The Perilous Gard (10 page)

"Could he see what was deep in the Well?" she demanded.

"That's where they lurk, to catch up the gold and the precious things that the pilgrims throw into the water. I'm not saying the child didn't go down the Well, mind you. I'm saying there was something come up out of the Well, and it took her."

Kate saw a sudden and intolerably vivid picture of the high carved curbstone at the Holy Well, with a long, thin, dripping arm beginning to reach over the rim.

"But how could anyone lurk down in the Well?" she protested. "It goes into a cavern below the rocks, and there's an underground river that carries everything away."

"Caverns and rivers under the ground are no more than houses and halls to some folk," said redheaded woman darkly; "and you mark my words, that's where she is now, poor little lass, a-sitting on a golden chair. They know it well enough up at the castle — and a wicked shame it is to them, too, never saying a word of the truth and letting the Young Lord break his heart with thinking he killed her. — There, there, be still now, my honey."

The little boy had stirred in her arms, and was beginning to cry fretfully. The redheaded woman bent over him. "There, there," she said.

Kate scrambled to her feet.

"I have to go," she said in an odd, breathless voice. "I have to get back to the castle."

The little boy stopped crying and stared at her fixedly.

"Apple," he said.

"Hush love, be a good boy, mother will give you an apple tomorrow," said the redheaded woman. "Sit up, my honey. Let the lady have her cloak again."

"No, no, never mind the cloak," said Kate, over her shoulder. "His own clothes are still drying. I can't wait. Keep it till I come for it."

"Anybody in the village can tell you my house," said the woman. "And — " she paused, coloring, "you needn't fear for your welcome from this day on, my lady, seeing as what you've done for — "

"Very well then," said Kate quickly. "Take it to your house for me. I have to get back to the castle now. I have to go and see — I have to tell — there's something I ought to be doing."

She had almost reached the path when she heard another cry of "My lady!" and swinging around, saw that the redheaded woman had come up behind her and was drawing something out of the bosom of her dress.

"I — I — " she stammered. "If you would take a gift from me, my lady? I can't rightly thank you, and — and it's an ill thing, living up at the castle. I'd feel easier to know you had a bit of the cold iron about you."

It was a little cross strung on a chain, such as peddlers sold to country women, and remarkable only because it appeared to be made of steel rather than the usual brass or silver. The workmanship was of the crudest kind, and the righthand bar was so skewed and bent that it looked ready to snap off at a touch.

"Thank you," murmured Kate, feeling a little as she had on the day that Alicia had come running out after Sir Geoffrey's horses, all in tears, and holding up her own most precious possession — a feather fan with a mirror set in it — for Kate to take on her journey. Then, seeing the anxious question in the woman's eyes, she added impulsively: "I shall wear it always. I promise you that I will. See!" She put the chain around her neck and thrust the cross down safe under her bodice.

The redheaded woman drew a long breath of relief and satisfaction.

"And you'll be sure to lay your hand upon it if the Lady in the Green ever comes nigh you again?" she begged. "There's a great virtue in the holy sign and the cold iron, and my grandmother always said — "

"Yes, I want to hear all about your grandmother when I come for the cloak," Kate interrupted her. "I have to get back to the castle now. There's — " and she too drew a long breath of relief and satisfaction, "there's something I ought to be doing."

Chapter VI

The Leper's Hut

Kate had somehow expected that Christopher Heron would be standing and looking at the dark entrance to the Holy Well, exactly as she had left him, but he was not there. Half an hour later, much discouraged and painfully aware of her feet, she was still searching the valley for some trace of him. He was not in the Well cave or by the spring or anywhere near the Standing Stone, and it was only when she left the path and began threading her way through the masses of tumbled stone along the cliff wall that a distant flicker of white caught her eye.

