My Lady Midnight

She heard a snort of laughter. “Do ye think Hawkswell would make it so easy to overwhelm the man who brings us our meals and empties our slop bucket? Nay, lady, we’re in a cell at the base of the stairway. Come on down and you’ll see.”

Was it a trick? She’d just have to trust that they were telling the truth, she decided, and lowered her foot onto the first step below.

The walls were cool and damp, but not slimy, she noted, and once she got halfway down she saw that the light was coming from a pitch-soaked torch set in the stone wall right next to a door in which a small, square hole, covered with close-set iron bars, was cut. The hole was just big enough to reveal Ivo’s and Jean’s faces pressed against the bars, watching her descent.

“It’s about time, my lady,” Jean greeted her in his coarse peasant French. “Do ye bring the key to let us out?”

“The key?” She paused on the last step, astonished at his question, but determined not to show her surprise. It was a relief to speak in French again, even to these rough men. “Nay, of course not. I don’t know where the key is kept. I merely came to see if you were both all right. Have you been questioned? Tortured?”

“See, I told you she wouldn’t think to bring no key,” she heard Ivo mutter to Jean. “Yes, we’ve been questioned—by none other than the lord o’ Hawkswell himself. But we didn’t tell him nothing,” the man-at-arms boasted.

“You’ve not been harmed?” Claire persisted, ignoring their surly reception. “You’re all right?”

“Nay, we’re not ‘all right’! We’ve not been tortured, just questioned, but we’re cold and hungry and the food the lord sent down is more like pig swill!” snapped Jean.

“Has he threatened to torture you?” she asked, feeling some lessening of her anxiety as she peered beyond the men and found that while their cell was small, it was furnished with blankets and clean straw.

“Nay, but what of that? Find the key and get us out of here!”

Claire felt a rising exasperation at the men’s truculence. They had not been tortured, at least not yet, and while their surroundings were not luxurious, they were not inhumane. “I’m sorry that you were captured, but I’m afraid it’s not that simple,” said Claire, injecting into her voice enough hauteur for a queen. “Even if I had the means to let you out of this dungeon, you might well be captured trying to escape the castle. And then the whole mission is jeopardized, for Lord Alain would have to discover how you escaped, would he not? You would be forced to reveal who released you, and then we would all be thrown into this cell and our mission for King Stephen would not be accomplished.”

Ivo swore and told Claire in graphic terms what the king could do to himself.

She was determined not to let the man bait her, and pretended she had not heard the obscene remark. “I pray you will be patient. Perhaps once he is satisfied that you know nothing, Lord Alain will release you.”

“Yes, and the pope will turn Muslim,” retorted Jean with an ugly laugh.

“If he does not, you will at least have to be patient while I learn my way about the castle,” Claire said. She was sorry she had found them. “I would remind you I have been here less than a day. If it is possible to effect your release without endangering myself, you may trust I will do so. In the meantime, perhaps I can steal a bit of food, so that you can at least have a little something better to eat,” she offered, trying to smile encouragingly at them.

“Well, ain’t that good of ye, my fine lady, dispensing charity to the poor captives?” snarled Ivo. “It’s all yer fault we’re here anyway. We could have found a way to kidnap Lord Alain’s whelps, easy. But no, Hardouin had to use ye!”

How dared they blame her! She hadn’t asked for this task! She opened her mouth to deliver a tart reprimand. “If you hadn’t lingered at an alehouse instead of finding a concealed place to wait for me, you and the rest of them—”

She froze, for suddenly she heard the creak of the flooring above, and the sound of voices.

A torch was thrust down the opening. “Who’s down there?” a familiar voice demanded in French.

Lord Alain! But wasn’t he supposed to be consulting with the reeve and the bailiff, and reading a message from the empress?

“I said, who’s there?” Lord Alain demanded again, this time in English, and she saw his booted feet coming down the stone steps.

There was no help for it. “I—it’s me, Haesel, my lord,” she said, before his head had come below the upper level.

He descended the final steps before speaking to her, and raised the torch.

“What are you doing down here, Haesel?” he demanded, his voice as cold as the stone wall she shrank back against. “Why are you talking to these men?”

Taking refuge in her role as Haesel, the simple Englishwoman, she said, “I—ye said I might explore, my lord, and I was doin’ that…I came into the cellar, and these men called out t’ me, and I just came to talk t’ them, ’tis all, my lord. I—I felt sorry for them, I did, for they said they’re cold and hungry…I’m sorry, my lord, I did not mean to anger ye. I merely wished t’ comfort them in their captivity, like a good Christian.”

