“I expect you’re right. I just don’t want to think about it. I’ve boiled the water, so it should be all right to drink, but it’s still pretty hot. There might be enough left to wash with. You look a right urchin. I found my clothes in the chests, and it mightn’t be a bad idea if we looked for something for you. I’m sure Mr. Furbelow would like that. He’s got himself some pretty elaborate fancy dress. Though I suppose Latin’s our best bet. What do you think he means about lucid intervals?”
“I don’t know. It ought to mean clear spaces, that’s what the words mean in Latin. May I have the last chop — you’ve got three and I’ve only got two. Is he mad?”
“Mr. Furbelow? No, at least he’s a bit loopy, but he’s not just imagining things, or not everything. Somebody must have built this tower and put the forest there — they aren’t on the map. And if you agree that far, it means that the somebody’s still here. He brings the food and he built the tower and he put the helmet back just now. He might be mad. I think that’s what lucid intervals’ means — the times when mad people aren’t mad for a bit. But I don’t think Mr. Furbelow’s mad.”
“But I don’t think he’s bad either. I think he’s made some sort of mistake and has gone on making it worse and doesn’t know how to stop. But I think he might easily be rather touchy. We must be careful what we say to him.”
“Yes. And don’t push the Latin too hard. Just wait for a natural chance to come up again. Let’s see if we can find some clothes for you.”
Everything in the chests was really much too big for an eleven-year-old girl, but they found a long emerald tabard with bits of red silk appliqued to it and intricate patterns of gold thread filling the gaps. On Sally it reached to the ground, almost, but when it was pulled in with a big gold belt it looked OK;
there weren’t any sleeves, so they left her brown arms bare. They found a silver comb in another small chest and did her hair into two pigtails tied with gold ribbon, and when Geoffrey had sponged the mud and sweat off her face she looked quite striking, as if she was about to play the queen in a charade. There was still no sign of Mr. Furbelow so they carried the tray down to the hall and started to explore the rest of the tower.
There were two stories of rooms in the gallery, all just like theirs, full of chests and furs. The ones in the lower story were all separate, but the higher ones ran into each other all the way round, with heavy curtains across the doorways, but with nobody in them at all. There was no sound in the whole tower except the crash of a log falling into the fire, followed by a squabble of disturbed hounds. It was very confusing, like a maze. Half way round they found another ladder going up still further. It led them out on to the roof.
They stood in the open air, still only a third of the way up a dizzy funnel of inward-leaning stone. An open timber staircase climbed spirally up inside this tube of roughhewn yellow boulders, and finished in a wooden balcony running all the way round inside the parapet. The roof they stood on was a flat cone, with the smoke hole at its point and drainage holes cut into the wall round its perimeter. As they climbed the endless timbers of the stairway Geoffrey noticed that you could still see on them the cutting strokes of a great coarse shaping tool. From the balcony they could see the whole valley, with the ridges of the hills mellow in the morning sunlight and the darker treetops smothering and unshaping everything in between. The children felt oppressed by those million million leaves. The bare upland beyond seemed suddenly a place of escape, if they ever did escape.
Geoffrey leaned over the parapet, his palms chilly with the knowledge of height, to study the courtyard. It was really nothing except the ground enclosed by the outer wall, against which leaned a higgledy-piggledy line of pitched roofs, tiled with stone and slate. They looked very scrappy from up here, like the potting sheds and timber stores and huts where mowers are kept which you can usually find behind privet hedges in the concealed nooks of a big garden. They seemed just to have grown there. In one place this ill-planned mess gave way to a neat modern building, set askew to the wall, finished in whitewashed stucco, with proper sash windows and steep slate steps leading up to a yellow front door. While they were staring at it the door opened and Mr. Furbelow came out carrying a tray. The old man stood for a moment, blinking in the keen sunlight like a roosting bird disturbed by a torch beam, and then tittupped down the steps with an easy little run that showed he’d done it a thousand times before.
“He’s going to come a cropper one of these days,” said Geoffrey.
“What’s that he’s carrying?” asked Sally.
She wasn’t tall enough to see over the parapet, so she’d wriggled herself up on to the warm gold stone and was lying on it face down, craning over the dizzy edge. Geoffrey grabbed angrily at her belt.
“Don’t be a nit, Sal. There’s nothing to hold on to.”
“There’s no reason to fall off either. What has he got?” It was a large black tray, with several dishes on it, and jugs, and a jar. Two cloths hung over Mr. Furbelow’s arm, and there was something about his bearing that didn’t seem to belong to this world of battlements and saffron-soaked chicken and wolfhounds scratching and snarling round a central fire. A faint haze of steam rose above the largest jug. Suddenly Geoffrey saw a picture, sucked out of forgotten times but very clear — lunch in a big hotel with Uncle Jacob, with tea trolleys whisked silently across thick carpets and huge bowls of fruit in baskets; men walked like that, carrying trays like that, with cloths over their arms like that.
“He looks like a waiter,” he said.
“Do you think he's going to wait on the Necro man? He must see him sometimes, if he knows that he's bored, and he keeps trying to talk to him in Latin.”
They watched Mr. Furbelow move across the cobbles to what Geoffrey had decided was a second well, with a heavy, roped windlass above it. Here the old man put the tray down and started to crank the handle. He turned it for ages, so that it seemed as if the well must be enormously deeper than that from which they'd watered Maddox.
“Oh look, Jeff. The stone's moved. I can just see the edge of it from here. It's enormous.”
Geoffrey moved along the parapet and saw what she meant. The side of a thick flagstone, a huge one, had been heaved out of the ground and a pitch-black opening showed beneath. The handle-winding hadn’t been because the well was deep, but because the windlass had to be highly geared to allow Mr. Furbelow to shift a stone that weight. At last he stopped cranking, picked up the tray and felt his way into the hole. From the jerky way his body moved as he disappeared they could see he was going down steps.
“Quick, Sal, now’s our chance to find something out.”
They belted down the long spiral of steps, through the trap in the roof, down the ladders and into the hall where the hounds lounged. The big doors were barred from the outside; Geoffrey shoved and tugged, but they moved as little as a rooted yew.
The children climbed back to the parapet and waited in the generous sun. They were feeling hungry again before Mr. Furbelow came out.
While he was cranking the flagstone back into place Geoffrey said “I’ve had a thought —we don’t want him to think we’ve been spying on him. Let’s try and find a window downstairs from which we can see him going back to his house but can’t see the windlass. If I leave my handkerchief on the balcony we’ll be able to keep our bearings when we get down.”
It wasn’t easy, even so, and they got it wrong first time. Then they found a suite of rooms with the tiny square windows tunneled through the masonry, from one of which they could see the white cottage. The ratchet of the windlass was still clacking monotonously.