The Stolen Lake (16 page)

"Leave that to me. I can talk the old lady round, by and by. Second thoughts she will be having, after a day or two. Just now, best to leave her alone.
Quieta non movere.
"

"I see," Windward said. He did not sound convinced. "Well—thank you, sir. We will be sure to remember your advice."

Gomez gave them another cunning look, then glided away round the curve and out of sight.

It was a relief to descend the stair, to go out through the revolving door into the bitter cold of the palace yard—a sharp but welcome contrast to the steamy heat inside.

Neither of the pair spoke until they were safely in the carriage, when Lieutenant Windward exclaimed, "What the
devil
do we do now?"

"Think hard," said Dido. "Talk it over with the others—somewhere we can't be listened to. I don't trust anybody in this murky town. Oh," she sighed, "it
would
be handy if Mr. Holy were a bit better and could talk sense when we gets back."

"That queen is a regular shocker!" muttered Windward, who could not get over the horror of seeing his commanding officer dragged away so helplessly at the whim of a fat old woman. After a moment he added, "It's rum, though—she seemed to take quite a shine to
you.
"

A council of war was held in Dido's bedroom at the Sydney Hotel. The participating members were Lieutenant Windward, Mr. Multiple, Dido, Plum, and Noah Gusset. Mr. Holystone had fallen into a high fever; the doctor was perplexed by his condition, which did not respond to treatment.

"All we can do is wait," he said, not too happily or confidently. "I am afraid the air of Bath does not agree with your friend."

"You mean to tell me this old girl believes she's King Arthur's
widow?
" Mr. Multiple incredulously demanded of the two who had visited the palace. "Round Table King Arthur? That one?"

"That's what she said. Didn't she, Miss Twite? Seemed to believe it, too. She's clean gone in her wits, of course; rats in the garret. But the thing is, what are we going to do? She's got Cap'n Hughes in the lock-up; for all we know, she's liable to chop his head off, or have it shrunk, like those ones in the waiting room, if we don't keep her sweet."

"Yes," said Multiple very doubtfully, "but even if Miss Twite goes to this King Mabon, and lets on to be his daughter, how do we know
that'll
help the cap'n? It sounds to me like a tottyheaded scheme. First, Miss Twite doesn't
look
like any princess—axing your pardon, Miss Twite."

"Oh, call me Dido, can't you," said Dido impatiently. "0' course I don't look like a princess."

"So it's odds but King Mabon'd twig our wheedle right from the start. And then
we'll
be rolled up too. Probably thrown into jail in Lyonesse. And he won't give back the old lady's lake."

"Supposing he
did
steal it," said the lieutenant skeptically.

Dido thought of the mysterious procession she had seen through the captain's telescope—all those loaded llamas slowly making their way over the mountaintops with their heavy burdens. But wait, she said to herself, I saw that
after
Cap'n Hughes had the message about the theft. Still, maybe llamas travel very slowly—specially with a heavy load, and maybe going only at night. Maybe it would take them two, three weeks to go from New Cumbria to Lyonesse?

"I reckon the lake
was
stolen," she said slowly.

"If it was stole, then King Mabon oughta return it," said Noah Gusset with stolid justice.

Plum, surprising everybody, said, "Mayhap she
do
be King Arthur's widow!"

They all stared at him, and he turned brick-red, but went on, "When I were a boy, in Usk, my gramma'd be telling us about King Arthur. Come back one day, she said he would, no matter how long. Sleeping in the mountain, him, till his time be come, with his knights around him. An' when his time be come, he'll pull his sword outa the rock again, an' put on his golden crown."

"Oh, flummery!" said Lieutenant Windward irritably. "Anyway—even if that were so—how could his widow survive him for
thirteen hundred years?
"

"The old medico Cap'n Hughes fetched in for Mr. Holystone said the climate up here was supposed to be devilish healthy," said Mr. Multiple.

"Not for poor Holystone it ain't!"

"Nor for all the young gels as gets took by the aurocs," said Dido. Then she stopped short. A perfectly horrible idea had come into her head. It was so strange, and so frightening, that she did not like to utter it aloud. Instead she said slowly, "I've had a kind of a notion. I believe I know where King Mabon's daughter might be."

They all stared at her in amazement.

"You
do?
" said Mr. Multiple. "How can that be?"

