Weathermonger

IX THE SENESCHAL

A CROOKED tissue of wind brought the sound of hallooing from over the cliffs behind them.

“Come on,” said Sally, “it’s the best bet. Maddox, you’re going to have to see if you can go a bit faster.” With the help of the downward slope the pony managed to produce out of his repertoire a long-forgotten trot. In a way he was like the Rolls, a rectangular, solid, unstoppable thing. Geoffrey, now in a daze of tiredness, let the path take him down it in a freewheeling lope, which he knew would end in fainting limpness the moment the path flattened to a level. They plunged into the trees.

It was darker than he’d thought possible. This was a quite different sort of forest from the gone-to-pot New Forest which they’d breakfasted in yesterday. That had seemed, somehow, like a neglected grove at the bottom of a big garden — after all, its trees had been tended like a vegetable crop only six years before. But this one had not seen a forester’s axe for generations of trees. The oaks were prodigious, their trunks fuzzy with moss, and the underwoods were a striving, rotting tangle, tall enough to overarch the path for most of the way — this was what made the shadows so dark. The silence was thick, ominous, complete; even the noise of Maddox’s hooves was muffled by the moss on which they ran, a soft, deep, dark-green pile which would surely be worn away in no time if the road was used much — used at all. Why had the forest not swallowed it? It lay broad as a highway between the tree trunks, without even a bramble stretching across it.

“Jeff, what was that?”

“What?”

“That. Listen.”

A noise of dogs howling. The hunt, of course. But it came from the wrong direction, forwards and to their right, and was different from the baying they’d heard last night — deeper, more intense, wilder.

“Jeff, there aren’t any wolves in England today, are there?”

“I hope not. But anything —”

There it was again. No, that was the hunt this time, behind them and distinctly shriller — they must be at the crest now. The new noise welled up again, closer, but still to their right, up the hill, and the hunt behind them bayed its answer. And here, at last, was the stream.

“Look, Sal, this is the only hope. Get off and lead Maddox down there, keeping in the water. I’ll run down here a bit further and then come back. Keep going down the stream till I catch up with you.”

“You will come back won’t you? Promise.”

“All right.”

“Promise.”

“I promise.”

She led Maddox gingerly into the stream, which was steep and stony, and Geoffrey pounded on down the mossy ride. He thought at once that he ought to have brought Maddox too, and bolted him on downwards while he climbed back to the scent-obliterating water, except that Maddox wasn’t the sort to fit into elaborate schemes of deception. Hurrah, here was another stream, too small to be marked on the map; if he went back now the hunt might waste time exploring this one.

The climb seemed like a crawl, and the woods swayed round him. This was hopeless — he must have somehow branched on to another path without noticing — there wasn’t a sign of his footprints on the moss. He looked back, and saw that he’d left no track there either, which would help the deception supposing he got back to the first stream on time. The two choruses of baying clashed out at each other again, and the hunt sounded fearfully close. At last he splashed down into the stream, his weak legs treacherous on the wobbly boulders, and waded downstream. He caught Sally up only a few bends down.

“You ought to have got further. You shouldn’t have waited.”

“I didn’t, but Maddox felt thirsty. Come on now, boy. Not far. Oh!”

Her quack of surprise was almost inaudible in the yelping and baying that shook the wood. Somewhere on the path the two packs must have met. Above the clamor he could hear human voices shouting and cursing; they did not sound as if they were in control of the situation.

He followed Sally down to a lower road, which also seemed to lead towards the tower; without a word they turned off along it, padding in a haze of silence down the endless mossy avenue while the battle in the woods above them whimpered into stillness. He realized with surprise that the darkness was not only caused by the double roofing of leaves; it was drawing towards night outside, and the tower, whatever it might hold, was the only chance of escaping from the fanged things that ranged these woods. And at least they would have arrived, against all odds, at the target at which the General had aimed them three whole days ago in Morlaix. And he hadn’t had a proper sleep since then. A voice somewhere, confused by the booming in his ears, started saying “Poor old Jeff. Poor old Jeff” over and over again. It was his own.

