The Perilous Gard (3 page)

Everybody halted obediently in a jingling of spurs and a creaking of leather as the men swung down from their saddles. Sir Geoffrey came looming out of the mist, on foot, with the rain blowing about his head, and paused beside Kate's stirrup. He put his hand on the pommel of her saddle and looked up at her. He had a big, craggy face with a jaw like iron, and level, rather forbidding gray eyes.

"How do you, Mistress Katherine?" he inquired stiffly.

Kate lifted her chin and looked back at him.

"I thank you, Sir Geoffrey," she replied. "Well enough."

"Is there anything you want?"

"I thank you, Sir Geoffrey," Kate repeated. "No."

Sir Geoffrey took a step as if to move away, and then swung around on her again, frowning. But he did not appear to be angry. He stood watching her for a long moment, and finally said: "There's no need to cry."

"I haven't been crying," Kate answered indignantly. Her father had said once that thank God, she wasn't always melting into tears like her mother and Alicia; and it had been a matter of pride with her never to let herself cry afterwards. "I haven't been crying," she repeated. "That's only the rain on my face."

The shadow of something that might have been a smile glinted an instant in Sir Geoffrey's forbidding eyes and was gone before she could be sure of it. "Wipe the rain off your face, then," he told her. "And stop trying to look down your nose at me! I've been on the road with you six days now, and all I've had out of you is yes-Sir-Geoffrey and no-Sir-Geoffrey and I-thank-you-Sir-Geoffrey like a stone speaking. Come now, you don't seem to be a fool: deal with me plainly — is there anything you want?"  The corner of Kate's mouth flickered suddenly in an answering smile before she could stop herself.

"Indeed yes, if you please, Sir Geoffrey," she replied. "I want a roof over my head and a blazing fire and some dry clothes and a hot roast chicken and a goose-feather bed with three coverlets on it. Will you be so kind as to fetch them at once?"

The glint of amusement deepened in Sir Geoffrey's eyes. "Stay where you are," he ordered, and striding away, returned after a moment with a slab of yellow cheese and a hunch of bread wrapped in a napkin.

"You can have your roast chicken tomorrow when we're safe at the Hall," he said. "Try a bit of this now, and eat as much as you can: you'll need it. We've a long road still ahead of us."

"How long?" asked Kate promptly. Though she had never until now brought herself to put questions to Sir Geoffrey, one of her chief trials during the last six days had been the riding blind into completely strange country. It had not been so bad at first, on the way up from the south, while she could at least recognize the names on the signposts and the towns where they had stopped for the night. The inns had been large and bustling, and there were other travelers on the road. But early that morning they had turned off the road and ridden away over a desolate moor seamed with ridges and outcroppings of rock, as if the bones of the land were forcing their way through it, with nothing alive on the wide gray folds of the hills except for an occasional flock of sheep so far away that it could hardly be told from one of the low drifting clouds. And after they had crossed the moor, it was only to pass through a narrow gap between two stony tors and down deeper and deeper into the forest.

"How long?" Sir Geoffrey shrugged his big shoulders. "If this rain won't stop and the carts go on breaking down, God knows. Not long as the crow flies. We're on Warden land now, in the Elvenwood. It's winding about among these cursed trees that makes the going so slow."

Kate frowned up at the looming green shadows. "Don't they ever cut them down?" she demanded.

"I asked my wife's father that same question once," said Sir Geoffrey, "and he told me it would be a bold man who'd lay an ax to any tree in the Elvenwood."

"Why?"

"I don't know," said Sir Geoffrey. "For then his daughter came into the room, and the matter went out of my mind."

Kate looked from the trees to the road. For a few feet around them it was churned into black mud and hoof-prints where the horses had trampled it; then the leaves covered it again. A few feet more, and it was out of sight.

"Isn't there any other way we could go?" she asked.

Sir Geoffrey shook his head. "We're in a valley between two cliffs," he explained briefly, "and we have to go the length of it to come to the Hall. What's the matter? Afraid of the dark?"

