"I don't know," said Kate doubtfully, feeling that given the pretty face, the sorrow and the pain could be left to take care of themselves. "What is it that you do here? Bathe your faces, the way they did in Kent?"
"Bathe your face in water from the Holy Well?" Old Dorothy sounded scandalized at the very idea of it. "No, no, Mistress Katherine: it's only to drink for a cure. You must first go up to the cave where the Well is, and dip your oak branch in the spring outside. Then you must offer a gift to be taken by the Well, speaking your trouble aloud, so that Those who rule over the Well can hear you."
"You mean there's some special saint that you pray to?" asked Kate, finding this a little hard to follow.
"I mean Those who rule over the Well," said old Dorothy obstinately. "Why should we trouble ourselves with the saints? Those who rule over the Well were here in the land for many and many a hundred years before they were heard of. But — " she broke off again, fumbling nervously with the ball of green silk. "Now, don't you go fretting about the Well any more, Mistress Katherine. It's not for me to talk of such matters. Master John's the one to tell you. You ask him if you're so wishful to know."
And much good that would do me, thought Kate to herself, watching Dorothy patter hastily out of the room. After what had happened in the village, she would not have asked Master John for so much as the time of day; and when she heard his voice from the back of the courtyard early the next morning, she slipped quietly into the dark entry of Lord Richard's tower to wait until he went by.
Master John came walking briskly past, followed by two other men. One was a young serving man in an unfamiliar livery, with a leather traveling-bottle slung over his arm; but the second was the elderly pilgrim she had seen coming up the road the day before; or so she judged from his white hair and the branch of oak leaves he was carrying with him. His face was almost as white as his hair, strangely rapt and exalted, and the branch he held had been dipped into water. Drops still hung gleaming on every leaf and twig and ran down over his fingers. Even after he had passed her and was gone up the steps to the terrace, the way he had come was marked by a faint line of dark wet splashes scattered along the pavement.
There was no time to work out a plan — Kate's first thought was to move quickly before the trail of splashes could dry out again. The faint dark line led her around the corner of Lord Richard's tower, through an old broken passage with ivy clustering between the stones, and finally out into a tiny circular courtyard, furred all over with thick fine moss as green as an emerald in a ring. To her left a flight of cracked and uneven stone steps went up to the battlemented walk that ran along the top of the outer wall. Below the walk, set in the mid-curve of the wall, was a narrow archway framed with blocks of carving that were pitted by age and hard weather. Through the archway she could see grass and rocks and a glimpse of open country.
Kate crossed the courtyard very slowly, frowning: her eyes on the archway. She was thinking of the fortifications at the other side of the castle, the massive walls rising out of the hill, the one steep road winding up to the gate, the gatehouse with its portcullis and arrow slits and towers. Even now, with its defenses neglected and the walls beginning to decay, the place had appeared overpoweringly strong; in the old lords' time it must have been impregnable. Yet here there were no defenses whatever, not so much as a door in the archway, not so much as a trace on the stone to show that a door had once been there before it had fallen away.
It was only when she passed through the archway and came on the grass beyond that she understood why. What she had thought was open country was actually a small deep valley, hardly more than a gorge, lying between high cliffs that were flung up sheer hundreds of feet into fantastic pinnacles and crumbling overhung masses of rock. The Perilous Gard was backed into the mouth of this gorge as though it were an old lion crouching in the entrance to his den, its great shoulders touching the cliffs on either side and filling the gap completely. The whole valley was sealed off. It could not be attacked or even approached except through the castle itself.
The archway from the castle opened on a wide flat stretch of grass, cut to a rough lawn; and at the far side of this lawn was an enormous standing stone, like the ones on Salisbury Plain, more than twice the height of a tall man. It was a gray cloudy day, smelling of wild places, with the promise of rain in the air. The only living thing in sight was a hawk circling and soaring on the wind above the cliffs.
