[The deBurghs 07] - Reynold De Burgh: The Dark Knight (14 page)

‘Careful! Don’t cause any more movement,’ Peregrine warned. Although not much older than Alec, Lord
de Burgh’s squire took charge, directing everyone to stay away from the collapsing side of the hole, while he scrambled over the open area to reach Lord de Burgh, half-covered in dirt and stones.

The knight’s head was free of debris, but his eyes were closed, as though he had been knocked unconscious.
Or was he dead?
Sabina could only watch in horror as Peregrine reached under the fallen man’s arms and struggled to drag him out from under the soil into the open area.

Once he was well away from the crumbling wall of earth, Peregrine leaned close, speaking to him and touching his limbs as though searching for crushed or broken bones. Would the man who spent a lifetime ignoring his bad leg now face worse injury?

Sabina felt a hand upon her shoulder and realised that she was still crouched upon the grass where she had fallen. ‘There, there, mistress, he will be well. It would take more than a little dirt to stop Lord de Burgh.’

Sabina nodded, even though she could hear the strain in Ursula’s voice. She lifted her head and saw a bleak scene. Adele and Alec were staring helplessly into the pit, for what could they do? Only Sabina had any knowledge of healing, and even as she tried to think of what she must do, fear and panic pressed down on her, keeping her still.

What would they do if they lost him? What would
she
do, if she lost him? The pain of their eventual parting had been easy to put off until tomorrow and the next day. But suddenly Sabina was faced with the fact that the man she loved might already be gone.

It was too much. Her breath seized, and Sabina began to tremble, but through the haze of her own misery she heard Peregrine calling out to her. And though no longer in control of herself, she obeyed, rising to her feet and clambering down into the huge hole, past the bolts and rotten wood that marked the shape of a ship, to where Lord de Burgh lay.

‘I can’t find any blood or anything…broken,’ Peregrine said in a whisper. ‘But he won’t wake up.’ The boy seemed one step away from tears, and perhaps that was what gave Sabina her strength as she turned to the prone form.

Lord de Burgh was breathing, that much she could tell by the rise and fall of his great chest. She ran her own hands over him, looking for anything unusual, bumps or twisted limbs, but all seemed straight and strong. Yet she knew that sometimes victims of injury were hurt inside, and there was nothing anyone could do.

Sabina swallowed hard. ‘Wet a cloth or a piece of clothing, if nothing else,’ she said to Peregrine. She heard him scramble away, but she had attention only for Lord de Burgh, his strong face somehow more relaxed than she had ever seen it. There were no lines of tension, no grim set to his handsome features.

Blinking against the tears that threatened, Sabina took his hands in hers. Big and calloused and warm, they were both strong and gentle, as was he, for Lord de Burgh was everything that a man should be. Not only a knight, a hero who held to his oaths, he was a flesh-and-blood being with sometimes maddening habits that just made her love him all the more.

‘You can wake up now, my lord,’ Sabina whispered. But he did not stir.

Sabina loosed a deep, shuddering sigh, and then Peregrine was at her side, handing her a damp cloth. Brushing back Lord de Burgh’s dark hair with one hand, she wiped the dirt from his forehead and stroked one cheek.

‘There, that’s better,’ she said aloud, more for herself and Peregrine than for Lord de Burgh. But as if the moisture had wakened him, the knight opened his eyes. Suddenly, he was looking at her, and Sabina cried out with relief.

‘My lord, are you all right?’ Peregrine asked.

He blinked, as though dazed, and then rose on to an elbow. ‘What happened?’

‘Part of the earthen wall there caved in upon you,’ Peregrine said. He paused, as though reluctant to continue. ‘Can you, uh, move your legs?’

The question was met by a scowl, and Sabina scooted back as Lord de Burgh heaved himself to his feet, the soil that clung to him flying in all directions. Peregrine quickly moved under one arm and Sabina the other, but as she looked at the sides of the pit, she felt her heart sink.

‘Perhaps you should just rest here a while longer,’ Sabina suggested. But she should have known better. Just as Peregrine’s words had roused Lord de Burgh from the ground, hers spurred him onwards, as though he must prove to the world that he was completely unaffected by the fall, the weight of the earth and his slip into unconsciousness.

