The Perilous Gard (21 page)

"Very true," said Christopher. "Much better than thinking about nothing, especially the nothing. That wasn't what you meant, was it?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Thank God for that," said Christopher. "What else do you think of, when you're thinking of food?"

"Well — apples," Kate floundered on. "Those hard greenish apples, the kind you get in October, that taste cold when you bite into them."

"Yes," said Christopher. "I remember. There was a whole orchard of those apples on my manor once."

"Is the manor your home in Norfolk?"

"No," said Christopher curtly. "It's an old deserted house with some land around it on the other side of the marsh. I used to go there sometimes when I was a boy. It must have been a very fine manor once — a hundred years ago." His voice was still colorless, but it did not sound empty now, only shy, as though he were speaking of something he cared for very much.

"Why was it deserted, then?" asked Kate cautiously.

"The family let it go to ruin. They were all fools." The voice quickened furiously. "Our old bailiff told me that they were cutting off the woods and grazing the pastures bare in his father's time, and the last man was a miser who starved the place and himself to death. Now it belongs to some cousin in London who's been try to sell it off ever since I was born, not that he ever will. Nobody but a lunatic would buy it: Geoffrey says it would cost a fortune to set it to rights by this time. And you needn't tell me that I'm a younger son with no fortune to speak of. I know that as well as you do. But I always wanted — I did think — if I could only clean the scrub out of the water meadows and had the money for ditching and draining the fen land — "

"What?"

Kate had thought she knew Christopher fairly well by that time — but now she realized, in a sort of bewilderment, that she did not know this side of him at all. She had always somehow, in her secret heart, never thought of him except in a world of knights and ladies, the sort of world that one read about in the old romances, where hermits knelt praying among the gray rocks and champions rode out to slay dragons from high turreted castles — not the sort of castles that could ever go to ruin because the scrub had not been cleaned out of the water meadows and there was no money for the ditching and the drainage.

"But why should you care so much about ditching and d-drainage?" she stumbled. "My father says that trying to drain land in the fens is only a waste of good money."

"Much he knows!" Christopher retorted rudely. "Fen land is the richest in England — if you know how to keep the water out of it. It's too heavy, and it lies too low, so the dead water backs up in it, and then it goes sick. What do you mean — a waste of good money? Your father sounds like old Martin to me."

"Old Martin?"

"The bailiff at home. He does say that I'm crazed in my wits over drainage," Christopher admitted. "But that's only because he thinks it's the will of God to go on ditching the same way we've been ditching for the last thousand years, and the world can't ever be otherwise! You might as well argue with a stone wall. I'd try liming too, of course, and marling, and some of the new root crops; but when it comes to sick land, there are two things you have to do before you do anything else — and one of them is drain." He drove his fist against the mesh by way of emphasis, forgetting to keep his voice down.

Very slowly and carefully, Kate settled back on the floor. "O be careful!" she thought incoherently. "Be careful! Don't let me spoil it! ... And what's the other thing you have to do first?" she asked him. She knew nothing whatsoever about tending sick land, or any kind of land for that matter, but it seemed like a safe question.

"Manure," said Christopher. "Good plain dung. You take those water meadows at the manor. What I had in my mind — "

The next morning Gwenhyfara came into the stable some time earlier than usual, while Joan and Betty and Marian were still asleep, and took Kate back with her to her own room. This proved to be a little bare cell some distance down the "smooth passage," with nothing in it but a chest and a thin pallet of woven straw that had been rolled up and laid against the wall. Gwenhyfara sat on the chest and made Kate walk up and down the floor by the light of three candles, studying every movement she made much as the Queen's Master of the Horse might have observed the gait of an unpromising colt.

"Who in the name of the gods trained you to carry yourself?" she demanded.

"Nobody," said Kate, flushing. "My mother said it was no use, I was always too clumsy. Blanche Parry used to try to teach me how to curtsy sometimes when I was with the Lady Elizabeth at Hatfield, but I could never seem to learn the way of it."

