“Oh, you can’t tell,” said their host. “Really you can’t. Having one pony here might put ideas into his head, and then we’d wake up to find the whole place full of horses, all needing watering and feeding. I don’t think he has any idea of the work involved, keeping a place like this going, but then he doesn’t have to.”
The bins were all brimming with grain, and there was sweet fresh hay in a barn next door. Geoffrey worked the windlass of the well, and found that the water was only a few feet down. They left Maddox tucking in to a full manger, like a worn traveler who, against all the odds, has finished up at a five-star hotel. As they crossed the courtyard to the keep they realized it was now full night, the sky pied with huge stars and a chill night breeze creeping up the valley. The door to the keep was black oak, a foot thick, tall as a haystack. The old man levered it open with a pointed pole. Geoffrey noticed that it could be barred both inside and out.
Beyond the door lay a single circular chamber, with a fire in the middle. It was sixty foot from where they stood to the fire, and sixty foot on to the far wall. The fire was big as a Guy Fawkes Day bonfire, piled with trunks of trees, throwing orange light and spitting sparks across the rush-strewn paving stones. Round it slept a horde of rangy, woolly dogs, each almost as large as Maddox. The smoke filled the roof beams and made its way out through a hole in the center of the roof, which, Geoffrey realized, high though it seemed, cannot have come more than a third of the way up the tower. He wondered what lay above. Round the outside wall of the chamber, ten feet above the floor, ran a wide wooden gallery supported on black oak pillars. It reached up to the roof, with two rows of unglazed windows looking out across the chamber. Beneath the gallery, against the wall, stood a line of flaring torches, like the one the old man carried, in iron brackets. Between them pot-shaped helmets gleamed. On either side of the fire, reaching towards them, ran two long black tables, piled high with great hummocks of food, meat and pastry and fruits, with plates and goblets scattered down their length and low benches ranged beneath the tables. They walked up towards the fire between an avenue of eatables.
“Oh, splendid!” exclaimed the old man. “Perhaps he heard the gong and decided it was time for a feast. Often he doesn’t think about food for days and days, you know, and then it starts to go bad and I have to throw it out to the wolves — I used to have such a nice little bird table at my own house — and I don’t know which way to turn really I don’t. Now, let’s see. If you sit there, and you there, I’ll sit in the middle and carve. I suppose we ought to introduce ourselves. My name’s Willoughby Furbelow and I’m Seneschal of the castle.”
“I’m Geoffrey Tinker and this is my sister Sally. It’s very kind of you to put us up.”
“Not at all, not at all. That’s what I’m here for, I suppose, though it isn’t at all what I intended.
Really this place ought to be full of wandering minstrels and chance-come guests and thanes riding in to pay homage and that sort of thing, only they don't seem to come. Perhaps it’s the wolves that put them off, or else you’re all too busy out there in the big world. I keep trying to tell him he ought to do something about the wolves, but he doesn’t seem very interested and my Latin isn’t very good — I keep having to look things up in the dictionary and I never thought I’d need a grammar when it all started, all those tenses and cases you know I find them very muddling and he does get terribly bored. In his lucid intervals, I mean. Now, this thing here is a boar’s head. Actually there isn’t a lot of meat on it, and it’s a pig to carve (pardon the pun) and though some bits of it are very tasty others aren’t, and besides it seems a pity to spoil it just for the three of us, it looks so splendid doesn’t it? Would you mind if I suggested we had a go at this chicken? You mustn’t mind it looking so yellow. Everything seems to get cooked in saffron, and it really does taste quite nice, though you weary of it after a few years. Which part do you fancy, Miss Trinket, or may I call you Sarah?”
“Everyone calls me Sally and may I have a wing and some breast, please? There don’t seem to be any potatoes. And what’s that green stuff?”
“Good King Henry. It's a weed really, but it’s quite nice, like spinach. I’m afraid they didn’t have any potatoes in his day, any more than they had the fish fingers you’re used to, but there are probably some wurzels down below the salt, if you fancy them. You do realize you’ve got to eat all this in your fingers, like a picnic? I used to have such a nice set of fish knives and forks, with mother-of-pearl handles, which my late wife and I were given for a wedding present. I think I miss them as much as anything. But the bread is very nice when it’s fresh and you can use if for mopping up gravy and things. There. Now, Geoffrey?”
“Please, may I have a leg? I didn’t understand what you said about lucid intervals.”
“That’s what I call them, but I doubt if a psychiatrist would agree with me. I don’t mind confessing I’m at a loss which way to turn. Perhaps I should never have started. The result has been very far from what I intended, I promise you. But now . . . he’s so dangerous ... so uncontrolable. So strong, too, of course. I did try to administer sedatives at one point, several years ago now. I thought I might contrive to return him to his previous condition, but he was angry. Very angry indeed. I was terrified. Oh dear, don’t let’s talk about it. You have no idea how powerful he is, really you haven’t. But he built this whole place in a single night, and all the forest too, and the wolves. I often wonder if he interferes with telly reception outside the valley. Just think what he might do if he were really enraged — especially now he’s so much worse than he used to be. Why, he might destroy the whole world. It says so on his stone. Is that enough or would you like a bit of breast too?”
“That’s fine, thanks,” said Geoffrey. Mr. Furbelow was one of those men who cannot talk and do anything else at the same time, so Geoffrey’s helping had been mangled off somehow between sentences, and then the high, eager, silly voice rambled on. The old man helped himself to several slices of breast and both oysters, and then began to worry about drink.
“Dear me, I don’t know what my late wife would say about Sally drinking wine. She was a pillar of the Abergavenny temperance movement. I had a little chemist’s shop in Abergavenny, you know. That’s what made the whole thing possible. As a chemist, I cannot advise you to drink the water, and though there is mead and ale below the salt, I myself find them very affecting, more so than the wine. I trust you will be moderate.”
The chicken was delicious, though almost cold. Geoffrey was still hungry when he had finished and helped himself from a salver of small chops, which were easy to eat in his fingers, unlike the Good King
Henry, which had to be scooped up on pieces of dark soft bread. His knife was desperately sharp steel, with a horn handle bound with silver. His plate seemed to be gold, and so did the goblet from which he drank the sweet cough-syrupy wine. All the while Mr. Furbelow talked, at first making mysterious references to the “he” who owned the tower and provided the feast, and then, as he filled his own goblet several times more, about the old days in Abergavenny, and a famous trip he and his wife had made in the summer of 1959 to the Costa Brava. It took him a long time to finish his chicken. At last he pushed his plate back, reached for a clean one from the far side of the table and pointed with his knife at an enormous arrangement of pastry, shaped like a castle, with little pastry soldiers marching about on top of it.
“You could have some of that, if you liked, but you never know what you’ll find inside it. If you fancy a sweet there might be some wild strawberries in that bowl just up there beyond the peacock, Sally dear. Ah, splendid. And fresh cream too. No sugar of course. Now you must tell me something about yourselves. I seem to have done all the talking.”