Pavane

Sixth Measure CORFE GATE

The column of horsemen trotted briskly, harness jangling, making no attempt to keep to the side of the road. Behind the soldiers the tourist cars of the wealthy bunched and jostled, motors sputtering. From time to time one or other of the drivers essayed a swift overtaking dash that took him past well clear of the horses; but few cared to risk the manoeuvre, and a bright-coloured jam stretched back over a mile behind the obstruction. The more philosophical of the travellers were already sailing; the striped lateens billowed in the puffs of breeze, propelling the vehicles along with the smallest assistance from their tiny, inefficient engines.

There was ample need for caution. The pennants carried by the column were known to all; at its head flew the oriflamme, ancient symbol of the Norman nobility, and flanking it were the Eagles of Pope John, silk-yellow on a blue field. Behind them fluttered the swallow-tailed tri-colour of Henry Lord of Rye and Deal, Captain of the Cinque Ports and the Pope’s lieutenant in England. Henry was known through the land as a hard and bitter man; when he rode armed it boded ill for somebody, and behind him was the authority of Christ’s Vicar on Earth and all the power and might of the second Rome. Henry was a small man, thin-shanked, sallow and sharp-featured; he sat his horse sullenly, muffled in a cloak although the day was warm. If he realised the dislocation he was causing he gave no sign of it. From time to time shivers coursed through his body and he shifted uneasily, trying to find a position that would ease his aching buttocks. En route from Londinium he had lain ten days in Winchester, stomach knotted by the cramps of gastroenteritis; and though the fool of a physician, who deserved to lose his ears or worse, had been swift enough to diagnose he’d been unable to bring about a cure.

Henry had barely recovered when the clacking of the semaphores had driven him on; the arm of the fortieth Pope John was long, his sources of information numerous and varied, his will indomitable. Henry’s orders were clear; to take the confounded fortress that had caused so much trouble, reduce its arms, raise John’s standards on its walls, and hold it for his liege lord till further notice. As for the West Country filly who’d started all the bother, well… Henry grimaced, and stiffened in the saddle. Maybe her backbone stood in need of airing, or she could find herself being dragged to Londinium behind a baggage waggon; such matters were minor. Minor at least to his own personal discomfort.

The semaphores were working again now to either side of the road, their black arms cracking and flailing. Henry glared at the nearest of the towers, standing gaunt on the crest of a sweep of down. Among the complex of messages it carried would almost certainly be news of his progress; for days now the information would have been flashing down ahead of him into the West. Another spasm of pain doubled him, and his temper snapped; he turned his head briefly and a Captain of Horse rode alongside, spurs jingling. Henry pointed at the tower of his choice. ‘Captain,’ he said. ‘Detach a dozen men. Go to that… Demand of who you find there the message it bears.’

The soldier hesitated. The order was seemingly without point; none knew better

than Henry that the Guildsmen would not divulge their affairs. ‘And if they refuse,

M’Lord?’

Henry swore.’ Then silence it…’

The officer still stared, until Rye and Deal turned to glare; then he saluted and wheeled his horse. For centuries the Guild of Signallers had enjoyed privileges not even the Popes dared question; now it seemed their immunity was ended, blown away by a diminutive nobleman with a bellyache. Orders were shouted, dust rose in a cloud; a group of men turned from the line of march and broke into a gallop across the grass, pennants flying. As they rode the soldiers loosened their falchions in the scabbard, saw to the priming of their muskets. With luck they would come on the Signallers unarmed, if not there would be a short and bloody skirmish. Either way, the end was not in doubt. Henry, twisting in the saddle, saw the arms of the tower drop to its side like the arms of a man suddenly tired. He grinned without humour. The respite would be temporary at best; if he knew the Guild, runners would quickly be despatched from the next station in line. After that all men would know of his act. The signal network was a delicate animal; touch one limb and all its parts reacted, sometimes within hours. With good visibility along the Pennine stations his work could be known to the Hebrides by nightfall. And to the Vatican by dawn… He hunched himself, caressing his suffering stomach. Another turn of the head, a snapping of the fingers and Father Angelo jogged up beside him, sweating a little and as usual more than anxious to please.

‘Well, sirrah,’ said Henry tartly. ‘How much longer on this confounded route march of ours?’

The priest bent his head over the map, trying to steady it against the movements of the horse. Churchmen always made lousy riders; and worse map readers, in Henry’s opinion. The Father’s failing sight had already led the party into a bog and forced half a dozen detours. ‘About twenty miles, M’Lord,’ he said uncertainly. ‘But that is by the road. If we left our present way a mile above Wimborne town -’

‘Spare me your shortcuts,’ said Henry brutally. ‘I wish to arrive by Christmastide. Send a couple of your people on ahead and arrange our accommodation some’ - he squinted at the sun - ‘some five miles up the road. And try this time to discover beds not too thick with lice, and just a little softer than the racks of my Serjeant-at-arms.’ Father Angelo gave a bumbling parody of a military salute and jogged back down the line. Henry was on the road again early next morning, in a thicker rage than ever.

Overnight he had been given proof of the changed temper of the West. As he stood shaving at the open window of his room a crossbow quarrel had passed beneath his elbow, demolishing a set of Venetian case-bottles before burying itself in the far wall. Henry, infuriated by the attack on his person but even more by the loss of so much fine and irreplaceable glass, had ordered an immediate search for the marksman. His soldiers had unearthed a handful of malcontents, all of whom had resisted arrest in a more or less desultory way; they were towed behind the baggage carts till the column came in sight of its objective. Then they were released; they staggered off bemused, snorting blood out on the grass, and none of them made more than a hundred yards before lying down to sleep it off. Henry’s ways with rebels had always been noted for their directness. He rode forward. In front of him the heath stretched out for miles, tawny red, splashed here and there with the fierce parrot-green of bogs. Across the horizon ran a curving line of hills; between them the place he had come to chastise thrust up like an ancient fang. Henry spat thoughtfully. The castle was strong, far too strong to be taken by assault; he could see that already. But then, it would never stand. Not against the blue. Behind him the soldiers bunched together; the oriflamme fluttered from its golden staff, tossing in the wind like the fire it represented. Off on the horizon the ubiquitous telegraph waved and gestured against the sky. Henry watched a moment longer then snapped his ringers. ‘Captain,’ he said. ‘Two men to ride ahead to the castle. Let them take orders under my seal to the woman of the place. Have her ready her ordnance to be delivered up to us; and tell her to regard herself and all inside the walls as prisoners of Pope John. What guns do they have anyway, now we’ve come so far to fetch them? Refresh my memory.’

The Captain gabbled, repeating a list learned by rote. ‘Two sakers throwing three pound ball, powder and wads for them. Some handguns, snaphaunces; not much more than fowling pieces, M’Lord. The great gun Growler, from the King’s arsenal; the culverin Prince of Peace, transferred on His Majesty’s instructions from the garrison of Isca.’ Henry sniffed and rubbed the tip of his nose with the back of his glove. ‘Well, I shall shortly be a prince of peace myself; and I dare say I shall do my share of growling too before the day is through. Have the pieces brought to the main gate, along with what shot and powder they have. Clear a waggon for the arms, and levy mules or horses for the great guns. See to it, Captain.’

The officer saluted and turned back, bellowing for his aides; Henry raised his arm and swept it down in the signal for general advance. At his shout Father Angelo crabbed forward, nearly parting company with his mount in the process. ‘Quarters in the village, Father,’ said Rye and Deal wearily. ‘At the worst we could have a lengthy stay. And secure me this time hot water and a flushing toilet, or I’ll send you back to Rome in charge of a crap cart. And you won’t be riding it either my friend, I promise you that; you’ll be running between the bloody shafts…’

The banners and the eagles spread out, bright in the sunlight, as the column cantered across the heath.

Sir John Faulkner, seneschal of Corfe Gate, woke early from a restless sleep. Sunlight from the fenestella six feet above his head slanted across the little bedchamber, fighting the chill that tended to gather in the room even in the height of summer. The great keep was always cool; for the sun at its hottest could scarcely reach through a dozen feet of Dorset stone. A week before the Lady Eleanor, mistress of the place, had moved her people from the lower baileys to make room for the soldiers flocking in and the refugees begging shelter; the household was still unused to the primitive conditions of the donjon. The seneschal rubbed his face, filled a bowl and washed, swilling the water down the sluice beneath the window. He dressed, grateful for the touch of fresh linen on his body, and left the chamber.

Outside, a circular stairway wound up through the thickness of the wall. He climbed it, placing his feet at the sides of the treads; generations of wear had scooped the steps into hollows that were traps for the unwary. At the top of the spiralling way a door, loosely closed by a lanyard, gave access to the roof. He unfastened the becket and stepped through, leaned on the parapet and looked down between the massive crenellations at the surrounding country. Five miles to the south the Channel stretched away in a pearly haze; out there on a clear day keen sight might make out the shape of the Needles, guarding the western tip of the Isle of Wight. The Devil sat there once in the long-ago, heaved a rock at Corfe towers, and dropped it short on Studland beach. The seneschal smiled slightly at the fancy and turned away.

Northward were the heights of the Great Plain, pale in the dawn light, grey and vague like the uplands of a kingdom of ghosts. Close to the castle rose the huge swellings of Challow and Knowle, its flanking hills; and all round was the heath, blackened in places by summer fires, flat and sullen and immense, a sour expanse that would grow nothing, supported nothing except roving bands of croppers. He could see the smoke from one of their camps threading up in the distance. Nearer at hand he looked down on the ribbed grey roofs of the village, the farm that stood just beyond the wet ditch. As he watched a lorry coasted to it, off-loaded two churns, and puffed away round the shoulder of the motte towards the Wareham Road.

Almost unwillingly, he lifted his eyes to the semaphore tower on the crest of Challow Hill. As if it had been waiting for a cue, the thing began to move; the jerky ‘Arms up, arms down’ of the Attention signal. He knew it would be answering another far across the heath; so far that only the Guildsmen, with their wonderful Zeiss binoculars, could translate accurately the letters and symbols of the message. Way across the land the chain of towers would be moving, lifting their jointed arms, banging them back. Attention, Attention…

Reading the semaphores was not officially the province of the seneschal; down in the third bailey a scurry of movement told him the guards had already alerted the household’s Signaller-Page. The boy would be hurrying from his room, rubbing his eyes maybe, message pad in hand. The seneschal watched the movements of the arms, lips shaping the numbers as they formed, mind translating the cryptograms to which generations of Signallers had reduced the king’s English. ‘Eagle Rye one five,’ he read. ‘North-west ten, closing.’ That would be My Lord of the Cinque Ports, with his hundred and fifty men; he was nearer than the seneschal had thought. Nine dead,’ said the thing on the hill. ‘Nine.’ That was bad; the Pope’s lieutenant was evidently determined to enhance his reputation for ruthlessness. There followed a call sign; Sir John heard cables rattle as Eleanor’s Signaller worked the arms of his tower. ‘Yield your guns,’ said the grid’ repeater briefly. ‘Give yourselves into captivity. Messengers en route.’ Then that was all. The arms dropped with a final clash; the tower fell austerely silent.

The watching man sighed and instinctively his hand went to the amulet round his neck. He turned the little disc in his fingers, tracing the outline of the symbol carved on it. Down below the kitchen chimneys smoked, pails clanked as the cows were milked in their stalls. Those of the household who had been in sight of the tower had paused momentarily when its arms started to move, and all would have heard the clatter of their own answer; but no commoners could read the language of the Guild, and they had soon bent to their tasks again. Eleanor would have to be told. He ducked back down the stairway, hunching his shoulders automatically to prevent banging his head on the low ceiling. His mouth was set grimly. This was the thing that had been ordained a thousand years; an era was about to come to an end.

