Some quality in Hélie's silence pierced Gino's fears, and he thrust his head round the gap to peer at his crouching master. A half-smothered yelp left him as he saw the goat-mask in Hélie's hand. Then he and Stephen were leaning over him, and curses in Italian and English assailed each an ear.
Hélie straightened and held up the odd garments against himself. They were not old as the mask was. They must fit closely and exactly, and had been made, he judged, for a slim man rather above the middle height. He scarcely heard the angry oaths of the other two who had been scared by a mummer in a mask. There was more to it than that. He weighed the things he had found in hand and mind, their implications penetrating to his wits.
‘I believe,’ he said gravely, 'that Reginald de Warby once wore this goat's head, and begot Rohese in this guise.'
'You mean—you said her sire was the Devil himself!' Gino exclaimed.
'I saw I had pricked her, and began to wonder. It fits all we know of her and of him.'
He set down the mask. Reginald de Warby had been in Hell these fifty years, and maybe he had not been the first to wear it. 'This monstrous evil reached back over generations, and men of rank abased themselves to rule it. Loathing filled him. He had to compel his hands to bundle up all as he had found it, and set it back. He tilted back the concealing slab, dusted off his hands and turned to his companions, who had exhausted their invective.
'We have stumbled on a very evil secret,' he told them flatly, and fixed Stephen with a compelling lion's eye. 'And you will speak no word to any of it.'
'The witch—this is enough to hang her!'
'Patience, brother. You shall have her. But not until she has led us to the man who wore this mask.'
Stephen nodded somewhat sulkily; patience did not commonly run in Trevaine blood. They turned away, very thoughtful, and moved slowly towards the gap. Then Gino halted them with a lift of the hand.
‘Someone out yonder!'
They all heard the clash of bramble snagging and breaking free, and made with one accord for the stair. They climbed as stealthily as they might, trying to avoid crackling the refuse on the steps, and crowded upon the tiny landing that opened onto what was left of the hall's floor. The walls rose more than head-high on either hand, sprayed with green sprouting from every crevice, and the stair climbed half another flight and pushed up a broken tooth of corner masonry above that.
Hélie thrust his nose into a splayed window-slit almost obliterated by ivy outside. He was looking out over the patch of dwale. A man in brown riding-dress came round the corner below him and moved across to it. The smooth black head, the light and easy carriage, were unmistakable. Hélie felt his heart thump uncomfortably, and his hands involuntarily clenched into angry fists.
Fulbert of Falaise turned a little, presenting an intent profile to the watcher, and contemplated the poison-plants for a long moment. He extended a lean brown hand and tipped up a berry in its green frill. His mouth pulled sideways in an odd grimace, and he wiped his hand distastefully on his tunic-skirt and turned away. His footsteps receded along the side of the keep and entered by the gap. Stephen stirred uneasily, and Hélie, crouching now by the newel and straining to hear, scowled fiercely at him and touched a finger to his lips. He held his breath, scarcely daring to hope that Fulbert would go to the hiding-place and so prove himself the man in the goat-mask.
Fulbert offered no such easy obligement. He stood for long enough to survey the undercroft, but moved no further. The soft pad of his feet retreated, the grass rustled, and all sound faded but the jackdaws' ceaseless squawking. Hélie moved swiftly along the few feet of remaining wall to a window-space, and watched the black head disappear beyond the curtain-wall. A horse was tethered beyond the ditch, and he gave thanks that they had come on foot. When Fulbert was out of sight they soberly descended the stair and emerged into the clean sunlight. Each man unconsciously braced his shoulders as though he had cast off a burden, and lifted his face to the sky.
'Watch your witch still,' Hélie crisply bade his half-brother, 'but discreetly. Do you need aught—a horse, weapons, money? No? Tonight or tomorrow I will walk up the hill after nightfall for speech with you. Remember, you will fare a deal better with my alliance than my opposition.' He nodded coolly to the startled man and left him gaping.