"I better not say here." Dido glanced round the room. "I don't trust this place above half." She looked under the bed. "What happened to the cat?" she asked Mr. Multiple.

"It dashed out when I opened the door."

"I reckon we'd better play along with the old lady a bit," Dido went on in a very low tone. "Say we'll go visit this King Mabon. That can't do no harm. Then we'll get a pass from the grand whatshisname, saying we're allowed to climb Mount Dammyache and Mount Catelonde and the other one."

Mount Arrabe, she thought.

Captain Hughes was thrust into a smallish stone-walled room, and the door slammed to behind him. He heard the rattle of bolts. For a moment or two he stood blinking (his head had been thrust into a black bag during his removal from Bath Palace); when he recovered his sight, he recognized a familiar figure in the small, plump man sitting dolefully on the floor by the window, with his buttons undone, his hair disheveled, and his cravat hanging in a loose tangle. He did not look up at the captain's unceremonious entry, but continued staring miserably at his own outspread fingers.

"Mr. Brandywinde! Upon my soul! I had thought you were upon the high seas! Do you mean to tell me that that hag of a queen imprisoned you too?"

"I don't mean to tell you anything," retorted Mr. Brandywinde moodily. "What's the use of talking? Oh, my hands, my poor hands!"

And he hunched his shoulders, turning his back rudely on the captain, who felt justifiably irritated. He had enough troubles of his own without being snubbed by this wretched little twopenny-halfpenny fellow.

Ignoring Mr. Brandywinde's sulks, Captain Hughes inspected the room, walked across to the window, and glanced out indifferently at the magnificent prospect of Bath encircled in its ring of volcanoes (the window was very high; they were at the top of the Wen Pendragon tower, which, in its turn, was at the top of Beechen Cliff). Then, discovering a second door, which stood ajar, the captain went through it into a second room, where he found a large loom, already strung with the warp for a carpet or a piece of tapestry. A door beyond the loom led on, and he discovered a circular suite of rooms, all interconnected and furnished with various materials for indoor occupation: a piano, a kiln and quantity of clay, paints, canvas, wool and needles, mathematical instruments, sewing equipment, canes, rushes, pipes, flutes; there was even a harp. What the captain did
not
find was any other exit apart from the bolted door through which he had been thrust by his captors.

"What the deuce is this place—a college?" he demanded, returning through a door opposite that from which he had started. "Or does Queen Ginevra propose to keep her prisoners at work weaving carpets?"

The British agent looked up at him with dismal bloodshot eyes.

"Oh, no," said Brandywinde. "She don't give a rap what happens to
us.
Unless we're some use to her. No, this ain't a college. It's a prison. But it's also King Arthur's castle. Where he's supposed to be residing till he's healed of his wound."

Forgetting his sulks, he imparted this information in a tone of condescension.

"Oh, what fustian!" exclaimed the captain irritably. "He is not really dwelling here, I collect?"

"O' course he ain't! But a good few o' the townspeople believe he is, an' that suits the queen's book an' keeps them contented. Every month or so she buys another set o' flutes or some wool and a crochet hook 'just to keep His Majesty diverted during his illness.' That's what all that clobber is in the other rooms."

"The jailors know it's not so."

"Ay, but they're all dumb."

"Why does she keep up the pretense?" asked the captain, shivering despite himself. "Does she really believe it herself?"

"Not that he is here.... Oh, who knows
what
she believes?" said Mr. Brandywinde morosely. "But whether she believes it herself or not, the rumor that he's in here is enough to keep King Mabon, or Ccaedmon of Hy Brasil, from invading and snapping up New Cumbria for themselves. A sick king is better than none."

"Oh. Ha. Hum. I see. Why the deuce didn't you tell me all this on the
Thrush?
" demanded the captain.

"Eh? Oh—well ... I never thought you'd get as far as Bath Regis," Mr. Brandywinde said evasively. "And—and—about to set sail myself ... preoccupied with plans for departure..."

"So why did you not embark? Why are you here in prison? And where are your wife and child?"

At these questions, to Captain Hughes's horror, his companion began to whimper distressingly. Tears coursed down his cheeks; he rocked himself to and fro.

