Witchborn Read online

  Hopkins laughed, and Master Blount looked confused. ‘I can assure you,’ he said, ‘she was nothing like his mother.’

  It was nearly midday by the time they’d crossed the bridge, and the sky was a clear, endless blue. Alyce very quickly realized that blending into a crowd was impossible with Vitali at her side, flouncing through the unwashed masses in his glittering cloak and bowing ostentatiously to virtually every woman who crossed his path. Still, she did her best to walk a few paces behind him, and kept scanning the crowds for anyone who might be following. The witchfinders forever hovered on the fringes of her imagination.

  Bankside was just as busy as the centre of London, but felt different, more ramshackle, more desperate. Here the shopkeepers regarded them with suspicious eyes, and Alyce began to feel a little homesick for the warmth and safety of The Swan.

  A few hundred yards further up, she suddenly heard the roar of a crowd, interspersed with unpleasant, vindictive laughter. That was followed by another, lower roar – that of an animal.

  Vitali halted and made a sour face.

  ‘Bear-baiting,’ he said, when she had caught up. ‘I do not know why you English take such delight in it.’

  ‘That was a bear?’

  ‘Fighting for its life, no doubt.’

  ‘But . . . why?’

  Vitali shrugged. ‘For sport.’

  Alyce had never seen a bear before. The most fearsome inhabitants of the woods around her house in Fordham had been foxes and badgers, but even those her mother had treated with the utmost respect. Lots to be learned from animals, she’d said. They see things more clearly than we do.

  The beast moaned again. Up ahead, she could see the crowd pressed around the baiting ring, jeering and cackling. There were stray dogs too, probably drawn by the smell of the blood, weaving around between their legs. She felt an awful pain in her chest.

  ‘I don’t want to see it. Can we go another way?’ she asked.

  ‘You will not have to,’ answered Vitali. ‘We leave the street here.’

  He took her hand and ushered her out of the thoroughfare. The bright midday sun disappeared, and Alyce found herself in a damp, murky alleyway that led down to the waterfront. Above her loomed a building whose timbers were so warped, whose facade was leaning at such an angle that she felt like the slightest breath of wind would cause the whole thing to collapse. The place was a wreck. It looked like it had been dredged up from the bottom of the river.

  The door was a greying slab of oak that was beginning to rot around its edges, and the windows either side were blank and dusty. There was no sign of life inside. The only thing that suggested it might have been a tavern was a fraying hangman’s noose, swaying ominously over the entrance and serving as its sign.

  ‘Once we are inside,’ Vitali said, ‘I think it best if I talk. Yes?’

  Alyce wasn’t listening. She’d heard something else. A croaking. A ruffling of feathers. She looked up.

  The raven was there again, perched on top of the tavern’s crooked gables. She couldn’t see its strange, mismatched eyes, but the silhouette was so bedraggled, it had to be the same one as from The Swan. She realized suddenly she was holding her breath. What if she lost control again?

  Vitali gave the door a shove, and it groaned on its ancient hinges. Before Alyce could say anything, he pulled her inside. The raven watched her go, and its feathers shivered.

  The room on the other side smelt of decay. It was dark and almost completely empty, apart from a table and chairs, on which were placed a fat, dribbling candle, a plate and some stale bread. A mouse was tentatively exploring some scattered crumbs.

  Sitting in one of the chairs was a very old, very crumpled-looking woman. She looked like Mrs Thomson would thirty years in the future, Alyce thought.

  The door closed behind them with a thud.

  ‘Good afternoon, Grissel! Would you be so kind as to allow us safe passage to the tavern?’

  The mouse froze, its nose twitching; then it abandoned the bread and disappeared up one of the old woman’s sleeves. She stirred, and opened a pair of milky eyes.

  Vitali gasped. ‘My lady, you look so young, so radiant!’

  She tottered over to them, peered at Alyce, sniffed, and then slapped Vitali across the face.

  ‘Your poisons don’t work, you painted fool,’ she said, her voice much stronger than Alyce had expected it to be.

