Suffolk, 1557
O Domine! Such was the cry in Abacuck’s heart up on the roof of St Mary’s. Save us.
The steeple above was all the answer he needed, a dark, judgemental finger. Treacherous his path was, slippery as the tiles under his boots, the removal of which the rector had charged him with that very morn, keen to curb the blow of the coming storm as much as earthly powers would allow. ‘For they hath sown the wind, and they shalt reap the whirlwind. Hosea eight seven’, quothed Goodryke in Latin (the queen had hitherto banned all the Bibles in their own tongue), and clapped his trembling young clerk on the back as if he thought his words a comfort. Then the rector, portly and grey, had shuffled off with the grimmest of smiles, keen to fettle the nave and dust off the gospels for his urgent sermon when the clock struck noon. Such a squall was rare, and prodigious—too much so to pass up the opportunity to strike the fear of God into the three hundred odd souls who dwelt in Bongay, the old market town huddled on the edge of the broads. Thankfully, he failed to mark the way that Ab cringed, the colour that rose in his cheeks, and to be out from under the chance of it, even up a poles-long rickety ladder struck the lad as a mercy.
I know it by heart, father, he might’ve said, and he pictured his sweet Lament once more by the mill, the memory of her blank gaze making him wince, the living proof of his transgression. Thou need not tell me.
To add to his woes, Ab descried in the roiling black clouds the likeness of a cowled figure, dwarfing the church in its gusty approach. Curtains of rain veiled the willows that prayed along the meander of the river, lending the impression of a moth-eaten robe. Lightning scythed in the thunderhead, illuminating the guise of a hollow skull, giant in its proportions. Death hi’self came marching over the fens that surrounded the town and for his sins, Abacuck ‘Die-Well’ Temple reckoned he came at his invitation.
Zounds! It were her love I wanted. Instead I court damnation.
It would not do to look down and the storm presented no cheer. The doings of the town below, however, gave him faint hope. The small ruined castle had lowered her flags, the new hotchpotch one symbolising the union of England and France, all crowned lions and stripes and fleur-de-lis, Bloody Mary having wed Philip the Prudent. Men were nailing shutters in the whisking arrows of thatch while goodwives shooed geese and goats into barns, most of the townsfolk already garbed in their Sunday best. Daundelyon, the tavern keeper, had unhooked the sign of the Queen’s Head lest it go sailing into the air and land in the reeking basket of the midden. The whittawer had taken in his skins, the frames outside his tannery left stripped and skeletal. Out in her garden on Crooked Lane, the decidedly uncrooked and buxom form of Grissel Cobbe was bringing in as much veg as possible, and the odd handful of flowers—monkshood and belladonna, Ab reckoned—all plucked and stuffed into her apron. That way lay further cause for shame, for it was Grissel who’d given him the book in the first place and extracted a saucy price to boot, more wood on the fire under him. With a blush he looked elsewhere. Folk in hemp and hose looked fit to drain the town square well, buckets passing from hand to hand, sloshing back and forth. The old mend-bones, Mother Scrogg, went hobbledygee for her washing, her petticoats flapping on the line like a stricken ship at sea.
Up in his precarious eyrie, it pleased Ab to think that all should endure the tempest and remain none the wiser to the witchery he’d performed, the matter of the book and the binding. His business with Lament Wyddowsoun would stay locked behind his lips and his imminent descent into Hell pass unmarked by Goodryke, his guardian. The shame of it alone, the thought that the man who’d taken him in one winter morn from the rectory steps and raised him as his own should learn of it . . . why, it was almost enough to make him fling himself headfirst into the graveyard.
But he’d undo his error yet, by God! Unlike Rose Allin and those other poor souls down in Colchester, Mary wouldn’t see him burn for heresy, no martyr he. This was his respair, the hope in his foolish and blasphemous heart, that the storm would sweep on south and leave him and his spell a secret, its breaking the matter of the morrow.
Under his boots, the tiles caught the swell of the gale and gave the lie to it, clattering like the laughter of the pit.
