Ariana Franklin - Mistress of the Art of Death

Two horses were grazing nearby.

Hugh said, “That where our Mary died? Down there? Who done it?”

She told him.

He stood still for a moment, the lantern lighting his face from below so that terrible shadows distorted it.

Teetering with frustration and indecision, Rowley shoved Ulf into Adelia’s arms. He needed men to hunt the tunnels below, but neither of the two women was in a condition to fetch them, and he dared not go himself or send Hugh.

“Somebody’s got to guard this shaft. He’s under this bloody hill, and sooner or later he’ll pop out like a bloody rabbit, but there’s maybe another exit somewhere.” He snatched Hugh’s lantern and set off across the hilltop in what he knew, they all knew, was a hopeless attempt to find it.

Adelia laid Ulf on the grass above the edge of the depression, taking off her cloak to pillow it under his head. Then she sat down beside him and breathed in the smell of the night-how could it still be night? She caught the scent of hawthorn and juniper. Sweet grass reminded her that she was filthy with sweat and blood and urine, probably her own, and the stink of Rakshasa’s body, which, she knew, if she spent her life in a bath, would never again quite leave her nostrils.

She felt expended, as if everything had gone from her and left just a trembling slough of skin.

Beside her, Ulf jerked into a sitting position, gasping at the reviving air, his fists clenched. He looked around, at the landscape, the sky, Hugh, the dogs, Adelia. He had trouble enunciating. “Where’s…this at? Am I out?”

“Out and safe,” she told him.

“They…got un?”

“They will.” God send they would.

“He never…scared me,” Ulf said, beginning to shake. “I fought the bugger…shouted…kept fighting.”

“I know,” Adelia told him. “They had to quiet you with poppy juice. You were too brave for them.” She put her arm round his shoulders as his tears began. “No need to be brave anymore.”

They waited.

A suspicion of gray in the sky to the east suggested that the night would actually have an end. Across the other side of the depression, Sister Veronica was on her knees, her whispered prayers like the rustle of leaves.

Hugh was keeping one foot on the top of the shaft’s ladder so that he might feel any movement on it, one hand on the hunting knife at his belt. He soothed his dogs, murmuring their names and telling them they were brave.

He glanced at Adelia. “Followed the scent of that old mongrel of yourn all the way, my lads did,” he said.

The hounds looked up as if they knew they’d been mentioned. “Sir Rowley, he were in rare old taking. ‘She’s gone after the boy,’ he said, ‘and very like got herself killed doing it.’ Called you a fair few names in his temper, like. But I told un. ‘That’s a fine old stinker, that ol’ dog of hers. My lads’ll track un,’ I said. Was that the old boy down there?”

Adelia roused herself. “Yes,” she said.

“I’m right sorry for that. Did his job, though.”

The hunter’s voice was controlled, dull. Somewhere in the tunnels below their feet ran the creature that had slaughtered his niece.

A rustle that caused Hugh to take the knife from his belt was the launch of a long-eared owl on its last foray of the night. There was sleepy twittering as small birds woke up. Rowley himself, and not just his lantern, could be seen now, a big, busy shape using its sword as a stick to prod the ground. But every bush on the studded, uneven ground flaked the moonlight with a shadow that could conceal a more sinuous darkness wriggling away.

The sky to the east became extraordinary, a lowering, threatening red band with streaks of jagged black.

“Shepherd’s warning,” Hugh said, “devil’s dawn.”

Listlessly, Adelia watched it. Ulf, beside her, showed equal indifference.

He is damaged, Adelia thought, as I am; we have been to places beyond experience and are stained by them. Perhaps I can bear it, but can he? He especially has been betrayed.

With that, energy came back to her. Painfully, she got to her feet and walked round the rim of the depression to where Veronica knelt, her hands steepled high so that the growing dawn light shone on them, her graceful head lowered in prayer, as Adelia had first seen it.

“Is there another exit?” Adelia asked.

The nun didn’t move. Her lips stilled for a moment before she resumed the whispered paternoster.

Adelia kicked her. “Is there another exit?”

There was a rasp of protest from Hugh.

Ulf’s gaze, which had followed Adelia, transferred to the nun. His treble rang out across Wandlebury Hill. “It was her .” He was pointing to Veronica. “Wicked, wicked female, she is.”

Hugh, shocked, whispered, “Hush, lad.”

Tears were plopping down Ulf’s ugly little face, but it had regained intelligence and intent and bitter anger. “’Twas her. As put stuff over my face, as took me. She’s in with un. ”

“I know she is,” Adelia said. “She threw me down the shaft.”

The nun’s eyes stared up at her, beseeching. “The devil was too strong for me,” she said. “He tortured me-you saw him. I never wanted to do it.” Her eyes shifted and glowed red as they reflected the dawn behind Adelia’s back.

Hugh and Ulf, too, had turned suddenly to the east. Adelia spun round. The sky had flamed into savagery like an entire hemisphere alight and advancing to overwhelm them all. And there, as if he had conjured it, was the devil himself outlined in black against it, naked and running like a stag.

Rowley, fifty yards away, hared to intercept it. The figure capered for a second and changed direction. The watchers heard Rowley’s howl: “Hugh. He’s getting away. Hugh. ”

The huntsman knelt, whispering to his hounds. He unleashed them. With the ease of rocking horses, they began the chase toward the sunrise.

The devil ran-God, how he ran-but now the hounds were outlined against the same stretch of sky.

There was a moment that stayed with those who saw it like a detail of hell on an illuminated manuscript, black on red gold, the dogs in mid-leap and the man with hands upraised as if he would climb the air, before the pack fell on Sir Joscelin of Grantchester and tore him to pieces.

Adelia and Ulf were helped onto one of the horses that Rowley and the huntsman had ridden to the hill. Hugh hoisted the nun onto the other. Taking the reins, the men picked their way down the hill, avoiding rough patches so that Adelia should not be jounced about.

They went in silence.

In his free hand, Rowley carried a bag made out of his cloak. The object in it was round and attracted attention from the hounds until Hugh called them off. After a first glance, Adelia avoided looking at it.

The rain that the dawn had threatened began when they reached the road. Peasants on their way to work put up their hoods, glancing from under them at the little procession with its following of redjowled dogs.

Passing an area of bog, Rowley pulled the horse up and spoke to Hugh, who squelched off the road and came back with a handful of bog moss.

“Is this the muck you put on wounds?”

Adelia nodded, squeezed some of the water out of the sphagnum moss, then applied it to her arm.

It would be nonsensical to die of putrefaction now, though at the moment she had no feeling left in which to wonder why that should be so.

“Better put some on your eye as well,” Rowley said, and she realized that there was yet another pain and that her left eye was closing.

The nun’s horse had drawn level. Adelia saw without interest that the girl sat with her face hidden by the cloak Hugh had wrapped her in for decency’s sake.