He was drowning in self-pity when they stepped out of the forest into the clearing round the tower. It was enormous, three times as high as the giant trees, wide as a tithe barn, a piled circle of roughhewn masonry sloping steadily in toward the top — the same shape as those crude stone towers which the Celts built two thousand years ago in the Shetland Islands, but paralyzingly larger. Round its base, some distance away from it, ran a stone skirting wall about as high as an ordinary house. Just outside this was a deep dry ditch, and then the clearing they stood in. There was no door or window in this side of the wall, so they turned left, downhill, looking up at the monstrous pillar of stonework in the center with a few stars coming out behind its level summit. The black wood brooded on their left.

They rounded a sharper curve by the ditch, and saw the line of wall interrupted. Eighty yards on was a bridge across the dry moat, and two small turrets set into the wall. As they trudged through the clinging grasses towards it no sound came from the tower, no light showed. Perhaps it was empty. They crossed the bridge and found the gate shut. Geoffrey hammered at it with his fist, but made no more noise than snow on a window pane. He crossed the bridge again to look for a stone to hammer with, but Sally pointed above their heads.

At first he thought there was a single huge fruit hanging from the tree above the path, then he realized it was too big even for that, and decided it must be a hornet's nest. He moved and the round thinned. When he was under it it looked like a thick plate, something man-made.

“What is it, Sal?”

“I think it’s a gong. You come along here on your charger and bonk it with your lance and the lord of the castle comes out to answer your challenge. If you stood on Maddox’s back you might be able to reach it. Come here, Maddox. That’s a good boy. Up you get, Jeff. Oh, Maddox, you are awful. I’ll see if I’ve got any horse bait left. Here. Stand still. That’s right. Now Jeff!”

He scrambled on to the broad back. The gong was just above his head and he struck at it with the fat edge of his fist. It made a tremendous noise, a sustained boom that died away at last into curious whinings all the way up the diapason. Nothing stirred in the tower. He struck the gong several times, judging its internal rhythm so that each blow produced a louder boom. At last Maddox decided that enough was enough and shied away; Geoffrey slithered down and the three of them stood listening to the resonance of bronze diminish into whimperings.

In the new silence they realized they could hear another noise, one that they had heard several times that afternoon. The baying of wolves (or whatever they were) was echoing through the valley, seeming to come at times from all round the compass, but at other times from the hill they had themselves descended. It was getting nearer.

“Jeff! D’you think we ought to go on?”

“We’ll give it another minute and then we’ll climb a tree. Maddox will have to . . . Look!”

In the near-dark they could see a movement of light behind the postern tower. A few seconds later they heard a rattle of chains and the grate of rusty metal drawn through metal. In the big gate a small door started to open and they ran towards it. A face thrust through, with a long white beard waggling beneath it.

“Well,” said the face, “what is it? Do you realize how late it is? I was just shutting up.”

“Please,” said Sally, “but we got lost in the wood and it seems to be full of wolves or something and could we come in for the night, please?”

“Ah,” said the face, “benighted travelers. Yes, yes, I’m sure he would think that proper, as far as one can be sure of anything. Come in. Goodness me, what an extraordinary animal! Is it a dog or a horse? Oh, it’s a pony, according to its lights. Well, well. Come in.”

The small door swung wide open, so that they could see his whole body. He was a little, bent man, holding a flaming branch which had been soaked in some sort of tar or resin which made it flare in the dark. He wore sweeping velvet robes, trimmed with ermine round the edges; a soft velvet cap, patterned with pearls and gold thread, sloped down the side of his head. Sally led Maddox in, and as Geoffrey stepped over the threshold there was a snarling in the trees and a pack of dark shapes with gleaming eyes came swirling towards the door. The little man pushed it almost shut, poked his head out again and said “Shoo! Shoo! Be off with you! Shoo!”

He shut the door completely, pushed two large bolts across, swung a huge balanced beam into slots so that it barred the whole gateway and laced several chains into position over it.

