‘If you please . . . If you might be willing to come with us . . .’ said Young Crowe, in a tone that managed to sound grovelling and aggressive at the same time.
‘What mean these swords?’ James glared. ‘How dare you wave bare blades at Lord Fellmotte!’ He gestured towards Makepeace.
‘That is not Lord Fellmotte,’ said Lady April coldly.
Do you trust me to speak? asked Morgan.
Yes, answered Makepeace quickly.
It was not the first time she had felt Morgan take control of her throat and use her voice, but this time at least it was done with permission, and did not feel as if it might choke her.
‘Galamial Crowe,’ said Morgan’s hard-edged voice through Makepeace’s mouth. ‘If you lack the wit to know your own lord, then we wasted the money we gave your father for your schooling. Was the advice we gave you on your twentieth birthday also wasted?’
Makepeace could feel her own body language changing too. Her posture became more stooped, in Obadiah’s old fashion. There was an inexpressible strangeness in feeling her own expression change, her brow puckering, and her mouth moving in ways that it seldom did.
‘That is his lordship!’ exclaimed Young Crowe, lowering his sword.
‘And you, Myles Crowe.’ Morgan spoke again through Makepeace. ‘Have you forgotten the day we vouched for your character at Gladdon Beacon?’
White Crowe started to put up his sword, then paused, his eyes fixed on the little turnspit dog, which had trotted down the steps towards Makepeace’s feet. Without thinking about it, she had moved one foot to stroke under the dog’s chin with her toe. It was a gesture of habit, but not the habit of a lord. He stared at her, his gaze cloudy with indecision and doubt.
‘Seize them!’ commanded Lady April.
‘No!’ Young Crowe moved to stand in front of James and Makepeace. ‘Forgive me, Lady April,’ he said shakily, ‘I never did think to disobey you in anything. But my first loyalty is to Lord Fellmotte.’
‘Defend the head of the steps!’ shouted James, and two of the other men obediently moved to stand alongside Young Crowe. White Crowe still did not move. A man on Lady April’s side tried to bat Young Crowe’s sword aside, and immediately a cramped skirmish broke out, blades clashing and striking sparks off the walls.
Taking advantage of the confusion, James grabbed Makepeace’s hand and ran with her, back down the cellar stairs. It was their only line of retreat. They hid among the maze of barrels.
‘How long do we have?’ whispered James, and she knew he was thinking of the smouldering fuse.
‘I don’t know,’ answered Makepeace. ‘Minutes, perhaps.’ They had intended to be far from the cellar when the powder exploded. There might still be time to put out the match, of course. But what could await them after that, but defeat and capture?
I do not know how big the explosion will be, admitted Livewell. It might well blow us apart. But I say we do it anyway.
I have seen enough of this hellhole to agree, the doctor said, sounding surprised at himself.
Morgan laughed, very quietly and sombrely.
Let it burn, she said.
‘Let’s bring Grizehayes down,’ said Makepeace.
‘Ah, well.’ James snickered. ‘We might as well die spitting in their Evil Eye!’
The shouts and clashes of weapons at the top of the stairs had hushed, and Lady April’s voice could be heard giving commands. Evidently she had triumphed over Young Crowe and his allies, through force of will or arms.
‘They’ll be coming for us,’ whispered James.
‘Let them,’ hissed Makepeace. ‘The more the merrier when the powder blows.’ She put out her lantern and plunged them into darkness.
She could tell from James’s wide eyes that he could not see a thing.
‘Trust us,’ she whispered.
‘Can you hear us?’ Lady April called down the stairs. ‘Come up and surrender, or we shall send down the dogs!’
Both siblings tensed. Once again, the Grizehayes dogs would be loosed on them. But now they had no moors to flee across. They were cornered prey.
Nonetheless, neither of them spoke a word, or moved to surrender.
Seconds crawled by, and then Makepeace heard a faint clatter of claws from the direction of the steps. Panting rough as sawdust. The flap of soft jowls.
