Kronos, p.16
Kronos, page 16
Grost looks out of the window, unable to meet my gaze as Kronos splashes me with oil from the lamps and then sets light to me. The sound as the flames encircle me – a giant handclap with me between the palms – is deafening and it distracts me for a short moment before the heat and pain take hold. I try not to scream, thinking of poor Carla, no doubt still within earshot, but the pain is too much and I let loose a loud moan as my skin bubbles and cracks. The smell of my hair aflame would be enough to bring tears to my eyes if I still had eyes to weep with. I wish the flames were hotter, wish they would burn quicker. Eventually the pain stops when the fire has burned the sensation away. I am able to watch my body darken, the skin turning brown then black like that of a hog left too long to roast on a spit. I try and move but the muscles are too damaged and all that I manage is to twist slightly, a loud cracking noise telling me that something on my left has snapped. Then my hearing goes and there is no more sensation at all. Is this it? Is this death? Can this finally be the end?
I am nothing more than thought – and that thought concerns the Durwards. Am I wrong in my opinion of them? Does the answer lie in fact with Paul and Sara?
I have no idea how much time passes but I’m startled by a whining noise that resolves into a voice.
‘… Think he’s returning …’ It’s Grost’s voice. ‘It didn’t work.’
After the sound comes the pain as the skin grows soft once more and rejuvenates.
My eyes are among the last organs of sense to be restored and I peel open gummy lids to see Kronos and Grost staring at me.
‘It’s not fire, then,’ I say and the sound of the words is bizarre in my ears. I realise that my tongue and lips are still re-forming.
‘No,’ Grost replies. ‘I’m sorry, but it’s not fire.’
He leans over me, and suddenly there is a pain like no other I’ve thus far experienced.
‘Kronos!’ Grost pulls back and they both stare at my cheek.
‘What is it?’ I ask.
Kronos reaches down and touches the silver crucifix that Grost wears. ‘This burned your face.’
Kronos yanks the pendant free and holds the tip of it against my other cheek. The pain is unbelievable! I thrash against my bonds, desperate to pull away, unable to bear the agony a moment longer.
‘The crucifix,’ he says.
‘Wait!’ I reply, struggling for breath. ‘Is it the crucifix or is it the silver?’ I see a look that is almost embarrassment cross his face. ‘Some bloody doctor you’d make,’ I say. ‘If you want an accurate diagnosis you have to rule out everything.’ I nod towards the fireplace. ‘Pair of candlesticks, a gift for my services from a man who had more silverware than money. Try them.’
Kronos walks over to the mantel and lifts one of the candelabra. They are big, heavy affairs – worth a good deal of money, I have no doubt. If my suspicion is right I might yet have cause to be thankful that I never sold them.
Kronos presses the metal against my face and the pain is, once more, excruciating.
‘There,’ I say, when I can speak again. ‘Might I suggest that you melt them down into something useful?’
‘Marcus …’
‘Oh, shut up,’ I laugh. ‘You never were cut out for sympathy. Just promise me you’ll kill the bastards.’
He nods. ‘I promise, my friend.’
Out of the corner of my eye I can see Clyde Lorrimer peering through the window. Oh, I think, this isn’t going to look good.
Then Kronos swings one of the candelabra right at my …
Forty
What the Fear Brought Out of Clyde Lorrimer
IF ONLY YOU’D seen it. After everything he’d done for them, the way they killed him.
He were tied down and all – they weren’t taking no risks. I can understand that sort of thing from the hunchback, I mean, how difficult can it be to fight a hunchback? He’d want to even up the odds a bit, wouldn’t he? But the other one, the foreigner …
Tied him down, they did, and then brained him with one of his own candlesticks. Bosh. Blood and brains everywhere. And Dr Marcus always had had a lot of brains so you can just imagine …
Yes, thanks, Dudley, I will just have one more. It’s my nerves, see? Shot to bits they are after having seen what they done.