“Nasty brutes,” he said, “but they’re all right if you speak to them firmly. This way. We’ll put your animal into the stables and then we’ll go and see if there’s anything for dinner. I expect you’ll be hungry. Do you know, you’re really our first visitors. I think he doesn’t fancy the idea of people prying around, reporters from the newspapers, you know, which is why he put the wolves there. But benighted travelers is quite different — I think he’ll appreciate that — it’s so romantic, and that’s what he seems to like, as you can see.”

He waved a vague arm at the colossal tower, and led them into a long shed which leant against the outer wall. It was crudely partitioned into stalls.

“Tie him up anywhere,” said the old man, “there ought to be oats in one of those bins, and you can draw water from the well.”

“Poor old Maddox,” said Sally, looking down the empty length of stables, where black shadows jumped about in the wavering flare of the torch, “I’m afraid you’re going to feel lonely.”

“Oh, you can’t tell,” said their host. “Really you can’t. Having one pony here might put ideas into his head, and then we’d wake up to find the whole place full of horses, all needing watering and feeding. I don’t think he has any idea of the work involved, keeping a place like this going, but then he doesn’t have to.”

The bins were all brimming with grain, and there was sweet fresh hay in a barn next door. Geoffrey worked the windlass of the well, and found that the water was only a few feet down. They left Maddox tucking in to a full manger, like a worn traveler who, against all the odds, has finished up at a five-star hotel. As they crossed the courtyard to the keep they realized it was now full night, the sky pied with huge stars and a chill night breeze creeping up the valley. The door to the keep was black oak, a foot thick, tall as a haystack. The old man levered it open with a pointed pole. Geoffrey noticed that it could be barred both inside and out.

Beyond the door lay a single circular chamber, with a fire in the middle. It was sixty foot from where they stood to the fire, and sixty foot on to the far wall. The fire was big as a Guy Fawkes Day bonfire, piled with trunks of trees, throwing orange light and spitting sparks across the rush-strewn paving stones. Round it slept a horde of rangy, woolly dogs, each almost as large as Maddox. The smoke filled the roof beams and made its way out through a hole in the center of the roof, which, Geoffrey realized, high though it seemed, cannot have come more than a third of the way up the tower. He wondered what lay above. Round the outside wall of the chamber, ten feet above the floor, ran a wide wooden gallery supported on black oak pillars. It reached up to the roof, with two rows of unglazed windows looking out across the chamber. Beneath the gallery, against the wall, stood a line of flaring torches, like the one the old man carried, in iron brackets. Between them pot-shaped helmets gleamed. On either side of the fire, reaching towards them, ran two long black tables, piled high with great hummocks of food, meat and pastry and fruits, with plates and goblets scattered down their length and low benches ranged beneath the tables. They walked up towards the fire between an avenue of eatables.

“Oh, splendid!” exclaimed the old man. “Perhaps he heard the gong and decided it was time for a feast. Often he doesn’t think about food for days and days, you know, and then it starts to go bad and I have to throw it out to the wolves — I used to have such a nice little bird table at my own house — and I don’t know which way to turn really I don’t. Now, let’s see. If you sit there, and you there, I’ll sit in the middle and carve. I suppose we ought to introduce ourselves. My name’s Willoughby Furbelow and I’m Seneschal of the castle.”

“I’m Geoffrey Tinker and this is my sister Sally. It’s very kind of you to put us up.”

“Not at all, not at all. That’s what I’m here for, I suppose, though it isn’t at all what I intended.

Really this place ought to be full of wandering minstrels and chance-come guests and thanes riding in to pay homage and that sort of thing, only they don't seem to come. Perhaps it’s the wolves that put them off, or else you’re all too busy out there in the big world. I keep trying to tell him he ought to do something about the wolves, but he doesn’t seem very interested and my Latin isn’t very good — I keep having to look things up in the dictionary and I never thought I’d need a grammar when it all started, all those tenses and cases you know I find them very muddling and he does get terribly bored. In his lucid intervals, I mean. Now, this thing here is a boar’s head. Actually there isn’t a lot of meat on it, and it’s a pig to carve (pardon the pun) and though some bits of it are very tasty others aren’t, and besides it seems a pity to spoil it just for the three of us, it looks so splendid doesn’t it? Would you mind if I suggested we had a go at this chicken? You mustn’t mind it looking so yellow. Everything seems to get cooked in saffron, and it really does taste quite nice, though you weary of it after a few years. Which part do you fancy, Miss Trinket, or may I call you Sarah?”

