During all these proceedings, Joan circulated between the hall and the kitchen to ensure the uninterrupted provisioning of the tables. But she never ceased to think of Mistress Frances' dreams, for coupled with her own vision and inklings, her reasonings and speculations, they made a powerful cause for concern.
Matthew, she had decided, had been right when he complained that Conroy’s death had rent the fabric. The problem, she felt, was that Matthew’s solution had been too easy. It had, like a poor job of weaving, merely intertwined a plenty of loose threads that gave way at the first proof of its strength. Now she saw her duty: to unravel the cloth and weave it right—and to do it before the murderer could strike again.
By early evening there was a lull in the eating but not in the drinking, and several of the servants who had surreptitiously sampled the abundant supply of wine having demonstrated their uselessness (and one sick unto death in the pantry!), Matthew had sent Cuth to find Edward and bring him indoors to assist with the serving. Matthew told Joan what he had done when she protested that Una was nearly exhausted and it was simply essential that she receive more help in the kitchen. She said, "Cannot Cuth Fludd give some help? I trust kitchen work is not beneath his dignity."
"I’ve sent him to find Edward for the same cause," Matthew said. "The service at table is slow, the guests continually call for more wine, and until the cellar is bare, they must be served."
Joan wondered if anyone had seen Edward since that morning, and indeed, she had quite forgotten him herself, so occupied she had been with worry about Mistress Frances. She realized that the hostler remained their chief suspect, now that Conroy was dead.
"Surely the man knew he would be wanted," Matthew remarked with a mixture of disappointment and disapproval. “Where could he have gone?’’
"Perhaps he’s at the cottage looking after his father," Joan ventured to suggest. "Or perhaps he’s fled, fearing that Conroys death will be blamed on him. You know he was either dissembling or woefully simple about the bloody spot in the stable. Conroys death confirms it."
‘There may be another explanation/’ Matthew said, “which we can discover when we discover him.”
Joan went into the kitchen to see what relief she could provide for Una. She was surprised to see Brigid there, clutching her baby to her and looking very distressed.
Brigid came up to Joan and said, “I can’t find Edward. He’s not come home. His father’s gone, too. I fear something dreadful has happened.”
Joan explained that no one had seen Edward since early that morning and that Cuth Eludd had been sent to find him only a few minutes before.
“He always comes home by this hour,” Brigid said anxiously.
"And while his father sometimes walks around the yard by himself, he rarely goes beyond call.”
Joan explained apologetically that although she understood Brigid’s worry, she could not leave her present duties to conduct a search for the young hostler or his father. “It’s likely the two of them are together,” Joan said. “Even now they may have returned to the cottage while you are here. Go home, Brigid. See if it isn’t as I have said.”
Joan watched worriedly as Brigid did as she had been advised, realizing the great sacrifice the young woman had made in coming to the castle—and with her child. Joan had a definite sense that Edward’s disappearance betokened something dreadful, and she did not know what to think about the elder Bastian’s behavior, for she had supposed him too infirm to ramble on his own.
Within the hour Cuth had returned to report that he had searched the stable and the grounds and could find Edward nowhere, nor had any of the servants celebrating on the greensward seen him. It was all a great mystery, Cuth said, and Moll, who had come into the kitchen to help Una, agreed, although she professed to have never trusted the hostler from the day he was born, nor his father.
It was nearlv midnight when the bride and groom rose to go, accompanied by howls of mock protest from the guests, who pleaded with them to stay and made many bawdy remarks that caused the bride to blush furiously. The groom, more than a little drunk, dug deep in his purse, drew forth a fistful of coins, and threw
them across the table as a gratuity for the servants, upon which the servants breached decorum and began scrambling for the coins, to the great merriment of the guests.
By this time the feast was long past its prime, yet the celebration went on, the society resembling more now that of a tavern than a company of guests in a great house. Men and women who would not have willingly given each other the time of day now talked intimately, danced, and sang. As the bridal couple began to thread their way toward the door, they were followed by a file of the grooms friends and relations, several of the women of the company, and, of course, Moffitt and Hargrove, who continued to take their roles as bodyguards with grim seriousness, although both seemed as besotted as the groom and had lost their place of proximity to her whom they had been assigned to protect. Some of the guests, not content that the newlyweds should take their leave without a proper sending off, had secured pots and pans from the kitchen and now hurried in with the same instruments and in a riotous manner were treating them like drums and tabors, howling and shouting and making such a deafening racket that Joan thought she was in Bedlam with a troop of lunatics. Joan had attended many a country wedding—and her own to Matthew twenty years before had not been without its predictable harassment of bride and groom—but she had never seen anything like this. It seemed incredible to her that a day that had begun on such a macabre note should end with such hysterical festivity. But then she remembered the bizarre stories of the plague years and how people then, despairing of survival, had eaten, drunk, and been merry on the very porches of the charnel house, their merriment fueled by unspeakable fear.
Joan’s fear now was more a dull ache; she had no heart for merriment; it would cease soon—the bride and groom gone to bed, the guests, exhausted from their revelry, would follow. The castle would be quiet.