It was the napkin-wrapped bundle she had seen swinging from the page's hand earlier that morning; but the page was gone and the bundle was lying in a hollow on the top of a broad flat slab of rock. Just beyond, a little way up the valley, more rocks had been dragged against the cliff face to form low walls which had been roofed over with rough-cut stone. A wooden door had been fitted into one of the walls, but it was so gray and weather-beaten that even near at hand the leper's hut could easily have been mistaken for a broken fold in the cliff itself.

The door was open, and there was nobody inside. Along the back cliff wall ran a long low shelf of rock which in Henry Warden's time had probably been softened by cushions and blankets from the castle; but there was nothing on it now, only the bare rock. In the right-hand wall was a crude fireplace of blackened stones with not even the ashes of a fire on the hearth. The only sign that the place was still inhabited was an ironbound chest set against the left-hand wall, with Christopher's gold-hilted hunting knife flung down carelessly on the closed lid. Otherwise, a cell or a tomb could hardly have been more desolate; and after one quick look Kate turned aside and went back to wait in the sun on the flat rock beside the bundle of food. He would certainly come for it sooner or later; meanwhile she could only hope that he had not been watching the path and was deliberately keeping out of her way.

The knot that secured the napkin was loose, and without lowering herself so far as to pry into the bundle she was able to see that it contained nothing except a half-loaf of coarse kitchen bread, at least a week old and harder than a billet of wood. She turned it over with one distasteful finger.

"Hungry?"

Kate swung around, too taken up with the loaf of bread even to be annoyed by the tone of the voice. "Is this all you get to eat?" she demanded accusingly.

"I might have known that that would be the first question you'd ask me," said Christopher Heron, standing over her. He had certainly been tramping about in the rain, just as she had thought he would; the old tattered blue smock was now hardly more than a sodden mass of rags. His face was set in the mask of contemptuous amusement which of all his masks was the one she disliked the most.

"What's the matter?" he inquired. "You're smirking like somebody with a sweet for a child: 'which will you have, the right hand or the left one?' Stop hovering, can't you? I don't care which hand it's in; and whatever it is, I don't want it."

Kate hesitated, and then made up her mind to tell him the whole story of the morning, step by step, exactly as it had happened. She wanted to see his face change while she told it.

"I was walking down by the river today — " she began.

Christopher listened without interrupting until she came to the end. His set face did not change at all as she went on. It only became slightly more set and contemptuous.

"And what made you trouble yourself with that old wives' tale?" he demanded curtly.

Kate flushed. She felt as if one of the splendid racing clouds overhead had suddenly begun to dissolve into a shower of cold rain. "But I saw the Lady in the Green," she protested. "I saw her with my own eyes."

"You saw a woman standing on the bank," Christopher corrected her. "She didn't have to be the Queen of the Fairies to look down at my brother's men as they went by on the road. Be reasonable, can't you?"

"I am being reasonable," Kate insisted. "And the curbstone of the Well is nearly five feet off the ground."

"O Lord!" said Christopher wearily. "Do we have to go over all of that again? I know, I know, you don't believe Cecily could have climbed up there; but it's a deal easier to believe in than a pack of bogles lurking down in a cavern to steal children! And I thought you had such a good clear mind!"

"You didn't see her fall. You said yourself you couldn't find out what became of her. Haven't you ever thought that she might still be alive somewhere?"

"Oh yes, often," said Christopher. "Very often. When I was a boy in Norfolk we had an old serving man who'd lost one of his hands. He told me that for a long time afterwards he kept thinking the hand was still there, he could feel all the fingers, it was so real to him that sometimes he'd wake on a cold winter morning and start trying to light the fire with it — before he remembered — "

"I don't see what that has to do with Cecily," said Kate stubbornly.

"It was by way of being a parable or fable," said Christopher. "Now in my case — " He broke off in the middle of his sentence and said: "Listen! What's that?"

