Free Betrayal by J. Robert Janes Page A

the gatehouse and the barbican with its armoury, offices and living quarters for the guards, it was a walk of several hundred yards across the bailey, the huge courtyard that was enclosed by the walls, the house and the towers.
    Clutching her bundle of books by its string, Mary started out alone, for the corporal who had accompanied her had been told to go no farther. That, in itself, was unsettling—always someone would escort her right to the library and not up to the top of the keep. But what made her even more uneasy was the sheer and utter absence of another living soul.
    Only the flapping of the flags came to her, and the solitary sound of her own steps on the metalled surface of the road. One hundred and eighty-two prisoners of war, their guards and guard dogs were here someplace, yet there wasn’t a sign of any of them.
    It made her think that the truth was out and that they were all watching her—Hamish especially, because he would have been let in early this morning. Colonel Bannerman and Major Trant would both be with him, spiffy in their uniforms but of so vastly different characters and abilities: Trant harshly military and always thinking the worst; Bannermann, the good fellow who was prepared to sit out the war here because the British High Command knew he was of no other use.
    Then, too, there was Jimmy—Captain James Allanby. Mary knew he had ordered this, that he must be watching her from the top of that bloody keep. He’d see the books and wonder about them, would hate her for having never paid the slightest attention to him at any of the staff do’s. Arrogant—did he think that of her? Did he not sense that she had instantly come to feel there wasn’t something quite right about him?
    A lone woman, dressed almost as she’d been the other day. The brown velvet jacket was a favourite. It went with so many things and it had lots of useful pockets, had been brushed thoroughly, brushed of its seeds and burs, brushed to that sheen only a good quality of velvet can possess. Didn’t it compliment the beige skirt and sand-coloured knee socks, her brown Oxfords, her eyes most of all?
    Still there wasn’t a sign of anyone—not up on the battlements of the enclosing walls, not anywhere within the bailey below them. Nothing, either, from the many tall windows of the castle house proper, but would the sun and the drifting clouds not block those out with glare or reflections?
    Access to the keep was either from within the castle via the second storey, or by the stone staircase to a forebuilding that went up to that same floor. Mary took the latter because she’d been told to, but paused only once to look back across that wasteland.
    Cannon were positioned at the four corners of the parade square. A flagpole stood in its centre. Five flags then—at least five. She picked out three of them. The wind … the wind atop the keep must be gusting hard.
    Reaching the iron-studded, oaken door at last, knowing how heavy it would be, she set the books down to use both hands and brace a foot against the sill. A rush of cold air hit her, she being momentarily blinded by flying dust. Straining now, she pulled the thing open and struggled to retrieve the books, finding this all but impossible unless she threw a shoulder against the door.
    It slammed so hard behind her, the sound of it reverberated in the emptiness, making her cringe and hurry on beneath a high stone arch whose portcullis hung above her like a grill of iron teeth set to come crashing down, a lesson in castles for which she might once have been grateful. Boiling oil and hot boulders or iron-tipped arrows would have rained through the murder holes, though this was only a pseudo-Norman castle, not a real one, but was Jimmy watching her through one of them? Would he cut the string and search through the books, he and Major Trant and Colonel Bannerman, the three of them in front of Hamish?
    The corridor was nearly