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  “Does it matter to you?” Marsan asked.

  “Rustengo de Soler is my kinsman,” Raymond replied, “and I would prefer that there be no further cause of dissatisfaction between him and the king. But if any action should divert the seneschal from holding back Navarre, I am like to suffer personally.”

  That remark made both the vicomte and Sir Oliver look at Raymond with surprise. He was well pleased to explain the extent of his wife’s dower lands and from there go on to the sequence of events that led to his marriage. He put himself out to make a merry tale of it, but brought it back in the end to his concern with peace in Bordeaux. This concern now seemed so reasonable that Marsan even urged him on his way as soon as dinner was over. He stopped only briefly in Benquel to gather up the twenty men-at-arms waiting for him, and Sir Oliver promised to send the bailiff after him in about a week, as soon as he had time to make up the accounts and hand over the farms.

  Shortly after Raymond left Benquel, Master Ernaldus had his servants load the goods he was taking with him on the ship that was sailing for Arles. They were careful and efficient, but each man’s lips moved in silent prayer. None spoke to the others, yet the prayers were identical—that the ship would sink and their master drown. Ernaldus himself went back on shore after seeing his baggage bestowed. He would return before the ship sailed, he assured the captain. That would be at dawn, with or without him, the captain warned, but Ernaldus only nodded and smiled. His business would be finished long before dawn.

  It was fully dark long before compline, but Ernaldus waited until he heard the bells of the nearby abbey calling the monks to prayer before he started. On winter nights all sought their beds early for warmth. By this hour, the inhabitants of Blancheforte would be soundly asleep, except for the men on guard, if there were any, but they would not see him. The postern pierced through the wall that was part of the keep itself, passing by a narrow tunnel into the lowest floor of the donjon. Perhaps in times past, when Blancheforte had some purpose for attack and defense, the land around it had been kept cleared and the doorway concealed and barred as well as locked, but now brush grew to the very walls, and for fifty years no bars had been fitted to the rusted slots of that door.

  By the time Ernaldus’s horse was saddled, the moon was high and there was light enough on the road. A sleepy guard let him out without question at the small gate which led to the docks. Elegantly dressed gentlemen were not likely to be thieves, and anyway his work was to keep dangerous persons out. The guard went quickly back to his shelter. He did not notice that the man who had asked to leave to board a ship did not ride to the docks but along the road.

  Ernaldus knew the road well. He had no trouble finding the place to turn off into a small wood. The bare branches did not block much of the moonlight, and the undergrowth was dead and brittle so that, aside from the unevenness of the ground, riding was not much more difficult than on the road. Among the last of the trees he tethered his horse. His passage had not been silent, but he did not believe the walls would be patrolled. That would be a ridiculous precaution in a time of peace where there were at most twenty men-at-arms.

  His guess was quite correct, and no sound beyond the crackle of twigs and dead brush marked his walk from the wood to the wall. The only anxiety he felt was over in a few minutes when the key he held at last turned in the stiffened lock. For a minute or two he had feared it was rusted closed, and he would be deprived of his revenge. The screech of the wards gave him another moment’s uneasiness, and he paused before pulling the door open; however, the sound seemed to have gone unregarded. Ernaldus entered the narrow passage, cursing the door, which had screeched even louder than the lock when he opened it.

  Here it was black as pitch. Ernaldus was prepared for that. He pulled a short candle and flint and tinder from his purse and crouched to make a light. When the flame was steady, he drew the door shut, cursing again at the squeal of unoiled hinges. Still there seemed to be no reaction. Either there were no guards at all or, at the distance they were, the sound was distorted so that it seemed to have a natural cause. There was another door at the end of the passage, but this yielded to the same key. The noise sounded worse here but worried Ernaldus much less. No sound could penetrate the heavy walls and thick floors of the old keep.

