“What’s that?” Phillipa asked, aiming the lantern’s wavering corona of light at a tall, tapering clay vessel mounted over a sort of brazier and connected to another vessel by means of a copper tube.
“I have no idea. I can’t begin to imagine what any of this—” He broke off abruptly and pointed to a spot in the middle of the floor. “Shine the light over there.”
Phillipa did as he asked, staring incredulously at what she saw. Scratched into the floor of packed earth was large circle containing eight spokes radiating from a central point, at the tip of each of which a mysterious symbol had been inscribed and a candle placed. In the hub stood a tall, ornate mortar filled with some sort of powder.
Hugh and Phillipa exchanged a look, and then his gaze shifted above her, toward the ceiling. “What the devil...?”
Turning, she raised her lantern, causing its light to shift and dance over dozens of writhing serpents dangling from the rafters.
She squealed, almost dropping the lantern.
“They’re dead.” Coming up behind her, Hugh wrapped his arms around her waist, his chin resting comfortably on top of her head. With a chuckle, he said, “I never would have thought to hear Phillipa de Paris screeching like a schoolgirl over a bunch of dried snakes.”
What are they for?” she asked, her heart still tripping in her chest.
“What is any of this for?” Releasing her with a reassuring pat, Hugh approached the long table and picked up the book on top of the stack. “Turba Philosophorum. Says it’s translated from the Arabic.”
“I’m not familiar with it.” Leaning over one of the workbenches, Phillipa lifted the top from an earthen pot, revealing an unidentifiable inky liquid. Another was filled with crumbly yellow sulphur, another with willow charcoal and another... “Ugh!” She quickly recovered it, wrinkling her nose. At Hugh’s questioning look, she said, “Urine, and none too fresh.”
“Hmph.” He squinted at the title of another book. “De Compositione Alchemiae by Robert of Chester.”
She shrugged. “Never heard of it. Or him.” Bracing herself, she opened the largest of the clay pots, then tilted it to display the powder within to Hugh.
“I think that’s saltpeter,” he said. “The infidels call it ‘Chinese snow.’ This—” he swirled a small container he’d just opened “—is quicksilver. I’ve seen it in Italy.”
Phillipa looked around in mystification. They had assumed Orlando’s work would be of some benefit to Queen Eleanor in her revolt against the king; otherwise why was it so shrouded in secrecy? Indeed, why had he and Istagio been brought here at all?
“Perhaps they’re developing some sort of new poison.” Hugh suggested.
They both looked toward the talisman inscribed on the floor, and then at each other.
“What’s this?” Phillipa crossed to the opposite wall, against which stood a cage of finely wrought grillwork, the type of cage valuables were kept in. “It looks new. Whatever they’re working on, they expect the results to be worth something.”
“Let’s see what’s back here,” Hugh said, heading toward the far end of the long chamber, beyond the massive stone support columns.
Phillipa followed him into the vast and unnerving darkness, her lantern held high. They passed a deep hole lined with stone. She peered into it; a drip of water rang in its depths. “A well? Down here?”
Hugh nodded. “Lots of castles have wells in the cellar so that there’s a source of fresh water in the event of a siege.”
“Ow!” Phillipa hopped on one foot, the other smarting.
Hugh spun around and came to her. “Are you all right, love?”
Love... “I stepped on something. Something small and hard.”
He massaged the sole of her foot as he looked around. “Here it is.” Plucking something off the earthen floor, he stood and held it close to the lantern.
“What’s that?” Phillipa asked as Hugh rolled the little iron ball around in his palm.
He shrugged. “I’ve seen children play a game with little balls of stone or clay. Perhaps this is naught but a game piece.”
“What’s it doing down here?”
Hugh shook his head. “The more I see, the more perplexed I am.” He tucked the little ball into his sleeve and took her hand, urging her to continue toward the rear of the vast chamber. “Is that a door in the corner?” It was, but all they found behind it was a garderobe. On the wall nearby was a rack that Hugh told her had probably held instruments of punishment at one time. He pointed to the ceiling. “Aim your light right there, on that beam.”