  The mountebank looked like he was about to start weeping. ‘My lady, you do me a disservice . . .’

  ‘I expect your cure-alls to be a load of old swill, but I would’ve thought you could at least mix up something that can kill a man. Not that difficult, is it?’ She directed this last remark at Alyce, as though looking for agreement.

  ‘Please, your demands were not quite so simple . . .’ Now Vitali looked at Alyce as well, embarrassment etched on his perfect oval face.

  ‘Now all my son-in-law does is roll around in his bed all day, clutching his innards. He’s worse than ever.’

  Vitali splayed his hands helplessly. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  There was an uncomfortable moment when it became clear that the old woman was not going to budge.

  Alyce cleared her throat. ‘What did you give him?’

  ‘It was a blend,’ said Vitali, knowing he was on thin ice. ‘Nightshade and wither root. My lady Grissel wished for the poison to do its work in the night, many hours after it had been imbibed.’

  ‘I put it in his ale, like you said,’ piped up the old woman.

  ‘There’s the problem, then,’ said Alyce. ‘The ale will have diluted the nightshade. And the wither root only delays the effects of a poison if it’s a dry paste. Might make his hair fall out, though.’

  ‘How d’you know all this, girl?’ Her dull, pupil-less eyes still seemed to twinkle, somehow.

  ‘My mother taught me.’ A sober voice at the back of her head told her to keep her mouth shut. The woman was a stranger, and Alyce had already said too much.

  ‘Well, my dear, seems I should be doing business with your mother instead of this great dullard.’

  ‘My mother’s dead.’

  ‘Oh my.’ The old woman pulled her old, tatty shawl around her a little tighter. ‘Forgive me. And here I am, ninety years old and still taking up space in the world.’

  ‘That’s all right.’

  Vitali seemed happy that he was no longer the focus of the conversation, and exhaled slowly.

  ‘So, then, my young apothecary. What would you suggest?’ The mouse who had crawled into her sleeve suddenly reappeared at the neckline of her dress, sniffed the air, and hid again. Alyce tried to ignore it.

  ‘Well, some sort of mixture of hemlock and amanita, but—’ She stopped, suddenly realizing that she might very well be consigning a total stranger to a very painful, protracted death. She wished she hadn’t said anything – at this rate she was going to make quite a name for herself as a murderess.

  ‘Do you have those?’ snapped the old woman at Vitali.

  ‘I think, perhaps, I do . . .’

  ‘Good. Then get me some of that. And make sure she’s around when you’re making it up, she seems to know a hell of a lot more about killing people than you do.’

  Alyce’s skin crawled when she said that. The back of her skull began to itch guiltily. She’d always assumed her mother had taught her about such poisons purely as a warning, but now she wondered: had she, her mother, killed someone in the past? Alyce had never thought to ask her while she was alive.

  Vitali bowed. ‘As you wish, my lady. A thousand apologies. And of course, I will give you a very special price.’

  ‘No,’ said the old woman. ‘You won’t put a price on it at all.’

  ‘Yes, yes, most fair.’ Vitali’s strange, fixed smile had been distorted into a grimace over the course of the conversation.

  ‘Excellent. Well, then, I suppose I should let you in.’

  From underneath her tatty old shawl, the crone produced a single, simple-
looking key. She went and unlocked the plain wooden door behind her. There was a gust of warm air that smelt of wine and ale and incense and stranger, richer things.

  ‘In you both go.’ She looked at Alyce. ‘Better pray there aren’t any more of his customers down there waiting for him.’ She frowned all of a sudden. ‘You, stop wriggling or be out with you!’

  It was an alarming few seconds before Alyce realized she was talking to the mouse.

  The stairs went down at least three storeys, the atmosphere getting warmer and damper the deeper they went, until it felt like they were under the Thames itself.

  ‘Poisons, signor? Really?’

  ‘They are only one small part of my work, I assure you. When I came to England I was very poor. I needed to use all of my skills to make enough coin to survive.’

  ‘Skills? You’re helping people kill each other.’ Alyce thought back to the black pouch with the strange smell that Mrs Thomson had given her. ‘For his special customers.’ So she’d known too.

