The Perilous Gard (9 page)

"You took him," the woman sobbed. "Just as my eye fell on you, he was behind me on the bank, throwing sticks in the water, and when I looked around for him, he was gone." She collapsed all at once on her knees, burying her face in Kate's old green cloak and fawning horribly. "Oh, give him back to me!" she cried.

Kate snatched with relief at the one piece of solid information that had flown past on this preposterous storm of demands and accusations. "Well, if he's lost, why couldn't you say so?" she asked. "Is everybody mad in this place? Be quiet, will you! He can't be far away. Be quiet, and listen! How do you expect to hear him if you keep screeching like a lunatic?"

The woman clutched at her convulsively, gasping for breath, but she did not scream again; and as the echo of her wailing cries died away, they both heard what sounded like a muffled chirp somewhere down among the noises of the flooded river. It came from a fallen oak tree that overhung the water a short way upstream in the direction of the village.  The little boy, trotting after his mother, had evidently run around the tree to watch the progress of his stick, and the waterlogged clay of the bank had collapsed under his weight, carrying him down with it. Fortunately, the tree was enormous; and the great gnarled roots that had interlaced the bank had kept him from being altogether swept away. He was half in and half out of the water, his feet swirling helplessly in the racing foam, his small hands clinging to the tangle of roots, crying and calling for his mother.

The redheaded woman darted forward, and had to be hauled back, struggling and flapping like a mother hen, while Kate tried desperately to think of some way to get the child without bringing down the whole bank and drowning all three of them, She had never rescued anybody from a flooded river, and did not have the least idea of what she ought to do next.

"You'll have to lie flat and throw him my cloak to catch at," she said, turning cold at the calm assurance of her own voice, "Do what I tell you, do you hear me? Take your time. I've got you by the feet . . . Edge forward slowly to ease the strain on the bank. Slowly — slowly — steady, that's right . . . No, don't just scream 'Darling! darling!' at him. Call to him to grip hold of the cloak and keep quiet . . . Tell me when you're ready to pull . . . There! Don't cry, it's all over, he's not hurt. Let's get him out of those wet clothes."

Between them, they somehow got him out of the clothes and dried him off and wrapped him in the green cloak, Kate's hands shaking and the redheaded woman overflowing with gratitude and apologies.

"I never meant to speak so rough," she explained imploringly. "But there was my Harry gone in a flash, and when I saw the color of the cloak I thought sure you must be the Lady in the Green."

"Oh?" said Kate. She was busy feeding Harry with bites of her apple. "Mind the core, poppet. — Who's the Lady in the Green?"  The woman drew back a little. "You'd be the one should know that," said she in rather a stiff voice, "seeing as you live up at the castle."

"I'm a prisoner up at the castle," Kate corrected her. "And as for what goes on there — " she hunched her shoulder, "anybody in the village would know more of that than I do."

"Na na, I know nothing at all," said the woman quickly. She leaned forward, lowering her voice to a whisper. "It's not good to speak of such matters. She walks among the trees in her green cloak, and if we talk of her too loud she may hear us and be angered."

"But — " Kate began, and then paused, her eyes narrowed as if she were trying to see something a long way off. The forest road; the broken cart; the thickets blowing in the mist; and among the trees in a green cloak . . . "Tell me," she said abruptly, "does she have dark hair, very long dark hair? And a gold bracelet on her left wrist, just under the edge of the cloak?"

The woman caught her breath. "She's showed herself to you, then?" she asked, almost as though she were frightened. "There's not many who can say so."

"Yes, she showed herself to me." That, thought Kate, remembering the delicate aloof mouth and the disdainful eyes, was exactly the right term for what had happened. "She stood on the bank over my head and looked down at us, the — the way you'd look at a clot of worms crawling about in the road."

The redheaded woman nodded. "Yes," she said without resentment. "That would be the way of her and her people."

"What people?"

The woman leaned still closer, one hand fumbling at something hidden in the bosom of her dress.

