It was her first proper sleep since their departure and she feels better for the rest. Indeed, they all seem to have relaxed. Rafe’s mood improved the minute his mother allowed him to abandon the hated dress, which Hope is almost certain he ripped on purpose. She didn’t say anything. Though none of them has articulated it, there appears to be no evidence of them having been followed. But a threat that doesn’t show its face is all the more sinister and they are still strung out with worry.
They load the cart with their few belongings and the supplies that Gifford bought at market: a large bag of grain, a barrel of salted fish and some other parcelled items. Hope is preparing to get onto the cart and Melis is on the mounting block, one foot already in the stirrup, to climb onto the piebald when Rafe begins to complain.
‘I’ve ridden pillion all the way. I want to ride by myself. I’m a good rider, aren’t I?’ His mouth is set stubbornly tight.
Hester puts up no resistance. ‘Very well, sweetheart, as long as you’re tethered to the grey. You don’t mind sitting in the cart with us, do you, Melis?’
They are all relieved he is safe, Hope as much as her sisters, and it is understandable, given all he has been through, but Hope still thinks Hester should indulge him less. She wishes Melis would say something, as Hester might listen to her, but Melis is a law unto herself.
Rafe takes the reins, his expression transformed. Hope, making much of her disguise, leaps onto the cart, holding out her hand to each of her sisters in turn as they clamber into the unwieldy vehicle, before she takes her place at the front beside Gifford.
They move away. The castle, a vast edifice high above, seems to watch their progress as they wind through the jumbled streets of Ludlow, alert for anything suspicious. The houses soon thin out until they are in the open countryside, where there are few places to hide.
The sky, a merciless blue, heralds yet another airless day. Hope has abandoned the wool jacket, wearing just a shirt and breeches, sun falling across her back, like spilled blood. Thankful for the wide-brimmed straw hat that protects her face, she arranges her handkerchief beneath it to protect her nape and draws her cuffs down over her hands: a few minutes exposed and they would turn dark as medlar jelly. They pass gilded fields of wheat. The verges throb with life, the song of crickets, the scuffle of rodents, and there is not a spot of shade, only wobbling pools of disappearing liquid in the track ahead and parched hills that roll out before them towards the distant Welsh mountains, purple and hazy.
She has the sense of moving further and further from civilization, towards a daunting nothingness, so she trains her attention on the rhythmic plod and trundle, the hard bench beneath her. Keeping an eye on the position of the sun, to hold her in the world, she arranges the days in obedient rows in her mind: it is the sixth day of August and four days since they left Orchard Cottage.
Before noon they enter an immense forest, its gloom a welcome reprieve from the relentless brightness. Smooth loam softens the motion of the cart, its mulchy scent rising as they move over it. Trees tower above, where birds flit and chat, light leaking through in channels to stipple the ground. The path narrows, winding and complicated, low branches forcing them to duck. For the first time since they left, calm falls over her, making her feel distant from her mistakes, as if they happened in another lifetime.
They pass round ham, bread and cheese, and a thin brew of beer, not wanting to stop, sensing their destination now. She notices Hester making notes on a fold of paper and asks what they are for.
‘I’m marking points on the route.’ Hester appears different, the strain filched from her eyes. ‘You know the story of Theseus and the minotaur?’
Hope does not, or can’t remember, but doesn’t want to seem foolish, so she nods as if everything makes sense when nothing really does.
They return to their comfortable silence, moving deeper and deeper into the forest. Melis has fallen asleep, her head resting on Hester’s shoulder, but is jolted awake when the cart comes to an abrupt halt.
A dark shape jumps into the path ahead.
Hope cries out, startled.
It is a creature, man-shaped yet monstrous, grey eyes staring from a dark face and great mats of knotted hair falling in clots over its shoulders. It is clothed but in rags, like streamers.
Hester grabs Rafe by the waist, pulling him from the pony’s back into the cart where they all cower together, waiting for the creature to move or speak or do something.
Inexplicably, Gifford laughs. ‘That’s only Hywel. Harmless, he is.’ He picks up the left-over remnants of their food and jumps down, walking towards the creature, who takes them, mumbling something incoherent and scurrying away into the undergrowth.
