This had been worrying Geoffrey. He didn’t know what a seneschal would feel about a traveling leech’s dependents. Would he come over snobbish, and send them down below the salt? Or would the chemist from Abergavenny be impressed by the magical title of Doctor?
“Honestly,” he said, “there isn’t much to say about us. We’re orphans, and we were traveling north with our guardian, who is a leech, when he had to hurry on and help someone have a baby, a lord’s wife, I think, and he told us where to meet him but we made a mistake and got lost, and when we heard the wolves in the forest we ran here.”
“Dear me,” said Mr. Furbelow, “I’m afraid your guardian will be worrying about you.”
Sally, her mouth full of strawberries, said sulkily, “I don’t like our guardian. I think he’d be glad if we were eaten by wolves.”
“Oh, Sally, he’s been awfully kind to us.” (Geoffrey hoped he didn’t sound as though he meant it.)
“You said yourself that he couldn’t wait to get his hands on the estate. I bet you he doesn’t even try to look for us.”
“What’s a leech?” said Mr. Furbelow.
“A doctor.”
“Do you mean,” said Mr. Furbelow, “that this” (he waved a vague hand at the tower and the hounds and the Dark Ages appurtenances) “goes on outside the valley?”
“Oh yes,” said Geoffrey. “All over England. Didn’t you know?”
“I’ve often wondered,” said Mr. Furbelow, “But of course I couldn’t go and see. And how did this doctor come to be your guardian?”
“He was a friend of Father’s,” said Geoffrey, “and when Dad died he left us in his care, so now we have to go galumphing round the country with him and he treats us like servants. I shouldn’t have said that.” “But it’s true,” said Sally.
“You poor things,” said Mr. Furbelow. “I don’t know what to do for the best, honestly I don’t. Perhaps you’d better stay here for a bit and keep me company. I’m sure he won’t mind, and I’ll be delighted to have someone to talk to after all these years.”
“It’s terribly kind of you sir,” said Geoffrey. “I think it would suit us very well. I hope we can do something to help you, but I don’t know what.” “Well,” said Sally, “I can speak Latin!”
Oh lord, thought Geoffrey, that’s spoiled everything, just when we were getting on so well. She’s tired and had too much wine, and now she’s said something he can find out isn’t true in no time. Indeed the old man was peering at Sally with a dotty fierceness, and Geoffrey began to look round for a weapon to clock him with if there was trouble.
“Die mihi,” said Mr. Furbelow stumblingly, “quid agitis in his montibus.”
“Benigne,” said Sally. “Magister Carolus, cuius pupilli sumus, medicus notabilis, properabat ad castellum Sudeleianum, qua (ut nuntius ei dixerat) uxor baronis iam iam parturiverit. Nobis imperavit magister . .
“How marvelous,” said Mr. Furbelow. “Fm afraid I can’t follow you at that speed. Did you say Sudeley Castle? I went there once on a coach trip with my late wife; she enjoyed that sort of outing. Oh dear, it is late. We must talk about this tomorrow. Now it’s really time you were in bed. He might put the torches out suddenly. Perhaps you’d like to share the same room. This castle is a bit frightening for kiddies, I always think.”
He said the last bit in a noisy whisper to Geoffrey, and then showed them down to the far wall where a staircase, which was really more like a ladder, led up to the gallery. There were several other ladders like it round the hall. Upstairs they found a long, narrow room, with a large window looking out over the hall and a tiny square one cut into the thickness of the wall. Through this they could see the top of the outer wall, and beyond that a section of forest, black in the moonlight, and beyond that the blacker hills. There were no beds in the room, only oak chests, huge feather mattresses like floppy bolsters, and hundreds of fur skins.
“Where do you sleep?” asked Geoffrey.
“Oh,” said Mr. Furbelow, “I’ve got a little cottage near the stables which I bought for my late wife. He didn’t change that. I have my things there and I like to keep an eye on them. I do hope you’ll be comfortable. Good night.”
Before they slept (and in the end they found it was easiest to put the mattresses on the floor — they kept slipping off the chests) Geoffrey said “How on earth did you pull that off?”
“Oh, I can speak Latin. Everybody can at our school. You have to speak it all the time, even at meals, and you get whipped if you make a mistake.” The furs were warm and clean. In that last daze that comes before sleep drowns you, Geoffrey wondered where the weatherman had got to.
X THE DIARY
Geoffrey couldn’t tell what time he woke, but the shadows on the forest trees made it look as if the sun was quite high already. Sally was still fast asleep, muffled in a yellow fur and breathing with contented snorts. He looked out of the window into the hall and saw that the feast was still there, though the dogs had been at it in places, scattering dishes and pulling the whole boar’s head on to the floor, where two of them wrenched at opposite ends of it. He felt stupid and sick, which might have been the wine, and very stiff, which must have been yesterday’s climbing and running. His clothes were muddy and torn. In one of the chests he found some baggy leggings, with leather thongs to bind them into place, and in another a beautifully soft leather jerkin. There was a belt on the wall, too, carrying a short
sword in a bronze scabbard, pierced and patterned with owls and fig leaves. He buckled it round the jerkin and went down into the hall to see if the dogs had left any of the food undefiled.
They were enormous things, very woolly and smelly, big-boned, a yellowy-gray color. Wolfhounds, he decided. Two of them lurched towards him, snarling, but backed away when he drew his sword. He found that they’d only messed up a tiny amount of the hillocks of food spread down the tables, so he filled a silver tray with fruit and bread and cold chops and looked round for something to drink. The thought of wine or mead or ale made him sick, and after Mr. Furbelow’s warning about the water he decided it would be safer to boil it, if only he could find a pot to put on the fire. He was afraid the gold and silver vessels might melt, and there didn’t seem to be anything else.
In the end he found, hanging between two of the torches, a steel helmet with a chain chinstrap and a pointy top. He used his sword to hollow out a nest in the red embers of the fire, settled the helmet into place and poured water in, spilling enough to cause clouds of steam to join the smoke and waver up towards the hole in the roof. It boiled very fast. He hooked it out by the chinstrap and realized that he couldn’t put it down because of the point and he had nothing to pour it into, so he held the whole contraption with one hand while he poured the water from one of the big jugs on to the floor and then wine out of a smaller jug into the big one, and at last he could pour his boiled water into the small jug.
When he went to put the blackened helmet back in its place he found a new, shiny one already hanging there. Chilly with fright he carried his tray up to the bedchamber and woke Sally to tell her what had happened.
“He must have done it,” she said matter-of-factly.
“Who? Mr. Furbelow?”
“Oh, Jeff, don’t be tiresome. I mean the ‘he’ Mr. Furbelow keeps talking about, the one who makes all the food and could get rid of the wolves if he felt like it and might put a lot of horses into the stable to keep poor Maddox company. The Necro man.”