Pavane (19 page)

Sir John Faulkner, seneschal of Corfe Gate, woke early from a restless sleep. Sunlight from the fenestella six feet above his head slanted across the little bedchamber, fighting the chill that tended to gather in the room even in the height of summer. The great keep was always cool; for the sun at its hottest could scarcely reach through a dozen feet of Dorset stone. A week before the Lady Eleanor, mistress of the place, had moved her people from the lower baileys to make room for the soldiers flocking in and the refugees begging shelter; the household was still unused to the primitive conditions of the donjon. The seneschal rubbed his face, filled a bowl and washed, swilling the water down the sluice beneath the window. He dressed, grateful for the touch of fresh linen on his body, and left the chamber. Outside, a circular stairway wound up through the thickness of the wall. He climbed it, placing his feet at the sides of the treads; generations of wear had scooped the steps into hollows that were traps for the unwary. At the top of the spiralling way a door, loosely closed by a lanyard, gave access to the roof. He unfastened the becket and stepped through, leaned on the parapet and looked down between the massive crenellations at the surrounding country. Five miles to the south the Channel stretched away in a pearly haze; out there on a clear day keen sight might make out the shape of the Needles, guarding the western tip of the Isle of Wight. The Devil sat there once in the long-ago, heaved a rock at Corfe towers, and dropped it short on Studland beach. The seneschal smiled slightly at the fancy and turned away. Northward were the heights of the Great Plain, pale in the dawn light, grey and vague like the uplands of a kingdom of ghosts. Close to the castle rose the huge swellings of Challow and Knowle, its flanking hills; and all round was the heath, blackened in places by summer fires, flat and sullen and immense, a sour expanse that would grow nothing, supported nothing except roving bands of croppers. He could see the smoke from one of their camps threading up in the distance. Nearer at hand he looked down on the ribbed grey roofs of the village, the farm that stood just beyond the wet ditch. As he watched a lorry coasted to it, off-loaded two churns, and puffed away round the shoulder of the motte towards the Wareham Road. Almost unwillingly, he lifted his eyes to the semaphore tower on the crest of Challow Hill. As if it had been waiting for a cue, the thing began to move; the jerky 'Arms up, arms down' of the Attention signal. He knew it would be answering another far across the heath; so far that only the Guildsmen, with their wonderful Zeiss binoculars, could translate accurately the letters and symbols of the message. Way across the land the chain of towers would be moving, lifting their jointed arms, banging them back. Attention, Attention... Reading the semaphores was not officially the province of the seneschal; down in the third bailey a scurry of movement told him the guards had already alerted the household's Signaller-Page. The boy would be hurrying from his room, rubbing his eyes maybe, message pad in hand. The seneschal watched the movements of the arms, lips shaping the numbers as they formed, mind translating the cryptograms to which generations of Signallers had reduced the king's English. 'Eagle Rye one five,' he read. 'North-west ten, closing.' That would be My Lord of the Cinque Ports, with his hundred and fifty men; he was nearer than the seneschal had thought. Nine dead,' said the thing on the hill. 'Nine.' That was bad; the Pope's lieutenant was evidently determined to enhance his reputation for ruthlessness. There followed a call sign; Sir John heard cables rattle as Eleanor's Signaller worked the arms of his tower. 'Yield your guns,' said the grid' repeater briefly. 'Give yourselves into captivity. Messengers en route.' Then that was all. The arms dropped with a final clash; the tower fell austerely silent. The watching man sighed and instinctively his hand went to the amulet round his neck. He turned the little disc in his fingers, tracing the outline of the symbol carved on it. Down below the kitchen chimneys smoked, pails clanked as the cows were milked in their stalls. Those of the household who had been in sight of the tower had paused momentarily when its arms started to move, and all would have heard the clatter of their own answer; but no commoners could read the language of the Guild, and they had soon bent to their tasks again. Eleanor would have to be told. He ducked back down the stairway, hunching his shoulders automatically to prevent banging his head on the low ceiling. His mouth was set grimly. This was the thing that had been ordained a thousand years; an era was about to come to an end. The Lady Eleanor was already up and dressed. A board had been set out for her in one of the chambers opening off the Great Hall; she was taking breakfast in an alcove beneath a window set with quarrel-panes of coloured glass. She rose when she saw her seneschal, and watched his face. He nodded briefly in answer to the unvoiced question. 'Yes, my Lady,' he said quietly. 'He will come today.' She sat back, no longer conscious of the food in front of her. Her face and worried eyes looked very young. 'How many men?' she asked finally. 'A hundred and fifty.' She waved a hand, conscious suddenly of her incivility. 