There was an instant's silence, and then the faint rustling stir of her feet coming nearer.
Kate lay still, sickeningly afraid that she was about to bend down and make sure that the spell was working as it should. But apparently it did not occur to the Lady even as a possibility that she might have missed her mark. The feet moved past Kate's inert body and on without pausing; there was a little clink as she lifted the branch of candles off its bracket to light her out of the room. The faint rustling stir retreated slowly and died away.
Kate let the cross drop from her hand with a gasp of relief, and stood up. It was pitch dark, but she knew where she was and long practice had given her a certain ability to find her way blind over any ground that was familiar to her. She paused a moment, picturing the shape of the cell in her mind; then she moved very quickly and lightly across to the door and out into the passage beyond.
She had no time to think or plan. Her one idea was simply to get to Christopher as fast as she could. What she would do if she met the Lady returning, or encountered another troop of the Fairy Folk, she did not know. How he and she were going to make their way out of the Hill without losing themselves, or reach the castle, or find Cecily, she did not know either. All that would have to take its chance now. Any chance was better than none.
She turned into the passage that led to the great cavern, her feet gathering speed. She knew every inch of the way here, every irregularity and change of surface, every step, every fold in the stone. There was nothing to stop her. The Fairy Folk seemed to have withdrawn to some other part of the Hill. The passage was completely silent and felt curiously empty, as though she were running about through the stillness of a deserted house.
The first check came at the two doors halfway down the passage. They had always been closed and locked before whenever she had passed them, but now she could feel that they were open, wide open, drawn back against the wall. And somewhere ahead of her — it was not possible to tell how far away — there was the faintest flicker of light.
Then she realized that the door into the great cavern must be open too, and what she had seen was nothing but the glow of the candles that were always left burning in honor of the Lady on the wall behind the stone chair. The glow vanished as she plunged through the narrow entrance to the last passage and turned to her left.
"Christopher!" she called. "Christopher, we — "
She stopped short, feeling again the silence, the curiously empty quality of the air.
"Christopher?" she said questioningly.
There was no answer.
Chapter XII
All Hallows' Eve
Kate said again: "Christopher!" and took a step forward, groping for the mesh. Her outstretched hands touched something hard in the darkness, and it moved a little, with a faint sighing sound.
The hidden door in the mesh was open: not broken or torn, as if he had forced his way through it and escaped, only open, wide open, like the other doors, drawn back to the wall. It came away loose as she caught at it and hung swinging, clappering gently — almost idly — against the stakes and knots of withy that framed the dark open entrance to the room beyond.
Somewhere in her mind a long-forgotten memory stirred and came back to her — her own six-year-old voice protesting that she was cold, and her nurse's answer, kind but uncompromising: "No, leave the door open, Mistress Katherine. On All Hallows' Eve you should always leave every door in the house open, to let the dead pass through."
After another moment the door stopped moving, and the silence fell again, complete, unbroken, and final. The room beyond the door was empty. She did not even have to go into it to be certain of that.
Presently she turned and began, very slowly, to make her way back towards the outer passage. She was not going anywhere, or thinking of anything. She had nothing left to think of.
There was only one place they would have taken him — back up the gorge of the Holy Well, to the Standing Stone, where the teind had been paid in the old days. She could not get out to him, and she could not "claim" him, like the lady in the ballad; she did not even know how the lady had done it, and she was utterly without help. The old dream of Sir Geoffrey riding down the forest road followed by a long line of heavily armed men was only a dream. It was clear by now that Randal must have failed them, and there was no reckoning on Sir Geoffrey any longer. The castle people were all under Master John's thumb, and too afraid of him to be of any use. The village people might possibly turn against the castle in some last extremity, but at midnight the village people would be asleep in their beds, and there was no way that she could reach them or rouse them. The only part of the Hill where she could find her way blind was along the path that ran from the great cavern to Gwenhyfara's cell. Without light and the signs, even the Lady herself would be lost among the other turns and passages: Gwenhyfara had said so. Kate had never learned the signs, and she had no light. There was no light in the whole Hill except for the candles that the Fairy Folk kept in their own hands, and the —
The - the "Oh, you idiot!" she cried out, and began to run.
The door of the great cavern was still open, and through it, distant and shimmering, came the glow from the four clusters of candles that were always left burning, in honor of the Lady, on the dais wall at the far end, behind the stone chair. She was so accustomed to seeing them there that until that moment she had not given them a thought. She had never even looked at them closely.
She went down the hall and looked at them now, her heart thudding violently but her eyes suddenly clear and as coldly intent as the Lady's own.
There were three candles to a cluster, set in branched holders like the one Gwenhyfara usually carried, and the holders placed on flat sconces that jutted out from the wall. The candles themselves were thick and fairly tall, eight or nine inches high, church candles, the finest wax. They would go on burning for a very long time.
