The Daylight Gate Read Online Free PDF Page A

it for her, but Alice had always enjoyed lighting her own fire. The wood caught and crackled.
    Soon she would have to ride over to Read Hall for her appointment with Roger Nowell.
    She turned back to Edward Kelley’s letter. She read aloud: ‘
And if thou callest him, like unto an angel of the north wearing a dark costume, he will hear thee and come to thee. Yet meet him where he may be met – at the Daylight Gate
.’
    There was a rush of air through the room. The new fire flared high and the flames pushed forward from the hearth, catching the little fire screen and igniting it.
    Alice jumped up towards the burning screen, and as she did so she heard a man say her name. ‘Alice Nutter …’
    She smothered the fire screen with her bare hands, left it smouldering, and went to the study door. She opened it onto the long, dark corridor that led to her bedroom. She looked this way and that; there was no one in the corridor.
    She went back inside and closed the door. She had a feeling of foreboding. Her study felt
occupied
– that was the word that jumped into her mind.
Occupied
… and not by a person, but by a presence.
    ‘Who is here?’ she said. There was no reply, only the intensity of the feeling. She said it again. ‘Who is here?’ This time there was a movement by her desk under the window. The window was fastened, so it could not be a draught.
    The letter from Edward Kelley lay on the desk. As she watched, the letter was picked up – that was the only way to describe it – picked up as if someone were reading it. The letter hovered in the air, held by what? An invisible hand? An unearthly wind? The letter was too near the candle flame and whatever was holding it began to move it nearer. Alice watched as if she were hypnotised. The thick paper began to scorch. Alice roused herself, jumped forward and grabbed the letter – as she took it she knew that something was holding it there. She summoned her courage.
    ‘I will act when I am ready,’ she said. ‘Now get gone.’
    The window opened wide. A rush of air blew across the study. The fire had died down. The candles were steady.
    Alice closed the window and took care to latch it. She folded the letter. As she did so, she saw that where the scorch mark had extended the ink the letters seemed raised up. ‘The Daylight Gate.’ That was what the presence wanted her to read.
    She opened a small cupboard filled with phials and powders and put the letter between the bottles. She locked the cupboard. Then, as a precaution, she took a piece of chalk and drew a symbol on the back of her study door. She had never done this before but she had seen John Dee do it many times.
    Was it protection? Was it warning? Was it recognition?
    Already she was beginning the route she had never wanted to begin. The Left-Hand Path they called it.
    She did not believe in witchcraft, but she had experience of her own that there was such a thing as magick.
Magick is a method
, John Dee had said,
no more, no less than a means of bringing supernatural forces under human control
.
    She felt she was in danger. She would have to use what methods she could to save herself. It would not be the first time.
    Outside her window she heard her servant trotting out her copper mare. She went to change into her magenta riding habit. It was time to keep her appointment with Roger Nowell.

Read Hall
     
    READ HALL WAS a confident, handsome building, old and large, riddled with medieval rooms and extended with later additions. The Nowell family had lived there since the 1400s. Roger Nowell was proud of his house and proud of his line.
    The moon lit up the courtyard well enough but Roger Nowell’s serving man was waiting with a flare. As Alice Nutter rode up, a second man ran out to take her horse. She slipped easily out of the side-saddle. Her body was lithe and strong.
    Roger Nowell was a widower. Alice Nutter was a widow. They were both rich. They could have been a match. Alice’s land abutted Read