Kate Sedley - The Green Man

I had grabbed my cudgel from the floor and now gripped it firmly as I stared around the chamber. I thought something moved behind me and whirled about, but no one was there, only a corner of the room, thick with shadows. I suddenly realized that I could hear Murdo and Donald snoring, where before all had been quiet, and I glanced in the direction of the chamber door. A line of less dense blackness showed that it must be standing slightly ajar. My heart beating unpleasantly fast, I tiptoed towards it, swinging the weighted end of my cudgel backwards and forwards, ready to strike whoever was lurking behind it …

It was abruptly pushed wide open and Donald Seton stood yawning and stretching in the doorway, his eyes still clogged with sleep.

‘Is something amiss?’ he muttered. ‘I thought I heard someone moving.’

‘You must have the hearing of a rabbit, then,’ I snapped, but keeping my voice as low as possible. ‘What are you doing up and about at this dead hour of the morning?’

‘I needed the piss-pot,’ he answered shortly. ‘What’s your excuse?’

I hesitated, not being at all sure what had roused me. I countered with another question.

‘Why was the door to the ante-room open?’

He frowned, puzzled.

‘I just opened it. You saw me. I thought I heard a noise.’

I shook my head. ‘It was ajar before you appeared. I was just coming to investigate.’

The squire glanced over his shoulder to where his companion was still snoring peacefully.

‘Couldn’t have been,’ he whispered positively. ‘No one’s been through here, I’m ready to swear. And the other door into the passageway is closed. You can see for yourself.’ Gently he pushed the inner door yet wider.

I crossed the ante-chamber, soft-footed, to verify the truth of this statement. The door was indeed closed and latched, but it wasn’t bolted, an omission I hastened to point out.

Donald Seton shrugged.

‘Why bolt it?’ he asked. His lips twitched in a small, mocking grin which I could see with eyes now grown accustomed to the darkness. ‘We’re amongst friends, after all. Or aren’t we? Perhaps His Grace is right to fear the Sassenachs.’

I bit back the retort hovering on the tip of my tongue; that the duke seemed more fearful of his late brother’s servants than he did of his English hosts. That would have been to put one of them on his guard — always provided, of course, that Albany’s suspicions had any sort of foundation.

Our voices, although pitched low, had finally aroused Murdo, who struggled up on his pallet to demand what, in the name of Saint Mungo, was going on.

‘I needed the piss-pot, only to find our friend the pedlar up and prowling about.’

‘Why?’

‘Ask him!’

‘Before I answer any of your questions,’ I hissed angrily, ‘what I want to know is why, ever since we left London and before, you two and Davey have pretended that you couldn’t speak anything but the raw Scots’ tongue, when all the time you can speak English perfectly well.’ I considered this statement. ‘Well enough, at least, for me to understand you,’ I amended.

‘We’ve had nothing to say to you before,’ was Murdo’s laconic answer; which I supposed, in its own way, was true. I had hardly sought their company. But their deception irked me, nonetheless.

‘So what’s the answer to my question?’ Murdo insisted.

‘Something woke me — I don’t know what — and then I discovered that the door between the main bedchamber and this one was ajar. Master Seton will vouch for that.’

‘Donald?’

‘It’s true. It was open, but I didn’t open it. And I’ll swear nobody could have come through here without rousing one of us.’

‘Impossible,’ his fellow squire agreed.

But it wasn’t impossible, not the way those two had been snoring. I reckoned more than one assassin could have walked into my lord’s chamber without disturbing either of his guardians in the room without. I wondered uneasily about that unbolted outer door. Was it just carelessness, an ingenuous belief that their master was indeed safe amongst his English friends? Or was it an alibi to cover their own tracks if they really did intend Albany harm?

Murdo rapped out something unintelligible and lay down again, pulling the blanket over his head.

Donald nodded. ‘He said let’s get back to bed before we catch our deaths of cold.’ He seized the chamber-pot and unrinated into it, a long, steaming, healthy-looking stream. ‘That’s better. Now, get back to sleep, chapman, and settle down. You’ve been dreaming. Your belly’s overfull and you’ve been riding the night mare.’

Copying his friend’s example he, too, lay down and pulled the blankets up around his ears. As he did so, something floated to the ground. Unnoticed, I stooped and picked it up, carrying it back with me into the main chamber where the object of my concern was peacefully sleeping, oblivious to the whisperings and shufflings in the ante-room. His earlier restlessness had abated, and Albany now lay quietly, one cheek pillowed in his hand, like an innocent child. Cautiously, I found the tinder-box and lit a candle, well away from where its light could shine on the bed, and held my prize towards the flame.

What lay in my palm was a silken leaf, green and veined with golden thread. A leaf come loose from a mummer’s costume — or a mummer’s mask.

The Green Man!

It was long before I slept. Dawn was rimming the shutters before I finally closed my eyes.

The night’s events had convinced me that Albany’s suspicions concerning his Scottish servants, however nebulous, were nevertheless founded on reason. They were not the figment of his overripe imagination that I had at first thought them. The explanation given to his immediate retainers for my constant presence — for my presence at all — had been that he feared treachery by the English. Yet his two squires were unimpressed enough by this threat to leave unlocked a door that, if they took their royal master’s fear even half-seriously, should have been carefully bolted. Moreover, while they had pretended to an ignorance of English, except as it was spoken in Scotland, I had presumed, as I was meant to presume, that their understanding of the tongue was equally feeble. I wondered what unguarded remarks I had made to Albany, and he to me, that the squires and Davey Gray, at least, had found perfectly intelligible.

But was the duke so ignorant of these men that he did not know this? Perhaps. When he addressed any of them it was in broad Scots, and they answered him in the same language. I had noticed that he kept them all at a distance, having no more converse with them than he was bound to. He certainly did not treat them with the camaraderie that he used towards me. And yet …

And yet the five of them had joined him during his exile in France, fleeing the wrath of King James after the Earl of Mar’s murder. If it had been murder …

But it was at that particular point that my tired brain refused to be teased any longer and, with the sun rising on another day, I at last fell asleep. Not for long, of course. All too soon the trumpets were blaring in the camp beyond Fotheringay’s grim walls, servers were hurrying up from the kitchens with jugs of hot shaving water and the whole castle wakened to life. Through a fog of sleep, I remembered that today we set out for York either under the command of the King or under that of His Grace the Duke of Gloucester.

To no one’s surprise, it turned out to be the duke who would lead us — eventually — into Scotland. As soon as King Edward entered the great hall after breakfast, it was obvious to all but the meanest intelligence that he was in no fit state of health to head a military expedition. His face had taken on an even greyer tinge than it had worn the previous evening and he was supported on both sides, leaning heavily on the arms of Lord Hastings and his elder stepson, the Marquis of Dorset. There was a sheen of sweat across his forehead; and the way in which he dropped thankfully into his chair at the head of the council table proclaimed that his legs were in imminent danger of collapsing under him.