The Dragon of Handale (23 page)

She froze as the shape came nearer. Then it seemed to notice her. Its head lifted. It swayed indistinctly from side to side, as if scenting something.

Then it turned, as if catching sight of her. It wasn’t Fulke at all.

She rummaged under her cloak for her knife.

The thing was still pale, shadowy. She could not quite make it out. It started to shuffle through the snow towards her again. Slowly, and with deliberation, it was drawing closer.

The moon, now almost at the full, slipped from behind a cloud.

“Heaven forfend!” Hildegard gripped her knife in horror as the thing was revealed in the metallic light.

It possessed a long snout. Leathery and unreal, it glistened in the moonlight. It was a monstrous protuberance, inhuman, a shape of nightmare. She watched, transfixed, as it swayed from side to side, sniffing with a hoarse, throaty rattling, lifting to the moon.

During one of its head swings, it paused, lowered. She saw its glance fix on her. For an endless moment, neither of them moved. Then the creature opened its maw wide in total and awful silence. Two rows of fangs shone in its black gullet. Its mouth lolled open.

Hildegard was rooted to the spot. Questions teemed through her mind. She could only gape.

C
HAPTER
20

Somehow, the will to survive brought life flowing back into her limbs. Gathering up the hem of her skirts, she started to run. Heart thudding, she simply ran with only one intention, to put as much space between herself and the monster that had stared at her with such malevolence. All the irrational beliefs of childhood, the nightmares, the pictures of devils on every church wall raced through her mind in a turmoil of fear.

Without knowing where she was going, she tore through the bushes, hearing twigs snap, feeling them nearly rip her cloak from her shoulders, the whiplash branches stinging her cheeks, clawing at her, trying to drag her back. She ran from the undergrowth towards a belt of trees, through barriers of saplings and over bushes. Vines clung to her ankles; roots tripped her. Breath rasping, she ran on.

There was a steep slope ahead and she scrambled up it in a shower of loose stones, mud, and snow.

When she was far enough away, she found a wide oak, came to a shuddering halt, and risked a glance back into the trees. The wood was as silent as a catacomb. Branches laden with snow drooped to the ground. There was no sound from within the entire dark maze but her own laboured and panicked breathing.

She held her breath for longer than seemed possible. Still nothing. The thing had not pursued her. Or if it had, it was standing as still as she was herself.

As she brought her senses to some kind of order, she looked about, her glance fixing nervously on an odd-shaped bush lower down the slope. It was the same height as the thing. It did not move. It seemed only to be watching her.

A weight of snow slid off overburdened leaves. She stared harder. Snow dropped again, as if a hand was surreptitiously parting the branches.

There is no hand, she told herself after a few moments. There is no dragon. There may be someone, some human force out there. But it is of this world. There is no world of ghosts.

Despite this conviction, she stood for a long time under the oak. If the thing was waiting for her to show herself, she would outwait it. Or him.

Snow began to melt inside her boots. The cold began to rise up her legs. She shifted soundlessly. Still nothing. Eventually, she decided she would have to risk revealing her hiding place or freeze to death. She would get back to the safety of the lodge. Warn the masons something was out here. Watch what effect her words had on them.

The masons.

When she looked round to choose a route back, she forgot them. She was lost.

The stars shone in their thousands. She fixed her position and began to walk. Keeping to the ridge with the trees stretched in ominous darkness below as she went, she reminded herself that there were no dragons in Handale Woods. There were no dragons anywhere except on the escutcheons of some noble houses. There were no devils, no hobgoblins, no danger other than that which came from mankind.

But the vision of that long protuberance, the widening orifice—the was no trick of the light; it was real. The thing had stared at her with a sort of astonished hatred. And then it had vanished. It had simply melted away. She had somehow outpaced it. If she had not done so, it would have caught her. And then what? She shivered.

