The Perilous Gard (4 page)

She was lying in a great carved bed, its four towering posts hung about with embroidered curtains. The curtains had been drawn to darken the room, but somewhere beyond them the sun was out, and a long ray of light was slanting in through a narrow parting where they did not quite meet on the left-hand side of the bed.

"It must be afternoon," Kate thought hazily, fumbling for the pull-ring of the curtains and jerking them back.

Her first impression was that she must still be asleep and dreaming. She remembered that the last Lord Warden was supposed to have done some rebuilding, but nothing had prepared her for what she actually saw. There was no sign that the Perilous Gard was "old" or even "a castle," as Master Roger had supposed. The walls were paneled in polished oak, finer even than the Princess Elizabeth's own bedchamber at Hatfield, and one wall was hung with a great tapestry showing ladies dressed in green, with garlands of oak leaves on their heads, dancing hand in hand through the trees of a flowery wood. The plaster ceiling was exquisitely moulded in an intricate strap-work design. The lattice windows flashed and sparkled with coats of arms painted on the glass. There were blue velvet cushions on both window seats; the long mirror that hung on the wall beside the bed was framed in gold and must have cost a fortune. She found her gray riding dress, brushed and sponged, laid out for her in a beautifully fitted garderobe opening off the main room.

The gray riding dress had been considerably battered by six days on the road; and Kate, surveying her reflection in the glass, could not help feeling a little out of place as she combed out her tousled hair before the golden mirror. The whole room would have made a much better setting for Alicia. Alicia would have looked lovely sitting on one of the blue velvet cushions with her shining head bent over an embroidery frame while she waited for the time when a knight on a white horse would (inevitably) come riding through the dark forest to rescue her.

Kate rose to her feet, and pushing back the lattice of the nearest window, leaned out to see if she could get any idea of the shape of the house.

Then she saw that Master Roger had been right after all. She was looking down into a paved courtyard surrounded on three sides by high gray battlemented walls and towers. At her side of the courtyard the whole of the castle had been rebuilt — she could make out fine oriel windows giving on a terrace below, and clusters of new chimneys rising from the roof above. The work was apparently not yet finished: there was a tangle of scaffolding around one of the chimneys, and the balustrade along the edge of the terrace was only half constructed, ending in a litter of raw stone and an ugly gap. Everywhere else the ancient walls and battlements and towers remained untouched. Most of them seemed to be abandoned, overgrown with ivy and gradually falling into decay. Only in one of the towers — a great square hulk of blackened limestone like a Norman keep on the far side of the courtyard — was there any stirring of life. There was a dark archway open at the foot, with a handcart standing before it. A man was unloading sacks and a pile of flat wooden boxes from the cart and carrying them inside.

The sacks held grain or something of the kind — she could tell that by the shape — but the boxes puzzled her until one of them suddenly toppled over and fell with a crash to the pavement. The catch of the lid broke open, and a shower of yellow tube-shaped objects fell bursting out over the stones of the courtyard. The man swore and scooped them back into the box again, jamming down the lid hurriedly, but not before Kate had seen what they were.

Wax candles — the yellow tube-shaped objects were wax candles, and they ought to go somewhere else before half of them were eaten by rats and the grain as well: her father had always said that old keeps were fit for nothing but charcoal or other rough stuff. Kate stood watching the man at his work for another moment or so; then she shrugged and went back across the room to the door. It was, after all, no business of hers to decide what Sir Geoffrey did with his household supplies. She ought to be getting downstairs to find out what he intended to do with her.

The door opened on a short passage, and this in its turn opened on a carved oaken gallery overlooking an immense echoing hall of stone hung with arms and trophies. It was one of the "great halls" where in earlier times feasts and assemblies had been held, and was evidently much older than the part of the house from which she had come. From the gallery a flight of stairs ran down to the raised dais set aside for the lord of the castle and his family, three steps above the level of the floor.

Sir Geoffrey was sitting at the long table on the dais, a wine cup in his hand and two serving men bustling about him with silver-gilt dishes and platters and flagons. Randal was there, too: Kate, hesitating at the top of the stairs, could see him curled up on the steps of the dais, his harp resting against his shoulder as if he had just finished a song. A little old woman with a bunch of keys at her girdle was pattering to and fro supervising the serving men; and a very small fat man — from the chain of office about his neck, Kate thought that he must be the castle steward — was leaning over the table by Sir Geoffrey's side, apparently making some kind of report. Beyond them, with his back to one of the great oriel windows, stood another and much younger man, dressed in plain dark green like a forester or a huntsman, a little apart from the rest.