The Lady Eleanor was already up and dressed. A board had been set out for her in one of the chambers opening off the Great Hall; she was taking breakfast in an alcove beneath a window set with quarrel-panes of coloured glass. She rose when she saw her seneschal, and watched his face. He nodded briefly in answer to the unvoiced question. ‘Yes, my Lady,’ he said quietly. ‘He will come today.’

She sat back, no longer conscious of the food in front of her. Her face and worried

eyes looked very young. ‘How many men?’ she asked finally.

‘A hundred and fifty.’

She waved a hand, conscious suddenly of her incivility. ‘Please sit down, Sir John. Will you take wine?’

He leaned back in the window seat, resting his head against the glass. ‘Not at present, thank you, my Lady…’

He watched her, and no one could have told the expression in his eyes. She stared back seeing how the lights stained his hair and cheek with colour, gold and rose and blue. She pulled at her lip, and twined her fingers in her lap. ‘Sir John,’ she said, ‘what am I to do?’

He didn’t answer for a time; and when he did speak there was no help in the words. ‘What your blood dictates, my Lady,’ he said. ‘You will follow your breeding, and your heart.’

She got up again quickly and walked away from him to where she could see the Great Hall shadowed and forbidding, the gloomy power of the vast crosswall, the dais where in ancient times the family sat at meat, the gallery where minstrels used to play. She touched a switch beside the chamber door; a solitary electric lamp flicked on in the roof, throwing a wan pool of light on the coarse flags of the floor, and suddenly the place seemed fitter for the dead than the living. Somewhere a chain-hoist rumbled; the Signaller-Page ran into the hall, stopped short when he saw his mistress. She took the message he carried, smiling at him, turned back with the flimsy in her hand. She said broodingly, ‘A hundred and fifty men…"

She walked back to her chair, sat with her hands folded in her lap, and stared at the table in front of her. ‘If I open to him,’ she said indistinctly, ‘I shall run behind his pack train like a soldiers’ drab. I shall lose my living and my home, most certainly my decency and probably my life. But I can’t fight Pope John. To war with him is to take on all the world… Yet this is his man come to try me.’

The seneschal said nothing; she hadn’t expected him to answer. She sat still a long time and when she looked up there were tears in her eyes. ‘Close the gates, Sir John,’ she said, ‘and get our people in. Advise me when these messengers arrive, but do not grant them entry.’ He rose quietly. ‘And the guns, Lady?’

‘The guns?’ she said sombrely. ‘Take them to the gate by all means, and shot and powder for them. So far we will do as he desires…"

Through all the passages and high walks of the place the drums throbbed, beating to quarters.

Henry of Rye and Deal reined his horse, and behind him the column of men boiled to a halt. A bare mile away the castle glared huge and close, smoke rising in columns from its walls; down the road, rutted between its tall banks, the messengers were galloping, trailing clouds of whitish dust that hung behind them dispersing slowly in the still air. Three sentences the couriers got out before Henry started to swear. His spurs tore gashes in the flanks of his horse; the animal leaped forward terrified, the column swirled and clattered in pursuit.

The village square was packed with visitors, the taverns doing a bustling trade; the folk who had gathered to stare were scattered by the Lord of Rye and Deal. He hauled his horse in at the outer barbican, the animal lathered and running blood. The great gun Growler had indeed been brought down; but he was loaded and primed and his muzzle stared through the iron of the portcullis, and the culverin was flanking him. Behind the pieces a semicircle of men stood at ease, halberds grounded on the turf.

‘Clear that bloody bridge,’ bellowed the Pope’s lieutenant, revolving on his horse. ‘Captain, if those people won’t get off throw ’em in the ditch…’ Then to the guards, ‘What damn fool game is this? Open for Pope John…"

One of the men inside the bailey spoke up stolidly. ‘Sorry, M’Lord. Orders of the Lady Eleanor.’

‘Then,’ swore the nobleman, voice rising on a high note of rage, ‘instruct Her

Ladyship that Henry of Rye and Deal commands her presence to answer for her fornicating insolence…’

‘M’Lord,’ said the man inside, unmoved, ‘the Lady Eleanor has been informed…" Henry glared back. Turned to see his soldiers crowding the bridge, stared up at the great impassive face of the keep. Round the donjon the inner battlements flocked with men. He leaned forward to rattle with his crop against the bars of the gate. ‘By nightfall, my talkative friend,’ he said, breathing heavily, ‘you’ll hang by your heels for this, probably with your head over a slow fire. D’ye realise that?’ The guard spat deliberately at his feet.

Eleanor took her time about coming. She had bathed and changed and dressed her hair; she would allow no hands to touch her body but her own, not even the hands of tiring-maids. She appeared holding the arm of the seneschal, her Captain of Artillery walking on her left. She wore a plain white dress, and her long brown hair was loose. A little wind moved across the bailey, blowing the hair and flattening her skirt against her thighs. Henry, who had lost enough face already, watched her, fuming. Twenty paces from the gate the others stopped and she came forward alone. She saw the horsemen on the bridge, the muskets and swords, the sea of tossing blue. She halted by the breech of the great gun, one hand resting on the iron. ‘Well, My Lord,’ she said in a low, clear voice. ‘What will you have of us?’

Henry’s rages were famous and spectacular; spittle flecked his beard, the standersby heard him grind his teeth. ‘Deliver me this place,’ he shouted finally. ‘And your ordnance, and yourselves. In the name of your ruler Pope John, through the authority vested in me his lieutenant in these islands.’ She straightened her back, staring up at him through the gate.

‘And in the name of Charles?’ she asked cuttingly. ‘For my liege ruler is my King. So it was with my father and so with me My Lord; I took no vows before a foreign priest.’ He drew his sword, and pointed through the bars.’ That gun,’ was all he could speak.

She still remained standing by the great gun, her fingers touching its breech and the wind moving in her hair. ‘And if I refuse?’

He shouted again then, waving an arm; at the gesture a soldier spurred forward lifting a bag from the pommel of his saddle. ‘Then your liege-folk in this isle pay with their homes and their property and their lives,’ panted Henry, slashing at the cord that held the canvas closed. ‘It’ll be blood for iron, My Lady, blood for iron…’ The string came free, the bag was shaken; and down before her dropped the tongues and other parts of men, cut away as was the custom of Henry’s soldiers.

There was a silence that deepened. The colour drained slowly from Eleanor’s face, leaving the skin chalk-pale as the fabric of her dress; indeed the more romantic of the watchers swore afterwards the blue leached from her very eyes, leaving them lambent and dead as the eyes of a corpse. She clenched her hands slowly, slowly relaxed them again; a long time she waited, leaning on the gun, while the rage blurred her sight, rose to a high mad shrilling that seemed to ring inside her brain, receded leaving her utterly cold. She swallowed; and when she spoke again every word seemed freshly chipped from ice. ‘Why then,’ she said. ‘You must not leave us empty-handed, My Lord of Rye and Deal. Yet I fear my Growler will be a heavy load. Would not your task be lightened if his charge were sent before?’ And before any of the people round her could guess her purpose or intervene she had snatched at the firing lanyard, and Growler leaped back pouring smoke while echoes clapped around the waiting hills.

The heavy charge, fired at point-blank range, blew away the belly of the horse and took both Henry’s feet off at the ankles; animal and rider leaped convulsively and fell with a mingled scream into the dry ditch. As if by common consent the crossbows of the defenders played first on them; within seconds they were still, pierced by a score of shafts. The grapeshot, ploughing on, spread ruin among the soldiers on the bridge, tore furrows from the buildings of the village square beyond. Shrieks sounded, echoing from the close stone walls; the harquebusiers fired into the struggling mass on the path; the Captain rode away, leaning from his horse while his blood ribboned back across the creature’s rump. Then it finished, dying men whimpering while a thin haze of smoke drifted across the lower bailey towards the Martyr’s Gate.

Eleanor leaned on the gun and bit her wrist like a child at what she had done. The seneschal was the first to reach her; but she shoved him away. ‘Take up that dirt,’ she said, pointing to the ditch. ‘And bury it inside the bailey walls. I will have my right of faldage from Pope John…’ Then she staggered; he caught her, lifted her and carried her to her room.

For most of her life Eleanor, only daughter of Robert, last of the Lords of Purbeck, had lived in seclusion in the great hall set between the hills. She was a strange child, secretive and shy, beloved of the Fairies who according to popular report assisted at her very conception. Though practical and level-headed in other respects, Eleanor never made any attempt to scotch the rumours of her paranormal origin, seeming instead to take pleasure in them. ‘For,’ she would explain, ‘my father often told his guests the tale of how he rode north that day to bring my mother home. When he ran out and jumped on his horse everybody was convinced he’d taken leave of his senses; but he always claimed it was the People of the Heath that drove him to it, showing him visions so beautiful they sent him completely wild.’ Then her face would cloud; for Margaret Strange had died in childbirth, and Eleanor felt very keenly the loss of the mother she had never known.

Too keenly sometimes for her father’s peace of mind; Robert, who never remarried, brooded over the child’s imaginings. Once, when she was very small, she walked in her sleep. It was on a night of wind, with a full gale roaring up from the Channel barely five miles away; one of those nights when the nervous of the household kept to their rooms, swearing they heard the laughter of the Old Ones in the gusts that hissed and droned round the high stones of the keep. Eleanor’s nurse, looking in to see the child was quiet, found her room empty; a hue and cry was raised, and the whole great complex of buildings searched. They found Eleanor high in the donjon, at the head of an ancient stairway unused for years. Her eyes were closed but as they reached her they heard her calling. ‘Mother,’ she shouted. ‘Mother, are you there…’ They led her down, careful not to startle her; for it was well known that such walkers were under the spell of the Old Ones, who took their souls very easily if they woke. Eleanor herself seemed oblivious of the whole affair; but it was not so. She referred to it days later, when her nurse was dressing her. ‘My mother was very pretty, wasn’t she?’ she said; then thoughtfully, ‘She wanted to play; but she had to go away…’ Robert frowned when he heard, and pulled his beard and swore; the girl was packed off to relatives in France, but when she came back six months later she was very little changed.

As a child Eleanor was frequently lonely; for the castle contained no other children of her own age except the children of the serving people, from whom she was largely excluded by barriers of rank and class. Most of her days were passed quietly in the company of her nurse and later her tutor, from whom she learned the several languages of the land. She proved to have a quick and receptive brain; she soon mastered the Norman French and Latin that had remained the tongues of the cultured world, even more quickly the churl talk of the peasants. It worried her father slightly to hear the old syllables bang and splatter from her lips; but because of it she was greatly respected by the few commoners with whom she came in contact. Indeed she seemed to identify herself more with the ordinary people of the countryside than with those of her own rank; which in a way was understandable considering that she was only partly of noble blood.

The peasants still lived and were governed by the ancient rhythms of moon and sun, ploughing and reaping, death and birth; and all old things, whether or not sanctified by the rulers of Rome, appealed strongly to her. Sometimes she would go with her nurse and her father’s seneschal and play on the nearby beaches. She would watch the endless roll and thunder of the sea, and ask strange questions of the seneschal; such as whether the Popes, from their golden throne, could order the waves that washed the shores of England, marching in their violet ranks to break against the ancient cliffs. He would smile at her, answering heresy with discretion, till she grew bored and scampered off to hunt for shells on the beach or seaweed, or pick the crinoid fossils from the rocks and give them to him for fairy beads. She felt an odd sympathy with the fabric of the land itself; once she took a flake of shale and pressed it to her throat and cried, and said that day she was made right through of stone, dark and stern as the Kimmeridge cliffs and as indomitable. Her waywardness caused in the end her removal to Londinium.

In her sixteenth year her father caught her with a bailiff, learning the handling of his motor vehicle; how to slip the bands of its gearbox and drive it in forward and reverse round the slopes of the outer bailey. Maybe some gesture, some turn of the head, reminded Robert too clearly of the girl who had died so many years ago; he pulled his daughter squawking from the machine, clipped her ear, and chased her off to her room.

