The Changes Trilogy (51 page)

“That's fine, thanks,” said Geoffrey. Mr. Furbelow was one of those men who cannot talk and do anything else at the same time, so Geoffrey's helping had been mangled off somehow between sentences, and then the high, eager, silly voice rambled on. The old man helped himself to several slices of breast and both oysters, and then began to worry about drink.

“Dear me, I don't know what my late wife would say about Sally drinking wine. She was a pillar of the Abergavenny temperance movement. I had a little chemist's shop in Abergavenny, you know. That's what made the whole thing possible. As a chemist, I cannot advise you to drink the water, and though there is mead and ale below the salt, I myself find them very affecting, more so than the wine. I trust you will be moderate.”

The chicken was delicious, though almost cold. Geoffrey was still hungry when he had finished and helped himself from a salver of small chops, which were easy to eat in his fingers, unlike the Good King Henry, which had to be scooped up on pieces of dark soft bread. His knife was desperately sharp steel, with a horn handle bound with silver. His plate seemed to be gold, and so did the goblet from which he drank the sweet cough-syrupy wine. All the while Mr. Furbelow talked, at first making mysterious references to the “he” who owned the tower and provided the feast, and then, as he filled his own goblet several times more, about the old days in Abergavenny, and a famous trip he and his wife had made in the summer of 1969 to the Costa Brava. It took him a long time to finish his chicken. At last he pushed his plate back, reached for a clean one from the far side of the table and pointed with his knife at an enormous arrangement of pastry, shaped like a castle, with little pastry soldiers marching about on top of it.

“You
could
have some of that, if you liked, but you never know what you'll find inside it. If you fancy a sweet there might be some wild strawberries in that bowl just up there beyond the peacock, Sally dear. Ah, splendid. And fresh cream too. No sugar of course. Now you must tell me something about yourselves. I seem to have done all the talking.”

This had been worrying Geoffrey. He didn't know what a seneschal would feel about a traveling leech's dependents. Would he come over snobbish, and send them down below the salt? Or would the chemist from Abergavenny be impressed by the magical title of Doctor?

“Honestly,” he said, “there isn't much to say about us. We're orphans, and we were traveling north with our guardian, who is a leech, when he had to hurry on and help someone have a baby, a lord's wife, I think, and he told us where to meet him but we made a mistake and got lost, and when we heard the wolves in the forest we ran here.”

“Dear me,” said Mr. Furbelow, “I'm afraid your guardian will be worrying about you.”

Sally, her mouth full of strawberries, said sulkily, “I don't like our guardian. I think he'd be glad if we were eaten by wolves.”

“Oh, Sally, he's been awfully kind to us.” (Geoffrey hoped he didn't sound as though he meant it.)

“You said yourself that he couldn't wait to get his hands on the estate. I bet you he doesn't even try to look for us.”

“What's a leech?” said Mr. Furbelow.

“A doctor.”

“Do you mean,” said Mr. Furbelow, “that this”—he waved a vague hand at the tower and the hounds and the Dark Ages appurtenances—“goes on outside the valley?”

“Oh, yes,” said Geoffrey. “All over England. Didn't you know?”

“I've often wondered,” said Mr. Furbelow, “but of course I couldn't go and see. And how did this doctor come to be your guardian?”

“He was a friend of Father's,” said Geoffrey, “and when Dad died he left us in his care, so now we have to go galumphing round the country with him and he treats us like servants. I shouldn't have said that.”

“But it's true,” said Sally.

“You poor things,” said Mr. Furbelow. “I don't know what to do for the best, honestly I don't. Perhaps you'd better stay here for a bit and keep me company. I'm sure
he
won't mind, and I'll be delighted to have someone to talk to after all these years.”

“It's terribly kind of you sir,” said Geoffrey. “I think it would suit us very well. I hope we can do something to help you, but I don't know what.”

“Well,” said Sally, “
I
can speak Latin!”

Oh, Lord, thought Geoffrey, that's spoiled everything, just when we were getting on so well. She's tired and had too much wine, and now she's said something he can find out isn't true in no time. Indeed, the old man was peering at Sally with a dotty fierceness, and Geoffrey began to look around for a weapon to clock him with if there was trouble.