'Please sit down, Sir John. Will you take wine?' He leaned back in the window seat, resting his head against the glass. 'Not at present, thank you, my Lady...' He watched her, and no one could have told the expression in his eyes. She stared back seeing how the lights stained his hair and cheek with colour, gold and rose and blue. She pulled at her lip, and twined her fingers in her lap. 'Sir John,' she said, 'what am I to do?' He didn't answer for a time; and when he did speak there was no help in the words. 'What your blood dictates, my Lady,' he said. 'You will follow your breeding, and your heart.' She got up again quickly and walked away from him to where she could see the Great Hall shadowed and forbidding, the gloomy power of the vast crosswall, the dais where in ancient times the family sat at meat, the gallery where minstrels used to play. She touched a switch beside the chamber door; a solitary electric lamp flicked on in the roof, throwing a wan pool of light on the coarse flags of the floor, and suddenly the place seemed fitter for the dead than the living. Somewhere a chain-hoist rumbled; the Signaller-Page ran into the hall, stopped short when he saw his mistress. She took the message he carried, smiling at him, turned back with the flimsy in her hand. She said broodingly, 'A hundred and fifty men..." She walked back to her chair, sat with her hands folded in her lap, and stared at the table in front of her. 'If I open to him,' she said indistinctly, 'I shall run behind his pack train like a soldiers' drab. I shall lose my living and my home, most certainly my decency and probably my life. But I can't fight Pope John. To war with him is to take on all the world... Yet this is his man come to try me.' The seneschal said nothing; she hadn't expected him to answer. She sat still a long time and when she looked up there were tears in her eyes. 'Close the gates, Sir John,' she said, 'and get our people in. Advise me when these messengers arrive, but do not grant them entry.' He rose quietly. 'And the guns, Lady?' 'The guns?' she said sombrely. 'Take them to the gate by all means, and shot and powder for them. So far we will do as he desires..." Through all the passages and high walks of the place the drums throbbed, beating to quarters.

Henry of Rye and Deal reined his horse, and behind him the column of men boiled to a halt. A bare mile away the castle glared huge and close, smoke rising in columns from its walls; down the road, rutted between its tall banks, the messengers were galloping, trailing clouds of whitish dust that hung behind them dispersing slowly in the still air. Three sentences the couriers got out before Henry started to swear. His spurs tore gashes in the flanks of his horse; the animal leaped forward terrified, the column swirled and clattered in pursuit. The village square was packed with visitors, the taverns doing a bustling trade; the folk who had gathered to stare were scattered by the Lord of Rye and Deal. He hauled his horse in at the outer barbican, the animal lathered and running blood. The great gun Growler had indeed been brought down; but he was loaded and primed and his muzzle stared through the iron of the portcullis, and the culverin was flanking him. Behind the pieces a semicircle of men stood at ease, halberds grounded on the turf. 'Clear that bloody bridge,' bellowed the Pope's lieutenant, revolving on his horse. 'Captain, if those people won't get off throw 'em in the ditch...' Then to the guards, 'What damn fool game is this? Open for Pope John..." One of the men inside the bailey spoke up stolidly. 'Sorry, M'Lord. Orders of the Lady Eleanor.' 'Then,' swore the nobleman, voice rising on a high note of rage, 'instruct Her Ladyship that Henry of Rye and Deal commands her presence to answer for her fornicating insolence...' 'M'Lord,' said the man inside, unmoved, 'the Lady Eleanor has been informed..." Henry glared back. Turned to see his soldiers crowding the bridge, stared up at the great impassive face of the keep. Round the donjon the inner battlements flocked with men. He leaned forward to rattle with his crop against the bars of the gate. 'By nightfall, my talkative friend,' he said, breathing heavily, 'you'll hang by your heels for this, probably with your head over a slow fire. D'ye realise that?' The guard spat deliberately at his feet. Eleanor took her time about coming. She had bathed and changed and dressed her hair; she would allow no hands to touch her body but her own, not even the hands of tiring-maids. She appeared holding the arm of the seneschal, her Captain of Artillery walking on her left. She wore a plain white dress, and her long brown hair was loose. A little wind moved across the bailey, blowing the hair and flattening her skirt against her thighs. Henry, who had lost enough face already, watched her, fuming. Twenty paces from the gate the others stopped and she came forward alone. She saw the horsemen on the bridge, the muskets and swords, the sea of tossing blue. She halted by the breech of the great gun, one hand resting on the iron. 'Well, My Lord,' she said in a low, clear voice. 'What will you have of us?' Henry's rages were famous and spectacular; spittle flecked his beard, the standers-by heard him grind his teeth. 'Deliver me this place,' he shouted finally. 'And your ordnance, and yourselves. In the name of your ruler Pope John, through the authority vested in me his lieutenant in these islands.' She straightened her back, staring up at him through the gate. 