The Eighth Witch (29 page)

“I wasn’t expecting you back so quickly,” he said. “Where’s Harry?”

“He’s still at the church going through the records. There’s a mountain of them, but he said he didn’t need my help, so I thought I’d come back to see if I could be of some use here. I left him a front door key, just in case we had to go out somewhere.” She sniffed. Her eyes were red from crying and she had a balled-up tissue in her hand.

“Are you okay?” Carter said.

She shook her head. “I keep thinking about them. Laura and Holly. Do you think they’re still alive?”

“We have no evidence to say they’re not.”

“This is horrible, Rob. When I asked you to come I only had the vague suspicion that something was happening here. Now I’ve been proved right. And I wish to God I hadn’t.”

She took the tray in to Jane. Carter heard a brief exchange of words and then Annie reappeared in the hallway.

“She seems lovely,” she said.

“Yes,” Carter said. “She is.”

“And there’s no chance you two…”

“From where I’m standing, Annie, not a hope in hell.”

“Shame. Come down to the kitchen. I made enough coffee to go round.”

“Ian Lacey should be here soon.”

“Then I’ll make him one too.”

He followed her along the hallway and down the stairs to the kitchen.

They were still sitting in the kitchen when Ian Lacey rang the doorbell. Annie ran up the stairs quickly and showed him down to the kitchen. He had just taken a seat when Jane appeared at the top of the stairs, still clutching the book.

“Finished,” she said, trotting down the rest of the stairs and pulling up a chair next to Lacey. “Jane Talbot,” she said to him without waiting for introductions. “I work with Rob at the department.”

“Ian Lacey,” he said, turning awkwardly in his seat to shake her hand.

“It’s Detective Inspector, isn’t it?” Jane said.

“At the moment, technically, no.”

“What do you mean?” Carter said.

“I mean that of ten thirty this morning I’m suspended, pending an internal inquiry,” Lacey said, a wry smile on his face.

“Last night?” Carter said.

“That’s the rope they’ll use to hang me with, but it’s been coming for quite a while. My boss, Chief Superintendent Knox, has been after my pelt for a long time. Now he can finally nail it to his trophy wall. Perhaps—and it’s a very big perhaps—but perhaps now he’ll leave me in peace, which will give me some space to pursue all the lines of inquiry that have just opened up. If you don’t mind me asking, Ms. Talbot, why are you here?”

“I asked Jane to come up from London,” Carter said.

“So have Department 18 made this official?”

“Semi-official,” Jane said. “One of our officers was attacked in the British Library. Simon Crozier decided it was time to take some kind of action.”

“Jane hasn’t come alone,” Carter said. “Another colleague of mine, Harry Bailey, came up with her.”

“I see,” Lacey said.

“He’s at the church now, checking out the parish records.”

“Not wasting much time then, is he?” Lacey said.

“I don’t think time is a luxury we have,” Jane said. “The files you showed Rob, do you have them with you?”

“In the boot of the car, yes. You want to see them?”

“If you wouldn’t mind.”

“Not at all. I’ll fetch them in. Do you mind me asking why you want to see them?”

“Jane has a theory,” Carter said.

“Well I’d be interested to hear it, because I’m buggered if I do,” Lacey said. “I’ll be back in a tick.” He got to his feet and climbed the steps. A moment later they heard the front door open.

“He seems okay,” Jane said.

“He is,” Carter said. “He’s invested a lot in this.”

“Including his job, it would seem,” Annie said.

“Yes,” Carter said. “I know how he feels, kicking against the pricks.”

“You’ve made a career of it,” Jane said.

“I do my best,” Carter said and winked at her.

Annie shook her head. “I feel like banging your heads together.”

“Why?” Jane said.

Before Annie could answer Lacey was back. He handed the carrier bag full of files to Jane and said, “Right. Let’s get started.”

Chapter Thirty-One

“How are you getting along?” Peter Wright asked.

Harry Bailey hadn’t heard him come down to the cellar—he’d been too busy. He had a couple of pages of notes and his eyes were aching from trying to decipher the faded ink, let alone the handwriting of the numerous vicars who’d been incumbent here over the years.

“Getting somewhere, I think,” Bailey said. “How well do you know your records?”

“Not very well, I’m afraid. I don’t have much reason to sit down with them. Of course, I try to keep them up to date but I rarely delve into the past. Especially as far back as you’re going.”

Bailey was seated at a table, notepad in front of him, three large, hide-bound volumes to his left, another open to his right. “This entry here.” He pointed to a line halfway down the page in the open volume. “Elinor Yardley. She had a child, but there’s no mention of the child’s gender, nor is there any mention of the father. It’s not exactly comprehensive.”

“It’s not all that unusual,” Wright said. “You can imagine in those days, a child born out of wedlock was not something to be celebrated. In fact I’m surprised it’s even acknowledged. The vicar at that time must have been very thorough.”

“How can you be sure the child was born out of wedlock?” Bailey said.
 

“You’ve been through the entries previous to that one. Did you find any mention of Elinor Yardley getting married?”

“No, nothing at all.”

Wright shrugged, as if that was explanation enough.

Harry Bailey wasn’t prepared to let it go. He had a feeling the vicar was holding out on him. “Forgive me, Reverend, but I think you know more than you’re saying.”

“Whatever makes you think that?”

“Because one minute you’re telling me that you rarely look at these old records, but you seem pretty well informed about Elinor Yardley’s bastard child. What aren’t you telling me?”

Wright looked at him, his eyes narrowing slightly. “Have you finished down here?” he said.

“I think I’ve gleaned all I’m going to,” Bailey said.

“Okay. When you’ve finished come up and see me. I’ll be in the vestry.”

