The Perilous Gard (31 page)
Authors: Elizabeth Marie Pope
It was not until the door of the hall opened behind her and the light streaming from the doorway filled the air with dancing points of fire that she even realized it had begun to snow. The flagstones were white already, and darting through the hot tears on her face and mingling with them were quick feathery touches of cold.
"Kate!" said Christopher. "Good Lord! What are you doing here?"
"Nothing," said Kate, turning her head away from the light. "Let me alone."
Christopher went on standing in the doorway.
"I told you the first time I met you that I didn't want you to die of a cold or an ague," he remarked. "Have you gone out of your mind? Come into the house before you freeze to a statue! I've been looking for you everywhere. I want to talk with you."
"No," said Kate. Christopher was the last person in the world she wanted to talk with at that moment; and after what she had just been through with Alicia and the Lady, only good breeding kept her from adding that she had had her bellyful of talking.
"You can go and talk with Alicia," she said. "It must be nearly time I went up to wake her."
"I've been talking with Alicia for the past two weeks, and your father and your mother and the whole skein of your other kin," said Christopher. "Now I want to talk to you, without your sister and my brother and Randal and your father all breathing down my neck. There's a good fire in the evidence room, and bolts on both the doors."
"I know that," retorted Kate waspishly. "Master John locked me up there."
"Master John is a man after my own heart," said Christopher. "What was it that he said to you on that occasion? That you could come or be carried? Well? Which is it going to be?"
Kate stalked into the evidence room ahead of him and knelt down to warm her hands by the armchair on the hearth. The snowflakes and the tears were already beginning to melt into ugly wet splotches all over the beautiful new dress; and she could hardly keep herself from saying to Christopher — most irrationally — "Now see what you've made me do!"
The evidence room was only dimly lighted by the fire and no longer quite so tidy as it had been in Master John's time, but it still looked very much the same: the big table covered with papers, the shelves, the account books, the new candles in the seven-branched holder on the mantelpiece. Christopher calmly bolted the other door and followed her over to the fire, stooping down to pick up a twig from the wood-basket.
"What do you want that for?" asked Kate hurriedly.
"Only to light the candles; it's very dark in here."
"I'd liefer have it dark, thank you."
Christopher threw away the twig and sat down on the floor at the other side of the hearth. "Very well then," he said amiably. "Now I come to think of it, I like the dark myself; it takes me back to the bad old days when we sat together like this under the Hill. And now suppose you tell me what the trouble is."
"Nothing."
"Don't speak that word," said Christopher. "For some reason I've taken a dislike to it. And don't try to cozen or deceive me! There's something you have on your mind. I can hear it in your voice. Do you think I could sit beside you and listen to your voice for as long as I did without coming to know it?"
Kate was startled almost out of her wits. It had never occurred to her that Christopher might have come to know every tone and shade of her voice as well as she had come to know every tone and shade of his.
"At least I never pestered you to tell me what you had on your mind," was the only retort she could think of.
"True," said Christopher, conceding the point. "Let that pass, then. I want to talk to you about the manor."
"You don't have to. Alicia's told me already."
"O Lord, I might have known it!" said Christopher. "Hasn't that girl any more brains than a buttercup?"
"You seem to have found her easy enough to talk to. She likes you very much, all the pretty things you say to her."
"Who doesn't say pretty things to a kitten? I like her, too. I like your whole damned family." Christopher's temper, never very long-suffering, was visibly beginning to fray, and he sounded like nothing so much as a small boy unjustly defrauded of some promised treat he had been looking forward to for a long time. "So she told you about the manor, did she? What else did she tell you about? The ring, and all the plans for the wedding, and every last penny in your dowry?"
"My dowry?"
"It is customary in this time and country for a father to give his daughter a dowry when she marries. It is also customary for the aspiring suitor to go visit his home and ask him for his consent. What did you expect him to do? Turn you over to me sight unseen? In your petticoat?"
"Turn me over to you?"
"Can't you understand English? You. Me."
"You're marrying me?"
"Who else would I marry?"
"W-w-well," Kate stammered, "Alicia."
"O God!" said Christopher, with finality.
"But she likes you."
