But, no, he didn’t mean that.
‘A secret passage,’ he yelled at her. ‘A hidden way out. A tunnel. Before God, woman, there must be one.’
Must there? To save her face she had spat in his for his rudeness – not ladylike, perhaps, but he’d made her furious – and stalked off. Yet he’d shaken her.
Now, turning and turning on her straw pallet, Maud alternated between anger, humiliation, and downright fear for her castle and her people.
He’d dared to shout at her. Dared to insist that the males he’d turned up with should be treated and accommodated like nobility. Sir Christopher was obviously of good stock … but the mercenary? And that peculiar-looking red-headed boy he had with him?
Was there a secret postern? Bloody Ghent had implied that no castle worthy of the name should lack such a thing.
Jesus and Mary, but she was in grown-up territory now: sheltering a fleeing empress; about to be swooped down on by an angry king. The last siege had been child’s play in comparison, and she’d been able to deal with it. The next, if it came, would bring real fighting, real death. And, as that bastard had said, she wasn’t ready for it. She saw now why her husband had made such defensive alterations as he had – he’d known how important they were – whereas she, and stupid old Sir Rollo, had relaxed once the danger was past, thinking it wouldn’t come again.
But a postern. A postern. Her father had never mentioned one. There simply wasn’t one. Nobody knew the castle better than herself, she who was, after all, familiar with every blade of its grass, every stone.
No, not every stone.
Sweet Mary, she thought. That’s where it is. Damn it. But despite a reluctance that brought sudden shivers, she got up, put on her boots and an underdress, took her fur mantle off its hook, picked up a candle, and went quietly out to kick Milburga awake. ‘Take my place for a bit,’ she told her.
‘Where you going?’
‘To find the secret postern,’ Maud told her. ‘We’ll have to smuggle the Empress out through it if necessary. Stephen’s likely to besiege us any moment.’
‘I ain’t never heard of it. Where is it?’
Maud told her.
‘I’m coming with you,’ Milburga said.
Tola took Milburga’s place in case she was needed though, as Milburga said, anyone who snored as loudly as the Empress was unlikely to be woken by the Last Trump.
Kenniford’s undercroft was a beautifully arched cave. It smelled of tuns of wine and brandy as well as the valuable spices and almost-as-expensive candles that were kept for chapel and hall in lead-lined boxes. There was also a tinge of pee from the cats that kept the rats down. Beyond this storeroom, it petered out into tunnels that followed the castle’s foundations in a circle like a snake, becoming lower and narrower as they went. These provided massive storage space but were rarely used, the castle’s people being reluctant to visit them. They said they contained bad spirits and it was true that the tunnels often reverberated with strange moans. Father Nimbus declared that the cause was draughts of air forcing their way through the narrow passages, but nobody believed him.
‘Which way?’
‘Right.’ The passage to the left would take them widdershins, i.e. against the direction of the sun, which was unlucky, and Maud was not inclined to court any more bad luck than she was facing already.
The lantern she had brought with her threw the two women’s shadows stalking along the walls, foreshortening every time they passed one of the pillars holding up the roof, then jumping back to become gigantic. They were aware as never before of the massiveness of the castle above them, of the possibility of becoming trapped.
Weight-bearing archways led from one section to another until they were moving along passages where cobwebs broke against their faces.
‘We’re going in a circle.’
‘Must be following the underside of the curtain wall. And stop whispering.’
‘Same to you.’
But to speak louder brought mocking echoes suggesting that they were waking things better left unwoken.
‘Is this it?’ Milburga wanted to know. A great iron door with bars on the outside. A grille in it at head-height provided a peephole.
‘No.’ Maud hurried her on. She knew what lay behind that particular door and it wasn’t a postern. Her one and only visit to it had been with her father when she was eleven years old and she had never been back. Known as ‘the Wormhole’, it was where extra-special prisoners had been lodged: men who’d offended old King Henry and required punishment from his sheriff in these parts, her father, Robert of Kenniford. Or had offended Robert himself. It was said of it that those who went in rarely came out, their screams being heard as far away as the village.
