Free Witchrise by Victoria Lamb Page A

your father catalogue his book collection, then it was a deception of the mind and we must beware your mother’s spell book. Agreed?’
    Climbing the stairs of my father’s house, I hesitated, then turned towards my brother’s chamber. The door stood open.
    I pushed it slightly, just as I had done in my dream, and peered inside. My brother’s bed was empty and in disarray, his bolsters askew, the blankets tossed higgledy-piggledy onto the floor.
    ‘Looking for me?’
    I jumped, turning to find William directly behind me on the narrow landing. He looked at my face, grinning. ‘Did I startle you? You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.’
    A ghost, I thought faintly. I had seen one or two in my time, thinking back to the dark spirit I had inadvertently summoned at court, to poor Anne Boleyn’s silvery outline floating above the Lady Elizabeth’s bed. And to my own mother . . .
    I would almost have welcomed a ghost at that moment if it meant my mother’s spell book could be trusted. It would kill me to think that her spells and secret musings on magick – written in her own hand and set down purposely for me to study – should be considered suspect.
    ‘What have you been doing this morning?’ I asked.
    ‘Nothing much. I was just reading, that’s all.’ William pushed past me into his chamber, his look defensive.
    I followed him, noting the shutters thrown open to admit the chilly daylight, and the general untidiness of his room, soiled clothes strewn on the floor, last night’s candle a puddled stump on the table beside his bed. ‘Reading what?’
    My brother was frowning, a slight colour in his face. ‘And how is it your business what I was reading?’
    ‘Will, please tell me.’
    ‘Very well,’ he said gruffly. ‘I was reading poetry. There, now you know the truth. Will you tell me what all this is about?’
    So it had been a true seeing.
    I shook my head. I was not ready to tell Will about the far-seeing spell, nor admit that I had spied upon him in the privacy of his own chamber.
    ‘I have never known you read poetry before.’ I smiled, teasing him. ‘You must be in love.’
    ‘
In love?
’ Now my brother was scarlet, stumbling over his words. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about. If you were a man, Meg, and not my sister, I’d . . . I’d . . .’ Then William saw my knowing smile, and his confusion grew even worse. ‘Oh, forget it!’

SIX
A Natural Death
    The weeks advanced with infuriating quietness towards spring at Lytton Park. The snow stopped falling and a wintry sunshine melted the last of its icy whiteness from the verges. New flower stalks broke the hard earth, the trees in the park came into bud at last, and my father’s vast sow gave birth to a litter of eight wriggling piglets. A robin red-breast came to sing and beg for crumbs on my windowsill every morning, its nest hidden amidst the tangle of foliage below. The world felt very fresh and new, though the air was still chilly in the early hours when I would wake from some confused dream and stare up at the stars.
    Meanwhile, I walked or rode out with William and Richard during fine weather, helped to run the household for my father, and spent my evenings by the fire in my chamber, reading my mother’s grimoire and occasionally heading outdoors to attempt a few of her minor charms when neither Richard nor my father was on hand to catch me.
    Then one afternoon in late February, supervising the beating of some filthy old tapestries hung over a wall in the spring sunshine, I heard a shout and turned to see the outline of a horseman riding steadily down the track from the main road, the sun at his back.
    I blinked and coughed in the wealth of spinning dust from the tapestries, unable to see clearly. Above me, William was hanging out of one of the casement windows, no doubt to get a better view. He shouted again and began waving his hand violently. I could not hear him, so turned, asking the servant to stop beating