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  “Knighthoods shouldn’t be distributed too generously,” she said. “Ruins the breed. Nothing Essex did in Ireland so much angered me as dubbing every fellow he had had a few drinks with, or praised his horse or leg. God’s wounds! he vexed me. Besides,” she said more calmly, “it would hardly have done to send a knight of the realm into the wilds of Derbyshire to play the part of a household servant—or to have his lady wife tag along as housekeeper. What a monstrous violation of decorum! And yet, if he succeeds in this—” “If, if, if,” he chided, finding his royal mistress in a more pliant mood. “Would Your Majesty be willing to make a small wager that he succeeds?”

  “A small wager? How small?”

  “Ten crowns.”

  “Ten! Don’t make me laugh, my little man. You’ll put a stitch in my side and bring my surgeon running to bleed me again. Ten crowns is a beggar’s ransom.”

  “Marry, fifteen then.”

  “Minuscule still.” She eyed him shrewdly. “Moreover, it shows precious small faith in the constable and his wife. Bet twenty and the wager is done.”

  “Twenty, then, and to show my faith I’ll add twenty more.” “Confident odds—and spoken like a true lover of the game. Gambling was always your principal vice, Robin,” she said with a throaty laugh and mockery in her eye that made her, for the moment, seem far younger than her years. “Now, to conditions.” “Conditions?”

  “Of course, conditions. For what if in a month’s time Stock returns with nothing. Which of us loses?”

  “Who else but I?” said Cecil. “Since Your Majesty is so ready with her purse, I’ll take a broad step out on the plank and wager as

  follows: first, that the knight was murdered for a fact; second, that Matthew discerns the murderer within the month and returns providing us with the very name and substantial proof of the charge. Be it so, and your twenty crowns are mine to spend as I please. If otherwise, you have my forty.”

  “Wagered like a true gentleman—or a complete fool.” She laughed.

  “Time will tell,” he said.

  “And, mind you, I will have good grounds for any tale of murder he fetches home. I will have grounds, I say, a terra firma of fact and no shifting sands of supposition, or your forty crowns are mine! We princes are wary of our bargains—and our wagers.” “Would Her Majesty be pleased to have her personal secretary notarize the conditions of our agreement, or have it drawn and quartered by an attorney-at-law?” he asked with sly amusement.

  She laughed heartily and cried: “Damn all lawyers! If 1 cannot trust you, Robert Cecil, son of Burleigh whom I loved like a brother, who can a poor old woman trust in these times of villainy and treason? Thirty days, Robin. Not an hour more. On that point I will not be moved.”

  “Thirty days.”

  “Not a minute more.”

  “Done!”

  She leaned back in her chair, looking pleased that her conditions had been met. She lifted a skeptical eyebrow and said, “Well, my little man, the plot is laid. Let the outcome be as God disposes.”

  Moll Fludd peered over her husbands shoulder with restless eyes, suffering the agony of ungratified curiosity and growling her complaints in blistering threats and calumnies that her husband read faster. The object of her interest was a letter—received that very morning and addressed to them both—written on costly vellum and indited with a fine goose quill; and although in her ignorance of learning she could make nothing of its strokes and curlicues, dots and squiggles, its importance had been established in her mind by the fact the letter bore the Challoner seal. That and her husband s present confirmation that its author was none other than the dead masters niece, she who was a Maid of Honor in the Queens court!

  As best as Cuth Fludd could determine, he being the husband in question, the letters burden was twofold. The first fold being that the young woman was to be married in the castle sometime before winter and that therefore all should be made ready. Further communications on that score were to follow. The second fold, very grievous for Cuth to read aloud, for he knew his wife would receive it badly, was that the new mistress of Thorncombe was to be preceded by two harbingers: a man and wife appointed as steward and housekeeper to stand in Cuths and Molls places.

  This news, the letter made plain, was not to be received as

  condemnation, but as word of a richly deserved retirement from the onerous duties their advanced ages could only aggravate. That Moll and Cuth were to enjoy continued maintenance in the household was also promised. The groundskeeper’s lodge, a tumbledown structure near the lake, was suggested as a suitable accommodation.

