To Ruin A Queen: An Ursula Blanchard Mystery at Queen Elizabeth I's Court (19 page)

We tried, for some time. We showed it in the window three times, for a count of five each time, and then took it out of the window for a long pause, before repeating the sequence. But outside, the mountain night remained empty of all but the wind. The rain had stopped again and once there was even a gleam of moonlight,
but it showed us nothing except heather and rock.

The candle began to burn down. There was no point in hoarding it. We stood it in the window, as our last hope, and then, huddling together under our cloaks, which we folded so that the dampest parts were outermost, we lay down on the dirty floor and tried to sleep.

We didn’t sleep, of course, although I think we all drowsed after a fashion. We woke up all together and came to our feet in a scramble. The candle was still alight, though guttering by now, and it was still deep night, but there was at last a sound which was nothing to do with the weather.

“That’s a dog barking,” Brockley said, getting up. “Oh, I’m as stiff as a dotard.” He blundered to the window, cursing quite outspokenly for once. Dale put her face against me and said: “I’m not brave enough. If we have to die here …”

“We’re not going to die here. If there’s a dog out there, there’s probably someone with it. Shout, Brockley, shout!”

“Come over here and we’ll all shout,” said Brockley, clinging to the window and peering out.

My mouth and throat were dry and I didn’t know how I would get any kind of shout from them but I did my best. Dale and Brockley did their best too. We clustered at the window and screamed for help in a chorus. There was an answering cry from somewhere; a high voice like a child’s. Then, wondrously, below the window, the final effort of the candle showed us the face of the shepherd boy who had frightened my pony on the way up. His black-and-white dog was beside him, eyes glinting red.

“Let us out!” Dale shrieked. “Oh, dear God, don’t go away! Let us out!”

The boy said something in Welsh.

“The door, the door! Oh no! He doesn’t know any English!” wailed Dale.

I rushed to the door and hammered on it. A moment later I heard the boy outside, struggling with the heavy bar. The bolts were pulled back and the door opened. Brockley had already caught up our cloaks. We crowded through to freedom, oblivious of the cold wind. I bridged the language barrier by giving the boy a hug.

“Now what?” said Brockley. “How do we speak to him?”

It turned out that the boy did have a few words of English. He said them, and more blessed, more joyous words I had never heard.

“Come. Food. Get warm.”

He started away, glancing back to see if we were following. The dog nosed at our legs, urging us forward. We complied, clutching our cloaks about us. Dale was swaying with relief and weakness both at once and Brockley and I had to help her, one on each side. On the heels of the boy, with his black-and-white dog prancing around us as though we were sheep to be herded, we started down the mountain.

I don’t know how far we went. It seemed to take a long time and we often stumbled in the darkness. Then there was another stone cottage and an open door, and beyond it, candlelight and warmth and an unbelievable smell of
food. We staggered through. We realized later that the place was actually cramped, dirty, and smelly, but that night it looked like Paradise. Grime and cobwebs meant nothing. We saw only the candle, which burned so brightly in its cracked earthenware candlestick; the bed with the red and green blankets and the white fleeces on it and a second pile of fleeces heaped in a corner; the leaping hearthfire and the encouragingly full woodbasket; and hanging over the flames, a cauldron, which a shawled figure was industriously stirring.

The boy called out something in Welsh and she turned, spoon in hand, to look at us.

“So Griff was right. It is you, then. But how did you come to be shut in that hut up there? There’s no one goes there in weather like this. Not till July do they ever use those pastures up on the Mynydd Llyr, the long mountain.”

“Gladys Morgan!” I gasped.

Gladys gave us her terrible fanged grin and gestured with the spoon. “Rabbit stew?” she inquired.

“I got back to my home village all right.
But …”
Gladys said grumblingly, as we sat on the floor by her fire, eating rabbit stew out of a single bowl. Dale and I had a spoon each; Brockley made do with a wooden ladle. It didn’t matter. The food was a marvel. It was brown, bubbling life. It even gave me the energy to ask Gladys why she was living in a lonely cottage like this and not with the kinsfolk with whom, I vaguely recalled, she had intended to seek shelter.