I don’t know what made them do it. Maybe they meant to rob the place, or maybe they’re just sick in the head, they just like doing that sort of thing. You never can tell. I remember a friend of mine telling me about a woman over in Gloucester, the things she did to men with an ale horn … some people just aren’t right.
So what are we going to do? That’s the thing, ain’t it? We can’t just let them get away with it, we should get over there and give them a little of what they gave old Dr Marcus. I mean, Marcus was a good man, I’ll always remember how he looked after my wife …
What are we going to do?
Forty-One
Carla Learns A Lesson
I CAN HEAR Marcus scream and however much I squeeze my hands over my ears it doesn’t block out the images in my head. I know he is dying, and dying badly, as Kronos and Grost torture him to death.
I understand that they think they’re doing the right thing – perhaps the only possible thing – but the willingness with which they accepted the task is what hurts. Neither of them even tried to offer another solution. The man who had once been their friend and host was now no more than a dangerous animal to be slaughtered by whatever means necessary. Theirs is a determination that I cannot share, it is the the single-mindedness of the zealot, a cold, narrow view that cannot fail to remind me of the most terrible man I have ever known and of what he did to my mother.
It is my hope that one day we will be able to look back on the days of the Witchfinder and wonder to ourselves how such a thing could have come to pass. How we could have been so stupid, so frightened as to not only believe his claims but encourage them.
He and his colleague John Stearne came riding into our village at the beginning of spring four years ago.
We were just waking up from the winter, welcoming the warmer winds and the damp thaw as a new chance at life. The village was exposed and that year the cold had been particularly harsh. A lot of livestock had suffered and a couple of the older residents had died. The first, Jeremy Bates, had been ill for some time and the general consensus was that if the cold hadn’t done for him then something else would have. Old Mother Langley was different. Her death had the sort of mysterious touch that small villages love, a little fuel for the gossip fires. She had been found on her front step, kneeling and with her hands raised in prayer, frozen solid. What had happened to her? The gossips wondered if it had just been the cold or had some evil spirit done for her? Evil spirits were a popular catch-all for anything that stayed unexplained. If the cows weren’t milking as well as they ought then evil spirits had infected their teats. If the corn crop was short, evil spirits had worked their way between the rows and soured the seed.
If anyone could make profitable use of this sort of small-minded lunacy it was Matthew Hopkins.
He was a charming man. If anything, that was his worst feature. He conveyed his lies and sadism with such gentle conviction that they were hard to dismiss. If he told you that the Devil was walking the streets of your village or town, if he told you that evil spirits were in residence, you would nod wisely and ask what you could do to help.
Also, people don’t like to believe that death can be random. They like there to be method and reason. If you ask me, people just die and sometimes bad things happen to good people, I honestly believe that … It marked me out as very strange indeed.
‘Describe how you found this woman,’ Hopkins asked, once the story had come to his attention. He had no shortage of eager witnesses: people were desperate to tell him, whether they had actually seen Old Mother Langley in her icy genuflection or not.
‘This is no ordinary death,’ Hopkins announced in the end. And of course he would say that, for there was nothing that he or Stearne could gain from an ‘ordinary’ death and, above all, they were greedy men. Greedy for power and all the riches and adulation it could bring.
And so the investigation began. What could Old Mother Langley have seen that made her fall to her knees in the cold? What infernal sprite had paid a visit to her that day and, more importantly, who was its human agent?
Stearne was the more visible of the two. While Hopkins kept to his room at the inn, his accomplice walked the roads and knocked on the doors. I never understood why people didn’t see him for what he was. Hopkins was charming, yes, but not so Stearne. When I opened our door to him his eyes crawled over me like spiders disturbed from their nest, scuttling for somewhere to hide themselves.
‘Good morning,’ he said, though not to my face. ‘My name is John Stearne, I am investigating the unusual death of Old Mother Langley.’
‘Nothing unusual to it,’ I told him, still young enough then not to have learned to guard my tongue. ‘It was cold, so she froze.’