Despite the moon, the light filtred dimly through the thick canopy of the trees. When she followed a route downhill it was like entering a tunnel. She groped her way along from tree to tree. What had looked like a fiend with a long snout had been a deer, nothing more. It had been as startled by her appearance as she had by it. Prickles of some kind of primeval fear still fingered up and down her spine. It’s nonsense to keep thinking about it, she told herself. Walk.

Keep walking.

And don’t look back.

It was an immense relief when she eventually saw the humped shape of the lodge some distance below. It was just a short scramble to safety. Dropping down into the undergrowth that grew around the clearing where the lodge was situated took a final steeling of her nerves. Then she was pushing her way through and running towards it.

She ducked under the eaves with a gasp of relief.

Only then did she realise that the place was in darkness.

Odd, she thought, no lights.

The guard had gone. There was the stump he’d sat on, covered in snow. Gone, too, was the pile of masons’ tools, their bags, and other equipment.

She fumbled at the door but discovered a wooden beam across it, holding it shut. When she tried to lift it, she found it was held in place by a padlock and chain. She rapped on the wooden panels, but without hope, and heard only the echo of empty rooms on the other side.

With a prickle of alarm, she glanced over her shoulder into the woods. Nothing moved.

Across the masons’ yard was the gaping void of the unfinished building. On the other side were piles of cut stone, a stack of logs. A pool of darkness lay between the lodge and the enclosure wall.

Steeling herself yet again, she ran from the shrouded lodge across the blazing white expanse of snow to the door in the enclosure wall. Nothing broke from the trees in pursuit. If there was anything out there, it was doing nothing more than watch.

Now she was faced with the task of digging away nearly two feet of snow to get the door open. With her back to the woods, she began to scoop away the snow with her bare hands.

The celestial voices of the choir rang out over the precinct. Astonished to find that the regular offices of the priory had continued in her absence, she realised she was in time for lauds. As she entered the cloisters, the flakes drifted to a stop. Moonlight shone full and clear on the even levels of untrodden snow.

Approaching the church door, she could hear the choir, but there was something different about the sound. She put her head to one side.

If she was not mistaken, she could hear a tenor and a bass. Men’s voices?

Astonished to think it might be Fulke and one of his henchmen, she pushed the heavy iron-studded door and stepped through into the nave.

A group of nuns, faceless under their black hoods, was standing against the wall, their heads bowed, hands clasped as usual. As the last note spiralled away into the vaults, she saw who had joined them. It wasn’t Fulke after all.

The great bulk of the prioress in her chair was foursquare in front of the altar, the cellaress standing as usual beside her, but—Hildegard opened her eyes wide—next to her were Dakin and the guard from Kilton Castle.

She stared hard. Dakin’s wrists were still in chains, but clasped across his chest, they looked natural, like something willingly worn. The guard, face red from singing, gave him a satisfied smirk as the sound rolled away to a whisper and vanished.

They must have been here most of the time she was lost in the woods, she realized. With the service nearing its end, presumably they had been here for some time.

Not Dakin in the woods, then. Not the mason playing some prank, thinking it a good laugh to scare the nuns who strayed outside the enclosure.

It was a thought that had helped to sustain her as she stood under the oak tree and considered the existence of ghosts and dragons.

Not Dakin.

One of the other masons perhaps?

Where were they?

Not here, that was for sure.

At a suitable moment and unobserved, she opened the door and went outside again. The moon shone brilliantly. It turned the garth into a silver lake, beautiful and sinister.

Then she stared hard.

There were not one but two sets of footprints cutting across the snow—one set her own, and a second pair that came side by side with hers to the very spot where she stood now.

In panic, she glanced along the unlighted arcade with its arching vault and columnettes. A cresset flickered above the entrance to the prioress’s lodging. It was enough to show that the footprints disappeared when they reached the cloister.

She groped cautiously along to the door, turned the ring, and inched it open. A lamp burned inside the entrance.

Then she noticed gouts of snow melting on the brown tiles.

It was hard to tell whether they went straight into the parlour or turned up the stairs to the scriptorium. Without hesitating, she crossed to the parlour door opposite. It opened into the prioress’s private domain.

