Death in the Castle (24 page)

“You want my scepter. I know you. I know your sort. Smooth tongue … black heart … traitors, all of you. I’ll brain you. That sword’s mine… my father’s sword… put it down … I’ll deal with you as I did with Dunsten. I trusted him … these years … raised him from a commoner … the only one who had my confidence. I … I … gave him my son … my only son … told him my secret. How else could he have got a wife like her? He let her die in childbirth. Killed her, likely. And then let them kill my son. There’s only a girl left… no heir … a girl …”

He heard these groans, these mutterings, his ears alert and his mind whirling with what they meant. This mystery, this hidden secret story. And the man gone mad with fear at the thought of losing all he had. Oh, who was Kate? Would he ever know, now that Wells was dead?

“Fool,” Sir Richard was saying between clenched teeth, “I’ve been the fool—thinking myself safe because I had the castle … all these wild peoples rising everywhere in the world … British lion—the castle’s besieged … lost. They’re coming … I see them … I see them … I see them … I give my life …”

He lifted the scepter high above his head again, his arms trembling under its weight, and charged at John, forcing him back, back toward the trapdoor.

“Down—down!” he bellowed. “Down where traitors belong!”

“Take care—for yourself!” John cried.

His feet caught on the edge of the trapdoor. He thrust the sword upward to ward off the descending weapon. The scepter fell on the sword, the blade broke at the hilt. He was flung to one side by the impact. He rolled on the floor, ducking like a football player. Sir Richard, unable to save himself, was hurled head first into the trapdoor.

John Blayne crawled to the door, dazed, his bead aching from the blow, the broken sword still in his right hand. The body of Wells lay there, unmoved by all the strife. With his left hand John put the limbs gently aside so that he could open the door. Still clutching the broken sword, scarcely knowing that he did so, he worked the last bolt from its hasp and opened the door.

They were waiting outside and they stared at him.

Kate cried out at sight of him. “You’re bleeding!”

She snatched the little ruffled apron from about her waist and ran to him and began wiping his face, talking all the while. “We heard the most dreadful—oh, John—such a bruise! How did it happen? And you with the sword broken—”

“Where is Sir Richard?”

It was Lady Mary, standing in the doorway, her eyes searching the room. She pushed her way in and saw the body on the floor.

“Oh Richard,” she whispered. “Oh no—How could you, how could you …”

Now she saw the scepter. She went to it, took it up and dropped it as though it burned her hands. For there before her the hole gaped and he was nowhere … nowhere …

She turned, her eyes searching, comprehending, until they rested on John. She stood looking at him, trying to speak. When her voice came it was a whisper, a gasp.

“Take this castle away. Take it … it’s evil. I always knew it was. It’s full of … ghosts.” She swayed, and caught herself and stood leaning against the table, her face white and cold.

“Kate, take care of her!” John cried.

But Lady Mary pushed them all away when they came to her side.

“I am quite all right,” she said. She tried to moisten her lips, her mouth dry. She turned to them with a wild sad smile, her haunted eyes unseeing.

“
They
were no help at all—no help! So perhaps
they
simply don’t exist!”

This she said in her high clear voice, and repulsing the hands stretched out to help her, she walked away from them all.

… The day was cool, the air clear with the delicate sunshine of an English morning in summer. The castle had never been more beautiful, John thought. He had strolled up from the village, needing time to be alone before he met Kate. The landscape was still and calm, the village too had been silent. People stayed in their houses, talking quietly of the shadow that had fallen upon the countryside. The inquest had been held—accidental death. So Sir Richard was dead, the last of the Sedgeleys, and who was to have the castle now? John had ordered his breakfast sent to his room, but Thomas had waylaid him at the door.

“What will we all be doing now, sir?” he asked. “We looked up to Sir Richard, you know, sir. Fussy he was at times, and a man of his own mind, but we was used to that from him and his father. High and mighty, but they’d a right to be. The likes of them made old England. So what’s to happen to us?”

“I don’t know, Thomas,” he said. “I don’t think anybody knows just yet. But you’ll be told, doubtless.”

“We’ll have to wait,” Thomas said dolefully.