His eyes bored a hole through her. His face was a mask of suspicion. “And would your piety allow you to go inside their cell if you could, and warm them with your body, Haesel? I’m sure they’d find that comfort enough! Would you like me to let you in? I regret I would have to lock the door behind you, of course.”

Claire felt her mouth fall open during his tirade, and she didn’t have to feign the tears that sprang into her eyes. “Nay, of course I wouldn’t, my lord! I was just talkin’ to them, my lord! They was lonely!” She allowed herself to sniffle as the tears spilled over her cheek, hoping she could move whatever trace of a heart he had left.

His eyes appraised her for an endless moment. “Very well, I’ll accept what you’re telling me this time,” he said, his eyes still full of distrust. “But don’t let me find you down here again, Haesel. These are low, murdering knaves, and they’d rape you as fast as look at you, then slit your throat, do you understand? They are not fit to be the recipients of your charity,” he concluded sternly, then gestured to the stairs. “Go on, get out of here. I would speak further with these baseborn scoundrels.”

She fled, silently thanking God and all the saints that he had apparently not heard her speaking French.

Alain turned back to his involuntary guests behind the barred window. “Well, have you considered your position during the night? Have you decided to tell me what you were doing in Hawkswell Wood?”

“We told you, we were going to join King Stephen’s forces,” sneered the one called Jean.

“And I told you yesterday I didn’t believe you,” Alain said with a pleasantness that he was far from feeling, especially after finding Haesel down here visiting with them. He wanted to smash the big ugly Norman’s nose into his skull. “None of Stephen’s forces are encamped near here, for I control the valley. Now why were you really here, fellow? Did you hope to infiltrate the castle? Did you think I was so stupid I’d hire any lordless soldier wandering around?”

“Nay, it’s as he said,” asserted the other one, known as Ivo, a rough-looking knave if there ever was one.

“It’s a pity you’re holding to that story,” murmured Alain with a careless shrug of his shoulders.

“Are ye goin’ t’ torture us, then, my lord? We ain’t afraid,” Jean boasted, though he couldn’t quite hide the uneasy look in his squinty eyes.

“Perhaps. Or perhaps we’ll just forget you’re down here,” Alain said with an elaborate show of unconcern. “Imagine it, my fine fellows—no food, no water, no one coming to visit you…the days would turn into weeks. How long would you last, I wonder?”

“Long enough, I’d vow, to see this castle in Stephen’s hands,” came Ivo’s snarling retort.

Was it all just bravado, or was the lout truly less afraid of possible starvation than torture? Perhaps he just felt torture was a more immediate prospect, whereas starvation might take longer—or did he have reason to think Stephen’s forces would somehow be able to take the castle soon, and liberate them?

It was just a rhetorical question in any case, for Alain had never yet stooped to torture, though he was not foolish enough to let these rogues know that fact. Continued incarceration ought to make them willing to talk, given time.

What had Haesel been doing down here? True, she had asked if she might explore, but he had pictured her poking her nose into all the aboveground nooks and crannies within the vast castle and strolling along the wall walk. Taking the trouble to lift the trapdoor was a little more than exploring, he thought.

He could not have explained the urge that had caused him to interrupt the reeve in midspate as that worthy fellow was trying to explain why Lucan the miller should not be expected to do his boon work, in order to check on his prisoners. Alain wished the urge had not caused him to find Haesel here.

Always eager to get rid of the feeling of suffocation that attended his trips down the dark, narrow steps that led to his one-cell dungeon, he turned around. He had started up the stone steps, in fact, when he stopped and turned back to the men in the cell.

“Do you speak English?” he asked suddenly, hoping to catch them off guard. If they denied speaking English, then how had they been able to speak to Haesel?

“Me? Speak that gibberish? N—”

Alain heard a grunt as if Jean had just elbowed Ivo in the ribs.

“That is, yes, just enough to flirt with the serf women, and make a bargain with them what sell their wares, if you catch my meanin’, my lord,” Jean said with a wink.

“Yes, that little blond woman is a hot little piece, my lord,” put in Ivo. “Is she your new leman? I’d watch her—she has a wandering eye, ye know.”

Alain stomped up the stairs before he could give in to the urge to throttle both of them.

Chapter Six (#ulink_14864b7b-ccdc-5d4e-b6e2-ea84e9a39d4e)

Shaken by the near-disaster, her eyes stinging with held-back tears, Claire dropped the trapdoor with a clatter. The arrogant caitiff! How dared he speak so cruelly to her, as if she were so witless that she fully merited the full measure of his contempt! How dared he stare at her with those icy, suspicious eyes? She deeply resented the flash of fear that had gone zinging through her after encountering those eyes. Had he made Julia feel that way?