Makepeace knew all of them by their smell. The hulking mastiffs with their great jaws and terrible bite. The wolfhound, its long sinews aching for large prey to chase. The greyhounds, swift and deadly like hawks of the land. The bloodhounds, scenting her fear like wine.
She smelt their fast blood, their hunt-hunger. The claw-skitter neared their hiding place. One deep bark reverberated in the darkness, and a moment later a cacophony of barking echoed throughout the cellar.
‘Shh!’ Makepeace rose from her hiding place, even as her heart raced, and her skin tingled in readiness for a bite. ‘Nero – Star – Catcher – Caliban! You know me.’
She could see their pale forms tensed in the darkness. Then one large shape drew closer. A wet nose nudged her hand, and a tongue licked her palm.
They knew her smell. She was the gravy-giver. She was pack, perhaps. And she was a beast whose temper should not be tested too far.
‘You will need to come up eventually,’ called down Lady April.
‘Why?’ shouted James, his teeth chattering. ‘We have friends down here, and enough wine to make merry. We might sing a few songs.’
‘Or perhaps we’ll hold out until your enemies take Grizehayes tomorrow,’ suggested Makepeace.
‘Don’t be absurd,’ snapped Lady April. ‘We can hold out against a siege until the end of the war, if necessary! We have enough provisions and shot for two whole months.’
Makepeace laughed out loud. ‘Do you think the war will be over in two months?’
‘The Queen is back in the country with money, arms and troops for the King’s cause,’ declared Lady April. ‘London will soon lose heart. The rebels are already crumbling.’ Her certainty was cold and monumental, like marble.
‘No, they’re not!’ exclaimed Makepeace. ‘And London’s fierce, my lady. It’s a quarrelsome, stinking madhouse, but it has a will like the Juggernaut. I don’t care how ancient and clever you are. If you say the war’s ending, you’re blind.’
‘How dare you!’ Lady April sounded angry, but Makepeace thought she detected the tiniest hint of something else.
‘I watched two Elders die today,’ Makepeace declared loudly. A shocked silence pooled like blood. ‘Sir Anthony’s ghosts possessed Symond, and one of your soldiers killed him. And those ghosts – those wise, all-knowing ghosts – didn’t see it coming. They had never really noticed that soldier, you see. They didn’t care that he’d lost a brother at Hangerdon Hill. And then he shot them in the head.
‘You’ve been missing things, important things, because there are people you never notice. And now it’s too late for you all. This isn’t like the other wars you’ve fought. Your wits and centuries won’t help you this time. This is new. This is the world ending, Lady April.’
‘Enough!’ rapped Lady April. ‘You have exhausted our patience.’
Men were venturing carefully down the steps, two of them carrying candles that underlit their faces. At their rear descended Lady April, armed with a pair of wicked-looking knives.
Carefully James lifted one of the smaller barrels, hefted it to his shoulder, then flung it at one of the candle-carriers. The barrel struck his hand, and the candle flew against the wall and went out. The other turned too quickly to see what had happened, and the motion killed the candle flame. There was consternation and confusion.
‘Something leaped at me!’
‘I saw something before the candle went out! The red of the light reflected in a dozen eyes! I . . . do not think they were all dogs.’
‘There’s something in the dark! I can hear it growling!’
‘If you can hear it,’ Lady April rasped, ‘then you know where
it is!’
But the growler was on the move. Makepeace relaxed into Bear. She dropped to all fours, and it felt easy and necessary. His nose was hers, her eyes were his. She let her throat vibrate with deep and ominous rumbles.
Bear’s not a child I have to humour. He’s not a Fury to keep on a chain. I don’t need to be ashamed or afraid of him. He’s me. Whatever we were, now we’re us.
The first man was knocked unconscious by one long side-swipe. A second aimed a slash of his sword in the direction of Makepeace’s growls, and was knocked over backwards by a mastiff and a greyhound. A third tried to run to the stairs for more light, and was flung bodily into a little stack of barrels.
‘I have the boy!’ shouted White Crowe suddenly. There were sounds of a scuffle.
