“I didn’t love my son enough—at least not during his life.” Lady Hartley shook her head. “My son starved to death while I was in France. Poole tried to tell me it was consumption that took him, but I could see the truth of it. I could see that it was her fault for leaving him alone down here to waste away and mine for abandoning him. I was his mother, and I hid him away so that I could have the life I desired. I loved him too much to let him live with others who might have cared for him, and not enough to claim him as my own. Poole fled, taking my secrets with her, and has used them to her profit ever since. And I took my boy back to his father’s house. It seemed fitting somehow. After all, Clifton had abandoned me. He’d let our son die just as much as I had. If he’d only stood up against me, forced me to marry him, then perhaps . . . Well, it was too late. I had heard what had become of Clifton. The more his wife ailed, the more the guilt of our past consumed him, and he was lost to bad men and evil ways, trying to drown away his horror by revelling with his cohorts and whores amongst the trees, fancying themselves bacchanalians. So in I went, quiet as a mouse, with my little boy in my arms. I had the secrets I needed. I gathered them all, all the female gods, the wisewomen and the moon, and wove them together as one. All I needed was the right place and a sacrifice. A child’s life for my son’s. If I can find the right boy, the right soul to please the old gods and the devil himself, I can bring my boy back to life, you see. I know I can.”

Anne watched as Lady Hartley talked, walking around and around her captives, her knife hanging loose at her side. As she passed in front of them, Charlotte tipped both her and Joseph’s cups across the floor, using her tattered skirt to cover up the pool.

“How did you get John Rafferty there?” Charlotte asked.

“I have never heard that name,” Lady Hartley said. “I went for Liston—he was to be my sacrifice, the babe born barely a year after my son. I wanted Clifton to feel the pain that I did, to see that no matter how much you drink and fight, you can never escape your sins. I underestimated Mary. I’m certain that Clifton never mentioned my name to her, but somehow the moment she saw me, she knew who I was.

“‘You are the one who drives him to madness,’ she told me. ‘You are the one I could never free his heart from.’”