The resulting interview, compounded as it was of Eleanor’s wounded dignity and her father’s always uncertain temper, proved disastrous. Eleanor vented her feelings in multilingual phrasing new even to Robert; he retaliated with a strap, the buckle of which left several marks that threatened permanence. He confined his daughter to her chamber for a week; on the day of her release she refused to leave and it was a fortnight before he caught sight of her down below the wet-ditch messing with some soldiers out at target practice. He sent immediately for his seneschal.

A time at the Court of Londinium seemed the only thing for Eleanor; there would be no more riding and hawking, and certainly no consorting with mechanicals. She must be brought if possible to a realisation of her station, and instructed in the skills expected in a lady of good birth. To the seneschal Robert entrusted the task, with the purely private directive that his daughter must be cultivated or killed. She left a fortnight later, with many snorts and head-tossings. He waited by the gate to see her go, but she ignored him. That was a flash of temper she regretted the rest of her days, for she never saw him alive again.

The accident happened on a feast day, when the lower bailey was filled with the tents of acrobats and jugglers and sweetmeat sellers, while the place resounded to shouts and laughter and the clatter of cudgels where the young bloods of the surrounding villages tried their strength one against another. Robert’s horse bucked as he crossed the outer bridge, and threw him; he struck his head against the stone, and fell into the dry ditch. The fair was quietened, and doctors brought from Durnovaria; but his skull was crushed, and he never reopened his eyes. Eleanor, summoned by a signal that fled from Challow Hill to Pontes inside an hour, rode hard; but she came too late.

She buried her father at Wimborne, in the ancient Minster there, in the painted tomb he had built to share with his wife; and the party rode back slowly to Corfe Gate, the horses and the motors dressed with black, the slack drums thudding out a dirge. It was still September; but a chilling wind moaned in from the sea, and the sky was grey as iron. Eleanor reined when she came in sight of the castle, and waved the rest of her people on down the long dim road. The seneschal waited, his horse fretting in the wind, till the mourners had passed nearly out of sight in distance; then she turned to him, her cloak whipping round her shoulders. She looked older and very tired, dark shadows under her eyes and tear tracks marking her cheeks. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘here I am a great lady; and that is the house I own…’

He waited silently, knowing her mind; she swallowed, and pushed the hair out of

her eyes. ‘John,’ she said, ‘How many years did you serve my Father, Robert?’

He sat his horse impassively and considered before he answered. Then finally, ’Many years, my Lady.’

‘And his father before him?’

Again the same answer. ‘Many years…’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You served him well; I left him alone, and sent no word. And it was all over such a trifling little thing. I’ve almost forgotten why we first fell out. Now it’s too late of course.’ She sat quiet a moment, stroking the neck of her horse as it fidgeted in the cold. Then, ‘Have you a sword?’

‘Yes, Lady.’ ‘Then give it me, and get down off your horse. This much I can do…’

He waited while she held the sword and looked unseeing at the damascene-work on the blade. ‘A title is a little empty thing,’ she said, ‘to such as you. Yet will you take it from me?’

He bowed; and she touched his shoulder lightly with the steel. "Whether the King confirms my choice or no,’ she said, ‘to us you will be Sir John…’ Then she turned her horse and rode hard for the castle, narrowing her eyes to see up at its glooming battlements and towers. So she came home, to a mourning place; and soon to the anger of Pope John.

From the outset Eleanor’s position was a curious one. The successive Lords of Purbeck had held their lands in feoff from the King; under normal circumstances she could have expected to be married off fairly rapidly and to see the demesnes granted to another. But she was, or would one day be, an heiress in her own right as granddaughter of the last of the Strange family; and in the restricted economy of the times the annual tax paid by that huge house accounted for a measurable proportion of the revenue to the Crown. Since Charles, King of England and nominally at least of the Americas, was expecting to make an extended tour of the New World in the spring he was content to let matters rest at least until his return; Eleanor was confirmed in her position of authority, although there were many up and down the country who resented the decision.

She took her duties with great seriousness. One of her first self-allotted tasks was to tour the boundaries of her lands with a circuit judge, settling such petty differences as had arisen since her father’s death. She rode informally, with only her seneschal in attendance, stopping off at cottages and farms as the fancy took her, speaking to all in the language of their birth, and her liege-folk scattered over the breadth and length of Dorset were much impressed. Where she found hardship she alleviated it not by gifts of money, too easily spent in the local taverns, but with clothing and food and grants of freeholds. She saw much suffering, and was shocked by it; she began in fact to feel dissatisfaction with her own way of life.

‘It’s all very well, Sir John,’ she said one evening shortly after her return to Corfe Gate. ‘But I’ve really achieved nothing at all. I suppose one’s bound to get a glow of wellbeing from a few small charities but looked at in a broad view they’re meaningless. One or two people are probably better off for not having to scrape and save and find their rent every week but what about all the rest I haven’t been able to do anything for? As long as the Church applies a censorship to certain forms of progress, which is what she does however strenuously the Popes deny it, we shall always be a scrappy little nation living just above the famine line. But what else am I to do?’

They were dining in the sixteenth century hall beside the great keep; she waved a hand at the furnishings, the richly hung walls, and spluttered over a mouthful of food. ‘I can’t pretend,’ she said, ‘that I don’t like this life, and being able to buy horses and dogs when I want and nylons and perfumes, things the ordinary people never get to see let alone afford… You know,’ she added, grinning suddenly, ‘when my poor father sent me off to town I had a fancy to run away and give it all up; just live the simple life, working the soil and rearing a family like a peasant girl. Only what I’ve seen has changed all that; I realise now I should have ended up having innumerable children by some brawny oaf who stank of pigs, and dying before I was thirty from sheer hard work. Or am I just getting cynical? Do tell me, you say so very little any more.’

He poured wine for her, smiling.

‘I was arguing with Father Sebastian the other day,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘I quoted the thing about giving all you have to the poor. He said that was all very well but you had to come to terms with the Scriptures and realise there had to be teachers and leaders for the people’s own good. It seemed an awful get-out to me, and I couldn’t help saying so. I told him if the Church would sell half her altar plate she could buy shoes for everybody in the country, and a lot else besides; and that if the Pope would make a start in Rome I’d see about getting rid of a few job lots of furniture down in Corfe. I’m afraid he didn’t take very kindly to it. I know it was wrong of me but he annoys me sometimes; he’s so pious, and it seems to mean so very little. He’d walk miles in the snow to pray for a sick child, he’s a very good man; but if there was more money about to start with maybe the child wouldn’t have been taken ill. It all seems so unnecessary…’

The winter was hard and long, the brooks and soil frozen like stone, even the rim of the sea sharded with ice. The towers clacked, on days when the Signallers could clear their arms of ice, with news of other parts of the country suffering as badly or worse. The spring that followed was late and cold, and the summer nearly as bad. Charles postponed his trip to the New World till the following year, spending his time, according to the semaphores, in organising relief schemes for the areas worst hit by famine. When autumn came round again, and the rush-bearing to the churches, the worst news of all arrived, brought by the urgently clattering grids. The taxation system of the country was to be reviewed; commissioners were already at work assessing contributions to be made by each area not in money but in kind.

Eleanor swore when the news was brought to her, and would certainly have given the officials a hot reception had they presented themselves at her hall; but nobody came near. Instead she was supplied via the semaphores with a list of the goods she would be expected to levy. Other parts of the country had been taxed in everything from turned ware to parsnips; Dorset’s contribution would be in butter, grain, and stone. ‘It’s quite ridiculous,’ fumed Her Ladyship, stamping up and down the little room that served her as office and study combined. ‘Butter and stone are all very well, or would be if they didn’t represent extra taxes; but grain! The people who drew this up must know very well there’s practically no arable farming round here at all; what little wheat we do grow is strictly for our own use and after a summer like we’ve had there’ll be barely enough of that to go round; I’m confidently expecting to have to set up soup kitchens in the bailey like they did once or twice in my father’s time. In Italy they don’t seem to have much idea of what a bad season can do to the produce of the farms; not that I suppose for a minute this junk ever came from Rome. It was probably drawn out by some fatpaunched little clerk in Paris or Bordeaux who’s never seen England and doesn’t want to and will sell our stuff over there at vast profits as fast as we can ship it. Anybody would think they’re deliberately trying to break us. If I squeeze all they demand out of the folk round about there’ll be deaths from starvation before the spring; on the other hand why I should buy in from Newworlders in Poole, give them back what I took from them, and ruin myself in the process I can’t imag -’

She stopped dead; and the look in her eyes showed plainly she’d just received the import of a crude lesson in economics. ‘Sir John,’ she said firmly. ‘I’m not going to do it. There’s no reason, except pure maliciousness, why I should either starve my people or pauperize myself.

She tapped her teeth thoughtfully with a stylus. ‘Have the towers send this message,’ she said. ‘Our crops are bad, if we meet these taxes we shall be in trouble before the spring. Tell them we’ll pay with a double levy next autumn; at least that’ll give us the chance to get some more acreage under cultivation, unless of course they decide to change their demands by then. Failing that we’ll make up in… oh, worsted, manufactured goods, whatever they want; but grain, no. It’s out of the question.’ So the message was passed; and a second signal was routed to Londinium informing the King of her reply to Rome.

Next day the towers brought word that Charles was displeased, and had ordered Eleanor to pay; but by then it was too late, her answer was already clattering across France. ‘I’m afraid there was no help for it,’ she said to her seneschal, ‘but to present him with a fait accompli; what I’d like to have said to him, and to Pope John as well, was that there was no blood to be got by squeezing Dorset stone, though they were both very welcome to come on down and try.’ She was sitting at her dressing table, making up her face as she had been taught at Court; she drew a careful bow on her lips, blotted with a tissue. ‘God knows the Church is rich enough already,’ she finished bitterly. ‘What she expects to gain by sitting on the necks of a few poor savages in England, I have no idea…’

She dismissed the whole subject; at the best of times politics tired her rapidly, and she was becoming very interested in certain surreptitious alterations she was making to her home. The most daring of them, and the most heretical, was the installation of electric lighting. She had commissioned a craftsman of the village to build and wind a generator, and proposed to drive it by a steam engine of a type designed to be fitted into lorries. The work had to be done secretly as although the principles of the electro-motive force had been known for many years the Church had never sanctioned its domestic use. The completed unit was to be housed in one of the towers of the lower bailey wall, far enough away for its clanking not to disturb the household’s rest, and Eleanor expected if not spectacular results, at least enough light to dispel the worst gloom of winter. And heating too, if things went well; for she had remembered from her schooling that a wire, suitably wound on an earthenware former, could be made to glow redly if sufficient difference in potential could be created between its ends. To her questions as to whether her generator would bring this state of affairs about, the seneschal replied quietly that such a thing was not inconceivable; but further than that he refused to be drawn.

‘Why, Sir John,’ said Eleanor archly, ‘you don’t sound as if you approve. Last winter I swear I had frostbite in at least nine of my toes, and that in spite of sleeping in flannel so thick the Pope himself would have been impressed by my rectitude. Would you begrudge me what little comfort is left to my declining years?’

He smiled at that, but wouldn’t answer; and shortly afterwards the generator began to chuff and an element glowed brightly at the foot of Her Ladyship’s bed, frightening the wits out of a chambermaid who ran to the Serjeant of the Pantry with a tale that the stones themselves were burning, grinning at her with scarlet mouths.

The same day Eleanor received a visit from a Captain of the Guild of Signallers. They sent runners from the outer barbican and she changed hastily, receiving him in the Great Hall with her seneschal and several gentlemen of the castle in attendance. A man of such status commanded great respect in the old times and Eleanor loved the Guild with all her heart though they had never been and never would be subjects of hers. The respect was mutual; for who else, on the occasion of Robert’s fortieth birthday, would have been taken to the Semaphore and let to spell her father’s name with her own hands, on the levers only Guildsmen were allowed to move?

