Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
RUE
Pierre placed my bags on the hall floor and stared at me. ‘Mistress Rue, you haven’t seemed yourself for a few weeks. Is there anything bothering you that I can help with?’
I felt my cheeks heat at the memory of what had happened between me and Theo Le Cerf, and turning my back to him to hide my shame, I went to pick up the bags. I wasn’t ready to mention the strange presence I kept feeling in the house, not wishing to sound silly.
‘No, I’m a little out of sorts thanks to this endless hot weather, but nothing more than that. You go and carry on with what you were doing. I’ve held you up for long enough.’
He hesitated briefly. ‘As you wish.’
‘Thank you, Pierre. As always you’ve been very helpful to me.’
He left the house and walked down the steps to go back where he had been busy on the drive.
A floorboard creaked upstairs and I saw my aunt coming down to join me.
I looked past her up the stairs at my grandmother’s closed bedroom door and shivered as a familiar chill trickled down my spine.
This feeling of strangeness had begun soon after my nineteenth birthday, an age, my grandmother believed, when it was time to think about finding a suitable husband.
Could it have anything to do with me growing up?
I couldn’t imagine that it did, especially as I was not remotely interested in marrying anyone anytime soon.
Whatever its cause, this feeling was happening to me more often – a strange presence in the house, growing stronger and more insidious.
‘Do you feel it, Aunt Sorrel?’ I asked without thinking.
I hadn’t mentioned my concerns to anyone else before, but it was getting to the point that I was certain others close to me must have noticed the distinct change in the house’s atmosphere, especially on the first floor where our bedrooms were.
I don’t know when I first noticed the black patches appearing in a corner of my bedroom walls.
I initially assumed it was damp, from where a leak in the roof was letting in rainwater.
Knowing that, if that was the case, there was little I could do, I had pulled my large chest of drawers in front of the offending sight.
Now, though, the mould had spread across two walls, the stains looking somewhat like the blue veins at my inner wrists. It was impossible to ignore these odd shapes that seemed more like someone’s arms coming out of the wall, as if beckoning me into a frightening hug.
‘There’s something alive in these walls, I’m sure of it,’ I whispered to my aunt.
She didn’t answer.
I pressed her further. ‘Please tell me I’m not the only one to be alarmed by this?’
She glanced upstairs before shaking her head slowly.
‘You’re not alone, sweet Rue. I noticed it for the first time a couple of months ago, when I was taking laundry to your room.
’ She gave me a sympathetic smile. ‘Mind you, living in one of the cottages, I sometimes have a fearful battle against damp.’
‘But it’s not like usual damp, as far as I can see.’
‘I agree with you.’ She swallowed. ‘I have to admit it does worry me.’ She seemed about to speak, then held her tongue and just looked at me, uncertainty on her face.
‘You can be honest with me,’ I said, urging her to continue. ‘Please, I want to know what you think.’
She shrugged. ‘I can’t help thinking there’s a dark malice in this place. Something that wasn’t here before. It’s getting worse over time too.’
I was relieved not to be alone with this belief and to know that my anxiety about this change was not without cause.
This house was the only home I had ever known.
It was my sanctuary from everything I found fearful outside the gates.
The thought that Thistlebury Manor had taken on something unpleasant that I didn’t understand terrified me.
Where would it lead? What would it mean for those I loved?
‘Where do you think it’s come from?’ I asked, eager to learn more about this thing that was slowly taking over our home and seemingly rotting it from the inside out.
I heard footsteps and then my grandmother’s voice.
‘Are those bags full because you’ve been bartering on your way home from making deliveries?
’ she asked, interrupting our conversation and startling us both.
She gave each of us an irritated glance, then indicated the two almost full bags at my feet.
I nodded. Our clients often lacked money.
Despite this, my grandmother never refused to help anyone who needed it.
We always accepted whatever they could afford to give us in lieu of payment, knowing that the villagers hated to be thought of as accepting charity.
We did this out of kindness, but also believed it showed we meant to help heal them.
We feared a treatment failing, or going wrong and causing a customer to become sicker, because it was then that someone of a more spiteful nature might be tempted to go to the Witchfinder and accuse us of being witches.
I knew other healers on the island who did not follow our craft, who chose to use water from holy wells or arranged to meet their customers near one.
Some also recited the Lord’s Prayer before or after carrying out their work.
As pagans, it wasn’t something we would ever do, but as long as we took care to act only for the good of our clients, we hoped to remain safe.
Today I had carried home a small but heavy oak box for spices, some table linen, a mixture of vegetables, and a dead rabbit someone had poached from our woods.
‘Did you manage to see everyone on my list?’
She opened one of the bags and peered inside.
She lifted the box out, studying it, then dipped her hand in once more and took out the linen tablecloth, murmuring something to herself.
Satisfied, she then turned on her heels and began walking back to the kitchen.
‘Well, don’t leave them there. Give that rabbit to Tilly to deal with.
She was wondering what to cook for our supper.
’ She pointed to the bags. ‘Take everything else to the work room and put them away.’
I picked up the bags and carried them down the hallway and through the kitchen – breathing in a sweet apple smell and hoping my grandmother was baking her delicious apple pie – before descending to the secret room.
I stopped inside and wondered whether I felt the odd sensation that someone or something else now lived among us. Thankfully it wasn’t there.
I loved the work room. It was down a few steps at one side of the kitchen.
The window was concealed from the outside by hedging that circled it, leaving enough space to let in light but not allowing it to be seen.
The door was covered on the inside by a sideboard that was lighter than it appeared.
Not that we ever had guests, apart from the other witches in our coven, and they only appeared at the house when they were invited.
When my mother was tried as a witch, the charge was based on false evidence provided by a maid who had left my parents’ employment to work for the woman my father had been expected to marry before he met my mother.
The woman had gone on to marry someone else, but having come across my mother at a party, had quarrelled with her and then returned home and suffered a miscarriage, followed by two more several months later.
She supposedly believed that my mother had cast a spell not only to bewitch my father but also to cause her to become barren.
I recalled only too well the whispers and comments by shocked locals that Lord Thistlebury’s glamorous, beautiful wife used her powers against others, so much so that people had been scared to venture down the drive.
I had overheard my aunt and grandmother discussing their relief that I had only been nine at the time, otherwise it was possible that I could have also been judged guilty.
I had to admit that, although I was lonely growing up, knowing this gave me a sense of security.
After putting away the goods I had been given in payment for my grandmother’s potions and powders, I went down to the spell room and carefully unpacked each of the jars and phials she had asked me to take, in case one of our trusted clients requested something, and put them away until the next time I ventured out to the market to work at the stall.
A waft of that now familiar smell – damp mixed with something else I couldn’t quite decipher – hit me.
I looked around, frightened in case I spotted the strangeness that inhabited my bedroom, and was relieved when I couldn’t see anything.
Had I imagined that smell? Was the house slowly disintegrating as the unexplained presence took it over?
My thoughts returned to my conversation with my aunt, and how I first noticed the presence when I visited the attic, searching for an old bookcase my grandmother wanted me to fetch.
At first I thought I was being fanciful, but it happened the next time I ventured up there, and after that I felt it in the room that had once been my parents’.
Even now, when I passed the closed door of the attic, I felt the oppressive sensation becoming stronger, as if it was absorbing power from the very walls and floors of the building.
I placed the final phial in the cupboard and closed the door. Then, folding both bags, I left them on the table near the entrance to the room to use next time. I stopped at the door and, unable to shift a feeling of dread, remembered my vow to my mother to avenge her death.