Stubborn fool, Sabina thought, but she said nothing
as the three of them struggled upwards, her own climb made more difficult by the drag of her long skirts. By the time they made it to the surface, she was hot and breathless.

‘Let us rest here,’ Sabina said when they reached the grass.

‘I need no rest,’ Reynold argued.

‘I want to take a better look at your leg.’

‘There is nothing wrong with my leg.’

Tired, sore, and still shaking with the effects of the harrowing experience, Sabina felt her temper snap. ‘None the less, I am mistress here, and I would make sure that all within my household are well.’

Through the corner of her eye, Sabina saw Peregrine shepherding the others well away, perhaps even back to the manor. But she paid them no heed. Her attention was focused solely on the man who could have been killed, yet was now shaking his head at her as though she were his enemy.

‘Tis my responsibility,’ Sabina said.

‘
Tis my leg
,’ he countered. Then his knees buckled, and he lurched forwards. Sabina caught him as best she could, helping him to the grass even as he swore at her and tried to push her away.

‘Why can’t you accept some help?’ she demanded.

‘And why can’t you mind your own business?’ he practically snarled at her. ‘You with your perfect body and your perfect beauty, you know nothing of—’

Sabina cut him off with a gasp. ‘You think I’m whole?’ she asked, her voice rising. ‘I’m afflicted with something far worse.’

He glanced at her sharply, as though he didn’t believe her. ‘That’s nonsense.’

‘Is it?’ Sabina asked, but she could no longer face him. Heart pounding, she turned away, ashamed to admit that which plagued her. She had spoken in anger, yet now she had no choice. She took a deep breath and said aloud that which she had hidden from everyone for so long. ‘I have a madness.’

‘What are you talking about?’

Sabina felt Lord de Burgh’s hands close about her shoulders, but she could not look at him. ‘Fits. Frights,’ she muttered. ‘It started after my father died. I thought at first that something in the foul dragon breath was affecting me, perhaps because I’m a Sexton.’

‘What makes you say that?’

Sabina shook her head. ‘It might be the madness, but I had begun to think that the dragon was after me, more than anyone else. And you say I am no coward,’ she said, bitterly.

‘You aren’t a coward,’ he said.

‘And you don’t know all,’ Sabina insisted. ‘The truth, my lord, is that I am assailed by fears. Then I begin trembling and my heart is beating too fast and I can’t breathe. I’m hot and cold and dizzy and faint, useless when I most need to be strong, starting at nothing while my people suffer in silence, brave beyond measure.’

Unwilling to see his reaction, Sabina tried to pull away from his grasp, but he held her fast. ‘I have heard that madness can sometimes be cured,’ she murmured. ‘So I thought to go to Bury St Edmunds, but I could not, for I was too afraid.’

Sabina would have fled if she could have mustered the strength, but Lord de Burgh pulled her towards him. Ignoring her protests, he took her in his arms, enclosing her with his strength and his warmth. One big hand came up to cup her head, stroking her hair, and Sabina finally gave in to the lure of his comfort.

She buried her face against his chest, and even the hard links of his mail shirt were a reassurance that nothing could harm her here. At last she was safe, secure, and untroubled by fears.

Lord de Burgh murmured something unintelligible, soft words meant to soothe her, and Sabina wanted to respond in kind.
I love you
, she thought, but she dared not speak the words aloud, and she had just told him why.

I
t took Reynold a full day to convince the others that he was unhurt, though battered and bruised, and able to return to digging. Mistress Sexton, especially, claimed the task too dangerous. They had been lucky this time, she said, and that was true enough. Reynold knew that his brother Simon had been trapped by falling earth when undermining, and the most stubborn of the de Burghs had nearly been killed.

But when Mistress Sexton said they tempted fate if they continued defiling a grave, Reynold could not agree. The mound held a ship, not any remains, and they had come too far to abandon their search. He might have wished for Simon’s or Geoffrey’s expertise in shoring up the walls of the hole, but he would do his best.