Her father had taken her to it ‘to show you where you must put your traitors’.
A harsh man, her father, disappointed that, despite three marriages, the only child surviving to him, his last, had been a daughter. Affectionate to nobody, not even her, he had nevertheless done his best to equip her for life as he saw it.
‘Will there be traitors, Father?’
‘There are always traitors. Trust nobody.’
It was his theme – perhaps because both were themselves descended from a traitor. Their ancestor, Wigod of Kenniford, kinsman to the sainted King Edward the Confessor, had betrayed his country by going over to William the Norman the moment that England’s conqueror had set foot on its soil. And done well by it, gaining a rich Norman bride, permission to build this castle, and the shrievalty of Berkshire as his reward.
Since Maud, being female, could not inherit her father’s position as sheriff, she would be absolved of coping with political prisoners, although she had a right to sentence ordinary law-breakers in her own court.
Her father had been ill and she’d been frightened, more by his harsh breathing and his attitude than the dark tunnels which seemed to her little legs to stretch for miles. Eventually they had come to the Wormhole’s door. ‘Is this where we must keep the traitors, Father?’
‘It is.’ With difficulty, for he was coughing badly, Robert of Kenniford had lifted the door’s great bar.
At first she’d thought the cell was empty. So it was – of the living. Then her father had raised the lantern and she’d seen the skeleton hanging in chains set into the back wall.
‘See there, Maud?’ her father had said. ‘Those are the bones of Walter Corbet whom I caught betraying me with my first wife. They have hung here for twenty-three years as a sign to other traitors of what they may expect if they cross me further. They are careful not to do so.’
She could see why they wouldn’t. The points of the blinding iron were still in Walter’s eye sockets.
Keeping the light focused on the skeleton, Robert of Kenniford had once more recounted his creed to his daughter. ‘Betrayal is the natural tendency of men and women, child. Remember it. Brutus betrayed Julius Caesar, Delilah betrayed Samson, Judas betrayed Christ, and so on down the ages. Expect your servants to cheat you, your friends to go behind your back, your love to let you down. That way you will never suffer disappointment. Only show them, as I have here, that they cannot do it twice. Do you hear me?’
‘I hear you, Father.’
But Maud had looked from where Walter Corbet’s eyes had been to those of her father and, young as she was, seen an equal emptiness.
‘And now,’ Robert of Kenniford had told her, ‘should this castle itself betray you, I shall show you how you may thwart it.’
They never got that far. In trying to replace the Wormhole’s bars, blood had gushed from her father’s mouth, and Maud had scampered back the way they had come to fetch him help.
He died the following evening. She saw that he’d been aware he was dying when he took her to the Wormhole, and that he’d felt the urgency of stressing his philosophy to her at the last. No final words of love, or of goodness, or of God; his legacy to her had been the truth as he’d seen it. Trust no one.
It was not
Maud’s truth; she’d known it even then. His blood might run in her veins, but so did that of Robert’s third wife, the mother who’d died giving birth to her, a jolly woman apparently, much loved by her household. In Maud, the amalgam ameliorated the one and strengthened the other.
In that sense, his daughter was another who betrayed Robert of Kenniford. She took joy in being a stern but affectionate and confident ruler. Trust, she found, was a two-way business: give it and, more often than not, it was returned. Accordingly, she handed the keys to the undercroft storage to Sir Bernard and Milburga, knowing they would not cheat her, which they did not. Those who did received sharp punishment, like any other malefactor, but above ground and in the open: at the castle whipping post, or the pillory, or the village lock-up, where they could be abused by their enemies and fed by their friends – this last saving Maud money on their maintenance, always a strong consideration with her.