“Die mihi,” said Mr. Furbelow stumblingly, “quid agitis in his montibus.”

“Benigne,” said Sally. “Magister Carolus, cuius pupilli sumus, medicus notabilis, properabat ad castellum Sudeleianum, qua (ut nuntius ei dixerat) uxor baronis iam iam parturiverit. Nobis imperavit magister—”

“How marvelous,” said Mr. Furbelow. “I'm afraid I can't follow you at that speed. Did you say Sudeley Castle? I went there once on a coach trip with my late wife; she enjoyed that sort of outing. Oh dear, it
is
late. We must talk about this tomorrow. Now it's really time you were in bed. He might put the torches out suddenly. Perhaps you'd like to share the same room. This castle is a bit frightening for kiddies, I always think.”

He said the last bit in a noisy whisper to Geoffrey, and then showed them down to the far wall where a staircase, which was really more like a ladder, led up to the gallery. There were several other ladders like it around the hall. Upstairs they found a long, narrow room, with a large window looking out over the hall and a tiny square one cut into the thickness of the wall. Through this they could see the top of the outer wall, and beyond that a section of forest, black in the moonlight, and beyond that the blacker hills. There were no beds in the room, only oak chests, huge feather mattresses like floppy bolsters, and hundreds of fur skins.

“Where do you sleep?” asked Geoffrey.

“Oh,” said Mr. Furbelow, “I've got a little cottage near the stables which I bought for my late wife. He didn't change that. I have my things there and I like to keep an eye on them. I do hope you'll be comfortable. Good night.”

Before they slept (and in the end they found it was easiest to put the mattresses on the floor—they kept slipping off the chests) Geoffrey said, “How on earth did you pull that off?”

“Oh, I
can
speak Latin. Everybody can at our school. You have to speak it all the time, even at meals, and you get whipped if you make a mistake.”

The furs were warm and clean. In that last daze that comes before sleep drowns you, Geoffrey wondered where the weatherman had got to.

Chapter 10

THE DIARY

Geoffrey couldn't tell what time he woke, but the shadows on the forest trees made it look as if the sun was quite high already. Sally was still fast asleep, muffled in a yellow fur and breathing with contented snorts. He looked out of the window into the hall and saw that the feast was still there, though the dogs had been at it in places, scattering dishes and pulling the whole boar's head onto the floor, where two of them wrenched at opposite ends of it. He felt stupid and sick, which might have been the wine, and very stiff, which must have been yesterday's climbing and running. His clothes were muddy and torn. In one of the chests he found some baggy leggings, with leather thongs to bind them into place, and in another a beautifully soft leather jerkin. There was a belt on the wall, too, carrying a short sword in a bronze scabbard, pierced and patterned with owls and fig leaves. He buckled it around the jerkin and went down into the hall to see if the dogs had left any of the food undefiled.

They were enormous things, very woolly and smelly, big-boned, a yellowy-gray color. Wolfhounds, he decided. Two of them lurched toward him, snarling, but backed away when he drew his sword. He found that they'd only messed up a tiny amount of the hillocks of food spread down the tables, so he filled a silver tray with fruit and bread and cold chops and looked around for something to drink. The thought of wine or mead or ale made him sick, and after Mr. Furbelow's warning about the water he decided it would be safer to boil it, if only he could find a pot to put on the fire. He was afraid the gold and silver vessels might melt, and there didn't seem to be anything else.

In the end he found, hanging between two of the torches, a steel helmet with a chain chinstrap and a pointy top. He used his sword to hollow out a nest in the red embers of the fire, settled the helmet into place and poured water in, spilling enough to cause clouds of steam to join the smoke and waver up toward the hole in the roof. It boiled very fast. He hooked it out by the chinstrap and realized that he couldn't put it down because of the point and he had nothing to pour it into, so he held the whole contraption with one hand while he poured the water from one of the big jugs on to the floor and then wine out of a smaller jug into the big one, and at last he could pour his boiled water into the small jug.

When he went to put the blackened helmet back in its place he found a new, shiny one already hanging there. Chilly with fright he carried his tray up to the bedchamber and woke Sally to tell her what had happened.

“
He
must have done it,” she said matter-of-factly.

