edging into the room. She made no further move to stop them; instead she turned and walked to the one small window, stood with her head down and her hands gripping the back of a chair. ‘How did you find me?’ she said.
There was no answer; and she turned to face them where they stood with feet apart on the bare boards of the room. A long pause; then she tried to laugh. The sound came out choked, like a little cough. ‘Have you come to arrest me?’ she said. ‘After all this time?’ The tall man shook his head slowly.
‘M’Lady,’ he said, ‘we have no warrant…’
Another wait, while the wind skirled round the eaves of the building, flung a salvo of rain spots at the windowpanes. She shook her head and pulled at her lip with her teeth. Touched her stomach, and her throat. Her hands were pale in the gloom, like white butterflies. ‘But don’t you see,’ she said. ‘You can’t… do what you’ve come to do. Not now. Don’t you see that? There aren’t any… words to tell you why, if you can’t see…'
Silence.
‘It doesn’t seem… possible,’ she said. She half laughed again. ‘In times to come,’ she said, ‘when people read of this, they won’t believe. They never will believe…’ She crossed the room, stood with her back turned to them. They heard liquid splash into a glass, the little sound as the rim chattered against her teeth. ‘I’m behaving better than I thought I would,’ she said, ‘but not as well as I hoped. It’s a terrible thing, being afraid. It’s like an illness; like wanting to fall down, and not being able to faint. You see you never get used to it. You live with it and live with it and every day it’s worse; and one day it’s the worst of all. I thought, when it… happened, I wouldn’t be afraid. But I was wrong…’
She went to the window again. The stranger moved forward; but softly, so the old boards didn’t creak. She stood looking down into the inn yard, and he could see her shaking. ‘I never thought,’ she said, ‘that it would be raining. It’s the details like that you can’t ever imagine. I didn’t want it to be raining.’ She set the glass down carefully. ‘One never quite believes in Last Great Thoughts,’ she said. ‘But it seems at the end one’s able to see so very clearly. I’m remembering now how many times I’ve prayed for death. When I’ve been lonely, and frightened, in the night. I’ve really done that. But now I can see what a wonderful thing life is. How every breath is… precious.’
The man at the door moved impatiently; but the other raised his hand. Eleanor half turned, showing them the sheen of tears on her cheek. ‘It’s absurd of course,’ she said. ‘It’s no use pleading with you. But you see I’m so very weak. I swore never to plead, not even if I got the chance. I’m doing it, all the same. But not for… myself. Not for me.’
She drew a slow, ragged breath. ‘I won’t go on my knees though,’ she said. ‘I’ve got enough sense left not to do that.’
She turned back to the window. ‘I’m trying to remember I’ve had a good life,’ she said. ‘Far better than I deserved. I’ve known love; it was very rich and strange. And there was a time once when I… owned all the land I could see. I could go to my… high tower, and look out to the hills and far off to the sea; and it was all mine, every yard of it. Every blade of grass. And people would come running when I called, and wait on me and do whatever I wanted doing. I loved them, very much; and I think some of them loved me… And some were hurt, and some were killed, and the rest were blown away by the wind…’
‘M’Lady,’ said the stranger gruffly. ‘This is far from our will…’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But your God is such an angry God, isn’t he? Far angrier than mine.’ She swallowed, and crossed her clenched fists slowly in front of her breasts. ‘I’m… damned,’ she said. ‘But I pity you. May He have mercy on your souls…’
The man at the door swallowed, licking his mouth. The other half turned, face contorted as if in pain; moved his hand slightly, felt the thin-bladed knife slide down into the palm.
John Faulkner climbed the stairs slowly, set down the basket he was carrying outside the door. Tapped quietly, then again; waited, starting to frown. Eased lightly at the catch, and pushed the door ajar. At first he didn’t see her, sitting in the high-backed chair; then his eyes dilated. He ran forward, tried to take her hands. She kept them pressed to her side; and he saw the blood marks on the floor, the scuffs of red where she’d dragged herself along. She turned her head listlessly, face a paper mask. ‘This too,’ she whispered. ‘This too, from Charles…’ She lifted her hands then, showed him in the gloom the brightness of the palms.