The Captain came in stolidly, a grizzled man in worn green leather with the silver brassard and crossed lanyards of his rank displayed in place. His eyes took in the electric light with which the place was flooded, but he made no comment. He came straight to the point, speaking bluntly as was the way for the Guild; for when kings watched their semaphores as eagerly as commoners they had never found a use for fancy words.

‘My Lady,’ he said. ‘His Eminence the Archbishop of Londinium took horse today for Purbeck, bringing with him a force of some seventy men, hoping to take you unprepared and make you yield your hall and your demesnes to John.’

She went pale, but a red anger spot glowed on each cheek. ‘How can you know this, Captain?’ she asked coolly. ‘London is well over a day away, and the towers have been quiet. Had it been reported, I would have been told.’

He shifted his feet where he stood with legs apart on the carpeting of the dais. ‘The Guild fears no man,’ he said finally. ‘Our messages are for all who can to read. But there are times, and this is one of them, when words are best not given to the grids. Then there are other, swifter means.’

There was a hush at that, for he meant necromancy; and that was not a subject to be lightly, bandied, even in the free air of Eleanor’s hall. The seneschal alone understood his meaning fully; and to him the Signaller bowed, recognising a knowledge greater and more ancient than his own. Eleanor caught the look that passed between them and shivered; then she recovered herself and tossed her head.

‘Well, Captain,’ she said, ‘our gratitude is deep. How deep, only you can know. If you have nothing to add to what you’ve told me, can I give you wine? My Hall would be honoured.’

He bowed again, accepting the gesture; and few enough there were who could have offered it, for the Guildsmen didn’t come often into the houses of the uninitiated, even the great of the land.

She roused out some two score of her liege-folk and armed them, and when His Eminence came in sight of Corfe towers the semaphores had already informed him of the state of things inside. He quartered his men in the village and came on with an escort of half a dozen, making a great show of the peacefulness of his intentions. They were conducted through the outer gate by a conspicuously well-armed guard and taken to the Great Hall, where they were told the Lady Eleanor would receive them. So she did; but not for over an hour, and the great man was fuming and striding the carpet well before that. She hung back in her room, seeing to the last details of her makeup and dress; she had previously sent for her seneschal and asked him to attend her.

‘Sir John,’ she said, adjusting a tiny coronet on her hair, ‘I’m afraid this is going to be a difficult meeting from every point of view. I don’t suppose for a moment Charles knows anything about all this, which makes His Eminence’s behaviour suspicious in the extreme; but I can hardly accuse an archbishop of attempted treason. Apart from that he’s obviously come to demand something I can’t give him, or rather something that I - ouch - that I refuse to for what seem to me to be excellent reasons. Yet he’s made such an exhibition of his quiet intentions that anything I say is bound to look churlish. I wish the King would stick up for himself a bit more; it’s all very well people calling him Charles the Good and pelting him with rose petals every time he rides through Londinium, but what it all comes down to is he’s very clever at sitting on the fence placating everybody. I’m getting so tired of strangers lording it over England, even if it is heresy to say so.’

The seneschal thought carefully before he spoke. ‘His Eminence is certainly a crafty talker if what I’ve heard is right,’ he said at length. ‘And it’s also true that you’re not in much of a position for bargaining. But I don’t think you can be too hard on Charles, my Lady; he’s got a difficult enough job keeping this mess of Angles and Scots and so-called Normans out of trouble and satisfying Rome at the same time.’

She looked at him very straight, sucking at her lower lip with her teeth. It was a trick he hadn’t seen for many years; her mother used to do it, when she was angry or upset. ‘If we fought, Sir John,’ she said, ‘if all of us just straightforwardly rebelled, what would our chances be?’

He spread his hands. ‘Against the Blue? The Blue is like the blue of Ocean, Lady; endlessly it runs, from here to China for all I know. Nobody fights the sea.’

‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘you’re not much of a help…’

She angled her mirror, tweaked carefully at an eyebrow hair that had got itself out of line. ‘I don’t know at all,’ she said tiredly. ‘Give me a sick dog or a cat, or even Master Gwilliam’s old jalopy down there in the yard with its carburettor bunged up again, and I know where I stand; I’d have a go at putting things right even if I didn’t make much of a job of it. But churchmen, and high churchmen at that, put shivers up my back. Maybe they think with my father gone they can bully me easier than some of our great barons; but I’m certain now we’ve made our stand we shall have to keep to it or we shall finish up worse off than ever; they’re sure to impose some sort of fine for defying them in the first place.’

She rose, satisfied at last that her appearance couldn’t be bettered; but at the door of the chamber she balanced suddenly on one leg, spat on her fingers and dragged a stocking seam straight. She looked up at the seneschal, with his fair round head and the odd features that looked now just as they had looked when she was a child. ‘Sir John,’ she said softly. ‘You who see all and say so very little… would my father have behaved like this?’

He waited. Then, ‘He would; were his people involved, and his own good name.’

‘Then you will follow me?’

‘I was your father’s man,’ he said. ‘And I am yours, my Lady.’

She shivered. ‘Sir John,’ she said, ‘keep very close…’ She ducked under the lintel and clittered down the steps to meet the delegation.

His Eminence was friendly, to a point jovial; until it came to the matter of the unpaid tribute. ‘You must realise my child,’ said Londinium roundly, taking a turn up the hall and back, ‘Pope John, your spiritual father and the ruler of the known world, isn’t a man you can dismiss so readily or whose favours or displeasure can be taken lightly. Now I…’

He spread his hands. ‘I’m merely a messenger and an advisor. What you say to me or I to you may be of no account. But once a word travels beyond these walls, and that it must if my duty’s to be done, then you and all your people will suffer; for John will crack this little place like an egg. His will must be obeyed, all over the world.’

He walked back to Eleanor. ‘You’re very young,’ he said genially, ‘and I can’t help feeling towards you perhaps as your father might, if he were alive to counsel you.’ His fingers lingered on her arm; and Eleanor, perhaps from sheer nervousness, raised an eyebrow. Under the circumstances, it was an unfortunate gesture. His Eminence reddened and constrained his temper with an effort.

‘Find this tribute,’ he said. ‘Levy it somehow, make it up any way you choose; but get it, and send it. Do it inside the week and you can still catch the last of the ships for France. But if you delay and the weather worsens, if your merchantmen are lost or stray into out-of-the-way ports with your grain, then with the spring I promise you John will reach out to punish. And rightly too, for the half of all you own belongs to him. You hold your place, as you know very well, by his good will alone.’

‘I hold my place,’ said Eleanor icily, ‘by the favour of my liege-lord Charles; and that you know, My Lord, as well as I. My father promised loyalty at his knee, kissing his hand according to the ancient way. I too, until I am released, will follow him. And no other, sir…’

There was a quietness, in which the clacking of the Challow tower could be clearly heard. Londinium seemed to swell, puffing himself up beneath his fur-trimmed robes much in the manner of a frog. ‘Your liege-lord,’ he said, and he obviously found it hard to keep from shouting, ‘has ordered you to send that grain. So you flout both Pope and King…’

‘I cannot send what I do not own,’ said Eleanor patiently. ‘What grain I do have to spare must be released to my people, or there will be famine in the land by Christmas. What will John have, a countryside of corpses to testify his strength?’

The churchman glared, but would say no more; and she withdrew, leaving affairs thus unhappily in the balance.

Matters came to a head in the evening, when dinner was prepared for the delegation in the Great Hall. The place was made cheerful by the light of many lamps and candles, and servants stood by with bundles of spares beneath their arms to replace the dips as they burned down in the sconces. Her Ladyship would have used the electric light, but at the last moment the seneschal had prevailed against such rashness; His Eminence would never have sat at meat beneath such open evidence of heresy. The exhausted globes with their delicate filaments of carbon had been withdrawn into the roof, the wall switches were hidden by drapes, and there was no visible sign of Eleanor’s disaffection. She sat on the dais, in the chair her father used to occupy; the seneschal was on her right, her Captain of Artillery to her left. Opposite her were the churchmen and such of the military as had been allowed inside the gates.

All went well until His Eminence touched sympathetically on the early death of Her Ladyship’s mother. The Captain choked and converted the sound hastily into a cough; all the household knew that that was Eleanor’s sorest point. She had drunk more than was good for her, again out of nervousness; and she rose instantly to the bait.

‘This, My Lord, is very interesting,’ she said. ‘For had a surgeon been allowed to help my mother, perhaps she would still be with us now. I’ve read you Romans were once more daring than you are now; for the great Caesar himself was born by cutting his mother’s womb, yet now you deem the trick heinous to God -’

‘My Lady -’

‘Also I have heard,’ said Eleanor, hiccupping slightly, ‘that airs may be distilled, the breathing of which quietens the body and the brain, so that one awakes from a mighty pain as from a sleep; yet Pope Paul I think it was disowned them, saying the pain was sent from God to be a reminder of sacred duty here on earth. Also that acids sprayed into the air will kill the very essence of disease; yet doctors work on us with unwashed hands. Are we to learn from this, it is better to die of holiness than live in heresy?’

His Eminence rose bridling. ‘Heresy,’ he began, ‘exists in many forms in each and every one of us; in you, my Lady, perhaps most of all. And were it not for the charity of Pope John -’

‘Charity?’ interrupted Eleanor bitterly. ‘Your duty here is scarce concerned with that. It seems to me, My Lord, the Church is fast forgetting the meaning of the word; for I would rather sell the drapes out of my house, were I Pope John, than starve my subjects in a foreign isle, unlettered idiots though they well might be.’

Londinium of course could scarcely be expected to stomach such a double-barrelled insult; as well as a direct attack upon his ruler and the Church it was a slight against his own person as one of the very idiots to whom Eleanor had likened the English. He banged the table, red in the face with rage; but before his harangue was well enough started the household’s Signaller-Page ran in with his pad, tore off the top sheet and handed it to his mistress. She stared at it uncomprehendingly for a moment, lips forming the words it bore; then she passed it to the seneschal.

‘My Lord,’ she said, ‘you must be seated, and spare your breath awhile. This message just arrived; I want it read to everybody in the hall.’

The archbishop’s eyes went automatically to the windows, curtained against the night; he knew as well as the others present that only matters of the greatest importance would induce the Guild to light torches on its signal arms.

The seneschal rose, bowing slightly to the dignitaries. ‘My Lords,’ he said, ‘as earnest of his support for us here in the West, Charles today despatched tribute doubling the amount we owe to Rome. Moreover he confirms the Lady Eleanor in her governorship of the isle and its demesnes; and in further witness of his trust in her sends to Corfe from his arsenal at Woolwich the great gun Growler in company of a platoon of his own men. Also from Isca the culverin Prince of Peace; the demicannon Loyalty, and shot and powder for him -’

The words were lost in an outbreak of applause from the lower tables; men shouted and banged their cups and glasses on the wood. The seneschal raised his hand. ‘Also,’ he said, eyes twinkling, ‘His Majesty requests His Eminence of Londinium, wherever he might be, to attend him at his earliest convenience to confer on matters of State.’

The archbishop opened his mouth and closed it abruptly again. Eleanor leaned back wiping her face and feeling reprieved from death. ‘He did know,’ she whispered to the seneschal under cover of the din. ‘And look, we’ve made him stand. Who knows, perhaps the next time he will fight…’

Two of the guns duly arrived; but the demicannon fell into a marsh while making the crossing into the island and the best efforts of the soldiers failed to lift it, giving rise in later times to the saying that Loyalty was lost east of Luckford Lakes.

After the guns arrived Eleanor breathed easier for a time; for though the armament was little more than a token its effect on the spirits of the household was considerable. Also the castle was recognised to be one of the most impregnable in the country; Her Ladyship spoke of that one cold evening a month after the discomfiture of the churchmen. She was pacing the second bailey, muffled in a cloak against the chilling wind from the sea; she paused by Growler, still limbered up as they had brought him in, and ran her fingers along the rough iron of his breech. Her seneschal stopped at her elbow.