Sir Geoffrey glanced up and caught sight of Kate on the gallery.

"Awake, are you?" he called to her. "Dorothy here told me you were sleeping like the dead an hour ago. Come down and have your hot roast chicken. Humphrey, fetch a seat for Mistress Katherine."

Everybody in the hall immediately slewed around to stare at her except the young man at the window, who had turned his head and was looking out at the courtyard. One of the serving men ran to set a chair at the table beside Sir Geoffrey's, and the little old woman came fluttering up behind him with a dish of hot manchet-bread and a choice of honey or thick cream to eat with it.

"Honey, please," murmured Kate, stiffening under the gaze of so many curious eyes and slipping into the chair as quickly as she could.

"This is Dorothy," said Sir Geoffrey, nodding at the little woman. "My wife's old nurse, who sees to the house for me. She put you to bed last night, though I don't suppose you remember it. Randal you know. And this is Master John, the steward. I've been telling him about you. He'll be the one to care for you until I come back again."

"Oh, are you going away?" asked Kate, in a rather dismayed voice. She was beginning to feel at least accustomed to Sir Geoffrey by this time, and she had taken an instant dislike to Master John. Master John was bowing to her respectfully, with a welcoming smile, but the small black eyes in the fat smiling face were watchful and extraordinarily cold.

"I'm needed at home in Norfolk," said Sir Geoffrey curtly. "And I can't take you there: the Queen's orders were that you keep strictly to the Hall. Now, John, about the brick for the new chimneys — "

He turned away from her and took up his interrupted talk with the steward again. It was the sort of talk that Kate had often heard before, sitting in a corner while her father did the business of the merchant fleet that had grown up out of the one small trading brig in which her grandfather had first put out to sea — sales and repairs, records and accounts, the rise in prices, the purchase of supplies, though that talk had all been of shipping and voyages, and this was about sheep-shearing and lead mining, manorial customs, the autumn sowing, a shipment of wine from Bristol that had mysteriously gone astray, the weight of the woolpack, the failure of the hay crop. Some of the discussion she could not follow, but most of it was plain enough. That was chiefly thanks to Master John. Master John was talking very well, all the facts and figures at the tips of his fingers: bills, prices, profits, and bargains (he seemed to have a remarkably good eye for a bargain), quite unruffled, never at a loss. He was, Kate gathered, already Lord Warden's steward when Sir Geoffrey inherited the estate — Lord Warden had died only that April — and it was clear that for some time the management of the whole place had been very largely in his hands. Sir Geoffrey evidently planned to leave it there. He was speaking rapidly and impatiently, with few questions and short answers, as if he had no heart for the discussion and his mind was really on something else.

"He's leaving everything for Master John to settle," thought Kate to herself. "What's the matter with him? ... I don't believe he's listening to half of it. All he wants to do is get away."

She ate her hot roast chicken gloomily. It was plain to see that Sir Geoffrey was not going to linger at the Perilous Gard an hour longer than he had to; and once he was out of reach, who would be left to her? Old Dorothy seemed kind enough, but she was tottery with age and had a foolish trick of pursing up her lips in a condescending, now-now-your-old-nurse-knows-what-is-best-for-you manner. Kate glanced at the young man by the window. He was still standing there, his eyes on the courtyard, so quietly that in the talk and confusion she had not yet really looked at him. Sir Geoffrey did not seem to be aware that he was even in the room.

He was a very young man — only two or three years older than she was — and a handsome one, as tall as Sir Geoffrey, and with much the same kind of thick tawny-yellow hair. From his plain green dress, and the knife at his belt, she had taken him to be one of the foresters on the estate, a keeper or a huntsman perhaps, waiting to make his report when Master John had finished; but now, as she looked at him more narrowly, over the rim of her cup, she was not so sure. The hand resting on the hilt of the knife was long and finely made, with a heavy ring on one of the fingers; the hilt itself was studded with amber and inlaid with gold. He was standing bolt upright and curiously rigid, his jaw set, the mouth shut in a hard straight line. His face was very white, and he carried his head stiffly, as if he went on holding it erect only by the sheer force of his will.