Six days ago, Abacuck had chased a black rabbit to Grissel Cobbe’s stoop and thought naught of it till later, the uncommon boldness of the beast, its certain direction. Nor of Grissel herself, no more shy than the creature itself, who’d opened the door the moment he arrived and scooped the rabbit up to her breast. How could he, a gangling lad with chaff in his locks and a mere sixteen years behind him, have gauged the trap into which he’d blundered? The scheming doxy (for so Ab thought her now) had simply stood there and grinned while he gawped, willing his eyes away from the untied laces of the woman’s shift and the pale orbs that peeped betwixt them, holding him entranced.
“Cop an eyeful, as it pleases.” Grissel stroked the rabbit in a most uncomfortable (for him) manner, appearing to relish the blood in his face. “Is that what brought thee to this daughter’s door?”
“Nay. Nay. ’Twas a stew I had on my mind, no more. Forgive my intrusion and fare-thee-well.”
Ab bowed, awkwardly, and made to depart. He wasn’t about to boil her pet. A hand on his arm gave him pause.
“Ah, so Prickears brought you hither,” said Grissel. “I’d say there were no harm in it, but ‘tis thy peepers that pain thee of late, no? A toss of her hair in the marketplace. Her cold regard when she marks ye, smoke-locks. And ne’er a word o’ kindness aimed in thy direction either. How a man stands it, I cannot say.”
Now Ab reddened in earnest, but the greater part of it was ire.
“What are ye babbling about?”
“Faugh! Like ye know not. And it’s not what, but who.” Grissel widened her grin, pearls under the summer sun. “Lament Wyddowsoun. Thy heart’s gleam, boy.”
“Pray tell, what do ye know of it? Have ye been spying on me, woman?”
Ab thought of a less pleasant term to call her, pricked as he was by her steady green gaze. Rumour had it she was orphaned like him, and unwed despite her middling years. The cunning folk went to her for charms, it was said, but considering the present fervour and the many fires of late, most muttered and pointed fingers, whispering of matters dark and diabolical. An unwed woman was an unwed woman, after all, particularly one as comely as she. Goodryke, loath to raise hob, turned a blind eye.
“Well I know the agony of longing, ‘Die-Well’ Temple.” She used his grace-name in a mix of mockery and soothing breath, taking a step towards him, his nostrils filling with the scent of rosemary and thyme. “Mine own hearth is lonesome with no husband or child to give comfort nor cheer. And all the young men gone off to France to protect our Holy Roman Emperor. If the rector hadn’t taken ye under his wing, ye would be marching with them, bound to die in a ditch in Picardy, a sword in thy guts.”
Sore vexed, Ab danced from foot to foot. There seemed naught to gain from denying it and Grissel’s mien told him she wouldn’t believe him if he tried. The woman spoke to the nub of his woes. All that long summer he’d found himself afflicted by a fresh interest in the cobbler’s daughter, the Lament in question (and ne’er a truer name granted), and anguish was all he knew. Gilt haired, she was, and lissome. Pale as morning milk and as far from his reach as the moon. Yet scorn lingered under his shame.
“Any can paint a morrow on the air,” said Ab, crossing his arms, “and none to disprove it. I’ll thank thee to mind thine own business.”
Grissel, to his alarm, laughed. A bright tinkle of bells.
“Ye love-raddled oaf. Will ye thank me if I tell ye the surest way to win her?”
For all the talk in town of Cobbe’s ways, there were none who thought her unwise. And the sneap she’d spoken of was true; Lament was fain to pretend that Abacuck Temple did not exist, a scrawny ghost haunting her steps, peeping over garden walls and the like. On one occasion, catching the lass alone on her way to prayer, he’d doffed his cap and hailed her in the street, keeping apace in the hope of conversation. Lament had swept on by, the snap of her skirts fit to stir the dust into devils and her bonnet skyward. What did she, a maid of her tender years (yet ripe), want of a lackey, a boy who cleaned the church gutters and buffed the rector’s boots?
Naught, that’s what.
