Page 1 of The Snow Witch

PROLOGUE

MIDWINTER, 1650

He rolled over onto his back, and threw the dagger to the side, covering his face with his crossed forearms as the despair and loss shook him physically as well as mentally.

He was aware of a smooth sliding noise, and turned his face, seeing the dagger slip inexorably down to the Well. He should just let it disappear, sink in there, be lost forever…

But then he rolled towards it and grabbed it, still sobbing, as he tossed it away across the other side of the field. He would deal with it later. He would put it back where he found it.

He could not let something like that contaminate Coventina’s Well.

That blade was stained with blood now.

And there was no going back.

1

NOW

It was probably not the most sensible of things to do. But when had Violet ever been sensible? If Violet had been sensible a few months ago, she probably would not be in this position now. Weeks away from the deadline on a book, and, well, add that to everything else she needed to think about and she absolutely needed this break.

She pondered it all as she got out of the car at Brocolitia, a spot on Hadrian’s Wall that held a certain fascination for her. The Wall itself was an ancient monument that cut across northern England from Wallsend in the east to Bowness-on-Solway on the west. Seventy-three miles of stone, built two thousand years ago.

It was an incredible feat.

‘Bloody clever, those Romans,’ she muttered. Kudos to the men who had built it, working in conditions like this. She shivered. It was February in the northeast of England. What did she expect?

Luckily, she was from the northeast herself; she lived close to the universities in Jesmond, a leafy suburb of Newcastle that she had lived in since she was a student, and her family home was a bit further east on the coast at Tynemouth. So it wasn’t as if she was unused to cold weather.

But here – the atmosphere was different. Much bleaker, much emptier and much more remote than she had expected.

But that was good. It was exactly what she needed. And the place – worked – for what she wanted. It was exactly fitting.

Violet had come to Hadrian’s Wall to research a book; as a historian, it was an academic tome on the whole concept of sacred spaces and folklore, and the genuine persecution of innocent, misjudged women was central to it – basically, witch trials. And thus, she had come up to Hadrian’s Wall to see what she could find. An odd connection, perhaps, to the Newcastle Witch Trials she had been researching, but there was a reason for it.

Everybody talked about Pendle Hill in Lancashire, and the Bury St Edmunds trial, but the figures in the northeast of England spoke for themselves. Thirty people, mainly women, were hauled to account at Newcastle, dragged down from Newgate Prison to the Guildhall on the Quayside to stand trial. Pendle had eleven witches. Bury St Edmunds had eighteen.

So, Violet considered, the Newcastle trials were the largest in English history.

And the connection she had made to those trials was poignant – she knew that very close by to Brocolitia, where a Roman Mithraic Temple nestled in a quiet sloping valley, was a stream. The stream flowed from an ancient goddess’s sacred spring, and the stream was named after a woman accused of witchcraft. Violet was intrigued – or maybe obsessed – but the fact was that here, on Hadrian’s Wall, she had stumbled upon a layered history of female spiritual figures spanning nearly two millennia, and it was all associated with this waterway.

Violet had booked into a B & B just up from where she was parked, and she could see the solid old building just on the crest of the hill.

But she’d check in there later.

It was late afternoon, and there weren’t many people about on the Wall; and to be honest, the peace was a welcome break from all the noise in her life.

As she stood by the car, looking over a low stone wall, Violet took in what she could see before her. Rolling green hills stretched across the countryside towards Hexham, and then a few miles east of where she stood was Newcastle: Violet’s hometown, and the site of those infamous Witch Trials, culminating in the execution of fifteen witches on the Town Moor.

It made her blood boil, if she was honest. Being named Violet Marsh was very close to being named after the Perthshire witch Violet Mar. She had learned about her at school and hadn’t heard the last of it from her schoolmates for a very long time.

Violet Mar had been executed in 1577 after being accused of plotting the murder of Regent Morton, the ruler of Scotland. Modern-day Violet didn’t know much about 1577 Violet, but she did know that some very influential people had been involved in the accusations against her – so much so that Annabell Murray, the Countess of Mar’s, involvement had probably shaped King James VI’s attitude towards so-called witches. Poor Violet had been tried and convicted on the same day. Modern-day Violet found that appalling. There was no way she could right those wrongs, but she could at least try and find out a little about this place and the witch it memorialised: Meggie.

But first, she had to find where she was looking for.

In the far, far distance, she could see more hills on the horizon. The North Pennines, she thought. And on the other side of the road, if she looked that way, to the north, she knew the Scottish Borders were just teasing her over that horizon.

What had absorbed her during her research was the entirety of it all; basically, the way everything was clustered about this place fascinated her: the temple, the Burn, the sacred spring and even the abandoned Roman Fort – Carrawburgh – which stood guard over it all. But the Burn was the most fascinating of all.