The sconces were set high on the wall, and she had to clamber up on the stone chair — feeling a flash of wicked pleasure at the sacrilege — to lift the nearest branch down. She could not take more than one: the wound in her palm had almost stopped bleeding, but her whole left hand felt numb to the wrist, and she was unable to carry anything except in her right. All she could do was put out two of the three candles to keep them for a reserve supply before she turned to go. The single remaining flame dipped and fluttered dangerously when she started to run again, and she was forced to rein herself down to a walk, pacing like an acolyte in a church procession back up the hall and through the door to the outer passage.
She had no choice in the matter: it would have to be the path that led to the waterfall and out into the glade with the oak tree. There must be other ways out of the Hill — the way by the Holy Well, and the way back to Lord Richard's tower; but she could not tell in what direction to begin looking for either of them. At least she knew where the path to the glade with the oak tree started: at the two closed doors halfway down the outer passage. It was there that she had been cowering when the Fairy Folk overtook her on the dancing night. She remembered the sudden rush of feet, and the clear voices singing, and the torchbearer with his head flung back, thrusting his way past her. Then the rest had come crowding up, and they had all run together through — through — which door had it been? the first, or the second? She had not seen it clearly. Everything had happened too fast, and there had been too many other bodies pressing about her to be sure. But that need not matter. She wanted a passage. With luck, the wrong door would lead only to a sleeping cell or a storeroom.
Her luck was out. The doors were still wide open, pulled back like the others against the wall; but when she stopped at last and raised her light to look, she found that both of them led to passages, narrow tunnels that sloped upward for a few feet and then vanished in darkness. There was nothing whatever to distinguish the first from the second, and Kate could almost hear Christopher's voice saying dryly: "One of their tricks?"
She beat off the thought of Ch
ristopher and what might be happening to him before it drove her frantic, and turned from the doorways to the doors themselves. She had to push them free of the wall with the point of her foot — for her left hand was past using, and her right taken up with the candle-branch — but in the end she swung them back and made herself stand still and look at them in turn.
One thing at least she was sure of. The Fairy Folk would not have lied to her. They might trick or mock her kind for the sport of the matter, but they would somehow do it by telling the exact truth. If Gwenhyfara or the Lady had said that there were "signs" to mark the passages, then signs there would be.
There were no signs. Both doors unmarked, and as far as she could see, there was nothing to choose between them.
She set her teeth, and relighting the other two candles, looked again.
The first door was made of plain oaken boards, with bronze hinges and a leaf-shaped bronze thumb-latch.
The second door was exactly like it.
No, not exactly.
Somewhere, as the light of the candles swung from one door to the other, she caught something — a flicker, the very faintest possible flicker, of a difference. Not the height, or the breadth, or the timbers, or the hinges, or —
The latch. The pattern of the latch, where it broadened out to make a holding place for the thumb. On one door, it was shaped like an oak leaf. On the other door, it was ivy.
For a long moment, Kate stood still, her head up, hardly breathing, as though the oak leaf thumb-latch might somehow vanish if she moved. It was all coming back to her again, the rush of feet behind her on the dancing night, and the clear voices singing together, question and reply —
O where is the Queen, and where is she now?
Go out by the oak leaf, with never a though!
and then suddenly her head dropped forward, and she was rocking between fury and exasperated laughter.
It was there before her, the bronze oak leaf that had never hung on a bough, the sign that marked the passage, the key of the Hill. And she had had it in her hand ever since the day that she had sat on her horse beside Sir Geoffrey and heard the same words blowing towards them through the misty rain. Randal must have learned the words on one of the nights when he was allowed to come back and harp for the dancers. It would be like them to teach him that song and then let him go singing the truth, the exact truth, over half the roads in England, since he himself would know nothing of what it meant, and everyone else would take it for a jingle of the lunatic he was. Her mouth hardened fiercely as she thrust back the oak leaf door with her shoulder and walked into the arched tunnel behind it. There were some things she thought that she might forgive the Fairy Folk, but what they had done to Randal was not one of them.
The new passage was neither rough nor treacherous underfoot, like the way from Lord Richard's tower; it had been made for running dancers, and it unwound before her as smoothly as a ball of old Dorothy's embroidery silk. Twice more she came to doors, and once to a cross-passage, but always the sign of the oak leaf was there to guide her, carved in the stone of the wall or worked into an ornament for a hinge or a latch. Presently the air grew fresher; she heard a murmuring splashing sound somewhere ahead, and wondered, with a lift of her heart, if it was the waterfall that masked the rock arch at the end of the passage. The path took a sharp curve to the left, and there suddenly opened out of the darkness the dimmed pearly moonlit glow she remembered. She stooped her shoulders to shield the precious candles from the spray, and was through it so quickly that only one of the flames went out.
The glade lay before her, silent now and empty of dancers, but still drenched in moonlight so brilliant that it broke through even the heavy shadow of the oak tree and showed a motionless dark figure curled up there among the roots. The light was running like silver rain down the strings of the harp that rested against his shoulder.
"Fairy woman," he whispered, "fairy woman, fairy woman, is it a dancing night?"
Kate hardly heard the question. Her mind was so wholly taken up with its one overwhelming concern that she did not even feel any surprise at finding him there.
