Emilia was superstitious too. She started to her feet, and looked for Luka. He was coming back through the trees, looking very dour.
‘Do you know where to find her?’ Emilia demanded.
‘Oh, yes. Everyone here knows the witch, Marguerita the Mad. She lives in the ruins of the abbey, and goes out into the forest, gathering sticks and poaching rabbits as bold as you please. No one dares try and stop her, not even the foresters, in case she curses them. They are all terrified of her.’
‘Wonderful,’ Emilia said.
‘Poor old thing,’ Father Plummer said. ‘It’s a wonder they have not hanged her for a witch. It’s not even five years since they last hanged a witch in Salisbury. She was a cunning woman, I heard, who wore a toad in a bag about her neck. Poor old fool.’
Luka and Emilia exchanged glances. That was an old gypsy remedy. Their hearts sank. They wondered if the woman who had been hanged had been a Rom.
‘We’ll stop here and rest our weary legs and have a bite to eat,’ the duke said. ‘Don’t be long.’
Lord Harry frowned. ‘Oddsblood, are you sure you want to see this witch? She could be dangerous.’
‘We have Rollo,’ Emilia said.
‘And Zizi,’ Luka added. The little monkey gibbered in delight at hearing her name.
‘Right-o,’ Lord Harry said. ‘Whistle me if you need me.’
‘I’ll come,’ Tom said eagerly. ‘I’m not afraid of witches.’
‘No,’ Luka said. ‘This is Rom business. Stay here.’
Looking very surly, Tom sat down, trying to pretend he did not care.
With Rollo trotting at Emilia’s heels, and Zizi riding on Luka’s shoulder, they crossed the bridge in the fast-gathering twilight and made their way into the vast maze of broken-down stone.
Everything was eerily quiet. No birds sang, and the wind was silent among the stones. They smelt wood smoke, and followed their noses.
They came to a long arcade, with delicate fluted columns forming narrow archways on one side. Beyond was a square of long grass, starred with dandelion and thistle. Big blocks of tumbled stone were woven round with weeds, and the wall beyond was crumbling away, steps leading up into empty air. Shadows were pressing down upon the ruin.
A great arched doorway led into darkness. Once there had been a cherub’s face above the curve of the door, but it had been smashed.
A woman stood in the doorway, watching for them. She was much younger than Emilia had expected. Her hair was wild and black and matted with knots. She would have to sweep it out of the way before she sat down. She was dressed in brown rags that showed the flesh of her arms and legs through the holes. Her feet were dark with dirt, and her nails were black half-moons. Amidst the wild profusion of her hair, her face seemed very thin and bony. Her nose crooked out of it like the prow of a boat. Her mouth was thin and twisted, and marred with sores.
‘You want what is mine?’ she asked. ‘I do not have much, yet all I have you want.’
‘Aye,’ Emilia said. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘At least you speak true,’ she said. ‘Come in . . . if you can bear the smell.’
The children hesitated.
‘I’m not going to eat you,’ she said, and she sounded so like her brother that the children relaxed and went inside, Rollo slinking at their heels, his tail between his legs.
It did stink inside, though mainly of smoke and bitter herbs. It was a long hallway made of grey stone, with a flagstone floor and a high arched ceiling held up with great buttressed beams. A small fire glowed in a massive hearth, large enough to roast an ox. Around the hearth was set up a small camp, with beds made of dried bracken with furs thrown over the top, and a rough table and stools made from old logs and wooden boxes. On either side the hallway stretched, dark and cold and empty, but the camp itself was cosy and warm, with a bunch of wildflowers in a broken urn, and a pot bubbling over the flames.
Wooden stakes had been hammered into the cracks between the stones of the wall, and from these rough pegs hung bunches of plants and the uncured skins of animals. Emilia saw rabbit, and fox, and badger, and deer, and wondered that this wild gypsy woman had not been branded or transported or hung for poaching long ago.
As they came in, a little boy scuttled sideways and hid in a pile of old furs. He stared at them fearfully through a tangle of black curls.
‘It’s all right,’ Marguerita crooned. ‘Don’t be afraid. You can come out. They’re only children.’