Kate stood hesitating a moment in the archway. She did not care for wild places, and nothing but curiosity and a rankling determination to get the better of Master John made her go on. There was a thread of a path running along the turf to the right of the Standing Stone, and she began to pick her way along it.
Beyond the Standing Stone the ground fell away and dropped sharply to the floor of the valley, so sharply that Kate would not have been able to keep her feet if the path had not been thrown back and forth across the steep decline of the slope instead of going straight down. The floor of the valley was all rock, littered with great boulders and loose scree and shards washed from the cliffs; only the path was free of them. The valley grew steadily narrower and deeper, the cliffs closing in and the path winding down until it finally came to an end in a little bay of green grass with the crags towering all around it.
The little bay was cool and very quiet except for the sound of running water. It came from a spring that fell from a crevice in the cliff wall on her right, and ran murmuring for a few feet through moss and clustering ferns and tufts of wild flowers clinging precariously to the stones before it was lost again among the rocks. In the cliff wall opposite the spring was a dark jagged opening like the entrance to a cave.
It was not a large cave. Even by the dim light that filtered in through the narrow opening, Kate could see that it was only a sort of chamber, walled and roofed and floored with living rock. The Holy Well lay in the center, a black circle surrounded by a curb of carved stonework, so old that the figures in the carving had worn away to nothing but blobs and lumps.
The Well was unusually wide and the curb very high — longlegged though she was, Kate's breast was barely level with the rim. The rim itself was made of flat hewn stones, carefully fitted together but very unequal in size. Those towards the back of the cave were fairly narrow, while those towards the front, facing the entrance, widened abruptly and came thrusting out to form a broad shallow lip. Standing on this ledge was a deep bowl of greenish bronze, fastened by a long chain to a bronze ring sunk into one of the stones. The bowl was empty, but still wet, and the stone on which it rested was splashed with water. There was no other sign that a pilgrim had been there that morning.
There was also nothing to account for the rapt, ecstatic look she had seen on his face as he passed her. What any sane person could have found to reverence about the Holy Well was beyond Kate's comprehension. The round black cavity with its out thrust lip reminded her unpleasantly of an open toothless mouth; and the air that came from it was cold, dank with the smell of wet moss and old decaying rock.
Even when she found a toe hold on the carving and scrambled clumsily part way up the curb, she could not see anything over the ledge except a ring of slimy stones going down a few feet and then vanishing into total darkness. Far below there rose the sound of running water again, unexpectedly loud, as if the Well were not fed from a spring or pool, but opened directly on some fast-moving underground stream. She found a heavy shard loose on the rim and pushed it off into the hole, scrambling a little higher and leaning still further forward to try to gauge the depth of the shaft.
The shard disappeared completely. Not the faintest tinkling splash came up to her through the booming depths of the water.
Kate drew back. She was beginning to feel cramped and dizzy with stooping; and the cold air rising from the Well seemed stronger.
Then, from behind her in the shadows, a hand suddenly shot out and closed over her wrist. She was torn from her hold, pulled down off the curbstones, lifted bodily, and hauled
, scuffling ignominiously, to the grassplot outside the cave. And the angriest voice she had ever heard in her life was shouting at her.
"What are you doing up there, you fool?" it cried. "Come down, do you hear me? Come down!"
Christopher Heron was standing between her and the entrance to the Well. He was dressed now in a tattered old blue shepherd's smock that he might have picked up on a rubbish heap, and the fine gold-hiked knife was gone from his belt; but Christopher Heron it certainly was. The hand was still clamped like iron about her wrist.
Kate looked back at him, almost as angry as he. She had never liked being swept off her own feet and dangled helplessly, even as a game in the nursery.
"I am down," she pointed out coldly.
Christopher Heron stared at her. His eyes went from her hair, which was tumbling crazily about her ears, to the skirt of her dress, which was dark with slime and streaks of moss where he had dragged her down the curbstones; and a slow, painful flush began to pour over his face But the hold on her wrist did not slacken. "I thought you were going over the edge," he said. "You might have been killed."
