A Fatal Winter (12 page)

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The weather cooperated, but grudgingly. The South West of England boasted a temperate climate that since time immemorial had drawn visitors to its shores, and this record for scenic hospitality was only now being threatened by the caprices of global warming. The area still enjoyed what the locals called “rainfall on tap”—rain when needed, sun when not—and the deep soil of the region meant not only good planting but good grazing for much of the year. Animals also could be bred earlier than in other parts of Britain. The region generally was spared the worst of winter, but this year’s had been unusually bitter, unusually cold, with snow staying on the ground longer than any of the locals could recall. The snow brought chaos with it, as many were not used to driving in wintry conditions, nor did they have the kinds of heavy automobiles designed to safely navigate snow and ice.

By this point the winter qualified as having been one of the most terrible in recent memory. From December first the country had been nearly paralyzed by icy roads and snow—elderly people, unaware and unused to the hazards, had been found frozen to death. Deliveries were halted as filling stations ran out of petrol, and people had been trapped on trains or unable to get public transport to work, further slowing the movement of goods and services.

Max steered the Land Rover, which was a bit too wide for the Lilliputian lanes leading to Monkslip-super-Mare. Despite the need for hypervigilance in this needle-threading task, it was a pleasant drive of hedgerows, stone walls, sparkling snow, and blue sky. At one point he caught a glimpse of an old barn in the distance, its roof thatched. The voices of the popular Scandinavian group Trio Mediaeval issued from the dashboard, singing thirteenth-century church music. Awena had lent him the CD.

The quiet otherwise was at a level beyond that of Nether Monkslip, as if he had slipped on noise-cancelling headphones. Mr. Whippet, the elderly parishioner Awena was watching out for, had told him the village once had been a noisy place, with the laments of animals being driven home at night, and carts rumbling down the High, and the shrieks of children at play. The village had had a school in those days, a building responsible for most of the clamor and, along with the church, for the ringing of bells. These days, the few young children were sent into Monkslip-super-Mare for their schooling. A baby mewling during church services was a welcome novelty.

Max, knowing full well that a flock of sheep would surely be around the next blind turn unless one pootled along at twenty kilometers per hour on the narrow road, resigned himself to a speed that in his pre-vicar days would have had him thrumming his fingertips against the steering wheel in barely controlled frustration. His caution was rewarded when, at the next turn, a small sheep appeared, as if from outer space, in the frame of his windscreen. It stood dead center to the road, alone and staring with startled, frozen panic at the Land Rover’s approaching grille. Max stood on the brakes, fishtailing madly, and, after pulling over as far as he could to the left (which was still nearly in the middle of the road), he climbed down out of the vehicle, first trying a mild tap on the horn to move the animal, to no avail.

Clearly, not a very bright sheep. He wondered briefly if there were any smart sheep.

Cautiously he approached the creature, making eye contact. It was not fully grown, still more lamb than sheep. Didn’t it need a shepherdess or something? A flock? The creature eyed him back, complacent now, since the engine that had worried it so was stopped. Max made little shoo-shoo motions with his hands, also to no avail.

Lily Iverson, who raised sheep outside the village and sold apparel made from their wool, became so attached to her creatures she had named each one. She claimed they knew and responded to their names. Knowing Lily, and her meticulous care of the animals, that was likely true. Did this sheep have a name, he wondered?

He sighed, looked about him. Privately he christened his sheep Noodlehead. They could be here all day and the next car down the road would come and flatten them both. He had never held a sheep in his life and never expected to, but holding out his arms he squared up to the animal and somehow scooped its legs together. They felt like large furry chopsticks, unwieldy in his arms. Beyond a token bleat, the creature made no protest as he lifted it, seeming to realize this mild indignity was fundamental to its well-being. Did sheep bite? Max had no idea. It was a soft—yes, soft as lambswool—and somewhat smelly bundle, and Max staggered up the road with it until a gap in the hedgerow revealed from whence it had come. Gently, he pointed its head through the gap and gave it a shove, a mere suggestion, which the animal seemed to understand. It disappeared, bleating, to join its mates, immediately to be greeted by a fierce blue-eyed dog who stood stock-still, clearly saying, “
There
you are. I was worried. You might have rung.”

