She got up and paced restlessly across the chamber and back. ‘It’s no good,’ she said. ‘I just can’t sit still and wait, not tonight.’ She sent for a writer, and the officers commanding, her troops and artillery; they worked into the small hours drawing up lists of the extra provisions they would need to withstand a full-scale siege. ‘There’s no doubt,’ said Eleanor with a flash of her old practicality, ‘that we shall be bottled up for a considerable time; till Charles gets back in fact. There won’t be any question of chivalry either, of being let to walk out with our arms or anything like that, the whole thing’s far too serious; but at least we shall know by the time we’re through who’s actually running this country, ourselves or an Italian priest.’
She poured wine. ‘Well, gentlemen, let’s hear your recommendations. You can have anything you need, arms, men, provisions; I only ask one thing. Don’t leave anything out. We can’t afford to forget any details; remember there’s a rope, or worse, waiting for every one of us if we make a single slip…’
The seneschal stayed with her after the others had gone, sitting drinking wine in the firelight and talking of all subjects from gods to kings; of the land, its history and its people; of Eleanor, and her family and upbringing. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘it’s strange, Sir John; but it seemed this morning when I fired the gun I was standing outside myself, just watching what my body did. As if I, and you too, all of us, were just tiny puppets on the grass. Or on a stage. Little mechanical things playing out parts we didn’t understand.’ She stared into her wineglass, swilling it in her hands to see flame light and lamplight dance from the goldenness inside; then she looked up frowning, eyes opaque and dark. ‘Do you know what I mean?’
He nodded, gravely. ‘Yes, my Lady…’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s like a… dance somehow, a minuet or a pavane. Something stately and pointless, with all its steps set out. With a beginning, and an end… ‘
She tucked her legs under her, as she sat beside the fire. ‘Sir John,’ she said, ‘sometimes I think life’s all a mass of significance, all sorts of strands and threads woven like a tapestry or a brocade. So if you pulled one out or broke it the pattern would alter right back through the cloth. Then I think… it’s all totally pointless, it would make just as much sense backwards as forwards, effects leading to causes and those to more effects… maybe that’s what will happen, when we get to the end of Time. The whole world will shoot undone like a spring, and wind itself back to the start…’ She rubbed her forehead tiredly. ‘I’m not making sense, am I? It’s getting too late for me…’
He took the wine from her, carefully. She stayed quiet awhile; when she spoke again she was half asleep. ‘Do you remember years ago telling me a story?’ she asked. ‘About how my great uncle Jesse broke his heart when my grandmother wouldn’t marry him, and killed his friend, and how that was somehow the start of everything he did… It seemed so real, I’m sure that was how it must have been. Well, I can finish it for you now. You can see the Cause and Effect right the whole way through. If we… won, it would be because of grandfather’s money. And the money’s there because of Jesse, and he did it because of the girl… It’s like Chinese boxes. There’s always a smaller one inside, all the time; until they get so small they’re too small to see but they keep on going down and down…’
He waited; but she didn’t speak again.
For days the castle rang with activity; Eleanor’s messengers rode out to scour the countryside around bringing in more men, provisions, meat on the hoof. The great lower bailey was prepared for the animals, pens and hurdles lined against the outer walls. The steamers toiled once more bringing cattle cake and baled hay from Wareham, chugging down the road with trailers empty, clanking back through the outer gate to discharge their cargo in heaps on the flattened grass. Everything possible was shifted under cover; what stacks remained exposed were covered by tarpaulins, and turves and stone rubble strewn on top.
The fodder would be a prime target were the enemy to bring fire machines with them. All day the hoists clattered and most of the night too, taking the provisions down to the cellars, bringing up quarrels for the crossbowmen, powder and ball for the harquebusiers, charges for the great guns. The semaphores seldom stopped. The country was aflame; Londinium was arming, levies from Sussex and Kent were marching towards the west. Then came worse news. From France, from the castles of the Loire, men were streaming to fight in the Holy Crusade while to the south a second armada was embarking for England. To Eleanor, John sent no word; but his intentions were plainer than speech. Her Ladyship redoubled her efforts.
Steamers towing vast iron chains scythed the banks of the wet ditch; working parties fired the scrub from the castle motte, the bushes and trees that had seeded themselves there over the years; and down over the blackened grass went ton after ton of powdered chalk. The slopes would glow now in starlight, showing up the silhouettes of climbing men. Through it all the sightseers came, parking their little cars in the village square, flooding into the castle, through the gates and across the baileys, staring at the guns and the sentries on the walls, poking their noses into this, their prying fingers into that, impeding everybody nearly all the time. Eleanor could have closed her gates; but pride forbade her. Pride, and the counsel of the seneschal. Let the people see, he murmured. Invite their sympathy, appeal to their understanding. Her Ladyship would need all the support she could get from the country in the coming months.
On the thirtieth day after the massacre the seneschal rose and dressed at dawn. He walked down softly through the still-sleeping keep, through chambers and corridors let honeycomb-fashion into the huge walls, past arrow slits and fenestellas pouring livid grey light. Past a sentry, dozing at his post; the man jerked to attention, bringing his halberd shaft ringing down onto stone. Sir John acknowledged the gesture, raising a hand thoughtfully, mind far away.
Outside, in the raw air of the upper bailey, he paused. Round him the curtain walls loomed from the night, massive shadows topped by the tinier shadows of men; the breath of the guards showed in wisps above their heads. Far below huddled the roofs of the village, dim and blue, odd lights burning here and there; out on the heath a solitary glow showed him where some mason’s boy trudged lantern in hand to work. He turned away, eyes seeing but not recording, mind locked inward.
At this dawn hour it seemed as always that Time might pause, turning and flowing in on itself before speeding again, urging in the new day. The castle, like a great dim crown of stone, seemed to ride not a hill but a flaw in the timestream, a node of quiet from which possibilities might spread out limitless as the journeyings of the sun. No one, not the seneschal and certainly no one else, could have understood his thoughts at that time. The old thoughts, the first thoughts of the first people ever; for the seneschal was of the ancient kind.
At the tip of the second bailey the squat Butavant tower jutted over the precipice of burned grass like a figurehead from the prow of a ship. The seneschal paused at the lower door, queer eyes on the horizon, swivelled slowly to face the Challow tower. And instantly, gracefully, the jointed arms began to flap.
He climbed the tower steps, feet shuffling on stone, hearing a drum behind him and a voice. A Page-Signaller scuttled across the bailey; something not more than a lad, hose wrinkled and tabard askew, message pad in hand, knuckling his eyes. Far out over the heath, in the cobalt intermingling of sea and sky, a light gleamed and was lost. Then another and another, and a patch of lighter dark that could have been a sail. As if a fleet had come to anchor, lay dressing its ranks and waiting.