'And in the name of Charles?' she asked cuttingly. 'For my liege ruler is my King. So it was with my father and so with me My Lord; I took no vows before a foreign priest.' He drew his sword, and pointed through the bars.' That gun,' was all he could speak. She still remained standing by the great gun, her fingers touching its breech and the wind moving in her hair. 'And if I refuse?' He shouted again then, waving an arm; at the gesture a soldier spurred forward lifting a bag from the pommel of his saddle. 'Then your liege-folk in this isle pay with their homes and their property and their lives,' panted Henry, slashing at the cord that held the canvas closed. 'It'll be blood for iron, My Lady, blood for iron...' The string came free, the bag was shaken; and down before her dropped the tongues and other parts of men, cut away as was the custom of Henry's soldiers. There was a silence that deepened. The colour drained slowly from Eleanor's face, leaving the skin chalk-pale as the fabric of her dress; indeed the more romantic of the watchers swore afterwards the blue leached from her very eyes, leaving them lambent and dead as the eyes of a corpse. She clenched her hands slowly, slowly relaxed them again; a long time she waited, leaning on the gun, while the rage blurred her sight, rose to a high mad shrilling that seemed to ring inside her brain, receded leaving her utterly cold. She swallowed; and when she spoke again every word seemed freshly chipped from ice. 'Why then,' she said. 'You must not leave us empty-handed, My Lord of Rye and Deal. Yet I fear my Growler will be a heavy load. Would not your task be lightened if his charge were sent before?' And before any of the people round her could guess her purpose or intervene she had snatched at the firing lanyard, and Growler leaped back pouring smoke while echoes clapped around the waiting hills. The heavy charge, fired at point-blank range, blew away the belly of the horse and took both Henry's feet off at the ankles; animal and rider leaped convulsively and fell with a mingled scream into the dry ditch. As if by common consent the crossbows of the defenders played first on them; within seconds they were still, pierced by a score of shafts. The grapeshot, ploughing on, spread ruin among the soldiers on the bridge, tore furrows from the buildings of the village square beyond. Shrieks sounded, echoing from the close stone walls; the harquebusiers fired into the struggling mass on the path; the Captain rode away, leaning from his horse while his blood ribboned back across the creature's rump. Then it finished, dying men whimpering while a thin haze of smoke drifted across the lower bailey towards the Martyr's Gate. Eleanor leaned on the gun and bit her wrist like a child at what she had done. The seneschal was the first to reach her; but she shoved him away. 'Take up that dirt,' she said, pointing to the ditch. 'And bury it inside the bailey walls. I will have my right of faldage from Pope John...' Then she staggered; he caught her, lifted her and carried her to her room.

For most of her life Eleanor, only daughter of Robert, last of the Lords of Purbeck, had lived in seclusion in the great hall set between the hills. She was a strange child, secretive and shy, beloved of the Fairies who according to popular report assisted at her very conception. Though practical and level-headed in other respects, Eleanor never made any attempt to scotch the rumours of her paranormal origin, seeming instead to take pleasure in them. 'For,' she would explain, 'my father often told his guests the tale of how he rode north that day to bring my mother home. When he ran out and jumped on his horse everybody was convinced he'd taken leave of his senses; but he always claimed it was the People of the Heath that drove him to it, showing him visions so beautiful they sent him completely wild.' Then her face would cloud; for Margaret Strange had died in childbirth, and Eleanor felt very keenly the loss of the mother she had never known. Too keenly sometimes for her father's peace of mind; Robert, who never remarried, brooded over the child's imaginings. Once, when she was very small, she walked in her sleep. It was on a night of wind, with a full gale roaring up from the Channel barely five miles away; one of those nights when the nervous of the household kept to their rooms, swearing they heard the laughter of the Old Ones in the gusts that hissed and droned round the high stones of the keep. Eleanor's nurse, looking in to see the child was quiet, found her room empty; a hue and cry was raised, and the whole great complex of buildings searched. They found Eleanor high in the donjon, at the head of an ancient stairway unused for years. Her eyes were closed but as they reached her they heard her calling. 'Mother,' she shouted. 'Mother, are you there...' They led her down, careful not to startle her; for it was well known that such walkers were under the spell of the Old Ones, who took their souls very easily if they woke. Eleanor herself seemed oblivious of the whole affair; but it was not so. She referred to it days later, when her nurse was dressing her. 