closed my fingers over the pipe. ‘The witchpricker. Go to her.’
With a tremendous effort I turned away and threw the foul thing on the floor. The head broke off and rolled to the corner. The men were now looking at me, faces wrinkled in surprise. The man in the blue coat stood up.
‘This is evil. Can’t you see it?’ I implored him, my voice breaking as if unused for years.
He said nothing. His companion stooped down to the broken pipe and picked it up gingerly. ‘Then we will bury it, Master, on sacred ground.’ He looked at me with uncertainty.
I wrenched myself away from them and looked back at the terrible sight of the young girl splayed on the chair. The old girl stood by her, idly tugging a lock of Rebecca’s hair.
Anger exploded out of me. ‘For God’s sake, woman, release her.’
The old lady’s face turned up to me, neck still stooped, bony shoulders hunched, hands grabbing themselves together. ‘Let her go?’
Doubt had sharpened her features, lending her a vulture-like aspect. ‘But she has confessed …’
I had started shaking, fear overtaking horror. I had to get out of here. Willing my body towards the door, I made for the bedroom. ‘Cut the bonds.’
Another voice, one of the men. I didn’t turn round to see who. ‘To the castle?’
My strength was ebbing. I was focused only on escaping the vile scene. ‘Yes, yes.’
As I unbolted the door I heard the old woman cackle, knowingly. ‘At your pleasure, sir. I daresay she will have her uses.’
Then I was through, back in the bedroom, amongst the duck-egg blue wallpaper and Egyptian cotton sheets. I turned round and looked at the wall behind me. No woodwork. No frame. Nothing to indicate there was a doorway there at all or ever had been.
I staggered forwards onto the bed and threw myself face down. Minutes later I rushed to the bathroom and brought up my dinner.
Chapter Thirty
It was sick. Utterly sick.
I was sick.
What the hell was I doing? Dreams of the Witchfinder’s sadistic perversion were not what I had ever expected to find here.
When I came out of the bathroom I sat back on the bed, trying to ground myself.
The ambience had returned to normal. The subtle background of twenty-first-century Essex replenished the room. My laptop buzzed on the floor, and beyond it I could hear the clinking of the kitchen staff clearing up after a regular Wednesday night, the low gurgle of a TV from a room down the hall.
The whole episode had taken no more than a matter of minutes but I felt like the life had been sucked out of me. Ill with shame, repulsed by the sexual quickening, I recalled the unholy sight of Rebecca tortured and bound. Why had she shown me that? It was so disturbing. So damn wrong.
Because that was what happened, said a voice inside my head. It was right. I knew it. That scene was the essence of the witch hunts – a hideous game that pitted the powerful against powerless. The motivation of the hunters was simply conquest.
And what of the pipe? Had he used it to suck their blood? Is that what that was all about? I could not bear to think about it. Especially as it had an uncanny resemblance to the thing that I had unearthed at St Boltoph’s in Colchester. The pipe that Felix had blown. ‘Qui est isti qui venit – Who is this who is coming?’
It was too much to take in.
And I was simply unable to process it. Even as I thought about that pipe, my brain’s survival techniques began to kick in and I found myself in a fog of confusion that began to obliterate parts of the memory. The more I tried to think about it, the less I was able to recall.
Perhaps it was shock. I don’t know. But whatever it was, it left me in a state.
After another thirty minutes or so I realised that I was so shaken and wired I would never go to sleep naturally. So I did something I had only done once since Mum died. I plucked a sleeping pill from my toiletries bag. Within twenty minutes I’d started to relax.
That night as I slept the experiences whirled, weaved and reconfigured my internal compass. Though I didn’t realise it then, by morning a new course had been mapped for my life.
Soon I would cast off.
Chapter Thirty-One
Mistley Churchyard, allegedly the site of Hopkins’ burial, was way out on the heath.