Now it was filled extravagantly with the glaring light of many candles. A book lay open on the reading stand. Next to it a wine goblet made of glass refracted a greenish light across a wall. The fire blazed. A log shifted. The prioress’s fur slippers stood warming on the hearth.

Hearing the sound of the choir singing a last amen in the adjoining church, she guessed she just had time to open the farther door and glance inside before the prioress returned. She hastened across and pulled it open.

A figure was stooping over a small chest with its lid open.

It was the nun Mariana.

Hildegard recovered first. “Is the lady prioress still at lauds?”

Mariana straightened. Her eyes shone oddly in the light from the candles. “You must know she is, mistress. Could you not hear them singing?”

Not liking her tone, Hildegard moved farther into the chamber. “What are you looking for? Something she would not wish you to find?”

Mariana allowed the lid of the chest to drop and came to stand in front of Hildegard. Her long, thin fingers went to her mouth. She gnawed her knuckles. “You are a mystery woman and no mistake.” She moved closer, so that Hildegard was backed against the wall. “What’s your trade, Mistress York?” she sneered. “Are you here to confess, or shall I find a way to force the truth from out of you?”

“By Saint Benet!” Hildegard exclaimed. “You’re taking airs on yourself to speak to me in this manner. Move off.”

Mariana’s right hand snaked out and she grabbed Hildegard’s head scarf. Just as quickly, Hildegard gripped her round the wrist and jerked her hand away. The nun clawed at Hildegard’s cloak, got a firm hold of it with her other hand, and used it to bang her back, hard, against the stone wall.

Hildegard was just about to give Mariana a good push when a sound from outside caused the nun to gasp in alarm. She swivelled to the door. In a trice, she had vanished.

Voices echoed from outside the prioress’s private entrance from the church. Basilda and her bearers. Her chair had evidently been dumped down and someone was starting to turn the door ring. On its perch, the prioress’s hawk began to squawk at the sound.

Without thinking, Hildegard dashed through the door and flew up the stairs to the scriptorium. Almost before she reached the top, the downstairs door opened and Basilda could be heard scolding the servants for scraping her chair on the doorjamb.

Anticipating the presence of Mariana in the writing chamber, Hildegard steeled herself to enter. She was just in time. The door below slammed shut. She heard the two servants, grumbling, letting themselves outside into the garth.

She glanced round. The scriptorium was empty.

In all the haste and confusion, she had scarcely had time to cast a single glance at Mariana’s footwear. It had been enough, however. Like all the nuns attending lauds and matins, she was wearing leather night boots. They were designed to be worn indoors. Puzzlingly, hers showed no sign of having been worn recently in the snow.

As she waited in the darkness for an opportunity to leave without being seen, she took stock of the last few minutes.

Someone had followed her across the garth to the cloister. There their footprints had disappeared. That meant they must have either gone into the prioress’s private chamber or made their way farther down the cloister arcade.

Although Mariana’s presence in the parlour begged an explanation, she could not have been the one whose prints Hildegard had observed next to her own. The nun’s manner was extraordinary and her hostility demanded an explanation. That for later.

Meanwhile, it was clear that the person who had followed her had hidden in the cloister and had probably watched her enter Basilda’s private rooms. Might, in fact, be waiting there in the shadows under the stone vault even now.

She reimagined what had happened after she had cleared the drifts to open the door.

Somebody might have been watching her from the woods and followed her in as soon as the door was cleared. Whoever it was would have been in the woods at the same time as she had. That person might have heard the dragon roar.

She arrived at the obvious conclusion that the person might have been so close to it as to have been one and the same.

The footprints following her own were slightly smaller, narrowish, and revealed that the person’s shoe had a smooth sole. Ones like many others. It seemed to eliminate the masons, who were strapping fellows who went around in heavy boots. Not Carola, though. Slight and frail-looking despite her command over the men, she might wear soft-soled boots. Hildegard had never noticed. Nor had she noticed whether Carola had been one of the shrouded figures at lauds.