This in mind, Ab found he couldn’t repress a narrowed glance at Cobbe.
“What’s this flim-flam you prate of?”
“Not flim-flam, Ab.” And at last Grissel’s amusement waned, usurped by a darker expression, one framed betwixt her curling brown locks. “‘Tis known to have done the trick for Tristan and Iseult, a philtre brewed by the princess’s mother and guarded close by Brangaine, her handmaid. The recipe came down to me in a book, and that told by Ursula Soothtell in her cave, many moons ago. One sip and thy heart’s desire shall come true, a binding that death alone can break.”
Indeed it was prattle and against the grain of all Puritan belief, a claim godless and witching. Goodryke would reach for his crop should he hear of it, a neighbour whispering of Ab on the stoop while Grissel shared a morsel of magic and stroked her Prickears with slow and indecent fingers. But he was desperate too, as desperate as any swain with his passions snubbed and his own hand nightly overworked, and so he refrained from flight.
Instead, hope glimmered through his suspicion.
“And why, Mistress Cobbe, would ye grant me such?”
The laugh returned, spare of jest, and the woman cracked her door a little wider. The house was a nest of shadow beyond.
“Why, young Ab, so that ye may do for me.”
’Twas an awkward business, Ab’s breeches pooled around his boots and the rolling pin and pots toppled from the kitchen table, Grissel gasping under him. And it was swift, though he fought hard to check it, conjuring up thought of a dead fox he’d spied in the woods, maggots asquirm in its guts. She’d had him kneel ere his mounting, his black locks betwixt her legs and him lapping at her like a starved dog until her giggling dissuaded him and she’d pulled his doubting face to the fierce sheen of her own. Though it pained him anon, he’d spared no thought for Lament Wyddowsoun nor foolish notions of straying. Not then. Not for the whole handful of minutes his labours took him.
Afterwards, Cobbe had lent him the book with the precise number of the page and a pouch of ingredients, in which there was a dash of cinnamon, honey, hibiscus, and rose petals, wax and salt for safeguarding. ‘Crystal thy intent must be,’ Grissel told him, tousled and aloof on the stoop as she bade him a farewell, plainly no longer keen to entertain him, the raggedy lad who’d come calling. ‘Picture Lament as clear as ye are able’ she’d said (and hadn’t he done so every eve, her face as known to him as his own mirror?). ‘By midday next, have her drink of the philtre.’ With that, the door had closed and left Abacuck befuddled there, sated and hopeful in the afternoon sun.
In his hand, a book, a pouch and a seed of evil in place of the ones he’d sown.
Thunder barked, rattling the tiles under Ab’s boots, shaking him from his reverie. The clouds resembled a wolf now, black coated and lurking over the weathercock, readying to pounce. To embellish the effect, the rumbling dwindled into a low growl, hastening the lad to collect the last loose slates he could find and tuck them into the bib of his smock. No one wanted flying stone coming through their windows or worse, raining down on their heads. Noon was nigh and all who were local, Catholic and sensible would seek shelter in the church. Let none be found tardy! There, Old Goodryke would berate them.
“Sweetling! Apple of my eye! What art ye about up there?”
Six days ago, to hearken to such words and ones aimed in his direction, would’ve filled Ab with a glow to rival any fear of hellfire (in his mind, a black rabbit, standing proud on its hind legs in the rectory parlour). Now this dulcet ringing in his ears, winging from the foot of the ladder, made of his heart a stone. Weighed by it, he stumbled to the apparatus in question and gave a wary look down.
“Dolt of a girl,” he said upon spying her, a mess of windswept ringlets below and dust assailing her Sunday dress. “A tempest comes. Get thee to church.”
“Honeysop! Mine soul! Prithee do not fall.”
