Page 27 of As Many Souls as Stars
‘Still afraid, I see,’ Richter said. ‘Good.’
‘I have the notion,’ Cybil said, ‘that the only reason you would ever leave me alone would be if you saw me dead.’
‘Perchance not even then,’ Richter replied, as much a threat as a promise.
‘Light chases away shadows. Is that not the case for you?’
‘Lightcreatesshadows,’ she corrected Cybil. ‘No absence without presence. But if it would be a comfort to you, to pretend you are blindto the dark—then I will allow you that comfort, if only tonight.’ She took a step back. ‘I believe I have made my point. The witchfinder will be here soon. When he is, I will call upon you, my dear, and see how desperation changes your tune.’
Cybil did not reply. She watched Richter fade away, just as the shadows around the table had—a blurred silhouette, losing form and clarity, until nothing remained.
Cybil pressed her hands against the wood of her mother’s door, imagining entering the room and screaming at Bess towake up, wake up, please, Mother, wake up—but she did not.
The witchfinder was coming; Cybil needed to prepare.
She could not leave for Court, not yet, not even to ask for succour. She could not convince Bess to come with her—Bess who could not leave her own chambers, let alone the building. Left alone here, her mother would succumb to her madness entirely. She would take all her mandrake tincture in a single swallow and welcome her end; the witchfinder would take her; or else she would die of the withdrawal, slowly, painfully. Cybil could not do it. She could not leave the one person she had ever loved to rot.
So, she could not leave; she would instead do all she could to ensure their survival.
Christopher Harding had spent a lifetime making this place an altar to his own ambitions: marking it with rituals and spells, filling its shelves with potions and grimoires. There was more than enough evidence to convict her, and her mother.
Cybil had to destroy it all.
She was not frightened: she was angry. She was poking her head through the bars of her cage and biting those who came near. If this place was to be the mechanism of her downfall, she would bring it down with her. She went first to the hawk-head tapestry, half-unpicked and marked with her own blood. She pulled it down—Troilus and Criseyde, too, which was pagan and thus tainted, and she tossed them into the fire. The scent of the tapestries burning, rich dyes and ancient wool, was indescribably awful. Cybil ran to the window, choking on the smoke, and cleansed her lungs with the frozen night air.
Then she went to her office, with its endless ledgers of numbers, accounts marking the purchase of henbane and mandrake and phosphorus: to the fire she fed those, too. Other documents—letters from mystics on the Continent, recipes for tinctures and powders—she tore into pieces before burning, throwing the scraps of parchment around her like snowflakes, watching them flutter to the floor. In the hallway, she smashed three windowpanes in the east gallery that had been painted with ritual grids. Then to her father’s study: the codices and potion bottles. The bottles she smashed in the garden—all but the mandrake tincture—flooding the soil with noxious liquid that made her head swim. She could not bring herself to destroy the books, precious as they were, beautiful as they were. She left them there on the shelves, keeping silent vigil over the dust and the darkness, telling herself she would deal with them later.
At first, the destruction felt rational, sensible; these things, these artefacts and pages, were the shovels with which the witchfinder would dig her grave. But as she continued to smash and tear and burn, she became less discriminatory, consigning almost anything her father had touched, anything his magic had made or affected. As the sun slowly began to rise, clay cauldrons were thrown from windows, poisonous plants pulled up by the root, Cybil’s own virginal, her childhood instrument, smashed to wooden shards and loose catgut strings by the blade of an axe.She used music for her rituals, Cybil thought, delirious with fear and anger and exhaustion, imagining Jane Lennard giving testimony at a courthouse:Lady Harding oft played for empty chairs, sirrah, for the chairs were laid out for the devil, and she was awaiting His arrival.
The servants thought her mad already—what difference would this carnage make? Accepting this, destroying the trappings of her childhood, Cybil found she was almost relieved. She found, by the time she was through with it all, that she was almost giddy. She felt freer than she ever had. She was the hedgehog in her cage, prying the bars apart.
Cybil went through Harding Hall and destroyed it like an animal at a carcass: pulling it to pieces, scooping out the innards. And once she was finished, once the Hall had suffered sufficiently at her hands—she sat at her mirror and smiled.
9
Miriam had left Cybil alone for long enough. It had been three nights since they had met on the rooftop; since then, she had been in Ipswich, passing the time with deals. Now she bid the town farewell, soaring through a flurry of snow.
As she flew, Miriam passed over the village next to the Hall. It was exactly the same as all English villages were, as far as she was concerned: squat hovels, a Norman church, and a square at the centre that sometimes contained a market or maypole. Typically, the square was empty at this time of year; Miriam was surprised to see that, this evening, it was populated. A small group of men had gathered, some on horses, some not. They had torches and dogs and weapons, as if they were going to hunt. It was clear enough what their prey would be. Henry Martingale stood at the centre of them. Beside him was a nervous-looking Peter Oswyn, twisting the hem of his tunic in his fists, expression pale and reluctant.
Miriam swooped in closer, alighting on the roof of a nearby cottage.
‘… northwards,’ Martingale was saying. ‘We must be cautious. We are given permission to search, nothing more.’
‘And if you find something?’ Peter asked him.
‘Then she shall be arrested.’
Peter looked queasy. ‘I see.’
Miriam made herself intangible, slipping into shadows. She slid to the ground and edged closer.
‘Men, to me!’ Martingale said, and the hunting party turned to look at him. He had his head lifted, imperious, lip half-raised like a dog about to snarl. ‘Listen and listen well. We seek a witch, and thus we must harden our hearts and our resolve. If she is innocent, let her come quietly and prove herself so; and if she is not, we must prepare ourselves for resistance. For although we see a face of a woman, it is not a woman who we fight on this day. It is the devil, and we must cast him out.’
As the men cheered, flailing their torches, a triumphant Miriam pulled the shadows around her and returned to the air. How thankful she was for the cruelties of men; they often outstripped her own. Few of her deals would come to fruition if her victims had not before suffered at humanity’s hands.
She flew north, until Harding Hall rose up in the distance: a vast cage of lead and brick, the lines of dead bushes in its gardens making a spiderweb-pattern of dark over the pale frosted grass. It was an impressive edifice, but in the night it lacked grace, finesse—its bulk, its symmetry and harsh angles, seemed in contention with the nature around it. It occurred to Miriam now that its presence, in its sombre squareness, recalled nothing so much as a tombstone: a memorial for some unnamed tragedy. Mayhap it was fitting for such a family, doomed as they were.
The weather had remained clear the past few days, and the night was silent and still. The moon had been made into a multitude, reflected dozens of times over by the glass panes of the building’s enormous windows. Most of the Hall’s interior was dark, save a few rooms on the upper floors.
