The Garderobe of Death

by Howard of Warwick

  Caput VI

  Half past Seven: Lady to Castle

  Lady Foella's perambulations of Castle Grosmal were inconclusive. Leaving the minstrels’ gallery, she followed her own idea of the route down to the main hall. She even took a couple of flights of steps downwards before ending up back in the gallery. She peered down to the hall once more, but Robert had gone. The place was deserted.

  Growling her frustration she set off again, this time turning right at every opportunity.

  Gallery again.

  Next time it was left.

  Gallery.

  The apparent impossibility of her journey did nothing to assuage Foella’s violent temper. She seriously considered jumping over the parapet, but the drop to the hall floor was just a touch too far. She screamed a few times for Eleanor. If she could only get the stupid girl into the hall, she could jump on to a servant for a nice soft landing.

  No response. She set off once more, determined to escape this maze if she had to batter the walls down with her bare hands.

  Following exactly the same route as before, she found herself in a different corridor. She stopped and glared at it, daring it to be there.

  The impudent passage defied her, even presenting a door she hadn't seen before. Knowing that this would be the exit she marched towards it, grabbed the iron ring handle and threw the thing open, ready to berate whoever was on the other side.

  It took her a few moments to realise that the floor she stepped on to sloped. It sloped viciously downwards, and it took her feet from under her. Sliding down a polished shoot on her aristocratic backside, Foella screamed.

  She screamed in surprise and in shock and of course in anger. How dare this castle treat her in this manner? How dare there be a slope behind a door? How dare the slope make her fall – didn't it know who she was? How dare the world be created like this? If she'd met God at that moment, she'd have wrung his neck.

  …

  Her slippery slope came to an abrupt end, depositing her on a large log. What the hell was a log doing in her way? She would have it burned later.

  She was sitting astride the log in a most undignified manner. Good job she wasn’t in company. Foella looked for something else to put her feet on and saw another log. She widened her gaze and saw more logs on the floor of this place. In fact, all she could see was logs. This unexpected sight calmed her slightly and she looked around.

  She had fallen into an inner courtyard of some sort. It was a square about fifty feet across, open to the sky and entirely floored with logs. Not carefully laid and jointed logs to create an interesting feature. These logs had been simply thrown into this space and left where they landed. If this was the log store for the castle, it was as poorly designed and managed as the rest of the place.

  Choosing a log to the side Foella clambered off her mount and pushed her skirts back down over her legs, She could have sworn she heard a brief moan of disappointment from behind a particularly large pile of logs which occupied the centre of the space.

  Not wanting to investigate further, her ladyship staggered to her feet, balanced on the large timber. She looked out into the dull winter light of the log yard and tried to see how the hell she got back inside.

  All around her were the steeply rising walls of the castle which kept this place in permanent shadow. They were dotted with the irregular arrow slits and just plain gaps that set Castle Grosmal apart from anything she'd experienced before. As far as she could see there was no way out. The ramp she'd slid down was as smooth as ice and far too steep to be climbed. The gaps in the walls were too high to be reached and the walls were all encompassing.

  Events had gone badly. They were still going in that direction and looked likely to carry on.

  Foella scanned the site for any sign of another entrance or exit. Her attention was drawn to the large pile of logs in the middle of the space. Peering at it more closely, she wondered if it was actually some sort of building. It resembled a simple collection of old logs that had been left rotting for so long they had taken root and happened to have grown into the shape of shed.

  Then again, perhaps it had been built as a shed and was reverting to logs.

  Not wanting to think about it too much, Foella realised the place was starting to give her the creeping shivers. Picking her way gently over discarded lumps of rotten and rotting logs and vegetation, she made towards the nearest outcrop of stone walling, some ten feet to the left.

  The floor of this yard was becoming a small wood in its own right. Mounds of sawdust, bits of unwanted wood, chippings and seeds were starting to create a little world. It wasn’t a pleasant world, shaded from the strictures of the weather and the goodness of the sunshine. Things were growing which didn’t look like they ought to be alive.

  She tripped and stumbled, and once trod on something that seemed to move of its own accord. Eventually she grasped the solid stonework of the castle, some of which naturally crumbled away in her hands. Seeing that one direction was no better than any other, she started to shuffle along to her right.

  'I wouldn’t go that way if I were you, my lady,’ said a very civilised voice which none the less made Foella nearly jump back out of her skirt.

  She spun round as best she could spin on the wobbly ground, and saw a man standing by the shed.

  'What?’ was all she could think of.

  'I said I wouldn’t go that way if I were you, my lady,’ the voice repeated. Foella relaxed a little as she recognised the gentle and rounded tones of a well-spoken but rather dim-sounding Saxon. 'The floor does get rather treacherous in that direction. And there’s a bit of a bog in the corner.’

  This was the sort of voice Foella had associated with in the days before the Normans. It was the voice of the rich Saxon idiots that her father had tried to marry her off to. At least the invasion got her out of marrying that moron Douglas – very good blood, but as poor as some poor people she’d nearly seen once. From a distance. Apparently his name meant ‘dweller by the dark stream’, and if Foella had her way she’d have drowned him in it. Not suitable material at all.