The churchyard was deserted, and only the raw scars left in the yellow-brown grass. Hélie remembered the priest at the morning’s services, an elderly man with a nervous sidelong eye, who had greeted him with trembling deference. A weakling shepherd grown grey in propitiation of tyranny, he would make no ally in this conflict, and Hélie saw no sense in even approaching him. The chink of tools on stone resounded within the church; the masons at work on the tomb for Robert of Warby, who had had to be accommodated in a temporary resting-place, since he had been insufficiently provident to see to it during his lifetime. He wondered how much Robert had known or cared of his domain’s corruption. His own leman had practised witchcraft on him.
Unrelated facts suddenly and blindingly forged themselves into links of a chain. He had carelessly taken for granted that the wench Mabille had been led by Rohese to the goat-man for the first time last night, to purchase revenge for her lover and son. But she had plainly been intimate with the witch; she had not held back nor shown alarm at the hideous encounter; she had prostrated herself as of habit. She also was a witch. It was better than a guess that Robert had discovered it, had followed her one night to the tryst as Hélie had done, and stumbled on the monstrous secret. There could not be another in Warby that must be kept at the price of murder. But the murderer had sat at Robert’s table and slipped poison into his cup. He was no peasant, but a knight like the infamous Reginald. Robert had recognized him and let him know it; Robert, loose-tongued and of habit a drunkard, who had never kept a secret in his life, who had surely sought profit from his knowledge. But the leather costume could not have been worn by the scrawny little lord of Collingford or the burly marshal of Warby. He knew on which of the alternatives he would lay his wager.
Edmund the porter bounced out of his lodge, his mouth open on eager speech, but Hélie made a curt response to his first greeting and brushed past him into the bailey. There was some sort of bustle round the stables, but his cursory glance flicked over it and halted at the hall steps. On the lowest a large and tawny-headed herald of tribulation awaited him. Edmund’s voice babbled at his shoulder.
'My lord, the Lady Dowager of Trevaine is here, and greatly desires your presence in the hall!’
7
HÉLIE had time, as he crossed the courtyard, to throttle the outward manifestations of his wrath and restrain his justifiable urge to throttle his cousin instead. Thomas himself saw nothing amiss; he greeted him with complacent cheerfulness and informed him that his mother and Lady Hermeline had been awaiting his coming this past hour.
‘Yesterday,’ Hélie grimly addressed him, ‘I forbade you to tell my mother how matters stood in Warby.’
‘I did not tell her,’ Thomas answered righteously.
‘No?'
‘I judged it necessary that my lady should know. Therefore I told my father, who saw to it.’
'That is your conception of obedience?' Hélie asked quietly.
'Lord Hélie,' Thomas said paternally, 'you are very young, all untried, and not bred to your high place. It behoves your elder kinsmen to guide you for your own welfare and Trevaine's.'
'Yours being the judgement?' Hélie saw that his self-approval was impregnable to anything but direct assault, and he had no time to expend on that. He ran lightly up the steps and through the open doorway.
Avice de Trevaine sat at Hermeline's right side, matching her in mourning black, and as Hélie came up to the dais she put out a hand and clasped the younger widow's. About them were gathered the officials of the household, and Oliver de Collingford stood close at Hermeline's left shoulder for all the world like a dog standing over his bone. He glared at Hélie with a desolate bitterness behind his jealousy.
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His mother greeted him reproachfully before he could salute her. 'Hélie, Hélie, where have you been? What are you about? We have waited this hour past for you! You use Hermeline with scant courtesy!'
'My apologies, Lady Hermeline,’ Hélie said formally, in a voice singularly empty of regret. Resentment stirred in him at the public rebuke, as though he had been an erring brat. 'I have a pledge to fulfil.’
'A pledge? What folly is this? You have entangled yourself with this vile girl, and grossly affronted sweet Hermeline!'
'I defend a guiltless maiden falsely accused,’ he answered flatly.
'Guilty or innocent,’ Oliver venomously interjected, 'you had best cease meddling and leave her defence to her kinsmen!'
'Who have abandoned her to live her days reviled as a poisoner.’
'A poisoner she is,’ cried Hermeline, 'and shall rightly live wretched and unwedded!'
'Not while I have hands and head to prove her innocent!'