'My mother was very pretty, wasn't she?' she said; then thoughtfully, 'She wanted to play; but she had to go away...' Robert frowned when he heard, and pulled his beard and swore; the girl was packed off to relatives in France, but when she came back six months later she was very little changed. As a child Eleanor was frequently lonely; for the castle contained no other children of her own age except the children of the serving people, from whom she was largely excluded by barriers of rank and class. Most of her days were passed quietly in the company of her nurse and later her tutor, from whom she learned the several languages of the land. She proved to have a quick and receptive brain; she soon mastered the Norman French and Latin that had remained the tongues of the cultured world, even more quickly the churl talk of the peasants. It worried her father slightly to hear the old syllables bang and splatter from her lips; but because of it she was greatly respected by the few commoners with whom she came in contact. Indeed she seemed to identify herself more with the ordinary people of the countryside than with those of her own rank; which in a way was understandable considering that she was only partly of noble blood. The peasants still lived and were governed by the ancient rhythms of moon and sun, ploughing and reaping, death and birth; and all old things, whether or not sanctified by the rulers of Rome, appealed strongly to her. Sometimes she would go with her nurse and her father's seneschal and play on the nearby beaches. She would watch the endless roll and thunder of the sea, and ask strange questions of the seneschal; such as whether the Popes, from their golden throne, could order the waves that washed the shores of England, marching in their violet ranks to break against the ancient cliffs. He would smile at her, answering heresy with discretion, till she grew bored and scampered off to hunt for shells on the beach or seaweed, or pick the crinoid fossils from the rocks and give them to him for fairy beads, She felt an odd sympathy with the fabric of the land itself; once she took a flake of shale and pressed it to her throat and cried, and said that day she was made right through of stone, dark and stern as the Kimmeridge cliffs and as indomitable. Her waywardness caused in the end her removal to Londinium. In her sixteenth year her father caught her with a bailiff, learning the handling of his motor vehicle; how to slip the bands of its gearbox and drive it in forward and reverse round the slopes of the outer bailey. Maybe some gesture, some turn of the head, reminded Robert too clearly of the girl who had died so many years ago; he pulled his daughter squawking from the machine, clipped her ear, and chased her off to her room. The resulting interview, compounded as it was of Eleanor's wounded dignity and her father's always uncertain temper, proved disastrous. Eleanor vented her feelings in multilingual phrasing new even to Robert; he retaliated with a strap, the buckle of which left several marks that threatened permanence. He confined his daughter to her chamber for a week; on the day of her release she refused to leave and it was a fortnight before he caught sight of her down below the wet-ditch messing with some soldiers out at target practice. He sent immediately for his seneschal. A time at the Court of Londinium seemed the only thing for Eleanor; there would be no more riding and hawking, and certainly no consorting with mechanicals. She must be brought if possible to a realisation of her station, and instructed in the skills expected in a lady of good birth. To the seneschal Robert entrusted the task, with the purely private directive that his daughter must be cultivated or killed. She left a fortnight later, with many snorts and head-tossings. He waited by the gate to see her go, but she ignored him. That was a flash of temper she regretted the rest of her days, for she never saw him alive again. The accident happened on a feast day, when the lower bailey was filled with the tents of acrobats and jugglers and sweetmeat sellers, while the place resounded to shouts and laughter and the clatter of cudgels where the young bloods of the surrounding villages tried their strength one against another. Robert's horse bucked as he crossed the outer bridge, and threw him; he struck his head against the stone, and fell into the dry ditch. The fair was quietened, and doctors brought from Durnovaria; but his skull was crushed, and he never reopened his eyes. Eleanor, summoned by a signal that fled from Challow Hill to Pontes inside an hour, rode hard; but she came too late. She buried her father at Wimborne, in the ancient Minster there, in the painted tomb he had built to share with his wife; and the party rode back slowly to Corfe Gate, the horses and the motors dressed with black, the slack drums thudding out a dirge. It was still September; but a chilling wind moaned in from the sea, and the sky was grey as iron. Eleanor reined when she came in sight of the castle, and waved the rest of her people on down the long dim road. The seneschal waited, his horse fretting in the wind, till the mourners had passed nearly out of sight in distance; then she turned to him, her cloak whipping round her shoulders. She looked older and very tired, dark shadows under her eyes and tear tracks marking her cheeks. 'Well,' she said, 'here I am a great lady; and that is the house I own...' He waited silently, knowing her mind; she swallowed, and pushed the hair out of her eyes. 'John,' she said, 'How many years did you serve my Father, Robert?' He sat his horse impassively and considered before he answered. Then finally, 'Many years, my Lady.' 'And his father before him?' Again the same answer. 'Many years...' 'Yes,' she said. 