‘You obviously are not aware of our latest discoveries,’ Stearne said as he pushed past me into the house. ‘We found signs of witchcraft at her house, charms designed to mark her out for death. We also found the mark of the Devil upon her skin.’
‘Upon her skin? She’s been buried for six weeks!’
‘It was deemed advisable to dig her body back up,’ Stearne explained, sitting down in our parlour. ‘We know the signs, the marks to look for.’
‘And of course you found them.’
‘“Of course”?’ he asked. ‘So you are not surprised that they were there, then? What do you know about it?’
‘I know nothing,’ I replied. ‘I just meant that you would find marks whether they were there or not.’
‘You’re suggesting that I am mistaken?’
‘I’m suggesting that you’re too keen on your job.’
‘It’s not a job, my girl,’ Stearne said, leaning back and spreading out his legs in the way that men do when they’re thinking of matters less holy than this man was pretending to contemplate. ‘It’s a vocation, a calling. I have given my life to God’s work.’
‘I don’t believe you would know God if he dropped out of the sky and stamped on your foot.’
Stearne’s manner changed at that. He leaned forward slightly, by now far too interested in me for my own good.
‘You blaspheme easily, girl,’ he said. ‘You want to watch that tongue of yours – it could get you swinging from a rope.’
Which was when my mother came in. She’d been in the fields nearby, picking wolfsbane and lavender for her medicines. She was a good nurse, my mother, for all her crazy ways (and they’re ways that I’ve learned myself, I’m only too aware of that): she knew how to mix everything from a poultice that would keep a wound fresh to a drink that would relieve pain. She was also a woman who was very good at reading people’s thoughts, something she proved that day when she took one look at myself and Stearne and decided, in no time at all, that major trouble was brewing.
‘Can I help you?’ she asked him.
‘This is your daughter?’ Stearne asked.
‘She is. Why do you ask?’
‘I only wonder if it is you that has taught her to take the Lord’s business in vain. She has a sinner’s mouth.’ In fairness Tom the coachman had said similar, though he meant it as a compliment.
‘I’m sure,’ my mother insisted, ‘that whatever she said she meant no disrespect. She’s a good girl, though she sometimes opens her mouth without thinking.’
‘Clearly,’ Stearne replied. ‘A shame. And such a beautiful mouth.’ He grinned at that and his legs spread a little wider. My mother was by now only too well aware of what was going on – more so than I was at the time.
‘I didn’t say anything wrong,’ I insisted. ‘He’s the one that misuses the Lord’s business, not me.’
‘Shush now, Carla,’ my mother said. ‘Just leave it be.’
Now I can look back on that moment and see that she was doing her best to shut me up before I made matters so bad that they couldn’t be fixed. At the time, though, I had the stupid, rebellious need to argue my point.
‘He’s a liar,’ I said, ‘and a dirty pig. You can see what he wants to do with me and it’s nothing to do with God!’
Stearne jumped from his seat and ran towards me but my mother was quicker. She grabbed hold of him and held him tight.
‘Please, sir,’ she said, ‘don’t hurt her – she doesn’t know what she’s doing.’
He paused, looking at me. ‘Maybe I don’t have to look any further for the killer of Old Mother Langley,’ he suggested. ‘Maybe I’ve found her.’
‘No,’ my mother begged. ‘Forget about her – she’s just a stupid girl, that’s all.’
I was about to argue with that when Stearne laughed and pulled my mother close to him. ‘I dare say you might be able to convince me,’ he said, smiling down at her.
That was it. Looking at him standing there, holding my mother close, I lost my mind to anger. I stormed out of the house and ran right out of the village.
My poor mother. I gave her such a lot to contend with. Not only did she have to bring me up by herself (my father, a lovely gentle soul by all accounts, having died when I was only three) but she had to try and manage my temper too. Look where it got her.
I spent the day walking in the fields above the village, too angry to speak to anyone. Eventually I climbed into one of the old trees that ringed the top of what we called Barnett’s Hump (though who Barnett was I have no idea, no doubt he was before my time) and I tried to calm down.
