Page 11 of As Many Souls as Stars
‘We are deeply regretful that Sir Christopher could not be here, my lady. He is sorely missed.’
‘Yes. My thanks.’
Her gaze drifted past the Pikes’ ruddy faces to watch the children dancing their ring around the barrow base. With the light from the bonfire between them, it was as if two chains of beings were surrounding the mound: some made of light and some of shadow, silhouettes emerging behind their makers to join them in the dance. Their only accompaniment was a stuttered tambourine beat from a grizzled man sitting beneath a nearby tree. His slapdash rhythm was largely ignored by the revellers.
‘I heard,’ said John Pike, who was always an eager gossip, ‘that some churchmen from the town found out about the ritual this evening, and they were calling it popery. They even demanded the dance be done away with. But our Father Lowrey set them right.’
‘We are blessed to have such a shepherd in our village,’ Nancy said.
They both looked at Cybil expectantly, clearly presuming she would agree.
‘Yes,’ Cybil replied. ‘He… shepherds us. Very much.’
Nancy, lips twitching with opportunistic malice, continued. ‘I suppose it has been so long, Lady Cybil, since we saw you and yours at church… Mayhap you cannot recall?’
Cybil snapped her head around to look at them. ‘I recall,’ she said, voice tight.
‘Truly? I believe the last time I saw you for services, you were still a girl.’
‘We have a chapel at the Hall.’
‘Of course. Strange, still, to even have Christmas services there, and the Holy Week also, away from your tenants.’
‘We worship as we will,’ Cybil replied. ‘As is our right, by the queen’s settlement.’
‘There is a limit, surely? I fear only for yoursoul, my lady, now you are alone. Your father was always an unorthodox sort—’
‘It isunorthodoxto insult the lady of the manor, when she owns the land you live on,’ Cybil returned. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath. ‘Forgive me, I… I must attend to—I see a petitioner.’
‘Where?’
‘In the bonfire.’
‘Inthe bonfire?’
‘The other side,’ she corrected herself, face growing hot. Leaving the gobsmacked Pikes behind, Cybil marched to the other side of the bonfire. By the time she had found another place to stand, she was biting her lip in self-recrimination, hard enough to break skin.Thicken the ice, Cybil, she told herself.Lose not your temper. You are mistress of Harding Hall now.
By the time she had regained her composure, the dance had ended, and the revellers had broken apart. Some were wandering around theedges of the mound in search of a new partner. Cybil noticed a boy watching her from a few feet away—when her eyes met his, he did not drop his gaze. He was tall, and the heat from the fire made his features shimmer and warp; unlike most of the congregation, who had looked at her with both fear and disdain, his was an expression of bashful awe. He was her age, cherubic, with hair the colour of straw. His cheeks were a little flushed and his eyes wide. When he realised she was looking back, he went even pinker.
Disquieted, Cybil turned her face away. She could still feel the boy’s eyes on her.
Unbidden, she was reminded of the lord’s son, the manner in which he had leered and laughed. She did not understand why he had done so, nor did she understand this new boy looking at her with such fascination. When Cybil was very young, her mother had sometimes looked at her father like that—back when Bess was well enough to desire something other than mandrake. What was there in him that had made him so compelling, that made Bess so willing to sacrifice her body for his children, her life at Court for Harding Hall? Cybil had never felt attraction to anyone; to her, it seemed attraction was a form of obligation, and she had no interest in accruing a debt.
Shouts rose from some of the villagers further afield, and Cybil saw that a group of riders were approaching the mound. As the group pulled their mounts to a halt, Cybil could see the reason the others had been so unsettled. There were ten men, all mounted and dressed in military cassocks, with swords at their hips. At their head was an older man with thinning grey hair and jaundiced skin. His bloodless, spherical face bore an expression of such intense scorn that Cybil took a reflexive step back. The crowd fell into a tense silence.
‘Good evening,’ said the man, his voice loud and low. ‘My name is Henry Martingale, and I have been sent here by the council at Ipswich. There has been an inquiry launched into the spread of heathenism and witchery within the counties. It is the council’s command that this gathering cease at once, and—’
Immediately, the crowd fell to booing and yelling at the man, their anger drowning out the rest of his sentence. He raised his hand tosilence them, to little avail; then one of his men drew the sword at his hip. The glint of its blade in the firelight sliced through the noise, leaving everyone in a sudden, contemptuous silence.
A witchfinder. Cybil felt ice slide down her spine. Had Gilbert not warned them of this? That questions were already being asked? Now the hunters were here, dogs sniffing at their doorstep. And Cybil, complacent, uncaring, had been busying herself with books and dances. She ought to have known better. Was she not mistress of Harding Hall now? Had she buried her sense with her father?
‘As I wassaying,’ Martingale snapped, ‘it is the command of the council, and through the council, the Crown itself. These superstitions are doors for devilry and popery, which our good land should soon cast out.’
At this there was another great hubbub of discontentment.This man is a fool, Cybil thought, with a little relief. Such arguments may have succeeded in London, or even Ipswich—but this was an ancient village, and its traditions, passed down through generations, were held dear by those who lived there. To suggest that the dance was connected to witchcraft or popery would be seen as slander at best; at worst, it was an attempt by a stranger, a town dweller, to undermine the very fabric of the community.
Martingale swatted the villagers’ complaints away, as if they were flies buzzing about his ears. ‘I am a witchfinder, and I know well what such things lead to. In the town, I saw a man struck dead by witchery; I saw his limbs go black like burnt tinder, his tongue fall away, his eyes rot in his skull. Would you, good people, invite the same?’
There was a pause, then, as the crowd fell silent. Cybil felt as if some of the villagers were now staring at her, and she thought briefly of her father’s corpse, how his tongue had jutted out of his lips in death as an oyster slips from its shell. She recalled how the shadows had seemed to reach for her after, as if they wished to swallow her whole; and she wondered how the witchfinder would have reacted if he had seen that, also.