Too late for that, thought Ab, grumbling as he made his way down. The ladder shook in the gale howling round the apse, dead leaves, grit and the odd branch threatening to turn Lament’s endearments into a diresome prophecy. He leapt from the last few rungs, greeting the lass with a leer and a swift shake of her shoulders, but there his vexation ran out. Heedless, she faced him—with the same damned and bedazzled eyes, the both of them like polished shillings, silvery and empty of thought. Of her. So she’d appraised him for the long week past. Indeed, she’d sought him out ever since he’d ground the herbs in the rectory on Monday midnight and uttered the prayer to Hecate, then succeeded the next morn in slipping the potion into the chalice at Mass, moments before Goodryke had descended the altar to give the Distribution of the Precious Blood. According to the book, the spell would only work upon the one intended (though Ab was afeared that the whole flock might become beguiled and follow him around town like in the tale of the golden goose, a simpleton rendered an Adonis) and verily, so it happened to prove. Lament had hailed him anon in the graveyard and invited him to a riverside stroll.
Mercy! How his chest had swelled to hear her speak his name! ’Twas for the first time and ever so sweet, the chime of his very own heart. And thus Ab had taken her hand, so pale, so cool, and drawn her away from the prattling crowd, down the wind of Crooked Lane and along the dyke, out to the abandoned mill yonder. Oh, he was neglecting the counting of the tithe and the sweeping of the nave, but what of it? Goodryke, he doubted, would come in search of him. A whipping would be worth the chance of an hour or so in the girl’s company, there in the shadow of the tattered vanes, far from prying eyes.
“Take me, heartikin,” said she, softly. “Do what thou wilt.”
Rising to his duty, Ab had pulled the girl close, revelling in the scent of lavender and woodsmoke, the honeysuckle all around. The coarse wool of her dress had pressed against his jerkin, his braies fit to burst with his passion. And, aye, awkwardly, he kissed her, he kissed her, their lips joining their souls. Zounds! When he released her, gasping, he’d observed the blank sheen of her gaze, her addled smile, the listless slump of her shoulders . . . and his grin had melted like wax. This was unlike Mistress Cobbe with her open arms, her kittenish talk and the brief work she’d made of him. Nay, it was a hundred times worse. Why, Lament was no more than a manikin, cradled in his arms. Should he proceed to lay her ‘pon the sward, hitch up her skirts and empty his lust into her? Unbidden, Old Goodryke whispered in his ear, ‘Flee the evil desires of youth, lad. Timothy two twenty two’. That proved enough to wilt him, to see him stagger away across the knoll, regarding Lament’s bewilderment with a look akin to dread.
Her wits have fled her. She is but a . . . mirror . . .
What the lass reflected was plain. All his longing, his ache for a single glance, was shining in her face. And yet it were dishonestly won. Gone was the chance to do so, he reckoned then, the ordinary trials of wooing, of plucked roses and fetching pails and a thousand heartfelt words of persuasion, all vanished in a wink. Forsooth, it was not Lament Wyddowsoun who stood before him, here under her own will. The lass he knew (or yearned to know) would sooner have thrown herself into the town square well than venture hither with the likes of him, hand-in-hand and spellbound. Nay, it was her will he had broken, no doubt about it. Broken with a dash of cinnamon, honey, hibiscus and rose petals, wax, salt and diabolical words. And to what end?
Tristan and Iseult be damned.
A cold snake of knowledge slithered in his belly, through his every vein. There under the sails of the mill, Abacuck Temple grasped the insidious touch of witchcraft and the power it held over minds. Grissel had plucked out the need in him and turned it to some wicked purpose. For private amusement? Out of jealous spite? To make a devil of him?
Bobolyne! Fool! Cursing himself, Ab had spurned the song of Satan and spun to hasten down the rise instead. Tucking his shirt into his breeches, his cheeks ablaze, he’d fled back along the river, the cries of the cobbler’s daughter in his ears.
And yet in a cruel reversal of fortune, the lass had hunted him ever since.
“What ails thee, my love?” she beseeched him now, mindless to the violent air and the twigs flailing all around. “Pray hold me close. Hold me and never let go.”