Max resumed his journey. A few cautious miles farther brought him to Monkslip-super-Mare, where he took the bypass which skirted the wanton, drunken architecture of the seaside town, with its ancient houses spilling down to the sea. He slotted the Land Rover into the traffic in the roundabout just outside the town and joined the slipstream that would carry him toward Chedrow Castle.

It was in the dying late-afternoon sunlight that he first had an up-close view of the castle. It was an image that would remain with him a long time.

He had made his approach via a long wooded drive, which seemed a veritable highway after the track from Nether Monkslip. Lined with sentinel trees on each side, the road rose at the last in a majestic sweep to the castle gates. Max imagined this road followed the same winding trail as the original, and was designed to ease descent while at the same time making a direct, plunderous assault impossible. He came eventually to a lane lined with low stone walls, which in summer would drip with vegetation, and passed through an open gate flanked by stone pillars. He could now see the castle with the latticed grille of its gateway.

The structure sat on an apron of land fanning out over the ocean far below. He could hear and smell the sea which beat at the back fringes of the compound, imagining stipples of light fighting the dark on the water’s surface. The “waist” of this apron was narrow—a high stone wall joined at the middle by a gate of elaborate iron scrollwork. You could see how the land might erode over many centuries, narrowing that waistline, causing the wall to collapse, stone by stone, and finally tipping the house and all its contents into the English Channel.

It was a weighty structure of turrets and battlements, fortress-like and forbidding in aspect, even after centuries of peaceful occupation—peaceful, Max reminded himself, until the events which had brought him to this place. The collection of buildings which comprised the compound crouched now behind defenses clearly added later to the original manor house. Perhaps from its inception the place was intended as a retreat from a hostile world, even before reinforcements had been added to repel all invaders. Effectively grappled to the top of a rock, the castle was a perfect picture of stoic majesty in the face of the relentless tide of the ages.

The sky was a grainy blue, like the nighttime sky in a photo taken with a cheap camera, but the graininess came from the snow that floated lazily in the distance. This near the sea, snow crystals tended to break apart almost as soon as they formed. He could not account for the odd luminescence of this sky, which looked like the first glimmerings of the aurora borealis.

A large car park had presented itself to his right as the old Land Rover sputteringly gained the top of the hill. Max parked and walked over to the high stone wall with its wrought-iron gate. He found the buzzer and speaker on the right pillar and announced his presence, as instructed earlier by a heavily accented, impeccably polite male voice over the phone. He seemed to have anticipated Max’s arrival either through the use of his good butler genes or, more likely, by peering through one of the tiny windows that dotted the front of the castle. No doubt Cotton had also given the man a heads-up on what to expect. Max was rewarded with an electronic buzz and the metallic
ka-thunk
of the gates unlatching.

Max stood looking at the castle, waiting, as instructed by the voice (“Vait zare for me, pu-leaze.”), unaware that his photo was being snapped by an enterprising young reporter from the
Monkslip-super-Mare Globe and Bugle
who was staking out the castle entrance from behind one of the low stone walls. He was busy noticing there were openings between the supporting corbels, brackets helping hold up the castle’s upper floors. He’d had a teacher once who was keen on old styles of architecture and some of her enthusiasm had rubbed off. But what was the name for those openings? He’d known it once. Starts with an M …

“The machicolations are interesting, aren’t they?” said a voice at his ear. Startled, he turned to see a squat, heavy woman, so short she had to tip her head far back to look up at him. She was not very old but had the look of someone anticipating old age by many decades, as if anxious to get the aging process over with all at once.

This must be Lamorna, thought Max. The orphaned young woman Awena told me about.

Awena had told him Lamorna had been named optimistically after the romantic spot where her parents met, although there was little about Lamorna that spoke now of romance. Doughy and lumpen, her shoulders slouched inside a nappy old gray sweater that Max suspected she wore even on summer days, using its stretched and bulging pockets as a carryall. She wore glasses in old-fashioned black plastic frames that might have been issued by the health organization of a failing socialist country. These fitted her poorly, and her every sentence seemed to be punctuated by her having to push the glasses the long way back up her nose. Her eyes were very slightly crossed and too close together. The sunlight caught the highlights in the thin mustache on her upper lip, and her fringed hair sprang wildly about the black Alice band she used in an attempt to tame it. He noticed that in an additional cruel twist of fate, she wore a hearing aid.