  He shrugged.

  ‘Death is the only business that a man like me can rely on in a city like this. There is always demand.’ He turned to her at last. ‘I am sorry if you feel I misled you. But we agreed that we both had secrets. Did we not?’

  That was true. She’d killed someone too – had personally driven the dagger into his back. She couldn’t work out whether that was better or worse than what Vitali did.

  When they reached the bottom, Alyce was faced with a long, low-ceilinged common room that sprawled, warrenlike, in all directions. The walls were illuminated by braziers that emitted a strange reddish glow, steadier and softer than firelight, but most of the patrons had tucked themselves away in dark corners. The whole place seemed to have been designed for people to disappear into.

  ‘Welcome to The Hangman!’ said Vitali, his voice echoing more loudly than Alyce would have liked. ‘Come, let us find somebody who might answer your questions. I have some more business to attend to, while we are here.’

  While Vitali set off in search of a free table, Alyce skulked in a damp corner. Fragments of a muttered conversation drifted to her from the shadows, a man and a woman, and she couldn’t help eavesdropping. One of them seemed tense. Alyce held her breath, to hear better.

  ‘You’re being hysterical,’ said the woman.

  ‘You mark my words. There’ll be slaughter. I’ve never known the world so divided.’

  ‘Witches have always been divided. People have always been divided. Everyone wants different things, and everyone thinks they know best. That’s human nature. We’ll all just rub along unhappily with each other, like we always have.’

  ‘This is different.’ The man slurped at his drink. ‘Mary Stuart, the Queen of Scots. They love her. Her supporters are everywhere. And I don’t just mean Catholics, or the Scots, or the French – I mean our kind of people.’

  ‘You read too many pamphlets.’

  ‘If she unseats Elizabeth, you know how she’ll deal with her enemies.’

  ‘That damned Scottish woman is in prison! Her cause is lost. Having a few witches on her side isn’t going to help her.’

  A pause.

  ‘You haven’t heard?’

  ‘I’m not interested in your conspiracy theories,’ said the woman wearily.

  Alyce suddenly felt Vitali grab at her elbow and drag her over to his table. What? What hasn’t she heard? She strained to catch the man’s reply, but their conversation was lost in the hum of the other drinkers and Vitali’s incessant babbling.

  She sat at one of the stools, peering across the room, but the couple were sunk in a pool of darkness. A serving girl finally appeared in front of her and blocked her view entirely.

  ‘Can I get you two something?’

  With her pale marble face and a chaotic mass of black hair, the girl could have been Solomon’s sister. Alyce felt loneliness creep back into her chest.

  ‘Two cups of Rhenish,’ Vitali said pleasantly, inclining his head. The maid gave a coy smile and swept away.

  Alyce again tried to spy the pair who had been talking so seriously. They’d disappeared.

  ‘Who are these people?’ she asked, turning to Vitali at last.

  ‘All sorts. What they have in common, though, is a desire to know things. To explore more than what is in front of their nose. Most people, out there –’ he pointed above his head –‘they are stupid, because they want to be stupid. Stupid is safe. Stupid is comfortable.’

  ‘So there are witches here?’ The couple had mentioned witches. Our kind of people, the man had said. Had they been witches? Maybe Alyce wasn’t as alone as she thought.

  ‘I think so, yes. Also astrologers, alchemists, apothecaries, sometimes – how do you say? – magi from far away. We come here to help each other learn, to share our knowledge. And to drink too much. Aha!’

  The maid returned with two cups of wine, and some bread and cheese. Alyce was still feeling sick from what she had drunk at Vitali’s lodgings, and she hadn’t eaten anything since she had left The Swan.

  ‘A thousand thanks, my dove,’ said Vitali as the maid set them down on the table. Alyce fell upon the bread like an animal. ‘So please you –’ he laid a hand on the girl’s arm as she turned to leave – ‘could you tell us, is Doctor Dee still a patron of this place?’

  ‘Oh yes, signor,’ she said, nodding enthusiastically.