"The Fairy Folk," she murmured, so low that Kate could hardly catch the words. "Those that rule over the Well. The People of the Hill."

Then, as if she were afraid that she had said too much, she drew back again and bent over the child in her arms. He had fallen asleep while they were talking, worn out with shock and exhaustion, his head cuddled into the hollow of her neck and his fingers closed determinedly on a sticky curl of apple peel.

Kate hesitated. Somewhere at the back of her mind, she could hear Master Roger's voice discoursing gravely about folly and superstition ("I saw myself what the country people can believe in with no more than old rumors and idle tongues to set them going"); but out under the oaks at the edge of the Elvenwood, with that quick terrified murmur in her ears, Master Roger's voice no longer spoke with the same authority it had had in the Princess Elizabeth's little parlor. The Lady in the Green was at least a real person — Kate had seen her with her own eyes — and the redheaded woman was certainly very much frightened of something.

"Where do the People of the Hill live?" she asked cautiously.

The redheaded woman flinched back and then edged nearer again, like a panicky horse coming up sideways towards a tempting handful of oats. Frightened though she was, she was apparently half-fascinated too. "In the Hill," she whispered. "Down in caves under the Hill. Wonderful they are, the walls all covered with gold, and the Fairy Folk with crowns on their heads, drinking out of magical cups and dancing to the music of harps and pipes; and they do say that any mortal man who drinks from one of those cups will dance to that music for the rest of his days, and never find his way out of the Hill again."

Kate disregarded the gold and the harps and the crowns; that was the sort of stuff people used to trim up a tale when they were telling stories by the fire on a winter night. But the caves — they had been one of the few things about Derbyshire she had heard of even in London, the caves in Derbyshire, the quarries, the chasms, the lead mines. The lead for repairing the windows at Hatfield that spring had come from Derby, and she remembered Master Roger nodding as if he were pleased and telling them that there was lead mining in Derby as far back as the days of the old Romans. Caves — mines — all sorts of passages under the ground: abandoned workings and forgotten shafts and undiscovered caverns; and if anybody wanted to hide —

She put the thought away for a minute, and came back to what the redheaded woman had actually said. "But the Lady in the Green wouldn't be one of that kind, surely?" she suggested. "I've heard that the fairies were little wee folk, no larger than puppets."

"Never believe it. Not when they're in their true shapes, and that's the size of men and women like ourselves."

"Do you mean," Kate ventured, "that they are men and women like ourselves?"

"Like ourselves?" The redheaded woman seemed puzzled by the question. "How could they be like ourselves? They cannot abide cold iron or the sound of church bells, and they cannot be moved by pity because they have no hearts in their bodies. They were here in the land for many and many a hundred years before us — yes, and ruled over it; but when the cold iron came into the kingdom their power failed them, and wherever a church was built they fled and hid in the caves and woods for fear they should hear the sound of the bells and be withered away." Her voice died out, and for a long moment they sat together in silence, the redheaded woman cuddling the little boy, and Kate looking down at the swirling brown water of the river.

She had not understood what the woman meant by the cold iron, but the talk of building churches and the sound of their bells was different. It sounded as though she were trying, vaguely and fumblingly, to speak of something which had been driven out by the coming of Christianity; and what had been driven out by the coming of Christianity? The old pagan deities of the land, the heathen gods. Kate remembered Master Roger speculating whether stories of the heathen gods might not be handed down the years, becoming more and more confused and distorted with the passing of time, until in the end the gods themselves would be remembered only as a race of strange beings, the Fairy Folk, the People of the Hill. There was nothing so very unlikely about that. It would explain everything: the redheaded woman's dread of "the Fairy Folk," her insistence that they were not "like ourselves," her wild tales of their magical powers, everything except —

Everything except the one thing that Kate was actually sure of.

The Lady in the Green had been real.

She might be a great lady — and Kate had always known at the root of her heart that nobody with that face and bearing could be a gypsy tinker or a charcoal burner's wife — but she was not a forgotten goddess out of heathen antiquity. Forgotten heathen goddesses did not stand about under trees; or if they did, it was not Katherine Sutton who would see them.

