The Grey Dawn

by Stacey DeMichael

  The next day followed very much the same as the last. It seemed their small band had gotten in a rhythm of sorts, though Ellalee noticed that Sir Kent paid Christopher small attentions whenever the earl wasn’t looking. She caught Sir Walter staring at Daniella again which made him turn red when he noticed Ellalee’s frown, and he quickly moved his horse forward. This day, Ellalee entertained Christopher with stories of a young maiden, the daughter of a baron’s great nephew, who always tried to do what was right but each time, her efforts missed the mark and left her in a worse situation. Christopher laughed through the stories at the ridiculous scenarios in which the maid found herself, and even the knights looked a little less sullen than usual.

  That evening, as in the last, Christopher tended the horses while Sir Kent handled the saddles and gear, and Daniella gathered the fire wood as Ellalee filled water skins and helped get the fire kindled.

  Sir Fritz and the earl came back that evening with a couple of birds and one rabbit which cooked up splendidly. The meat was cut and divvied up amongst the group. This time the men dug into their own meat. Ellalee didn’t blame them. One could only go so long on the jerky and tack in their saddle bags. Christopher seemed very satisfied with his share, but Ellalee held onto her meat and pretended to nibble on it. She would wait until Christopher was done with his share and once again offer him her own. Somewhere deep down, she felt as though his leg injury was her fault because if she could have kept him properly fed, perhaps he would have properly healed.

  Without warning, the earl roared to his feet, drawing his sword, causing the other knights to drop their meat and lunge for their swords as well, turning this way and that to determine the source of danger. Daniella screamed and grabbed Christopher drawing him to her chest to shield and protect him.

  Ellalee’s mouth dropped open as the earl charged directly at her and not some heretofore unknown danger. She slid backwards trying to keep herself out of the reach of the tip of his sword, but only managed to scoot backwards into her skirt which caught her up until she could move backwards no further.

  “Eat. Your. Meat.” The earl raged at her. “You will not give it away. You will not starve yourself. He’s had enough, and I know what you’ve eaten these past three days which wouldn’t be enough to keep a bird alive.”

  The knights sheathed their swords and cursed under their breaths as they picked up the remainder of their meat and tried to brush off the dirt. They glowered at the earl’s back and then at Ellalee.

  “Please eat, Ellalee. It has been provided. Be grateful,” Daniella said softly.

  “Good Lord, at least one has sense,” the earl sheathed his blade. “Eat, or I will kill you now rather than enduring the slow process of waiting for you to die. Starvation is so tedious.”

  “Eat. I’m fine,” Christopher said in a low but encouraging voice.

  She could hardly make eye contact with anyone. She took a bite, but found it hard to swallow past the lump in her throat. She chewed each bite long and slow, and after three bites, the earl seemed to think her sufficiently chastised and went and sat down though his hooded face never turned from her, his lips firm and set. She choked down the rest of her meat, not tasting it, took her blanket and rolled over.

  The next three days followed much the same way, only there was more conversation between the knights and less between Ellalee and anyone. Even Christopher, who loved stories, finally left her alone, and began pelting Sir Kent and Sir Fritz for stories of their adventures, and in between, Daniella and Christopher carried on small conversations about this and that. However, the earl and Ellalee stayed stubbornly quiet. Ellalee ate whatever she was given but refused to look at anyone in silent defiance.

  It wasn’t until the end of the fourth day that they came to the moors. The sparse trees looked ill, and a cold fog hung over thick, sharp grass. Rocks cropped out in strange hostile shapes. All the comradery that the knights had shown the past few days left them in a single breath of frigid wind. Sir Walter and Sir James crossed themselves as the mist enveloped their steeds. What could be seen through the cold fog was a hard, unfriendly, foreboding landscape. As they breathed in, the air seemed to freeze not just their lungs but their very souls.