"Oh, I am a wicked, wicked wretch!" he lamented in a thin, reedy voice. "I did wrong—dreadfully wrong—and now I'm being punished for it. And what's worst of all, I didn't even
benefit
from my wrongdoing. On the contrary! Oh, my hands! My poor hands!"

"Why, what the devil
did
you do?" inquired the captain without much sympathy.

"I sold that child of yours—Twitkin, Tweetkin, whatever the name is—to Lady Ettarde, for our passage money. Five hundred gold bezants."

"
Sold Miss Twite to Lady Ettarde?!
" exclaimed the captain in wrath and astonishment. "As a slave, do you mean? How can you have sold her? She was not yours to sell!"

"Oh, I shouldn't have done it, I know!" blubbered Brandywinde. "And anyway it didn't do me a particle of good—because those two cursed witches, Morgan and Vavasour, swore they never got their hands on the brat—the little monster escaped—they wouldn't give me the ready after all, the cheating harridans! So the boat sailed without us, and my wife and child are lost forever, and worst of all—"

"What became of your wife and child?"

But at this question Mr. Brandywinde went wholly to pieces, rocking, gulping, and gibbering. The only words Captain Hughes could distinguish among those he gasped out were, "Hunted to death—to death!"

A grisly thought flashed into the captain's mind.

"
Hunted?
Good God, you can't mean that hunt in the forest...?"

"If she can't get 'em by other means, she'll send her hell hounds after them!"

Captain Hughes shuddered. He said, uncertainly, "Do, pray, man, pull yourself together." He had not the heart to ask any more questions; the subject was too dreadful. And no more sense could be got from Mr. Brandywinde for the time; the little agent wept and trembled and shivered, moaned that he wished he were dead, and then in the next breath voiced a longing to get his hands round the throat of Lady Ettarde and strangle her. "Only how could I?" he wailed. "My hands don't work anymore!"

"How do you mean?" demanded the captain, exasperated after an hour or so of these continual lamentations. "Your hands do not appear to be injured or crippled? I can see nothing amiss with them."

"But there is! She overlooked them. She was angry—said she would teach me to cheat her—not that I had any intention of cheating her—indeed,
indeed
I didn't! She blew on my fingers, she said, 'From now on they will be as soft as paintbrushes; that will teach you not to bamboozle me'—and they are, they are—look at them! I cannot even tie my cravat."

"Oh, fiddlestick, man. This must be moonshine! A mere disorder of the senses. Let me see you tie your neckcloth."

But if it was a delusion, it was a very deep-seated one. Mr. Brandywinde fumbled limply and hopelessly with the linen neckpiece, as if his fingers had lost the power of obeying his will; and later, when one of the guards opened the door and thrust a basin of thin soup into the room, Captain Hughes was obliged, with disgusted reluctance, to feed his fellow captive like a baby, while Mr. Brandywinde whimpered and sobbed and snuffled, repeating that he was a wicked, wicked wretch and he wished that he were dead.

Early next morning Mr. Windward was informed that a letter had come from Her Mercy for Miss Dido Twite.

"Fancy her remembering my name!" said Dido, impressed, and she opened the note. It was an engraved card, bidding her present herself at the palace between the hours of four and five that afternoon.

"Humph!" said Windward suspiciously. "I hope there isn't anything skimble-skamble about this. What do you think Dido had best do?" he said to the others. They were all assembled, shivering, in the cactus gardens behind the Sydney Hotel.

"Tell you one thing—if I go, I ain't a-going to put on that fancy court rig again," said Dido. "I was perishing well frozen in it yesterday, except jist in the palace, an' it's turned a lot colder today, and I felt a fool in it. I'll jist wear my breeks and duffel jacket."

"Multiple and I had best come with you."

Somehow, without further discussion, it had been accepted by all of them that Dido had better keep the appointment. Lieutenant Windward went on, "Plum and Gusset can stay to keep an eye on poor Holystone."

"Let's take a dekko at that big map of Cumbria that hangs in the hotel lobby," said Dido. "Try and see how long it'll take us to get to King Mabon's place, if we go."

"What about the grand inquisitor, though?" said Mr. Multiple. "You say he didn't want us to go to Mabon."

"I don't trust him," said Lieutenant Windward. "He looked about as straightforward as an adder. I reckon he has his own ax to grind."

"So we diddle him too? Pretend we're just
pretending
to visit Mabon?"