"What time is it?" she whispered back. There was such a hard knot in her throat that she could barely speak. "Randal, for the love of heaven, tell me what time it is."
"A little past ten," replied Randal obediently.
"Ten?"
More than a hour until midnight, almost two: and even one seemed at that moment like time everlasting. Her worst fear, the fear she had not dared to think of, had been that she was already too late. "You did say ten, Randal? Are you sure?"
"The big clock in the courtyard arch was striking ten when I went down the hill from the castle to here, and it's no more than a mile away."
"The castle? You've been at the castle tonight?" Then with an effort Kate remembered that she must keep her voice quiet and easy, not to confuse him. "Is Sir Geoffrey there, Randal? Did you give my letter to Sir Geoffrey?"
"What letter, fairy woman?"
Quiet; quiet. "I'm not a fairy woman, Randal," she said quietly. "Don't you remember me? Kate Sutton? Mistress Katherine?"
"Why have you changed yourself into a fairy woman, then?"
"I've not changed, not in myself, Randal. I haven't changed at all. Do try to remember. I gave you a letter for Sir Geoffrey, to put into his own hand. What did you do with it?"
Randal drew back a little. "Sir Geoffrey was angry with me." For the first time since she had met him, he sounded petulant and even sullen. "I did as you told me," he whimpered. "I carried it with me all summer long and never forgot it. You wanted him to come back by All Hallows' Eve. I counted up the days it would take him to ride here, counted them up carefully, to be sure I was doing just as you told me. By All Hallows' Eve was what you said."
"Yes," said Kate, dismayed, remembering how she had blundered over the message. "Yes, I did."
"Then why was he angry with me? There was time enough, and more. We rode like the wind, and it was not my fault that he fell over the rope."
"What rope?"
"Someone had stretched a rope across the road in the forest, and it was so dark that the horse couldn't see it." (Master John, thought Kate instantly. The mean little trick to bring down any chance pilgrim or traveler who might try to reach the castle that night did not taste of the Fairy Folk.) "Sir Geoffrey was first in the line, and he fell striking his head. So I left his men trying to recover him, and ran away in the dark. I don't like it," said Randal simply, "when people are angry with me."
"But what became of Sir Geoffrey? Was he hurt? Hurt badly?"
"That's more than I know. I went down to the castle from there, to see if I could get a bit of bread, but they were all asleep, and then the moon made me remember that it might be a dancing night. Is it a dancing night?"
"No, I'm sorry," Kate murmured, her mind trying frantically to grapple with the new problem. A blow on the head could mean anything. Sir Geoffrey might have been stunned for a moment — or an hour. He might not come to himself for days. He might even (face it) be dead. Most certainly she would be a fool to count on his reaching the place in time. With a sigh she thrust the old dream away again. "Randal — " she began.
But Randal's wandering gaze had flitted off to something else. "There's blood on your hand," he announced. "Why is there blood on your hand?"
"I ran a sharp piece of steel into it," said Kate. "Randal, how did the lady claim Tam Lin in the ballad?"
"I can tend the hurt for you," said Randal proudly. "The Fairy Folk showed me how to do it one night when I'd stepped on a rusted nail." He rummaged in the pouch at his belt and brought out a little silk bag containing a jar of ointment and a crescent-shaped knife. These he laid out on a ledge by the waterfall with all the gravity of a child playing doctor to a doll.
Kate bit back a cry of impatience. If she snapped at him or did not let him have his own way he might think she was angry and run from her as he had run from Sir Geoffrey. "It's no great matter," she said. "M
y hand can wait."
Randal took the hand and frowned over it professionally by the light of the candles. "No," he said, "for this is the kind that festers the soonest if you let it close up on you. Hold still now," and bending back her fingers, he cut the wound open with two quick slashes, one across the other, and then told her to hold it under the running water of the fall to let it bleed out. The water was icy cold and numbing to the pain; after a moment Kate took a deep breath and asked for the second time:
"Randal, how did the lady claim Tam Lin in the ballad?"
Randal shook his head. "Tam Lin's not a song to sing so near the Queen's hall," he said reproachfully. "I told you that long ago, on the rock by the little stone house."
"You don't have to sing it to me," Kate implored him. "Only tell me what she did. Whisper if you like. Then nobody can hear us. Please, Randal. What did she do?"
Randal opened the jar of ointment and bent to salve Kate's hand, his head very close to hers. "Tam Lin told the lady to pull him down from the white horse and then hold fast to him," he answered hurriedly, under his breath. "A terrible hard thing to do."
"Is it so hard to pull a man down from a horse?" asked Kate, taken aback.
"Not if he wants to come. But then the Fairy Folk laid a spell on him to make her let him go."
"What spell?"
Randal's voice dropped even lower. "They changed his shape in her arms," he whispered. "Some say to a cold snake, and some to a burning fire, and some to a great bird, and some to all of them in turn; but still she held him fast, so in the end he came back to his own true shape and knew her face, and then the Fairy Folk had to set them free."