The Perilous Gard (28 page)

"Ah, Mistress Katherine!" She turned around to smile at Kate cozily. "I thought you were never going to waken. Sir Geoffrey says you'd best keep to your room and not trouble your mind with questions today. So you drink what I've made you like a good girl, it's chicken broth with an egg beaten up in it, and then I'll put you properly to bed." She poured the contents of the pan into a silver porringer, and advanced on Kate with a tray.

"Dorothy!" Kate sat up. "Dorothy, what's happened? Is Cecily safe? Where's Christopher? Did they catch the Fairy Folk? And the Lady? Whatever became of the Lady?"

Dorothy sniffed. "I'm sure I don't know what you mean, Mistress Katherine," she retorted. "What Lady? You're the only Lady we have now."

"You know well enough," said Kate indignantly. "The Lady who rules over the Fairy Folk. Those in the Well. The People of the Hill. Where do you think I've been all this while?"

"Master John said you'd run away with someone."

"The Young Lord?"

"Someone," said Dorothy, avoiding Kate's eye. "I believed what Master John told me. Sir Geoffrey left the house in his charge. Didn't I have to believe what Master John told me?"

"And where's Master John now?"

"You'll have to ask Sir Geoffrey that. He must have gone away in the night. I was asleep myself; I don't know. I was never one to pry and meddle with the business of the great folk; and besides — " her voice dropped and she looked directly at Kate for the first time. "I was so afraid, Mistress Katherine," she whispered. "We were all of us so dreadfully afraid of them."

Kate thought of Master John's fat white fingers sinking into the flesh of Dorothy's arm, and his story of the prying servant who had gone to walk in the Elvenwood and never come out again.

"Then let's not speak any further of it." She finished the last of the broth and swung her legs over the side of the bed. "Are my clothes still in the garderobe, Dorothy? I want to get up."

Dorothy was so relieved that she went off to fetch the clothes without a murmur and stayed to help Kate put them on. Kate was glad of the help: she could not arrange her hair one-handed, and dressing was no longer a matter of slipping her arms into the sleeves of a loose robe and clasping the belt. She had almost forgotten how heavy and elaborate the dress of the world was: linen shift, under petticoat, upper petticoat, kirtle, gown — merciful heavens, what a welter of skirts! — the bodice fenced with whalebone, the starched discomfort of the collar. Nor did anything really fit her any longer. The coif and hood seemed to have become too small for her hair, the starched collar too large for her neck; the bodice was too tight under her arms and fell away from the new slenderness of her waist, dragging the skirts down with it into ungainly swathes, as if the whole dress had been meant for an entirely different person. Even the face in the mirror did not look like the one she remembered.

"You've changed, Mistress Katherine, that's what it is," Dorothy pointed out, doing what she could with pins. "No, don't try to hitch that up through the girdle; you're only making it worse. All your dresses will have to be taken apart and made over, and that's the brief and the long of it."

"All of them?" said Kate in dismay, and glanced involuntarily at her old scrubbing robe, lying like a heap of discarded skins on the floor.

"Every single one of them," said Dorothy firmly. "And don't you go looking at that nasty heathen rubbish, Mistress Katherine, it's not fit to be worn. Just you stand still there like a good girl while I fetch you my sewing basket."

"Later," said Kate. She could see that if she did not put her foot down at once she would soon be celebrating her return to the world by "standing still there" all the long afternoon while Dorothy clucked around her with the sewing basket. "Later," she repeated. "I have to go and speak with Sir Geoffrey now. Where is he?"

"Sir Geoffrey said you were to keep to your room and not trouble your mind today."

"There's something I want to ask him. It's great folks' business," Kate added wickedly, "the kind you say that you never want to pry or meddle in. Where is he?"

"I don't know, Mistress Katherine. The last time I saw him he was out looking at the water."

"What water?"

"He said you weren't to be troubled about it until you'd rested."

"Was Christopher with him?"