‘Tell me, Sir John,’ she said skittishly, ‘what would our father in Rome have done if Charles hadn’t made up our taxes? Do you think he would really have faced this creature and myself, both virgins in our way and still unblooded, for such poor chaff as we hold here in our granaries?’

The seneschal thought carefully, almond-shaped eyes brooding put over the battlements, looking at nothing in the gathering dark. ‘Certainly, Eleanor,’ he said - no other would have dared to be so familiar - ‘His Holiness would have been very tempted to put us down. He wouldn’t dare let defiance go unpunished for fear of setting the whole country in revolt. But fortunately that problem’s over for a time; you can enjoy Christmas at least entertaining those of your father’s friends who’ll come to visit you in Corfe.’

She looked up at the keep, frowning and black in the night, and at the scatter of softly glowing windows where her people were preparing beds and meals. Here and there harsher flares showed where her heretical engine was again supplying light to the place. The sound of the generator came faintly over the bailey walls, eddying and fading as the wind blew.

‘Yes,’ she said, shivering suddenly. ‘The cows in their stalls and the horses, the motors shut away against the frost - I bet Sir Gwilliam’s burning peat under his confounded cylinder block again for fear the cold bursts it; one day he’ll have the whole place go up in smoke - we shall be nicely shut away too, Sir John, and safe at least till spring.’

He waited, gravely. She half turned to him, seeming to expect some remark; then she brushed her hair impatiently where the wind flapped it across her eyes. ‘I wasn’t fooled,’ she said. ‘And neither were you I’m quite sure. Not even by His Eminence riding out all smiles, showering blessings and good advice. Charles will go to the New World next year, won’t he?’ ‘Yes, Lady.’

‘Yes,’ she said broodingly. ‘Then all those unpleasant layabouts at Court, and all the little popish dogs scattered round the country, will get up on their back legs and run about to see what mischief they can make; and we shall be high on the list of priorities. I’ve got no doubt of that. We’ve shown our teeth, and not been beaten for it; they won’t let things rest at that. John might have a long arm, but his memory’s even more remarkable.’ He waited again; he knew more than she, but some secrets were not his to tell. ‘And, my Lady?’

She touched the gun again, frowning down at its great black barrel. ‘Why,’ she said, ‘then they will come for these…’

She turned away suddenly, tucking her arm through his. ‘But as you say, we needn’t worry till the better weather; John will need good seas in case he has to back his little people with arms and more valour than any of them own. Come on, Sir John, or I shall get worse depressed than ever; I hear a new showman came into the village this morning and Sir Gwill has bought his services for the night. We can have a look at the tricks he’s got to offer, though I expect we’ll have seen most of them before; and afterwards I’ll get you to tell me some more of your lying stories about the times before there were castles on our hilltops and before the world knew anything of churches, high or low.’

He smiled at her in the dark. ‘All lies, Eleanor? You seem to develop less and less respect for your oldest retainer as the years go on.’

She stopped, silhouetted against the brightness of a window. ‘All lies, Sir John,’ she said, trying to keep her voice firm; for she spoke of forbidden things. ‘When I want the truth from you, you’ll know…’

Christmas came and went pleasantly; the weather was neither so hard nor so cold as the year before and enough travelling entertainers, musicians, and the like passed through the district to provide variety at night. One man in particular fascinated Eleanor. He brought with him a machine, a strange stilt-legged device with complex parts. A strip of unknown substance was fed into it, a handle turned; a limelight spat and hissed, and pictures, flickering and seemingly alive, danced across a screen rigged on the other side of the chamber.

Her Ladyship made efforts to buy the apparatus, but it was not for sale. Instead she added to her mechanical armoury, setting two more generators clanking and hissing beside the first. The globes, always fragile and short-lived, were replaced by arc lamps that gave a more ferocious light; with her own hands she made shades for them to soften the glare. One of the brachets spawned a great yelping litter of pups that ran through the corridors and kitchens piping and squeaking, stealing from the cooks’ soup bowls, tearing up everything they could find with their tiny teeth. She was delighted and kept them all, even the runts.

When winter gave way to the blustering wetness of March nothing more had been heard either from Charles or the Church concerning the events of the year before. Nothing out of the ordinary happened except that a few days before His Majesty was due to leave the semaphores brought a request from Sir Anthony Hope, Provost Marshall of England and the King’s hereditary champion, who asked to be allowed to hunt the Purbeck Chase for a few days and enjoy the pleasure and delight of Eleanor’s company.

She pulled a face at the seneschal when he told her. ‘As far as I can remember the man’s hugely conceited and a complete boor; and anyway the season’s nearly finished, we don’t want him trampling about with his great hooves just as everything’s settling down to breed. But I suppose there’s nothing to be done except put up with him, he’s far too influential to upset over a trifle. I can’t help wishing though he’d go up to the Taverners at Sherborne or over into the Marches like he did last year. You’ll have to help me out with him I’m afraid, Sir John, I’ve got nothing in common with him at all; after all he is almost old enough to be my father, though perish the thought of that.’ She sniffed. ‘But if he sends any more of his laboriously gallant messages I shall feel very inclined to greet him like Daddy did that famous Golden Eagle…’

The towers of the Guild sent back her agreement and soon brought news that Sir Anthony was on his way in company with some score of soldiers of his household. Eleanor shrugged and ordered extra barrels of beer to be laid in. ‘Well the ground’s still pretty soft,’ she said. ‘There’s always the chance his horse’s foot will turn and break his fat neck for him, though I suppose we mustn’t hope for miracles.’

Certainly none took place and within a few days Sir Anthony arrived at her hall, where his men were quartered in the lower wards and played havoc with the serving girls till Eleanor took the matter up more than firmly with their master. The party stayed two weeks and Her Ladyship, who at first had been inclined to be suspicious about the whole affair, found herself relaxing and merely wishing Sir Anthony, his gang of roughnecks, and his repertoire of tall boasts all safely back inside the walls of Londinium. But on the fifteenth morning came disaster. When dawn broke, England was at peace; by nightfall the first of the acts had taken place that would lead inevitably to war with Rome.

Eleanor had risen early and ridden out to hunt, accompanied as usual by her seneschal and some half dozen servants and falconers of the household. They took dogs and a brace of hawks, hoping to see a little sport before Sir Anthony and his cavalcade spoiled their chances too much. For a time they were fortunate; then one of the gentle falcons missed her kill and refused to come to the swinging of the lure. Instead she winged away across the heath, flying strongly and high, making apparently for Poole harbour and the sea. Eleanor galloped after her, swearing and banging her heels into her horse; she had put in a lot of time on that bird and didn’t intend to lose her if she could help it. She rode fast, letting her mount pick its way among the tussocks and clumps of gorse, and soon out-distanced the rest of the party; the seneschal alone kept pace. After a mile or two it became evident the bird was gone beyond recall. There was no sign of her, and they had already travelled so far that Corfe towers were tiny in the distance.

Eleanor reined in, panting. ‘It’s no good, we’ve lost her. Honestly…’ She pulled the gauntlet off her wrist, and hooked it over her saddlebow. ‘I’m beginning to see why they talk about being bird-brained… Sir John, what is it?’

He was staring back the way they had come, narrowing his eyes against the cool bright sun. ‘Lady,’ he said urgently, ‘the hawk stooped on a hare, and fell beneath an eagle…’

He spun his horse. ‘Ride, quickly. Make for the Wareham Road…’

She saw them then; a line of specks strung out across the heath. Horsemen, moving fast. They were too far off for their features to be seen but there was little doubt of their identity; Sir Anthony had sprung his trap at last. Eleanor glared right and left. The pursuers were well spaced; hopeless to try to outflank by drawing across their line. She turned in the saddle. Ahead of her a track stretched into distance, a white thread laid across the heath; beyond was the pale glow of the sea. There was no doubt about the way; she spun her horse, flicking it into a gallop.

The men behind, their mounts fresher, gained steadily; a half mile further on they were close enough to call to her, telling her to give up. A pistol banged flatly; Eleanor turned back to the seneschal and her mount stumbled, pitching her headlong. She rolled, covering her face as she had once been taught, rose tousled but unharmed. Beside her the horse lay screaming, blood dribbling brightly from a foreleg.

She ran to it, eyes wide. The seneschal had wheeled behind her; he dismounted and thrust his reins into her hand. ‘My Lady… ride for Wareham…’

She shook her head dazedly, trying to think. ‘He’s blown, there isn’t a chance. They’d take me on the road…’ The horsemen were close; the seneschal raised a pistol, steadied the barrel on his forearm, and squeezed the trigger. By the merest accident the ball took one of the riders in the chest, fetching him from his horse; the line wheeled, momentarily confused.

A whistling sounded. Eleanor turned, fists clenched. Behind her, distant on the rutted strip of road, a heavy steamer laboured with a train of waggons. She began to run towards it, feeling the air scythe into her lungs. A pistol exploded again; this time she heard the ball cut through the grass twenty yards to her right. Another shot; she snatched a backward glance, saw the seneschal ridden down by a mounted man. Then her feet were stumbling along the road, and the engine was very close.

She stopped by it, leaning on the great rear wheel and panting, seeing the oldness of the steamer, the canopy pierced through with holes, the rust streaks and the bubbling of water from ancient boiler joints. A great worn-out wreck she was, ending her days hauling wood and manure and stone, but still liveried in the dark maroon of Strange and Sons. Her driver was a fair-haired boy in the corduroys and buckled cap of a haulier, greasy muffler knotted round his neck. Eleanor gulped and thrust her hand up so he could see the ring she wore. ‘Tell me quickly,’ she panted. ‘Where is your home?’

‘Durnovaria, Lady…’ ‘Then you are my liege man,’ she gasped. ‘Fight this treachery…’

He answered something, startled; she didn’t hear the words. His hands went to regulator and brake, she heard the sudden overworked thunder of the engine. She flung herself away; a hot drizzle lashed her face, smoke stung her lungs and the train was past, gathering speed down the road, the loco half hidden by steam as the driver used his whistle over and again.

What followed was confused. The horses, bunched, were scattered by the iron shrieking; the haulier spun his wheel, turning the engine onto the rough. Three of the waggons broke clear; the others, loaded high and bound with tarpaulin, swayed behind the steamer as she bounced towards Sir Anthony. He bellowed with rage, whirling a sword; a charger bucked, throwing a soldier over its neck; the chest of another man was crushed by cascading blocks of stone. A rider raised a pistol, firing blind; the ball struck the hornplate of the loco, throwing hot splinters into her driver’s face. He flung up his hands and a second shot took him in the armpit, bowling him from the footplate. The loco, regulator open, ploughed by Sir Anthony. Fifty yards on, one wheel struck a mound in the grass. She slewed, held back by her load; a huge grinding, a hissing explosion of steam and she landed on her side, flywheel still churning, cinders from her firebox scattering across the grass. Flames licked up at once, showing brightly through the drifting smoke. She burned the rest of the day; it was night before a peasant child crept close enough to the wreck to prise the naveplate from one mighty wheel. He kept it in his cottage, polished bright; and half a life-time later he would still tell his children the tale, and take the big disc down and fondle it, and say it came from a great road steamer called the Lady Margaret.

Escape was no longer possible; Eleanor rose sullenly and let her wrists be pinioned at her sides. She saw the seneschal, arms similarly held, queer light eyes blazing with rage; beside’ him two men supported the haulier. The boy was coughing, face masked bright with blood. Sir John’s second shot had struck the tip of the Provost Marshall’s thumb, flicking back the nail till it stood at right angles from the flesh; he was dancing and swearing, fussing with a handkerchief. ‘When slaves revolt,’ he fumed, ‘raising their hands against their masters, then there’s no more but this…’

The haulier was pulled forward. Eleanor shrieked; a falchion swung hissing to bite into his neck. The blow, badly delivered, didn’t kill; the boy scuttled to her, wetting her feet with blood while they cut at him in panic. It seemed an age before the thing was through; the body flopped and leaped, subsided into stillness.

