It was cold. Bitter, damp, bone-chillingly cold. The darkness was unfathomable. They’d given Alice a candle, out of pity, but it was a poor stump of a thing and it had gone out long ago. Alice’s cheeks burnt with shame and indignation. She didn’t deserve to be here, crouched in the filth in the tiny village lock-up, a rat-infested basement beneath old Smithson’s cottage. She tried to drag her thoughts away from the night’s events: the horror of the mill on fire, great tongues of flame leaping up into the night sky, the heat driving back everyone who’d rushed to help, labouring to douse the flames with water from the stream. Her throat felt raw from the smoke. She could still smell it in her hair, on her clothes.
Cautiously, she edged her toe forward, probing to locate the basket that lay somewhere on the floor. This was her evidence, her best hope. This was her proof that she’d been doing as she said, gathering herbs for her mother, looking for the skullcap that needed to be picked by moonlight before it was added to the pot, to effect the most potent brew. Her mother would be frantic, wondering where Alice had got to. She’d have seen the glow of the flames lighting up the sky, heard the commotion as people rushed up and down the road, trying to muster help, find buckets or anything that could be used to collect water to quench the fire that was devouring their livelihood. She’d have been soothing Elisabeth, made fretful by Sarah’s agitation. The water would have already been on the boil, everything ready for Alice to return with the precious herbs.
Now Sarah would be standing anxiously at the garden gate in the dark, asking anyone who was passing by if they’d seen her daughter, waiting and waiting as the numbers of people returning from the fire became fewer and fewer, until the number dwindled to none. She wouldn’t know that Alice, who had been an early arrival on the scene once she’d recognised the fire for what it was, had been pointed out to the local constable by a smoke-blackened figure, wild-eyed and with a cruel twist to his mouth. She wasn’t there to see her bewildered daughter seized roughly and thrown into the back of a cart along with her basket. She didn’t hear her try to protest, or witness her struggle as her hands were bound roughly with rope and she was pushed into the bottom of the cart with a coarse blanket thrown over her.
‘Stay quiet, missie.’ The voice had been rough, angry. ‘You’ve caused enough trouble for one night. It’s lucky that Williams spotted you before you could scarper.’