Sobs choked her. She wept, her hair gleaming pale-gold in the candlelight. The women fluttered and whispered, staring with incredulous indignation at the dolt who had not sense enough to take into his arms such beauty and wealth freely offered. The marshal's wife mouthed at him violently. Slow anger rose in Hélie at the silly vanity that thought to win him so, and forced him into this intolerable embarrassment before so many prejudiced witnesses. Reginald of Warby's blood ran in her too; she had demonstrated it.
'Calm yourself, my lady. This is folly,' he said firmly. He understood very well; she was determined to marry him, she could not endure that he championed Durande whom she hated, and she would balk at nothing to win betrothal.
She lifted her head, unbelief in her face, and then flung herself upon him, crying his name. Her arms twined round his neck, and she strained close against him, shaking and gasping, her warm flesh scarcely veiled by the thin linen. Her heart thumped against his body, her hair filled his mouth as she dragged his head down and turned her swimming blue eyes up to him, her lashes dark with tears and clinging in wet spikes about them.
He jerked his head back, caught her by the elbows and set her from him at arms' length. 'My lady, you are distraught. Let Lady Emma tend you,' he said sternly. He thrust her into the older woman's arms. Speech was stunned from everyone by his rejection. He stalked to the door, and behind him Hermeline's voice cried out in raw fury and pain.
'Witchcraft! She has bewitched him!'
He let fall the heavy curtain behind him and stood for a moment in the doorway. He scrubbed his hand violently across his lips, where the touch of her hair still tingled. His hand was shaking slightly, his breath coming faster, and his temples throbbed as reaction invaded his body. The marvel was that he had not taken Hermeline by the throat and throttled her. Did the fatuous little fool truly believe she could seduce him into marriage, tempting him with her body as blatantly as any harlot, holding her honour and his so cheaply? For the first time he acknowledged a bitter gratitude to Osanne de Périval who had led him down that road to Hell. He had been of the company that sultry summer night when Raymond de Périval slew his wife and her paramour and himself, and no power on earth or out of it would ever set his feet to tread that track again.
At the sound of fresh hysterics Ranulf detached himself from the mild seneschal and advanced on Hélie with the expression of one goaded to the point of murder and suddenly deprived of his victim. Hélie moved to meet him, resignedly anticipating, to end this disastrous day, an irreparable quarrel with this one man of Warby he accounted his ally.
The marshal's lips parted on words of wrath. He looked into Hélie’s hard face and swallowed them. His expression softened to something near compunction. ‘Nay, lad, take it not amiss!' he said roughly.
‘Sir Ranulf, I think I have no right to accept the hospitality of this roof any longer,' Hélie said soberly. ‘I had best take my leave.'
‘Leave?' The marshal looked appalled. ‘Lose me the only sense to be found this day in Warby? God's Throat, no! And after nightfall—no!’
‘But my lady—'
‘Never heed a woman's vapours! What we all need is food in our bellies! Bid them set on supper, in the Devil's name, Sir Gerard! Are our guests to starve? We shall not see our lady again tonight.'
They picked at a supper as dispirited as the company, and drank deeply of good wine that did nothing to cheer them. Mercifully there were no strangers present. Fulbert of Falaise, with a social adroitness Hélie had not expected of him, talked determinedly of the Normandy campaign throughout the dismal meal, but won no support from the Collingfords. There was no lingering to gossip over the wine, and as soon as he decently could Hélie quitted the hall for the darkness outside.
He wandered over to the carpenter's open-fronted shed, which overlooked the gatehouse, and perched himself on a sawhorse. Gino, who had padded after him, squatted on a log and murmured, in the undervoice men of experience prefer to the penetrating sibilance of a whisper, that if any man came prowling after them they would know what to think. Hélie grunted agreement, and he held his peace.
