Old Saxon Blood Page 10

  separated by a narrow corridor at the end of which was a tall, unglazed window. The large White Keep chamber proved to be a repository of trash—boxes and old casks, discarded furniture, much of it broken—an arsonist’s delight. Joan found moldering in one corner an old arras with faded scenes of castles and ships and a battered chest full of rusting weaponry, chain mail, and old tools some stonemason had left behind years earlier. The windows afforded the same view as those in her former quarters.

  While Joan was conducting this inspection, Una remained in the corridor. When Joan had concluded, she noticed the anxious expression of her companion and suggested they take a quick look at what remained and then go downstairs. Una seemed to understand this communication and smiled gratefully. The first of the remaining rooms was empty. There was little evidence that the room had ever been occupied. The second room, however, was a mystery. The door was equipped with a lock, but Joan found nc key in her collection that would fit.

  She was puzzled. Why should this room be locked when the others weren’t?

  She was contemplating this question when she heard something stirring on the other side of the door. She wasn’t sure if it was a footstep or the rustle of a gown. Then she heard what sounded very much like a muffled cough. She looked at Una and knew that the Irishwoman had heard the noise as well. Una’s eyes were large with fear.

  Joan rapped sharply on the door. “I know there’s someone there,” she called. “Open at once.”

  But Joan’s commands had no effect, and although she heard no more movement within the room, she had the absolute conviction that someone was there.

  When subsequent knocking met with equal failure, she ordered Una to remain by the door while she went to find Moll. Una seemed very reluctant. “Stay here,” Joan ordered with gestures unmistakably to that effect.

  Matthew looked for Edward in the stable but the young hostler wasn’t there. The stable door gaped wide, admitting a generous swath of sunlight into the dusty, horsey interior. The horses were standing in the paddock, and the broken harness draped on the workbench with the mending tools at hand suggested that Edward had been about his business earlier that morning, had been interrupted, and would presently return.

  Matthew was content to wait, glad for a chance to look around on his own.

  The stable, pleasantly redolent with the smell of beast, straw, leather, and horse dung, was old but in good repair, with a sound roof and sturdy timbered walls. It had been constructed to house a veritable herd of animals but provided for only a small number now. Most of the stalls appeared to be unused; several had been converted to storage of hay. In the back of the stable was a small room outfitted with a pallet where, Matthew presumed, Edward slept.

  While he waited, Matthew examined the hostler’s tools, an orderly array of knives, aids, mallets, and pikes. The knives were sharp and arranged according to size. The tools Edward had been using to mend the harness were placed at right angles like a table setting at a feast. The bench itself was smooth and brushed clean of scraps and dirt. T here were a small forge and bellows, a blacksmith’s tongs and hammer.

  Then a shadow fell across the sunlit doorway and Matthew looked up to see Edward standing there. “Good day to you, Edward."

  For a moment Edward said nothing. He seemed startled, and Matthew wondered if he had offended the hostler by invading his domain while Edward was absent. But what should he have done? And after all, he was the steward of the house. He asked if Edward would keep him company on his rounds. Edward, relaxing, it seemed to Matthew, said he would.

  “I looked around the stables while you were out. All seems in good order. I want to visit the tenants. I have a list from Cuth's ledger."

  Matthew reached in his pocket and pulled out a crumpled sheet of paper on which he had written the names. “I see one of the tenants is named Bastian. Would that be one of your kin?"

  “My father," Edward answered. “He occupies a mean cottage on a small parcel of land—it's hardly worth a visit."

  “Perhaps not, but I will want to meet your father all the same," Matthew said.

  The two men walked out into the paddock. “We'll ride," Edward said, eyeing the horses. “It's four or five miles to the farthest tenant."

  “I want to call upon Master Stafford as well."

  “Yes, sir. His property lies to the north of here, but he’ll give us a cold welcome."

  “Cold, why?"

