Hal had gone out and up the spiral of worn stairs, for all jakes were up and there was a servant nearby who could see him on the stairtop. He wanted to go down, for captives were more likely to be down – but there was the chance that the chess-playing lord of Closeburn would not be pushing rooks and pawns in the cellar, but in his own comfortable solar. With Isabel.
He went up, reached the next floor. Left or right – he went right, along a flagged corridor, narrow enough to make him weave along it to avoid the sconces. Well lit, he thought, feeling for the hidden dagger – then recoiling from the hilt as if it stung.
Foolishness. Try anything with a blade in it and they were lost …
He stepped cautiously round a corner – this was the keep at Closeburn, square and solid as a stone block – and came face to face with an astonished servant, his hands full of bowls and a brass ewer. Food and wine, Hal noted swiftly, for those who were behind the door, open enough to spill out yellow light – expensive yellow light, Hal noted, from beeswax candles, which turned the helmet of the guard to gold.
‘Who … whit why in the name o’ God are ye up here?’
The servant was astounded and truculent, his round face indignant. Hal clutched his belly and whimpered.
‘That way, ye jurrocks,’ the servant declared, pointing with his chin back the way Hal had come. ‘An’ dinna you mess the floors afore ye get to it.’
Hal, obedient and scurrying, whipped round and left, his mind racing with the certainty that he had found the Master’s refuge. Behind him, he heard the servant berating the guard to follow Hal and make sure of him; in turn, the guard stolidly defended his remaining where he was, as ordered.
He reached the spiral stair and went down, back to the level of the hall, paused to make sure the servant could no longer see him and darted downwards. Incongruously, he heard only one voice and knew it was Kirkpatrick’s but did not know why – if he had heard it right – the man would be discoursing about ploughboys.
‘The ploughboy,’ Kirkpatrick declared to his rapt audience, ‘whose name was Tam, then ran off, never thinking of what ruin this brought on his da and his brithers, left to pay the price to their liege lord. Tam ran to the nearest toon, for it is kent that if ye can stay hidden in a toon for a year and a day, ye escape the punishment o’ yer rash disregard for God’s plan for the world.’
Kirkpatrick paused, to allow for the head-shaking and tutting of noble and friar.
‘He sleekit himself into work at the castle, though it was of the meanest kind – he became a gong farmer, covered in shite crown to toe every day. But paid well for it – as much as a good latch bowman.’
The crossbow soldiery took the jeers of their comrades well enough, though some sharp words from the top table had to stop the drunken worst from rabbling there and then. Kirkpatrick waited patiently, ticking off the seconds and hoping Hal made the most of them; the sweat was trickling icy trails down his back and pooling where his tunic belt cinched.
‘The castle never smelled as sweet wi’ Tam at the cesspits, so that the Earl declared it a pleasure to turd and it was to be hoped that this sweet-smelling addition to life would please his daughter. She was a ripe beauty, right enow, with a chest o’ treasures in more ways than just the one – but had stopped speaking entire when she was nine and had not peeped once since then. Not a single person kent the why of it, neither.’
The soldiery perked up at this – beautiful damsels with large chests of treasure made for a good tale in their eyes and Kirkpatrick, who had known this – and even tailored his speech from the neat southern English to the rawer north, where most of the men-at-arms came from – saw Fitzwalter had also noted this, was stroking his beard, thoughtful and considered.
He is a creishie wee fox, that yin, Kirkpatrick thought, hoping he did not go dry-mouthed, hoping – Christ save us – that Hal remembered his place. One slip and we are spiked on some city gate.
Hal had no idea of his place save that it was in the dim of the undercroft, a maze of cellars, most of them emptied. He knew the kitchen was on the other side of the hall and surmised that these cellars had been emptied to take captives, but the doors of most of them were locked tight.
Then, in the grey gloom, he heard a door rattle open, the jingle of keys and a burst of red-gold light. He froze, trapped, then fell into the belly-curled whimper he had been adopting all along, so that Dixon stared, amazed, his blue bottom lip wobbling with the surprise of it.
‘Jakes,’ Hal groaned and Dixon stirred and frowned.
‘A garderobe in an undercroft?’ he growled. ‘Are ye slack-wittit? Go up, ye daftie. Get ye gone …’
He lashed out with his only weapon, the heavy keys and Hal took it on a shoulder, wincing as he backed away and scuttled back up the stairs, to where a troubled earl wanted his daughter to speak.
‘The Earl declared that whoever teased his daughter to speak would be married on to her,’ Kirkpatrick declared. ‘Many tried – clivver nobiles from all the airts and pairts – but the lovely quine stayed silent.’