Hélie scowled into the darkness, his thoughts running in distracted circles about the day's thronging troubles. For all his brave pledge to the red-haired girl, he had no idea where next to turn to unearth the murderer, and his heart misgave him as he reckoned the difficulties he had rashly piled upon himself. Yet he was unrepentant ; he could do naught else. And one pure gain he counted; he could never again so much as contemplate wedding Hermeline. From that disaster he was safe. He would choose the fourteen-years-old innocent, and they would make what they could of duty and kindness. The last ashes of his old folly were cold and scattered. He thrust thought of Hermeline aside; it was her brother's death he must consider; that wretched, ugly death of a poisoned rat that was an affront to humanity and reason.
‘But why?’ he demanded of himself. ‘It makes no sense! A quarrel over a dowry or a mercenary's terms might draw blade from scabbard, but to poison one's host on such paltry grounds— and on the eve of his marriage at that!'
The timing was odd and significant. In a flash of blinding enlightenment Hélie realized that the act cried aloud of fear and haste. Premeditation and preparation had been necessitated by the weapon chosen; chosen by one who dared not challenge Robert openly, one who dared not have a secret exposed. A faceless furtive shape scurried across Hélie's inner vision, snatching at the first chance to pour death into a cup. He had not only been lucky in a scapegoat, but in Robert's having died too dazed of wit to guess what had befallen him and tell it. Robert's arrogance could never have imagined a victim's striking back.
Hélie set that thought into the framework of the few facts he held. It fitted truly. If Robert had surprised any man's secret he would have used it to his profit, taunted him, forced him to his will. Robert had never in his life seen reason to bridle his loose tongue; he was vicious in drink and had taken to fuddling himself nightly; he had had to be silenced. And any of his suspects might be hiding something to his discredit, though Hélie again inclined to the mercenary as having a past history more lurid than any of the others. Then the obvious fact he had been too thick-witted to perceive earlier hit him like a blow.
‘Who should know more of Robert’s mind than his leman?’ He half-rose and then sank back on the saw-horse, his eyes on the dark hut. Even his eagerness recoiled from questioning the miserable woman now, while her child lay unburied and her pain was raw in her. The morning would be time enough to confront her and the witch in the village, who sold spells and charms and love-philtres, and perhaps poisons too.
The hut doorway was a rectangle of blackness against the dim grey of the wattle and daub walls. A part of the darkness moved, separated itself, and slid along the wall, a long black shadow moving soundlessly. It flitted into the shadow beyond the hut, under the wall. Shavings rustled dryly behind Hélie as Gino crept to his shoulder, and the warmth of his breathing touched his ear. The shadow moved against the breast-high stone wall. A head showed, black against the sky. Then a humped black shape sprawled upon the wall’s top, heaved up and over, and was gone.
✸ Trial by ordeal was abolished by the Lateran Council of 1214.
5
HÉLIE was across the courtyard and under the wall before he stopped to think. He took the shallow embankment in one stride and put his nose over the coping. The black shadow was flitting down the grassy slope. He glimpsed the flutter of a skirt in the starlight and knew it was the woman Mabille. Without waiting to examine reasons he straightened, grasped the coping and swung himself up and over. Warby was easy to leave; no Angevin king had been fool enough to grant licence to crenellate it. The drop on the outer side was considerably deeper. He hung by the hands and let go, balancing on the narrow berm. His foot touched something hard and round in the grass, and he bent to feel it. A notched log, of course; the simplest of ladders for the woman’s return. Not the first time she had quitted the enclosure by this way, he knew. A slither
and a soft thud announced that Gino was with him.
He scrambled out of the nettle-grown ditch, dry after the fine weather, and trotted after Mabille. She never looked back, but fetched a wide circle round the sleeping village, over the rough stubble-fields, along the slope that lifted to the black woods. He made no attempt to shorten the distance between them, even when she reached the edge of the ploughland and crossed the waste, where scattered clumps of bushes and bramble-patches sometimes hid her from his view. He had thought she was making for the woods, but now she circled in again towards the village. A bigger, denser thicket than any other concealed her. He halted to see where she would emerge, but she did not. He waited while one might say a Paternoster, straining eyes and ears. He thought he heard a faint squeal, but could not be certain. When he still saw no more of the soundless black shadow that had led him so far, he crept forward more cautiously towards the thicket that seemed to be her goal.