None of her prisoners went to the Wormhole; nor did she visit it herself, but secretly sent Sir Rollo to transfer the bones of Walter Corbet to the burial ground. She’d wondered how her father had got away with flaunting them for so long – the murder, even of an adulterer, should have provoked inquiry, if not a trial. But that had been in the days of old King Henry, who’d been her father’s friend and not above murder himself if the rumours about the death of his elder brother were true.
Whatever it was, the prison held a grimness for Maud, and she’d paid good money to nearby Abingdon Abbey so that its monks should pray for peace for Corbet’s soul that his ghost might not haunt her, the child of his killer.
So large did the memory of the cell loom in her mind that, until now, she’d forgotten what else her father had taken her down there to show her.
What was it he’d said? Should this castle itself betray you … ? Something about thwarting it. She hadn’t understood at the time – how could a castle commit an act of betrayal?
But it could if it fell to an enemy. (How typical of Robert of Kenniford to blame even a building for failing its function.) In which case, it must provide a salvation for those it betrayed.
An escape route. That was where the secret postern was, if there was one at all; somewhere further along, and it behoved her, as its owner, to find it.
They kept going along the gradually curving tunnel, hating it, wondering at the labour and expertise that had built it, passing no exit. The ground began to rise sharply, which suggested that it would eventually reach the surface.
There was a nudge from Milburga and Maud nodded; she too had heard the light steps behind them. God help them, the place was haunted after all. Terrified at what she might see, she swung round, raising the lantern to shine it on whatever creature or non-creature was following them – and saw a pale, small figure as frightened as herself.
William.
‘Father sent me after you, my lady. I think he worries for you.’
Oh yes, highly likely. If Sir John’s brain was still working, it wasn’t for his wife’s protection. More probably he, or perhaps Kigva, had wanted to know what was going on in the castle tonight and had sent young William to find out.
Time you went away, my lad, she thought now. He’d reached the age when boys were sent off to some other noble house to begin their training for knighthood. Secretly she suspected the boy, with his gentle manners and ways, would be more suited to the cloister but he was determined to follow his father’s ambitions for him and Maud had already entered into negotiations on the matter with Sir Robert Halesowen, a distant cousin, who held extensive lands in the West Country and Normandy. Sir John would not approve of that either, were he to learn about it – Halesowen was an Empress supporter – but then Sir John wouldn’t approve of anybody who didn’t beat knightly manners into their protégés’ backsides, whereas Halesowen, though strict, was a kindly man as well as a competent fighter.
She sighed. ‘What are we to do with you?’
‘Bring him with us, I reckon,’ Milburga said. ‘Look at the poor little bugger shaking.’
It had taken courage for the boy to face these dark tunnels on his own; sending him back to a maddened father was more than she could do.
‘We are looking for a postern, William, a secret exit. Keep your eyes open.’
‘Is that it?’ He was pointing some yards ahead to where there was a break in the form of an arch in the outer wall. The women hadn’t seen it.
‘Must be. Hallelujah.’
By Maud’s reckoning, they had circumnavigated well over half of the passage that lay beneath the castle; if they’d turned left out of the undercroft instead of right they would have got here sooner.
There was no doubt that this was an exit; for the first time since leaving the undercroft, they felt a cold draught.
‘Where d’you reckon it comes out?’
‘Let’s see.’
The arch led to a spur of the tunnel they were in, much smaller, lined with closer-packed stone, and considerably less daunting now that they were heading for fresh air. At the far end it had partly fallen in, making it impossible for someone of Milburga’s size to get through. Maud sent her back to fetch men with picks and spades while she and William struggled through holes in the debris that, peculiarly, resembled miniature versions of the tunnels they were leaving behind.
‘Oh God, what was that?’ Something bristly and strong-smelling had blundered against Maud’s ankles.
‘A badger, I think.’
The light from Maud’s lantern showed a grey, thickset body scurrying away from her on short legs.
‘Poor thing, we frightened it,’ William said.
‘Not half as much as it frightened me.’
