Isabel moved swiftly on her own advice, while the others gawped for a moment, before helping her. It took hardly a moment to pull off the nun’s outer habit and scapular, then Isabel had Hal and Kirkpatrick drag the woman into the cell. She came round as Isabel’s face came out of the scapular and they looked at each other, the nun round-eyed with astonishment; her mouth opened as if to scream.
‘I would not do that, Sister Alise,’ Isabel said and looked to where Kirkpatrick stood with the dagger in his fist. The nun’s eyes went huge and round with fear, and then Isabel spoke to Kirkpatrick.
‘I would not like to hear that she had died,’ she said coldly. ‘A wad in her mouth, tied with a bit of her habit cord, will suffice. Her wrists and ankles too, I think.’
Kirkpatrick obeyed her and Alise was trussed and staring, snoring through her damaged nose.
‘How the world turns, Sister,’ Isabel said, her gentle voice no less of a scathe than a hot iron. ‘If you had not contrived to have Constance kept from me, out of spite, it would be her across my door and not you. Malise will not be pleased – his power may have been removed, but his hate is not and he will visit it on you. It seems that you may burn in Hell before I do.’
‘Time we were away,’ Kirkpatrick interrupted and Hal stared miserably out at Sweetmilk, who pressed his face close to the bars and grinned a wet, wan farewell.
‘On yer way, lords. I will scrauchle free of this, dinna fret.’
‘Down to the bailey and out the gate,’ Isabel declared, shoving Hal out of the tower cell. ‘A nun and her braw escorts, headed back to her convent and away from all this Godless trouble.’
‘Bigod,’ Kirkpatrick declared admiringly, ‘you can strop your wits when you walk with your ladyship and no mistake.’
They slithered like dancing shadows down to the level where the guard lay, down the spiral of stairs further still; somewhere beyond they heard men cursing and picking their way carefully down the worn-smooth, steeply pitched Breakneck Stairs.
At the foot of the tower, Hal led the way out into the bailey, walking smartly, but more casually than his thundering heart; behind came Isabel, hands folded piously in the sleeves, scapular hood drawn up against the rain and to hide her face. Kirkpatrick, at the tail end, saw the great gates of the castle start to close, and Isabel called out sharply to let her and her escort through. The gate commander, a long-time garrison resident, looked at the black-shadowed Bride of Christ and shook his head.
‘Sorry, Sister, while the alarum is up, the yett is shut and the bridge raised as well in a meenit. You mun wait.’
The tile clattered at his feet and made them all leap away from it, looking round wildly. Above, Sweetmilk swung and capered and launched another so that the guards scattered. Someone yelled to fetch a latchbow and the gate commander, squinting up through the rain with a face like bad whey, crossed himself. It was an imp of Satan, for sure – Christ’s Wounds, this was a night when Hell had unlatched its door …
A man ran up with a crossbow spanned, slid in a leather-fletched bolt, aimed and shot. Just as he did so, the gate commander remembered the nun and turned to warn her to get to safety – but she was gone.
Then the body fell, a whirl of arms and legs crashing to the cobbles with a sickening wet thud; the gate commander was disappointed to see that it was no imp at all, just a man with his face twisted in agony and his head leaking into the gutter like a broken egg.
Hal knew Sweetmilk was dead and the sour sick of it dogged his heels as he wraithed through the last crack of the gate and across the bridge, which trembled and creaked under the raising windlass even as they scurried.
‘He saw we were shut in and contrived to help,’ he muttered. ‘God forgive us, he could never have survived the fall.’
Kirkpatrick, feral eyes flicking this way and that as they moved along the lee of buildings, growled back that the bolt would have killed him before that; it was meant as a soothe but did not balm the loss much. Isabel snapped the glare between them.
‘Best we do not stand here like a set mill, for I am resolved never to go back in that cage.’
Hal blinked the rain from his face, felt it scamper, erratic as running mice, down through his collar and back. She never would, he vowed, for he would die before he let it happen and, when he said it, had back the glow of a smile and a kiss on his wet cheek.
The streets were dark – they had called couvre-feu hours before – but not empty; the place was stuffed with the debris of war, the sour wash of those flung out of their old lives and forced to run for the dubious shelter of Berwick, with nothing more than hope to cling to.
Huddled in doorways and up covered wynds, soaked and starving, they made a mockery of the orders that were supposed to keep folk indoors, by law of the Governor. Too miserable even for the oblivion of sleep, they stretched pale hands out of the shadows: ‘Alms, for the love of Christ.’