"No," said Kate, rather more loudly than she meant to. It was already dusk on the deep pathway under the overhanging branches, and her eyes were beginning to play tricks on her as the moving leaves wavered and shifted in the uncertain light. There was one old stump covered with ivy at the top of the bank that looked exactly like a hooded figure in a green cloak, leaning forward to listen.

Then, somewhere in the distance, through the trees, she suddenly heard a voice singing. It came blowing towards them on the misty rain — a high clear voice, curiously piercing and sweet. It was singing a verse from the old ballad about the minstrel who met the fairy lady under the elder tree.

Her skirt was made of the grass-green silk,
  Her mantle of the velvet fine,
And from every strand of horse's mane
  Hung twenty silver bells and nine.
'O harp and carp, True Thomas,' she said,
  'O harp and carp along with me — '

"Good Lord, it's Randal," said Sir Geoffrey. "I'd know his voice if I heard it in the Indies. Listen! He's coming this way."

"Who?" asked Kate, bending forward to catch the notes through the rustling of the leaves.

"Randal," repeated Sir Geoffrey. "Old Randal the harper. I wonder where he's been all the winter? I haven't seen him since I came back from Ireland."

"Is he one of your men?"

"He's been known to call himself that when it would keep some town from putting him in the stocks for a vagabond," replied Sir Geoffrey dryly. "And I suppose you could say that he lives with me when he lives anywhere. He's a minstrel — one of the old wandering breed, always on the road. I took him in one harvest time years ago when he came ill with the fever to my door in Norfolk, and he's been drifting back now and again ever since. Don't be frightened when you see him, will you? The fever nearly killed him, and he never got his wits back properly afterwards."

"Do you mean," Kate ventured, "that he's mad?"

"No — only touched in the head, as my old nurse used to say. He can't remember much before the fever, and sometimes he talks a little wildly. You needn't mind that. He's as gentle as a baby, and you can hear for yourself that it did no harm to his voice."

The voice was singing again, higher and nearer. This time it seemed to be a "riddle song," but not one that Kate knew, set to a gay, curiously dancing air:

O where is the Queen, and where is her throne?
  Down in the stone O, but not in the stone.
O where is the Queen, and where is her hall?
  Over the wall O, with never a wall.
O where are her dancers, and where are they now?
  Go out by the oak leaf, with never a bough.

"Randal!" called Sir Geoffrey. "Randal, lad! Come here!"

The air snapped off suddenly in the middle of a note, and a slight figure dressed in rusty brown came scurrying like a dead leaf around the bend of the road. Under one arm, cradled against his shoulder, he was carrying something that looked like a small harp, covered with fine canvas to shield it from the rain. A broken crimson quill-feather dangled from one corner of his battered cap.

"Welcome, Sir Geoffrey," he said, pulling off the cap and somehow contriving to bow gracefully in spite of the harp and the rain. He had a pointed brown face and spoke with a sweet, lilting, musical accent very unlike the harsh Norfolk voices of Sir Geoffrey's other retainers. "It is many and many a day since I saw you riding down the road with all your armed men at your back. Where have you been so long away?"

"Where have you been yourself?" demanded Sir Geoffrey, glancing at the little stream of water that was running off the tip of the crimson feather and splashing down past Randal's knee into the mud of the road. "Put that cap back on your head, man: it's no weather for courtesy. You ought to be sheltering at the Hall. What are you doing here?"

Randal's mouth drooped like a scolded child's.

"I was looking for the way in again," he explained, twisting the cap between his hands. "I knew the way in as well as the door to your house before they took my wits away from me, if I could only call it back to my mind. There is one way in through the stone of the tower, and another way in over the wall by the well, and another way in by the oak leaf, with never a bough."

"No more of that talk!" said Sir Geoffrey. "Do you want to work yourself into the fever again? What you need is a corner by the fire and something to eat. How long have you been starving this time?"

"Not a bit of bread have I had since morning," Randal admitted, "nor," he added winningly, with his eyes on Kate's hand, "any cheese."

Sir Geoffrey smiled and shook his head. "No, that's the last of it," he said. "There'll be more at the Hall. Find Diccon and tell him you're to ride with us in one of the carts when we go."