And then suddenly the old nightmare sense that there was something she had missed, something she should understand, something urgent, something she ought to be doing, was back on her, stronger than ever — and it was concerned in some way with the Lady in the Green. The redheaded woman had started chattering again about golden crowns and magical cups, but Kate did not really hear what she was saying. Her mind seemed full of other voices, all crying confusedly together, just as they had in her dream: Randal's voice singing "Down in the stone O, but not in the stone," maddeningly, over and over; Dorothy's voice asking, "Why should we trouble ourselves with the saints? Those that rule over the Well were here in the land many and many a hundred years before them"; Master Roger's voice still talking gravely of the heathen gods: "The stories of the Fairy Folk are only memories of the old heathen gods, overlaid with fantasies and superstitions"; and then — suddenly, cutting through the confusion — a stillness without word or sound, like a thought taking shape in the depths of her own mind.

Not heathen gods, she thought. There were never any heathen gods. There were only heathen people who believed in them.

Not heathen gods: people.

That was it. People. Heathen people.

But what difference would that make? The heathen people were gone too, long ago.

And yet — and yet — surely in the beginning there must have been heathen people who wanted to keep on worshipping the old gods. Not common heathen people. True believers, lore masters, priests and priestesses, great folk who hated the New Faith, with followers and friends in high places who could help to hide them from the power of the Church. Why should they not go on meeting in secret, passing down the old knowledge and the old arts to their children? Half their cults had been secret and mysterious even in their own day; it would not seem strange to them. They might dwindle and diminish more and more as time went on, but perhaps always remembering the old worship, lingering about the old holy places, carrying on the old rites and ceremonies as well as they could. And if they kept themselves to wild solitary caves and woods, living off the land or on what their secret followers gave them — Kate turned back to the redheaded woman.

"Tell me," she said, "does anybody in the village ever leave out food for the Fairy Folk?"

The redheaded woman shrugged. "They do some places, but they've no need of that here," she replied. "The castle feeds them. Na, na, if they come about the village it's not food they want. It's a child to take away with them."

"But why should they?" Master Roger had said something about the Fairy Folk taking children too, but Kate could not recall exactly what it was.

"Some will tell you it's for to have servants and slaves down there in the golden halls, and some will tell you it's for worse than that, and either way the child's gone," said the redheaded woman. "My own grandmother had a cousin put her baby down under an elder tree while she went to the hedge for a berry and never laid eyes on it again. The trouble is, there's no proper ring of bells to the church, and not likely to be, while Master John has the ordering of things at the castle. Some times are better than others. They do say that when there's been a bad harvest you had ought to keep watching every minute." Her arm closed fiercely about the little boy. "But there!" she added, recovering herself. "That's one tale I don't set any store by. It was this spring when they took the Big Lord's daughter, and that was long before the harvest failed us."

All the voices and thoughts in Kate's mind suddenly stopped at the same moment, and there was a dead silence.

"The — " she had to pause before she could go on. "The Big Lord?"

"The Big Lord who came out of the sea lands to the east and wedded the castle lady," explained the redheaded woman impatiently. "Him they call Sir Geoffrey."

"Sir Geoffrey's daughter was drowned in the Holy Well."

"I've heard that story," said the redheaded woman, "and who but a fool would believe it?"

"They found her slipper on the curbstone, torn off."

"Torn off when she was taken," said the redheaded woman, "You're never going to tell me she climbed up on that curbstone by herself. It's nearly a grown woman's height off the ground."

"Yes," said Kate slowly. "I know it is. I know it is, but — "

"There, then!" said the redheaded woman. "And who saw her fall, answer me that! You're never going to tell me — "

"Sir Geoffrey's brother was with her."

"The Young Lord? I've heard that story too. And I've heard he had his eye off her for a minute, like my grandmother's cousin."

"He'd been in the cave, and there was nobody there. He sat watching outside, and says nobody could have slipped past him."  The redheaded woman looked at her almost contemptuously.