John had nodded and gone his way along the cobbled road to the edge of the village, and then the country road through the meadows and the wood. Kate would be waiting for him in the yew walk. Last night when he had seen to it that all was arranged for the funeral today, they had clasped hands at parting.

“I’ll come in the morning,” he had promised. “I’ll meet you in the yew walk—about eleven?”

She had nodded.

Yes, he could see her figure now—a white dress, in the shadowy walk. How small she looked between the great shrubs towering darkly above her! The sunlight fell straight and she walked in a path of sunlight, narrow, but wide enough for her to escape the shadows, and her hair was bright in the sunshine.

They met, he held both her hands in his and restrained himself from taking her in his arms. It was still too soon. She was grave from all that had happened.

“The vicar’s here,” she said. “He came early. Lady Mary sent for him. She wants the crypt to be full of red roses. She won’t have a long sermon, she says. And the people are to be allowed to come in and stand as close as they like—and the broken sword is to be put back into its place.”

“How is she?” John asked;

“Brave,” Kate said. “She talked about him this morning quite calmly, though I’m sure she hadn’t slept—such deep shadows under her pretty eyes. She said she was glad he had gone first, because she could bear being alone better than he could; because women are stronger about some things, she said. Men want so much, she told me—but we women ask very little, really. Just someone to give us a little affection, someone to talk to—and a hand to hold—”

Her voice broke. He took her in his arms. She leaned her head on his breast, and he laid his cheek against her hair.

“Kate—” he said after a moment.

“Yes, John?”

“I’m not coming to the funeral. Will she mind too much? I can’t—after that last dreadful meeting in the throne room.”

They paused, still holding hands, and he looked into her upturned face, flawless in the sunlight.

“No,” Kate said. “She’ll understand—a wonderfully understanding woman. She said this morning she wished she hadn’t to go to the funeral, either. She stayed with him alone yesterday evening. She said she was glad he was peaceful at last with his ancestors, where he’d always belonged.”

He wondered, watching her, if Lady Mary had told her anything of herself. Did Kate know that she was the daughter of Sir Richard’s son, and so his own granddaughter?

“Kate, look at me!”

She obeyed instantly, lifting her face to his, and meeting his smile she blushed sweetly.

“Yes, John?”

“Has Lady Mary ever said anything to you about a child?”

“A child? No, John. What child?”

Kate was thinking, remembering. “She did say she wished so much she could have given Sir Richard a child. She said it was her fault they hadn’t an heir. But I told her it wasn’t, because she wanted a child as much as he did—a son, of course, for the castle.”

“What did she say then?”

“She said there was no use in talking about it. And then, I don’t know why, she told me that Queen Elizabeth came here to this castle after Essex was beheaded. She loved him, you know, though he was half her age, but she said nothing after he was dead. Her motto had always been
Video et taceo.
And it was a good motto for a woman, Lady Mary said, especially for a woman who loves a man.”

“I see and I am silent,”
John repeated, “It’s a good motto for us all.”

A silence fell between them.

“You don’t want the castle now, I suppose,” Kate said. She pulled her hands away as she spoke and tucked them into the pockets of her dress.

He answered slowly, pausing often to reflect. “It would be easy for me to run away from it, run away and forget. Yes, the castle fills my heart with horror, and with love. It’s an old, old castle. … Even castles must have evil in them when they live too long. But it isn’t the castle that’s evil, it’s the people who used it for evil. See how the sunlight falls there on the towers, Kate? See how beautiful it is?”

He drew her with him and they looked between the yews. “It’s a work of art. I don’t want it destroyed, any more than I want a book or a painting ruined. I want generations of people—new generations—to enjoy it, and purify it through new life.”

“And you’re taking it away?”

“Yes, I think that’s been settled legally and voluntarily,” he said, “but I’ll leave something in its place—a fine modern farm, the best of machinery. My father will like that! And Lady Mary will live nearby and see the earth bloom—”

“And I’ll be staying with her,” Kate said in a low voice.

“You’re wrong,” he said firmly. “She won’t let you. If I know her, and I think I do—ah, but I’m sure I do—she won’t let you. And I won’t let you. You’ll live on the other side of the ocean, in a new country, my little Kate. With the man who loves you.”