  ‘Do you know when we might be able to make his acquaintance? We have some very important business to discuss.’

  ‘Why, he’s here now.’ Alyce nearly choked on her crust, though whether it was from fear or excitement she wasn’t sure. ‘He’s over in that corner, talking with the foreign gentleman.’

  ‘My dear, you are as courteous as you are beautiful,’ said Vitali. The maid laughed as though this was the hundredth time she had heard him say it, and returned to her duties.

  Vitali turned to Alyce. ‘Well, we have good fortune today! Are you ready?’ He stood up abruptly, not waiting for an answer.

  She looked over to where the maid had pointed, and saw the darkened outlines of two people, and something glittering being passed between them. One of these was the man her mother had told her to seek. The man she trusted above all others to keep Alyce safe. Why, then, did she feel such a cold sense of foreboding?

  ‘You had better introduce yourself, Alyce. I must speak with one of my customers, but I will be close by. Let me know when you have finished your business.’

  She stood up slowly, and felt Vitali place a hand on the small of her back, pushing her gently in the direction of the two other men. She took a few dazed paces, and suddenly she was there, at the table’s edge, listening in on their conversation. Vitali had wandered somewhere else. Alyce was alone.

  They were not talking in English. Alyce had encountered a few different languages on the streets of London, and Vitali’s accent was so thick he may as well have been speaking in his mother tongue, but this was like nothing she had ever heard. It was guttural, and produced odd clicking noises.

  The man whom she assumed was Doctor Dee was wearing a plain cloak of black sable that covered his whole body, as though he were a member of the clergy. A small white ruff poked out of the top of the cloak, but most of it was covered by a luxuriant beard that was just beginning to grey. In his hands he held a circular slab of black rock that sparkled beneath its perfectly smooth, polished surface. A mirror of some sort. He was turning it over and inspecting it, back and front.

  His companion could not have looked more different. He was dressed rather like Vitali, Alyce thought, the golden threads of his doublet occasionally catching the light as he moved. His hair was like the mountebank’s, too – jet-black and oily – but his skin was creased and tanned. He had scars on his face too, she noticed. Not scars from battle, though – these were regular, ordered, patterned even. They had been carved into his face deliberately.

  Alyce fumbled nervously in her pocket, folding and unfolding the letter, while they continued to talk
. Neither of them had noticed her. She gave a little cough.

  The bearded man rounded on her, pinning her where she stood with small, sharp, black eyes under the most unruly pair of eyebrows she had ever seen.

  ‘Yes, I know you are there, child, but you may have noticed that I am choosing not to speak to you.’ His companion, the foreign gentleman, regarded her languidly.

  ‘Forgive me—’

  ‘What?’

  Alyce’s throat felt as though it was stuffed with damp wool. ‘Forgive me, sir. I am looking for Doctor Dee.’

  ‘Looking for him? And where do you think he is?’

  ‘I think,’ she said slowly, ‘you are him.’

  ‘You think? My child, if I were impudent enough to approach Doctor John Dee unbidden, I would at least be certain of his identity first.’

  There was silence. This was not going well.

  ‘Well . . . are you?’

  The man heaved a great sigh of displeasure. His eyes did not move. His pupils were strangely small, she noticed. ‘You are speaking to the man you seek. What could you possibly want of me?’

  ‘I have a letter for you.’ Her breath was fluttering as she withdrew the parchment from her dress. ‘It is of great importance. To me, at least. And perhaps to you. I’m afraid the seal fell off, but I have it here . . .’

  Doctor Dee’s brows knotted even more than they already were, and he took the letter and the seal in his wrinkled, stained fingers. He muttered something in that odd, clicking language, and his companion nodded, got up, and left.

  ‘My mother was Ellen Greenliefe. She’s dead now. But she told me to come and find you. That you could help me.’

  He spent a long time looking closely at the seal, before laying the parchment out flat on the table. Neither he nor Alyce moved. He must have read the message four or five times – the characters obviously made more sense to him than they had to her or Solomon or Vitali. Somewhere in another corner of the tavern, she heard the mountebank’s tinkling laughter.