“My kin were there all right, but they don’t want me,” Gladys told us, “and there aren’t so many of them left now, indeed. My cousin the smith would have taken me in but his silly bitch of a wife had heard I was a witch and said I’d put the evil eye on her brats. Hah!”

Gladys and the shepherd boy, Griff, were squatting beside us, Gladys keeping an eye on our cloaks, which were steaming in front of the fire, draped over a roughly
made clotheshorse. She and the boy had already eaten, she said, but now and then she nipped bits of rabbit out of the pot with her fingers, sharing them impartially with Griff and the sheepdog.

“My cousin’s brats are four demons out of hell,” Gladys informed us roundly. “More likely to put the evil eye on me, I’d have said. No more manners than a pack of weasels, they haven’t. They’re dirty; they fight …”

“Is your cousin your only relative?” I asked, more to stop the monologue about her cousin’s children than because I really wanted to know.

“What? Oh no. I’ve a sister, but she’s heard the tales about me too and she and her man didn’t want me either, though her children are grown and gone long since. My daughter’s married and gone north into Powys, and my son’s dead and his widow’s another one who’s scared of me—same reason as all the others. But Griff here is her boy and my grandson and he’s not scared. Are you, Griff?”

She added something to him in Welsh, and he laughed, shaking his head. She fished out another bit of rabbit, and popped it into his mouth.

“In the end,” Gladys said, “they settled that I’d come here and they’d let me have food and that, and Griff’ud bring it. He’s always about the mountain. Gets his living herdin’ sheep. Wants a flock of his own one day. By good luck, this place was empty. A hermitage, that’s what it used to be.” Grunting, she got to her feet and turned the cloaks around. “Fellow called Bruno used to live here,” she said. “He came from the priory at Ewyas Harold, back in the days when it was still a monastery—Priory of St. James and St. Bartholomew, that was its name. Bruno
said he had a call to live on his own and be an anchorage, though I wouldn’t know what he meant. We’re nowhere near the sea, or even a river you can bring boats up.”

“Anchorite,”
said Brockley. “It’s another word for hermit. But hermits were sent back into the world along with the monks when the monasteries were shut. This place must have been empty a good long time. I wonder it didn’t fall down.”

“Good long time nothing,” said Gladys, squatting down again. “Bruno only died last year. The priory at Ewyas was closed down right enough and not before time. Dissolving the monasteries, that’s what everyone called it.” She let out what I can only call a cackle. “Dissolved it was for being dissolute, if you want to know. Story going round was that they had as many kitchen maids as they had monks, and all of ’em pretty. Maybe that was why Bruno wanted to go off and live as a hermit. No one ever said
he
was dissolute. Whatever happened to the monastery, no one came over to the Black Mountains to dissolve Bruno. He just stayed here and went on being an anchor whatever it is and the villagers fed him like they always had. He’s buried out there.”

She nodded toward the window. “When he died, his place was just left. It was no good for a shepherd’s hut because this is no place for sheep. There’s a precipice up above and a wood down below. But it weren’t empty long enough to do it much harm. So I took it over. My daughter-in-law gave me a few bits and pieces and my cousin gave me some chickens and the man Griff works for, that owns the flock—he’s charitable and let me have some fleeces to keep my old bones warm. So here I am, and not
ill-pleased to be away from the village and all the clacking tongues. Now, what about you? How did you get shut in up there? You’ve not told me yet. I’d like to know—if you can stop awake long enough.”

Warmth and food were making our eyelids droop and she had noticed. “It’s a long tale,” I said. I wasn’t sure how much to tell her and couldn’t, in my weary state, work it out. Gladys gazed at me with disconcertingly sharp eyes and said: “All right. Let it wait till day. We’ll have to spread these fleeces around the lot of you, but you’ll be warm enough if we make up the fire. Your cloaks are dry now.”

“How did you know we were up in the hut?” I asked sleepily. “Did you see our signal with the candle? You said Griff was right. How did he know who was up there?”

