The Vanishing Witch Read online

  Copyright © 2014 Karen Maitland

  The right of Karen Maitland to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This Ebook edition first published by Headline Publishing Group in 2014

  All characters – apart from the obvious historical ones – in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  eISBN: 978 1 4722 1502 4

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette UK Company

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.headline.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About Karen Maitland

  Praise

  About the Book

  Also By

  Epigraph

  Cast of Characters

  Proem

  Prologue

  September 1380

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  October

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  November

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  December

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  January

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  February

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  March

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  April

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  May

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  June

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  July

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  August

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  September 1381

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Epilogue

  Historical Notes

  Timeline of the Events of the Peasants' Revolt

  Glossary

  About Karen Maitland

  © John C. Gibson

  Karen Maitland travelled and worked in many parts of the United Kingdom before settling for many years in the beautiful medieval city of Lincoln, an inspiration for her writing. She is the author of The White Room, Company of Liars, The Owl Killers, The Gallows Curse and The Falcons of Fire and Ice. She has recently relocated to a life of rural bliss in Devon. To find out more, visit www.karenmaitland.com.

  Praise for Karen Maitland

  ‘Karen Maitland neatly captures the spirit of primitive superstition’ Daily Express

  ‘Passion and peril. A compelling blend of historical grit and supernatural twists’ Daily Mail on The Falcons of Fire and Ice

  ‘A ripping tale . . . full of colour and detail’ Daily Telegraph on The Gallows Curse

  ‘Scarily good. Imagine The Wicker Man crossed with The Birds’ Marie Claire on The Owl Killers

  ‘Combines the storytelling traditions of The Canterbury Tales with the supernatural suspense of Kate Mosse’s Sepulchre in this atmospheric tale of treachery and magic’ Marie Claire on Company of Liars

  About the Book

  The reign of Richard II is troubled, the poor are about to become poorer still and the landowners are lining their pockets. It’s a case of every man for himself, whatever his status or wealth. But in a world where nothing can be taken at face value, who can you trust?

  The dour wool merchant?

  His impulsive son?

  His stepdaughter with the bewitching eyes?

  Or the raven-haired widow clutching her necklace of bloodstones?

  And when people start dying unnatural deaths and the peasants decide it’s time to fight back, it becomes all too easy to spy witchcraft at every turn.

  By Karen Maitland

  The White Room

  Company of Liars

  The Owl Killers

  The Gallows Curse

  The Falcons of Fire and Ice

  Liars and Thieves (novella)

  ‘The children born of thee are sword and fire,

  Red ruin, and the breaking up of laws.’

  The Idylls of the King, Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809–92)

  ‘So hideous was the noise, a benedicite!

  Certes he, Jack Straw and all his meinie,

  Ne made never shouts so shrill

  When that they would any Fleming kill.’

  A reference to the Peasants’ Revolt in The Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1340–1400)

  The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement – but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims.

  Under Western Eyes, Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)

  Cast of Characters

  Lincoln

  Robert of Bassingham – wool merchant and landowner in Lincoln

  Jan – Robert’s eldest son and steward

  Adam – Robert’s twelve-year-old son

  Edith – Robert’s wife

  Maud – Edith’s cousin

  Beata – Edith’s maid

  Tenney – Robert’s manservant

  Catlin – a wealthy widow

  Leonia – Catlin’s thirteen-year-old daughter

  Edward – Catlin’s adult son

  Diot – Catlin’s maid

  Warrick – Widow Catlin’s late husband

  Hugo Bayus – elderly physician

  Father Remigius – Robert’s parish priest

  Fulk – overseer at Robert’s warehouse

  Tom – Robert’s rent-collector

  Hugh de Garwell – member of the Common Council of Lincoln and former Member of the Parliament

  Thomas Thimbleby of Poolham – Sheriff of Lincoln

  Matthew Johan – Florentine merchant in Lincoln

  Master Warner – Adam’s schoolmaster

  Henry de Sutton – a boy at Adam’s school

  Sister Ursula – nun at the Infirmary of St Mary Magdalene

  Godwin – a seafarer

  Greetwell (a village on the outskirts of Lincoln)

  Gunter – a river boatman

  Nonie – Gunter’s wife

  Royse – Gunter and Nonie’s
fourteen-year-old daughter

  Hankin – Gunter and Nonie’s twelve-year-old son

  Col – Gunter and Nonie’s four-year-old son

  Martin – rival boatman

  Alys – Martin’s wife

  Simon – Martin’s son

  London

  Thomas Farringdon – leader of the Essex men

  Giles – rebel from Essex

  Proem

  Legend tells that seven hundred years before our story begins . . .