  She found herself feeling nostalgic for the gentle touch of a Saxon noble, or at least for the way they always asked first. Still, business was business. Now she needed a Norman.

  Anyway, this fellow didn't look like a rich Saxon. He looked more like one of the logs, dressed in brown from head to foot with moss growing here and there. She couldn't tell his age, but he wasn't far off her own twenty.

  Then she remembered the disarray of her dress when she appeared on the log shed floor.

  'How long have you been here?’ she demanded.

  'Oh, months, I think. One loses track really.’

  This was not the answer Foella had been expecting.

  'Months?’

  'Probably. What’s the date today?’

  'Erm.’ Foella had never been very good with numbers. 'January, I think.’

  'Missed Christmas again, then,’ said the man.

  Foella now gingerly made her way back towards the log shed. At least this strange person should know the way out.

  Noticing the direction she was taking, the man spoke again. 'And I wouldn’t come this way either if I were you, my lady.’

  Foella’s natural reaction to instructions came to the fore. 'Just who the hell do you think are you, what are you doing here and why can’t I walk where I please?’

  'Who am I?’ said the man as if the question had never occurred to him before. 'They call me Logs, but I don’t think that’s my name.’ He paused for a moment, thinking hard. 'I live here.’ Another pause. 'And if you walk straight towards me you will almost certainly step on my dead crows.’

  ‘Mad as a Norman,’ Foella mumbled as she ignored his directions. Like so many others, this soul had obviously been humiliated by the invaders and left to rot. In his case, literally.

  Stepping reasonably carefully through the rough ground of the courtyard Foella made her way towards the rotting Saxon in the middle of his rot
ting little kingdom. She was brought up short by a pile of dead crows.

  'Ahhyeuch,’ said Foella as the smell inveigled its way into her nostrils. She skipped quickly around them and up to the man. She did think for a moment of asking why he had a pile of dead crows, but quickly decided it would cause more trouble than it was worth. She probably didn’t want to know anyway.

  'How,’ she panted, 'do I get out of here?’

  'Why would you want to do that?’ said the man in obvious puzzlement.

  'Well,’ said Foella using her talk-to-an-idiot voice, 'it is cold, damp, smelly and dirty. There is no food, no clothing, no fire and no servant. And I think you may be mad.’

  'Ah,’ said the man, accepting this completely.

  'So?’

  'So what?’

  'Tell me how I get out of here before I scream for a guard or hit you with something myself.’

  The man seemed to pause for several moments, carefully considering this plethora of offers. He weighed up, in what was left of his mind, which would be for the best.

  'Would you really do that?’ he asked, checking the situation.

  'Yes,’ said Foella in a very convincing voice.

  'Oh well,’ his mind made up, 'the guards come every now and again and throw their trees out of that hole.’ The man gestured to a door some fifteen feet above the ground, below which was a patch of bare and clear earth. Around its opening the remnants of branches could still be seen, as if it was a messy eater.

  ‘What about the door I fell through?’ Foella pointed at her arrival gate.

  ‘Yes, they used to use that, but then some builders built something on the other side and they stopped. Anyway, I then chop the trees up into logs and push them down that hole.’ He pointed again towards a hole much nearer to them and a lot closer to the ground.

  'And that’s the way out, is it?’ Foella asked.

  'Don’t know,’ said the man, 'but it’s the hole that eats my logs.’

  Despite herself Foella was curious. She had to know some more about this man.

  'Have you always been a logsman?’ she said.

  This obviously caused some trouble in the Saxon mind. The answer took a while to arrive.

  'Ah no, actually I don’t think so. I used to live in there,’ he gestured to the walls, 'but it all looks different now.’

  'You mean you used to live in the castle?’ This all made some sense.

  'Only it wasn’t really a castle then, I think.’ Logs seemed perfectly at ease relating his past as if it was all a new revelation to him. 'More a sort of house thing.’

  'Before the Normans came, then,’ said Foella in what she thought was an encouraging voice, 'this was your house. Probably quite a big house.’

  'Yes, I think that’s about right. And then the French types came along, knocked down the house and gave me the job of logman here.’ Logs sounded as if these events had been a marvellous career development handed to him on a plate by those nice Normans.

  'That’s about all there is to tell, eh, Logs?’ said another voice. Foella was getting a bit fed up with jumping all the time.

  The new voice belonged to a tall figure who emerged from the log shed and who Foella felt strangely sure had witnessed her fall and done nothing about it. It was equally Saxon and sophisticated, but a lot more educated. And devious.

  'Allow me to escort you from this horrid place, my lady.’ The tall man took two steps forward, grasped Foella’s arm quite firmly and almost carried her over to the log hole. The grip on her arm was strong and the man was well built. He was dressed far better than Log, and his face was a lot less vacant. He looked like a man who was used to being in control. He was older and more grizzled, as if he had been through a lot just to get here. Foella considered getting here was pretty much a failure, so no wonder the man looked grizzled.

  'Just a minute,’ Foella began, thinking that for a log dump this courtyard was strangely crowded. Before she got any further with her enquiries she found herself at the lip of the dark hole which wormed its way into the rotten body of the Castle Grosmal. Her balance deserted her, and only the strong grip of the tall stranger prevented her from falling.