Makepeace lurched towards the noise, but suddenly thin, strong fingers clasped the sides of her head and gripped fistfuls of her hair.
‘Mongrel!’ The hard voice of Lady April rasped in Makepeace’s ear. ‘Ingrate!’ And Makepeace screamed as a spirit lunged out, and bit into her mind’s defences like an axe. It caught her off guard and she had no time to brace for it.
Makepeace had been attacked by ghosts before, but they had always been trying to make a home in her. This was different. This was a bombardment, and Lady April did not care what she destroyed. Makepeace fought back and felt her secret allies do the same.
All of us. We learned to fight together in the end. Even as she felt painful cracks appear in her mind’s shell, there was a sad jubilation in that thought. At the same time, she could sense the Elder’s frustration. Makepeace was losing, but much more slowly than expected.
Then Makepeace smelt fear that was not her own, and sensed the hairline cracks of doubt now running through Lady April’s marble souls.
‘My lady,’ called White Crowe, his voice anxious. ‘There is something here. A glowing red star. It looks a bit like a lit match . . .’
The assault on Makepeace’s brain abruptly halted as she was physically thrown aside.
‘Fools!’ shouted Lady April. ‘That is gunpowder!’ Makepeace saw the old woman speed like a greyhound through the darkness, towards the glowing, crimson star of the lit match . . .
And that bright red dot was the epicentre when the world broke.
The explosion was deafening, and the force of it knocked Makepeace back, the way a careless hand might fell a house of cards. There was a brief rush of heat, and then a lot of things seemed to be raining around her. The air was full of smoke and flour. She sat up coughing, just in time to see a large, jagged chunk of the wall and ceiling buckle and crash down on to the slabs.
Ashen and astonished-looking sky gawped down through the gap. James stumbled over rubble to her side, and helped her up. A small distance away, White Crowe sat dazed and dust-covered. If there was anything left of Lady April it was under the great fallen pile of masonry.
James was mouthing something. Makepeace’s ears were ringing, and his voice was as faint as a ghost, but she thought she understood. She hurried up the cellar stairs with him, stepped carefully past Young Crowe’s unconscious body, and gaped at the beautiful crack that had appeared in the wall.
It was just wide enough for two young people to slip through, and let themselves fall on to the grass outside. It was even easier for the dogs as they followed.
CHAPTER 39
Many hours later, in the early afternoon, Makepeace and James stopped to rest near a spinney at the top of a hill. It had been an old hill fort in ancient times, but now there was just a strangely shaped mound with views across the surrounding countryside.
Both were feeling battered and exhausted inside and out, and it had caught up with them at last. James was still recovering from playing host to five arrogant Fellmotte ghosts, and being crushed into a corner of himself. Makepeace’s own battles with the Elder ghosts had left her battered and a little melancholy. They had left a dusting of their memories, like the ashes of singed moths, and for the moment it flavoured everything she saw.
Both siblings had a fine collection of bruises, which were showing through their skin in all colours of the rainbow. Furthermore, Makepeace’s arms ached from carrying the turnspit dog, whose short legs tired more quickly than those of the other dogs.
‘What’s that?’ said James.
In the far distance, the two of them could see a tall whisker of brownish-grey smoke. It was too large to come from a chimney or campfire, and the wrong colour for woodsmoke. It was the wrong time of year for stubble fires.
Makepeace got out the diptych dial, and looked at the compass. She tried to remember the maps that she had so carefully pieced together, but she already knew in her heart where the smoke was coming from.
‘Grizehayes,’ said James in a whisper. He looked numb and shocked, and Makepeace knew that her face wore the same expression.
Grizehayes the invulnerable. Grizehayes the eternal, with centuries encrusted upon it like barnacles. Grizehayes the unchanging rock in the world’s river. Their prison, their enemy, their shelter, their home.
Grizehayes was burning.
‘Is the world ending?’ James asked huskily.
Makepeace moved over, wrapped her bruised arms around him and hugged him tightly.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘What do we do?’
‘We walk,’ she said. ‘We find food, and a place to sleep. Tomorrow we do it again. We survive.’
