The Perilous Gard (8 page)

"I told you why," said Christopher impatiently. "The man was a leper. He had to stay where he could see people coming if he was going to keep out of their way."

"No, no, it isn't that. You said, without your seeing, nobody could go past without your seeing them. As if you were there all the time. As if — " An appalling thought suddenly flashed into Kate's mind. "Sir Geoffrey doesn't make you live in that place, does he?"

"Geoffrey has nothing to do with it," said Christopher Heron. "He hasn't concerned himself with me or my affairs for a long time now, any more than my father did. I live as I please."

"In that place?"

"I go back to the Hall whenever Geoffrey comes."

"But when he's away you live in that place?"

"I have to live somewhere."

Kate looked up the narrow valley with its litter of fallen stones and the bare rock shutting it in on either side. The gray clouds that had filled the sky all morning had begun to close down and were pouring over the cliffs like smoke. "But surely you haven't any need — " she began.

"No: Henry Warden saw to all that," Christopher cut in before she could finish the sentence. "It's not far to the spring, and there's a flat rock by the door of the hut where a boy from the castle could come and leave food without troubling him."

"I don't care what Henry Warden did," said Kate fiercely. "You aren't a leper like Henry Warden."

"No, I'm not. He shut himself away before he could kill anybody."

"You didn't kill Cecily."

"Why is she dead, then?"

"You didn't mean to kill her. Any more than you meant to kill your mother."

"I could have kept her safe at the Hall, I could have tried to catch her on the path, I could have gone to look for her sooner, I said I wanted to be rid of her, perhaps in my heart I always wanted to be rid of her without knowing it. How can you tell what I meant to do? How can I? How can anyone? I think the damned souls in hell must spend half their time wondering what it was that they really meant to do."

"If you think the damned in hell spend their time doing that, then you can't know very much about the damned in hell," Kate retorted furiously. "I am utterly at squares with this childish dealing. Why in the name of heaven don't you go down to the village and make a proper confession to the priest and let him tell you what penance you ought to be laying on yourself? You aren't one of the damned in hell. We're all of us under the Mercy."

"I'll lay my own penance on myself," said Christopher Heron. "And I wasn't born under the Mercy . . . Good lord, it's starting to rain again! Look at that sky."

Kate disregarded the sky. "You could at least go away somewhere else where you wouldn't have to think about her all the time," she suggested, as a last resort.

"I could go digging for pearls in the ground too, and much good that would do me," said Christopher Heron. "Must you leave now?"

"I wasn't leaving."

"Oh yes, you are," said Christopher Heron. "Leaving to my great regret because I don't want you to get caught in the rain and die of a cold or ague. How otherwise could I courteously put an end to this stupid and profitless conversation? I told you what I did because I laid it on myself to do it, but I've told you now and it's over and done. Why should we go on quacking over the way I feel — or the life I lead — or anything else I may choose to do? Be off with you."

He said it very quietly, without stirring a step, but something in his voice swung Kate around like a hand on her shoulder and sent her almost running up the path back to the castle. She was halfway to the Standing Stone before she paused and glanced back.

Christopher Heron was still standing where she had left him. He had turned his head again and was looking through the rain at the dark opening in the cliff wall.

Chapter V

The Redheaded Woman

The rain lasted three days. By the time Kate went to bed, it was falling steadily, and by midnight it was coming from the northeast in great gusts that lashed against the windows and made it impossible to rest. She lay awake a long while staring into the dark and wondering how far a leper's hut that had been deserted for a hundred years would serve to keep out the weather or shelter anyone, even supposing that anyone had sense enough left to get under shelter. He had more likely laid it on himself to tramp about in the rain.

She sat up, punching her down pillow vindictively into shape. It was all very well for a hero in a romance, like Sir Launcelot, to break his heart and — how did it go? — "run mad in the wilderness"; but in her opinion Sir Launcelot had behaved very foolishly. Somebody ought to have stopped him.