But Kate had already tumbled the bread and cheese back into the napkin and was leaning down from her saddle. "May I give him the rest of mine?" she asked. "I've had all I want."

Sir Geoffrey nodded. "If you choose," he said. "This is Mistress Katherine Sutton, Randal, and you must play your harp for her one of these days. She is coming to stay at the Hall for a time."

Randal looked up at her, and then suddenly made another of his fantastically graceful bows, the crimson feather fluttering in the rain.

"A blessing on your gentle heart, my lady," he said.

Kate stiffened again at once. She had never liked to be thanked; and what was the sense of making such a to-do over a morsel of bread and cheese?

Randal went on standing by her stirrup, the bread and cheese in his hand.

"Sir Geoffrey says you will be staying at the castle," he told her. It did not seem to occur to him that she must have heard what Sir Geoffrey had said.

"Yes, Randal."

Randal took a step forward and touched her bridle with the tip of his finger.

"You won't be lost, will you?" he asked anxiously. "Like the other one?"

"What other one?"

Randal's gaze faltered and then went uncertainly from Kate to Sir Geoffrey and back to Kate again. He seemed puzzled and unhappy about something.

"The — the other girl," he stammered at last. "The little girl who was lost. I was told there was a little girl. Some say that she went of her own free will, and some that she was taken, but she found the way in, and then she never found the way out again."

There was an odd, breathless sort of pause. Kate, turning her head, saw that Sir Geoffrey was standing stock still in the road, his big hands clenched at his sides. All the friendliness was gone from his face, and his jaw looked more than ever as if it were made of iron.

"Do you know what it is that he means?" he demanded curtly.

"No, Sir Geoffrey."

"You will, soon enough," said Sir Geoffrey, in his grimmest voice. "Take that food now, Randal, and come along with me: it's time we were away."

He tramped off without another word, Randal trotting obediently at his side. Through the blowing mist, Kate saw the driver of the wrecked cart go running up to speak to him. There was a jingling stir and a confused trampling of hoofs as the men began to mount again. She turned to haul the white mare's nose up out of the ferns on the bank.

Then, low but very distinct under the rough noises from the road, she heard the last sound in the world that she had expected to hear.

Someone was laughing.

Startled, she looked up, and saw a woman at the top of the bank, among the branches.

She was standing so still, her long dark hair and shadowy green cloak melting in and out of the shifting leaves, that for an instant Kate thought she was not real, only a trick of light and color like her first illusion about the ivy-covered stump. But she was real. Kate could see the hard delicate bones of her face, and the glint of a gold bracelet on the wrist under the edge of the cloak. She was gazing down at the scene on the road beneath her with an amused, faintly disdainful laugh still lingering about her mouth, as if she were watching a pack of half-grown puppies all yelping together in a kennel-run.

The next moment there was a great noise of shouts and cracking whips as the carts began to move forward. The white mare snorted and plunged, and by the time Kate got control of it again, the woman was gone.

Chapter III

The Young Man at the Window

By the time they had ridden another two miles, Kate had made up her mind that the woman among the branches must have been a gypsy tinker or a charcoal burner's wife pausing to watch them out of curiosity: it was not a very good explanation, but it was the best she could think of. All the same, she could not rid herself of a foolish notion that the woman was still with them, flitting from tree to tree, though in the deepening shadows it was getting impossible to distinguish the trees or much of anything else except the solid, square-shouldered shape of Diccon's back on the road just ahead. She was tired now, too tired to reason; presently, her thoughts began to run together and everything faded into a blur of weariness like a dream, the endless bone-racking trot of the mare, the wet discomfort of her cloak, the clang of a gate, torches and running feet and hands lifting her down from the saddle, and then more feet and firelight and warmth and darkness, all slipping away at last into another confused dream. The woman in the green cloak was watching her again, but after a while she went away, and Master Roger had his hand on her shoulder and was telling her to listen to what it was that Randal was singing, only Randal was singing a long way off, and try as she might she could not seem to catch the words because she had lost the way in and there was a light that kept shining on her face and bothering her. She put up one hand to thrust it away, and turning over drowsily, opened her eyes.