Cruel As the Grave (19 page)

"I guess that rules out sending him over the walls with one of the mangonels," Luke said with a grin. "I'll own up that I know more about chasing down outlaws and felons than battlefield stratagems. But it has been my experience that even the most diligent guards can be distracted. I remember an incident a few years ago in Winchester, when two whores got into a cat-fight at the St Giles Fair, shrieking and pulling hair and ripping clothes off and drawing quite a crowd, as you'd expect. And whilst they put on that highly entertaining performance, their accomplices were filching money pouches and robbing untended booths and stalls. Now I suppose it would take more than a couple of brawling harlots, but surely we can come up with something equally dramatic?"

"That would be the easy part," Marshal pointed out. "Getting him over the wall is the trick."

Justin had been sprawled out on the floor of the tent, nursing the last of his wine. At that, he sat up. "Can it be done, my lord?" Marshal regarded him pensively. "Yes," he said at last. "But you'd be taking a great risk."

Justin already knew that. "How do we do it?"

"We wait till dark, preferably on an overcast night. We decide what section of the wall seems most vulnerable. The upper bailey has far too many towers, but there are stretches of the lower bailey where a man might approach undetected. A scaling ladder could get you over the wall, provided that no sharp-eyed guard happened by at the wrong time. We could improve the odds for you by feigning an attack upon the gatehouse. Night assaults are rare and would be sure to cause considerable confusion. Midst all that chaos, you might possibly get away with it, but you'd need a lot of luck."

Will cleared his throat. "One of our scouts reported to me that the guards do not regularly patrol the north side of the lower bailey. Whether they are short-handed or think the approach is too steep or are just lazy, I cannot say, but my man claims it is not as well guarded as other sections of the wall." He glanced toward William Marshal, then away. "I did not mention it until now," he said, sounding both defensive and defiant, "because I hoped it would not come to an outright assault."

An awkward silence followed. Will was clearly embarrassed and the other men were sympathetic to his predicament. Civil wars were cruel by their very nature, rending families and setting brother against brother, father against son. Justin finished the last of his wine, remembering something Will had once said, that John had grown to manhood with his three elder brothers in rebellion against their father. In rebelling against his brother now, was he merely following in their footsteps? Was Richard reaping what he had sown? Thinking suddenly of his own father, thinking, too, of Humphrey Aston and his sons, he found himself wondering why some families were like poorly defended castles, offering meagre protection against a hostile world. The queen's army might be able to take Windsor Castle by force if it came to that, but her own family was far more vulnerable to attack.

Setting down his wine cup, Justin thanked Will for that belated revelation. He did not fault the other man for wanting to loyal to the Crown and loyal, too, to his brother. And John? Where did his loyalties lie? Evn more troubling to Justin was the ambiguous issue of Durand's loyalties. Was Eleanor's trust justified? Could a wolf ever truly be tamed? He had no answers to those questions, not yet. They would be found only within the walls of Windsor Castle.

~~

The next few nights were disappointing, for the sky was cloudless, spangled with stars. Justin passed the time watching the assault preparations go forward. The belfry was almost completed, and work had begun on a bore. The battering ram was already done, sheltered behind a hastily erected stockade fence. The day of reckoning was not far off.

Until then, though, the siege continued, the mangonels pounding away at the castle walls, bowmen watching for flesh-and-blood targets, the castle defenders shouting defiance from the battlements. One man was particularly irksome, for after a mangonel had launched a load of rocks toward the castle, he would lean over the embrasure and ostentatiously dust off the wall. The bowmen spent much of their time trying to puncture his bravado, but to no avail. Both sides resorted to fire arrows, winding two saturated with pitch around the shafts, and the castle soldiers made effective use of a ballista, a large crossbow-like weapon that fired bolts as well as arrows. Justin saw a bolt strike one of the cooks in the stomach; he died in agony.

It was an unstable brew, monotony relieved only by sudden spurts of violence, and Justin marveled that there was not more brawling in the camp. But William Marshal demanded that his commanders keep their men on a tight rein, and so far there had been only one killing. A soldier had been stabbed when he found a man rifling through his bedroll. Marshal promptly hanged the culprit from one of the mangonels and that seemed to have a salutary effect upon others tempted toward thievery or feuding.

