The Perilous Gard (6 page)

It was too much. Kate, white with shock, stood for a moment as if he had struck her and then, lifting her chin, turned away without another word and walked back up the steep path that led to the castle. Master John was still at the gate, apparently enjoying the evening air, and moved aside with a respectful bow when she came in.

"Here again so soon, Mistress Katherine?" he inquired solicitously. "You shouldn't have troubled yourself with the villagers. They're a little distrustful of strangers, if I make myself clear."

"Yes, Master John," said Kate in her stoniest voice. One thing at least was perfectly clear. Master John had known what would happen and was laughing up his sleeve at her. She could still see the flicker of malicious amusement in his eyes as she sat by the window of the long gallery listening to old Dorothy chatter about the sewing maids and gazing down at the cluster of roofs in the valley below.

The sky was overcast again, but the corn fields had begun to change color at last, and it looked as though there might be some hope for the crop. Two men on horseback had just emerged from the shadows of the forest and were coming slowly down the road towards the castle. They paused for a moment under the last of the great oak trees; then they dismounted, and started to make their way up the winding path to the gate on foot.

Kate, surprised, leaned forward to get a better view. The path, though very steep, was well cared for and quite safe for riding; even a stranger ought to have been able to see that. And one of the men should not have been walking at all: he was lame, with white hair, and pitifully slow.

"Dorothy!" she said over her shoulder. "Come here, Dorothy! Look! Who are those men? Why are they leading their horses?"

Dorothy gave them one brief glance and returned to her tapestry.

"They always do," she answered indifferently. "Pluck an oak branch from a tree by the hill and walk up the rest of the way — that's the rule of the land. Don't fall out of the window, Mistress Katherine. It's only a couple of pilgrims coming to the Well. They'll have to spend the night here now, it's so late."

"Pilgrims?"

It was the last word Kate had expected to hear. The old custom of going on pilgrimage to the holy places had been dying out in England ever since King Henry had plundered the great shrines during his quarrel with the Pope; and even at the best of times, the Perilous Gard could never have been a holy place like Walsingham or Canterbury, if the miserable condition of the church in the village was anything to go by.

"Pilgrims?" she repeated incredulously.

"Didn't you hear me? Pilgrims, coming to the Well."

"What well?"

"The Holy Well," snapped old Dorothy, like a Londoner being asked for the third time what he meant by Saint Paul's Cathedral. "Over the wall westward, at the back of Lord Richard's tower."

"Oh," said Kate, beginning to understand. There were holy wells in other parts of England. They were usually springs or fountains which some saint was supposed to have blessed in the old days, and country folk in the neighborhood were likely to believe that a certain power of healing still lingered on the waters. "We had a maid at home once who came from a place in Kent where they had a holy well," she told Dorothy. "The girls used to go and bathe their faces in it every May Day for a charm to make them prettier."

"Did they, indeed!" said Dorothy, with a disdainful shrug. "And what's a pretty face? Could the water in Kent take away sorrow and pain and the grief of a wound, like the Holy Well here at the Gard?"

"I don't know," said Kate doubtfully, feeling that given the pretty face, the sorrow and the pain could be left to take care of themselves. "What is it that you do here? Bathe your faces, the way they did in Kent?"

"Bathe your face in water from the Holy Well?" Old Dorothy sounded scandalized at the very idea of it. "No, no, Mistress Katherine: it's only to drink for a cure. You must first go up to the cave where the Well is, and dip your oak branch in the spring outside. Then you must offer a gift to be taken by the Well, speaking your trouble aloud, so that Those who rule over the Well can hear you."

"You mean there's some special saint that you pray to?" asked Kate, finding this a little hard to follow.

"I mean Those who rule over the Well," said old Dorothy obstinately. "Why should we trouble ourselves with the saints? Those who rule over the Well were here in the land for many and many a hundred years before they were heard of. But — " she broke off again, fumbling nervously with the ball of green silk. "Now, don't you go fretting about the Well any more, Mistress Katherine. It's not for me to talk of such matters. Master John's the one to tell you. You ask him if you're so wishful to know."

