Morgan, in her customary black robes, intoned prayers that were echoed softly by the others. Then they all formed into a procession with Morgan at the head. Slowly, sol emnly, accompanied by the incessant chanting of the atten dants, they left the chamber and began to walk through the halls of Corfe. Boys chanted hymns; they filled the halls with incense. Guards cleared the way.
At the rear of the procession, Britomart whispered to Merlin, "This doesn't make sense. People will be suspi cious."
"Let them be."
"The place to do the séance is his room."
"His room is too small, Brit. You saw how we were packed in there. Besides, a procession will get us noticed, which is precisely what we want. Keeping this secret would defeat the purpose."
And so the odd procession proceeded, followed by more and more curious gawkers. The guards had been carefully instructed to make token efforts to show disapproval but not to do anything that might actually scatter them.
Their route through the castle was the longest, most cir cuitous one possible. Morgan, her robes billowing in the castle's drafts, walked it slowly, permitting the hymns and the incense to attract more and more spectators. The gen eral mood was more celebratory than solemn, despite the chanting and the grave demeanor of the principals. People who would normally have been in bed at that hour savored the diversion.
When, finally, they reached the Great Hall, dozens of people were following them, knights, diplomats, servants, people from every stratum of the castle's closed little soci ety. The procession halted and Arthur stood at the door; he cleared his throat loudly and addressed the crowd. "Please, all of you, you must understand that we have embarked on a perilous undertaking. To disturb the dead carries danger. Once disturbed, the dead do not easily return to their rest. We are doing what we must in the one place with doors that close. Please respect that. We have no wish to put any of you at risk."
In the crowd Sir Sagramore shouted, "So it is that, then. You are raising the spirit of the dead French boy."
"I have said no such thing." To Morgan, he said, "Come, let us begin."
"Wait!" From among the onlookers Bishop Gildas stepped forward. "This is blasphemous. The sacred book clearly condemns divination through the agency of the dead."
Morgan sneered at him. "Does the sacred book condone the protection of their murderers then?"
She, Merlin and the rest of their party turned their backs on him and entered the Great Hall. Guards pushed the heavy doors shut behind them, barred them with thick wooden beams and suggested that everyone return to their business. But they made no move to actually drive anyone away. And when the crowd began to inch toward the door, the guards stood back and let them do so.
For what seemed an eternity nothing more happened. No voices were heard inside the hall. The smell of incense came from under the door, and candlelight could be seen flickering, but there was not the slightest sign of activity or even movement inside. Then at length Morgan's voice could be heard, intoning still more prayers.
From the hallway behind the crowd came a weak voice. "What is going on here?"
Some people turned to see Leonilla approaching them, walking heavily on a cane of blackthorn.
"What are they doing?" she demanded.
Sagramore stepped toward her. "We don't know for cer tain, Your Majesty. But word has it they are attempting to contact the spirit of your servant Jean-Michel."
She stopped walking; she virtually froze in place. Then, finally, she spoke one word. "Fools."
She turned and went on her way. After a moment every one turned back to the huge wooden door. Suddenly Sagramore cried out, "What are we doing here? There are other doors!"
Followed by a dozen people, mostly knights and squires, he rushed off, only to find the other entrances to the Great Hall similarly closed, barred and guarded. Sagramore growled in frustration and struck the stone floor with his sword.
From inside the Great Hall came Morgan's voice, chant ing more loudly and insistently, accompanied by her chorus of boys. Ears were pressed to doors, but no one could make out in a definite way what was happening inside. Sagra more's party went back to the main entrance of the hall.
This went on for long, long moments, and still it was impossible to tell for certain what Morgan and the rest were doing. The thick smell of incense began to make some peo ple nauseated; others developed headaches. The crowd be gan to thin out. Sagramore, increasingly impatient, made a move to pound on the door; the guards sprang to action and stopped him.
Then, at length, everything inside became quiet. Some one tapped on the door and instructed to guards to open it and to disperse the crowd. Arthur emerged first, followed by Morgan, then Britomart, then all the rest. Merlin lin gered behind.
Sagramore went inside to confront him. "What hap pened? What were you doing in here?"
Merlin appeared distracted, or perhaps disappointed. "Nothing."
"Don't be evasive. I want to know what the king was doing."
From the corner of his eye Merlin glanced at the knight. "A prayer service." He smiled, then added, "Of sorts."
"Don't make me laugh. What would you be doing at a
prayer service? Everyone knows you're the most irreligious man in England."
"Shouldn't you be off someplace with the other jurors?"
Sagramore snorted, turned his back and stormed away. Most of the crowd was gone. Merlin stood alone in the Great Hall, savoring the odor of the incense, and smiled to himself.
