Airs Above the Ground

by Mary Stewart

  I couldn’t hear him now. It was to be assumed that he was hunting me along the southern wing. Turning the other way, I dodged along through the sharp lights and shadows, stumbling sometimes, both hands spread out in front of me, for so weird was this lunar landscape that, however brilliant the moonlight, one felt as if one was running blind.

  In front of me loomed the turret at the north-east corner, the twin of the one up whose stairway I had come. Here, surely, must be the second stairway which I was so sure that I remembered . . .?

  There was indeed a stairway: the head of it lay in the shadow away from the moon. But as I ran up to it I saw that it was ruinous, its top railed stoutly off with timber, and the first half-dozen steps hanging, crumbling, over vacancy.

  But beside it, in the wall of the tower, straight in front of me there was a door.

  This was like all the other castle doors, heavy, and lavishly studded and hinged with wrought iron. There was no latch, only a big curved handle, which, as I seized it and pushed, felt under my hands as if it were the shape of some animal, a griffin or a winged lizard. The door was immovable. I pushed and pulled, hardly believing that this, which had loomed up in front of me as a sort of miracle of escape, was not, after all, going to work.

  I think it was at this moment that it occurred to me seriously, for the first time, that perhaps I was not going to get away, that the thing which happened to other people might, now, soon, be going to happen to me. Possibly the very fairy-tale atmosphere of the castle – the lonely valley, the turrets, the moonlight, the battlements, this door with the griffin handle – the trappings of childhood’s dreams and of romance, once become actual, were seen to be no longer dreams but nightmare. Caught up in one’s own private world of fantasy, perhaps one would always trade it for an acre of barren heath under the grey light of day.

  There was even, set in the stone beside the door, the familiar bell-push mounted in wrought iron. I pressed it. It seemed the perfectly normal thing to do in this crazy night. I believe it would have seemed perfectly normal if the door had opened silently and a wizard had bowed me in among the cobwebs and the alembics . . .

  But nothing happened. The door was immovable, blank in the moonlight.

  They say that every end is a beginning. Even as I stood there, with my hand on the silly bell, feeling the courage, and even the driving fear, spill out of me to leave me sprung and spent, I remembered where I had seen the other stair.

  For me it couldn’t have been better placed. It was a wide stone stairway leading down beside one of the gate towers – the twin turrets which flanked the main gateway at the bridge. Originally these towers had been joined by a stretch of machicolated curtain wall, a narrow catwalk above the gate, but this had fallen into disrepair and was a mere skeleton, simply an arched span of crumbling stone joining the two towers. The southern gate tower, similarly, had fallen into ruin, and had been left in its decay with its stairway fallen away and its roof sticking up like a jagged tooth. But the northerly one, I knew, was whole and perfectly negotiable, and it gave on the courtyard and the steps and the front door of the castle and the bridge and the road up which Lewis would be coming . . .

  There was still no sign of Sandor. Chin on shoulder I slithered out of the shadow of the turret, round the curve, and then ran and dodged my crazy way along the rooftop towards the gate tower on the west front.

  I was right. The stairway was there. And it was open. The head of it lay full in the moonlight, fifty yards ahead of me. As I burst out of shadow into the full glare of the moon, running, I saw Sandor again. He had done just as I had hoped. He had run right round the other wing of the castle, and was now heading for the opposite side of the gate – the side with the broken turret.

  He had seen me. I saw the gun flash threateningly into his hand; but I knew that, here of all places, he wouldn’t dare to shoot. In any case I couldn’t go back; there was nowhere to go back to; he could reach the turret up which we had come before I could. And I could get down to the courtyard, down my stairway. He couldn’t. His was broken, the turret itself just a jut of crumbling fangs. To get to me he would have to go all the way back. I ran forward.

  I had run twenty yards, not looking at him, my whole being intent simply on the head of that stone staircase, when I suddenly saw what he was doing. I had forgotten who – or what – Sandor was. To a man who worked daily on the high wire, a nine-inch wall, in whatever state of repair, was as wide as a motorway. He never even hesitated. He went up that broken turret like a leaping cat, and then was on top of the arch and running – not walking, running – across it towards me.