  They reached the black stone gate sometime around noon Ellalee thought, though she certainly couldn’t be sure with the sun hiding its face behind the gloom. Only her internal sense of time offered inclination of the hour. The castle rose up in the background through the fog and between the trees in the distance. The left corner tower was taller than the right, and the grey stone of the castle was only slightly darker than the fog which made the castle appear even more ominous. The trees, as they neared the castle, looked black and dead beyond what late fall could have imbued. As Ellalee turned her head to take in the entire area, she decided it looked bleak and forlorn as though God himself had forgotten it.

  The knights put on a brave face, but they fooled no one, least of all Ellalee and her siblings. Christopher quaked at the sight of Castle de Avium, and Ellalee was right there with him. The place looked like life had long been emptied from this place. No flags flew at the pinnacles. There was no rush to greet the returning earl by knight or servant. No smoke rose up to fill the air with the homey smells of baking bread. Rather the air smelled as dank as a freshly dug grave with a raw scent of decay and wet earth.

  Ellalee crossed herself. The more she looked around, the more Castle de Avium had the feeling of a sepulcher, a place for the dead. And what had the devilish earl said? She would live here until a hundred years after her death. Here she would live, and here she would die. Suddenly the stories spoken by the stranger in Old Tate’s tavern came streaming back to Ellalee once more. All three of them would die here just like the last barn boy and the upstairs maid. This was an evil, forgotten place, and Ellalee was afraid. She wanted to blame the earl, but deep within her heart, she knew it was her sin that had brought her to this place of desperation and desolation and her siblings with her.

  The earl offered the knights the cursory hospitality at Castle de Avium, but they assured him that the Baron de Bressott expected them back with all due haste.

  Rotten cowards, Ellalee thought, frowning furiously.

  Sir Walter helped Daniella down, and Ellalee didn’t miss that he whispered something in her ear before he turned back to assist Ellalee from the wagon, and certainly less gently that he might have. Then the knight clamored back into his saddle, turning his horse towards friendlier lands and home.

  Sir Kent lifted Christopher down and helped him get his crutch secured under his arm. He knelt before the boy. “Mind yourself. Do as you’re told. Keep careful watch. I will come check on you if I can.” The knight gave Ellalee a glance too, perhaps to include her in this promise or perhaps to chasten her with the same warning, but it was hard to tell. Then he scrubbed the boy’s head, and got back into the wagon next to Sir Fritz and snapped the reins following Sir Walter and Sir James on horseback.

  Ellalee put her arms around Daniella and Christopher as they watched the knights disappear into the fog returning the way they had come. Sir Walter looked back twice before they could see him no more through the mist. Ellalee rolled her eyes when the earl started bellowing behind them, but she lowered her arms and whispered, “Don’t drink the water from the well. It has been tainted, and be careful of the food. This isn’t a safe place.”

  Christopher shivered.

  As Ellalee and her sibling turned to face the Earl de Avium, truly, as he was, for the first time, uncloaked and leering before them in all his horror. Under loose brown curls, his forehead was horribly scared on the top left side as though it had been melted and stuffed back together where the ends didn’t quite meet leaving a long deep angry groove with jagged scar tissue along the edges. His left cheek bore heavily gullies as though something had near melted away the flesh parts. Part of his hair was missing on the left side of his head, and the top of his left ear appeared as though it had been melted and the flesh had dripped
into what remained of his lower ear and frozen there. Daniella gasped and stared at the ground, refusing to look back while Christopher sucked in a loud breath and stared unabashedly, open-mouthed. The earl’s eyes were brown, burning embers as he faced Ellalee and her siblings, enjoying their horror. She felt her fear give way to anger. She realized that the earl wanted to horrify them with his appearance. He enjoyed the shock-value playing out before him. She also realized he was not that much older than she was. She didn’t know why that made him less menacing, only that it did.

  “The servant’s entrance is there.” He pointed around the side of the south castle wall, lifting his chin, daring Ellalee to look away from his sad mangled face.