And much good that would do me, thought Kate to herself, watching Dorothy patter hastily out of the room. After what had happened in the village, she would not have asked Master John for so much as the time of day; and when she heard his voice from the back of the courtyard early the next morning, she slipped quietly into the dark entry of Lord Richard's tower to wait until he went by.

Master John came walking briskly past, followed by two other men. One was a young serving man in an unfamiliar livery, with a leather traveling-bottle slung over his arm; but the second was the elderly pilgrim she had seen coming up the road the day before; or so she judged from his white hair and the branch of oak leaves he was carrying with him. His face was almost as white as his hair, strangely rapt and exalted, and the branch he held had been dipped into water. Drops still hung gleaming on every leaf and twig and ran down over his fingers. Even after he had passed her and was gone up the steps to the terrace, the way he had come was marked by a faint line of dark wet splashes scattered along the pavement.

There was no time to work out a plan — Kate's first thought was to move quickly before the trail of splashes could dry out again. The faint dark line led her around the corner of Lord Richard's tower, through an old broken passage with ivy clustering between the stones, and finally out into a tiny circular courtyard, furred all over with thick fine moss as green as an emerald in a ring. To her left a flight of cracked and uneven stone steps went up to the battlemented walk that ran along the top of the outer wall. Below the walk, set in the mid-curve of the wall, was a narrow archway framed with blocks of carving that were pitted by age and hard weather. Through the archway she could see grass and rocks and a glimpse of open country.

Kate crossed the courtyard very slowly, frowning: her eyes on the archway. She was thinking of the fortifications at the other side of the castle, the massive walls rising out of the hill, the one steep road winding up to the gate, the gatehouse with its portcullis and arrow slits and towers. Even now, with its defenses neglected and the walls beginning to decay, the place had appeared overpoweringly strong; in the old lords' time it must have been impregnable. Yet here there were no defenses whatever, not so much as a door in the archway, not so much as a trace on the stone to show that a door had once been there before it had fallen away.

It was only when she passed through the archway and came on the grass beyond that she understood why. What she had thought was open country was actually a small deep valley, hardly more than a gorge, lying between high cliffs that were flung up sheer hundreds of feet into fantastic pinnacles and crumbling overhung masses of rock. The Perilous Gard was backed into the mouth of this gorge as though it were an old lion crouching in the entrance to his den, its great shoulders touching the cliffs on either side and filling the gap completely. The whole valley was sealed off. It could not be attacked or even approached except through the castle itself.

The archway from the castle opened on a wide flat stretch of grass, cut to a rough lawn; and at the far side of this lawn was an enormous standing stone, like the ones on Salisbury Plain, more than twice the height of a tall man. It was a gray cloudy day, smelling of wild places, with the promise of rain in the air. The only living thing in sight was a hawk circling and soaring on the wind above the cliffs.

Kate stood hesitating a moment in the archway. She did not care for wild places, and nothing but curiosity and a rankling determination to get the better of Master John made her go on. There was a thread of a path running along the turf to the right of the Standing Stone, and she began to pick her way along it.

Beyond the Standing Stone the ground fell away and dropped sharply to the floor of the valley, so sharply that Kate would not have been able to keep her feet if the path had not been thrown back and forth across the steep decline of the slope instead of going straight down. The floor of the valley was all rock, littered with great boulders and loose scree and shards washed from the cliffs; only the path was free of them. The valley grew steadily narrower and deeper, the cliffs closing in and the path winding down until it finally came to an end in a little bay of green grass with the crags towering all around it.

The little bay was cool and very quiet except for the sound of running water. It came from a spring that fell from a crevice in the cliff wall on her right, and ran murmuring for a few feet through moss and clustering ferns and tufts of wild flowers clinging precariously to the stones before it was lost again among the rocks. In the cliff wall opposite the spring was a dark jagged opening like the entrance to a cave.