“Everyone calls me Sally and may I have a wing and some breast, please? There don’t seem to be any potatoes. And what’s that green stuff?”

“Good King Henry. It's a weed really, but it’s quite nice, like spinach. I’m afraid they didn’t have any potatoes in his day, any more than they had the fish fingers you’re used to, but there are probably some wurzels down below the salt, if you fancy them. You do realize you’ve got to eat all this in your fingers, like a picnic? I used to have such a nice set of fish knives and forks, with mother-of-pearl handles, which my late wife and I were given for a wedding present. I think I miss them as much as anything. But the bread is very nice when it’s fresh and you can use if for mopping up gravy and things. There. Now, Geoffrey?”

“Please, may I have a leg? I didn’t understand what you said about lucid intervals.”

“That’s what I call them, but I doubt if a psychiatrist would agree with me. I don’t mind confessing I’m at a loss which way to turn. Perhaps I should never have started. The result has been very far from what I intended, I promise you. But now . . . he’s so dangerous ... so uncontrolable. So strong, too, of course. I did try to administer sedatives at one point, several years ago now. I thought I might contrive to return him to his previous condition, but he was angry. Very angry indeed. I was terrified. Oh dear, don’t let’s talk about it. You have no idea how powerful he is, really you haven’t. But he built this whole place in a single night, and all the forest too, and the wolves. I often wonder if he interferes with telly reception outside the valley. Just think what he might do if he were really enraged — especially now he’s so much worse than he used to be. Why, he might destroy the whole world. It says so on his stone. Is that enough or would you like a bit of breast too?”

“That’s fine, thanks,” said Geoffrey. Mr. Furbelow was one of those men who cannot talk and do anything else at the same time, so Geoffrey’s helping had been mangled off somehow between sentences, and then the high, eager, silly voice rambled on. The old man helped himself to several slices of breast and both oysters, and then began to worry about drink.

“Dear me, I don’t know what my late wife would say about Sally drinking wine. She was a pillar of the Abergavenny temperance movement. I had a little chemist’s shop in Abergavenny, you know. That’s what made the whole thing possible. As a chemist, I cannot advise you to drink the water, and though there is mead and ale below the salt, I myself find them very affecting, more so than the wine. I trust you will be moderate.”

The chicken was delicious, though almost cold. Geoffrey was still hungry when he had finished and helped himself from a salver of small chops, which were easy to eat in his fingers, unlike the Good King

Henry, which had to be scooped up on pieces of dark soft bread. His knife was desperately sharp steel, with a horn handle bound with silver. His plate seemed to be gold, and so did the goblet from which he drank the sweet cough-syrupy wine. All the while Mr. Furbelow talked, at first making mysterious references to the “he” who owned the tower and provided the feast, and then, as he filled his own goblet several times more, about the old days in Abergavenny, and a famous trip he and his wife had made in the summer of 1959 to the Costa Brava. It took him a long time to finish his chicken. At last he pushed his plate back, reached for a clean one from the far side of the table and pointed with his knife at an enormous arrangement of pastry, shaped like a castle, with little pastry soldiers marching about on top of it.

“You could have some of that, if you liked, but you never know what you’ll find inside it. If you fancy a sweet there might be some wild strawberries in that bowl just up there beyond the peacock, Sally dear. Ah, splendid. And fresh cream too. No sugar of course. Now you must tell me something about yourselves. I seem to have done all the talking.”

This had been worrying Geoffrey. He didn’t know what a seneschal would feel about a traveling leech’s dependents. Would he come over snobbish, and send them down below the salt? Or would the chemist from Abergavenny be impressed by the magical title of Doctor?