"I might have been if it was a moonless night and the curb wasn't nearly five feet high," Kate retorted "How could anyone go over the edge? A child would be perfectly safe in there."
The grip on her wrist tightened savagely for an instant; then it loosened, and he took a step back, away from her, his hands dropping to his sides. All the color and excitement had suddenly drained out of his face, and it looked very faintly, almost contemptuously, amused.
"You'll be telling me that Cecily's safe and alive next," he said.
"And so she may be for all I know," Kate snapped at him. "Who is Cecily?"
"The child you were speaking of."
"What child?"
"His child," said Christopher impatiently. "Surely Geoffrey told you what became of her."
"Well, he didn't. I never heard of anyone named Cecily in my life."
"Somebody must have told you. Master John, or old Dorothy."
Kate's mind went back all at once to that first afternoon when she had stood on the battlement walk outside the long gallery looking across the courtyard to Lord Richard's tower. "Dorothy did say — " she began.
"I thought as much. What did she say?"
"She said — " Kate suddenly realized just what was coming and tried to stop; but it was too late: the words were already out of her mouth. "She said you'd killed Sir Geoffrey's daughter to get the whole inheritance for yourself — I didn't believe her," she added hastily.
Christopher Heron only shrugged his shoulders.
"Why not?" he asked. "It makes a far better tale than what really happened."
Kate frowned at him. She had always detested being laughed at, and the mysteries and uncertainties of life at Elvenwood Hall were becoming more than she could bear.
"What did happen?" she demanded bluntly.
The look that came into Christopher's eyes made her regret the question the instant she asked it. They were no longer amused, or contemptuous, or even angry — only cold, level, and as implacably stern as his brother's. He stood there before her in silence for a long moment, while the question — which seemed to Kate to grow louder and ruder with every passing second — hung unanswered in the air between them. Then he said, very slowly and deliberately:
"I'll tell you."
And Kate realized with a start that the look in his eyes had not been meant for her at all. It was himself that he had considered and judged. The "I'll tell you" did not mean that he liked or trusted her, only that he had passed a sentence on himself.
"No!" she said sharply. "Don't! I'm sorry. I shouldn't have asked you."
Christopher Heron went straight on without heeding her.
"There is one thing you ought to hear first," he said, in that deliberate voice. "It is what Geoffrey did for me. I am twenty years younger than he is. My mother was too old to have another child: she died when I was born, and my father never forgave me for it. He could no more bring himself to look at me or speak to me than — than Geoffrey can, now."
"Do you mean to say," Kate asked incredulously, "that your own father never spoke to you at all?"
"Well, I remember him telling me once that I was born damned," said Christopher calmly, "but he didn't live long enough to see how right he was. Geoffrey was the only one who cared for me. He saw to it that I got some learning, and gave me a horse — not a pony, a proper horse — and taught me to ride himself. He was a stern man in many ways, but a very kind brother too. If it hadn't been for his wife — "
"What was wrong with his wife?"
"Nothing — as far as I can tell. I never saw much of her. He didn't have a wife until five years ago, and then he married Anne Warden, God knows why. She was a little sickly thing, always ailing, and afraid of her own shadow; but Geoffrey thought the sun rose and set in her. She made him leave home and take that post in Ireland: I know she did."
"It was Queen Mary who sent Sir Geoffrey to Ireland."
"There were plenty of other men she could have sent to Ireland instead. Geoffrey didn't have to go: he went because Anne wanted it so much. For some reason she was bound and determined to get him out of the country and away from us all."
"You didn't like her, did you?"
Christopher paused, and then went on as if he had not even heard the question. Whatever sentence he had passed on himself, there were evidently some things that it did not bind him to tell her; and the nature of his private feelings was one of them.
"They stayed in Ireland until she died, and Geoffrey came home with the child. That was last winter. Cecily was four then."