Pleasant enough speech, but in her face, Ab saw only pain. A certain weariness plagued her, the lines too deep for her years and sleeplessness under her eyes. She was the one ailing, he realised then, his revelation—nay, repulsion—leaving her bereft. Well he knew the sting of those thorns. With every ducking behind a hedge, every about-face in the street, every locking of the rectory door to avoid her, her sorrow had gone the deeper. It wasn’t love he’d given her, but poison. He feared she’d not survive it.
Neither of them would if they tarried out here in the storm. Down Crooked Lane, he spied the congregation approaching, a flutter of urgent bonnets and hats. There was Issac Pecke, the mayor, and Alice Ruggenale, the seamstress. There was Crispe, Fogg and Beaurepaire, the butcher, the baker and the blacksmith. There was Daundelyon and his wife, Joan. And there was Tobias Wyddowsoun, the cobbler, who was the last man on God’s green earth that Abacuck wanted to see. Above the bell rang, the clock striking noon, the echoes twisted by the wind, laden with impending doom.
Drawing Lament into his embrace, Ab ushered the girl towards the church. ’Twas a desperate act and would likely incur the thrashing of all thrashings—an excommunication at worst—but he had to confess to Goodryke of his dabbling and pray for his intervention.
Above, the clouds boiled, black and ravenous over the spire.
The gale made progress to the church irksome. It was naught compared to the wonders that the flock babbled of thereafter, once the darkness had passed.
Farmer Bray and his wife swore blind that their milk had soured that very morn and their prize cow taken ill, but that was not the worst of it. Reaching the end of Crooked Lane, the heavens opened and a hard rain began to fall, the crowd pulling up collars and holding onto hats, a commonplace event in Suffolk till Mistress Pecke shrieked and waved a frantic hand above the throng, and all went scattering around her.
“Hail mixed with blood!” squawked she, strident despite her birdlike frame. “The first angel sounds his trumpet, just as the Good Book says.”
There was a great deal of muttering at that. ‘The end is nigh,’ folk cried, which considering the queen’s purge of Protestants and the battles on the continent, most of them had come to expect to varying degrees. All could see the ruddy condition of the woman’s palm and the crimson stars peppering the cobbles at their feet, runnels of the stuff trickling into the gutters. ’Twas Gilbert Vawdrey, the esteemed physician, who shook his cane and pressed upon all that the phenomenon was likely due to river clay from the nearby Waveney, whipped up and borne by the blustering squall. More muttering greeted this and a shaking of heads, for science aside, who dared question the Work of the Lord? But it was enough to get them moving again. The good sheep went dashing into St. Mary’s and the doors stood wide to welcome them.
Only Kekilpenny, the local sot, who was trailing behind the parade (and to mask the reek of gin on his breath), spied the brief pillar of flame that shot skyward from the town square well, flaring and sizzling in the downpour. And Kekilpenny was a man who’d long since come to doubt his own peepers.
Besides, no one hearkened to him.
“Fall not into temptation! Temptation is the song of Satan hi’self!” Resplendent in chasuble, alb and cincture, the torchlight catching his grey hair and him aflame in the pulpit, Goodryke looked set to chastise the wind. “For so it was with Eve in the Garden, the Serpent whispering in her ear. And so with Our Lord in the Wilderness, offered all the shining Kingdoms of the World, which He did forswear. Sin, my brethren, is how the Devil gets in. And forsooth there be many a sinner among us. The fornicators, gossipmongers, tipplers, profaners and bastard-bearers.” As the rector reeled off the evils abroad in Bongay, some in the pews glanced at each other, Ab saw, praps heeding the name of their shortcomings; it was clear who Goodryke believed had brought the storm. “The liars, the swindlers and the sodomites.” Here, the lad chanced to see Elizeus Fortune and Polidore Fane, the farrier’s son and the blacksmith’s respectively, exchange anxious glances, fidgeting under the beams. “And those among us who consort with witches!”