But who was to stop Christopher Heron from doing as he chose?

For one instant, she had a brief dazzling vision of Katherine Sutton back in the valley again, facing Christopher Heron with cool certainty, winning all the arguments, reducing him to a state of stammering admiration and apology; but this dream did not survive a moment's inspection: it would have to be somebody else. Not Master John — if it suited Sir Geoffrey's heir to spend his days repenting in a leper's hut while Master John went on ruling over the whole estate, Master John would doubtless be only too pleased to oblige him. Sir Geoffrey? Sir Geoffrey was far away out of reach in Norfolk, but when he returned in November — ? When he returned in November, Christopher would come back and stand in the great hall again, with his fine green suit and his hand on the gold-inlaid hilt of his hunting knife, to keep his brother from knowing where he had really been spending his time. It might be a foolish proud way to act, but it was his last dignity, the only one that was left him, and how was it possible to tell Sir Geoffrey without stripping him even of that? She could not do it. She could not, as a matter of fact, do anything at all.

The worst of it was that she kept having a strange, restless feeling that there was something she ought to be doing. She could not think what it was, but there was something, flickering at the back of her mind where she could not get at it, like a mote on the edge of her eye. Even when she finally drifted off into a half-consciousness filled with the sound of falling rain, it was only to hear Master Roger's voice again, as she had on her first night at the Hall, very faint and far off, telling her to listen, there was something she had forgotten, something urgent, listen, there was something she ought to be doing, but though she listened frantically all that came to her was a confused echo of more voices, Randal's voice singing,

O where is the Queen, and where is her throne?
  Down in the stone O, but not in the stone,

and mingled with it another voice, a child's voice crying pitifully, "O Cecily is lost! Where is Cecily?" over and over, until she woke shivering with the room still dark and the rain tearing at the windows.

The morning was no better. The storm had risen higher during the night, turning to gales that ripped along the roofs and sent tiles and chimney pots crashing down in fragments over the stones of the courtyard. By noon they were having trouble with all the fires, and dinner was a matter of bread and cheese and lukewarm broth and yesterday's roast duck cold. Pages and menservants with errands to do stood huddled in the doorways, eyeing the sky like uneasy animals before they pulled their cloaks over their heads and darted out into the rain.

Kate spent most of the day wandering restlessly about the house. She hated storms, and the queer sense that there was something she ought to be doing still nagged at her. Old Dorothy had taken to her bed with the rheumatism, and that meant she had no one to talk to. There was a great carved case full of books in the long gallery, but most of them seemed to be ancient manuscripts of works on alchemy and medicine, illustrated with obscure designs and written in languages that she could not read. She finally stumbled on a small, badly printed Lives of the Saints in English, thrust away behind the others. It had apparently belonged to Anne Warden; her name, looking oddly familiar, was written on the title page in a thin, delicate hand. Kate riffled over the leaves idly, catching at a passage here and there:

. . . and then came a night of great rains and wind, and in the midst of it the ferryman was awakened by a child's voice crying pitifully, "It is very late, and I am lost far away from my home, O come and carry me over the river." So he arose, and took his staff in his hand, and set the child on his shoulder, and went his way into the water; but ever as he went that water rose higher, and he felt the burden of the child grow heavier and yet heavier, as though he were carrying the whole weight of the world on his own back, until he cried out, "It is more than I can bear!" and then —  and then she broke off without finishing the story. She knew how it ended, it was one of the most familiar of all the legends, the sudden radiance of light surrounding the Child at the end of the crossing, the divine voice saying, "And your name henceforth shall be Christopher, the Christ-bearer, because you were moved by pity to carry your Lord tonight." But that had been in the morning of the world, when miracles rose out of the wayside grass as easily as larks; it was not to be expected that such a thing would happen again. She closed the book and went over to the window to see if the storm showed any signs of slackening off.