Even at that age I knew that my temper was not helpful. Stearne, however hateful he clearly was, had power and authority. He was a man used to getting what he wanted out of life. All my whining had done was to put both mother and myself in danger.
The best thing to do, I decided, was to go back into the village. Find Stearne and apologise. It would stick in my throat but at least it would keep us safe.
I walked slowly, not looking forward to the task that lay ahead of me. By the time I got to the village it was all over.
‘Come now, child,’ said Mrs Barrow, the wife of the innkeeper, George Barrow. ‘There’s nothing for you to see here.’
I wondered what she was talking about. I was momentarily confused about why so many of the villagers were out on the streets and why they all seemed to be staring at me.
‘Of course,’ said someone in the crowd, ‘she’s just as bad. Brought up on it, no doubt.’
‘Poor thing,’ said another. ‘Do you think she knew?’
‘Knew what?’ I asked. Then I said no more as the crowd parted and I saw the body hanging from the tree in the centre of the village.
It was a beautiful spot, with its old cedar and the small pond with its family of ducks. The circle of grass on which I had sat and dreamed away lazy summer afternoons ever since I was a small child. I could never look on it again, not without feeling a chill, not since they hanged my mother there and let her swing for no reason other than the word of a liar. Stearne had exercised his power, all right. Then he had promptly left, along with his master, to go and find new lives to ruin.
‘Come on,’ said Mrs Barrow again. ‘There’s nothing to be gained by you looking at it. You just come away.’
Later I realised that she had known that the mood of the crowd was still excitable, that it might not take too much encouragement for them to decide there was more lynching to be done. She was a wise woman, was Mrs Barrow: like all good publicans she knew how to read people.
Of course the enthusiasm for what Hopkins and Stearne had done soon passed, as I imagine it did in most villages. My mother was cut down – I never did find out what happened to the body. She certainly never made it as far as the churchyard – her ‘crime’ saw to that – and the village made haste to pretend that nothing had happened. I went home and tried to forget, too. I didn’t blame the villagers any more than I blamed myself. Maybe that was why it took me as long as it did to do the sensible thing and leave.
And now, a few days later, I am sitting in the barn of a dead man – or at least I hope he is: please let his suffering be over – wondering why my life seems to revolve around those who kill with conviction.
The barn door rattles. When I came in here I drew the bolt because I wanted to be alone.
‘Carla?’ It’s Kronos, come to tell me why he had to do what he’s just done. I’m not interested. ‘Carla? Let me in. Please.’
No. I don’t think so.
I walk over to the coach and run my hand over its lacquered finish. It’s a beautiful thing. A pretty box that holds a nasty treasure. I open the door.
It’s amazing that it’s taken me this long. I think, despite all my concerns, that I didn’t want to betray Kronos’s trust. He obviously didn’t want people looking inside. He blacks out the windows, he keeps the doors closed. Fine, it’s private, I understand that. But now … now my respect has worn thin and I want to know if there is anything worse to know.
I look inside and think that maybe there is.
It takes me a moment to see in the darkness. All the seats have been removed so that the interior of the coach is just a large box, and in the middle of that box, strapped down to stop it moving, is a coffin.
Why stop now? I ask myself. I could reach for the coffin lid.
‘If you had asked,’ says Kronos behind me, ‘I might have shown you.’
‘Might?’ I reply, wondering how the hell he got in. Then I remember the hayloft. He probably climbed in through it.
‘You assume you have known me long enough that I should share anything with you?’
‘No. I suppose not.’ I make a grab for the coffin lid, yanking it back so that it clatters against the floor of the coach. The coffin is empty.
‘Why have an empty coffin?’ I ask. It’s just to voice the question really: I don’t expect an answer,
Nonetheless Kronos gives me one, unbuttoning his shirt and angling his neck towards the light. There is a scar there. A bite mark. ‘It’s where I sleep,’ he says. Suddenly I realise that I’m in the most terrible danger.