Lower down in the valley, almost hidden, the black and grey cottages lay without light or movement. He closed in on the dark mass of trees and bushes. Leaves rustled faintly in the slight breeze, that bore to his nostrils a pungency of herbs. He moved along the tangle’s edge, so high and dense that he could see nothing beyond, and came to its end, to check and stare. Gino at his shoulder drew a softly-audible breath.
He looked across a garden-patch at a cottage he had never known was there, so effectively did the long curve of the thicket screen it from village, road and manor-house. It squatted close in a hollow, and from the vent in the roof a thin feather of white smoke lazily lifted and dissolved against a sky lightening to moonrise. From some small chink a dim gleam of yellow light diffused, double defiance of the curfew law. A queer little tingle lifted gooseflesh over Hélie’s flesh as some sense beyond his normal five roused to awareness of evil. He set his teeth and pulled his shoulders back against the prickling along his spine. He looked over the tangle of a garden, picking out the vegetable beds, the row of hives, the narrow path twisting between tall clumps of herbage to the shut door.
'Stay here and guard my back, Gino,’ he murmured, and started round the last dense elder-bush at the thicket’s corner.
'Best go no nearer, my lord,’ advised another voice from the elder-bush at his knee.
Hélie’s hand leaped to his dagger, and he leaped sideways and back from the bush as he whirled to face it. 'Who—?’ he demanded in an urgent under-voice, peering into the bush’s impenetrable blackness. Gino was already on its other side, his dagger glinting in his hand.
A low chuckle answered these threatening movements. 'A sow and her farrow by the wall. Be lucky to reach the door with two legs, Lord Hélie.’
The voice spoke good French with an English accent, like an upper servant. Hélie remembered the faint squeal he had heard, and removed his hand from his weapon. 'My thanks,’ he acknowledged between annoyance and gratitude. An argument with an infuriated sow would hold no dignity and a deal of danger. 'Come forth and show yourself!’
'Nay, wiser if you get to cover too, my lord, instead of waiting in plain sight for moonrise.’
The voice, if disrespectful, was perfectly good-humoured. Hélie grinned reluctantly and took its advice. Like many big old ciders, this must have a space between its down-sweeping branches and its trunk, large enough for a man to lie or crouch perfectly concealed within. He could see nothing of this shy fellow. He peered through the leaves at the hut door, impatiently wishing he could set his ear to it, but a man might less riskily challenge a mastiff for right of way than a half-wild vicious sow with piglets at foot.
The yellow glimmer of light went out. The door opened on the dull red glow of a banked fire. Hélie heard a grunt, a thin squeak, and a diminishing grumble. A vast, billowing black shape bulked against the firelight, and shifted aside to let pass the slighter shadow he had followed here. The door closed. The two padded soundlessly round the side of the cottage and started slowly up the hill towards the woods.
The leaves rustled at his side, and the stranger crawled from the bush's interior and uncoiled an imposing length. He was as tall as the young knight, and in the darkness appeared even broader.
'We need not hurry, my lord,’ he murmured. 'The old bitch is too fat to shift herself quickly.’
'Who joined you to this enterprise?' Gino demanded in affront.
'It was mine before yours,' the stranger pointed out placidly. ‘I give you both leave.'
Gino choked on the wrath he could not raise his voice to utter. Hélie chuckled, sudden liking springing in him for this cool fellow. 'He is in the right of it, Gino. And another pair of hands may be useful.'
They followed the women at a decent distance, dodging between the clumps of bushes that dotted the waste, though the two neither halted nor looked back, as though the idea of pursuit never occurred to them. They moved slowly indeed, toiling along and up the slope as if they found it heavy labour, and suddenly Hélie realized that they were making for the ruins on the hill's crest. The women reached the trees and vanished in their shadow, and the three men, who had dawdled after them, now quickened their pace to close in.
Haste was impossible under the trees, so dark was the night.
They felt their way forward step by step, straining eyes and ears. They could discern the solid trunks of trees, but not the undergrowth that clawed at them and entangled their feet. The woods rustled round them, dry and noisy with rattling leaves and brittle twigs, and their own progress sounded in their ears like an army's passage. The shriek of an owl sent Hélie's hand to his dagger in a convulsive jerk, and startled a whispered oath in Italian out of Gino. Then light reached them; the stars dimmed, the whole sky paled, and the white radiance of the new-risen moon shafted between the tree-trunks and pooled along the ground.