For what else was there? Their days at Grim’s End were numbered, but Reynold was not ready to think about the future, especially that of Mistress Sexton. Although he didn’t fully understand what ailed her, she was not mad, Reynold was sure of that. She had been
hiding something from him, as he suspected, but it had nothing to do with the dragon, a realisation that did much to ease the tension between them.

Although she called herself a coward, Reynold thought her even more courageous to lead her people, fight fires and face dragons. Strong, brave, nurturing, kind, beautiful and yet struggling with a problem of her own, Mistress Sexton threatened to make Reynold abandon his old precepts where women were concerned.
Maybe, just maybe, this one was different.

‘Look, the soil is an unusual colour there,’ Peregrine said, drawing Reynold from his thoughts. Perched upon the bank, Peregrine pointed to an area at the very bottom of the cavity that Reynold had recently uncovered. Moving closer, Reynold knelt down to see for himself. Deep in the belly of the ship, he might not have noticed what Peregrine saw so clearly from above, yet he realised this spot
was
distinctive, the dissimilar ground forming a square.

Reynold glanced up at Peregrine and nodded. The boy scrambled back into the hole, and they set to dig in what seemed to be the very heart of the ship. Here Reynold wielded a smaller shovel and his hands, searching for anything out of the ordinary, the smooth surface of a chest or the thin contour of a piece of gold.

After all the work they had done, all the ground they had moved, all the time they had spent within the mound, Reynold was astonished when his fingers touched something almost immediately. Until now, they had found nothing beyond the two coins, bits of pottery and cloth, blackened wood and loose stone. Had they finally come upon the dragon’s treasure?

Sucking in a sharp breath, Reynold felt along the edge of the object, with a sense of disappointment. Smooth and long, it was probably a bone, which would draw Mistress Sexton’s wrath down upon them.

But Reynold had come too far to leave it be. After he had fallen, Adele gave him a small broom to brush off the dirt, and now Reynold used that to carefully dust away the soil. Rough usage, such as pulling the item from its berth, might very well cause damage. And Reynold did not care to admit to Mistress Sexton should he break any remains buried here.

When he finally was able to lift it out of the ground, Reynold realised that what he held in his hand was too strangely shaped for a human bone. Wide at one end, it tapered to a point at the other. Beside him, Peregrine crowded in to take a closer look.

‘It’s a horn,’ the boy whispered.

‘What have you found? What is it?’ sharp-eyed Ursula called from above.

‘A horn,’ Peregrine called back.

‘Is it one of the dragon’s horns?’ from beside Ursula Alec’s voice rose with awe and curiosity.

Reynold shot a glance at his squire. In their many discussions of worms, he could recall no mention of horns. And if there ever had been a dragon, where was the rest of it?

‘Perhaps this was used to call the beast or emulate its sound,’ Peregrine said.

Something certainly had been used recently to create a roar, but Reynold doubted that it was this worn instrument, buried so far beneath the ground. Still, he fingered
the end, and when he found no hole, he gently shook out the dirt that filled the opening.

‘Or perhaps it holds not noise, but ale,’ Reynold said, drily.

‘A drinking horn?’ Peregrine asked. ‘I’ve heard of them, but never seen one.’

Reynold had seen them, though he could not understand their appeal, then or now.

‘How do you even set it down?’ Peregrine asked.

‘Maybe the point is not to,’ Reynold said, with a wry twist of his lips.

Peregrine flashed him a grin, but then turned pensive. ‘But what is it doing in the bowels of the ship?’

Reynold shook his head. What was the ship even doing here? His quest for answers about Grim’s End only seemed to yield up more mysteries.

Peregrine frowned. ‘Perhaps long ago “grim” was a word for ship?’

‘Perhaps,’ Reynold said, for the explanation was as good as any other. ‘Better take this up to Ursula,’ he added, and he stood watching as the boy scrambling up the banked earth.

Mistress Sexton’s attendant had insisted on dragging a chest to the site, presumably to fill with the treasure she had hoped was hidden here, but Reynold didn’t think an old drinking horn was what the woman had in mind.