A pulley had been attached to the beam, she saw.
“They would tie someone’s arms behind his back and hang him up high,” he said, “possibly weighted with rocks, then drop him, dislocating his—”
“Yes, I think I get the idea,” she said.
“Come, let’s finish this. It’s hot as blazes down here.”
It was—sweat prickled Phillipa’s scalp and trickled beneath her nightclothes—but she felt chilled to the marrow by what her lantern illuminated next. “Hugh, my God, what’s that? Is that for...”
“For torture, aye.”
It was a massive iron chair fitted with leather straps and shackles, the whole thing blanketed with a thick layer of dust.
“I’ve never seen one of these outside of the Rhineland,” Hugh said. “We’d find them in the cellars of castles we seized. Frederick Barbarossa was very keen on torture. Even petty thieves would get the rack, or be strapped into this thing, to get them to confess.” He pointed to a blackened depression in the dirt floor beneath the chair. “A fire would be built underneath—”
“Oh, how awful.”
“‘Twas meant to be awful. I’ve never known a man to be tortured who didn’t eventually crack.”
“How can people do such things to other people? Is there no spark of human compassion in their hearts? Even if a man is your enemy, he’s still a man.”
“Those who have that spark of compassion assume it’s in everyone,” Hugh said grimly. “‘Twould astound you if you knew what seemingly ordinary people are capable of doing to others—and not just to their enemies.”
The unaccustomed gravity of his tone made Phillipa wonder if he weren’t speaking from personal experience, but before she could formulate an inquiry along those lines, he pointed to a spot on the wall next to the chair and said, “Ah, look, a sachentage. You don’t see many of these.”
Phillipa shone her lantern on a small, dusty iron frame bolted at right angles into the wall of rock. In the center of this frame, connected to it by chains, hung two hinged halves of an iron collar lined with spikes.
“The idea here,” Hugh said, fitting the two halves of the collar together, “is to force the prisoner to stand interminably, which prevents him from sitting or lying down, or from getting any sleep—if he dozes off, the spikes will wake him up quick enough. If one’s jailers are particularly merciless or determined to break one down, they withhold food and water, as well. A man can’t last more than a few days without water, and death by thirst is a painful way to go.”
Phillipa shuddered, imagining the agony of being locked into such a device day after day... “I would tell them whatever they wanted to know immediately,” she said. “I could never bear up under such punishment.”
“You’d be surprised what you can bear if you only approach it the right way,” Hugh said thoughtfully as he turned the cruel iron collar over in his hands, leaving fingerprints in the dust. “Pain can be transcended. The trick is to rise above it, as if you were floating in the air, watching it happen to someone else.”
Phillipa’s gaze lit on the ugly, pinched wound where his right thumb had once been. He placed his hand on the block as calmly as you please... Didn’t make a sound when the thumb came off...
“Hugh,” she asked quietly, “how did you get those scars on your back?”
His eyes grew opaque as he contemplated the sachentage. “‘Twas a long time ago. I scarcely
remember.”
“Hugh...”
“We’ve seen all there is to see down here.” He dropped the collar and took her hand. “Come. Let’s go to bed.”
* * *
Much later, as they lay together in the dark, snugged up front to back, waiting for the veil of sleep to float down over them, Phillipa whispered, “I know you don’t want to talk about it, and I shouldn’t press the issue, but I can’t stop wondering...” She drew in an unsteady breath. “I think it’s because my feelings have gotten so tangled up with you.” This was the first time she’d mentioned her feelings for him since they’d agreed to be friends, although they consumed her every waking thought. “I’ll only ask this once, and you needn’t answer if you really don’t want to, but...why were you flogged, Hugh?”
The silence was so deep and lingering that Phillipa concluded he must have fallen asleep. She closed her eyes on a sigh, thinking she really ought to get some sleep herself.
“‘Twas because I cried for my mother.” His voice was so scratchy-soft she wondered if she’d imagined it, but then she felt his arm tighten around her and she realized she hadn’t.