He stayed kneeling, breath hissing between his teeth; and when he raised his head his face was totally changed. ‘Who did this, Lady?’ he asked her huskily. ‘When next they cross the heath, then we must know…’
She saw the blazing start at the backs of the strange eyes and reached for his wrist, slowly and with pain. ‘No, John,’ she said. ‘The Old Way is dead. Vengeance is… mine, saith the Lord…’ She pushed her head against the back of the chair, parting her lips; blood showed between her teeth. ‘Get… horses,’ she said. ‘Horses… Quickly, John, please…’ He stood a moment staring down; then he ran to do her bidding.
The two horses moved slowly, in the first chill light of dawn. Round them the wind yapped and shrilled, plucking at the cloaks of their riders. Eleanor sat hunched and frozen; it was the seneschal who reached across to rein her mount. He swung to the ground, supporting her as she leaned in the saddle. Before her, seeming miles off in the iron-grey light, loomed the two flanking hills; between them, where once had stood a hall, the bosses and nubs of stone, the teeth and pinnacles and shattered fingers thrust into the sky. Round them the rain squalls moved and the cloud, obscuring; and over all, ragged and stiff and robbed of colour, flapped the remnants of great flags. Flags of cobalt, and of gold.
She panted, quick and agonised; and her fingers gripped his shoulder, digging at the flesh. ‘There,’ she said faintly. ‘There, see… The Great Gate was broken; you told me, but I wouldn’t hear…’ She stared round her dully, at the half-seen vastness of the heath. ‘This is the… place,’ she said. ‘No further. No more…’
He picked her gently from the horse, wiped at the blood that had run and dried on neck and chin. Lifted her again and carried her to where bushes screened her from the wind. She cried out, arcing her body. Then again and once more, the sound piercing the wet air, soaring up to vanish in the great dull sky. The horses shuffled, flattening their ears. Champed their bits and snorted, returned to their cropping of grass. They browsed a long time; long after Eleanor had gasped again and stiffened, and was dead. A troop of royal cavalry came, late in the afternoon. They found blood on the grass, a woman with peace and pain both in her face. But the seneschal was gone.
CODA
From an official guide: Between Bourne Mouth and Swanage lies a wild tract of heathland. Bounded on the south by the Channel, on the east by Poole harbour, to the north by the curving River Frome, and to the west by Luckford Lakes, the Isle of Purbeck is crossed by a single line of hills. One pass, a geat or gut in the old tongue, carves through them to the sea; and in that pass once stood a massive stronghold. Nearly unapproachable, seldom invested and never reduced by arms, the castle was truly a gate; Corfe Gate, key to the entire southwest.
The castle, from which the village takes its name, or rather the shell of what was once a mighty hall, tops the steep natural mound that overlooks the clustering of houses. The sides of the hill are overgrown now with bushes and saplings and some stoutish trees, while the brook that once comprised the wet ditch is quite shadowed over. It runs grey and silent between high banks, from the sides of which ferns drop wobbling tongues of green into the water.
Access to the first of the triple baileys is by way of a stout bridge of stone, itself of considerable height and spanning the great ditch that runs round half the mound. Across the barbican once hung a single portcullis; the grooves of its passing may still be seen scored an arm’s depth in the stone. Inside, across the sloping grass of the lowest ward, is the second outwork known incorrectly as the Martyr’s Gate. Here it is claimed Elfrida stabbed Prince Edward, to secure for her own son Ethelred the throne of the land; only unfortunately for the legend neither keep nor baileys then existed, the hill being crowned at that time by a hunting lodge. The Martyr’s Gate itself is split, it is said, by the mines of Pope John; one great tower has sunk from the path some dozen feet and slid a distance bodily down the hill, but its foundations still hold it firm.
Above this inner gateway the ruins of the Great Keep rise a hundred feet and more, daunting with their massiveness and strength. Two walls only remain and a fraction of a third; a high and slender needle, worn by the rain but secure still in the splendid bonding of its stones. All the rest has fallen and lies scattered on the hill in chunks and masses, some of them twenty feet or more across and half as thick. The pathway winds between them,
