“And if you were the earl, how would you prevent that?”
“I’d have a pile of stones, ready shaped, and a supply of sand and lime for mortar, and a mason standing by ready to block up that doorway in times of danger.”
Earl Bartholomew stared at Tom. His pale blue eyes were narrowed and there was a frown on his white forehead. Tom could not read his expression. Was he angry with Tom for being so critical of the castle defenses? You could never tell how a lord would react to criticism. By and large it was best to let them make their own mistakes. But Tom was a desperate man.
At last the earl seemed to reach a conclusion. He turned to Matthew and said: “Hire this man.”
A whoop of jubilation rose in Tom’s throat and he had to choke it back. He could hardly believe it. He looked at Ellen and they both smiled happily. Martha, who did not suffer from adult inhibitions, shouted: “Horray!”
Earl Bartholomew turned away and spoke to a knight standing nearby. Matthew smiled at Tom. “Have you had dinner today?” he said.
Tom swallowed. He was so happy he felt close to tears. “No, we haven’t.”
“I’ll take you to the kitchen.”
Eagerly, they followed the steward out of the hall and across the bridge to the lower compound. The kitchen was a large wood building with a stone skirting. Matthew told them to wait outside. There was a sweet smell in the air: they were baking pastries in there. Tom’s belly rumbled and his mouth watered so much it hurt. After a moment Matthew emerged with a big pot of ale and handed it to Tom. “They’ll bring out some bread and cold bacon in a moment,” he said. He left them.
Tom took a swallow of the ale and passed the pot to Ellen. She gave some to Martha, then took a drink herself and passed it to Jack. Alfred made a grab for it before Jack could drink. Jack turned away, keeping the pot out of Alfred’s reach. Tom did not want another quarrel between the children, not now when everything had turned out all right at last. He was about to intervene—thereby breaking his own rule about interference in children’s squabbles—when Jack turned around again and meekly handed the pot to Alfred.
Alfred put the pot to his mouth and began to drink. Tom had only taken a swallow, and he thought the pot would come around to him again; but Alfred looked set to drain it. Then a strange thing happened. As Alfred upended the pot to drink the last of the ale, something like a small animal fell out onto his face.
Alfred gave a frightened yell and dropped the pot. He brushed the furry thing off his face, jumping back. “What is it?” he screeched. The thing fell to the floor. He stared down at it, white-faced and trembling with disgust.
They all looked. It was the dead wren.
Tom caught Ellen’s eye, and they both looked at Jack. Jack had taken the pot from Ellen, then turned his back for a moment, as if trying to evade Alfred, then handed the pot to Alfred with surprising willingness. ...
Now he stood quietly, looking at the horrified Alfred with a faint smile of satisfaction on his clever young-old face.
Jack knew he would suffer for that.
Alfred would take his revenge somehow. When the others were not looking, Alfred would punch him in the stomach, perhaps. This was a favorite blow, for it was very painful but left no marks. Jack had seen him do it to Martha several times.
But it had been worth a punch in the stomach just to see the shock and fear on Alfred’s face when the dead bird fell out of his beer.
Alfred hated Jack. This was a new experience for Jack. His mother had always loved him and no one else had had any feelings for him. There was no apparent reason for Alfred’s hostility. He seemed to feel much the same about Martha. He was always pinching her, pulling her hair and tripping her, and he relished any opportunity to spoil something she valued. Jack’s mother saw what was going on, and hated it, but Alfred’s father seemed to think it was all perfectly normal, even though he himself was a kind and gentle man who obviously loved Martha. The whole thing was baffling, but nonetheless fascinating.
Everything was fascinating. Jack had never had such an exciting time in the whole of his life. Despite Alfred, despite feeling hungry most of the time, despite being hurt by the way his mother constantly paid attention to Tom instead of to him, Jack was spellbound by a constant stream of strange phenomena and new experiences.
The castle was the latest in a series of wonders. He had heard about castles: in the long winter evenings in the forest, his mother had taught him to recitechansons,narrative poems in French about knights and magicians, most of them thousands of lines long; and castles featured in those stories as places of refuge and romance. Never having seen a castle, he imagined it would be a slightly larger version of the cave in which he lived. The real thing was amazing: it was so big, with so many buildings and such a host of people, all of them sobusy—shoeing horses, drawing water, feeding chickens, baking bread, and carrying things, always carrying things, straw for the floors, wood for the fires, sacks of flour, bales of cloth, swords and saddles and suits of mail. Tom told him that the moat and the wall were not natural parts of the landscape, but had actually been dug and built by dozens of men all working together. Jack did not disbelieve Tom, but he found it impossible to imagine how it had been done.
At the end of the afternoon, when it became too dark to work, all the busy people gravitated to the great hall of the keep. Rushlights were lit and the fire was built higher, and all the dogs came in from the cold. Some of the men and women took boards and trestles from a stack at the side of the room and set up tables in the shape of the letter T, then ranged chairs along the top of the T and benches down the sides. Jack had never seen people working together in large numbers, and he was struck by how much they enjoyed it. They smiled and laughed as they lifted the heavy boards, calling “Hup!” and “To me, to me,” and “Down easy, now.” Jack envied their camaraderie, and wondered whether he might share it one day.
After a while everyone sat on the benches. One of the castle servants distributed big wooden bowls and wooden spoons, counting aloud as he gave them out; then he went around again and put a thick slice of stale brown bread in the bottom of each bowl. Another servant brought wooden cups and filled them with ale from a series of big jugs. Jack and Martha and Alfred, all sitting together at the bottom end of the T, got a cup of ale each, so there was nothing to fight over. Jack picked up his cup, but his mother told him to wait for a moment.
When the ale had been poured the hall went quiet. Jack waited, fascinated as always, to see what would happen next. After a moment Earl Bartholomew appeared on the staircase that led down from his bedroom. He came down into the hall, followed by Matthew Steward, three or four other well-dressed men, a boy, and the most beautiful creature Jack had ever set eyes upon.
It was a girl or a woman, he was not sure which. She was dressed in white, and her tunic had amazing flared sleeves which trailed on the ground behind her as she glided down the stairs. Her hair was a mass of dark curls tumbling around her face, and she had dark, dark eyes. Jack realized that this was what thechansonsmeant when they referred to a beautiful princess in a castle. No wonder the knights all wept when the princess died.
When she reached the foot of the stairs Jack saw that she was quite young, just a few years older than himself; but she held her head high and walked to the head of the table like a queen. She sat down beside Earl Bartholomew.
“Who is she?” Jack whispered.
Martha replied: “She must be the earl’s daughter.”
“What’s her name?”
Martha shrugged, but a dirty-faced girl sitting next to Jack said: “She’s called Aliena. She’s wonderful.”