For the rest of the evening, predictably, gossip spread. No one knew for certain that the service Morgan had conducted had been a séance, but it gave every appearance of being that. But whose spirit had she tried to contact? Jean-Michel seemed the likeliest candidate, but there were people who argued that it must have been Leodegrance, Podarthes or even the maid Marthe.
Equally predictably, it was Sir Sagramore who re peated—and magnified—all the rumors and speculation most energetically. And he was eager to tell anyone who would listen that the séance appeared to have been a failure. Everyone emerging from the Great Hall had looked disap pointed, not to say crestfallen. Whatever they had wanted to do had not been accomplished.
By late that night, well past midnight, despite all this activity, most of the castle's occupants were asleep as usual. It had been a long, eventful day. And once all the furor about the séance had begun to die down, the trial was on most everyone's mind as well. It was in recess but would resume soon enough. Following the conference, this new major event at Corfe was equally exciting, if not more so.
But the castle was asleep, along with most of its occu pants, and these thoughts of trials and arcane rituals oc curred in the minds of sleeping women and men. The ones still awake had more immediate things on their minds. Guards worked not to fall asleep at their posts; conscien tious cooks toiled in the refectory, beginning to prepare the next morning's breakfast; servants cleaned the castle's pub lic spaces. Until—
Strange noises began to reverberate through the halls of Corfe Castle. Low howls echoed, The moans of someone in torment could be heard. People stirred in their sleep; halfawake, they covered their heads with blankets and pillows. Some were alarmed at what they heard; others tried to ig nore it and go back to sleep. A particularly loud gasp of pain roused many of them completely; but when the air went silent again they quickly fell back to their dreams.
A guard at the door of the Great Hall was the first to see the apparition. A vague glow, as tall as a man, seeming to drift about the hall, stopping here and there and then mov ing again. It floated; it hovered. The guard watched, awe struck. And eventually he managed to make out more detail. It was the glowing figure of a knight in armor, his helmet tucked under one arm. The man's face was almost lost in the eerie glow.
Weakly the guard tried to challenge whoever or what ever it was he was seeing. "Stop! Identify yourself!" He felt foolish saying it—talking to a cloud of light. And as he expected, it did not answer but continued its slow progress
around the Great Hall. When it finally moved through the door and out into the corridor, he was relieved. No one but he had seen it. Whatever it was, if he said it had not been there, no one could contradict him. When more people saw it—more than one at a time—it would become their problem.
He watched as the smoke or light or phantom moved along the corridor toward the wing where the guests were housed and disappeared around a corner.
There was a guard posted at the Byzantines' rooms; he was asleep, leaning against a wall. The cloud-knight moved past him without disturbing him. But the inhabitants of the rooms, or at least the light sleepers among them, stirred in their sleep and gasped at the sight.
One of the lesser members of their party rushed to awaken Eudathius. "Sir! Sir! You must waken and see this."
Eudathius opened his eyes and saw it at once; it had come to rest at the threshold of his room. He sat up in bed, immediately wide awake. "Podarthes? Podarthes, is that you?"
The specter did not answer him but seemed to quiver in the night air. Then it moved on down the hall.
Petronilla saw it next. She was sitting up, unable to sleep, doing needlework. The phantom light moved very slowly past her door. She froze then, shaking with anxiety, and she pricked her finger with the needle. Drops of blood stained the linen she had been working on. And then it was gone.
It moved on, groaning as it went, pausing at one door way after another as if it were looking for someone or something. Next it came to Leonilla's suite. All of her ser vants were sound asleep, But the old queen was sitting up in her bed and drinking wine. When she saw the phantom she called to it. "Leodegrance? Is that you?"
The specter stood still and went silent.
"Leode—" Suddenly through the phantom mist she seemed to discern the ceremonial armor of someone other than her late husband. "Jean-Michel. It is you. I know it."
The light shimmered.
"Jean-Michel, I never meant for them to blame you. Please believe me."
No response came, not even a slight movement.
"Jean-Michel, you know I loved you, Of all my lovers, you were the one." She began to climb out of her bed and stumbled drunkenly.
Abruptly the light moved on along the corridor. Bishop Gildas saw it and, terrified, made the sign of the cross. Petronus woke to find it looming over his bed; he shook with terror and, thinking it was an avenging angel, begged it not to harm him.
On and on it moved, crying softly in the night. And then at last its glow began to fade, and it vanished. No one who had seen it could shake off the memory. Very few of them managed to sleep again.
And in his room, Merlin sat and read an essay of Aris totle by the light of a single candle. Now and then, when the night's unexpected sounds came to him, he looked up from the manuscript, and he smiled.
A few moments later he began to nod off. But the sound of someone approaching awoke him. Standing in his door way was Nimue, dressed in Jean-Michel's armor. She put the helmet down on a table and wiped her brow. "These things are hot. How do they do it? I mean, how do they manage all that exercise and all that warfare dressed like this?"
