The Perilous Gard

  "It may be," said Kate.

  "It is," said the Lady. "But the knowledge of truth is only a shape in the mind, and that much I can change to ease you. You have borne it already longer than I thought it was possible that you could; and there would be no shame in your asking me to take it away from you now, nothing but wisdom, to lay down a load that is too great for you to carry. And so: answer my question. Why did you do what you did?"

  Kate looked from the inexorable face to the blazing lights, and back again.

  "I slipped," she said. Even in her own ears this did not sound particularly convincing, but it was the best she could do. "I caught my heel and slipped and I fell against the wall."

  The Lady merely lifted her hand and glanced down at the empty palm as if she were waiting for something to be put into it.

  "I — I'm very clumsy," Kate stammered desperately. "You know how it is with me. You spoke of it yourself, and it's true."

  The Lady closed her hand and dropped it.

  "With my kind it is a matter of pride always to speak the truth," she observed calmly. "The most that can be said for your kind is that they will sometimes tell a good lie instead of a bad one. But let that pass. I will take what you have said to me. You are not in pain, you need no easing, you stumbled in your clumsiness, and you fell against the wall. Is that as you would have it?"

  "Yes," said Kate thankfully.

  "Very well," said the Lady. "But I think you would have been wiser if you had told me it was only the weight."

  It would have been wiser: Kate knew that before the Lady had even done speaking. The Fairy Folk might have forgiven her for a fleeting attack of the weight — anybody, even the Folk themselves, could have a fleeting attack of the weight. Habitual bungling awkwardness would seem by far the greater offence to them.

  "I couldn't help myself," was all she could say.

  "And is that a good reason why the order of my hall should be broken by your clumsiness?"

  "No," said Kate, adding despairingly: "I only meant that I would help it if I could."

  "There are ways of doing that," said the Lady. "Have you ever looked well at the mortal women we keep here in the Hill?"

  A quick cold stab of terror went through Kate's heart like ice, but there was nothing she could do except answer, and only one answer she could give.

  "Yes," she said.

  "Would they be clumsy if they were left to themselves?"

  "Yes."

  "But are they clumsy now?"

  "No."

  "Why not?"

  Kate's eyes went helplessly to the Lady's right hand. It was empty but she could see the golden cup in it as clearly as if she were already crouching on the steps of the dais, waiting her turn along with Joan and Betty and Marian. "Because of what you gave them," she said.

  "Then can you think of one way that I might rid you of your clumsiness, since you wish it so much?"

  "Yes," said Kate. There was nothing else she could say.

  "And if you were in my place," asked the Lady softly, "would you take that one way to do it?"

  Kate lifted her head. She was sick of being run up and down for the Lady's entertainment like the last forlorn piece on a chessboard.

  "Yes," she replied deliberately. "In your place I think it very likely that I should."

  The Lady stood for a moment regarding her with a smile so faint that it could hardly even be called malicious.

  "You must learn to attend more carefully to what I say to you," she observed at last. "I said: one way, not that it was the only one. Gwenhyfara!"

  "Madam?"

  "Take this clumsy girl somewhere out of my sight and teach her to move as our kind are taught to do."

  "Gwenhyfara's going to teach me how to move," said Kate.

  "Is she?" asked Christopher; and then, after a pause, "Why? What's the matter with the way you move now?"

  "The Lady doesn't like it," Kate answered vaguely, thinking not of Christopher's question, but of his voice when he asked it. She had not talked with him very often, and when she did, her mind was taken up with other concerns, but surely his voice as she remembered it had never been so — so — what was the word she wanted? Lifeless? Colorless? Empty? Remote? It sounded almost frighteningly like her grandfather's during his last illness, when he was so far gone that it was only by a great effort of will that he could attend to what was said to him, or even hear what was said.

  "Christopher — " she began tentatively, wondering what the gray creature had done to him while she had been away. Certainly it had done something.

  "Christopher," she began again and then broke off, drawing back a little as she had drawn back the night she had come upon him praying in the darkness.

  "Yes?" said Christopher. "What is it?"

  "Nothing," said Kate, wishing passionately — not for the first time — that she were only somebody else. Her father, with his wisdom, would have known what to say: the right words to comfort and hearten him; or Master Roger, with his calm authority; or the Lady Elizabeth, with her royal spirit. She even had a momentary vision of Alicia, laying her velvet cheek against the mesh and crying: "O Christopher! how dreadful it must be for you! O I wish I could help you! Truly I do!" But when she thought of herself, all she could see was herself, Kate Sutton, that first day up at the Holy Well, making stupid demands, pelting him with questions and arguments, rummaging with her great clumsy hands through his pride and his grief and his dignity until he had finally ordered her off, because — she remembered exactly how he had put it — he could not otherwise end a stupid and profitless conversation. Stupid. Profitless. Enough to drive any man mad.

  "You're not talking," said Christopher. "Go on talking."

  "What do you want me to talk of?" asked Kate helplessly.

  "I don't care," said Christopher. "Whatever you like. Anything. Only talk." Kate cast wildly around in her mind for the "anything," wishing more than ever that it was her father who was sitting there, her father or Master Roger or the Lady Elizabeth or Alicia. Surely that was the least God could have done for him, the very least.