'You served him well; I left him alone, and sent no word. And it was all over such a trifling little thing. I've almost forgotten why we first fell out. Now it's too late of course.' She sat quiet a moment, stroking the neck of her horse as it fidgeted in the cold. Then, 'Have you a sword?' 'Yes, Lady.' 'Then give it me, and get down off your horse. This much I can do...' He waited while she held the sword and looked unseeing at the damascene-work on the blade. 'A title is a little empty thing,' she said, 'to such as you. Yet will you take it from me?' He bowed; and she touched his shoulder lightly with the steel. "Whether the King confirms my choice or no,' she said, 'to us you will be Sir John...' Then she turned her horse and rode hard for the castle, narrowing her eyes to see up at its glooming battlements and towers. So she came home, to a mourning place; and soon to the anger of Pope John. From the outset Eleanor's position was a curious one. The successive Lords of Purbeck had held their lands in feoff from the King; under normal circumstances she could have expected to be married off fairly rapidly and to see the demesnes granted to another. But she was, or would one day be, an heiress in her own right as granddaughter of the last of the Strange family; and in the restricted economy of the times the annual tax paid by that huge house accounted for a measurable proportion of the revenue to the Crown. Since Charles, King of England and nominally at least of the Americas, was expecting to make an extended tour of the New World in the spring he was content to let matters rest at least until his return; Eleanor was confirmed in her position of authority, although there were many up and down the country who resented the decision. She took her duties with great seriousness. One of her first self-allotted tasks was to tour the boundaries of her lands with a circuit judge, settling such petty differences as had arisen since her father's death. She rode informally, with only her seneschal in attendance, stopping off at cottages and farms as the fancy took her, speaking to all in the language of their birth, and her liege-folk scattered over the breadth and length of Dorset were much impressed. Where she found hardship she alleviated it not by gifts of money, too easily spent in the local taverns, but with clothing and food and grants of freeholds. She saw much suffering, and was shocked by it; she began in fact to feel dissatisfaction with her own way of life. 'It's all very well, Sir John,' she said one evening shortly after her return to Corfe Gate. 'But I've really achieved nothing at all. I suppose one's bound to get a glow of well-being from a few small charities but looked at in a broad view they're meaningless. One or two people are probably better off for not having to scrape and save and find their rent every week but what about all the rest I haven't been able to do anything for? As long as the Church applies a censorship to certain forms of progress, which is what she does however strenuously the Popes deny it, we shall always be a scrappy little nation living just above the famine line. But what else am I to do?' They were dining in the sixteenth-century hall beside the great keep; she waved a hand at the furnishings, the richly hung walls, and spluttered over a mouthful of food. 'I can't pretend,' she said, 'that I don't like this life, and being able to buy horses and dogs when I want and nylons and perfumes, things the ordinary people never get to see let alone afford... You know,' she added, grinning suddenly, 'when my poor father sent me off to town I had a fancy to run away and give it all up; just live the simple life, working the soil and rearing a family like a peasant girl. Only what I've seen has changed all that; I realise now I should have ended up having innumerable children by some brawny oaf who stank of pigs, and dying before I was thirty from sheer hard work. Or am I just getting cynical? Do tell me, you say so very little any more.' He poured wine for her, smiling. 'I was arguing with Father Sebastian the other day,' she said thoughtfully. 'I quoted the thing about giving all you have to the poor. He said that was all very well but you had to come to terms with the Scriptures and realise there had to be teachers and leaders for the people's own good. It seemed an awful get-out to me, and I couldn't help saying so. I told him if the Church would sell half her altar plate she could buy shoes for everybody in the country, and a lot else besides; and that if the Pope would make a start in Rome I'd see about getting rid of a few job lots of furniture down in Corfe. I'm afraid he didn't take very kindly to it. I know it was wrong of me but he annoys me sometimes; he's so pious, and it seems to mean so very little. He'd walk miles in the snow to pray for a sick child, he's a very good man; but if there was more money about to start with maybe the child wouldn't have been taken ill. It all seems so unnecessary...' The winter was hard and long, the brooks and soil frozen like stone, even the rim of the sea sharded with ice. The towers clacked, on days when the Signallers could clear their arms of ice, with news of other parts of the country suffering as badly or worse. The spring that followed was late and cold, and the summer nearly as bad. Charles postponed his trip to the New World till the following year, spending his time, according to the semaphores, in organising relief schemes for the areas worst hit by famine. When autumn came round again, and the rush-bearing to the churches, the worst news of all arrived, brought by the urgently clattering grids. The taxation system of the country was to be reviewed; commissioners were already at work assessing contributions to be made by each area not in money but in kind. Eleanor swore when the news was brought to her, and would certainly have given the officials a hot reception had they presented themselves at her hall; but nobody came near. Instead she was supplied via the semaphores with a list of the goods she would be expected to levy. Other parts of the country had been taxed in everything from turned ware to parsnips; Dorset's contribution would be in butter, grain, and stone. 