The Witch Hunter (The Witch Hunter #1)(25)

But when the quail lands in front of me, I decide it doesn’t matter. I’m starving. I reach for the platter, but John grabs my arm and pulls it back.

“Wait,” he says.

“Why?” I briefly wonder if he’s questioning my manners.

“It’s just that Hastings—that’s Nicholas’s servant—well, he’s a ghost. You have to be careful when he’s around.” John gestures at the empty air. “He usually wears a white hat so we know where he is, but sometimes he forgets. I usually wait until everything goes still before reaching for anything. I’ve made the mistake of touching him before.” He gives me a sheepish smile. “Hurt like hell.”

Being a witch hunter, I’ve seen a lot of things: revenants, ghouls, demons, and, yes, ghosts. But never ghost servants. Ghosts are known for destroying your home, possessing livestock, and suffocating you in bed, not pouring tea or fluffing pillows.

“I’ve never heard of a ghost servant before,” I say.

“He came with the house,” John says. “Used to work for the wizard who owned it before. Mostly cooking, but other things, too. Gardening, cleaning, things like that. Apparently, he was so good at his job that after he died, the wizard brought him back so he could keep doing it.”

I think of those necromancers digging up that corpse in Fortune Green. Mossy, decaying, maggots, bones gleaming in the moonlight…

I smile weakly. “Well, you know what they say. Good help is hard to find and all that.”

John laughs. Across the table, Peter looks from John to me then back to John again. He’s smiling.

“Nicholas keeps offering to send him on, but he wants to stay,” John continues. “And he’s great, really. I mean, the not seeing him part takes some getting used to, plus he’s hard to understand. Half the time it feels as if he’s just blowing in my ear.”

I manage another smile, a real one this time.

“Anyway, it looks all right now.” John nods at the table. “I imagine you’re hungry.”

“A little.” It seems rude to say yes, especially after all the trouble he went to brewing me those potions.

“Dig in, then. Hastings is an excellent cook.”

I watch him pile his plate high with food. After a minute I do the same, taking huge helpings of strawberries and cake. If Caleb saw this, he’d laugh and tell me to save room for supper. I always eat dessert first.

The mood at the table is relaxed, everyone eating and making small talk. No one speaks to me directly, and aside from the occasional glance from John, no one even looks at me. I relax a little, look around. Still amazed at what I see.

Before, whenever I thought of Nicholas Perevil, I imagined him holed up in a dank, drafty cottage somewhere. Tattered robes, matted hair, living off grubs and acorns and tea made from leaves. A fugitive. The most wanted criminal in Anglia.

The table in front of me tells a different story. I glance at my plate. Pewter, definitely valuable. The silverware. Finely wrought and highly ornate. A tablecloth made from soft-spun linen instead of coarse muslin. Fine candles made from beeswax instead of rushes dipped in tallow with a flame stinking of animal fat.

He’s not foraging for food. He’s not selling his possessions to raise an army. He’s not wanting for anything. This is the kind of information Blackwell would want to know. Information he’d pay a king’s ransom to know. Because he’ll know, as I know, it means Nicholas is receiving help—and money—from somewhere. But from where? And from who?

I pick up my glass and examine it. It’s thick and heavy, probably crystal. The stem is made up of three intertwined snakes, the bowl perched on top of their heads. I’m wondering what the disadvantage of the glassblower was—aside from having questionable taste—when Gareth speaks.

“Have you told her yet?”

Her. I set my glass down on the table with a thud. “Told me what?”

“I was going to wait until later to tell her, in private.” Nicholas’s voice is low, full of warning. Gareth seems not to notice.

“Tell me what?” I repeat.

Peter clears his throat. “The thing is, Elizabeth, Gareth just came in from Upminster,” he says. “And things there, well, they’re a little worse than they were three weeks ago.”

Three weeks ago there were protests, burnings, and I was accused of witchcraft and sentenced to death. How could things possibly be worse?

“I know Nicholas already told you about Veda, our seer, that she sent us to find you,” Peter continues. “But while she gave us your name, she didn’t give us much else. Not where you were, not what you looked like. It was down to us to figure it out.

“We managed to locate two people named Elizabeth Grey. You and a witch from Seven Sisters. We thought for certain Veda meant her. I don’t know what kind of magic she can do, but she was certainly more… formidable than you. She weighed about fifteen stone.”

Beside me, George lets out a snort.

“So we let you go. A mistake in hindsight, of course, but we’re not in the business of rounding up people for interrogation.” Peter’s dark eyes flash with sudden anger. “But if we had, we could have avoided”—he waves his hand—“all this.”

“My arrest,” I say.

“Among other things.”