Haunt Me Still (30 page)

DARKNESS AND COLD
swirled around me, smooth as glass, as if I’d fallen into the dark mirror. The next thing I remember is the shock of hands, a rushing, and air scraping across my body. I coughed and retched, and a face swam into view above me, ringed with the glow of the fire.

Dark, wet hair and green eyes. The planes of his face chiseled with damp and fire.

Ben.

“Kate,” he said, his face very close to mine as he wiped wet hair from my eyes, wrapping his body around mine so that warmth flowed from him to me.

We seemed to be on a rocky shore. The singing had stopped, and the silvery light was gone. The moon laid a long glittering path of gold across the dark water. From the other direction, red and blue lights flashed over the water.
Emergency vehicles,
I thought.
Police.

Behind Ben, other faces peered down at me. Lady Nairn, full of concern, and Lily, her face pale with relief and something I would not recognize till later: pride.

“How did you find me?” I asked Ben.

“
I can call spirits from the vasty deep,
” he said lightly, his mouth tipping into a smile.

I frowned. “How?”

“Lily told me where to dive.”

Just beyond him, she’d bent to pick up something among the rocks. A silvery rectangle dangling from a chain. “I saw you,” she said, looking back with a smile. “In the loch.”

But that is not possible,
I thought, slipping back into unconsciousness.

November 4, 1606
Hampton Court Palace

NOT LONG AFTER
the boy Hal Berridge had come to Mortlake to serve as his father’s scryer, Arthur Dee had walked in on the boy kissing Dee’s younger brother rowland—a particularly deep and passionate kiss. He’d reviled the boy as a catamite ever since, a Ganymede corrupting his little brother. He spat vile terms at the boy, aiming hidden kicks and blows his way whenever he could. Not only because of the allure he had for rowland, but because Arthur found himself also gazing at the boy, tingling when he walked by. Deep down, he knew it was not entirely the issue of sex that rattled him, however, no matter how startling he found the attraction. It was jealousy, and not of his body. Of his sight. With the possible exception of Edward Kelley, Hal Berridge was the best seer his father had ever employed.

Though his father had been crestfallen, Arthur, for one, had breathed more than one sigh of relief when the boy left Mortlake for Hampton Court at the invitation of Lord Salisbury. Then, on the eve of the play in which Berridge was to star as a queen, Arthur discovered that rowland had made an assignation with him at the palace. Telling himself that he was protecting his little brother’s reputation, Arthur had got rowland stupendously drunk, left him snoring in the music room, and then gone downriver himself to keep the appointment.

The exact spot turned out to be deep in a deserted wing of the oldest part of the palace. Arthur had arrived early to find the otherwise empty room warmed by a fire of apple logs scented with lavender. He had laid rowland’s cloak on the floor and retired behind the door to wait.

The boy’s blue velvet skirts whispered sweetly against the flagged floor as he entered the room. Arthur stepped swiftly behind him, closing and latching the door. The creature had turned, and Arthur had enjoyed the flash of fear on the boy’s face.

“Arthur—”

“Don’t foul my name in your mouth,” he said, and lunged. Berridge managed to duck, and Arthur’s elbow hit his jaw with a glancing blow. The boy kept his feet, barely. As Arthur came back at him, he pulled a knife, which slid across Arthur’s arm, trailing a bright line of blood. A scratch, really, no more, but it made him shout with rage.

He aimed another blow at Berridge’s head and this time connected with more force. Winding a fist into the long hair of the boy’s wig, he dragged him across the floor. When the wig did not come off, Arthur stopped and, with his other hand, tore at the gown, which ripped down to the waist.

As if Berridge had suddenly turned to a serpent in his hands, Arthur stepped back, his eyes widening, his breath seizing. “But you are not—you are not a boy,” he stammered.

Naked from the waist up, the person in front of him was a woman. A beautiful woman with long red hair. “Would your father have taught me in this shape?” she charged.

Arthur’s mouth opened and closed. “And rowland—?”

“Has known almost since the beginning,” she said.

He blinked, still trying to process her transformation, and she stepped close and took his hand in hers. With a smile, she slid his hand up to her breast.

Suddenly all the longing that he had bottled up inside, twisted and questioned and tried to press out of himself for over a year, tumbled forth. An instant later, his arms locked around her, and she let him pull her down onto the cloak spread over the floor, where they mounted one another with a wild, rutting urgency.