  . . . in the days of the Saxons, in the kingdom of Lindsey, there was Ealdorman who had a beautiful daughter, Æthelind. She was famed throughout all her tribe not only for her knowledge of herbs and healing, but for her ability to tame animals. There was no bucking horse that would not grow calm when she fearlessly laid her hand upon its flank, or a savage dog that would not roll over like a puppy when she approached.

  One day when she was out in the forest gathering herbs, the men were hunting a wild boar that had killed several villagers and trampled their crops. As their hounds trailed after it, they saw to their horror that it had changed course and was charging straight towards Æthelind. When she grasped its lethal tusks, it laid its great head meekly in her lap, and there remained until the huntsmen came to slay it. In gratitude for her bravery, her people gave her an amulet for her cloak in the form of a golden boar’s head studded with red garnets.

  Æthelind’s reputation spread far and wide and many noble Saxons came to ask for her hand in marriage. Her father finally agreed to give his daughter to the son of the king himself, a match that would bring great honour to his hall, peace and prosperity to the tribe.

  But the day before the wedding, Æthelind fell asleep in a grove of oak trees and a snake crawled into her mouth, slid down her throat and coiled itself inside her. When she returned to her father’s mead hall, her belly was swollen as if she was great with child. The king’s son, who was being entertained in the hall, was seized with rage that his intended bride should have shamed him by taking a lesser man to her bed.

  Before all the company he drew his sword and struck off her head, but as her body fell to the ground, the snake slithered out from between her legs, like a newborn babe, and transformed into a beautiful human child, who cursed the prince. At once, the ground that was stained with Æthelind’s blood fell away and the prince plunged through the dark earth into a pit of vipers. As the earth closed over him the serpents stung him to death, then instantly revived him that he might be tormented to death again. And thus he will suffer night and day throughout the ages until the great wolf Fenris breaks the chain that binds it, heralding the end of the world.

  Meanwhile, Æthelind’s kin sorrowfully gathered up her head and body and burned them on a great funeral pyre. They placed her ashes in an urn with the golden boar’s head they had given her. The urn was inscribed with the ouroboros, the snake that devours its tail, a symbol of the eternal cycle of death and rebirth. That night, when the moon rose, they carried the urn in a torchlight procession to the top of a cliff, close to the walls of a ruined city the Romans had called Lindum. There they laid it in a cave with the burial urns of her elders.

  And they say that when lightning flashes from the sky and thunder roars, Æthelind rides out over the cliff, her hair streaming in the wind, leading the wild hunt. But woe betide any man who witnesses that fearful sight, for she will hunt him down until he can run no more and his body lies broken at her feet.

  Prologue

  A killing ointment made of arsenic, vitriol, baby’s fat, bat’s blood and hemlock may be spread on the latches, gates and doorposts of houses in the dark of night. Thus can death run swiftly through a town.

  River Witham, Lincolnshire

  ‘Help me! I beg you, help me!’

  The cry was muffled in the dense, freezing mist that swirled over the black river. As his punt edged upstream, Gunter caught the distant wail and dug his pole into the river bottom, trying to hold his boat steady against the swift current. The shout seemed to have come from the bank somewhere ahead, but Gunter could barely see the flame of his lantern in the bow, much less who might be calling.

  The cry came again. ‘In your mercy, for the sake of Jesus Christ, help me!’

  The mist distorted the sound so Gunter couldn’t be sure if it was coming from right or left. He struggled to hold the punt in the centre of the river and cursed himself. He should have hauled up somewhere for the night long before this, but it had taken four days to move the cargo downriver to Boston and return this far. He was desperate to reach home and reassure himself that his wife and children were safe.

  Yesterday he’d seen the body of a boatman fished out of the river. The poor bastard had been beaten bloody, robbed and stabbed. Whoever had murdered him had not even left him the dignity of his breeches. And he wasn’t the first boatman in past weeks to be found floating face down with stab wounds in his back.

  ‘Is anyone there?’ the man called again, uncertainly this time, as if he feared he might be speaking to a ghost or water sprite.

  Such a thought had also crossed Gunter’s mind. Two children had drowned not far from here and it was said their ghosts prowled the bank luring others to their deaths in the icy river.

  ‘What are you?’ Gunter yelled back. ‘Name yourself.’

