Free The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope Page A

hut that had been deserted for a hundred years would serve to keep out the weather or shelter anyone, even supposing that anyone had sense enough left to get under shelter. He had more likely laid it on himself to tramp about in the rain.
    She sat up, punching her down pillow vindictively into shape. It was all very well for a hero in a romance, like Sir Launcelot, to break his heart and — how did it go? — "run mad in the wilderness"; but in her opinion Sir Launcelot had behaved very foolishly. Somebody ought to have stopped him.
    But who was to stop Christopher Heron from doing as he chose?
    For one instant, she had a brief dazzling vision of Katherine Sutton back in the valley again, facing Christopher Heron with cool certainty, winning all the arguments, reducing him to a state of stammering admiration and apology; but this dream did not survive a moment's inspection: it would have to be somebody else. Not Master John — if it suited Sir Geoffrey's heir to spend his days repenting in a leper's hut while Master John went on ruling over the whole estate, Master John would doubtless be only too pleased to oblige him. Sir Geoffrey? Sir Geoffrey was far away out of reach in Norfolk, but when he returned in November — ? When he returned in November, Christopher would come back and stand in the great hall again, with his fine green suit and his hand on the gold-inlaid hilt of his hunting knife, to keep his brother from knowing where he had really been spending his time. It might be a foolish proud way to act, but it was his last dignity, the only one that was left him, and how was it possible to tell Sir Geoffrey without stripping him even of that? She could not do it. She could not, as a matter of fact, do anything at all.
    The worst of it was that she kept having a strange, restless feeling that there was something she ought to be doing. She could not think what it was, but there was something, flickering at the back of her mind where she could not get at it, like a mote on the edge of her eye. Even when she finally drifted off into a half-consciousness filled with the sound of falling rain, it was only to hear Master Roger's voice again, as she had on her first night at the Hall, very faint and far off, telling her to listen, there was something she had forgotten, something urgent, listen, there was something she ought to be doing, but though she listened frantically all that came to her was a confused echo of more voices, Randal's voice singing,
     
O where is the Queen, and where is her throne?
  Down in the stone O, but not in the stone,
     
    and mingled with it another voice, a child's voice crying pitifully, "O Cecily is lost! Where is Cecily?" over and over, until she woke shivering with the room still dark and the rain tearing at the windows.
    The morning was no better. The storm had risen higher during the night, turning to gales that ripped along the roofs and sent tiles and chimney pots crashing down in fragments over the stones of the courtyard. By noon they were having trouble with all the fires, and dinner was a matter of bread and cheese and lukewarm broth and yesterday's roast duck cold. Pages and menservants with errands to do stood huddled in the doorways, eyeing the sky like uneasy animals before they pulled their cloaks over their heads and darted out into the rain.
    Kate spent most of the day wandering restlessly about the house. She hated storms, and the queer sense that there was something she ought to be doing still nagged at her. Old Dorothy had taken to her bed with the rheumatism, and that meant she had no one to talk to. There was a great carved case full of books in the long gallery, but most of them seemed to be ancient manuscripts of works on alchemy and medicine, illustrated with obscure designs and written in languages that she could not read. She finally stumbled on a small, badly printed Lives of the Saints in English, thrust away behind the others. It had apparently belonged to Anne