  “An old grudge—a dispute over the lake and the dam that made it.” Edward walked over to one of the horses, a bay gelding with a fine-shaped head. He patted it on the withers and whispered something in its ear.

  Matthew came up behind the hostler and said, “You know, I think I’d like to take a look at the lake before we ride."

  Edward turned sharply; his eyes were puzzled. “The lake? Why, there’s nothing to see there that can’t be seen from the house."

  “I know, but I feel obliged to see everything."

  Edward shrugged and patted the horse on the rump; it trotted off. He walked back through the stable door with Matthew.

  Matthew followed the hostler around the stable to where a path

  led through the woods. They walked a hundred yards or so through dense foliage until the lake came into view. Matthew stood on a high, slippery bank overlooking the water, which even on a fair day had a strangely leaden hue. He noticed an unpleasant smell and asked Edward about it.

  ‘The water,” Edward said. “Most pestilent and unhealthy it is, yet no one is sure why. Sir John made the lake, you know, not nature. That is, he caused the lake to be made. Before his time there was a good running stream and marsh. Sir John had been south and had seen some great house there—Kenilworth, I think.”

  “Ah,” said Matthew. “The castle of the mighty Earl of Leicester.”

  “The same,” Edward said. “That castle, I have heard tell, had a moat, a very fine broad one. Sir John wanted the same. He hired a French engineer to build an earthwork dam against the stream that coursed through the valley. A hillock called hereabout, ‘the thorn/ became the island you see yonder.”

  “And the little pile of stones upon it?” Matthew asked, casting an eye across the water.

  “A replica of Thorncombe’s towers—or at least one of them. A pure novelty, for it has no practical use, being hardly large enough for a tall man to stand upright.”

  “You’ve been on the island then?”

  “In my youth. There’s nothing more to see than what you see at this distance, I assure you.”

  “But the water is foul,” Matthew said.

  “It is indeed,” Edward said with an ironical laugh. “As the waters rose they found something strange and malignant in the ground they covered. Instead of being deep and clear and sweet as the natural lakes of the region, Sir John’s was warm, murky, and foul-smelling. Some of the neighbors said it was God’s judgment for Sir John’s presumption. Lakes were God’s work, not man’s—or so they said. Some more charitable said the smell was caused by seepage from old lead mines. They counseled Sir John to seek some learned man conversant with the properties of stones and rocks— they thought the water might be a cure like St. Ann’s in Buxton. But the lake proved to have no such virtue. Sir John stocked the lake with fish but they all died; the jackdaws are its only denizens.”

  “You know a good deal about your late masters history." Matthew remarked, turning from his inspection of the lake to his young companion.

  “These things happened almost before my time. My father told me of them, for he too was a servant in the castle and knew Sir John, his brother that died in the Irish wars, and the father before them."

  “I have heard Sir John drowned in this very lake," Matthew said. “On the day of his homecoming."

  “You’ve heard true, then," said Edward. The hostler pointed to a spot on the lakeshore. “We found him down there—Cuth and I—where the shore curves inward."

  Matthew could see the place, a stretch of rock and pebbles, and started
to walk in its direction. He climbed down the bank. The odor of the water, reminding him of something he had once smelled in an alchemist’s den in the final stages of distillation, seemed not so strong as before. The shore itself was littered with dead branches.

  “Is the water deep then?" Matthew asked Edward, who had followed him down from the bank.

  “Some of it is, some isn’t," Edward answered, picking up a smooth stone and flinging it out across the water. “There were old lead mines and potholes in the valley before the lake was made. The water covered them. But most of it is shallow, not more than four or five feet, I should judge."

  “Sir John couldn’t swim?"

  “Oh, he could," said Edward. “He could wade as familiarly through rivers as a water spaniel, or so the Irish manservant tells the tale. But he lost his leg, you see, in Ireland. He came home with a wooden one and was not yet recovered fully from the surgeon’s knife."