The wind had quieted a little, but the rain was falling harder than ever. The line of stone discharge-spouts jutting from the roof gutters was choked and strangling with water. More water was running from every slate and tile and pane, sheeting down walls and buttresses, gathering in streams among the rocks of the hill, making its way to the flat lands around the village in the valley. The tranquil little river that wound through the corn fields to feed the mill weir had become a raging brown torrent.

By the second day, the damp was steadily eating its way into the house, and a finger touching the velvet of a cushion left a spot. The rain continued to fall. Down in the valley, the river had swept away the mill weir and was pouring in floods over the fields through the broken bank. From the long gallery, Kate could see figures, dwarfed by the distance, toiling like ants with rocks and hurdles and logs and sacks of earth to close the gap and save what was left of the standing crops. There was no telling what might have happened in the little valley where the Holy Well lay, on the other side of the castle. The battlement walk that opened off the long gallery ran all the way around the old curtain wall until it joined the walk above the archway that overlooked the valley; but when she made her way there, staggering under the wind, it was only to find that the whole gorge was so full of mist and rain that she could not see beyond the Standing Stone.

The third day the wind shifted towards the end of the afternoon, and the rain began to fall more and more softly, but by that time the change was too late to be of any use to the village. The waters were still coming down from the hills in floods, tearing out hurdle and log and earthwork, and spreading in a great widening sheet further and further over tile wreck of the grain.

The morning of the fourth day was different. All that was left of the storm was a fleet of huge white clouds racing like splendid ships over the flawless blue of the sky, with their shadows racing below them on the drowned fields that sparkled in the sun. Elvenwood Hall threw open its windows and began to sort itself out in a fine bustle of kindling fires, flourishing brooms, running feet, and chattering laughter. Kate was forgotten in the confusion; nobody had any time to think of her. She took a breakfast apple from a fruit dish on the high table, and slipped through the door out onto the terrace.

She glanced at the walk leading past Lord Richard's tower as she crossed the courtyard, and then turned aside — she was not wanted up at the Holy Well; and even if she had been, she could not have gone there: one of the castle pages was loitering about the overgrown passage, whistling and swinging a bundle wrapped in a white napkin. She went instead to the outer gate and dropped down the path towards the village.

There were figures in the distance picking their way through the wreckage on the banks of the river, or standing in forlorn twos and threes looking out over the waste of the fields, but she turned aside again when the path forked and took the road by which the pilgrims had come from the forest. She would not be wanted at the village either.

She passed on into the grove of oaks where the pilgrims cut their branches, and had not gone far when she found that the river had taken a bend and was coming to meet her. It was still very high, roaring with yellow foam and tearing great snatches of grass and clay out of the banks as it passed; but dappled with green leaf-shadow and cut off from the tragic fields by the trees of the grove, the coursing waters were a fine sight. Even Kate, who disliked waste or extravagance in any form, lingered along the path to watch them plunging and racing away into the deeper shadows of the Elvenwood.

The sun had grown pleasantly warm, and she was looking for a place to sit down and eat her apple when there was a piercing cry and something came blundering and hurtling through the trees further down the bank. It flung itself on her, snarling, sobbing, scrabbling at her cloak, its hands outstretched and clawing wildly. "I see you! I see you!" it wailed. "You give him back to me! I see you!"

Kate caught at the flailing wrists and thrust the creature away. It was the redheaded woman who had snatched up the little boy in the village, her face blubbered and her eyes wide with panic and hysteria. Kate shook her.

"Why shouldn't you see me?" she demanded furiously. She had had enough of being seized and pulled about by total strangers. "Certainly you see me! I'm not invisible! What do you want?"

"Give him back, give him back, give him back!" the woman shrieked, writhing against Kate's grip. "I warn you! I've a holy cross made of the cold iron in my bosom, and I'm warning you! You give me back my child!"

"I haven't got your child," Kate informed her coldly. "And if he's the dirty little boy with the snotty nose, I don't want any part of your child! What in heaven's name is the matter with you? Has anything happened to him?"