And the bridal couple would be alone.
It was strange, she thought at that moment, that she had not considered the dire implications of that fact earlier. Mistress Frances’ protectors—Cecil, his friends, the great company of guests—would soon go their ways. Quickly. Her uneasiness grew into panic. If Mistress Frances’ dreams had substance, did they not predict not only her murder but its very hour?
She elbowed her way through the crowded tables to find Matthew. She saw him among the grooms friends, who had formed themselves into a serpentine chain, each persons hands on the shoulder of him who came before. She realized now that while the banqueting hall had rung with celebration, the new house must have been virtually abandoned! Why, anyone might have entered unseen or unnoticed, stolen upstairs, and hidden himself, waiting for the revelry to cease and young Master Cooke and wife to come to bed.
But she saw that ahead of her the great dancing snake of guests following Mistress Frances had made its way through the kitchen and was into the new house. She followed quickly. Thomas Cooke and Mistress Frances had reached the top of the stairs and were looking down into a crowded, noisy throng, prevailing with them to be still. The young bridegrooms speech was slurred, his handsome face ablaze with a satisfied grin, but Mistress Frances, who clutched adoringly to his arm, looked yet more radiant, as though her past dreams had dissolved harmlessly in the bright moment of her present happiness.
Thomas Cooke's pleadings and threats having taken no effect, the groom's Templar friends, his tormentors and chiders before, now took it upon themselves to defend the stairs against further encroachments by other wedding guests. The bridal pair disappeared from sight and the little company of defenders of the couple's right to privacy challenged those below them to dare to cross the line. This offer was met with mockery from those who wanted to pursue the newlyweds to the very door of the nuptial chamber—if not to the marriage bed itself—which, their own upper chambers aswill with wine, they would certainly have done otherwise. They contented themse
lves, instead, to congregate in the hall, banging upon their pots and pans and making such a deafening din that Joan could hardly hear herself think.
She struggled to get to where Matthew stood smiling at the scene of misrule and shouted in his ear. Thrice she had to repeat herself, but Matthew was not slow to grasp her meaning. He told her he would go at once to find Cecil, that only the great knight's authority could penetrate the self-appointed guardians ot the stairs, and even then he was not sure the “good tosspots united there” would let him pass.
But as she waited anxiously for Matthew to find Cecil, she saw Edward. He had come through the door and was staring around the packed, noisy hall as though looking for someone. She made her way toward him and asked where he had been the long day. His explanation was partially lost in the din of banging and shouting, but she was able to discern the words "father77and "lost77 and she could read upon the handsome young mans face an expression of great concern. Yelling at the top of her voice, she expressed hers about the bride.
Edward glanced at the crowded stairhead and then back at her. He seemed to grasp her intent. "There’s no time to wait for Sir Robert,77 he shouted. "There’s another way to the chambers above.”
Then, without further word, the hostler dashed out the door into the night.
Mistress Frances hardly noticed the uproar from downstairs, which might have served to represent a rout of black-faced hellions in an old moral play. They were her guests, deep in their cups. A good time was being had by all, and she herself was more than a little tempest-tossed. Her new husband had excused himself of a sudden to run to the adjoining chamber, where she could hear him throwing up in the chamber pot, and she began to giggle at the thought, for he had bragged all during the feast how he could hold his liquor, but she, who had matched him cup for cup by her last count, remained as sober as a judge. Suddenly a wave of dizziness overwhelmed her. She stumbled toward bed. Laid out, bless Priscilla’s heart, was her fine nightgown, the bolster perfectly propped, flowers strewn upon the coverlet. She sat down on the bed, intoxicated as much by happiness as by wine.
She began to undress, fumbling and humming and anxious for Thomas to come, for surely she supposed he had recovered by now. Slipping into the nightgown, she went over to the cheval glass and admired her reflection; by candlelight her white skin showed to best advantage. She had never been so happy, not in all her years.
She brushed her hair, counting the strokes, waiting for Thomas to come.
But still he did not come; she called out his name. Below, the din continued. She was prompted to go find him, but then she
remembered it was his place to come to her. She could not violate tradition.
She climbed into the bed, shuddering a little as her bare feet explored the lower regions of the cold sheets, and closed the velvet bed curtains around her. She splayed her flaxed hair out over the scented bolster, imagining how she should appear when he came, remembering, too, what Priscilla had said about the ways of men with their virgin brides. Her excitement grew. But also her drowsiness, stealing upon her before she was aware. Words she had spoken at the marriage service ran through her mind, mingling with fragmented visions—of her dead mothers smile, of the palace garden. And then not a vision but a sensation, of being touched upon the cheek by a dry, cold hand.
She awoke with a start, conscious that she was no longer alone, knowing that someone or something was beyond the bed curtain.
She heard a ripping noise, then another. She saw the curtain being parted by a sharp curved blade.