It was the first violent death the Lady Eleanor had ever seen; and it had overtones of horror she was never likely to forget. She hung her head, trying not to faint, seeing the blood run glittering and soak into the dust. She didn’t faint; instead she began to vomit. The spasms became more violent; she tore her arms from the men who held her, dropped to her knees and panted. When she had finished she raised a face that was blazing white to the lips; and she began to swear. She swore in English and French, Celtic, and Latin and Gaelic; she cursed Sir Anthony and his men, promising them a dozen different deaths in a flat, nearly gentle voice that seemed to hold the Provost Marshall fascinated. He stopped bothering with his thumb, stood frowning; then he recollected himself and bellowed for his men to fetch the riderless horses.

The seneschal was forced to mount; a soldier swung Eleanor up in front of him and the party struck out past the crackling wreck of the steamer and across the heath, intending no doubt to rendezvous with some fishing boat that would take the captives out of reach of any pursuit. In those days there were men in Poole who would have ferried the King himself into bondage if the price was right.

Whatever scheme Sir Anthony had in mind was never put into effect. Somewhere across the heath the Signallers had seen, watching the distant fight through their great Zeiss lenses, and the pall of smoke from the burning train had been easily visible from Corfe. Signals flew, alerting not only the castle garrison but the militia of Wareham; the party was intercepted before it reached the sea. The Provost Marshall checked when he saw he was cut off, and would have made great play of having Eleanor as a hostage had she not bitten the wrist of the man who held her and tumbled off a horse for the second time that day. She landed in a stand of gorse, rose scratched and bleeding and more furious than ever; the fight was over within minutes and Sir Anthony and his people threw down their arms.

She limped to where they stood on the heath, surrounded by a ring of guns. Men ran to her but she pushed them away. She circled the prisoners slowly, rubbing her hip, picking unconsciously at the grass and twigs on her skirt; and it seemed the rage bubbled and boiled in her brain like the strange fumes of a wine. ‘Well, Sir Anthony,’ she said. ‘We made a little promise on the road. And here in the West, you’ll find we keep our word…’

He tried to barter with her then, or beg his life; but she stared at him as if he spoke an unknown tongue. ‘Ask mercy of the wind,’ she said, almost wonderingly. ‘Beg to the rocks, or the great waves of the sea. Don’t come and whine to me…’ She turned aside to the seneschal. ‘Hang them,’ she said. ‘For treason, and for murder…’

‘My Lady-’

She screamed at him suddenly, stamping on the ground. ‘Hang them…’

Beside her a soldier sat a restless horse; she grabbed his jerkin and pulled, nearly tumbling him from the saddle. She was mounted and away before a hand could be raised, riding furiously across the heath, beating the neck of the animal with her fist. The seneschal followed her, leaving, the prisoners to their fate. She reined a mile from the castle, dropped to the ground, and ran to a knoll from where she could see her home spread out before her, the baileys and towers and the flanking hills clear in the bright air. She gripped the stirrup of the seneschal as he rode alongside, fingers twisting the stiff leather. If he’d hoped the wild ride would calm her he was disappointed. She was nearly too angry to speak; the syllables jerked out from her like the cracking of sheets of glass.

‘Sir John,’ she said, ‘before our people came, and took this land with blood at Santlache Field, that place was called a Gate. Is this not true?’

He said heavily, ‘Yes, my Lady.’

‘Why then,’ she said, ‘let it be so again. Go to my tenants in the Great Plain, and north as far as Sarum Town. Go west to Durnovaria, and east to the village on the Bourne. Tell them…’ She choked and steadied herself. ‘Tell them, they pay no tithes to Purbeck but in arms. Tell them that Gate is closed, and Eleanor holds the key…’

She tore at the seal on her finger. ‘Take my ring, and go…’

He gripped her shoulder and turned her, staring into her wild eyes. ‘Lady,’ he said deliberately, ‘this is war…’

She knocked his hand away, panting for breath. ‘Will you go,’ she fumed, ‘or shall I send another?…’

He said nothing else but touched heels to his horse and turned it; galloped north, trailing dust, along the Wareham Road. She mounted again and rode yelling into the valley, scattering the little chugging cars, sending them batwinging into the hedges; and though her soldiers raked their horses bloody, none could match her speed.

Messages were despatched at once to Charles in Londinium, but all the semaphores brought back was the news that the King had already sailed for the Americas. Sir Anthony’s stroke had been well timed; for though there were rumours the Guild could even get a message to the New World, by means no one could guess at, there was no known way of contacting a ship at sea. Meanwhile the Provost Marshall’s supporters were rampaging round the capital threatening death, destruction, and worse while Henry of Rye and Deal, under direct instructions from Rome, was hastily assembling his force. What Eleanor had predicted had to a large extent come true; all sorts of dogs were yapping in the absence of the King. The fact that the quarrel had originally come about as a result of what was now generally admitted to be an administrative error made the situation even more ironic.

Her Ladyship faced many problems down in Dorset. She could levy men from the districts round about, the commoners would flock to her banner soon enough; but a standing army must be fed and clothed and armed. For days the rage sustained her while she worked with her captains and house people drawing up the lists of what she would need. Money was clearly the first essential; and for that she rode north, to Durnovaria. What passed between her and her aged grandfather was never known; but for a solid week the crimson-dressed steamers toiled down to Corfe Gate, hauling in produce free. Flour and grain they brought and livestock, salted meat and preserves, shot and powder and wads and musket balls, rope and slow match, oil and kerosene and tar; chain hoists rumbled all night long, derricks powered by panting donkey engines swung load after load high into the keep. Eleanor had no idea what support might be forthcoming from the rest of the country and planned for the worst, packing her baileys with men and supplies. That was how Henry came to find the place so well prepared, and in such a lethal temper.

Eleanor called the seneschal to her room on the evening following the massacre. She was deadly pale, her eyes ringed with dark shadows; she waved him to a chair, sat awhile staring into the firelight and leaping shadows.

‘Well, Sir John,’ she said finally, ‘I’ve been sitting here thinking up a glorious phrase for the… thing that happened this morning. This is it. "I’ve blown a Roman gadfly off my walls." Don’t you think that’s very good?’

He didn’t answer, and she laughed and coughed.

‘It doesn’t help of course,’ she said. ‘All I can see still are those creatures in the ditch, and writhing on the path. Somehow beside that nothing else seems real. Not any more.’

He waited again, knowing there was no help in words.

‘I’ve expelled Father Sebastian,’ she said. ‘He told me there was no forgiving what I’d done, not if I walked barefoot to Rome itself. I told him he’d better leave; if there was no forgiveness he couldn’t be a comfort and he was only putting himself in mortal sin by staying I said I knew I was damned because I’d damned myself. I didn’t have to wait for any god to do it for me. That was the worst of all of course; I only said it to hurt him but I realised afterwards I meant it anyhow, I just wasn’t a Christian any more. I said if necessary I’d raise up a few old gods, Thunor and Wo-Tan perhaps or Balder instead of Christ; for he told me himself many years ago when I was still taking lessons at his knee that Balder was only an older form of Jesus and that there have been many bleeding gods.’

She poured wine for herself, unsteadily. ‘And then I spent the rest of the afternoon getting drunk. Or trying to. Aren’t you disgusted?’

He shook his head. He’d never criticised her, not in all her life: and this wasn’t the time to start.

She laughed again, and rubbed her face. ‘I need… something.’ she said. ‘Maybe punishment. If I ordered you to fetch a whip and beat me till I bled, would you do it?’ He shook his head, lips pursed.

‘No,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t, would you… Anything else, but you wouldn’t have me hurt. I feel I want to… scream, or be sick, or something. Maybe both. John, when I’m excommunicated, what will our people do?’

He’d already considered his answer carefully. ‘Disavow Rome,’ he said. ‘It’s gone too far now for anybody to turn back. You’ll see that, my Lady.’

‘And the Pope?’

He thought again for a moment. ‘He’ll certainly act,’ he said, ‘and that quickly; but I can’t see him ferrying an army all the way from Italy just to put down one strongpoint. What he’s almost bound to do is instruct his people in Londinium to march against us in force; and I think too we’ll be seeing some of the Seigneurs from the Loire and the Low Countries coming over to see what they can pick up in the confusion. They’ve been wanting to stake out a few claims on English soil for years enough now, and they’ll certainly never get a better chance.’

‘I see,’ she said wearily. ‘What it comes down to is I’ve made a complete mess of things; with Charles out of the way as well I’ve played right into their hands. They’ll be flocking into England, with the Church’s full blessing, to put down armed revolt. What the end of that will be I just can’t imagine.’

She got up and paced restlessly across the chamber and back. ‘It’s no good,’ she said. ‘I just can’t sit still and wait, not tonight.’ She sent for a writer, and the officers commanding, her troops and artillery; they worked into the small hours drawing up lists of the extra provisions they would need to withstand a full-scale siege. ‘There’s no doubt,’ said Eleanor with a flash of her old practicality, ‘that we shall be bottled up for a considerable time; till Charles gets back in fact. There won’t be any question of chivalry either, of being let to walk out with our arms or anything like that, the whole thing’s far too serious; but at least we shall know by the time we’re through who’s actually running this country, ourselves or an Italian priest.’

She poured wine. ‘Well, gentlemen, let’s hear your recommendations. You can have anything you need, arms, men, provisions; I only ask one thing. Don’t leave anything out. We can’t afford to forget any details; remember there’s a rope, or worse, waiting for every one of us if we make a single slip…’

The seneschal stayed with her after the others had gone, sitting drinking wine in the firelight and talking of all subjects from gods to kings; of the land, its history and its people; of Eleanor, and her family and upbringing. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘it’s strange, Sir John; but it seemed this morning when I fired the gun I was standing outside myself, just watching what my body did. As if I, and you too, all of us, were just tiny puppets on the grass. Or on a stage. Little mechanical things playing out parts we didn’t understand.’ She stared into her wineglass, swilling it in her hands to see flame light and lamplight dance from the goldenness inside; then she looked up frowning, eyes opaque and dark. ‘Do you know what I mean?’

He nodded, gravely. ‘Yes, my Lady…’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s like a… dance somehow, a minuet or a pavane. Something stately and pointless, with all its steps set out. With a beginning, and an end… ‘

She tucked her legs under her, as she sat beside the fire. ‘Sir John,’ she said, ‘sometimes I think life’s all a mass of significance, all sorts of strands and threads woven like a tapestry or a brocade. So if you pulled one out or broke it the pattern would alter right back through the cloth. Then I think… it’s all totally pointless, it would make just as much sense backwards as forwards, effects leading to causes and those to more effects… maybe that’s what will happen, when we get to the end of Time. The whole world will shoot undone like a spring, and wind itself back to the start…’ She rubbed her forehead tiredly. ‘I’m not making sense, am I? It’s getting too late for me…’

He took the wine from her, carefully. She stayed quiet awhile; when she spoke again she was half asleep. ‘Do you remember years ago telling me a story?’ she asked. ‘About how my great uncle Jesse broke his heart when my grandmother wouldn’t marry him, and killed his friend, and how that was somehow the start of everything he did… It seemed so real, I’m sure that was how it must have been. Well, I can finish it for you now. You can see the Cause and Effect right the whole way through. If we… won, it would be because of grandfather’s money. And the money’s there because of Jesse, and he did it because of the girl… It’s like Chinese boxes. There’s always a smaller one inside, all the time; until they get so small they’re too small to see but they keep on going down and down…’

He waited; but she didn’t speak again.

For days the castle rang with activity; Eleanor’s messengers rode out to scour the countryside around bringing in more men, provisions, meat on the hoof. The great lower bailey was prepared for the animals, pens and hurdles lined against the outer walls. The steamers toiled once more bringing cattle cake and baled hay from Wareham, chugging down the road with trailers empty, clanking back through the outer gate to discharge their cargo in heaps on the flattened grass. Everything possible was shifted under cover; what stacks remained exposed were covered by tarpaulins, and turves and stone rubble strewn on top.