'It's quite ridiculous,' fumed Her Ladyship, stamping up and down the little room that served her as office and study combined. 'Butter and stone are all very well, or would be if they didn't represent extra taxes; but grain! The people who drew this up must know very well there's practically no arable farming round here at all; what little wheat we do grow is strictly for our own use and after a summer like we've had there'll be barely enough of that to go round; I'm confidently expecting to have to set up soup kitchens in the bailey like they did once or twice in my father's time. In Italy they don't seem to have much idea of what a bad season can do to the produce of the farms; not that I suppose for a minute this junk ever came from Rome. It was probably drawn out by some fat-paunched
little clerk in Paris or Bordeaux who's never seen England and doesn't want to and will sell our stuff over there at vast profits as fast as we can ship it. Anybody would think they're deliberately trying to break us. If I squeeze all they demand out of the folk round about there'll be deaths from starvation before the spring; on the other hand why I should buy in from Newworlders in Poole, give them back what I took from them, and ruin myself in the process I can't imag -' She stopped dead; and the look in her eyes showed plainly she'd just received the import of a crude lesson in economics. 'Sir John,' she said firmly. 'I'm not going to do it. There's no reason, except pure maliciousness, why I should either starve my people or pauperize myself She tapped her teeth thoughtfully with a stylus. 'Have the towers send this message,' she said. 'Our crops are bad, if we meet these taxes we shall be in trouble before the spring. Tell them we'll pay with a double levy next autumn; at least that'll give us the chance to get some more acreage under cultivation, unless of course they decide to change their demands by then. Failing that we'll make up in... oh, worsted, manufactured goods, whatever they want; but grain, no. It's out of the question.' So the message was passed; and a second signal was routed to Londinium informing the King of her reply to Rome. Next day the towers brought word that Charles was displeased, and had ordered Eleanor to pay; but by then it was too late, her answer was already clattering across France. 'I'm afraid there was no help for it,' she said to her seneschal, 'but to present him with a fait accompli; what I'd like to have said to him, and to Pope John as well, was that there was no blood to be got by squeezing Dorset stone, though they were both very welcome to come on down and try.' She was sitting at her dressing table, making up her face as she had been taught at Court; she drew a careful bow on her lips, blotted with a tissue. 'God knows the Church is rich enough already,' she finished bitterly. 'What she expects to gain by sitting on the necks of a few poor savages in England, I have no idea...' She dismissed the whole subject; at the best of times politics tired her rapidly, and she was becoming very interested in certain surreptitious alterations she was making to her home. The most daring of them, and the most heretical, was the installation of electric lighting. She had commissioned a craftsman of the village to build and wind a generator, and proposed to drive it by a steam engine of a type designed to be fitted into lorries. The work had to be done secretly as although the principles of the electro-motive force had been known for many years the Church had never sanctioned its domestic use. The completed unit was to be housed in one of the towers of the lower bailey wall, far enough away for its clanking not to disturb the household's rest, and Eleanor expected if not spectacular results, at least enough light to dispel the worst gloom of winter. And heating too, if things went well; for she had remembered from her schooling that a wire, suitably wound on an earthenware former, could be made to glow redly if sufficient difference in potential could be created between its ends. To her questions as to whether her generator would bring this state of affairs about, the seneschal replied quietly that such a thing was not inconceivable; but further than that he refused to be drawn. 