‘Hywel’s nothing to worry about. Just a vagrant who likes to keep himself to himself,’ says Gifford, as he returns. ‘My daughter, Margie, leaves food out for him, so he won’t starve. Mind you, wouldn’t think it to look at him, but he can hit a sparrow with a slingshot at twenty paces, so he finds enough to keep heart and soul together.’
‘So, he’s some kind of hermit?’ says Hester.
‘’S right, mistress. Been about here a long time. I remember him when my Margie was still a girl and he was not a young man even then.’
Hope wonders what kind of man Hywel might once have been, whether he had a family, a trade. She tries to imagine what it would be like to discard the past, like an old coat, what could have caused the choice – madness or shame. Maybe he had done a terrible thing.
‘He won’t tell anyone about us, will he?’ Hester sounds firm.
‘Oh, no, mistress, no chance of that. There’s no one for miles. And Hywel doesn’t like company.’
Hester seems satisfied as her expression mellows, and she fields questions from Rafe about how to kill a bird with a slingshot. ‘I imagine it must take a great deal of skill,’ she tells him.
It is not long before they arrive at a fence too high to see over and a gate, tied open, giving on to the lodge. Hope doesn’t know what she had imagined, but not this.
It is an imposing brick house, drenched in sun, tall as the surrounding trees with four symmetrical rows of windows, shuttered tight. The windows increase in size towards the top floors, giving the whole place an ungainly air, like a beautiful woman whose head is too large. The decoration in her hat is a dovecot set on the highest point of the steep slate roof.
A sweep of stone steps rises to a central door, a great studded slab of oak. And high above, right at the top, is a large wooden balcony where vines that have wound their way up the face of the building are woven through its balustrade, like garlands.
A dog barks lazily as they ride into a large fenced enclosure with a scattering of outbuildings and a paddock, where a few goats and a grizzled mule are huddled in a patch of shade cast by the barn.
‘Goodness!’ says Hester, seeming as surprised as Hope. ‘I hadn’t thought it would be so …’ She doesn’t finish and both sisters seem to have noticed that what at a distance had seemed excessively grand is unkempt now they are closer. A few panes are broken in the windows, like missing teeth, and the bricks are deeply pocked and crooked. Plants have seeded in the mortar and the vines run amok up the walls, interwoven with other climbing plants, all fighting for supremacy.
They dismount and a woman appears from the barn. She is as tall as a man, plainly dressed, with a skein of sun-bleached hair coiled into a knot and stabbed through with a long pin. She approaches them but seems to cast her eyes away as if the visitors are too bright to look at. It takes Hope a few moments to realize that she must be blind.
Gifford introduces her as his granddaughter, Lark. They free the grey from the cart, and Lark takes him, with the pony, into the shade. ‘So, who are you, then?’ she asks the piebald, producing a carrot, which she snaps in two, offering half to each.
Hope finds she cannot drag her gaze away from the strange girl.
Gifford is swinging a ring of keys from his hand. He leads the way up the steps, unlocks the
door and they are swallowed into the shady interior. As Hope’s eyes adjust to the gloom she feels, as the heavy door swings shut, a palpable sense of relief to be somewhere safe at last.
They are in a large, badly lit hall. Hope imagines it was once hung with tapestries but its walls are bare now, save for a few abandoned pikes arranged above the large stone fireplace, which is empty except for a nest that must have fallen down the chimney. It contains the broken blue shell of what looks like a robin’s egg.
A large white cat darts by, disappearing up a flight of wooden stairs that rises to a gallery. The place has a sad, neglected atmosphere, and several hulking pieces of dark brown furniture squat about the room, filmed with a coating of dust.
A door bangs, and a woman emerges from behind the stairs. She introduces herself as Margie, ‘With a hard g,’ she insists. She is solid, with a frizz of red hair and freckled, damp skin, like cheese left out in the sun.