  To have all this stuffing brought forth at last, Moll had had to poke her husband in the back as she might have prodded a mule, but now that it was revealed, her irritation at Cuth had not abated. For as he was the conveyer of such ill tidings, she held him in large part to blame for them. Moreover, having no other present—and certain not she who was ultimately responsible, that stringbean of a child, the young puke of the palace, the last drop of the Challoner blood—to blame for the deep insult and apprehension she felt, there was nothing left but to beat upon him, like Judy upon Punch, whose guilt in the matter was further evidenced by his failure to express his resentment as energetically as she.

  “Old ponderous fool,” she growled with dangerous eyes. “Damn her ladyship’s maintenance and freedom of the larder! The groundskeeper’s lodge? Oh yes, very well and wellaway! Pray, shall we make the rats and other vermin give room to us, for the place has not been tenanted for a generation or more? New steward! New housekeeper! Something more is afoot, I warrant. Something more!”

  “Why, what could it be?” her husband asked, looking up from the letter which he still studied, as though new writing should suddenly appear there if he looked away for a moment, writing with even more terrible import. He picked at the thatch of white hair that crowned his long, narrow head and mumbled the words of the letter silently as if praying.

  “What be their names again, say you?” Moll asked.

  “Says Stock. Says Matthew and Joan Stock.”

  “Stock, is it? As in a wooden stump or block. Godsbody! I’ll wager lie’s a right blockhead and his wife another and both of them as rightly and fitly named as the Devil.”

  “Well,” drawled her husband, “blockhead or no, he is to be the new steward and his wife the housekeeper. Mistress Frances puts the matter very plainly.”

  Cuth Fludd had said this quite without thinking how such a capitulation to necessity would affect his wife. She slapped him

  upon the noggin for his insolence, reproving him too for his lack of respect for her injured merit. He bore his beating with his usual long-suffering, tight-lipped and downcast like a whipped dog.

  Her fury spent for the moment, Moll folded her arms on her ample bosom and rocked on the balls of her feet. She stared into the middle distance of the kitchen, contemplating the greater injuries to come—the arrival of the Stocks, her dethronement as reigning female of the house and chief terror of the lower servants, the aggravation of adjusting to a new mistress, surely full of whims and airs and bent on changing the little universe of the castle. These impending developments aroused more anger—and suspicion. And thus her remark to her husband that something indeed was afoot, something more ominous than a change of masters or the appointment of new servants.

  “Stocks,” she repeated, as much to herself as to her spouse, and making a face as though she had just swallowed a fly. “I like not their names at all—that’s their first offense, the names. Surely greater will follow.”

  “Follow they may,” replied Cuth in a philosophical tone of one inured to suffering. “The young mistress who wrote this letter is now mistress of the castle according to England’s holy laws and the mighty Court of Chancery. She commands us to accept these newcomers in our place, to relinquish our offices in which we twain have served for forty years or more. That’s the sum, as I see it.”

  His voice broke; his eyes filled with tears.

/>   “Sum indeed,” snorted the wife, partly mollified by her husbands expression of grief and half sorry that she had beaten him so roundly. “Sum indeed! I say there’s more here than’s sounded. Why, all these years we’ve labored, through several Challoners, and never were we complained of. We knew our duties, and we did them. And never were strangers brought in from outside the shire, save the wild Irish Sir John would bring home from the wars for kindness’s sake. Mark me, this does not bode well for Thorncombe. As if enough evil had not already fallen on our heads, what with the master dying as he did.”

  At that very moment Aileen Mogaill appeared in the doorway, cast a hesitant glance at Moll, and then stepped over the threshold. She was carrying a basket of fresh greens from the kitchen garden. Moll scowled at the girl on general principles but held her tongue until she had gone out again. Of all the crosses she had born in the house the presence of so many heathen Irish was the heaviest. But what was a Christian woman to do? Coddling the Irish had been the masters will, the master’s bounty, the master’s high-fantastical humor. Surely it had not been her place to deny him.

