The Hidden Evil Read online

  She pulled at her horse’s bridle.

  ‘I will go back the way I came,’ she thought, and then realised with a sudden sense of dismay that she could not move.

  The men’s hands were at the horse’s head. They hemmed her in. They were shouting and arguing with one another and all the time looking at her and with a shudder she knew that their eyes were full of hate.

  “Let the horse go,” she said at first quietly and then angrily, “Let him go, I say.”

  As no one heeded her, it was obviously impossible for the horse to move.

  She bent forward with her whip, intending to tap lightly on the hands of those who held the reins but the man who had been preaching from the tree trunk sprang forward and, before she realised what he was about, seized the whip from her and, taking it in his hands, he broke it across his knee.

  “That is what we must do to her!” he yelled. “Break her as she has tried to break France. We can save our King, save him from the sorcery of this evil woman.”

  It was both his words and the expression on his face that told Sheena what he thought.

  “Listen,” she then called out, shouting above the noise. “If you think I am the Duchesse de Valentinois, you are mistaken, I am not the Duchesse.”

  There was a sudden roar at the words and then Sheena found herself being dragged from the saddle, rough hands pulled her down and she felt herself thrust forward, half-carried and half -propelled, until she stood beside the tree trunk, two men holding her hands behind her.

  She was frightened, but she would not let them see it.

  “Will you listen?” she said to the man who had been speaking. “I am not the Duchesse. I am Sheena McCraggan from Scotland. You have no right to treat me in this way.”

  Even as she spoke she realised with horror that they were all past listening to her. Their leader was on the trunk again, haranguing the others, his voice, harsh and excitable, ringing out.

  “The whore has been delivered into our hands!” he screamed out. “The harlot who has bewitched and enslaved our King is our prisoner. Here is the woman who by her evil magic has traduced our fair land and sold her own soul to the Devil. What shall we do with her? Is it not right that we should punish her?”

  “Yes! Yes!” the men roared back at him.

  “We could make her suffer for her sins,” the speaker went on. “We could flog her and humiliate her as our own people have been flogged and humiliated at her command. Or we could treat her as she has treated our friends and comrades – our comrades in the struggle for freedom. What has she done to them? I ask you, brothers, what has she done to them?”

  There was a yell which seemed to blast its way into Sheena’s ears.

  “She has burnt them!” they roared.

  “Then let us treat her likewise,” the Preacher shouted. “Let her feel the torment that she has meted out to others and let us pray that as she burns our King will be free of her and her spell will be destroyed.”

  “Burn her! Burn her!” they yelled in unison.

  With a sudden unexpected movement Sheena wrenched herself free of the men who were holding her and, reaching up, caught the arm of the man standing above her on the tree trunk.

  “Look at me, you fool,” she yelled. “I am young. I am only seventeen. Can it be possible that you believe me to be the Duchesse who is an old woman?”

  He looked down at her.

  “The Devil has made you fair,” he replied. “See if the Devil can save you now.”

  She saw with indescribable horror that his eyes were wild, the eyes of a fanatic and a man driven beyond himself. She saw too that his oratory had brought a dribble of saliva to his lips and that he was almost in a state of ecstasy.

  He shook his arm free of her and raised his hands towards the crowd.

  “You have decided what is right and good. The Lord has been very kind to us. But hurry, brothers, lest the Devil who befriends her should spirit her away.”

  With a terror that was almost intolerable, Sheena felt the rough hands holding her again and knew it would be impossible to escape. Each man’s hold was like an iron clamp upon her delicate arm.

  At the same time she realised that they held her away from them as if the very nearness of her was a contamination.

  They touched her, but they were afraid and she knew with a kind of helplessness that nothing she could say would convince them that she was not the Duchesse de Valentinois.

  And now the Preacher had burst into a wild prayer, a prayer of thankfulness to God for delivering the King’s harlot into their hands and for giving them the opportunity to rid France of the scourge that had lain on all of them these past ten years.

  “Send her, O Lord,” he was shouting, “into the Hell of the damned. Let her unclean body burn and rot until the worms destroy it. Let her heart be eaten by the dogs and her eyes be gouged out by birds of prey.”

  It could not be true! This could not be happening to her, Sheena thought.

  She too wanted to pray and yet no words would come. She could only stand captive and yet at the same time was conscious of a kind of strange numbness that made it impossible for her to cry out or even to ask for mercy.

  She watched the men come running from the wood with a high stake, which they placed in the middle of the clearing. One man climbed up on another’s shoulders and hammered it into position. And others came bearing sticks, logs and branches of trees, which they grouped around the stake until the pile was about three feet off the ground.

  At last Sheena realised that they were now ready and they turned, as if awaiting further instructions, to the man who was still praying, the froth from his mouth running down over his chin and beard.

  She remembered then how the men like him had shrieked at the Duchesse as she and the King had walked up the steps towards The Palace and how Mary Stuart had told her that they would be burnt at the stake. She knew now, although she had never heard what had happened to them, that it had been done.