They follow her up the stairs, past a small chapel that is on the turn of the second flight. ‘I’ve put you at the top,’ she says. ‘It’s safer up there and you have the view. These rooms,’ she says, of the firmly closed doors on the middle landings, ‘haven’t been used in years.’
At the top of the stairs they see the small carcass of a dead finch, tiny claws furled around an invisible twig. Margie scoops it into the pocket of her apron. ‘Cat brings them in.’
Behind the first of three doors at the top is a large bedroom with a sagging ceiling and an enormous canopied bed. Hope runs her finger over the top of the bed head. It is dusty and the windowsills are silted with dead insects, a few flies but mostly bees, and she itches to clean the place.
‘There’s another small bedroom next to this,’ says Margie. ‘But you may prefer to be together. This bed’s certainly big enough.’
‘This room’ll do for us.’ Hester flings down her jacket, pulling off her boots and stockings and abandoning them on the floor.
‘I could take the small room,’ Hope suggests, but Hester is firm in her insistence that they stay together.
It is hardly surprising.
The third door off the top landing leads to a large, bright chamber that Margie calls the ‘blue room’, most likely because of the ceiling, which is a grimy blue and flecked with faded stars. There is a chimneypiece on the far wall, where an old clock squats in a niche, measuring out thimblefuls of time with an insistent tick. It is already almost seven, yet outside there is no sign of dusk.
A lone bee loops lazily round the space, escaping when Margie opens the doors onto the balcony, from where they can see far over the tops of the trees that spread out in a blanket of endless green.
‘At least from up here we’ll know if anyone’s approaching,’ says Hester, who has unpinned her hair, shaken it out, and pads about the balcony barefoot.
Hope looks out in silence. She can see Lark far below, herding the goats into the barn. It is that still moment of the evening, when the light gleams and everything sharpens as if summer is holding its breath, waiting for something to happen.
Rafe insists upon his mother lifting him up so he can look down. He leans precariously over the balustrade. Hester is so slight, Hope fears he will slip from her grip and fall.
To her relief, Hester hauls him in, puts him down and, suddenly serious, turns to Margie. ‘Dr Cotton told me there was a priest-hole somewhere here. Will you show me?’
Back in the blue room, Margie crouches in the fireplace, heaving away the iron back-plate to reveal an empty alcove behind. They squat to peer in but there isn’t anything to see, just a dark space the size of a tomb. There is nothing on the outside of the house, with its perfect symmetry, each window carefully placed, that suggests the possibility of this hiding-hole.
‘You won’t make me go in there.’ This is almost the first thing Melis has said since they left Ludlow that morning.
‘You may have no choice.’ Hester’s tone is blunt, like a heavy object dropped on stone.
They stand, wrapped in the swirl of their private thoughts, staring at the hole without speaking for some time.
Felton
Felton has frantically searched Oxford and the surrounding villages for two days, but Bloor is nowhere to be found. He had lost him after the incident with Dr Cotton and has been searching for him since. Time presses. No one of Bloor’s description has been seen at any of the inns, or the stews or the back-street taverns where the wastrels flock.
He even returned to Littlemore Manor, crouching unseen in the woods beyond the gate, to see if Bloor had been informed of Dr Cotton’s death and gone to pay his respects. The only activity he witnessed there was the arrival of a draper’s cart and the unloading of several bolts of black material – funeral hangings, certainly.
It is Sunday now and he walks from church to church, in the hope of sighting his quarry among the worshippers, but the trail is dead. Walking back to the Lamb and Flag, a hunched and cheerless figure, he is plagued by the thought of returning to George to confess that he has not only lost Bloor but also managed to eliminate the doctor. He remembers George’s scathing attitude towards Worley and imagines being consigned to those George deems unreliable. Not the first choice any more. Like sand into an hourglass, despondency dribbles into him.
The only small mercy in his situation is that he has money in his pocket and enough opium tincture to keep his pain at bay for several weeks. He finds the landlord, orders a measure of ale and sits to weigh up his options, which seem vanishingly few. The drink is cool and delicious, offering fleeting succour from the doldrums. He closes his eyes, his mood lifting temporarily as the strong brew winds its way to his head where it mingles drunkenly with the tincture.
