The widow peered at the hem and felt the fabric between her fingers. Snow thudded to the floor from a hole in the thatch.
‘I think I saw it – but I cannot be certain.’
Then the sorceress caught it – a fleck of a secret in the widow’s eye.
‘Be warned, old widow,’ said the sorceress, her anger a blood-red moon, ‘for I speak willow words that, if I so desire, can snatch your soul away, turn your good fortune to bad and bad to evil. My magic is eternal. What is it you are keeping from me?’
The widow shivered.
‘A scrap of your hem. He had it. The alchemist had it.’
Blinded by rage at what she had heard, such was her impatience to be gone that in all the Widow Bott had said the sorceress had missed the details. The truth, as tiny as spring flowers, lay unnoticeable beneath the snow.
That night, this night, midnight, the end of Christmastide. Father Thames has begun to freeze, so tight is winter’s grip. Silent, soft, canny snow begins to fall; thick is each determined flake that gathers unrelenting in its purpose to make white this plague-ridden, shit-filled city.
On such a night in Southwark, the bastard side of the Thames, by the sign of the Unicorn where the houses bow towards one another, their spidery beams made solid with salacious gossip. There the torches that would have lent light to the street have long been defeated, but one paltry candle burns in the cellar window of the house of the alchemist, Thomas Finglas. A vixen trots up the narrow alleyway, her soft pads leaving paw prints that are soon to vanish in a layer of crisp snow. She sniffs the night air and sees at the bars of the cellar window a creature, not of human shape. For a moment their eyes meet. Then, with a nod, the fox sets off once more, her brush proud behind her, her breath licked with flames. At the back door, the sorceress hesitates and listens. From the cellar comes an unearthly cry.
Herkain’s long-ago words return to her unheeded.
‘Pride, my love, is the Mistress of Misrule.’
Pride? she thinks. No, it is not pride that brings me here, unless pride be the essence of my being. She is here to retrieve what is rightfully hers, a piece of her hem, perilous, too powerful to be taken by a mere mortal.
Unseen, a ghost, she steps into the house and as she enters the threads from the stolen hem needle into her, pull her towards this unknown thief. Quite suddenly she feels her powers wane, her magic weaken. Surely it is impossible that a man could possess wizardry equal to her own?
Not a sound do her feet make on the stairs and there, in a tattered, long-neglected chamber, the alchemist lies on his lumpy mattress. The sorceress can hear his thoughts as she can with most mortals. In the flicker of troublesome dreams he notes the bluish light, the bitter cold, and longs for a peaceful sleep to rob him of all conscious thought. He thinks the cause of so much waking is a dry brain and his continual fears, he believes, account for his lack of sleep.
But it is the memory of his late wife, deep buried, that is the cause. He had hoped with her death would go all the bell, book and candle curses that had tortured his days, made barren his nights. Half asleep he stares up at the canopy of the bed. His disquiet mind frets at the shabby drapes until in the fabric he sees the face of his dead wife, hears her voice crab-clawing at him.
‘Nay, Husband. I would call you a murderer.’
And into the covers of his bed, he mumbles, ‘It was your curiosity that killed you, woman, not me.’
Her cackle was as thick as his blood and just as black. ‘Suspicion will always fall on you, husband. I made sure of it – a gift from my winding sheet. I might be dead and maggoty-eaten but the power of my mischievous tongue has outlived me, has it not, Husband?’
Thomas sits bolt upright in bed. He is a thin man, his eyes hooded by anxiety. He has lost the optimism that had once given him an arrogance that marked him out, as if he alone knew the answer to all the world’s conundrums. His mind is kept sharp with knowledge yet his wits are dulled by superstition and a terror of the power he has unleashed.
This dead wife of his is an indigestible piece of gristle. Her bitter words sit heavy on the right side of his stomach, a pain no remedy of his devising can ease. A cold wind moans into the chamber through the gaps in the glass. He hears the vengeful night conquering the current of the Thames, transforming water into ice. He hears with a heavy heart his late wife’s waspish voice prattle on.
‘I would call you an adulterer, a dealer in the Devil’s magic.’
He sinks back and pulls the covers up over him.
‘And you,’ says Thomas Finglas, ‘what brought you to our table apart from rumours and lies to make misery of my tomorrows? Never once an infant came from that barren womb of yours to comfort my days. Be damned, be gone.’
He thinks back to his mistress, his beloved Bess, her flesh so soft, her breasts so firm, her belly round. Her belly round that had given him his one and only infant, a secret to be protected from this cruel world and from his wife’s vicious temper.
‘You never knew the truth, woman,’ he says into the hollow silence.
The sorceress is intrigued.
‘Tell me, Thomas,’ she says. ‘Tell me the truth.’
‘Bess . . . is that you? Bess . . .’
Sleep takes him, exhausted, in its kind embrace. And just as he dreams of Bess’s round bottom, her soft cheek, just as he feels her lips upon his, downstairs something heavy falls.
‘The cat,’ says Thomas sleepily.
He cares little, for only Beelzebub now will make him rise from this floating warmth of oblivion, from the tender-breasted Bess. All else can go to the Devil.
‘The cat,’ he says again, his eyes heavy, his mind at last clear of the past.
But it is no cat.
There are two men in the house, heavy of build but nimble of foot, the stench of the river and the tavern on them, mercenaries in search of any paid work. Kidnapping, assault, murder, all arts they are well-versed in as long as they are paid and can own their own boots. Each step they take in hope of waylaying their prey.
Thomas’s apprentice, John Butter, does not wake at the sound of the intruders. He is asleep in the kitchen. He, unlike his master, sleeps the deep sleep of youth. Walls may crash, trees may fall and still he would dream on.
Thomas wakes with a start. He tries to gather his dreaming wits and fails.
‘Bess?’ he calls into the darkness. ‘In the name of God, show yourself.’
Swift are the two men. He has no chance to scream before he is muffled in a cloak, wrapped and strapped.
His two assailants are big-built, battle-dented men. Thomas is an easy customer. The knife held to his side tells him they mean business.
‘Keep quiet and no harm will come to you. Make a sound and the knife will find its home in your heart.’
He is bundled from the chamber. The vixen slips out unseen before them.
The garden gate creaks back and forth in the wind. Thomas struggles to free his face from the cloak, shaking his head vigorously. From the low window of his cellar comes the high-pitched yowl and the vixen sees there again the feathered creature who stares out through the bars, eyes glinting; a halo of light outlines its shape, talons scrape at the glass. The image is disjointed by the round panes so there appears more than one and behind all a shadow of wings looms