  There was no hope for her and no reprieve and so she could only pray with some faraway critical part of herself that her pride would sustain her through the ordeal and that she would not die ignominiously and as was unbefitting to a Scot.

  At the same time she was practical enough to know that there was no point in pleading, that nothing she could say would either be listened to or heard. These men had faith in their cause, believed what they were saying was the truth. And she was not dealing with ordinary people.

  The stake was finished and the last man to throw a log at the foot of it came towards her. He was a large burly man and, by his bulging muscles and the leather apron he wore, Sheena guessed that he was a blacksmith.

  He shouted at the Preacher, interrupting his prayers.

  “Is the Devil’s spawn ready for the burnin’?”

  The man who was praying stopped abruptly.

  “She is ready,” he replied. “And be careful she’s tied tightly to the stake and so Satan himself cannot come on wings and carry her off.”

  The blacksmith hesitated for a moment.

  “Will she burn as she is?” he asked. “Or like our own people with little to cover them save a shift?”

  “Do we treat a harlot any better than those who have found favour with the Lord?” the Preacher enquired.

  Sheena then tried to struggle, but there was nothing she could do. The blacksmith put out his great hand and pulled at the jacket of her velvet habit. The jet buttons burst and scattered on the ground and he dragged it from her shoulders and off her arms and, although she tried to clutch at her skirt, it too was torn from her.

  Then she had to cease struggling and try to hold the torn remnants of her shift across her naked breasts. The blacksmith then picked her up in his arms and carried her to the stake. She smelt the pungent animal smell of him and the smell too of excitement and fear.

  He set her down on the pile of logs and there were other hands as well as his binding her with ropes around the waist to below her knees.
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  She tried again to clutch at her shift and hold it across her breasts, but it was impossible and she stood there naked to the waist and she knew, in some manner that made it almost worse, that the men’s eyes who beheld her were filled only with loathing and disgust.

  She was tied securely.

  The ropes cut into her soft flesh and hurt her almost unbearably, but even as she thought of it, she realised how stupid it was to complain when the pain she was to feel a few moments later would be so much much worse.

  She crossed her hands over her breasts and knew that she was trembling with fear and yet she was still in possession of enough self-control to try one more plea.

  “I wish to speak,” she cried. “Hear me! Hear me!”

  The chatter of tongues ceased for one moment.

  “I am innocent,” she told then them. “I am not the Duchesse de Valentinois. I come from Scotland. If you burn me, you will burn only someone who has done you no harm. Believe me, for I speak the truth and in the name of God I beg of you to let me go.”

  There was silence for a moment as she finished and then with a great shout the man who had been praying yelled,

  “’Tis a trick! She lies to save herself! ’Tis a trick! Close your ears, brothers, and do the will of God, which is to free the world of such filth.”

  Hurriedly, as if they were half-ashamed of having listened, the men surged forward to do his bidding. One man had kindled a flame to a piece of wood and now the others ran towards him, pushing other pieces into the darting fire and shielding them with their hands against the wind.

  Sheena closed her eyes. She thought of Scotland and of the quiet and peace of the moors, of the burn at the end of the garden trickling down over heavy stones.

  She thought of her mother and felt somehow that she was near her.

  “Make me brave,” she whispered. “Let them not see how frightened I am. Please, God, do not let me scream at the pain.”

  There was the smell of smoke in her nostrils and she opened her eyes to see the men already kindling the logs at the bottom of the pile.

  It would be some time before the fire reached her and yet already the little flames were beginning to dart amongst the brushwood, running along a branch and then petering out only to be revived again elsewhere.

  The Preacher was at his prayers again.

  “We burn this woman, O Lord, as we burn away the sins of those who blacken the fair name of France. Destroy her and destroy all those who batter down the poor and hungry and exalt only the rich. Help us to throw off all that is corrupt and wicked in our midst and save our King that he may rule over us in decency and pureness of heart.”

  Other voices joined in.

  “Burn her, O Lord! Burn her! And let the evil she has perpetrated die with her.”

  “Burn her! Burn her!”

  The men repeated themselves over and over again.

  The flames were creeping higher. The smoke was beginning to overpower Sheena and she could feel her eyes smart and water.

  The voice of the Preacher was rising excitedly. Now he was almost in a frenzy.

  “May all the harlots and all whores be destroyed in such a manner,” he was screaming. “Bring down on them the wrath and destruction of the Lord. May they rot in the Hell of their own creating. May they burn as those who have died for right have been burned, but in the torment not only of the mind but of the soul.”

  Sheena felt a sudden flame flicker on her foot and bit back a scream of pain as it rose in her throat.

  Now it was coming. She was going to be burnt and her body would be charred black and lifeless and no one would ever know what had happened to her.

  She wanted to cry out and yet still her pride kept her silent.

  “Oh, God, save me!” she whispered and she longed in that moment to have someone to call on for help. Her father, how far away he was. She had no friends anywhere, no one who would think of her when she was dead.

  Almost unbidden, the Duc’s face came into her mind and even as it did so she heard a sudden shout from the men around her.