But the little boy would not come out, shrinking down further into the bed.
‘He does not like strangers,’ Marguerita said.
Emilia squatted down by the bed and held out her hand to the little boy, asking his name, but he only huddled deeper, turning his face away.
‘His name is Abram,’ Marguerita said. ‘He does not talk. He has not said a word since he saw his father killed in front of him.’
‘How dreadful,’ Emilia said. ‘Poor little boy.’
The witch stared at her. After a moment, Emilia dropped her gaze, feeling awkward and afraid. There was a strange ferocity in the gypsy woman’s gaze.
‘You have a fiddle,’ she said to Luka, who nodded, clutching his violin a little closer.
‘I have not heard a fiddle played since they took my family away. If I give you some of our supper, will you play for us?’
‘All right,’ Luka said, relaxing a little. Zizi clung tightly to his neck, not liking the smell and darkness of the cavernous hall, and Rollo pressed close to Emilia’s legs.
‘We are hungry,’ Emilia said.
Marguerita snorted. ‘Weans your age are always hungry. You’ll have to share a bowl, I haven’t many.’ She bent and stirred the pot, then began to ladle it out into three battered tin bowls, one of which she pushed towards the shelter of the furs. A small grimy hand sneaked out and caught it, drawing it under the fur.
‘It smells good,’ Luka said, sniffing the air. ‘What’s in it?’
Marguerita laughed. ‘What’s not? There’s chicken and pheasant and bacon and lamb and venison and hare and potatoes and carrots and beans and peas and corn and mushrooms and whatever else I’ve found in the woods. Nothing poisonous, though. I save my poisons for those I hate.’
Rather gingerly the children tasted the stew, but it was quite simply the most delicious meal they had ever eaten. They could not get the spoon to their mouths fast enough. Marguerita laughed, showing a mouthful of discoloured, crooked teeth, and silently served them some more.
‘Today we feast,’ Luka said with a grin at Emilia.
‘Tomorrow we’ll starve,’ she replied, with an exaggerated shrug.
‘. . . and the next day we’ll feast again,’ Marguerita finished off the proverb, and they smiled a small, complicit smile, the smile of people who knew they shared each other’s language.
‘So, play to us,’ Marguerita commanded when they had licked out their bowls. ‘My husband was a fiddler. He could play the birds down out of the trees, and the fish out of the streams.’
‘That’s what they say about my father,’ Emilia said.
‘They’ll say it about me too one day,’ Luka boasted, and lovingly took his violin out of his case, tuning it gently.
Emilia expected him to play a wild lament, like he had played for the highwayman, but instead he played a tender lullaby, so sweet and loving it drew tears to Emilia’s eyes. The witch stared at him and did not move, or even seem to breathe, and very slowly the furs slid back and the little boy crept out, his eyes fixed on Luka’s face. Closer and closer he crept, until he was crouched right at Luka’s elbow, and when at last Luka laid down his bow, he put out one hand and touched the fiddle reverently. ‘More?’ he whispered.
So Luka played more, and the little boy pressed his hands together, his eyes shining; and his mother, the witch, wept silently and violently, her whole body shaking.
At last Luka wearied of playing. It was dark and the wind was rising, and he could no longer hear his own music. He laid down the bow and let
the little boy touch it. Abram was as gentle as if the violin were a living thing, running his hands over its curving sides and caressing its silky wood before, tentatively, plucking at one of the strings. At the shimmer of sound, he raised his transfigured face, and then he bent over the violin again, experimenting with the sounds.
‘So, tell me, who do you know, and what do you want with me?’ the witch demanded, turning away so they could not see her face.
They told her, and Marguerita listened quietly.
‘Do you have the charm?’ Emilia asked when they had finished.
The witch nodded.
‘Can I have it? Please?’
Marguerita crossed her arms over her chest, and rocked back and forth. Her hair was so thick and frizzy it rose out around her body like a thunder-racked cloud. ‘Why not?’ she murmured. ‘What good has it ever done us? What luck have we had? It’s worthless, useless, a funny old trinket my Baba used to wear.’
