The Witching Hour (Lives of the Mayfair Witches 1)

"Aye, and that is what makes it so interesting to me," she said. "That on its own it cannot think, do you not see? It cannot gather its thoughts together; it was the call of Suzanne which gathered it; it was the call of Deborah which concentrated it further, and gave it the purpose to raise the storm; and I have called it into the old man, and it delights in these tricks, and peers through his eyes at us as if it were human, and is much amused. Do you not see, I love this being for its changing, for its development, as it were."

"Dangerous!" I whispered. "The thing is a liar."

"No, that is impossible. I thank you for your warnings, but they are so useless as to be laughable." Here she reached for the bottle and filled my glass again.

But I did not take it.

"Charlotte, I implore you ... "

"Petyr," she said, "let me be plainspoken with you, for you deserve as much. We strive for many things in life; we struggle against many obstacles. The obstacle of Suzanne was her simple mind and her ignorance; of Deborah that she had been brought up a peasant girl in rags. Even in her castle, she was that frightened country lass always, counting Lasher as the sole cause of her fortune, and nothing else.

"Well, I am no village cunning woman, no frightened merry-begot, but a woman born to riches, and educated from the time I can remember, and given all that I could possibly desire. And now in my twenty-second year, already a mother and soon perhaps to be a widow, I rule in this place. I ruled before my mother gave to me all her secrets, and her great familiar, Lasher, and I mean to study this thing, and make use of it, and allow it to enhance my considerable strength.

"Now surely you understand this, Petyr van Abel, for we are alike, you and I, and with reason. You are strong as I am strong. Understand as well that I have come to love this spirit, love, do you hear me? For this spirit has become my will!"

"It killed your mother, beautiful daughter," I said. Whereupon I reminded her of all that was known of the trickery of the supernatural in tales and fables, and what the moral was: this thing cannot be fully understood by reason, and cannot by reason be ruled.

"My mother knew you for what you were," she said sadly, shaking her head, and offering me the wine which I did not take. "You of the Talamasca are as bad as the Catholics and the Calvinists, when all is said and done."

"No," I said to her. "Of a different ilk entirely. We draw our knowledge from observation and experience! We are of this age, and like unto its surgeons and physicians and philosophers, not the men of the cloth!"

"Which means what?" she sneered.

"The men of the cloth look to revelation, to Scripture as it were. When I tell you of the old tales of demons, it is to draw attention to a distilled knowledge! I do not say take the Demonologie on its face, for it is poison. I say read what is worthwhile and discard the rest."

She gave no reply.

"You say you are educated, my daughter, well then consider my father, a surgeon at the University of Leiden, a man who went to Padua to study, and then to England to hear the lectures of William Harvey, who learned French that he might read the writings of Pare. Great doctors cast aside the 'scripture' of Aristotle and Galen. They learn from the dissection of dead bodies, and from the dissection of live animals! They learn from what they observe! That is our method. I am saying look at this thing, look at what it has done! I say that it brought down Deborah with its tricks. It brought down Suzanne."

Silence.

"Ah, but you give me the means to study it better. You tell me to approach it as a doctor might approach it. And be done with incantations and the like."

"Ah, for this I came here," I sighed.

"You have come here for better things than this," she said, and gave me a most devilish and charming smile. "Come now, let us be friends. Drink with me."

"I would go to bed now."

She gave a sweet laugh. "So would I," she said. "By and by."

Again she pushed the glass at me, and so to be polite I took it and drank, and there came the drunkenness again as if it had been hovering like an imp in the bottle. "No more," I said.

"Oh, yes, my finest claret, you must drink it." And once again she pushed it at me.

"All right, all right," I said to her and drank.

Did I know, then, Stefan, what was to happen? Was I even then peering over the edge of the glass at her succulent little mouth and juicy little arms?

"Oh, sweet beautiful Charlotte," I said to her. "Do you know how I love you? We have spoken of love, but I have not told you ... "

"I know," she whispered lovingly to me. "Don't upset yourself, Petyr. I know." She rose and took me by the arm.

"Look," I said to her, for it seemed the lights below were dancing in the trees, dancing as if they were fireflies, and the trees themselves seemed quite alive and to be watching us, and the night sky to rise higher and higher, its moonlit clouds rising beyond the stars.

"Come, dearest," she said, now pulling me down the stairs, for I tell you, Stefan, my limbs were weakened by the wine. I was stumbling.

A low music had meantime commenced, if one could call it that, for it was made up entirely of African drums, and some eerie and mournful horn playing which I found I liked and then did not like at all.

"Let me go, Charlotte," I said to her, for she was pulling me towards the cliffs. "I would go to bed now."

"Yes, and you shall."

"Then why do we go to the cliffs, my dear? You mean to throw me over the edge?"

She laughed. "You are so handsome in spite of all your propriety and your Dutch manners!" She danced in front of me, with her hair blowing in the breeze, a lithesome figure against the dark glittering sea.

Ah, such beauty. More beautiful even than my Deborah. I looked down and saw the glass was in my left hand, most strange, and she was filling it once more, and I was so thirsty for it that I drank it down as if it were ale.

Taking my arm once more, she pointed the way down a steep path, which led perilously close to the edge, but I could see a roof beyond and light and what seemed a whitewashed wall.

"Do you think I am ungrateful for what you've told me?" she said in my ear. "I am grateful. We must talk more of your father, the physician, and of the ways of those men."

"I can tell you many things, but not so that you use them to do evil." I looked about me, stumbling still, and trying to see t

he slaves who played the drums and the horn, for surely they were very near. The music seemed to echo off the rocks and off the trunks of the trees.

"Ah, and so you do believe in evil!" She laughed. "You are a man of angels and devils, and you would be an angel, like the angel Michael who drove the devils into hell." She placed her arm about me so that I did not fall, her breasts crushed up against me, and her soft cheek touching my shoulder.

"I do not like that music," I said. "Why must they play it?"

"Oh, it makes them happy. The planters hereabouts do not think sufficiently about what makes them happy. If they did they would get more from them, but now we are back to observations, are we not? But come now, such pleasures await you," she told me.

"Pleasures? Oh, but I do not care for pleasures," I said, and my tongue was thick again and my head swimming and I could not get accustomed to the music.

"What on earth are you saying, you do not care for pleasures!" she scoffed. "How can one not care for pleasures?"

We had come to the small building, and I saw in the bright light of the moon that it was a house of sorts with the usual pitched roof, but that it was built to the very edge of the cliff. Indeed the light I had seen came from the front of it, which perhaps was open, but we could gain entrance only through a heavy door, which she did unbar from the outside.

She was still laughing at me, for what I had said, when I stopped her.

"What is this, a prison!"

"You are in prison, within your body," she said, and pushed me through the door.

I drew myself up and meant to go back out, but the door was shut and being bolted by others. I heard the bolt slide into place. I looked about me, in anger and confusion.

A spacious apartment I saw, with a great four-poster bed, fit for the king of England, though it was fitted out in muslin rather than velvet, and in the netting they use here to fend off the mosquitoes, and on either side of it burned candles. Rugs covered the tiled floor, and indeed the front of the little house was entirely open, its shutters back, but I soon saw why, for to walk even ten steps out was to come to a balustrade, and beyond that, I soon saw upon clumsy investigation, as she held my arm to steady me, was nothing but a great plunge to the beach below and the lapping sea.