Hour of the Witch(120)

There on horseback were Thomas and a fellow Mary didn’t recognize. Was it possible that her husband had left her in her jail cell and then gone to the ordinary until it closed? Apparently, it was. The other rider spotted them behind the oak.

    “Who is that? Who’s there?” he asked. Like Thomas, he was a big man. “I can see thy breath.”

The idea came to Mary that she had come so close and yet was, in fact, destined to die here. It was her winter yet. So be it. “I will go to them,” she whispered.

“Come out!” Thomas shouted. “Show thy selves!”

Peregrine pried Mary’s fingers from her arm and shocked Mary by pulling a knife from her cloak. She walked fearlessly from behind the tree and past the first rider to Sugar, her father’s horse, the knife shielded by her side.

“Peregrine?”

“Yes, ’tis me.”

“Why art thou out?” Thomas asked, his tone condescending, as if he were speaking to a toddler that was stretching its leading strings. Mary recognized, even in so short a sentence, the precise enunciation he used when he was drink-drunk.

“We should both be in our beds, Father,” she said.

Thomas spoke to his drinking companion. “Sam, this is my daughter. I have no idea why she is not home. I, of course, have but an empty bed. But this one? She has her gambler to warm.”

“Thy bed won’t be cold long, Thomas,” said his friend, chuckling. “Thy servant will be thy wife.”

“And my life will be much improved.” Then he climbed down from Sugar. “Peregrine, I shall bring thee home. I haven’t a pillion, but we can walk. Thou canst tell me what devilment thou art up to at this godless hour.”

“Dost thou feel nothing about the fact thy wife will be hanged tomorrow?” Peregrine asked.

“No,” he said, his voice ice. “She is the spatter at the bottom of a sick man’s slop pot. I am thankful only that she was barren and brought forth no demons. The Devil can have her.”

“Thy father,” Sam told her, “has endured too much already at the hands of that witch.”

    “Come, Peregrine,” Thomas commanded. “Sam, I will see thee soon enough.”

“Dost thou plan to watch her swing tomorrow?” Sam asked him.

“I do not. That face is ugly enough to me while it breathes. In death? It will be a mask too vile to bear.”

“Father, she is—”

Abruptly, Thomas took his daughter by the throat. “Enough!” he yelled, before calming ever so slightly. “Enough. I know thou art out tonight because thou hast plans that will wind thee in the same crater as Mary. Let me bring thee home and save thy soul.”

Sam climbed off his horse, nearly stumbling he was so inebriated. Then, slurring his words, he said, “Thomas, it doesn’t seem thy can manage thine own seed.”

Thomas looked back and forth between his drinking companion and Peregrine, visibly insulted by the idea that he could not discipline his own daughter. And so he did what Mary knew he would do: he took the hand that was gripping the woman’s throat and in a motion that was swift and awful, he backhanded her across the side of her face with it, knocking her to the ground and the knife from her hand, where it bounced like a stone on the frozen earth. He bent over and picked it up, studying it for a moment as if it were but a fallen leaf or flower he didn’t recognize. Finally, he spoke: “I am going to presume thou hast this because of fears of encountering some common scoundrel in the dark, and not because thou hast plans to add patricide to thy ledger.”

“Patricide? Recall what thou just said about thy wife,” she responded, rubbing her cheek where he had struck her. From experience, Mary knew the flesh there was warm. “The words mark thee, too: thy face is ugly enough to me now while breathing. In death? It will be a mask too vile to bear.”

Thomas had to think about what she had said, slowed by the beer he had drunk. But when its import registered, he kicked her in the side, and then Sam did, too, slamming the toe of his boot into her ribs, and even muffled by the weight of her cloak, Mary could hear clearly the sound of each thud, a thump reminiscent of the hard work of tenderizing raw meat. For the briefest of seconds, Mary wondered at Sam’s complicity, how comfortable he was joining in on the beating. But he was drink-drunk and he was Thomas’s friend, and that probably was all the explanation there was. He was a man; he was a harrier.

    “Thou hast always been a whore. Look at what thou married,” Thomas was saying.

“Kick my jaw and break my neck! Isn’t that how thou killed my mother?” Peregrine hissed when her father paused his beating.

“Thou dost not believe that.”

“It is the truth. And, coward thou art, thou blamed it on a horse.”

“Thou art a fiend, child, a monster. Thou has a brain that is but white—”

“Meat?” asked Mary as she emerged from behind the tree.

“Mary?” He looked aghast, as if he were seeing an actual demon risen up from Hell, a monster with talons sharp as scythes. And so she became one. A winged Fury. She rushed at him, and he was so shocked by her presence here in the night and the speed of her assault that she was able to wrest his dagger from its scabbard and use both of her hands to spear him with it—a motion as fluid and violent as the crash of a wave. She plunged it deep and hard through the fabric of his coat, between his ribs and into his heart. He looked down at the hilt that protruded from his chest, but then he gazed at her as if seeing her for the first time.