to be prepared. He pulled my bodice even further down so the gathering villagers could ogle me and the proof of my ‘Devil’s mark’. Then Marcus seized my long fair hair and sawed through it with his knife, leaving a ragged edge that reached only just below my ears.

I suddenly remembered the vision of the future in the scrying mirror, of me on a cart bound for London with my fair hair cropped short as a boy’s, its shame hidden under a cap.

Did that vision mean I would survive this?

The tiny glimmer of hope in my heart was abruptly extinguished. My aunt had told me once that the scrying mirror did not always predict the future clearly. Sometimes it told a future which might come to pass if certain conditions were met. In this case, that I neither drowned nor was hanged today, but survived to return to Elizabeth’s service. And what were the chances of that?

‘You won’t need to look beautiful where you’re going,’ Marcus whispered. I felt his breath on my bare neck and shuddered. ‘It’s a shame, Meg. But you should have agreed to
marry
me when you had the chance. You thought I was helpless in the face of your refusal, that I could do nothing. Now do you see how powerful I am?’

Powerful? I wanted to hurt him. I wanted to hurt all of them, these vile cowards who felt such a need to crush what they could not understand. But if I raised my eyes to his face now, if I spoke a single word of power, I knew Alejandro would not be able to stop himself from taking advantage of the moment and attempting to rescue me. Then they would catch Alejandro and kill him too.