Directly ahead of him was a pair of ancient wrought-iron gates festooned with rusty barbed wire and heavily padlocked. But the track had curved first round an isolated mound crowned now with trees, the roots of which straggled between the remnants of what looked like stonework. Except for the narrow beaten path up to the gates there seemed no rhyme or reason in the construction, though.
'One cannot but reflect with satisfaction on the surprise with which Monson and his be-ribboned cavaliers, flushed with their early successes, gazed upon the cunning defences with which Sir Edmund had girdled his property in their absence, and upon which they were to dash themselves in vain for two long years—'
Audley looked round again, and then retraced his steps to the point where the path had begun to sink into the cutting.
Cunning defences? If they were, then they were as confusing dummy5
as the Iron Age earthworks at the entrance of Maiden Castle, two thousand years older than Roundheads and Cavaliers, and their cannon—
Cannon?
He swung on his heel. Of course!—This had been the age of cannon, and he had been thinking foolishly of castles and towers!
That sudden steeper rise in the hillside wasn't hillside at all, but the earth shifted from the ditch ahead. A— what was the name?—a
And the mound in front was a ruined horn-work, with ravelins on each side of it, behind the counterscarp, and with the flanking bastions of the main ramparts ahead of him. He was in the middle of a classic seventeenth-century defence line, far in advance of anything the amateur soldiers of the English Civil War normally built, much more in the style of Vauban and the great French military engineers.
But, of course, Steyning hadn't been an amateur soldier at all, but a veteran of a dozen battles and sieges from the North Sea to the Baltic, who had learnt his trade from the great Gustavus Adolphus himself. There had been scores of others like him in both armies—men like Hopton and Waller, and the Scotsman Leslie—who had taken the same tuition, but they had all been fighting in the field, whereas Steyning had been caged by his injuries in his own great house in the middle of Royalist territory—caged with his Protestant zeal and his military know-how—
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And, by God, he'd been an artillery expert too, if the Reverend Musgrave could be relied on! So he'd done the only thing left within his power to do: he'd turned his home into a strongpoint, overlooked by his enemies until too late, so that no one had had the knowledge or the resources to dislodge him. Or the incentive either . . . until Colonel Nathaniel Parrott had descended on him with a ton of gold in his saddle-bags. And then—
'Indeed, Standingham Castle might well have endured all the shocks of war until Cromwell and Fairfax had crowned the Parliamentary cause with the laurels of victory, but for the malevolence of fortune which, by a singular coincidence, visited upon Sir Edmund a second and final disaster.'
Audley glanced at his watch. The details of the second disaster would have to wait. A railing thickly encrusted with barbed wire now surmounted the rampart, but the beaten path he'd been following seemed to indicate that there was a way in to his right, among the trees.
He followed the path through a thicket of holly bushes until the way was blocked by a moss-covered tree-trunk. Where the tree had fallen there was a gap in the overhanging roof of leaves and also in the rampart above him: the fallen tree had grown on the very lip of the old parapet, and in falling had dislodged a five-yard stretch of it into the ditch below.
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Although the break had been long since plugged with a tangle of barbed wire, the abrupt end of the path and the regular footholds printed up the side of the bank of earth clearly marked the barrier as being weaker than it looked from below. But then the usual run of trespassers probably didn't wear good suits, thought Audley as he clambered up; this was the second time today that he'd had to negotiate barbed wire, even though the field gate on the ridge above the Swine Brook
—and Frances Fitzgibbon's spiked backside— seemed like distant memories.
When he reached the wire, however, he saw at once that its strength was an illusion, for the whole concertina was held in place by an unbarbed loop hung loosely over the twisted end of a broken railing: surmounting the cunning defences of Standingham Castle wasn't going to be such a problem after all, thank heavens!
He lifted the loop and stepped gingerly over the remains of the old railing. But then, as he was in the act of refixing the loop, he felt a sharp tug at his trousers, behind and right down by his heel.
Holding the loop in one hand and cursing under his breath at his clumsiness, he reached down to free the snagged material, only to encounter something warm and wet and soft.
There was something licking his hand.
Audley looked down into the eyes of a beautiful, half-grown red setter.
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The red setter grinned at him, gave an excited but perfectly friendly little yelp, and made as though to grab his trousers again: the discerning student of seventeenth-century fortification was being invited to play a game with an idiot dog.
Correction: an idiot bitch. A beautiful, half-grown, well-groomed, amiable and totally inconvenient idiot bitch of a red setter.
Audley's brain accepted the information. That the bitch was friendly was no surprise to him, because he was accustomed to animals liking him, even though he had no special affection to return. He had grown up in a household where there were only two kinds of animals: the ones which were eaten and the ones which worked for their living, guarding, mousing, pulling or carrying. He had never quite understood, when he became old enough to want to analyse their reactions, why they rewarded this unsentimental attitude with trust and affection, but he had had to accept the fact of it, that animals liked him. Maybe they just liked being treated like animals.
But it wasn't the setter's behaviour that mattered, it was the combination of her presence and her appearance. She wasn't just anyone's dog running loose in search of canine adventure: that shining coat had been brushed not long ago, and the little brass plate on the real leather collar shone pale with recent polishing.
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This wasn't anyone's dog, it was