On the third night, the moon was haloed, and the men knew that was a reliable sign of coming rain. It arrived the following afternoon, a drenching storm. Looking up at the cloud canopy over their heads, Marshal nodded in satisfaction. "Tonight," he told Justin, "you'll go in."

It was agreed that Justin would attempt to scale the wall in the third hour past midnight. Once Marshal thought he'd had enough time to get onto the battlements, he'd launch his diversion, a loud, noisy raid upon the gatehouse. The timing had to be almost perfect. Too soon and Justin would find the walls swarming with alarmed, sleepy men; too late and he risked attracting the attention of the sentries. Following a somber supper with Will and William Marshal, Justin retired to Luke's tent to get some sleep.

After tossing and turning and dozing uneasily for hours, Justin gave up and quietly exited the tent. The air was chilly, the sky swathed in clouds, and light, patchy fog had drifted in, giving the sleeping camp an eerie, ghostly appearance. The weather could not have been better for his purposes, but he was too tired and too edgy to take pleasure in it. Moving between blanketed bodies, he sat down beside a smoldering campfire and stirred the dying flames back to life.

The camp was still but not silent. Sounds carried on the damp tight air: snoring, the crackling of the flames, the jangling of harness and bit as a scout rode in, the low-voiced queries of sentries, somewhere in the distance a barking dog. Gazing into the fife, Justin started when a hand touched his shoulder, then moved over to make room for Luke.

"I could not sleep either," the deputy confided. "The waiting is always the worst. What do you think Purgatory is like... flames and serpents and suffering? I see it as a place where people just sit... and wait."

Luke's commentary had drawn groggy curses from men sleeping around the fire, and they rose, began to walk. "God must truly love you, de Quincy," Luke observed. "Not only did you get your clouds, but fog, too! With luck like that, remind me never to shoot dice with you."

"A pity we do not have a trumpet," Justin said, smiling at Luke's puzzlement over that apparent non sequitur. "I was remembering that Joshua took down the walls of Jericho with a few blasts from his trumpets. That surely sounds better than fooling around in the dark with scaling ladders!"

"I do not know about that. I've had a lot of fun over the years fooling around in the dark," Luke said with a grin, "although never on a ladder! We'd best head back toward the tent, for Marshal ought to be sending a man to fetch us soon. If you need to write a letter, de Quincy, I can get parchment and pen and ink from one of the priests."

"You're bound and determined to make sure I do not die without a will, aren't you?" Justin laughed softly. "I've already taken care of it, and in truth, Luke, it was a humbling experience to realize how little I had to bestow! I told Nell that I wanted Gunter to have my stallion. He saved my life, after all."

"What about me? Hellfire, de Quincy, you did not leave me that mangy dog of yours?"

Justin grinned. "No, he goes to Lucy... and Nell had a few choice words about that bequest!"

"I daresay she did, and none of them bear repeating," Luke joked. "When I suggested the parchment, I was not thinking about a will. I thought you might want to leave a letter for Claudine."

Justin's smile splintered. "No."

"Are you sure? Whether you'll admit it or not, you're besotted with the woman-"

"Let it be, Luke!"

"Why? Think about Claudine. If you die in this lunatic quest, it might comfort her to have a letter-"

"She'll have John to comfort her!"

Luke stared at him, but the only light came from a campfire some yards away. "Are you saying what I think you are? Claudine is John's woman?"

Justin's revelation had been involuntary. But it was out in the open now and there was no going back. "She is John's spy," he said tiredly. "That I know for a certainty. The other is conjecture."

"Jesus God ..." Luke was rarely at a loss for words, but this was definitely one of those times. "I do not know what to say," he confessed. "Aldith would say it serves me right for meddling. I am sorry, de Quincy, truly I am."

Justin shrugged. "Now that you mention Aldith, I might as well say what is on my mind, too. Why are you here at Windsor, Luke, when you ought to be back in Winchester with Aldith?"