“Who? Mr. Furbelow?”

“Oh, Jeff, don't be tiresome. I mean the ‘he' Mr. Furbelow keeps talking about, the one who makes all the food and could get rid of the wolves if he felt like it and might put a lot of horses into the stable to keep poor Maddox company. The Necro man.”

“I expect you're right. I just don't want to think about it. I've boiled the water, so it should be all right to drink, but it's still pretty hot. There might be enough left to wash with. You look a right urchin. I found my clothes in the chests, and it mightn't be a bad idea if we looked for something for you. I'm sure Mr. Furbelow would like that. He's got himself some pretty elaborate fancy dress. Though I suppose Latin's our best bet. What do you think he means about lucid intervals?”

“I don't know. It ought to mean clear spaces, that's what the words mean in Latin. May I have the last chop—you've got three and I've only got two. Is he mad?”

“Mr. Furbelow? No, at least he's a bit loopy, but he's not just imagining things, or not everything.
Somebody
must have built this tower and put the forest there—they aren't on the map. And if you agree that far, it means that the somebody's still here. He brings the food and he built the tower and he put the helmet back just now.
He
might be mad. I think that's what ‘lucid intervals' means—the times when mad people aren't mad for a bit. But I don't think Mr. Furbelow's mad.”

“But I don't think he's
bad
either. I think he's made some sort of mistake and has gone on making it worse and doesn't know how to stop. But I think he might easily be rather touchy. We must be careful what we say to him.”

“Yes. And don't push the Latin too hard. Just wait for a natural chance to come up again. Let's see if we can find some clothes for you.”

Everything in the chests was really much too big for an eleven-year-old girl, but they found a long emerald tabard with bits of red silk appliquéd to it and intricate patterns of gold thread filling the gaps. On Sally it reached to the ground, almost, but when it was pulled in with a big gold belt it looked okay; there weren't any sleeves, so they left her brown arms bare. They found a silver comb in another small chest and did her hair into two pigtails tied with gold ribbon, and when Geoffrey had sponged the mud and sweat off her face she looked quite striking, as if she was about to play the queen in a charade. There was still no sign of Mr. Furbelow so they carried the tray down to the hall and started to explore the rest of the tower.

There were two stories of rooms in the gallery, all just like theirs, full of chests and furs. The ones in the lower story were all separate, but the higher ones ran into each other all the way around, with heavy curtains across the doorways, but with nobody in them at all. There was no sound in the whole tower except the crash of a log falling into the fire, followed by a squabble of disturbed hounds. It was very confusing, like a maze. Halfway around they found another ladder going up still further. It led them out onto the roof.

They stood in the open air, still only a third of the way up a dizzy funnel of inward-leaning stone. An open timber staircase climbed spirally up inside this tube of rough-hewn yellow boulders, and finished in a wooden balcony running all the way around inside the parapet. The roof they stood on was a flat cone, with the smoke hole at its point and drainage holes cut into the wall around its perimeter. As they climbed the endless timbers of the stairway Geoffrey noticed that you could still see on them the cutting strokes of a great coarse shaping tool. From the balcony they could see the whole valley, with the ridges of the hills mellow in the morning sunlight and the darker treetops smothering and unshaping everything in between. The children felt oppressed by those million million leaves. The bare upland beyond seemed suddenly a place of escape, if they ever did escape.

Geoffrey leaned over the parapet, his palms chilly with the knowledge of height, to study the courtyard. It was really nothing except the ground enclosed by the outer wall, against which leaned a higgledy-piggledy line of pitched roofs, tiled with stone and slate. They looked very scrappy from up here, like the potting sheds and timber stores and huts where mowers are kept which you can usually find behind privet hedges in the concealed nooks of a big garden. They seemed just to have grown there. In one place this ill-planned mess gave way to a neat modern building, set askew to the wall, finished in whitewashed stucco, with proper sash windows and steep slate steps leading up to a yellow front door. While they were staring at it the door opened and Mr. Furbelow came out carrying a tray. The old man stood for a moment, blinking in the keen sunlight like a roosting bird disturbed by a torch beam, and then tit-tupped down the steps with an easy little run that showed he'd done it a thousand times before.