A thorn pricking his own heart, Ab craned his neck to search the congregation around him, as furtive as possible under his cap. In all the hubbub, he’d not marked Grissel Cobbe in the gathered throng and he wondered at that, even as heat crawled up his neck and out of his collar, an invisible imp of shame. Beside him, Lament squeezed his hand, sensing his unease. Her grip was cold, cold as a trough on a winter’s morn, yet too tight to shake off without drawing eyes. Or the girl’s complaint. Lightning flashed and thunder rolled, the stained glass rattling the attendant saints and throwing the blackest shadows on the floor. Those nearest murmured, restless, and he barely heard an uttered ‘amen’. How could he sit here, the worst of all Pharisees, and hearken in silence to this?
I cannot.
“We turn now to Luke, eight twenty two,” Goodryke declared, basking in the subsequent rustling of Bibles. “Jesus calms the storm. ‘One day, the Lord sayeth to his disciples, “Let us go yonder to the other side of the lake. So they—”
“Enough! Enough, I can bear it no more!”
Wrenching himself free of Lament, Ab shot to his feet, trembling amid the packed pews, the sea of shocked faces around him. And he came into the scope of the wide eyes above, his guardian Goodryke, which made him regret his zeal at once. The rector (no stranger to waywardness) recovered himself in moments, his scowl the equal of the gloom outside. The old man opened his mouth to speak, praps to deliver further censure or command his ward from church, but he never got the chance. Nor did Ab muster the breath for confession, which he’d intended all the townsfolk to hear, calling for assistance in his hour of need. Prayer alone would break the spell, he reckoned (he’d deafened his ears to Cobbe’s claim, that death would prove the cure) and he’d chosen his moment for contrition.
The storm, as it happened, had other ideas.
Afterwards, reports would vary as to what occurred in St Mary’s that Sunday. Long into the future, ’twould become a matter of myth, a tale which the town came to be known for with many a traveller turning their horse away on the crossroads and riding for Barsham or Darrow instead. In Blythburgh, twelve miles yonder, some came to claim that a devilment had struck there as well, leaping into the church of the Holy Trinity, but that was long after the fact when the finders had come and gone, and an otherwise unremarkable village wanted something to boast of. Abacuck Temple could only witness the horror unfolding with his own eyes.
There came a crash from the east transept, the unmistakable splintering of glass. At the same time, a great crack of air shook the roofbeams, the walls shuddering, mice scattering and dust showering down. Lightning had struck the weathercock, it seemed, the reproachful finger of God Himself. The church clock, an ancient thing, was later seen to have shaken loose from the tower, bursting apart in cogs, springs and rusted Roman numerals in the churchyard. Bibles and bonnets were aflutter as the gale came sweeping into the nave, howling around the tapestries and knocking over candlesticks like skittles, the townsfolk clutching each other in dread. Alack, it was the rector who alighted on the latecomer to his sermon. Whilst the echoes went dancing down the nave, the darkness pooled in the transept and the old man peered that way, a fearful look usurping his outrage. Following his gaze, Ab gave a yell at the shape lurking there, what at first seemed like no more than a stray scrap of thunderhead, somehow seeping through the broken window. Yet it took on substance with every beat of his wicked young heart. When it dawned on him that the storm had travelled hither, sounding in the throat of the bristling mass, he made out the beast that hunkered there, a pair of eyes like cinders in the smoke.
“By all that’s holy . . . ”
“God’s balls!”
Ab wasn’t sure who spoke. Praps Pecke, the mayor, who liked to shew authority at any given opportunity. Praps Kekilpenny, who ne’er thought twice about taking the Lord’s name in vain. All he knew, standing frozen in the pews, was that he observed the figure of a great black dog—a wolf of some kind, he thought—though he’d never seen one the size of it before and wolves these days were blessed rare, limited to the northern forests and the Wolds. Nonetheless, sure as he’d seen a black rabbit stand on its haunches and speak in the rectory parlour come midnight, the lad accepted the strange visitation. And quailed at the tongue that came lolling out, red and steaming with caliginous mist, which was all it took to convince him. Along with its teeth, each the length of a masonry nail and doubtless as sharp.
“Wretches all,” the black dog snarled, an unlikelihood that passed unmarked in the general astonishment. “Though I thank thee kindly for opening yon gate. And the feast ye shall now provide.”