  ‘A humble Friar of the Sack, a Brother of Penitence.’ The voice was deep and rasping, as if it had rusted over the years from lack of use. ‘The mist . . . I stumbled into the bog and almost drowned in the mud. I’m afraid to move, in case I sink into the mire or fall into the river.’

  Now Gunter could make out dark shapes through the billows of mist, but the glimpses were so fleeting he couldn’t tell if they were men or trees. Every instinct told him to ignore the stranger and push on up the river. This was exactly the kind of trick the river-rats used to lure craft to the bank so that they could rob the boatmen. The man they’d found in the water had been a strapping lad, with two sound legs. Gunter had only one. His left leg had been severed at the knee and replaced by a wooden stump with a foot in the form of an upturned mushroom, not unlike the end of one of his own punt poles. Although he could walk as fast as any man, if it came to a fight, he could easily be knocked off balance.

  But the stranger on the bank would not give up. ‘I beg you, in God’s mercy, help me. I’m wet and starving. I fear dawn will see me a frozen corpse if I stay out here all night.’

  The rasping tone of the man’s voice made it sound more like a threat than a plea, but Gunter had been cold and hungry often enough in his life to know the misery those twin demons could inflict and the night was turning bitter. There’d be a hard frost come morning. He knew he’d never forgive himself if he left a man out here to die.

  ‘Call again, and keep calling till I can see you,’ he instructed.

  He listened to the voice and propelled his punt towards the left bank, eventually drawing close enough to make out the shape of a hooded figure in a long robe standing close by the water’s edge. Gunter tightened his hold on the quant: with its metal foot, the long pole could be turned into a useful weapon if the man tried to seize the boat.

  The friar’s breath hung white in the chill air, mingling with the icy vapour of the river. As soon as the prow of the punt came close, he bent as if he meant to grab it. But Gunter was ready for that. He whisked the quant over to the other side of the punt and pushed away from the bank, calculating that the man would not risk jumping in that robe.

  ‘By the blood of Christ, I swear I mean you no harm.’ But the man’s voice sounded even more menacing now that Gunter was close. The friar stretched out his right arm into the pool of light cast by the lantern. The folds of his sleeve hung down, thick and heavy with mud. Slowly, with the other hand, he peeled back the sodden sleeve to reveal an arm that ended at the wrist. ‘I am hardly a threat to any man.’

  Gunter felt an instant flush of shame. He resented any man’s pity for his own missing limb and was offering none to the friar, but he despised himse
lf for his distrust and cowardice. It couldn’t have been easy for the friar to pull himself free of the mire that had swallowed many an unwary traveller.

  Gunter had always believed that priests and friars were weaklings who’d chosen the Church to avoid blistering their hands in honest toil and sweat. But this man was no minnow and he was plainly determined not to meet his Creator yet, for all that he was in Holy Orders.

  Gunter brought the punt close to the bank, and held it steady in the current for the friar to climb in and settle himself on one of the cross planks. His coarse, shapeless robe clung wetly to his body, plastered with mud and slime. He sat shivering, his hood pulled so low over his head that Gunter could see nothing of his face.

  ‘I’ll take you as far as High Bridge in Lincoln,’ Gunter said. ‘There are several priories just outside the city, south of the river. You’ll find a bed and a warm meal in one, especially with you being in Holy Orders.’

  ‘It’s close then, the city?’ the friar rasped. ‘I’ve been walking for days to reach it.’

  ‘If it weren’t for this fret, you’d be able to see the torches blazing on the city walls and even the candles in the windows of the cathedral.’

  Gunter pushed the punt steadily upstream, trying to peer through the mist at the water in front. He knew every twist and turn of the river as well as he knew the face of his own beloved wife. He didn’t expect other craft to be abroad at this late hour, but there was always the danger of branches or barrels being swept downstream and crashing into his craft.

  ‘So what brings you to Lincoln?’ he asked, without taking his gaze from the water. ‘You’ll not find any of your order here. I heard tell there was once a house belonging to Friars of the Sack in Lincoln, but that was before the Great Pestilence. House is still there, but none of your brothers has lived in it for years.’

  ‘It is not my brethren I seek,’ the friar said.

  They were passing between the miserable hovels that lined the banks on the far outskirts of the city and the mist was less dense. Gunter was anxious to drop off his passenger as soon as he could: he was impatient to get home, but there was something in the man’s voice that unnerved him. There was a bitter edge to it that made everything he said sound like a challenge, however innocuous the words. Still, that was friars for you, whatever order they came from. When they weren’t shrieking about the torments of Hell, they were demanding alms and threatening you with eternal damnation if you didn’t pay up.