"And small wonder," said Gwenhyfara. "How did she think you could learn the way of anything when your backbone is as stiff as a stake and you hold yourself as if you were strapped to it? That is what she should have begun with. Stand where you are."

"Yes," said Kate apprehensively.

"Now: stretch your arms out before you — so — and let your hands drop. No.
Drop
, stop holding them, let them drop from your wrists and hang. Now let your arms drop and hang from your shoulders. Now drop your head forward and let the cords in your neck go loose. Do you have that? Now — slowly — slowly — try to feel that same loosening all down your back, one link after another, slowly, as though they were melting — no, no, don't stoop." She came over to Kate and made a little light gesture with her hand. "Here is where you want it, and here, and here. You must know how to let your whole body go before you can fall without hurting yourself."

"
Fall?
" Kate jerked bolt upright again, making a wild plunge to recover her balance.

"Fall," said Gwenhyfara calmly. "It is easy enough."

"Couldn't you — " said Kate, "couldn't you teach me how to move some other way? Without falling?"

"Not I," said Gwenhyfara. "For there is no better way to learn the flow and the manage of your body. I will teach you other things in time, but that will be the first. Start over, now. Stretch your arms before you — so — "

"No, no, no," said Christopher. "The sheep folds at the manor were on the other side of the barn,
across
from the stables. Start over."

"You turn right off the road at the bridge and go up a deep lane to the gate," Kate recited. "The gate leads into an outer yard with a well and a dovecote, where they used to have a watering trough and a pond for the ducks. The farm buildings ran around another yard to the left of the well. First the kennels, and then the stables, and then the forge, the toolshed, the workshop, the storerooms, the pigsty, the sheepfolds — I'm sorry, that's wrong, it was the hen yard — the hen yard, the sheepfolds, the barn, and the wall of the orchard. On your right as you come in from the outer yard is another wall with a door in it and some steps down to the rose garden and the house. You never told me about the house."

"The house?"

"Yes," said Kate. "The house."

"The house is a wreck, like everything else."

"What do you mean by a wreck? How much of a wreck?"

"Well — " Kate could not see Christopher's shrug, but she could feel it in his voice. "The roof was still on, the last time I saw it, but even that may be done by now. The steward lived there for a time after the old miser died, but he got drunk one night and started a fire that burned out the kitchens and the dairy and about half of the north wing. Then after the fire, the place was shut up, and thieves and strollers tore out most of what was left of it. One of the doors at the back had rotted clean off its hinges. Anybody could go in."

"Did you ever go in yourself?"

"Anybody could go in."

"Then what are you planning to do with it?"

"Do with it?"

"Well, you can't spend all your time down in the orchard or the water meadows or the stables," said Kate impatiently. "What are you planning to do with the house?"

"No, no, no," said Gwenhyfara. "Lightly, lightly, I tell you. You must learn to walk lightly, just as you learned to fall.
Walk,
not put your feet down on the floor dump, dump, as if they were two great logs of wood. Think that your body is hanging from the roof by one single hair drawn up from your head, and you can't let yourself break it."

Kate thought obediently, taking two or three tentative steps, but picturing herself strung up by her hair like Absolom in a church window did her no good at all: it only distracted and confused her.

"No," said Gwenhyfara. "You have not caught the way of it. Think of something else. If you can once get the shape of your need alive in your mind, your body will follow it. Suppose that you had to pass an enemy in the dark, and so you want feet made out of velvet, light, so light that there would not even be the fall of an echo to warn him. Would that image speak to you more than the other? Try it, then . . . Softly now, softly, more lightly still . . . There! what did I tell you?"

Christopher was having what Kate had come to think of as "one of his bad nights." A "bad night" — and the "bad nights" were growing more and more frequent as the weeks went on — always meant that the gray creature had been at him again. He had never yet told her exactly what it did to him. Once, on a particularly bad night, he had said to her, with curious intensity: "Don't let them into your mind, Kate! Whatever else you do,
don't
let them into your mind!" — but that was all. On another night, when she had spoken to him about her attacks of the weight, he had seemed almost surprised to hear that they troubled her so much, because he himself rather liked to feel the hard walls and the rock pressing about him, especially after he had gone away.