It was not a large cave. Even by the dim light that filtered in through the narrow opening, Kate could see that it was only a sort of chamber, walled and roofed and floored with living rock. The Holy Well lay in the center, a black circle surrounded by a curb of carved stonework, so old that the figures in the carving had worn away to nothing but blobs and lumps.

The Well was unusually wide and the curb very high — longlegged though she was, Kate's breast was barely level with the rim. The rim itself was made of flat hewn stones, carefully fitted together but very unequal in size. Those towards the back of the cave were fairly narrow, while those towards the front, facing the entrance, widened abruptly and came thrusting out to form a broad shallow lip. Standing on this ledge was a deep bowl of greenish bronze, fastened by a long chain to a bronze ring sunk into one of the stones. The bowl was empty, but still wet, and the stone on which it rested was splashed with water. There was no other sign that a pilgrim had been there that morning.

There was also nothing to account for the rapt, ecstatic look she had seen on his face as he passed her. What any sane person could have found to reverence about the Holy Well was beyond Kate's comprehension. The round black cavity with its out thrust lip reminded her unpleasantly of an open toothless mouth; and the air that came from it was cold, dank with the smell of wet moss and old decaying rock.

Even when she found a toe hold on the carving and scrambled clumsily part way up the curb, she could not see anything over the ledge except a ring of slimy stones going down a few feet and then vanishing into total darkness. Far below there rose the sound of running water again, unexpectedly loud, as if the Well were not fed from a spring or pool, but opened directly on some fast-moving underground stream. She found a heavy shard loose on the rim and pushed it off into the hole, scrambling a little higher and leaning still further forward to try to gauge the depth of the shaft.

The shard disappeared completely. Not the faintest tinkling splash came up to her through the booming depths of the water.

Kate drew back. She was beginning to feel cramped and dizzy with stooping; and the cold air rising from the Well seemed stronger.

Then, from behind her in the shadows, a hand suddenly shot out and closed over her wrist. She was torn from her hold, pulled down off the curbstones, lifted bodily, and hauled, scuffling ignominiously, to the grassplot outside the cave. And the angriest voice she had ever heard in her life was shouting at her.

"What are you doing up there, you fool?" it cried. "Come down, do you hear me? Come down!"

Christopher Heron was standing between her and the entrance to the Well. He was dressed now in a tattered old blue shepherd's smock that he might have picked up on a rubbish heap, and the fine gold-hiked knife was gone from his belt; but Christopher Heron it certainly was. The hand was still clamped like iron about her wrist.

Kate looked back at him, almost as angry as he. She had never liked being swept off her own feet and dangled helplessly, even as a game in the nursery.

"I am down," she pointed out coldly.

Christopher Heron stared at her. His eyes went from her hair, which was tumbling crazily about her ears, to the skirt of her dress, which was dark with slime and streaks of moss where he had dragged her down the curbstones; and a slow, painful flush began to pour over his face But the hold on her wrist did not slacken. "I thought you were going over the edge," he said. "You might have been killed."

"I might have been if it was a moonless night and the curb wasn't nearly five feet high," Kate retorted "How could anyone go over the edge? A child would be perfectly safe in there."

The grip on her wrist tightened savagely for an instant; then it loosened, and he took a step back, away from her, his hands dropping to his sides. All the color and excitement had suddenly drained out of his face, and it looked very faintly, almost contemptuously, amused.

"You'll be telling me that Cecily's safe and alive next," he said.

"And so she may be for all I know," Kate snapped at him. "Who is Cecily?"

"The child you were speaking of."

"What child?"

"His child," said Christopher impatiently. "Surely Geoffrey told you what became of her."

"Well, he didn't. I never heard of anyone named Cecily in my life."

"Somebody must have told you. Master John, or old Dorothy."

Kate's mind went back all at once to that first afternoon when she had stood on the battlement walk outside the long gallery looking across the courtyard to Lord Richard's tower. "Dorothy did say — " she began.

"I thought as much. What did she say?"