The fodder would be a prime target were the enemy to bring fire machines with them. All day the hoists clattered and most of the night too, taking the provisions down to the cellars, bringing up quarrels for the crossbowmen, powder and ball for the harquebusiers, charges for the great guns. The semaphores seldom stopped. The country was aflame; Londinium was arming, levies from Sussex and Kent were marching towards the west. Then came worse news. From France, from the castles of the Loire, men were streaming to fight in the Holy Crusade while to the south a second armada was embarking for England. To Eleanor, John sent no word; but his intentions were plainer than speech. Her Ladyship redoubled her efforts.

Steamers towing vast iron chains scythed the banks of the wet ditch; working parties fired the scrub from the castle motte, the bushes and trees that had seeded themselves there over the years; and down over the blackened grass went ton after ton of powdered chalk. The slopes would glow now in starlight, showing up the silhouettes of climbing men. Through it all the sightseers came, parking their little cars in the village square, flooding into the castle, through the gates and across the baileys, staring at the guns and the sentries on the walls, poking their noses into this, their prying fingers into that, impeding everybody nearly all the time. Eleanor could have closed her gates; but pride forbade her. Pride, and the counsel of the seneschal. Let the people see, he murmured. Invite their sympathy, appeal to their understanding. Her Ladyship would need all the support she could get from the country in the coming months.

On the thirtieth day after the massacre the seneschal rose and dressed at dawn. He walked down softly through the still-sleeping keep, through chambers and corridors let honeycomb-fashion into the huge walls, past arrow slits and fenestellas pouring livid grey light. Past a sentry, dozing at his post; the man jerked to attention, bringing his halberd shaft ringing down onto stone. Sir John acknowledged the gesture, raising a hand thoughtfully, mind far away.

Outside, in the raw air of the upper bailey, he paused. Round him the curtain walls loomed from the night, massive shadows topped by the tinier shadows of men; the breath of the guards showed in wisps above their heads. Far below huddled the roofs of the village, dim and blue, odd lights burning here and there; out on the heath a solitary glow showed him where some mason’s boy trudged lantern in hand to work. He turned away, eyes seeing but not recording, mind locked inward.

At this dawn hour it seemed as always that Time might pause, turning and flowing in on itself before speeding again, urging in the new day. The castle, like a great dim crown of stone, seemed to ride not a hill but a flaw in the timestream, a node of quiet from which possibilities might spread out limitless as the journeyings of the sun. No one, not the seneschal and certainly no one else, could have understood his thoughts at that time. The old thoughts, the first thoughts of the first people ever; for the seneschal was of the ancient kind.

At the tip of the second bailey the squat Butavant tower jutted over the precipice of burned grass like a figurehead from the prow of a ship. The seneschal paused at the lower door, queer eyes on the horizon, swivelled slowly to face the Challow tower. And instantly, gracefully, the jointed arms began to flap.

He climbed the tower steps, feet shuffling on stone, hearing a drum behind him and a voice. A Page-Signaller scuttled across the bailey; something not more than a lad, hose wrinkled and tabard askew, message pad in hand, knuckling his eyes. Far out over the heath, in the cobalt intermingling of sea and sky, a light gleamed and was lost. Then another and another, and a patch of lighter dark that could have been a sail. As if a fleet had come to anchor, lay dressing its ranks and waiting.

At the top of the stair a locked door gave access to a tiny cell set in the thickness of the stone. To that door, the seneschal alone held a key. The key itself was strange, a little round-headed thing that carried instead of wards a wavy crest of brass. He inserted it in the lock, twisted; the door swung open. He left it ajar behind him; his hands worked deftly, assembling the apparatus of magic the Popes in their wisdom had long since disallowed.

Shapes of brass and shapes of mahogany tinkled and clattered; a tiny spark flashed blue; his name and questionings fled into an undiscovered Ether, invisible, silent, faster by a thousand times than the semaphores. He smiled quietly, took down paper and stylus and began to write. Footsteps clunked overhead; a voice called urgently. He ignored it, lost to sensation, all his being focused on the thing that sparked and flashed between his fingers.

Behind him the door swung inward. He heard the intake of breath, the scrape of a shoe on stone; he half turned, papers in his hands. Behind him the thing on the table clacked shrilly, untouched and unbidden. He smiled again, gently. ‘My Lady..-.’

She was backing off staring, hand to her throat clutching the wrap she had flung across her shoulders. Her voice husked hollow in the shaft. ‘Necromancy…’

He left the machine, pattered after her. ‘Eleanor…" He caught her at the bottom of the stair. ‘Eleanor, I thought you had more wit…’ He took her wrist, drew her after him. She moved unwillingly, pulling back; above her the device banged and tutted frantically. She edged round the door, lips parted, one hand flat against the stone, saw the little thing chattering devil-possessed. He started to laugh.

‘Here. It isn’t good for your people to see.’ The door was closed behind her; the lock shut with a snap. Her mouth trembled; she couldn’t take her eyes from what lay on the bench. ‘Sir John,’ she said falteringly.’ What is it…?’

He shrugged impatiently, hands busy. ‘A manifestation of the electric fluid; known to the Guild now for a generation.’

She stared at him as if seeing him for the first time. She said wonderingly, ‘This is a

language?’ She drew nearer the bench, no longer afraid.

‘Of a sort.’

‘Who speaks it to you?’

He said shortly, ‘The Guild of Signallers. But that is unimportant. My Lady, the semaphores will clack all day. That is what they will say; are saying…’

Before he could finish a voice sounded over their heads; it came thickly through the

stone, full of resonance and wonder.

‘Caerphilly has taken arms…!’

She jerked sharply, staring up; her mouth moved, but no sound came.

‘And Pevensey,’ said the seneschal, reading. ‘And Beaumaris, Caerlon, Oxford… Bodiam has declared for the King, Caernarvon has burned its charter. And Colchester, Warwick, Framlingham; Bramber, Cardiff, Chepstow…’

She heard no more but ran to him, laughing and swinging her arms round his neck, waltzing round in the tiny space, upsetting wires and batteries and coils. And all day long the noise from the hill went on as the messages came lagging through on the old arms that were no longer of any use. All day till nightfall and far into the dark, spelling out the names in streaming arcs of flame; the old places, the proud places, Dover and Harlech and Kenilworth, Ludlow, Walmer, York… And from far out of the west, calling through the sea mist, the words that were like the tinkling of old armour; Berry, Pomeroy, Lostwithiel, Tintagel, Restormel; while the lights crawled forward from the heath, and far out on the sea. At midnight the arms stopped working; by next morning Corfe Gate was invested, and nothing moved on the semaphore towers but the swaying bodies of men.

The rising of the royal and baronial strongholds in every part of the country spared the defenders the main weight of the armada; the armies pushed inland, moving hurriedly and by night, harried by Eleanor’s artillery as they passed through the gap in the hills. Some five hundred men remained to lay siege to Corfe. They brought with them or built on the spot a whole range of engines, ballistas, and mangonels; and these with the three great trebuchets Persuader, Faith of Rome, and Dierwolf made play at the walls from the valley and surrounding hillsides. But so extreme was the range, and so great the elevation, that few of the missiles so much as cleared the outer curtain. Mostly they struck the stone below the battlements, bouncing back with hollow booms; the odd shots that landed in the baileys were welcomed by Eleanor’s men as additions to their own supplies.

The machines set up by Her Ladyship had better sport, and with the great guns caused such havoc that the lines of the besiegers were soon withdrawn beyond the wet ditch. From there the Pope’s men mounted attack after attack, varying their methods in the hope of taking the defenders by surprise; but they were invariably driven back. Mantlets were employed, each carried on the backs of a dozen men; sharpshooters blew off the legs of the wretches beneath, tumbling them and their engines back into the stream, leaving long swathes of redness on the flanks of the mount.

An attempt at mining was watched with more sympathy than concern, while belfries could only be employed against the outer gate. One was constructed, out on the heath beyond long cannon-shot; a heavy tower hung with wetted hides and with three storeys inside it for snipers. It made its approach one dawn, rumbling through the village street, propelled by a hundred sweating soldiers; but Growler, entrenched behind a triple line of sandbags, disembowelled it with a single shot, blowing men and parts of men into the great ditch to either side.

After that there was a lull in the fighting; and the besiegers hailed Eleanor, promising her the forgiveness of John (which wasn’t theirs to offer) and asking her what she intended, if she thought she could war with the entire world. Then they sent a herald, with letters purporting to be from Charles, telling her the cause was lost and she must yield to Rome.

Him she dismissed; though she offered, if he came again on such a bogus errand, to load him in the sling of a trebuchet and send him back by an airy and quicker route. There followed a greater bombardment than ever. All day long the stones roared in the air, while dust rose from the nearby quarries where roughmasons toiled to shape more rocks for the slings. Men charged the scarps, urged on by officers with primed muskets who offered to shoot waverers in the back.

Eleanor taught a terrible lesson. The defenders withdrew, seemingly in confusion, from an entire section of the lower wall. The attackers, yelling like frightened fiends, ran for the Martyr’s Gate, bunched there hammering and tearing at the bars of the portcullis. They realised their mistake too late to save themselves. The outer grating, hauled out of sight in the stone, slid down, imprisoning them like animals in a cage; and through the vents above their heads poured the scalding oil. Then the besiegers, rendered more cautious, sat down in earnest to starve the castle out; but when November came round, and Christmas and the New Year, the flags still flew above the high keep, the oriflamme and the flowers and leopards of Eleanor’s house.

Still there was no word of the King; neither thaumaturgy nor wireless telegraphy availed the seneschal now, the land was dumb. Then at last there was news, brought by a Serjeant of Signallers who worked his way through the enemy lines one dusk, dying already from an arrow broken off short in his back. Beaumaris had fallen, and Caerlon, and the mighty Tower of Dubris had taken forty days before abandoning the fight.

Eleanor stayed up late that night, walking the tower rooms and the baileys, heaped now with the debris of the battle. To her came the seneschal, in the dim time before dawn when the torches burned amber and guttering, when the sentries nodded at their posts or started up alarmed at the whisperings of oiled silk windowpanes. The mist was rising on the Great Heath, and the moon eclipsed by cloud.

‘Tell me, Sir John,’ she said, and her voice was lost and tiny, barely stirring the harsh air. ‘Come to the window here, and tell me what you see…’

He stood silent a long time. Then, heavily, ‘I see the night mists moving on the hills, and the watch fires of our enemies…’

He made to leave her; but she called him sharply. ‘Fairy…’

He paused, back turned to her; and as he stood she used his proper name, the sound by which he was known among the Old Ones. ‘I told you once,’ she said acidly, ‘when I required the truth, then you would know. Now I charge you. Come to me again, and tell me what you see.’

She stood close while he thought, head in hand; he could feel the warmth of her in the night, scent the faint presence of her body. ‘I see an end to everything we know,’ he said at last. ‘The Great Gate broken, John’s banners on the walls.’

She pursued him. ‘And me, Sir John? What for me?’

He didn’t immediately answer and she swallowed, feeling the night encroach, the

dark slide into her body. ‘Is there death?’ she said.

‘My Lady,’ he said gently, ‘there is death for everyone…’

She threw her head back then and laughed, as she had laughed months before in the face of Rye and Deal. ‘Why then,’ she said, ‘we must live a little while we can…’ And that morning they sallied before it was light, fifty strong, and burned Direwolf; his bones still lie there on the hill. And the long gun Prince of Peace broke the arms of his fellows, arms so stout and long there was no wood to replace them. So they brought the great gun Holy Meg, and she and the culverin talked to each other across the valley till the smoke rolled back between the hills like steam from a boiling pot.