'Why, Sir John,' said Eleanor archly, 'you don't sound as if you approve. Last winter I swear I had frostbite in at least nine of my toes, and that in spite of sleeping in flannel so thick the Pope himself would have been impressed by my rectitude. Would you begrudge me what little comfort is left to my declining years?' He smiled at that, but wouldn't answer; and shortly afterwards the generator began to chuff and an element glowed brightly at the foot of Her Ladyship's bed, frightening the wits out of a chambermaid who ran to the Serjeant of the Pantry with a tale that the stones themselves were burning, grinning at her with scarlet mouths. The same day Eleanor received a visit from a Captain of the Guild of Signallers. They sent runners from the outer barbican and she changed hastily, receiving him in the Great Hall with her seneschal and several gentlemen of the castle in attendance. A man of such status commanded great respect in the old times and Eleanor loved the Guild with all her heart though they had never been and never would be subjects of hers. The respect was mutual; for who else, on the occasion of Robert's fortieth birthday, would have been taken to the Semaphore and let to spell her father's name with her own hands, on the levers only Guildsmen were allowed to move? The Captain came in stolidly, a grizzled man in worn green leather with the silver brassard and crossed lanyards of his rank displayed in place. His eyes took in the electric light with which the place was flooded, but he made no comment. He came straight to the point, speaking bluntly as was the way for the Guild; for when kings watched their semaphores as eagerly as commoners they had never found a use for fancy words. 'My Lady,' he said. 'His Eminence the Archbishop of Londinium took horse today for Purbeck, bringing with him a force of some seventy men, hoping to take you unprepared and make you yield your hall and your demesnes to John.' She went pale, but a red anger spot glowed on each cheek. 'How can you know this, Captain?' she asked coolly. 'London is well over a day away, and the towers have been quiet. Had it been reported, I would have been told.' He shifted his feet where he stood with legs apart on the carpeting of the dais. 'The Guild fears no man,' he said finally. 'Our messages are for all who can to read. But there are times, and this is one of them, when words are best not given to the grids. Then there are other, swifter means.' There was a hush at that, for he meant necromancy; and that was not a subject to be lightly, bandied, even in the free air of Eleanor's hall. The seneschal alone understood his meaning fully; and to him the Signaller bowed, recognising a knowledge greater and more ancient than his own. Eleanor caught the look that passed between them and shivered; then she recovered herself and tossed her head. 'Well, Captain,' she said, 'our gratitude is deep. How deep, only you can know. If you have nothing to add to what you've told me, can I give you wine? My Hall would be honoured.' He bowed again, accepting the gesture; and few enough there were who could have offered it, for the Guildsmen didn't come often into the houses of the uninitiated, even the great of the land. She roused out some two score of her liege-folk and armed them, and when His Eminence came in sight of Corfe towers the semaphores had already informed him of the state of things inside. He quartered his men in the village and came on with an escort of half a dozen, making a great show of the peacefulness of his intentions. They were conducted through the outer gate by a conspicuously well-armed guard and taken to the Great Hall, where they were told the Lady Eleanor would receive them. So she did; but not for over an hour, and the great man was fuming and striding the carpet well before that. She hung back in her room, seeing to the last details of her makeup and dress; she had previously sent for her seneschal and asked him to attend her. 'Sir John,' she said, adjusting a tiny coronet on her hair, 'I'm afraid this is going to be a difficult meeting from every point of view. I don't suppose for a moment Charles knows anything about all this, which makes His Eminence's behaviour suspicious in the extreme; but I can hardly accuse an archbishop of attempted treason. Apart from that he's obviously come to demand something I can't give him, or rather something that I - ouch - that I refuse to for what seem to me to be excellent reasons. Yet he's made such an exhibition of his quiet intentions that anything I say is bound to look churlish. I wish the King would stick up for himself a bit more; it's all very well people calling him Charles the Good and pelting him with rose petals every time he rides through Londinium, but what it all comes down to is he's very clever at sitting on the fence placating everybody. I'm getting so tired of strangers lording it over England, even if it is heresy to say so.' The seneschal thought carefully before he spoke. 'His Eminence is certainly a crafty talker if what I've heard is right,' he said at length. 'And it's also true that you're not in much of a position for bargaining. But I don't think you can be too hard on Charles, my Lady; he's got a difficult enough job keeping this mess of Angles and Scots and so-called Normans out of trouble and satisfying Rome at the same time.' She looked at him very straight, sucking at her lower lip with her teeth. It was a trick he hadn't seen for many years; her mother used to do it, when she was angry or upset. 'If we fought, Sir John,' she said, 'if all of us just straightforwardly rebelled, what would our chances be?' He spread his hands. 'Against the Blue? The Blue is like the blue of Ocean, Lady; endlessly it runs, from here to China for all I know. Nobody fights the sea.' 'Sometimes,' she said, 'you're not much of a help...' She angled her mirror, tweaked carefully at an eyebrow hair that had got itself out of line. 'I don't know at all,' she said tiredly. 