He thinks his apprentice will not know the right words to calm his child. The thought of her escaping into the streets fills him with dread. She will be hunted like an animal, torn apart. She is still only a child, he thinks. Only a child.
And the sorceress thinks, she is no child of this world.
It was a bitter dawn and snow illuminated the grounds. The light made beard shapes of trimmed hedges and in the distance, looming large through unnatural angles of bush and wall, the three turrets rose, each spire impaling the sky’s tapestry. Surrounding all, the forest cast its shadows. The sorceress heard its familiar, deep, slow heartbeat. This was a place Thomas had never wanted to see again and he had a feeling – no, a surety – who it was who had sent for him and to know it made his bones cold as stone.
Two servants each took one of his arms to guide him lest he should slip. In defiance he pulled away. If death be waiting for him then he will meet it with dignity, not being handled as if he be a criminal.
One had to admire his courage and, in spite of herself, she did. The sorceress followed him up the steps to the great door where near seventeen years ago she had left a basket, certain of her powers. Where fifteen years ago Thomas came, certain of his powers. He is taken to an antechamber with no fire, no candle and there in the darkness he is left, the door closed, the key turned.
And then he says her name into the darkness of that worrisome chamber. How does he know her name? Fury rises up in her – and sinks back. It is never wise to trust a witch.
‘You are here,’ he whispers. ‘I cannot see you but I feel your presence. I know it is not my Bess. I am right, am I not? It is you who have been watching me, listening to my very thoughts. Did you come for your hem? Return me safe to London and I will give it to you.’
‘Where is it?’
Thomas jumps when she speaks. That at least she finds satisfying.
‘Where are you?’ He turns wildly this way and that and he cannot see her. ‘Help me, mistress, I must return to . . .’
‘To what? What is it – what is she – who you must return to?’
Here he stumbles.
‘You saw her?’
‘Yes, I saw her.’
‘I beg of thee. She cannot – must not be discovered. She would be . . . John Butter will not know what to do to calm her. I must return home.’
‘Tell me the truth of how you came by this winged beast and perhaps I will help you.’
He says as he might a prayer, ‘She is my daughter.’
This cannot be, the sorceress thinks.
‘Tell me how.’
And from the liquid dark of the chamber his wife is once more conjured, her voice set to nibble away at his paper-thin sanity.
‘Yes, Thomas, tell her. Tell her of your whore and the beast.’
‘I am listening,’ says the sorceress. ‘Tell me about the beast, Thomas.’
Again he floods her with his misery, his loss, the torn pieces of unstitched memory, a misleading patchwork of thoughts.
‘I loved her,’ he says.
‘But she was not your wife,’ says the ghost of Mistress Finglas whose tongue is blacker than Hell’s back door. ‘It was I who was your wife.’
‘Quiet,’ he shouts. ‘Quiet, woman, stop plaguing me. What more do you want?’
No one comes to see what is wrong. The silence thus disturbed takes time to thicken upon them once more.
The sorceress hears then a crackle, a laugh.
‘I want my house, my furnishings, my garden,’ says Mistress Finglas. ‘You went away to find an earl and came back with a whore, did you not, Husband?’
The alchemist’s dead wife clings to him as ivy to a house.
With a sigh he lets go of all the fragments of his memory for the sorceress to knit together.
Some fifteen years before he and John Butter had returned from the House of the Three Turrets, bringing with them a maid to work in the house. Upon seeing that the maid Bess was quickening with child and no father to its name, Mistress Finglas, the good, Christian woman that she was, insisted that Bess be thrown out for her ungodly ways. Thomas forbade it. In revenge she had hagridden the girl with that venomous tongue of hers. The babe would be cursed by the hellwain, born boneless, horns on its head, fur in its mouth, a tail in its breeches.
Five months later, Bess began her labour. Not even the pain of the oncoming infant was allowed to interfere with the main meal of the day. Betwixt two courses the babe slipped slithering, bloody, between her mother’s legs, and not a cry did either make. Bess held her close, and there they sat, tied together by the cord. She was baffled by the newborn’s silence as liver-like, the placenta slopped onto the stone floor. She cut the cord with the carving knife, wrapped the creature and warmed her by the fire. Then served roast chicken and with the gravy quietly informed her master of their daughter’s birth. Pushing back his chair hard he rose abruptly as it fell backwards. The noise of it startled his wife. She looked up from her plate, mouth wide open, stuffed with chicken meat, so that all the chewing and her few black teeth could be seen.
She said, ‘What is it, Husband?’
And he, repulsed by the very sight of her, felt himself on the precipice of declaring a truth, the truth that was well known to all three of them.
Like the newborn babe he remained silent, even when his wife asked, ‘Husband, where go you?’ and gravy rolled down her double chins.
Downstairs in the kitchen Bess wept and showed him their newborn, eyes closed and silent, her tufted hair red like her mother’s.
Mistress Finglas, puffing and hefting herself after her husband, demanded to know what all the fuss be about.
Then seeing the babe so still, wax white, said, ‘I told you, I told you so I did, the pucklar would come and steal the bastard.’
Good, kind Bess, by then at her mind’s end, screamed, ‘If she be dead. So be me.’
Master Finglas gathered mother and child into his laboratory and closed and bolted the door against the fury of his wife. Mistress Finglas, knees bent, praying that wood might become parchment, stayed there cursing less the child should think to cry its way back to life.
‘I hear a crow croak from the next roof, and you know what that means, Husband,’ she shouted. ‘A coffin in the ground, a coffin in the ground. Serves you both right.’
No answer came and on the second day, the door still barred to her, she took to boxing the ears of her husband’s apprentice, demanding he open it.
‘I . . . I . . . I cannot,’ stammered the terrified boy.
Having beaten John Butter until the worst of her rage had subsided, Mistress Finglas left him curled in upon himself outside his master’s door, lifted her skirts high and crossed the stinking alleyway to the house of her neighbour. She huffed up the narrow stairs and there she stayed by the window and talked away the hours in unwise words. She knew, she said, what they be doing, her husband and the whore, they be eating the flesh of the unbaptised babe. Her jealous imaginings gave birth to rumour, its midwife being gossip that to this night still haunted the alchemist’s good reputation.
On the third day, in desperation, Mistress Finglas cut up her husband’s fur-lined cloak. The wanton waste of such a necessity gave her untold pleasure. She wondered what her scissors, razorsharp, would feel like plunged into the heart of her cheating husband. On the fourth day she went to church, fired by the idea of Hell’s vengeance and all the demonic winged beasts to be found