  She nodded, but instead of walking towards the entrance, she walked towards the earl. “If you don’t mind me saying so, you look a lot less intimidating without that hood. Frankly, I rather like your roguish, devil-may-care look. You have nice eyes.” Then she turned, dropped her crutch at his feet, and limped towards the servant’s entrance and refused to turn around even to see if her siblings were following. Her ankle was still stiff and sore, but all things considered, the place rubbed raw under her arm hurt worse. The long days spent in the wagon had at least given her time to partially heal.

  She heard her sister behind her mumble, “She doesn’t mean to be so rude, your lordship.”

  “On the contrary, I rather think she does,” the earl replied, but Ellalee noticed he didn’t have the usual sneer in his voice. In fact, she knew she must be wrong, but without looking back, it seemed that his voice carried just a hint of humor, which made her all the more furious.

  Chapter Seven: The Dungeon

  Ellalee entered the servants’ entrance near the kitchen. The kitchen was its own horror. Dishes had not been washed in days. The stench was terrible. A fat woman whose red hair had begun to run to grey snored in a corner, and a rat, who seemed to take exception to Ellalee’s interruption, zipped across the floor. She wrinkled her nose in distress as Daniella came up behind her.

  “Ellalee, really, you should…..oh. Dear.” Daniella hovered just behind Ellalee’s shoulder and seemed equally unsure of whether or not she really wanted to enter.

  “Uh! This place is a pit,” Christopher announced as he caught up, his loud voice stirring the fat woman out of her slumber. She awoke spitting and hissing.

  “Who are you? Be gone with you! We don’t feed vagabonds here.” The lady grabbed her broom and began charging them. Her girth was a sight more intimidating than the broom she wielded.

  “We are the new servants,” Ellalee put her arms up to shield her younger sister and brother.

  “Oh, does that mean Lord de Avium is back? Oh! Oh, my, my, my. I wasn’t expecting him for several more days.”

  “Apparently,” Ellalee snorted, disgustedly. “Christopher, go work on the dishes. Daniella and I will start the meal since we don’t know our way around the castle. You,” she said to the older woman, “should go get the fires started.”

  “You come in ordering me around? I’ll smack you as soon as look at you. I’m in charge here, and I’ll be the one handing out assignments, young miss.”

  “Fine. What do you suggest?” Ellalee put her hands on her hips.

  “You there, boy, go out to the yard and catch a chicken. Pluck it well and bring it in. You, girl,” she addressed Ellalee. “Get to work on those dishes, and you, get the fire going, and start working on some bread.”

  “He is a cripple. He can no more catch a chicken than fly to the moon,” Ellalee replied curtly.

  “You will address me as Mistress Murray if I leave breath in your body to address me at all. You, boy, you scrub those pots, and you, Miss Sunshine, go catch a chicken. If you say so much as one more word of sass, you will sleep in the barn.”

  “While I would hate to sleep in the barn, I will have to risk it. I have injured my ankle. I can manage a hobble, but it would be doubtful, if I could manage to catch a chicken,” Ellalee sighed.

  “Ah, worthless, the lot ‘a ya. You’re even worse than the last. Figure it out!” she shouted and then scurried out, no doubt to get the fires going.

  Daniella managed the chicken and was steadfastly plucking it, and Christopher was chugging through scouring the dishes with high hopes of a meal at the end of his work. He had quite taken the Earl de Avium at the inverse of his corollary. If he worked, then he would eat. As Ellalee watched him, she smiled at the realization that this was a plenty good-enough deal for him. They had had food for days now, meat even. Suddenly, she was ashamed that she had not been more grateful, for at least, in that, God had watched over them and answered that prayer. The thought gave her pause.

  Ellalee soon had the cook fire blazing, bread dough rising, and was working on a stew based on what she could find in the larder that looked safe enough to eat. It had been so long since she had been blessed enough to use or taste spices that she was really beginning to enjoy herself and thought she might come to enjoy working in the kitchen despite the huffy nature of Mistress Murray and her own reduction to eternal servitude.