She drew a deep breath, then tried to laugh. “How you can be so sure of—of everything!” she cried. “How you can tell it all out like that!”

He took her face between his hands. “You tell me,” he said. “Am I right?”

A long look passed between them—no, much more than a look. He saw through those violet eyes straight and deep into her heart, and she looked up and saw what she wanted to see, a man she could adore and did, and did—

“Yes!” she said.

“And shall we go on living in the castle,” she inquired, “after it’s moved to Connecticut?”

“No,” he said firmly. “We will not live in it. Nobody will live in it, ever again. We’ll live in a new house, you and I, and there’ll be a wing it it for Lady Mary, if she likes the idea of a new country, another life—without ghosts—”

“Oh,” she breathed in ecstasy. “How you do think of everything!”

They kissed then, for what else was there to do after that, and drew apart at last and only because the church bells were tolling. No, they were ringing.

“Hark,” Kate whispered. “Lady Mary said they weren’t to toll. They’re ringing a song he used to sing with her when they were young—it’s what she told them to do. ‘I won’t have the smell of death, nor the sound of it,’ that’s what she told the vicar …”

She hesitated and gave him a coaxing smile. “But I’ll just go and be with her a bit, John, shan’t I? Until this is over? Since I’m to have the rest of my life with you?”

How could he refuse her, now or ever?

He nodded, smiling, and sat down on a garden seat, from where over the dark yews he could see the castle towering against the blue sky.

“I’ll wait,” he said.

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) was a bestselling and Nobel Prize-winning author of fiction and nonfiction, celebrated by critics and readers alike for her groundbreaking depictions of rural life in China. Her renowned novel
The Good Earth
(1931) received the Pulitzer Prize and the William Dean Howells Medal. For her body of work, Buck was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in Literature—the first American woman to have won this honor.

Born in 1892 in Hillsboro, West Virginia, Buck spent much of the first forty years of her life in China. The daughter of Presbyterian missionaries based in Zhenjiang, she grew up speaking both English and the local Chinese dialect, and was sometimes referred to by her Chinese name, Sai Zhenzhju. Though she moved to the United States to attend Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, she returned to China afterwards to care for her ill mother. In 1917 she married her first husband, John Lossing Buck. The couple moved to a small town in Anhui Province, later relocating to Nanking, where they lived for thirteen years.

Buck began writing in the 1920s, and published her first novel,
East Wind: West Wind
in 1930. The next year she published her second book,
The Good Earth
, a multimillion-copy bestseller later made into a feature film. The book was the first of the Good Earth trilogy, followed by
Sons
(1933) and
A House Divided
(1935). These landmark works have been credited with arousing Western sympathies for China—and antagonism toward Japan—on the eve of World War II.

Buck published several other novels in the following years, including many that dealt with the Chinese Cultural Revolution and other aspects of the rapidly changing country. As an American who had been raised in China, and who had been affected by both the Boxer Rebellion and the 1927 Nanking Incident, she was welcomed as a sympathetic and knowledgeable voice of a culture that was much misunderstood in the West at the time. Her works did not treat China alone, however; she also set her stories in Korea (
Living Reed
), Burma (
The Promise
), and Japan (
The Big Wave
). Buck’s fiction explored the many differences between East and West, tradition and modernity, and frequently centered on the hardships of impoverished people during times of social upheaval.

In 1934 Buck left China for the United States in order to escape political instability and also to be near her daughter, Carol, who had been institutionalized in New Jersey with a rare and severe type of mental retardation. Buck divorced in 1935, and then married her publisher at the John Day Company, Richard Walsh. Their relationship is thought to have helped foster Buck’s volume of work, which was prodigious by any standard.

Buck also supported various humanitarian causes throughout her life. These included women’s and civil rights, as well as the treatment of the disabled. In 1950, she published a memoir,
The Child Who Never Grew
, about her life with Carol; this candid account helped break the social taboo on discussing learning disabilities. In response to the practices that rendered mixed-raced children unadoptable—in particular, orphans who had already been victimized by war—she founded Welcome House in 1949, the first international, interracial adoption agency in the United States. Pearl S. Buck International, the overseeing nonprofit organization, addresses children’s issues in Asia.