The Jezebel Read Online Free PDF Page A

gifts to teach them her craft, rooting the ancient ways in them. Maisie pictured Lennox as a wily, rebellious lad who cared for his sisters nonetheless. And her fey twin, who was wilder even than she. Had they thought of her as she had of them?
    Let them be safe and free in our birthplace, she wished as she drifted toward sleep, hoping that she would find them there. So many years had passed since they’d been torn apart. Too long. Pain twisted inside her as she remembered the day.
    * * *
    On the day her mother was put to death on a charge of witchcraft, Cyrus Lafayette and his wife, Beth, claimed Maisie Taskill.
    Maisie and her sister had been forced to watch their mother stoned until she was close to death, before the villagers forced her upright to stagger to the gallows, where she could see her own funeral pyre as the rope went around her neck. The villagers decided the lad, Lennox, was too far under the devil’s influence to be saved. They said he should be destroyed.
    Maisie heard every word they spoke about her and her kin, and a deep part of her became locked in a prison of fear and horror in response.
    The villagers decided the two girl children were young enough to be redeemed, if they were taught the wrongness and evil of their mother’s ways. So it was that Maisie had been placed on a pillar at the kirk gates alongside her twin. With the church at their backs and the persecution of their mother before their eyes, they were supposed to learn what was wrong and what was right. Both girls learned what was wrong, because they balked at what the villagers said was right.
    Maisie had struggled to stand upright on the stone pillar, but had kept her silence as she had been ordered to do by the people gathered there. Her brother had already been dragged away, lashing out and cursing the villagers. Jessie had whimpered and flailed, and Maisie wanted to go to her sister and help her, but could not.
    Instead, the two of them were made to watch, made to suffer every wound and insult as their mother suffered. When she tried to turn her face away and close her eyes, Maisie was prodded by the man stationed nearby, his task to force her to observe.
    Maisie had all but fainted from the horror unfolding before her when a man in coachman’s livery pushed through the crowd and lifted her down from the pillar. The villagers did not stop him.
    Maisie could not even attempt to break free, for she was in shock, petrified by what she had witnessed. The coachman had a scowl on his face and a whip in his hand, and she’d believed she was about to meet the same fate as her mother. However, the man held her tightly to him, with both arms around her, as he made his way back through the crowd. He did not speak, and Maisie had been so afraid, she could scarcely understand what was going on around her.
    He took her to a coach, and a grand coach it was. When the door opened, she was taken from the coachman’s arms by another man. He stood her on her feet in the interior and examined her before indicating the coachman should close the door.
    The din of the crowd grew muffled once the door shut. Maisie trembled violently, her legs buckling under her.
    The man put his hands beneath her elbows, easily holding her slight form in place. Then he forced her to look at him directly by putting a finger under her chin.
    Maisie’s first glimpse of Cyrus Lafayette was not reassuring, for he was an imposing man with dark hair and intense green eyes.
    “Your name is Margaret?”
    She nodded.
    Interest flickered in his eyes. He seemed to approve of what he saw. Instinct warned her that he knew what she was. Maisie could see it in his eyes and she shied back. But he smiled, and his eyes glittered, as if he was pleased.
    “Poor child,” a woman’s voice behind her said, and Maisie found herself drawn backward into a comforting embrace. Shivering with fear and shock, she barely felt the woman’s touch and could not fight it. Lifted onto the woman’s lap,