They moved more briskly with that guidance, and at last came to the over-grown ditch and the gap-toothed wall. A broad black shadow was just labouring through a breach, and Hélie breathed a little sigh of relief that he had guessed aright.
They crept after her, scrambled down and up through the inevitable nettles of the ditch, and through another gap. Curiosity burned in Hélie, who could conceive no reason for this darkling visit to the ruins—unless such poisons as dwale were most potent gathered under the cold and unbenign rays of the moon. Stalking the women across the bailey, with its great bramble-clumps and scattered trees and bushes, was easy enough, though they took it cautiously, slipping from cover to cover half-crouched and watchful. Then the one standing corner of the building was a black crag among the stars, above a moon-silvered length of jagged wall, and the two women moved along it, one straight and tall, one squat and bulky, their gowns and kerchiefs flapping like bats' wings.
From the darkness beyond the broken wall lifted a thin music, the kind herd-boys made on pipes of elder-shoot. The queer little tune ran like a trickle of icy water along Hélie's spine. His breath caught in his throat, and he shivered convulsively. The big fellow on his right crossed himself, and Gino was muttering a prayer under his breath. Only a simple little tune, a handful of notes on an urchin's whistle, but black horror had brushed them all. The music skirled up to a long high wail and ended. The two women sank to their knees in deep obeisance as something moved in the blackness beyond the pale wall, among the heaps of dark rubble, advancing with a hard deliberate clop of hooves on stone. Then a dark head moved from behind a bush, clear against the wall, and the moon shone full upon it. Hélie lifted a hand to his mouth and set his teeth into his flesh.
The head was a goat's. Magnificent spiked horns swept back from its brow, a long beard fluttered under the dark muzzle, and its eyes glinted in the moonlight. The head was a goat's, but it was set on a man's shoulders. It spoke to the women in a human voice, but the words did not reach the watchers crouching behind the brambles. Hélie could not have moved hand or foot. Horror paralysed him, and a dread of great darkness. The big stranger had put out a hand and gripped his arm; his fingers drove bone-deep, but Hélie did not feel pain. Gi
no was drawing breath in little gasps, whimpering, ‘Il Diabolo!' over and over.
The goat-man moved forward with a curiously stilted, jerky step, and extended his right arm. He held a long-shafted trident, whose points caught the moonlight with the same menacing gleam as the baleful eyes in the beast-head. He stood stark in the white moonshine, black as the darkness he had come from, and a long tail swung behind him. Hélie bit on his hand until blood was warm and salty in his mouth, and did not know it. Terror had numbed the flesh on his bones, chilled his very entrails to ice within him. He looked on the visible Fiend, and Hell yawned before him.
The women were still on their knees. One was speaking fast and urgently, and then the other, in a higher, thinner voice whose words he still could not distinguish. The trident lifted and swung in threat over their heads, over the bramble-grown bailey, over the sleeping valley, over the whole cringing world. Hélie crouched in rigid horror, incapable even of prayer. The arrogant head turned his way, the eyes blankly shining, and he waited, shuddering, for them to pierce his thorny screen and discover him, like a cony waiting for a stoat to close and kill. The human voice issued again from the goat's mouth, and with another menacing gesture of the trident the monstrous black figure swung about, its tail swishing, and clopped back into the darkness.
The women rose and slowly moved back the way they had come, muttering together. They passed the bramble-clump without seeing the crouching men, and their low voices and the rustle of their garments faded across the over-grown bailey and died.
None of the men could stir to follow. The wind's murmur had long been the only sound before the paralysis relaxed its grip on Hélie’s limbs, and he fell stiffly to his knees, crossed himself with a trembling hand, and whispered a prayer for delivery from the manifest power of evil. Gino crumpled onto his face in the long grass, sobbing dryly, and the big stranger loosed his vicious grip on Hélie’s arm and covered his face with his hands, his whole great body shaking.
Power of Darkness Page 9