Some time later, she lay atop him, her head in the small of his shoulder as the dark explosion of climax drained away. Hearing a sound, he opened his eyes to see an old man he did not know lunging at them, a knife in his hands. Arthur rolled, flinging Berridge—or whoever she was—away.

Stumbling with the force of his drive, the other man ran past them but turned quickly, leaping at them again.

How the knife—the one she’d cut him with, still marked with his blood, and with strange characters running down the blade—came into Arthur’s hand, he didn’t know. And what happened next happened so quickly that he could never quite remember it: As their attacker darted around him, clearly headed for her, Arthur’s hand flicked out and slit his throat.

The other man dropped to the floor, blood welling and spurting into pools on the flagstone. Arthur heard the knife clatter to the floor as well and stood staring at his hand in horror.

Moments later, the Berridge who was not a boy propelled him out the door, saying he must save himself and that she would clean up as necessary. And she’d added a strange request: Send Mr. Shakespeare.

January 1607
Castle Bruiach, Scotland

Well-wrapped in furs on a still and moonless night, she sat alone in an open window high in a tower, staring down at the dark ice of the loch. Once, her mother had ruled this castle. Just that morning, however, after a quick but decisive seduction of the young lord who now had charge of it, she had become the new lady of the lake. The way she sat, one hand resting protectively on her still-flat belly, might have made her new husband proud, thinking he had tilled his new field well. Inside her, though, another man’s child was already growing, a fact she had not found fit to share with her new lord.

The night before, in a sudden bitter cold, the loch had frozen, its surface smooth as black glass. Still uncluttered by snow or the tramping of men, it glimmered faintly in the starlight. Letting her breathing slow and her body relax, she stared at its surface without really seeing it, and after a while, pictures began to form in her mind. At first, they were memories, though she saw the scenes with a detached clarity, not, as she’d first seen them, from within her body, but floating somewhere overhead.

She had always looked young and boyish, so it was easy to bind her breasts and dress like a boy five years younger than her true age. She had refused, however, to cut the bright hair that had always seemed, somehow, to be an extension of her soul, some part of herself more intrinsic than other, less unique features. So she acquired a wig and a large cap, and she experimented with various substances until she found one that could slick her long hair down inside them. And then she traveled south all the way to London.

West of London, to be exact. To a place called Mortlake.
From a boiling lake,
she thought with dark satisfaction,
to a lake of the dead
. There, she presented herself to the English wizard Dr. Dee, in order to steal the learning out of which he had cheated her mother.

Her mother had been dead for nearly a decade, but the girl had forgiven neither the wizard nor the thief for their part in making her mother’s life a disappointment. Though she had met neither man, the whole of her young life had been one long exercise in reviling them. Neither man, in fact, had any reason to know of her existence, though the thief, Mr. Shakespeare, had been present—as an illicit observer—at the hour of her making. During a Great rite, her mother had told her, at the top of Dunsinnan Hill, in the light of a Samhuinn fire. Later that night, he had stolen away the mirror and the manuscript whose loss had made her mother howl at the moon. She had been born, the girl sometimes thought, with the express purpose of retrieving those two lost treasures. She had gone to London to hold true to that purpose.

Dr. Dee sensed her power at once and took her in. He had been in the dark, when it came to the spirit world, since his last scryer of real talent, Edward Kelley, had got himself killed in Bohemia. So he welcomed this new boy, Hal Berridge, with open arms and trembling delight, giving thanks to a gracious heaven. In the guise of a boy, she toiled for him dutifully, and he repaid her efforts, unveiling, layer by layer, all the deep learning of his long life. More than her mother could ever have dreamed.

She spent all her spare hours in the maze of his library in that rambling set of conjoined cottages on the banks of the Thames. It took her almost a year to find her mother’s manuscript in his most closely guarded hiding place, behind the movable stone in the fireplace of his innermost study. She could not read the original, but she could and did read the translation, making her own copy sentence by sentence in the moments she could finagle alone with it. By the time she finished, she had engraved its tales of the goddess Corra—also called Cerridwen, Dee had noted—and her rites, word for word, into her memory.

It would not, however, be enough. For always, Dr. Dee taught her, learned magi left some crucial detail out of their written records of magical rites, lest they fall into the hands of the uninitiated. It was why apprenticeship was so essential and why Dee’s refusal to teach her mother had rankled so.

