Henry of Rye and Deal reined his horse, and behind him the column of men boiled to a halt. A bare mile away the castle glared huge and close, smoke rising in columns from its walls; down the road, rutted between its tall banks, the messengers were galloping, trailing clouds of whitish dust that hung behind them dispersing slowly in the still air. Three sentences the couriers got out before Henry started to swear. His spurs tore gashes in the flanks of his horse; the animal leaped forward terrified, the column swirled and clattered in pursuit.
The village square was packed with visitors, the taverns doing a bustling trade; the folk who had gathered to stare were scattered by the Lord of Rye and Deal. He hauled his horse in at the outer barbican, the animal lathered and running blood. The great gun Growler had indeed been brought down; but he was loaded and primed and his muzzle stared through the iron of the portcullis, and the culverin was flanking him. Behind the pieces a semicircle of men stood at ease, halberds grounded on the turf.
‘Clear that bloody bridge,’ bellowed the Pope’s lieutenant, revolving on his horse. ‘Captain, if those people won’t get off throw ’em in the ditch…’ Then to the guards, ‘What damn fool game is this? Open for Pope John…"
One of the men inside the bailey spoke up stolidly. ‘Sorry, M’Lord. Orders of the Lady Eleanor.’
‘Then,’ swore the nobleman, voice rising on a high note of rage, ‘instruct Her
Ladyship that Henry of Rye and Deal commands her presence to answer for her fornicating insolence…’
‘M’Lord,’ said the man inside, unmoved, ‘the Lady Eleanor has been informed…" Henry glared back. Turned to see his soldiers crowding the bridge, stared up at the great impassive face of the keep. Round the donjon the inner battlements flocked with men. He leaned forward to rattle with his crop against the bars of the gate. ‘By nightfall, my talkative friend,’ he said, breathing heavily, ‘you’ll hang by your heels for this, probably with your head over a slow fire. D’ye realise that?’ The guard spat deliberately at his feet.
Eleanor took her time about coming. She had bathed and changed and dressed her hair; she would allow no hands to touch her body but her own, not even the hands of tiring-maids. She appeared holding the arm of the seneschal, her Captain of Artillery walking on her left. She wore a plain white dress, and her long brown hair was loose. A little wind moved across the bailey, blowing the hair and flattening her skirt against her thighs. Henry, who had lost enough face already, watched her, fuming. Twenty paces from the gate the others stopped and she came forward alone. She saw the horsemen on the bridge, the muskets and swords, the sea of tossing blue. She halted by the breech of the great gun, one hand resting on the iron. ‘Well, My Lord,’ she said in a low, clear voice. ‘What will you have of us?’
Henry’s rages were famous and spectacular; spittle flecked his beard, the standersby heard him grind his teeth. ‘Deliver me this place,’ he shouted finally. ‘And your ordnance, and yourselves. In the name of your ruler Pope John, through the authority vested in me his lieutenant in these islands.’ She straightened her back, staring up at him through the gate.
‘And in the name of Charles?’ she asked cuttingly. ‘For my liege ruler is my King. So it was with my father and so with me My Lord; I took no vows before a foreign priest.’ He drew his sword, and pointed through the bars.’ That gun,’ was all he could speak.
She still remained standing by the great gun, her fingers touching its breech and the wind moving in her hair. ‘And if I refuse?’
He shouted again then, waving an arm; at the gesture a soldier spurred forward lifting a bag from the pommel of his saddle. ‘Then your liege-folk in this isle pay with their homes and their property and their lives,’ panted Henry, slashing at the cord that held the canvas closed. ‘It’ll be blood for iron, My Lady, blood for iron…’ The string came free, the bag was shaken; and down before her dropped the tongues and other parts of men, cut away as was the custom of Henry’s soldiers.
There was a silence that deepened. The colour drained slowly from Eleanor’s face, leaving the skin chalk-pale as the fabric of her dress; indeed the more romantic of the watchers swore afterwards the blue leached from her very eyes, leaving them lambent and dead as the eyes of a corpse. She clenched her hands slowly, slowly relaxed them again; a long time she waited, leaning on the gun, while the rage blurred her sight, rose to a high mad shrilling that seemed to ring inside her brain, receded leaving her utterly cold. She swallowed; and when she spoke again every word seemed freshly chipped from ice. ‘Why then,’ she said. ‘You must not leave us empty-handed, My Lord of Rye and Deal. Yet I fear my Growler will be a heavy load. Would not your task be lightened if his charge were sent before?’ And before any of the people round her could guess her purpose or intervene she had snatched at the firing lanyard, and Growler leaped back pouring smoke while echoes clapped around the waiting hills.
The heavy charge, fired at point-blank range, blew away the belly of the horse and took both Henry’s feet off at the ankles; animal and rider leaped convulsively and fell with a mingled scream into the dry ditch. As if by common consent the crossbows of the defenders played first on them; within seconds they were still, pierced by a score of shafts. The grapeshot, ploughing on, spread ruin among the soldiers on the bridge, tore furrows from the buildings of the village square beyond. Shrieks sounded, echoing from the close stone walls; the harquebusiers fired into the struggling mass on the path; the Captain rode away, leaning from his horse while his blood ribboned back across the creature’s rump. Then it finished, dying men whimpering while a thin haze of smoke drifted across the lower bailey towards the Martyr’s Gate.
Eleanor leaned on the gun and bit her wrist like a child at what she had done. The seneschal was the first to reach her; but she shoved him away. ‘Take up that dirt,’ she said, pointing to the ditch. ‘And bury it inside the bailey walls. I will have my right of faldage from Pope John…’ Then she staggered; he caught her, lifted her and carried her to her room.
For most of her life Eleanor, only daughter of Robert, last of the Lords of Purbeck, had lived in seclusion in the great hall set between the hills. She was a strange child, secretive and shy, beloved of the Fairies who according to popular report assisted at her very conception. Though practical and level-headed in other respects, Eleanor never made any attempt to scotch the rumours of her paranormal origin, seeming instead to take pleasure in them. ‘For,’ she would explain, ‘my father often told his guests the tale of how he rode north that day to bring my mother home. When he ran out and jumped on his horse everybody was convinced he’d taken leave of his senses; but he always claimed it was the People of the Heath that drove him to it, showing him visions so beautiful they sent him completely wild.’ Then her face would cloud; for Margaret Strange had died in childbirth, and Eleanor felt very keenly the loss of the mother she had never known.
Too keenly sometimes for her father’s peace of mind; Robert, who never remarried, brooded over the child’s imaginings. Once, when she was very small, she walked in her sleep. It was on a night of wind, with a full gale roaring up from the Channel barely five miles away; one of those nights when the nervous of the household kept to their rooms, swearing they heard the laughter of the Old Ones in the gusts that hissed and droned round the high stones of the keep. Eleanor’s nurse, looking in to see the child was quiet, found her room empty; a hue and cry was raised, and the whole great complex of buildings searched. They found Eleanor high in the donjon, at the head of an ancient stairway unused for years. Her eyes were closed but as they reached her they heard her calling. ‘Mother,’ she shouted. ‘Mother, are you there…’ They led her down, careful not to startle her; for it was well known that such walkers were under the spell of the Old Ones, who took their souls very easily if they woke. Eleanor herself seemed oblivious of the whole affair; but it was not so. She referred to it days later, when her nurse was dressing her. ‘My mother was very pretty, wasn’t she?’ she said; then thoughtfully, ‘She wanted to play; but she had to go away…’ Robert frowned when he heard, and pulled his beard and swore; the girl was packed off to relatives in France, but when she came back six months later she was very little changed.