“And you’ll answer my question?”

“I’ll tell you all I know,” Wright said.

It was only fifteen minutes later when Harry Bailey knocked on the vestry door.

“Take a seat,” Wright said.

Bailey sat across the table from the vicar and looked at him expectantly.

“You have to understand,” Wright began. “These were primitive times when compared to today.”

“I understand all that,” Bailey said impatiently. “Things were done in the name of the church, in the name of Christianity, that have left an unpleasant taste in the mouth. I’m not interested in that. But I am interested in the Yardley sisters, especially Elinor. So what more can you add to what I’ve just read in the records?”

Wright sighed. “As I said earlier, the Yardleys were held in very high regard around here, except that is, Elinor. She was the only one of the seven who embraced the darker side of her craft.”

“Black magic?” Bailey said.

“In essence, yes. There were many tales of her excesses. Remember, she’d seen some of her older sisters hunted down, so I suppose she may have been pushed towards the dark side by that. But some would have it that she, unlike her sisters, was born evil. She created a coven here in Ravensbridge and there was talk of secret, and not so secret, ceremonies. When I said earlier about knowing your enemy, it was her I was talking about. The more I looked into the stories about her, the more I found there was some substance to them.

“She and her coven were implicated in at least ten deaths. The victims were all people who in some way or another had displeased Elinor. There was a blacksmith, for instance, who refused to shoe her horse. He was a devout, pious man and doing anything to aid a self-confessed witch who embraced Satan and all his works, well, that was anathema to him. Elinor’s horse had thrown a shoe when she was visiting town. She took it to the blacksmith who not only refused to tend to the animal, but also drove Elinor away by brandishing a cast iron crucifix he’d forged in his own furnace. He was found two days later nailed to the wall of his house. The nails were through his hands and feet in a mockery of the crucifixion. His belly had been sliced open and crudely sewn up again. When the wound was examined and opened up they found that a black cat had been sewn up inside him, and the cat, before it suffocated, had eaten away most of his internal organs.”

Sweat was beading on Peter Wright’s brow, as if just telling the story of Elinor Yardley was taking a physical toll on him.

“On another occasion a woman who had openly mocked Elinor and her beliefs was found dead in her cottage. Her body was little more than a husk, as if all the water had been drained from her. She was twenty-three but looked over a hundred.”

“What about the child? Why is there no record of the father?” Bailey said impatiently.

Wright ignored the questions. His face darkened further as the frown lines deepened. “Those are the most disturbing of the stories I heard. As I said, Elinor formed a coven, thirteen of them, including her. They engaged in many rituals, from simple devil worship to necromancy. On one particular occasion Elinor decided she wanted to summon Satan himself to bear witness to her devotion to him. According to the stories, the others in the coven weren’t so keen on the idea and only four turned up for the ritual. Well, they and Elinor certainly conjured up something that night. Whether it was Satan or not we’ll never know. Three of the four disciples were killed outright, their bodies torn apart. The one who survived was a gibbering wreck, totally insane and raving.”

“And Elinor?”

“Elinor was found wandering around in the woods the next day, naked and dazed. She’d been raped and badly beaten, but she wouldn’t talk about it to anyone. A few months later, obviously pregnant, she turned up at the church and sought out the vicar there at that time, a man named, appropriately enough, Parsons, Caleb Parsons. She was seeking forgiveness for her past ways, offering to devote herself to God for the rest of her life.”

“So what did Parsons do?”

“He forgave her and welcomed her into the congregation. When the baby was born Parsons made every effort to keep Elinor and the child on the path of righteousness.”

“And did he succeed?”

“According to the journal he left, yes, he did. Elinor became a pillar of society, a devout believer and a mainstay of the church. Whatever happened to her that night in the wood changed her forever.”

“And yet she was still killed as a witch.”

“Ironic, isn’t it?” Wright said. “But then there was always more to the deaths of the Yardley sisters than the simple desire to eradicate witchcraft. Jacob Barker, the Lancashire magistrate who instigated the campaign against the Yardleys, was no saint. In fact, he was a thoroughly evil man. He wanted to get rid of the sisters because their land bordered his and he wanted it. The Yardleys’ land had a river running through it, Barker’s didn’t, and he wanted access to that water supply. To him the answer was simple—get rid of the Yardleys and claim the land for himself. The fact that they were self-confessed witches played straight into his hands. With the backing of the church he could justifiably hunt them down and kill them, which is exactly what he did.”

“So Elinor was killed. What happened to the child?” Bailey said.

“Well. For the first ten years you could say the child had a normal childhood. Jacob Barker’s men didn’t catch up with Elinor until the child was eleven.”

“Was the child a boy or a girl?”

“A girl,” Wright said. “And when I say she had a normal childhood, there were stories about her that belie that.”

“What kind of stories?”

“Apocryphal, for the most part. Stories brought about by the fact that Elinor Yardley was her mother and all the attendant baggage that brought with it. In the eyes of the church—well, Caleb Parsons in particular—Elinor may have changed and embraced Christ, but people in the area were distrustful, based on her past, which wasn’t really that unreasonable. So Elinor’s daughter was tarred with the same brush. There was talk that she had strange powers, that if anyone crossed her she would turn them into a frog or a rat…the usual nonsense. I know she was shunned by the other children at the time. They refused to play with her and wouldn’t let her join in with their games. Consequently the girl grew up very much a loner, which only added to the stories.” Wright paused, got up from the table and went across to a shelf at the back of the vestry. When he returned he was clutching a small, vellum-bound book. He sat down again and opened the book. “This is one of Caleb Parsons’ journals. Let me read you something.”

“Go ahead,” Bailey said.