But perhaps that was not all, Reynold thought, and he returned to his task. Using mostly his hands, it was slow going, and often he would get excited by the feel of something, only to discover a piece of fur or bits of material that had disintegrated in the earth. But, finally, his fingers
closed around something smooth again, and he worked steadily until an object protruded from the earth.

‘It’s only another old piece of wood,’ Peregrine said, his disappointment apparent.

Still, Reynold slowly followed the shaft into the earth, where he glimpsed a glint of metal, and eventually they uncovered a cudgel that stood on end as if thrown here long ago.

‘An axe!’ Peregrine said, obviously more impressed by the weapon than by the horn.

‘Careful, it looks as though it might fall apart,’ Reynold said as Peregrine hoisted it in his arms to deliver to Ursula and her mistress. Reynold wondered what Mistress Sexton would make of such a thing, but he did not stop his work to find out.

Although he no longer eyed the damsel with suspicion, Reynold kept his distance, for with no obstacles standing between him and temptation, he didn’t know how long his will would hold. And he was well aware that the comfort he gave when she wept in his arms could have turned into something else had they not been upon the grassy slope by the mound, where all could see.

‘My lord?’ Peregrine’s voice once again drew Reynold from his thoughts, and they continued their search. Not far from the axe, Reynold felt something else smooth and hard, but thinner and curved. It proved to be a piece of iron that had been worked into its shape, but to what purpose, he did not know.

‘What is it?’ Ursula called.

‘Just a piece of metal,’ Peregrine answered.

‘Not jewellery?’

Reynold snorted. Mistress Sexton’s attendant must be growing impatient, for what they had pulled from the earth so far was no treasure by any reckoning.

‘No, we don’t know what it is,’ Peregrine answered. He turned the piece over and over in his hands, studying it thoughtfully, before glancing up at Reynold in surprise. ‘I think it’s part of a helmet.’

Reynold shook his head, for ’twas like none he had ever seen. He watched, fascinated, as Peregrine fitted the thing over his head to hang over his face. ‘’Twould seem to be backwards to me,’ Reynold muttered.

But a helm would go with the axe, Reynold reasoned, with a sense of foreboding. Not only had they come across no cache of coins to please Ursula, but what they were finding were personal objects—the kind that might be found upon a dead man.

When Reynold returned his hands to the soil, it was with some reluctance, lest he come upon the owner of the items that Ursula so zealously inspected. However, when his fingers closed, once more, upon something smooth, it was not the shape of a skull, but of small circles, obviously crafted by man. Although Reynold suspected what he held in his hands, he said nothing, leaving Peregrine to recognise the object after a part of it was uncovered.

‘Tis a mail coat,’ the squire whispered in awe.

But ’twas an old one, strangely crafted, and they struggled for a long time to release the entire thing from the earth’s grip. As Peregrine carried it up to the waiting women, Reynold shuddered at the thought of what was left below. Yet he set to his task until he came upon
them, not the solid bones of someone recently deceased, but bits and pieces, as if they, too, were disintegrating in the sandy soil.

‘Twas not a welcome discovery. Reynold had faced down armed enemies without flinching, yet he was uncomfortable squatting among the remains. Perhaps he would not have felt such dismay had he simply stumbled over a grave, but these bones lay at the very core of Grim’s End, a village steeped in curious legends and abandoned by all except a handful of the living.

‘So it is a burial place,’ Peregrine said, softly, as he stared down at the evidence. He glanced up at Reynold. ‘But why are these other things here?’

‘Personal possessions,’ Reynold said. ‘Considering the axe, the fellow might have fallen in some primitive battle.’

‘Remember what happened to Beowulf?’ Peregrine said quietly. ‘He was buried in a broad high tumulus.’

‘A mound,’ Reynold said.

‘But that was after battling a dragon that was guarding its treasure,’ Peregrine noted. ‘And here in Grim’s End, there’s no dragon or treasure, just a ship.’

Reynold could only shake his head. Who knew what the ancestors of these villagers had done and why? Some pagan rituals and strange rites were not even to be found in Geoffrey’s books. Perhaps what happened here was lost to history except for a thread of rumour that survived, changing over the years into something unrecognisable, making the mound into the tomb, not of a ship, but of a dragon.