  “When does it say we can expect these Stocks?”

  “Within a month—before the winter at the latest,” he said.

  “Which means they could turn up anytime.”

  “That’s what it means.”

  “Christ Jesus’ Holy Name,” mumbled Moll. “We shall have our work cut out for us. Yet I shall accord these Stocks no welcome to the house beyond what I must, nor will I trust them farther than I can throw them, for the thief must expect no thanks from the honest householder, nor the wolf from the sheep he devours. Why, they do take what’s rightly ours—our places of long durance!”

  Husband and wife contemplated this injustice together. Side by side in a grim parody of comradeship before a common enemy. They were a very curious pair, the Fludds. As physically ill-matched as any two human creatures could be under God’s heaven. He so thin and pale and rickety as to be the very image of an early death; she florid and broad—a likely apprentice to the village blacksmith were she forty years younger and of the opposite gender.

  For the next few days the letter remained the sole topic of conversation between them. Nothing was done to prepare the house, nor were any other servants informed of what was to come. Cuth and Moll did their work as usual, as though sheer routine would ward off the terrible changes ahead.

  But finally something had to be done, for, as Cuth pointed out to his wife (but very diplomatically!), the promise of continued maintenance in their dotage was something worth securing, and if Mistress Frances arrived to discover that her express commands had been disregarded, the Fludds might well find themselves out in the road.

  To such a fate even the groundskeeper’s lodge with all its vermin was to be preferred.

  And so Moll ordered the Irish servants to ready the late master’s chamber for the new mistress of Thorncombe and also to prepare a place in the west ward of the castle for the new steward and his wife.

  Sir John’s armor and trunkful of weaponry, his moldy volumes on war and history, his lank, flea-bitten hounds that had long kenneled themselves on his bed, his five suits of indifferent quality, and a great deal of other assorted stuff were transferred elsewhere to give the chamber a more feminine look. Fresh rushes were laid and the windows were opened to air the place out, which it badly needed because of the dogs. The Irish girls applied themselves to this task with their usual sullen acquiescence. There were six of them in all, including Una the cook. Moll rarely called them by name. When she wanted something done she pointed and blustered, a mode of communication she was convinced was universal. The girls chattered among themselves in Irish and sometimes sang Irish songs. Moll knew the girls did not like her, and she didn’t care. To her mind, mutual hostility was the proper relationship between higher servants and lower, English and Irish. As for Cuth, he had no commerce with the serving girls at all. He thought them stupid, and even if he had allowed himself to admire their girlish charms, the brightness of an eye or smooth contour of a calf or forearm, he would have struck the offending member from his own body before he would have allowed his wife to detect his interest.

  The preparation of the west ward of Thorncombe was of special concern to Moll, for although she had at last come to accept the need to comply with her young mistress’s orders, she was committed to making the newcomers as unwelcome as possible. She had therefore chosen the Stocks’ accommodations with that care with which a patient but purposeful spider locates his web.

  Moll led the Irish girls down the long corridor that connected the kitchen of the new house with the cavernous banquet hall of the old castle. She climbed the stone stairs to the ward. She came to a massive oak door and selected from the bunch of keys that dangled from her waist one of curious and antique design. This she inserted in the lock; then she pushed the door open.

  The chamber exhaled a breath of cold, stagnant air that caused even the dauntless old woman a moment of apprehension. As to the reaction of her fellow servants, Moll could not gauge that, even if she had been less indifferent. But she suspected that the girls, as ignorant of English as they were and isolated from town gossip, would think the chamber simply another of the many in the castle and the house. But Moll knew the story of the chamber in all its horrific fullness.