  "Christopher," she blurted out, "do you ever think about food?"

  "Food?" The heartbreaking control of the voice flickered a little, as if in surprise, and the next question was a real one. "What do you mean?"

  "J-j-just food," Kate stammered. "Things to eat. I mean, they don't feed the mortal women on boiled grain and milk, like you, but with us it's always meat in wine and spices, every single day, richer than Christmas, and I'm so tired of it. I keep thinking all the time what it would be like to have a loaf of bread, a new loaf out of the oven, with the crust on it, and clotted cream and strawberries."

  "I might have known that would be what you'd think of," said Christopher.

  "Well, it's better than thinking about nothing," Kate retorted defensively.

  "Very true," said Christopher. "Much better than thinking about nothing, especially the nothing. That wasn't what you meant, was it?"

  "I don't know what you're talking about."

  "Thank God for that," said Christopher. "What else do you think of, when you're thinking of food?"

  "Well — apples," Kate floundered on. "Those hard greenish apples, the kind you get in October, that taste cold when you bite into them."

  "Yes," said Christopher. "I remember. There was a whole orchard of those apples on my manor once."

  "Is the manor your home in Norfolk?"

  "No," said Christopher curtly. "It's an old deserted house with some land around it on the other side of the marsh. I used to go there sometimes when I was a boy. It must have been a very fine manor once — a hundred years ago." His voice was still colorless, but it did not sound empty now, only shy, as though he were speaking of something he cared for very much.

  "Why was it deserted, then?" asked Kate cautiously.

  "The family let it go to ruin. They were all fools." The voice quickened furiously. "Our old bailiff told me that they were cutting off the woods and grazing
the pastures bare in his father's time, and the last man was a miser who starved the place and himself to death. Now it belongs to some cousin in London who's been try to sell it off ever since I was born, not that he ever will. Nobody but a lunatic would buy it: Geoffrey says it would cost a fortune to set it to rights by this time. And you needn't tell me that I'm a younger son with no fortune to speak of. I know that as well as you do. But I always wanted — I did think — if I could only clean the scrub out of the water meadows and had the money for ditching and draining the fen land — "

  "What?"

  Kate had thought she knew Christopher fairly well by that time — but now she realized, in a sort of bewilderment, that she did not know this side of him at all. She had always somehow, in her secret heart, never thought of him except in a world of knights and ladies, the sort of world that one read about in the old romances, where hermits knelt praying among the gray rocks and champions rode out to slay dragons from high turreted castles — not the sort of castles that could ever go to ruin because the scrub had not been cleaned out of the water meadows and there was no money for the ditching and the drainage.

  "But why should you care so much about ditching and d-drainage?" she stumbled. "My father says that trying to drain land in the fens is only a waste of good money."

  "Much he knows!" Christopher retorted rudely. "Fen land is the richest in England — if you know how to keep the water out of it. It's too heavy, and it lies too low, so the dead water backs up in it, and then it goes sick. What do you mean — a waste of good money? Your father sounds like old Martin to me."

  "Old Martin?"

  "The bailiff at home. He does say that I'm crazed in my wits over drainage," Christopher admitted. "But that's only because he thinks it's the will of God to go on ditching the same way we've been ditching for the last thousand years, and the world can't ever be otherwise! You might as well argue with a stone wall. I'd try liming too, of course, and marling, and some of the new root crops; but when it comes to sick land, there are two things you have to do before you do anything else — and one of them is drain." He drove his fist against the mesh by way of emphasis, forgetting to keep his voice down.

  Very slowly and carefully, Kate settled back on the floor. "O be careful!" she thought incoherently. "Be careful! Don't let me spoil it! ... And what's the other thing you have to do first?" she asked him. She knew nothing whatsoever about tending sick land, or any kind of land for that matter, but it seemed like a safe question.

  "Manure," said Christopher. "Good plain dung. You take those water meadows at the manor. What I had in my mind — "

  The next morning Gwenhyfara came into the stable some time earlier than usual, while Joan and Betty and Marian were still asleep, and took Kate back with her to her own room. This proved to be a little bare cell some distance down the "smooth passage," with nothing in it but a chest and a thin pallet of woven straw that had been rolled up and laid against the wall. Gwenhyfara sat on the chest and made Kate walk up and down the floor by the light of three candles, studying every movement she made much as the Queen's Master of the Horse might have observed the gait of an unpromising colt.

  "Who in the name of the gods trained you to carry yourself?" she demanded.

  "Nobody," said Kate, flushing. "My mother said it was no use, I was always too clumsy. Blanche Parry used to try to teach me how to curtsy sometimes when I was with the Lady Elizabeth at Hatfield, but I could never seem to learn the way of it."

  "And small wonder," said Gwenhyfara. "How did she think you could learn the way of anything when your backbone is as stiff as a stake and you hold yourself as if you were strapped to it? That is what she should have begun with. Stand where you are."

  "Yes," said Kate apprehensively.