  When Ellalee pondered the moment of happiness, she realized it was the smells of the stew that reminded her so much of her home and of the times when her father was alive and laughing with them at the dining table. The memories warmed her soul, not perhaps enough to melt, but at least cracking her glacial anger at the world. The feeling was short-lived.

  The door blew open startling all three of them. Mistress Murry stormed into the kitchen like a whirlwind. She checked the stew, added way too much salt without tasting, threw the still-rising bread dough onto a wooden peel and into the oven with such force that it was flattened. She made quick use of the chicken, not bothering to add spices or properly butcher it in order to get it onto the spit. Ellalee tried to contain her disgust with this woman. This wasn’t cooking; this was gastronomic suicide in process. Ellalee looked at Daniella who also stared in stunned disbelief at the cook’s fervor. Yet for all the flurry of terror she wreaked on the preparation of the meal, she looked positively gleeful.

  “What’re you standing around for? There’re servants t’feed too. Get busy making a meal for us before we all starve!” Mistress Murray snarled over her shoulder.

  Daniella and Ellalee scurried into action. Christopher helped them scope out the larder once more. Daniella began making more bread and Ellalee pulled ingredients for another stew with Christopher’s help. Interestingly, Mistress Murray did not try to take over their work again, and Ellalee was determined to fight her if she tried. She didn’t care a whit if the Earl de Avium ate that atrocious meal, but the servants with the vile luck to be under his appellant charge should at least be well fed.

  Mistress Murray put her ghastly ruinations onto silver trays in the mock irony of a proper dinner as footmen, one dark-headed and swarthy and the other fair and blonde, appeared to convey the meal up to the dining hall. Daniella set the servants’ table with Christopher’s help, and Ellalee finished the meal. The smells of the rich vegetable stew combined with the homey aroma of baking bread was enough to bring servants from every quarter to the table. They stood and waited behind their chairs until the butler came.

  The butler was a tall, gaunt man, with more hair coming out of his ears than the top of his head. He had cold, inhuman eyes and yellowed teeth. He looked like he had once been a brawn man but had lost some of it with age, however, not enough to fail in being intimidating in stature. He paused before pulling out his chair, and the staff, with him, stood erect.

  “Who is the difficult one?” his slick voice echoed in the room. All the servants’ eyes were downcast in deference except Mistress Murray’s whose eyes blazed.

  “That’s her, Winslow,” Mistress Murray said pointing at Ellalee.

  “Now just a minute,” Ellalee began.

  “I see,” Winslow replied dryly. “If it were up to me, you would receive no supper, but would proceed directly to his lordship for disciplinary action. As it is, you are to finish your mea
l, which may be punishment enough, and then proceed to his lordship’s study under escort of Simmons, his lordship’s valet.”

  Ellalee cast her eyes around the table to a small man with thinning hair who inclined his head slightly as her gaze collided with his.

  Winslow looked at Daniella and continued, “Daniella, you will take over as cook from the trusty hands of Mistress Murry who will return to her duties as housekeeper. She will show you to the women’s quarters upstairs after you have cleaned up the evening meal and prepared for the morning meal.

  “Christopher, your duties will be determined by his lordship in good time, for this evening you will stay with your sister and help her with the dishes following dinner. The footmen will show you to your bed this evening. You may be seated.” With that Winslow pulled back his chair and sat, the staff with him.

  After grace was said, the servants pushed their food around or tilted their bowls to sniff the stew except for Mistress Murray who dug right in.

  Christopher’s eyes met Ellalee, and he raised his eyebrows obviously worried about the food. Ellalee bobbed her shoulders and took a bite, and Christopher followed suit. Daniella looked at her once with a pleading look that Ellalee also had no difficulty deciphering as concern for her upcoming meeting with the earl to which she also bobbed her shoulders again, noncommittally.

  “Oh! This is good!” Simmons said and then smiled apologetically at Winslow, “Sorry, Sir. Surprised is all.”