“Honestly,” he said, “there isn’t much to say about us. We’re orphans, and we were traveling north with our guardian, who is a leech, when he had to hurry on and help someone have a baby, a lord’s wife, I think, and he told us where to meet him but we made a mistake and got lost, and when we heard the wolves in the forest we ran here.”

“Dear me,” said Mr. Furbelow, “I’m afraid your guardian will be worrying about you.”

Sally, her mouth full of strawberries, said sulkily, “I don’t like our guardian. I think he’d be glad if we were eaten by wolves.”

“Oh, Sally, he’s been awfully kind to us.” (Geoffrey hoped he didn’t sound as though he meant it.)

“You said yourself that he couldn’t wait to get his hands on the estate. I bet you he doesn’t even try to look for us.”

“What’s a leech?” said Mr. Furbelow.

“A doctor.”

“Do you mean,” said Mr. Furbelow, “that this” (he waved a vague hand at the tower and the hounds and the Dark Ages appurtenances) “goes on outside the valley?”

“Oh yes,” said Geoffrey. “All over England. Didn’t you know?”

“I’ve often wondered,” said Mr. Furbelow, “But of course I couldn’t go and see. And how did this doctor come to be your guardian?”

“He was a friend of Father’s,” said Geoffrey, “and when Dad died he left us in his care, so now we have to go galumphing round the country with him and he treats us like servants. I shouldn’t have said that.” “But it’s true,” said Sally.

“You poor things,” said Mr. Furbelow. “I don’t know what to do for the best, honestly I don’t. Perhaps you’d better stay here for a bit and keep me company. I’m sure he won’t mind, and I’ll be delighted to have someone to talk to after all these years.”

“It’s terribly kind of you sir,” said Geoffrey. “I think it would suit us very well. I hope we can do something to help you, but I don’t know what.” “Well,” said Sally, “I can speak Latin!”

Oh lord, thought Geoffrey, that’s spoiled everything, just when we were getting on so well. She’s tired and had too much wine, and now she’s said something he can find out isn’t true in no time. Indeed the old man was peering at Sally with a dotty fierceness, and Geoffrey began to look round for a weapon to clock him with if there was trouble.

“Die mihi,” said Mr. Furbelow stumblingly, “quid agitis in his montibus.”

“Benigne,” said Sally. “Magister Carolus, cuius pupilli sumus, medicus notabilis, properabat ad castellum Sudeleianum, qua (ut nuntius ei dixerat) uxor baronis iam iam parturiverit. Nobis imperavit magister . .

“How marvelous,” said Mr. Furbelow. “Fm afraid I can’t follow you at that speed. Did you say Sudeley Castle? I went there once on a coach trip with my late wife; she enjoyed that sort of outing. Oh dear, it is late. We must talk about this tomorrow. Now it’s really time you were in bed. He might put the torches out suddenly. Perhaps you’d like to share the same room. This castle is a bit frightening for kiddies, I always think.”

He said the last bit in a noisy whisper to Geoffrey, and then showed them down to the far wall where a staircase, which was really more like a ladder, led up to the gallery. There were several other ladders like it round the hall. Upstairs they found a long, narrow room, with a large window looking out over the hall and a tiny square one cut into the thickness of the wall. Through this they could see the top of the outer wall, and beyond that a section of forest, black in the moonlight, and beyond that the blacker hills. There were no beds in the room, only oak chests, huge feather mattresses like floppy bolsters, and hundreds of fur skins.

“Where do you sleep?” asked Geoffrey.

“Oh,” said Mr. Furbelow, “I’ve got a little cottage near the stables which I bought for my late wife. He didn’t change that. I have my things there and I like to keep an eye on them. I do hope you’ll be comfortable. Good night.”

Before they slept (and in the end they found it was easiest to put the mattresses on the floor — they kept slipping off the chests) Geoffrey said “How on earth did you pull that off?”

“Oh, I can speak Latin. Everybody can at our school. You have to speak it all the time, even at meals, and you get whipped if you make a mistake.” The furs were warm and clean. In that last daze that comes before sleep drowns you, Geoffrey wondered where the weatherman had got to.