  As I stopped dead, I saw something else. Away below, down the hillside, down among the dark trees away to the right, I thought I saw the lights of a moving car.

  It was silly, it was futile, but I screamed his name. ‘Lewis, Lewis!’ I doubt if the cry could have been heard from farther than ten yards away; it came out only as a sort of sobbing gasp, not even as loud as the cry of an owl. Sandor was three brisk strides from the end of the arch, straight above the stair head. I turned and ran back the way I had come.

  He leapt down to the leads and came after me.

  At least now I knew my way, and at least I now knew he didn’t intend to shoot me. With a thirty-yard lead I might yet make the corner turret and the steps down to my own room. And now there would be someone to run to. Lewis.

  Almost immediately I realised that, even with the lead I had, I couldn’t hope to do it. My very fear had exhausted me, and Sandor’s physical strength and fitness were far greater than my own . . . I didn’t have my hands held in front of me now. Blind or not, I simply ran as hard as I could back the way I had come along the rooftop maze of the north wing, round the turret where that nightmare magic door stood in the shadows fast shut . . .

  It was wide open.

  I was almost past it when I saw, out of the corner of my eye, the blank, black oblong of the open door. Sandor was barely ten yards behind me. I could never reach my own turret now. This, whatever it was, was the only port in a storm. I jerked round like a doubling hare and almost fell through the open door.

  He overran me. My sudden movement, as I seized the jamb of the door and swung myself round and back in through the gap, took him completely by surprise. I must have vanished almost literally from under his hands. I saw him shoot past me as I swung back into the shadow, and then I found myself sprawling breathless against a slippery wall on the inside of the tower.

  I had not known what to expect inside the door – some kind of stairway, perhaps; but there was no such thing. As I swung round the door-jamb into the blackness, I found myself on a level slippery floor, and then, as I staggered and put my hands out to the wall to save myself, the door through which I had come slid fast shut behind me, and a light came on.

  The floor, the shining steel walls, the light, dropped frighteningly downwards like a stone and I went with them. It was the lift.

  16

  O Lewis . . .!

  Shakespeare: King John

  There was barely time even to register this. It was only afterwards that I knew what had happened. When the lift had been installed they had made a thorough job of it and extended the shaft to the roof to give access to the rampart walks, and (I found later) a belvedere on the south side. My half crazy, wholly thoughtless action in pressing the bell-push had summoned it, and as I had swung myself into the small metal box one of my hands, outstretched and flailing for balance, must have caught the controls as I fell, and sent the lift earthwards.

  I hardly realised when the dropping motion ceased. I was gasping and sobbing for breath, and still just picking myself up shakily from the floor, when the drop finished as smoothly as it had started, and with a click the doors opened. I caught a glimpse of some dimly lit passage outside, empty and silent. Dazedly, my hands slipping on the ribbed metal of the lift wall, I pulled myself to my feet, still barely aware of what was happening, and moved shakily towards the open doors.

 
They shut in my face. The metal cage moved again – this time, upwards. He had called it from the roof. He must have been standing with his thumb pressed on the button, and now, locked in my small metal trap, I was being hurtled straight back to the roof.

  I flew at the controls. I had no idea what they were, and in any case all the labelling was in German. But one knob was red, and at this I shoved with all my strength. With a sickening sensation and a jar, the lift stopped in mid-flight. I jammed hard with my thumb at the lowermost of the rank of buttons, released the red, and after perhaps two seconds of intolerable pause I felt the lift drop once more . . .

  This time I was pressed against the doors, waiting, one hand spread against the metal, ready to push, the other clutching the only movable object in the lift, a big oblong trough for cigarette butts, a foot long by nine inches wide, which had been standing in the corner underneath the control panel.

  The doors slid open easily on to darkness. Before they were a foot apart I was through them and had turned to ram the metal through between them as they slid shut. They closed smoothly on the metal, gripped it, held – and stayed open, nine inches apart.