She tried to scream but no sound could she make. At the third strike, she rolled to the opposite side of the bed and dropped to the floor, entangled in bedding while she heard heavy footfalls moving toward her and raspy breathing. Scrambling to her feet to meet her attacker, she saw a cloaked figure with muffled mouth and glaring eyes. In his hand was the means by which he had shredded the bed curtains—a reapers sickle.
She found her voice and screamed for Thomas.
Then there was a blaze of light and at the open door stood the hostler, holding a torch.
“Put down the sickle!” he commanded to the cloaked figure menacing her. “Shes done no harm to you or me. Leave her alone or answer to heaven.”
Her assailant had turned aside at this interruption. It was all she needed. She moved backward slowly, at the same time hearing new voices in the corridor, voices she recognized as those of Sir Robert Cecil and Matthew Stock.
Her would-be murderer bolted for the door, shoving the hostler aside. Mistress Frances screamed again, again, and again, as she watched her young protector recover himself, snatch the torch from the rushes before it could set them afire, and disappear through the door.
* * *
When Joan came in with Cecil and Matthew, she saw Mistress Frances standing by her bed, so sickly pale and quaking she seemed a very ghost. She was holding the shredded bed curtains as though the damage done them were the cause of her distress.
Joan went directly to ask how she was, and after some hesitation the trembling young woman said she was well enough now, but not so before. She gave a confused account of what had happened, from which Joan gathered that she had been attacked by a cloaked, sickle-wielding creature; that, had it not been for Edward the hostler’s timely intervention, she would have been murdered; and that she feared that awful fate had befallen her new husband, else he would have rescued her himself.
Cecil assured Mistress Frances that she was safe enough now, and he sent Matthew next door to see to the bridegroom, while Joan offered what comfort she could. Then Matthew returned to say that Thomas Cooke was in the next room but asleep rather than dead, and that, if fouled linen and stench about his person were any clue, the young man had fallen victim to more dry sack and burgundy than he could hold, and he would be well enough off in the morning.
Moffitt and Hargrove now appeared, along with about a dozen of the groom’s friends. They had just come from a search of the other bedchambers and had found no strangers. Cecil was in the process of organizing a more extensive search when Sears rushed in to say that the hostler had the assailant cornered in the attic and they should all come, for the man would not surrender and was threatening to cut his own throat.
Everyone, even Mistress Frances, went to see.
Like a fox at bay, the person whom Mistress Frances had described was standing in an alcove, his back to an open window. He was swinging the sickle in front of him as though he were reaping an invisible harvest and in consequence keeping Edward at a distance. Although Edward was begging for the man to put the sickle down, he refused and continued the threatening motions.
Joan and the others had crowded into the small room and were standing behind Edward, but the appearance of the men had its
effect on the cornered man, who proclaimed in a hoarse, unearthly voice that they should all stand back if they desired to live.
Cecil commanded the man to put down the sickle in the Queen’s name, but the man only laughed a mad, hysterical laugh, and then, before anyone could prevent it, he turned suddenly and dived head-forward through the window.
Joan heard a piercing scream. Then an awful stillness.
Mistress Frances’ assailant—the Challoner murderer, as Joan now supposed—had fallen on his head and had been killed instantly, for those who had been standing in the courtyard and watched his plunge swore he never moved once he hit the cobbles. There was a great pool of blood beneath the body, and blood on the cloak, too.
It was Matthew who ran forward to identify the murderer and told Joan who it was. Then Joan looked around for Edward and realized the hostler must have stayed upstairs. It was just as well, she thought.
The dead man was Edward’s father.
It was just past midnight, a fact that only moments before had been solemnly pronounced by twelve strokes of the clock, and the wedding guests, chastened by the fatal climax of the feast, had retreated to their beds to dream whatever dreams God or the devil should send to e
ach. In the withdrawing room a fire had been laid for the comfort of those few souls still awake—Cecil, Joan and Matthew, and Edward Bastian, who within the hour had seen his father dashed to pieces on the cobbles and was of so stony a visage and lusterless eye that he seemed almost a dead man himself.
To the right of the fire sat Cecil, his small body encased in a high-backed chair taller than himself, his legs crossed casually but hardly touching the floor, and a shadow across his eyes giving him an inscrutable expression of a wizard or prophet. To the left of the fire, Matthew and Joan occupied a long bench and were silent as in church, for each understood that Cecil's coming had usurped their own little authority and that any questions put to the accused would be framed by Cecil alone.
Between the Stocks and Cecil then was Edward, like a prisoner at the bar—an apt comparison, since whether the hostler was to be hailed as defender of his mistress or condemned as an accomplice in her attempted murder was the issue to be resolved.
“You came to the castle this evening in search of your father,"
Cecil began, with an edge to the question, as though he anticipated that Edward would deny it. “Whereby I think it plain as day you knew his malice toward the Challoners, were privy as well to his other dreadful murders—I mean those of Sir John Challoner, the Irish maidservant whos~ name ^scapes me, and Sir John; own manservant, Michael Conroy. Speak, churl, and remember how God hates a lie and him that utters it.”
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