  “He was in a weakened condition, then?" Matthew asked, turning to look at the hostler, whose expression suggested he was genuinely pained by these recollections.

  “He had ridden a long day the day of his death," Edward said.

  “That’s strange that he should choose to go out on the water on such a day, in such a condition. Was the weather fair?"

  “The weather was miserable," said Edward. “An unseasonable tempest."

  "The stranger, then/’ Matthew said. "Why should a soldier, convalescing from surgery and weary from a long, exhausting ride, choose to go boating on the lake? And in a tempest?”

  Edward seemed to think about this. Shrugging, he said, "We don’t know what time he set out. The weather wasn’t so bad earlier. The tempest came of a sudden, as 1 remember. For his other reasons, I did not think it was my place to inquire.”

  Edward’s tone suggested that the question was equally impertinent on Matthew’s part. Matthew decided to change subjects. "1 see no shallop or other craft now.”

  Edward looked up and down the shoreline and agreed. He said he didn’t know where the shallop was. Its care had been the charge of Sir John’s manservant. Edward said he himself was no sailor and water made him queasy.

  Matthew decided he had seen enough of the lake. He was satisfied that even if he had been at liberty to search the scene of Sir John’s drowning in private, he would have discovered nothing more than what was in plain view. It had been over a year since the drowning. There had likely never been evidence of foul play, and had there been, it would long earlier have been removed by weather or will of him who had done the deed. But there remained another question he wanted to put to the hostler, a question that had been bothering Matthew since the night they had discovered Aileen Mogaills body and Edward had helped Matthew bury it.

  "It was a dreadful thing that happened to the girl,” Matthew said offhandedly, as though he had introduced the subject only to while away the time it took to climb back up the bank and walk through the woods to the paddock again.

  "It was, in truth,” Edward answered solemnly.

  "Who did it, do you think? Was it the Challoner ghost, as Cuth affirms?”

  Edward scoffed at the idea. "Cuth is a fool. His wife’s another.” "Who, then?”

  Edward stopped; he had been leading the way back. He said, "Live men wield swords more often than the spirits of dead folks do, I warrant. But I’d as lief believe some tramp or roving bedlamite made the keep his bed for the night and did murder for lust and madness’s sake than in a ghost’s revenge. I tell you it wouldn’t be the

  first time the old castle has had uninvited guests. In summer the roads are full of vagabonds. I sometimes have found them sleeping in the stable or in the field. IVe given them something to eat and sent them on their way—before Moll spots them. Shes hard on peddlers, she is. Whacks them with her cudgel she does. A very hard woman.”

  “Aileen was killed by a passing stranger, you think?”

  “Why, it's an explanation good as any other. What think you, Master Stock?”

  “Why, I agree its an explanation as good as any other,” Matthew answered, because he could think of nothing else to say and because it suddenly occurred to him that the hostler’s theory could be sound.

  Matthew waited by the paddock fence while Edward got the horses. Soon Edward was returning, leading a bay gelding and sorrel mare. Matthew watched while the hostler saddled both. Meanwhile the young man talked casually of horses, about which he obviously knew a great deal. He did have something to say about the castle’s tenants, too. “It’s always bad when the master is an absentee landlord, as Sir John so often was.” Edward said the tenants were an uncouth, unruly lot. He warned Matthew that the survey of the estate might not be a pleasant one.

  Edward’s words turned out to be true. The next several hours he took Matthew to a series of habitations that were little better than hovels, where the denizens spoke such a thickly accented local dialect as to be virtually incomprehensible, and where there was little welcome for the new steward. The tenants seemed indeed an ignorant and complaining brood; they regarded Matthew with suspicion and whispered among themselves. Matthew left them behind in relief that his position as steward was a temporary guise.

  But then he remembered they had not yet visited the cottage of Edward’s father. He reminded Edward of the fact.

  “My father’s cottage is no better than the others you’ve seen,” Edward said.