  It was enough. The lift didn’t move. I turned in the shaft of light from its wedged door to see where I was.

  I was standing on stone, rough stone flags, and I could tell somehow from the feel of the air around me that this was no corridor, but a large room or space. It was cold with the dank chill that one associates with cellars: and in a moment I saw that this was in fact where I must be. Back in the dimness, the faint glint from crowded ranks of bottles showed me that this was the wine cellar, neatly situated at the junction of the kitchen wing and the central block of the castle. They had certainly made a comprehensive job of the new lift, roof to dungeon. And, I reckoned, if they used the lift to come down for the wine there must surely be a light switch near it . . .?

  There was. My fingers, slithering and padding over the wall to either side of the lift, found the switch and pressed it, and a light, dim enough, but more than adequate, flicked into life just as the lift light (presumably on a time switch) went out.

  If the lift had been an anachronism behind the panelling of the castle corridors, here it seemed like something from another world. I was in a great vaulted space, treed like a forest with squat massive pillars which supported the low ceiling on great branches of stone. Stacked here and there between the pillars were the racks for wine, themselves by no means new, but young compared with this Gothic dungeon, partly hewn, I suspected, out of the living rock of the crag. The shadowed spaces between the pillars seemed to stretch infinitely in every direction. From where I stood I could see neither door nor staircase, though patches of deeper darkness seemed to indicate where passages might lead off underneath the rest of the castle.

  I swung back to face the lift and tried, remembering how it was situated on the upper floors, to imagine exactly where under the castle I stood now. Somewhere along to my right would be the main part of the castle with the central staircase. Off to my left the kitchen premises, and beyond them the stables and the gatehouse . . .

  I bit my lip, hesitating. It was impossible to guess what Sandor’s next move would be. I didn’t know whether he had seen the lights of the approaching car; I thought not. But in any case it might be supposed that, with time slipping on, he would cut his losses, abandon the chase, and make straight for the stairway by the gate and the stable. Or he might go back by the way he had come, through my bedroom, in which case he would come down by the main staircase . . .

  There was no way of guessing. Only one thing was certain, that I wasn’t going to stay down here in this echoing vault. I had to get out somehow to the upper air, to the courtyard. And even if Sandor was there, there also any minute now would be my own safety, Lewis.

  Only then did it occur to me that my safety was Lewis’s danger. If by chance, as he entered the courtyard or the castle, he were to meet Sandor, then I no longer had any illusions about what the latter would do, and Lewis was unsuspecting, and for all I knew unarmed.

  Foolishly or not, I was not going in the lift again. I turned to my left, and running between the pillars, began to search for a way out.

  I was back in the world of fantasy, Red Riding Hood lost in the depths of the grey forest . . . on every side, it seemed, the vast stone trunks stretched away, ribbing the floor with shafts of darkness. Soon the dim electric light was lost behind the crowding pillars, and I was groping my way from stone to stone, stumbling on the uneven flags, heading apparently for deeper and ever deeper darkness.

  At the very moment when I faltered, ready to turn back towards the light – even, perhaps, to use the lift and risk meeting Sandor in the upper corridors – I saw light ahead of me, and soon recognised this for a shaft of moonlight falling through some slit window in the outside wall. I ran towards this.

  It was an old spearhead window deep in a stone embrasure, and it was unglazed. The sweet night air poured through it, and outside I got a glimpse of the moonlit, glinting tiers of pines, and heard faintly the sound of falling water. Inside, just beyond the window, and reasonably well lit by the edge of the moonlight, was a flight of stone steps leading upwards. At its top was the usual heavy door, liberally studded with iron. Praying that it wouldn’t be locked, I half ran, half stumbled up the steps, and seizing the big round handle, lifted the massive latch and pushed.

  The door opened smoothly and in silence. Cautiously I pushed it open a foot and peered out.

