The Puzzle Ring (26 page)

When at last Angus called a halt, it was dark and bitterly cold. Hannah's hands and feet and face were frozen, and her whole body ached. Yet there was nowhere to sleep but on the ground. The children huddled together, too cold and exhausted to even speak, as Angus cut fronds of brown bracken and heather with his knife, and Linnet gathered together kindling.

Angus scowled at them. ‘Do you expect to be waited on hand and foot? There's water to be got, and a meal to cook. And it'll be a cold night if you don't cut yourself some bracken to sleep on.'

‘Surely we're not sleeping here!' Scarlett said. ‘Out in the open!'

‘We're still too close to Wintersloe Castle to risk finding shelter,' Angus replied tersely. ‘Lord Montgomery will hang me if he finds me.'

‘Just for quitting your job?' Max demanded.

Angus was surprised. ‘Of course.'

‘It's not just Lord Montgomery we need to worry about, but the black witch's spies,' Linnet said. ‘Luckily the gate is
now closed again, which gives us another six weeks before the black witch can send her host against us. Her spies will still be watching for us, though, so we must try to keep you hidden, at least till we are well away from Fairknowe.'

‘I wouldn't be lighting a fire at all tonight if it wasn't that you look so cold,' Angus said. ‘But if you want the fire to last more than an hour or two, I'd be gathering up some wood!'

As Hannah got up stiffly, she looked out at the dark, cold, shadowy forest with a sense of misery approaching despair. There was still snow on the tops of the hills and in the furrows under the trees. Surely they would freeze to death?

Their dinner was little more than a mug of hot water in which a few turnips had been boiled and mashed. Cold and hungry, the children wrapped themselves in their plaids and lay down on piles of old bracken and heather, as close to the fire as they could. It was so cold their breath puffed white. Hannah could not stop shivering, so that the dry bracken beneath her rustled noisily, poking her through her clothes.

Linnet came and spread her own plaid over the two girls, and then heaped more bracken and heather upon them. ‘Sleep, my lambs,' she whispered, gently touching Hannah's brow. Somehow, Hannah did.

The next day was the same. All day, they walked and walked and walked. At midday they ate what Angus called ‘brose'—uncooked oats shaken up with water—and walked on till it was dark, when they shared a thin broth made with water and limp vegetables, and, hollow with hunger, rolled themselves in their plaids to sleep.

Hannah woke in the morning, stiff and sore and cold, to find Angus once again stirring a pot of plain porridge
flavoured with nothing more than a pinch of salt. She groaned loudly. ‘Not porridge again!'

Angus looked affronted. ‘Nothing better to stick to the sides of the stomach.'

‘What I wouldn't give for some bacon and eggs and sausages,' Donovan said.

‘I'd love a hot croissant,' Scarlett said. ‘With lots of butter and strawberry jam.'

‘Cinnamon rolls with hot chocolate,' Hannah said longingly.

Angus had been scowling ferociously all this time. At Hannah's words, he burst out, ‘The Lord preserve me! It's cinnamon they be wanting now! Where am I meant to be getting the gold for that? A king's ransom, it costs!'

Hannah stared at him in surprise as he got up, seized his bow and arrows, and stumped off into the forest.

‘What's up with him?' Scarlett wondered.

Linnet knelt and stirred the porridge. ‘By the stars, it must be a wonderful place, your world,' she said. ‘To eat meat every day like a lord, and cinnamon like a queen.'

‘Why, don't normal people get to eat bacon and eggs, and cinnamon, and stuff?' Max asked.

Linnet shook her head. ‘Only the rich eat meat every day, while cinnamon is rare indeed. The queen loves dates flavoured with cinnamon, I know, because Lord Montgomery took her some as a gift earlier this year and it cost him a pretty fortune. Why, we do not even know where cinnamon comes from. The merchants keep it a closely guarded secret.'

‘Wow,' Hannah said. ‘We can buy it any old place.'