Worlds ended sometimes. Makepeace had known that for a while. She had known it since the night of the riots and Mother’s death, when her own world had neatly and completely fallen to dust.
One of the dogs snarled at something in the spinney. Makepeace leaped to her feet, but then saw the small outline lumbering through the undergrowth, and the livid white streaks on its pointed face. It was a badger, going about its business as if there were no wars to be fought.
Makepeace watched it with fascination. She remembered all that she had learned about badgers in the bestiary book at Grizehayes. The badger, or brock, whose legs were longer on one side, to help it on sloping ground . . .
. . . but they weren’t. As it ambled through a patch of daylight, she could see it quite clearly, and all its short legs were the same humble, sturdy length.
Perhaps none of the old truths were true any more. This could be a new world entirely, with its own rules. A world where badgers were not lopsided, and pelicans did not feed their young with their own blood, and toads had no precious stones in their heads, and cubs were already bear-shaped at birth. A world where castles could burn, and kings could die, and no rule was unbreakable.
‘We survive,’ she said again, more firmly. ‘And we try to lick this new world into shape while it’s still soft. If we don’t, there’s others that will.’
It was only much later that a news-sheet told them the full story of the fall of Grizehayes.
The explosion in the dead of night was commonly blamed on powder stored too close to the walls. When dawn came, white cloths had hung from the battlements of Grizehayes, signalling a willingness to talk. A man called Crowe had emerged to negotiate the surrender.
The siege commander had let all the civilians leave, and even take some provisions and possessions with them. In peacetime he had not been an unkind man, and the siege had been relatively short. His fighting zeal had not had time to curdle into hatred.
The Parliamentarian force that had taken Grizehayes had barely had time to raid its stores before they received word that a large Royalist force, headed by Sir Marmaduke, was less than a day away.
The siege commander faced a hard decision, and made it quickly. Better to torch the house, so that it could never be used again, than risk the King’s forces using it as a stronghold, albeit a broken one.
The account said that when Sir Marmaduke saw his ancestral home in flames, it ‘killed his heart’. He refused to wear his protective buff coat, led the cavalry charge and fought like a madman. Afterwards both sides spoke highly of his bravery. But then ag
ain, the dead are often easier to praise than the living.
Not all battles were reported in the news-sheets, and not all of them involved full armies or neat battle lines under the gaze of eagle-eyed commanders. Months were passing, and there was still no peace. Sometimes there was a great battle that everyone said would decide things, one way or the other. But somehow it never did.
Humans are strange, adaptable animals, and eventually get used to anything, even the impossible or unbearable. In time, the unthinkable becomes normal.
The inhabitants of one forest hamlet were very glad to be visited by someone who could dress wounds. They had been attacked by an armed band wearing sashes. There had been shots fired and blows struck. In the end the villagers had hidden in the church, and dropped rocks on the strangers until they tired of trying to set fire to the building and left. Nobody was quite sure whether they had been paid troops, brigands or a group of marauding deserters.
The villagers could only pay Makepeace and James by offering shelter, meals, and bones for the dogs, but these were very welcome. James did most of the talking. He cut a good figure, even as a wanderer.
When I think of the fees my services might once have commanded, muttered Dr Quick, as Makepeace’s latest patient left through the door with a clean strip of linen around his head. Nonetheless, the doctor complained less about such things these days. Perhaps rich patrons were less grateful than struggling householders. You are sentimental, as ever.
It’s sense, not sentiment, Makepeace told him, as she cleaned her hands. We needed somewhere to stay for a few nights.
You had good solid reasons to help these people, said the doctor. You always do.
Did I ever tell you about another chirurgeon I knew before the war? He was a rising star, with better patrons than many physicians. But one day a child died under his knife – the little daughter of his closest friend. After that, he was hopeless. Suddenly he could deny nobody. He ran himself ragged, taking up every case, even where there was no hope of payment. And he could always give excellent, sensible reasons why it was in his interests to do so. He never admitted that he was trying to save everyone, to soothe the ache of failing to save that girl.