This time Kate knew better than to ask him whether he had liked the child.
"Geoffrey was still grieving for Anne, and very concerned to keep Cecily happy. My sister Jennifer — she's married and lives in London — wanted to take her to bring up with her own children; but Geoffrey couldn't bear to part from her. We were afraid she'd miss her mother, and her old home, and — well, I suppose the truth is that we both fell into the way of making too much of her. Jenny said that if we didn't take care we'd ruin her between us; but Geoffrey had seen too much of taking grief out on a child, and so had I ... Then this April, Lord Warden died too, and we had to come down and settle what was to be done with the estate. Cecily ought to have stayed at home with her nurse; but she kept crying and crying to go with us, and we didn't reckon on what she might do when she got here. It was bad enough the first night, when she wouldn't go to sleep without one of us on each side of her bed singing her lullabies; but it was worse in the morning. Geoffrey had to be off by himself, working on accounts, so he gave her over to me and told me to take care of her until it was time for dinner. I didn't mind that. But there was one game she wanted to play — a silly thing we called Cecily-is-lost. I'd look away and count to a hundred while she hid somewhere, and then run up and down calling OCecilyislostwhereisCecily? until she jumped out and laughed at me. I wouldn't have cared if we'd been alone to ourselves, but we were out on the terrace by the hall, and half the household was hanging out the windows to see what the new young master would do next. I told her to come indoors and be quiet, but she only stuck out her tongue and ran away — she was very quick on her feet and harder to catch than a butterfly — and a fine fool I felt, my first day at the place, chasing her around the courtyard with Master John and old Dorothy and all the rest of them looking on and snickering up their sleeves at me. As if that mattered!"
Kate bent to pick a flake of wet moss from the folds of her skirt. She supposed that the whole thing had served Christopher right — he and his brother must have spoiled Cecily outrageously, but . . .
"Tell me," she said irrelevantly, "did she have golden eyes? Big golden eyes, almost the color of honey?"
"Cecily?" Christopher looked puzzled. "No: her eyes were gray, like Geoffrey's and mine. Why? What has that to do with it?"
"Nothing," said Kate. "I'm sorry: go on. What happened then?" r />
"By that time I didn't care what happened. All I wanted to do was to be rid of her. I shouted to Master John to see to the child — she'd ended up hiding behind him in one of the doorways — and went away by myself to walk it off by going to look at the Holy Well. Randal was always talking of the Holy Well, and old Dorothy had been crooning to Cecily about it too, the night before, while we were trying to put her to sleep.
"When I was past the Standing Stone I saw that she'd gotten away from Master John somehow and was following me. She was keeping behind the rocks, ready to run if I started after her, but I didn't. I went on to the Well without looking around, and threw my penny in the water, and had my drink; and when it came to speaking my troubles aloud, I called out that Cecily Heron was a pestiferous brat and I wished that somebody else had the charge of her. I could see her out of the corner of my eye, over by the spring, peeping between those two big stone slabs, and I knew she was listening; but I was still so angry that I didn't try to go after her. I only sat down by the edge of the path with my back turned, and waited for her to come to me. I was sure she'd come to me sooner or later if I didn't pay any heed to her, and it was better to have her up here than playing off any more of her tricks down at the Hall. I thought it was perfectly safe, too. There were the cliffs on both sides of us, and I was sitting by the path, and the curb of the well was — how did you put it? — nearly five feet off the ground. Even when I looked for her and didn't see her, I couldn't believe it. I only thought she'd found an especially good place, and was hiding again."
"You — you mean she slipped past you?"
"No. I was watching for that. She was behind me all the time. If she went anywhere, it was — " He turned his head and looked at the narrow dark opening among the rocks.
Kate caught her breath.
"But she couldn't," she said desperately. "She couldn't — it's not possible. She couldn't have climbed up and fallen. She could not have climbed up there. The carving isn't deep enough to give her a hold. I had to catch at the rim before I could get any grip myself."