Ere any in the nave could flee, the beast sprang forward, aiming its shaggy and smouldering snout for the choicest of morsels in the flock. In a blur of fangs and shadow, the terror sprang from the flagstones and up to the pulpit, engulfing Goodryke in a wave of fur and smoke. There came a wail and a spray of blood, splattering the pages of the Good Book before him like a spill of sacramental wine. Then the rector tumbled, or was flung, down the little wooden steps to the chancel floor, sprawled in his tattered robes with half his God-fearing face torn off.
Saints!
The sight broke the spell that gripped the congregation. As one, mayor, tavern-keeper, whittawer, mend-bones, farmer, physician, farrier and blacksmith’s sons, local sot and all the babbling goodwives spun and went hastening into the aisles, heading for the latched church doors. Daundelyon, ever the opportunist, elbowed Mother Scrogg from his path, the old woman clutching her belly and falling to the floor with bonnet askew. The butcher, Crispe, made of her hump a footstool, the better to bear him through the wrestling mob.
And the cobbler went with them, aye. Master Tobias barely spared his daughter a glance as he lurched for the portal and the black skies outside, storm-stricken or no. It was that and Ab’s regard of the narrow entrance that prompted him to grab the girl’s arm (not so timorous now) and drag her in a different direction, the pews clattering and Bibles underfoot as he made for the nearest wall. If he could but slip along it, concealed by draperies and cobwebs, he might make it to the north door and reach the graveyard and freedom. Nor had it escaped him that the north door was commonly known as the devil’s door, and he wondered then at the black dog’s praise, the gate of which it had spoken . . . The townsfolk never used the portal in question. It was said that if a bedevilled child were christened at the font then the banished spirit would fly out through the small ingress and the sanctity of the church be preserved. Six days ago, Ab had thought such matters poppycock, a tradition to bolster the sway of faith. Of late, he’d come to learn otherwise. In practical terms, and cringing up at the blood-muzzled horror in the pulpit, he judged the beast too large to pursue him thence. In dread of those hellish eyes, he drew Lament towards the hub of his hope.
“Oh, my lamb. Wither do we go?”
To his bewilderment, the lass gave a giggle. Did she imagine he’d fancied another jaunt to the mill, shirking communion and prayer? He drank in the coins that passed for her eyes, realising that the spell had fastened her care to him alone, even over and above the chaos in the church. What had Lament done to deserve this? How dare he have uttered her name to Prickears in the parlour when the damnable pet had appeared on the mantle, emerging from a puff of smoke, and beseeched him to speak the name of his desire? ‘A drop of blood now, m’lad,’ Prickears had said, ‘to seal the ritual and grant thee thy wish’. Had he truly thought the rabbit Hecate’s minion or known then that he dabbled in a darker art? Nay, he’d turned a blind eye to it, his need the greater of his pains. Curse Cobbe and all of her kind! The woman had led him to the very lip of Hell and here its hound came a-hunting . . .
O Domine!
It wounded him, an anvil in his chest, and shame threatened to unman him. A growl from above appraised him of a more present threat. Aghast, Lament sagged against his smock, and he watched as the beast leapt from the pulpit and descended ‘pon the fleeing crowd.
Of them all, only Beaurepaire, the blacksmith, dared to challenge the beast. Bull-shouldered and squint-eyed, the man whipped out a knife from his belt and stood with legs parted in the nave. The dog loped on without pause. And praps Ab blinked, or fright addled him, but the moment that the beast gave a bark, the poor man was singed, a blackness smothering him from head to toe. When the dog proceeded, fleet towards the porch, it did so through a cloud of ash, of scattered bone—all that was left of the blacksmith.
Zounds!