  Once he had the door open, he cursed emphatically. Although his candle had given adequate light in the narrow passage, the glow was swallowed up completely in the huge open space. Then Ernaldus shrugged. The small radius of candlelight would have an advantage later. He left the door open halfway and began to work his way forward cautiously. Somewhere ahead of him was an old strongroom. The cooking staff, which Alys had driven out, had come to him for help. Before he had told them to “go and be damned” since he had no further use for them, he had discovered that the strongroom had been fitted with a new door and the twelve men-at arms were imprisoned there.

  Ernaldus hurried forward across the dark expanse, nearly colliding with one of the thick pillars as his confidence increased to overconfidence. That act of carelessness made him gasp with fright, for he suddenly remembered the castle wells and the fact that their covers might have rotted. He went more cautiously thereafter, eventually coming to a stone wall. Ernaldus cursed again. He had lost his way in the dark. He turned right along the wall, knowing that this was what he should have done at first. Eagerness had wasted time.

  Only it had not. Just a few steps farther, his candle lit a heavy, double-barred door. Ernaldus smiled in triumph. His information had been correct. The cursed blonde bitch and her husband had not thought the men-at-arms worth the cost of installing a lock. He lifted the bars and swung the door open, his lips twisting wryly when there was no rush for freedom.

  Then he stepped back with a grimace. What had rushed out was a fetid stink.

  “It is Master Ernaldus,” he announced into the dark interior. “I have come to free you so that you may take your revenge and remove this blight. When the bitch is dead, you may have your places back, as before.”

  Then there was a rush through the door and a babble of voices, which Ernaldus quickly ordered into silence. He did not fear detection, but merely wished to set his plans into action with the least delay and without listening to stupid questions and complaints. He told the men quickly that Lord Raymond was gone from the keep. Most of the guards had gone with the lord, and discipline would be lax. They should be able to seize weapons and kill the few remaining castle guards without difficulty. Most important, however, they must first kill Lady Alys.

  There was murmuring at this statement, a few growls of approving hatred and more weak whines from men who desired only to escape. Ernaldus had his explanation all ready. The woman must be killed first because the castle belonged to her. When she was dead, it was arranged that the property was to go back into the king’s hands, not pass to her husband. Once Blancheforte belonged again to the king, Ernaldus would again be the bailiff, and thus the men would be restored to the sweet life that had been reft from them.

  The woman first, because once they attacked the guards, some would surely rush to defend her, whereas if there were only women above it would be easy, even without weapons, to wring her thin, white neck. This picture was so enthralling and the men so accustomed to thinking of Ernaldus as the master of Blancheforte that they accepted his statements without question. None knew Alys had stripped him of power. They had been imprisoned before she had done that. Nor did they know of the passage by which he had entered—or if they knew, they never thought of it. All assumed that Ernaldus was a welcome guest in the keep and had stolen down from his chamber to release them.

  “I will give you the candle,” Ernaldus said to the leader, who had been one of those eager for revenge even before he explained why it was necessary to kill Alys. “I could get no more than the one without raising suspicion. Let each man hold to the other until you find the stair so that none be lost in the dark.”

  The boldest who were most filled with hatred, lined up behind the lead
er eagerly, each grasping the belt or arm of the man ahead of him. The fearful and broken hung back, but as the leader moved forward and the small sphere of light cast by the candle left them in darkness, they also joined the line. To be left alone in the dark was more terrifying than to go forward.

  Ernaldus alone remained, smiling to himself as the point of light from the candle moved along the wall. When it suddenly began to rise and then disappeared and no cry of consternation followed, he knew that the leader had begun to climb the stairs and turned a corner. Silently, feeling his way, Ernaldus started along the wall in the opposite direction. It seemed very long, and he was growing nervous, but he did, at last, slide into the passage through the wall past the half-open door. He pulled it shut quickly and locked it, then permitted himself to give voice to his malicious laughter.