“I don’t understand,” she murmured.
His chest expanded against her back; his breath ruffled her hair. “My mother died of childbed fever after Joanna was born. I’d loved her so much. She was...” Phillipa felt his head shake slowly. “She was my mother. I was seven. She was everything to me. I couldn’t stop crying.”
“Of course not.” She grasped his hand. “You were a child.”
“My sire wanted me to be a man. He said I was weak, that I needed better command over my emotions if I was to become the greatest knight in Christendom. He told me he hadn’t shed a single tear over my mother, and was proud of it. I pointed out that he’d been tupping his whore when my mother died, in pain and delirium, crying out his name, and that I despised him and hoped to God I grew up to be nothing like him. I told him to send away Regnaud, the master at arms who’d been training me in the arts of war, because I didn’t want to be a knight anymore—I’d rather be brought up in a monastery and trained for the priesthood.”
So stunned was Phillipa that he would disclose so much that she was loath to speak, lest she discourage him from continuing.
“My father was...displeased,” Hugh said with a harsh little laugh. “I don’t think anyone had defied him in a very long time, if ever. Regnaud had been chafing at the bit for some time to discipline me with his...not a whip, exactly. ‘Twas a steel-tipped thong meant to open the flesh, not just leave welts.”
Phillipa closed her eyes, praying for the strength to listen to this.
“Regnaud thought I needed toughening up. After my tears and defiance, my father agreed. He said he loved me too much to let me wallow in my weakness—that a sapling needed to feel the bite of the pruning saw if it was to grow up straight and strong. He gave Regnaud permission to tie me to a post and give me a half-a-dozen lashes. He said I would thank him someday.”
“Oh, Hugh.” Phillipa tried to turn around, so as to embrace him, but he tucked her more firmly against him, as if he didn’t want to face her as he recounted these melancholy events.
“I cried, of course,” Hugh said. “I was only seven, and it was excruciating. My father told Regnaud to give me six more lashes for having cried. He said I ought to take it like a man, without so much as flinching. After that, he gave Regnaud a free hand with the whip, with standing instructions to double the lashes if I showed any reaction.”
“That’s when you learned how to...rise above the pain, wasn’t it?”
“Aye. ‘Twas almost as if I would hover over myself, watching the whip tear into me, and feeling it...but in another realm, where I could keep myself apart from the worst of it. It’s difficult to describe.”
“No, you’re...you’re doing fine. It’s hard for me to understand, though, what kept you at Wexford until you were eighteen. Weren’t you tempted to leave before that?”
“Aye, long before that. But there was Joanna to think about. She was a willful little thing, and always earning our sire’s wrath.”
“He didn’t have her whipped, did he?”
“Nay, but he beat her from time to time, after locking me in the cellar so I couldn’t stop him. I told him I’d kill him if he ever hurt her, and that I didn’t care if they hanged me for it or not. I think he believed me, because he never beat her too badly. When she was eleven, he sent her to London to serve the wife of Baron Gilbert de Montfichet. I was dubbed shortly thereafter.”
“And because Joanna didn’t need you around for protection anymore, you felt free to leave Wexford and turn mercenary.”
“That’s right. And I promised myself I would never again be crushed beneath the wheels of anyone else’s expectations of me—that I would go my own way, unencumbered by any demands but my own.”
Phillipa nodded, understanding at last the forces that made him so fiercely autonomous and self-contained. “Yes,” she said soberly. “I would have done the very same thing.”
Chapter 19
“I have an announcement to make,” Clare informed her guests at the conclusion of supper the next evening—another open-air repast in the outer bailey, not in deference to any holiday this time, but to a wave of brutal July heat. “Tomorrow morning at dawn, I’ll be leaving to visit an old and dear friend...”
Murmurs of protest arose. Aldous, Phillipa noted, seemed as surprised by the news of his sister’s impending departure as did everyone else.