Avice de Trevaine's eyes brimmed with tears, and her pale face crumpled like damp linen. 'Oh, that I should live to see this day! My last remaining child to use me so! When I had thought to see you betrothed to fair Hermeline, and you involve yourself with this monstrous girl! Unnatural, undutiful, will you break my heart?'
'My lady—'
'Here I have dragged myself, ailing and grief-stricken as I am, and most inconvenient with the verjuice pressing begun and the barley for the October brewing all about me, to say nothing of bargaining for the winter's stockfish and wine with the merchants in the hold, and never in my life before did I leave that to the seneschal, yet what pains should I spare to save my son from his folly? You must heed your mother!'
Hélie suddenly realized what should have been obvious from the first to his thick wits, that long before he returned from France his mother had negotiated the match with Hermeline, certain that he would confirm it. His resolution hardened in him to flint. 'My lady, I am pledged,' he said flatly.
'Hélie, you need concern yourself no longer for her! Out of the mercy of her tender heart and her regard for you, Lady Hermeline has forgone her just vengeance and relinquished her to her kinsfolk! Will that not satisfy you?'
'Only justice on the true murderer will suffice, my lady.'
'That is an intolerable insult to Lady Hermeline!' proclaimed her wordy champion. ‘You have no right to dispense justice in Warby!' Oliver looked quickly to Hermeline in uneasy triumph, for her approval.
But Hermeline took her hand from her eyes and reached it out to Hélie, mutely inviting him to claim that right with her hand. He stood as if rooted to the floor, his stern face unreadable, sweat breaking out over his body. She uttered a desperate sob. ‘Hélie!'
All stood with breath suspended and eyes at stretch, waiting for him to take that offered hand. Oliver de Collingford, his whole face a betrayal, clutched white-knuckled at her chair-back.
Avice de Trevaine exclaimed in outrage. ‘What do you wait for? A lady so fair, all the vows you once made—'
‘Must my lad's madness be cherished against me forever? My lady, you made this match without waiting to learn my mind—'
‘Will you break my heart?' she cried in anguish. ‘Are your mother's wishes naught that you flout them so? Have you whey in your veins instead of your sire's blood? Mother of God, I cannot bear it! I tell you, the match is made, and waits only on your word! By your duty to the mother that bore you, say it!'
The whole company waited in shocked, avid silence. Hermeline sat like a figure of snow. White to the lips, driven to this public extremity, Hélie spoke his word grimly.
‘No.'
Thomas, as white as he, spoke first in the horrified stillness, his voice ringing harshly. ‘This is an intolerable insult to your mother and to Lady Hermeline! Why?’
‘I will not turn up the face of any child of mine to see Reginald de Warby grinning at me.'
There was no answer any could make to that. In the deathly hush he turned on Sir Ranulf. ‘Where is Lady Durande?'
The marshal swallowed visibly before he could reply. ‘Gone, my—my lord.'
‘Gone?’
‘My lady relinquished her into the care of her guardian.’ His gaze flicked in agitation from the Dowager to Thomas, and that was all Hélie needed.
‘Your planning?' he demanded furiously.
Thomas answered stiffly, ‘Since you wilfully persist in this scandalous folly, it is for your elder kinsmen—'
'To break my pledged word and betray a maid who trusted me,’ Hélie finished in a dangerously soft voice, his hands closing on each other to keep them from this monument of righteousness. Gino was already half-way to the door. Hélie turned back to the palsied group on the dais, and closed his mouth firmly; a man did not publicly rebuke his own mother. But Oliver's consternation was lighted with triumphant malice, and the whole was plain to him. 'And Fulbert of Falaise will relieve you of her charge, Judas?' His contemptuous gaze scorched them, and Hermeline whimpered his name. 'Farewell, Hermeline! You are well rid of me!' he said, and strode headlong from the room before any could stir to stay him.