  Sweet, sweet. Revenge was truly sweet when it cost nothing. From what he had seen of Alys’s men-at-arms, there would be no slackening of discipline, and he knew only a few men had gone with Raymond, not most of the troop. Those twelve idiots would be cut to pieces—but not until after the bitch herself was dead. She would be strangled in her bed before any of her men even knew she had been attacked.

  Chapter Ten

  To her dismay, Alys found it no easier to sleep the second night she spent alone in her bed than the first. She was surprised at this, for she had fallen asleep quite soon after going to bed. However, she had awakened suddenly when she turned out of the small hollow of warmth that her body had made onto the cold sheets where Raymond should have been. She snuggled back into the warm spot, sighing with exasperation, and closed her eyes, but sleep would not come again. Perhaps, she thought, it is near morning and I have slept myself out.

  Hugging the covers to her, she put out an arm and drew the bed curtain aside. From the size and drippings on the night candle, she had slept only two or three hours. There were nine or ten hours of dark still to be gotten through before morning. Suddenly, a very faint metallic screech came to her ears. She cocked her head, trying to associate the sound with something familiar, and thought of the noise of rusty hinges. Was it one of the gate guards entering or leaving the tower? Those hinges should be seen to, she thought, trying to tuck the covers tighter around herself and determinedly closing her eyes again.

  A moment later, her eyes opened once more. It could not be a tower door she had heard. Those were on the other side of the keep, across the bailey. Here her chamber faced the outer wall. In fact, her chamber was part of the outer wall. Alys could have sworn that the sound came through the narrow window slit, but that was impossible. There was no door in the wall. It must have been the door at the head of the stairs. Could it have been one of the women sneaking down to the bed of a man-at-arms?

  At first Alys grinned naughtily, thinking that nine or ten days of good feeding and good treatment had drawn the devil’s attention to the most unlikely objects of lust. Then she frowned. Although she did not believe it likely that any person now in Blancheforte wished her ill, it was still a dangerous precedent to allow free passage to and from the lower floor of the keep while she, and Raymond when he was at home, were sleeping. Also, if a maid was stealing downstairs, it meant that Aelfric and Edith, who slept across the entrance to the stairwell in the great hall, had agreed to let the woman pass. This laxness, Alys realized, could not be condoned. She could easily understand the maids seeking to win favor with her men-at-arms and would not blame them, but her own servants needed no favor. If Aelfric and Edith were venal enough to take a bribe, the matter was serious.

  Alys was out of bed and into her bedrobe in an instant. She paused only to light a candle at the night light and went swiftly through the antechamber and out into the main room. Examination of the maidservants’ beds, however, showed no one to be missing. Several of the women woke, and Alys signaled them to be quiet as she turned and went to the door. This was closed as it should be. Curiously, Alys pulled it open, but it did not make a sound. Reaching up, Alys felt the well-greased hinge. She should have known better than to think Edith or Bertha would have neglected the door. It would have driven them crazy, squealing each time it was opened or closed.

  Then it could not have been a door she heard, Alys told herself. Probably it was some animal cry that distance had distorted. Annoyed with herself, she went back to her room, but she found herself very uneasy and reluctant to get back into bed. Nonetheless, it was ridiculous to stand shivering in the cold. Slowly she raised the candle to blow it out, fighting the foolish feeling that she would be trapped once she was under the heavy covers.

  Quite unaware that their “liberator”, Master Ernaldus, had abandoned them, the twelve men slowly climbed the stairs. They no longer held on to each other. It was too awkward on the steep rise and was not necessary in the narrow stairwell where a man had only to cling to the wall and feel for each step with his feet. But these men were not in the condition they had been when Alys had ordered that they be imprisoned. Over a week of near total darkness and semistarvation had sapped both their strength and their self-confidence. Hatred drove four of them, the most stubborn and stupid of the men. The remaining eight, a few clever enough to sense something wrong in Ernaldus’s argument, the others simply broken and frightened, were already thinking only of escape. As the distance widened between the leaders and the reluctant group, one man—one of the clever ones—balked. A second touched his foot when seeking the next step and stopped, also. The first man reached back and squeezed the second warningly. The light of the candle rounded another turn and disappeared, but the afterglow showed a third and fourth shadow climbing and disappearing around the turn, also. By then, the third and fourth men of the reluctant group had come to a halt.

