The Devil's Mistress by David Barclay (summer reads txt) 📗

passed the cemetery. Black clouds had begun to roll in overhead, blocking what little daylight remained. The graves were built in an open clearing where the trees parted, but she had no lanthorn to guide her this night. The fold of darkness had begun to close its fist over the entire forest, and as she rode past the gravestones, it took every ounce of concentration not to guide Lily afoul.

At last the road narrowed, and a familiar, long puddle stretched before her.

“Here,” she said, patting the mare’s neck. “’Tis just ahead, see? You needn’t be afraid.”

The horse whinnied.

From behind there came shouts and the thunder of hooves. Three or perhaps four riders coming fast down the road after her.

All at once, Lily decided she’d had enough. She reared up with a terrible shriek and threw Isabella from the saddle. She fell backward into the mud.

The shouts grew louder.

Isabella rose to her knees, and Lily shrieked again, backing up the path. The horse turned, cantered fifty paces, then stopped as if waiting for her lady to join her. Isabella wanted to give chase, but the riders were too close. A small orange light bobbed up and down near the cemetery.

She waved at the mare. “Go on! Get out of here or they’ll see you!”

The mare grunted, suddenly unsure it wanted to run after all.

With a cry of despair, Isabella turned and ran toward the narrowing path, the place she and Jacob had left the carriage the previous night. The old oak rose before her, a twisted gray giant with a dozen nightmarish arms. She retraced her steps, following not the path to the cliff, but cutting through the woods to the overlook, the way she had come back. It was exhausting work. The brambles were thick. They tore at her dress and bit her ankles like hungry rats.

Then, the forest broke, and she was standing at the top of the cliff. The cottage would be just ahead, though the darkness was so complete, it was invisible. To her left, the sounds of the water crashing into the rocks, and the narrow strip where she had lost the lanthorn on her first jaunt.

“I see her! There, do you follow?”

“Aye!”

The voices of the watchmen, now shy of their mounts. Their light was just behind the ridge and closing.

Isabella moved forward, running, stumbling, loping along the edge of the cliff. The cottage should have been just in front of her, but she still couldn’t find it. It was too bloody dark.

“Where are you?” she whispered. Then, shouting to the cliff side, “Where are you?”

“Got her!”

Something large and heavy hit her from behind, driving her whole body to the earth. Her mouth struck a stone, and two front teeth ricocheted into the back of her throat. She swallowed them, gagging, and choking, and crying as a fat man with hairy arms leaned upon her back. Just when she thought she might suffocate, the man took her by the hair and jerked her head from the mud. She opened her eyes, staring into the face of the large fellow from the kitchen, the one who had groped for the vial. He grinned at her, showing a mouthful of teeth as gray and rotten as the old oak at the head of the path.

“There you are, my lovely,” he said.

Behind him, the light of the candle shown over the hill, illuminating the cliff side where the house should have been. But the cottage itself, the Lady, the workshop of wonders…they were simply not there.

They had vanished into the night as if they had never existed at all.

Part II

Chapter 14

To the side of the town parish was an awning beneath which stood a hitching post and trough, such that horses might be sheltered during official gatherings and stay out of the rain. It was a low enclosure with thin beams exposed beneath the roof and two arched entrances at either end.

It was here that she was taken, dragged in upon her back and then strung up by the wrists to a long strip of leather run from a ceiling beam. Hardly sturdy enough for a six-foot man accused of a child killing, but for a criminal of a younger and more feminine persuasion, it sufficed quite handily.

The two watchmen stripped her of her clothes. First down to the shift beneath her bodice, then upon Sloop’s command, down to the skin. Her mother’s crucifix was the last remaining article, the only protection between her and the grim triumvirate.

Sloop ripped it from her neck. “Search her.”

The watchman from the forest approached first. “What are we looking for, sir?”

“An open sore. A third nipple. Anything which may constitute the Devil’s mark. Do you understand?”

The other watchman, a thin scarecrow of a boy not much older than Isabella, grabbed her by the legs and wrenched them wide. “Are we going to look in all her places?” he asked, and laughed.

“Mind yourself, Wembly, or you may find yourself a slave to her charms.”

Isabella wished she had charms. She wished she had magic enough to whisk herself away and never look back. Her and her servant boy. “I want to go home.”

“This is your home,” Sloop said. “Here you will stay until we find the extent of your crimes.”

And what a home it was. Damp, and rotten, and bitingly cold. Filled with the stench of horse manure, which hung in the air like a wet fog.

Slowly, laboriously, the three men began to move round her. They only looked at first, and then the young one pinched the flesh beneath her left breast. She cried out, but instead of shaming them, it only made them bolder. Soon they were all touching her, prodding her, pinching her. Even Sloop picked a stick from off the ground and used it to pry open the cleft of her buttocks in search of an imperfection.

She closed her eyes, but try as she may, she could not block them out.

“Confess.” Sloop’s voice,