  "Now: stretch your arms out before you — so — and let your hands drop. No. Drop, stop holding them, let them drop from your wrists and hang. Now let your arms drop and hang from your shoulders. Now drop your head forward and let the cords in your neck go loose. Do you have that? Now — slowly — slowly — try to feel that same loosening all down your back, one link after another, slowly, as though they were melting — no, no, don't stoop." She came over to Kate and made a little light gesture with her hand. "Here is where you want it, and here, and here. You must know how to let your whole body go before you can fall without hurting yourself."

  "Fall?" Kate jerked bolt upright again, making a wild plunge to recover her balance.

  "Fall," said Gwenhyfara calmly. "It is easy enough."

  "Couldn't you — " said Kate, "couldn't you teach me how to move some other way? Without falling?"

  "Not I," said Gwenhyfara. "For there is no better way to learn the flow and the manage of your body. I will teach you other things in time, but that will be the first. Start over, now. Stretch your arms before you — so — "

  "No, no, no," said Christopher. "The sheep folds at the manor were on the other side of the barn, across from the stables. Start over."

  "You turn right off the road at the bridge and go up a deep lane to the gate," Kate recited. "The gate leads into an outer yard with a well and a dovecote, where they used to have a watering trough and a pond for the ducks. The farm buildings ran around another yard to the left of the well. First the kennels, and then the stables, and then the forge, the toolshed, the workshop, the storerooms, the pigsty, the sheepfolds — I'm sorry, that's wrong, it was the hen yard — the hen yard, the sheepfolds, the barn, and the wall of the orchard. On your right as you come in from the outer yard is another wall with a door in it and some steps down to the rose garden and the house. You never told me about the house."

  "The house?"

  "Yes," said Kate. "The house."

  "The house is a wreck, like everything else."

  "What do you mean by a wreck? How much of a wreck?"

  "Well — " Kate could not see Christopher's shrug, but she could feel it in his voice. "The roof was still on, the last time I saw it, but even that may be done by now. The steward lived there for a time after the old miser died, but he got drunk one night and started a fire that burned out the kitchens and the dairy and about half of the north wing. Then after the fire, the place was shut up, and thieves and strollers tore out most of what was left of it. One of the doors at the back had rotted clean off its hinges. Anybody could go in."

  "Did you ever go in yourself?"

  "Anybody could go in."

  "Then what are you planning to do with it?"

  "Do with it?"

  "Well, you can't spend all your time down in the orchard or the water meadows or the stables," said Kate impatiently. "What are you planning to do with the house?"

  "No, no, no," said Gwenhyfara. "Lightly, lightly, I tell you. You must learn to walk lightly, just as you learned to fall. Walk, not put your feet down on the floor dump, dump, as if they were two great logs of wood. Think that your body is hanging from the roof by one single hair drawn up from your head, and you can't let yourself break it."

  Kate thought obediently, taking two or three tentative steps, but picturing herself strung up by her hair like Absolom in a church window did her no good at all: it only distracted and confused her.

  "No," said Gwenhyfara. "You have not caught the way of it. Think of something else. If you can once get the shape of your need alive in your mind, your body will follow it. Suppose that you had to pass an enemy in the dark, and so you want feet made out of velvet, light, so light that there would not even be the fall of an echo to warn him. Would that image speak to you more than the other? Try it, then . . . Softly now, softly, more lightly still . . . There! what did I tell you?"

  Christopher was having what Kate had come to think of as "one of his bad nights." A "bad night" — and the "bad nights" were growing more and more frequent as the weeks went on — always meant that the gray creature had been at him again. He had never yet told her exactly what it did to him. Once, on a particularly bad night, he had said to her, with curious intensity: "Don't let them into your
mind, Kate! Whatever else you do, don't let them into your mind!" — but that was all. On another night, when she had spoken to him about her attacks of the weight, he had seemed almost surprised to hear that they troubled her so much, because he himself rather liked to feel the hard walls and the rock pressing about him, especially after he had gone away.

  "Gone away?" Kate had said, startled. "I didn't think they ever let you out of this place."

  "They don't. It isn't that kind of being 'gone.' "

  He had said nothing more about the "going away," and Kate had not pressed the matter further. It was much more important that he should feel there was one person at least under the Hill who would treat him as a living individual with a right to keep his mind to himself if he chose to. When the bad nights came, she asked no questions and merely brought the talk as quickly as she could around to the never exhausted topic of the manor. They had walked over it, ditched it, drained it, rebuilt it, and argued about it for so long now that Kate sometimes felt as though she had lived there all her life.

  But on this particular night even the manor seemed to have failed them.

  " — and the new dairy could fit into the far corner of the yard," Christopher was saying. "Along the old orchard wall."

  "What do you mean?" Kate demanded, more sharply than she meant to. She had come to know every tone and shade of his voice by that time, and what she heard in it now troubled her. It was empty again, empty and oddly remote, as if he were speaking from somewhere a long way off; and never before had he made the smallest mistake when it was a question of anything to do with the manor. She pulled herself up. "Not straight across the wall, surely?" she asked, treading as lightly as she could. "Didn't you tell me that the gate to the orchard was there?"