  'Logs is quite happy doing his logging, my lady. We look after him and there is no need for you to be concerned about his wellbeing.’

  ‘We?’ Foella thought about saying that she was not in the least bit concerned about his wellbeing, but decided that there probably wasn’t time.

  The man ignored her question. 'At the bottom of the hole you will see a door to your right. If you go through that and then take three turns to the right, you will emerge on the outer wall by the gatehouse. And my lady?’

  'Yes?’ Foella felt somehow completely helpless in this man’s grasp, and then realised she was.

  'I wouldn’t stay in the castle if I were you. I’d go home now.’

  'I’m sure you would,’ Foella found her tongue, 'but I shall do as I please. Let me go.’

  'Please take my advice seriously. You are one of us.’

  ‘I most certainly am not,’ Foella snapped back, with a frosty glare around the log store.

  ‘I mean a Saxon.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘And it doesn’t do to mix with these invaders. They are doing great damage to our country and their time will come.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I cannot give you details. That would be to risk discovery.’

  ‘Discovery?’ Foella sounded surprised. ‘You’re in the castle log store, you’re bound to be discovered,’ she pointed out.

  ‘Not that sort of discovery.’ The man was losing patience. ‘The discovery of what is happening.’

  ‘Why, what is happening?’

  He squinted mysteriously. ‘That I cannot tell you.’

  ‘I think you’ve been in the log store too long.’ Foella cast a suspicious glance at him.

  ‘Just because the Normans have invaded doesn’t mean the matter is closed,’ the man explained.

  ‘Too right it doesn’t.’

  ‘And there are those of us who are prepared to take action.’

  ‘I was taking action until the idiot got killed.’

  ‘Henri de Turold?’ The man asked.

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Many things come to the log store.’

  Foella looked about.

  ‘Oh, for goodness sake,’ the man said, ‘not literally.’

  ‘Well, what then?’

  ‘Information.’

  ‘Well, if you get any information about other Norman nobles of marriageable age, let me know.’

  ‘You’re planning to marry one of them?’ The man was disgusted.

  ‘Not for long,’ Foella defended herself.

  ‘Ah, I see,’ the man returned to his mysterious tone, ‘a devious plan and one demanding great personal sacrifice on your part.’

  ‘I hope not,’ Foella was pretty clear on that. ‘You’re being very mysterious,’ she complained.

  ‘I’m trying to be mysterious. Things are mysterious. And if you don’t take care, some of the mystery might rub off on you,’ he nodded very significantly.

  Foella started nodding too, in sympathy. ‘I see, well, really must be going.’

  ‘Don’t forget, my lady.’

  ‘How could I?’

  ‘Beware the Normans. We’ll watch out for you now we know your plan, but you watch out for us.’

  ‘Oh I will, don’t worry about that. Now if you would kindly let me go?’

  The man kindly let her go.

  …

  She fell straight into the hole and landed with a bump at the bottom, fortunately into a large heap of discarded leaves and bark. She looked back up the way she had come and saw the last of a covering of some sort being put in place over the hole.

  ‘Wait a minute, do you know who killed de Turold?’ She got no answer.

  Foella waited for a few moments to let her eyes get used to the gloom. What had he said? Door
to the right and then three to the right, or on the right or something? Or three doors to the right?

  There was a faint scrabbling in the dark and leaves were pushed aside by a creature of some bulk. Foella was in the dark. She couldn’t see where she was going. Her main target was dead and she couldn’t identify any other opportunities at the moment. The whole visit had been awful and this morning had taken it not just downhill, but to the very the bottom. Into a bog. A bog of floating logs.

  There were few times in her life when she craved comfort and companionship, but this was turning into one of them. All she wanted to do, right at this moment, was go home. She knew, of course, that her home no longer existed. That all of those who might have offered her comfort and companionship were dead. That there was no longer any home for a Saxon to go to.

  Such thoughts and cogitations might give birth to a justifiable sob, if not a few moments of understandable tearfulness and self-pity.

  They just made Foella really, really angry.

  Caput VII

  Eight-o-clock: Castle Grosmal

  The saying ‘don't judge a privy by its hole’ did not apply to Castle Grosmal. The outside was a shoddy shambles, and any hope that this hid an interior of efficiency and quality was quickly dispelled. If the exterior was an example of the unqualified using the unsuitable to construct the unstable, the theme carried through the gates, where it met a philosophy of ‘it'll do’.

  If great buildings were going to travel down the centuries, and Hermitage thought the new Cathedral in Lincoln was a fine example, they would be leaving Castle Grosmal well behind. It would be lucky to make it to next Michaelmas.

  The pointlessness of most of human activity struck Hermitage forcibly as he gazed about. His thoughts leaped forward, and he imagined that in a thousand years people would look on his time as he looked on the Romans. And they would marvel. They would think great craftsmen had worked tirelessly to create the masterpieces which still stood. They'd have no idea about piles of rubbish like Castle Grosmal and useless builders like Chirk. They’d be lost to history. Good job too.