"The Young Lord? Oh no, Mistress Katherine, how could he be, seeing that he's — but you're not to trouble your mind about him either, Sir Geoffrey says, and it won't take me but a minute to fetch the basket. No, don't, Mistress Katherine, do be quiet, you mustn't — "

She followed Kate to the door and out into the hall, still expostulating, just as Sir Geoffrey emerged from the long gallery and came striding towards them. He was frowning as if something perplexed or troubled him, and the narrow white bandage around his head made him look even grimmer than he usually did. "Be off with you, Dorothy," he said briefly. "Mistress Katherine, I thought you were keeping to your room today. Don't you ever do as you're told?"

Dorothy vanished around the corner in a flicker of skirts, and Kate ran to him.

"Sir Geoffrey, where's Christopher?" she demanded.

"Gone," said Sir Geoffrey.

"Gone where?"

"Away. He left very early this morning, as soon as it was light."

"But he couldn't have — he can't be — " Kate protested. "Why? Why should he go away now?"

"Because I sent him."

"But you can't have! Not now! Surely not now, after all he's — you haven't forgiven him? Even now?"

Sir Geoffrey stood regarding her.

"No, I haven't forgiven him," he replied gravely. "But I asked him to forgive me." The old smile flashed up into his eyes; he put both his hands on Kate's shoulders and very gently shook her. "So you can take that look off your face, and don't let me see it again! I said there was no need for you to trouble your mind about him any longer, didn't I? He's only gone to London to take Cecily to live with her aunt Jennifer, as she ought to have done a year ago, God pardon me for a fool! But yes, I did send him away and I sent Cecily away, and believe me, my girl, if it weren't for the Queen's own strict command, there's nothing I'd sooner do than send you off straight down the road after them."

"But why? I mean, what's wrong? Surely, now that you and your men are here, there's no reason — "

"Oh, but there is," Sir Geoffrey interrupted her, "and a good reason too. Come along with me, and I'll show you." He tucked Kate's hand into his arm and drew her with him back into the long gallery and out onto the battlement walk. "I didn't want to tell you, at least not until you were rested, but — " He checked his long stride as they passed out of the shadow of Lord Richard's tower and stood for a moment looking down at her face in the sunlight. "Saints above, how you've changed, lass!" he said abruptly. "What in the world did they do to you?"

"It's nothing; none of my clothes fit, that's all," Kate answered, flushing. "Sir Geoffrey, will you please tell me — "

"I want you to see something first." He stopped on the walk above the archway, almost where she herself had stood the night before, and pointed over the parapet.

"There," he said.

The fallen torches had been carried away, and all traces of the great fire had vanished. The grass turfs had been neatly laid in again over the burnt earth and the ashes, so that the wide flat stretch of rough lawn between the Standing Stone and the castle wall looked very much as it always had. Beyond the Standing Stone she could see the sharp drop to the floor of the little valley, the great boulders and the rocks below, the thread of a path winding among the litter of stone as far as the last dip down to the cave and the Holy Well — but beyond that last dip the path disappeared. She could make out nothing but a bright line along the ground between the cliffs, shining in the afternoon sun, and glimmering a little as if it were very faintly moving.

"Water coming up out of the Holy Well," said Sir Geoffrey's voice beside her. "They must have broken some sort of dam or known how to block the river so as to flood the caves and the valley if anyone tried to break in, and they had almost an hour to do it. First I was delayed at the foot of the road to the gate when Randal walked out of the trees with Cecily — wanting to know if I was pleased with him now, the poor loon! — and meanwhile Christopher was in the house carrying you up to your bed and finding himself some armor and weapons. Then when we came together at last we began by looking for the secret passage from Lord Richard's tower and searching the whole place for Master John — no, we didn't find him; he must have left by some bolt hole of his own as soon as he heard my horn and knew the game was over. We did find the stairs in the keep, but they were flooded already; and by the time we came to the valley the water was pouring out of the Well cave in torrents and no one could go that way. Christopher thinks they must have escaped from the Hill through some other tunnel and got away into the Elvenwood. But for all I know they're still lurking about there — and that's why I made him take Cecily off to London with a good strong escort so early this morning, and why I came within an inch of sending you with them, Queen or no." He stood looking over the parapet with the troubled frown in his eyes again. "Who's to say what the creatures will do next? They may even feel they've some sort of right to kill the child or my brother."