Trapped they were, the faithful bottled in the doorway of the church, shoving and cussing between weatherworn stone. Beyond, the lychgate and the town square, the shrouded uplands of Crooked Lane . . . The hellhound fell upon them like a sack of coals, claws bared and crimson eyes ablaze. Bellows and screams spiralled under the beams, up to the bell in the steeple where no clarion had rung so loud. Up went a glitter of blood, the gizzard of the tavern-keeper, Daundelyon, slicking the pelt of the beast atop him. Then up and up, the entrails of Mistress Pecke, a looping necklace of pink pearls. Up the limbs of butcher and baker. Up the guts and ballocks of the cobbler. Up, up into the air and their Papist souls with them.
Ab tore his eyes away. Swallowing and tasting brimstone, he took Lament Wyddowsoun by the shoulders and spoke like a blade into her trance.
“Forgive me, I beg thee. I only thought to win thy heart. Instead, I’ve damned us all.” The lass smiled up at him, prompting him to shake her again. “Wake! Wake, curse you! I’ll not have thy blood on my hands.”
“Oh, Abacuck. Thou say the sweetest things.”
At his back, a growl that might’ve passed for thunder. Or praps a laugh.
“Ah, yes. Here be the one, the fellow who called me forth.”
Like one in a dream—nay, a nightmare—Ab released Lament and clasped his hands under his chin, a penitent. Cold to the bone, he faced the black dog, its muzzle adrip and steaming. Its shadow dwarfed them on the wall, pinned there by the furnace of its gaze. There was more than the warmth of shame on his cheeks now, and at his groin besides, the sight teasing a squirt of piss all down the leg of his hose. His nostrils filled with a sulphurous stench, the perfume of his sin.
“Aye, daemon. ’Twas I.”
There was naught to gain from denying it. Not here in this place of death.
“Then I ordain thee as steward, boy” said the dog or the wolf or whatever in blazes it was. “And all those who come after of your blood, down the long years of this world. Key-keepers, I’ll name you, and each one born a doorway into my kingdom. Thou hast opened the gates of Hell!”
Afeared though he was, Ab sensed no trial in the threat. He was sixteen years old and childless, an understanding that made him bold.
“Well I know it,” he told the beast, trembling. “Do I not stand here before them?”
The black dog grinned, red and sated, and shook its billowing head.
“Not yet, ‘Die-Well’ Temple. Nay, not yet.”
With that, the beast leapt forth, closing its maw upon Abacuck’s neck. The boy’s cry was fit to split the roofbeams, joining the clamour of the townsfolk along with his bobolyne blood. Ah, but his redemption had come too late. A bargain had been struck, the rabbit dancing. The last of his breath hadn’t quite flown from his lungs as the black dog turned, a coil of smoke, and thundered down the jumbled nave. Over the heap of the dead and the dying, out through the wide church doors. Out into blessed Bongay. In the lad’s mind, a glimpse of Lament as a fare-thee-well. My Iseult. Her pale face was blank and shining, yet soon, he thought, to shake off the spell.
Then, in a spout of flame, the beast leapt into the town square well and there was no lad left to speak of.
That evening by the fire, Mistress Cobbe sat in her rocking-chair and basked in the peace of the town. Some, she imagined, had managed to drag themselves clear of St Mary’s and presently either tended wounds or were riding hard for the Norwich garrison, there to speak of a wonder terrible and strange. No matter. Come dawn, she’d be long gone, hooded on a stolen horse and headed for the sea. In her lap, she stroked her rabbit, Prickears, and reflected on the woe that had led her to this course, the choosing of a boy guileless and hale. One dazzled by a maid who was far too good for the likes of him and yet one, happily, fertile.
The townsfolk gave her no pang of remorse – they’d never been kind to her, what with their evil eyes, their demands and suspicions. The boy, however, offered a shiver of guilt and she drew her shawl more tightly about her.
“Ah, but we’ll give thee thou father’s name, child.” Grissel smiled and stroked her belly, her pet shifting and twitching its ears as if it sensed her quickening. “Such were ne’er part of the price and he’ll likely fare no better than thee, but a witch is not without honour.”
The wood popped and embers danced on the rug, the house empty of all but her and the shadows.
For the first time in many a year, the silence was far from lonesome.