They heard of his coming from the telegraphs. It was a fine summer day when he crossed with his retinue into Purbeck Isle. They were still closely invested; in fact the besiegers had launched a heavy attack, their first for many months, and in the confusion he arrived almost unheralded. The first they knew was when the guns in the valley fell silent. A strange silence it was too, a breathing hush in which one could hear the wind soughing over the heathland. They saw his banners in the village, the horses and the siege train winding across the heath, and the seneschal hurried to find his mistress. She was in the second bailey; they had the culverin mounted beside the Butavant tower and were playing him at the men trying to climb the slope below. Eleanor was dirty with smoke and a little bloody, for one of her people had been hurt by the fire from an harquebus and she had helped bind the wound. She straightened when she saw the seneschal, his grave features and bearing. He nodded quietly, confirming what she had already seen in his face. ‘My Lady,’ he said simply. ‘Your King is here…’

She had no time to change or make any preparations, for the royal party was already in sight of the lower ward. She ran on her own, down across the sloping bailey to the gate, the seneschal pacing a distance behind. Nobody else moved, not the gunners, not the bowmen and snipers lining the walls. She stopped by Growler, still standing where he had stood from the first, and leaned on his barrel. Before her were the tossing banners and the armour, the horses champing their bits and dancing from the smell of powder, the waiting soldiers with their guns and swords.

He rode forward alone, disdaining protection. He saw the gatehouse towers, stained now by smoke and scarred by shot, the portcullis sunk into the ground where it had fallen over a year before and not moved since. He stared a long time at Eleanor, standing fists clenched by the gun; then he reached forward, rattled his whip against the bars in front of him and gestured once with the stock of it. Up…

She waited, the hair blowing round her face; then she nodded tight-lipped to the people above. A pause; and the chains creaked, the counterweights swung in their carved channels. The gate groaned and lifted, tearing aside the rank grass that had seeded round its foot. He rode forward, ducking his head beneath the iron as it climbed up into the stone; they heard the hooves of his horse on the hard ground inside. He dismounted, going to Eleanor; and only then did the cheering spread, through the village and the soldiers and the ranks of people on the walls, up and away to the tower of the Great Keep. So the place yielded, to its liege-lord and to no other.

She spoke to the seneschal once more before she left her home. It was early dawn, the sky pale and grey-blue, the mist lying cloud-thick on the heathland promising a sweltering day. She sat her horse stiffly, back straight, and stared round her. Down across the baileys to where the guns stood limbered by the outer gate; across the parched, spoiled grass, over the lines of neat crosses where the dead were buried inside the walls they had helped defend. Above her the great donjon-face loomed, pale in the new light, empty and desolate and waiting. Below her, fifty yards away, the King of all England sat surrounded by his soldiers. He looked stooped and prematurely old; exhausted by months of campaigning, of haggling and manoeuvring and bartering, fighting desperate men who knew they stood to lose at best their homes and living, at worst their lives. He had won, if it could be called a victory; the boiling land was quiet again. The question they asked Eleanor, he had answered for himself.

She beckoned quietly to the seneschal, leaned from her horse. ‘Old One,’ she said. ‘You who served my father so well, and me… Make my Signs the hawk and the rose. The flower to sink her roots into the soil, the bird to taste the wind…’

He bowed, accepting the strange charge. ‘Lady,’ he said, ‘we shall meet again. Yet it shall be as you wish.’

She saluted him once, raising a hand; then shook the reins of the horse and turned it, clattered down the steep way. Out under the towers of the Martyr’s Gate to the great lower bailey. The soldiers fell in behind her, harness jangling; the party moved through the outer barbican to the village street beyond, and never once did she look back. There was a trial, of sorts. A life was involved; she understood this distantly. These pompous, bewigged gentlemen, these gloomy corridors and halls of law, meant little to her.

Sentence was commuted, by the express wish of King Charles. She was imprisoned in the White Tower, lay there many years. Reality ceased to trouble her. She wove garlands of fresh spring flowers, the piling of clouds across a Dorset sky.

There were great changes afoot in England; this too she realised, dimly.

One by one, the castles came down. Their walls and battlements, their towers and barbicans, the ramparts and the high allures. Their baileys were breached, opened to the wind. Charles the Good, who thought first of his people; this was his price, for warring Holy Rome. The sappers sweated, carving out their mines, packing round the wooden props with straw.

At Corfe, a noise on the hill. A thudding, roaring; the bounding of huge blocks into the stream. A seismic growling, high shaking rise of dust into the clean air. Death of a giant.

From Charles Eleanor got an open door, the sleepiness of a sentry. A horse at the postern, these things can be arranged. Money was provided, and advice. She ignored both. She flew back to what had been her home.

The seneschal found her, he alone of all her people. She had taken the dress and patterned nylons of a serving wench, but he knew her for his mistress.

On a dull October day many years after the last of the castles had rumbled into ruin, two men walked quietly through the streets of a little West Country town. There was something in their movements both urgent and secretive; they strode quickly, glancing round from time to time as if to make sure that they were not observed. They turned under the archway of an inn yard and crossed the cobbles beyond. Beneath the arch strands of dead creeper swayed; a scatter of rain, driven on the gusting wind, lashed their faces. The strangers tapped at the door, were admitted; the door was fastened behind them with a scrape of chains. Beyond was a passageway, almost pitch dark in what was left of the afternoon light, and a flight of stairs. They climbed silently. There was a landing, a door at the end; they stopped in front of it and knocked, softly at first then more imperiously.

The woman who opened to them held a wrap loosely across her throat; her hair, still long, coiled brownly round her shoulders. ‘John,’ she said, ‘I didn’t expect -’ She stopped, staring; and her hand slowly tightened on the scarf. She swallowed, closed her eyes; then, ‘Who do you seek?’ She asked the question flatly, as if drained of all emotion. The taller of the visitors answered quietly. ‘The Lady Eleanor…’

‘There’s no such person,’ she said. ‘Not here…’ She made as if to close the door but they pushed her aside, edging into the room. She made no further move to stop them; instead she turned and walked to the one small window, stood with her head down and her hands gripping the back of a chair. ‘How did you find me?’ she said.

There was no answer; and she turned to face them where they stood with feet apart on the bare boards of the room. A long pause; then she tried to laugh. The sound came out choked, like a little cough. ‘Have you come to arrest me?’ she said. ‘After all this time?’ The tall man shook his head slowly.

‘M’Lady,’ he said, ‘we have no warrant…’

Another wait, while the wind skirled round the eaves of the building, flung a salvo of rain spots at the windowpanes. She shook her head and pulled at her lip with her teeth. Touched her stomach, and her throat. Her hands were pale in the gloom, like white butterflies. ‘But don’t you see,’ she said. ‘You can’t… do what you’ve come to do. Not now. Don’t you see that? There aren’t any… words to tell you why, if you can’t see…"

Silence.

‘It doesn’t seem… possible,’ she said. She half laughed again. ‘In times to come,’ she said, ‘when people read of this, they won’t believe. They never will believe…’ She crossed the room, stood with her back turned to them. They heard liquid splash into a glass, the little sound as the rim chattered against her teeth. ‘I’m behaving better than I thought I would,’ she said, ‘but not as well as I hoped. It’s a terrible thing, being afraid. It’s like an illness; like wanting to fall down, and not being able to faint. You see you never get used to it. You live with it and live with it and every day it’s worse; and one day it’s the worst of all. I thought, when it… happened, I wouldn’t be afraid. But I was wrong…’

She went to the window again. The stranger moved forward; but softly, so the old boards didn’t creak. She stood looking down into the inn yard, and he could see her shaking. ‘I never thought,’ she said, ‘that it would be raining. It’s the details like that you can’t ever imagine. I didn’t want it to be raining.’ She set the glass down carefully. ‘One never quite believes in Last Great Thoughts,’ she said. ‘But it seems at the end one’s able to see so very clearly. I’m remembering now how many times I’ve prayed for death. When I’ve been lonely, and frightened, in the night. I’ve really done that. But now I can see what a wonderful thing life is. How every breath is… precious.’

The man at the door moved impatiently; but the other raised his hand. Eleanor half turned, showing them the sheen of tears on her cheek. ‘It’s absurd of course,’ she said. ‘It’s no use pleading with you. But you see I’m so very weak. I swore never to plead, not even if I got the chance. I’m doing it, all the same. But not for… myself. Not for me.’

She drew a slow, ragged breath. ‘I won’t go on my knees though,’ she said. ‘I’ve got enough sense left not to do that.’

She turned back to the window. ‘I’m trying to remember I’ve had a good life,’ she said. ‘Far better than I deserved. I’ve known love; it was very rich and strange. And there was a time once when I… owned all the land I could see. I could go to my… high tower, and look out to the hills and far off to the sea; and it was all mine, every yard of it. Every blade of grass. And people would come running when I called, and wait on me and do whatever I wanted doing. I loved them, very much; and I think some of them loved me… And some were hurt, and some were killed, and the rest were blown away by the wind…’

‘M’Lady,’ said the stranger gruffly. ‘This is far from our will…’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But your God is such an angry God, isn’t he? Far angrier than mine.’ She swallowed, and crossed her clenched fists slowly in front of her breasts. ‘I’m… damned,’ she said. ‘But I pity you. May He have mercy on your souls…’

The man at the door swallowed, licking his mouth. The other half turned, face contorted as if in pain; moved his hand slightly, felt the thin-bladed knife slide down into the palm.

John Faulkner climbed the stairs slowly, set down the basket he was carrying outside the door. Tapped quietly, then again; waited, starting to frown. Eased lightly at the catch, and pushed the door ajar. At first he didn’t see her, sitting in the high-backed chair; then his eyes dilated. He ran forward, tried to take her hands. She kept them pressed to her side; and he saw the blood marks on the floor, the scuffs of red where she’d dragged herself along. She turned her head listlessly, face a paper mask. ‘This too,’ she whispered. ‘This too, from Charles…’ She lifted her hands then, showed him in the gloom the brightness of the palms.

He stayed kneeling, breath hissing between his teeth; and when he raised his head his face was totally changed. ‘Who did this, Lady?’ he asked her huskily. ‘When next they cross the heath, then we must know…’

She saw the blazing start at the backs of the strange eyes and reached for his wrist, slowly and with pain. ‘No, John,’ she said. ‘The Old Way is dead. Vengeance is… mine, saith the Lord…’ She pushed her head against the back of the chair, parting her lips; blood showed between her teeth. ‘Get… horses,’ she said. ‘Horses… Quickly, John, please…’ He stood a moment staring down; then he ran to do her bidding.

The two horses moved slowly, in the first chill light of dawn. Round them the wind yapped and shrilled, plucking at the cloaks of their riders. Eleanor sat hunched and frozen; it was the seneschal who reached across to rein her mount. He swung to the ground, supporting her as she leaned in the saddle. Before her, seeming miles off in the iron-grey light, loomed the two flanking hills; between them, where once had stood a hall, the bosses and nubs of stone, the teeth and pinnacles and shattered fingers thrust into the sky. Round them the rain squalls moved and the cloud, obscuring; and over all, ragged and stiff and robbed of colour, flapped the remnants of great flags. Flags of cobalt, and of gold.

She panted, quick and agonised; and her fingers gripped his shoulder, digging at the flesh. ‘There,’ she said faintly. ‘There, see… The Great Gate was broken; you told me, but I wouldn’t hear…’ She stared round her dully, at the half-seen vastness of the heath. ‘This is the… place,’ she said. ‘No further. No more…’

He picked her gently from the horse, wiped at the blood that had run and dried on neck and chin. Lifted her again and carried her to where bushes screened her from the wind. She cried out, arcing her body. Then again and once more, the sound piercing the wet air, soaring up to vanish in the great dull sky. The horses shuffled, flattening their ears. Champed their bits and snorted, returned to their cropping of grass. They browsed a long time; long after Eleanor had gasped again and stiffened, and was dead. A troop of royal cavalry came, late in the afternoon. They found blood on the grass, a woman with peace and pain both in her face. But the seneschal was gone.