“Met you when you were on the way up there, didn’t he? His sheep frightened your pony and off you came.” Gladys cackled again. She seemed to enjoy the misfortunes of others. “Well, he heard you and Brockley speak to each other by name. He hasn’t the English, or not much, but his ear is quick enough. I’d told your names to him and he recognized ’em. Talked about you, I have. You rescued me back there at Vetch and we Welsh don’t forget a good turn any more than we forget an ill one. He came up the mountain again later, with a couple of rabbits he’d caught in a trap—they’re what’s in the pot. I put the stew on and told him: stop and share it. While it was cookin’, he told me he thought a Mistress Blanchard and a man called Brockley had ridden up the path toward the shepherd’s hut, with some others, who seemed to be taking ’em there, and it was queer, because
what would anyone want up there this soon in the year?

“There’s funny, I thought, but at the time there was nothing to be done. We had our bit of stew and we were going to bank the fire and settle in for the night. Too late it was for Griff to get home but his mam knew he’d come up here to me. But before we went to sleep, he stepped outside for a moment and saw your light and called me. We watched it awhile. It was just a spark in the night, and it kept comin’ and goin’, regular like, and then there’d be nothing, and then we’d see it comin’ and goin’ again.”

Griff, hearing his name mentioned, asked something in Welsh. Gladys answered and he nodded energetically and said something more. Gladys turned to us.

“He says he told me the light looked like a signal and so he did, and right he was. I thought the same. That’s why I sent him up with his dog to see what was going on. Just as well I did, from what he told me when he brought you back. Locked in, weren’t you?”

“Gladys,” I said. “We’re grateful.”

“I was so frightened,” Dale said. “I thought we were going to die up there.”

But her voice was drowsy. Gladys grinned her terrible grin. “A fleece under you and your cloak and a blanket on top and you’ll sleep like a babe new-born.”

Gladys and Griff slept on the bed; we slept on the floor, wrapped in assorted fleeces, blankets, and cloaks. I didn’t care, anyway. We were safe and fed and I could have slept anywhere. When I woke, light was showing through the chinks in the shuttered windows. Taking
my cloak, I slipped outside to find that the sun was well up and shining out now and then between blowing drifts of cloud.

Gladys’s hermitage was halfway up a mountain. The wood that she had mentioned grew thick and dark below, and above us was an all but perpendicular hillside of grass and heather. A waterfall splashed straight down it in a line of white, and sped on to the wood as a rapid, noisy stream. But to my right, the slope of the cliff was less extreme. A few bushes clung to it and I could see the path down which we must have come, winding to and fro. Raising my eyes, I made out the tiny shape of the shepherd’s hut, last night’s prison, high up on a ridge. As I looked, a rainstorm swallowed it from sight. It was a wonder that our candle had been seen, so far away.

I stood a moment, breathing the cold, refreshing air, conscious that my gown was filthy and my hair in a bird’s nest and that I probably smelled. Then the rain swept in my direction and I turned quickly back into the hermitage, scenting food, to find that Dale and Brockley were up and toasting bread at the fire while our hostess beat eggs in a bowl. “There’s milk too,” Gladys informed us. “I was up afore any of you, milking the goat. My sister gave me that. Thought she’d ward my curses off that way.”

We broke our fast with beaten eggs cooked in goat’s butter and piled onto toasted bread, washed down with fresh goat’s milk. I never knew a meal taste better. At the end of it, Gladys took the platters and mugs outside and put them in the stream to be washed clean by the forces of nature. Then she scurried back into the hermitage, shut
the door behind her, and scanned our faces, her head on one side. “Well?” she said.

I hesitated, but she said: “I’d have been stoned out into the wild but for you people,” and it struck me that although she was one of the most unprepossessing women I had ever set eyes on, she was honest in her fashion. I told her some of the truth.

“I work for the queen,” I said simply. “I was asked to read Sir Philip’s private papers if I could, in case he is involved in some kind of plot against Her Majesty.”

The humblest peasant in the land understood what plots against the throne meant. We had had so many of them in the last two reigns that they were the currency of gossip in every alehouse. Gladys didn’t even seem surprised. She just nodded knowingly.

She wasn’t surprised either when I told her about Alice and Rafe. Most of Vetch, castle and village alike, had apparently heard all about that, the previous Christmas. She looked much more astonished when I explained how Brockley and I had found Rafe’s body. Then I told her how we had been caught, accused, and imprisoned, and brought up here on Lady Thomasine’s orders, to be locked into the cottage. Here, Gladys nodded vigorously and I stopped.

“Like Isabel and Rhodri,” she said.