  A corridor this time, flagged floor, rush matting, dim lights, probably somewhere near the kitchens. To my left it stretched between closed doors to a right-angled corner; but only twenty yards to my right it ended in another vaulted door. This was locked and bolted on the inside, but the bolts soon yielded, and quietly enough I was through. Outside was darkness and moonlit arches and a confusion of massive shapes. I shut the door softly and leaned back in the shadows, getting my bearings.

  In a moment I had it. I had come out into the coach-house. The shape looming in front of me was the ancient closed carriage, its shaft sticking up like a mast and bisecting the moonlit archway that opened on the courtyard beyond. Beside it was the car, a big old-fashioned limousine. I tiptoed forward between the two vehicles, and, pausing at the edge of one of the arches, peered out into the courtyard.

  This was empty. I could hear no sound. In the bright moonlight that edged the scene like silverpoint, nothing stirred, but at almost the same moment I heard the purr of a car’s engine mount the last hill towards the castle, mount and grow and distort into a hollow echo as the car crossed the bridge. Then the lights speared through the archway, and a big car – a strange one – stole into the courtyard, swung round with its headlights probing the shadowed corners, and came to a quiet stop with its bonnet no more than a yard from the open archway of the coach-house.

  The lights went off. The engine died, and Lewis got quietly out of the car and reached into the back seat for his bag.

  As he straightened, bag in hand, I breathed: ‘Lewis.’

  He did not appear to have heard me, but just as I nerved myself, regardless of possible danger, either to call him more loudly, or to go out into the open towards him, he turned, threw his bag into the front of the car, got back into the driver’s seat himself, and re-started the engine. As I still hesitated, tense and shaking, I heard the hand-brake lift, and the car, without lights, slid forward and into the open arch of the coach-house.

  I remembered, then, his trained reaction to the news reel cameras. When a whisper came from the dark, he was not likely to give anything away to a possible watcher. The car came to a stop a yard from me; he got out quietly with the engine still running, and said, very softly: ‘Vanessa?’

  Next moment I was in his arms, holding him tightly enough to strangle him, and able to say nothing but ‘Oh love, oh love, oh love,’ over and over again.

  He took it patiently enough, holding me close against him with one arm, and with his free hand patting me, com
forting me rather as one does a frightened horse. At last he disengaged himself gently.

  ‘Well, here’s a welcome! What’s the matter?’ Then in a suddenly edged whisper: ‘Your face. How did that happen? What’s been going on? What’s wrong?’

  I had forgotten my bruised cheek. Now I realised how sore it was. I put a hand to it. ‘That man . . . it’s that man from the circus . . . Sandor Balog, the Hungarian, you know who I mean. He’s here, somewhere about, and oh, Lewis—’

  My whisper cracked shamefully, half aloud, and I gasped and bit my lip and put my head down against him again.

  He said: ‘Gently, my dear, it’s all right. Do you mean the high-wire act from the circus? He did that to your face? Look, my dear, look, it’s all right now . . . you’re all right now. I’m here . . . Don’t worry any more. Just tell me. Can you tell me about it? As quickly as you can?’

  He had sounded startled and very angry, but somehow not surprised. I lifted my head. ‘You came back as Lee Elliott because you knew about him?’

  ‘Not about him, no. But I was expecting the worst – having to get next to the circus again. Now it may not be necessary. If this is it breaking, pray heaven it does so this side of the frontier. Now, quickly, my darling. Tell me.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I’ll try, but he’s somewhere about, Lewis. He’s somewhere here, and he’s got a gun.’

  ‘So have I,’ said my husband matter-of-factly, ‘and we’ll see him before he sees us. What’s behind that door?’

  ‘A back passage, somewhere near the kitchens, I think. I came up that way from the dungeon.’

  ‘My poor sweet. Come on, then, back here, behind the car . . . If he comes out that way now, we’ll get him. And if he comes in through the arch we’ll see him easily. Keep your voice down. Now, please, Van, if you can . . .?’

  ‘I’m all right now. Everything’s all right now. Well, it started with Annalisa giving us the old piebald horse that belonged to Uncle Franzl, so we arranged to bring him up here tonight and his saddle and bridle along with him . . .’