  It was a large, high-ceilinged chamber of oppressive bareness, said to be haunted by the ghost of an earlier Challoner who had been murdered in his bed; indeed, in this very place. One version of the story had the unfortunate victim smothered in his bedclothes. Another claimed that the murder weapon was a large two-handed sword, by which merciless engine the victims head had been dissociated from his body. But all the variations concurred that the murderer was the dead man’s own brother. There was also general agreement as to motive. The murdered man had seduced and violated his own sister!

  Why the restless spirit of the dead man should have lingered in his former habitation rather than descended at once to the fires of hell was not explained. The chamber was known as the Black Keep, both because of the legendary crime and to distinguish it from a similar compartment in the tower opposite, called the White Keep.

  Moll was unsure as to whether Mistress Frances had heard of the legend. If she had and discovered where Moll had put the Stocks, Moll might be in great trouble. But Moll knew Mistress Frances had never set foot in Thorncombe and inferred from that fact that the young woman knew none of its grisly legends. And even if, by some mischance, rumors had come to the ears of her new mistress, Moll could always point out that the chamber was the most commodious in the castle and readily accessible to the kitchen, the center of servant life, if one did not mind climbing all those steps.

  So, justified in her choice, Moll proceeded to direct her assistants to their labors. It was no mean task, the cleaning. The chamber was unspeakably filthy from long disuse. The stone floor was covered with dirt and the moldering remains of rushes a half-century had seen unchanged. A legion of mice and spiders fled at the first wielding of the broom, and broken panes in one of the tall lancet windows admitted drafts of bracing air that might have pleased a monk bent on mortification of the flesh but surely no warm-blooded Englishman concerned for creature comforts.

  The room’s few furnishings were no enhancement either. A funereal four-poster with tattered hangings like a cannon-blasted vessel occupied one corner. In another stood a tall cabinet which, when opened, exhaled such a miasma that Moll was forced to run to the window for relief. The stone walls boasted remnants of tapestries, but their designs and colors had long ago succumbed to dust, except where a curious observer could detect a martial scene of knights in combat, sieges, castles, sallies, and alarms, reflecting the consuming passion of the baronets of Thorncombe. Above the bed itself hung a rusty two-handed blade that for all Moll knew was the very instrument by which the baronet of the ghostly tale had met his deserved end.

  The chambers only accommodating feature was a large hearth. Moll order
ed a fire to be laid, but the chimney proved to be plugged, and the room filled with smoke. The smoke disturbed a previously undetected wasps' nest in the blackened beams of the ceiling and the swarm attacked the women, who went screaming downstairs, the angry wasps in pursuit.

  And for all these troubles—the filthy chamber, the loathsome air, the biting wasps—Moll blamed the Stocks and cursed them both aloud and in her heart.

  In her tiny cubicle under the eaves, Aileen Mogaill stared forlornly at the painful welts where the wasps had stung her several days before. The cook had given her ointment for the stings, and she had applied it generously each night since.

  It had been while applying the ointment that she noticed that the thin copper bracelet with the tiny crucifix that she wore for pure religions sake was gone. Since earlier that morning she had been aware of its presence while she washed her face and hands, she concluded that she had likely lost it while cleaning the filthy chamber in the Black Keep.

  Her heart sank at the thought, for she knew she must return for the bracelet, and waiting until morning light would hardly do, for who knew who might find it in the meanwhile and claim it for her own?

  Her bedmate asleep, to judge by the soft snoring beneath the covers, Aileen Mogaill took the candle from her beside and started out for the Black Keep.

  Edward Bastian, the hostler at Thorncombe, had heard of the coming of the Stocks from Michael Conroy, Sir Johns Irish manservant, who in turn had had the news by way of threat from Moll Fludd. Conroy, for want of better employment elsewhere, had remained at the castle since his master’s drowning, drinking up Sir John’s supply of ale and wine and sleeping most of the day. At night he rode into Buxton, won money at cards, and flirted with the local wenches who were charmed by his flaming red hair, his brawn, and his flattering Irish tongue. After more than a year of this, Moll had grown impatient with Conroys presence; she felt that the advent of the Stocks was an auspicious time to send Conroy packing. She sent her husband to do the job.