  “This is madness,” the first man whispered. “We are unarmed. Where will we find weapons?”

  “Ernaldus!” the second hissed back in panic. “He is behind. If we do not obey him, he will betray us!”

  “How?” the first asked. “He dare not call out and be found in our company. He cannot pass us. Where is he? Is he lost?”

  The second man whispered a question down to the third, the third to the fourth, and so on to the last man. Then names were whispered back up the stairs, and it was discovered that Ernaldus was not among them. Since the first man knew the bailiff had not preceded them up the stairs and knew Master Ernaldus’s nature, he promptly smelled a trap. He communicated this suspicion and received quick, nervous agreement from the others. All knew Ernaldus and leapt to the conclusion that they were to be cat’s paws for his benefit. Several of the men began to weep softly, but the first had a plan which he whispered down to the rest.

  The solution was simple. They need only cross the hall to the outside stairs. In the bailey there would be sticks and small timbers which could be used as clubs in case there was a man guarding the gate. Like as not, no one would be there. What was there to guard against? Ernaldus probably had lied about the guards to make them obey him. It was Ernaldus who would benefit from the woman’s death, not they. Even if there were only a few men-at-arms and they succeeded in taking back the castle, when the husband returned they would all be tortured to death for a noblewoman’s murder. Better to open the gate, killing the one or two men-at-arms there—and eight of them with clubs should surely be able to do that—and flee.

  Before the four who had continued to climb reached the top floor of the keep, the fourth man realized there was no one following him. He hastened his step and plucked the man ahead by the tunic to report this defection. Word passed up to the leader just before he arrived at the door to the women’s quarters. He paused only for a moment before he snarled, “It will not take more than four of us to strangle one small woman. You heard Master Ernaldus. The man is gone. There are none but women above. Do you fear the maidservants of this keep?”

  One of the other men laughed coarsely. “Why kill her right off?” he asked. “If we stuff her mouth so she cannot cry out, we could try out whether gentlewomen are softer down there as well as els
ewhere.”

  The leader liked the idea well enough, but he was not quite as stupid as the others and something told him there would be no time to waste. He hesitated slightly as he lifted the latch of the door, vaguely troubled that no plan had been laid out for him to follow after the death of the woman. He made an indeterminate growl. The man behind had been fired by his own carnal suggestion and he took the sound to be acceptance of it. He pushed eagerly forward, and his eagerness both infected and shamed the leader, so that he pushed the door open at once.

  Raymond had kept men and horses to a hard pace as long as the light lasted. When it was too dark to see the road properly, he decreed a rest. The animals were fed and watered, and the men chewed at rock-hard travel bread and well-smoked strips of meat. Raymond found more delicate fare, pieces of roast fowl and slabs of cold beef and pork, together with a stoppered flask of wine packed by Sir Oliver’s lady. Since he joined his men around the fire they had built for warmth, he shared out a good part of these provisions, which made for good cheer and good feeling all around. Stomachs full, the men stretched out to sleep until the moon rose.

  The going was slower when they rode out again. Although the horses had been rested, they were not as fresh as when they had started. The moonlight was deceptive on the rutted road, and no pace faster than a trot was safe. Nor was there any need, for Raymond was not in any particular hurry. He knew there would be a warm bed and a tender welcome for him at whatever time he arrived. Moreover, even when the moon rose higher and the light improved, they went no faster, because Raymond was not familiar with the road. It looked very different in the dark than it had the previous day in the light, and he was afraid he would miss the turn to Blancheforte.