"Kate! Unkind! How can you? Marry Alicia? Think of it!"
But Kate was past thinking coherently of anything. A whole part of her mind seemed be loosening, dissolving, vanishing away, as strangely as if the Standing Stone itself had suddenly crashed down and turned into a handful of dust, and there was nothing but green grass in the place where it had stood for so long. Over the grass a white kitten with golden eyes was chasing butterflies in the spring wind.
"Alicia," she said witlessly.
"Will you stop maundering about Alicia?" demanded Christopher. "I'm not marrying Alicia. I'm marrying you."
Kate shook her head as though to clear it. She was still very uncertain of herself and the world and everything in it. "I'm not marrying you," she protested. "I can't be marrying you."
"Yes, you are," Christopher informed her. "And give me leave to remark, my girl, that when you've been spending all your nights with a man for weeks on end, it's high time you married him, or so your mother should tell you."
"I might have known you'd only say something silly," retorted Kate, stung by this injustice.
"That sounds more like you," said Christopher approvingly. "But what's so silly about my wanting to marry you?"
"You don't want to marry me. If you'd wanted to marry me, you'd have said so, long before this."
"It's hard for a man to ask a woman to marry him with an eight-foot wall of stakes and withy between them, especially if he happens to be dead at the time."
"But why should you want to marry me? Why do you?"
"Well, you might say it's because I need you." For the first time, Christopher's voice sounded a little uncertain, as if he himself were not very sure of his ground. "You know how it is with me, Kate. I've been going to waste all my life, like the manor. It's not bad land, but it's too heavy and if the dead water backs up in it — "
"And what am I supposed to do — keep you drained?" Kate interrupted him indignantly. "Next you'll be telling me that you want me to ditch you and manure you!"
"Perhaps that wasn't the most fortunate way of saying it. But I can't think of the right words."
"There aren't any right words. You don't even love me. You know you don't. They asked you on All Hallows' Eve if there was a woman you loved, and you said there wasn't."
"I've never thought of it like that," said Christopher. "How could I? If you were any other woman, I could tell you I loved you, easily enough, but not you — because you've always seemed to me like a part of myself, and it would be like saying I loved my own eyes or my own mind. But have you ever thought of what it would be to have to live without your mind or your eyes, Kate? To be mad? Or blind?" His voice shook. "I can't talk about it. That's the way I feel."
"I — I didn't know," Kate's voice had begun to shake too, uncontrollably. "I didn't think — you never said — you've never even looked at me as if — "
"Look at you! Geoffrey says that all I did this afternoon was stand there and gawk at you like a mooncalf from the minute I walked into the hall! It was you who weren't looking at me. Everyone else could see it plainly enough."
Everyone else: Sir Geoffrey, and her father, and Alicia, and the Lady standing at the oriel window, seeing — what had she said? — "her face when she looked at him, and your face when you looked at her, and his when he looked at you both." The Lady had known. Her eyes missed very little, and she was subtle beyond belief. She had been speaking the truth when she said that she would not avenge herself on Kate or the Young Lord by anything so cheap as robbery or murder. Kate was in no state to trace out all the intricacies of the many truths she had told her, but she did find herself wondering what it was — exactly — that she had had in her hand. A dry berry? A hedge-fall? A withered leaf, like the fairy gold she had given poor Randal? It did not matter, as long as Kate went on thinking all her life that Christopher had spoken those words to her only because he was under a spell.
"Well?" said Christopher. "What more do you want?"
"Nothing," said Kate.
When they finally came out of the evidence room, Randal was still crouched by the fire, crooning to himself. But now he appeared to be engaged on a new song, rather than an old one. His head was bent over his harp, and trial scraps of dialogue and snippets of refrain were floating about the air of the hall like the tag ends of silk and thread when Dorothy was cutting out a dress. Only one stanza had as yet taken shape as they stood listening in the doorway:
Nine and twenty ladies served in the Queen's hall,
(Follow, my love, come in at the door!)
But bonnie Katherine Sutton was the flower among them all,
(And we'll never go down to the Well any more.)
Sir Geoffrey had been right. Randal was making it all into a ballad, and after a while nobody would believe it was ever anything more than a tale.
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