  It was a shout not of exaltation but of fear.

  “They are coming!”

  She heard the words distinctly and then there was a clatter of harness and horses’ hoofs, of men’s voices and then the scream of those who were injured. She saw someone on a horse gallop up to the Preacher and run him through with a sword so that his body for one moment stood suspended on the tree trunk, his mouth open, his eyes protruding and before he toppled over backwards, blood gushing over his shirt.

  There seemed to Sheena to be horses and men everywhere. The flame was licking again at her foot and she closed her eyes in an effort not to scream and then realised that there were men at her side kicking the burning logs away from the stake.

  There were screams of terror and agony, the snorts of horses and the jangle of harnesses. The rope that bound her to the stake was being cut.

  She would have fallen if someone had not put his arms round her.

  She knew who it was and still she dare not open her eyes.

  It was not only that she did not wish to look at him, it was because she was ashamed of her own nakedness, of her bare breasts smudged with smoke and her torn shift gathered over her hips.

  Then, as she stumbled forward, a soft velvet cloak enveloped her and strong arms lifted her off the ground.

  “Is she badly burned?” she heard someone ask and the Duc’s voice from above her head replied,

  “I think not, but the shock must have been really terrible, poor child.”

  She had never heard such kindness in his voice before.

  Surprised more than anything else, she opened her eyes and looked up at him. His face was not very far from hers.

  “It is all right,” he said quietly and soothingly. “You are safe.”

  To her dismay her self-control broke and her whole body was racked with sobs.

  She hid her face against his shoulder and cried uncontrollably as a child might cry who had been alone and frightened in the dark.

  “It is all right, it is all right,” she heard him mutter.

  She felt him lift her onto the front of his saddle and spring up behind her.

  Then the noise and shouting were left behind and they were riding quietly through the wood.

  Gradually the tempest of her tears ceased and, while she still hid her face against him and her breath came in quick sobs, she was no longer shaken by a torrent she could not control.

  “It is all right, Sheena,” she heard him say very gently. “You are safe now, thank God.”

  She felt at that moment that she had never realised before how strong and comforting a man’s arms could be.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Sheena lay on a couch with her eyes closed.

  She could feel some of the tension leaving her body and letting her breathe quietly and normally again. The physician had treated her burned feet and bandaged them and now they were covered with a soft silk rug which bore the arms of Scotland.

  For the moment she could hardly remember all the terror and panic which had been hers when she thought that she was about to die.

  Yet it seemed to her now that never had life been so desirable, so wonderful or quite so exciting and with so much promise.

  She remembered how once she had stood with her father watching a company of soldiers marching to battle and, as they passed by, whistling gaily and waving to the crofters who had cheered them on their way, he had said,

  “They give their lives gladly, they have nothing else to give.”

  But looking at the sunshine glinting over the moors, the touch of snow on the tops of the mountains and hearing the waves breaking on the shore, Sheena had thought how hard it must be to give up one’s life and how desperately difficult to go willingly on a journey from which there is no return.

  She knew that, as she had stood bound at the stake, praying that her pride would hold and sustain her she had longed passionately to live.


  And she was convinced that life, however hard and complex and however troublesome and treacherous, was preferable in every way to surrendering oneself to the darkness and the uncertainty of death.

  “I am alive!”

  She had repeated the words silently until suddenly she now found that she had said them aloud and she opened her eyes to see the Duchesse de Valentinois coming into her bedroom.

  For a moment Sheena stiffened, hating the Duchesse for what she had suffered on her account. Then she saw that there were tears in her beautiful eyes as she came towards the couch and bent down to take Sheena’s hand in hers.

  “How can I ever tell you, my child, what are my feelings that you should have suffered in this manner on my account?” she said in her soft low musical voice.

  “It is – nothing, madame,” Sheena replied, feeling somewhat at a disadvantage as she lay looking up into the Duchesse’s face.

  “On the contrary it is everything. It is wrong and shaming,” she said. “The King and I are both humiliated that a visitor from another land, a guest under the shelter of our roof, should have been treated in such a manner. If it had not been for the Duc de Salvoire, Heaven knows what might have happened.”

  “The Duc?” Sheena questioned.

  “Yes, indeed,” the Duchesse replied. “It was he who saved you. Did you not know?”

  “I-I knew that he came to my rescue as the – the flames were beginning to – burn my feet,” Sheena stammered. “But I did not understand why.”

  “The Duc was out riding with a number of his friends,” the Duchesse explained. “He saw your groom leading a lame horse back to The Palace and asked him what was amiss. The man told him that you had gone on ahead alone and that he had been unable to keep up with you.”

  The Duchesse paused for a moment and then went on, her voice warming,

  “Anyone else might have thought it of little consequence, but the Duc sometimes has an instinct that has served him in war and has now served him to save your life. He felt, as the old peasants say, in his bones that something was wrong. He called to his friends who were moving off in another direction and gathered them together. He told them what none of us knew at the time that he had heard rumours of a band of Reformers who had a secret hiding place somewhere in the woods where they met and plotted against the True Faith.”