"Gone away?" Kate had said, startled. "I didn't think they ever let you out of this place."

"They don't. It isn't that kind of being 'gone.' "

He had said nothing more about the "going away," and Kate had not pressed the matter further. It was much more important that he should feel there was one person at least under the Hill who would treat him as a living individual with a right to keep his mind to himself if he chose to. When the bad nights came, she asked no questions and merely brought the talk as quickly as she could around to the never exhausted topic of the manor. They had walked over it, ditched it, drained it, rebuilt it, and argued about it for so long now that Kate sometimes felt as though she had lived there all her life.

But on this particular night even the manor seemed to have failed them.

" — and the new dairy could fit into the far corner of the yard," Christopher was saying. "Along the old orchard wall."

"What do you mean?" Kate demanded, more sharply than she meant to. She had come to know every tone and shade of his voice by that time, and what she heard in it now troubled her. It was empty again, empty and oddly remote, as if he were speaking from somewhere a long way off; and never before had he made the smallest mistake when it was a question of anything to do with the manor. She pulled herself up. "Not straight across the wall, surely?" she asked, treading as lightly as she could. "Didn't you tell me that the gate to the orchard was there?"

"Did I?" said Christopher, in that far, indifferent voice. "Yes, I did. The gate to the orchard. What does it matter where the gate to the orchard is?"

"The new dairy will block it."

"Cut a new gate in from the other side, then."

"How much would that cost?"

"Cost?" Christopher was trying to speak lightly too, but Kate was startled by the bitterness of the question. "It won't cost us a penny. None of this is real. Go on, spend as much as you please. Why trouble yourself? What does it matter? We're only dreaming like Joan and Betty and Marian."

"Then we may as well begin with a palace straight off, on a golden cloud, all hung with diamonds and rubies, and be done with it," Kate retorted. "We're not talking about a place like that. We're talking about the farmyard at the manor."

"With the new dairy and the new barn and the new stables and sheepfolds and gardens?" Christopher inquired grimly. "If you want to talk of palaces on golden clouds — dear heart, do you know what
is
there? Nothing. Half an acre of ruins knee-deep in stinging nettles, and the old gate in the orchard wall is rusted so stiff you couldn't even open it."

"Yes, but it's still a real wall, isn't it?" Kate argued. "And if you build the new dairy there, after we get out of here, you'll still have to cut a new gate in it for real money, won't you? When my father put the new gates in down at the counting house, it cost him fifty shillings for the labor alone."

There was a moment's silence; and then, to her bewilderment, Christopher suddenly went off into one of his wild gusts of laughter. "F-f-fifty shillings?" he gasped. "Oh, Kate! Here I am, the King of the land at his death-time, and you won't even let me spend fifty shillings!"  Kate stiffened furiously. It was bad enough never to be told exactly what it was that the gray creature did to him (for though she honored his privacy, she resented it very much, always to be shut out, treated like a child, kept at a distance), but if he thought he was going to laugh at her too —

"I don't see why — " she began.

"What don't you see?"

Kate checked herself. Anything — even being laughed at — was better than having him sit there on the other side of the mesh, sounding as if he were a thousand miles away.

"I don't see why you want to spend fifty shillings for nothing," she said. "It's foolish."

"Very foolish," Christopher agreed with her gravely. "Fifty shillings — and all for nothing! Very well, then. Where else can we build the new dairy?"

"You are learning the way of it," said Gwenhyfara. "Make the great bow to the Queen now, as the women of our kind do."

Kate obeyed a little anxiously. The exquisite, long drawn out sweep of the Queen's bow had to be done perfectly, if it was to be done at all. The smallest failure of grace or balance sent the performer toppling over into a dreadful sprawl on the floor.