The Wise Woman. Philippa Gregory

died at once, the room filled with thick smoke. Alys clapped her hand over her mouth so as not to choke.

      The banging on the little wooden door was like thunder. The two women shrank together, their eyes fixed on the entrance as if the door would splinter and fall apart. Someone was hammering on it with a sword hilt.

      ‘I’ll open it,’ Morach said. In the darkness her face was as white as a drowned woman’s. ‘You get yourself upstairs and hide under my pallet. If it’s the witch-taker it’ll likely be for me, you might escape. No one will listen to Tom’s wife without others to speak against you; and no one has died this week. Go on, wench, it’s the only chance I can give you.’

      Alys did not hesitate, she fled towards the ladder and upwards like a shadow.

      ‘I’m coming,’ Morach said in a harsh grumbling voice. ‘Leave an old woman’s door on the hinge, can’t you?’

      She checked that Alys was hidden above, and then swung the wooden latch to open the door.

      The two tall men on horseback filled the skyline like giants. Around their shoulders the stars shone and the dark streams of cloud raced past their looming heads.

      ‘We want the young wise woman,’ the man said. His face was muffled against the cold, he was armed only with a cudgel and a short stabbing dagger. ‘The new young wise woman. Get her.’

      ‘I’m not rightly sure …’ Morach started, her voice a plaintive whine. ‘She is not …’

      The man reached down and grabbed the shawl at Morach’s throat and lifted her up till her face was near his. The horse shifted uneasily and Morach gurgled and choked, her feet kicking.

      ‘Lord Hugh at the castle orders it,’ he said. ‘He is ill. He wants the young wise woman and the spell against the vomiting. Get her, and no harm will come of it. He will pay you. If you hide her I shall burn this stinking shack around your ears with the door nailed up, and you inside.’

      He dropped Morach back on her feet, she stumbled back against the door frame, and turned back towards the cottage, half closing the door.

      Alys was looking down from the sleeping platform, her eyes huge in her white face. ‘I cannot …’ she said.

      Morach snatched the shawl from her own shoulders, spread it on the hearth and heaped into it handfuls of herbs, a black-backed prayer-book, four of the twists of powder, a shiny lump of quartz tied up with a long scrap of ribbon, and the pestle and mortar.

      ‘You’ll have to try or they’ll kill us both,’ she said bleakly. ‘It’s a chance, and a good chance. Others have been cured of the sickness. You’ll have to take the gamble.’

      ‘I could run,’ Alys said. ‘I could hide on the moor for the night.’

      ‘And leave me? I’d be dead by dawn,’ Morach said. ‘You heard him. He’ll burn me alive.’

      ‘They don’t want you,’ Alys said urgently. ‘They would not do that. You could tell them I’m spending the night in Bowes. I could hide by the river, in one of the caves, while they’re gone to look for me.’

      Morach looked at her hard. ‘You’ve a bitter taste,’ she said scowling. ‘For all your lovely face you’ve a bitter taste, Alys. You’d run, wouldn’t you? And leave me to face them. You’d rather I died than you took a chance.’

      Alys opened her mouth to deny it but Morach thrust the shawl into her hands before she could speak.

      ‘You would gamble with my death, but I will not,’ Morach said harshly, pushing her towards the door. ‘Out you go, my girl, I’ll come to the castle when I can, to get news of you. See what you can do. They grow herbs there, and flowers. You may be able to use your nun’s arts as well as mine.’

      Alys hefted the bundle. Her whole face was trembling. ‘I cannot!’ she said. ‘I have no skills, I know nothing! I grew a few herbs, I did as I was ordered at the abbey. And your arts are lies and nonsense.’

      Morach laughed bitterly. The man outside hammered on the door again. ‘Come, wench!’ he said. ‘Or I will smoke you out!’

      ‘Take my lies and nonsense, and your own ignorance, and use it to save your skin,’ Morach said. She had to push Alys towards the door. ‘Hex him!’ she hissed, as she got the girl over the threshold. ‘You have the power, I can feel it in you. You turned the flame blue with your thought. Take your powers and use them now, for your own sake! Hex the old lord into health, Alys, or you and I are dead women.’

      Alys gave a little moan of terror and then the man on the horse leaned down and gripped her under both arms and hauled her up before him.

      ‘Come!’ he said to his companion and they wheeled their horses around, the hooves tearing up the vegetable patch. Then they were gone into the darkness, and the wind whipped away the noise of the gallop.

      Morach waited a while at the cottage doorway, ignoring the cold and the smoke from the doused fire swirling thickly behind her, listening to the silence now that Alys had gone.

      ‘She has power,’ she said to the night sky, watching the clouds unravelling past the half-moon. ‘She swore that she would go, and in that moment the horses came for her and she was gone. What will she wish for next? What will she wish for next?’

       Three

      Alys had never been on a galloping horse and she clung to the pommel of the saddle before her, thrown and jolted by the horse’s great rolling strides. The wind rushed into her face and the hard grip of the man behind her was that of a jailer. When she looked down she could see the heaving shoulders of the great horse, when she looked forward she saw its tossing mane. They went over the little stone bridge from the moorland road to Castleton with sparks flying upwards from the horses’ hooves, and clattered up the cobbled street between the dozen stone-built houses at the same breakneck speed. Not a light showed at any of the shuttered windows, even the smaller houses, set back from the main street on earth roads, and the little shanties behind them on waste ground were dark and silent.

      Alys was so shaken that she had no breath to cry out, even when the horse wheeled around to the left and thundered up the drawbridge into the great black maw of the castle gateway. There was a brief challenge from two soldiers, invisible in the darkness of the doorway, and a gruff response from the rider and then they were out into the moonlit castle grounds. Alys had a confused impression of a jumble of stables and farm buildings on her right, the round tower of the guardroom on her left, the smell of pigs, and then they crossed a second drawbridge over a deep stagnant moat, with the noise of the hooves rumbling like thunder on the wooden bridge, and plunged into the darkness of another gateway.

      The horses halted as two more soldiers stepped forward with a quick word of challenge and stared at the riders and Alys, before waving them through into a garden. Alys could see vegetable-beds and herb-beds and the bare-branched outline of apple trees; but before them, squat and powerful against the night sky, was a long two-storey building with a pair of great double doors set plumb in the centre. Alys could hear the noise of many people shouting and laughing inside. The door opened and a man stepped out to urinate carelessly against the wall; bright torchlight spilled out into the yard and she could smell hot roasted meats. They rode the length of the building, Alys saw the glow of a bakehouse fire in a little round hive of a building set apart from the rest on their right, and then before them were two brooding towers, built with grey stones as thick as boulders, showing no lights.

      ‘Where are we?’ Alys gasped, clinging to the man’s hands as he thrust her down from the saddle.

      He nodded to the tower which adjoined the long building. ‘Lord Hugh’s tower,’ he said briefly. He looked over her head and shouted. An answering cry came from inside the tower and Alys heard a bolt sliding easily back.

      ‘And what’s that tower?’ she asked urgently.