Kate put down the cup, startled. She had seen that look before, during her grandfather's last illness, when he was suffering almost unendurable pain.

"Oh, see to it yourself, John, see to it yourself, can't you?" Sir Geoffrey demanded, suddenly and violently. He rose to his feet. "Do anything you like. I've no more time to waste on you now: I want to be out of here at sunup. Have you done, Mistress Katherine? I told Dorothy to show you the house and settle your room for you. Randal, come with me." He set his untasted cup on the table, with a savage thud, and strode away. The young man at the window drew back a step to let him pass.

Sir Geoffrey went by him without a word or a glance, and on down the hall to the outer door. Master John, all bows and smiles, scurried after him; and when Kate turned her head again, the young man had disappeared.

Nobody else seemed to think that what had happened was in the least out of the ordinary. Humphrey and the other serving man were already clearing away the dishes on the table, and old Dorothy came pattering up to her again to ask her if she would care to look at the house before she went back to her chamber.

Kate nodded politely. She longed instead to sit old Dorothy down on the nearest stool and start asking her questions, but it seemed a little soon to try anything of that sort. From behind the great standing screen across the lower end of the hall, she could hear what sounded like a vast range of pantries, butteries, and kitchens still clattering with plates and voices; but Dorothy, pursing up her lips, led her firmly past these interesting noises to a side door opening back into the newly constructed part of the building, where they went solemnly through one beautiful, empty room after another.

"I did not know it was such a rich house," said Kate at last, looking about her wonderingly. They were standing in a long gallery of the kind that was becoming fashionable as the old solar chambers fell more and more out of style. The gallery was the most sumptuous she had ever seen, magnificently paneled, with one entire wall cut into a sweeping line of windows through which the sun fell dappling on polished floors and portraits and cabinets of rarities. From the windows she could see the ground below falling away sharply to the roofs and fields of a little village huddled at the foot of the hill on which the castle had been built. Beyond the village was a stretch of open land dotted with groves of trees; and beyond that, as far as the eye could reach, the greens and far misty blues of the Elvenwood, with the cliffs closing in on either side of it.

"A rich house," she repeated, turning from the window to gaze around the gallery again. "A marvelous rich house."

Old Dorothy seemed pleased.

"The Wardens were ever great builders in their day and their time," she said, complacently. "My young lady's father finished this room the year after Queen Mary came to the throne." She had a high voice, and spoke with much the same curious, lilting accent as Randal. It seemed to be a peculiarity of the district. Master John, Kate remembered, had a touch of it too.

"They were an old family?" Kate decided she had better not mention Thomas Corget's report that the Wardens were a strange folk.

"Old?" Dorothy threw the word away from her with a contemptuous toss of her head. "Old, did you say to me? Look you here." She opened a small door in one corner of the gallery, and beckoned Kate through it onto a narrow walk that ran along the top of an ancient curtain wall, behind a battlemented parapet.

"Do you see that yonder?" she asked her, pointing west across the courtyard.

Kate nodded. It was the great square tower with the dark archway at the foot. The man with the handcart had gone away, and only a flight of rooks was wheeling and calling about the blackened stone.

"Lord Richard out of Normandy set that there to be his strong place many and many a hundred years ago, when he came into this land with Duke William the Conqueror, and took the old lord's daughter for his wife," said Dorothy, through the clamor of the rooks. "And even so it was not the first strong place that ever was built on that ground — no, nor the second, for the old lord's line had been in the land for many and many a hundred years before Lord Richard drove him out. He was a fierce proud man, Lord Richard was; they say he brought a master builder all the way from France to lay that tower, and killed him when the work was over so that no one would ever make another the like of it. But the old lord's daughter was a match for him, and she taught him the way of the land, and he reared his sons according to the custom of the Gard; and for many and many a hundred years they held the Elvenwood in their turn, and kept it free and safe from all the world. Oh, they were a great family, the Wardens, as mighty as kings in their day and their time, yet my poor lady's father was the last of them, and who's to have the care of us now?" She looked almost imploringly at Lord Richard's tower, her wrinkled hands shaking.