‘Well, here all we have is what we can grow or catch with our own hands,' Linnet said. ‘So, come eat your porridge
while it's hot and let us be on our way. Angus will catch us up when his temper has cooled.'

The old man did not join them until late in the afternoon, and then he carried two fat red birds hidden in his plaid. ‘Let us hope no one sees us till we've eaten every last scrap of them,' he said dourly. ‘I have no desire to lose my ear.'

The children winced and did not know what to say, feeling bad that it was their complaints about the food that had led him to poaching.

‘I'll cook us up a feast tonight!' Linnet cried, clapping her hands. ‘And make us some proper soup with the bones. Thank you, Angus!'

‘Thank you!' the children echoed.

The roast grouse that night seemed the most delicious thing Hannah and her friends had ever eaten in their lives, and they were lavish in their praise of Angus's hunting and Linnet's cooking, so much that the old man seemed to forgive them their complaints of the morning. The children sucked every last scrap of meat and fat from the bones, and then Linnet put them to boil with the leaves of wild garlic and some carrots so that their broth the next day should taste a little more flavoursome.

At dusk on the following day, they came to Stirling, with its grim grey castle towering over the town and the river. The children were very excited by the sight of it, and began to talk animatedly about inns and fires and hot stew and soft beds, but to their disappointment Angus said he did not have the money for them to live in the lap of luxury, and he marched them past the town and back into the forest for another night shivering on the iron-hard, iron-cold ground.

‘But why?' Scarlett raged. ‘It's so unfair! Why couldn't we have a night inside for once? We could've done the washing-up or sung for them to pay for it!'

‘Better no one sees you,' Angus said shortly. ‘I don't want any talk.'

‘But surely they're used to people travelling by?' Max said. ‘Why would we cause talk?'

‘You're bound to be noticed,' Angus said.

‘But why?' Scarlett demanded. ‘We'll all catch pneumonia if we sleep outside every night.'

‘You don't catch pneumonia from getting cold,' Max said. ‘Pneumonia is caused by bacteria, usually. We could get hypothermia though.'

‘I think I've got hypothermia now,' Hannah said, huddling her plaid around her. ‘I am so cold! Please, please, can't we just spend a night in an inn somewhere? I'd wash a hundred plates for a nice soft bed!'

‘No,' Angus said.

‘Why not?' Scarlett demanded. ‘It's so unfair!'

‘Your manners are too bad,' Angus snapped, as if goaded beyond all patience.

Scarlett was affronted. ‘Our manners aren't bad! We say “please” and “thank you” and “excuse me” if we burp!'

Angus pressed his lips together, looking very dour.

‘What do you mean?' Hannah demanded, feeling quite as affronted as Scarlett looked. Her mother was always drumming the need for politeness into her, so much so that Hannah felt she was half crippled by the need always to be courteous. Most teenagers were not half as well mannered as she was, she thought.

‘Do not be angry, my lambs. Angus does not mean to upset you,' Linnet said gently.

‘But what does he mean?' Max demanded. ‘We haven't been rude, have we?'

‘You argue with him a lot,' she said unwillingly.

‘Well, yes,' Hannah said, surprised. ‘But . . .'

‘I don't know what children are permitted to do in your day,' Angus said huffily, ‘but in our day children listen to their elders and do what they're told.'

‘Oh, all that stuff about children being seen and not heard!' Scarlett said scornfully. ‘That's so old-fashioned!'

There was a little silence, then the four friends exchanged guilty looks.

‘We didn't mean to be rude,' Hannah said. ‘That's just how we talk.'

‘And as a matter of fact,' Max said, ‘your manners aren't so hot either. You wipe your mouth on your sleeve, and blow your nose in your fingers, and then we all have to eat out of the same pot, which must be simply seething with germs . . .'

‘You do not raise your hat,' Angus said angrily, ‘or stand and bow when I come by, or say your prayers upon going to bed, and not once have you waited for me and Linnet to finish our meal before you begin yours. Such rudeness would raise eyebrows in any village we stopped by.'