Dr. Dee as good as told her that he’d remained silent on some key aspect of what she sought: the deed without a name. In all probability, the writer of the original manuscript had done the same. If she meant, as she did, to reenact the rite whose secrets had gone to the grave with her mother, then she would have to milk that knowledge from a witness. And she knew the identity of only one.

A man who had stolen, according to her mother, not only the mirror and the manuscript, but also something more precious: a thunderbolt from the gods. The first two she intended to take back. The third she intended to avenge.

And then vengeance landed in her lap. First, in the face of a redheaded woman she had seen in the mirror. The face of a woman with a knife. Dr. Dee, she knew, suspected that it was the face of her mother. It was not, but it was useful, nevertheless, in a way she had not dreamed. It took her, willy-nilly, to court, where she found herself lodged in Hampton Court Palace.

And then, in a strange chain of events, it had prompted the misshapen earl of Salisbury to call for a play from Mr. Shakespeare. An early draft had been sent out to Mortlake, which had brought the old wizard back to court in a quavering rage. At first, when she’d realized that it shadowed her mother, she’d thought she had yet another reason to wreak revenge on Mr. Shakespeare. And then she’d realized that it also conjured up something else: the memory she had been seeking, of a rite seen long ago on a hill in Scotland. A deed without a name. A deed Mr. Shakespeare had remembered, it seemed, without the guile of a wizard, recording it in full.

After that, she laid her plans well. The suggestion that she might be given a role in the play came from her, though it reached Salisbury’s ears through a circuitous route. The play was to be offered before the king amid the celebrations around the anniversary of the Powder Plot. The Samhuinn moon fell just before the appointed day, and she chose that night for her revenge.

She’d found the empty wing of the palace and chosen the room with care, arranging an assignation there with rowland Dee. Some time before, she’d gone fishing for Mr. Shakespeare’s eyes; feeling them fall upon her, she’d done her best to keep them there. She’d sent a message to him, as well, begging his company.

And then she’d seen what she’d seen in that mirror, the moment it passed her by in that last rehearsal.

Dressed in her queen’s costume, her real hair cascading around her in coppery waves, she left the rehearsal in the Great Hall, heading back to the buttery that served as a greenroom. She knew exactly where they kept the mirror in its chest. It was the work of a moment to pick the lock and take it, and then to slip back out, unseen by the rest of the company, who were riveted by Burbage in full-blown rant.

She made her way through the palace’s web of corridors to the old deserted wing, but from there her deep-laid plans went awry. First, Arthur Dee had appeared instead of rowland. And then the old man who’d been tailing her had died instead of Mr. Shakespeare.

She’d sent Arthur quickly away, telling him to send the playwright back.

As soon as he was in the corridor, she latched the door behind him and set about the work she needed to do. She had just drawn the blue gown over the body, stripped naked and bound, when she heard a tap at the door.

Mr. Shakespeare, at last. “You are late,” she said as he took in the form of the body draped in blue on the floor. “That was meant to be you.”

He looked up with horrified eyes. “And if I cry murder?”

She held his eyes coolly. “They will arrest the killer. Arthur Dee.”

He would not consign his old master’s eldest son to the executioner, and they both knew it.

She had quoted his words to his face, enjoying it: “
Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under it.
”

As Arthur had recently done with her, she now enjoyed watching him realize who she was. “The Lernaean Hydra,” he murmured. “Lady Elizabeth Stewart’s child.”

In exchange for her silence and her disappearance, they agreed upon a trade: He had brought, as requested, a folded wad of pages excised from the first version of his new play—a version that he said was now obsolete after he’d spent the last few hours revising.

He insisted, however, that she leave behind the mirror. She looked at it, briefly, with regret, for it was beautiful, and a thing of power. But she did not need it. There would be another, more powerful, where she was going. So she opened her fingers and let the dark circle drop; it rolled into the folds of the blue gown.

After that, they had both exited through a high window, leaving the door latched behind them. The way he had come, he thought, was being watched. In the garden below, they parted. She turned one last time before fading into the dark, a smile playing at the corners of her mouth.
The queen, my lord, is dead. And I shall be queen hereafter.

In the tower window, the memories went dark. And then another picture arose, not a memory, though whether it belonged to past or future, she could not tell: the face of a redheaded woman with a knife.

And in the background, the tower in which she sat, in flames.