With a frown, Reynold continued his search of the
square chamber, but the bones appeared to be all that remained.

‘What is it? What are you setting aside down there?’ Ursula called, as if she expected Reynold and his squire to keep hidden valuables for themselves. Reynold shook his head at Peregrine in warning, but it was too late. His squire was already calling out the truth.

As Reynold suspected, Mistress Sexton soon appeared at the top of the pit, a horrified expression on her face. ‘Bones? You found
bones
?’ she accused, as though by unearthing the remains Reynold had called down some ancient curse upon Grim’s End.

But perhaps that was her fears talking. Dusting off his hands, Reynold made his way towards the sloped side in order to climb out, lest she be stricken with her malady. And, indeed, when he made it to the bank, she was pale and stiff.

‘You desecrated a grave,’ she said, with a gasp, and Reynold reached out to take her hands. He held her gaze, too, never wavering, as she drew one deep breath and then another.

‘What do you fear?’ he asked.

‘Nothing,’ she muttered, glancing away. ‘Everything.’

‘But this can’t be all that is hidden there,’ Ursula protested. She stared at the objects she had laid in the chest with a look of dismay that appeared to have little to do with the discovery of the bones.

‘What did you expect, the fabled Sexton hoard?’ Mistress Sexton asked, her scorn evident.

Although Reynold could not blame Mistress Sexton for her distress, he shared Ursula’s disappointment. The
villagers had gone to a lot of work, expending all their energy and time on a huge undertaking that had yielded little. Reynold was not sure what he had hoped to find, but some riches would have helped Mistress Sexton and her people establish themselves elsewhere. Yet, like so much associated with Grim’s End, it seemed that the rumoured hoard was as insubstantial as the dragon itself.

‘But treasure lies below the grim,’ Ursula insisted. ‘That’s what your grandfather said.’

‘What?’
Mistress Sexton blanched and turned towards her attendant.

Ursula blinked, as though only now realising what she had just said. ‘Tis nothing, mistress, just another story.’

‘One you heard from my grandfather?’

Ursula took a step backwards and began wringing her hands. ‘’Twas something I overheard, mistress, probably just the ranting of a sick man.’

‘Sick? When was my grandfather sick, except when he lay dying…?’ Mistress Sexton’s expression grew fierce. ‘Ursula, you helped tend to him. What did you do?’

‘Nothing, mistress, I swear,’ Ursula said, obviously agitated. ‘Your mother bid me sit with him and to fetch her, if need be.’ Ursula paused to eye Mistress Sexton with entreaty. ‘He mumbled to himself. Most of it I could not understand, and I paid no heed, unless he asked for your mother. But one time, I was unsure, so I leaned close. He must have thought I was her, for he grabbed my arm with surprising strength.

‘“Remember the treasure is under the grim,” he said very clearly as he looked me right in the eye.’ Ursula shivered. ‘Then he fell back and I ran to get your mother.’

‘Why did you never tell me this?’ Mistress Sexton asked.

‘In truth, mistress, I forgot all about it,’ Ursula said. ‘When I found your mother, I told her, and she brushed it aside. She claimed that he said lots of things from the past that gave him comfort, but that I was not to worry. And so I dismissed it from my mind. It wasn’t until recently that I remembered it.’

‘So you are responsible for this,’ Mistress Sexton said, sweeping an arm to encompass the vast chasm that had been the mound.

‘No, mistress! I would never speak to Urban of such things,’ she said, with a sniff.

‘But you did tell someone.’ Mistress Sexton persisted.

‘Yes, but that was just in the course of relating old tales, after the fashion of my kinsman Gamel. His stories were mentioned, and I added this one, never thinking…’ Ursula trailed off, as though unable to go on. ‘But, then it doesn’t matter because that one is…dead.’

Mistress Sexton blanched again, and Reynold wondered whether this conversation was too much for her. And what was the point of it? No matter who told what to whom, the legends were just as fanciful as the dragon purported to be buried here, and the precious store of gold was nothing but a couple of coins possessed by the dead.