Opening his eyes, he believes he must be in the grip of a hallucination, for there, sitting a mere arm’s length from him, nursing his own draught of ale, is the very man he’s been looking for. His back is turned. Felton doesn’t need to see his face. He instantly recognizes the neatly ordered hair and the erect posture. And there is the ring on the hand that holds his drink. He hears the dead man’s voice – This will serve as proof you come from me. A charge of excitement catches in his breast, more intense and thrilling than any arousal of the flesh.
He waits. Planning. Watching. Wondering what good fortune brought the man back to the Lamb and Flag. Perhaps news of Cotton’s fate had turned him back on the road. No matter the reason, Bloor is here. Felton wipes his sweaty palms on his breeches and drains his drink.
The landlord brings Bloor a plate of food, which he eats fast and efficiently, as if the meal is army rations, not the Lamb and Flag’s famous capon pie. What a waste of fine food, Felton can’t help thinking. But he concedes that it is only fair for a condemned man to have his last meal.
Finally, when they have both availed themselves of a second cup of ale, the man rises, stretches his arms with a loud yawn and, tossing a tip to the landlord, makes his way towards the stairs. Felton falls unseen into his slipstream, following him up and along the jumble of corridors on the first floor. Bloor is teetering slightly and holds his hand to the wall to steady himself.
He stops finally outside a bedroom door, fumbling with his key. Felton waits at the turn of the corridor, his fingers wound around a length of sturdy twine in his pocket.
The key cranks in the lock, the door falls open, and Felton is upon him, nimble even with only one arm, flicking the twine around his neck, drawing it tight, shoving him into the room, kicking the door shut. Bloor gurgles and flails for breath as Felton tightens the makeshift noose.
Pressing his mouth tight to the man’s ear, Felton says, ‘I know who you are, Bloor, and whom you have been charged to guard.’ He loosens the string slightly. Bloor coughs, his body heaving desperately. ‘Tell me where to find Buckingham’s son.’ His voice is menacingly reasonable, as if it is an ordinary question, asked in ordinary circumstances.
Bloor struggles to reply, managing to croak, ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ The man is brave, if nothing else.
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br /> ‘Don’t play the fool with me.’ Felton thumps his knee into Bloor’s kidney. The officer releases a guttural cry. ‘Tell me.’
Felton expects him to beg for his life but he remains stubbornly silent.
Bloor holds firm as Felton asks and asks again. Another sharp prod meets his lower back. He expels a grunt. ‘Ready to talk?’
‘Never,’ he rasps, as his terrified eyes flick involuntarily towards a satchel slung over a chair.
‘Thank you,’ says Felton. He has played enough games of cards with enough hard-nosed soldiers over the years to have learned when to spot a tell.
Bloor looks confused and, for an instant, he seems to believe he will be set free, until the noose jerks tight. As dread surges into him, his pupils gape, as if sighting a beloved rather than staring death in the eye.
Felton waits for the body to slacken, then a little longer to be sure the job is done. It is a long time since he has been obliged to kill a man who wasn’t also trying to kill him.
It is surprisingly easy.
He feels for a pulse.
The skin of the man’s neck is rough with bristle.
There is nothing.
He pulls the ring from Bloor’s finger, has to tug it with some force so dark bruises appear on the knuckle, and slips it onto his own finger for safe-keeping. Then, riffling swiftly through the satchel, he finds the roll of papers that will lead him to the women. He removes the few valuables, a purse of coin, a silver hat badge with a gemstone set into it and the man’s jacket, a superior replacement for his own, which is threadbare.
He considers taking Bloor’s firearm, a heavy flintlock apparatus, and his sword, but decides against it as he already has the better, lighter, newer pistol, given to him by George, and the sword is too cumbersome. He pockets a serviceable poniard, which will replace the blade he left embedded in Dr Cotton’s ribcage. Before he leaves, he wraps a blanket around the window latch to deaden the noise as he bludgeons it with the hilt of the flintlock, creating the appearance of a break-in.
The Honey and the Sting Page 9