She got up and rummaged in a chest by the wall, while her son strummed the violin’s strings, totally absorbed. The smell and the darkness and the sound of the wind in the ruins seemed to grow thicker, heavier, nastier. She turned from the chest with something in her hand.
‘See? It is a sprig of rue, wrought in silver. It is very, very old. I do not wear it, for it’s meant to guard against black magic.’
Emilia stirred. ‘Why, what do you mean?’ she asked, even as she took the charm from Marguerita’s hand. It felt very light and flimsy.
The witch laughed. It was a high, shrill, scary sound. ‘I would not want it to stop me,’ she murmured.
Abram stopped strumming the violin strings. The only sound was the rush of the wind through the trees, and the low crackle of the fire.
‘Stop you from doing what?’ Luka asked.
‘I shall have my revenge,’ the witch answered. ‘Oh, yes. He shall suffer the agonies of grief, like I have, and then he too will die.’
‘Who?’ Emilia whispered.
Marguerita stared at her without seeing her. ‘Cromwell,’ she answered, as if it was obvious. She lifted down a box from the shelf and took out what looked like two small rag dolls. They smelt bad, like rotting nettles. Emilia shrank away, feeling suddenly sick. One was a limp little doll in the shape of a man, dressed in a scrap of dark material crudely cut to look like a jacket and breeches. It had a tuft of gingery hair sewn to its head, and features roughly drawn with charcoal. The other wore a grey dress and carried a baby in its arms. Two long hatpins protruded from their breasts.
‘The daughter and her little baby gone already,’ Marguerita said softly, ‘and soon you too, Big Man.’ And she took out another pin from the box and jabbed it cruelly into the rag doll, over and over again. ‘Shall you die tonight, Cromwell? Or shall I make you suffer a little longer?’
‘What are those?’ Luka asked roughly. Emilia wondered if he too felt the thick, dark odour of hatred and menace that writhed out of the rag dolls like smoke.
Marguerita smiled. ‘Poppets,’ she answered. ‘After they killed my husband and took away my boys, selling them like cattle, I walked all the way to Fernhurst, where I had heard the general was staying. It took me days, with Abram on my back. My feet were so sore and swollen I could barely take another step, but I went up to the house, and I went into his bedroom, and I took the hair out of his brush, and I cut some material out of his suit, the bit that would rest just over his heart, and then I went into his daughter’s room, and I took her hair too, and I cut up her dress, and then I walked all the way home again. No one saw me, no one stopped me, for I’d changed into the shape of a black rat.’
She laughed wildly. ‘And then I made my little poppets, and I stuffed them with nightshade and belladonna, and I sewed them up with black thread, and chanted every curse and evil spell I knew over them, all in the dark of the moon, and every day I take them out and I jab him and stab him and jiggle and wriggle the pin, and laugh as I think of him shrieking and falling about in agony. And then I take the pin out, and let him rest awhile. For I want it to be slow. I want him to feel every bit as much pain and grief and horror that I have felt since they hanged my mother for telling true what she saw, and murdered my husband, and stole my sons away.’
Emilia and Luka were horrified. They backed away from her. Emilia had the charm clutched in her hand.
The witch stared at her. ‘You can have it,’ she said indifferently. ‘What good has it done our tribe? I’ll make my own magic, a stronger, blacker magic! But I must have something in return.’
‘What?’ Emilia spoke through stiff lips.
‘We have nothing to give,’ Luka replied unhappily, though Emilia saw how he clutched his little monkey closer.
‘But you do,’ Marguerita said.
‘What? We have nothing.’
She pointed at Luka’s violin, which Abram held pressed to his chest, staring at them wide-eyed and frightened. ‘He spoke for the first time since his father died,’ she said. ‘One word! Only one word, but it is the gladdest word I ever heard. Give him your fiddle.’
‘No!’ Luka cried.
‘Give it to him, else I’ll curse you with all the power at my command,’ she said menacingly. ‘You came here wanting my rue sprig. Well, now you have it, so go. Go!’
Luka cast one last look at his beloved violin, then he seized Emilia’s hand and they turned and ran.
If ghosts pursued them through the moonlit ruin, they were not benevolent. As she ran, her breath sobbing in her throat, Emilia clutched tightly in her hand the sprig of rue, the bitter herb of repentance, and trusted in it with all her heart to guard them against such black magic.