  Matthew detected the hostler’s reluctance, but was not content to let the visit pass. He might feel compelled to disguise his curiosity about Sir John’s drowning, but he was certainly under no obligation

  to do likewise with one of the tenants cottages. “We can spare the time, Edward. Lead on.”

  “Very well,” Edward said, “if it is your pleasure.”

  Matthew assured him it was.

  They traveled along the road for some way, passing several of the tenant cottages they had already visited, and Matthew realized that Edward had deliberately avoided the byroad which would have brought them to the cottage sooner.

  “My father is not well,” Edward said. “Hes like a child sometimes, at others like his old self. Half blind too. Death will come as a blessing to him, but thats in Gods hands.”

  “So there's just your father and you at the cottage?” Matthew asked.

  “We two. When he fell ill and could no longer take care of himself, I moved from the stable to the cottage to become his companion and nurse. So I have done these twelve months.”

  “It’s a fortunate father who has so dutiful a son,” Matthew remarked approvingly.

  Despite the hostler's disparaging comments about his father's cottage, the habitation that now7 came into view suggested a higher level of existence than those Matthew7 had previously visited that day. It w7as situated in a little clump of trees and had a roof of new thatch and a chimney from which a thin curl of smoke could be seen. The yard was girded by a sturdy picket fence in good repair, and inside the compound and before the front door an assortment of ducks, geese, and chickens was hunting and pecking, while at the side of the cottage there was a neatly tended kitchen garden and a shed.

  Edward said he w7ould ride ahead and announce their coming. “We rarely have visitors to the cottage, and your sudden appearance may startle my father.”

  Matthew was about to protest that he hardly thought himself a presence that should alarm an aging invalid, when Edward put his words into action and went galloping toward the cottage, leaving Matthew to follow at leisure.

  At Edward's advance, a large dog of indeterminate breed crept from beneath bushes growing near the cottage door and commenced a clamorous greeting, straining against the rope to which

  he was f-ethered. Edward dismounted, tied his horse to the fence, and bounded into the cottage. By the time Matthew had reached the fence, Edward reappeared in the doorway, smiling and beckoning Matthew to come in.

  Although several inches below mean height, Matthew had to dueV his head to clear the lintel before stepping down on a har
d earthen floor. The interior of the cottage was a single room at the far end of which was a hearth of ragged stone with a good fire going. Beside it was a battered cupboard, heavy with pots and crocks and other implements of rural housekeeping. There was a square oak table that might seat four with luck, a bench, several stools, two pallets, one larger than the other, and a large chest. Although it was a humble dwelling and the furnishings no better than to be expected, everything was neat and orderly. Certainly, there was not the squalor Matthew associated with the houses of old invalids and frisky young bachelors. Flowers from the kitchen garden had been gathered and placed in a vase on the square table, a touch that reminded Matthew of something his wife might have done.

  But of greatest interest to Matthew was not the furnishings of the cottage but its human occupant. On a stool near the hearth, his palms outstretched toward the fire as though he were trying to keep the heat it generated at a distance, sat an old man of fifty-five or sixty with thinning gray hair and scraggly beard, and an expression — Matthew noticed as the aged face turned in his direction— suggesting not so much deficiency of sight as indifference to what he looked upon. Edward’s father, for Matthew supposed this to be he, was broad-shouldered and sinewy like the son and he wore the garments of a rustic, except on his feet were slippers rather than boots or shoes. His complexion was darker than Edwards and his nose had once been broken, for it veered toward the left part of the face, where there was a noticeable tic. It was in the vacancy of his stare that Matthew recognized the true nature of the old man’r decrepitude. It was clear now why Edward felt obligated to look after his father: the elder Bastian was a man living in body beyond the minds strength to govern it, an unfortunate adjunct of age Matthew fad observed in many of his fellow townsmen.

  ' Master ftock, this is my father, Hugh Bastian.”

  Matthew said something about being pleased to meet the old man, but Hugh Bastian turned his face back toward the fire.