'Give me a sick dog or a cat, or even Master Gwilliam's old jalopy down there in the yard with its carburettor bunged up again, and I know where I stand; I'd have a go at putting things right even if I didn't make much of a job of it. But churchmen, and high churchmen at that, put shivers up my back. Maybe they think with my father gone they can bully me easier than some of our great barons; but I'm certain now we've made our stand we shall have to keep to it or we shall finish up worse off than ever; they're sure to impose some sort of fine for defying them in the first place.' She rose, satisfied at last that her appearance couldn't be bettered; but at the door of the chamber she balanced suddenly on one leg, spat on her fingers and dragged a stocking seam straight. She looked up at the seneschal, with his fair round head and the odd features that looked now just as they had looked when she was a child. 'Sir John,' she said softly. 'You who see all and say so very little... would my father have behaved like this?' He waited. Then, 'He would; were his people involved, and his own good name.' 'Then you will follow me?' 'I was your father's man,' he said. 'And I am yours, my Lady.' She shivered. 'Sir John,' she said, 'keep very close...' She ducked under the lintel and clittered down the steps to meet the delegation. His Eminence was friendly, to a point jovial; until it came to the matter of the unpaid tribute. 'You must realise my child,' said Londinium roundly, taking a turn up the hall and back, 'Pope John, your spiritual father and the ruler of the known world, isn't a man you can dismiss so readily or whose favours or displeasure can be taken lightly. Now I...' He spread his hands. 'I'm merely a messenger and an advisor. What you say to me or I to you may be of no account. But once a word travels beyond these walls, and that it must if my duty's to be done, then you and all your people will suffer; for John will crack this little place like an egg. His will must be obeyed, all over the world.' He walked back to Eleanor. 'You're very young,' he said genially, 'and I can't help feeling towards you perhaps as your father might, if he were alive to counsel you.' His fingers lingered on her arm; and Eleanor, perhaps from sheer nervousness, raised an eyebrow. Under the circumstances, it was an unfortunate gesture. His Eminence reddened and constrained his temper with an effort. 'Find this tribute,' he said. 'Levy it somehow, make it up any way you choose; but get it, and send it. Do it inside the week and you can still catch the last of the ships for France. But if you delay and the weather worsens, if your merchantmen are lost or stray into out-of-the-way ports with your grain, then with the spring I promise you John will reach out to punish. And rightly too, for the half of all you own belongs to him. You hold your place, as you know very well, by his good will alone.' 'I hold my place,' said Eleanor icily, 'by the favour of my liege-lord Charles; and that you know, My Lord, as well as I. My father promised loyalty at his knee, kissing his hand according to the ancient way. I too, until I am released, will follow him. And no other, sir…' There was a quietness, in which the clacking of the Challow tower could be clearly heard. Londinium seemed to swell, puffing himself up beneath his fur-trimmed robes much in the manner of a frog. 'Your liege-lord,' he said, and he obviously found it hard to keep from shouting, 'has ordered you to send that grain. So you flout both Pope and King...' 'I cannot send what I do not own,' said Eleanor patiently. 'What grain I do have to spare must be released to my people, or there will be famine in the land by Christmas. What will John have, a countryside of corpses to testify his strength?' The churchman glared, but would say no more; and she withdrew, leaving affairs thus unhappily in the balance. Matters came to a head in the evening, when dinner was prepared for the delegation in the Great Hall. The place was made cheerful by the light of many lamps and candles, and servants stood by with bundles of spares beneath their arms to replace the dips as they burned down in the sconces. Her Ladyship would have used the electric light, but at the last moment the seneschal had prevailed against such rashness; His Eminence would never have sat at meat beneath such open evidence of heresy. The exhausted globes with their delicate filaments of carbon had been withdrawn into the roof, the wall switches were hidden by drapes, and there was no visible sign of Eleanor's disaffection. She sat on the dais, in the chair her father used to occupy; the seneschal was on her right, her Captain of Artillery to her left. Opposite her were the churchmen and such of the military as had been allowed inside the gates. All went well until His Eminence touched sympathetically on the early death of Her Ladyship's mother. The Captain choked and converted the sound hastily into a cough; all the household knew that that was Eleanor's sorest point. She had drunk more than was good for her, again out of nervousness; and she rose instantly to the bait. 'This, My Lord, is very interesting,' she said. 'For had a surgeon been allowed to help my mother, perhaps she would still be with us now. I've read you Romans were once more daring than you are now; for the great Caesar himself was born by cutting his mother's womb, yet now you deem the trick heinous to God -' 'My Lady -' 'Also I have heard,' said