She was saying now, “The machicolations could be purely decorative but of course they were used to drop things onto the enemy below. Stones, boiling oil, the contents of chamber pots—whatever was close to hand, presumably.”

She gave an exaggerated shudder. “Horrid, they were in those days,” she said. But Max thought her smile unpleasant as she envisioned such fates for the victims.

“Yes, of course,” said Max. “Machicolations. I couldn’t pull up the word.”

“You would be Father Tudor. They said you’d be coming.”

It wasn’t a question. The clerical collar saved so much time in terms of identifying himself and his mission. It was like being a fireman, thought Max.

“And you are?” he asked, just in case he was wrong.

“Lamorna Whitehall.” She pointed toward the castle, warming to her role. “You see the lookouts? They’re everywhere, really, at ground level and above. These let the defenders observe the approach of the enemy. From the sea, the place is impregnable. It was really only this approach they had to worry about.”

“But originally it was a manor house,” prompted Max. “Unfortified.”

“Yes. They had to get a special license from the king to castellate it and to surround it with protective walls.”

“You seem to know a lot about it.”

This pleased her. “We’re open to the public three or four days a week in summer. Sometimes I take tours around. The family just administers the place, you know. The National Trust owns it. We live here on suffering.”

Presumably she meant sufferance, but he understood that her alternate word might sum up her own feelings more precisely. Max looked up, taking it all in. It really was a fine specimen of its type of building, crenellated and dour, yet romantic. The only jarring note was provided by the tubes running up the walls, carefully painted to match the stone but tubes nonetheless, meant to conceal modern things like electrical wires. These old stone buildings had walls too thick to allow for drilling—wires and tubes had to be dropped in from the roof.

He said aloud: “It’s stunning. You’re lucky to live here.”

“Forsooth it is,” she said, oddly. But she was an odd woman. “I don’t know about lucky, but the place is a beauty. You’ll see soon enough. Behind the main portcullis is a small courtyard. The entry to the Great Hall is off of that.”

A sepulchral but youngish man now made his appearance. Tall and broad-shouldered, he gravely introduced himself as Milo. (“Just Milo, sir. My last name is a difficult one for British peoples.”) Because of the formality of his dress, Max assumed he was some sort of factotum of the castle, an official greeter/butler.

“If you could wait one moment, Father Tudor,” Milo said. “I need to close the gate at the top of the drive. I should have done it earlier but we’ve been in a turmoil, as you can imagine.”

He set off. A clanking sound was heard as he wrestled a gate into place. Lamorna took advantage of Milo’s absence to whisper, “I’m so relieved you’re here,” stammering out the words so softly he had to turn his head to hear.

Returning at a trot and taking Max’s single bag, Milo led him under the portcullis which hung, incisor-like, over the central gateway into the main grounds. Turning to speak to Lamorna, Max saw she had beetled off without another word. He saw her round form under the enveloping gray sweater disappear beneath a stone archway into what appeared to be a garden, now dormant in its own winter gray. Presumably the hothouse where Lady Baynard had died would be somewhere in the vicinity. Lamorna had said not a word to him about her grandmother or her granduncle, or about Max’s reasons for being at the castle—which was, according to Cotton, at her own request. Perhaps she was one of those who hid strong emotion behind a cool discussion of stone and machicolations and warfare. Protective walls, indeed.

He gazed about him as he walked. The buildings of the castle compound were inviting in that gloomy, portentous way beloved of history buffs. Max, who was one, found it creepily atmospheric—satisfyingly so. The corridors would probably be draughty and the rooms chilly and prone to all the ills that befall extremely old buildings, but Max thought that a fair tradeoff. If the place ran true to type, there would be a massive hall and a buttery or service room in the main part of the structure, along with living areas above; there would be a chapel, perhaps built into the curtain wall along with other buildings. The kitchen would by now have been moved into the main structure for modern convenience, but the remains of the original building might still be around. He could see a Watch Tower that dominated at one side, an anchoring building of some three stories.