The duke and his men had been watching for Luka and Emilia anxiously, wondering what was taking them so long. Everyone was eager to hurry on their way, all too well aware that soldiers would still be hunting them. Besides, Beaulieu was an eerie place to be at dusk, with mist rising from the river and twining about the pale broken stones, and frogs croaking weirdly in the rushes.
All night the fugitives stumbled through the thorns and tangles of the forest, the twigs and briars weaving themselves into nets that caught at their feet as if the trees themselves were alive and hungry. Sometimes roots writhed up out of the ground to trip their feet and send them sprawling. Other times they found themselves trapped in a thicket of brambles, sharp as teeth and claws. Each time Emilia’s fingers found their way to the rue charm that she had hung from the chain at her wrist. In the darkness, it was incomprehensible. Yet as her fingers traced the sinuous knot of metal, they would suddenly burst free of the thicket and find a moonlit path winding through the black murmuring shadows.
By the time they reached the shore, the darkness was fading. Delicate colour bloomed in the eastern sky. Fishing-boats were already out on The Solent, and smoke was rising from the chimney of every cottage. They dared go no further. Huddled together under some bushes by the shore, the men argued in low voices, their faces pale and drawn. Luka lay curled with his back towards them, his arm flung over his eyes, his mouth twisted in misery. Zizi was curled up against his neck, patting him consolingly. Emilia would have liked to try and comfort her cousin too, for it must have been a dreadful wrench for Luka, giving up his beloved violin. But she knew he would rather she kept away.
So Emilia lay in the grass, examining the charm they had won from the witch of the New Forest. Her grandmother had told her it was very old and very powerful. Emilia certainly found it mysterious. Forged from silver, and no larger than the circle she could make with her first finger and thumb, it was formed by slender coiling tendrils, tarnished and black. Entwined within the rue leaves were a flower, a dagger, a rooster, and a crescent moon twined about with a snake. Tracing their shape with her finger, Emilia wondered what they meant. They gave her an odd, shivery sensation, as if she crouched outside a forbidden door, listening, wondering, scenting danger.
Baba had told her the charm of the Wood tribe was imbued with the power of all growing things, which all the Rom k
new had a potent magic of their own. All her life Emilia had been taught to look out for certain leaves and flowers and roots and berries, some to boil up with water to make gypsy tea, some to throw into the pot with meat to make stew, some to tuck inside their chests to keep their linen sweet-smelling, some to use as remedies for all sorts of illnesses. All the Rom were taught the lore of the hedgerow – it was their larder and their apothecary.
Yet sometimes the most gorgeous flower was the most dangerous. Foxglove was grown in many a garden for its tall spires of bright, drooping bells, yet make gypsy tea from its leaves and your heart would beat so fast it felt as if it would burst from your chest, until eventually it failed to beat at all. Black hellebore was called the Christmas rose for its delicate winter beauty, yet its roots, powdered, could kill a man. Deadly nightshade was also called belladonna, for it was a beautiful plant with bell-shaped purple flowers and round black berries. Many a small child had died from popping a few of those juicy-looking berries into their mouth, and every part of the plant was poisonous.
Yet all these plants, if used wisely, could heal too. Baba made a potion from foxglove leaves that could restore a stilled heart to life, and she added just one of the toxic berries of bittersweet to the tea she drank for her rheumatism. Even deadly nightshade could be used in a poultice to ease the inflammation of a wound.
Life, death. Healing, hurting. Curing, cursing. Growing, dying.
Emilia traced the delicate silver tendrils of the rue charm with her finger, round and round, thinking and wondering. She and Luka had travelled so far already, the two of them, and yet their journey was only half over. Three charms hung on her chain, and another three were yet to be found. Emilia could not help being afraid of what lay ahead. They had paid so dearly for what they had won that her spirit quailed within her. Yet . . .
Rue for pity’s sake, Baba had said.
Emilia smiled a little wryly. Certainly she and Luka had seen cruelty and malice, but they had seen courage and kindness too, and found friends in unexpected places. They had the beginnings of a plan, at least, and promises of help.