"That is none of your concern!"

"But Claudine was
your
concern?"

Luke swore. "I did not go home because I knew we'd quarrel again. Aldith does not understand why I am loath to set the date for our wedding."

"Neither do I. You told me you wanted to marry her as soon as the banns could be posted."

"I do want to marry her!"

There was a raw sincerity beneath the anger in Luke's voice. Justin believed him. "So why then..." he began and then drew a sharp breath, suddenly comprehending. "Is it the sheriff?"

Luke nodded. "He does not think Aldith is a fit wife for his under-sheriff. He has enlisted the Bishop of Winchester to show me the folly of such a union. They cared not that I was bedding her, but they were horrified to learn I meant to marry her and they have made it very clear that this marriage could cost me dearly."

Justin wondered why he hadn't seen it sooner. Aldith was not gentry like Luke, but a poor potter's daughter with a dubious past, for she'd lived openly as another man's mistress before taking up with Luke. In their world, people were supposed to know their place; it was only to be expected that the sheriff's wife would shrink from having to socialize with Aldith. "What are you going to do, Luke?"

"Damned if I know. I suppose I can hope that the sheriff falls out of favor with the queen and gets replaced. Or I might get lucky and catch him in some wrongdoing," Luke said, only half joking. "The whoreson is as greedy as he is sanctimonious and one of these days I might find him with his hand in the honey pot."

"I think you ought to tell Aldith what is really going on."

"Are you daft? How do I tell her that she is unworthy to be my wife?"

"Is it better for her to think you love her not?"

Luke cursed again, helplessly, and then they both swung around as footsteps sounded behind them. Justin's pulse speeded up as he recognized one of William Marshal's men.

"My lord Marshal says it is time."

~~

With Will's "Godspeed" echoing in their ears, Luke and Justin began a cautious, circuitous approach toward the north side of the castle's lower bailey. It was slow going, for they dared not use a lantern. It had occurred to them both that they might become disoriented in the darkness and they were relieved to see a wooden palisade up ahead. The western wall of the lower bailey was the only section that had not been replaced by stone, and it served as a useful landmark, assuring them that they had not gone astray.

The fog was thickening, for they were closer to the river, and the ground was rising. Despite the damp chill, they were soon soaked in sweat, biting back oaths as they struggled to find secure footing on the muddied slope. They now discovered that they had a new peril to cope with. Luke was startled when Justin suddenly grabbed his arm, pointing downward. The deputy flinched, for he'd been about to step upon a caltrop. This was a particularly nasty device for disabling horses, a ball with iron spikes, set so that one was always protruding upward. The slope was strewn with these insidious snares and they began to feel as if they were treading water, so slowly were they advancing. How much time did they have left until Marshal launched his attack?

At last, though, the stone wall of the bailey loomed up out of the fog. They paused to catch their breath and to share a moment of labored triumph. They could detect no movement on the walls. With a brief, heartfelt prayer that Will's scout had been right, Justin gestured and they crept forward. Luke had been carrying the scaling ladder. It was made of wood, hinged to fold in two, with spikes at the end to pierce the earth and hold it steady. It would not reach all the way, and Justin had a hemp ladder to get him to the top of the wall, fitted with hooks to grip the embrasure. It had all seemed possible, even plausible, in the security of Marshal's tent. Out here in this fog-shrouded landscape, his nerves as tautly drawn as that hemp rope, Justin found himself agreeing with Luke's assessment - a lunatic quest.

"Are you ready?" Luke whispered. When Justin nodded, he seemed to want to say more, finally settling for "Do not fall off the ladder."

"If I do, I'm likely to land on you." The fog was swirling around the castle battlements; gazing upward, Justin thought it looked as if Windsor were crowned in clouds. He loosened the sword in his scabbard, slung the hemp ladder over his shoulder, and began to climb. When he was about to run out of rungs, he braced himself with his left arm, aiming for the embrasure above his head. The hooks caught on his third try, but the sound of iron scraping stone seemed loud enough to reverberate throughout the entire castle. Justin waited, scarcely breathing as he watched for faces to appear at the embrasure.