But some of the tunnels the badgers had built into their sett were of a size to accommodate a large human child so that Maud and William, both of them slim, were able to get through them by heavy scrabbling, heading for the dim light that now showed ahead.
Maud had been expecting the tunnel to end in a grille, something that could be raised or lowered, but if there had been one it had rusted away. Instead, bedraggled and scratched, they emerged out of a hole in a hedge. From here the ground sloped downwards through a copse of rowan trees, leafless now but so thickly planted that their bare branches formed a roof hiding the approach to the postern from eyes scouring the castle walls from the surrounding Chiltern hills. The snow was trackless except for a tiny path leading from the sett behind them to where the badgers, cleanly animals, kept their privy.
William began to follow it. Maud dragged him back. ‘We’re expecting visitors, boy. Unfriendly ones. Better that our footprints don’t show them how to get into the castle.’
‘Like that one?’
She followed his gaze. To the east, where the dawn was touching the hilltops, was a rider. His outline faced the castle and was perfectly still as if he were waiting for something. As she watched, another horseman joined him, then another and another, sprouting along the horizon like equine statues.
Taking William with her, Maud pushed her way back through to the main tunnel in order to alert her castle that it was once again under siege.
Chapter Twelve
THAT MORNING, AS every morning, Gwil had woken first, prodding Penda awake with his foot. ‘Got to get up, Pen. We been summoned.’ Alan had appeared beside them only moments before to warn them that they would be needed.
The small recumbent body at Gwil’s feet groaned and opened one eye, then closed it again quickly.
The truth was that Penda had slept badly if she’d slept at all; quite apart from the alien environment she now found herself in, and yet another strange bed, there was the matter of the un accustomed, debilitating ache in her belly, a peculiar cramping which had begun during their flight from the charcoal-burner’s hut and now spread to the top of her legs, making her feel sluggish and sick.
‘Ain’t even light yet, Gwil,’ she pleaded, turning away from him to curl into the foetal position which eased the pain.
‘Tell that to Stephen’s
men, then,’ Gwil said, ‘’cause I don’t reckon as they know arse from elbow when it comes to timekeeping; an’ they’re right outside. You want to ask ’em to come back when you’re ready or shall I?’
Suddenly she was wide awake, the top half of her body launching itself upright from the waist like the arm of a mangonel.
‘We under siege then, Gwil?’ she asked, her voice squeaky with excitement, the pain all but forgotten.
‘More ’n likely,’ he said. ‘An’ if so we’ll need all the archers we got so you’d best rise sharpish.’
He turned away and stood with his back to her.
He’d become more mindful of her privacy lately and sometimes, she’d noticed, it was as if it offended him to look at her. She couldn’t blame him; it offended her to look at herself nowadays; her once neat and malleable body had become increasingly cumbersome, the fleshy mounds on her chest more resistant to their swaddling now, however tightly she bound them.
She gathered her blanket around her in defiance against both Gwil’s back and the morning chill and stood up but as she did so something warm and liquid seeped down her legs.
‘Gwil!’ The panic in her voice made him turn abruptly. She saw his face fall.
‘Oh Pen.’
She followed his gaze to the wetness at her feet and saw, for the first time, the tiny rivulet of blood dripping from her ankle bone on to the floor and suddenly the banks of an old memory burst like a dam flooding her head with a maelstrom of long-forgotten images, of unholy wounds and water and men on horseback, of pain and fear and blood.
Gwil caught her before she fell and laid her gently on the palliasse. When she came to the memories had gone again and Gwil was kneeling beside her gesturing at her awkwardly with a fist full of strips of cloth.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘For the blood.’
She grabbed his arm. ‘Am I dying, Gwil?’
He smiled then and stroked her forehead. ‘Not dying, Pen. Just means as how you’re a woman now. You’ll grow accustomed to it; all women do, or so they say.’ He was trying to reassure her, hoping his features had arranged themselves into what might pass for reassurance; judging by hers – the down-turned mouth, the large, anxious eyes – they had not.
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