Kate shook her head. "No, not now," she said. "I know them. They won't touch Cecily now because Christopher paid the teind for her, and they won't touch Christopher because someone was able to lay claim to him. They won't touch anybody. The Lady did say that she'd kill the mortal prisoners if the Hill were attacked, but once they're beaten and driven out of a holy place all they can do is wander away and never come back to it. Gwenhyfara told me so herself. They're probably miles from here by now, looking like gypsies or tinkers, and if they ever meet again, it will only be for a dancing night."

"You're sure of that?" Sir Geoffrey was still frowning. "God knows there's nothing I'd sooner do than let them go. The last thing I want is to raise a stinking scandal about my wife's family and send the whole countryside off in a state of frenzy hunting for witches and heretics. Nine-tenths of the folk they'd rake in and ruin would be real tinkers, or real gypsies, or the miserable castle people. But what am I to do? We have to catch the creatures. Otherwise, they'll be stealing some other child the next time they need a human sacrifice, and — "

"They won't, they won't," Kate insisted. "They can't form a circle of power or pay the teind in any holy hill that's been desecrated or broken, and the Lady said this was the only place left in all England where it could still be done. There won't be any more teinds now, ever again. They're finished."

"You're sure of that?"

"I'm sure of it," Kate replied steadily.

"Very well then," said Sir Geoffrey, and drew a breath so long that he might have been holding it for her answer. "Let them go."

"But can you?" asked Kate, frowning a little in her turn. "I mean, can you keep it a secret? How about your men? They must know what happened here last night. Can you trust them not to tell about it?"

"No," said Sir Geoffrey. "But there's not much they can tell. Remember that we came too late for the teind-paying, and they didn't see you or Christopher in those outlandish gauds you were wearing. All they saw was the castle people sleeping it off after a Halloween bonfire and a drinking party."

"Then why did you ride back so fast when you got my letter? Who's had Cecily all this time? Why aren't you still angry with Christopher? And they must have seen you were hunting for someone when you searched the house and the valley."

Sir Geoffrey laughed suddenly as she had sometimes heard his brother do when the strain broke. "My men and I were hunting for Master John," he said calmly. "And if they end by thinking it was all a plot of his to keep control of the whole estate by making trouble between the new masters, where's the harm? That was a good story he told you about someone stealing the child and then running away rather than face me when someone else found out the truth and sent me word to ride back. It's such a good story that it seems a pity to waste it — especially as it happens to be perfectly true. We'll only have to change a few of the names."

"And do you think the castle people will believe you?"

"The castle people have had a deal of practice in conniving at whatever belief would do them the most good," said Sir Geoffrey dryly. "All they'll want now is to forget they ever heard of Those in the Well. Though to speak justly, I think they really were terrified of the creatures, and won't shed any tears because they've lost your Lady and her Fairy Folk. If you ask me, nobody's going to miss them." Kate nodded, remembering what Dorothy had said to her. Sir Geoffrey was right, she reflected: nobody was going to miss the Lady or the Fairy Folk, unless — it was a curious notion — unless she herself did. She put the thought away from her, and came back to the point.

"But there's bound to be some talk," she observed doubtfully.

"There's been talk about the Perilous Gard for hundreds of years," said Sir Geoffrey. "A little more won't hurt us. In a month or two, Randal will be making it all into a ballad, and after a while nobody will believe that it was ever anything more than a tale by the fire."

The long bright line across the end of the valley was widening now as the water continued to rise and advance. Kate thought that it must be well beyond the leper's hut already, and the flat rock where she had eaten dry bread with Christopher would soon be gone too.

"Nothing was carried up out of the caverns on the water?" she asked Sir Geoffrey. "Some of them may have been killed or drowned trying to escape."

"No, nothing at all," said Sir Geoffrey. "That's to say, it wasn't a body, exactly. We did find a mass of old bones floating outside the Well cave, wrapped in some kind of thin gray raggedy stuff that was holding them together; but whatever it was had been dead a long time. The men didn't want to touch it, and I can't blame them; it wasn't a pretty sight. In the end we buried it in the ashes down there at the foot of the Standing Stone before we laid the turfs back, to get it out of the — Kate! Hold up, lass! What's the matter? You're as white as a ghost."