Maggie Prince - Raider’s Tide

In the gatehouse I step over the horse rug. I never stand on it. It used to be Peter, my favourite pony. The heat from the candle on the wall-pricket sears my cheek. I leave the door open for a moment to allow fresh air in. This nail-studded door, half the thickness of an oak tree, is the only outer door to our home, and therefore the only entrance to defend when we are attacked, but the result on the lower floors, where there are no windows either, is that the air is often stale and heavy. The only other way out is underground, a passage below the kitchen which leads downhill to the barmkin, the high-walled enclosure where our animals are sometimes kept.

I open the inner door. Greasy smoke hangs in the gloom. I can hear the clank of iron pans beyond the low arch which leads to Kate’s kitchen. There will be bread warming on the hearth, and stew steaming in a pot suspended from the rackencrock over the fire. I’m hungry, and Kate will be angry with me for being late, but I need to breathe. This is too suffocating after the wind on the Pike. I set off up the spiral stone staircase, and meet my younger sister, Verity, coming down.

“Beatie, where were you? I’m trying to sort out next week’s watch rota. Germaine wants to exchange with you on Monday.” She sits down on a step.

Verity at fifteen is taller than me, her hair a darker brown and her eyes a darker blue. The word which older members of the family use to describe her is ‘wilful’. Verity really couldn’t care less what they say. She is one of the people I am closest to in the world. I sit down on the step below her.

“Sorry. I was on the Pike. Dickon has the ague and there was no lookout, so I took over his watch. Where’s Mother?”

“She’s out. She went off in a temper to visit Aunt Juniper.”

We exchange a look. “And Father?” There are only two places where Father might be: lying in wait next to the highway, or drinking himself into a stupor upstairs.

Verity pulls a face and gestures up the stairs. I groan. Faintly I can hear Germaine playing one of the nauseatingly sentimental tunes my father adores, on her three-stringed fiddle. “I wish I’d stayed on the Pike,” I mutter, feeling a twinge of longing for the peace there. Nature might be brutal and complicated, but at least it doesn’t play the fiddle.

We talk a little longer about how to organise the watch, then I continue on up four floors, round and round the circling steps, to the battlements. It’s turning cold. I pull my hooded cloak more closely round me. In the centre of the battlements is the crenellated beacon turret, with its tall wooden pole topped by an iron crossbar and two tar barrels, ready to be ignited should any neighbouring beacon flare up in warning. We keep a ring of fire here on the coast. There are beacons on the Pike, on Beacon Hill behind us, at my cousins’ pele tower along the cliffs and on Gewhorn Head, the promontory across the bay.

Up here on the battlements the air smells of damp earth and new leaves. William, one of my father’s henchmen, is on guard tonight. He is dozing on his feet, but when he hears me he jumps, and starts marching dizzyingly round the battlements, his gaze turning from west to north to east.

“Good evening, William.”

“Good evening, Mistress Beatrice.”

I lean with my elbows on the stone parapet, and after a moment William joins me. Stars are coming out in the east, like maker’s flaws in expensive blue pottery. In the west the last glow, as if from a kiln, shows uneasily. Bats dip and swing below us. Far down in the meadow Leo heads home, and a homesteader calls to her dog.

I love all this, but I do not love my Cousin Hugh, except as a cousin. If the queen refuses to marry, why cannot I? I am perfectly capable of running this farm unaided. Verity and I mostly do already. Why, for heaven’s sake, would I need a husband?

“Lord Allysson’s carriage is coming through tonight,” William says in an offhand manner.

I turn to look at him. “Have you told my father?”

His gaze slides away. “I had to, mistress. I didn’t want another beating like the last one. Mebbe a sprig of valerian in his wine? I reckon he’s got wise to Mistress Verity’s trick with the stone in his horse’s shoe.”

I sigh. “I could try it. Thanks William.” It isn’t easy having a father who’s a part-time highway robber.

Back downstairs in the kitchen Kate, our cook, is standing inside the hearth, stirring something, her hair wrapped in a white cloth and her overskirts tucked into her belt. She lifts her red face from the blaze.

“About time, young woman. This broth is well nigh incinerated. Get your plate.” A cauldron of steaming mutton stew is standing on a trivet at the side of the fire. Kate ladles some on to my plate, and takes half a loaf of black bread from the warming oven in the wall. I sit down at the long table, mutter a quick grace and eat in silence. Verity has vanished now, but elsewhere in the tower Germaine’s music creaks on.

Kate throws more logs on the fire and turns the wheel of the bellows, sending the flames roaring high. I realise now that she is boiling bones for glue. The disgusting smell starts to fill the kitchen. Kate sings while she works, something about a cold-hearted maiden who condemns a young man to die by not loving him enough. I find that my sympathies lie entirely with the maiden. Kate crosses to the chopping block on its tree-trunk legs, lines up the next batch of mutton bones left over from the stew and swings her cleaver high. The firelight throws her giant shadow across the smoky walls. Our kitchen is the only room which is two storeys high, to dissipate heat and allow some light in, since there are no windows on the ground floor. High up, the narrow window slits show the night sky. Owls and bats live up there. There are flutterings as Kate’s shadow flies through the darkness and crashes down. I shiver. There is a strange feeling in the air tonight.

Later, in my room three floors up, I peer out of the window. We had glass put into some of our windows last year – not into the arrow slits of course – and so it is more difficult to see out now, through these tiny, greenish panes. I thought I heard a horse outside, and my father’s nervous cough. I do wonder quite how all this expensive glass came to be paid for.

A heated stone lies in my bed, under my sheepskin bedcover. My cat, Caesar, grudgingly relinquishes his place on it as I climb between the sheets. I leave my faded blue bed-curtains open. I don’t want to be cut off from the world tonight. When I kick the warmingstone out, scents of lavender and thyme billow up from the rushes on the floor. Caesar sidles on to the stone, jumps back, creeps up on it again. Finally he decides to burn, and his purring is like the sea on the pebbles over the hill as we both settle down for the night.

I dream of Scots. They are in the lower section of the spiral staircase where it opens into the gatehouse and the kitchen archway. I run up the stairs away from them, but it is worse there, because the stairs are enclosed and narrow between curving walls, and I cannot see how close they are behind me.

I wake with a jump, hot and trembling. In the darkness the dream is still too real. I stare in the direction of my door. I am afraid to reach out for my tinderbox and candle, but eventually I do. The shadows swoop and dance as I light the candle. I need company to drive the nightmare away, so I wrap a shawl round my shoulders and go up on to the battlements, throwing glances behind me down the stairs. Martinus is on watch. He smiles and greets me, and talks comfortably of ordinary things, food, horses, the pattern of the stars, and we stand for a long time leaning against the beacon turret, under the stare of the wall-eyed moon.