Gino and Oswald were leading out the horses as he reached the stables, and he vaulted into the saddle and sent the stallion across the bailey at a pace that scattered dogs, pigs, poultry and brats in scurrying panic. He checked to take his sword from the porter's hand, and then touched spurs to his mount and stormed across the drawbridge like thunder, the guards dodging aside in haste. Ignoring the rutted, winding track he urged the horse across the half-ploughed stubble and the waste beyond at full gallop, astonished serfs gaping after him, pounded past the ridge, crossed the river at the lower ford in a smother of flying spray, and steadied into a run as he reached the forest's edge, and the north-eastward track to Etherby and Collingford. Gino's tough little pony scuttled valiantly after him, and caught up on the forest track. The stallion was eager to gallop after two days of light usage, but Hélie held him to his companion's pace.
He cursed Thomas's perverted notion of duty, and then dismissed him from his reckoning; he could and would skin Thomas at his leisure. He thought of the red-headed girl, bitter and alone, believing him a forsworn deserter; of her cousin's spite; of Fulbert's outrageous proposal of marriage and his presence in the ruin an hour ago. They all added to one total, and he was grimly sure of his arithmetic, and determined to make his own accounting.
'What now, my lord?' asked Gino cheerfully from his usual place at Hélie's left stirrup.
'I am sure Fulbert of Falaise intends to abduct Lady Durande on her way to Collingford,' Hélie answered briefly. He could have no secrets from so intimate a companion, and in any case gave him his full confidence. 'I do not know whether my kinsfolk connived at that to put her farther beyond my reach,’ he finished grimly.
Gino snorted. ‘Beef-witted way of persuading you to wed the pretty widow.’
He smiled wryly. ‘Wasted endeavour.’
‘Praise the Saints,’ said Gino with unwonted piety, ‘the Lady of Périval gave you a bellyful of pretty vixens.’
‘What?’
‘Had mine soon enough,’ Gino benevolently proceeded, 'lying under her window on watch for the Lord of Périval. Not the man I'd have chosen to cuckold, and lucky we were to come out of that so lightly. And I give you due warning, my lord; the same hour you wed the pretty widow, I start for Italy,’
Hélie spluttered into unwilling laughter. Gino’s outrageous candour always disarmed him, and he had not known before of vigils under the tower window, in that other life that now seemed far off and unreal as a dream. ‘Fret not; in that case you will stay until I have to hang you,’ he retorted.
The open woods, that the peasants and their animals kept clear of small growth, closed on the track in a tangled wilderness. The way was rutted with wheels and pitted by hooves, runnelled with rain and burned hard as tile, and now deep in floury dust that hung in the air from the recent passage of another party. It sifted into every crevice of their clothing and settled o
n their sweating skins in gritty discomfort. They passed a charcoal-burner, who courteously crowded himself and two laden asses off the track to yield them passage, and thereafter met no one for the greater part of a league, when they came to the clearing and wayside cross where the Collingford path turned off the main road to Etherby. An urchin aloft in the branches of a crab-apple tree confirmed that two mounted companies had taken the Collingford track, and that the first included a lady and the second was composed of armed men.
Hélie, his calculations fully proven, followed the hazy dust. There went the red-haired girl, friendless and alone, hustled away from the one man who would champion her by that sanctimonious uncle by marriage, and after her the mercenary who would force her for her dowry if he closed his greedy grasp on her. All she had to trust were her own wits, for trust in man she could not possess. He had failed her. He was furiously aware that he could not overtake Fulbert of Falaise in time to save her from capture, though he pressed his stallion faster than was prudent on that miserable track.
Half a mile beyond the wayside cross he exclaimed and pulled in the eager stallion. A loose horse was browsing by the roadside, saddled and bridled but riderless. It whinnied and shied nervously from them, tossing its head. The reins were looped about the saddle-horn; it had been deliberately turned adrift. Gino rode forward softly, calling and clucking. The beast backed among the bushes, the whites of its scared eyes glistening, but he crowded it into a thicket, seized the rein and led it out, pointing to a welt across its rump that provided reason enough for its fright. Without a word they pushed on, the runaway following meekly with its reins secured to Gino's saddle.
Less than a mile further on a man started into the road and called on him. He pulled in the stallion, stared, swore and swung down, tossing his reins to Gino. Eustace de Collingford, lying between the mossy roots of a great ash with a bloody clout about his head, was struggling painfully up on one elbow. Hélie went down on one knee and caught his shoulders.
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