‘We didn't know,' Hannah said. ‘Why didn't you tell us?'

‘I didn't wish to be rude,' Angus replied gruffly.

The children laughed at that and, once they began laughing, could not stop. Linnet laughed with them. After a moment Angus's face relaxed and he allowed one corner of his grim mouth to lift in what may have been a smile.

‘You'd better give us lessons in manners,' Scarlett said. ‘What a hoot! Maybe you could teach us how to curtsey too, Angus, and flutter our fans.'

‘Fans?' he asked, puzzled. ‘What's a fan?'

The next morning, the children were dumbfounded to realise that the main road in Scotland was little more than a muddy cart track through the forest, so deeply rutted you could have hidden a baby in some of the potholes.

‘You should see the M9 now,' Max told Angus and Linnet. ‘It's got three lanes in either direction. Cars and trucks and buses just whiz along. It takes less than an hour to get to Edinburgh from Stirling.'

‘You're trying to make a fool of me,' Angus said suspiciously. ‘It's just not possible!'

He would not believe any of their stories of the marvels of modern life, though Max was in his element, telling him about landing on the moon and heart transplants and submarines and escalators till the old man was puce in the face.

It took the weary travellers another long day's hard walking to reach Edinburgh from Stirling. Upon its ramparts, the castle glowed like a great golden crown with irregular peaked roofs and windows glittering like diamonds. It seemed a much greater and more magnificent building than Hannah had seen in her own time, surrounded as it was by empty snow-dusted fields and winter-bare woods instead of sprawling suburbs.

A suspicious-eyed guard let them through the gate in the stout grey wall after Angus told him they were just travellers
passing through. Within the wall was a different world, a warren of narrow stinking alleyways and courtyards, stairways and vaults and cobbled squares, with filth pooling in the gaps between the stones and running down the walls from the windows. The streets were crowded with people, some of them dressed in doublets and ruffs and codpieces and pointy shoes, just like people in paintings. Pigs rooted through the rubbish, and a skinny dog chased a squawking chicken down an alley, chased by a barefoot urchin with a grubby face. A huge black rat with a white belly and feet raced between their feet and up a wall, turning to stare at them with beady eyes before swarming along the wall beside them. Max yelped and jumped backwards, and both Scarlett and Hannah screamed, much to the amusement of everyone around them. A fat woman whacked at the rat with a broom, and it disappeared down a drain.

Hannah had found it easy to forget that she was back in the sixteenth century when they had been tramping through the forest, but in Edinburgh the difference between times was all too clear. The streets stank, and even the people looked quite different. They were smaller than Hannah was used to, both shorter and thinner, and many were scarred with pox marks. Most had lost some or nearly all of their teeth, and she saw one man who had had both his ears carved off, leaving him with ugly stumps.

So little light struck down between the towering buildings that it was dim and shadowy in the alleys. Angus led them up steep cobbled lanes and stairwells, his square, indomitable figure a source of secret comfort to them all. At last he led them to a broad, sunlit street that ran along the bony spine of rock that connected Edinburgh Castle on its high rampart
at one end, and the glowing bare rock of Arthur's Seat at the far end.

‘Less than a mile from here,' Angus said, panting slightly from the climb. ‘If we hurry, we'll make it before sunset.'

By the time they reached Arthur's Seat, it was growing dark. The great hill, shaped like a crouching lion, reared above them, bare and windswept, blocking the light from the setting sun so that Hannah and her friends were climbing into sombre shadow, although behind them the firth blazed scarlet and gold. Hannah's breath was coming sharply, hurting her side. She stopped, and turned to look back on Edinburgh and the palace of Holyrood, glowing golden in the last rays of light. She could see all the way to the river and the firth, and across the grey winter fields. Rooks' nests swung precariously in the delicate tracery of twigs, bare against the pale sky.