“No, no, you mustn’t think I’m abandoning you,” she said with a cool little smile. “My friend lives just to the south of London. I’ll only be gone a few days...”
Istagio, loitering near the drawbridge to the inner bailey, got that lascivious glitter in his eye that could only mean one thing—he’d spied the object of his unrequited lust, Edmee. Tracking his gaze, Phillipa saw the maid emerging from the cookhouse with two jugs of wine. The corpulent Italian hurried toward her and blocked her path as she walked toward the tables; she paused, looking beyond him with an expression of listless forbearance. He pointed toward the gatehouse; according to Edmee, he was forever trying to talk her into walking with him along the river. She shook her head no, indicating the jugs she held and nodding toward the tables. He whispered into her ear, glancing around as if wary of being overheard, and opened the leather case slung across his chest to show her something. She stared unblinkingly at whatever it was for several long seconds, then handed her jugs to a passing maidservant and let Istagio take her hand and escort her across the bailey.
Also observing this exchange was Orlando, sitting across from Phillipa, who caught Istagio’s eye and gave him a furious little shake of the head—curious, since Orlando always seemed so imperturbable. Istagio waved his hand dismissively as he led Edmee toward the gatehouse. His expression grim, Orlando braced his hands on the table as if to rise, but hesitated when he realized Clare was still holding forth; it wouldn’t do to bolt from the table while his hostess was speaking. He fiddled with the ties of his felt cap, stealing furtive glances toward the couple until they disappeared through the gatehouse.
“...and so I trust everyone will continue to enjoy my hospitality even though I won’t be here,” Clare was saying. “While I’m gone, I entrust my brother with the keys to Halthorpe Castle—” these she removed from around her own neck and draped around his “—as well as responsibility for the comfort and happiness of my guests. Should you need anything while I’m gone, just ask Aldous.”
As soon as Clare took her seat, Orlando leapt up from his bench and darted toward the gatehouse, nearly tripping on the hem of his long tunic. Capturing Phillipa’s gaze, Hugh cocked his head toward the departing metaphysician and raised his eyebrows.
He was right; this was the perfect opportunity for them to question Orlando about the things they’d seen in the cellar last night—alone, Castle Halthorpe being a place where privacy was at a premium. They rose together from the table, to the consternation
of Aldous, sitting next to Phillipa, who grabbed the tapering sleeve of her blue satin tunic to ask in a terse whisper where she was going—with him.
“Just for a walk along the river,” she said, prying his fingers from her sleeve. “I’ll be back before the sun sets, and then you and I can go inside and have a nice game of backgammon in a quiet corner.” Aldous preferred backgammon to chess, which she suspected he didn’t understand well enough to play.
He sighed grumpily and raised his wine cup to his mouth.
By the time Hugh and Phillipa had made it through the gatehouse and across the moat, Orlando was well ahead of them, holding his tunic up off the grass as he scurried down a grassy, tree-studded embankment toward the patch of woods that hid the river from view. Hugh took Phillipa’s hand and they sprinted after the Italian, calling out, “Signore Orlando! Wait!”
Orlando paused, looking from his pursuers to the path through the woods that led to the river, and back again.
“Good evening, Orlando,” greeted Hugh as they approached him. “Mind if we have a word with you?”
“I...er...”
“Just for a moment,” Phillipa put in. “We want to ask you about something.”
“Er...perhaps later,” said Orlando, edging toward the path.
Hugh said, “It has to do with the cellar.”
Orlando stilled, his gaze snapping to them.
“We were down there last night,” said Phillipa. “And we have some questions about your...experiments.”
Nodding limply, the Italian crossed to a tree stump nearby and sat, wiping his damp brow on his tunic sleeve. “S...I thought you would.”
Hugh and Phillipa exchanged a look. Why would he have anticipated their curiosity? Had he found out they were in the cellar last night?
“We saw some things,” Phillipa said, “that were most perplexing. You’ve always put me off when I’ve tried to ask you what you’re doing down there, but now I simply must know.”
Lords of Conquest Boxed Set Page 59