Merlin sat up. "The phosphorus makes it hotter."
"Even so. If I had to wear this nonsense all the time, I'd throw myself into the nearest moat."
"How did it go? Did you notice any reactions?"
"Nothing definite, but . . ."
"Anything at all?"
"No. Well . . . Leonilla said something odd." She told him about it. "But really, Merlin, do you think this will accomplish anything besides making me work up a sweat?"
"Think. If you had committed one—or all—of the mur ders, and if you knew Jean-Michel had been arrested for your crimes, and if you believed his spirit had returned from the grave, what would you be thinking and feeling?"
She wiped her forehead again. "That he was a nitwit to have worn this armor?"
"I am asking seriously. Even if no one reacted overtly tonight, it is only a matter of time. We simply have to sit back and let Sagramore and the other rumor-mongers do their worst."
"And if the killer or killers were not among the ones who 'saw' him?"
"Time will tell, Nimue. Time will tell."
The next morning the ghost was all anyone could talk about. Arthur announced that because of the disruption and agitation it had caused, Lancelot's trial would not resume for one additional day. Speculation about the ghost's iden tity ran rampant, but after a few hours a consensus devel oped that it must have been Jean-Michel. Despite the furor his appearance had caused initially, the morning meal was fairly calm and people were subdued. Merlin wondered if it was from lack of sleep; he himself had slept little enough.
People in the refectory talked in hushed tones, as if they had suddenly come to see Corfe Castle as a sacred place, or at least a very unusual one. Merlin was in a thoughtful mood; he sat beside Arthur, as usual, and kept a careful eye on everyone he suspected, hoping one of them might give something away.
Petronus, who neither Arthur nor Merlin really sus pected might be at the bottom of the crimes, or at least one of them, appeared pale and shaken, but there was no way to tell if it was from guilt or simple fear. When they returned from France, Merlin had assigned him to watch Leonilla lest her mad ramblings lead to injury or worse. The boy was unhappy about it but obeyed. She had not come to the dining hall but sent a servant to fetch her breakfast. Petronus ate then went glumly to her rooms.
His sister moped and made idle conversation with the people around her, but not much of it; she ate very little and left. Eudathius and his people, with Gildas among them, talked softly among themselves; their general air was more of bafflement than of fright or nervousness. Guenevere was her usual imperious self; it was impossible to tell if her silence was the product of her usual aloofness or of some thing darker. Arthur watched her carefully; he still wanted her to be the killer.
Alone among the visitors, Germanicus seemed in a voluble mood; but he could find no one willing to converse with him. He moved from table to table, looking for amia ble company. His aimless wandering about the refectory only served to remind several people of the previous night's apparition.
Merlin had instructed the kitchen staff to work at being especially convivial, hoping it might annoy someone to the point of indiscretion. "I want you to be jolly and carefree," he told them. "Nothing annoys a melancholy person more than seeing someone else in a buoyant mood."
"How can we be buoyant when there is a ghost roaming the castle?" one of the maids asked.
"Ghosts only stalk by night."
"That isn't exactly reassuring."
"I give you my word, the ghost will do no harm to any of you."
"How can you know that?"
"It is my job to know."
They found this more cryptic than reassuring, and so they grumbled more; they insisted that acting happy was more than they could do. But Merlin promised them extra pay, and their mood brightened considerably.
But despite close perusal, all the suspects' reactions proved inconclusive.
Even Arthur, who knew the truth of what had happened the previous night, was subdued. He ate his breakfast with out much conversation. Then just as he was finishing, he whispered to Merlin, "Where is my sister?"
"Morgan complained that the strain of last night's per formance gave her a headache."
"And you don't find that suspicious?"
"Morgan has a murderous nature, granted. But I simply
can't fathom what she might have gained by killing any of the victims. Now, if Gildas had been killed . . ."
"You think too much."
Merlin ran a finger around the edge of his plate. "I choose to take that as a compliment."
"I wish I knew whether I meant it as one." Arthur stood to go, then had another thought. "And I suppose Leonilla is off on another of those lunatic walks of hers?"
"Perhaps. I've sent Petronus to watch her; he will report on her doings. She has been teetering on the edge of mad ness
for weeks. The sight of her dead lover may have pushed her past the brink."
"You do realize, don't you, that if this charade produces no results, you may have driven the poor woman mad for no good reason?"
"With all the killings, added to the loss of her kingdom, that would have happened anyway. She has been more than a little mad for years. We must hope it gets no worse. I do not think I can eat any more. Let me walk out with you."
The two of them moved toward the entrance. Various people tried to talk to them as they passed. Sagramore blus tered and said they should all leave for Camelot as quickly as possible. "We can conclude the trial there. It will be safer."
Merlin smiled a sarcastic smile. "Is it possible to be safe from the supernatural?"
The Lancelot Murders Page 30