Somewhere above them, on the path that led down from the Standing Stone, a voice was singing. It was a high, familiar voice, curiously piercing and sweet:

It fell about the winter time,
  A cold day and a snell,
That as I to the hunting rode
  That from my horse I fell —

The tune suddenly curved over, sweeping down on a sort of low mournful cry:

And the Queen of the Fairies took me,
In yon green hill to dwell.

"Randal," said Christopher, with a jerk of his head. They could see the small brown figure now, flitting along the path between the rocks. "Have you ever heard him talking of the Fairy Folk? He says they took his wits away from him. That's what comes of meddling in such foolery. You'll end wandering about the country too, with a harp over your shoulder, looking for the way in again, if you're not careful."

"The way in where?" asked Kate.

"God knows," said Christopher. "I was only repeating the words after him. The way back into his right mind again, perhaps, poor soul."

Randal had seen them. He had left the path and was making his way towards them down the slope, pausing as he approached to bow and flourish the battered cap. The feather had now broken off altogether, and only a small crimson tuft remained in the band.

"That was the ballad of Tam Lin I was singing down there, but it was wrong of me," he remarked a little anxiously, as if apologizing for some carelessness. Then he looked at Kate, and his whole face lit up like a delighted child's. "I know you well; the lady who gave me the bread from her hand one day in the forest. There are words for you from Sir Geoffrey. He came safely to his home in Norfolk, and said I was to carry him news of your doings when I went back again. To his brother," he added, in a rather puzzled voice, "Sir Geoffrey sent no word."

"Why was it wrong of you to sing the ballad of Tam Lin?" Kate cut in. She cared nothing for the ballad of Tam Lin — Alicia was the one who liked ballads — but any question was better than letting Randal talk any more about Sir Geoffrey's feelings for his brother.

"It's not a song to sing so close to the Queen's hall," said Randal, shaking his head. "Surely they'd never show me the way in again if they heard me. For it tells of the lady who rescued her lover out of the fairy land, and that's a story they wouldn't care to remember; and in it the teind is openly spoken of, and that's a thing they would choose to have for a secret."

"Teind?" asked Kate. She had never heard of a "teind" before: it might be a treasure, or a hiding place, or even a ceremony of some sort, for all she knew.

"It's a word they use in the north country," said Christopher's voice from behind her. "Meaning a tax — the sort of tax you pay to the Church. Like tithes."

"Yes, yes," Randal nodded eagerly. "That was the very same as Tam Lin said to the lady in the ballad." He began to sing again, softly this time, almost under his breath:

And pleasant is that fairy land,
  To them that in it dwell,
But aye at the end of seven years
  They pay a teind to hell:
And I'm so fair and fu of flesh,
  I fear 'twill be mysel'.
 

"He means," said Christopher's voice behind her, "that the gentleman feared that he was to be put to death as a kind of sacrifice because he was tall and handsome. Don't ask me why."

"They would always take a man for it if they could," said Randal. "A young man of high degree, strong and with no blemish about him, like Tam Lin in the ballad — for he would be the one to have the greatest power in his spirit and his blood. I've heard it said that there was a time once when they might take the king of the land himself if it pleased them. But that was in the old days, a long time past, a long, long while ago. The king is beyond their reach now, and it's been many and many a year since they could lay their hands even on a man. I never saw a man in keeping for the teind among them, not any of the nights I've been in the Queen's hall."

"Where?" asked Kate sharply.

It was a mistake; she knew it before the word was even out of her mouth. Randal drew back as if she had struck him, and gave her a vague, confused look. The sudden question had been too much for him. "Yes, my lady?" he mumbled. "What did you say?"

"Nothing," said Kate. She settled herself on the flat rock again, and stretched out one casual foot to study the tip of her shoe. "I only wanted to know how you came to be in the Queen's hall."

Randal twisted his cap nervously between his hands.

"I-I found the way in once," he stammered, "and by their law they can never use a singer to pay for the teind, so — so they took my wits away, to keep me from telling their secrets, and then they turned me out into this world again. But some nights ..."

"Some nights?"

"Some nights they let me come back to them."